Dual City

Tracking the tech boom and ongoing affordability crisis in San Francisco. Original content, clips from the news media, background information and data.

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SF Biz Finds New Hires Hard to Find

While the boom in San Francisco has helped boost business, shops and restaurants are finding that they have no one to make the sales. “We’re desperate,” said Jefferson McCarley, the owner of Mission Bicycle.

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The flipside of San Francisco’s displacement crisis: The influx of the very rich

The best way to visualize this dramatic decline of the working and middle class and the rise of the affluent is by charting the overall change in numbers of households by income bracket from 2005 to 2012. As the graph below clearly illustrates, households earning below $100,000 a year have left San Francisco by the thousands while the affluent have flooded in in even greater numbers.

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It's a residence in lieu of a hotel. They have all their stuff there, their clothes are where they left them. They know the doorman. They know where to get their car to head for the airport. It hits to the affluent lifestyle, and there's definitely a demand for it.

- Bryant Kowalczyk, SF Luxury Realty

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Silicon Valley's wealthy scramble for San Francisco's luxury condos

A shortage of high-end condos has newly minted tech millionaires scrambling for a pied-a-terre in San Francisco. They want a view and all the latest amenities — but there’s little available, according to luxury real estate agents.

Sotheby's International Realty's 2013 report on luxury condo sales in San Francisco said that sales of $1.5 million or more were up 19.2 percent last year from 2012. In addition to what the report described as "newly minted" Silicon Valley media execs quietly acquiring properties, Sotheby's said San Francisco is attractive to international buyers and empty-nesters who are downsizing.

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Almost Half Of Newly Built Condos In S.F. Are Second Homes For Peninsula Wealthy, Others

Looking at property records, a local news source finds that absentee owners have snapped up anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of new luxury condos in the last 14 years.

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They think we are a bunch of losers who can’t find better jobs. That’s why they treat us like robots — like we are replaceable.

- Joseph DeWolf, California App-based Drivers Association (CADA)

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This Is How Bad the Sharing Economy Is for Workers

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs keep telling us their way of doing business will “change the world.” And in many ways it already has, but it’s changed your world differently than it’s changed theirs.

Currently, the gig economy trades labor fluidly across online platforms, digital hiring halls where workers typically farm out their short-term gofer services. Yet these contract jobs are at least as hierarchical as an assembly line; “independence” means you get assigned where to drive but pay your own traffic tickets, you fund your own social insurance, and if you’re sexually harassed or hurt on the job, may be left completely on your own.

Takele Gobena of Seattle said he used to make $9.40 at the SeaTac airport complex, but sought more entrepreneurial pastures driving for Uber and Lyft while studying and raising a young family. Then came the car expenses and other requisite investments needed for ride-sharing, plus the 15-hour shifts his “flexible” job platform demanded — which left him earning the equivalent of less than $3 an hour.

“We are not earning a living wage, we don’t have job security even though we bought a car to work for them,” Gobena said. “When drivers speak about their driving experience [and] working conditions for Uber and Lyft, they automatically investigate” drivers to try to penalize them.

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Uber would never negotiate with any group that claims to represent drivers.

- William Barnes, Uber’s LA director

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Uber’s like an exploiting pimp. Uber takes 20 percent of my earnings, and they treat me like shit — they cut prices whenever they want. They can deactivate me whenever they feel like it, and if I complain, they tell me to fuck off.”

- Arman, Uber LA driver

From the very beginning, Uber attracted drivers with a bait-and-switch. Take the company’s launch in LA: In May 2013, Uber charged customers a fare of $2.75 per mile. Working full time, drivers could make a living wage: between $15 and $20 an hour. Drivers rushed to sign up, and thousands leased and bought cars just to work for Uber — especially immigrants and low-income people desperate for a well-paying job in a terrible economy.

But over the last year, the company has faced stiff competition from its arch-rival, Lyft. To raise demand and push Lyft out of the LA market, Uber has cut UberX fares nearly in half: to $1.10 per mile, plus 21¢ a minute. Uber drivers have no say in the pricing, yet they must carry their own insurance and foot the bill for gas and repairs.

