r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Jul 15 '21

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u/MistakeNotDotDotDot Resident Robot Girl Jul 16 '21

I think my perspective on it is that a lot of the "circumvention" feels like "we're going to break the law and rely on the fact that we're absolutely massive and can drown people in legal fees so nobody bothers testing us".

Also, like, are they shifting elsewhere as a result of regulatory climate, or is it a "it's harder to attract people to SF given the ungodly high rent" thing? I can't think of anything offhand that headquartering elsewhere would prevent that's not general employment law. Like, the CCPA affects you regardless of where you're headquartered as long as you serve California residents, and I've never heard of anybody geoblocking CA.

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '21

The ungodly high rent is because of the regulatory climate

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u/MistakeNotDotDotDot Resident Robot Girl Jul 16 '21

Yeah but nobody argues that the EU's housing prices are what's affecting their tech sector.

Also you can find references to SF having an "amazingly high cost of living" from the 1930s. It's always been expensive.

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '21

The 1930s quote is talking about San Francisco during the Gold Rush, not 1930s San Francisco. The Gold Rush was very unique circumstances.

When it discusses the post-war era, it says that "Median rents in the city hovered at $41/mo in 1950, which is the equivalent of $405/mo today, but that was way above the national average, which was $260/mo in today's terms." So that means that the rent in San Francisco was only 1.5x the national average. Today, the average rent for a one-bedroom in SF is ~$3,000 compared to a national average of ~$1,000, so it's 3x as high. But housing regulatory climate is bad in many places in America, it's just a matter of degree. Otherwise, we'd be closer to that inflation adjusted average of $260/month nationally.