Why is San Francisco trying to strangle its golden goose?
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Anyone who takes Uber in SF has met a fair number of these 'entrepreneurs'. They look an awful lot like low-wage employees trying to make ends meet, and extending them basic protections that reflect the reality of their job is not clipping their entrepreneurial wings.
It's pretty sad that many other companies and jobs with "independent contractor" status but continually exploitative conditions have slipped under the radar.
Newspaper carriers are a particularly good example. Typically 100 miles or more, seven days a week, with the cost of each paper deducted from their pay.
I tried a paper route last year. It's a 60-70hr/week job without overtime pay. Pays less than minimum wage after factoring in vehicular expenses.
Excuse me for dumping, I just had to laugh when quitting the job meant a contractual month's-advance notice or a $3,000 fine.
They've already done this. And from their careers page (http://www.liveops.com/company/careers-jobs) they are characterizing their operators as independent contractors, if I am reading the verbiage correctly.
(Source, I interviewed there and received an offer which I declined)
* Is it moral to capitalize on employee classification rules to build an enormous workforce that is denied protections and benefits that are common to other employees? And,
* Do we as a society want to maintain the classification rules that allow this to happen?
We could easily change the rules so that, for instance, protections and benefits must be extended to anyone who does more than N hours of work for you in a calendar year. Individual states could do that. Shouldn't we? Why or why not? In answering, consider that over the long term, Uber won't be the only firm taking advantage of these rules, and that in competitive marketplaces the most ruthless, least responsible companies often have an insurmountable edge. One thing we like to do with regulation is to prevent races to the bottom.
There are some good points that we are still fighting the after effects of this policy to this day. A good example would be how business owners encapsulate their properties to not trigger the re-assessment of the property to current values. It explains a number of the remaining low cost/slum-lord apartments still around.
A resident of SF thus might have a very different outlook on this than a resident of Ann Arbor. They won't face a loss of service as a result of new government restriction.
Time-based limits on any kind of labor also seem to hit the wall at some point, and you can see it in Bay Area. At some point a court decision mandated extending full-time benefits to contractors with employment record longer than 12 months, and if you browse contractor listings for any of the Bay Area mega-corps, they're pretty explicit the contract is for 12 months and 12 months only without a possibility of extension.
Similarly Uber app will likely just go dark after N hours of work have been reached in a given year. Do we as a society win from having the worker switch to Lyft or look for another job?
This is not "double Irish" scheme, a bright 8 y.o. could have figured this outcome, yet, this being California, people still vote for the people who bring these laws on them. Boggles my mind.
drivers arent working for uber, uber is an app that facilitates a connection between a service provider and a client, not all that different than the yellow pages. uber is a communication provider, the same as att.
The contractor status for low skill jobs is used too much as a way to put all the costs on the employee. That's why the sharing economy sucks.
Not sure about the other types of insurance, since an Uber vehicle was not bought by Uber, is not maintained by an Uber mechanic, and is used for other purposes than driving for Uber, it seems unlikely that they would offer more than commercial liability insurance they already offer https://newsroom.uber.com/56463/
What are the "downsides of the technology boom"? The mission was originally german-irish, and then became latino. Now a lot of young technology professionals live there, cause, you know, cities evolve.
I remember in the 80s you had to hopscotch over human feces when walking in SF. Why are politicians so short sighted that they want wealthy, well educated people out of their city?
A lot of the homelessness in SF is not visible. You see the ranting person in the street off their meds, but not the families who are in and out of shelters.
https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
Obviously higher rents are making it harder to get out of homelessness (and the survey acknowledges that many times), but they are not the reason most of the chronic homeless ended up being homeless in the first place, by their own account: "Nearly one-third of chronically homeless respondents reported alcohol or substance abuse as the primary cause of their homelessness; this was in contrast to 14% among non-chronic respondents. Fewer chronically homeless respondents reported economic factors as the primary cause of their homelessness. For example, 19% reported job loss as a primary cause compared to 27% of non-chronic respondents."
According to the survey (same pages), the chronically homeless are less likely to be in shelters and accept government assistance than the general homeless population. They therefore comprise a significant number of the homeless seen on the streets.
Also, according to the survey, among the chronically homeless in San Francisco, there were only 18 families in 2015 (page 50).
And let's not sugar coat it. Some are mentally ill, but many others have serious drug/alcohol addictions. You only need to stroll through the Tenderloin or Civic Center at any time of day to see that first hand.
