Hacker News Reader

Comment by qqqwerty | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps you are part of the problem? Maybe leaving would be best for both you and SF.

I was born and raised in the area, and have watched as friends and family are forced out due to rising costs. These are folks who legitimately loved the area and were actively involved in their communities. And they get replaced by people who seem to only care about big paychecks and spend more time complaining about the area than actually doing anything to improve it.

The rise in remote work due to COVID seems like a perfect opportunity to correct this misalignment. For those that don't like it here, I think everyone would be better off if you moved to somewhere that suits you better. And as a bonus you can take your big paycheck with you. I don't mean to offend, it just gets a little old seeing people complain about a place when they are perfectly capable of leaving.

View on HN

People are not leaving SF because tech employees are coming in. If nobody moved in, the economy would just get worse, housing wouldn't get any more available.

The problem is that your parents go to every community meeting and get all the housing projects shut down to prevent "greedy developers". That's been happening consistently since the 70s.

It's not SF but I did leave Seattle because of tech employees coming in. They destroyed my beloved city of excellent, cheap music played out of our parents' basements and in any of the bars on Capitol Hill and replaced it with shining citadels of emptiness. Seattle was a bright little miracle before Amazon set itself down right in the middle and disgorged its peoples flown in from far and wide.

The knock-on effects of Amazon moving in included a flurry of real estate speculation which directly led to the closing of a restaurant that had been continuously operating for over a decade and close family losing their job there they had worked since its beginning.

I firmly lay the blame of this wanton appropriation at the hands of the tech companies. Amazon didn't need to move directly into the heart of Seattle: they could have done as Microsoft and moved next door to Redmond. But hey, eff the residents who grew up there, right?

I have a great little story of a waiter who had lived in his apartment in the Belltown neighborhood for many years: somebody had come in to look at apartments for all the new tech hires. Person is getting the tour of a unit, pauses to look around at all the other units, "Great, we'll take it!" It was every unit in the building including the occupied. Waiter got the boot.

Seattle had and continues to hold onto the cultural evil of the "Seattle Freeze" but I sure do miss the music and to hear the punky cries of Alice Glass: "Down, down, cities fall down on me."

> People are not leaving SF because tech employees are coming in

I didn't say that. I literally said they are "forced out due to rising costs".

I am all for tech workers moving to the bay area if it suits them. What I don't like, is tech workers who show up and then just complain about how much they hate it here. If you don't like it here, either leave or get involved with your community and help us fix things (including YIMBY, which all of my friends and family support, for the record).

One day you too will move somewhere else, and realize that either you love it or that it’s pretty bad and... think “why should I try to improve this place when I can just move elsewhere?”

Housing is cheaper when the economy is worse. See Berlin.

That's not sustainable, you're just living on scraps because a lot of other people have made bad decisions in your favor. They're not going to keep investing after that, and of course it's bad for the people who moved out - this is a cause of gentrification.

Tokyo, Vienna, Singapore are examples of cities with good housing policies. Although for Vienna's to get started all the landlords had to die in WW1, and then the planners died in WW2.

I’m totally part of the problem! I actually had that theory that most people in SF are just temporarily here to get as much money as possible before leaving. Knowing that why would they try to improve anything? To improve homelessness you need both a national effort and a local effort. Both are embarrassingly small compared to the seriousness of the crisis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com