San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and Hating Itself

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/scottlucas/san-francisco-spent-a-decade-being-rich-important-and

by smadge • 7 years ago

65 136 7 years ago

allovernow4• 7 years ago

Hordes of newly minted and newly wealthy tech bros, flush with Silicon Valley VC cash, ruined what once had been an all-are-welcome cool, gray city of love, where the funky landlady Anna

This article nicely represents the narccisistic hubris of the ivory tower leftist viewpoint, and in-group social behavior at large. Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society. This has been the norm in the U.S. for decades. It's not cool to be smart and have geeky interests.

Now tech is hot and the in-group is having trouble competing with people for whom this wasn't just a job or a class, or even a hobby, it was an escape. So they go after their characters to justify quotas and the now deliberate social stigma they were previously oblivious to enforcing. Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse. And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always.

There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular subcultures, and how one of the three groups eventualy ruin everything, linked in the comments below which is related.

majos3• 7 years ago

There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular trends, and how three groups of people interact to eventually ruin any nice thing. If anyone knows that I'm talking about I'd appreciate a link!

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

dehrmann2• 7 years ago

Honest question: are tech bros bros who upped their tech game or nerds who got bro game?

mc322• 7 years ago

It’s an epithet conjured up by journalists plugging in to the angst created by city policies and cast onto a ready and easy target.

enraged_camel3• 7 years ago

>narccisistic hubris

That's funny, because as member of the tech community myself, I can unequivocally state that if there is one group that can be defined by the narcissistic hubris of its most prominent and influential members, it's techies.

I mean, we're talking about people whose idea of "disruption" is bending and breaking all kinds of rules and laws. AirBnB, Uber, Theranos, Facebook, Google, you name it... they're all led by people who think they are better than others, know more than others.

THAT is the real reason there's a backlash against us.

majos3• 7 years ago

But “techies” mostly aren’t the CEO-types who try to do all this disruption. They’re mostly developers who like to get paid to do semi-interesting work. The messianic stuff is largely confined to a small, loud group, I think.

mc322• 7 years ago

That’s not “techies” those are VCs and some founders.

allovernow4• 7 years ago

That's exactly what I'm talking about. You can cherry pick good and bad actors in any industry. This ignores all of the dedication poured into open source and support in frequently thankless roles - have you ever noticed how dry and professional OSS support forums like github and stackoverflow tend to be? To the point where people feel the environment is offensive (though I disagree). All of the positive contributions to control systems that link the globe and drive our factories and machines. Brilliant, completely free GPU based mathematics libraries in multiple languages - do you have any idea how far these technologies are driving the future? Tech is the foundation of the future. Maybe not now but it is inevitable, if we don't destroy ourselves, the live of the average person will undoubtedly become more and more computerized.

Also, what technology do you think is enabling clean tech? We simulate everything on the back of a subset of the tech industry.

doublement5• 7 years ago

At least we're not getting evicted.

To me the evictions dwarf every other concern. It's a result that's straightforwardly inhumane, and I don't think any reasonable person would disagree.

Personally, I'm inclined to blame NIMBY San Francisco homeowners for this, but of course they would blame me and other "tech bros" for moving here. In the meantime, those hardest hit, low-income renters, are a member of neither bickering party.

forrestthewoods2• 7 years ago

Evicting someone who doesn’t pay rent is definitely not inhumane. Prices changing alongside supply and demand is not inhumane.

Policies which artificially constrain supply for no good reason? I’ll agree that’s inhumane.

bandrami3• 7 years ago

The question of who "deserves" to live in a city, and who gets to decide that, is as old as cities themselves, and nobody's found a good answer yet.

Remember that every current resident who isn't evicted means one person who wants to move in to the city isn't able to.

epistasis2• 7 years ago

What's fucked up is that the people evicting get no blame, the people deciding that the city is full and should not accept more people get no blame.

nytesky• 7 years ago

Tech bros are not the nerds and geeks of years past, suddenly rich. That was the dot.com boom.

These are sons of the elite who used to mainline to investment banking on Wall Street, or maybe a MBB shop — they follow the money.

