In defense of San Francisco's techies

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/In-defense-of-San-Francisco-s-techies-4616783.php?cmpid=twitter

by coloneltcb • 13 years ago

43 104 13 years ago

This is absolutely appalling that this is going on...I've never even heard or would fathom this in SF.

I was raised in San Francisco, right there on Mc Coppin and Market...smack damn in downtown. I've always known SF to be the most accepting and tolerant place I've lived in.

How could this type of prejudice go on in a city that allows nudes in parades, diversity in sexuality, and a bunch of 12 yr olds to run around downtown on Razor scooters at 3 in the morning.

I'm just speechless to hear this about my hometown.

rdouble7• 13 years ago

In the first dot com boom DIE YUPPIE SCUM was stencil painted on all the sidewalks in SoMa and the Mission, so nothing new...

http://www.salon.com/1999/10/29/yuppies/

quackerhacker3• 13 years ago

That's crazy, although I was 11 when this was going on...so I'm guessing the eyes of a child may not be a great reference here.

What I do remember in 2000 when I was there....WebTV, WebVan, Yahoo Auctions, and having Lycos go fetch a search....that's when I was 12.

I do remember everyone had prejudice against the homeless, and I vaguely remember talk of trying to oust them.

WildUtah• 13 years ago

1998. Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.

http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradicatio...

michaelochurch8• 13 years ago

My problem is that it's going to target the wrong people. Low-level software engineers (who suffer the high rents like everyone else) are being lumped in with the douchebag underachievers whose boarding-school friends in VC handed them VP positions in startups (i.e. rich people welfare).

I stopped supporting violent revolution when I realized that it was the fringe of the elite (i.e. people like me) rather than the ones really in charge who tend to get killed.

wwwong• 13 years ago

Having witnessed the eras of gentrification in the mission district (my family has a small business around 20th and mission), the same people that are complaining that 'techies are forcing them out' are the same people that forced out the large hispanic community in the mission just 5-years earlier.

I shall not shed a tear.

walshemj9• 13 years ago

As they say "Never trust a hippie"

walshemj9• 13 years ago

Obviously the SF nimbys are in action on HN :-)

michaelochurch8• 13 years ago

I have little patience for hipster leftism. Liberal politics, for hipsters, is just a way of saying, "I'm nonreligious, so you can assume I put out". As a nonreligious leftist with more restraint than that, I'm offended by their use of those stereotypes.

They turn into New York's limousine liberals 15 years later. They gripe about "capitalism" but run nonprofits that are even more authoritarian and exploitative of the low-ranking people than most companies. Bitch, please. You just hate capitalism because you couldn't make it in that world.

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

This article is about an intriguing subject, but ends up becoming a bland editorial at the very end. The author brings in interesting anecdotes and a few stats, but it doesn't explore the suggested trend- that there is growing animosity between tech workers and non-tech workers- very much. He writes that "a growing number of San Franciscans are fed up" but doesn't seem to pinpoint who exactly this number is composed of. Lower-income anti-gentrifiers? Non-STEM hipsters? The author brings up both, but without more data, this trend seems ambiguous and undefined.

This article is about a news item that is still in development. But it'd be nice to see in which direction (i.e., who are the most active anti-tech worker segment) it's developing.

tommorris4• 13 years ago

"If the tag on Valencia had read "F- immigrants," or that piñata was made to represent a transvestite"

Yeah, because entrepreneurs and technology businesses are marginalised by society just like immigrants and trans people are.

supercanuck• 13 years ago

that was the exact sentence that caused me to leave and check HN comments. If only someone would think of the poor techies! geesh.

walshemj9• 13 years ago

Well in the UK engineers are seen as second class people compare the number of MP's who have a technical background and the average pay in the other professions to engineering.

And outside of SV the same is true to an extent in the USA certainly in DC and the corridors of power people with technical backgrounds are rare.

And MP like John Robertson (Glasgow North West) who was a LCM for British Telecom before he entered Parliament is very rare. Any congresmen or senators start as a line man for the phone company?

tommorris4• 13 years ago

I'm in the UK. If I'm a second-class citizen qua my being a software engineer, I'd say being a second-class citizen pays pretty fucking well.

Let's see: good pay, mostly recession-proof work, often interesting work. Crikey, it's like apartheid South Africa or the Deep South during Jim Crow being in engineering...

walshemj9• 13 years ago

Well given the proportion of Indian's in the techie community relative to the SF population in general - It is arguably Indirect Racism.

oblique634• 13 years ago

I've lived in SF my entire life, and I can guarantee you that a vast majority of the tech community here is not Indian. SV is a different story, but in SF it is mostly a 'middle-class' white demographic. If there's any "indirect racism" that's going on, it's probably best encapsulated by what's happened to the mission, but even that would be stretching it a bit. This is really more of a 'class' issue than a racial issue.

