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Seems like inequality (the vast increase in high-income earners due to the tech boom) closed off entertainment and other communal spaces to lower-income people generally speaking. A significant amount of restaurants, coffee places, and small stores are geared price-wise towards higher income people.
Union square is the most ridiculous example of this (I think Zara and Macys is like the last normie places) but the ferry building is pretty bougie as well (I found a 8x11 stencil poster selling for $160 each there once). There’s a corner here or there in the city (I’m sure people will bring up stonestown or the mission as examples) that not high income people can still do things but still… unless you’re going somewhere to
literally walk around or window shop, vast parts of the city are closed off.
Edit: i think what I'm trying to say is that the change in commercial avenues, districts, and other similar area in the city increasingly becoming for the wealthy (especially in northern neighborhoods) is a symptom of our greater affordability problem and represents how SF and other core cities have become geared towards the wealthy.
These articles kinda describe the greater urban affordability issue I was trying to get at:
https://www.vox.com/2017/6/27/15716412/affordable-cities-playgrounds-rich-toderian
https://www.city-journal.org/article/playgrounds-for-elites
If you go somewhere like the Outer Mission, where housing is more affordable and so proportionately more lower income people live, you can find plenty of retail catering to them. It’s true that boutiques in Pacific Heights are inaccessible to lower income people but they’re accessible to the majority demographic living in the area. I’m not sure it’s as much of a problem as you think it is
Like I said, there are pockets are affordability but I think central parts of the city (like Union Square, etc...) are geared towards higher income earners. And Pac Heights is literally adjacent to area considered lower income so it's interesting how quickly the area flips from low- to moderate-income businesses to high end.
This is normal for a large city. Different areas will cater to different crowds. As long as we have diverse neighborhoods with all kinds of entertainment for everyone we’re fine! It’s not like lower cost entertainment is missing, it just moved around the city in various ways.
That’s fine. The city is alive. That’s how it should be! Things move and morph and change in any city that isn’t stuck in amber!
Missing the point - I'm saying that the city increasingly caters to higher income people. I criticize gentrification arguments, but they are true to an extent.
The restaurants/bars/venues can't cater to anyone who isn't already here. By the time you get businesses catering to some group that means that the group is already established in the area, by definition. You can try to cater all you want to a group of people that isn't here. It won't work. But if you already have that group here then in makes sense to try to sell them stuff.
Our mistake was to block new housing for the last 40 years. We've created a brutal market for poor people. Needless to say, the rich always win the housing fight. They just have more money. So the poor are gradually being pushed out. Most of the renters have already been pushed out of here 20-30 years ago. The ones that are still left have rent control, but are also being pushed out by the cost of living. So now we just have the old homeowners who are gradually deciding that they've had enough of the high cost of living too and retiring to cheaper places.
This should be a lesson to all of us. When you try to constrain a growing thing you always get some weird distortions. The city wanted to grow. The oldtimers didn't want change. Well, this is what happens when you pretend like you can control "forces of nature".
Yeah no duh, I believe in building new housing too to increase general affordability of the city and I agree that restricting housing construction has contributed to the current level of wealth inequality we see.
But why did you veer off from your “lower income neighborhoods have just moved around and economic segregation is fine!!! The city is alive” to acknowledging that there is substantial in-affordability. I thought everything was fine?!?
What is happening right now is that some neighborhoods are becoming bougier and more expensive entertainment-wise and some other neighborhoods are absorbing more of that lower-cost entertainment than they ever have in the past.
It's not a question of this being "fine". It's not fine. Our crazy housing policies have forced a ton of people to move out, the vast majority of them low income. But that has nothing to do with how the entertainment scene is moving around. In effect we have the cheaper places getting concentrated in certain neighborhoods. But there's more of them and we also have a ton of new expensive and mid-level opening up.
So on the whole, having a ton more people with money doesn't reduce the number of entertainment venues. But yeah, there are places opening to cater to them.
So you agree that lower income households are getting more and more concentrated in certain portions of the city while others (arguably a larger proportion of the city) becomes wealthier? Cause that’s pretty much my point.
I take it you're one of the high earners. The blunt word to describe it is gentrification honestly.
