Salesforce’s Benioff Spars with Twitter’s Dorsey Over Support for Homeless

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-12/salesforce-s-benioff-spars-with-twitter-s-dorsey-over-support-for-homeless

by petethomas • 8 years ago

42 51 8 years ago

bloomberg.com

gruglife• 8 years ago

There is only one way to end this ..... fight to the death :)

saagarjha• 8 years ago

Benioff says his investors aren’t complaining that he’s campaigning for a tax increase.

Honestly, this is quite surprising. I know Tim Cook has been grilled in the past at shareholder meetings for "wasting" money on green initiatives.

dahdum• 8 years ago

I'd think that positioning himself this way would be seen as a positive. The more he virtue signals and raises his own profile the easier it is to move in the Fortune 500/1000 circles, landing new or expanded contracts.

romed2• 8 years ago

Kinda seeing Jack's side of the argument. Why do we need the voters to partition up the city budget in perpetuity? It's a bad way to run the government.

The city has a far better, far cheaper lever by which it can fix the homelessness crisis: nuke the housing market by permitting 45-foot-tall multifamily buildings on every parcel in the city. The fact that they will never do this tells you everything about that city.

ummonk• 8 years ago

Yup, exactly. It's a terrible idea to start passing piecemeal tax increases to fund specific programs. And Prop C will only put an expensive bandaid on the housing crisis, absent an actual increase in the housing stock; any homeless you house will just result in displacing lower middle class people.

Animats2• 8 years ago

It's been tried. Huge failures. See Robert Taylor Homes (Chicago)[1], Pruett-Igoe (St. Louis) [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe

Inconel2• 8 years ago

Both you and the user notfromhere seem to be interpreting the GP post as suggesting the solution is large public housing projects, it's possible my reading comprehension is really off today but I see no such suggestion. To me the GP seems to be saying that so much as high housing costs are responsible for at least part of the homeless crisis, perhaps less restrictive zoning might help considering that large portions of SF and very large portions of the Bay Area as a whole are pretty low density, at least compared to other global urban centers.

grandmczeb2• 8 years ago

Those are public housing projects. Lifting zoning requirements is a different solution.

romed2• 8 years ago

Neither you nor the sibling comment I'm not going to bother responding to expended one iota of brainpower parsing my post. This is what an ordinary 45-foot-tall apartment building looks like in San Francisco. This type of building houses the overwhelming majority of San Franciscans, while occupying relatively little land:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7759476,-122.4242439,3a,75y,...

Most of the land in San Francisco is limited by law to short, detached, single-family dwellings. Erasing that regulation will make housing dramatically cheaper.

notfromhere• 8 years ago

Housing at risk populations in huge towers has already been tried tons of times.

Look up Cabrini-Green

thatswrong02• 8 years ago

45 feet is not a huge tower.

njarboe3• 8 years ago

For other in this thread: 45ft is 4 or 5 stories, not a tower.

cheeze• 8 years ago

Good. It sickens me that there is so much wealth in both the Bay Area and Seattle, yet both cities are going through a homelessness crisis.

I recognize I'm part of the problem and I'm working to help the problem, but I'm only a little guy, not a billionaire.

Tech companies keep building skyscrapers, feeding their engineers food every day and paying their employees ludicrous salaries, yet those employees walk past tons of homeless folks on their way to the offices...

Are there any examples that folks are aware of where a big tech company (or really any company) stepped in to help with a crisis like this? What companies should we be celebrating for being 'good citizens'?

fx32s• 8 years ago

Actually many of them regularly donate to charity and have employee charity matching programmes (https://macrumors.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202084918-Ap...)

I'm not sure if only money would help in this case without tackling the fundamental reasons of why people are homeless (lack of social security and affordable housing). California is the state with the highest income taxes but little goes to solve these fundamental problems.

