The Bay Area Is Separating into Red and Green Zones(danielmiessler.com) |
The Bay Area Is Separating into Red and Green Zones(danielmiessler.com) |
Then he drives south from San Mateo down south and until he reaches Palo Alto, he thinks everything is working class poor. Interesting, because between San Mateo and Palo Alto you have Belmont, Redwood City, San Carlos, Atherton, and Menlo Park. Anybody who believes only working class poor lives in these cities, not sure how to take them seriously.
Then this person believes whole of San Jose is a slum. Obviously never been to Evergreen or the myriad of other neighborhoods in San Jose. Then he thinks Fremont has "promise". I actually live in Fremont and not sure if there is a working class neighborhood in Fremont. Fremont has beautiful parks and lakes and great schools.
Ok, Hayward and Oakland are bit rundown. But even Hayward Hills and Oakland Hills are amazing places to live.
My guess - this person drove down El Camino real in the Peninsula and concluded everything by driving down one street.
He also makes an incredible claim - only 2-3% have salaries that let them live comfortably. Others are working on 2-3 jobs. I guess people are working on 2-3 jobs and paying millions for their houses.
What a terrible article.
Look at the surface area and the percentages of the population. That's what the article is about.
It's pretty clear that it's hard to live on even 100K as a family in the Bay Area, and if you look at the median incomes for most of the cities around the Bay Area they're nowhere near that.
I don't see how you counter that by naming off a few more rich microclimates.
--
Also, I wrote the article, and I'm born and raised here. I didn't drive down a street and come up with this. I've been here for four decades, watching it change, and this is what I'm seeing. Sorry you didn't like it. :)
"The more I pay attention in the Bay Area the more I’m noticing that it’s a place of absolute poverty."
"Much of the East Bay is extremely poor."
You really need to quantify absolute poverty and extremely poor. Without some numbers to back it up the article comes off as out of touch.
Also with you living in San Francisco when you write all these things about large areas of the Bay Area as being extremely poor the article feels a little like you are looking down your nose at the "rest of the people". Sorry but that's what it comes across as.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanmateocountyc...
Key facts: Median Household income is $93,000 and Poverty Rate is 8.4%
Based on this, I would say your observation should be reversed. Extreme wealth surrounding pockets of poverty (which is rapidly being gentrified, eg. EPA)
Sorry this is a bit off topic & earthquake risk is everywhere in the bay. But this morning I'm a salty house-hunter.
http://gis.abag.ca.gov/website/Hazards/?hlyr=liqSusceptibili...
> Heading north from Fremont is basically sadness. Hayward, Oakland, San Leandro, Richmond, Vallejo. They’re all poverty stricken and broken.
If you're driving along the freeway looking out the window, I could see how you might think this. Surprise - people that have any amount of money don't want to live within hearing distance of a freeway. Most of the spaces slightly further away are fine. I have friends in the Oakland Hills along 13; perfectly respectable area. Those friends have parents out near Richmond - lots of typical older middle class housing from the 50s.
> The only green zones I see out in that area are maybe in Dublin, Pleasanton, Moraga, etc., but I honestly don’t know much about those areas because I seldom get out there.
I do get out there, and most of Alameda county away from the edge of the bay is comfortably upper-middle class (Dublin/Pleasanton/Fremont/Livermore; Hayward/Castro Valley/San Leandro feel more middle class with upper-middle surroundings + urban gentrification starting to take hold). I have friends out in Stockton; they have a comfortably middle-class house, as do their parents (though on the whole I've seen less of Stockton than I have of the Bay).
I could go on (grandparents in Orinda, an uncle in Fremont, friends scattered through SF, SJ, etc.) but my main point is that most of the Bay is suburbs on suburbs, most of them are at least middle class, and our ridiculous zoning/prop 13/NIMBY problems trap people wherever they are and discourage new construction, which contributes to the crappy old look of a lot of places.
There was a period when we were the model nation for the world, and that period is long gone. As long as America is ruled by the mindset of "everyone for themselves" and free market fundamentalism, nothing is going to improve - and in fact things are only going to get worse as the job market tightens due to technological automation.
Fremont has top rated schools and a median income above 80k. Combine income with college grad percentage and it's in the 81st percentile on the "superzip" metric.
