[00:00:00] Speaker A: Today on Podcast by the Bay. Part two of our discussion with the author, Carrie McLellan, of the book Silicon City, San Francisco and The Long Shadow of the Valley.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: There is too much of this conversation which is happening at a particular level or is happening with only particular stakeholders at the table. And we need to begin to recognize that what was so special and created here, what was fought for during the AIDS crisis, fought for by the Black Panthers, fought for by any number of immigrant groups that had to sort of stake their own claim here. Fought for by every family that came to the bay Area is still alive and needs to be preserved.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Where we discuss the current state of our society here in the San Francisco bay area on an after interview discussion on today's episode of podcast by the Bay. Stay tuned. Podcast by the Bay is a production of Bay City Communications and is sponsored by Liberty Realty. Liberty Realty, serving the Peninsula and surrounding areas since 1986. For all your real estate needs, www dot liberty Realtyinvestments.com and also Highwaysol Productions, www.highwaysoul.com. And now another podcast by the bay. This is Andre and we thank you for being with us again on part two of our discussion with the author Kerry McLellan regarding his book Silicon City San Francisco and the Long Shadow of the Valley. And so this episode really features the after interview discussion that we actually had with author Kerry McLellan and really his vision about society here in the San Francisco Bay Area.
[00:02:18] Speaker C: Both Patrick and I pushed the discussion.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: With a lot of questions.
[00:02:23] Speaker C: Kerry actually had a lot of great.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: Ideas and just really helped elevate the discussion to a new level. So it was a lot of fun. We definitely appreciate Carrie for taking the time for speaking with Patrick and myself here on Podcast by the Bay.
[00:02:37] Speaker C: So with that, we're going to open.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: Up to after interview discussion with the author of Silicon City, Carrie McLellan. Stay tuned.
[00:02:48] Speaker C: To be honest, Carrie, we could go this could, we could have a discussion like this for a couple hours because it's so good and there's so much mean. One of the always I was thinking, I just want to get your feedback and me and Patrick were talking recently about housing and one of the things is the income disparity, right? Income disparity right now is so big here in the Bay Area, right. Income disparity is huge. And I was looking at something and I'm looking at the way that the policies and the approach to housing has been this rapid growth and a rapid building, especially around apartment buildings, right?
And I think while there is a need for apartment, I think I actually also came to realization that if we really want to provide wealth and get the income disparity, we really need to create that opportunity for people to actually invest into the community. And instead of maybe building specifically apartments, actually focus on building homes for purchase and really provide that ability for middle class to actually get into the market and create that wealth equity because otherwise we're just going to stay in this rat race. How do you feel about something like that?
[00:04:03] Speaker B: That's a great question.
Yeah, I do think there's a real struggle post Prop 13 to figure out what homeownership means for modern Californians, for particularly young people or people approaching middle aged who have families, et cetera.
And it just makes the property tax base for so many long standing, you guys probably know about property thing, but what it has known that the daily boomer generation and those who've been able to own houses for a long period of time, their property taxes are suppressed. And to cover that shortfall, property taxes on new homeowners are just very high compared to what they would be in a leveler market.
There's so much that needs to be done to subsidize the housing market that I think some real estimates need to be put to figuring out what the numbers are to pull off the various proposals that are necessary. Because I'm super in favor of homeownership for genuinely lower middle class and middle class people. But the middle class in the Bay Area now earns about 200 plus thousand dollars a year.
[00:05:22] Speaker D: I'm going to give you some food for thought you might have not thought of. I'm a real estate broker for 38 years. I'm going to tell you we do not have a shortage of housing. Now you know why we don't have a shortage of housing? The disparity is this 60% of your people that own houses in San Mateo and Santa Clara County are senior citizens. And you know what?
They're not selling. And the reason why they're not selling, they don't want to pay taxes even though they got an exemption for a half a million. So one thing that everybody's overlooking in this big picture of the scenario is the shortage of housing is those senior citizens or those baby boomers aren't moving. They don't want to pay taxes. Now, that doesn't mean a few of them are. I mean, I sold my brother's house. He moved to, what was it, grass Valley. Penn Valley. From a home in Pacifica that I sold a two bedroom, one bath for a million dollars to a home in Penn Valley for 365. But I think what we're always missing is the inequity of housing has gone up, food has gone up, but guess what? Your tax brackets have not been reorientated. And this is even in the case for somebody that makes 200,000 a year. If you make 200,000 or 250, you're paying it all in taxes. We don't encourage people to save. It's got to be attacked.
