The Google Shuttle Effect: Gentrification and San Francisco's Dot Com Boom 2.0

The city is free to mandate subsidized housing ratios in the neighborhoods it is worried about becoming gentrified.<p>Maybe it doesn&#x27;t because it wants the property tax revenue from the highly paid tech employees that live in these neighborhoods but don&#x27;t use as many of the city services (including, most evidently, the public transport).<p>This is like the OPPOSITE of what Wal-Mart is infamous for - paying their employees as little as they can, and forcing them to depend on millions of dollars of federal subsidies like food stamps to actually make ends meet.<p>Gentrification is a real social concern that needs careful but focused solutions. But it is a goddamn travesty that all the discussion is focused on &quot;Google&quot; (really all Silicon Valley tech companies that are doing this stuff), and the employees that have the audacity of being highly skilled, highly desired, and are willing to put up with a long commute to stay in the city.<p>They pay city taxes, they put money into the local economy, and they&#x27;re the enemy? And don&#x27;t give me the garbage that they spend all their time at the company offices. If that was the case, they&#x27;d just live in the valley and save on rent. They live in San Fran because they want to spend money on the things that you can do in San Fran that you can&#x27;t do in the suburban sprawl hell that is the valley.<p>This isn&#x27;t a &quot;99%&quot; thing. Everyone involved here is in the 99%.

I am mystified by housing&#x2F;anti-gentrification advocates&#x27; refusal to consider building new housing stock as a solution to this problem. And what&#x27;s with &quot;luxury housing&quot; snub? You can&#x27;t prevent highly paid tech workers from moving into the city without restricting their freedom of movement.. so why not make some room for them? The &quot;historic character&quot; of neighborhoods doesn&#x27;t have to be ruined, either.<p>I&#x27;m not opposed to something like her Community Benefits Agreements, as long as it actually does speed the approval process up. Of course, it might be hard to get off the ground, since &quot;While the community coalition might be a representative group, there is no oversight to guarantee appropriate representation&quot;, and the rest of the community will always be arguing over who has the right to represent them.

tl;dr: The City of San Fancisco should prohibit Google buses until Google promises to magically repeal the laws of economics that rents increase when demand exceeds supply.<p>EDIT:<p>The paper specifically recommends that the city prevent Google buses from stopping to pick up passengers until Google enters into &quot;Community Benefits Agreements&quot; (CBAs), the purpose of which is to &quot;foster changes&quot; and &quot;mitigate impact&quot;.<p>Unfortunately, it&#x27;s obvious to any rational person that Google cannot change human nature via any kind of CBA. Hell, they can&#x27;t even get me to sign up for Google+!<p>The thing that makes the paper super-funny, are the types of things the author be included in these CBAs would be agreements to &quot;hire locally&quot;, which would require Google to open new offices in San Francicso, which would... further increase rents. Funding for parks, which would... further increase rents. Job training, which would increase wages and... further increase rents.<p>But hey, we could all live in a Marxist paradise if people would all just magically stop being humans who want what&#x27;s best for themselves.

I wasn&#x27;t aware until now that &quot;city planning&quot; was so much marxist navel gazing. Am I supposed to just assume that rising rents and gentrification are a bad thing?

This master’s thesis does provide some evidence that shuttle stops are correlated with localized rent increases. This is a survey rather than an experiment; there’s no way to tell whether the shuttle lines caused rent increases, or whether they simply started in already up-and-coming neighborhoods. It’s also impossible to tell whether the desirability is due to shuttles or other transit; all the chosen shuttle stops (“selected by the San Francisco Tenants’ Union”!) are also within a couple blocks of a Bart station or the intersection of major Muni bus lines. I wish she had at least compared these locations to other Bart and Muni stops that don’t have shuttles (although admittedly this can be difficult). She also makes no attempt to correct for geography or neighborhood differences and just assumes that the annulus around a circle contains “similar units in the same neighborhood.”<p>I doubt that this would be too useful to the greater debate, however. The real problem is not that a few bus stops are getting too expensive; it’s that <i>the entire city and peninsula are getting too expensive</i>. And to discuss that, we really need to quote the number of housing units and the number of jobs in the area.

Not sure I agree with all of it, the data on rents of 1 and 2 br units within and not within walking distance didn&#x27;t see particularly convincing. But I really appreciate that the approached it methodically and could share that with us (a requirement for the project I know, I still appreciate it).<p>I get kind of lost on the economic justice angle though. I&#x27;m not sure what an economically &quot;just&quot; city would entail.

This article is confusing cause and effect. Bus routes have been opened to cater to people who choose to live in desirable neighborhoods. It&#x27;s not the buses that make the neighborhood desirable. If all googlers decided they wanted to live in Marin, I would bet that google would send a bus up there in a heartbeat.

Thanks providing something concrete to go with all the hand waving on all sides of this.

I gladly welcome more study in general. Every conversation on this topic is either anti-gentrification hand-wringing or self-victimization by oversensitive tech professionals. More data, less sensationalism.