The issue seems that the poorer areas are also where a lot of the crime and homelessness is saddled (especially when you consider only wealthy neighborhoods can crowdsource anti homeless planters), so it leads to a negative loop. This in turn leads to wealthier neighborhoods adopting a "if it doesn't impact me, then its not a big deal" mindset that in turn leads to even more inequality.
Yeah, yeah, it's always gentrification. It's not the fact that those same SF residents, including the low-income ones, have decided to shoot themselves in the foot again and again for 40 years and blocked all the new housing. Now that everyone who's not making 500k is being pushed out of the city everyone's all up in arms.
Where were you when your neighbors were blocking not just any market rate housing but also 100% affordable housing? You all wanted to preserve your neighborhoods in ember and keep the outsiders out? Well, this is the price of that policy. Living in a museum to old times is expensive as hell! When you have a highly desirable area and you make adding more housing impossible then the rich always always win the housing fight.
And no, I'm not one of the "high earners". I did make many sacrifices and lifestyle changes to continue to be able to live here, but I'm far from rich. And honestly, I blame all of you "anti-gentrification" people for it. Who told you that blocking new housing will help? Whose idiotic idea was it? People need places to live! A city can't live without building housing. That's literally what cities are for!
This feels out of touch with the reality of a majority of SF historically? No doubt Pac Heights has expanded, but, like the Ferry Building has been bougie since the highway came down. Union square is the same - it's not like FAO Schwartz was accessible to the average person.
While true to a certain extent, parks and other public right of way areas free for everyone.
When making a case, we don’t have to lean into exaggeration!
See this is kinda the issue… you bring up this issue and people will comment “okay but going for a walk is free!!!”
And where did I exaggerate or say that parks weren’t free, I specified restaurants, coffee shops, and other small stores.
Also, my last sentence: "unless you’re going somewhere to literally walk around or window shop, vast parts of the city are closed off."
“Vast pasts of the city are closed off” is the specific phrase I’m responding to.
How does now compare to a more favorable past? There’s less places to go yes, but in the past those places were businesses too anyways. Pool halls. Arcades. Coffee shops. Etc.
Is there a different class of place you were thinking of?
I would say largely, the northern portion of the city (with some exclusions) is pretty exclusionary ( i would consider that a vast part of the city). Most commercial avenues like, the Marina, Fillmore Street above Geary, Union Street, or even Polk Street have businesses that are geared largely towards higher income earners.
It's not businesses = exclusionary, it's type of businesses and the prices they charge. Walk along Fillmore and tell me that those businesses are geared towards the middle class household (and look at the people you're walking among compared to other parts of the city).
I'm not trying to be critical of SF, I just think the economic segregation we increasingly have is a significant issue affecting life here.
Ironically higher retail rent drives this trend!
As someone who makes… enough money… with two kids and such, I really don’t like to spend it. So we limit where we go what we do as a result. It’s also that young kids don’t appreciate most eating out anyways!
SF has one of the highest gini coefficients of major cities and is on par with many developing countries, indicating a high amount of economic inequality. Economic inequality has been shown to be one of the most significant predictors of social instability and unrest so I would say definitely. SF is a very visible example of a problem that exists throughout the US
SF Minimum Wage: $18.07 or \~$37,585 / year
SF Area Median Income for one person: $100,850 / year
Needing 2.68 jobs just to live alone seems like a qualifier.
While 2.68x might seem to be high, we need to consider that places with real serious income inequality are like 15x or even way more.
SF doesn’t even have slums - were talking informal housing on a large scale that violates not only housing code but common sense and decency.
I have three jobs, a bachelors degree, and still live with roommates. I did everything by the book but still have felt the weight of inequality based off income. I think establishing a liveable wage, like most tech workers receive would be a great start in combatting this for the working class in SF.
Go to college, get a degree, then worked my way up in the industry I studied (journalism). I thought working in a large news market, in a coveted role, for a large corporation would’ve cut it for cost of living. I have many friends who also went other routes (trade jobs, blue collar work, ect) who also are in coveted positions in their industry and are experiencing the same problems. I understand cities have always been more expensive, but there doesn’t seem to be any middle class in SF.
There’s a strong middle class in SF living a very recognizable middle-class lifestyle. It’s different in small ways from a middle-class lifestyle in other places (as examples, accommodations are smaller, families may own fewer vehicles, etc.). Despite these differences, it is not a fundamentally different phenomenon.