[00:06:44] Speaker B: Well, there has to be more business taxation in the Bay Area.
It can't be that this is such a lucky, beautiful, synergistic community with Stanford there and berkeley there, and all the lawyers who make the business work quickly and all the innovation happening and all the venture capitalists there, and it still ended up being significantly unattractive to people to keep running businesses there. If the business taxes go up a little bit, it would do a ton to sort of recapture some wealth from the activity, put something of a wealth tax on the genuine billionaires who are in the area, and create something of a public coffer to address.
I think anybody who's making less than $300,000 in the Bay Area right now is choking. Because if you make totally true, if you make between 200 and $300,000 a year now, there's a way to live in the Bay Area where you head out to the East Bay a little bit further, and you buy a cheaper house and you sort of invest in that community and you take your time and you commute the way you can. But that's not how most people are being incentivized by these companies to make choices. And so the google bus lines run up and down a very expensive real estate market, and they run up and down a very attractive school know? And for those people who are trying to stay in San Francisco and keep their families there, god bless them, but anybody who's at a tech company feels the pressure to put their kids in a private school, do all these other kind of things, now, we can talk about the wisdom of all those choices. I don't have full empathy for all of them, but I don't believe all of them are wise. But I do have empathy for the situation of feeling trapped in a series of economic choices, no matter what amount of money you're being making. Now, it's founders, but go back, it's the venture capital community, and it's the sort of billionaire class that needs to start paying for some. Alleviation of are I don't know where you are fully, but like anywhere south of south san Francisco needs to start recognizing that its miracle of low density housing has to be short lived if they want to participate in a society that doesn't look as cool.
[00:09:10] Speaker D: One of our major problems, which is just as bad as housing, is the transportation. And the major thing of all the stakeholders that we've interviewed on podcasts by the bay, we do not have a regional transportation system that hooks to everything. We still have 70% to 80% of the people in the single driver.
Our transportation system. Yes, it's a major, major price.
[00:09:35] Speaker B: The more it elaborates, the more it has to go out to Fresno, stockton, Sacramento. The more time goes by, the actual, the greater burden that there needs to be in terms of a transportation system to close the gap.
[00:09:52] Speaker D: Tell them about Dave Tanner, the woodside city council.
[00:09:55] Speaker C: Tell me what he well, and I think this kind of highlights the thing because patrick's bringing up dave Tanner. And so there are solutions out there and there's people who have vision to actually solve this problem. Dave Tanner wants to create a high speed rail from San Bruno, which the Tamferan, right by the airport, right there, all the way out to Stockton. And so they have this vision. And he created this video. We actually put it on our website so any of the listeners out there, they could check it out. But it's a really cool concept and I think that it's been kind of overlooked by some of the agencies in aberra in favor of other alternatives.
And I think that there are, I think, solutions out there. And I think that I saw yesterday and I pointed it out to Patrick, miami is building a monorail system and that's something on the peninsula. If they had a monorail system up and down the peninsula, like on El Camino or somewhere, and it might alleviate some of this more immediate kind of things.
Yeah, north and south. But I think it goes back to we are all living in a society. Think about this, Patrick. This is going to connect you to me, to Carrie. Basically, our parents generation, they lived in San Francisco. Where did our parents move? They moved to Daily City, right?