Hayward has some run down areas but the median income is $54k. One the income/college grad metric it's 49th percentile. Basically average for the country. (When average is seen as a dominion of "sadness", that says something -- whether about the commentator, the state of the country, or both is up to you)
The problem, as is beaten to death yet still not enough, is housing costs. In "average" Hayward, a barely adequate home for a family will run you north of $600k. What you'd expect in most places as a middle class home closer to $750k+
I've lived 90th and International in Oakland and have a pretty good idea of what "red" looks like. Speaking from personal experience, San Leandro and Hayward are nice places to live in, and the crime maps match my experience with the area [1]. I understand the article was talking about poverty and not crime, but poverty and crime are correlated [2], so a crime map is a valid proxy.
I agree that some areas are a bit run down, but overall I think its the opposite, pockets of "red" surrounded by "green".
[1] https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Oakland-California/crime/ [2] https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5137
There are a lot of places that don't look like much (for someone used to rich areas) but are decent, stable communities. That run-down looking restaurant might be a stable business that serves great food.
It's funny but more than one of my neighbors is in a similar boat, early 40's, works in IT, divorced, and just saving, mostly.
At the very least, earmark higher budgets for corporate philanthropy and community outreach.
This is exactly why it's a problem to solve at the government level; a higher authority, with teeth, is needed to solve these coordination problems and force market participants to all do the right thing.
But your comment is also sad because it shows how despite all of the iconoclast rhetoric, Silicon Valley companies are often far more risk-adverse, some could say, cowardly, in not willing to buck change. Not simply on matters involving social value or controversy, but more mundane topics that have been brought up before on HN such as willingness to embrace remote work, create better interview processes, etc.
And that of course, is also understandable. Tech companies are only willing to disrupt the economic markets and labor practices that would lead to maximum value extraction and shareholder value. No one sincerely disrupts to "make the world a better place."
Even if you want to build public housing, its gotten so expensive that it will be an unacceptably huge chunk of the budget. Governments like China don't have this problem - if they realize they need to build it happens.
I live north of San Mateo in one of these "broken" areas. It is most definitely not broken, and nor are the people. But if you go down by the CalTrain line you'll see some trash strewn about and some houses that look run down. But go 200 feet away and it is no longer that.
The one caveat, as skybrian mentions, is that you can't really judge a family's financial status from where they live. A large number of residents in the run-down areas are immigrant bargain-hunters, often with tech jobs; even the run-down areas in Silicon Valley are better than many other countries, and so they'd rather save money than flash their social status. Oftentimes it turns out that they own 3 houses and are collecting serious rent money from young American techies who think they're top of the hill in Silicon Valley.
I'm curious whether this is different from other cities. When I lived in Boston, it wasn't all that different; you'd have gorgeous restored brownstones in the South End that were a few blocks away from homicides and drug deals in Dorchester and Roxbury.
Basically what the author (Daniel Miessler) is seeing is this suburban sprawl being selectively re-invented. Originally the Peninsula was sprawl for San Francisco in the 1940-70s. Then the housing stock slowly aged and the rich people moved on to Pleasanton, etc.
At some point Oracle, Google and the dot-com bubble and associated traffic jams on 880/101 made it make sense to re-examine and subsequently re-invent/re-invest in infill locations like San Mateo and Mountain View respectively. Usually the leading indicator for re-development is the school district.
Mountain View when I was growing up was were you went for well priced non-Italian/French restaurants. In fact there are some original still there on Castro street still hanging on if you look closely. It was most definitely not high end baked French goods (i.e. Alexander's Patisserie).
I would say with the arrival of Box in Redwood City, it's starting to happen there too.
I'd also add that in places that are not physically constrained (like in Texas or even Southern California), you just have more sprawl. It looks different but it doesn't seem any better (or any worse).
A separate note: I did enjoy San Jose. It's not wealthy but it's a quaint type of lifestyle that I did not dislike. To say that it's comfortable living, however, would be a stretch.
. . .said every public office-holder in this area for the last fifty years.
"Heading north from Fremont is basically sadness. Hayward, Oakland, San Leandro, Richmond, Vallejo. They’re all poverty stricken and broken. The only green zones I see out in that area are maybe in Dublin, Pleasanton, Moraga, etc., but I honestly don’t know much about those areas because I seldom get out there."
