Salesforce CEO Benioff on How to Fix San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce CEO Benioff on How to Fix San Francisco

blogs.wsj.com

38 points_pius70 comments

I think these buses — which if you hang out in the Mission, [they come] every five minutes — they’ve got to be massively regulated, we have to get them off our streets.

Really? He thinks that's the solution? And what? Have all those employees drive?

I can understand why people target the shuttle buses, they are a highly visible indicator of the kind of wealth moving into the the area, but I think there are better solutions than just getting rid of them.

Of course he wants to get rid of the busses. Salesforce is located in San Francisco. If highly talented tech workers are forced to drive or take public transportation down to Mountain View, working at Salesforce starts to look like a very attractive option.

Isn't that a better option, to work where you live?

According to this report, 8.1% of Americans commute more than an hour, which I assume is slightly longer than the Google bus ride from SF. 23% of these Americans use public transit. It hardly seems unreasonable to live in SF and work in Mountain View.

edit: forgot the link. http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/american_co...

The penalty of a commute is not simply measured in time.

Commuting from SF to MV, Menlo, or really anywhere on the Peninsula with public transit is kind of ridiculous.

Given the lack of Caltrain stops in the city, coupled with the fact that just about none of the large tech companies are based near Caltrain stations on the other end means at least 2 transfers (bus -> caltrain -> shuttle). I can attest that it is very difficult to get any meaningful work done when you're hopping on and off busses and trains every 25 minutes.

Contrast this with a luxury coach shuttle bus, which is a wi-fi enabled productive commute.

Even if they were to take precisely as many minutes, they really are polar opposites on the pain spectrum (first world problems class pain, but still pain).

A better option than working for who you would like to work for?

No, it isn't a better option. If it were a better option, then people would make that decision regardless of the damn buses.

I don't understand why people target the shuttle buses. For decades I've been hearing all about those rotten suburban commuters who make money in the city and pay taxes somewhere else. Now we have a group of people doing exactly the opposite and somehow they're rotten too.

Because wealth is clearly a zero-sum game. If I'm poor, it's because you're wealthy, and that's your fault! Right?

Having money makes you a target. Period.

It is simple: People just love being jealous of those who have slightly more than them.

Neighbor Jim buys a car every 4 years, and you buy a car every 6 years? Obviously Jim is an asshole scumbag. Neighbor Sam has a swimming pool, but your kids just have some squirt guns? Don't even get me started on that guy!

They could both make money and live in the city, which would make the city a better place.

Turning the city into a bedroom community is bad for the city. It works in suburbs because suburbs are designed that way. Sprawl, low density, distribution of goods and services. Cities are not designed that way.

High density produces higher rents, for homes and for businesses. Businesses with high rents can't survive when the neighborhood is only occupied at night and on weekends.

What you have here are people who want the advantages of this city, but aren't around enough to make it worth providing those advantages.

The medium term outcome of this is pretty clear- many businesses in SF are going to go under. Most of what makes SF unique is going to be driven out by cost. What you'll be left with is some sort of bizarre bedroom city that no one really enjoys any more.

And then what?

What advantages are they supposed to be providing to the city? They pay taxes in the city. They are customers for the city's businesses. The eat in the city's restaurants. They have a stake in the upkeep of the city's properties.

You mis-read that.

The point is that they don't make it worthwhile to businesses to provide those advantages. They aren't there 12+ hours a day, only at night, when people spend less money anyway, so how could they?

They aren't sufficient customers for the city's businesses and restaurants. Later at night, a bit. On weekends, some. During the work week? Not at all.

And that works in bedroom communities where rents and other costs are lower. It doesn't work in cities.

Wait, wasn't it a few months ago that San Francisco was battling with too many people working in the city, but not enough people living in the city, which prompted the tax hikes on tech companies, which Twitter then has been able to avoid by agreeing to locate an office in an undesirable neighborhood?

Couple thousand commuters to the Valley are not going to turn a million-resident city into sleepy bedroom community with only soccer Moms driving occasional minivans.

Let's check back in 7-8 years. By then it's too late, of course, but the situation will at least be obvious.

Are the buses really running every 5 minutes? If so, is that just during a couple hours? How full are they?

Most of the big companies have routes every 30-60 minutes. Every 5 minutes probably isn't much of an exaggeration overall.

