homesmillbrae.com » Constraints http://homesmillbrae.com Thu, 20 Oct 2022 03:48:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 SF Techie Explains Why the World Should Revolve Around Bay Area Techies http://homesmillbrae.com/2404/sf-techie-explains-why-the-world-should-revolve-around-bay-area-techies/ http://homesmillbrae.com/2404/sf-techie-explains-why-the-world-should-revolve-around-bay-area-techies/#comments Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:03:53 +0000 http://homesmillbrae.com/2404/sf-techie-explains-why-the-world-should-revolve-around-bay-area-techies/ Continue reading →]]> 7323f techies thumb 300x300 SF Techie Explains Why the World Should Revolve Around Bay Area TechiesFlickr/:rayWhat would we do without you?Last week technology reporter Farhad Manjoo wrote an impassioned defense of the city’s tech sector for SF Magazine. By chance our own tech-savvy correspondent, SF Techie, had written a very similar article, often using the very same words. We’re proud to present it now, in support of his well thought out case.

By SF Techie

I recently met a 23 year-old who’s launching a startup while living out of his car. As a young tech entrepreneur, on or off his meds, he represents San Francisco’s future, and he’s not alone. Hundreds of thousands of equally qualified people are all moving to the Bay Area.

They’re coming here to innovate. And is there anything more innovative, in this day and age, than being a twenty-something with an idea for a startup?

They have to come here. One of the great promises of the Internet, after all, is liberation from the petty constraints of geography. But in practice, that’s absurd — if you want to be anyone in tech, you have to be in the Bay Area. Which means that, this one time, the Internet didn’t actually live up to its promise to change something. But that’s the only time that happened, or ever will happen. That and ending racism. And raising the living standard of the middle class. It turns out the internet has failed to do any of that.

But that’s it. We should be confident that every other promise made about the Internet by tech-funded economists, tech-funded journalists, and tech-entrepreneurs, will come true. Why? Because: Technology. Disruption. New Economy. 2.0.

You can’t argue with that.

No other region is better positioned to take advantage of the new tech forces shaping the world than the Bay Area, except perhaps the Virtual Bay Area being constructed by Google. It’s where the Singularity will live, if it can afford an apartment. (Our best engineers are still testing whether the Singularity can create a real estate market it can’t buy into.)

Nowhere else besides the Bay Area has anything close to the density of funders, product managers, engineers, journalists, strategists, and data miners that you find here living out of their cars. And if someday those cars drive themselves, then we’ll have finally revolutionized homelessness, too.

All those brilliant and ambitious engineers and scientists working together with government support can only do good things, the way they once did in Motor City or Tuskegee. These were extraordinarily productive times for technology and innovation, and no one got hurt.

Which means there’s only one thing standing in the way of the Bay Area becoming a permanent capital of the next global economy: democracy. If the small minded, myopic, and reflexively antagonistic people who live here decide they don’t want to reinvent their neighborhoods for the good of the technology industry, and use their votes to prevail, then we may have to take their votes away, like we have so many minority-owned homes. Real estate, after all, is a meritocracy.

But don’t be pessimistic! As a tech journalist in constant contact with industry executives, founders, investors, and engineers, I’ve been struck lately by how giddy the techies have become — how often they seem to pause in slack-jawed awe at their industry’s potential to reshape our lives over the next decade. To be sure, many of these people are professional smoke blowers. And yet I believe them. That’s called “Journalism.” Or, at least, “Pando Daily.” And it’s never been wrong.

Study the roots of our new tech economy, and you’ll find that it differs in important ways from the Internet bubble of the ’90s. That blip was fed by the promise of future billions that we were certain to realize from the web economy. Today’s tech industry, on the other hand, is fed by the promise of future billions from the mobile economy.

It’s a completely different economy. And unlike the web, which never caught on, people actually use mobile devices.

The vast infrastructure created by personalized big data collection incorporated across biometric mobile platforms in no way cross-synergizes empty buzzwords the way the 90s tech boom did.