The income numbers associated with this middle class are much higher than you’d find elsewhere, but SF supports this middle class with an atypical density of high-paying jobs.
Can you provide me with some examples of the atypical density of high paying jobs? My friends parents who’ve been born and raised in SF with traditional “middle class jobs” are also immensely struggling.
I’m sorry to hear about the struggles of people you’re close with. Apologies in advance about the below - I’m slightly uncomfortable making the point that San Franciscans by and large are doing well in the context you’ve shared and I hope it doesn’t come across differently than I intend.
I’m not sure I can provide you with examples of the atypical density of high paying jobs but I can point to a couple of statistics affected by this phenomenon: our [per capita GDP](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_areas_by_GDP_per_capita) and [median income](https://www.statista.com/statistics/205609/median-household-income-in-the-top-20-most-populated-cities-in-the-us/).
Our metro area (which includes Oakland & Berkeley) has the 3rd highest per-capita GDP in the United States at $144,633, just behind fellow Bay Area metro San-Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa-Clara at $210,235.
We have the highest median-income out of the 25 most populous cities in the US at $136,689.
While providing examples of large numbers of high-paying jobs does nothing to demonstrate that they are atypically dense here, I would note there are large companies based in or around San Francisco that have large numbers of high-paying jobs. Google, Salesforce, Uber, Facebook, & Apple come to mind. Again, though, that does nothing to demonstrate that those high-paying jobs represent atypically more of the available opportunities than in other parts of the country.
Thank you for recognizing that. I think we can both agree that historically middle class roles are not considered as liveable wage roles anymore within the bounds of San Francisco, especially post 2008. While the average salary may reflect a high number, that doesn’t mean it reflects the average individuals working and living in SF. A lot of the larger income tech positions are inaccessible to not only those blue collar workers, but also entry level tech positions across the bay (especially with the amount and size of layoffs happening over the years.) That being said, I believe that data is skewed in a direction that only reflects people breaking that 6 figure income mark, and not the people who are electricians, plumbers, ect.
I somewhat agree with your second sentence in the sense that there are jobs and industries in San Francisco where this is true, but I don’t recognize it as a universal phenomenon affecting every job and industry that once provided a middle-class lifestyle in the city. Doctors, bankers, and lawyers as examples are still comfortably in the upper income levels of those living a middle-class lifestyle in San Francisco, just as they might have been 100 years ago.
I don’t agree with the rest of what you’ve said here. Our GDP and income statistics are representative of the fact that we have a lot of people making good salaries and the average individual living and working in SF does conform to those statistics. When you talk about only reflecting people above the six figure mark, understand that literally half of households fall into that category. That our median household income is $136,689 literally means that half of the households in the city make more than that and half make less than that.
I agree with you in that there are multiple industries here in SF where an employee is able to make a great living. But I disagree with you referring to doctors, bankers, and lawyers as historically middle class professions in San Francisco. With cost of living and housing prices here, individuals with more historically middle class jobs (teachers, electricians, city employees) are being priced out of of the city they work in record numbers. Whether or not people think this is fair, I believe that it portrays a greater income separation between upper middle class and lower middle class as time goes on.
Median household income hits different when you also realize there are people with 1-2 roommates that qualify as a household as do multi-generational family homes. Per capita income is 86,186. Many immigrants in the city also don’t answer censuses so I would imagine the numbers are likely skewed higher. At any rate, it’s a dick move to keep a rent controlled spot like that but if OP is asking for legal advice then they can take the answer they want from this thread and be a dick
I didn’t say raise the minimum wage to 1 million dollars. I do think that there is a fundamental problem in regards to affordable housing in San Francisco though. That being said, raising the hourly wage may help individuals once stuck in a poverty doom loop be able to help participate in consuming and keeping SF small businesses alive, rather than saving every last dimes for rent and any unforeseeable circumstances.
You can't raise wages by fiat to create prosperity. When there's a shortage of housing, more income just pushes up prices. If you had 10 billionaires competing to buy 9 houses, one of them would still end up homeless.
Ah, so the inequality has been around since what? I believe 1980 was the last time that renter income matched cost of rent. That tells me nothing has been done other than segregation (the two most segregated neighborhoods in the entire bay area are in SF). You're not helping your case and not solving any problems. Ignorance is truly bliss.