There are plenty of nerds coming here, and they make a bit more money if they snag a FAANG job, but VCs and bros make sure they don’t get too big a slice of the startup pie.

allovernow4• 7 years ago

You're arguing over the characteristics of a stereotype. Even if what you say is true, journalists wrap programmers in general up in their manufactured connotation. And that's, as they increasingly say in tech hubs, "problematic."

throwawaybbb2• 7 years ago

I've been called a tech bro, late 20 something 1m in net assets. Me and my group of friends are absolutely the geeks of yore. Ffs my last pitch had a wh40k reference in it and the guy financing it spend more time talking about warhammer lore than about the actual startup.

migueltyson2• 7 years ago

Heck, some go into MBB then do startups. Look at the Plaid cofounders - both super broey-looking Bain guys. I would be shocked if neither went to fancy elite private schools before heading to their elite colleges for undergrad.

tempsy7• 7 years ago

The reality is that incredible returns could've been had by anyone investing in public tech stocks over the last decade. You didn't need to be employee #10 at a unicorn.

Apple 25x'd over the last 10 years and is at all time highs. Microsoft is at all time highs. Tesla is at all time highs. Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, Google, FB are close.

claudeganon3• 7 years ago

There’s an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular trends

Is this what you’re referring too? “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths”?

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

By this formulation, it’s hard to argue that “tech” as a subculture hasn’t been overrun by sociopaths. Just compare the tech heroes of yesteryear (thinking the 70s/80s) with those of today.

allovernow4• 7 years ago

If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture.

To some degree you may be correct, but tech is unique. It primarily falls into this category, however in recent times, probably as during the tech boom, the culture is also rightly seen as a strong career path. And the people who spend their lives coding out of pure passion make these things look extremely easy to outsiders - you can't deny that someone who spends 4-8 hours a day coding in their spare time since teenagehood isn't likely to outperform someone who just does this for a living. So there will be a particularly strong pressure to coopt the subculture - but my point is that tech is different, because it isn't a subculture, it's a passion that cannot be simply emulated because in the end code either works or it doesn't.

scottrogowski• 7 years ago

And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always.

This. So much. I've been a nerd since middle school and have experienced a fair amount of bullying while growing up.

But the fact is, nothing has really changed between then and now. It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed. We shrug and accept it because we are used to it.

We as a group need to get better about advocating for our rights to live and work as humans just like everyone else and be more deliberate about pointing out the completely bizarre policy environment of California in general and San Francisco in particular that has led to this explosion of issues.

dondawest5• 7 years ago

It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed.

It’s because nerds are too busy following our interests to bother attacking back. Defending oneself in general doesn’t work: attacking back does. The maxim “Never defend, always attack” is a maxim for a reason.

The only real “solution” here is to attack back and bully the people who bullied you in the first place. And is that really a solution?

If as nerds, we defend ourselves, then we stay in the frame of the bully. If we attack back, we become bullying nerds.

Society needs scapegoats. For decades and decades, nerds have been safe to pick on. It’s not until you get an extremely aggressive nerd like Bill Gates that a member of the “nerd class” even begins to defend themselves. And aggressive nerds are rare and generally self-interested. Rather than attacking back for the “nerd class” as a whole, they attack companies competing with theirs.

What is the solution to this quandary? Everyone who’s read Girard knows we need scapegoats. If not nerds — oh wait, I mean “tech Bros” — then who else can we scapegoat as a society? The answer should obviously be Wall Street IMO, but that moment seems to have passed when the Occupy movement got culturally supplanted by in-group identity politics.

IMO in order to stop the bullying, we must become bullies ourselves which poses two questions:

* do we really wanna do that?

* and would it even work since Occupy failed so dramatically?

johnpowell• 7 years ago

How are you bullied in your daily life? I visited your about section on your page you list in your profile and you look like a normal dude, and it says you are 29.

This is my junior year picture that is in the yearbook. https://i.imgur.com/qDmYOJV.png

High school wasn't great for me. But by 29 I knew people had it worse and I realized nobody wants to hang out with a perpetual victim. Do you think you shouldn't have to work to get laid?

