*** From the Archives ***

This article is from May 22, 2000, and is no longer current.

Eye on the Web: The Dot Com Invasion

I live in San Francisco, which is the biggest city in what’s called the San Francisco Bay Area which is essentially the metropolitan sprawl of Silicon Valley. I’m pretty left-wing, politically, which I like to think is in keeping with San Francisco’s great activist tradition. I ride a bike so as not to burn fossil fuels, I hate SUVs, I keep up on my rights as a renter, and I think the so-called housing crisis in San Francisco just plain sucks. I also write about the Web, and have a lot of friends who work for Internet startups, that sector of employer known as the dot com’s.

The other day I received a notice from Media Alliance, a San Francisco-based media activist organization that, among other things, teaches computer skills and provides services such as access to health insurance for freelance and contract employees. The notice said there was going to be a meeting of independent media producers and activists to find ways of fighting the housing crisis in the city. For those of you who aren’t aware, the rents in San Francisco have skyrocketed in the past five years or so, and few long-time city residents can now afford to pay market value for an apartment. This seemed fine with me – I’m all about affordable rents.

But Wait, There’s More
However, as I read on, the notice informed me that "middle-income people are being squeezed out of the market by high-paid dot com employees." Hmm, I thought. All of the dot com employees I know are either squatting in an apartment they don’t really like because the rent control laws prohibit landlords from raising rents to market value until they move out, or leaving the city for greener, and cheaper, pastures elsewhere. In fact, so many dot com employees live on the eastern shores of the San Francisco Bay there’s actually a weekend rush hour as they make their way to the city to put in extra hours at their supposedly high paying jobs.

Are dot com employees really the enemy of affordable housing, I wondered, or are they unwitting scapegoats for the more conventionally employed? To find out, I took to the Web. It’s a darned handy resource after all. I started out at www.computerjobs.com, where a 1999 salary survey that culled information from twenty-one thousand respondents, told me that the average salary for computer-related jobs in the Western US is $53,000, the same as the Midwest, and $1,000 lower than the Northeast average. Well, $53,000 isn’t peanuts, but in a city where a studio apartment can cost upwards of $1,500 a month, we’re still talking about a third of your income. And that’s before taxes.

A look at the salary survey at www.webjobsusa.com shows that, as in most conventional industries, the people earning the most money are the sales and marketing executives, who took home over $100,000 a year on average, although Web designers do earn somewhere in the fifty and sixty thousand dollar range.

There is money to be made in the dot com arena, to be sure, but you’re more likely to make it if you are a programmer ($63,000 according to an AFL-CIO report on teacher salaries compared to other industries, at www.afl.org), or, of course, in sales. A friend of mine who spent ten years working for the stock photo industry, was able to net only $45,000 a year when she got a job as director of operations at a Silicon Valley dot com, about the same amount she was making in her previous career. Another friend had to fight to get a prospective dot com employer to match the salary she was making as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit museum.

Who We Really Are
One of the most important things to remember about dot com’s, however, and the reason that dot com employees are not a threat to their communities, is the tremendous opportunities these businesses offer to young, and often inexperienced, job seekers. I know many writers, myself included, who got their first break from a computer-related company. Some of us may never have had the chance to strut our stuff in the tremendously competitive worlds of consumer magazine and book publishing. I know a successful Web designer who started out as an office services assistant, and was given the opportunity to learn HTML on the job. An editor I worked under a few computer-related jobs ago had worked his way up from the mailroom. I know graphic designers who were able to land dot com jobs with portfolios consisting almost entirely of fliers for rave parties.

All of these people have grown in the dot com world, adding new skills, and racking up the experience necessary to eventually rake in the big bucks. And, for the most part, they are not SUV-driving, high-paid menaces. For the most part, they ride their bikes, live in studio apartments, care about the environment and renters’ rights, and don’t eat out every night. For the most part, these people are not the enemy of a modest, inexpensive lifestyle (though I won’t argue that there are dot com employees who may be). Simply, the answer to the housing problem, and other problems, in the San Francisco Bay Area is bigger than a bunch of people who managed to score good jobs. So let’s stop blaming them.

Read more by Andrea Dudrow.

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