Fuck Gentrifying Tech Companies
How does one deal with a duality of emotions from a new-found acceptance for oneself while being shocked into the horror of classism?
Some strange feelings started to merge at the beginning of my time in San Francisco: fear and exhilaration, distrust and comfort, privilege and marginalization. The whirlwind of emotions was, and still is, very hard to comprehend. I’m just going to jump right into it.
The average price of rent in San Francisco is over $3,000 per month.
The average price of rent in Eau Claire is over $600 per month.
These numbers are ridiculous. Housing is a human right. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, shelter is among the priority needs for a human being to function. Without a place to live, one cannot live a healthy life. Everyone deserves a healthy life and no one should be struggling to survive.
If you don’t have your physiological needs met, then you are denied safety, which then effects your right to love, your esteem, and your ability to self-actualize.
No one is free if they do not have shelter. If this is America and this is “the land of the free” why are millions of people sleeping on the streets? This is not freedom. This is enslavement.
San Francisco is the most expensive place to live in the United States. The elite are restricting livable entry into certain areas of our country. This is massive inequality, and we can’t accept it! San Francisco, and other big cities, are telling us that the most “ambitious” and the most “talented” people need to be living there. First of all, categorizing people in terms of ambition and talent is wrong. It is okay to believe you are ambitious and talented, but that does not make you any better or more deserving of shelter than someone who is homeless.
Going back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the people who have the time and the resources to self-actualize (the desire to become the most that one can be) are the people who have comfort. A place to live and food to eat leads to personal security, employment, resources, and health which leads to a sense of connection and love, which leads to self-esteem and freedom.
Most people who are talented, ambitious, and “successful” are just privileged people with the time and the resources to live the life they want to live. Some of us aren’t born privileged and have to work extremely hard to become “successful.” Their path to “success” is more rocky, but still, they have their basic physiological and safety needs met.
It should be our goal to recognize our privilege, and to help those that aren’t privileged. We ALL deserve air, water, food, shelter, and clothing FIRST.
Systems of power do not recognize privilege to be something to deconstruct...they praise it. These systems are run by the elite. They do not understand what it really means because most of them have never had to think twice about having their basic needs met.
According to Richard Florida, the earnings gap between CEOs and the average worker have increased from 1978 t0 2015 dramatically. CEO pay increased by more then 940%, while the typical worker grew by 10%. In 1965, the average CEO earned 20 times what the average worker did in 1965, and by the 2000s, it increased to more than 300 times that amount, where it remains, increasing today.
We need to stop putting CEOs on pedestals. Just because they have new ideas, does not make them superstars. Without the average worker to implement their ideas, NOTHING would get accomplished. Why is this so overlooked? Why are they getting paid more than 300 times more than the ones who are actually DOING the work?
Having good ideas is not something that should be praised above labor. We all have specific skills that work TOGETHER to accomplish things. One cannot exist without the other. Corporations and tech companies do not recognize that their work is just as important everyone else’s work. Their whole existence is based on the oppression and exploitation of the “average” people. It is disgusting!
Everyone is capable of having new ideas once they self-actualize. It is not an elite concept, therefore the ones who have new ideas should not be elite.
When it comes to making change, we need to remember that gentrification is unavoidable in capitalist economies. San Francisco is the picture perfect town that shows us exactly how American capitalism is destroying humanity and the ability for our basic needs to be met. We ALL need to do some thinking to re-evaluate our ideas of what it means to be a human being, and what it takes for all of us to feel like one.
We need to spread the truth!
