— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |
If you read the criticisms, the protests over tech shuttles and the industry's impact on housing costs are pointless and misdirected, if not worse.
“The protests are xenophobic and illogical,” wrote Rodrigo Guzman, CTO of iDoneThis, in an essay that was passed around Reddit and other like-minded echo chambers. “They do serve a useful purpose in sparking discussion about important issues (e.g. the Ellis Act, housing, cultural change in SF, etc), but the impact of that is very limited when there isn't coherence about the issues and the desired changes. The protests may even be counter-productive to their cause.”
On Twitter, the peanut gallery of peanut galleries, the backlash is even more pointed.
“The tech bus protests are targeting the wrong people,” tweeted urban housing specialist Mark Hogan. “Buses are not the cause of prices going up, local government policies are.”
“Tech workers taking a bus to get to work aren’t The Man,” chided Lisa McIntire, Gavin Newsom's former Deputy Communications Director. “HAVE YOU CONSIDERED CITY HALL, GUYS?”
But if City Hall hears the protesters and reacts, doesn't it mean they are successful?
Scott Lucas of SF Magazine recently opined that the protesters are winning, and his case is damn convincing:
Though we doubt that Google is going to “Fuck Off” any time soon, the protests already have had a pretty substantial impact. Since the first Google bus blockade on December 9th, there's been a noticeable uptick in both talk and action from city and industry leaders. While there may not be a direct correlation between the demonstrations and the responses below, it's hard to deny that the protestors have been driving the city's conversation.
His proof? Ed Lee coming out in favor of a $15/hour minimum wage, activists “shaming the [tech] billionaires into philanthropy,” new ideas for spurring middle-income housing development, Ron Conway's lobbying group sf.citi going on a public relations campaign, and three new pro-tenant measures getting passed by the Board of Supervisors.
And it doesn't just end there.
Tech companies themselves are scrambling to look good, with companies like Airbnb and Zendesk pledging community classes for children, donating unused office space as free community spaces, and even hosting lectures on the industry's impact on the city.
Even former Mayor Willie Brown, arguably patient zero in the artisocratization of San Francisco, has come out slamming the industry, writing, “What the tech world needs to do is nip this thorny plant in the bud. They need to come off their high cloud efforts to save Africa or wherever they take adventure vacations and start making things better for folks right here.”
One must consider the goals of the protesters before attacking their effectiveness. No one is naive enough to think that sporadically blocking a few commuter shuttles for 30 minutes a pop is going to create systemic change. But when it comes to raising awareness—and making sure City Hall gets the message loud and clear—taking on tech has been the most effective strategy yet, despite the divisiveness.
Like Occupy Wall Street targeting the financial sector to highlight America's inequality crisis, San Francisco's housing activists have made the tech industry represent our skyrocketing cost of living. So it's little surprise that shuttle commuters, many having just come from ramen dinners at Stanford and Berkeley, are now uncomfortable with being the new face of economic ruthlessness—a characterization that is often grossly inaccurate. And, of course, the targets are pointing fingers elsewhere, and dismissing the movement as scattered and confused.
But protesting greedy landlords didn't work. Howling at the Mayor did little good. Complaining about tax breaks and America's Cup never got traction.
It wasn't until activists put up roadblocks in front of the those gleaming white economic engines, squeezing the pockets of City Hall's primary backers, did anyone listen.
Those roadblocks might just make San Francisco a better city for everyone… even the tech community.
Comments (125)
A $15/hr minimum wage is a great idea, but that is entirely separate from any question of pro-techie/anti-techie movements.
Wages are directly related to cost of living.
Yes, and a living wage for a full-time job is a bare minimum in any civilized society.
Getting politicians to give lip service to an issue is a start, but not much of an accomplishment in and of itself.
Kevin, you are very naive if you think these protesters will ever be satisfied.
But that’s irrelevant to the question of whether they are successful or not.
Are the Anti- Tech Protesters Whining?
Typo…
Yes, the national media loves the storyline of one of the country’s most liberal and “tolerant” cities seemingly at war with its own success. Also the extremely profitable mechanics of gentrification makes a great story too.