The kids of Daily City when they grew up, where did they move? They may have moved out to the East Bay. They may have moved out, know, a little bit further down the peninsula. Well, now the people growing up in the East Bay, they have to move out to Sacramento. They have to move out to Tracy. They have to move. So the whole package is circling again and again, but the cycle becomes more and more vicious as it comes. But one of the factors is, okay, you have people in the Bay Area right now and they want to buy a home and they're middle class. Well, it's almost impossible unless you're making two people making $200,000 a year. But let's say we actually focus on actually maybe 500, $600,000 homes that we can actually get for purchase for these low middle class people designated for them, where they can build equity, they can actually create wealth. And it gets rid of this whole income disparity issue where actually you're able to get out of the system. Because if you'renting and I rented for ten years, you're never going to get out of the system. No matter what you do. You can make $200,000 in a bear. You will never get out of that cycle of debt. You can never get out of it. You're stuck. And so until we create those ability for people, we're going to have to move out to Fresno, we're going to have to move out to Stockton. And there's really no other know, I think there's opportunities there, but how are we looking at them?
[00:12:39] Speaker B: Sometimes some of the region of 1000 solutions and no sacrifice. So the people who really need to.
I think the high speed rail idea is a fine idea. Of course, in all ideas, the devils in the details, but fine, that's a great idea.
SB 50 had a lot of issues with it, but that gets around some of the issues of having to build more transit to solve some of the housing inequities. Suddenly you have some density around transit hubs, and that would begin to alleviate some pressure on the system. You'd have to also marry that with a ton more affordability investments, whether it's towards ownership or whether it's towards renting, to compensate for the fact that the development that SB 50 is going to spur is going to create new hot markets in the region that displace some people, et cetera, et cetera. You're going to have to radically invest in affordability if SB 50 passes. But it's a good idea to get around the fact that you can't get the amount of momentum around any transit solution. But nobody wants to sacrifice nobody.
Your grandparents funders don't want their businesses to be businesses, don't want to ask more. And who's going to give it up? Nobody wants a navigation center in their own neighborhood. Well, who's going to give up?
Who's going to sacrifice something to make sure that we can relieve some pressure.
[00:14:04] Speaker D: On the system, on the transportationist? Your Caltrans, your Bart, your Sam Tramps, they're all fighting for the same federal and state tax dollar based on ridership. So they fight independently for the same because that's survivorship for their people, their employees that worked for Bart, or their employees that work for Caltranes or Sam Tramp. So we got to get them all on the same plate that they're not going to lose their jobs, their careers. So we interviewed Seamus Murphy and he said, sam Tram's buses are for the elderly, the poor, and disabled. He said that right.
And I didn't prompt him for.
[00:14:50] Speaker C: Want to, I want to hit on Kerry's point because he brings up an excellent point. And I actually asked Senator Weiner when I saw him at the California Democratic Convention about this. Why are we focusing?
Why are we approaching the SB 50 this way? And here's my approach. I think instead of mandating across the board, that everybody has to do this. And this is what I experience in quality work. Because when I work in quality work, you don't just go and say, okay, everybody has to do it. You start with the people that are engaged. You start with the people that want to do this. And there's plenty of cities that want to be a part of now there's a plenty of cities that don't too. And that's what he pointed out. He said, there's too many people that don't want to do this. But I said, I think if we started with the 40% of cities that do want to be coming against, they're very progressive. They want to help participate and we start with them, I think we can start making a dent in this process and actually move forward because you're going to have all this other resistance otherwise. So that would be my approach on approaching these kind of things, is you work with the people that are engaged that want to be a part of it and you start with there. Because I think the idea of building around transit, the idea of building where the zoning makes a lot more sense than going to open areas, open spaces, wilderness, and cleaning up that to build housing, which I think is unacceptable.
[00:16:11] Speaker D: Yeah, I accept what you say on it, but the fly in the ointment is this. There is no freaking study that shows building your quarter transportation places, which you get a federal and state tax dollar credit that people actually use public transportation. And when we have an inefficient public transportation system, you're even putting more problems. I think we need to build the transportation system and make it efficient.
Andre and I argue the governor says we need 3.5 million in housing. Well, guess what? I've asked every assembly person, I've asked senators, well, how much is that workforce housing? How much is that subsidized housing? How much is that senior citizen housing? You know what the answer is? They have no freaking clue.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: No, I agree with you.
No clue.
It would be ideal if a transit system could be built. It would really work. And it would be also ideal if SB 50 came with the sort of like affordability metrics that I think even Scott wanted to put into it that ended up getting kind of drummed out of it over time. So there needs to start being thinking, though, at scale. And I kind of in principle agree with the idea of sort of like making things voluntary and letting people welcome into it. But nobody wants a navigation center in their community. Nobody.