So what San Francisco really needs is more tech workers. Just as only technology can solve the many, many, problems created by technology, so only more tech employees can solve the many, many problems created by tech employees.

The fact that we deny causing them only proves how much better we’ll be at solving them than you.

Why should we assume that the thousands of new aspiring tech workers pouring into the Bay Area will decimate the arts, cultural diversity, tolerance, and neighborhoods of San Francisco, just because that’s what happened last time? Technology is about innovation. If the industry destroys your city the same way twice, it hasn’t done it right. We’ve obviously learned from our mistakes, the same way Wall Street has.

If you want to see the benefits that the tech sector brings to San Francisco, look no farther than Airbnb, which refuses to pay hotel taxes, and the ride sharing site Uber, which won’t adequately insure its drivers or accept the non-discrimination clause taxis do. They boldly show that the tech industry doesn’t respect your laws or your regulations, which is how you know they’ll be great neighbors.

Uber, it should be pointed out, is also greening the city by discouraging people from using public transit or bicycles. And you haven’t even thanked them.

So San Franciscans have to find new ways to accommodate the tech industry. The tech industry would be glad to find new ways to accommodate San Franciscans, too, but it’s busy innovating. That’s much more important than anything you’re doing. Trust us. We’re innovators. It says so in our mission statements.

These newcomers are not barbarians at our gates — these are people whose values largely mirror those of the city dwellers they are ruthlessly pushing out. They’re just like you, only whiter and able to live here. There’s absolutely no rational reason to expect you won’t enjoy knowing they’re living in what used to be your apartment.

What cities in the Bay Area need to do is to develop policies that better support young entrepreneurs: more Single Room Occupancy units, for example, that can be given to tech workers instead of actual homeless people. We’re not asking for a government handout, we just want the government to support the development of our industry through massive tax breaks and civic realignment without getting anything in return.

Which you have to do because, if you don’t, we won’t locate here. Except that we have to locate here, because if you want to be anyone in tech you have to be in the Bay Area. Which … hmmmm ….

Ah screw it, just give us the tax breaks and your houses, and let the trans-humans figure out why. They’ll be smarter than both of us put together, which is how we know they’ll agree with me.

The Bay Area has finally found a source of economic prosperity that will keep on going no matter who it hurts. Let’s not ruin that by worrying about unintended consequences. There’s no historical evidence to support such fears. When has a new industry ever had unintended consequences?

It’s never happened. I checked my Twitter feed.

People who are worried about how a boom industry that refuses to play by the rules of democratically elected local governments might lead to unintended consequences for their communities just don’t understand how the world works. They’re naïve, which is why the people who decided to come to the bay area and live out of their cars while pursuing a startup will crush them.

What I’m saying is: we will destroy you. But don’t worry about it. We’re just like you.

Benjamin Wachs is a Literary Chameleon

Article source: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2013/09/sf_techie_explains_why_the_wor.php

]]> http://homesmillbrae.com/2404/sf-techie-explains-why-the-world-should-revolve-around-bay-area-techies/feed/ 0 Bay Area will lead California’s recovery this year http://homesmillbrae.com/2004/bay-area-will-lead-californias-recovery-this-year/ http://homesmillbrae.com/2004/bay-area-will-lead-californias-recovery-this-year/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2013 23:13:41 +0000 http://homesmillbrae.com/2004/bay-area-will-lead-californias-recovery-this-year/ Continue reading →]]>


433d1 San Francisco Bay Bridge Rocket%2A304 Bay Area will lead Californias recovery this year

Job growth in the Bay Area will outpace California and the United States, according to a new report.


Bay Area will lead Californias recovery this year






433d1 BrownSteve Bay Area will lead Californias recovery this year
Steven E.F. Brown
Web Editor- San Francisco Business Times

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With job growth over 3 percent, the Bay Area should “continue to lead the recovery” in California this year, according to a report from the University of the Pacific.

While the Golden State’s job growth will stick at about 2 percent over the next few years — that’s marginally faster than the likely U.S. rate — the metropolitan region around Oakland and San Francisco will outstrip that. So says a report by the Stockton school’s Business Forecasting Center.

