I find the “Bay Area exodus” an interesting phenomenon as someone who lives in Austin. I’m curious to see if the same mentality that ruined living conditions there (and other large cities in the US with large tech presence) will repeat itself here or if Austin/Texas have better conditions to avoid that fate. Anecdotally I already feel the changes to Austin are negative, as I assume the old residents felt when I moved here in 2007. What I can’t discern is whether it’s a sign of the times or specifically a consequence of the tech worker affluence/politics coming to the city.
You could argue that people who moved away from Bayarea to other places are not as aligned with the far left, so in theory their ideology and politics should be more deviated from the Bayarea norm.
FYI - what you call "far left" is considered pretty centrist in almost every other highly developed country. And the Bay Area as a whole is in no way "far left".
You'll find most extreme leftists (by that I mean marxists, maoists, dedicated anarchists) don't care much about "woke culture", because they care much more about class divisions than racial or gender or sexuality or other divisions. "Woke culture" is primarily a center-left phenomenon.
Some of the founders of Black Lives Matter described themselves as Marxist, and it was that organization that popularized the term. And for them it would be a mistake to focus only on class. They would argue that there are multiple systems of oppression that interact with each other and need to be considered as a whole rather than individually, the critical race theory term for that is intersectionality. I don't consider critical race theory to be a center-left phenomenon. Right wing politicians would be overjoyed to find out that people on the center-left do.
Wokeness displaces left wing politics. Wokeness is a byproduct of neoliberal ideology. The culture wars displace politics with catharsis while everything sacred in public and private life is replaced with so-called free-market solutions. Wokeness and its counterparts are the results of various elite entities capitalizing on this crisis by selling empty hope in exchange for marketable virtue. Wokeness does not solve any of the problems it claims to solve, but that doesn’t matter to those who wield it; mostly individuals climbing institutional ladders and brands doing public relations. And, unsurprisingly, it’s less useful for politicians because most people outside liberal elite social circles see right through the farce.
For the last few years, the only people using the word "woke" are constantly outraged conservative commentators. It's impossible to take you seriously when you use terms like that.
Since I don't exist in that bubble, can you define "woke" & "woke culture"?
The term was popularized by Black Lives Matter, I don't see why it isn't fair game for outraged conservatives. If it is impossible to take people using the term seriously, I guess that tells us how you feel about Black Lives Matter.
It was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2017:
chiefly US slang
: aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
But we will only succeed if we reject the growing pressure to retreat into cynicism and hopelessness. … We have a moral obligation to "stay woke," take a stand and be active; challenging injustices and racism in our communities and fighting hatred and discrimination wherever it rises.
— Barbara Lee
… argued that … Brad Pitt is not only woke, but the wokest man in Hollywood … because he uses his status—and his production company Plan B—to create space for artists of color, with such films as 12 Years a Slave, Selma, and the upcoming film Moonlight.
So based on that definition, explain to me how being "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)" is bad...
And does "woke culture" just mean a culture of being "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)"?
Being aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues is not bad. Using language that implies that you, but not other people, are aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues is bad. And using language like "woke" which implies that other people are asleep or they would agree with you, is bad.
It's similar to using words like "sheeple" to describe people who you disagree with. As you said, it's impossible to take you seriously when you use terms like that. That's what the outraged conservative commentators are latching on to. They're telling their listeners, "They think they are woke and you are asleep". Things are tribal. It's a powerful message.
So you're saying there's more to the term "woke" than the definition you provided. In fact, the additional context you gave makes the definition almost completely meaningless.
But what if (and it's a big what if) there is a whole side of thought in America that believes issues of racial and social justice are not worthwhile and have already been settled? Would the term "woke" still be offensive then, based on what you just said?
I don't really know if the 2nd paragraph of your comment is supposed to be satire or serious, but that often happens when these undefinable words are thrown around as if they are cannon.
It actually is. The far left are associated with Marxism, which is completely unrelated to "Woke Culture". In fact, Marxists completely denounce "Woke Culture" as well as any other difference between peoples except economic class.
I couldn't disagree more. But based on your framing, we're obviously looking at 2 different realities that will not be able to find common ground here.
> For the American Left, individual responsibility doesn't exist. We don't control our life.
You need to turn off the conservative talk shows for awhile and go for a nice walk outside. Maybe meet some real people and have an actual conversation. Because your post sounds completely deranged.
I'm speaking of climate change, healthcare, education, taxes, womens & minority rights, etc.. (central issues that matter to the country).
It's entirely on you if you choose to get involved in the hot button social issue discussion of the week. If you don't care to engage in that, it doesn't affect you at all.
Depends. I am not sure what combination of policies created the San Francisco street filth and petty crime problems and whether those policies qualify as far left in the U.S.
It is certainly an outlier in the developed world, too, especially when the total wealth of the region is taken into account.
Take a trip to any of the major US cities (especially older US cities) and you'll find them by and large to be much much worse than SF in terms of crime. Which is a much more a result of the gross economic disparity found in America than any "far left" policies.
Some people are very poor while others are very rich. The poor people feel desperate/trapped and want what the people living near them have. The only places with as much economic disparity as America that have less crime most often have authoritarian governments.
Blaming a local city government for country-wide issues is quite short-sighted in perspective and not helpful when talking about solutions.
But that also leaves out large programs in Sweden that vastly narrow the gap between rich & poor, which America does not have. Namely universal healthcare, free child care, free prenatal care, free school lunches, free college, union participation in 70% of the workforce (which provides additional unemployment benefits & pensions), and most retired persons being able to receive multiple public & private pensions. You cannot measure the desperation of poor in America vs Sweden without taking all of this into account.
Furthermore, I'm struggling to see what your point is. All of the policies I listed above are considered "far left" by many people in America, yet seem to reduce the desperation of lower classes (and crime). So are you saying the America and cities like SF should adopt these "far left" policies? Because that's the exact opposite view of the parent comments that I've been replying to.
Being poor in and of itself isn’t a globally accurate predictor of crime rate.
This would seem to contradict your earlier statement:
> [Crime is] much more a result of the gross economic disparity found in America than any "far left" policies.
The reason this can’t be true is China and Sweden have comparable wealth disparity to the US, yet vastly better public safety outcomes. If “gross economic disparity” were as predictive of crime as you claim, surely China and Sweden would have comparable crime rates to the US, irrespective of social programs. The fact they have much lower crime rates than the US disproves economic determinism along this axis.
> Being poor in and of itself isn’t a globally accurate predictor of crime rate.
If you look at income inequality (with a few exception), it is not the sole predictor, but it gets you pretty damn close. Of course there are many other factors, but there is still an extremely strong correlation. After all, if the poor are not extremely disconnected from wealth, there is less incentive to resort to crime.
Income inequality is a much better measure of inequality than wealth inequality. Just like how a cash flow statement is much better at describing the health of a business than their balance sheet. If you don't have the cash to pay the bills, you're screwed. I have explicitly said that countries with authoritarian governments are an exception to the correlation and factored in how massive social programs (like the ones in Sweden) decrease inequality. And you would see those decreases if you looked at income inequality, where the US is 2-3x as unequal as Sweden by almost every measure.
> If “gross economic disparity” were as predictive of crime as you claim, surely China and Sweden would have comparable crime rates to the US, irrespective of social programs.
Why would it be irrespective of social programs when social programs (largely supported by the "far left") reduce inequality? That doesn't make any sense.
You are straw-manning my argument to that of "wealth inequality is the sole determining factor of crime". This is something that I have explicitly not said and given you multiple reasons why. It's an extremely weak and disingenuous way to have a discussion, and frankly makes this entire exchange pointless. Try to actually engage with the people your speaking to in the future and you'll have more meaningful interactions.
>Take a trip to any of the major US cities (especially older US cities) and you'll find them by and large to be much much worse than SF in terms of crime.
Show me video from other major American cities of smash and grab looting flashmobs of ANY frequency comparable to what is routinely happening in the bay area today.
Hell it's gotten so bad the SF mayor was recently ranting, sounding more like a conservative. Of course talk is cheap. Will they fire their useless DAs and actually support the police? I'm not holding my breath.
Are you saying they don't make fun of the "radical rightists" who deny climate change is real, refuse to take basic safety measure in a worldwide pandemic, decry a war on Christians & Christmas, yet worship a man who raw dogged a porn star when his 3rd wife was home with their new born baby?
Your framing and perspective is interesting to say the least.
On issues that matter to the country like climate change, healthcare, education, taxes, womens & minority rights - sure there's plenty.
If you're talking about hot button social issues of the week that right wing commentators care/talk about 1000x more than anyone else, I don't know because I don't care about that at all.
This is exactly the type of delusional ignorance and self-congratulatory excuses that produce the dysfunction.
Any American denying the overwhelming influence of rich people and rich industries on the American political system can’t (and rightfully won’t be) trusted.
Austin is still fighting the updates to the building code after many many years which would have helped growth within the city itself. If Austin can keep building housing, then it might be ok.
It really tends to be the other way around. If you build a transit network and no one is riding on it, people freak out about their money being wasted (and they're not entirely wrong). It's entirely possible to build out transportation at a later date. Look at cities in Europe, which are historic and difficult to work with: the people are there first, and then they add the transportation.
Part of the problem (a huge part) is our land use decisions in the US, which require that people possess and store an automobile for even the most basic things in life.
I live in Seoul and here transportation network and housing are planned together. Yes it's possible to build transportation later, but it's unnecessarily painful, so why bother?
It's great if you can kind of plan some things out together, but I think flexibility and adaptability are more important than trying to plan out everything ahead of time. It's impossible to predict the future. In the US, we try and rigidly control and plan out land use and are surprised when it causes huge problems like the Bay Area housing crisis.
It certainly appears to be a repeat of the same delusional elite behaviors and outcomes. Look no further than the outright brutality, irresponsibility, shameless excuses, and self-congratulatory ignorance with which SF, and now Austin, have responded to their unprecedented homelessness crises. If this were any other nation, it would be declared a human rights emergency.
I moved to Vegas and am similarly interested to how it shakes out. Not super familiar with the local politics but they seem very amenable to building. There are a huge amount of SFH and midrise apartments going up all over. I think the Casio's have a vested interested in keeping the city affordable given the amount of labor they consume.
I think the issues the Bay Area faces are due to the diversity of residents and the diversity of their needs and not specific to the Bay Area. Its a byproduct of having a dense, creative economy.
Who gets to "define" the goals and strategy of the region?
Do the original techies get to define it or is it the new media techies or the original residents or the service workers supporting the techie lifestyles?