Not a single South Bay City council has had what's, close to a rational conversation around increasing density, housing density there. And there have been instead very fast pass measures to sort of like turn parking lots into homeless encampments for families living out of their cars.
The amount of political will and public will to organize around the profound economic sickness that is all related to the same disparity issues is the problem. We could talk about it as almost anything, any specific bill. But the problem remains the ability for those who have to be able to admit that at this moment, the community that they love, that has a tremendous tradition for signaling to the rest of the country appropriate, the appropriate next steps for the culture and our politics to take. Cannot figure it out right now.
[00:18:45] Speaker D: You brought this point up earlier when you said Stanford Berkeley. The ego of being in the Bay Area is one of the biggest driving forces of what brings up value. Being near Stanford university or every all over the world globally. When you think of it, you tell somebody that's coming from India or China or Germany or Russia to be near Stanford University oh my.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Should be. I can't remember the numbers on this now, but when I was starting there, the amount of Stanford staff that was commuting from over 2 hours away to be able to work there was who the guy who used to run one of the sort of food spaces near the law school would come from?
Have this you have this sort of like upstairs downstairs problem perpetuated at Stanford. Then you have graduates leaving Stanford with a tremendous amount of debt and economic potential. And of course they don't go into a bunch of public work and justice work and of course they're not solving the world's problems. They join a tech company. 50% of Stanford's graduates are CS majors.
They just instituted a mandated ethics class for CS majors. Now, congratulations for that. But it's long overdue that people entering the tech industry have the civics and humanities background to be able to design for the society that they live in.
[00:20:22] Speaker E: What do you think of Gavin Nuisance idea as a tax on the Google and Facebook? In other words, it's kind of like a dividend tax back to the citizens. He's talked about something of putting a taxation on Google or Facebook and I think he said the equity was to give it back to the citizens of Know because they're taking your know, you could argue when you give your email mean, you know, you give it away. My industry in the real estate industry, did you realize there is no such thing as a multiple listing service? Really? The Multiple listing service is an independent company that we as realtors hire. And guess what? On our multiple listing system, we're selling close now.
And these people are you go on my multiple listing. Now, what I say when I put a listing in the multiple listing, I say I give it up to Redfin, Trillia Realtor.com, any subsidiary. So the company that I'm paying quarterly for my multiple listing service is selling everything that I put on there.
They're selling the data and I have no right to do it. Now, sometimes they put the data on other platforms and it's inaccurate.
It's inaccurate.
[00:21:42] Speaker B: We've been dealing with this question for a long time because for longer than we know, there's been a ton of third party sharing of our data, whether it's on your MLS platform or whether it's on Facebook or Google or wherever.
And there are a number of people in the book who are super articulate about this. Probably more articulate than I could ever be. But the attention marketplace, the marketplace for our attention and our activity has a tremendous upside for these companies. And we're beginning to understand what the downsides are. Now, France and I think England, france has, I think, instituted it and I think the UK is considering implementing attacks on this kind of, like, third party data usage.
What's your thought on I'm incredibly in favor of it. I couldn't be more in favor of it, and I also couldn't be more in favor of my issue overall in terms of the argument that the tech industry has been making about its economic success, is that it hides the costs to us, and it hides what's really being done. So if you look at a company like Uber now, we could begin to talk about all the third party data usage of Uber, and that's all important as well. But let's just talk about Uber and its fundamental sort of like, market strategy.
It is doing something that's no different than taxi or limousine company, but it argued that it occupied some sort of negulus, unregulated space in the market and wasn't responsible to carrying the costs that any of these other companies did, whether they operated in San Francisco, New York, or anywhere. And so as a result, they got to speed to growth, speed to speed, entry to market, undercut costs, undercut price, undercut all their competition that were frankly hamstrung by regulatory obligations.
