I find it strange that the protesters target tech workers. The real class war seems NIMBY-supported landlords vs everyone else, not crappy-paid vs well-paid workforce. But well, I'm not even in US so what do I know.
It's because mob psychology chooses targets based on visible availability. A Google employee boarding a special bus is visible - literally - in a way that his landlord is not. The reason mob psychology behaves that way in turn is because the coordination mechanisms used are very basic; thus, while individual members of the mob may be as intelligent as you or I, the mob as a collective entity necessarily behaves as though its intelligence were much more limited.
What to do about it?
At an individual level, if you're being targeted, say if you're on the receiving end of hostility from your neighbors, try talking to them, present yourself as a human being rather than a target. Read up on nonviolent communication. Explain what the real problem is.
At a collective level, fight fire with fire. Make the correct targets more visible. Find out the names, addresses and faces of individual landowners who have been primarily responsible for the political corruption. Publish them. Make them targets.
Or else get out of San Francisco. Seriously, tech workers have more intrinsic mobility than nearly anyone else does. Google could just decide to move its operations to a friendlier city tomorrow, and its net cost for doing so would be negative. If your startup has to be in San Francisco for the moment while you're raising capital, plan on getting out as soon as you have done so.
But don't move to San Francisco unless you are willing to get into the political fight; as things currently stand, that's like stepping into a boxing ring and then standing there with your eyes closed. You're just setting yourself up as a target.
Finding a usefull scapgoat to blame is a very common tactic by the 1% look at how beneift cliamants are demonised in the UK and simarly the scare stories the tabloids run about how polish plumbers cause cancer, killed lady diana eat swans and so on.
Inequality in the United States doesn't have to do with capital accumulation and wealth, at least not yet.
It has more to do with income inequality and a larger share of total income going to the very highest earners. The key driver of this upward distribution of income has been the steep rise in executive compensation.
The United States also redistributes far less through taxes than Europe. This leads to a wide gap between the very highest earners—those in the top 1.0% or even top 0.1%—and everyone else, including other high-wage earners.
As lotsofmangos has found average is 110k plus OT and a much better FS pension.
And in the UK Tube Drivers basic is £60k (plus OT Plus FS pension ) average dev salary in london is £50k (and that includes a lot of high paid city it types)
I don't have your numbers, but when you get them, remember that with government workers like BART employees, there's categorically more non-salary compensation - things like defined-benefit pension plans instead of 401(k) contributions getting deducted from your paycheck. Likewise the health-care plans.
This is all on top of some of the best job security in the world, too.
As of last strike (mid-2013) the average BART worker make around $130,000 including benefits but not including overtime. Including overtime one train operator made $175,000. And both these number are likely to underestimate future pension and medical costs.
Considering that, my guess is that the drivers are unionized and that it is really, really hard job to get, possibly harder than getting a job as a Google engineer (although for completely different reasons).
Its a valid target for the protestors. The tech workers have sufficient funds to become part of the existing class that supports the restrictions. Since they can't do anything about those already here they merely target those who increase the problem. The downward pressure increases as more and more people with the ability to pay the high rates move in causing prices to move up.
Face it, the protestors have a point. I have watched postings on this very site deride the suburb gated community members yet they turn around and defend the same if the setting is city based. Guarded/gated/etc condos/apartments are all fine, zoning rules forcing many to go to the suburbs to afford housing are fine, but damn if picking on techies living in the city who simple increase the problem is.
As before, they don't want YOU or THEM as neighbors so they will invent all sorts of politically correct sounding terms to insure that outcome.
There are times where it really makes sense to take zoning authority away from cities, especially when costs are demonstrably affected.
Gated suburbs are themselves NIMBY types that seek to exclude certain classes of people through politics and restrictive land use policies. Rich tech workers are generally not like this.
The secured condo building reflects the economic reality that land is expensive in San Francisco, and that housing requires security unless you like needles on the doorstep and bums pooping in your side alley. This is not hyperbole: housing in San Francisco carries a significant alley-pooping-bum risk. The only exclusion involved is a result of economic reality, and there is no way around it: someone has to be excluded from San Francisco, and you won't fix that situation by not building houses and not providing convenient transportation. That will just exclude more people. Which I think is what the protestors actually want (so long as the "right" people are excluded), but they haven't really pondered whether they are doing the right thing to achieve their distasteful ends; making them morally questionable and economically wrong.
