April 17, 2014

The San Francisco housing "crisis"

Ryan Avent, an exponent of the Blade Runner School of Urban Planning, discusses in The Economist the "housing crisis in San Francisco," such as it is.
The economy of the Bay Area is booming, but the region is one of the most difficult places to build in the country. Prices are therefore soaring and neighbourhoods are changing, touching off some occasionally nasty social conflicts. 
But the author of the TechCrunch piece, Kim-Mai Cutler, puts her finger on the real problem. Yes, supply constraints are the cause of the affordability crisis. The trouble comes in trying to understand why those constraints are there and how to alleviate them.

When I was a kid, San Francisco was the city of snobbism and environmental, historical, aesthetic, and who knows how many other constraints on building, while Los Angeles was just starting to move away from its pro-development, anti-elitist past. So, which ideology has worked out better?

If Diversity is Goal #1, then Los Angeles is vastly more successful than San Francisco.

San Francisco is down from 13.4% black in 1970 to 6.1% black in 2010, while Hispanics are only up from 11.6% to 15.1% over 40 years. 

In contrast, Los Angeles, went from 18.3% Hispanic in 1970 to 48.2% Hispanic in 2010. Meanwhile, LA's black population declined from 10.8% to 9.3%, but that isn't a big change in absolute terms because the population of Los Angeles, unlike San Francisco, grew from 2.8 to 3.8 million in those 40 years. San Francisco grew from 0.7 to 0.8 million over 40 years.

So, super-liberal San Francisco has been impressively effective at driving out blacks and, perhaps more impressively, keeping out Mexicans. It's perhaps not a coincidence that the first Earth Day was in 1970, a couple of years after the Fair Housing Act was passed and exacerbated white flight from less desirable locations like the West Side of Chicago. Northern California was the center of the environmental movement, and has emerged, 45 years later, immensely wealthy.
Maybe the market will fix itself? That's not entirely impossible. Assume that there is persistence to zoning regimes, such that relatively liberal-building cities tend to stay that way even after population growth begins ramping up. And assume that as San Francisco deflects away would-be migrants to other cities, critical masses of people begin to pile up, leading to the growth of new tech hubs, at least some of which will occur in liberal-building places. Then maybe one eventually generates a flip in technological leadership to a city that likes building more than San Francisco.

Of course, the trend over the last 50 years has been in the opposite direction. Back in the Soul of a New Machine era 35 years ago, Route 128 outside Boston was almost as fashionable as Silicon Valley. Not anymore. And Silicon Valley, which was always highly suburban, is increasingly following 1980s marketing yuppies like me and squeezing into the big city, as "tech" becomes increasingly less about making things and more about marketing.

So, yeah, eventually this trend will reverse itself, but you can go awfully broke waiting for that to happen.
On the other hand, if San Francisco zoning mostly deflects away non-techies who add to San Francisco congestion without adding much to its tech-centre synergies, then San Francisco's regulations may be reinforcing its status as technological leader.

Bingo. And if you can drive out non-techies who are, say, criminals, then life gets even better in San Francisco for those who can afford to live there.
That leaves technology as the saving grace.
Maybe we invent really good holodecks, which make it much less critical to actually be in San Francisco. Maybe we invent teleportation, laws of physics be damned. Maybe we simply come up with better ways to build and design cities, which minimise the real or perceived downsides to residents of new building. 

Remember the Information Superhighway back in 1994? The idea was that you wouldn't have to jam into Silicon Valley suburbs, you could live in Santa Fe or Bozeman or wherever and do tech business without being there. How'd that work out anyway? Oh, the opposite happened, and now it turns out that not only do you have to squeeze into the greater San Francisco Bay area, you now have to squeeze into tiny San Francisco. Apparently, the technology of the Information Superhighway just couldn't be developed.
Or maybe we do nothing, and simply sit back and observe as housing remains an instrument of oligarchy. Who knows. But however one imagines this playing out, we should be clear about what is happening, and what its effects have been.

We should be clear, but not so clear as to mention minor matters like race, crime, and immigration policy.
     

114 comments:

Dave Pinsen said...

Great tweet on this topic today.

Chief Seattle said...

In 1995 a very pretentious lefty college buddy and I bumped into each other in Berkeley and he gushed that San Francisco was so beautiful and it was amazing that they had no poor people. Without out thinking I blurted out, "that's because they moved all the poor people to Oakland". He was speechless, and that certainly put a damper on the evening.

I don't know why the press has just caught onto the "San Francisco is expensive" meme. San Francisco was expensive in the 90s, it was expensive in the 2000s, and it's expensive now. More expensive? Probably a bit, but the trend has been going for a while.

Anonymous said...

Oh it's not that complicated Steve. Kids these days like to go out and get drunk and be able to walk home. We have a serious shortage of places where this is possible. But the market is responding.

Beware that Boomers and gen Xers shouldn't count on the mortgage interest deduction to survive a huge generation of indebted renting voters.

Dan said...

The Life Reform Movement is the best sort of Fascism.

Hippies do have a clever way of getting racism enacted. I raise my Muldwine to them!

The Anti-Gnostic said...

Steve - there's got to be another Law of Journalism in here somewhere. Something like this: "The most heartfelt articles by journalists tend to be demands that housing policy (or journalists' incomes) be structured in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist will be able to afford stylish digs in safe, affluent, in-town neighborhoods."

Anonymous said...

Steve, any thoughts on the passing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Jeff W. said...

I think you meant "Soul of a New Machine."

http://www.amazon.com/The-Soul-A-New-Machine/dp/0316491977/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397788960&sr=8-1&keywords=the+soul+of+the+new+machine

Has it occurred to you that all the analysis is brain dead these days because the audience is brain dead? Maybe brain dead analysis is the only kind of analysis a brain dead audience will accept.
Maybe publishers are being forced by marketing necessity to publish brain dead analysis against their will.

Anonymous said...

Last year, I went home to the Bay Area for my 20-year high school reunion. My classmates with young children who had stayed in the area were universally depressed about how miserably difficult it was to find an affordable place to raise kids there.

My wife (who is originally from the Midwest) could not get over how stressed out everyone at the reunion seemed.

Incidentally, today our suburban high school looks nothing like the majority-white middle-class school that it was in the 1990s. Now it's overwhelmingly low-income Hispanic, and substitute teachers get the equivalent of hazard pay for taking jobs there.

Bill said...

Oh great, another demographic sink for the bright and productive, just like Singapore.

Boomers, who grew up in an expansive, family friendly country, still drive the tech industry. When they are gone, who will take their place?

This is the fatal flaw in the SF model: that "critical mass" isn't some future possibility; it's about to retire.

carol said...

equivalent of hazard pay for taking jobs there.