Just like Los Angeles used to be fairly homogenous and conservative prior to embracing the creative economy, eventually any city which having any success attracting the diversity of views required by a creative economy well face these issues.
5 years ago, I would have loved to move to the Bay Area, despite the expense. Today, I'm looking for a new city and the Bay isn't really even in my consideration set.
I will say that as an outsider, the Bay and San Francisco often seem to get conflated when people discuss them. I've heard plenty about the issues the city of SF is facing right now, but my sense is that many parts of the Bay are still thriving - just prohibitively expensive for most. Is that true? Or is the lived experience in other parts of the Bay also getting worse?
For all intents and purposes the Bay has two parts. The places tourists visit and news org talk about (almost exclusively downtown SF and SOMA), and the places people actually live - like the sunset, mission, san jose, east bay, and the peninsula.
Most analysis does not go beyond the first part.
I'm not saying the second part is a utopia by any means, but you can carve out a more affordable and generally normal and happy life in the latter part pretty easily.
All said the traffic sucks (like all large metros), its still very expensive (particularly for families who can't live with roomates), childcare costs are high, etc.
I understand what you're trying to say, but I find it disturbing to suggest that "people don't actually live in downtown SF and SOMA". Many people, especially many lower income folks, do actually live there. The compartmentalization mentality is real, and highly problematic. (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt though and assume you were just relaying this widespread sentiment, and not yourself supporting it.)
Thats an important distinction and you're right that my goal was not to marginalize those regions in any way.
My framing was in giving context to housed individuals considering moving into the Bay Area, and to highlight that the Bay Area is incredibly diverse and that there is room if you look outside the more "mainstream" areas.
If you have the money, it's still a great place to live. While it does have its problems, a lot of it is right-wing propaganda. I've thought about leaving, but the one thing that keeps me in the Bay Area is the sheer density of smart people. You are surrounded by ambition. I have yet to find another city in the US that has the same energy.
Oakland still has crime issues but it has really rejuvenated in the last 10 years. The census data reflects this (we grew by 10%) but it is also getting much better in terms of amenities, restaurants and nightlife. For the first time I can remember I see younger people (mid 20s) out and about in the evening rather than trekking over the bridge to SF. It seems to have become the epicenter of dining innovation in the East Bay (taking that title from Berkeley) and is some ways competitive with SF now in terms of new restaurants. The San Francisco Chronicle reviews a large number of Oakland restaurants now (which I suspect is mostly due to the fact that their new restaurant critic likely can't afford to live in SF and lives in Oakland). Many neighborhood corridors are finally "happening" after previous false starts (the Laurel District being the most recent example).
I just moved to Oakland (Lakeside area) from Tennessee, and it was purely voluntary. My job is remote-first, but the office is in SF. I'd been working remotely for the last 4 years in TN, and I was sick of it. Now I'm really enjoying life in Oakland and the Bay Area. Locals keep telling me it's a shell of what it was pre-pandemic, but the pandemic is (hopefully) a temporary state. It will be interesting to see where things go when everything normalizes again.
SF has always been a far worse place to live and work unless you are young and like nightlife and restaurants and lots of socializing outside of the office. Yes, SF has gotten worse because too many petty crimes have been de-criminalized which has lead to the rational decision of bad actors to commit many petty crimes.
Outside of SF, life goes on as it always has. The major crime issues are (a) catalytic converter theft which costs the victim thousands and (b) car window breaks to grab any visible bags because too many techs leave their laptops in a visible bag.
Housing prices have always been rising, traffic is always getting worse. It's annoying, but not new. Companies have always been leaving and new places are always touted as the new "Silicon XYZ." The Silicon Glen. The Silicon Prairie. Silicon Forest.
I'm old. All this has happened before. All this will happen again.
> SF has always been a far worse place to live and work unless you are young and like nightlife and restaurants and lots of socializing outside of the office.
You can replace "SF" with any developed city and you make the same point. It sounds like you're more against urban living in general than SF specifically.
The details and tradeoffs vary by city but I think I generally agree. You tend to have at least many of the same tradeoffs in many major cities and the tradeoffs are such that cons tend to become weightier with age and the pros less compelling.
On the contrary, I find older people who live in cities to be much more engaged in life (and interesting as a result) than older folk who moved out to a suburb or rural area. When you're older in the city, you can walk or take public transport to interesting cultural events, have more frequent conversations with neighbors, and continue to have unique daily stimulus in your life. And as you get older, not being dependent on a car is a huge deal.
Without unique events taking place, people more often than not settle into a set routine that causes them to recede mentally at a much faster rate.
It really depends on what sorts of activities you like. I know a lot of non-urban older folks who are extremely active with hiking, paddling, etc.
And "dependent on car" varies. If you can easily walk distances and take public transit, not being dependent on a car can be a plus. But if you can safely drive but aren't very mobile otherwise, using a car can be more liberating.
Very true - I think the common ground here though is as people get older, they need to stay engaged in something on a regular basis outside of their home.
I'm from the Bay Area and have lived in Oakland for the last 6 years (lived in SF for 11) and from my perspective it's great here. Not without it's problems and very expensive compared to other cities. The only other places I've ever lived were north TX, MT, and central CA, but I've extensively traveled the US for work and holidays.
My entire career (since 2005) has been in tech and mostly at startups. The bay area is done has been a trope my entire life. What I've noticed in my adult life and as a professional is that people move here regularly, but there is also a bit of a hype cycle that draws and repels people. I also see a whole lot of people that come here to get rich and get jaded pretty fast when they don't while having to pay a whole bunch more than if they lived elsewhere. I have a great group of friends that are mostly from other places around the world and I think some of them are here to stay, but inevitably some will leave. I don't think this is specific to the bay though.
Moved here 6 months ago. Lot of what you read is hyperbole. Truth is always somewhere in the middle. Bay Area can be amazing or horrible depending on where you live, where you work and how much you earn. There are some areas where I don't want to go but there are a lot more areas that are thriving, full of friendly people with great communities.
Yes, it is expensive - that is very true. Yes, taxes are high. But despite those, there is no lack of people moving here so there must be something right, right?
I have lived in 6 states in the US and 5 countries globally including most that people throw out as alternatives to the Bay Area. In my experience, Bay Area has the highest concentration of smartest and open minded people that I have come across. You want to build something? Bay Area energizes you because everyone will be encouraging and ready to help. Weather is nice. There are plenty of gorgeous places to visit, within the area and even more with a short drive.
However, I'll repeat - it is expensive! This is the most expensive place I have lived. We are a dual income household and money is less important than it used to be so for us it is totally worth it. Some years ago, we probably couldn't afford to live here.
There are two kinds of people I am seeing moving to the Bay Area - 1) high earners that can afford it and 2) those early in their careers who don't mind living in a less than optimal situation and moving here gives them a wage bump .
By large, the people moving away are those with average to good incomes who have kids and can't afford the lifestyle that they want. In the end, it comes down to what you value more. In the Bay Area, one thing you do NOT get is value for money. Will we be here long term? Who know but right now, I am in love with this place.
I'd also add that much of what drives Silicon Valley tech to a significant degree is the highly educated first immigrant and the support system and retail infrastructure that this requires (i.e. familiar restaurants, grocery stores, cultural events, language schools/tutoring).
So I would say most folks saying the center tech will just move to Texas are discounting the needs for first generation immigrants to travel home to Asia Pacific as well as have a local support network.
It's trivially easy for Keith Rabois, Jason Calacanis or Peter Thiel to move to Miami or Elon Musk to Austin. It's another thing for Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang to move to Miami/Austin and feel more at home versus just staying put.
I use this as a barometer of first generation immigrant tech friendliness.
Also its not that it wouldn't be great if all places had built in support for first generation tech immigrants - its just not the current reality.
99 Ranch Market is a chain of supermarkets catering to the Asian community, and it's pretty easy to shop there if you don't speak English.
They tend to build in places with large immigrant communities, so having a 99 Ranch Market could be seen as a sign of diversity.
That being said I personally tend to shop at smaller Asian stores which don't have websites or multiple locations. Just because the store doesn't have a website doesn't mean there isn't an strong immigrant community in that area.
A more time intensive but perhaps more useful/fair measure is Yelp 3.5+ star ratings designated at $$$ with more than 100 reviews for things like Indian chaat, Cantonese dimsum, Taiwanese boba, Korean BBQ, Japanese Izakaya etc.
I agree with most of your comment, but I do think you're discounting the ability for those hubs to exist elsewhere a bit. Dallas, Houston and surprisingly Atlanta all have really robust areas where you can see and feel the cultural influence of immigrants that live in the area.
It extends to the buildings that are built, shops that are run and overall feeling of the neighborhoods.
They're not all in the city for sure, and none of them are as big or as connected as areas you would find in say Orange County but still quite strong and really add to the cities themselves.
Yes totally didn't mean to discount it. It is getting quite diverse and growing more so everyday - which is a good thing.
I'd only point out - for a first generation immigrant with a tech salary and tech stock options - all things being equal - I'd imagine the vast preference would be to go where there are 99ranches and Din Tai Fungs and high end chaat at a density where its in proximity to high end housing versus being in the traditional "ethnic" end of town.
It will change for sure as tech slowly disperses - so it should be fun to watch.
SF can be a really delightful city but it comes with the well publicized problems associated with a large homeless problem and a lot of petty crime. Especially away from the Moscone/SOMA/Tenderloin, it's probably not as bad as its reputation but it isn't great.
Aside from housing prices, the issue with most of the South Bay is that a lot of it is pretty boring suburbia with a few cute little downtowns. But I don't love the area in general until I get into the Santa Cruz mountains.
One thing about San Francisco is exactly the same thing as any other city. It has problems, usually localized to a few neighborhoods, with bad city services, crime, and homelessness. The thing about San Francisco that is different is a whole lot of people bid up the price of housing even in the crappy neighborhoods, hoping to ride the wave of gentrification, only to find out you can't gentrify the entire city because the poor and the homeless don't just evaporate by sheer force of will. Now they're left in still crappy neighborhoods, but with homes they paid 7 figures for, or 3k a month a rent in places they don't even own.
Buuuut, crime actually is abnormally high there.
If you just look at crime trends, violent crime in San Francisco has trended downward pretty consistently for decades, but slower than nationally and across California. Property crime has actually gone up, which is the most atypical thing, because it's gone down most everywhere else. San Francisco is the fourth biggest city in California. So what about the fourth biggest in Florida? Orlando has seen both property and violent crime rates drop quite a bit, but they were absurdly high for some odd reason 20 years ago. They're still higher than San Francisco on violent crime, but lower on property crime. Fourth biggest city in Texas is Austin, which is quite a bit lower than both Orlando and San Francisco on both property and violent crime, close to Texas and national averages. New York only really has one city, and it's a little bit lower on violent crime, and drastically lower on property crime.
