The little things I learned in the valley
gigpeppers.comMy first impressions of San Francisco were quite opposite of yours -- it was ugly, dirty, smelly and scary. I went for a conference and was in a nice hotel downtown. I went out to grab some dinner at night and couldn't wait to get back, lots of weirdos out on the street. I've been to cities all over the world and never felt as uncomfortable as I did in SF. Maybe I just got unlucky that night...
What the others said. I had similar experiences for basically the first 10 years of my visits to SF - I never really got beyond the Moscone Center / The W Hotel / 3rd Street and that 10-square-block area was my impression of SF.
But having lived here now for almost 2 years, that impression is just so wrong. It's a TINY fraction of SF, and that is not what SF is about. Next time you're here, find a boutique hotel in the Marina, or Pacific Heights, or Russian Hill, or the Mission and Uber over to your conference/meetings (the city's small enough that it's $10-$15 each way).
That's the SF that people love (or hate ;)
So your advice is - to enjoy SF, stay in the expensive areas, and get a taxi if you need to go through the poor areas, or the parts where there might be homeless people?
Do people ever go to poor areas to enjoy themselves? Wouldn't that be some form of poverty tourism? I don't see any reason to lash out at the comment you're replying to. Saying "these are fun areas in SF (or any city)" is not a political comment. For all you know the commenter you replied to volunteers in shelters, and donates to charities that aid the homeless.
> Do people ever go to poor areas to enjoy themselves?
Absolutely! There are many poor areas in London (Whitechapel, Brixton or Dalston, for example) but the idea that you would have to avoid them is crazy. In fact there are great reasons to visit them - the best Indian or Pakistani food in the city is in Whitechapel, the music scene in Brixton is amazing, there are great clubs in Dalston if you don't mind the hipsters.
How has SF let things get so bad that there is a major area of the city that people are told to actively avoid because of all the homeless people?
Some of the best clubs in the city are in the Tenderloin. Some of the best music venues are in areas that are "questionable". Same with the various theaters, the symphony, the opera, etc. They are always packed with people. People who live here don't have an issue going to those places.
I think you're reading the parent's comment in a particularly negative light. My take-away was along the lines of "take a cab, because it's too far to walk".
I might disagree slightly in that it's easy to hop on metro or BART from the Mission, but if you're in the marina I think taking Uber downtown is totally defensible. Hell, if you're new to the city and don't feel like mucking around with public transit taking a cab is a pretty routine thing to do.
You did not get unlucky. The Tenderloin is (rightly) considered the worst part of San Francisco, but this spills out quickly into Union Square and Downtown. I've witnessed homeless guys beating each other with brooms in front of a nice restaurant downtown. I've witnessed the sous chef from a Union Square restaurant getting into a fistfight with a guy on the street who was trying to lift some produce that was getting loaded into his kitchen. You have to be careful not to step on needles in Yerba Buena gardens.
The only reedeming quality about the Tenderloin is that you expect it to be sketchy and disgusting. When one pays out the nose to be at a giant tech conference at Moscone, or spends hundreds of dollars a night on a hotel room in Union Square, one is very surprised how disgusting that part of the city is.
This was exactly how I felt. I just didn't get the charm.
I have lived and traveled to dozens of major cities around the world. I am an above average sized former linebacker and I felt genuinely unsafe almost every time I went out at night in SF and was walking around. It almost as bad as Tijuana.
SF has tons of potential as a city, but the homeless just ruin it. If SF is so great to it's homeless, then why are they everywhere and making everyone uncomfortable?
I don't know if the problem is wealth inequality or a culture in SF that sees homelessness as a viable lifestyle, but it's just sad.
I am not saying get rid of them by kicking them out. I am saying give them a place to live and sleep so they aren't living on the streets, it's just inhumane.
San Francisco is slightly unusual among major American cities in that what could very well be areas of prime real estate downtown along Market street are in fact kind of seedy or even dangerous. It's kind of like what I imagine some parts of Manhattan or downtown DC were like in the late 80's, complete with the run down front-and-center strip clubs and weirdly anachronistic porn theaters.
I don't have a particularly good explanation for this. However, most of what defines SF as a city isn't really along Market St, or even downtown for that matter. It's a city of neighborhoods, and without venturing out from downtown you haven't really experienced what the city has to offer. I moved away last year, and still think of SF as one of the world's most interesting cities.