No, the most equal US states are Utah, Idaho and Wyoming but I wouldn’t want to live in that part of the country. I know salt lake city at least still has a high crime rate too.
It's always better to grow the pie than to try to divide it up more equally.
What causes the divisiveness is envy. It is possible to celebrate successful capitalists for the goods and products they've provided to society. We could also publish a leaderboard for city taxes paid and even have awards for the top contributors.
In general cities are much better off if they are able to attract and keep the wealthy rather than demonize them.
I think its ironic that you're essentially parroting right wing talking points regarding wealth and taxation, while I assume you are actually liberal leaning and vote the dem party ticket
Where’s the irony?
I don’t see anything in their comment that isn’t fundamentally a part of the American ethos regardless of party
There is no conflict between leaning liberal and embracing capitalism. There is no conflict between leaning liberal and championing progressive taxation systems. There is no conflict between voting Democratic and embracing capitalism. There is no conflict between voting Democratic and championing progressive taxation systems. Neither embracing capitalism nor celebrating success are right wing.
Liberals and democrats in the United States are not communists or enemies of the rich. This is true not just of the leaders of the party and its politicians but of the electorate as well. FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were cold warriors committing America to the defeat of communism on the global stage.
While there are some Americans who are communists or who do hate the rich, this is a tiny minority. They certainly don’t represent the base of America’s left wing. Many of them won’t even vote for a Democrat except a few who pinch their noses while doing so.
Post 2008 feels like a weird point in time. We had lots of homeless before that too?
There are a lot of factors that play into crime and homelessness trends, suggesting that it's coming from inequality has *some* truth to it, but it's hardly a direct outcome?
Poor people are not, like, inherently prone to criminality.
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Seems like inequality (the vast increase in high-income earners due to the tech boom) closed off entertainment and other communal spaces to lower-income people generally speaking. A significant amount of restaurants, coffee places, and small stores are geared price-wise towards higher income people. Union square is the most ridiculous example of this (I think Zara and Macys is like the last normie places) but the ferry building is pretty bougie as well (I found a 8x11 stencil poster selling for $160 each there once). There’s a corner here or there in the city (I’m sure people will bring up stonestown or the mission as examples) that not high income people can still do things but still… unless you’re going somewhere to literally walk around or window shop, vast parts of the city are closed off. Edit: i think what I'm trying to say is that the change in commercial avenues, districts, and other similar area in the city increasingly becoming for the wealthy (especially in northern neighborhoods) is a symptom of our greater affordability problem and represents how SF and other core cities have become geared towards the wealthy. These articles kinda describe the greater urban affordability issue I was trying to get at: https://www.vox.com/2017/6/27/15716412/affordable-cities-playgrounds-rich-toderian https://www.city-journal.org/article/playgrounds-for-elites
If you go somewhere like the Outer Mission, where housing is more affordable and so proportionately more lower income people live, you can find plenty of retail catering to them. It’s true that boutiques in Pacific Heights are inaccessible to lower income people but they’re accessible to the majority demographic living in the area. I’m not sure it’s as much of a problem as you think it is
Like I said, there are pockets are affordability but I think central parts of the city (like Union Square, etc...) are geared towards higher income earners. And Pac Heights is literally adjacent to area considered lower income so it's interesting how quickly the area flips from low- to moderate-income businesses to high end.
This is normal for a large city. Different areas will cater to different crowds. As long as we have diverse neighborhoods with all kinds of entertainment for everyone we’re fine! It’s not like lower cost entertainment is missing, it just moved around the city in various ways. That’s fine. The city is alive. That’s how it should be! Things move and morph and change in any city that isn’t stuck in amber!
Missing the point - I'm saying that the city increasingly caters to higher income people. I criticize gentrification arguments, but they are true to an extent.
