from Hacker News

How San Francisco Broke America’s Heart

by mitchelldeacon9 on 5/21/19, 6:55 PM with 45 comments

  • by alphagrep12345 on 5/21/19, 9:31 PM

    People complain that prices are so high that none of the restaurant staff, waiters, etc can live in the city. NY is also as costly as SF. You see foodcarts which earn lesser than SF restaurants, right in the Financial District. How does NY manage this? People live somewhere away and commute. It's going to get difficult for workers, but we're definitely not in any kind of crisis here. NY has been managing it since ages. Several other cities are. SF too can.

  • by ralusek on 5/21/19, 7:14 PM

    "This is unregulated capitalism, unbridled capitalism, capitalism run amok."

    Um, what? California, and specifically San Francisco, has some of the most regulated and restricted development on the planet. This is not unregulated capitalism.

  • by i_am_nomad on 5/21/19, 7:41 PM

    And yet the Bay Area has the worst-rated road maintenance of any American metropolitan area. I still can’t understand how that happens in a region with the most billionaires per capita on Earth.

  • by csense on 5/21/19, 10:00 PM

    Living in the Rust Belt, I play the world's tiniest violin for people who say it's too expensive in San Francisco, yet are themselves transplants who chose to live there.

    If you're disgusted with the rampant inflation of SF, come to Iowa, or Michigan, or Indiana, or Ohio. You can live like a king on wages that barely keep you in the middle class on the West Coast.

    Bring us the economic value of your startups and the well-educated workers they draw. Give smart, ambitious local kids a reason to stay instead of moving away forever to some coastal city. Spreading the opportunity and wealth of the tech economy outside a handful of the biggest cities will do a lot to calm the political anger that's led to Donald Trump.

  • by eevilspock on 5/21/19, 7:04 PM

    My heart is broken.

    I grew up an hour to the southeast of the Bay, and went to high school school in Atherton and college at Berkeley (both in the 80s, long before many HN readers were born). I used to be so proud that my home was the most progressive place in the country. Now I am embarrassed. My old home is now emblematic of much that is wrong with our culture.

    What the Bay says (We're so liberal! We're anti-Trump!) so deeply contradicts what it does.

  • by tqi on 5/22/19, 5:12 PM

    I don't understand why it's always new residents who get blamed for high rents / legacy businesses getting priced out and not property owners (many of whom are "lifelong" residents) who set the rents.

  • by JohnFen on 5/21/19, 9:43 PM

    I largely agree with the article. San Francisco used to be one of my favorite places. Now, I try to avoid it when at all possible.