Union Square is one of the most touristy parts yet with a couple wrong turns you're in some very sketchy areas.
I remember once being a hotel ~15 years ago that was 5 or 6 blocks along (I think) Geary from Union Square - when I told the taxi driver where I wanted to go he said "Do you really want to go there?".
The direction I got from the chap on reception were interesting - basically walk up the hill two blocks and along and back down to Union Square - he was very clear on not walking directly to Union Square. Of course, I did try walking directly back myself late one night - took taxis after that!
I find it even worse. I often stay at Parc 55 and there's a liquor store about 3 doors down that is a nightmare just to walk by. It's a sad sight to see watching homeless people spending the little money they have on booze in the heart of the new Silicon Valley. It's that feeling where you don't know the solution but the problem is so pervasive that you truly feel powerless. You know right from wrong but feel powerless in the easy amoral apathy.
Yeah, you were probably in the Tenderloin. The worst part of the city.
What was most off putting on my last trip to SF was the juxtaposition of the yuppie and homeless worlds. It wasn't uncommon to see long lines for local chic coffee shops full of young, well-to-do individuals while the homeless begged, urinated and defacated on the same stretch of sidewalk to often no acknowledgement by the former group.
I live in NYC so I see homeless people every day, but here you don't see such an unsettling and stark contrast between them and the non-homeless.
That seems to be largest complaint I hear from tourists. SF takes care of their homeless. Matter of fact, SF programs are so good we have a problem with other states sending their homeless specifically to SF[1]. I'm from Chicago where the homeless don't have nearly the same advantages as they do here in SF(particularly the weather).
There were encampments in Grant Park in Chicago and they were forcibly removed by the police both in '68 and just a few years ago[2]. Which, again, is in stark contrast to something like Golden Gate Park here in SF where there has been a large homeless encampment for at least as long as I have lived here and probably longer[3]. That shit would just not fly in Chicago but I do like that SF actually takes care of everyone and not just the people that know the right people.
[1]http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/09/11/2602391/san-franc...
[2]http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-10-16/news/chi-occup...
[3]http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/despite-improvement-5...
I'm not sure that I agree with you. I don't equate allowing homeless encampments with "taking care" of them. Many of these people have mental illness and / or drug addiction that is being ignored by the city.
I feel like San Francisco (and some of the other nearby municipalities like Berkeley) have this lassez faire mentality when it comes to their homeless population where they think that interfering would be a bad thing. That this acceptance is a healthy thing. That some guy in a tent in Golden Gate Park who yells things at passers-by and chases dogs is somehow a charming slice of life in the city and contributes to its uniqueness and not that this poor guy might benefit from antipsychotics.
But again, that's just a feeling I get that I can't really back up with anything but anecdotal evidence.
Chicago is certainly no better in terms of taking care of its homeless, as you point out: the city and state have been deprioritizing spending for years. Homeless shelters, community health organizations, addiction centers have been losing state funding and having to get federal and private grants to get by (when they can get by; certainly the number of beds available are shrinking.)
But Chicago isn't proud of the status quo and I'm surprised that San Francisco, well, seems to be.
I don't understand your second graf; you seem to be referring to an Occupy protest as an "encampment of homeless people", but those two things obviously aren't equivalent.
San Francisco differs from Chicago on homelessness in two significant ways: the weather and environment is amenable year-round, while Chicago is inhospitable for 1/4 of the year, and San Francisco's politics regarding homeless people are "hands-off".
Based on the last spot counts I could find, Chicago and San Francisco have roughly comparable homeless populations, despite the fact that Chicago is more than 3x larger. That difference is not simply because Las Vegas busses homeless people to SF.
I dispute the notion that SF does a particularly good job taking care of homeless people. It's indeed possible that SF does a better job of this than Chicago and NYC, both of which see clusters of indigent people on the streets as a quality-of-life problem for residents. But if you can find a source that says SF is doing a good job of actually delivering services and getting homeless people off the streets and into society, I'd like to read it; the sources I've found say the opposite.