Combat pay for all. I've stopped blaming the unions. The unions are there and strong because the work is so shitty now.

Anonymous said...

Steve Sailer observed:
"""""Meanwhile, LA's black population declined from 10.8% to 9.3%, but that isn't a big change in absolute terms because the population of Los Angeles, unlike San Francisco, grew from 2.8 to 3.8 million in those 40 years. San Francisco grew from 0.7 to 0.8 million over 40 years.

So, super-liberal San Francisco has been impressively effective at driving out blacks and, perhaps more impressively, keeping out Mexicans. It's perhaps not a coincidence that the first Earth Day was in 1969, the year after the Fair Housing Act was passed and exacerbated white flight from less desirable locations like the West Side of Chicago. Northern California was the center of the environmental movement, and has emerged, 45 years later, immensely wealthy.""""



Oh, oh, he's noticing again. Starting to put some things together. That's a no-no. It just isn't done anymore and is simply unacceptable.

The first Earth Day was held April 22, 1970, btw.

Anonymous said...

Aren't there a lot of homeless people in San Fran, not just in Oakland? Everyone complains about how bad it is in San Fran.

Jefferson said...

San Francisco Blacks are some of the country's most racially segregated Blacks, according to a San Francisco Chronicle news article.

But that is not saying much because in the majority of big cities in this country, Blacks tend to be Balkanized.

Blacks only tend to be racially integrated in big cities that do not have any majority Black neighborhoods, like Phoenix, Arizona and San Jose, California for example. Blacks in these 2 cities are pretty much evenly spread out everywhere and Blacks do not dominate any part of these cities.



Anonymous said...

Steve, any comment on the Bryan Singer scandal?

"‘X-Men’ Director Bryan Singer Accused of Sexually Assaulting Underage Boy"

http://www.thewrap.com/bryan-singer-accused-sexually-abusing-underage-boy

"“X-Men” director Bryan Singer is being accused of drugging, raping, and using his power to exploit a teenage boy in a lawsuit filed Wednesday, according to court documents obtained by TheWrap.

According to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Hawaii, plaintiff Michael Egan, who was named in a press release by his lawyers, was 17 when he was forcibly sodomized by Singer, among other accusations."

Bert said...

I used to live in Santa Rosa in the early 90s, up in Sonoma County. Great place to grow up. My parents, of course, rented our house, as there was no way they could afford to buy.

Sonoma Country also has extremely draconian development rules, so very little new housing has been built since then and the entire area as remained largely white.

Anonymous said...

SF's homeless rival LA's for violence and aggressiveness and property damage. But that's all right, because they're nearly all white.

Anonymous said...

The Great Recession caused a shift in Silicon Valley. Apparently a lot of young techie types in the financial sector (located is SF) found themselves out of work. Meanwhile, a lot of the go-go era startups in the south bay were gone, as VC funding dried up. Large non-startup tech companies in the south bay (The Google's, etc.) purchased a lot of office space there. The out of work SF folks were forced to try their hand at small-scale tech startups. So 'Silicon Valley' now truly includes SF, which wasn't really the case before.

The large south bay companies all now use private bus services to pick employees up in SF (and lots of other places all over the greater Bay Area) and bus them down to the south bay. This allows young hip techies to live in the new SF. This is driving up housing costs around bus stops in SF. It has led to some ugly incidents, people blocking busses, a lot of noise from people being evicted from (rented) homes so apartments can be built, noise at the city politics level, talk of SF paying for free lawyers for those getting evicted, etc..

slumber_j said...

Anonymous said...
"Aren't there a lot of homeless people in San Fran, not just in Oakland?"

Yeah, my impression has always been that Frisco is pretty bummy. Not that I've been there in a couple of decades, but still.

Anyway, regarding hardship pay for substitute teachers: when I was a sub in the LA Unified School District for a year or so, there was certainly none of that! If you got called in the morning it was a total crapshoot, and there was no differentiation in pay.

Amazing disparities: three days in a seventh-grade class in Lincoln Heights, where two kids were absent for court dates, e.g. (One of them for arson: he was accused of having set a nearby hillside aflame). Or class photos in an all-Armenian school, with the kids totally decked-out Soviet-style and the impenetrable alphabet.

I think my favorite day was in a micro-neighborhood close to Downtown known as Dogtown--doing a special-ed class, weirdly. (Nothing to do with the skateboard movie.) The kids were all from the projects across the street and mostly not retards but I guess ADHD or whatever, and super-pleasant to anyone who gave them the time of day. They were delightful children.

Then just after lunch there was an earthquake, and everyone had to evacuate the building and assemble on the blacktop playground. And then the mothers started showing up, having pulled themselves away from the TV to withdraw them from school with their horrible fingernails and makeup. The day wasn't over, but they definitely wanted their children back. Not that I blame them I guess...

I still have a drawing one of those kids did for me.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

This allows young hip techies to live in the new SF. This is driving up housing costs around bus stops in SF. It has led to some ugly incidents, people blocking busses, a lot of noise from people being evicted from (rented) homes so apartments can be built, noise at the city politics level, talk of SF paying for free lawyers for those getting evicted, etc.."

Young, smug, liberal internet hipsters vs. the shrill old new-lefties. It brings a smile to one's face. Just as it does when latino Democrats fight asian Democrats over University places, or when rich liberals dump on public-school teachers. The inherhent contradictions in the left-liberal program are beginning to show.

Let it burn.

Dave Pinsen said...

I remember it being impossible to sit outside at a restaurant in San Francisco without getting panhandled by bums. Don't know if it's still like that.

Short Timer said...

Boomers, who grew up in an expansive, family friendly country, still drive the tech industry. When they are gone, who will take their place?

This is the fatal flaw in the SF model: that "critical mass" isn't some future possibility; it's about to retire.


This is for real. My head security guy is retiring at the end of the month. Our head financial guy at the end of June. I just ran my numbers over the weekend and I can leave any time. I just bought a beach house in Naples, Florida so once we get new folks settled in these jobs I'm outta here.

Reg Cæsar said...

Those figures must understate SF's loss of straight blacks. I really doubt the number of black fairies has declined in the past 40 years.

Mount Shasta Inquirer said...

Didn't some pundit write about the dirt gap (ie. cities with water on three sides?

Bob Loblaw said...

Yeah, my impression has always been that Frisco is pretty bummy. Not that I've been there in a couple of decades, but still.

Yeah, it still is. It's the typical leftist story of unintended consequences. The city added up everything it was spending on the bums and said "Crap, we spend so much if we just did away with the bureaucrats and handed out money these poor people would practically be not poor." So they started handing out cash, with predictable results.