Again, really curious how you are are being bullied. Are people pushing you into lockers? Or do you just equate bulling with not getting the respect you think you deserve?

wbl4• 7 years ago

Where is my flying car? Clicking on ads is not revolutionizing society.

lazylizard• 7 years ago

I think it has actually. It motivated go, brotli, quic, tensorflow, kubernetes, vp9/av1, webrtc, hack, rust, hadoop, node, etcetcetc

remarkEon2• 7 years ago

Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse.

[Emphasis added] Well, this is certainly true. It's worth thinking for a moment about why "tech bro" has become a pejorative phase. Perhaps it has something to do with the "tech", which, for the most part, is really just online-ad-tech, UI/UX optimization, and a couple other things. Non-technical people don't really understand what most of this stuff is that "tech bros" work on, even though it really does affect them. And so it seems reasonable that they are a little confused as to how the "tech bros" got so rich working on "tech", which, again, is allegedly going to make us all better off. At least that's what we were all told growing up.

To be frank I think the hubris comes more for the other side of this equation that you do, and I don't think it's a uniquely leftist viewpoint to be skeptical of all of this (as I am not a leftist). When I visit SF (which is probably a dozen times a year) I'll see plenty of new billboards and ads for new startups working on the "hottest new stuff". I'm a technical person and can actually grasp what they're working on. Some of it is great. But working people who can't afford to live there now don't get what any of this is, and they're right to be skeptical about it. Who cares how passionate you are about revolutionizing an algorithm to better serve adds on social media. Long term, that's probably going to hurt society. Not help it. And if criticism of this is now "bullying" then, well, I'm Biff Tannen.

pm90• 7 years ago

Who cares how passionate you are about revolutionizing an algorithm to better serve adds on social media. Long term, that's probably going to hurt society. Not help it. And if criticism of this is now "bullying" then, well, I'm Biff Tannen.

Most of Silicon Valley isn't working on ad-tech (although a large chunk of it is). To dismiss everyone working in SV as working in optimizing ads doesn't make much sense.

There are other sectors of the economy completely wrecking the Environment (Energy, Global Warming), Global Economy (Finance, 2008 crisis) etc. While those sectors get their fair amount of attention, it seems like its cool to pick on those in tech now.

/shrug

tempsy7• 7 years ago

I would be surprised if the number of millionaires minted from being an employee (not founder) at a private tech startup founded in SF was over 1000 over the last 10 years.

Even if you're employee #10 the amount of equity you receive is, if you're lucky, maybe .20%, and drops exponentially from there.

Employees working at the big cos likely made much more depending on how long they held on to their RSUs than your average startup employee.

echelon• 7 years ago

You're definitely wrong. I'm at a company that minted over a thousand millionaires, assuming they held onto their options.

That's just one company.

doublement5• 7 years ago

I would estimate that the typical software developer working over that 10-year period and putting the money into either S&P 500 or a house saw an increase of $1M in their net worth.

barry-cotter• 7 years ago

I would be surprised if the number of millionaires minted from being an employee (not founder) at a private tech startup founded in SF was over 1000 over the last 10 years.

That would be roughly 100 a year. Y Combinator definitely funds more than a 100 startups a year, and it funds a small minority of all startups. Given that there were over 250 yet to IPO unicorns as of 2018 and Google alone made over 100 millionaires when it IPOed I think you’re off.

Employees working at the big cos likely made much more depending on how long they held on to their RSUs than your average startup employee.

Most employee stock options are more akin to joining Stripe now than to joining a company that just left YC.

dmix2• 7 years ago

This comment is 10/10. Excellent cultural critique.

Impossible• 7 years ago

While it's already kind of problematic to call nerds 'cast off from "normal" society' like they were an oppressed minority, I don't think the comparison is relevant. Most tech bros would have been working in finance or as lawyers or some other lucrative field. Many of them don't care about technology beyond how it can make them money, you see this attitude again and again on HN (countless posts about how the only value a programmer brings in business value). Most tech bros are not nerds that love technology for the sake of it, although there are of course people that work in tech that have this passion. The only way your comment works is if you apply "tech bro" to everyone working for a tech company...

bsanr2• 7 years ago

Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society.