The CPD definitely makes it a priority to treat people as "blight" in the more touristy areas(Grant Park, Loop, Navy Pier, North Ave. Beach, etc); be it protestors or homeless people, they're quick to, literally in some cases, extricate them from the area. The Occupy protests in NYC turned into an encampment of people for some time. They weren't homeless people, but I fail to see the difference between an encampment of homeless in a public space vs an encampment of protestors in a public space. If there's nothing from stopping the protestors, I assume they will protest indefinitely, thus they'll be "living" in Grant Park for some time.
Someone on here had mentioned something I never thought of before, and it might be a cop out I don't know but "quality of life" isn't something for people of authority or higher societal status to figure out for another person. To put it another way, just because a person is living on the street doesn't mean that person doesn't want to live on the street and you, as an individual, shouldn't make such assumptions. They may seem to be in a bad state, but, perhaps, that's their lifestyle. SF is hands-off for that reason.
The services exist in SF for those who want treatment; a homeless person may subsist on the nice weather and any government social services alone if they choose that lifestyle. People go in and get their treatment, food, medicine, blankets, etc. and then they're on their way back to their living area.
Is it right for me to judge them based on their lifestyle? Should the government insist that they're living incorrectly and explain to them that they're messed up in the head and that normal people don't want to live on the streets?
Three things:
1. The difference between an Occupy encampment and a clustered homeless population is that the Occupy encampment is there to disrupt the surrounding area (that's the point: to generate awareness) and the homeless cluster is there for safety and convenience --- in other words, for the intrinsic benefit of the people in the cluster. Policy responses to those two different circumstances aren't comparable.
2. I do not disagree that displacing organic, emergent clusters of homeless people to improve optics and quality of life for residents and tourists is an unfriendly and probably unhelpful policy response to homelessness. It is not my contention that shuttling homeless people out of the Mag Mile in Chicago is a positive step. This is, however, the standard policy response to homelessness in much of the US (not just Chicago), because the overwhelming majority of urban residents want it to be.
3. The relativism underpinning your sentiment about not judging the lifestyle of the homeless is disquieting. Homeless people aren't hobos. They aren't deliberately living a different lifestyle. They are an underserved population of mentally ill, substance-dependent people continually victimized by their circumstances through lack of medical care, death by exposure, and crime. Let me help you out: it is OK to judge homelessness as bad. Homelessness is bad.
1. Regardless, I believe the Occupy movement in NYC wasn't very disruptive. It was more of a peaceful protest. So I was going off that.
3. While I agree a large percentage of the homeless in Chicago are as you describe; it seems, at least from what I've read, SF contains a large enough percentage of homeless people that also seem to choose the lifestyle.
http://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/22/homeless-by-choice/
Read the comments for more insight into the mindset.
The belief that homeless people in SF want to be homeless and should be left alone to be homeless does a pretty good job of encapsulating the qualms people have about how SF deals with homelessness.
This is a good article on homelessness in SF and the industry that has grown up to support them: http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_4_san-francisco-homeless...
"Finally, the homelessness advocates pulled out their trump card: associating supporters of the Civil Sidewalks law with “business interests.” San Francisco “progressives” regard businessmen as aliens within the body politic whose main function is to provide an inexhaustible well of funds to transfer to the city’s social-services empire. If it weren’t for vigilant politicians, however, the interlopers would constantly seek to duck this ever-growing civic obligation. “If these corporations pay their fair share,” supervisor John Avalos explained in 2009 when introducing a new business tax, “we can generate millions that will go towards keeping health clinics, youth and senior services, and jobs safe for San Franciscans.” (The contradiction between raising business taxes and keeping jobs safe was lost on Avalos.)"
That's because Bloomberg moved all the homeless to the Bronx and outskirts of the city...
There is hope on the streets. The cogs of the American economy seem like moving.
[...]
A lot of people are homeless. Every year I visit it’s increasing. Maybe I am using the wrong streets. I am surprised there’s no startup to fix this.
Seems like he's missed the elephant in the room.
The tech sector's cogs are moving at an increasingly rapid pace whereas nearly everyone else has been jammed to a standstill or losing ground since 2008. The proliterian hatred of the tech sector is based on jealousy and misplaced blame for the fallout caused by gentrification which follows higher incomes.
The homeless are the most blatant casualties of a depressed economy, but rest assured, there are countless others who suffer without falling onto the streets.