So all in all, it seems like San Francisco has an abnormally high property crime rate. People seem to love pinning this on Prop 47, but property crime rates have actually always been abnormally high in San Francisco. It's worth noting Prop 47 is statewide, yet property crime rates double the state average is just a San Francisco thing. Los Angeles is almost the same as the statewide average.
So whatever the heck is actually the problem, it's specifically a San Francisco thing. Unfortunately, since I don't think it really fits standard red/blue culture war narratives, no one is incentivized to figure out the real reason and do anything about it.
Something interesting is to compare to other places that were the site of some type of "gold rush" that is the reason the city even exists. South Africa and Congo have been in terrible shape forever, at one point murder and kidnapping capitals of the world. Even the Yukon Territory in Canada has among the highest crime rates in the country, in spite of being largely rural.
Way before anyone ever wrote Twitter take downs of tech bro gentrifiers, California's first millionaire, Samuel Brannan, was the richest man from the gold rush, but he never even found gold. He just bought up all the retail space and sold shovels, pick axes, and pans at a ridiculous markup. When his speculation drove up the price of land, it led to something called squatter's riots when people being made homeless got pissed, and he formed an extra-legal "vigilance committee" to be a sort of private police force that rounded up and hanged people before California became a real state and has actual laws.
I'm not sure there's a real point there, except to speculate about the possibility of some sort of centuries spanning cultural inertia that forces a place to maintain the same character it was founded with long after there is still any good reason for it.
"So whatever the heck is actually the problem, it's specifically a San Francisco thing. Unfortunately, since I don't think it really fits standard red/blue culture war narratives, no one is incentivized to figure out the real reason and do anything about it."
One of my wife's classmates wrote a B-school paper on this (having a certain intimate acquaintance with it). It's corruption and dysfunction between the SFPD and the DA's office. The two organizations have a uniquely antagonistic relationship, such that the SFPD actively does poorly at their job to spite the DA's office, and then the DA's office actively refuses to charge to spite the SFPD.
Uncertain what the set of incentives is that led to this, but I suspect it may have something to do with the DA being an elected official and hence responsible to the people of SF (who are fairly wary of the SFPD because of past history), while the SFPD are career civil servants who want to avoid taking any action that could endanger their life or job but aren't ultimately responsible to voters.
> I will say that as an outsider, the Bay and San Francisco often seem to get conflated when people discuss them. I've heard plenty about the issues the city of SF is facing right now, but my sense is that many parts of the Bay are still thriving - just prohibitively expensive for most. Is that true? Or is the lived experience in other parts of the Bay also getting worse?
That's very, very true, and also one of my pet peeves as an insider.
Most of the problems that people are associating with the Bay Area - the rampant crime, poop on the streets, poor schools, dysfunctional politics, performative wokeness - are specifically San Francisco problems (and to a slightly lesser degree, Oakland and downtown San Jose). In my neighborhood, there are yard signs out saying "We [heart] our police", right alongside BLM signs and rainbow flags. There is no poop on the streets, not even dog poop (there are occasional broken bottles, but they're as likely to be Snapple as beer). The two times I've had to call them (for identity theft and a medical emergency), they were there within an hour and 3 minutes, respectively, and they were courteous and professional. I feel safe walking my kid back from preschool.
Mid-peninsula, Redwood City, Mountain View, most of Sunnyvale, Fremont, North San Jose, Berkeley/El Cerrito, are all on the upswing. Housing prices are unfortunately all going up to match, but that's because people want to live there.
I've heard that the center of gravity of Silicon Valley shifts every 5-10 years or so, each time a new tech wave happens. It was SF in the 2010s (mobile & sharing economy), Palo Alto & Mountain View in the 00s (Web 2.0 & social networking), SF in the late 90s (dot-com boom), Mountain View in the early 90s (SGI & Netscape), Cupertino in the late 80s (Apple, Seagate, and Borland), Scotts Valley in the early 80s (Borland), spread over the peninsula in the 70s (Oracle in Redwood Shores, Intel in Santa Clara), and Sunnyvale in the 1960s (Lockheed Martin, Hendy Ironworks). It's likely we're seeing another turn now, and my bets for a new center of gravity would be Redwood City (crypto, drones) or Foster City / Redwood Shores (biotech).
> I will say that as an outsider, the Bay and San Francisco often seem to get conflated when people discuss them.
Yes, from an outside perspective SF and South Bay (clasically Silicon Valley proper, though in the last decade many companies have settled in SF) are mingled together. I know I used to say "SF" when I meant the Bay Area, before I lived here.
But SF is about an hour north (or way more if traffic is bad) from the classic Silicon Valley. And a very different place with its own unique problems. I go to SF once a year or less and it always feels like an alien place.
The rest of the Bay Area is still mostly pretty great, if you can somehow deal with the expense.
Source: Just my observations, closing in on 25 years living in Silicon Valley.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. The Bay Area used to be a nice place for regular people to live. The successive waves of tech booms kind of ruined that and average quality of life has gone down for everyone except the very wealthy.
For our country as a whole it was never healthy to have so much of the tech industry concentrated in one small geographic area. We'll be better off in the long run to distribute it more widely, even if that makes it a bit harder to form a startup and recruit local employees.
Yes, some of the artists can move back in when rent dips 50% for a little bit.
That seemed to be a goto point for anyone that was in San Francisco in the 90s.
“There used to be so many artists in this formerly horrible neighborhood, it was awesome!” Perplexing, but they’re right, this transplant would have never come there as nothing would have been moderately appealing about it to me.
Detroit has artists too. So doesnt seem like the strongest argument.
The truth about the artists argument is that all the people lamenting the loss of the artists are the groupies. I know because up in the Oakland hills my friends throw creative parties with art and music and eclectic talks.
But to the groupies, it appears the artists have gone. And that’s because in the mop-geek-sociopath trichotomy, the groupies are the mops. The geeks have hidden themselves from the mops because the latter are creative leeches.
So if you don’t know where the artists have gone, it’s because they went to get away from you.
lol I love this, but that’s not really the point, The people complaining are not confused where they’ve gone, they are annoyed that they aren’t in San Francisco city limits, not at the artist commune in Oakland serving to remind us why fire codes were invented
The killing of Alex Nieto I think got the point across
I read everything I could about that, and yeah I would have gotten out of there as fast as I could
It was the most obvious sign to me that the society there simply is too incongruent to work
Transplant that wasnt even supposed to be there calls cops on a licensed security guard eating in the park who had legally had a holstered taser on, transplant watches behind the bushes as the state hit squad pulls up on the guy in the fog and shoots him without question due to his uniform being “gang colors”. All while the transplant is texting trayvon martin references to his buddy about how he was looking for an excuse to handle this himself if he was in another state, and then winds up dodging police bullets while on the phone with 911. All cops acquitted.
I think in the long run, not being forced to live in the Bay Area if you want to be ambitious in tech will be good for the Bay Area. If you don’t feel forced to live there to make money, you’ll hopefully only go there if you actually like it. So perhaps the tech community will become less “transient”, more invested in the community, and not as big “haters” as they were. Or at least as they were perceived.
I’m also pretty skeptical this is the bay area’s death knell. Web3 is a pretty bad example if you’re looking at funding, because if you interpret web3 as just “crypto” or decentralized, that suffers a legitimacy problem which makes all VC averse to it, not just the Bay Area VC (though of course a lot of crypto stuff does get funded still). And obviously it’s not only people in the Bay Area who work less than their stated 40 hrs or go to tech conferences…
In the near-term, say 5-10 years from now, I think the Bay Area will represent maybe 50% of the “hot” tech industry (not counting giants based in the Bay Area which have already spread all over the world) whereas it was maybe 80% before. Obviously right now is an aberration because with remote work you don’t benefit much from the network effects.
I agree with this perspective and it’s part of the reason I’ve been considering moving into the city — it seems like a tech diaspora could relieve many of the pressures on SF in the coming years that would allow it to grow back in the direction of its prior reputation as a cultural center.
If the Bay Area struggles to deal with an influx of tech workers, why would it struggle any less to deal with an influx of artists? There would be fewer dollars chasing the housing, but that doesn't make more housing available.
The Bay Area has chosen stasis. That doesn't bode well for its revival as a cultural center.
You’re getting downvoted but it’s true. After the dot bomb there were the influx of ‘creative’ hipsters with an art degree their parents bought them gentrifying neighborhoods. Then they got priced out by techies.
SF is an attractive place so it attracts people, the vulnerable communities with less resources get pressure.
That sort of art scene is famously broke, so there's a financially-imposed limit on the influx.
The hipster influx that was followed by the tech influx were both fueled by steadily rising disposable income (whether from trust-fund hipsters or highly-paid tech workers, later).
I don't think a starving artist influx is likely though because there's a substantial cohort of independently-wealthy people (from the US tech industry, from other US industries, and from abroad) that are going to continue to live in places with desirable climate/amenities/scenery/cultural centers/etc even if the jobs of the newly-high-income move around. So it'll probably just go back to circa-2010-hipster-less-expensive-but-still-expensive levels.
You have excellent points here. I would also add that the Bay Area really missed the point from an innovation perspective when they started investing billions by and not leading with solving real problems.
As an example you only need to look at the amount of money the FAANG companies spend at consuming your data to sell to advertisers - their investments in data mining for that data, various technologies for click-bait advertising, etc. rather than addressing holes in cybersecurity, technology that may help in the climate crisis, tracking child predators, sex traffickers, mass shooters/shootings etc.
The Bay Area is known for caring about Social Networks, Apple products, Amazon's BS, Google (screwing search results around) and just now slowly increasing biotech...it doesn't have a track record of caring about innovation around important items but more around throwing large sums of money at trivially bullshit stuff - yes, my opinion, but this is a fact and has an impact.
I agree wholeheartedly. I first moved to San Francisco in 1998 for reasons unrelated to tech, and despite becoming a software engineer I cheered the effect the dotcom crash had on the city. The people who made the city great were being forced out and replaced by young tech workers who largely didn't care about anything other than their careers.
The app boom was similarly heartbreaking, only this time most tech workers didn't even need to explore the neighborhoods they lived in -- they could Uber to the front door of any restaurant they wanted, and take tech buses instead of riding their bikes or taking public transportation to get to work.
A few years ago I read that the average tenure of a business on Valencia was less than 18 months, which is nothing short of a death sentence for a neighborhood like the Mission. Long times residents no long feel connected to (or were able to take pride in) their neighborhood, and most new residents don't care to to establish those connections -- why bother if the upscale boutique that replaced a multigenerationally owned family business is just going to be gone in a year an a half?
