A San Francisco family is looking for a butler – for $175,000 a year.

Evoking characters from Downton Abbey, the job listing posted on the Help Company website (and picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle’s intrepid daily columnist Leah Garchik) calls for a “house manager”. It reads in part:

You will be responsible for calendar management for this family of 5 (plus a puppy!), help with travel planning, restaurant reservations, to running local errands and organizing closets and pantries. We are looking for someone who can set up systems for this new home and organize everything from a gift database to cleaning routine for the housekeeper and groundsmen. If you have the best eye for attention to detail, and love keeping everything in its place and want to work for the loveliest, most loyal client, please send your resume. Anyone with a background in architecture or art would be a bonus to this client – as they have an extensive art collection comparable to a museum!

In terms of a rage read, a classic of the San Francisco gentrification genre, it’s all there: the decadence of hiring a house manager plus the uniquely San Franciscan attempt to shade the post with liberal, feel-good jargon. They call themselves a “creative family” with a “casual” environment. Where bankers in New York might say they’re out to make money, the rich in Silicon Valley will call themselves creatives at all costs (“code is art too,” or so they tell me).

The job post continues: “You should have a deep level of commitment to service and understand white glove service, yet feel comfortable in a more casual environment. The client enjoys a simple lifestyle but also loves to entertain High Profile friends from around the world.”

Twitter co-founder and former CEO Dick Costolo joked about it with Google Ventures partner Rick Klau:



dick costolo (@dickc) @rklau @NellieBowles

Remains of the Bay



Thank you, thank you very much.

dick costolo (@dickc) @NellieBowles Nellie, do you think bullying me into an answer is the kind of white glove treatment your new boss expects? Not very butler-y!

Here’s the trouble with this particular rage read: it’s perfectly legal and fine for people to hire house staff. And there’s nothing immoral about spending money. Rage at those who post a listing like this – such as the rage that Mark Zuckerberg could legally set aside his $45bn fortune tax free – is misplaced. The post is just a reminder of the nasty, anti-development system that has created a city so rich and gilded it seems out of place in history.



The job posting reminds me that Noe Valley – the quiet family neighborhood in San Francisco where the position is based – now has a 10,000 sq ft mansion with house staff. And that’s jarring. House managers are on TV or in the Upper East Side or probably at the Getty’s house in Pacific Heights, but Noe Valley? We hear about gentrification all the time here, and you can see it to some extent by walking the city (construction crews, artisanal chocolate). But to realize Noe Valley (named after the Mexican leader José de Jesús Noé) now has the real trappings of enormous wealth – the house manager, the groundsmen, the hidden museum of art – is still a shock.

It also seems like a decidedly old-fashioned solution to life maintenance.