Nick Wingfield has an interesting article in the NYT about how Seattle, Austin, Boulder, Portland, and other tech hubs around the country are seeking not to emulate San Francisco where wealth has created a widely envied economy, but housing costs have skyrocketed, and the region's economic divisions have deepened with rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco at more than $3,500 a month, the highest in the country. "Seattle has wanted to be San Francisco for so long," says Knute Berger. "Now it's figuring out maybe that it isn't what we want to be." The core of the debate is over affordable housing and the worry that San Francisco is losing artists, teachers and its once-vibrant counterculture. "It's not that we don't want to be a thriving tech center — we do," says Alan Durning. "It's that the San Francisco and Silicon Valley communities have gotten themselves into a trap where preservationists and local politics have basically guaranteed buying a house will cost at least $1 million. Already in Seattle, it costs half-a-million, so we're well on our way."
Seattle mayor Ed Murray says he wants to keep the working-class roots of Seattle, a city with a major port, fishing fleet and even a steel mill. After taking office last year, Murray made the minimum-wage increase a priority, reassured representatives of the city's manufacturing and maritime industries that Seattle needed them and has set a goal of creating 50,000 homes — 40 percent of them affordable for low-income residents — over the next decade. "We can hopefully create enough affordable housing so we don't find ourselves as skewed by who lives in the city as San Francisco is," says Murray. "We're at a crossroads," says Roger Valdez. "One path leads to San Francisco, where you have an incredibly regulated and stagnant housing economy that can't keep up with demand. The other path is something different, the Seattle way."
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Saturday October 10 2015, @07:47AM
We need unions, good unions, unions with the power to bring the "investing" class to their knees. Why? Oh, probably just class warfare jealously of those who work harder than that rest of us and can afford rents that are more than half of the average wage. Or, those bastards are part of a "bubble", a part of the economy that exists outside of the economy (until it doesn't) that allows for these huge disparities in the ability to pay for a place to live. I recommend not just squatting, but active, armed, squatting. If anyone cannot afford an apartment, they still should be able to afford a .38 Special (or discounted 357 Mag, same thing), and so be able to find one of the overpaid tech people that are driving up the cost of living, and just explain to them how you will be living with them until such time as wage inequalities are remedied. Such a simple solution, one that even a Republican could understand. I do not condone any sort of violence, but if it takes a Duck side-swiping a Google or Amazon commute bus, so be it. Maybe Amazon could pay the Duck guys to have their vehicles looked after so the axles do not just shear off. But until then, just saying!
(Score: 3, Informative) by GungnirSniper on Saturday October 10 2015, @01:19PM
Let me know when you find union leadership that won't simply enrich themselves and fund politics workers may not support, all the while putting up roadblocks to advancement such as first-hired-first-promoted.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @06:10PM
I can't speak for the original poster, but over the years I've dealt with plenty of union leadership. Alas, the ones that weren't actually in bed with organised crime were generally corrupt and incompetent.
I've been called upon to vote for unions several times in my career, and have always felt interested, until I met the leadership. Then I felt depressed and disgusted.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @05:45PM
With all due respect to the seriousness of your proposal, while this might result in some temporary affordable housing availability, I can't help but notice a few downsides.
First, it will drive flight of people and capital from Seattle. Most of the techies showed up in Seattle in the last ten or twenty years - they can leave just as quickly. This will crater the local economy - but at least the rent should drop.
Most tech workers are not armed, but many of the less well-off already are. This includes those who have homes they've managed to hang onto, and they are unlikely to be thrilled at the wholesale devaluation of what they have. I would bet on your armed incursions resulting in open conflict - again, not great for the local economy.
Ultimately, while I'm sure you have the best of intentions, I don't think that you've really thought through all the ramifications.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday October 11 2015, @12:19AM
I've thought through the ramifications, I think you're making things up to support your point.
Most people in this region don't abuse firearms. In a given year we rarely have more than 40 murders total. There are a small number of neighborhoods to stay out of, but even there you're usually fine as long as you're not wearing gang colors. This was the case prior to the techies moving here and it will probably be the case after they leave.