I don't think you understand what the phrase "elephant in the room" means. If lots of people are talking about something (and certainly, a lot of people are talking about the tech sector vs the rest of the economy) then it's not the elephant in the room.
(and certainly, a lot of people are talking about the tech sector vs the rest of the economy)
I'm not sure they're talking about it in the tech sector, though.
Sure they are. Whether arguing for or against it, they're talking about it. Not everyone, certainly, but enough that "elephant in the room" seems an inappropriate description.
Homelessness in SF is a lot more complicated than that. With a mild climate, political sympathy (and associated city services), and lots of tourists to panhandle... SF is something of a destination for the homeless who can manage it.
I laughed out loud at the last sentence.
Are you implying that the two are mutually exclusive? Solving homelessness is not an economic problem. There are so many factors involved, that you can have a great economy with low unemployment but tons of homeless people.
Getting to 0% homelessness would require more than just economic action, but homelessness is still an economic issue.
Only in the sense that everything is an economic issue. My understanding is that mental illness is still the leading cause of homelessness.
Yes because the crazy guy outside my office yelling at the brick wall just needs a job, and he'll be living in a home in no time.
But that's my point. Only 39% of homeless people have mental issues[1]. It's not correct to characterise homelessness as caused by mental problems.
Sure, it may not be the leading cause. But the homeless that people are usually referring to when they talk about San Francisco's homeless problem, are the ones with mental issues or addiction problems. I rarely ever see the regular, sane, homeless people sprawled across the sidewalk in the middle of the day. It's always the drug addicts or the mentally ill.
Well sure. People come to the conclusion that most homeless are crazy or addicts based on what they see. Of course they only ever see crazies and addicts. They're the loudest, the weirdest, the scariest, the least self-aware, and the least likely to have any kind of refuge.
The rest of the homeless are hiding from the myriad threads, difficulties and humiliations they're exposed to on a daily basis. The regular, sane, homeless people don't want to be sprawled across a sidewalk in the middle of the day. They want to watch over their stuff, or try to find food or medical assistance or clothing, or solicit donations, or try to contact estranged family/friends, or whatever else they can do to survive.
>Solving homelessness is not an economic problem
Of course it is. If housing were not so expensive, there would be no "homeless" population.
> Palo Alto, Mountain View etc. are no more part of Silicon Valley
Seems somewhat exaggerated to me. There's definitely a shift from the valley to the city (and Palantir eating up all available space in PA sure catalyzes this process), but I wouldn't say PA/MV are "no more part of SV".
The sexy, consumer-focused startups are in SF and where people want to be. Down in Mountain View & Palo Alto is where the VCs, unsexy B2B startups (Box), and accelerators (YC/500) are thriving. 20 something bachelors & DINCs want to live in the city where it's fun and happening whereas mothers/fathers would rather raise a family in the suburbia of the peninsula. I won't deny the trend towards SF as VCs and accelerators are making a presence there but most are not replacing their HQs in the peninsula.
for reference, DINC = double income no children
Probably true. However, I do like the "observations from an outsider" perspective. He came to the bay area and spent all his time in SF. Therefore, from at least one persons perspective, SF is Silicon Valley and PA/MV aren't.
> A lot of people are homeless. Every year I visit it’s increasing. Maybe I am using the wrong streets. I am surprised there’s no startup to fix this.
Does he mean a startup to help him avoid streets with homeless, or a startup to solve the homeless problem?
"A startup to solve the homeless problem" is the Golden Hammer Antipattern in action.
"We have software startups and they're amazing, so they can solve any problem".
Being surprised it doesn't exist is not the same as having faith that they could definitively solve it.
I certainly hope we wasn't referring to a startup to help you avoid the homeless. Taken in context, I believe he's referring to the widening income gap and would therefore not be advocating simply avoiding them.
A startup to fix the homeless problem? Good luck.
Agreed about the "good luck" thing. I wonder if this is a common reality disconnect thing going on in the SF startup world.
Homelessness and poverty aren't entrepreneurial problems to be solved by a startup. They are profound socioeconomic and mental health problems that require a big change beyond what's possible with a new social app thingy or an iOS gadget or an agile web framework or whatever. It probably requires country-wide or world-wide political and economic policy change. It's also something that has been going on for centuries, and I doubt this was because there weren't enough enthusiastic startup entrepreneurs in the world.