Pointing to companies and claiming "you make money, you should fix everything that goes wrong here" is too simple in my opinion. Companies exist to create wealth for the shareholders. I don't particularly like it but that's how the system is set up.

Padradov• 8 years ago

If I may ask - why are you part of the problem?

InclinedPlane3• 8 years ago

If you live in a booming city and you have a high paying job then you are part of the problem. You are paying lots of money for rent, which raises the cost of housing, which forces a lot of people who can't afford housing elsewhere.

As an individual it's difficult to not contribute to these problems, and the solution isn't for high wage workers to stop moving to cities either. But it's important to recognize that simply going about your daily life with no ill intentions doesn't mean that nobody is harmed by your actions. We live in complex societies with complex interrelationships and complex rules (laws, regulations, social norms, etc.) that govern them. We have a responsibility to understand the unintended consequences of our actions so we can actively correct for them (through government, laws, taxation, etc.)

thatswrong02• 8 years ago

I don't blame or hate myself for any of the homeless problems here, and you shouldn't either. Blame crooked / regressive SF / Bay Area / California politicians, the voters that keep voting for them, and the climate here instead.

SF could be a much less expensive place to live if supply of housing had ever kept up with demand. If it were less expensive, there'd be fewer homeless people. The regulations here were put in place by regressives. Not our fault.

If politicians hadn't wholesale wiped out mental institutions without any other plan in place, we would probably see fewer mentally ill homeless people. Not our fault.

Many drug addicts go homeless, and it's really hard to accept any personal responsibility for that. Drug addiction is a health problem treated like a criminal problem, and again that's a societal problem.

There are a lot of reasons why homelessness is such a problem here, but they're really large, difficult problems that are _not_ a result of wanting to live and work here.

I don't even think companies should really be to blame either.. these companies are generating enormous wealth and paying enormous salaries to workers here. These workers _live here_ and use their salaries here, which naturally generates other jobs that can provide others their livelihood. This would be a good thing if not for the limited supply of housing, which means attracting more workers results in displacing other, less wealthy citizens.

What realistically do you expect these companies to do to fix mental health issues? Drug addiction? The housing crisis?

nostrademons• 8 years ago

There's a causal connection in both cases:

When a lot of wealth is generated by a city, a lot of people attempt to move there to cash in on it. The number of people who physically can live in a city is limited by the number of housing units available. If they don't build new housing, then for every person who moves in, another person is going to be displaced, whether that be moving elsewhere or ending up on the streets or moving in with other people. Market mechanisms ensure that the housing that is available goes to the people who are willing to pay the most, which is generally the highly-paid tech workers in SF & Seattle and the financial types in NYC.

The solution is pretty obvious: build more housing.

It's also independent of the amount of wealth that's generated, or whether the new housing is high-end gentrified condos or low-end affordable housing. If the new housing is high-end condos, then all the tech workers move into new construction and people who otherwise would've ended up homeless stay in their existing apartments, or move into the run-down apartments vacated by the tech workers. If the new housing is small affordable units, the high-end tech workers stay put and the homeless move into the new construction.

ap3• 8 years ago

A requirement to “build more housing” is to make “building more housing” less expensive by removing as much limitations as possible

A startup environment thrives because it easy to start Apple in a garage.

Housing comes with a lot of restrictions for code, land, labor, environment

Make it profitable to build housing for low wage workers

andyburke• 8 years ago

I was never a Salesforce fan, but Benioff is making me take a second look.

anothergoogler• 8 years ago

Don't read too much into it: SFDC feels the pinch in recruiting, and they are heavily invested in a San Francisco presence with their tower.

dpflan• 8 years ago

“This is the Bay Area: We have 70 billionaires. We're the headquarters of the 4th industrial revolution,” Benioff said. “We're in a homeless crisis."

sremani2• 8 years ago

From Wikipedia:

