Drop down a sextile, which is what the Census uses, and you get the same pattern: Three times as many people earning $25,000 to $39,999 a year moved from SF to Alameda County as moved the other way. The next group, $15,000 to $24,999? It’s about 4-1.
You can see the same data with Alameda County, where poor people are moving to Solano. And so on.
It’s getting way, way, worse. When we see the updated numbers for 2013, we’re all going to be stunned.
Or else we won’t. Doesn’t everyone know someone who has been forced by eviction, threatened eviction, or the cost of housing to move to the East Bay? How about people in Oakland who have to move to Brentwood?
And many of them still work in San Francisco – which makes all of this displacement about the most environmentally unsound thing since the invention of the suburbs.
Oh, and maybe high housing costs aren’t even that good for business: Charles Schwab is moving 1,000 employees out of San Francisco in part because of the cost of living.
I always read Lowell Cohn when he was a Chronicle sportswriter, and now that he’s in Santa Rosa, I don’t see his stuff as often – but he got the story about the Warriors arena just right:
The Warriors recently admitted their new San Francisco arena, their Taj Mahal by the Bay, won’t be ready for the 2017 season as originally projected. They said it could be ready a year after that. Or not.
The “not” is a terrific option. The Warriors do not need a new arena, and San Francisco sure doesn’t need one, either.
…
Show us the need. Please show us the need. Oracle Arena already was made over once. It’s an admirable place. Has luxury boxes. Has great sight lines. The Warriors have sold out 61 games in a row. On their website they invite fans to buy tickets and be part of the 62nd consecutive sellout tonight. Please check it out. The Warriors are a smashing success in Oakland.
For this, the Warriors need a new arena?
I’ll tell you what there is — greed and vanity.
From the moment Joe Lacob and Peter Guber bought the Warriors, they’ve exhibited an extreme case of San Francisco envy. You feel sorry for those guys and wish they would seek appropriate psychotherapy.
MORE:
The Warriors have choices. They can pursue this ego-driven real estate deal to its bitter end — emphasis on bitter. They could go in with the Giants and try to erect a place near AT&T Park. The Warriors likely would be junior partners in that arrangement, and may not like that. Or the Warriors can stay put in their current, highly desirable location and work hard at building a champion, something they already are doing.
This issue likely will go before San Francisco voters in June. Me, I hope San Franciscans vote it down.
The other angle of this, of course, is that loyal Oakland/East Bay fans will find that ticket prices go WAAAY up when the team moves to new WAAAY expensive palace on the San Francisco waterfront. So the people who kept the seats filled all these years will be priced out.
Greed. Indeed.
Okay, this is just too strange.
The idea of making a Google bus nicer to look at (for $500) is so badly misguided that it’s utterly backfired. It’s PG&E hiring a muralist to paint a wall in the Mission and then telling him not to include any political images (true story, from years back).
The problem with the buses isn’t that they’re ugly. It’s that they don’t fit on narrow city streets, they clog up Muni stops – and most important, they create a two-tiered bus system, one private for the rich, one public for the rest of us. It’s pathetic, of course, to charge just $1 for the bus stops, and at the tenant convention this weekend, there was talk of putting something on the ballot to raise the fee (I think $271 sounds about right).
But here’s another approach I’ve heard: Tell the buses they can’t use Muni stops, and make them rent space to load and unload – maybe in a few Church parking lots, maybe somewhere around the Daly City border …. Then the tech workers would at least have to ride Muni for part of their commute. You know, with the commoners. And that might encourage them to get to work trying to help improve public transit instead of just privatizing their own special trips.