Yes, the secured condo building is a symbol of wealth and exclusivity, just like the gated community, but to declare that these two things are essentially similar is a serious misunderstanding of the situation, probably motivated by a rich-vs-poor sort of thinking.
The secured condo building reflects the economic reality that land is expensive in San Francisco, and that housing requires security unless you like needles on the doorstep and bums pooping in your side alley. This is not hyperbole: housing in San Francisco carries a significant alley-pooping-bum risk.
So the reason people need secured condo enclaves is to avoid people of a different class.
The only exclusion involved is a result of economic reality, and there is no way around it: someone has to be excluded from San Francisco, and you won't fix that situation by not building houses and not providing convenient transportation.
Someone has to be excluded, it must certainly not be those new high paid workers colonizing the area!
Which I think is what the protestors actually want (so long as the "right" people are excluded), but they haven't really pondered whether they are doing the right thing to achieve their distasteful ends; making them morally questionable and economically wrong.
Of course, these people are protesting for their right to exclude the rich because they are mean. Losing their homes, being priced out of where they grew up, and being unable to access the new tech wealth has nothing to do with it, these protesters are just spiteful.
Yes, the secured condo building is a symbol of wealth and exclusivity, just like the gated community, but to declare that these two things are essentially similar is a serious misunderstanding of the situation, probably motivated by a rich-vs-poor sort of thinking.
When people of a higher class mobility move to a location and erect barriers physical and economic to prevent "undesireables" from living or existing there, its the same phenomenon regardless of building type.
So the reason people need secured condo enclaves is to avoid people of a different class.
Well, I guess if you put it that way, yeah: the class that leaves human waste in your alley-ways and might break into your home to steal your laptop. Everyone excludes them if they're in your neighborhood. There are plenty of historic iron bars on the windows of historic homes in San Francisco.
That is the same argument the dockers used when they marched for Enoch Powell against black emigrants in the UK back in the 60's think about what your saying this is like saying well the KK have a point about these uppity <ethnic slur>
I agree with you. The First Estate (landlords, investors and executives, paid enough to own houses) has been dicking over the Second Estate (engineers, able to live in SF but not save or buy houses) through no-poach agreements, collusive arrangements (note-sharing among VCs) blocking them from starting new businesses, and increasingly mean-spirited HR policies (stack ranking). The Third Estate (everyone else) is being evicted and abused by the rent-seeking First Estate.
Somehow, the First Estate managed to convince the Third Estate that it's the Second Estate's fault, hence the bus attacks. It's not. I'm not so out-of-touch that I'd call $120,000 per year, in any city, "poor" because it's not; but neither is it "rich" and these tech workers are not responsible for this NIMBY nonsense.
A similar situation is behind the Economist existing, as about 200 years ago in the UK they had a strange setup with land owning aristocrats, free market industrialists, and proto-communist "Chartists". The aristocrats found unlikely allies in the Chartists, though it didn't help in the long run.
The free market types were concerned about the Corn Laws, and formed the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corn_Law_League , and their journal ended up becoming the Economist. The Corn Laws effectively subsidised the aristocracy, and prevented free labour movement, first by keeping cost of living too high (through cost of food) secondly by keeping people working on otherwise unviable farms to produce corn. The Chartists were so preoccupied with the idea that the industrialists wanted to drive wages down they missed the bigger picture.
This seems to always be the case - people turn on neighboring socioeconomic classes, not the ones at the extreme top of the pyramid. During the Jim Crow era, the worst discrimination against blacks came not from the elite (many of whom had been abolitionists during slavery and equality-minded liberals afterwards), but from poor white sharecroppers who were one degree removed from slavery themselves. Nowadays, the conservative movement within the U.S. is composed of the ultra-wealthy plus the lower-middle-class and working-class Religious Right. The targets of the LA race riots were not rich white people, but Korean shopkeepers in minority neighborhoods.