Not only did the bums spend their grocery money on meth and Thunderbird, but homeless people from all over the country poured into SF looking for their handout.

Now the city is back to giving them, you know, food and housing, but the people who came for the cash are still here.

The thing about homelessness is it isn't any more expensive to be homeless in a nice place than to be homeless in a crappy place. If you came to SF from Philly, why go back?

Anonymous said...

Vanity Fair covered this story in January 2014. The piece was ostensibly about the "starchitects" designing the new Apple and Gooogle HQs but it delved into the housing dynamics, private buses, etc.

CJ said...

Short Timer said ...I just bought a beach house in Naples, Florida...

Good move. My mother stays down there in the winter, near Bonita Springs. I went down to visit and catch some sun and was highly impressed by the Florida Gulf Coast. I was shocked to find it seems to be over 90% white Americans, that hardly anyone is from New York or New Jersey (lots are Midwesterners -- I accidentally crashed a reunion of Ohio State alumni), that people are mostly affluent, that the winter weather is generally dry and very pleasant, hardly anyone has tattoos or piercings, and the beaches are great (locals had to be prompted to remember the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which seems to have left no traces). I used to think Florida was Floriduh, but now I'd consider retiring there myself.

J said...

Steve, Are you saying that the "green", sustainable, recycling, rainwater collecting, etc. movement is, objectively, the most effective form of classism/racism? The hidden logic of those bizarre "green" regulations protecting the smelt sardine and the spotted owl appears to protecting the rich and driving out the poor, the brown and the black.

Anonymous said...

o/t

"The UK Labour Party has appointed US election strategist David Axelrod as a strategic adviser on leader Ed Miliband's 2015 election campaign.

Labour will also call on Mr Axelrod's consulting, firm AKVD, in its bid to win power, BBC Newsnight revealed."


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27062278

"Last month, Mr Alexander denied the party had sacked adviser Arnie Graf, another former US Democrat strategist.

Fellow Democrat Stan Greenberg, who has been a pollster for former US President Bill Clinton and ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, also remains on the Labour team.

In August last year, the Conservatives confirmed they had recruited former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina to work on its 2015 campaign team."

Anonymous said...

Single family homes in Bayview/Hunter's Point--the shittiest, most gangbanger-ridden part of San Francisco--are going for anywhere between $450k to $900k.

Anonymous said...

What's wrong with Vallejo?

My wild guess for a replacement for Silicon Valley, the Eastern Mediterranean. Centered around Israel places like Athens Greece and even Sicily offer more value and close proximity to everything Europe and Russia.

Jorn said...

Just because we've entered an Internet Dark Age where the evil forces of *Marketing* are maximizing clicks with superficial glitz, and simultaneously polluting everything with ads... that doesn't mean the savvy minority who keep to higher standards, by taking the trouble to seek out quieter deeper sources... that minority is quietly growing... which is cause for hope.

jack strocchi said...

Chief Seattle said:

In 1995 a very pretentious lefty college buddy and I bumped into each other in Berkeley and he gushed that San Francisco was so beautiful and it was amazing that they had no poor people. Without out thinking I blurted out, "that's because they moved all the poor people to Oakland". He was speechless, and that certainly put a damper on the evening.

[correction]

Ditto hyper-liberal NYC where poor minority groups have been ethno-economically cleansed to Newark. And ditto hyper-liberal WDC where poor minority groups have been ethno-economically cleansed to Baltimore.

It's almost as if some kind of pattern is emerging.

bjdubbs said...

maybe this is a stupid question, but why doesn't somebody take one of these corporate campuses in SV and turn it into like a Reston Town Center, with lots of apartments and shopping and so on. If the problem is not enough density in SV, then bring some density to SV. I'm sure lots of these Chinese and Indian programmers aren't real interested in rehabbing Victorian rowhouses.

Anonymous said...

Not really. Just SF became an Asian, primarily Chinese, slum instead of a Mexican one. SF could be considered the bigger failure since it managed be subsumed by a third world horde without the excuse of a nearby border.

Anonymous said...

Off topic from Slate:

Will Today’s Hispanics Be Tomorrow’s Whites?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/04/america_s_future_racial_makeup_will_today_s_hispanics_be_tomorrow_s_whites.html

Freedom 55 said...

Good move. My mother stays down there in the winter, near Bonita Springs. I went down to visit and catch some sun and was highly impressed by the Florida Gulf Coast. I was shocked to find it seems to be over 90% white Americans, that hardly anyone is from New York or New Jersey

New retiree here. A couple of years ago I bought a place in Pelican Bay, between Naples and Bonita Springs. Golf, fishing, tennis, it's all good. Lot's of Midwesterners and Ontarians here, not so many New Yorkers or Quebecers, they're at Ft. Lauderdale. More and more Germans and British also, heck, Air Berlin has a club lounge at the Ft. Myers airport. Most folks I talk to here just want to retire away from the "diversity" and spend the rest of their lives doing things they didn't have time to do when they were busting their hump running a family business, making partner at some accounting firm, etc. My neighbor sold his stock transfer business at 60, bought his house, a boat and a golf club membership and never looked back. With all the crap going on in the workplace these days, more guys 55+ are looking for a way out while they are still above ground.

Anonymous said...

It's almost as if some kind of pattern is emerging.

Move along now, there's nothing to see here.

Anonymous said...

that minority is quietly growing...

Okay, Greybeard, fess up now: What's your baby momma's Total Fertility Rate?

Dahinda said...

"a couple of years after the Fair Housing Act was passed and exacerbated white flight from less desirable locations like the West Side of Chicago." The West Side of Chicago was once a really desirable place. My ancestors lived there from the 1880's on and seeing pictures of the area up to the 1960's, it was a really nice place. Big houses, greystones, huge parks etc. BTW, Chicago is another city that is run by liberals and has made a great effort to drive blacks out. Chicago is usually identified with its black population but the black population went down by over 200,000 in the fist decade of this century and Chicago overall is less than 1/3 black.

Luke Lea said...

Steve, based on those figures you give for L.A., has there been an absolute decline in the number of whites there? How about for the larger metropolitan area?

Luke Lea said...

Just as a historical note, I shared a house with four other Reed graduateds in the Haight Ashbury in 1967, in a nice neighborhood on Rivoli Street. I had a nice room of my own. My share of the rent? $30/month. The whole house went for $150/month.

JerseyGuy said...

Another great post by Steve Sailer and the intersection of housing economics, density and the development (and destruction) of the middle (and upper middle) class....