But read the SF survey linked twice in this thread. It's got lots of actual answers. The homeless you see on the street are not really representative of the problem. There's a bigger population of precariously housed people who cycle in and out of homelessness.
28% said no permanent address
20% said alcohol or drug use
17% said disability
14% said age
13% said need for clothing/shower facilities
...
9% said mental health concerns
Source: https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
Many people will deny their circumstances because they are mentally ill and don't realize it, or are simply in denial, or because they think they will get more help if they hide their problems.
From what I've read, at the national level the incidence of serious mental illness in the homeless population are around 20 - 25%. So the numbers for San Francisco seem reasonable.
There's another option - we can not rely on self-reporting and just acknowledge that we don't know. It's not satisfying, but it sucks less than creating public policy based on bad/misleading information. I doubt very much we can fix 28% of homelessness by handing out free PO boxes.
It's literally like any other disease. We don't know how many people actually get the flu every year. We only know how many people self-report getting the flu, and how many people seek treatment. Self-reported surveys are used all the time in epidemiology and we manage to form effective public policy based on that.
So sure, there's definite bias when it comes to self-reporting, but your suggestion is to ignore what data we do have and form public policy based on what? How you feel? First principles?
I genuinely would like to see that.
Homeless people move to SF (and California in general) because it's relatively rich and temperate and tolerates homeless people crowding thoroughfares and shitting on the streets.
How is this claim "malicious"?
The reason I call it malicious is that it serves a Malthusian argument where doing more to help the homeless will just attract more homeless people to San Francisco, so we might as well not do anything.
Source: am young technology professional.
/s
Sounds like you're dull - stop making generalizations without facts.
Pokemon Go does not count as a hobby, btw.
The downside of the technology boom is that it's turning a living city into a bedroom community for high-income people. And the city has not been able to harness any of this wealth to fix the old problems that plagued it.
The best thing to happen to SF urban planning, and I say this without hyperbole, was the Loma Prieta earthquake. Otherwise the city seems paralyzed and incapable of action.
The mission is far safer now than it used to be. And if you look like a "techie" (What does that mean exactly?) you're more likely to be victimized. The criminals are probably thinking that you have some assets, and won't fight back. I've never felt unsafe in the mission in the past ten years.
Yes, that's because a lot of the locals are caught up in some shady activities.
Gang violence and drug violence generally don't bother outsiders. Being poor doesn't have much to do with it, except to make you want to get caught up in the life to make some money for your family.
I don't know anything about the mission but in my southside Chicago neighborhood having assets will not get you targeted. Being a young black kid from the wrong block will.
This thread is basically all about the idea that rich techies deciding if a neighborhood is more safe from their perspective is flawed, because they are likely to be the least impacted. From my experience, that's true.
Why are you inserting age and race into this discussion? Either you're caught up in street drama or you're not. If you're not, people generally don't mess with you unless you have assets, there's nothing in it for them.
> This thread is basically all about the idea that rich techies deciding if a neighborhood is more safe from their perspective is flawed, because they are likely to be the least impacted. From my experience, that's true.
Agreed, not because they're "rich" or "techie", but because they haven't been around long enough to take sides and get targeted by a particular group of people. "Rich techies" is just a dog whistle to try to get sympathy.
Because by every metric you can come up with young black men in my neighborhood are in more danger than any one else & it has nothing to do with their criminal affiliation. It is a trivial excercise to find kids that grew up just like me but black, who experience violence levels unheard of where I grew up & the only demographic difference is race. The idea that its only "criminals" who suffer from American urban violence is so trivially refuted that no one who studies it seriously considers it credible. Yet on one of the most affluent tech boards in the world its considered normal to argue the opposite.
Spend the trivial effort and show me.
> Yet on one of the most affluent tech boards in the world its considered normal to argue the opposite.
What does affluent and tech have to do with anything?
Let's spin this another way. By every metric you can come up with, young black men are more likely to commit homicide, deal drugs, skip out on child support, and be incarcerated than any one else, and the only demographic differnce is race. It has nothing to do with their criminal affiliation.
Once you start going against the social narrative, things get interesting.
One of my son's classmates, Elijah Sims, was just shot in the head and killed less than a mile from our high school. He used to live east of Austin Blvd, which divides Oak Park (our wealthy suburb) from the neighborhood Austin on the west side of the city. He and his family moved into Oak Park to get access to our school district. But of course he had friends in Austin, and he'd ride his bike 5 minutes or so over to Columbus Park to hang out with them.