And then we all wake up sort of seven to ten years later, realizing what we've built and the problems, not just culturally of the company, but the problems in terms of what it's done, in terms of pay, fairness. In terms of insurance equity, in terms of the fact that, frankly, most taxi systems in most cities had specific emissions regulations, had specific paratransit regulations, none of which Uber had to sort of comply with in any way, and all of which undercut the sort of stability of those systems and those public resources, all of which we invested. Do you know what I mean? All of which we invested in as citizens. So there's this sort of way I think Facebook and Google are the same thing.
Part of their business is broadcasting. Part of their business is a media company. And the fact that they're not the same FCC obligations, you know, a television channel or a movie company is I get that's where I have issues with this whole system, which is like, I want all of them to succeed. I want this economic activity happening, but I don't want us to hide the fact that the miracle is in part, regulatory arbitrage.
[00:25:02] Speaker C: That's a great point. That's a great point. Carrie I actually have never thought about that before. But you bring up something. Do you feel that these tech companies and a lot of the new ideas as far as these new innovations, are actually finding kind of opportunities that these paths have never been focused on before? So they actually can blaze this trail and they can take advantage of something because they're really the first in line, or they're really approaching it a different way.
So they're not really aligned with these some or other regulations like you said, so they can actually get ahead, and the rest of us are sitter stuck in the system trying to beat our heads against the wall to try to get ahead. But here they come up with an innovative idea. They create the platform, and they really control it because they're one of the first people.
[00:25:52] Speaker B: Clear let me make clear the argument I'm making, though. Like Uber didn't. I think invent a new idea, uber said that you could order a car by your phone rather than by pushing a button on your phone in an app, rather than making a phone call. That's what they did. Or raising your hand in the street.
The innovation is just using an existing technology that they didn't invent, that's invented the Internet, the apps, the coding languages, all those things.
They stand on the shoulders of giants, some of which are private sector giants, some of which are, frankly, public sector giants, because half that stuff got built through investments in DARPA and any number of other things that wanted to make sure that there was a sort of thriving Internet in the US.
So the business model isn't fully a new idea. The business model is, in part a very old idea that should have been regulated under should have been regulated according to existing regulations. And because it wasn't, uber got to displace an amount of economic activity that know, there's a lot that was broken in the cab system at the time, but people were able to invest in a long term career on fair terms in a regulated marketplace, and that stopped happening as a result. And you had people making under minimum wage working for any of these sort of gig economy companies.
[00:27:20] Speaker E: And what you're also saying is there's no regulations to address these questions. And the sad thing is that our government, our congress and a Senate, unless they have some young staffers that are understanding what's going on, it's rather embarrassing to watch on television your congresspeople and senators asking questions which really to them make sense, but make no sense to the real core problem. What we have is regulating safety on cyber, on regulations for communications, like you said, whether Google or Facebook are actually a broadcasting company, or from our standards and day age television, which has strict regulations on what they can assimilate and what they can put out, at what frequency. This is a new road to pioneer. It's a new road.
[00:28:21] Speaker B: I think some of the sort of like liberalization and liberal arguments about the freedom that this technology should have had to be able to operate and innovate isn't fully unfounded. But we have to recognize that it came with cost. And one of those costs was we chose not in all cases. In some cases, there was no regulation. In some cases, there was plenty of regulation, but we just didn't apply it to these companies.
In other cases, we allowed these companies to grow and grow and grow at a pace that means that they are now significantly challenging to unwind fully.
And so some of the arguments about breaking up via antitrust these companies are coming right before it may be too late, before these companies are sort of too large and too integrated a going concern for them to be unwound according to current antitrust law. So you may have to rewrite some of antitrust law to be able to do that.
All of this has happened.
We neither regulated nor did we tax significantly the business position. That's why I think the twitter tax break in San Francisco and its ilk throughout the bay area has been so troubling is if we're not going to tax the companies and we're not going to regulate them, how are we going to guarantee that we're collecting the money necessary to reinvest in the public, to manage the offsetting crises that are coming from the inequality that this amount of economic duct absolutely so quickly creates. We're just going to do neither of them. I don't know what we're talking about doing. I don't know why we're beginning to hear.
