The dawn of the 'start-up douchebag': San Francisco locals disturbed as Google, Facebook, Apple and eBay professionals move in
Saturday 28 September 2013
The dawn of the 'start-up douchebag': San Francisco
locals disturbed as Google, Facebook, Apple and eBay professionals move in
As Google staff flock to the city, a battle is raging at
the heart of San Francisco’s middle class
By TIM WALKER FRIDAY
27 SEPTEMBER 2013
Pointless workplace perks? No, this is 'serendipitous
interaction'
Vance Maverick points down at the pavement with a
chuckle. There on the concrete, close to the spot in San Francisco’s Mission
District where the 42-year-old Google engineer catches a private commuter bus
to Silicon Valley, is some faint political graffiti. It’s still possible to
make out a crudely painted Google search box; before it faded, Maverick
explains, the search terms read: “Trendy Google professionals help raise
housing costs.”
It’s safe to say that sentiment still holds. In the
Mission and across San Francisco, long-time locals are disturbed by the
profusion of young, rich tech professionals moving into their neighbourhoods,
driving up house prices and – inadvertently or not – driving out residents. The
phenomenon has inspired impassioned essays in San Francisco magazine, the
London Review of Books and The New Yorker.
The Google buses, which often stop in spaces supposedly
reserved for public transport, are a particular point of contention. This
growing fleet of unmarked luxury coaches carries some 14,000 people on their
35-mile trip from the city to Silicon Valley and back. Since the search giant
introduced the buses a decade ago, Facebook, Apple, eBay and almost 40 other
companies have followed suit. Each new route quickly becomes a corridor of hip
clothing stores and restaurants.
Maverick admits that the criticism has upset some of his
younger colleagues. “I’m old enough not to be personally offended, but I know
some people at Google were surprised and hurt,” he says. “I’ve always found the
graffiti amusing. It reflects the adversarial culture of public protest in San
Francisco – which is part of the reason we’re all moving here.”
Yet campaigners say this culture is dying – that the home
of the Beats and the hippie movement, and heart of the gay community, is fast
becoming a vanilla monoculture made up of wealthy tech yuppies. Nowhere is this
more true than in the Mission, traditionally a cheap, diverse area where
middle-class families, working-class Latinos, struggling creatives and small
businesses all rubbed along together. Now, it’s where Mark Zuckerberg lives.
Tim Redmond, a veteran Mission resident and former editor
of The San Francisco Bay Guardian, sits in a café, grumbling as the Google
buses come and go outside. “For more than a century San Francisco has been a
Mecca for young people who were different in some way, who wanted to start
again,” Redmond says. “Most young people arrived here poor, with enough to rent
a place then get a job. We moved here and built a life from what we had and
could find. The people who move in now are the same age – but they’re already
stinking rich.”
In 2011, according to the US Census, the median income
for a man aged 25-34 was $32,581 (£20,368). The average Silicon Valley salary
was a little under $100,000. The Bay Area’s tech industry boasts 50 or more
billionaires and many thousands of millionaires. Yet homelessness in the region
has risen by 20 per cent in two years. This month, Twitter announced its
imminent flotation on the stock market, which means there may soon be several
hundred more tech millionaires in San Francisco. The firm was recently awarded
a tax break to open its new headquarters in the heart of the city, mere blocks
from the Tenderloin district, where a quarter of residents live beneath the
poverty line.
The median monthly rent on a one-bedroom flat in the
Mission is now $2,850. Between 2011 and 2012, San Francisco rents went up
faster than in any other US city. As a result, the creative middle-classes are
decamping in droves across the Bay to Oakland, with its thriving arts and food
scenes. Rents there rocketed by 11 per cent in the same period.
Chris Tacy moved to the Mission in the early 1990s and
established a tech start-up there shortly afterwards. So incensed is he by this
latest wave of wealthy young tech workers that he recently moved out of the
neighbourhood after 20 years. In June he blogged about the infestation of
“start-up douchebags” bragging loudly about their bank accounts or their latest
Google Glass app, with casual disregard for the community they were colonising.
Tacy says: “I got upset because I thought, this is my industry, this is my
community, and this is not OK.”
In August Peter Shih, a young tech entrepreneur from New
York, published a blog post entitled “10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco
Edition”. In it he complained, among other things, about the number of “crazy
homeless people” in his adopted city. After a public outcry, Shih took down the
post and apologised, but he had already confirmed San Francisco’s worst fears
about its most conspicuous new demographic.
“In past eras of great industrial wealth… people tended
to work until their 40s or 50s before they got really rich: the Rockefellers,
the Morgans, the Vanderbilts,” Redmond says. “It’s remarkable to see so many
people amassing great fortunes before they’re 30. There’s something wrong with
having that much money so young – you haven’t learned how to behave.”
It is tempting to see this argument as so much media
chatter: one group of relatively wealthy people complaining about the
gentrifying influence of another group of slightly wealthier ones. Yet that
petty conflict masks a more troubling truth about gentrification – that those
on the lower rungs of the income ladder are being forced out of the city
altogether.
“Who cares whether the chattering class are arguing among
themselves? It has no effect on public policy,” says Peter Cohen, executive
director of the San Francisco Council of Community Housing Organisations. “This
rather silly and conceited debate among two sets of gentrifiers takes the
conversation away from the fact that gentrification is very real, and that real
people get hurt by these economic impacts. We need to break or slow down the
cycle of gentrification for the benefit of folks who don’t just sit in coffee
houses talking about their despair; they’re trying to survive.”
Though the city has seemingly strong tenant laws,
loopholes allow owners to eject residents and redevelop buildings for sale or
rent at vastly inflated prices. With the influx of new tech money, landlords
have an incentive to do just that. Sure enough, evictions in San Francisco
reached a 12-year high in 2013 – and those most affected are often the least
privileged: working-class Latinos, the elderly, even people suffering from Aids.
San Francisco has struggled to rehouse those who lose
their homes. Scott Wiener, who chairs the city’s Land Use and Development
Committee, says: “The number one challenge in the city is housing
affordability. It’s not surprising that when you have a growing population and
don’t build new housing, you see an explosion in house prices. In the last
decade we’ve added at least 50,000 new residents to San Francisco, and produced
very little new housing.”
Though he doesn’t much care for the start-up douchebags,
Redmond blames not individual tech workers for the current crisis, but property
speculators and the lawmakers who have let them take advantage of their
precious commodity: space. “If we had a major earthquake in San Francisco, the
water mains all broke, and some guy showed up with a water truck and started
selling water for $10 a gallon, people would be pissed,” he says. “That guy
would be ridden out of town; he’d be attacked with sticks and pitchforks. But
that’s what the real estate people are doing right now – and they’re getting
away with it.”
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