He wasn't a white dude on a bicycle with a backpack with a $2000 laptop in it. If he had been, the car that drove alongside him and his friends and opened fire on them would have driven right by. They're not interested in "victimizing" "techies".
Can you tell me more about the "street drama" Elijah was caught up in?
You think his story is unique? You're right! It is! His family had moved to Oak Park, and students at OPRF don't routinely get murdered. It was newsworthy. You can search "Oak Park student murdered" and get story after story.
But kids in South Austin and for fuck's sake Englewood and god help you if you live in or around Gary --- they're in "street drama" as soon as they set foot out of the house every morning. We techies in Oak Park and Logan Square don't hear so much about it when they got shot.
I go to Gary every so often; there's a couple of really good beer bars out near there. You know how scared I am to be there? Really not scared at all. White dude. Nobody has to guess if I'm affiliated, and I'm not there long enough to catch a stray, like Zariah Muhammad did in Park Manor --- near Uncle John's Barbecue, a Chicago foodie destination. The white dudes who venture out for hot links and rib tips don't seem to get shot. I guess they're better at "not taking sides" and "getting targeted by a particular group of people". Zariah got caught up in street drama, too, I guess. She's 6 years old.
Come to think of it, when I lived in an apartment in Bayview in '98 --- when the murder rate in SF was, it looks like, 50% higher --- I was never worried either. And I was the dumbass parking a BMW on the street.
So I guess long story short is, I'm questioning the logic you're applying to rough neighborhoods. Are you sure you know what you're talking about? I mean: maybe you do. I'm really seriously asking.
That's a good question. Chicago is a very racially segregated city, but so is the San Francisco Bay Area.
You bring up several anecdotes, mainly involving a killing and a feeling of safety. The plural of anecdote of is not data.
I've lived in some bad areas, but never anywhere with the racial tension that seems prevalent in Chicago. But I will say, if you're not in the East Bay, if you walk into a bar full of black people, if you're not black or with black friends, you walk back out again real quick.
This is absolutely correct. My family has lived in the SF area since the 1930s. My grandfather saw it evolve through many stages: working class German-Irish Catholic city, military city during WWII with a huge influx of soldiers from all over the country, center of counterculture in the 1960s, influx of gay culture, dot-com boom, second tech boom...
All of those changes happened in one person's lifetime. Before then, there were other huge changes -- the gold rush, the influx of Chinese immigrants as well as the German and Irish working class that comprised much of the population in the early 20th century, the great earthquake and fire.
Every time the city changed, the people who were already there were pretty unhappy about it.
This hasn't changed. Not as prevalent but it's not gone either. I will give you the point that the primary excretion is now vomit, and not feces.
Now, one could argue about whether it would be good or bad for SF to turn into SV2, but unless someone starts bulldozing entire city blocks to start building campuses for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees, it is not yet SV2. To date the conflicts have been more about how much runoff from SV are SF residents willing to tolerate, in terms of being a bedroom community for SV, and the local startup scene that arises from that arrangement.
I personally think that much of the anti-tech sentiment in SF comes from entitlement, tribalism, and a culture that values protest and political strife for its own sake over actually trying to understand what the problems are and actually trying to solve them, but that's just my take. More charitably, I see it as SF trying to figure itself out in changing times, as opposed to the "tech capital of the world" being strangely oblivious to its own place in the industry.
Now, one might say, "but it's so much more boring to live in Sunnyvale than SF!", but that's still a choice being made for lifestyle reasons and not a housing decision that they were forced into. I would also say that if anyone is bored almost anywhere in this day and age, that that's far more a personal failing than a property of where they live, but that's totally besides the point. :)
Consider also that you and I are techies, and move in techie circles. There is a large population of people working non-tech jobs for whom cost is the overriding concern.
Palo Alto is a bit unrepresentative of SV. It has very high barriers to new housing. On the other hand, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose, which are much larger than Palo Alto, are building stuff everywhere. So is Redwood City, just to the north of Palo Alto, which has seen its downtown area completely transformed over the past few years.
The cities I mentioned are building a lot more housing than SF is building, even though they have fewer startup jobs, so it's hard to justify any accusations that they aren't doing their part.
I think that San Francisco is trying to avert the Detroit outcome. Instead of being completely dependent on a single industry they are trying to regulate the growth and allow non-techies to live there. And instead of just forbidding things or over-regulate they are using taxes and other incentives to bring balance to the city. The article just cites some regulations as evil-doers without explaining why that's the case, or what is the relationship between the selected regulations.