Oh no, what happened to Piedmont, Berkeley, Kensington and all the other lovely East Bay towns? Perhaps the author is only seeing poverty because that's what he's looking for.
To me, the suggestion that living in Dublin is preferable to living in Oakland sounds bizarre. A lot of people in these "broken" cities would rather be there than anywhere else, so they must have something going for them.
Due to the complex history of evolving meanings and contexts, there is no clear or agreed-upon definition of the Third World. Some countries in the Communist Bloc, such as Cuba, were often regarded as "Third World". Because many Third World countries were extremely poor, and non-industrialized, it became a stereotype to refer to poor countries as "third world countries", yet the "Third World" term is also often taken to include newly industrialized countries like Brazil, India and China now more commonly referred to as part of BRIC. Historically, some European countries were non-aligned and a few of these were and are very prosperous, including Ireland, Austria, Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland.
The term Third World is still largely used interchangeably with the least developed countries, the Global South and developing countries.
I'm not really seeing the progress, but I hope he does make America great again.
But I see your point.
Casting it as an singular moral entity which you can then accuse of moral delinquency may not help in understanding or solving any particular problem. If it were in fact a hyper powerful agency that could change the landscape around itself merely through the commission of its moral will, why would it not have removed all of the anti-housing laws already? Tech workers don't want to pay millions for housing. It is not in the tech industry's best interest – therefore, the issue can't be due to tech having ill best interests.
That's applicable where (1) the free dumping of sewage into a common water supply or (2) advertisers get so good at making noisy attention-grabbing web ads that people have a strong motivation to start installing ad-blockers, making ad-based business models try and install more ad placements. It's similar to the Prisoner's Dilemna, where game theory has each player pitted against each other but the outcome is subject to a downward spiral of some common resource.
There is no downside for long-term property owners or the highly paid. If the well-paid engineers at tech companies were equally hurt by rising cost of living, then TotC might apply. They aren't, so it doesn't.
I think it's far more about identity than it is any faith they have in him being able to actually change anything via policy or legislation.
there is no clear or agreed-upon definition of the Third World
There is also the park/bird sanctuary/landfill near Winton, but that's not residential.
I'd argue that the problem is the existence of red zones, and we can fix that by helping green zones prosper and redistributing some of their productivity.
This is also a pretty pessimistic view of cities in general, if the best way to help a city is to abandon it. Could be true, but that's pretty dark. White Flight certainly reduced the affluent's competition for housing in cities, but it didn't exactly leave them better off. White Flight Round 2 doesn't sound like a good idea.
The problem is when the socialized cost of “helping green zones to prosper” exceeds the redistributed benefits.
Given that green zones map pretty well to outsized political influence, there is a lot of incebtive to use that kind of language to sell a policy that focuses much more heavily on helping them prosper than on redistributing benefits. Especially since that reibforces their already outsized political influence.
EDIT: I'd go farther and argue that the existence of red zones already is a direct and deliberate outcome of policies directed at helping green zones prosper, because the manner in which that is done is to make sure that poor people, crime, and facilities which adversely impact land values are redirected out of green zones to somewhere else. Those other places become the red zones.
What I meant is, if you are doing well you can both have nice place to live AND save. You aren't not doing well if you have to pick one or the other. Many techies seem to misunderstand their actual relative wealth in the area. Below $250k/y is lower middle, 500K/y+ is middle and 1M/y+ is upper. But everyone acts like their 300k/y makes them pocket rich while they live in a hovel.
2.) Living knowing that you produced more than you consumed.
3.) Passing it on to your kids.
Anyway, from personal experience - living below your means doesn't mean deprivation. It means deciding what you actually want and not buying into all of the messages society sends you about what you should want. Usually you can get what you actually want for a small fraction of a tech-worker's salary, and then once you do that, why give the rest to somebody else?
I agree, there's not nearly enough redistribution. Finding a way to raise taxes from wealthy longtime residents commensurate with the region's present needs would be a start. Relying primarily on newly sold homes (prop 13) and newly signed luxury apartment leases (BMR) to provide the necessary subsidy isn't working.
It would also be great if we could compel the suburban governments that sign on for the benefits of growth (office space) without the costs (housing) to direct some of the funds they raise this way to the municipalities that really need them.