A variety of factors -- some strange rent laws intended (ironically) to protect tenants, lack of new units, overabundance of millionaires -- have resulted in a situation where housing in San Francisco is rapidly exceeding a price where ordinary people can afford it. If you're not making 100k+ per year, you will have trouble finding a nice one bedroom home, let alone more bedrooms. At the same time, many of the newly rich CS folks don't actually work in the city -- they work an hour away in the valley.
So companies have provided the awesome service -- as you mention -- of running busses. The buses sometimes use bus stops reserved for city buses. That itself isn't such a big deal. But within this specific context, the buses have become a symbol of the class strife in the area.
From the perspective of long-time SF residents: Here you have private buses illegally stopping in a zone reserved for the public, paid for by the taxes of the long-time residents quickly getting priced out of their own [rented] homes, which each day take their new neighbors to jobs that pay the wages, inflated by the economies of scale that come with the internet, that are the cause of the meteoric housing price rise.
From the perspective of San Francisco's nouveau riche: real estate is just another market, and SF is a market undergoing rapid change in which there will be winners and losers, and while it sucks to be a loser, that is inevitable as the "rich" and "not rich" zones of housing move around geographically, as they inevitably always will.
The stance of most people on both sides is, of course, somewhere in the middle, empathetic to the situation both sides find themselves in.
The anger isn't about the buses; it's about the evictions. The buses are just a symbol that attracts the activists' attention. (The activists are mostly transplants too, living out some fantasy that they're fighting capitalism, but whatever.) Nevertheless, here's why it's so vivid:
San Francisco is a city of extreme wealth contrasts in a nation of extreme wealth contrasts.
And many young tech workers want to live in places like the Mission, which are gentrifying but traditionally working class, ethnic neighborhoods, with a strong tradition of bohemia too.
So, picture this: a line of zillionaire white kids in geek t-shirts and laptop backpacks, waiting on a street corner that is caked with human filth and stinking in the sunshine. They are surrounded by ethnic (often undocumented) immigrants, and homeless people limping by, sometimes with untreated open wounds. Then a giant black monolith of a bus swoops down on the corner, releasing a whiff of air-conditioned comfort as the doors open, and whisks all those kids far, far away, to their playground offices.
True story: in the early days of the Google Bus, the contracting company sometimes ran out of buses. So they would have to dispatch other large vehicles instead.
You cannot imagine the burning looks I got stepping into a stretch limousine on 16th and Mission.
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A variety of factors -- some strange rent laws intended (ironically) to protect tenants, lack of new units, overabundance of millionaires -- have resulted in a situation where housing in San Francisco is rapidly exceeding a price where ordinary people can afford it. If you're not making 100k+ per year, you will have trouble finding a nice one bedroom home, let alone more bedrooms. At the same time, many of the newly rich CS folks don't actually work in the city -- they work an hour away in the valley.
So companies have provided the awesome service -- as you mention -- of running busses. The buses sometimes use bus stops reserved for city buses. That itself isn't such a big deal. But within this specific context, the buses have become a symbol of the class strife in the area.
From the perspective of long-time SF residents: Here you have private buses illegally stopping in a zone reserved for the public, paid for by the taxes of the long-time residents quickly getting priced out of their own [rented] homes, which each day take their new neighbors to jobs that pay the wages, inflated by the economies of scale that come with the internet, that are the cause of the meteoric housing price rise.
From the perspective of San Francisco's nouveau riche: real estate is just another market, and SF is a market undergoing rapid change in which there will be winners and losers, and while it sucks to be a loser, that is inevitable as the "rich" and "not rich" zones of housing move around geographically, as they inevitably always will.
The stance of most people on both sides is, of course, somewhere in the middle, empathetic to the situation both sides find themselves in.
eob is correct, more or less.
The anger isn't about the buses; it's about the evictions. The buses are just a symbol that attracts the activists' attention. (The activists are mostly transplants too, living out some fantasy that they're fighting capitalism, but whatever.) Nevertheless, here's why it's so vivid:
San Francisco is a city of extreme wealth contrasts in a nation of extreme wealth contrasts.
And many young tech workers want to live in places like the Mission, which are gentrifying but traditionally working class, ethnic neighborhoods, with a strong tradition of bohemia too.
So, picture this: a line of zillionaire white kids in geek t-shirts and laptop backpacks, waiting on a street corner that is caked with human filth and stinking in the sunshine. They are surrounded by ethnic (often undocumented) immigrants, and homeless people limping by, sometimes with untreated open wounds. Then a giant black monolith of a bus swoops down on the corner, releasing a whiff of air-conditioned comfort as the doors open, and whisks all those kids far, far away, to their playground offices.
True story: in the early days of the Google Bus, the contracting company sometimes ran out of buses. So they would have to dispatch other large vehicles instead.
You cannot imagine the burning looks I got stepping into a stretch limousine on 16th and Mission.