As far as capital and techies leaving, good riddance. We can't handle the amount of growth we've had over the last 20 years as it is. Seeing a considerable amount of people in one industry leaving would hardly be a deathblow to the region. We're well diversified and we had tech firms here before the recent influx and we'll do just fine without them.
Tech firms that leave over this sort of thing aren't needed, they're corporate leeches that we're better off without. We have cheap electricity and a generally agreeable set of courts, so it's not like all of those firms are going to leave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @11:31AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 10 2015, @12:13PM
I would have thought highly intelligent tech workers were smarter than that, too smart to get caught up in the fool's game of Keeping up with the Joneses. But I saw long ago, during the dot com bubble, that they weren't. Maybe it's their spouses who push them to do it.
Many medical doctors, another group of highly intelligent people, are horrible at managing their own finances.Can't understand that one either.
What is so crazy about this is they have the wealth to free themselves of much corporate control but they won't do it, instead making frivolous purchases. Pay rent to those parasites of society known as landlords? Finance expensive cars at relatively high interest rates? Carry credit card debt at even higher rates??
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Saturday October 10 2015, @04:31PM
It is very much less about finance management and more about price of rent. People want to commute as little as possible (can't buy back your time) and many enjoy living in the major cities. I have a friend who makes close to 150k a year and he is unable to save very much after paying rent and taking care of his two kids. He even lives outside the city, but moving farther away means less time with his kids. The real kicker is rent, too bad rent control does not apply to buildings after 1979. Also, loopholes are being abused where a group can buy an entire building and then evict tenants by moving in. There are some restrictions, but it is a pretty shady way for some rich folks to get what they want: https://www.sftu.org/omi/ [sftu.org]
Outlying areas are feeling the same crunch as the lower salaried workers look for affordable housing. It is going to be a really weird shift if the bubble pops again.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @09:25PM
If you're living somewhere where making $150,000 a year doesn't mean anything because of rent, you're just a fool. No job is worth that nonsense, because you're not actually being paid that well in the long run. So yes, it is a finance management problem.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Michelle on Saturday October 10 2015, @09:53PM
(note: the following opinionated rant is not directed at any specific person. Techies, save your breath - your attacks will be ignored.)
Highly intelligent? Techies see themselves and fellow techies as being "highly intelligent" because of their nauseating arrogance. They are often pretentious to the extreme, typically conservative and classist and very often racist/homophobic. Take a stroll through San Francisco some time and observe (make sure you're not wearing the rose colored glasses of tech arrogance). Maybe Santa Cruz, too - another fine example of what happens when nauseatingly arrogant techies move in. Of course, if you are yet another invading transplant from elsewhere, you wouldn't have a clue what SF was like before the techie transplant invasion. It actually had culture and diversity. It was actually possible for a normal working class person to live there.
Yes, San Francisco, where techies move into their overpriced Luxury Designer Condos (that all look like poorly constructed austere glass boxes) right next to a nightclub or music venue then have the nerve to try to get the venue shut down. Obviously not "highly intelligent" enough to know that moving in next to a loud venue might disturb their sleep so they won't wake up in time to make the Google Bus down to Mountain View (too elite to ride public transportation). Of course, in some cases, they've been successful in getting historic venues shut down (the Lexington Club, and soon the Elbo Room) to make way for more Luxury Designer Condos and formula retail space (need to have space to open yet another starbucks, right?) The tech-twats have tried (so far unsuccessfully) to shut down many other venues, such as Slim's, DNA, Great American Music Hall, Brick and Mortar, etc...
And in the *former* Gay Mecca of the Castro district, there are hardly any gay people anymore - at least not since the techies' almightly messiah Scott WIENER took control and tried to turn it into a phony ghost of its former self, like a sanitised attraction at Yuppie Disneyland. I remember when the newly-arrived-from-the-midwest-to-cash-in techie transplants were stomping and foaming at the mouth about the fact that people were allowed to be naked in public in *gasp* San Francisco (who would have thought, right?). "I don't want to look at that!!!", they whined incessantly. Well techies, if you're so "highly intelligent", then you should know that no one is forcing you to look. So the yups have their messiah Scott WIENER pass laws to ban nudity (as well as pass laws attacking homeless and poor people, naturally - techie classist protocol). All of this because of about 4-5 naked guys in a 2-block area of the Castro. If it was such a problem for the techies, maybe they shouldn't have moved into SF (the Castro in particular). Even better, maybe they should've stayed in the midwest where they belong and will feel at home.