I really hope that San Francisco is able to keep its roots and what make it a great city to innovate and live.
> Eric Mar, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, even went so far as to say that the tax would serve as indemnification for the “downside of the technology boom,” according to The New York Times.
And as clarification, according to The New York Times Eric said that the tax would serve as indemnification for the “downside of the technology boom”. The "even went so far" is just part of Techcruch opinion.
What roots are these? The Irish used to run the avenues, and now the Sunset is predominantly Chinese. Like I mentioned before, the Mission used to be german-irish, then it turned latino, and now there are a lot of techies there. Portola used to have mostly white and black residents, now there are a lot of Chinese people there.
Change happens. You have to constantly re-invent yourself.
The issue is an economically diverse city becoming polarized into a theme park and bedroom community for high earners, and a bunch of poor enclaves, with a service sector that has to commute in from outside the city.
They sure as heck try to go to SOMA to recruit technical people and try to get technical advice. How is that any less of a tribe than a specific ethnicity. One tribe has spaghetti, one has dim sum, and the other has layers upon layers of technical expertise.
> The issue is an economically diverse city becoming polarized into a theme park and bedroom community for high earners, and a bunch of poor enclaves, with a service sector that has to commute in from outside the city.
Define economically diverse. The only reason less affluent people can't live in the city is because of the NIMBYism of SF residents, and the fact that they believe real estate should be a good financial investment.
A few decades of compound interest later, you get to where we're at, where either you have to be incredibly wealthy or lived here for a long time to afford anything.
What was SF (and SV) like after the Dotcom crash? I was in high school at the time on the East Coast and haven't really heard any first-hand accounts of what the cityscape was like after. Did rents / housing become cheaper? Was there mass out-migration? Etc.
Otherwise...we're all grownups here. If the people of San Francisco decide that the best possible set of tradeoffs involves reducing tech's footprint, and their elected representatives implement policies to that effect, then that's democracy. Certainly the city's rich and diverse history provides some weight to the anti-tech crowd's strongly held belief that the City needs to pump the brakes.
I think it's pretty similar to New Yorkers who insist on living in Manhattan, rather than the other boroughs which are more affordable, or, God forbid, New Jersey.
You don't have to move very far from San Francisco to get a significant decrease in rent. Just a few miles is enough.
I know plenty of people who insist on living in SF. They do the same things after work that most people do: go home, eat, watch TV or read a book. They go out a few nights per week. They could easily move 10 miles south, cut their rent by more than 1/3, and still spend just as much time enjoying the San Francisco restaurants and nightlife as they do now.
On top of that, some of the author's logic is just... broken:
It continues with the shutting down of private bus services for tech workers that reduce traffic and pollution and encourage residents to stay in the city.
Almost none of the new tech workers were "residents" before the current boom. The problem with the shuttle busses is that they encourage people to move to the city -- forcing the people who were, in fact, long-term residents to move out. The fact that the author (obviously very sympathetic to the tech industry) can not just miss, but completely invert this obvious point simply underscores the disconnect -- or more direct terms, cluelessness -- among tech workers that some longer-term residents are so resentful of.
What's wrong with this? If you're a renter, you sort of accept the fact that you can be forced to move at any given time, or that rents may be hiked up.
Rent control has been an unmitigated disaster in SF. You're basically giving a subsidy to people who have lived here for a long time, over new arrivals.
Cities change over time. People arrive all the time. To try to shut people out is naive and short-sighted. I sure don't want to live in a time capsule.
Heck, I don't know -- whole families being traumatized? Children having their lives upended, because their parents suddenly have to move across the state (or the country)? That sort of thing? So you can live within walking distance of that fancy new Belgian beer bar, and your favorite S&M club?
It's one thing to acknowledge that displacement of existing (generally lowest income tier) residents is very unfortunate -- and yes, causes real suffering -- but to maintain that the cure (e.g. rent control) may be worse than disease. That's at least a position with a certain logic to it.
But what people reasonably resent about the new tech elite is that (some of them) don't even pretend to rely on sober assessments like the above. They just come right and out say it: "What's wrong with poor people being displaced? What's wrong with a city that school teachers, first responders, restaurant workers can't afford to live in? I'm doing fine -- why should I give a fuck?"
Yeah yeah, it's always a lot nicer to do that because I have a choice, I get that. I just think that level of hyperbole doesn't help the discussion at all.