Effective, non-violent protest has to take advantage of hot-button, lightning-rod symbols like the buses, and has to employ elements of theater, such as blocking them. It gets people talking, it gets on the news, it even gets the news choppers overhead. It’s a sad truth, but protests at City Hall get no publicity, and leave no trace. Had the bus-blockers marched on City Hall instead, no one would be talking about this. So in that respect, they have already succeeded, just as Occupy succeeded in injecting discussion of inequality into the national consciousness, even if it accomplished little else.
There is also a need for the status quo to derogate all protestors, and to portray protest as ineffective/illegal/hypocritical/offensive, because their biggest fear is that a given protest could galvanize a large number of people against them – and the more successful a movement is, the more successful it becomes, as fence-sitters and agnostics begin to join in.
You’ll know the bus-blockers are becoming a perceived threat when undercover cops try to infiltrate them…
About 15 minutes ago I heard about 5 or 6 gunshots near Garfield Park. In listening to the police scanner it seems that some punk kids shot some dude.
So yeah, let’s keep talking about goddam buses and sweep the real problems under the rug.
You have a police scanner?
There’s an app for that.
http://www.scansf.com
Kevin, I want to thank you ahead of time for promoting violence in this neighborhood. Hope you can sleep at night.
Hyperbole much?
I know… but he’s certainly throwing a bunch of fuel on the fire by continuing to present a single-side view of the world.
Watch Glenn Beck for long enough and you’ll start believing his bullshit. Much like people who continue to read the same narrative on this issue with no real constructive ideas on how to tackle it.
There’s some truth behind the “squeaky wheel” approach but when that squeak turns into “brick into windows” and terrorizing people on their way to work… well, umm, it’s kinda fucked up.
The good news is they’ll probably go for the jerk-off dressed in a teddy bear outfit touting his Drupal skillz first.
Kevin = Glenn Beck!!!
I’m impressed with You’s tenacity to keep coming back after losing 13 rounds in a row.
Being spit on, being threatened with assault, and having bricks thrown at you all count as violence. Various tech shuttle employees have had all of the above happen to them in recent weeks. Go ahead, be glib about it, or dismiss it as “inevitable” and their fault.
I don’t see how Kevin is encouraging or endorsing that behaviour.
Not sure what blog you think you’re reading, but I’ve never condoned aggravated assault.
Is this about gun control legislation?
I am really happy that you write these observations rather than just complain like everyone else.
problem?
rent
control
3 words
Funny how the “problem” in your mind is that people making less than $200,000 can still afford to live here.
even funnier, how the problem of basic arithmetic eludes you. If you want your rent control subsidized $700 a month 2 bedroom for 20 years, then you have to be able to live with $3k a month when that same you can be turned over.
So you’re saying pricing based on supply and demand magically stops working because of rent control? You’re going to have to explain that one.
The exact opposite, rent control distorts supply and demand. By artificialy limiting supply, it is going to create significantly higher pricing for demand.
But wait, if rent control makes rent sky high, then didn’t the people who got rent controlled buildings in 1990 already get exploited when they pained rents that were sky high for the time they moved in.
No matter, now that they are in the way of your convencence, dehumanize their situation and call them free loading chairman Maos.
False statement is false. Rent control doesn’t limit supply, artificially or otherwise.
OK, can you point me to some data on that?
There’s this thing called “google,” you should try it.
In the meantime, why don’t you think about what you’re saying here; where does this supply of available units come from?
I did. From what I can see there are some pro rent control articles that don’t site any data in the bay guardian. They talk about how exasprerated they are in talking about having to defend rent control and how the arguement has already been settled. On the flip side, there are a bunch of conservative sites like the Cato institute that despise rent control. I can not find any data on the success or lack of success on rent control.
Druggie, they paid the high rent at the start of the contract. Its like insurance contract pay more up front, and if you stay longer, you pay less in you later years.