AYBABTME• 13 years ago

One could get offended in infinitely many ways using this kind of logic.

cwp3• 13 years ago

So prejudice and hatred are OK, as long as the group you hate isn't marginalized?

Or maybe it's a hipster thing? Marginalizing immigrants and transvestites is so 20th century. These techies are getting too big for their britches; time to marginalize them.

tommorris4• 13 years ago

Let's see.

http://www.civilrights.org/publications/hatecrimes/escalatin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LG...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unlawfully_killed_tran...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States

Ah, but that pales into comparison because someone scrawled "Fuck your startup" in SF.

oblique634• 13 years ago

There is a very real difference between living a well-paid life with some social stigma attached, than having your equal rights denied. Lets not forget that gay marriage is still technically up in limbo right now, and that a large portion of the immigrant community in SF is 'illegal' (whether we like that or not). Quite frankly, being stigmatized for being a techie is not much of a marginalization in comparison. This is largely a privilege/status/class issue, so when talking about marginalization it is important to keep those factors in mind.

maxcan• 13 years ago

"hipster on hipster hatred"

wavefunction5• 13 years ago

This is some hate I can get behind. Is there an online petition or something I can sign?

raldi2• 13 years ago

The solution to all these problems is housing density, especially in places like the Mission, which have excellent public transportation.

The anger should be directed at low-rise zoning restrictions, and at the incredible power we provide obstructionists to endlessly delay development projects.

wavefunction5• 13 years ago

Actually the real solution is not focusing on concentrating all technological development in the Bay Area or NYC or Boston but spreading it out across this great wide country (and world) of ours so that everyone can take part in and benefit from the modern economy.

raldi2• 13 years ago

Could you express that in concrete terms? For example, my suggestions would be:

* Remove height restrictions near public transit

* Make the building permit process more similar to that of a typical American city. Specifically, reform CEQA and the SF Discretionary Review process.

wavefunction5• 13 years ago

Why am I getting downvoted? Nothing I said was offensive.

dasht• 13 years ago

Bah. I call BS. You sound like a San Francisco real estate speculator or developer. "High density infill" projects are loved by the people who make money off the development of the property but no matter how much you weaken zoning protections to get there they somehow never manage to swing prices when demand, like it is now, is just so much greater. What you do accomplish with these projects, typically, is building very high-end price units, often of compromised quality (cheap materials, absurd square footage, etc.) Of course this does have the effect of reducing gentrification. On the contrary it steps up the pace while simultaneously leaving the city with a less desirable housing stock in the long run.

tptacek17• 13 years ago

I call "math". Manhattan is 34 square miles and houses 1.6MM people. San Francisco is 49 square miles --- 1.5x bigger! --- and houses just 810k.

Working class people in SF aren't just upset that they're losing apartments they've lived in for years; they're upset that they can't predict where they're going to have to move to and where their kids are going to school; the whole city is crunched.

scythe• 13 years ago

but no matter how much you weaken zoning protections to get there they somehow never manage to swing prices when demand, like it is now, is just so much greater.

It doesn't make sense that they would, but that's okay because it's not the goal. In oversimplified microeconomic terms, new housing is built for the current price point, and can have the effect of preventing a price rise -- preventing demand from exceeding supply. Prices come down when supply overgrows demand, which doesn't happen by increasing supply, because the people doing so would lose money: demand has to decrease. tl;dr: high prices cause construction, but it's a negative feedback loop.

Concerns about housing quality seem misplaced. In a large majority of cases, new housing tends to be better than old housing, thanks to innovations in construction. High rises were popular in the '70s, which is why low-quality high rises are common: they're old.

cooop• 13 years ago

I've never been to SF, but I'd imagine that the tag's popularity lies in its irony, not the fact that it's a hard hitting sociopolitical statement.

ritchiea2• 13 years ago

It's tough, I've long empathized with complaints about SV taking over San Francisco and the soaring rents. Largely because I believe SV culture is intentionally blind to or intellectually dishonest about the fact that it is first and foremost a business sector that generates revenue, not a community that innovates for the betterment of humanity (and I think we should be okay with being a business sector! it's creepy to try and avoid that obvious truth). And the claims you occasionally hear about SV being a "true meritocracy" are deeply concerning. Being a "true meritocracy" of people with elite educations is a joke. I do include the self educated people in that comment, once again, great work but a huge percentage of America and the world grow up in places where the idea that they could learn Python and make 100k is unfathomable. And quite frankly, do not have easy access to the educational and cultural environments that aid in developing the soft skills that are necessary to be a self educated success in SV. In short, there are a lot of ways the SV is full of itself, so I empathize with people feeling they are being shoved around by privileged elites.