I'd counter with something more radical for HN: that "Tech Bros" are the beneficiaries of a colossal intergenerational wealth transfer, constructed (consciously or unconsciously) to ensure that the vast majority of that wealth stays within the hands of relatively highly-educated, middle class white people. The myth-making that this "revenge of the nerds" fantasy is a subset of is in service of countering the obvious observations that would make such a wealth transfer untenable politically (in this case, hiding the fact that Tech Bros tend to come from privileged backgrounds). Another example is tech's dogmatic obsession with the notion of meritocracy, disguising the gatekept (and, otherwise, often arbitrary) nature of its job market and feeder pipelines in education and networking. With the general public's perception of the tech community cemented in this way, its members are free to wield influence and exoform their political, social, and cultural environment as they see fit.

This doesn't have to be a conspiracy to work; instead, what often happens is that investment entities headed and funded by elite, wealthy, often white Boomers look independently at pitches for companies that make widgets, if anything at all; that sell advertising and the profiles of the advertised-to; and that will never turn a profit, and ultimately determine, "I like these guys, they could turn this thing unicorn." They never will, of course - hopefully FAANG will buy you out for the technology you built to better sell ads - but in the meantime, dozens, hundreds, thousands of people will have access to incredible salaries and opportunities. Just as long as it's the "right" people.

I say this from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in, locked out of tech prosperity by circumstance, not lack of desire or aptitude: Tech Bro-dom bullies, ignores, and eventually leaves in the dust, professionally and economically, the people who are really on the margins.

desert_boi2• 7 years ago

For anyone that hasn't seen it, _Cities Without Suburbs_ is a book that lays out the case that fragmentation and infighting are a major hindrance on American metro areas.

San Francisco is bounded on all sides from expanding, so it's partially at the mercy of its suburbs when it comes to things like housing. Has there ever been a movement to consolidate the Bay Area like how Nashville consolidated 14(?) counties with the city itself?

x3n0ph3n32• 7 years ago

Given how poorly San Francisco is run and how corrupt its politics are, I don't think anyone outside of San Francisco would want that.

CoolGuySteve• 7 years ago

Silicon Valley could at least consolidate. I used to live on the border of Cupertino and Sunnyvale. The sales tax was different depending on which side of Homestead Rd I was on.

What was the fucking point of that? Were the culture and values of Sunnyvale really that antithetical to those of Cupertino?

It would be really nice if one of these parking lot hamlets actually did act differently and zone themselves to be super dense but when I left councilors were still mostly arguing about public WiFi and paying millions to water those plants in the road dividers all summer long.

wbl4• 7 years ago

San Francisco added 13 jobs for every home over the past decade, making it by far the worst housing actor. The suburbs of SF are the whole western half of the city.

Apocryphon11• 7 years ago

That's what happened to San Jose in the '50s-'60s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._Hamann

pascalxus• 7 years ago

The decision of the Mayor back in 2012 to attract a bunch of Tech companies to the city that wanted growth the LEAST, is highly questionable. It's just such a contradiction of what the locals wanted. And, now we're paying the price, litteraly.

In SF, I used to think the answer was to build more housing, lots more. But, after hearing from sooooo many NIMBYs and so much extreme angst against any kind of growth, I've come to realize that SF doesn't deserve tech companies or any companies for that matter. It's time to accept what the locals want and start acting like it. Remove the incentives for companies in SF and start applying disentives.

Tech needs a new home, a new city, perhaps one that hasn't been built yet. Perhaps one where innovation will be welcomed instead of stifled. One, where inclusiveness is all encompassing (and applies to housing) and not just a catchphrase used to be politically correct. One that isn't covered in poop. A city where enough housing supply can be built for everyone.

dehrmann2• 7 years ago

The decision of the Mayor back in 2012 to attract a bunch of Tech companies to the city

Do you mean the tax break for companies in the mid-market area, aka the Twitter tax break? There's definitely some tech around there, but I think SoMa has a lot more. The big ones, Google, Facebook, and Salesforce, aren't there.

