A little tech love for the new year

I sympathize with the tech workers; I can see things from their point of view. After all, they’ve been training their whole lives for a good job in a cool city. Their employer is even kind enough to provide free shuttle buses to their place of employment, so they can still live in the cool city on the rare occasions when they are able to enjoy a personal life.

I have arrived in new cities to take new jobs. It ain’t easy. Cities are hard for newcomers to figure out. Where’s the best supermarket? Is there a dry cleaner anywhere close? Where should one eat if one is eating out? These are all things that one doesn’t know, all things one is concentrating on.

I didn’t think of myself as part of a demographic movement when I arrived in a new town, although I was certainly part of a statistical profile. (Since both times, I moved from the Bay Area to cities much bigger than San Francisco, I suppose I was part of the durable trend of people moving to bigger cities. No one hated me for that, though.)

Tech workers may not have time to think about their citizenship in San Francisco. They may be more involved with their jobs than with thinking about the imploding middle class. They may think they are middle class, because a six-figure salary in San Francisco lands you precisely there.

And if it’s in the low six figures, it’s not quite that comfortable middle class that people tend to visualize. No, it’s still balance-your-checkbook middle class, stay on budget and hope for a bonus. So they’re not exactly flush either, and making them feel like evil masters of the universe because they take a free bus to work — hardly fair.

I think it’s an easy way out, to blame the workers, to yell at them and leaflet against them. They’re just people trying to make it and, if possible, have some fun along the way. That’s what we’re all trying to do, one way or another.

No, there’s a reason San Francisco has become a ghetto for the 1 percent. It has to do with city policies. If the city can see its way to making San Francisco a boomtown, it will do so. Boomtown economy plus finite living space equals unaffordable housing.

Naturally, landlords are looking to cash in. This is capitalism, friends. It’s not meant to be warm and fuzzy. If they can find a way to drive out the schoolteachers and the civil servants and replace them with young affluent people who are hardly ever at home — great. Go for it.

Sell those houses. Churn that market. Look at those gaudy prices! Everybody wins.

Everybody who’s on the money train, that is. Since the money train starts at City Hall — remember, City Hall likes the money train — it stands to reason that all its policies would be of the train-enabling sort. But getting mad at City Hall is cheap and easy. More interesting to get mad at the envy-inducing young people who are running the future.

Or think they are running the future. It doesn’t matter which is true. The attitude is the same.

But really, give them a break. They’re wage slaves who got lucky. Yes, we all want to be wage slaves who get lucky, but it ain’t going to happen. Blame the valuation of Internet companies; blame the mountains of cash the tech companies are rolling in. Once the system starts grinding, there’s no stopping it — and the next thing you know you’re living in two bedrooms, 1½ baths in Tracy and getting up before dawn to start your commute.

We should smile at each other now. We should remember that bust always follows boom, and things will not always be thus, and many people will lose their jobs just when they were getting used to the perks. We’re all going to be messed around by the economy, and fortune does not necessarily favor the bold.

And maybe San Francisco should figure out a way to get affordable housing for its teachers. You want your teachers to be part of the community; you want them to understand the neighborhood. You want them to have a short commute so they can stay longer teaching your children. Surely solving the housing problem would be a lot more useful than, say, making Google pay a fee for its free shuttle service. Less attention to style, more to substance — always good advice, rarely followed.