I’m in between the surprise that NYTimes continues to print non-stories about Google, as in Google’s Buses Help It’s Workers Beat the Rush, and surprise that the best thing Stephen Elliot can think to write is a resentful criticism of “Google’s gentrification shuttle”:
When one takes into account the cost of gentrification, which is destroying the arts in San Francisco and forcing many low-income workers out of the city, the Google Shuttle no longer looks so environmentally friendly. Low- and middle-income wage earners are forced to commute to the neighborhoods they can no longer afford to live in. Their commute can take more than an hour, and they can’t afford environmentally friendly cars.
It’s very possible the Google Shuttle is doing as much harm to the environment as good. And the young Google employees, many making well over $100,000 a year, who move to places like the Mission for the art and diversity, are unintentionally devastating the neighborhood they love. Soon there will be no economic diversity in the Mission, and the young rich who have driven the rents so high will wonder how they ended up living in a place that resembles Greenwich, Conn.
Ending the Google Shuttle is not the only solution. It’s not even the best solution. A much better alternative would be for Google to make substantial investments in low- and middle-income housing in the areas it’s transforming, like the Mission and the Tenderloin, where its employees are clustered.
Gentrification happens. I agree that it’s good for San Francisco to have a diversity of housing options. But not everyone wants to live Elliot’s low-income artist life style – like the people who own or work in stores and restaurants in the Mission and other neighborhoods, and how about the artists and writers who get financial support from these hated young well-paid hipsters! I suppose I would be disappointed if my neighborhood turns into Greenwich, although I doubt this would happen.
December 9, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Two interesting things about that SFBG quote:
One, if Google had a smaller workforce than they currently do, the shuttle would have a negligible effect on the neighborhoods their employees choose to for their homes, so gentrification would be a non-issue. It’s interesting to me how simple growth of a company and its accompanying expansion into the lives of external actors (e.g. employees’ neighbors, accompanying commuters, competitors) exposes a company to a huge number of new concerns that they never might have guessed were an issue. When Google was a university lab project, who could have guessed that their transportation choices would be cast in the light of harmful gentrification? What financial effect on their bottom line must these concerns have? My company has been bidding on projects in the EU recently, and I can say that the Europeans really put this stuff front-and-center from the start, asking for documentation on corporate responsibility and environmental practices (“uh, we recycle and all of us ride bikes except Eric”).
Two, I don’t think the presence of these young rich geeks is having a harmful effect on the Mission, but rather their non-presence. Google is well known for its employee comfort programs that minimize the need for workers to leave campus: on-site chef, laundry, haircuts, oil change, and so on, mean that these Mission-dwelling geeks occupy maximal space but minimal time. If in fact there’s enough of these guys to have a gentrification effect, and they’re *not around* to participate in the nightlife, frequent the salons, or patronize the restaurants that make the Mission interesting, then they’re also having an actively negative effect on the surrounding neighborhood life just by keeping out people who might choose to do all these things.
Given the SFBG’s colorful history as breathless rakers of muck, I think they’re making mountains out of molehills. But, the disastrous effects of the previous dot-com insanity are only recently being smoothed-over, so I can see how Google might operate as a canary in the coal mine. I also offer Yahoo! as a counterpoint: their Flickr and Brickhouse teams operate out of San Francisco office spaces, saving all those guys a miserable Caltrain commute to Sunnyvale, and having a marked positive affect on the neighborhoods in between.
December 9, 2007 at 1:54 pm
You’re totally right – I hadn’t thought about the space-spent vs time-spent ratio. I hope administrators do think about the effect on neighborhoods when making decisions like more shuttles vs. open a local office. I guess what got me about the article was the implied moral superiority of a low-income artist class, and the idea that people with money “destroy the arts.”
December 9, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Yeah, the assumption of artist superiority is a tough one. By their nature, artists and creatives seek out new niches and colonize previously-uninhabitable spaces. The Mission is what it is because it used to be cheap and dangerous and undesirable, just like the parts of West Oakland that all those artists are currently flocking to – I was a warehouse dweller too, just a short time ago. The “artists’ community” view of a neighborhood is inherently transient: they move in to a problem area, demonstrate that it’s safe enough for whitey, hangers-on follow, and pretty soon the market value of that space has risen above their means. To be an artist is to be a nomadic entrepreneur, constantly forced by your own success to be on the lookout for the next unexploited cluster of cheap studio spaces, vacant storefronts, and lenient cops. Sustainable neighborhoods are a different thing altogether, requiring a separate set of skills and concerns.
People with money destroy the arts only insofar as they support the arts. =)
December 12, 2007 at 12:50 am
Relevant, interesting: http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/imomus/2006/06/71172
“That’s why, to my mind, areas where creative types cohabit with, and are influenced by, the urban poor are better than purely yuppie neighborhoods. There’s a cultural tension here, a dynamism that falls away as you head north into Berlin’s more prosperous districts. In some ways that tension can’t last: liminal zones like Neubeca are doomed to lose their ambiguity, to become one thing or the other, to gentrify. And yes, I’m a part of that process and so is this article.”
December 13, 2007 at 12:23 am
and so is Elliot