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The New York Times continues to want to make sensational the growing disparity of wealth and income in San Francisco, although Manhattan is the capital of this disparity. The latest example is a full-time garbage collector, Jake Orta, a mission resident who regularly inspects Liberty Hill garbage cans for trash thrown trash.
These bins include those that came out of billionaire Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's tudor manse on 21st Street – the Bay Area's second home, a pied-à-terre in the city, which Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, bought in 2012 and renovated over the course of several years.
Orta told the Times that he recovered "a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, a coffee machine – in working order – and a stack of clothes" in the black baskets of the Zuckerberg-Chan residence, and all this is part of the $ 300 or more. so per week that he wins by selling what he finds.
Orta lives in a Mission studio and the Times wants her readers to feel less and less comfortable with the fact that there are a hundred people doing what Orta does, pulling a Meager waste income from the millionaires and billionaires of the city.
The play follows a much-discussed, early-March article in which the Times predicted that San Francisco would soon be "drowned in millionaires" after Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and other companies all enlist this year.
Several real estate agents and investors have been quoted in this article, very excited about seeing "ten thousand new millionaires" popping up overnight, and the impending era when the average single family home in San Francisco will cost $ 5 million. These are dubious predictions – and as everyone who worked for one of these large corporations who went public in the past was aware, only the first 10 or considerable profit from an IPO. Many people will probably just make enough money to make a down payment on a house, but not make an all-money offer for a multi-million dollar home.
But that brings me back to the garbage collection room. Yes, it's an uncomfortable reality for all of us, middle-class or otherwise, to see people picking up in our recycling bins and garbage collection to survive in the gentrified and increasingly expensive neighborhoods of our Beautiful city. But is it really a) a particularly new phenomenon worthy of an important newspaper article, or b) a phenomenon so particular to San Francisco that it deserves this kind of attention.
"But rubbish exists in many cities in the United States and, like homelessness in San Francisco, is an indicator of the extremes of American capitalism," the Times writes. "A snapshot of 2019: One of the world's richest men and a garbage collector, living within walking distance of each other."
This is perhaps more of an example of the income diversity that still exists near the mission, despite rising rents.
The rich and the poor also live near New York, and what is perhaps more remarkable is that low-income neighborhoods, such as Harlem, the Lower East Side and Chinatown, are under increasing gentrification pressure. in the last two decades. Manhattan has almost no more poor to pick up in the trash of the rich. Both cities have this problem. I simply wish the Times would stop exhorting our tech-powered wealth boom as being odd, sensational or very different from the millionaire's playground that their city has built – and with far less development checks or battles for affordable housing.
In San Francisco, live off your billionaire neighbor's waste [NYT]
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