I mourn what happened to the city I used to love, but I'm optimistic that the decentralization of tech will leave San Francisco a better place.
> The people who made the city great were being forced out and replaced by young tech workers who largely didn't care about anything other than their careers.
I mostly get the impression people leave because they don't want to deal with the school lottery system. As for retirees, they tend to have incredible housing wealth built up - and old people being replaced by young people over time, even if bad, is much better than the alternative.
> A few years ago I read that the average tenure of a business on Valencia was less than 18 months, which is nothing short of a death sentence for a neighborhood like the Mission.
If you want to have businesses in the Mission, they need cheaper startup costs. That doesn't happen when SF is designed to make new businesses take 2-3 years to open so the planning commission can determine they're sufficiently quaint and precious, and all their neighbors and competitors can sue them looking for bribes.
> I mostly get the impression people leave because they don't want to deal with the school lottery system.
In my experience that may be true for the small number of people who leave the city for Marin, Contra Costa or San Mateo counties, but members of the creative communities that gave the city the reputation it had before the tech booms typically don't have children. I can think of countless coworkers with children, but I only know two couples who decided to have children after moving to San Francisco.
Pre-pandemic if they had done that I probably would have moved there despite passing on a reasonably priced penthouse condo in the mission that has tripled in value back in the early 00s.
Post pandemic and post the past 5 years maybe not so much. You get all the density, they've got some huge budget surplus, but it comes with endless annoying petty crime and poop on the streets about which nothing can be done because of political paralysis. I think I'm too old for that now. But it's silly to assume this is San Francisco's last chapter, no?
They could if the government and NIMBY neighbors would get out of the way.
SF's housing problems are entirely self-created and also very solvable. No one wants to change in order to solve them, so the situation continues to get worse.
Decades of single issue voting for idiot politicians leads to idiotic policies that literally are destroying what used to be one of the finest cities in America.
People need to stop leaving SF and instead clean it up. But they won't. Like locusts that swoop in, destroy everything in sight and then move on they will leave CA, infest other nearby states and then vote for the same utter bullshit that destroyed the areas they came from. I'm watching southern Nevada slide into shithole status more and more from this right now and it's beyond frustrating.
They could if the government and NIMBY neighbors would get out of the way.
And you know perfectly well they won't (decide tomorrow to repeal all zoning), so we're already in the territory of wishful thinking. And in any case far outside the realm of "could just do it."
SF's housing problems are entirely self-created
They are not. There are multiple factors involved.
The city has essentially the same housing stock as it did 20 years ago, but there wasn't, at that time, anything like the housing crisis like it has now. I'll leave it to you to guess what some of those intervening factors might be.
Building more housing wouldn't solve the overcrowding problem. While some people love living in dense cities, most consider having some space and quiet important for quality of life.
> most tech workers didn't even need to explore the neighborhoods they lived in -- they could Uber to the front door of any restaurant they wanted, and take tech buses instead of riding their bikes or taking public transportation to get to work.
This feels like a recurring theme I hear from people who resent the migration of so many "tech" (read: software) workers to San Francisco, but each time I wonder if it's legitimate. I took MUNI twice a day for 6+ years, and walked nearly everywhere else. I don't feel like that caused me to meet many people or form any particular connections with the community. I've certainly had more conversations with strangers taking Lyft than I have on MUNI or BART, despite taking Lyft much less often. Public transit isn't some kind of transformative bonding experience.
Most people go to work, socialize with a small circle of friends, and have a private life at home. That's not some uniquely antisocial "tech worker" thing, as if everyone else spends much of their time painting street murals or serving in a soup kitchen. Poll the young people you know in other jobs and ask them how many local civic organizations they're involved in; folks don't have the time. I say this having been on the board of a small SF nonprofit for several years.
Still to early. People said the same about IoT, VR, BLE, and 5G. Most of it was marketing buzz.
Don’t forget that web3 involves NFTs. And you can buy an NFT from yourself to make it appear it’s valuable even though it’s not. Wash sale rules along with plenty of others don’t apply to NFTs, yet.
It’s definitely early, but not too early to see it once you dive in. NFTs are a very small off shoot of what web3 is about to offer. Jpegs and songs will be part of it, but not likely the biggest part.
I don’t think I’ll ever be a buyer of NFT jpegs but I can still appreciate what is possible
>NFTs are a very small off shoot of what web3 is about to offer.
What else do you think web3 can offer besides NFTs? I'm genuinely curious because I hear a lot of rumbling about web3 but don't really see much being done other than NFTs.
IPFS is decentralized storage and is a big part of what web3 is. Many NFTs use IPFS urls and many dapps are hosted on it. Browsers can resolve them today via centralized gateways like ipfs.io and some browsers (like Brave) support IPFS natively.
>Home IoT might be crap, but it really has a place in manufacturing and monitoring.
What will IoT will bring to manufacturing that hasn't already existed for the past few decades? I started my career in manufacturing at a pretty large company around 2010, and quite literally every process was being monitored over a network. I worked with a framework called XMII (formerly Lighthammer[1]) that integrated with SAP and allowed us to read from various sensors collecting data on manufacturing lines and built dashboards for monitoring.
As I understand it, the difficulty with IoT is it tries to combine together millions of small markets into one big one. But you compete with specialized products designed with expertise in those niches, or else you're trying to sell general technologies to specialists who have no idea how to use them. I think the consensus is largely that IoT hasn't overcome this yet. Aren't they trying to rebrand it with new names now?
Don't forget multimedia (South Park was briefly known as "multimedia gulch" before the Web took off), 3DTV, "smell-o-vision", and a bunch of other crud.
Ad-supported surveillance media selling behavioural manipulation turns out to be what took off. It's a mix of what pays, what the public would consume, and what regulators were (at least for a time) afraid to touch.
> So perhaps the tech community will become less “transient”
This is the saddest part for me, as someone from here. I get that lots of my childhood friends were priced out. That’s life. But them being priced out by people who want to stay until their thirties and then leave just sucks. Your new friends price out your old friends and then leave too.
It doesn’t exactly help as far as sense of community.
Define "good". I agree that the people in SF will be happier to be there (I'm someone moving out of SF because I feel like I can now, I moved there because I "had to"). But this tradeoff includes a massive decrease in the tax base, and losing the security of knowing that they will have a growing tax base from the creation of new billion dollar tech companies. The tech people that the Bay Area loves to hate pay for a huge amount of what the government does, and we all know they're not efficient with that money.
Eventually the Bay Area will find a new equilibrium, but it won't look much like the current Bay Area does. I believe the Bay Area exists in it's current state because of the network effect of having this much tech money/talent in one place. If this goes away, what is left that outweighs high crime, drug abuse and homelessness, taxes, etc?
You make it sound SF was a basket case before tech arrived. It's a city literally created from the Gold Rush. And probably has seen more boom and bust than most cities. I assume SF will find a happy medium where part of the population isn't forced onto the streets by overwhelming capital.
I more so meant that taking away capital is a much more painful process than adding in capital. But you make a good point, it's not the first boom/bust the city has seen.
Go back to 2009 and 2002 and you'll see very similar sentiments. The Bay Area is done.
The author compares this to the decline of Yahoo. It started grinding lower and never recovered.
But a better analogy might be Amazon. It was finished in 2002 and was worse for wear in 2009. How would you say Amazon is doing today?
Some tech companies can come back from the brink. Most can't. I'd compare the Bay Area to a tech company with 9 lives. Rumors of its death have always been greatly exaggerated.
as long as the bay area has some of the best weather, easy access to activities like beach, mountains, parks, and and great schools and neighborhoods, this area will be a destination
Good points here, I got kicked out of my “Nextdoor neighborhood” in SF by pointing out how different things are “outside the building” as the article puts it.
They’re not different but SF is only one piece. Tech people live everywhere. SF got a lot more big tech companies in the past decade but the rest of the bay is chugging along too. To me it seems many people who moved out of SF moved to the east bay or north bay.
It's weird to see this article reference the Justin Keller open letter and pretend that its intended purpose was to call attention to the problem of unhoused people with mental health issues in SF. As if his "heretical" act that attracted public anger was to point out an obvious injustice.
The actual text of the letter[0] argued that people who can't afford homes or who have mental health issues _don't deserve to live in the Bay Area_, and that he _does_ deserve it, because he has money. This is literally spelled out in his letter, not obliquely implied. It's this part of his opinion that got him in public hot water.
I clicked on those links curious what he was talking about and was shocked he was painting this guy as a martyr. I didn't finish reading the second article about another guy comeback since it similarly didn't seem to acknowledge the reality of what he wrote being patently horrible when painting him as some kind of homeless man messiah.
Theres a lot of truths in this article, but it overlooks that every 10-15 years another new generation of people move to the city and after enough time will write sorrowful creeds about how the city has changed for the worse. I could write how much North Beach has changed since the mid-80's with the disappearance of cafes full of old Italian men, but frankly most of the people in the city now never experienced that. The Bay Area is more than just the tech industry and attempts to label it as one thing or another seem misguided.
Better to zig when others zag. Probably the most contrarian and therefore best time to move to the bay is now while everyone is complaining. Even London breed is getting serious about crime, I think SF will bounce back with new energy.
There's something to be said here for the Lindy effect: the longer something has survived, the longer its remaining life expectancy. This is why the "decline of New York" at the beginning of COVID was so overblown. NYC has long been the financial (and arguably cultural) capital of the world; I'd place a bet that the city will still be extremely relevant in 100 years.
Similarly, the Bay has been the center of tech since 60s. But the Bay is much more fragile than New York; it is largely dominated by the tech industry. So a better comparison might be Detroit. When the car industry left, the entirety of Detroit was hollowed out.
Additionally, you need to be in New York if you want to "play in the big leagues" in the world of finance, fashion, art, etc. But tech has already embraced the remote model. 5-10 years ago, I would have felt like I needed to be in SF to further my career in tech. Now, I live in Austin and don't feel like I'm missing out. If anything, it feels like there is way more startup potential here – people actually building cool things, as opposed to resting and vesting at the big companies that dominate Silicon Valley.
Even 5 years ago calls with customers and investors invited questions like "so are you in the city or in the South Bay?" Raising money in particular was very hard if you were not in the Bay Area.
Now nobody even asks where you are located and if you say you are distributed/remote everyone shrugs. Angels and VCs don't seem to care at all.
It's been a stark and noticeable shift and it pre-dates COVID. COVID has just accelerated the geographic diversification trend dramatically.