Gunax• 7 years ago

The USA is such a vast country, there are so many nice areas. We don't need to cram all of one industry into a single city.

I vote Denver, Seattle, or Pittsburgh.

Apocryphon11• 7 years ago

As far as animosity towards tech workers and rising housing costs go, Seattle is second only to San Francisco and Austin.

boring_twenties2• 7 years ago

Denver and Seattle are both already having extreme housing shortages, congestion, and in the case of Seattle an anti-tech backlash.

thatsenough3• 7 years ago

What made San Francisco what it is today?

It's not the soft-on-crime District Attorney who cleared out the prisons by releasing criminals back onto the street.

Not the soft-on-crime SFPD, who barely enforces the law because what's the point? The DA won't prosecute anyway.

Not the fact that the hippies grew up and moved to Marin, and marijuana and mushrooms have been replaced with fentanyl and methamphetamine.

It's certainly not the bustling drug market that operates in 24 hours a day without police interference in the Tenderloin around Hyde and Golden Gate, making the city a go-to destination for drug addicts from across the region.

It's not the hundreds of millions of dollars the city hands out each year to homelessness advocacy groups that have no accountability and deliver no results.

It's not the entrenched NIMBYs who fight housing development tooth and nail.

It's the tech bros.

um_ya• 7 years ago

It's hard to change others, but it's easy to change yourself.

It's easier to just move to a more conservative state or a more welcoming city with less taxes and less restrictions.

I appreciate those that choose to stay and fight, but sometimes it's better just to move on.

San Francisco has been getting worse.

fredsanford• 7 years ago

> San Francisco has been getting worse.

From my first visit there in ~'93 to my last in ~'99 SF felt like it was going downhill quickly. I would not have gone back voluntarily after the first visit if not for job requirements.

I had an uncle who lived in Hayward who complained about both areas a lot.

After reading the news about needles, mental patients, shitting in the street etc... I dunno how it could get worse.

someguydave2• 7 years ago

Yes but if you move to a more conservative state please leave your extreme left wing politics behind.

smadge5• 7 years ago

I think the article was more nuanced than that.

thatsenough3• 7 years ago

I wish it were, but it's not. The author presents a myopic and one-sided view of the situation, scapegoating the city's numerous problems on a single group of people. It's not nuanced at all.

baron816• 7 years ago

The vilification of the “tech bro” is really such a tragedy (I know, preaching to the choir here). We’re just people, trying to make a living for ourselves, and doing the things we enjoy. Our culture is no better than anyone else’s. But neither is that of those lived in the Bay Area for the previous decades. Why should we be denied the life we were meant to live because they were here first and they don’t have room for us? There’s plenty of room for everyone to coexist, if we make it.

Apocryphon11• 7 years ago

But that's the thing- there isn't plenty of room, both in terms of affordable housing, and in actual housing (SF is 49 sq. miles hemmed in by the sea). And as our industry gets more entrenched, we are creating that which is directly in contravention of one of our craft's most important axioms: a monoculture.

wbl4• 7 years ago

49 square miles used improperly. We could house millions with the ancient technology of the apartment building.

ericd4• 7 years ago

SF is ridiculously non-dense. Paris, which most people think of as a much nicer city than SF, is much more dense, despite being limited to ~5 stories for most of it.

eecsninja2• 7 years ago

"Tech bro" describes a few people at the top (think Adam Neumann or Travis Kalanick) known for their bad behavior but unfortunately is used by the media to paint the rest of the men in tech with the same negative light.

The irony is that these people don't have a strong technical role -- they are mostly founders and executives. It's the people working under them with less influence who are doing all the hands-on tech work.

claudeganon3• 7 years ago

While I don’t agree with the label, one could argue that there’s a deep problem at the heart of tech culture where developers are happy to prop up cultish frauds or criminal behavior for a good paycheck. Neither Neumann or Kalanick got to where they are without a lot of people enabling them.

Areading314• 7 years ago

Greed, meet envy

anguswithgusto• 7 years ago

"Tragedy"?