The report says, however, that Bay Area job growth will slip below 2 percent in 2014 “as the national economy fully recovers and high housing costs and other constraints to growth become more binding.”

Growth in 2014 will shift inland to Sacramento and Stockton — construction and real estate jobs will increase, and state and local governments will recover slowly.

Steven E.F. Brown is web editor at the San Francisco Business Times.


Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2013/02/12/bay-area-will-lead-californias.html

]]> http://homesmillbrae.com/2004/bay-area-will-lead-californias-recovery-this-year/feed/ 0 Credit Clips Homebuilder Confidence http://homesmillbrae.com/1767/credit-clips-homebuilder-confidence/ http://homesmillbrae.com/1767/credit-clips-homebuilder-confidence/#comments Wed, 17 Oct 2012 01:09:47 +0000 http://homesmillbrae.com/1767/credit-clips-homebuilder-confidence/ Continue reading →]]>

cf689 home building7 Credit Clips Homebuilder Confidence

After a summer of significant monthly jumps in confidence among the nation’s home builders, fall appears to be bringing in a chill.

Builder sentiment edged up just one point in October, according to an industry association index, but credit issues still plaguing the market appear to be holding sentiment from making the final move from negative to positive.

(Read More: Are Big Home Builder Stocks Too Hot?)

“The slight gain in builder confidence this month is an indication that, while still moving forward, the speed at which the housing recovery is proceeding is being moderated by the various constraints such as tight credit, difficult appraisals and more recently, the limited inventory of buildable lots in certain markets,” explained National Association of Home Builders’ chief economist David Crowe. “These are the complicating factors that make it difficult for builder confidence to reach and surpass the 50-point mark, at which an equal number of builders view sales conditions as good versus poor.”

Buyer traffic continues to improve, marking the only positive move in the NAHB’s monthly index. Both current sales conditions and sales expectations over the next six months were unchanged, both still below the positive mark. Regionally, confidence improved in all but the Northeast region.

(Read More: How to Play the Housing ‘Boom’)

Record low interest rates are bringing buyers back to the market, tempting them, but often turning them away at the same time. The rates are great, if you can get them, but a lot of potential buyers, especially much-needed first-time home buyers, cannot.

“You have to have substantial down payment. The minimum down payments are difficult,” says Jane Fairweather, a real estate agent in Bethesda, Maryland. “The people that can manage them run into appraisal problems, banks are still squirrely, so mortgage money is still an issue in the marketplace.”

That is not likely to improve any time soon. Details on new regulations in the mortgage market are beginning to leak out of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and while they appear to be less onerous than once expected, they are not exactly benign.

“For us the biggest issue with QM (the Qualified Mortgage rule that will be issued by the CFPB as part of financial reform legislation) remains that banks have an incentive to be more conservative in their underwriting until they are confident on how the Qualified Mortgage safe harbor will protect them from borrowers trying to avoid foreclosures by claiming that they never should have gotten the loan in the first place,” writes Jaret Seiberg of Guggenheim Securities. “This is why we believe we remain at risk for a purchase mortgage credit crunch in 2013.”

(Read More: Homebuilders Rise as Market Continues Recovery)

While credit is an obstacle to the home builders, dramatically low supply of existing homes is a near-term boon.

“October is going rather well. What I see as an interesting story is that realtor listings of existing homes keeps dropping,” notes Stephen Paul, executive vice president of MidAtlantic Builders in Rockville, Maryland. “I think the reason for this is that we are past the big short sale and foreclosure problem, and the balance of people are remaining in their homes with upside down mortgages, making their regular payments. They are not moving, not defaulting, just standing pat. That has shrunk the existing home inventory and will help the new homes market.”

CNBC Realty Check producer Stephanie Dhue contributed to this report.

Sector Watch: US Home Builders

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Credit Clips Homebuilder Confidence

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/49430599?__source=RSS*blog*&par=RSS

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