Jack Halprin:There's been a lot of misinformation recently about my decision to buy a seven-unit San Francisco home and evict all the other tenants, including a city school teacher, just so I can have the place to myself.
People are saying it's a bad thing. Somehow they're using Google to spread this lie. It had never before occurred to me that such a thing could happen.
So I need to clear the record: as a Google employee, I need the homes of seven school teachers to survive. It's just a fact of life, like the food chain, or the singularity. [...]
What I'm trying to say is that, in a free society, some people make better choices than others, and we reward those people with the homes of their vanquished enemies. Some people, for example, choose to be teachers, and spend their lives teaching other people's kids things that they can Google for free. Naturally, we pay them very little money -- so little that they're practically homeless already. Frankly, I'm surprised that anyone even notices when I evict someone making under $150,000 a year. Honestly, how can you tell?
Then there are other people, like me, who make good decisions, becoming important parts of the companies that sponsor TED talks. Naturally, we pay these people what they're worth. Why am I so highly compensated? Well, if I weren't at the office every day, doing the work I do, the government wouldn't be nearly as good at spying on you.
You're welcome.
Without my taking over their homes, how do you expect Google to file patent claims against Apple -- patent claims that are more important to the future of mankind than the work of a thousand homeless teachers? Without my ability to have an extra six bathrooms at my disposal, how could Google possibly lobby city government for the right of its employees to take your homes away?
.
this is brilliant.
Hahaha
Apropos of nothing, have you read this Techcrunch article? http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
(Almost everything on Techcrunch is shit, so I was surprised to see them publish an article backed with real research.)
"Real research" that ignores the real estate developers who do everything they can to prevent the development and subsidy of high density affordable housing?
You're right. Obstructionist real-estate developers are not explicitly mentioned in the piece. I suppose that that would have been properly placed in Section 1. Were there other things that were missing from the article?
What did you think about Section 6? How about Section 14?
Do you feel that the article was -as a whole- poorly researched, or does the absence of this particular bit of information render the article useless and uninformative?
Also, you are aware that -in SF- affordable housing is only available to folks whose household is taking in no more than 120% of the area median household wage? [For a family of one this is currently $81.5k. For a family of four, $116.5k.] (I ask not to be flippant, but because I have no way of knowing how well informed you are of the issues at hand.)
Well, I see the developers as a far greater problem than the burrowing owls mentioned in the title, or regulations in general, except for height restrictions. No South Bay municipality has the political will to put a high-rise anywhere, even on the shore. But the developers make bank from McMansion ranch house sprawl. I wish that had been addressed. I suppose the article collects a lot of important aspects, but it could be a lot shorter and still be far more comprehensive.