As a clash over scooters highlights inequality and a housing crisis, techies and local residents feud over whos at fault
The cold war between San Francisco and the tech industry erupted into open hostilities again this month, when the overnight arrival of hundreds of motorized scooters across the city’s streetscape reignited tensions between the techies and the tech-nots.
The dockless electric scooters, which were distributed around San Francisco by three competing startups just as the city was preparing to pass legislation to regulate them, have become the latest symbol of competing visions for city living. To critics of the tech industry, they represent everything that is wrong with the “move fast and break things” ethos. To tech evangelists, they are further proof that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
But in a city whose streets are often littered with the symptoms of a housing affordability crisis and gaping wealth inequality – homeless encampments, human waste and discarded needles are impossible for the affluent to ignore – the scooter wars have evolved into a contentious debate over who is most to blame for making San Francisco so unlivable and who should be trusted to fix it.
“Why is it that we can have emergency action on scooters but we have needles on the sidewalk?” asked Sam Altman, president of the startup incubator Y Combinator. “The existing civic institutions that are supposed to make life better and more affordable and easier in the city have not done a good job.”
Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook product manager who has lived in San Francisco on and off for 20 years, expressed a similar sentiment on Twitter, where he described the city’s response to “streets covered in human shit, drug needles, and broken glass from an epidemic of property crime” as “meh”, while its response to “startups us[ing] private money for a citywide experiment in personal mobility” was “THIS OUTRAGE CANNOT STAND”.
When another user pointed out that the city spends hundreds of millions of dollars on services for the homeless and police, Martinez shot back: “In Silicon Valley we like to measure performance via outputs, not inputs.”
A year after tech’s favorite bad bro, Travis Kalanick, was ousted from his perch atop Uber, it’s no longer de rigueur for tech entrepreneurs to flash their wealth around or offer products designed exclusively to solve the problems plaguing the 1%. Instead, startups are making the case for their existence using the language of Bay Area liberalism.
“Not everyone can afford their own electric scooter,” Travis VanderZanden, the ex-Uber executive and current CEO of the scooter startup Bird, told the New York Times. “We shouldn’t discriminate against people that are renting versus owning.”
Altman, too, cast the scooter companies as a necessary corrective to the high cost of living in San Francisco. “We have an affordability crisis beyond anything I’d imagined, and when people see a startup that is trying to help people afford to live farther out, and it would really help people, and then they see that get taken away, I think people respond very badly,” he said.
Of course, the other side of the debate also claims the moral high ground. Advocacy groups for pedestrians, seniors and disabled people turned out in force at a city hearing to speak about the importance of keeping sidewalks clear for vulnerable populations. And anti-gentrification and affordable housing activists have long harbored animosity toward the affluent tech workers displacing lower-income renters from the city’s limited housing stock.
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