On Startups, Gentrification, and Getting Mugged in West Oakland
The Bay Area is a cocktail of snake oil and golden eggs, of contrasts and contradictions. There are beautiful expanses of water, and yet a crippling drought. Technology companies mint thousands of new millionaires every year, while thousands of others drop off into poverty or homelessness.
I recently went to a board-game night hosted by Eventbrite, replete with craft beer and gourmet sliders. Eventbrite is a trendy San Francisco startup — the best way to buy tickets to Bob Dylan’s next show. They were hosting a party to celebrate their new office, and to unobtrusively highlight the long list of job openings they were hoping to fill. The market for “top tech talent” is such that it makes perfect economic sense to throw a top tech party in hopes of reeling in one or two résumés.
And yet, while leaving the party, I had to sidestep two men sleeping just outside of Eventbrite’s offices. The contrast of feast and famine is overwhelming: of wealth, employment, and especially housing.
Gentrification is perhaps the most divisive contrast in the Bay Area.
It inspires interesting debates and worthwhile discussions, as well as protests and angry clashes.
I haven’t seen the contradictions of gentrification anywhere as clearly as in my own neighborhood of West Oakland. Dirt bikes roar down my street in weekday-afternoon drag races, and yet a few hours later, Teslas and BMWs drive down the same road on their way home from work. The Financial District in San Francisco, while only ten minutes away from me via BART, has a median monthly rent about six times as high as mine.
While gentrification is a rather abstract macroeconomic concept, it can be illustrated well through individual anecdotes. Have you seen the YouTube video of Dropbox employees clashing with Latino teenagers over a soccer field? Have you read Peter Shih’s vitriolic rant against San Francisco and its homeless population? Gentrification fuels the tensions that surface in these confrontations.
The story of my arrival to West Oakland is primarily a tale of gentrification. The son of a startup co-founder and a second-generation computer science professor, I spent 22 years in the Midwest before shipping out to try my hand at entrepreneuring. West Oakland provided the cheapest housing without sacrificing access to smart people doing interesting work in the Bay.
About two months after I arrived, I was mugged on a Thursday afternoon. The incident itself was nondescript — I was punched in the face several times and lost $20— but it sparked a lot of reflection: Should I not have moved to West Oakland? What could make the neighborhood a safer place?
My mugging is a snapshot perspective of West Oakland in flux. The two empty lots near my house have since been fenced off in preparation for future development. Gentrification is in the air, and there aren't any obvious answers for how to make the neighborhood a better place for everyone who lives there.
I expect that West Oakland will continue to “get nice” as housing prices unceremoniously push poor families out of the neighborhood. The influx of tech money will warrant an increasing police force, which will cut down on petty and violent crime. Unfortunately, muggings won’t just disappear — they’ll be brushed aside to new low-income areas, yet-unblessed by tech workers’ arrivals.
Gentrification is a game of hot-potato with poor people. It is a rising tide that does not lift all boats; it capsizes many too small to ride the swell.
Gentrification is certainly an unsolved challenge, but I believe it is also an untapped opportunity.
The contradiction here is that the tech industry puts its best and brightest engineers and capitalists on the task of achieving market dominance for on-demand laundry services or food-delivery apps. Who’s working on problems that, from a societal perspective, actually need to be solved? We’re all going to die in a decade or six, and no one will remember who monopolized San Francisco’s food-delivery market. Why not work on something that matters?
To be fair, you can point that barb at me too. My startup is an online community for thought-provoking conversations — it’s not going to solve world hunger. But it’s fueled by a vision of what online communication could look like. In my wildest dreams, Discoverboard could foment discussions that influence international policy-making. If your work has a mission you believe in, I think that’s good enough — but don’t settle for working on whatever you find interesting. If your mission is to disrupt laundry, then I think you need slightly wilder dreams. As Richard Hamming said:
“If you do not work on an important problem,
it’s unlikely you’ll do important work.”
Gentrification is not the world’s most important problem. But it’s close to home for the Bay Area, and that makes it a good place to start. How could tech companies turn gentrification into an opportunity? Build large-scale complexes with affordable housing and private education. Focus curricula on technical skills with the goal of placing high-school graduates into colleges or Hack Reactor-style bootcamps. Develop top tech talent by training it from a young age, not by giving away gourmet sliders to engineers like me. Rather than exiling poor families, empower them to contribute to the Bay Area’s wealth. Could it work? Maybe.
The Bay Area is betting on horse races — someone is going to win, but most of the money will get burned in the competition. If more people build businesses that address social issues, some will make billions and some will make a difference.
Tech companies have unprecedented power to solve the world’s problems.
Let’s focus on the important ones.