One of the most interesting things that has happened over the last 30 years (I'm only 30 years old but I've talked to my parents extensively about this) is that as human capital has become more important than in any time in history, it has perhaps never been harder in the modern era of the West to develop human capital in peace time (i.e. starting a family, raising multiple children, etc.). As is typical from the Glaeser, Avent, Yglesias types, families are just not a consideration. It’s purely short term thinking. As long as we can maximize GDP!

In fact, there was an article in the NY Post recently about how certain urban women are shunning children for dogs: http://nypost.com/2014/04/10/more-young-women-choosing-dogs-over-motherhood/
Also, there was a post this morning on Walter Russell Mead’s blog about how cities have essentially become playgrounds for extended adolescence and that the suburbs are still the place for families. As a 30 year who works about half of my time in NYC, I can’t begin to describe how spot on this is: http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/04/18/adults-shun-suburbs-for-playground-cities/

What is interesting is that the growth during the 1960s through the 1980s of suburban Silicon Valley, suburban Route 128 and in NJ, the massive, suburban pharmaceutical corporate campuses is that it helped make family formation (i.e. development of human capital) and capitalism compatible. I can tell you from first-hand experience that this is no longer the case. This is true in NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, etc. These are fertility sinks for the middle and upper middle class. I don’t mean that in any sort of provocative way. Just go there and have a look for yourself and you’ll see what I mean.

Sorry for an incoherent post but like Steve Sailer, I have a mild obsession with these topics and what they portend for the 21st century...

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:"Not really. Just SF became an Asian, primarily Chinese, slum instead of a Mexican one."

The Bay Area Chinese are not exactly slum-dwellers...


Anonymous:" SF could be considered the bigger failure since it managed be subsumed by a third world horde without the excuse of a nearby border."

Mexico and Central America are Third World. China is not.

Anonymous said...

"I just bought a beach house in Naples, Florida so once we get new folks settled in these jobs I'm outta here."

That stretch of coastline between the Gulf and Highway 41 is a lot like San Francisco... they exclude the undesirable element with high prices (driven by development restrictions) and gated communities with active HOAs.

FredR said...

"Ditto hyper-liberal NYC where poor minority groups have been ethno-economically cleansed to Newark"

There are tons of poor minorities in NYC. I get that maybe some have left, but 'cleansed' doesn't fit my "lived experience."

Anonymous said...

I watched "Dirty Harry" a while back with my fiancee, and (to her great annoyance) I had to keep pausing the movie to point out the otherworldly scenes of a San Francisco brimming with modest-income, middle-class people.

Of course, it goes without saying that the whole premise of the movie — that the San Francisco police department actually has a guy like Dirty Harry on its payroll — would be in the realm of Tolkienesque fantasy today.

Anonymous said...

Not really. Just SF became an Asian, primarily Chinese, slum instead of a Mexican one. SF could be considered the bigger failure since it managed be subsumed by a third world horde without the excuse of a nearby border.

Right, because Shanghai and Mexico City are the same and that makes San Francisco just like El Paso.

jody said...

nothing dirty harry callahan could not take care of.

Anonymous said...

The real failures of California are Oakland and Richmond, both of which have large black populations.

Anonymous said...

"Will Today’s Hispanics Be Tomorrow’s Whites?" - given that they fought for their non-white racial classification, why would they go back on that? Likewise, if there were any incentive for them to identify as white, there'd be every incentive to hold them to their previous decision on the part of actual whites.

Robert What? said...

Never forget, however, that the uber leftists of As Francisco are the ones who are demanding that we all live in a diversity paradise. But maybe that is their successful technique for keeping SF white and upper middle class: guilt everyone else into taking the people you don't want. It has worked out remarkably well for them.

Anonymous said...

I'm about to move out to the valley (Silicon, not Silicone). I can't afford SF. Anyone know a neighborhood with reasonably priced apartments in or around San Jose?

SVer said...

@bjdubbs - Google is currently wrestling with the city of Mountain View to do just that with an expansion into Bayview.

Anonymous said...

"Not really. Just SF became an Asian, primarily Chinese, slum instead of a Mexican one. SF could be considered the bigger failure since it managed be subsumed by a third world horde without the excuse of a nearby border."

It's not an Asian slum. You might find it unpleasant to live next to Asians, with their different cultural values, but it's not a slum.

Silicon Valley Guy said...

They're not, and they don't. The Google buses are for young white elite types who do want to live in SF. They're overwhelmed, numerically, by Indians who live and work in the South Bay and, as necessary, ride BART to jobs in SF. In fact, at 9AM the Indians are 90% of the BART passengers. In the South Bay they are 100% of the engineering workforce at more and more places.

Anonymous said...

Everyone who's never lived there straining to solve SF's problems by paving over thousands of square miles of land and throwing up a facsimile of exurban Dallas, please identify the location of the land you propose to liberate from locally-accountable democracy, er, the tyranny of zoning laws.

If you bother to so much as look at the Bay Area on a map, the biggest cause of high housing prices is really obvious: most of the Bay Area is either the ocean or mountains.

The short-term crisis is indeed fueled by this latest tech bubble. The last one popped, the one before that popped, and this one will pop, too.

Anonymous said...

Well, this time I managed to get two out of three past Komment Kontrol.

The third mentioned the Frankfurt School, but I see that someone else was able to reference Axelrod and Greenberg in his Komment, so maybe not all is lost.

manton said...

My family goes way back in SF. On my mother’s side, we survived the 1906 earthquake (arrived in the 1880s). On my father’s side, we arrived in 1912.

I’ve seen the change up close, thought I no longer live there (but I do visit at least 3x/year and my parents maintain an apartment there.

Post-earthquake, and after the Gold Rush and the various other Sierra Nevada commodity/mining booms were over, SF reinvented itself as the Manhattan of the west, the key metro capital west of the Mississippi. It had all the typical NY industries: finance, publishing, advertising, etc. All the major services. (Read the Tales of the City series for last glimpse of what the old SF professional classes were like.) Plus the port (this was before Oakland was a big port), both as a passenger and freight terminal, the most important on the West coast. And it had a decent amount of manufacturing, light in the city, heavier as you went down the Peninsula.

It was also, like Manhattan in the Gilded Age, THE place on the West Coast to build your fabulous mansion after you had made your pile in some grubby business elsewhere, first on Nob Hill and eventually on Outer Broadway.

All that eroded post-WW2 for various reasons. The growth of LA was one. Technology, ironically, was another. The West Coast after a while just didn’t need a mini-Manhattan of its own any more as communication with the rest of the country got faster and cheaper.

It went into serious decline consequently and, unlike LA, had no marquis industry to prop it up until the emergence of Silicon Valley as a real power much later. SF prices bottomed out from the mid-60s to the early 80s. Luke Lea recounts his experience renting in the Haight in the 60s. I’ve heard many relatives tell the same stories. One reason the hippies poured in was, it was insanely cheap in those days. A classic underpriced asset. Great weather, very pretty, lovely housing stock, above average “culture”, and all that for pennies on the dollar. It couldn’t last.