That I have to even say this makes me wonder if the startup guys in SF are actually Martians experimenting on us Earthlings.
Homelessness is an amazingly intractable problem. In Boston even though crews are dispatched to bring the homeless to shelters during cold snaps they still die on the street because you can't forcibly make them get into the van.
Probably avoid streets since his next bullet is "A lot of socially driven business is just pure BS."
Solving the homeless problem would be a socially driven business and that would make it BS and not worth doing.
I think you're reading it wrong.
What he's saying is: many socially-driven businesses are pure BS. That doesn't mean he doesn't believe that a genuine socially-driven business can be built to solve that problem.
I think what the author means is that a lot of the businesses CLAIMING to be "socially driven" are pure BS, not that the very idea of a socially driven business is inherently BS.
Which would make sense to me.
lol wat?
That's an..'interesting' parsing of what he's saying. Is it just me or is it fairly apparent to most others that he's likely saying he's surprised that homelessness in general isn't being tackled (without speaking to the likelihood of success) by a startup, and he then follows by stating the obvious: that most startups who talk about 'changing the world' are blowing smoke. Of course, the unstated insinuation being that a startup aiming to reduce homelessness would actually be worthy of that title. Not sure why you jumped to the least generous interpretation possible but I'd bet a lot of money that there's no there there.
>> But the increasing divide in between the rich and the poor and the nouveau riche will only hurt in long term. History has taught us that. I hope my American friends will learn this for the larger good.
Every time I hear this, I wonder if people just don't know that we lift more people out of poverty every year, or its just such a common misconception that is now engrained in our culture.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/10/land-of-opportunity-almost-...
"Land of opportunity: Of the 1.8M net increase in global millionaires last year, more than 9 out of 10 were Americans"
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/09/17/2633881/poverty-...
"The official poverty rate was essentially unchanged at 15.1 percent in 2012, and alternative measures show that safety net programs like food stamps, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and tax credits for the working poor keep tens of millions of Americans out of poverty each year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday."
Maybe we have different ideas of what poor is?
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-pov...
"“The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.”[3] In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation.[4] In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker."
TFA struck me as mostly harmless anecdotal observations of a twenty-something living in a bubble. But
A lot of people are homeless. Every year I visit it’s increasing. Maybe I am using the wrong streets. I am surprised there’s no startup to fix this.
indicated a whole new level of bubble-induced cluelessness. If we take him at his word, that he really is 'surprised' by this, his incapacity for any thoughtful awareness undermines the whole piece.
"Quite a few companies are built by people who have no passion for that business. They are in the axis mundi to strike gold. It makes me sad."
Worked or is working for Tony Hsieh @Zappos who couldn't give a crap about shoes.
I realize the author is actually talking about start-up founders and not CEO's of successful corporations, but we should be weary of the advice that you must be passionate about your market/product to be successful.
You don't need to be passionate about the product of your business. Tony Hsieh may not care that much about shoes, but he cares tremendously about customer service and employee satisfaction. He's not making happy shoes, he's making happy customers and happy employees.
Frankly, lots of businesses don't require "passion" in the eros sense about the product. One doesn't become passionate about dry cleaning, or transmission overhauls, or phlebotomy. The vast majority of jobs pay because they're necessary but not interesting. Products that inspire deep passion, like music or farming, rarely pay well, because passion is its own reward.
If you want to make money, become really good at doing something that doesn't inspire passion, preferably something that most people really hate or fear. Get rewarded with pride in quality work, and the pay that comes with doing something that sucks for people who need it done.
> If you want to make money, become really good at doing something that doesn't inspire passion, preferably something that most people really hate or fear.
Excellent point. The British have a saying for this: "where there's muck, there's brass." (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/where-the...)
He didn't say they can't be successful.
> "This future is “only” mobile. I thought it is mobile."
I wouldn't mind seeing more expansion on that thought. Maybe it's because I spend so much time on the computer for work, but I still think there is a LONG ways to go before you can have the same experience with applications or sites on your mobile device that your desktop gives you. I will never want to be locked down to such a small screen for everything. And things like touch screens (at any size) are far from perfect verse the precision you can get with a mouse.