But I suppose when your face is constantly buried in your "smart" phone, you tend not to see much outside your own echo chamber. Maybe that's why there's been so many "smart" phone thefts and muggings in SF - those "highly intelligent" techies aren't quite intelligent enough to know they're in a big city where people sometimes do bad things. And there they are with their smug faces lit up in the dark with the glow from that ever-present screen like a big banner saying "Come and get me!"
And Portland is rapidly going the same direction.
Folks in other cities be warned... these yuppie techies don't give a fuck about anything but themselves and their own advancement and will gladly turn your city upside down; they'll strip it of all its culture and replace it with chain stores and formula retail (a Starbucks on every corner, literally). All your artists, musicians, normal working class people - everything that gave your city character - will be EVICTED to make way for yuppie condos. All your local bars shut down to be replaced by "upscale" drinking establishments for the "highly intelligent" sophisticates. All your local markets replaced with Whole Foods.
And when it gets so expensive that even the techies can't afford it (like is now happening in San Francisco), these arrogant self-serving twats will pack up and move to YOUR city and do the same thing there. Parasites - they're only there to feed and will jump off their host as soon as they've drained it.
Don't end up like San Francisco: a bunch of nouveau-riche self-entitled arrogant assholes moved in and bought the city, wiping out its long historic culture (famed in song and story, literally). And making a lot of people very angry. You'll know they're coming - you'll hear the illegal modified exhaust on their rice-burner cars from miles away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @10:07PM
Most of your comment I can pass over as being just, as you admit, an opinionated rant. But I do have a few quibbles where I think you're just being unfair.
I'm not a techie, but a writer. That said, I help fill my coffers with some technical writing, so I work with a few.
They are, on the whole, very intelligent. There are a few outliers, but passing upper division mathematics isn't for the bottom of the barrel, and most of them have done that. They might not have high general intelligence (some of them are very socially unaware) but the days of the CRT-tanned nerd are largely over. I can't say that they're more pretentious than some of my colleagues, but I can say that the ones I've worked with have been invariably left-wing, typically to an amazing degree. I've worked directly with card-carrying IWW members, LGTBQA boosters, Obama and Bernie Sanders political footsoldiers. Your experience is radically different from mine.
Most of their flaws are the flaws of the young and inexperienced, because it's a very ageist industry. And that's my main complaint - but in Seattle I think that they are being hoodwinked by people who take advantage of their naivete, and sell them a political fairy tale, with the consequences plain for all to see.
(Score: 1) by PocketSizeSUn on Saturday October 10 2015, @10:40PM
TL;DR: Old-school hipster from the hipster mecca rants that the new hipsters are destroying mecca ... and your town is next.
Just seems like hipster generation gap naval gazing to me.
SF and the Bay Area in general are suffering from a long history if mismanagement and corruption in a misguided attempt to hold on to what it *was* in the late 60s. Yes it was a great city but you can't live in a time bubble and expect anything else to have happened. That is what you are seeing being played out before you.
As you are witnessing, no one living today actually *wants* to live in the 60s just like nobody actually *wants* to live in the 1600s. Some of us like to pretend we would ... but giving up all the improvements that have occurred over years just isn't realistic. Even the Amish make concessions to modern life and the are the epitome of time bubble technophobes.