There's long been strong financial pressure for the tech industry to disburse: it's incredibly expensive. Ideally you'd start a tech company somewhere where office and engineers are cheap. But the companies stay in SF because employees and VCs are there. VCs and employees are there because companies are here.
And even though Sand Hill VCs could fund companies anywhere in the country, in practice, they didn't (much). If that's changing, I feel like that's the trigger for a big tech diaspora as much or more than remote eng work.
> Additionally, you need to be in New York if you want to "play in the big leagues" in the world of finance, fashion, art, etc.
I'm still a little worried about these (less finance); I keep hearing about people moving back home and not looking back because broker fees + rents shot up to where they used to be. Currently only 60% of jobs lost in NYC came back, vs ~90% nationally.
It's hard to imagine the bay area going the same way as Detroit, if only for the fact that it has excellent geographic advantages. It's one of America's biggest Pacific shipping ports, and having access to the Asian markets will always be a huge strategic advantage. On top of that the very stable Mediterranean climate will always be a draw for Americans looking to live somewhere that's not too hot and not too cold.
Besides, many of the current problems of the bay area could be solved by building denser housing and better public transportation. The whole region would be improved if so many of the NIMBYs weren't opposed to "Manhattanization".
Venezuelans had similar access to natural beauty, and control over oil. Internal strife dispensed with their civil society in a matter of years. It’s now a humanitarian disaster.
> Besides, many of the current problems of the bay area could be solved by building denser housing and better public transportation. The whole region would be improved if so many of the NIMBYs weren't opposed to "Manhattanization".
High crime and political instability are California’s biggest issues. Fixing “the markets”, be it the housing market or Wall Street, is unlikely to be a panacea for this. America’s problems go much deeper than markets, and it may already be too late to course correct.
I can’t claim to know much about Venezuelan politics, but wasn’t the crisis in that country largely a result of over-dependence on natural resources? That might have described California in the gold rush days, but the state’s economy has since become extremely diversified.
Basically I think as long as Northern California is a relevant political and economic entity the bay area will stay vital
I hear people every so often saying that Seattle or SF or {insert prosperous liberal city} is going to be the next Detroit. It's hard to express how preposterous that assertion is. Detroit filed for bankruptcy. It's major industries needed massive government subsidies in order to survive.
To think anything like that would happen to SF anytime in the next 50 years is absolutely absurd.
The Lindy effect is not some immutable law. It's an observation and it does not necessarily have to be always true. A friend of mine was funded by a Tier 1 VC and has an office in Palo Alto. But all of engineering is in Princeton, NJ. He is thinking of opening another office somewhere in Texas if needed.
The article peddles the falsehood that the crime rate in SF is exploding, while retail crime is actually at a historic low: http://www.cjcj.org/news/13165
As a short-term housing operator in the Bay Area, specializing in hosting tech workers, we've witnessed first hand the decline in quality of life and exile of the tech traveler.
It started with homeless people camping out in front of our units in SoMa and Mission (often times blocking the entrance/exit because some units had a direct street-level entrance), petty package theft and occasional car break-ins in the building garages.
Police couldn't do anything but take a report.
Then the pandemic started and the vacancy rate skyrocketed. We started getting reports from neighbors or the on-site management that are our guests are dealing drugs out of our units. Except that these units were supposed to be vacant. Our lockboxes were getting broken into, keys taken and people have been living there for several days and in some cases weeks. We often had footage of this.
We would call the police as we arrived at these units for our protection, but they wouldn't be able to arrest anyone because the people in the unit would say "so and so gave me the keys, told me this is their apartment, I don't know anything about that broken lockbox."
This scheme quickly expanded to Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Milpitas and other South Bay cities. We would call the police on a daily basis in the first few months of the pandemic. Sometimes it would take them an hour or two to come, and if the squatters saw our team at the building and got wind of what was going on, they would start packing up their car with our appliances: Apple TV, Nespresso machine, we've even had furniture and major appliances like TVs, washer and dryer rolled out while we were waiting for the police to come.
At most they would temporarily restrain these squatters if they had previous warrants (many of them did, but many others didn't produce an ID.) But even with warrants for their arrest, they would get uncuffed and released within an hour. We thought that at least a warrant would have them appear in front of a judge and we'd not have to encounter them again in a few days at another building, but the pandemic gave them a free pass.
The officers were very candid in saying that if it was up to them, they would book them, but they have instructions not to bring anyone in for non-violent crime. Theft is not prosecuted.
This is how it goes, anyone that has any doubt that crime is not prevented, pursued or prosecuted should go on a ride-along to any of these calls.
If you're a cop, why do your job if the people are just going to be released with no consequences? Police can't do anything if the DA refuses to prosecute.
They could at least do it so they could hammer the news with soundbites for the next election: Police took N reports about crime, showing that set stats are undercounting by M; Police arrested X for QoL crimes, but released all but Y because the DA doesn't care about you, etc...
Imagine I worked at a pizza shop and was getting $10 per hour to make pizzas. Every pizza I make my boss throws into the dumpster. My boss refuses to talk with me. The boss publicly tweets: he doesn't believe in pizza. This goes on for 12 weeks. It gets pretty hard to go to work and make pizzas.
Is that really comparable to a police office in SFPD? "San Francisco offers excellent benefits and the current starting salary is $92,560 per year. After seven years of service, a Police Officer may earn up to $139,152 per year. You will receive comprehensive training, at your full starting salary." [1]
==This goes on for 12 weeks==
This seems like hyperbole. Has nobody been prosecuted in San Francisco for 12 weeks? Does a prosecution after-the-fact stop a crime from happening?
HUD defined “Low Income Limits” in San Francisco as $82,200 for an individual and $117,400 for a family of four. So you are a little above poverty. I think $10 an hour works.
"This goes on for 12 weeks" i just make up some time not related ;)
$10/hr is the equivalent to $20k a year. SFPD officers make 4-6X that number. Then we can add the health benefits and pension contributions that your "Low Income Limits" don't measure. Not to mention the slight of hand where you turned it into a family of 4 to make the math look better.
==i just make up some time not related=
Another made up number. Making up numbers from thin air doesn't create a legitimate comparison for actual data.
Personally, I'd do the same thing as the cops if I were in the situation you describe: do nothing and rake in the moolah, and if anyone has a problem with that, pretend it's someone else's fault.
The SFPD were defunded, staff left in droves due to a cargo culting 'social democrat' political climate that was openly hostile to them. Cops are one wrong move away from being in jail themselves in an increasingly lawless bay area environment. This has reached crisis level and the subtleties of community policing vs law enforcement, and restorative justice experiments have been blown to smithereens by ham fisted, tone deaf ideologues such as DA Boudin. It will take decades to recover from this and is a societal disaster IMO, especially those who are most vulnerable.
Citation please. How much money was taken away and where was it put?
==especially those who are most vulnerable.==
Am I to believe that the staff who fled the department because they disagreed with the politics are now deeply concerned about the "most vulnerable"? Seems the best way to help them would be to focus away from after-the-fact prosecution and instead on community outreach.
You got a citation on this? Because even my city is "defunding the police" because of a budget shortage. And defunding other city services for the same reason. Police leaving in droves, according to Fox News turned out to be 90% retirement.
> Cops are one wrong move away from being in jail themselves
"The mayor also highlighted other changes in 2020-21 and 2021-22 budgets, designed to deal with a $1.5 billion shortfall amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic."
You have not provided any evidence of this claim, attrition is not "de-funding".
I appreciate the link for the article on a proposed budget. I did some google searching (as you suggested) and found some more updated information. The budget has gone up 50% over 10 years, hardly de-funded.
"For the proposed 2021-22 budget, the San Francisco Police Department’s allocation will decrease by $6 million, from about $668 million to $661 million. Those cuts can nearly all be attributed to decreased demand for police at the airport. However, in the following fiscal year, the city projects the police budget will increase once again to $689 million. That’s close to the police budget’s all-time high of $692 million in FY 2019-20. By way of comparison, in FY 2010-11, the police budget weighed in at $445 million."
Because they're paid by taxpayers to do their job. And to be clear: their job is to make arrests and allow the rest of the justice system to do its job, which is (1) to determine the feasibility of going to court, and then (2) to determine the innocence or guilt of the arrested party in a public trial of peers.
Police abstention because other parts of the justice system refuse to play by their (cruel) rules is revanchism, nothing more or less.
Police abstention because other parts of the justice system are non-functional is, beyond any moral or ethical concerns, a certainty.
Every time a police officer arrests someone they're risking life and limb. Whether you like cops or not, you've got to see that aspect of it. Why would you take that risk when you know the system is being operated so that there is literally no difference between if you make the arrest or not?
> Why would you take that risk when you know the system is being operated so that there is literally no difference between if you make the arrest or not?
The ability of police to forecast complex systems so accurately is astonishing.
The change being blamed for 2020/2021 elsewhere in this thread is "catch and release without cash bail." It's noted that there's been a 50% charge rate for a while on things as well. So if the police make that arrest, and that 50% charge rate held, half the time there's going to be a charge filed and regardless of if the person was held in jail or has to be brought back, that's still not "literally no difference."
Umm, no they are under instructions directly from Chesa Boudin, He initiated a reduction of pretrial incarceration and reduction of cash bail. His DA office is only trying ~50% of crimes compared to other major cities where the percent is 80-90%. In addition he is facing a recall this coming June.
You claim: "they are under instructions directly from Chesa Boudin"
Article you linked says: Absolutely nothing to support this
You claim: "His DA office is only trying ~50% of crimes compared to other major cities"
Article you linked says: The charging rate was completely unchanged when Boudin became DA.
If you are going to make an outrageous claim that "they are under instructions directly from Chesa Boudin" you have to provide evidence that this is true, otherwise it will appear to be a lie.
Did you actually read the article I linked? Property crime has increased dramatically under Boudin in SF. Here you go(murders also increased as well but not as dramatically):
2018 - 10,058 property crimes
2019 - 9,404 property crimes
Boudin Elected
2020 - 13,632 property crimes 44% increase
2021 - 6,180 property crimes (half year of stats only)
Boudin has initiated a catch and release for non-felony crimes which means the police arrest someone for breaking into a apartment and they are on the streets the next day due to no cash bail. Charging rates are extremely low(from 2018-2019) as the previous SF DA George Gascon initiated the same policies as Boudin and went to LA as DA and he(gascon) is also being recalled.
The question is whether "[the police] are under instructions directly from Chesa Boudin [not to arrest people for property crime]" as you claimed. This claim appears to be a lie, the article you linked provides no supporting evidence, and your followup comment as well provides no supporting evidence.
