OpenAI and Anthropic are ruining San Francisco(sfgate.com) |
OpenAI and Anthropic are ruining San Francisco(sfgate.com) |
I've been "entertaining" myself recently with a report on how various Bay Area cities are tracking against their housing elements. Remember, these housing elements were their state-mandated plans for additional housing units between 2022 and 2030, and extra emphasis was put on this cycle to make sure the plans were realistic, accountable, addressed the magnitude of the need, and included (relatively) affordable housing.
We are close to halfway through this time period. San Francisco has built, according to this report, less than 10% of their commitment. They have a little over four years now to come up with 76K units. See: https://cities.fairhousingelements.org/cities/san-francisco
Last year SF built 1.75K units. This year, by June, they had built 400 units.
This isn't an OpenAI problem.
Also worth keep in mind the US tried mass public housing projects in the 60s. And then they stopped because they all ended up being crime ridden shitholes.
Losing those companies and their employees would cost the cities far more than they might gain.
The other complaint is that the author doesn’t think they see any benefit from all the taxes the companies are paying. Shouldn’t they be taking this up with the city? Companies don’t decide how their taxes are spent.
If you own a lot in San Francisco you should be able to build an apartment building on it.
Abolish zoning, legalize housing.
.. that's generally how it works.
If the city wants more money from the companies, tax em.
San Francisco has been a boom town since before California was a state.
Do they pay back enough? No, they should of course be nationalized alongside YC and the rest of the giants. But this feels like performative anti-AI pot-banging than an honest concern (and I don’t think the author is prepared for the Molotov-laden Reign of Terror that is rapidly building towards…)
Literally what taxes are for. If there are expectations that a company contributes to civic duties then make it a law and apply it equally.
Government should work on what the citizens should need. Having individual companies play it like a marketing game where the loudest voices get appeased is a very bad expectation. Decide what the people need centrally and apply tax dollars collected on a fair basis.
> but if it's true that OpenAI has made "less than a million dollars" in SF civic contributions
If you completely ignore all of the taxes paid by the corporations and their employees and also discount their civic contributions as not counting because the author of the op-ed doesn’t like them and therefore has decided they don’t count.
Even I can see why this game is unwinnable. The person writing this piece doesn’t understand how taxes work or the role of the government. They don’t even have great ideas for what would appease them. They just want to be angry at the current companies in the news and will move on to being angry at a different set of companies when the news cycle shifts in a few years.
OpenAI and Anthropic are going to drop metric fucktons of taxes into California—and San Francisco—when they IPO.
Data center finances seem vaguely similar? They could be a good source of tax revenue but don’t provide many jobs.
But I agree, it would be far preferable to let property developers solve this problem. I support regional and state-level interventions and accountability. I don't want this particular federal administration within a thousand miles of the problem!
I suppose there are some moving to Texas. But the East Bay is a lot closer.
> Even I can see why this game is unwinnable.
The point is that this is not supposed to be a "game" to win or lose. As a San Francisco business, OpenAI is supposed to care about the health of San Francisco in and of itself, not just doing the minimum to discharge some abstract duty. If San Francisco residents are going around saying "I'm unhappy about OpenAI, they're making my housing cost way too much", there should be a team working on that as passionately as the team working on training the next model.
Doesn’t matter for taxes on wages, options, realized gains, distributions, et cetera.