In 2014, the City of San Francisco spent $167 million annually on housing homeless residents.[64] By 2016, total spending (including housing and treatment) was believed to be $241 million annually.[65] However, much of this spending is focused on housing the formerly homeless, or those at risk, and not the currently homeless. The city's shelter program has approximately 1,200 beds, and several hundred people are on a waitlist to be housed.[65] Even with 1,200 shelter beds and several hundred on waiting list, most homeless avoid the shelter for various reasons such as: overcrowding, safety, and rules that, among other things, separate people experiencing homelessness from their possessions, pets, and loved ones. In 2015, the Navigation Center shelter was created to address these issues.[65] --------------------------------------------

How much money is going to solve this problem ? This reminds me of extending roads to tackle congestion, 5 years after the extension, the roads have same congestion conditions because of the sprawl. At some point, spending more money and making it better for being homeless in SFO will attract even more homeless and creating the conditions similar to today.

I do not have enough information about Prop C and what each of them are coming from, but I am leaning towards Jack simply because the holier than thou smugness from Benioff.

wbronitsky2• 8 years ago

Just to make sure I understand your argument:

You are going to vote a certain way on a proposition because tech a CEO was smug about why you should vote one way or another?

Regardless of which way you are voting, there has to be a better, more informed and analytical way to decide how to vote.

sremani2• 8 years ago

It never occurred to me but I think as a non-resident of SFO I should have refrained from commenting on this issue. Consider my post as an observation of a curious mind.

jdavis703• 8 years ago

Somewhere between 70-90 percent of unsheltered people became homeless here. This shows there’s a displacement crisis. It’s root cause is a lack of housing. But we can’t only build our way out of this problem while people with jobs are being forced to live on the street, their car or an RV.

SF needs to do something until they can build enough housing to stop low income tenenats from being evicted. Measure C is one such way to stem the displacement crisis. If the homeless census ever starts to indicate a majority of unshelteted people are from out of state then we can talk about different ways to tackle the problem.

pound• 8 years ago

SF is not going to build any housing and for all the local NIMBYs all these propositions are the way to feel good about problems they are causing - let's "address" it with someone's else money while preserving the current state of properties values.

Prop C is about getting 0.5% of business revenue (if it's over $50million) towards homelessness. And we already are spending ~ $250million a year. This is not the case of an effective program that's just underfunded.

TomMckenny• 8 years ago

People are homeless because housing is expensive.

Drive housing prices down and you reduce homeless problem. But I'll bet that's pretty close to a forbidden idea.

Animats2• 8 years ago

There's now homeless removal as a service.[1] "Call Bio SoCal for fast and professional service to clean up and remove the homeless encampment. We operate 24/7 and can provide service during or after business hours to meet your needs and get you back in business."

In Seattle, there's an app for reporting homeless encampments.[2]

Dallas considered a concentration camp, to be called "Dignity Field", at an old military base.[3]

[1] https://biosocal.com/services/homeless-encampment-clean-out/

[2] https://www.seattle.gov/homelessness/unauthorized-encampment...

[3] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2016/05/02/old-naval-ba...

tathougies• 8 years ago

The first two seem distasteful, but I fail to see how the dignity field proposal falls in the same vein. You are both criticizing inaction (just get them out of here and I don't care what happens to them) and action (let's get them in one area, offer them shelter, and provide services). This seems to me like speaking out of both sides of your mouth.

Inconel2• 8 years ago

Name aside, which just seems very paternalistic, based on the article you linked I can't see anything particularly objectionable about the third proposal. I would've definitely preferred to live in that kind of sanctioned open air campground compared to some of the places I've had so sleep.

Jach• 8 years ago

"Dignity Field" is pretty good, I still prefer "Sanctuary District"[0] though.