No way. Try once an hour at each stop, only during commute hours.

Edit: I'm only talking about one company. I don't know about the others.

It's so silly that people would have to avoid riding a shuttle bus to work, fearing for their safety because it makes them look too wealthy.

Many people see the busses as a distraction issue, but they're a lot more important than they seem at face value. They're basically a microcosm of how the social fabric of a city is structured. New York City can be justly criticized for its wealth inequality, but you have to give it one thing: it's a place where a managing director at JPM and a guy who works at the Starbucks in the building ride the same midtown subway or bus to work in the morning. And that's a start. Public infrastructure works best when everyone has a stake in it. It's bad to have the rich ride around in their own private shuttles, but it's also bad for the rich to bankroll public busses they never use. Neither is a path to building a sustainable, functioning city.

I'm pretty sure most managing directors at downtown banks aren't taking the subway or the bus too often. They get driven around, just not in shuttle buses.

This is like how Bloomberg would take the subway* once in a while.

*Get driven in his convoy from his house to the subway station.

Bloomberg would take the subway 10 stops about three days a week. He got driven to 59 street, skipping 2 stops, which is the nearest station that has express service on the 4. That's pretty legit.

John Paulson, the investor responsible for the single biggest trade in Wall St. history which netted him $4 billion personally, routinely took the public bus to his office.

Your rank-and-file MD isn't getting driven to work. He or she is taking Metro North from Westchester or LIRR from Long Island. There'a lot of people making $500k-5m in New York who take public transit or walk to work.

Driving from Westchester to Manhattan is 1.5 hour drive in slow-moving traffic to a city where parking is almost dollar a minute. Taking the train is 20 minutes, with bathrooms, often times wifi, and comfortable seats. Subway is usually about 35-45 minutes. Public transport is comfortable and saves time.

> Public infrastructure works best when everyone has a stake in it.

These are private busses. Not public ones. That's not public transportation.

> > Public infrastructure works best when everyone has a stake in it.

> These are private busses. Not public ones.

The busses aren't the infrastructure being used.

But the buses use far less infrastructure than if each employee drove themselves, or even if they all carpooled.

They are using public bus stops, and allegedly create traffic backups which is also an effect on public infrastructure. To what extent they impact traffic I don't know. I'm not saying whether there is a net gain/loss here, but there is an impact on the roadways.

If employees used their own car instead of the shuttle there would probably be more detrimental effects on the traffic.

In the short term. In the longer term, they'd be less likely to work in Mountain View and live in SF at all, which might offset that.

Attorneys, bankers, and businessmen routinely take BART/MUNI/public transport to their offices in downtown SF just like their secretaries do, yet MUNI still stinks and BART literally stinks.

Public infrastructure?

Perhaps they should start with toilets for the street urchins.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/us/06bcseats.html?pagewant...

http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/3758-why-is-there-so-m...

NYC also has public transportation that's actually usable.

Infrastructure gets usable surprisingly fast when rich people rely on it. After hurricane sandy, metro north was back up in days, amazing considering all the track clearing repair and inspection involved. The line I rode was used by rich commuters coming in from Greenwich, as well as working class Hispanic immigrants from New Rochelle and Portchester. If it was just the latter group, I doubt the city would've acted so fast.

Was it an Amtrak line belonging to a single company with a single decision maker somewhere up the corporate chain?

Caltrain is financed by three counties it spans - San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara, all with their own budgets, schedules and current issues, coordinating anything expensive in regards to Caltrain would require coordinating everything with those counties.

Then if your project requires any personnel changes, you have to coordinate that with Amtrak, as Caltrain subcontracts their employees. Amtrak might or might not have the human resources.

No, it was Metro North's (a division of the NY MTA) own track, which spans several counties and two states. I don't doubt MTA is a more efficient organization than Caltrain, but that's also just a byproduct of rich people actually relying on the MTA and creating the political imperative to consolidate all the operations.

It is zero-sum thinking. If it makes your neighbour poorer you feel richer. Pointless internecine conflict.

There's a hidden assumption in the phrase "zero-sum" which is that the social impact of someone getting 10% of 100 and someone else getting 90% of 100 is the same as that of someone getting 5% of 200 and someone else getting 95% of 200. Peoples' absolute level of consumption isn't zero-sum over time, but peoples' share of total consumption at any given instant is indeed zero-sum. And people respond to the latter much more than to the former.

