It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

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There is a story being told about us here in the tech industry in San Francisco — that we are entitled, or that we are oblivious. I don’t believe that’s true. Or I don’t believe that it has to be true.

I’m worried that if we do not have a civil discussion soon, the situation will become violent or contentious beyond recognition. We have already seen rocks smash windows. Now, there are unidentified protesters stalking and harassing individual Google employees at their homes.

The bus protests during the last several months are a symptom of San Francisco’s perennial housing shortage, which has become especially pronounced with 75,000 people moving here over the last decade. Supply just hasn’t kept up with the city’s growth; San Francisco has added an average of 1,500 units every year for the last two decades.

This is a textbook supply-and-demand issue, which — Google buses or not — we can’t avoid. On top of that is another labyrinth of policy choices with unintended consequences like Proposition 13, rent control, the Ellis Act and an attitude of slow growth among those with influence over San Francisco’s permitting process. The bus protests are misguided, because taking buses off the road will increase traffic and it won’t reverse the tide of growth-stage companies that have decided to stay like Square, Twitter, Airbnb and Dropbox.

But they have done one good thing: they’ve pushed housing to the forefront of the mayor’s agenda. Last Friday, Mayor Ed Lee made a seven-point housing plan the centerpiece of his State of the City speech and announced plans to bring 30,000 new or rehabbed units online in the next six years. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.

This is not a new conflict. The Bay Area has two very strong historical legacies of social justice and technological solutionism. They seem more at war than ever, but this is a place where greed and idealism have always co-existed in a peculiar, and sometimes powerful, way. That potent combination created the Mac, which is celebrating its 30th birthday today, and put the world’s knowledge on smartphones in our pockets.

Recently, the tech industry has become a focal point of anger because there is such a jarring disconnect between the “Change The World” language of our industry and the very real and rising inequalities that sit in our own backyard.

Moreover, tech industry workers are increasingly treated like bankers during 2008 in the mainstream media. It’s strange considering how many people I know who came here because they wanted to work on hard, technical problems with meaningful impact.

I’m still researching what can be done, so this is a work in progress. Everyone is going to have to give a little.

Service As A Part of Company Culture

Somehow, somewhere, between my grandfather’s generation here in Silicon Valley and mine, our prevailing rhetoric changed from one of “service” to one of “changing the world.” There is a big gap between the two. The word “service” is deferential and empathetic to those around us, and “changing the world” is individualistic and full of hubris. We have to remember that with or without us, the world will change. That is its nature.

So we have to get back to a simple, humble place where we’re listening to the people that we share the city with. Maybe we’ll end up making more than “custom-designed, one-of-a-kind, bespoke” apps to communicate with our personal assistants.

Here’s an example: Zendesk, a San Francisco-based IPO candidate that was originally founded in Denmark, is running the “gold standard” of community benefit programs in the Tenderloin.

That’s according to Del Seymour, a former drug addict who now sits on the city’s Homeless Coordinating Board and gives tours to new Zendesk employees, so they can understand the history of the neighborhood they’re working in.

Seymour takes Zendesk employees to places like St. Anthony’s and the Gubbio Project, where hundreds of homeless people get to rest every day in the pews of the Tenderloin’s St. Boniface Church. He points out where he used to sleep in an old refrigerator bin during his six years on the streets, when he fell into drug abuse after working as a paramedic and firefighter for the city.

“I never thought I would end up there,” he told a crowd of Zendesk employees in front of St. Boniface’s doors.

The City Exposed: Touring the Tenderloin from San Francisco Chronicle on Vimeo.

Zendesk employees did about 1,400 hours of community service last year, doing everything from serving in soup kitchens to tutoring in the Tenderloin Tech Lab to hosting a tech camp for neighborhood kids. They are the only tech company receiving a payroll tax break from the city that won approval from the Citizens Advisory Committee for their community benefit program. The others, including Twitter, Yammer and One Kings Lane, all had their plans shot down this month. (All companies in the mid-Market area receiving the payroll tax break have to set up community benefit agreements.)

Community service has actually become a key recruiting tactic for the company, says the program’s creator Tiffany Apczynski, who spent four years as a journalist in the Tenderloin for the San Francisco Examiner before joining Zendesk.

“Other startups do all this stuff to build a culture. They bring in ping pong tables. They have happy hours,” she said. “But what we do to differentiate ourselves is our social responsibility. We want to avoid an Ivory Tower syndrome.”

Apczynski also knows that even as luxury apartment buildings sprout up on Market Street around Twitter’s headquarters, the Tenderloin won’t gentrify in a classic way. It can’t. Its single-room-occupancy residential hotels are protected by city laws and its historic non-profits like Glide and St. Anthony’s are politically powerful.

Other startups do all this stuff to build a culture. They bring in ping pong tables. They have happy hours. But what we do to differentiate ourselves is our social responsibility.

“Usually, gentrification swings all the way in one direction. But I feel like the Tenderloin is going to become a model for how to establish a truly mixed community,” she said. “San Francisco is a city of compassion. We take pride in our ability to accept everyone, no matter their condition.”

I want to be clear that I’m not promoting some kind of “white tech guy’s burden” or the notion that apps or college- or grad school-educated programmers can magically solve intractable problems like the drug abuse and mental illness that afflicts so many of our city’s chronically homeless.

But at the very least, this is just about empathy and understanding where others are coming from. This is about acknowledging that widening income inequality and media fragmentation have led us to a place where we can physically live on the same streets, and yet inhabit entirely different worlds.

While walking the Tenderloin with Seymour last week, I asked him what he thought people in San Francisco’s tech industry could do. He pointed at a group of teenagers on the street, who come in every day from the East Bay to sell dope at the corner of 6th and Market.

“Teach them how to code,” he said. “The only difference between them and someone in that nice building across the street is that they know how to code.”

The answers aren’t easy. They are time and resource-intensive, and they have to overcome so many of the inequities that are baked into the system to begin with.

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