Its not a subsidy.
what insurance contracts are you talking about? Insurance contracts do not work in the way you describe at all…
Glad you asked ,
With an insurance contract you pay something each month to be covered against a big loss later. Agreed??
Stabilization control does the same. It raises a renter’s initial cost of renting, ( yes some people deny this, and point out that it doesn’t constraining building, but classic mainstream thought says it has some effect..) For the first years, in a rent stabilized apartment, the renter pays something extra each month in what amounts to an insurance policy that she is protected against a bad landlord, and certain changes in the economic landscape.
Like insurance, the renter may never recover on his policy but its there.
If years later, some economic incident occurs, liquidity events„ the renter’s insurance stabilization policy kicks in, and she is protected against a heavy increase in living expenses
Another way to wrap your ahead around this. Yes today’s rents in rent controlled buildings look sky high at $6,000 for a nice apartment. But in 20 years, its quite possible that $6,000/ month is a cheap rent. And the aging techie will say that she paid the sky high rents in 2014, so she shouldn’t be kicked out by the young.. bla bla, she built this town, and it is not fair that now when she is competing against Banglore wages, she can’t afford to move..
“With an insurance contract you pay something each month to be covered against a big loss later. Agreed??”
I disagree. Insurance covers risk. When you buy insurance, you buy into an aggregated risk pool with different outcomes tabulated by the arcania of actuary tables. Depending on the greed of the insurance companies, and associated regulations the price per policy is set. Things like age factor into risk so an 18 year old driver costs more to insure than 50 year old drivers, smokers have a hard time getting insurance, etc… There is nothing individual about an insurance contract, only statistical outcomes that are determined by various factors. In addition in the case of say auto insurance, a lot of insurance companies will jack your rates up by anywhere from 25% - 60% annually if you have at one fault accident. Low end home insurance companies will not hesitate to drop your policy outright if you do something like say, file a claim.
“Stabilization control does the same”
Rent stabilization and rent control are two different things. In the case of NYC which has both, rent stabilization in addition to helping renters also provides a tax break to landlords, that in turn gives the incentive to keep up the building. In SF rent control effectively freezes rent with minimal annual increases.
Hey genius, rent control is the main cause of sky high rents in ess eff. A lot of people just stick around for years under low rent, keeping a lot of units off the market, and this makes newly created vacancies very expensive. It’s an antiquated system that totally distorts the market; hence someone pays $3500 for a 2br, while some hoarder-douche slums in his apartment from the 80’s and pays only $700 for a similar 2br. Kapish?
Oh, please, give it a rest. The whole “Rent control causes high rents!” bit of disinformation has been proven to be decades ago.
(proven to be bullshit, even)
You’re a willful delusional idiot. Every study done on the subject proves it is totally ineffective. There are many well paid renters in SF that simply hoard their cheap RC apartments. How does that help lower income people exactly?
No matter how often you spout that lie, it’s still a lie.
Actually, I may be being unfair. Lying requires intent, you could simply be delusional instead, I suppose.
Rent control works fabulously for those who don’t need to change their living situations. No arguing that. Rent increases are limited to 60% of the CPI, so renters enjoy a significant savings if they are willing to stay in the same rental for long periods. Next year increases are limited to 1%, which is an amazing deal considering that real estate prices are appreciating 25% or so.
When buildings sell, the new property owners pay market rate prices, property taxes, and insurance. Long term tenants are shielded from this by very strict caps on rent increases. Again, a fantastic deal! Of course, very few new owners remain in the rental business when there is such an imbalance. They tend to pursue a variety of legal eviction procedures (OMIs, Ellis, etc), permanently removing rental units from the market.
Do you have a quantifiable number for very few new owners remain in the rental business…?
I’d think this could be resolved with actual data from our City.
You probably prefer vacancy control too, eh? Shouldn’t most SF housing just be owned by the gov so they can control who can live there? What do you suggest, doktor?
Are you a temporarily inconvenienced millionaire too?
