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Telesphorus posted:Is there really any practical way to address gentrification in the Bay Area? I guess I'm confused, because if there's a tech boom in an area that's expensive to begin with, then of course non-tech skilled people are going to be at a disadvantage. San Francisco has been adding quite a bit of housing in the last couple years, along with some developer subsided affordable housing. But the demand is so high, there really is no way to keep pace with the demand. Public workers really are starting to be priced out of SF. Younger workers typically can get roommates, but once you start thinking bout kids, you're moving out of the city. Most do commute (you can see a huge amount of public sector workers getting off the BART from the east bay at Civic Center station). SFPD and firefighters make enough to stay in the city, if they live out in the western neighborhoods, as they are pretty well paid. But I really don't see an answer to addressing high costs of living, outside of towns on the peninsula starting to allow for denser construction. But the NIMBYs there aren't going to let that happen.
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May 2, 2014 02:59
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Rah! posted:It's a completely ignorant tourist view of SF. Wasn't thought of as a business center until recently? Yeah, I guess the city's status as a primary business center of the west coast starting in the 1850s was all a dream (and it was the primary business center of the west until the mid 1920s, when LA passed it in population). Wells Fargo, Bank of America, the Pacific stock exchange, Hearst Corporation, Chevron, Visa, Bechtel, etc, etc, etc never were founded/headquartered in SF! poo poo, before tech started booming in SF, there was no business at all! Everyone was a hippie and/or beatnik, and no one worked. And a "small" city of 825,000? Nevermind that the SF Bay Area has over 8 million people, making it the 5th largest metropolitan area in the US. Very good point. The problem I usually have with the approach of a lot of progressives, like the Bay Guardian, is they all think San Francisco is some sort of falling liberal utopia. Except for the early 2000s backlash against Willie Brown, and a brief blip in the 70s, the city government has always been very friendly to the corporate downtown interests. Because those interests have been the dominate feature of the city since the gold rush. And the second problem is when progressives are elected, they end up being alienating idiots like Chris Daly. San Francisco is still very progressive compared to most other major cities in the United States. But it's still a big city with a lot of money, and pretending otherwise never really helps the progressive cause.
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May 2, 2014 03:05
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UberJew posted:Police and Corrections Officers aren't in the same universe as the rest of the state government. I've been a full time unionized state employee for five years and make 29k. They've got the unions that both Dems and Republicans love! It's not to begrudge the unions for advocating for their members, but they definitely work in a different political world than other public sector workers.
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May 2, 2014 03:12
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ComradeCosmobot posted:On the topic of the tech buses, activists have filed lawsuits against all involved in the recent agreement, seeking to halt implementation as no environmental study was performed. Another fine misuse of CEQA! I really hope they manage to get a reform of that law through. It's really just turned into a political weapon, rather than something designed to preserve the environment. The tech buses help keep cars off the roads by providing mass transit along a route not adequately served by public transit.
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May 5, 2014 02:19
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FRINGE posted:The meta-argument "tell all the Apple drones to go live in Apple land instead of ruining our city" does have some ground-level sanity to it. If the coffee-pourers cant afford to live in SF then it makes sense that there will be a backlash against the Apple drones driving rents up "because they can". (Telling low-wage workers to commute in and out of SF is ridiculous. Adjusting the system to make it less attractive to bigger-money vultures makes political sense from a local perspective.) They're misusing environmental protection laws (private mass transit is bad for the environment!) to push an unrelated agenda (make it harder for tech employees to live in San Francisco!). It does make a ground level amount of sense in a totally cynical, yet also ineffectual, way. If they manage to kill the tech buses, it's not like tech people will stop living in San Francisco. They'll just start driving more cars. It also undermines public support for environmental laws. It's this kind short sighted politics that's really damaged the progressive movement in the city.
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May 6, 2014 04:18
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