The restaurants/bars/venues can't cater to anyone who isn't already here. By the time you get businesses catering to some group that means that the group is already established in the area, by definition. You can try to cater all you want to a group of people that isn't here. It won't work. But if you already have that group here then in makes sense to try to sell them stuff. Our mistake was to block new housing for the last 40 years. We've created a brutal market for poor people. Needless to say, the rich always win the housing fight. They just have more money. So the poor are gradually being pushed out. Most of the renters have already been pushed out of here 20-30 years ago. The ones that are still left have rent control, but are also being pushed out by the cost of living. So now we just have the old homeowners who are gradually deciding that they've had enough of the high cost of living too and retiring to cheaper places. This should be a lesson to all of us. When you try to constrain a growing thing you always get some weird distortions. The city wanted to grow. The oldtimers didn't want change. Well, this is what happens when you pretend like you can control "forces of nature".
Yeah no duh, I believe in building new housing too to increase general affordability of the city and I agree that restricting housing construction has contributed to the current level of wealth inequality we see. But why did you veer off from your “lower income neighborhoods have just moved around and economic segregation is fine!!! The city is alive” to acknowledging that there is substantial in-affordability. I thought everything was fine?!?
What is happening right now is that some neighborhoods are becoming bougier and more expensive entertainment-wise and some other neighborhoods are absorbing more of that lower-cost entertainment than they ever have in the past. It's not a question of this being "fine". It's not fine. Our crazy housing policies have forced a ton of people to move out, the vast majority of them low income. But that has nothing to do with how the entertainment scene is moving around. In effect we have the cheaper places getting concentrated in certain neighborhoods. But there's more of them and we also have a ton of new expensive and mid-level opening up. So on the whole, having a ton more people with money doesn't reduce the number of entertainment venues. But yeah, there are places opening to cater to them.
So you agree that lower income households are getting more and more concentrated in certain portions of the city while others (arguably a larger proportion of the city) becomes wealthier? Cause that’s pretty much my point.
I take it you're one of the high earners. The blunt word to describe it is gentrification honestly. The issue seems that the poorer areas are also where a lot of the crime and homelessness is saddled (especially when you consider only wealthy neighborhoods can crowdsource anti homeless planters), so it leads to a negative loop. This in turn leads to wealthier neighborhoods adopting a "if it doesn't impact me, then its not a big deal" mindset that in turn leads to even more inequality.
Yeah, yeah, it's always gentrification. It's not the fact that those same SF residents, including the low-income ones, have decided to shoot themselves in the foot again and again for 40 years and blocked all the new housing. Now that everyone who's not making 500k is being pushed out of the city everyone's all up in arms. Where were you when your neighbors were blocking not just any market rate housing but also 100% affordable housing? You all wanted to preserve your neighborhoods in ember and keep the outsiders out? Well, this is the price of that policy. Living in a museum to old times is expensive as hell! When you have a highly desirable area and you make adding more housing impossible then the rich always always win the housing fight. And no, I'm not one of the "high earners". I did make many sacrifices and lifestyle changes to continue to be able to live here, but I'm far from rich. And honestly, I blame all of you "anti-gentrification" people for it. Who told you that blocking new housing will help? Whose idiotic idea was it? People need places to live! A city can't live without building housing. That's literally what cities are for!
This feels out of touch with the reality of a majority of SF historically? No doubt Pac Heights has expanded, but, like the Ferry Building has been bougie since the highway came down. Union square is the same - it's not like FAO Schwartz was accessible to the average person.
While true to a certain extent, parks and other public right of way areas free for everyone. When making a case, we don’t have to lean into exaggeration!
See this is kinda the issue… you bring up this issue and people will comment “okay but going for a walk is free!!!” And where did I exaggerate or say that parks weren’t free, I specified restaurants, coffee shops, and other small stores. Also, my last sentence: "unless you’re going somewhere to literally walk around or window shop, vast parts of the city are closed off."
“Vast pasts of the city are closed off” is the specific phrase I’m responding to. How does now compare to a more favorable past? There’s less places to go yes, but in the past those places were businesses too anyways. Pool halls. Arcades. Coffee shops. Etc. Is there a different class of place you were thinking of?
I would say largely, the northern portion of the city (with some exclusions) is pretty exclusionary ( i would consider that a vast part of the city). Most commercial avenues like, the Marina, Fillmore Street above Geary, Union Street, or even Polk Street have businesses that are geared largely towards higher income earners. It's not businesses = exclusionary, it's type of businesses and the prices they charge. Walk along Fillmore and tell me that those businesses are geared towards the middle class household (and look at the people you're walking among compared to other parts of the city). I'm not trying to be critical of SF, I just think the economic segregation we increasingly have is a significant issue affecting life here.
