Neighborhoods change. They change ethnically and they change physically. They change for the better and they change for the worse. The process isn’t always pretty. Some people benefit and some suffer.
A letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle presents the writer’s grievances stirred by gentrification. The writer’s points are dramatically presented but she does make her case.
Tax Big Tech and IPOs
More taxes on Big Tech and IPOs is a good idea. And if taxes drive them out of town, better yet. Taxes will never mitigate the miseries brought by the recent invasion of San Francisco. The homeless are the tip of the iceberg. Practically everyone (except the overpaid kids and fat cats) is crazy stressed and forging on with few of life’s pleasures.
Even those with house bought 40 years ago with minimal mortgages and taxes are suffering severe loss of old friends and relatives who have fled to greener pastures. Artists and writers either join the chain gang or scram as well. Furthermore, the traffic and public transportation are too awful to encourage visits even to the not-far-distant. Neighbors sell out and vamoose; their charming homes are torn down and replaced with San Francisco’s cool version of McMansions, and the new owners come and go in limos.
Neighborhood stores and restaurants give up. Insane rents don’t allow for friendly cobblers and owner-operated hardware stores. The biggest victims are children with overworked, worried parents. One would think the riches brought in would afford magnificent public services and great schools. Apparently not. Please, tax big and when they go, good riddance.
Esther, San Raphael
The solution to the problem of gentrification, says Esther, is to tax the hell out of those bringing high-income jobs to the community until they leave or at least until others get the massage not to come. This is the opposite of the [equally dubious] practice of enticing job-producing industry with exorbitant tax breaks. One program gives companies money to come; the other takes their money so that they will leave.
There are two premises underlying the writer’s argument. One is that you are entitled to maintain any position you have in life which is beneficial and/or important to you. The corollary is that it is the role of the broader community – i.e. the government – to protect you and assure that those benefits you have are indeed yours for life.
You used to make enough money, now you don’t; impose a minimum wage. Now that isn’t good enough, make it a living wage. You used to be able to afford the rent for a decent apartment, now you can’t; put in rent controls. Interlopers move into your neighborhood; find out what they do to make more money than you do and tax that activity until it goes away
For most of human history, most people lived in a static world. They were born and died in the same village and did the same thing for a living that the parents did; the same thing that their children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren would do in turn. Change was gradual at best and was not likely to be revolutionary.
We, on the other hand, live in a dynamic world. Change is not an anomaly but the norm. This is true and inevitable even if you do not like it or do not want it. And of course, change is disruptive. Economist Joseph Schumpeter described transformative economics as creative destruction. The emphasis in on the creative part, the destruction is unfortunate but necessary. The point is that, at least in theory, the end result brings more that is good than bad.
The writer’s laments that all this new-found wealth coming into San Francisco has not resulted in great public services and schools. This is a valid point. She overlooks that new wealth does in fact bring in more tax revenue. If private wealth has made the broader community notably richer, the public sector may well be entitled to a fair cut. Services should be better. If they are not, the onus goes to the [progressive] San Francisco government, not the capitalist invaders. A fair cut, however, does not mean milking the local nouveau riche just because you can, and it certainly does not mean driving them out of town by confiscating what they have built.
One of my favorite bumper stickers says: The best things in life aren’t things. Acknowledged. Nevertheless, progress is largely things and things make life easier and better. Cars are safer and more dependable than ever. ERI scanners are better than x-ray machines. Growing up on the East Coast a half century ago, I didn’t even know there were such foods as artichokes and avocados. Now we get winter produce from summertime Chile. This article is better written than it would have been 30 years ago because, compared to a typewriter, a word processor makes it so much easier to rewrite and edit. The internet puts the world’s knowledge at my beck and call. It tells me how to spell nouveau riche and it verifies that I was right to attribute the concept of creative destruction to Schumpeter.
We mold change with our individual decisions as well as our communal decisions. What we do communally depends on a vision. That vision is up for grabs. The writer has a vision for San Francisco. It is a delusion. Current residents can use the political process to exclude, or at least make difficult, the entry of newcomers of whom they disapprove. They have manipulated the composition of their neighborhoods forever.
Not everything on our blue and white marble in space is perfect. We make mistakes. Some credible voices claim that climate change is the downside of what we have wrought and that it will wipe our species from the face of the planet. That would indeed be a very major oops. However, change is generally more beneficial than detrimental. It makes life better, more interesting and easier. Driving it out of town is not an option.