Life is change, if you don't manage it, it will manage you and you won't like how it ends up...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @12:28PM
I am a chef/meat cutter in Redmond, I work two jobs as does my wife. We don't work for M$ nor Google etc. And we are priced out, so we are leaving. THis matters not because some post grad douche is getting 6 figuresa, but that the economy isn't driven by them. It just panders to them. Every working class person I klnow who can't inherit a house is exodusing SeaTac as fast as they can. No city without cooks, meat cutters, bus drivers etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @05:44PM
What is semi amusing about that is *THAT* will take care of min wage. Scarcity drive prices up, and prosperity drives them down. Not dictating it thru law.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gordo on Saturday October 10 2015, @04:01PM
When you refuse to allow any building for 30 years in a burgeoning city, you're bound to have problems with housing demand outstripping supply. If SF had enforced reasonable building codes in the 80s, 90s and 00s, we wouldn't have this class warfare crap today, because practically everyone would fit. Instead, you have multiple square miles of shitty two and three storey dilapidated death traps through the Sunset and various other neighborhoods, and virtually no new highrises anywhere save for a handful that have gone up in SoMa in the past 5 years. I'm sorry but you can't fix 30+ years of non-building in three years. If proper city-building had been taking place during the past 30 years, most of the artists, bohemians and blue collar workers currently being forced into Oakland or out of the Bay Area altogether would be able to find plenty of affordable housing in previous high-end construction projects from the 80s and 90s.
Instead, we just blame those who moved in last.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @04:12PM
Very true, and I would like to add that the price jumps are a recent phenomena in the last 2-5 years. They've been going up for a while, but the large spike has occurred somewhat recently.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Saturday October 10 2015, @04:13PM
I can't speak of San Francisco, but the problem we have in Seattle is that basically all the new construction is in condos. There's also been a ton of apartments that have been converted into condos as well. So, there's not anywhere near enough affordable apartment space for the people who actually make the city function. Even my parent's relatively modest house is assessed at $370k last time I checked and they bought it back in the mid '70s for about $26k. There's a house listed a couple blocks from there that's listed at over a million.
Landlords raise their rents because they can and then when they find some sucker to pay, they renovate their other properties and raise the rents. We're barred by state law from enacting any controls on the rent. However, we did recently put into place rules about using rent hikes as a method of evicting people. Landlords would serve a large increase as a way of getting around the assistance fee they were required to pay if they evicted people under certain circumstances.
The problem here isn't entirely Amazon, but Amazon pays too much for the people they're hiring and it negatively impacts the surrounding community.
The best solution would be if so many other parts of the country would get their shit together and stop being such cesspools. People come here because we have a generally good economy and tend to be the last hit by recession. With the depth of recession usually not being as deep.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 10 2015, @06:07PM
This will change as the industrial base erodes.
Seattle tends to be fairly recession-resistant because of a very varied economy. Maritime, military, high tech manufacturing, primary industries, logistics, and software. Unfortunately, Seattle is doing all it possibly can to be hostile to most of the above. Software is welcome, and when the salmon runs come in, Seattle pretends that primary industries are welcome, but the pervasive ideology is that anything that doesn't run on a computer is nasty, dirty, should probably be banned and definitely isn't worth a lot of money.
Combine that with Amazon being such a toxic environment that they have to pay like crazy just to keep people working there, and you have a recipe for unbalanced wage inflation, resulting in unbalanced costs in the area. You can actually live a lot cheaper less than 100 miles outside Seattle than you can in it, and that's not because the roads don't go there. And companies know this too - that's why Seattle has unbalanced downtown development, while all sorts of other businesses radiate out.
If Seattle were smart, they'd work hard on finding ways to make it easy for other businesses, but it turns out that they never saw a tax they didn't like, never saw a regulation that couldn't be improved by more regulation, and couldn't put an infrastructure plan together if masked men were holding their families hostage. It's standard practice for Seattle businesses to support lots of telecommuting, not because they think it works better, but because there's a strong chance that their employees will be more available from home than on I-405 ... again. For software, this is fine. For large data facilities with an on-site staff of a dozen, that's no problem. For a factory, it's nightmarish.
It would actually be better for the entire region if the Seattle area, from Tacoma to Everett, from West Seattle through Issaquah, were a state by itself. Maybe even give them Bremerton, JBLM and Lynnwood. Then Seattle would distort the regional economy less.