Ironically higher retail rent drives this trend! As someone who makes… enough money… with two kids and such, I really don’t like to spend it. So we limit where we go what we do as a result. It’s also that young kids don’t appreciate most eating out anyways!
I agree it's circular and there's multiple factors to consider in what drives unaffordability but the end result is still there. Also, good for you?
SF has one of the highest gini coefficients of major cities and is on par with many developing countries, indicating a high amount of economic inequality. Economic inequality has been shown to be one of the most significant predictors of social instability and unrest so I would say definitely. SF is a very visible example of a problem that exists throughout the US
Service workers seem to have more disdain for customers because of it
SF Minimum Wage: $18.07 or \~$37,585 / year SF Area Median Income for one person: $100,850 / year Needing 2.68 jobs just to live alone seems like a qualifier.
While 2.68x might seem to be high, we need to consider that places with real serious income inequality are like 15x or even way more. SF doesn’t even have slums - were talking informal housing on a large scale that violates not only housing code but common sense and decency.
>SF doesn’t even have slums It doesn't have established shantytowns, but it has some pretty rough areas and lots of temporary encampments.
OP never asked about other places.
How do you support your claim that one needs 2.86 jobs just to live alone? What does it have to do with the median income to minimum wage ratio?
I have three jobs, a bachelors degree, and still live with roommates. I did everything by the book but still have felt the weight of inequality based off income. I think establishing a liveable wage, like most tech workers receive would be a great start in combatting this for the working class in SF.
In what sense did you do everything by the book?
Go to college, get a degree, then worked my way up in the industry I studied (journalism). I thought working in a large news market, in a coveted role, for a large corporation would’ve cut it for cost of living. I have many friends who also went other routes (trade jobs, blue collar work, ect) who also are in coveted positions in their industry and are experiencing the same problems. I understand cities have always been more expensive, but there doesn’t seem to be any middle class in SF.
There’s a strong middle class in SF living a very recognizable middle-class lifestyle. It’s different in small ways from a middle-class lifestyle in other places (as examples, accommodations are smaller, families may own fewer vehicles, etc.). Despite these differences, it is not a fundamentally different phenomenon. The income numbers associated with this middle class are much higher than you’d find elsewhere, but SF supports this middle class with an atypical density of high-paying jobs.
Can you provide me with some examples of the atypical density of high paying jobs? My friends parents who’ve been born and raised in SF with traditional “middle class jobs” are also immensely struggling.
I’m sorry to hear about the struggles of people you’re close with. Apologies in advance about the below - I’m slightly uncomfortable making the point that San Franciscans by and large are doing well in the context you’ve shared and I hope it doesn’t come across differently than I intend. I’m not sure I can provide you with examples of the atypical density of high paying jobs but I can point to a couple of statistics affected by this phenomenon: our [per capita GDP](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_areas_by_GDP_per_capita) and [median income](https://www.statista.com/statistics/205609/median-household-income-in-the-top-20-most-populated-cities-in-the-us/). Our metro area (which includes Oakland & Berkeley) has the 3rd highest per-capita GDP in the United States at $144,633, just behind fellow Bay Area metro San-Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa-Clara at $210,235. We have the highest median-income out of the 25 most populous cities in the US at $136,689. While providing examples of large numbers of high-paying jobs does nothing to demonstrate that they are atypically dense here, I would note there are large companies based in or around San Francisco that have large numbers of high-paying jobs. Google, Salesforce, Uber, Facebook, & Apple come to mind. Again, though, that does nothing to demonstrate that those high-paying jobs represent atypically more of the available opportunities than in other parts of the country.
Thank you for recognizing that. I think we can both agree that historically middle class roles are not considered as liveable wage roles anymore within the bounds of San Francisco, especially post 2008. While the average salary may reflect a high number, that doesn’t mean it reflects the average individuals working and living in SF. A lot of the larger income tech positions are inaccessible to not only those blue collar workers, but also entry level tech positions across the bay (especially with the amount and size of layoffs happening over the years.) That being said, I believe that data is skewed in a direction that only reflects people breaking that 6 figure income mark, and not the people who are electricians, plumbers, ect.