I suspect it's because it's generally impossible to "skip" social classes and jump directly from the bottom to the top. Even rags-to-riches stories usually involved a period of a few decades where the person enters and assimilates into the intervening classes. Jan Koum went from immigrant to middle-class tech worker to aspiring entrepreneur to multi-billionaire. Henry Ford went from farmer to machinist to engineer to captain of industry. Andrew Carnegie went from immigrant to bobbin boy to telegraph operator to bookkeeper & investor to steel magnate.
As a result, each class views the class directly above them as their impediment to upwards mobility, and they're not wrong in that belief. In times of scarcity, resentment usually flows upwards to their immediate neighbors. The more distant causes of the socioeconomic structures that hold people down are effectively invisible to the rioting classes; all they see is people who are not very different from themselves doing better than them.
All salaries should just be spoken of with respect to their purchasing power, not qty of dollars per year.
A 120k salary in sf has the same purchasing power of a 50k salary in other states (according to some studies from a few years ago, and id suspect it has gotten worse)
The annual income required just to afford a monthly rent in SF is insane. Assuming that many 1bed apts are ~3,000 per month, youd need to make north of 50k just to cover the rent - let alone all other living expenses...
Somehow, the First Estate managed to convince the Third Estate that it's the Second Estate's fault, hence the bus attacks. It's not.
Tech workers most certainly share some blame. When you accept work with those companies and move out to the valley, you are contributing to the culture of evictions and hyper gentrification that affect that area. You don't get to wash your hands clean.
I don't think I can be held accountable for the higher order consequences of my normal, everyday decisions. Researching the complex interactions of a local economy and deciding to disincentivize things by not moving there? Not buying the yoghurt from a food corporation that's 'evil' in one category, yet trying to be exemplary in another?
Whether you want to be accountable or not, you are to a certain degree complicit in those things if you choose to pursue them. Obviously systemic issues are hard to deal with as an individual, but nobody should have blinders on about what exactly is going on when they move, when they take a new job, or when they consume a product.
The question is the size of the degree of complicity. That degree, for a salaried tech-worker, is really fucking tiny. There is no alternative choice he could make that would have visibly better consequences, nor would there be any power in an attempt to have tech-workers in general boycott living in overly-expensive metros (since there are no nongentrifying metros with tech jobs).
On a bit of additional thought, the best move anyone could make in that position would be to seek a tech job in a metro area or municipality that has pro-proletarian housing/development policies, and to try to effect such policies in general.
Paying more for something than someone else isn't a moral dilemma, even when it is housing. A renter just doesn't have ownership rights when it comes to rising prices.
If you got a job driving the Bart and moved there you would be getting about the same as an engineering start wage at google. Are Bart drivers also to blame, given the wages are similar? And if not, why not?
I wouldn't say "blame", because blame carries a whiff of malfeasance that just isn't there.
But "cause"? I do see a different cause, mainly because of scale. Dental Hygienists earn about as much as software developers in SF (about 106k vs 110k a year, according to use news best jobs). But do Dental Hygienists displace people to the same extent? Of course not. Dental practices, which draw most of their business from the local population, just can't create enough six figure DH jobs to displace the population they serve.
Tech, on the other hand, sells outside the region. Not sure what Facebook's SF-based revenue is as a percentage of total, but it's got to be minuscule compared to a dental practice.
Tech workers may not earn much more (median) than nurses or DH's, but they can exist in vastly, vastly larger numbers in a particular region. This can cause large scale displacement that other low six figure jobs can't cause.
And why should other cities act differently to San-Francisco?
And if other cities do act differently to San-Francisco and expand and take on these new people, then why isn't San-Francisco also able to do this in the first place?
You seem to think they have a choice. Most tech workers don't want to live in the Bay Area. They're forced to live there because their careers require it.
VC is a feudalistic, oligarchic reputation economy, concentrated in a tiny (now congested and overpriced) geographic area. Since they're not content to be passive investors (although their portfolios would perform better than they were) but want to actively manage, they only fund companies within 30 miles of them.
Tech workers don't have much of a choice. If you want to have a career in this game, you have to live where the jobs are.