When pressed on this point, you are relying on deflection to other criticisms you have of Boudin. Eliminating cash bail is in no way, shape, or form a direct instruction to not arrest property criminals.
A notable part of SFPD history is during the 70s when they went on strike over a pay raise, started arresting citizens who looked at them funny on the picket line, sent threats on the mayor’s life and set off a bomb at his house.
One of my family members is a DA and we were talking about this and they were bragging that, yes, cops and DAs are doing this because of Boudin and George Floyd protests. They were happy because in their opinion it was working.
Flamewar comments like this will get you banned on HN, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. No more of this, please. If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this a lot with this account already. I don't want to ban you, but we need you to fix this if you want to keep commenting here.
Is there an article I can read to understand the reasoning behind not booking anyone for non-violent crime? I'm looking to understand the nuances of the issue instead of taking a political side.
Because they're not a threat to society, have not been determined to be guilty, and throwing people in jail (only to bond out anyway a couple days later, in most cases - funneling more money to bondsmen) is a great way to (a) spread a pandemic and (b) waste money giving them what they want (shelter, food, healthcare, etc.)?
The threat to society is the scummy speculator hotel owners^W^W "landlords" who have units sitting empty and unattended for months (or years in the case of many places around here) in an attempt to drive up or sustain artificially high rent...
Sorry, what makes them scummy? Because they want random squatters who are stealing stuff and not paying, while dealing drugs to not be in their accommodations that they created?
This kind of comment is exactly why “we can’t have nice things” when low-life’s are always defended, while those of us who actually meaningfully contribute to society are burdened to pick up the pieces and put up with illegal behavior.
i thought you would offer a different take on these things. not answer with a question.
> We started getting reports from neighbors or the on-site management that are our guests are dealing drugs out of our units.
> Our lockboxes were getting broken into, keys taken and people have been living there for several days and in some cases weeks
> they would start packing up their car with our appliances
in civilised societies these kinds of actions would be considered extremely damaging to the fibre of the neighbourhood. people would complain to their elected official if the police refused to intervene. and if the elected official refused to act then he would be recalled.
A lot of people have gotten soft on petty (and misdemeanor) non violent crimes and assume everyone is a criminal with a heart of gold "just trying to make it out there". I have been very poor before and living out of my car, I never stole one thing or broke into and squatted in any houses. If I had I would not have soiled the place up and taken stuff on my way out. I was raised with better morals than that. If I were a Californian I would be tired of the excuses the far left come up with to excuse petty crimes and lawlessness. I think it will come full circle in the next few years though as the crooks get bolder with the breakins and flash mob robberies.
A dude swiping some snacks from Target I can understand, but people that break into private residences are definitely a threat to society. It is easy for that to escalate into a violent encounter and it makes people feel legitimately unsafe living in the city.
It's not a hotel, it's some sort of corporate subletting situation. These people broke into an apartment unit.
>7% of home burglaries resulted in a violent encounter. Given that only ~27% of the time someone was even home that's a pretty big risk when someone indeed happens to be home: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vdhb.pdf
Did you seriously just compare people being uncomfortable around black people with people being uncomfortable that their residence may be broken into??? "Legitimately" was the key word there.
The pandemic closed and limited a lot of civic services, including courts, to where there was no room/time to process everything. This meant things had to be prioritized and usually it is violent crime that takes precedence. Things that boil down to non-violent he said, she said situations aren't worth the time in that situation. Before looking deeper into this topic, I think that needs to be understood. It's not as much a political policy as it is a response to a pandemic.
You've basically described running a fancy motel for tech workers. Do you guys not have any form of front desk/building management on site? It seems crazy to run a housing unit with so many people coming in and out otherwise, particularly in those neighborhoods.
I lived in a shared house in the Mission and the neighborhood is still safe enough so that you don't need that. We literally buzzed in anyone that dare ring and friends are still there and still do and never in the two years I lived there, one pandemic one not, we had issues with people wandering in unchecked and doing nasty stuff inside. The Bay Area insecurity thing is blown out of proportion. I'm in Noe Valley now and my drunk condo neighbor forgot the garage door open and it took like four or five hours for someone to actually take something from inside and it was a guy that was clearly not doing well, he wasn't even wearing shoes.
So in my experience so far bros in finance just out of college renting a 3 million condo are more at fault for stuff getting stolen from my property than the cops, the homeless and politicians.
Yeah I'm not saying San Francisco doesn't have an issue with the mentally ill and antisocial chaps stealing from everyone, I'm just saying that my direct experience doesn't match what one would expect when reading headlines or outraged people on online forums. I lived in Argentina before and I was home invaded at gunpoint once, mugged on the street once, and fended off muggers on the street countless times, so maybe I'm just not a good reference because Mission St. between 16th and 24th was the safest place I lived in my life until I moved to Noe Valley.
So SF isn't as bad as the third world?
Whew - what a relief
/s
The amount of utter BS people in CA are willing to put up with never ceases to amaze me. Which is why I find it harder and harder to have any sympathy. At this time we might as well let it all burn down - maybe then people will finally get off their asses and vote for anyone other than the current crop of utter moron politicians that are literally destroying the state.
When CA goes from the most prosperous state to loosing enough pop to get demoted a representative in the House - you'd think that would be enough of a wake up call that shit democrat policies might not be such a good idea. But here we continue to remain talking about this stuff while nothing changes.
The faster it all just burns to the ground the faster it might get rebuilt into something that's not a literal needle infested pile of shit :/
> When CA goes from the most prosperous state to loosing enough pop to get demoted a representative in the House
It didn't lose any population. Because of the fixed size of the House, you can lose a rep while gaining population (in California’s case, gaining more than 2.2 million between the 2010 and 2020 census.) Also, apportionment isn't tied at all to prosperitt; California didn't get any less relatively prosperous to lose a seat, so your “going from...” doesn't make any sense, even ignoring the factual error about losing population.
> California experienced a population decline in 2021, the first in its history as a state. That may be what GP was referring.
That couldn't be the population drop GP referred to costing a house seat, since it was after the Census on which the apportionment was based, and would have no effect on apportionment except in how it contributes to the state at the time of the 2030 Census.
No, it's better than the third world. You are arguing with yourself, no one said it's as bad as the third world. I literally said it's the safest place I've ever lived in my life.
Yeah I leave mine open all the time when I go on store runs as I figure it increases the life of my garage door opener by a fair bit. I've never had anything stole (I have a camera system and alarm would go off if they had because of motion sensors)
In large cities on the east coast we didn't run into this problem because nearly every new development had a doorman.
In the Bay Area and LA many apartment buildings don't have a front desk, they have a leasing office that may or may not be open, and typically keeps odd hours.
With the exception of high-rises, new developments in SF and South Bay with under 200 units typically don't have a front desk.
They do have security patrol come in for a couple of hours nightly, but they're not supposed to get involved and just take notes of suspicious activity, then email it to the leasing office to review the next day. Security will call the police if it's blatant theft of break-in, but they rarely catch it because this is one person patrolling a garage and endless hallways for just a few hours each night. When the security patrol car is by the building entrance, they can return a couple of hours later to steal packages, break into the bike room, break into cars, open lockboxes, etc.
However, things got out of hand significantly during the pandemic. Package theft and mailbox theft started happening during daylight hours. At one building in Mountain View they stole the USPS master key as the mail carrier had the boxes open putting in the mail. One leasing agent was assaulted during a tour and the keys & fobs were stolen.
You can't fight this type of crime by having a security guard in every area of every building. The issue is rooted in that the thieves and squatters know that they will get away with it. The criminals became bolder and even if confronted by a security guard, they have no more power than your average citizen has. They can just observe and take notes.
Bah - SF DA's will not prosecute anything so it wouldn't matter if the buildings had doormen or not.
I'm not sure why it's so hard to for people to understand when you don't prosecute all crime, crime starts to bubble up and grow rampant but here you go. None of this is a surprise to anyone paying the least bit of attention to what has been going on in CA for a long time now. We are seeing in real time the effects of this grand experiment - how many people's lives and livelihoods have to be destroyed before CA residents start demanding real accountability?
I'm not holding my breath. Just stay in CA. Do not leave and then start to shit up other states with your batshit crazy politics too.
I simply can’t fathom how tax payers allow this to happen. Is someone from the Midwest I cannot understand the mindset that says this type of thing is OK? I guess the Bay Area selects against people that think like me so it becomes a self reinforcing problem??
while true, the bigger problem is the "two-party system." Democrats get voted in and do nothing or make things worse, but when election time comes around again, people'll keep voting Democrat again and again, because they're most certainly not going to vote Republican, and we've somehow been brainwashed into thinking that those are the only two options for any elected position. with no viable competition, corruption spreads and entrenches itself, and the whole region generally decays over time.
that it's the Democratic Party we're talking about here is irrelevant—this is just a natural consequence of the two-party system.
That may be generally true, but not in SF. We have open primaries. Most elections are two Democrats against each other. Sometimes it's even a Democrat vs. a Green.
I'm a bay area registered Democrat and strongly agree - no electable opposition party = political atrophy and the corruption we are seeing more and more of
Building a single new unit of housing in SF costs like $400,000 and takes years of cutting through red tape.
There’s far fewer homeless in the Midwest because homes are actually affordable. The poverty, squalor, heroin addiction is just as bad. It’s just out of sight.
There is a time delay to any voter related action.
In a transient place like the bay area, the voters also do not experience the consequence of their votes and follow along with whatever trendy compassion based arguments is around at the time, the one year they vote.
The people who run for office are not many. Most of these positions are uncontested.
It sounds like (maybe?) the SF mayor is tire of this and things might turn around but I doubt if one official can turn it around given the overly lax policies CA government has expressed lately. I think the pendulum has swung to far the other way now and people are tired of the petty crime, breakins, and harassment they get on the streets. It all feels dangerous, even if your personal chances of experience violence is low because most criminals know if they cross that line they might actually have to face some jail time.
Or, you could, like, lower the rent so someone is willing to live there?
But, see, your financing would require you to cough up cash if the basis changes. And everything related to housing has become a Ponzi scheme to extract money from the people trying to simply find somewhere to live.
In this case, you have chosen to prefer to leave the rent high and let squatters break into your units rather than drop the rent and have residents.
I believe we refer to this as "the hand of the free market".
Short-term housing is different, if you lower rates below a certain threshold you are competing with local motels but you are offering a residential space governed by a different set of laws.
In other words, low-cost short-term housing attracts people that can book a stay for one month that will continue to occupy the space and stop paying until the eviction is processed. Eviction is a 3 to 6 month process in most counties in California, and it typically costs $10k-$15k. That was before the pandemic, evictions were completely suspended since.
