Yesterday evening Don and I discussed the rental situation in the city, and we realized that there really is no place here for working class people anymore. Since the big internet companies like Guggle, Twatter, and fazebuk (misspellings deliberate, as I don't want to get sued by the bastards) discovered that their programmers and marketing sleazebags love the place, rents have gone sky-high, public transit has gone down, city services have become more unavailable due to inefficiency coupled with increased demand, pot holes have increased, and the entitled asshole quotient evinced by new arrivals has gone through the roof.
Plainly put, thanks to high-tech, this city has become unbearable, unlivable, unaffordable.
On the other hand, real-estate speculators are making a killing, and the corrupt political establishment is just fine with that.
Party politics in San Francisco has always been on the side of slum landlords.
The present city government is no exception.
Frankly, I do not care if Valencia Street is a hell-hole filled with rabid yuppies. And the inbred Keltic element out in the avenues can go hang. As well as the illiterates in the projects, and the syphilitics infesting the club scene.
But there are so many of them now that despite the obscene profits that well-connected players enjoy, the city is fast becoming unbearable.
In slightly over two weeks, half a million people will flock in to enjoy the Chinese New Year Parade.
Which will be great, except that it doesn't feel like a festive occasion at present.
There are commercial vacancies on every block in C'town.
And massive residential overcrowding.
Plus increased poverty.
Two days before New Year, and the local Chinatown population has scant cause for celebration. Drug-addicted non-Chinese lurk in the alleyways, jobs are scarce, families live cramped together in ever-more un-affordable studio apartments. Businesses are dying because of over-regulation, the increased burden of city services, enormously expanded poverty, and a complete lack of favourable attention by city hall and the Democratic Party commissars.
Folks, I understand that the ONLY reason for Chinatown in your eyes is to draw in tourists to gawk at the colourful primitives. The more the merrier. Who cares that the midwestern scumbuckets don't drop any money in Chinatown, when the very fact that they are paying to stay in over-priced hotel rooms and eat chain pizza and burgers makes it all worthwhile?
Poverty, malnutrition, hopelessness?
Oooh, colourful!
How about employing some Cantonese speakers (or other natives) in your hotels, fancy restaurants, bars, and designer clothing stores?
We can't afford to spend money here, but that's okay.
Our expectations headed south years ago.
But we'll work to escape.
Or just survive.
How come every time I go to Macys, I hear Tagalog from the snippy shop girls? And who let in all these dumbass trustfund bimbos? The Filipinos should stay in Daly City, the in-migration of consumerite blonde sluts and jock-slime from FlyoverStan should be discouraged.
That bunch of shitty criminals and vulgarinas from the East Bay should go back.
There's room in Hayward and Fremont for them.
Or in Oakland, across the Bay.
Screw Oakland.
There's something seriously effed up about this city if all you care about is the real-estate boom and squeezing the tourists, and won't actually allow local people to escape poverty.
More than that, it's racist and discriminatory.
And for craps-sakes, STOP encouraging the Euries!
I keep hearing French and German here.
From well-dressed people.
Obvious imports.
By the way, the sewers don't work, potholes on several streets (for instance, Van Ness between Union and Lombard) are big enough to drown in, PG&E is a piss-poor excuse for a utility company, public transit is horrendous, and emergency services suck.
Enjoy that parade two weeks hence.
We won't be there.
We live in this shithole.
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4 comments:
Wow, things are that bad? I always hear a lot of bitching from my cousin in SF (now Daly City), but he's a Marxist, so I always ignore most of what he says.
Well, the Cantonese population is not sharing in the boom, and many people are being priced out of housing by soaring rents. Guggle and Twatter employees have put a real crunch on the market.
The apartment that Savage Kitten and I live in could go for four thousand a month now. We're not paying anything near that; we've been here for more than twenty years.
Un-employment has hit the C'town community really hard; the collapse of the garment industry was economically crippling for a great many people.
Of course, educated white twenty-somethings complain about our rents, but many of them make more than entire Chinese families.
map
That map is one hundred percent correct.
Except, possibly for the subs and oysters.
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