In the video, a Google employee who hopped off the bus shouts down Erin McElroy, a protester who also heads the eviction mapping project. "How long have you lived in this city?" McElroy asked him. He shouted back "Why don't you go to a city that can afford it? This is a city for the right people who can afford it. You can't afford it? You can leave. I'm sorry, get a better job."Can't stress this enough. The political leaders you elected to represent you are currently cheering the arrival of these people to your city.
Update: Agent provocateur? I wouldn't be shocked. In that case, the little stage play is still a useful fiction. The caste system is clearly illustrated by Google's privatized buses. Those things are real.
Upperdate: The guy is very definitely a fake. Which is another reason to hate Occupy style protesters. Even when they're right they make it very difficult to be on their side. And yet, incidentally, this in itself is another reason not to want New Orleans to turn into San Francisco.
4 comments:
Technopandering is not actually a path to net growth - major cities shrink as metro regions grow. I believe tech employees are 4% of the U.S. workforce. So if there were somehow 100% magical growth in the sector they'd be 8% of the workforce -- still less of a percentage than the people who work in retail or tourism and about the same # of people who work in manufacturing. When mayors pander to these workers, cities shrink, and become more douchy (douchier?) in the process. Young wealthy single people push out families, immigrants, and anybody with more than 10,000 miles on their odometer. Single white libertarian males (hello tech world!) can barely order an office pizza together, so forget about running a diverse and tolerant city.
So the city proper gets remodeled as a playground for new urban gentrifiers (nuggies?). The 80% of the population that is the new rabble (families, people over 35 or under 18, immigrants, seniors, laborers, service workers) finds themselves more welcome in old ring suburbs than in the new city model. Traditional municipal services like providing decent schools, libraries, a diverse job base, and decent housing stock where school teachers, librarians, and laborers can actually live -- that's not in the plan. At the rate things are going, you are going to have a post-post-post punk generation of kids who grow up in nuggified homogenous urban America making some awesome music about moving out to Slidell or Cicero or Yonkers in about 2030.
WTH? SF Bay Area has the highest average income of any metro area in the country. All those big tech companies and workers help pay for social services, infrastructure, teachers, baristas, in home help, construction workers etc etc
Congrats to San Francisco County! It's neighbor Alameda County has workforce that is nearly 2x as large and has an unemployment rate that is 7.7% -- or higher than the national average. It seems the benefits of being SF don't radiate across the bay, nevermind across the country.
It's not a sustainable economic model to look at the success of shining individual municipalities and then pretend you can scale them up everywhere. My point is it is easier to just design policies to improve the lot of the middle class, instead of trying to sink the triple bank shot of 1) luring wealthy young tech companies 2) taxing them and 3) spending the taxes dollars to improve the community. As soon as you accomplish 1) the corporations you attract actively work to oppose 2) & 3). Why not just enact policies that directly benefit a majority of citizens at the outset instead of relying on some kind of trickle-down barista support plan?
Way to cherry pick. SF MSA is clearly the highest average income in the country:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest-income_metropolitan_statistical_areas_in_the_United_States
I never said it was scalable or could be replicated everywhere.. I was just pointing out the fallacies in what you said.
But please, bless us with your brilliant, foolproof economic development plan. Haven't heard a peep about that yet...
Post a Comment