San Francisco is ‘kind of a train wreck’ because of tech-fueled inequality, CEO says
There’s at least one thing President Donald Trump and this liberal technology executive can agree on: The streets of San Francisco are a mess.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC on Tuesday that San Francisco, where his company is headquartered, is “kind of a train wreck” because of inequality fueled by technology companies.
“In some ways, San Francisco is the canary in the coal mine,” Benioff said at the yearly World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, sporting a winter coat with snow-covered evergreens behind him. “We have to look at San Francisco and say, wow, here’s the best technology example in the world and yet the worst homelessness — walking down the streets is disgusting, and it has to change.”
Benioff also pointed to gentrification and stratospheric housing prices as symptoms of tech-driven inequality.
The tech leader made the comments days after Trump wrote on Twitter that the streets in the Northern California city “are disgusting” — and that Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who represents the city in Congress, should get to work cleaning them up.
“Nancy Pelosi has behaved so irrationally & has gone so far to the left that she has now officially become a Radical Democrat,” Trump wrote in a post on the social network. “She is so petrified of the ‘lefties’ in her party that she has lost control...And by the way, clean up the streets in San Francisco, they are disgusting!”
Trump was scheduled to attend the Davos gathering of business elites and world leaders as well — just as he did last year — but the ongoing partial federal government shutdown over his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall has kept the president in Washington, D.C.
San Francisco’s filthy streets and sidewalks have grown infamous in recent years, as tech wealth has ballooned from Silicon Valley but drug use, car break-ins and human waste on the streets have proliferated.
That’s led to some novel solutions: The city has launched a “poop patrol” to pick up the human excrement that dots the sidewalks, and an intrepid young developer has created an app called “Snapcrap” to easily alert 411 about new piles of poop.
“It’s kind of funny, obviously,” Sean Miller, who recently moved to the city, said of the Snapcrap platform he created in a phone interview interview with McClatchy last year. “But it’s also a health crisis, and it’s disgusting seeing that stuff.”
San Francisco is about to get a lot more money to tackle its homelessness problem, thanks to Proposition C, an initiative voters approved in 2018 that imposes a tax on giant corporations in the city. The tax will raise as much as $300 million a year from corporations with revenues greater than $50 million — funding services and support for the city’s homeless, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Benioff championed the proposal, much to the chagrin of some fellow tech leaders, including Twitter’s Jack Dorsey — with whom Benioff debated the tax on Twitter last year, SFGate reports.
“Not every CEO was committed, as you know,” Benioff told CNBC. Some “were fighting tooth and nail to stop it.”
Benioff said supporting the proposition should have been a no-brainer for other tech leaders.
“Wake up, look at what’s happening, walk down the street,” Benioff said in the CNBC interview. “Can you see what’s happening here?”
This story was originally published January 22, 2019 at 1:20 PM with the headline "San Francisco is ‘kind of a train wreck’ because of tech-fueled inequality, CEO says."