Arman often works up to seventeen hours a day to bring home what he used to make in an eight-hour shift. When he emailed Uber to complain about his plummeting pay, he said the company blew him off. Uber’s attitude is that drivers are free to stop working if they are dissatisfied, but for drivers like Arman who’ve invested serious money in their cars, quitting isn’t an option.

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Uber and the lawlessness of 'sharing economy' corporates

Companies including Airbnb and Google compare themselves to civil rights heroes, while using their popularity among consumers to nullify federal law

Civil disobedience by citizens can be an important challenge to corrupt or immoral politicians, but when corporate leaders themselves start breaking the law in their own narrow interests, societal order breaks down. Polishing their left-libertarian veneer, the on-demand economy firms now flouting basic employment and anti-discrimination laws would like us to believe that they follow in the footsteps of Gandhi’s passive resistance, rather than segregationists’ massive resistance. But their wealthy, powerful, nearly-all-white-and-male cast of chief executives come far closer to embodying, rather than fighting, “the man”. As Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel has demonstrated, the goal of tech firms is not to compete – it is to so monopolise a sector that they basically become synonymous with it. Uber’s and Airbnb’s self-reinforcing conquests of markets attract more venture capital (VC) investment, which in turn enables more conquests, which in turn attracts more VC money. As that concentration of economic power continues apace, it’s more vital than ever to dispute Silicon Valley oligarchs’ self-aggrandising assertions that they follow in the footsteps of civil rights heroes.

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Always aim for a monopoly. It's one big transgressive idea, and you're not allowed to talk about it. That's a clue that it's an under-explored idea. There are questions on what point is it good or bad for societies. From society's perspective, it's complicated. But from the inside, I always want to have a monopoly.

- Peter Thiel, billionaire tech investor

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One-Third Of San Francisco’s Rent Is Attributable To VC Funding

Zumper, a venture-backed startup that focuses on creating a more efficient and transparent apartment rental marketplace, ran a study of housing costs in tech hubs across the United States. They’re arguing that one-third of San Francisco’s rents are attributable to venture capital funding. Last year, venture firms invested $49 billion across the United States. The vast majority of it, or 78 percent, went to just 10 American cities. “It is not a coincidence that these cities also top the list of most expensive rentals in the country,” the report said.

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At some point you get so used to not following the rules, that when you follow the rules you think you’re doing society a favor.

- David Campos, Mission District Supervisor, Airbnb’s ads make them fools in national news

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Just How Many Apartments In SF Are Being Used As Full-Time Airbnb Rentals?

Airbnb issues their own report estimating how many "commercial hosts" there are citywide who may be keeping vacant units off of the long-term rental market.

The city's Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office, at the behest of Supervisor David Campos, put out a report in which they attempted to estimate how many "commercial users" of Airbnb there are citywide — and by that they meant hosts who are keeping units off the long-term rental market because it's more financially advantageous to them to rent them out via Airbnb. The figure is hard to determine without Airbnb's help, but the report came up with some startling assertions such as a) between 29 and 40 percent of all available housing units in the Mission are currently being rented out via Airbnb instead, and b) there are something like 2,000 units citywide that are being rented by these "commercial hosts."

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The Silicon Valley is such a small little area [that] it's inevitable that prices will rise, and it's inevitable that those who have the most money will pay the premium to be as close as possible to work. The techies who are working these amazingly long hours and who tend to be really brilliant, great people - I'm for that. Just because someone grew up in this area for a while - I think that the person who is working at Google has more of a right to be here than somebody just because their parents were here. They complain they can't afford a home. I would say, just work harder, get more education - is my advice to them.

- Ken DeLeon, Peninsula real estate agent

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The strongest all cash offers will be from international investors. They're here for one week to buy a home. They're not gonna let $50k or $100k stand in the way of getting the home they've identified.

- Ken DeLeon, Peninsula real estate agent