Some of the hippie transformation was simply chance or fate. E.g., it just so happened that Ferlinghetti settled there in the 50s. And that Kesey ending up enrolled at Stanford and becoming a drug test subject at the Menlo Park VA hospital. And the Hallinans.

But it was also that, for several decades, the SF upper class was very Progressive Republican, which is to say, extremely lib on “social issues” and so tolerant of all forms of deviancy so as to show their superiority to the Irish and Italian working class and bourgeois out in the Richmond and the Sunset. That attracted kooks because they knew that they could get away with more in SF than they could anywhere else. Porn in the US was concentrated in SF for most of its early years because the SFPD did nothing about it, whereas the LAPD in those days was hell on wheels against it.

Prices finally began to catch up with reality in the early 80s and, if I recall correctly, it was finally in 1987 that SF became officially the most unaffordable housing market in the nation, an “honor” which it has retained ever since. Tech played a large part in that, but hardly the only part. Being hemmed in by water was also important, plus the building restrictions, plus the fact that it’s just a really nice place to live, if you can look past the sanctimonious libs (which is very hard to do).

Anthony said...

Anonymous at 11:42:

There's East San Jose (mostly Mexican), there are trailer parks in Sunnyvale (we don't have tornados, so it's ok), and there's East Palo Alto (where the Mexicans haven't driven out all the blacks). But even these aren't that reasonably-priced, nor is the neighborhood across 280 from downtown San Jose.

If your job is close to CalTrain, there's the neighborhood of San Bruno that's underneath the SFO flight path; it's not too expensive, and you can catch up on your sleep on the train.

Anonymous said...

Throughout this article, a secondary theme appears. It can't actually be stated too directly for that's not good manners but its there nonetheless.

It is namely: The San Franciscans, do they really wake every morning and think to themselves, "Gee, my city is just so perfect, but I do wish that we had more of those.....Shermans around."

As in Richard Sherman, that is.

Really?

Seriously?

Anonymous said...

Of course the Whites in San Francisco live well. Traitors always live well.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 11:42 -- I grew up in East San Jose and my parents still live there. I like it quite a bit. Sure there are a lot of Mexicans but I think they make fine neighbors (of course, I grew up there, so I'm used to them). People complain about the crime but the crime rate is so, so much lower than what you would find in an actual rough area. So long as you aren't a complete pussy you'll be fine. Single family home there can be had for $450,000, so not exactly affordable but more affordable than anywhere else in the area. I recommend looking in the Berryessa/Penetencia Creek neighborhoods. That's somewhat north of the roughest parts. Closer to Alum Rock Park the better. The commute is killer if you're going to the mid peninsula, but eventually there should be an east-west commuter train more convenient than the light rail, which is slow and follows a circuitous route.

Silicon Valley Guy -- BART doesn't as of yet extend into the South Bay. The Berryessa station is still under construction, and it'll be many years before BART gets downtown. Would figure a Silicon Valley guy would know that....

Anonymous said...

Of course the Whites in San Francisco live well. Traitors always live well.

Thread winner.

Next thread, please.

PS: Even though it's still only April, that one's already on the short list for COTY.

Just sayin'.

Silicon Valley Guy said...

I'm all too familiar with the BART system. I was thinking of Fremont as South Bay, and you can call that a stretch I suppose, but culturally, wirh the big Indian population, I'd say it's more like Sunnyvale than like Berkeley!

Alice said...

Why yes, yes it is. But only tourists try to sit outside now. Or googleaires.

ben tillman said...

I used to live in Santa Rosa in the early 90s, up in Sonoma County. Great place to grow up. My parents, of course, rented our house, as there was no way they could afford to buy.

Of course? As renters, they were paying the cost of ownership plus a profit margin. How could it be cheaper to rent? Do you mean they didn't have the money for a downpayment?

Anonymous said...

I heard on the radio today that the median-price for a house in SF is $860K, I think it was.

There's actually a fair amount of housing in silicon valley proper (say, the south bay north of central San Jose), but the area is mostly just blocks of cheap plywood apartments (people farms), office buildings (the older ones are cheap 1-story "tilt-ups", very easy to build), and small strip malls with Indian or Mexican restaurants. No reason for a cool hip white kid to want to live there. Can't walk around, for the most part with a few exceptions (the old main drags of what used to be the small towns); can't walk around and see many members of the opposite sex in the same age group.

Despite all those apartments, I think the little free Mountain View ad-paper said that either now or next year there will only be half the amount of housing needed.

It's getting to be a problem. I know successful senior engineer types, with parents who were engineers in the valley and had houses, who can't afford to buy a house and raise kids in silicon valley. When they get married they are leaving for places like Austin and, ironically, Route 128 (where a lot of their dads were likely youngsters).

This is due, among other reasons, to the "Google effect". The day care workers and plumbers know what they have to charge to live in the area and they get it. Young googlers (and others from similar companies) who hit it rich on stocks can pay these rates, which are high enough that those who haven't will consider moving instead. The end of the open frontier, as has been said.

Anonymous said...

Not the 1st time that Singer has had boy troubles, google "David Stockdale" and "Apt Pupil".

I think Singer did the nasty to Brad Renfro & drove him to his suicide.

Anonymous said...

I like having seasons, but thats just me.

Anonymous said...

"Third world" is often just used as a pejorative for non-white. It doesn't necessarily have to do with how prosperous or advanced an area.

Bob Loblaw said...

Mexico and Central America are Third World. China is not.

Mexican GDP/capita is more than 50% higher than that of China. China is still a poor country. Mexico really isn't, by world standards.

Anonymous said...

Some have alluded to this but San Francisco was mostly built out by 1950 and has water on three sides. LA and SF have little in common. Interestingly, at a time of highway development nationwide SF citizens fought off highways and built a regional subway system to support a growing Financial District. To grow to match demand SF would literally had to grow up with density that is somewhat unthinkable in the US. San Franciscans said no to redevelopment and "manhattanization". The results have not all been bad.

SF is second only to NYC in housing density. The housing crisis in the Bay Area is the result of suburban values in the rest of the Bay Area before SF which is once again growing.

Anonymous said...

If China were a first world nation then among other things its collective GDP would dwarf the entire rest of the first world.

Anonymous said...

Also I can say to the extent that SF is able to defy the laws of economics they do by housing derelicts and criminals. What other city preserves SROs for bums in some of the most valuable real estate in the US? How much intervention does it take to keep mid- market and the Tenderloin a slum?

