Slouching towards San Francisco

Stories like this are fun and I think they resonate well with a lot of people, but unfortunately the details are actively harmful cynicism that ignore fact that would ruin the narrative.<p>Look around San Francisco today. What has changed recently? Crime is way down, lower than it has been in 15 years. Homelessness is down, lower than the past 4 years.<p>Did tech companies decide to start paying more taxes? Did the city start spending more? No, the actual cause is boring and simple, but makes anti-establishment folks very uncomfortable.<p>The truth is that our government started operating more effectively, intentionally trying to solve problems that it previously pretended were insoluble. This change was instigated by a relatively small number of rich people where were fed up and decided to and spend their own money to fix the city.<p>Some other nitpicks I have with the sentiment expressed in the article:<p>* Police and firefighters in SF make more on average than tech workers. Is that a source of injustice? Or is unequal pay more complicated? Is inequality only bad when the groups benefitting are aesthetically undesirable to you?<p>* SF remains one of the highest tax cities in the country, and is the highest in the Bay Area. At the margin, businesses are leaving (including Twitter, mentioned in the article). Raising more taxes on these businesses seems unlikely to increase revenue long term.<p>* We spent more per resident on most services than nearly every other city in the country. Aren&#x27;t you curious why that is, and doesn&#x27;t it seem like understanding that problem would lead to insights more interesting than &quot;tech bad&quot;?

I&#x27;m one of the co-founders of an organization mentioned in the article, GrowSF. We focus on common sense outcomes, not political posturing or national progressive rhetoric. The author makes the classic mistake of cynically dismissing the hard work required from regular people to make a difference. And to cast a centrist organization like GrowSF as part of some secret cabal is both lazy and irresponsible journalism.<p>If anyone has any questions about GrowSF, feel free to ask!

&gt; Both the city’s public school system and transit systems are crumbling and underfunded, and its housing and homelessness crises remain existential.<p>Some quick googling indicates that SF has something like <i>3x</i> the per capita city budget as San Jose, a city in the same metro area with similar average rent (according to Zillow). If its city departments manage to still be underfunded in spite of that, something is deeply wrong.

&gt; I unexpectedly moved here two years ago from Chicago<p>I was going to say, this sounds like it was written by someone who wasn’t around during 2012-2016. Aside from AI not much is new.<p>&gt; A tech crash wouldn’t just mean a higher unemployment rate; it would also devastate local businesses and public services. Empty offices, empty coffee shops around those offices, empty balance sheets for coffee beans, and so on.<p>This already happened with COVID and remote work. The city was overflowing with tech hype and industry to support it 10 years ago.

People talk about SF because the US is not otherwise producing much change, and people are hoping things will change.<p>But anecdotes and selective stats pique interest without leading to insight.<p>Too bad this is what drives the zeitgeist!

Reminded me of this documentary I just watched about humans and Waymo - beautiful and sad. Highly recommend it. Kind of a hard opener, but stick with it <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;WsGWqxxMt9k?si=ycrIBGvdy73SLgsA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;WsGWqxxMt9k?si=ycrIBGvdy73SLgsA</a>

This was a great read!<p>I recently visited SF for the first time in January coming from a city in the Canadian prairies and I really resonate with this article. I was down there for a job interview and the experiences I had whle down there left me with a similar vibe.<p>Two memories in particular that stick out in my mind are 1) that I accidentally reserved an Airbnb in a poor neighbourhood and, while walking over broken glass, I saw one billboard for Vercel to my left and another billboard for Notion AI to my right.<p>2) I also really wanted to take a Waymo while down there but couldn&#x27;t because the app required a US zip code. I took an Uber instead and, while the driver lamented about US politics and inequality to me, I saw at least a dozen Waymos zip by with no driver.<p>I really liked SF, but it left a pretty strong impression!

&gt; local money is now lavished on centrist and right-wing pressure groups — such as GrowSF, Abundant SF<p>I didn’t know that supply side progressivism was considered right wing or centrist. You build more houses because otherwise working class people can’t afford to live in your city. It’s bad if your kid’s teacher needs roommates or has to commute an hour each morning.

Most discussion of employment is for the San Francisco <i>metro area</i>, but I think the county level statistics at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.census.gov&#x2F;profile&#x2F;San_Francisco_County,_California?g=050XX00US06075" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.census.gov&#x2F;profile&#x2F;San_Francisco_County,_Califo...</a> are actually specific to people who live in San Francisco.<p>I never know what business codes &#x2F; job codes get included in &quot;Professional, scientific, and management, and administrative and waste management&quot; but there&#x27;s an explicit separate one for Information that is only 6.3% (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.census.gov&#x2F;vizwidget?g=050XX00US06075&amp;infoSection=Industry" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.census.gov&#x2F;vizwidget?g=050XX00US06075&amp;infoSecti...</a>)<p>People write about tech jobs because they&#x27;re highly paid (on average) and highly visible. But it&#x27;s not the case that the city is entirely dependent on technology. You wouldn&#x27;t say the same thing about the equally large segment of &quot;Finance and insurance, and real estate and rental and leasing&quot;.