Short-term housing / corporate housing does not require proof of income, credit check, etc. That would create a barrier of entry that would deter the majority of the clients; they would flock to the first available Airbnb. These travelers are typically staying for a couple of months and don't want to go through the hassle of lease approvals, agreements, credit checks, etc. Many of them are foreign and unable to provide the documentation necessary for a typical lease agreement.
You do make a valid point, however. Rent should be driven down as the market dictates.
For long-term rentals (your typical 1 or 2 year lease agreement with the building) there is another reason why rent does not drop significantly: most of the large rental buildings are owned by banks. There are clauses where if the rent per unit drops under a certain amount, the interest rates increase. There are several other clauses that disincentivize rent decreases. In addition, not every investor in a real estate investment trust has the same terms. When things go south (rent drops, operating costs increase, rate of evictions increases), investors that hold a fraction of the REIT will be the ones taking that loss, while institutional investors that provided the majority of the loan are protected. Thus it's in the interest of the more powerful investors or lenders to keep the rent where it is, and let the smaller investors take the loss.
We as property managers, whether long term or short term, can only fluctuate the rent within a certain margin. It's easy to oversimplify as "why can't you just drop the price", but there are bigger players that hold the cards, and they decide what the rent is, and if units are to remain vacant, who will be taking that loss. And it's the new guy that just entered an REIT with a mere $100k.
In other countries, like South Africa, private security is a big industry. Since everyone knows the police are easily bribed, buildings hire private security. I stayed at an AirBnB in an apartment building, and they had 24 hour, onsite, heavily armed security. Who also helped us with our bags!
I suspect SF may move towards this model soon. You can already see it around Union Square. They are hiring off duty cops to monitor the stores.
I try to tell people that California is not “a market based economy” right now
But honestly even that euphemism is an insult to state capital systems that incorporate marxist ideology, as those systems tax lower and have better private property assurances
As a 4th generation Californian this article really hits the mark. I spent a majority of my life in the sfbay area and moved out of there when the pandemic started and will never move back. Everyone of my friends and my Wife's friends left along with the last of my direct family as well.
It really boils down to alot of things, cost, dysfunction and environmental degradation. For me I know that life is short and I don't want to live in a crime infested dump that costs a fortune and is extremely crowded where everyone is miserable and has overreaching laws for decent people and lawlessness for criminals.
We had packages stolen off our porch, liquor bottles/trash thrown on our lawn, cars broken into, illegal fireworks being fired off almost every night(scaring our dog to where she was having serious issues), driving anywhere I saw huge piles of trash, homeless camps and shopping carts. Oh and all houses run about $1.3M for a non dump and schools are terrible. And I didn't get into the non-stop fires that have happened the past few years(which has really never happened in California before).[I lived in San Jose]
You, in what sounds like a reasonably-well off position, struggle with the 1.3M home costs, etc.
Imagine how it must be to be surrounded by 1.3M homes and multi-thousand dollar apartments when you're broke, not well paid, and can barely afford any of it? Homelessness and crime are both things that people are much more likely to resort to in a society with wildly inequal distributions of wealth than in one where everyone is in a similar place.
So we could build more jails and prisons, throw more people in them. Punish people very harshly for stepping out of line as we continue to worsen the ability of the less-wealthy/less-paid to thrive. "There's no excuse for resorting to crime," etc. Criminalize sleeping on the street so that we can toss them somewhere too.
We could build massively more. That seems much more humane. But a lot of people don't want to do that!
So we could push people out, lower the demand. That would put pressure on prices and open up housing... nobody wants to do that, though! We just sorta "unintentionally" do it by choosing not to do anything else - let the problems push people away on their own!
The crime isn't a direct symptom of government dysfunction, it's a symptom of the ever-growing divide. The government dysfunction is trying to have your cake and eat it too, but that's not actually just the government that wants to do it - tons of citizens want to both keep housing scarce and less dense and get rid of visible homelessness.
What do you think the government alone could do that wouldn't result in their being rapidly voted out by people who don't want change?
How about any punishment for theft and other crimes? Any disincentive at all? Why even bother having a theft law if it won’t be enforced? Why bother even paying for things if you can steal it with no consequences?
Sure housing costs are high, how about just stealing it instead?
> Imagine how it must be to be surrounded by 1.3M homes and multi-thousand dollar apartments when you're broke, not well paid, and can barely afford any of it? Homelessness and crime are both things that people are much more likely to resort to in a society with wildly inequal distributions of wealth than in one where everyone is in a similar place.
> The crime isn't a direct symptom of government dysfunction
does everyone have to live in SF? if you provide them with enough infrastructure, then the answer is "no". if you don't provide infrastructure then you have a problem. anyway, all of these issues have been solved around the world. the US and CA governments just need to look to other countries for examples.
>A scant five years ago, a “tech bro” wrote an open letter to San Francisco mayor about street conditions, including being assaulted by a homeless person and pervasive drug use on the streets. He was lambasted in tech and national press, and his letter effectively ended his career. If he had written that letter in pretty much any other city, everyone would have agreed with him. In San Francisco today, everyone now publicly states what he wrote five years ago.
This has been a part of SF culture since Tom Wolfe wrote about City Hall. I really don't understand folks who have lived here for a quarter century and don't know the City's history and culture.
The "tech bro" who wrote the open letter is Justin Keller. I'll reserve judgement on whether or not his career is over; he's currently running a devops consultancy, and I don't know how successful it is.
However, the "effectively ended his career" link goes to a story about someone else completely: Greg Gopman. Justin Keller factors in only in a few paragraphs at the end of that story, and there are no conclusions drawn about whether or not his career is over.
> When I first moved to San Francisco in 1997, it was a magical and inspirational place. Remember the Flying Saucer and Survival Research Labs parties?
I do remember that! I started working in 1999, and my coworkers and I were in SF a few times a week at various nerd parties. They used projectors to cat out the linux kernel on the wall as the decor. I miss those parties, because they were fun and also you got to meet other really cool nerds and talk about nerdy things.
Breathless admiration of Miami as a "tech city" based on tweets by the disempowered mayor of the City of Miami (population bupkis) are a red flag that the author isn't thinking very seriously or speaking from direct experience, rather just regurgitating memes and shortcut thoughts.
If you have ever lived in Miami (the 3M person metropolis, whose mayor is not Francis Suarez), you know that techies goes there to party, vacation, or retire but the actual startup scene suffers from perennial brain drain with no end in sight.
The thing that's confusing to me about the Miami-tech-hub story is the lack of universities. Good universities + big companies + lots of money floating around, that's the holy trinity of tech/startup hubs, no? Miami has maybe 1.5-2 out of 3?
I worked for a year at a startup that had space in FIU's (Florida International University) startup accelerator program -- unshockingly called "StartupFIU".
When I moved down here, I was surprised. FIU is a massive and very nice school; University of Miami is also nice.
I had never even heard of FIU before I worked on campus there.
They're no Ivy League but I would say they're better than a lot of other schools.
It seems like Miami is currently a hotspot for VCs, particularly the social media influencer set, to relocate to. What actual well-known tech companies are currently located there? Even Magic Leap is based in Plantation, not Miami.
For a while now I've been wondering whether the cryptocurrency bust—which is inevitable in my view—will mean the end of these kinds of articles and the resurgence of the Bay Area. Many of the other up-and-coming tech areas, particularly Miami, are disproportionately composed of cryptocurrency ventures, which doesn't strike me as a sustainable tech scene.
I'm a local Miamian and I'm hoping the crypto scene in Miami is a beach head for other tech and not a white whale that sucks up all the capital and brainpower from other emerging technologies.
I met some of the crypto startups working out of co-working spaces around the city 2017-2019; maybe things have improved dramatically more recently but the startups I encountered were unimpressive.
The crypto/ICO/NFT/WEB3 scene is just so much hype right now it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s a scam. 2019 feels like a decade ago and things have changed so much in the last year. I’d consider a revisit.
I grew up in Miami and left for California as soon as I could. Miami has a pretty facade, and if you visit for a week or two you might think it's great, but beneath the facade is a cesspool of stupidity, vanity, and corruption just like many other places. As a native Floridian, I hate to say that Florida is just such a strange place. It attracts a really weird mix of people. I think the VCs flocking there appreciate the shiny veneer and the fact that Miami worships rich people - intelligence is almost completely disregarded. The rich VCs can feel like popular kings and queens in their $20m Palm Beach mansions, but it's honestly one of the last places I'd want to be as an engineer.
I worked in tech in Fort Lauderdale for around 10 years and you're right about all of that. The place has potential of being a tech hub if they could just attract and retain smart people. Year round warm weather, lots of outdoor stuff, if you like the ocean, zero state income taxes! But, instead of the Bay Area's smart, risk-taking wealth, optimistically (and naively) trying to "change the world with tech", South Florida is filled with dumb, idle "to hell with my neighbors" wealth. It's full of people who got rich running payday loan stores and used car lots, instead of people who got rich building ML models for selling kitty litter on the internet.
I remember a boat ride up the intracoastal, and there was a guy with a million-dollar mansion with a yacht docked next to his backyard that had a beautiful gigantic statue of a hand with a raised middle finger. That pretty much sums up South Florida's mindset.
Wow it’s been that long, jeez. End of an era. I always thought that thing succinctly summed up the community, culture and zeitgeist of 2000s South Florida.
I'm here and I feel things are turning around. The brain drain has receded and turned into an influx. As a tech worker who grew up in this city and have a love/hate relationship with it I fail to see what the new migrants see in Miami.
If you grew up down here and know the history of South Florida it's just a history of tech failing to launch since WWII. We have a giant runway in the middle of the Everglades for supersonic jets and space craft, and that fizzled. We have a decommissioned rocket plant and missile silos in Everglades National Park. The IBM PC was invented here, but IBM shipped that whole division to North Carolina. Miami could have a been a Silicon Valley when the valley got created during the Cold War but we lacked the leadership and funding.
So here we are trying to become the capital of crypto which I feel still won't make us another Silicon Valley but another Las Vegas.
>I'm here and I feel things are turning around. The brain drain has receded and turned into an influx.
I moved to Miami in 2017, couldn't find any kind of interesting work in machine learning or genomics. I started the machine learning meetup, which did end up with an enthusiastic but inexperienced community. My friend also moved to Miami at the same time and the only interesting graphics related jobs in the whole area were in Magic Leap. The startup scene was anemic and superficial. People we met who had deep technical skills all had one foot out the door, bound for Austin, SF, Durham, New York, &c. Eventually we both left and now live in Durham.
As far as I can tell, Suarez is a joke. The county wields all the power, and the city itself is utterly reliant on the county.