Working and middle class blacks have followed whites out of the city but if not for SROs and public housing there would be 1% blacks in SF. City policy can only do so much in such a small city

Anonymous said...

If China were a first world nation then among other things its collective GDP would dwarf the entire rest of the first world.

China is not quite Singapore, Japan, South Korea or Taiwan, but it is getting there. And there is quite a gap between Singapore, one of the richest countries in the world and much of Latin America.

For that matter, the last time I checked no Latin American country has ICBMs and nuclear weapons.

It's simply silly to claim that San Francisco is a "Chinese slum" just as it is silly to compare China to countries in Latin America. This isn't the era of the Great Leap Forward (and even then China was much more important world-historically than Latin America).

Anonymous said...

"Third world" is often just used as a pejorative for non-white. It doesn't necessarily have to do with how prosperous or advanced an area.

So Japan is "Third World" then? Or are we back in Apartheid South Africa where Japanese (and other East Asians) are "honorary whites"?

Anonymous said...

Mexican GDP/capita is more than 50% higher than that of China. China is still a poor country. Mexico really isn't, by world standards.

Qatar has nearly twice the GDP per capita (PPP) as the United States. Does that make Qatar the top of the First World?

The Chinese have invested and built factories in Mexico. The reverse is not true. One is a rising world power, the other is a narco-state living off NAFTA, in which the central government does not even control large sections of its own territory.

GDP per capita is a useful metric, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

notsaying said...

"Yes, supply constraints are the cause of the affordability crisis."

I would agree with this -- if the "supply constraints" was the supply of money available to Americans to pay for housing.

There's been a lot in the news recently about housing and affordability. For the people having the worst time, the only new construction they could afford would be newly constructed public housing. And many of those "people having the worst time" are formerly middle class people now making low wages.

We will have a housing crisis of unprecedented size and severity on our way to 400 million of us by 2050, up from 315 million today.

We are completely unprepared for this, of course. Building apartment buildings that are taller than most office towers will not change anything. It's going on in or near a lot of places, though. Whatever their past, I cannot say San Francisco's people would benefit going vertical. Most of the renters and buyers would be newcomers, not people already in the area.




Anonymous said...

Of course the Whites in San Francisco live well. Traitors always live well.

Traitors to what?

People have a variety of different allegiances. Some are traitors to their race, some to their ethnicity, some to their culture and some to their economic class and some, even, to their intellectual peers. Some of these allegiances converge while others are conflict.

Most educated, successful whites in SF probably prefer to live next to educated, successful Asians than next to uneducated, poor whites.

Anonymous said...

Call me crazy, but during my one visit to SF it occurred to me that the reason it's so attractive to gay men is because the hills are difficult for pregnant women to walk up and down.

PS the guy who is accusing Singer of rape was 15 when it started. Allegedly, of course.

Prediction: nothing will come of this, not a thing. I'm very pessimistic that anything can be done about Hollywood pederasty, because the rewards of shutting up and the sanctions for speaking out are so great. This is not the Catholic Church. What can the Church reward people with? Eternal life? Puhleeze.

Anonymous said...

Check out "Peninsula Open Space Trust." Over 70,000 acres of land are now off the market - permanently. It's a liberal win-win: less land to develop = higher home prices, and you get credit for saving the environment....

outsider said...

Evil thrives on hypocrisy.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 4/18/14, 2:00 PM: Everyone who's never lived there straining to solve SF's problems by paving over thousands of square miles of land and throwing up a facsimile of exurban Dallas, please identify the location of the land you propose to liberate from locally-accountable democracy, er, the tyranny of zoning laws.

I realize your question is rhetorical, but the answer is very real and very pressing.

There is indeed a large and well-organized campaign to liberate large parts of the Bay Area from locally-accountable democracy. The campaign has both a federal component (HUD), a state component (SB 375, RHNA), and regional/local components (PBA, ABAG, MTC). It allies wealthy developers with poverty pimps and government bureaucrats against local homeowners.

I live in Sausalito. I reported last year that we're "having a dust-up at this very moment of Marin Liberals vs. Marin Radicals. The Rads want to cram poor NAMs into the county under the flag of Affordable Housing while the Libs fret about their property values and about not being seen as racist/classist/nimby."

Even here in wealthy, low-density Marin County, every community has been told to increase housing density. The first of these monstrosities has gone up and caused great alarm. I only hope it's enough to wake up residents about the far larger plans underway.

For a bigger-picture answer to your question, TPTB have been kind enough to identify the locations: "Plan Bay Area creates Priority Development Areas throughout the nine counties and 101 cities that are members of ABAG. Eighty percent of the new housing needed in the Bay Area over the next 28 years, as its population grows from 7 million to 9 million, will occur in these areas. The largest are in North and Central San Jose; parts of Alum Rock; Redwood City near Highway 101; the eastern third of San Francisco; and the western Oakland/Emeryville area." Hello, Dallas.

Sincerely,
Dock of the Bay

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 4/18/14, 2:00 PM: If you bother to so much as look at the Bay Area on a map, the biggest cause of high housing prices is really obvious: most of the Bay Area is either the ocean or mountains.

I disagree, it's not physical barriers. Large parts of the Bay Area are low-density and are either agricultural or deliberately removed from development. Densities range widely, from highs of 2,100-18,000 (Alameda and San Francisco Counties) to lows of 180-500 (four North Bay counties). Trust me, you could cram a lot of crappy apartments into the North Bay. That's what has us worried.

Besides, a motivated builder can build on mountains. Look at San Francisco. Look at Marin, where fifty years ago a developer tried to build a city on the Headlands. And that's not even the largest of Marin's failed development scams.

The short-term crisis is indeed fueled by this latest tech bubble. The last one popped, the one before that popped, and this one will pop, too.

Yes, but when? Before or after the low-rent apartments get built and the low-rent people settle in?

Sincerely,
Dock of the Bay

The Anti-Gnostic said...

Steve - I raised this on a thread at Cowen's site but wanted to get your answer as well.

Why so little development north of San Francisco?

ben tillman said...

"Third world" is often just used as a pejorative for non-white. It doesn't necessarily have to do with how prosperous or advanced an area.

Right. The term denotes the countries that were not aligned with the US (First World) or USSR (Second World) during the Cold War. It has nothing to do with race or prosperity.

Pat Boyle said...

The sub rosa removal of black people from San Francisco is seldom told story. Those crude 'Whites Only' signs I remember from my child hood in Virginia proved to be ineffective if not counter productive. San Francisco found a better path.