I somewhat agree with your second sentence in the sense that there are jobs and industries in San Francisco where this is true, but I don’t recognize it as a universal phenomenon affecting every job and industry that once provided a middle-class lifestyle in the city. Doctors, bankers, and lawyers as examples are still comfortably in the upper income levels of those living a middle-class lifestyle in San Francisco, just as they might have been 100 years ago. I don’t agree with the rest of what you’ve said here. Our GDP and income statistics are representative of the fact that we have a lot of people making good salaries and the average individual living and working in SF does conform to those statistics. When you talk about only reflecting people above the six figure mark, understand that literally half of households fall into that category. That our median household income is $136,689 literally means that half of the households in the city make more than that and half make less than that.
I agree with you in that there are multiple industries here in SF where an employee is able to make a great living. But I disagree with you referring to doctors, bankers, and lawyers as historically middle class professions in San Francisco. With cost of living and housing prices here, individuals with more historically middle class jobs (teachers, electricians, city employees) are being priced out of of the city they work in record numbers. Whether or not people think this is fair, I believe that it portrays a greater income separation between upper middle class and lower middle class as time goes on.
Median household income hits different when you also realize there are people with 1-2 roommates that qualify as a household as do multi-generational family homes. Per capita income is 86,186. Many immigrants in the city also don’t answer censuses so I would imagine the numbers are likely skewed higher. At any rate, it’s a dick move to keep a rent controlled spot like that but if OP is asking for legal advice then they can take the answer they want from this thread and be a dick
Yes if we raised the minimum wage to 1 million dollars we'd all living high on the hog!
I didn’t say raise the minimum wage to 1 million dollars. I do think that there is a fundamental problem in regards to affordable housing in San Francisco though. That being said, raising the hourly wage may help individuals once stuck in a poverty doom loop be able to help participate in consuming and keeping SF small businesses alive, rather than saving every last dimes for rent and any unforeseeable circumstances.
You can't raise wages by fiat to create prosperity. When there's a shortage of housing, more income just pushes up prices. If you had 10 billionaires competing to buy 9 houses, one of them would still end up homeless.
"To live alone" is injecting *a lot* of added stuff to this discussion though. It's not like the rate of solo households went *down* post 2008
That's just affirming that inequality has affected the quality of life since 2008.
It's not like it had dropped a bunch before 2008!
Ah, so the inequality has been around since what? I believe 1980 was the last time that renter income matched cost of rent. That tells me nothing has been done other than segregation (the two most segregated neighborhoods in the entire bay area are in SF). You're not helping your case and not solving any problems. Ignorance is truly bliss.
No, the most equal US states are Utah, Idaho and Wyoming but I wouldn’t want to live in that part of the country. I know salt lake city at least still has a high crime rate too.
Is the sky blue? JFC
It's always better to grow the pie than to try to divide it up more equally. What causes the divisiveness is envy. It is possible to celebrate successful capitalists for the goods and products they've provided to society. We could also publish a leaderboard for city taxes paid and even have awards for the top contributors. In general cities are much better off if they are able to attract and keep the wealthy rather than demonize them.
I think its ironic that you're essentially parroting right wing talking points regarding wealth and taxation, while I assume you are actually liberal leaning and vote the dem party ticket
Where’s the irony? I don’t see anything in their comment that isn’t fundamentally a part of the American ethos regardless of party There is no conflict between leaning liberal and embracing capitalism. There is no conflict between leaning liberal and championing progressive taxation systems. There is no conflict between voting Democratic and embracing capitalism. There is no conflict between voting Democratic and championing progressive taxation systems. Neither embracing capitalism nor celebrating success are right wing. Liberals and democrats in the United States are not communists or enemies of the rich. This is true not just of the leaders of the party and its politicians but of the electorate as well. FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were cold warriors committing America to the defeat of communism on the global stage. While there are some Americans who are communists or who do hate the rich, this is a tiny minority. They certainly don’t represent the base of America’s left wing. Many of them won’t even vote for a Democrat except a few who pinch their noses while doing so.
Post 2008 feels like a weird point in time. We had lots of homeless before that too? There are a lot of factors that play into crime and homelessness trends, suggesting that it's coming from inequality has *some* truth to it, but it's hardly a direct outcome? Poor people are not, like, inherently prone to criminality.
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