I also thought the Prop c conversation was fascinating. Not just because of its own internal dynamics, and not just because Jack Dorsey and Benioff got into an argument about it, but because I think what you heard from Mark Benioff was the cry of a native son of san Francisco in the region, saying, I can no longer in good conscience look at the city I grew up in and the city that I consider to continue to call. Home and the city that I claim that I'm doing good in and not be taxed greater to invest in the homelessness crisis and the human rights crisis that is at my city. I think you're going to begin to hopefully off the back of that, see greater willingness by him and a couple of other people to argue for taxation as a solution to this.
What I think we don't want to get too comfortable with, though, are the sort of performative philanthropic gestures by Facebook and others to create a sort of like, private entity that would address these issues on their.
[00:31:22] Speaker D: Question, is Facebook google can give I think what we need to do is charge some taxation. But Facebook has put 50 million in the Bay Area, or what was it? A billion dollars in the Bay Area. But is that housing just for Facebook or is it for Google or whatever it is?
[00:31:42] Speaker B: It's not for Facebook. But the thing to sort of recognize about the reason why I think we need to get back into being comfortable with taxation as Americans, after decades of the Reagan consensus telling us that it was stifling business activity is that we need its legitimacy.
We need it as a cry from public consensus to say this is what we need and this is what it means to live in a. Society together. Not because we don't like business activity or because we're angry at tech companies or we're punishing them or we're doing anything like that, but because we know where we're headed as a community and we know where we want to invest in. And so we're confident that we can turn to businesses that come from our local roots, that have benefited from the society we've organized here. And we're confident we can turn to them and say, we need more money from you to be able to make the kind of society that continues to produce the kind of environment that you find so lovely to live in and to build businesses.
Can't I think it's lovely that Facebook wants to create philanthropic endowment for this to address housing. I think it's lovely that Google wants to do something similar, and I think the amount of money that they want to put into it is laudable. They'll probably still underneath the scale of what we need to be able to attack the crisis. But those are private companies creating more private individuals, creating private entities to be able to address public questions of public concern. And I welcome the work that they're going to do with that. But we can't think that it replaces the need for us as citizens together to be able to direct where housing is going to go in our community. Because the minute that Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook's as a corporate entity or Google or Larry or Sergey or whomever believe that housing can only be solved a single way and disagree with any number of others regardless of whether it's evidence based or not.
If it lacks the public legitimacy of that, there's going to continue to be this rift between the very wealthy in the Bay area and those and almost everybody else who don't have the ability to participate in community decision making together.
[00:34:06] Speaker C: That is so true. That is so true. Carrie and from my experience in quality work, you have to engage the people at the front lines, you have to engage the cities, you have to engage the localities to be a part of the solution. And if you're just deciding, well, we're going to solve it by doing it this way and there's all these strings attached, there might be an issue with that process, and there will be downstream effects that happen, and are you really going to solve the problem? So these are valid questions, valid points.
[00:34:34] Speaker B: In terms of the front lines. But I want you to take on also the reality that the front lines are changing significantly because of the economic pressures. And so some people who are coming out and protesting, who can but the infrastructure around organizing, around organizing, around labor, around organizing, around racial and ethnic equality, any of the prior networks that previously existed are getting fractured as people are being displaced to communities that they don't understand, no neighborhoods that they're not familiar with, and being disconnected from the networks that are significant to them. And so one of the stories in the book that's being repeated over and over and over again is the idea that people were strong when they were in their neighborhood, that they knew when they were surrounded by their communities. And one of the things that has happened because of the displacement that's occurred, whether it's a Google bus protester, whether it's a family, a large multi generational family trying to sort of continue to hold on, whether it's black families that have been fragmented and sort of run from the city, whether it's the ability for them to organize now has been significantly weakened because how quickly the community has changed.
[00:35:54] Speaker E: Carrie I want to pick on the Google bus for a minute because I think this is real important and it says the bureaucracy question. We have Google buses, realistically, from everybody I've talked to are half empty. Now, I'm going to show you a minor example. In the city of Foster City, we have a Jewish community center. 31 of those people all come from the East Bay. They have difficult they run the whole center for a center of 5000. Okay? Now, I said to Paul, the CEO of the Peninsula, why don't we team up with Google and see if your people in the East Bay can get on the bus? But the sensitivity or the answers that I got back from those people were, well, somebody might share a secret or there's insurance liabilities. We kind of have to find a solution where we collectively work.
