Tech Rides Are Focus of Hostility in Bay Area(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
Tech Rides Are Focus of Hostility in Bay Area
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/technology/tech-rides-are-focus-of-hostility-in-bay-area.html?hpw&rref=technology
4 comments
One of the reasons it is easy to throw a stone at a big white bus is because it dehumanizes it's occupants. This makes it easy for people to treat them differently.
The target is not the employees. The anger towards the city, which has failed to provide good public transportation for it's residents.
The tech companies recognized that the public transportation sucks and built their own. The protestors could just stand outside of city-hall, but disrupting tech-buses is a much louder and more effective message.
The target is not the employees. The anger towards the city, which has failed to provide good public transportation for it's residents.
The tech companies recognized that the public transportation sucks and built their own. The protestors could just stand outside of city-hall, but disrupting tech-buses is a much louder and more effective message.
These aren't executives & owners riding the bus; they're employees. Do the protesters think the answer to income inequality is paying lower wages, that an increased load on the public transit and increased cars on the road is better than private shuttles?
I find it amazing that no one has yet pointed out that the people increasing the rents are their fellow San Franciscans. The overwhelming majority of landlords are people who have lived in San Francisco for years. Yes, new people can move into an area raising demand, but at the end of the day it is San Franciscans who control the properties and decide who to rent to.
One of my good friends is 64 and has lived in SF since the early 70s and says that that most landlords try to create a situation where housing rotates over and over by making the rents unsustainable so people eventually have to move so they can jack up the price again. She owns an apartment in a 3-unit building that survived the 1906 earthquake and her neighbor below inherited the property from their parents ~30 years ago and has been using this strategy for years. He was born and raised in SF, but moved out and now just collects rent checks on the property. The three bedroom unit below her is now being rented for just shy of $5000/mo.
Beyond those people I've met many few San Franciscans who have decided to move out of the city while maintaining the lease on their rent-controlled apartment and now sublease the apartment for the difference in rent control and market rate.
Pretty much everyone in a position to extract rent in this city is doing the most they can, and almost all are long time San Franciscans.
With all this in mind, I don't understand why all this ire isn't also directed at the supply side of the market, which is as culpable as the buy side of the market.
One of my good friends is 64 and has lived in SF since the early 70s and says that that most landlords try to create a situation where housing rotates over and over by making the rents unsustainable so people eventually have to move so they can jack up the price again. She owns an apartment in a 3-unit building that survived the 1906 earthquake and her neighbor below inherited the property from their parents ~30 years ago and has been using this strategy for years. He was born and raised in SF, but moved out and now just collects rent checks on the property. The three bedroom unit below her is now being rented for just shy of $5000/mo.
Beyond those people I've met many few San Franciscans who have decided to move out of the city while maintaining the lease on their rent-controlled apartment and now sublease the apartment for the difference in rent control and market rate.
Pretty much everyone in a position to extract rent in this city is doing the most they can, and almost all are long time San Franciscans.
With all this in mind, I don't understand why all this ire isn't also directed at the supply side of the market, which is as culpable as the buy side of the market.
If there is an injustice going on regarding tech buses, sure, bring it to city hall and demand that they fix it. But everything else is entitled bullshit by protesters.
They have zero rights to interfere with how much money, say, Google pays employees or complain about how much these employees pay for fancy lattes. And it's especially repulsive how they showed up at the house of that engineer terrorizing him and his family.
Seriously. All these techies are guilty of is being successful and choosing a very rewarding industry-location combination.
Should we go harass NFL and NHL players because they do even better than us economically?