[0] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District

InclinedPlane3• 8 years ago

Watching that episode of DS9 when it came out (in 1995) made it seem as though they had to exaggerate a lot to get a point across and things could never be that bad. Now though? Now it seems like we'll be lucky if things don't end up worse sooner. It's shocking to me the degree to which the homeless are hated and dehumanized by such a huge number of people.

shafyy• 8 years ago

What do you guys think is the biggest lever for this crisis?

olivermarks• 8 years ago

I've lived in the area for twenty five plus years and have known local social workers and city employees. I also have friends who are effectively homeless (living in RV's) having grown up in silicon valley and been evicted from family rental homes and can't afford massively increased rents.

There's a huge number of people who wind up in San Francisco for all sorts of reasons and the civic reputation for being less harsh on homeless plus relatively mild weather makes it a place people wind up staying in. There's always been flop houses in the tenderloin and people on the streets but the disparity between the wealthy and the poor is very striking now.

The opioid crisis is a big thing in SF but the levers are unaffordable rents, no care for the insane (who often self medicate with street drugs), an attractive place with lots of dumpster diving lifestyles behind classy restaurants and a general romanticism that dates back to the beats and hippies.

There are huge numbers of people living in their cars and couch surfing who are less visible than the unwashed zombie insane that you see at most downtown intersections and passed out on sidewalks but this is in essence a have and have not crisis

grandmczeb2• 8 years ago

High housing costs.

tomatotomato37• 8 years ago

As an outsider looking in I would say decent weather and constraining geography that prevents the usual urban reaction to high housing prices, which is to sprawl like mad.

InclinedPlane3• 8 years ago

There are many but the biggest is probably the destruction of unions, destruction of the social safety net (e.g. welfare et al), and especially the stagnation of wages for nearly the last half century. If the minimum wage had kept pace with, say, per capita GDP since the 1960s it would be at around $20/hr by now, and if it had been increased gradually over time to keep parity with economic growth (as it had been for decades in the past) then there would be no great immediate economic shock to having the minimum wage "so high". And such a high minimum wage would also raise the wages of a lot of other folks as well, pushing up the bottom end of the wage scale, forcing a lot more of the economic growth since the '80s to have gone to workers instead of just corporate and millionaire profits/income. All of which would have led to a situation where it was much more difficult for climbing housing prices to force huge numbers of people into a homelessness that represented a huge uphill climb to get out of.

On top of that there's the insane SF zoning problems and many other issues, but those are really just the icing on the cake, the core problem is the massive wealth/income inequality that exists in the US today.

njarboe3• 8 years ago

Maybe listing 10 levers and your estimate percentage would be more useful in thinking about the very complex problem.

samstave• 8 years ago

This is a complex issue and is close to home for me.

I have thought a lot about what I would want to do regarding hte homeless problem, and have looked into the spend that SF has to this problem, as well as the self-limiting regulations on the housing market which prevent small-size, high density developments from even doing proof-of-concepts.

After thinking on the problem a bit, I am personally drawn to the following ideas:

1. Mobile health and hygeine centers: -- These would be truck-trailers converted to contain a micro-clinic and showering facilities. And would provide standard low-cost 'scrubs'-like clothing to provide cleaner, more dignified clothing.

2. Paying homeless in resources (food/beds) in exchange for cleaning up the city.

3. Autonomous pressure-washing-street-robots. In silicon Valley, and SF specifically - it would be thoughtful and clean to have industrial sized Roomba Street Cleaning bots that will crawl along the sidewalks and pressure wash them. They should be able to dock and refill/dump/charge at various locations. These should have sensors which count exactly how much foot traffic they see constantly - have cameras and be beacons for services.

3. Correct the zoning laws in bay-area counties for supporting small micro-dwelling communities. Currently, for example, alameda county zones a much larger parcel requirement for a single family dwelling than is needed.

Also - the zoning laws do not allow for tiny/micro housing units to share common infrastructure. For example, even though you could fit multiple tiny homes on the 3800 SF lot requirement for a single family home, you cannot have more than one person/family living there, and these units could not share utility connections to power/sewer/water - and you cannot have them all have separate entrances, there can be only one primary entrance.