[00:36:45] Speaker D: Even.
[00:36:46] Speaker E: I love those buses. They're half empty. They're half empty.
They're not full. The concept is good. I like it. But the bad thing is that it's not working to the level it should.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: But there's a way you could make tax breaks around this. It's been done in the past. It's not a giant mystery. Like if we wanted the companies to be able to receive a tax break, why don't you build an important leg of the transit system that we're missing? We'll name it after you and your corporation can benefit from the public optics benefit of having created this thing and then the cost of that or something sort of less than the dollar cost. Greater than the dollar cost. Of that will offset because we recognize it's going to create an amount of economic activity both in the jobs to create it and in the ability to create stimulate economic activity across that quarter, that we're going to be all better off as a result of it. It's hard to do that when nine counties have to all consent together or like three at least that participate in whatever the transit ring. It's really, really hard. And so some of these things I think you're right, there's a tremendous goodwill. Facebook and Google have ponyed up a ton of money to try to, I think, sincerely grapple with some of these issues. There's a ton of goodwill inside these corporations. Most of the people who work for them are all good people. Everybody in the book wants to fix this. But figuring out how to build structures where everybody can collaborate together, particularly while this continues to unravel, is very challenging. And that lack. And then I just get depressed.
I get hopeful at some moments because I think the closure of the Juvenile Justice Center in San Francisco is an exciting opportunity. I think Prop C was an exciting moment to see the city vote in a direction that was really meaningful. But then you see the controversy around the placement of the navigation centers, or then you see SB 50 fail. And I think it's really tough to watch the sort of steps forward and steps back and try to figure out really, are we making progress on these issues or are we not? And if we're not making it may not be enough of a question of are we making progress? Are we making progress quickly enough?
[00:39:00] Speaker C: Great point.
[00:39:01] Speaker B: So with that go ahead, Gary.
[00:39:04] Speaker D: I want to state the thing.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: I have to run, too. I was doing the same thing. Good. Okay.
[00:39:12] Speaker C: Carrie, quick question. I've been recording this last conversation for the last 45 minutes. Is it okay if we use some of this?
[00:39:19] Speaker B: Because this is gold. Yeah, you're welcome to use it. And look, I think look, not with any caveat, but with saying, look, the effort of the book here has been to I didn't just speak to 50 people. I spoke to over 150 people for the purposes of this book. 50 made it into the book so that I could build a coherent conversation across them, but not one.
There aren't significant places of disagreement around the common questions of, is this a crisis? Do we need to solve this? Am I personally responsible?
And I think what the book is trying to share is the fact that there is profound agreement on those questions and there is profound wisdom in unexpected places in our community. And there is too much of this conversation which is happening at a particular level or is happening with only particular stakeholders at the table. And we need to begin to recognize that what was so special and created here, what was fought for during the AIDS crisis, fought for by the Black Panthers, fought for by any number of immigrant groups that had to sort of stake their own claim here. Fought for by every family that came to the Bay Area is still alive and needs to be preserved in part of this. Even though this economic transition is beneficial to so many.
[00:40:49] Speaker D: It's by the people.
[00:40:50] Speaker B: Tear it apart.
[00:40:51] Speaker D: By the people. Yeah.
[00:40:56] Speaker B: Great. .1 of the things I hope you're seeing in the book and that I hope readers see in the book, is that there's such poetry and wisdom in literally every voice that's in it.
[00:41:08] Speaker C: There is.
[00:41:17] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of Podcast by the Bay, you can contact us by email at
[email protected]. Podcast by the Bay is a production of Bay City Communications and is sponsored by Liberty Realty. Liberty Realty serving the Peninsula and surrounding areas since 1986. For all your real estate needs www.libertyrealtyinvestments.com and also highwaysoulproductions www.highwaysol.com.
[00:41:55] Speaker C: You can follow us on Twitter at.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: Podcastbythebay as our handle. Or on Facebook. Facebook.com slash podcastbythebay. And remember, you can listen to any of our episodes anytime on any Podcast site. Until next time, stay tuned.