I think a more significant problem than rent control is all the red tape and obstacles that a builder has to overcome to get anything going. It takes literally years. But this is nevertheless relevant:
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html
Hey, you have choices. There is little red tape for building crappy buildings and formula malls and complexes in Dallas. Dallas has its charms, economically it does seem to work because Dallas has low unemployment rates. If that is the type of community you want, then move to Dallas. Don’t tell us that we need to green light developers who build so fast that during construction their building falls down. We need to stop this fever building with buildings collapsing in mid build.
I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that the majority of obstacles to building housing in San Francisco is related to ensuring the safety of the buildings.
Correct, but its true that a city hall connected developer’s building just collapsed during during the current building frenzy.
You think that was about safety? LOL
Are you saying the developer had the building purposefully collapse, so that he could eventually build something larger? That he had it safely collapse when no one was there to be injured. That’s has been done before.
You’ve already expressed that you want to price out long-time residents. I don’t know why you hate San Franciscans so much, but this clearly is not the city for you.
Again, I am willing to be convinced, but how does being long term entitle anyone to anything? Is the arguement, we have been here longer, thus we have more rights? Are you proposing housing discrimination based on seniority?
Often criticized, but proposition 13 is our policy. Meaning, it already is the public policy decided by the people of the state of California to discriminate in housing toward stability and seniority. Since this is a long standing existing policy, it would be very hard to articulate its continuance as a “proposal”
er.. Prop 13 funded by anti tax billionare, which has resulted in the hollowing out of our public education system is a weak sauce comeback. It doesn’t do shit to help renters. It does create tax stability for a bunch of old rich white people in pacific heights…
Here is the story The Birth of Rent Control in San Francisco from a 1999 Article from Apartment Magazine.
http://www.sfaa.org/0406forbes.html
Loose history has its charms, but when the chuckles end, here are some citations Interesting, the article describes how Howard Jarvis false promises that the landlords would lower rents because of their savings from Prop 13 was called the father of rent control by one of the San Francisco’s main advocates for rent stabilizaton
.
For completeness here is the Howard Jarvis wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Jarvis#cite_note-6
How does having more money entitle anyone to anything? Why is that a better system than letting people keep their existing rental units at an inflation-adjusted price until they want to move?
WTF are you talking about? I just explained how rent control causes a major constraint on availability of apartments, which ratchets the price upwards. I love SF and owning real estate here- it’s made me rich!
Your explanation leaked.
Qué?
[citation needed]
Bra, I ain’t your nigga. The failure* of rent control is has been fully vetted and credibly covered in countless academic studies and Econ think tanks. Can’t you google?
* but I’m sure Herr Doktor Coktur can weasel out a contradictory finding from some looser-SF-state school “scholar.”
you are an antisocial jerk and its showing. Please go away.
May I suggest that you pull the stick out of your ass? You’ll feel better.
Interesting claim for someone who’s unable to defend their position. So ballpark figure, how many academic studies are we talking about here? Can you provide links to some of them?
Here’s one for you. http://econjwatch.org/file_download/238/2009-01-jenkins-reach_concl.pdf
This is heresy. Is there a way to burn a pdf file?
You’ll note that the arguments being made here are in regard to a rent ceiling, and the paper even goes on to define what we have here in SF as a “second generation rent control.” The economists don’t reach much of a conclusion on this topic, let alone a consensus.
But hey, you’d actually have to read the link you posted in order to know that. Nice try.
Sure Eric, spin it the way you want to. The preponderance of studies show RC as an utter failure. Enjoy your little apartment while it lasts!
The logic is distorted all over. In 2011, I was paying 2600 for a 1BR in the mission while my recovering druggie neighbor who’d squatted there for 18+ years paid 800. That’s fine. I don’t begrudge him his cheap rent but now that I’ve moved to the east bay, I discover that no one wants me here, either. Fuck all of you assholes.
Right… our logic is distorted. Meanwhile, evictions are WAY lower than they were in years past yet we have a fucking crisis.
Drama. Fucking .Queens.
Leave.
No.
Eric: Yup, well said. The notion that rent control causes high rent is utterly laughable, and has been disproven repeatedly wherever rent control has been abolished.