Yes, I think the future is mobile, for certain categories of business. I just think we are still very far from saying that statement applies to everything in the tech industry, or any industry for that matter. I think a better statement is the future is "mobile enabled" meaning you have to have a way to use the site or app on the go (mobile), but that doesn't mean it's the ideal way to interact with the product 100% of the time.
The "future is mobile" thought isn't saying that mobile experiences are superior to desktop experiences. In fact it's almost a tacit acknowledgment of the opposite.
Think about it this way: Google Maps on desktop is IMO much, much more useful than Google Maps on my phone. I can fit a lot more search results, things are much easier to see at a glance, I don't have to zoom in so far to see important map features, etc etc.
But ultimately I still use Maps on my phone a lot more than I do on desktop, because I need maps a lot more while I'm out and about than when I'm sitting still.
Ditto shopping. Surfing Amazon on a desktop is probably always going to be a superior experience to doing it on mobile, but as smartphones get better and connectivity improves, more and more people are going to want to quickly buy something (e.g., notice you need a pack of razors as you're heading out the door - use your phone instead of sitting down at your desktop).
And what we're seeing - at least from the few companies I've had the opportunity to watch this from - is that even traditionally "desktop" use cases are increasingly mobile. Looking for something to do with your significant other this weekend? That used to be a desktop use case, but it's increasingly mobile as well, even though it is of course not an intrinsically or obviously mobile thing to do.
"The future is mobile" means "people want to use this on mobiles, even though it's going to be strictly worse than the desktop experience, so you can either try to close the desktop-mobile UX gap as much as possible or watch your users bleed off to your competitors". The corollary to that is also "you should try to find actual mobile-centric use cases for your product so that your mobile product isn't just a slightly crappier clone of your desktop product".
>>>`A lot of people are homeless. Every year I visit it’s increasing. Maybe I am using the wrong streets. I am surprised there’s no startup to fix this.`
https://handup.us/ is tackling the challenge of direct donations to homeless.
> Palo Alto, Mountain View etc. are no more part of Silicon Valley. SF is the happening city. Cent percent of my meetings were in SF. The last time I was here its was distributed between University Ave, PA, Castro Mountain View and SF
The big Silicon Valley companies apparently haven't gotten the message yet. The Wikipedia article on Silicon Valley [1] has a list of 32 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Silicon Valley. Only one of them is headquartered in San Francisco.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Silicon_Valley&old...
>>>"Ironically there is a lot of hatred among the locals about “tech” but I was honestly surprised since the west coast is largely transient population."
It's interesting to note the parallels between SF and Bangalore in this aspect.
San Fransisco is a dirty, two-fisted drinking town.
I grew up in the Bay and my family has been there 4 generations now. The tech sector is a small part of SF and SF is a small part of the Bay and California as well. There are millions of teachers, janitors, dentists and accountants that live in the Bay too. Most of these people couldn't care less about tech. They care about Prop 13. The care about the police; my town was a This American Life special [0] on corruption. They care about traditions and family; Pittsburgh is owned by old mafiosi from way back [1]. They care about stable jobs; Telegraph is nothing but burning out asians and burnt out hippies [2][3]. They care about fun and freedom; SF clears out for the Burn every year more and more [4]. Tech, though rich, is a fad and we can all see it. The impression I get is that it's a bunch of trustafarians and credit cards playing around because there still aren't any good jobs left over from 2008 and no-one knows what to do 6 years on.
SF will be who lives, works, goes to PTS meetings, runs for Geary Revitalization seats, goes to A's and Raider's games, and cleans the streets. Not doughy guys staring at screens and pretending they can make Soylent real (really, how uncool can you be?) Unless it's got bourbon in it, most people in the Bay could care less.
[0]http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/447/t...
[1]http://mafia.wikia.com/wiki/San_Jose_crime_family
[2]http://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data
[3]http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/Council_4/Elected_Officials_and...
[4]http://blog.burningman.com/2013/09/news/black-rock-city-2013...
> A lot of people are homeless. Every year I visit it’s increasing. Maybe I am using the wrong streets. I am surprised there’s no startup to fix this.
Do we really think startups are the silver bullet to solve all of the world's problems?