Yeah, that is precisely what I am criticizing. When you take away the time dimension nothing can change -- stasis is static. Immigration is driving up prices, so the solution is regulation to make the city less appealing economically to non-residents. Anyway -- I'm not equipped for a serious discussion of West-Coast urbanization since I've never even set foot there, but I don't think Benioff is even coherent, he is suggesting more regulation and then civil disobedience in the next breath.

This is clearly a slimy attempt to dodge his own company's role in the problems.

He's CEO of a multi-billion dollar tech company, based in San Francisco, with probably more highly-paid employees living in SF than than the companies that run the buses.

If you buy the specious argument that the affordable housing problems are caused by tech companies, and not by NIMBY housing development laws, I'd guess his employees living in SF, by sheer numbers, are doing more to drive up the cost of housing in SF than the others. And let's not forget the the lack of affordable housing is the fundamental issue that the bus protesters are upset about.

EDIT: clarification.

> Really? He thinks that's the solution? And what? Have all those employees drive?

Removing SF shuttle busses, while certainly unpleasant[1], is probably one of the few measures that would exert sufficient pressure on the local governments to improve public transit and actually tackle road congestion.

[1] I used to work in Menlo Park for not-Facebook, and at one point attempted the tri-fecta terri-commute of Bus + Caltrain + local shuttle. It really sucked.

I'm currently doing the trifecta -- 101 has gotten so bad that it's actually faster than the Google bus for my evening commute.

Er, so we should make transportation worse so that it will be better?

Another way to view it would be to temporarily inconvenience a relatively privileged minority in order to benefit the region as a whole.

Transportation policy in the Bay has been stuck in the mud for decades though, it didn't just happen recently and certainly not because some Google/Apple/Facebook workers started commuting from the city down the peninsula.

Look at the Benicia Bridge debacle. Funding was approved by the voters in 1988, the new northbound span didn't open until 2007 and it was $1 billion over budget!

I don't think inconveniencing some tech workers is going to have much effect on the politics in the region.

The problem is the massive number of shuttle busses has allowed a massive number of people that work down in the valley to live in San Francisco without the hurdle of the awful commute.

Usually this would happen with public transportation or better highways, and as a city is more able to shift people around, the city will either sprawl (SF can't, because it's a peninsula and people would rather live in the valley than South SF) or densify (SF won't, because the zoning laws prevent building of new high-rises or destruction of older buildings for more dense units.)

Because of that, you have a large shift in the supply/demand of the housing market. Since SF is unwilling or unable to increase in sprawl or density, supply is pretty much fixed. The shuttle busses open up a river of demand though, forcing the prices up and up. Removing the shuttle busses, and I agree the idea sounds ridiculous at face value, is probably the most plausible solution right now. Making it difficult for people to commute down to Mountain View and Cupertino will cause a lot of people to move closer to their jobs, and balance the market here again.

No. Caltrain allowed a massive number of people that work down in the valley to live in San Francisco, as evidenced by the number of SOMA rental listings that make sure to include Caltrain references.

Companies have been running shuttles off Caltrain stations for years. WiFi-equipped buses are just a nicer alternative to Caltrain or driving or Muni or driving+Caltrain.

I've got an idea: Ban all buses, public or private. Then tear up roads too. Also get those pesky sidewalks out of there.

Making rent plummet by destroying your city is easy!

SF Public Transit has always suffered from severe urban blight.

It is down right, condemnable, in some respects [1].

I am certainly not selectively harpooning the SF transit system. I do not have extensive

familiarity with other places to judge whether things are just as bad, in other metropolitan

areas, across the nation.

Throwing good money after bad, while stubbornly refusing to tackle key problems like the dumping of

their homeless populations by other states, has contributed to the current state of affairs.

SF suffers from what is called a progress trap [2].

[1]

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down...

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/escalators-san-fran...

http://ww2.hdnux.com/photos/13/50/11/3048045/7/628x471.jpg

http://uptownalmanac.com/2012/07/human-feces-blamed-bart-esc...

http://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/239769/slide_239769...

[2]

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

I don't understand this "tech elite" nonsense. I make nearly 200k a year, and can't afford a house in San Francisco nor the Peninsula. I actually live in Hayward. Even though I suppose I could spend half my take-home on rent in those places, I'd rather not be doing this shit till the day I die... I do not feel elite by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, Benioff with his billions is elite... but us workers, we are middle class. I would argue not even upper middle class for this area.