Live here. Yes. Move here - not so much.
On long threads, the indentation on this site,makes it hard to know who and what John Murphy is responding to.
Look. I don’t want to displace anyone. I just want to live in a walkable neighborhood in a nice climate, and the Bay Area has the most career opportunities for someone with my particular skills and background. Not every techie is a douchebag asshole.
Of course you don’t. But you need to understand they’re not actually angry about you displacing poor people, because both you and said poor people could easily be accommodated by encouraging more development in the city. What they really want is to kick you out of the city, which they somehow believe is their natural right.
Suggestions for techies who are trying not to be douchebag assholes:
1. Make sure your apartment was not an ellis act eviction.
2. Buy your veggies at casa lucas instead of whole foods, get your tacos at vallarta instead of tacolicious, etc., etc.
3. Don’t get drunk and walk in the Dia de los Muertos procession (i.e. recognize that the neighborhood is not a playground built for your enjoyment).
4. Let your employer know that you find the shuttle situation assholish and unsustainable, and request they work to improve it.
“Work to improve it”?
You mean, like, come to some agreement with the City that ensures that they are appropriately permitted and using them in a city-sanctioned manner? Yeah! They should do that! It’s time they came together to work on something like that! Something like … the thing they’ve already been doing with the city for quite some time now!
https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/shuttle-partners-progra…
The website suggests they at least want to give the impression of improving the shuttle situation, but you’ll notice there haven’t been any updates since September of 2012… so potentially a little bit of agitation by tech employees and our friendly neighborhood protestors is not such a bad idea.
Does Vallarta source their meat from humane sources? Are they free of excessive hormones and antibiotics? Or is it douchebaggy to care about that?
Shut your fucking trap. Who the fuck do you think you are?
so you’re basically just talking about the mission. you suck.
when people can’t afford to pay the rent, when they’re losing the homes they can afford and middle class jorbs are pushed out by silicon walley you can expect to get fucked with. wake up. high tech seems to give very little back except gentrification. why is that?
What is your point? Is your constitutional right to cheap housing is being infringed upon? Perhaps you are upset that your social science degree doesn’t entitle you to a guaranteed good paying job? I fail to understand how high tech is different from every other corporate product you use ever day. What are you expecting to be given back?
I’m beginning to think that all coders injected with Ayn Rand’s DNA at conception. For dudes who are supposed to be so smart, most of you seem to have a comic book understanding of political economy.
I’ll take you up on that, please explain political economy me. I’d love to expand my understanding because, I do not get it. I disagree with you that in general coders subscribe to objectivism as a default philosophy.
You guys have one god called the Free Market, and it has supposed magical„ spiritual, “unseen” powers to provide the best possible outcome for every member of society, if only the market is “left to itself.” It becomes a holy, unassailable virtue in and of itself, but in fact, there is no such thing as what you believe to be a “free market.” All markets are human constructs, and have implicit rules and conditions that favor certain parties over others. At best, all governments can do is act as referees, and try to ensure the markets operate fairly, so that no parties are favored. But this inhibits the formation of monopolistic and oligopolistic markets that are the goal of every large player, and thus we have the incessant assault on ay attempt to run fair markets. There is, and can be, no such thing as a “free market” at anywhere near the scale required to run a global economy. Applying simplistic “objectivist” platitudes enables large market players to implement plutocratic structures, and that is exactly where we are today.
Smith and Ricardo recognized the limits and conditions required for a free market, and the idealized market of today’s libertarian violates those terms.
Honestly, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. The majority of tech workers in the Bay Area are not libertarians, and don’t “have one god called the Free Market”. You shine a light on the handful that are (and they’re usually guys with business degrees, not actual engineers) because it fits the narrative better.
“two beers” is a fucking tool. He’s a know-it-all but really dont-know-shit-all…
Excellent, convicing refutation of my argument. Sound reasoning, lucid presentation. Well played, sir!
Jet planes fly faster without tails, but its good that there are things to stabilize them.