While agree about VC being feudalistic and oligarchic, that doesn't mean tech workers don't have choice in where the work to some degree. There are many kinds of software development for many different companies in different locations, not to mention remote work. If you choose to pursue an opportunity in the valley, that has very real consequences and realities and that should be fully examined, and that includes knowing that you may be contributing to displacement and gentrification.
EDIT: For the record, I've been a tech worker for a while and have never lived in California (except when I was a wee child).
I worked for 7 years in NYC, considered the #2 tech hub. (Obviously, there's a huge gap between #1 and #2.) I'd almost certainly be an angel investor by now if I spent that time in SV. People about as talented as I am (and, some, significantly less) are now EIRs and partners at reputable VC firms, or even able to found. Place matters.
I'm not poor, but I'm not where I should be, and probably not where I would be if I'd started in SF. (Why I chose NYC would take too long to explain. It's not relevant.)
Once you have a national reputation and can get $250+ per hour consulting rates, you can live whereever you want. It takes a while to get there. Most people have to put in their decade in a congested, expensive, and not very pleasant region of the country before getting there (and some never do).
As for remote work, it has the same issues. If you have a national reputation already, you can get away with it. Most places, remote workers don't really advance their careers and are the first ones axed.
If your goal is to assimilate into certain wealth classes, then it probably doesn't matter to you about the socioeconomic conditions of people you displace or how a city changes as people like yourself pursue that wealth. I those things do matter to you, I would expect that you'd be highly critical of VCs and investing culture.
Once you have a national reputation and can get $250+ per hour consulting rates, you can live whereever you want. It takes a while to get there. Most people have to put in their decade in a congested, expensive, and not very pleasant region of the country before getting there (and some never do).
As for remote work, it has the same issues. If you have a national reputation already, you can get away with it. Most places, remote workers don't really advance their careers and are the first ones axed.
For what it's worth, I started my career in NYC in a really depressed market and made peanuts for my work as a software dev. I command nowhere near that kind of money now nor do I want to, but I'm paid very well compared to many friends and people in NYC and I have no trouble surviving gentrification effects on rent. But that survival is a privileged, I've seen tons of people driven out of the city because their skills and credentials are not valued by business. To that end, I am highly privileged, I don't have to flee because I'm part of a career class that is riding high right now.
Comments
I find it strange that the protesters target tech workers. The real class war seems NIMBY-supported landlords vs everyone else, not crappy-paid vs well-paid workforce. But well, I'm not even in US so what do I know.
It's because mob psychology chooses targets based on visible availability. A Google employee boarding a special bus is visible - literally - in a way that his landlord is not. The reason mob psychology behaves that way in turn is because the coordination mechanisms used are very basic; thus, while individual members of the mob may be as intelligent as you or I, the mob as a collective entity necessarily behaves as though its intelligence were much more limited.
What to do about it?
At an individual level, if you're being targeted, say if you're on the receiving end of hostility from your neighbors, try talking to them, present yourself as a human being rather than a target. Read up on nonviolent communication. Explain what the real problem is.
At a collective level, fight fire with fire. Make the correct targets more visible. Find out the names, addresses and faces of individual landowners who have been primarily responsible for the political corruption. Publish them. Make them targets.
Or else get out of San Francisco. Seriously, tech workers have more intrinsic mobility than nearly anyone else does. Google could just decide to move its operations to a friendlier city tomorrow, and its net cost for doing so would be negative. If your startup has to be in San Francisco for the moment while you're raising capital, plan on getting out as soon as you have done so.
But don't move to San Francisco unless you are willing to get into the political fight; as things currently stand, that's like stepping into a boxing ring and then standing there with your eyes closed. You're just setting yourself up as a target.
Finding a usefull scapgoat to blame is a very common tactic by the 1% look at how beneift cliamants are demonised in the UK and simarly the scare stories the tabloids run about how polish plumbers cause cancer, killed lady diana eat swans and so on.
Nerds are trivial to beat up for their lunch money. Sad, but still true.
Inequality in the United States doesn't have to do with capital accumulation and wealth, at least not yet.