Yes, San Francisco's subtle negro removal program was far more effective. Across the Golden Gate in Marin they did much the same thing. They had a center for wartime ship building in Marin county which led to a concentrated black area for the workers who came up from the South. It was called 'Marin City'. For more than seventy years it has been isolated and walled off from the rest of the county like a tubercular infection is isolated in your healthy tissue in your lungs.

I was a young liberal public social worker in San Francisco in 1970. I was also fearless. Unlike almost any other social worker I actually did home visits in the black ghettos.

But almost none of those black areas are there anymore. The Moscone Center today is in what used to be a very bad neighborhood. Some people may remember from musical references the 'Fillmore Auditorium'. Not just the auditorium but the whole black neighborhood around it was redeveloped out of existence. Not that was a bad thing. It was worth your life to ride the Fillmore bus for the length of it's route.

This pattern was noted at the time. The press used to call 'urban renewal' 'negro removal'. This was said with a sour note of irony but changing demographics has proven to the only city planning technique that reliably works.

I actually moved from being a social worker to going to city planning school. However no one in grad school dared to recognize that 'negro removal' was underway in the real world. We read le Corbusier and were taught that the answer to urban blight was better design and architecture. My whole planning class was lily white, relentlessly liberal and earnest.

Today we worry that what happened to Detroit will spread, but the solution is there before us in the example of San Francisco.

Albertosaurus

Jefferson said...

"Mexican GDP/capita is more than 50% higher than that of China. China is still a poor country. Mexico really isn't, by world standards."

Mexico's GDP per capita maybe higher but too bad most Mexicans in the U.S do not behave like a 1st world people with their high rates of teenage mothers, high school drop outs, and a lot of Mexican youths joining street gangs.

Mexicans are not exactly an ethnic group that WASPs should strive to be just like.

Pat Boyle said...

I think you are misremembering The Information Super Highway. You are quite right about the idea that we would soon all be working from home and the there would be no more congestion on the real physical concrete freeways.

The actual term "Information Super Highway" stems from Al Gore. Or rather Al Gore's misunderstanding of the Internet.

Vint Cerf had asked Gore to help promote the Internet in the Senate and he did so. But Gore really didn't understand much. Newt Gingrich in the House who also had a reputation at the time as technically savvy was equally mystified by the new technology.

Gore was thinking in terms of circuit switching and mainframes. His father Senator Albert Gore Sr. had been the chair of the Roads Committee and was instrumental in the Eisenhower era Interstate Highway System.

Our Al Gore thought this new Internet thingee was like the defense highway network his father had worked on. He said so at the time. He also seemed to believe that all the computing was going to take place at the nodes - probably by the 'giant brains' of fifties Sci-Fi movies.

This is what makes his claim to have invented the Internet so risible. He never even knew what it was. That didn't keep him from promoting it or earning Cerf's gratitude.

As for everybody telecommuting - yes and no. I telecommuted for months for a software development company. The majority of the team were in San Jose and I never saw them in person until just before the company went bankrupt. Maybe there's a lesson there.

But telecommuting is all wrong for management. Every mid manager when I worked in government competed to have the office nearest the top guy's office. When I took an office near to my units and with a window they thought I was nuts. All the 'normal' bureaucrats crowded near the center of power. Like the song says - 'Cortigiani vil razza dannata'.

Albertosaurus

Bob Loblaw said...

Right. The term denotes the countries that were not aligned with the US (First World) or USSR (Second World) during the Cold War. It has nothing to do with race or prosperity.

The cold war is over. All "third world" means today is "poor country".

Anonymous said...

Why so little development north of San Francisco?

A quick google finds this wikipedia article on Marincello and its demise, which implies a lot about this question:

"... upheaval set the precedent for Marin County's rigid anti-development stance and push for open space. ...

... Marincello was originally conceived to house up to 30,000 people in 50 apartment towers...

...worried about the diminishing quality of life and the growing amount of development in the county, Marincello was looked at as the last straw... endless amounts of development...

The court ruled that the entire project was improperly zoned....

... the Marin Headlands was a crucial area to complete this national park. ...western director of The Nature Conservancy, met with the Gulf Oil Corporation about selling this valuable land to the park service.... After Gulf Oil lost their lawsuit... In 1972, the land was sold to the Nature Conservancy for $6.5 million and then transferred to the newly formed Golden Gate National Recreation Area."


Sometimes a national park around your border is even better than a strong fence. Though it doesn't seem to work that way on the southern border...

David Davenport said...

So Japan is "Third World" then? Or are we back in Apartheid South Africa where Japanese (and other East Asians) are "honorary whites"?

Japan has never been considered 3td World in post 1945 era.

Anonymous said...

Right. The term denotes the countries that were not aligned with the US (First World) or USSR (Second World) during the Cold War. It has nothing to do with race or prosperity.

It does have to do with race and to some extent prosperity in actual usage though.

The technical Cold War definitions weren't really applied in popular usage. "Second World" wasn't used much and is obviously used even less today. Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Finland, and Ireland were technically "Third World" by the Cold War definition, but the word generally wasn't used to signify them.

Anonymous said...

Blacks only tend to be racially integrated in big cities that do not have any majority Black neighborhoods, like Phoenix, Arizona and San Jose, California for example. Blacks in these 2 cities are pretty much evenly spread out everywhere and Blacks do not dominate any part of these cities.

Also, Anaheim they are pretty integrated, but Anaheim is only 2.8 percent black and most live in West Anaheim. In fact Orange County has the smallest black population among the largest counties at only 2 percent and only 65,000 blacks out of a county of 3.1 million. Chinese and Koreans and Vietnamese are more numerous than blacks ther.

Anonymous said...

Good move. My mother stays down there in the winter, near Bonita Springs. I went down to visit and catch some sun and was highly impressed by the Florida Gulf Coast
You are lucky, south Florid is Hispanic Cuban and others more so than even La. Miami was the hghest foreign born in the us. I would not go to Florida either its humid and it will be pretty foreign born in the future unless you are in the panhandle or places that retirees like.

Anonymous said...

Well, liberal has little to do with it, some moderate to conservative counties also have expensive real estate, Orange County for example. Blacks from La moved to the Inland empire instead because the OC is expensive when it comes to rent or housing. Hispanics and Asians are able to afford Orange County more because they rent or buy with relatives while blacks don't.

ben tillman said...

Check out "Peninsula Open Space Trust." Over 70,000 acres of land are now off the market - permanently. It's a liberal win-win: less land to develop = higher home prices, and you get credit for saving the environment..

It's also the ultimate in extreme immigration restriction: a permanent immigration moratorium applied to uninhabited land.

ben tillman said...

The cold war is over. All "third world" means today is "poor country".

Obviously, that's not true. To educated people, it means something else.

If you mean "poor country", say it.

Why take a term with a precise meaning and corrupt it so that it becomes a redundant synonym of an existing word? That's stupid and destructive.