Like it or not, male technologists are privileged beneficiaries of SF's broken social order. They might not be individually responsible for what's broken, but if there is "really such a tragedy" in the city, it is certainly not the fact that some guys are being stereotyped and mocked on Twitter.

ibeckermayer• 7 years ago

Beneficiaries? We’re the ones paying the rent, bro.

susijdjdjxa• 7 years ago

It is really weird to be called a bro when I’ve been bullied by bros for half of my life. I came here to get away from the bros, and based on the behavior of people I encounter on a daily basis, this was successful.

majos3• 7 years ago

Somebody help me understand the appeal of the bay area. What is the relative weight of

1. proximity to other tech companies (good for employees switching jobs) 2. proximity to venture capital (good for entrepreneurs) 3. general culture of tech work 4. general culture, food, weather?

4 seems to pale in comparison to the cost and quality of life issues I have read about (super expensive, dirty, bad transport).

2 seems plausible. But are in-person meetings so necessary and hard to set up outside the area (also, how many people there just want to be employees somewhere and don’t care about VCs?).

3 is pretty nebulous. And again I wouldn’t expect this to be a big factor for people who mostly just want to work somewhere and not build their own thing.

I’m left with 1. Is that it?

It just seems weird that company location appears optimized for founders (we should go where the action and investment money and talent is!) and not the enormous mass of people who would just be clocking into their jobs and making those companies run. I have no data on this, but it looks like those masses of lower-level employees might prefer to live somewhere more “sensible”.

It looks like such an...inefficiency.

mwilcox• 7 years ago

dating probably

migueltyson2• 7 years ago

Dating in SF is not great for dudes.

corysama• 7 years ago

It’s not just optimized for founders. The investment-employment concentration is a feedback loop that has been running for decades. Investment stays here because there is such an established concentration of talent. VCs talk about wanting to tap into the global talent pool. But, remote/distributed development is still a penalty vs everyone on the same floor. And, there are no comparable concentrations elsewhere.

The Bay Area is expensive. But, if you have a tech job, the pay balances out easily. Sometimes excessively.

There is tons of interesting tech work in the Bay. Not just pay the bills and go home work. But, work that is fascinating in itself. If you can’t find fascinating work here, maybe your interest in tech is limited to the paycheck. That’s totally respectable. But, you’d probably be happier some place more family friendly, or with mountains, or with a culture less focused on work -even if your bank account won’t grow as fast.

The arts culture has fallen off recently as rents have risen and the drug/homeless epidemic has really picked up in the past two years. But, it’s SF is still a beautiful city full of wonderful things. And, a lot of (mostly dog) poop.

shuckles2• 7 years ago

For what it’s worth, many of the region’s problems are not unique to it and are instead shared by any prosperous economic region in the USA. Land use, infrastructure, ineffective bureaucracy, urban place making, etc are countrywide issues that need resolution, and in some ways the Bay Area is leading that reform. I hope to see Prop 13 repealed or greatly weakened before I die.

pasttense012• 7 years ago

On the other hand the tech industry should be much better able to handle telecommuting than all other industries--so tech workers should be able to telecommute from anywhere which has decent internet.

shuckles2• 7 years ago

Start by observing that Sun, Google, HP, Apple, PayPal, VMware, Cisco, Netflix, Instagram, LinkedIn, and many other huge companies were founded by affiliates of a single university located in that region. What could be so special about the place, indeed.

_bxg1• 7 years ago

If Jackson, Mississippi is in 1985, I worry that Austin, Texas is in 2010. Slowly, and in miniature, the signals are starting to crop up. Homelessness downtown has visibly increased in just the past 3 years. Historic holes-in-the-wall are dropping like flies. Plenty of new housing is going up, but it's all luxury apartments with ground-floor shopping. The city's culture that everyone moved here for is being thrown out with the bath water. It's tough to watch.

SCAQTony• 7 years ago

San Francisco has been a boom/bust town since the gold rush. San Francisco's economic focal point, which has lasted there for a century or so, is tourism.