Furthermore, Miami, like a lot of Florida, is mostly driven by real estate and money laundering of illicit money, not by any tech whatsoever. It's also become a playground of the uber-rich libertarian subset of the PayPal mafia, but otherwise, there is no startup activity out of Miami.
Using this as some sort of exemplar instantly diminishes the credibility of the article. Also, the comparison to Yahoo is weird. It has ceased to be a big name for the longest time, but as a mismanaged and dysfunctional company that missed the bus several times, it is second only to Hewlett-Packard. H-P is a far better analogue of what SV has become.
The way I think of the Bay Area is that it is just after the local peak of a form of civilization- the ascendancy of the techno-elite- that is currently taking over the world, or rather, taking its place alongside energy, medicine, and agriculture as major pillars of wealth and power.
We are witnessing a micro-Rome, micro both in time and space. Instead of an empire rising and falling over centuries, the Bay Area rose and is now falling within the period of after WWII to now.
Certainly the Bay Area didn't create the internet on its own, or develop the first micros or personal computers, nor invent all the machine learning algorithms, solely "solve search", or ad revenues. But it played a critical role in all those areas because the BA has, through a number of factors (some intentional, some not) been poised to do this since the end of WWII.
At the end of WWII, the Bay Area was already a technological center with plenty of money about to undergo a population and building boom, but civic leaders and others recognized that the Bay Area's unique combination of attributes (weather, business, intellectual climate) made it ideal for a revolution based on companies depending on heavy technology development and smart well-payed employees funded by VCs. Those combination of attributes have reliably caused people to migrate here to go to school or get jobs or just bum around since 1945.
Unfortunately, while that growth at the beginning worked out pretty well, the Bay Area has a number of limitations (some physical, some mental) that affect its ability to resolve the underlying infrastructural and social problems that occurred due to the "climate" (both political and atmospheric) and which have grown especially bad during a series of unbelievably good economies which have led to high housing prices, congested roads, etc.
Don't worry- the bay area will muddle on in this state for some time and won't just crash immediately into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But, unless we change our ways significantly, the relative importance and power of the Bay Area will wane, being replaced by other areas which have found circumstances leading to rapid growth of a techno-elite.
This is not a bad thing at all. Silicon Valley in the 1980s was not the powerhouse it is today. It was still the center of the universe in tech, but no way was it anywhere near today's level. But you could get a tech job if you wanted to get one.
I'd love it if all the people in the Bay Area and hate it just moved. That would be great if the city and Bay Area emptied out, wouldn't it be great if rents were cut in half, on both commercial and apartments, and home prices went down by half? Which would never happen, despite how many tech companies leave, because the Bay Area actually is a fantastic place to live, unlike anywhere else in the USA.
Not only that, commercial offices all over the USA are emptying out.
And while I lived in the Bay Area and San Francisco City a long time, I am in a commercial office high rise in Los Angeles, and in the morning from 7am to 9am, at any time, I've never shared the elevator with a single person. In an 18 story building, for the last 2 years.
Also, rents and home prices all over the country have shot up, even in the most remote locations. So it's not like there are any fantastic deals to be had. It's not like you're going to be able to move to Lincoln Nebraska, for example, and get a nice modern home for $80,000. It's still be over $300,000. Sure, better than the Bay Area. But it is in Nebraska, and not in the Bay Area. You don't get a Ferrari for the same price as a Toyota Corolla.
Additionally, I DO hope a lot of companies follow Elon Musk and the other companies to Texas. Texas is already an extremely light purple - Ted Cruz beat Beto O'Roarke 50.9% to 48.3%. Getting a lot more ex-Bay Area liberals moving to Texas could easily swing elections and turn Texas blue over time. Houston was 58% for Beto, Dallas 66% for Beto, Austin 74% for Beto. San Antonio was 59% for Beto. Travis county was 74.3% for Beto, El Paso was 74.4% for Beto.
And while the tech is spreading out all over the USA and world, for that matter, there's just too much infrastructure geared to tech to ever collapse. It's like Hollywood - they just have too much infrastructure for it being likely for any other city to overtake it. They have people specializing in entertainment law, accounting, props for movies, caterers, extras, companies providing cameras and other tech, talent scouts, talent agent companies, editors, musicians specifically geared for the entertainment industry...and probably so much more that I can't even think of. Any new city wanted to become the new Hollywood would have to build up the extensive infrastructure.
I'm not saying that Hollywood or Silicon Valley couldn't ever completely collapse, of course, that goes without saying. But I just never see that happening at least in the near and medium term for the Bay Area. I'd move back there in a hot minute if I could afford it. So please, Bay Area residents who hate it, please move to Texas or Mississippi, or Arkansas, or West Virginia, or Louisiana. Please.
As someone who works in tech and enjoys the outdoors (mainly hiking and biking, meaning I'm looking for sunny/temperate weather year round) I haven't found many better options than the Bay Area. Visited Miami and Austin in the last year, but the Summer temperatures are stifling and there's not the same wealth of natural beauty on their doorstep - Portland is great, but the grey skies would eventually wear me down.
I'd love to find somewhere more affordable but San Francisco still checks a lot of boxes. Where else to consider?
I have a hard time trying to justify the Yahoo / SF comparison the article tries to establish. Yes I see the surface-level similarities; Yahoo was the leading website until it wasn't, and SF was the leading tech hub until one day it won't be.
How does the relationship evolve beyond that? The symptoms of a once-giant slowly losing its lead will be similar no matter which industry or entity you look at. You could probably force similar parallels about Blockbuster, Brittany Spears, the Soviet Union or even GM.
The author never bothers to develop any meaningful connection between the the reasons for their decline. They seem to hint at the fact that maybe hubris played a part - but it's all extremely unclear and I'm not going to read into it anymore than I need to.
In the end it's yet just another "SF ain't the hot thing anymore" article with a sensationalized title.
i sort of expected to not like this piece just from the title, but it was even worse than i expected.
it didn't take long, but he really lost me when he defended the writing of these words:
“The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that’s okay.
In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city…You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us It’s a burden and a liability having them so close to us. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I’d consider thinking different, but the crazy toothless lady who kicks everyone that gets too close to her cardboard box hasn’t made anyone’s life better in a while.”
i think that maybe when a culture emerges that thinks that sort of thinking is okay, something is very wrong. if that culture is on the decline, then i think that maybe not only the bay, but maybe the entire world is made a better place for it.
in truth though, the tech/office diaspora does scare me a little bit. there is so much power and influence that is wrapped up in the white collar world. if the power brokers decamp for country fiefdoms and homesteads, their reduced interaction and engagement with the problems of the real world may change how they perceive the world and those problems. i fear this could manifest as reduced political will and financing to help the less fortunate in the long run, leading to a worse off society overall.
If you think about what the Bay Area tech boom was, it was essentially a huge make-money-at-all-costs operation. Investors, tech startups, and the money that dominated the region set the tone for the culture. Despite all the talk about "making the world a better place", that was all a facade for making people filthy rich and trashing everything else that stood in the way of money. None of these companies cared about the things that make a healthy community and society. Certainly none of the politicians in the area did, many of which had symbiotic relationships with these entities, and that showed in the policies that manifested over the past decade.
news from the Bay Area -- my low-tech trendy colleague hooked up with a merciless real-estate investor landlord, they both became serious alcoholics/multiple times wealthier. One is moving back to Ohio with a bundle of legal money and the other is just fat now, showing off to relatives back home; both boomers, no party in their future, no culture making, not interested in being friends with anyone. It seems that they ate a lot of expensive food, lived mediocre lives, got rich and now running away.
"The report of my death is greatly exaggerated" San Francisco, Dec 17, 2021.
Every article about the death of SF since the 80s has a litany of commentators saying how true that rings for them validating the article (and validates their own decision) - and yet it is still stands. The comment section is obviously HIGHLY biased towards sour grapes.
Anyways while the litany of problems will always need to be fixed I just don't see any major city in the lower 48 that competes. Sorry all you valley emulators - best of luck re-branding your city the next valley - probably better to strike out on a different marketing campaign then trying your we are the next silicon ___ (insert geologic formation here).
As I read further into the article I increasingly disagreed with the thesis and the influencer hyperbole used to support it. Cities are not tech companies. They have to provide services, infrastructure - housing, health, education, transportation. They can't be "disruptors" in the move fast break things sense, they are almost entirely a legacy maintenance job with thirty year planning horizons.
The post pandemic quandary is really one faced by every developed-world city: where are the jobs gonna be? What's the economy gonna be? SF and California had a stunning run of attracting new jobs over the past century or so. But the housing issue and its side effects are built on issues that are primarily to do with broad aspects of national demographics and wealth distribution - landlords get rewarded because homes are investments, and homes are investments because we set up the financing that way when the Boomers were young. But that game has played out. The population is represented by younger generations now, and they aren't on this ladder. All of the rest follows from that, and little of it has anything to do with tech, except for that tech can be applied to shape the next economic model.
With the "Great Reset", that's the kind of thing being referred to. It's not unique to SF, SF was just unusually impacted by being thrust into the global power center role.
The thing that bothers me a lot about all the people fleeing and moving out of the bay area is that.. it just feels to me like giving up. These people complain about all the problems in the bay area, and the same people being the most vocal about the crime problems and homelessness and drug issues, also happen to be people that have the tools (financially, socially, etc) to actually help solve the problems. But instead they just choose to leave and join another community that they envision will be a new utopia.
If people thought Tech bro's were hated before.. just wait until all the tech people move to other states and work remote and just get up and move every time they disagree with whats going on in their new communities. Never truly becoming part of the communities and only taking advantage of policies and circumstances they had no hand in building or creating.
To me that is a toxic cycle and no community anywhere can evolve and get better if the communities members are not invested and are only temporarily aligned when it suits them.
There's this concept of voice vs exit. When things aren't going well in an organization or politically, you either decide to speak up and say there is something wrong or leave to find something else. One of the points in the article is that speaking up has been and currently feels like something you can't really do for fear of being ostracized by the greater community. Try mentioning you think there should be something done about the homeless problem, and the response always seems to be that we shouldn't criminalize homelessness, it's not their fault, more housing would fix everything.
At a certain point you realize that if you can't speak up, or those in power/those that elect the people in power aren't going to listen, then you might as well seek a place that is a better fit.
The crazy thing that happened recently is that before you had to make the decision to leave your job and hope to find an equivalent job in a new place. Which as challenging and probably led more people to try to speak up vs exit. But with remote work it is so much easier to leave, and there are even benefits to the cost of living calculation coming from the Bay Area, that exit becomes not only much easier, but also beneficial in terms of buying power for your dollars.
reply