“For every person who moves to San Francisco, another two start commuting to work here. Traffic is down to a crawl: The average afternoon speed on the roads feeding into the highways has dropped 20 percent in the last two years. And the BART trains are squeezed tight: Since 2012, average morning rush-hour ridership from the East Bay has risen 30 percent.
“Signs of distress are plentiful. The Fraternite Notre Dame’s soup kitchen was facing eviction after a rent increase of nearly 60 percent. (It was saved for a year after its plight received worldwide publicity.) Two eviction-defense groups were evicted in favor of a start-up that intended to lease the space to other start-ups. The real estate site Redfin published a widely read blog post that said the number of teachers in San Francisco who could afford a house was exactly zero.
“‘All the renters I know are living in fear,’ said Derrick Tynan-Connolly, a teacher at a high school for pregnant teenagers and young mothers. ‘If your landlord dies, if your landlord sells the building, if you get evicted under the Ellis Act’ — a controversial law that allows landlords to reclaim a building by taking it off the rental market — ‘and you have to move, you’re gone. There’s no way you can afford to stay in San Francisco.'”
Read the entire article at the New York Times online: In San Francisco and Rooting for a Tech Comeuppance
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