But in the end, I think that providing showers/hygiene and basic clothing should be the starting point.

Not having clothing or showers is a primary driving factor in the decline of mental health of homeless. You cannot focus on anything if these needs are not met.

Based on the numbers I looked at in the past, SF was "paying" the equivalent of ~$25,000/homeless/year in their services.... but clearly this number is not evident in the lives of the homeless.

Personally, I think there is a TON more that the tech community can do with respect to building and testing out various service offerings (like shower trucks/scrubs clothing/cleaning/etc)...

I would love to work on these if anyone else would.

pg_bot4• 8 years ago

San Francisco's politicians are treating the symptoms of the problem and not the root cause. Homelessness has increased because markets are not functioning due to poor governance. You could cure the majority of the problem by allowing developers to build more housing and removing caps on rent increases to tenants.

s73v3r_3• 8 years ago

Build more housing yes, but removing caps on rent increases, especially if there is not more housing, is just going to exacerbate the problem.

pg_bot4• 8 years ago

I know it's counterintuitive to most people, but price controls only cause shortages. Rent control is fundamentally an unfair policy as it selectively benefits one class of people (long term renters) over everyone else.

In conditions where demand for housing increases dramatically, landlords tend to let apartments go vacant because they do not want to lock in a low price immediately if they know they could be stuck with a tenant for a long period of time. You can see this effect when you compare the cost increases of apartments over time with the allowable increase set by the rent control board.

You can model renting your building quickly in excel. When you do so you can find the cases when it is smarter to hold the apartment and let market prices increase instead of leasing today. Your job as a landowner is to maximize the total amount of money you can make from ownership of the property. Landlords act rationally, so if you make rules that incentivize them to not rent it shouldn't be surprising to see empty units. If you run the numbers yourself for what happened in San Francisco you will easily be able to duplicate this effect.

It's ok if you need to leave your apartment so long as you can find another apartment nearby. No one has a right to live in a particular city, and scarce resources will go to those most willing to pay for them.

https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren...

https://sfrb.org/sites/default/files/Document/Form/571%20All...

mindgam3• 8 years ago

Leaving aside the spectacle of two rich and powerful white male CEOs publicly throwing down about homelessness, which, admittedly, is riveting stuff - can we please talk about the real issue?

“Critics of Prop C say that it sets aside too much of San Francisco’s budget to one issue, giving it less control over long-term spending. The new mayor has said that the city needs to better spend the money it already dedicates to combating homelessness.”

Speaking as a full stack dev turned founder who experienced homelessless in San Francisco for several weeks in 2015, I am entirely unimpressed with the stated arguments against this corporate tax hike.

Too much for one issue? Can someone tell me what might be a more pressing issue that incredibly wealthy corporations could be supporting?

And regarding spending the current homeless better, well, yeah. Nobody’s going to argue against that. But is anybody seriously claiming that more money wouldn’t at least put a dent in the problem?

Without sounding overly dramatic, people’s lives are at stake. And not just people of poor character who made bad life choices. Real people, people that you might even interact with in a social or professional context. God forbid any pampered Twitter employee actually had to experience surviving on the streets of SF for a few days. It’s so easy to judge. But it is so much harder to pick yourself back up when you are that far down. Basic, stupid things get in the way. Getting to interviews, having clean clothes, being able to shower and use the rest room. Not to mention the nearly constant power tripping you are subject to from everyone you interact with based on your position on the lowest rung of society.

Yeah, I think companies making $50M a year should be glad to pay an extra half percent tax. If the moral argument isn’t persuasive, do it for business reasons. SF is attractive to the kinds of people who build world-changing startups because for all of its faults, it has a soul when it comes to progressive issues. Simply as a PR issue it would be wise for the tech community to take a simple action to make the world a better place, right here in our own backyard.

Salesforce’s Benioff Spars with Twitter’s Dorsey Over Support for Homeless

Related Stories