The name is rent stabilization, and just like jet planes, its good that there are objects that stabilize, otherwise would be more crash and burn incidents.
That’s gotta be the dumbest analogy me heard in a long, long time.
Colin Quinn wonders what happened to his old neighborhood
http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/colin-quinn-mario-joyner-i-hear-…
According to the article, Ed Lee did not come out in favor of a $15/hr minimum wage hike, but rather a $15/hr minimum wage. A $15/hr hike would bring it up to over $25/hr.
Fixed.
I really support these people, and know some of them. I do. But against it at the same time. It isolates a group of workers, some working class, many upper class as a problem. Most of the upper class people will be working class when the bubble bursts. So no bonds have been established in the sense of us against capital, that a minority of the tech people would embrace, or at least fall back upon when it bursts. I hate the arrogance of the ‘tech’ little fucks strutting down 24th street. But that is a one on one thing. The other ‘tech’ people I’ve had contact with since late 90’s commons grabs, summit jumpers, etc, were amazing. And many I heard speak at occupy.
Great, in that this thrust may slow some evictions, but I see us still back in the 90’s. that is, One issue politics. Obviously many of the people involved know that most of the million dollar condos and most of the evictions are being bought and carried about by the top 10%…NOT people making high salary in the tech industry. We have massive speculation going on in the bay area by equity (think the too big to fail)and hedge funds as well as chinese capital, and maybe, sovereign wealth funds from the middle east.
Still, to change city policy and create some stop gaps, this kind of thing works. So it works for a moment. Then we have an economic depression coming. So obvious even the mainstream economists at Bloomberg and zero hedge are calling it hot money. What we really need, and I doubt 90% on this blog or Missionmission would even consider, though most of the rest of the country wants it, is a mass bottom left org that aligns with no party and makes demands based on strength, not spectacle. All cities in the USA have been controlled by large real estate developers since day one. It is profit, not people. And to put people forward, you have to attack capitalism itself. That a minority should be subsidized, low interest rate enabled, and politically supported to destroy whatever working class communities have even been built, speaks about an entire system, not just one bubble. This is the history of the western addition, south side chicago, much of new york, boston, and the horrible ghettos of Baltimore. It is a casino. Nothing has changed since 2007. QE will have to be stopped. And this will all tank. Meanwhile, people bicker about changes and flows in such a provincial way. I can’t imagine anyone in SF being but slack jawed……when a real depression happens. I can only hope that for a bit of revenge, that woman on panda goes broke as does that asshole that wrote that facebook shit about the ‘scum’ on market street. Such is the disaster coming. I can only think of little petty mental revenge .
And so I am american as you. Petty and provincial. Land and Liberty will never be on these banners. Oakland and SF will not be Athens or Barcelona or Cairo. We will be little spectacles. And the rich will continue to cackle and strut.
From June, 2000 progressive economist Paul Krugman:
The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and – among economists, anyway – one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ”a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.” Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go – and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out – what yesterday’s article oddly described as ”free-market horror stories” – and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html
Krugman calls himself a “progressive” now; he was a deregulatory Rubinite back then. Despite his blather, he’s still quite to the right of Keynes to day. He beats the monetary stimulus drum (go, Wall St, go!), but the fiscal stimulus drum? Not so much. He’s just another tool of Wall St, albeit a kinder, gentler one.
I didn’t finish, http://www.amazon.com/End-This-Depression-Paul-Krugman/dp/0393345084
and wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_This_Depression_Now!
but I had been counting Krugman as one of the stronger Fiscal stimulus voices.
Indeed. Everything that Krugman said about NAFTA was completely wrong. Everything that Krugman said about housing prices was wrong up to the bubble. Only towards the end did he sound an alarm. And only at the beginning of austerity did he sound the alarm. Then walks lock step with de regulation democrats to the death kneel.
William Black, Mike Whitney, Yves Smith, Michael Hudson, Wolf Richter….plenty of others…outside the pundit circle, will give a realistic view of the ‘dismal science’ of economics. The rentier class does noting but extract, it never produces. It never invests in production.
