Does this industry (to the extent that you can call AirBNB, Uber, and Twitter the same industry) really act like a flock of grackles or starlings, descending on a place, eating everything, and moving on?
This is causing rents to increase noticeably in nearly every major urban area. Couple that with relatively high pay for tech sector jobs that like to hire these younger folks and you get it even worse in SF, Seattle, etc.
[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...
I know a number of people here who are praying for a tech crash so they can afford housing again.
I moved to Mountain View in 2009. In late 2008 (as the crisis was hitting the stock market, but before landlords had realized it would affect them), a realtor was showing me around, and I asked about a swanky corporate apartment complex we drove by. "Oh, that's out of your price range - they charge $2000+/month." I ended up living there for $1400/month in 2009-2010, then they started jacking up the rent. When I left in 2013, they turned around and rented it for $2700/month.
If art and culture are so valuable to us why are those who create these things so poor? Why do people cringe at buying an album for $9 but then spend $11 on a coffee and a biscuit?
But there is also artistry in creating a coffee or dining experience, and hopefully that money spent on the meal and coffee goes more to the chef artist who prepared the meal, the architect artist who designed the space, and the line cook, waitress and dishwasher.
If anything music is overvalued. I'm surprised we haven't automated Skrillex and all that house crap yet. ;-)
Why is a Picasso worth more than paint?
The artists shouldn't have balked at taking a class in economics.
I've seen quite a few people here wanting high-rise residential buildings in San Francisco to alleviate the high rents there. A skyscraper is at least 40 floors, according to wikipedia and one rule of thumb I've seen puts the construction time for them at 1 month per floor, from ground breaking to completion. That's about 4 years in construction, plus design and planning time, plus site acquisition. That's five, six years (more?), total, even in the most positive political atmosphere.
Someone who wanted to alleviate SF's high rents today, assuming you could do that by building high-rise apartment buildings, would had to have started at the height of the construction bust. That would be, I think, before San Francisco proper's tech boom, i.e. before there was a problem evident.
And if you started building one today,... Once upon a time, Intel planned to build a 10 story office building in downtown Austin. They stopped, with nothing but the structure of the building up, in 2001. The incomplete building was demolished in 2007.
Meanwhile, in the real world, if attitudes and policies were to start shifting, 15 to 20 years is probably a more realistic planning horizon.