That said, some of the anger at SV is starting to remind me of general resentment of nerds, in a very high school way. My guess is both of these things are going on and they are getting conflated and that's causing real discussion to halt. Which is a shame because both are real problems, some SV people are clueless elites and blanket anger towards geeks is unreasonable. Any intelligent conversation about the culture of San Francisco should keep those things in mind and be very careful not to conflate them.

michaelochurch8• 13 years ago

That said, some of the anger at SV is starting to remind me of general resentment of nerds, in a very high school way.

Actually, the real enemy of both categories (engineer "nerds" suffering calibration scores and cliffing vs. San Fransicans being priced out by useless, bland people) is the same for each: the executive douchebags who beat those nerds up in high school and are now VPs of BizDev in those supposedly engineer-centric startups.

rdouble7• 13 years ago

This isn't 1996. The douchey executives who invented the calibration scores also have EECS degrees from Stanford.

tptacek17• 13 years ago

Hey. No. Stop pretending. The people hitting the Google bus pinatas are mad at you. They're not mad at the "douchebags" in "bizdev". The difference between someone who makes 140k+benefits and someone who makes 200k+benefits is immaterial to a family of four bringing in 60k. Both groups are pricing that family out of their apartment.

The difference is material to you, because you're upset that they're making more than you without justification. But guess what? Factory workers generally think you make much more than you're worth too, and, more importantly, they're a lot more afraid of you displacing them than the VP/Bizdev who doesn't want to live in their neighborhood to begin with.

tptacek17• 13 years ago

They shouldn't be angry at techies, who, after all, are helping fund the city with their taxes.

They have good reason to be angry, at the city itself. It's comically mismanaged. San Francisco spends more than 2x per capita than Chicago does, and something like 3.5x what Los Angeles spends. Its outcomes across the board are poorer.

Moreover, the city is infected with NIMBYism that prevents it from employing the rational response to a housing crunch, which would be building more freaking housing. San Francisco is small, and, more importantly, locked in geographically. It's a metro area that can't afford irrational density restrictions; it's a Manhattan that zones like it's Des Moines.

People have written about the mismanagement and quality of life problems in San Francisco for a decade and a half. It shouldn't surprise anyone that people on the streets in San Francisco are happy to look for scapegoats, since it's a lot easier to beat up a pinata of a Google bus than it is to make new housing happen, or get libraries and hospitals built, or ensure that quality public transportion is universally available in all parts of the city, or mitigate crime.

rdouble7• 13 years ago

I'm not a fan of SF's bizarre city politics and NIMBYism, but... where can more housing be built?

Much of the western half of the city is single family homes. As are neighborhoods like Glen Park, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, etc. The dense parts of the city like the loin and nob hill are already pretty dense. In semi-dense neighborhoods like SoMa, Hayes Valley and the Mission existing renters have to be given the boot in order for new housing to be built. That actually happens, and the anti gentrification crowd protests being edged out by yuppies, because that is what is actually happening. I'm not sure where the city could put more high density housing.

arjunnarayan• 13 years ago

Build up. The same way every other big city deals with this problem.

http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005...

tptacek17• 13 years ago

You really think that if we took the time to work out the square mileage of SOMA, The Mission, downtown, Potrero, and Bayview that the population per square mileage of those areas would be competitive with Manhattan? Anything close to it?

DanBC2• 13 years ago

Would better public transit systems (clean and fast trains, with power and wifi, at a reasonable cost) help? You ship people in every morning.

cwp3• 13 years ago

where can more housing be built?
Much of the western half of the city is single family homes. As are neighborhoods like Glen Park, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, etc.

You've answered your own question.

clicks3• 13 years ago

They shouldn't be angry at techies, who, after all, are helping fund the city with their taxes.

That is a specious line of reasoning. What good is funding the city with taxes to the very inhabitants of the city who're forced to pay more for rent, or forced out because they can no longer afford to live in the city?

The way I see it, these techies, and these techy companies have a moral responsibility to use up their resources in trying to effect change on zoning laws, on improving transportation for the general public, etc.

tptacek17• 13 years ago

Did you stop reading at the first line of my comment?

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

I'm curious about something. Please note that I know nothing about urban planning or construction or anything like that.