It causes nothing but grief, eviction, and a security state to stabalize property values.
from the same article:
” But people literally don’t want to know. A few months ago, when a San Francisco official proposed a study of the city’s housing crisis, there was a firestorm of opposition from tenant-advocacy groups. They argued that even to study the situation was a step on the road to ending rent control – and they may well have been right, because studying the issue might lead to a recognition of the obvious.
I love how you link to a 13 year old article that says:
It certainly sounds like the many things he doesn’t know about SF’s rent control include how many buildings it applies to, how many units are covered, or how many people would be forced out if rent control were abolished.
Krugman is no dummy, but this is far from an educated look at the issue.
just say no to PC Thugs who all went to state schools on scholarship and studied “ethnic studies” or some other social studies bullshit and can’t get a job so they return to a shitty neighborhood that for some reason people with money and jobs seem to want to live in God knows why and and are jealous they are flippin burgers with that SF State degree in social studies.
Has google hired anyone with a BA/S from SF state? Anyone know? ….jus curious.
I can think of at least two SFSU grads I know who ended up at Google.
Interesting…maybe goog is not as elite as some would like to believe.
Btw, I gave you a RC link…look ^upstairs.^
Don’t look at me Mac, I’m on your side bro. I love Googlers, always polite and pay their rent on time. The enemy is outside.
I’ll go you one better: I’m a college dropout and I work at Google. Put that in your oh-poor-me pipe and smoke it.
I hope your home collapses on your sorry elitist ass in the next earthquake. Chump.
I went to SF State. I studied Anthropology and Psychology. Guess what? I’m not flipping burgers. In fact, I’m doing great. You humongous omni-twat. I laugh at you lot though. Your 100K$ private educations all so you can sit in front of a computer for 12 hours a day surrounded by socially inept beardos. Oh, and with no chance for a career change once you hit 40 because you’ll be irrelevant. Enjoy your staycation while it lasts. You’ll be shown the door soon enough.
And that was a pathetic jab at people who flip burgers for a living. Burgers are good. As if coming up with new ways for people to yell at each other annonymously in limited characters is somehow valiant and commendable. The best bit is that you have no clue how big of a joke you are. Actually, you probably do. That’s the better bit. I’m going to get a burger now. You should prepare for your inevitable funemployment..
I’m just plain embarrassed for all the techies who defend their position in the City - y’all are so smug, it’s gross.
For the record, I am not a “techie.” But I think they have a right* to live here, just like everyone else.
* right = who can afford it, of course. Dat is da catch. But thus is life, there is always a catch. Can’t expect the gov to always take care of you. For those truly in need sure, but not all the rent controlled hanger oners directly benefiting from private landlords. SF wants inexpensive housing? Fine, let ALL it’s residents pay into an affordable housing fund (like a section 8 type plan specifically made for SF. )
Fuck That. The law is clear and simple: rent is based on how long you’ve lived in the same place. It’s based on how long you’ve contributed to this city. It’s not up to greedy fucking landlords or some rigged, bullshit market.
15 years of lame roommates and I finally have this apartment to myself. I’ve earned it. It’s mine. Fuck you.
You win.
I missed the part about what you’ve “contributed” to the city?
We need to build more housing; and it needs to be higher. Why can’t/don’t we build apartment buildings like the one at 25th & Bartlett anymore? People are always going to want to live in SF. We need to make room for them.
First reasonable thing I’ve read here.
San Francisco has always been a boomtown. And in the last 40 years they haven’t been very good at managing housing supply.
1. How many of these protesters continue to use Google themselves?
2. How many of these protesters would take a job at Google in a hot second and then realize how nice a shuttle to work is and STFU immediately.
3. No complainants about Apple? They use the same bus stops… Ohhh wait…. that’s a “good” company right?
4. The people who are complaining are the same people who took over the missions and now Oakland in the first place.
The people who write and read this lame-ass blog are the fucking problem!!!
Arguing on blogs fixes the world, asshole.
case-in-point you fucking tool
Nice tu quoque fallacy ya got there, bub.