Anonymous said...

Some folks with their heads buried in the sand for the past thirty years seem to be in denial about the fact that much of East Asia is now a part of the "First World" and increasingly richer and more technologically advanced than Southern and Eastern Europe.

Anyone who equates Mexico with East Asia hasn't been to either place in the last thirty years.

Even when it was poorer than Latin America due to war and conflict, East Asia was more literate and civilized.

jiggaboo said...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction

I spoke to a guy who works at one of the nuclear plants, and he told me they developed nuclear weapons, but never admitted to it. He could be full of crap though.

Anonymous said...

Some people may remember from musical references the 'Fillmore Auditorium'. Not just the auditorium but the whole black neighborhood around it was redeveloped out of existence. Not that was a bad thing. It was worth your life to ride the Fillmore bus for the length of it's route.

Yes, we remember the Fillmore District. I believe it was referred to in the film Dirty Harry, when Harry previously got in trouble for killing a naked man who was chasing a girl down an alley with a butcher knife.

jody said...

"Of course the Whites in San Francisco live well. Traitors always live well."

now this is a post.

Anonymous said...

Why so little development north of San Francisco?

If you're a SF lawyer who lives in Marin county and commutes across the Golden Gate, it's a good bet you're anti-immigration, immigration to Marin county that is. It's an Issue:

"Affordable housing is again a red flag in 'green' Marin County", LA Times, March 31, 2013.

"The issue has long produced conflict in the eco-friendly county, California's wealthiest. Officials are being urged to help workers find housing in a place where the median home price is $650,000. ...

...a place so environmentally friendly that hybrid-car ownership is four times the state average.


...No Bay Area county has more protected open space — or fewer workers who can afford to live anywhere near their jobs."

How convenient. One set of rules for thee, another for me, apparently. "Save the Planet!"

David Davenport said...

Didn't Jerry Garcia and other Grateful Dead-ers reside in Marin County?

Anonymous said...

How convenient. One set of rules for thee, another for me, apparently. "Save the Planet!"

Well, it beats the La model which has lots of Hispanics or the Houston Texas model with about 43 percent Hispanic and about 19 percent black. As I mention you can also have the Orange county model worst on Hispanics than San Fran but better overall than La or Houston for Hispanics and Blacks.

Anonymous said...

Will Today’s Hispanics Be Tomorrow’s Whites?" - given that they fought for their non-white racial classification, why would they go back on that? Likewise, if there were any incentive for them to identify as white, there'd be every incentive to hold them to their previous decision on the part of actual whites.

Hispanics are complex. There are many that don't do as well as whites or Asians but better than blacks. There are many that are moving into the upper middle class in Ca, Tx, AZ or NV or even NM and probably will marry whites. In fact La and Orange seem to be having more second and 3rd generation Mexicans moving up but there are still lots of illegals and their children. A small group of children of illegal immigrants do much better than the average. Once in a while you will read about a very good student here illegality but most are average or lower.

Anonymous said...

I spoke to a guy who works at one of the nuclear plants, and he told me they developed nuclear weapons, but never admitted to it. He could be full of crap though.

He is.

Nonetheless, Brazil is unique in all of America south of Rio Grande in that it has a functioning aviation industry and capable of nuclear power. However, the whole country is mired in extreme corruption and poverty (though such trends are less severe in the southern -- that is, European-settled -- part of the country).

But it never weaponized. Weaponization is not as easy as claimed. Only known non-NATO/Warsaw Pact countries to weaponize are China, Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan and North Korea.

Additionally a handful of others are capable of rapid weaponization: Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and so forth.

jiggaboo said...

The nuclear power plants are in Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo, that I know of. Both have a good amount of Europeans, but more mixed than the rest. Brazil inst as poor as you'd think. Even with all the nonwhites I am fully confident that Brazil will have first world level living. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd put money on it. Nonwhites just need a white ruling class and smart economic policy and widespread prosperity isn't out of the question.

Anonymous said...

Even with all the nonwhites I am fully confident that Brazil will have first world level living. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd put money on it.

You might lose that money. Although Brazil will likely become the most powerful country in South America (which isn't saying much), it is going to remain largely very poor. Despites its abundant natural resources, its population remains woefully uneducated and will continue to be so. Its politics are both corrupt and redistributist (which is being redundant). There is no prospect of it going "Tiger" any time soon.

A number of prominent Brazilian business tycoons have expressed similar sentiments -- that Brazil will remain poor due to its corruption and poorly educated workforce.

Jefferson said...

"There are many that are moving into the upper middle class in Ca, Tx, AZ or NV or even NM and probably will marry whites."

There also Blacks that move into the upper middle class but it does not change the fact that both Blacks and Hispanics as a whole are not a model Minority group.

Bob Loblaw said...

Obviously, that's not true. To educated people, it means something else.

No. No it doesn't. The meaning of the term has changed. It means "poor country" now. Nothing more. You're welcome to come up with your own pet definition, but "educated people" use the normal one.

Anonymous said...

The growth of the Hispanics in Texas needs to be addressed through education, economic improvement and job training or the state will become one of the poorest in the nation, a former U.S. Census Bureau official said Thursday.

Former director of the U.S. Census Bureau Steve Murdock discussed the demographic changes Texas has undergone in the past decade and the impact it will have on the state at the Texas Tribune's On the Road: A Symposium on Demographic Change on Friday at the Tomás Rivera Conference Room at the University of Texas at El Paso.
What we been saying been some Tea party right wingers think only tax cuts and low regulation. Same of course for California and the rest of the Southwest.

Anonymous said...

There also Blacks that move into the upper middle class but it does not change the fact that both Blacks and Hispanics as a whole are not a model Minority group.

True, that's why I wonder why the right has Texas as such a role model according to Steve Murodock Texas will go Mexican and poverty rates for Mexicans there are not any better than California, only Bexar County in Texas has a poverty rate under 20 percent for lots of Hispanics. Granted, if the right could really enforce employment laws against illegal immigrants and a million went home then Texas's rate of Hispanization would slow down but the state has at least 1.8 million and is only behind California in illegal Mexicans and Central Americans and does have a lot of 2nd generation Mexicans. I think the problem with the right its too much into classical liberal economic theory rather than ethnic and racial group theory that why it praises Texas to the skies.

Anonymous said...

Mexican GDP/capita is more than 50% higher than that of China. China is still a poor country. Mexico really isn't, by world standards.
True, its the rural part of Mexico that really sinks though life is still better in San Diego with Mexicans living 10 to an apartment than Tj but it was Pope John Paul that helped keep Mexican birthrates at 4 30 years ago why we have them pouring in for several years.