What a low bar for traumatization.
> So you can live within walking distance of that fancy new Belgian beer bar, and your favorite S&M club?
Hyperbole much? You've managed to shoehorn both hipster style, alcohol, and sexual proclivities that are a few standard deviations from the norm into the same statement. Well done. /s
> "What's wrong with poor people being displaced? What's wrong with a city that school teachers, first responders, restaurant workers can't afford to live in? I'm doing fine -- why should I give a fuck?"
Poor people are constantly victimized. That's just a thing that happens. For instance, I bet you're typing this post out on a computer that is made with parts manufactured in China/Taiwan and are exporting your pollution. (Yes, I consider a mobile phone a computer)
Why are you so concerned about the relatively mild pain of people in SF rather than the peasants in southern China? Do you live in either place? What skin do you have in this game?
No, it's a thing that we've been inculcated into believing to be something that "just happens." Actually it happens for systematic and structural reasons.
For instance, I bet you're typing this post out on a computer that is made with parts manufactured in China/Taiwan and are exporting your pollution.
The difference is that I don't pretend to believe that this kind of exploitation is something that "just happens", or that I'm not responsible for it.
Nor do I go around saying things like "What's wrong with children disassembling the battery cage in my used phone for 25 cents an hour in the Philippines or somewhere? These things happen, you know."
Wha? Thousand of years of history would prove you wrong. The more laws we pass, the more people with resources can abuse the letter of these laws to seize advantages for themselves, and their friends/family.
Refer to the Melian dialogue: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must".
That's just human nature. And I'm not just saying poor as in happens to have no money.
Even if I were tossed out onto the street right now with nothing, I'd do ok. I have friends and family who will look out for me and give me a place to sack out. I'm still decently young and in good health, speak english fluently, and have a good degree.
Now if you have no resources, you are teetering on the brink constantly. No law or policy will be able to change that, due to human nature. No inculcation is necessary, at the root of things we're just animals squabbling over scarce resources.
Referring to atrocities committed by a dying empire two thousand years ago (recall that the occupation of Melos was eventually repulsed; and Classical Athens itself would ultimately collapse shortly thereafter, as a direct result of its unsustainable military expansion) doesn't seem very helpful in deciding public policy.
If you have power, and your opponents only have the moral high ground, your opponents will lose.
According to the historical sources (on wikipedia), the Athenians executed all the adult males, and took everybody else into slavery.
Much like the situation of the Ukraine. Russia decided it wanted a warm water port, and then took it. Nobody else said anything.
Only in SF we're willing to overlook a compete failure of government services and infrastructure and blame the issues on newcomers paying higher prices for the properties and driving up the property tax revenues.
The goal of rent control laws and rent caps is to avoid situations where families can be summarily uprooted. How well they succeed is another matter.
If you don't have a lease and are going month-to-month, that's what you're signed up for. Sign a longer lease if you want, but everything is spelled out up front for you. No surprises. If they want to jack up rent or move back in unit, you have no legal recourse.
> Detroit doesn’t place burdensome regulations on automobile manufacturers; Idaho doesn’t put undue restrictions and hurdles in front of potato farmers; and California takes steps to protect its farmers — because these industries are part of the lifeblood and identity of their respective states.
And automobile industry became the doom of Detroit, and Californian style farming could pretty well become the doom of that state.
The quickest and most effective way to fix a demand crisis is to eliminate the demand. And it has the nice side effect of diversifying the tech industry and reducing the ridiculousness of the tech echo chamber.
San Francisco could do a lot worse than strangling this particular goose. Tech will find a way to go on.
Income gains were across the board in the Reagan years. https://www.brookings.edu/research/income-growth-and-decline...
https://aneconomicsense.org/2012/01/29/the-impact-of-reagan-...
All they care about is their relative position.
Aside from Detroit not being a state, isn't this also because these industries are the main employers in their areas? Tech companies employ a small minority of the people that live in San Francisco.
I'm a business owner working in tech an I actually applaud SF for having the guts to stand up for its people.
For this author, the purpose of SF's regulations seem to be in the realm ok the "unknown unknown". He doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of defining quality of life by anything other than GDP.
The whole article just reads like an ode to corporatism; a whiny one too.
dying, unprofitable, dead
... is trivial in the scheme of San Francisco things, which has a population of 800,000+ and an annual general fund revenue of 2.7 billion.
http://sfmayor.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/mayor/budget/SF_Budget_...