It has more to do with income inequality and a larger share of total income going to the very highest earners. The key driver of this upward distribution of income has been the steep rise in executive compensation.
The United States also redistributes far less through taxes than Europe. This leads to a wide gap between the very highest earners—those in the top 1.0% or even top 0.1%—and everyone else, including other high-wage earners.
But they are not going after the executives are they FWIW a bart train driver makes as much as a googler and after overtime probaly more.
I've seen the salaries of BART train drivers and I'm pretty sure you're wrong. That or Googlers don't make as much as I thought.
Either way I'm not buying this statement until I see some actual numbers.
Many Bart drivers appear to be making around $110k http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area?Entity=Bay%20Ar... and Google apparently pays an average base salary of ~$125k, and Microsoft at an average of ~$100k.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-highest-paid-softw...
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-highest-paid-softw...
As lotsofmangos has found average is 110k plus OT and a much better FS pension.
And in the UK Tube Drivers basic is £60k (plus OT Plus FS pension ) average dev salary in london is £50k (and that includes a lot of high paid city it types)
I don't have your numbers, but when you get them, remember that with government workers like BART employees, there's categorically more non-salary compensation - things like defined-benefit pension plans instead of 401(k) contributions getting deducted from your paycheck. Likewise the health-care plans.
This is all on top of some of the best job security in the world, too.
As of last strike (mid-2013) the average BART worker make around $130,000 including benefits but not including overtime. Including overtime one train operator made $175,000. And both these number are likely to underestimate future pension and medical costs.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/07/are-bar...
Considering that, my guess is that the drivers are unionized and that it is really, really hard job to get, possibly harder than getting a job as a Google engineer (although for completely different reasons).
Its a valid target for the protestors. The tech workers have sufficient funds to become part of the existing class that supports the restrictions. Since they can't do anything about those already here they merely target those who increase the problem. The downward pressure increases as more and more people with the ability to pay the high rates move in causing prices to move up.
Face it, the protestors have a point. I have watched postings on this very site deride the suburb gated community members yet they turn around and defend the same if the setting is city based. Guarded/gated/etc condos/apartments are all fine, zoning rules forcing many to go to the suburbs to afford housing are fine, but damn if picking on techies living in the city who simple increase the problem is.
As before, they don't want YOU or THEM as neighbors so they will invent all sorts of politically correct sounding terms to insure that outcome.
There are times where it really makes sense to take zoning authority away from cities, especially when costs are demonstrably affected.
Gated suburbs are themselves NIMBY types that seek to exclude certain classes of people through politics and restrictive land use policies. Rich tech workers are generally not like this.
The secured condo building reflects the economic reality that land is expensive in San Francisco, and that housing requires security unless you like needles on the doorstep and bums pooping in your side alley. This is not hyperbole: housing in San Francisco carries a significant alley-pooping-bum risk. The only exclusion involved is a result of economic reality, and there is no way around it: someone has to be excluded from San Francisco, and you won't fix that situation by not building houses and not providing convenient transportation. That will just exclude more people. Which I think is what the protestors actually want (so long as the "right" people are excluded), but they haven't really pondered whether they are doing the right thing to achieve their distasteful ends; making them morally questionable and economically wrong.
Yes, the secured condo building is a symbol of wealth and exclusivity, just like the gated community, but to declare that these two things are essentially similar is a serious misunderstanding of the situation, probably motivated by a rich-vs-poor sort of thinking.
So the reason people need secured condo enclaves is to avoid people of a different class.
Someone has to be excluded, it must certainly not be those new high paid workers colonizing the area!
Of course, these people are protesting for their right to exclude the rich because they are mean. Losing their homes, being priced out of where they grew up, and being unable to access the new tech wealth has nothing to do with it, these protesters are just spiteful.
When people of a higher class mobility move to a location and erect barriers physical and economic to prevent "undesireables" from living or existing there, its the same phenomenon regardless of building type.
Well, I guess if you put it that way, yeah: the class that leaves human waste in your alley-ways and might break into your home to steal your laptop. Everyone excludes them if they're in your neighborhood. There are plenty of historic iron bars on the windows of historic homes in San Francisco.
Are there locks on your door?