Lumping centrists who want to solve intractable livability problems with rich right-wing libertarians is the road to failure. Not everyone who wants to stop throwing mountains of money at nonprofits and ineffectual, corrupt city officials is a Peter Thiel&#x2F;Elon Musk fascist. The more that the left continues to force ideological purity tests like this, the more it will fail.<p>It also seems silly to move to a city internationally known for a specific influential industry and then lament that influence. If you hate entertainment industry people, don’t live in LA. If you hate commercial fishing, don’t live in Dutch Harbor. You’re at least 10-20 years late to fight tech being influential in SF.<p>There are a lot of places to live in this world. Vote with your feet. Conservatives certainly have, migrating en masse to Texas, Florida, Idaho. If you want to see what a place that has actually swung hard right looks like, it’s not SF where the city government is still captured wholly by Democrats and the Board of Supervisors has anti-development NIMBYs and members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

&gt; Instead, local money is now lavished on centrist and right-wing pressure groups — such as GrowSF, Abundant SF, Together SF, and Neighbors for a Better San Francisco — which have in the past four years fundraised over $50 million from conservative tech and real-estate elites.<p>Probably notable that this happened because the left wing managed to fuck things up so badly in its management of the city. For example:<p>* 8,323 homeless people in the city - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sf.gov&#x2F;data--homeless-population" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sf.gov&#x2F;data--homeless-population</a><p>* 846m homelessness budget for FY 2024-2025 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sf.gov&#x2F;reports--september-2024--hsh-budget-fiscal-year-2024-2026" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sf.gov&#x2F;reports--september-2024--hsh-budget-fisca...</a><p>So, a tiny bit over $100k USD per homeless person and they&#x27;re still not all sheltered (you can see the sheltered vs unsheltered breakdown in the first link). That&#x27;s an incredible amount of money to not house people.<p>Of course, SF&#x27;s famously anti-build-anything processes[1] and culture probably don&#x27;t help when you&#x27;re trying to provide housing, but ostensibly &#x27;progressive&#x27; people are a big part of that unfortunately[2].<p>1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;sanfrancisco&#x2F;news&#x2F;state-report-slams-san-francisco-glacial-expensive-housing-permitting-process&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;sanfrancisco&#x2F;news&#x2F;state-report-slams...</a><p>2 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;abs&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S0094119010000720" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;abs&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S00941...</a>

&gt; San Francisco looms large over the American imagination.<p>Not for me, or only in the sense if not careful it could become the next Detroit. In 1960, Detroit was the richest city in America. Now, not so much.

Asking the important question: where&#x27;s this sub-$10 burrito?

I dont think the transformative zeal that powerful people experience is new. The assumption that expertise in one domain, coupled with money&#x2F;power and vision must equate to positive results in another.<p>How quickly did America turn from a smallholder society into one trumpeting Manifest Destiny? That seems no different from tech bros trumpeting their utopian cities. It&#x27;s not exclusively an American thing of course, one thinks of the British of 1800 going from regional naval experts to talking about spreading their idea of civilization to the East in utopian terms. &quot;For the benefit of the natives, you see&quot; doesnt sound very different from the Yarvinesque patter.<p>It&#x27;s all hubris, of course. The question is how Nemesis arrives, and who she chews up on the way.

Hard-hitting journalism: billboard proves greedy companies would rather not hire anyone.

&gt; I glanced at the bookshelves around me — a lot of Isaac Asimov and faddish tech-sponsored print magazines covering “the future of governance and society”.<p>Perhaps because I am in tech I don’t understand how this is a bad “I have to leave this party now” sort of thing.<p>&gt; The city is the indisputable tech capital of the country.<p>Do people think that? “Silicon Valley” is on the other side on the bay and I usually think of it as an amorphous blob that covers a few city borders. I’d have probably said Mountain View if pressed.

lol, just ask yourself, where are all my elders? Why are we in a zone of same agers. Ah, ignorance is bliss, your future is elsewhere. Enjoy it whilst it lasts.

The absolute gall of this person, who is a 2 year transplant from Chicago, to cast aspersions on the tech industry. Their evidence of our wrongdoing?<p>* We own the wrong books<p>* We pay both too much and too little in taxes<p>* We support &quot;right wing&quot; pressure groups like GrowSF and &quot;right wing&quot; politicians like Mayor Lurie and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood<p>* We are eager to extend technical expertise to societal problems<p>SF has its problems, but they are largely problems of success. It is much, much better off than cities like Detroit whose main industries are experiencing slow declines.

funny how people think anything right wing adjacent is bad.

&gt; Yet I’m left wondering if ordinary San Franciscans will benefit from the boom, or if the city&#x27;s newfound wealth will remain concentrated among an increasingly tiny class of digital oligarchs and venture capitalists<p>Thousands of engineers make a lot of money. I think writers like the author sometimes don&#x27;t realize how much money the median senior engineer makes at Big Tech Of course, most of these said engineers probably came over from a different country, so not sure if this ticks the box for &quot;ordinary San Franciscans&quot;