Why doesn't San Francisco expand onto the ocean?

Many sea-locked cities around the world do that. For example, the Hong Kong International Airport was built on the ocean in its entirety [1]. Probably wasn't cheap, but shows that its doable.

I feel like San Francisco can do the same - or something similar at least.

Again though, I know nothing about this sort of thing, and I'm just asking to learn. :)

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

usaar3333• 13 years ago

1. I assume you mean bay, and historically it has. All of the pink areas on this map: http://imgs.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/ontheblock/2011/0... are landfill (The blue were marshes)

2. Why not more expansion? Huge environmental costs. A lot of the Bay has already been filled so many locals don't want to continue that route. Additionally, landfill is very expensive AND produces the least safe land for a building to be on during an earthquake (meaning building costs also increase).

quackerhacker3• 13 years ago

There was also the Treasure Island project, but that fell through it looks like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island_development

x0x02• 13 years ago

sf is worse than comically mismanaged; to steal a quote from Philip Greenspun, watching san franciscans play at running a city is like watching a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off. We came from nyc and were astounded how bad muni is. Two people who very happily lived without cars were forced to buy one then two cars to live an adult life in sf. How are you supposed to get groceries, run errands, go to the gym, go to the library, etc etc on muni when every errand costs an additional 60 to 90 minutes because of muni. When we lived in Haight, we could bloody walk many places in the city faster than muni could take you there. Taxis, even to valencia at 23rd, just don't come. And muni is not only glacially slow [2], but it's fucking expensive as hell too:

   For every mile Muni runs a bus in this city, it spends 9.21; comparable 
   agencies nationwide pay between 0 and 3. For every mile Muni runs a 
   light-rail vehicle, it throws down 4.37; comparable rail services spend 
   between 2 and 2. [1]

So -- we pay the most and get the worst services. Plus, I've ridden public transport all over the world and never before sf had I regularly felt physically unsafe on public transport.

And the housing. Walk through the mission; while there's definitely beautiful victorians there's also a bunch of cheap shit, no more than two stories, thrown together for as little money as humanly possible in the 60s and 70s that we could tear down and replace with 10 story housing. And landlords are fucking amazing; we ended up in court with multiple lawyers because, for the low low price of $2200/mo, we expected the shower not to leak into our bed and the landlord not to steal electricity from our meter. When we lived in manhattan, people had landlord problems, but it wasn't par for the course. Here, amongst personal friends, roughly 40% have had just horrific landlord problems that ended up with police or court involvement.

And the schools. There's a reason parents are driven out; it's because you either pay for private school or move to the peninsula and get good public schools for your taxes.

[1] http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-04-14/news/the-muni-death-spira...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/san-francisco-buses-are...

nthitz• 13 years ago

Picture of the graffiti mentioned http://instagram.com/p/aSl87rK-IR/ edit: someone registered www.fuckyourstartup.com

protomyth• 13 years ago

Read a newspaper from western North Dakota and you will get the same story. Booms are incredibly hard on fixed or lower income residents. It might be an interesting contrast given the towns in ND have an expansionist bent.

michaelochurch8• 13 years ago

Technology is a weird space because it has some of the best individual contributors, but also many of the worst managers on earth.

Now that the elites have caught on to technology being actually important, they've colonized us as a people. Just as they've colonized the space in major cities (see: San Francisco and New York) they have taken over us and our economy, and we are now under occupation. And there is a Damaso Effect going on when it comes to technology management.

What's the Damaso Effect? It refers to the theologically incompetent friars often sent from Spain to the colonies, such as the Philippines. The good ones stayed on the mainland; the inept, fired ones who were sent away to die ended up in the colonies and became local authorities. You see a weird and unstable dynamic in a colony relationship where the best people of some society have to answer to the worst of another. It leads to a lot of violence as those with natural leadership talents (the best of the colonized society) refuse to subordinate to people who are, although from a more powerful nation, in all other ways inferior.

That's what's happening to nerds/"techies". We're being subordinated to the worst of another kind. See, in the business/executive/finance world, the good ones who can actually sell and motivate and mentor (rather than bumbling middle managers who can't motivate shit to stink) are off writing billion-dollar private equity deals and flying around the world on private jets. It's the bad ones, mostly, who get stuck managing nerds or who end up being a mere product manager (of a product that was someone else's idea) at 32.

The reason I am writing this is because it's important point out that "we" (the technology people) and "they" (the ones being priced out) have a common enemy: the useless executives and colluding VCs who are actually both (a) running up house prices while (b) destroying the technology sector.

In defense of San Francisco's techies

Related Stories