Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

I find the recent uptick in progressivism in SV refreshing, and sorely needed. Then again, I've lived my entire life in liberal enclaves and do not personally identify with conservative / "family values" viewpoints.

San Francisco’s “progressivism” is undermined by how terribly the city operates. Dirty streets, aging infrastructure, crime, homelessness, laissez faire law enforcement, conservative housing policies, and extreme wealth inequality everywhere. If the progressives can’t get their own house in order, good luck selling their vision to the rest of the country.

The entire country has awful city planning, SF just happens to be a highly visible example with some unique problems.

Conservatives have plenty of issues as well - look at Kansas or Alabama. Don't see those being discussed at a national level, though the politics that drove them into the ground as now steering the federal government.

> SF just happens to be a highly visible example with some unique problems

Coming in from New York, San Francisco’s lack of attention to its homeless population is self inflicted. It’s also a problem that nobody in the city seems very much to care about.

Years ago, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU. At the time, SF had about as many homeless as NY in a city with about one tenth the population, IIRC.

I spent 6 years on the street. I blog about homelessness and have done at least a little paid writing on the subject. My blog and other online activities keep me in touch with homeless people. I have also been interviewed by reporters because of my homeless blog.

I firmly believe that climate is a major factor in the high levels of homelessness in SF. This plus insane housing prices become a recipe for intractable homelessness.

Some homeless travel to places like SF in part for the good weather, in part because big cities have more services for the homeless. Then once they are there, they can't afford to get into housing and leaving to go someplace cheaper is both expensive and time consuming.

I suspect SF just feels overwhelmed by events. The only real solution here would be to get housing prices under control. People don't know how on earth to solve that issue for more middle class individuals in SF. The idea of solving it for the seriously poor is just too much to even contemplate.

I am not excusing it. I appreciate you refusing to step over a homeless individual. But one of the problems is that most people talking about this issue talk about The Homeless as if this is primarily a people problem and not a housing issue. It becomes a psychological barrier to the ability to imagine making real progress. So, like the relatives of addicts get inured to it and quit trying, I think SF is getting numbed to the problem because it seems simply unsolvable.

It’s very easy to contemplate how to solve this problem: make it easy to build extremely dense housing in SF. The problem is that the powers that be don’t want to make it easier, and they all have ultimately self serving excuses as to why.

Every time a politician tells me more housing won’t make it cheaper, I posit the hypothetical “what if we built 100,000 more units? No? How about 1 million more? 5 million more?”

The answer I get is the same: “well, we don’t want to change the character of the city. Do we really want to be like New York?”

Press the question enough and the subject will eventually confess.

Unfortunately, it isn't actually that simple.

Since WW2, the vast majority of our financing mechanisms and housing policy has been aimed at creating family housing because that was what the parents of the Baby Boomers wanted and needed. Meanwhile, our population has diversified away from that. Plus there are myriad zoning policies, tax policies etc at all levels of government that are pieces of the puzzle for how SF has ended up this way.

There isn't anyone on the planet who actually knows exactly what needs to be dismantled to untangle this mess and trying to do so comes at high risk. It isn't at all unusual for the baby to be thrown out with the bath water when dealing with things as complicated as city planning.

I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. It is why I took a class on homelessness and public policy. I have a good grasp of what is generally wrong. I can't give you a point by pint list if instructions on how to fix it for SF.

San Francisco proper is physically much smaller than New York City, 231 sq. miles vs 468. Part of it is built on infill, reclaiming land from the waters around it. Such infill has serious structural limitations. You can't build on it like it is solid ground. San Francisco also needs to be built to withstand serious earthquakes. All of these geographic factors further constrain what you can realistically build there.

I generally agree that simply building more housing would help. But when I lived in Fairfield years ago, SROs in San Francisco were $1000/mo. San Francisco is one if the few US cities that still has more than a few SROs and it still is not cheap enough. I am not convinced the problem is as easy to solve as you suggest.

Easy fixes very often come at a hidden cost. That cost can be quite high, catastrophically so.

To say that matters are complex is not really helpful, though. We must demand our representatives break down these barriers and eliminate complexity.

The infill argument is totally bogus. The majority of the Financial District, which is where the majority of high rises are today, is on the very same infill you claim cannot support high rise structures. Singapore is largely infill and is mostly high rises. Tokyo is very dense and is in an earthquake prone area.

The absolute area argument is similarly specious. That argument would be valid only if, per unit area, we were already building at a density similar to New York. Moreover, it’s irrelevant how large the city is within its political boundaries if you consider this to be a regional problem, which it is.

So I’m not really sure whose side you’re on in this matter since you muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.

The problem is entirely political. You can either help or make excuses.