That is the same argument the dockers used when they marched for Enoch Powell against black emigrants in the UK back in the 60's think about what your saying this is like saying well the KK have a point about these uppity <ethnic slur>
I agree with you. The First Estate (landlords, investors and executives, paid enough to own houses) has been dicking over the Second Estate (engineers, able to live in SF but not save or buy houses) through no-poach agreements, collusive arrangements (note-sharing among VCs) blocking them from starting new businesses, and increasingly mean-spirited HR policies (stack ranking). The Third Estate (everyone else) is being evicted and abused by the rent-seeking First Estate.
Somehow, the First Estate managed to convince the Third Estate that it's the Second Estate's fault, hence the bus attacks. It's not. I'm not so out-of-touch that I'd call $120,000 per year, in any city, "poor" because it's not; but neither is it "rich" and these tech workers are not responsible for this NIMBY nonsense.
A similar situation is behind the Economist existing, as about 200 years ago in the UK they had a strange setup with land owning aristocrats, free market industrialists, and proto-communist "Chartists". The aristocrats found unlikely allies in the Chartists, though it didn't help in the long run.
The free market types were concerned about the Corn Laws, and formed the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corn_Law_League , and their journal ended up becoming the Economist. The Corn Laws effectively subsidised the aristocracy, and prevented free labour movement, first by keeping cost of living too high (through cost of food) secondly by keeping people working on otherwise unviable farms to produce corn. The Chartists were so preoccupied with the idea that the industrialists wanted to drive wages down they missed the bigger picture.
This seems to always be the case - people turn on neighboring socioeconomic classes, not the ones at the extreme top of the pyramid. During the Jim Crow era, the worst discrimination against blacks came not from the elite (many of whom had been abolitionists during slavery and equality-minded liberals afterwards), but from poor white sharecroppers who were one degree removed from slavery themselves. Nowadays, the conservative movement within the U.S. is composed of the ultra-wealthy plus the lower-middle-class and working-class Religious Right. The targets of the LA race riots were not rich white people, but Korean shopkeepers in minority neighborhoods.
I suspect it's because it's generally impossible to "skip" social classes and jump directly from the bottom to the top. Even rags-to-riches stories usually involved a period of a few decades where the person enters and assimilates into the intervening classes. Jan Koum went from immigrant to middle-class tech worker to aspiring entrepreneur to multi-billionaire. Henry Ford went from farmer to machinist to engineer to captain of industry. Andrew Carnegie went from immigrant to bobbin boy to telegraph operator to bookkeeper & investor to steel magnate.
As a result, each class views the class directly above them as their impediment to upwards mobility, and they're not wrong in that belief. In times of scarcity, resentment usually flows upwards to their immediate neighbors. The more distant causes of the socioeconomic structures that hold people down are effectively invisible to the rioting classes; all they see is people who are not very different from themselves doing better than them.
All salaries should just be spoken of with respect to their purchasing power, not qty of dollars per year.
A 120k salary in sf has the same purchasing power of a 50k salary in other states (according to some studies from a few years ago, and id suspect it has gotten worse)
The annual income required just to afford a monthly rent in SF is insane. Assuming that many 1bed apts are ~3,000 per month, youd need to make north of 50k just to cover the rent - let alone all other living expenses...
yeh i am loking at a well paid job in london uk and I will still end up geting paid a lot less than a tube driver does and a much worse pension.
Btw I am not saying that tube divers dont deserve thier sallary just pointing out how poorly techies are treated in the UK
Tech workers most certainly share some blame. When you accept work with those companies and move out to the valley, you are contributing to the culture of evictions and hyper gentrification that affect that area. You don't get to wash your hands clean.
I don't think I can be held accountable for the higher order consequences of my normal, everyday decisions. Researching the complex interactions of a local economy and deciding to disincentivize things by not moving there? Not buying the yoghurt from a food corporation that's 'evil' in one category, yet trying to be exemplary in another?
I that doesn't work morally, nor practically.
Whether you want to be accountable or not, you are to a certain degree complicit in those things if you choose to pursue them. Obviously systemic issues are hard to deal with as an individual, but nobody should have blinders on about what exactly is going on when they move, when they take a new job, or when they consume a product.