While I do agree with you (I'm living in SF making slightly above avg backend eng salary and feel broke all the time with rent, living expenses, student loans, and etc), you have to realize there are tons of people living in the bay area (even in SF itself) making $60k or less. Imagine living on that salary here.

But you're right, a lot of the vitriol is designated at us -- who appear extremely wealthy because so many of us are flooding the area and pushing others out of houses -- when we're really not elite or rich by any means.

If you feel that way with $200k/year, how would you feel with $50k? You are somewhat wealthy in comparison. A rule of thumb I've heard is that most people can't understand or identify with the financial concerns of anybody with an income in excess of three times their own. You're definitely in that "3x higher" class compared to a ton of people in the Bay Area.

$50k is lower middle class in this area. I didn't say that wouldn't suck. I said that I am by no means elite. Nor upper middle class. Upper middle class people can at least afford to pick a reasonable 3/2 house in an area with good schools. I can't do that. Elite people can have mansions and multiple homes and they don't need to work. They aren't the techies riding the WiFi shuttles to work. No engineer is elite.

I don't agree with most of those statements. You're not in a small rural or even medium sized town. San Francisco is one of the most popular cities in the US and the world. Even very wealthy people generally make sacrifices to live there. What you lose in square feet you make up for in location. That's the whole point of cities.

It doesn't make sense to treat San Francisco as if it were a town of 100k people where everybody lives in houses, because it's not. The traditional metrics (middle class = 3/2 house with a yard) do not apply to cities like Manhattan and San Francisco.

I also don't think it's right to ignore your buying power relative to the rest of the US. Maybe you only have a downpayment for a San Francisco condo, but that might suffice for you to pay cash for a house in many somewhat affluent suburban communities throughout the country. Social classes are nationwide strata--you can't lose focus by literally looking at a single city and deciding that you're middle class or lower just because you're not a multimillionaire.

My gym runs shuttle busses, Levi's runs shuttle busses, UCSF runs shuttle busses, and on and on...

You want real disruption? Start with homemade wifi jammers.

This sort of thing always makes me think of the classical class warfare context of charity from business.

People know that the business they're conducting is damaging society at large, so they build charity in so that they can feel like they're absolved.

1% is pretty trivial, particularly since it's of profit, not revenue. Sure, it's a lot of money, but by comparison with the possible impact of a larger commitment of time and resources it looks cheap. Makes you sad to think most companies don't even do that much.

Well, employing thousands of people in high-paying jobs is also a pretty positive impact on society...

It's not always a net positive, no. If the employees make that money while not producing anything notably positive (hedge funds are a pretty good example), they're actually just sucking money out of the system, like the mythological "welfare queens" of the Reagan era but on a much larger scale, and with the pernicious side effect of looking like they're doing something useful.

People know that the business they're conducting is damaging society at large, so they build charity in so that they can feel like they're absolved.

Google (or Apple, or Oracle) is damaging society? Must have missed that memo.

Because from where a lot of people stand, the ability to access the world's knowledge and information, communicate with loved ones, and many other tasks, from a handheld device that costs a day's pay for the average worker ... that's not really "damaging society at large" so much as it is giving people an amazing gift.

You could use this amazing gift to read up on "externalities," then engage your mind-blowing intelligence to think about how that is relevant to this discussion.

What an asshole. I'd take Tom Perkins over Benioff any day of the week.

I hope this is sarcasm.

To both of you: Why? Can you give us more than a dogmatically-stated position? Can you give us a reason for it?

I don't believe I stated a position, and I didn't want to elaborate more without knowing the context of the previous comment. I would be pretty appalled if s/he seriously thinks Benioff is an asshole (over the one bus comment perhaps?) despite this being 95% about some totally reasonable views on philanthropy (especially relative to the stuff Perkins said)

How is 1% of an employees time 4 hours/month? A month is typically 4 weeks(ish) at 40 hrs per week = 160 hours * .01 = 1.6 hrs?

Am I missing something?

Salesforce runs buses too.

does benioff live in SF? I always figured him for mor of a woodside kind of guy ?

does benioff live in SF? I always figured him for mor of a woodside kind of guy

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