Have you heard about that sinking luxury condo skyscraper in S.F.? The terrain is formable in San Francisco, the geographic location treacherous. San Francisco's urban plan does not work well enough to fit nearly a million people. NYC has less than half the square mile footage, yet double the population. NYC works primarily better mainly because of location and geography. "...It turns out that Manhattan has a bedrock unusually suited to the construction of very tall buildings, in many cases just a few meters below the surface."

https://observer.com/2012/01/uncanny-valley-the-real-reason-...

ericd4• 7 years ago

Thing is, it doesn't need to be skyscrapers to house vastly more people than it does, it just needs to be 5 story walkups. And SV is currently one long stretch of strip malls, open air parking lots, and single story ranch homes with sad little yards.

acslater00• 7 years ago

and single story ranch homes with sad little yards

This is so spot-on it literally pains me

pasttense012• 7 years ago

5 story WALKUPS? Very few are going to walk up that many flights of stairs.

hn_throwaway_99• 7 years ago

I'm kind of disappointed in most of the comments here, because I think most of them are so focused on pushing back against the "tech bro" characterization (and TBH I think pushing back against this characterization is totally fair), that they're missing the broader picture of "Hey, things have become kind of fucked up in our largest cities", and it's worth thinking about how to deal with that.

What do I mean by fucked up? I mean that the cost of living and housing has become so high that the broad cross section of people you need to produce a vibrant city (e.g. bankers, politicians, techies, policemen, teachers, fireman, waiters, paramedics, artists, etc.) can no longer all afford to live there, and this is a real, serious problem. Cities have always had rich areas and poor areas, but as inequality has grown over the past few decades, with wealth flowing out of rural areas and into urban ones (especially "supercities" like SF, NYC, Seattle, etc.), it means that these cities are having less and less room for anyone but the rich.

SF is just the most acute example because (a) the concentrated tech boom here has created enormous amounts of wealth and (b) the geography here more tightly constrains sprawl compared to most other cities. However, the same exact thing is happening in lots of other places. E.g. there used to be "good parts" and "bad parts" (Hell's Kitchen, Alphabet City) of Manhattan, but there are almost no cheap places in Manhattan anymore. Similarly, Austin TX was a "slacker's paradise" 30 years ago, now pretty much all central housing is looking at $300-400k or more just for lot value of a single family home.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it's worth talking about how something feels broken in our cities, and what viable solutions would be, instead of just focusing on the "anti-anti-tech-bro" angle.

smadge5• 7 years ago

Totally agree that many comments here indicate a deep misreading of the article. The article examined two viewpoints, one that scapegoats the tech industry and one that scapegoats the NIMBYs. They say no progress has been made in a decade as these two viewpoints are in a stalemate. Ironically the author seems to see hope and a way forward in initiatives by the technology industry itself. Maybe everyone here only read the passages that presented the point of view that was critical of the tech industry and not the parts that were critical of the NIMBYs, or the parts that praised the YIMBYs and the tech industry getting involved in a solution.

iudqnolq2• 7 years ago

Edit: This comment is completely wrong, I take it back unreservedly

Can you explain why you thought this comment required a throwaway? I have seen many people express similar sentiments without anonymity, and can't think you anything in it that would get someone not hired, for example.

grzm• 7 years ago

The "throwaway" you're responding to was made in 2017 and has over 13K karma. At this point I strongly suspect it's just a handle rather than something used for some singular purpose.

wbl4• 7 years ago

America has only two cities: the rest are suburban conglomerations. Actual cities have buildings over four stories and apartment buildings everywhere.

perl4ever2• 7 years ago

Cities that I've been in, maybe precisely because they aren't "actual cities", have high rises downtown, but mostly that area is too expensive for ordinary people to live there. I don't understand why, given that the center of any area is necessarily relatively small, it shouldn't be reserved for commerce, because that is what requires everybody to come together. And it is!

seibelj• 7 years ago

Sad the author can’t be a dictator and make the world exactly as they determined it should be, as that sounds like their true passion, other than injecting smug into their veins every few hours. What an awful, meaningless article.

San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and Hating Itself

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