The question is the size of the degree of complicity. That degree, for a salaried tech-worker, is really fucking tiny. There is no alternative choice he could make that would have visibly better consequences, nor would there be any power in an attempt to have tech-workers in general boycott living in overly-expensive metros (since there are no nongentrifying metros with tech jobs).
On a bit of additional thought, the best move anyone could make in that position would be to seek a tech job in a metro area or municipality that has pro-proletarian housing/development policies, and to try to effect such policies in general.
Paying more for something than someone else isn't a moral dilemma, even when it is housing. A renter just doesn't have ownership rights when it comes to rising prices.
If you got a job driving the Bart and moved there you would be getting about the same as an engineering start wage at google. Are Bart drivers also to blame, given the wages are similar? And if not, why not?
I wouldn't say "blame", because blame carries a whiff of malfeasance that just isn't there.
But "cause"? I do see a different cause, mainly because of scale. Dental Hygienists earn about as much as software developers in SF (about 106k vs 110k a year, according to use news best jobs). But do Dental Hygienists displace people to the same extent? Of course not. Dental practices, which draw most of their business from the local population, just can't create enough six figure DH jobs to displace the population they serve.
Tech, on the other hand, sells outside the region. Not sure what Facebook's SF-based revenue is as a percentage of total, but it's got to be minuscule compared to a dental practice.
Tech workers may not earn much more (median) than nurses or DH's, but they can exist in vastly, vastly larger numbers in a particular region. This can cause large scale displacement that other low six figure jobs can't cause.
Where should the companies relocate then?
And why should other cities act differently to San-Francisco?
And if other cities do act differently to San-Francisco and expand and take on these new people, then why isn't San-Francisco also able to do this in the first place?
You seem to think they have a choice. Most tech workers don't want to live in the Bay Area. They're forced to live there because their careers require it.
VC is a feudalistic, oligarchic reputation economy, concentrated in a tiny (now congested and overpriced) geographic area. Since they're not content to be passive investors (although their portfolios would perform better than they were) but want to actively manage, they only fund companies within 30 miles of them.
Tech workers don't have much of a choice. If you want to have a career in this game, you have to live where the jobs are.
While agree about VC being feudalistic and oligarchic, that doesn't mean tech workers don't have choice in where the work to some degree. There are many kinds of software development for many different companies in different locations, not to mention remote work. If you choose to pursue an opportunity in the valley, that has very real consequences and realities and that should be fully examined, and that includes knowing that you may be contributing to displacement and gentrification.
EDIT: For the record, I've been a tech worker for a while and have never lived in California (except when I was a wee child).
I worked for 7 years in NYC, considered the #2 tech hub. (Obviously, there's a huge gap between #1 and #2.) I'd almost certainly be an angel investor by now if I spent that time in SV. People about as talented as I am (and, some, significantly less) are now EIRs and partners at reputable VC firms, or even able to found. Place matters.
I'm not poor, but I'm not where I should be, and probably not where I would be if I'd started in SF. (Why I chose NYC would take too long to explain. It's not relevant.)
Once you have a national reputation and can get $250+ per hour consulting rates, you can live whereever you want. It takes a while to get there. Most people have to put in their decade in a congested, expensive, and not very pleasant region of the country before getting there (and some never do).
As for remote work, it has the same issues. If you have a national reputation already, you can get away with it. Most places, remote workers don't really advance their careers and are the first ones axed.
If your goal is to assimilate into certain wealth classes, then it probably doesn't matter to you about the socioeconomic conditions of people you displace or how a city changes as people like yourself pursue that wealth. I those things do matter to you, I would expect that you'd be highly critical of VCs and investing culture.
For what it's worth, I started my career in NYC in a really depressed market and made peanuts for my work as a software dev. I command nowhere near that kind of money now nor do I want to, but I'm paid very well compared to many friends and people in NYC and I have no trouble surviving gentrification effects on rent. But that survival is a privileged, I've seen tons of people driven out of the city because their skills and credentials are not valued by business. To that end, I am highly privileged, I don't have to flee because I'm part of a career class that is riding high right now.