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.
It's crazy. The Bay Area used to be probably the most desirable place in the world. Now it's descended into something much, much worse.
It's hard to see how the descent can stop. Short of very firm "cleanup" measures, things will probably get worse. But a great many of the citizens would oppose such measures.
I usually see things in a positive light, but this is a hard one. I'd love to be wrong and see the Bay Area thriving in 20 years.
IM going to guess that CA, Hacker news resident has you leaning left and affluent. Maybe even a (fellow) Bay Area resident.
Lets look a the bay. The tech boom. The bay is covered from Marin to San Jose with money. Tech, Film (Skywalker, Pixar), Wine.
That's the gentrified, affluent, peak Bay Area... Outside this one window the Bay Area has a long storied history of being grimy and hard.
WWI and WWII ... Spanish flu, a public safety officer shot a man for not wearing a mask. WWII had the Bay Area as a pretty bawdy town. It stayed that way, one of the OG strip joins was (is?) in the Bay Area. Look at the 50's and 60's Hells Angels, Black Panthers (the armed edition), Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, The Altimont Speed Way murder (concert). Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Bill Graham has a venue named after him, but the murder around him getting his start is suspect... You get some "fun" fringe thinkers. The Grateful Dead (you don't have to like them) became a roving acid distribution system every summer (wall of sound, Owlsy acid). Burning man is latter day hippies (more gen X than anything else) who wanted to carry on that spirt and optimism. Neither of these groups are "bad" but they aren't the current afluent Bay Area set for sure.
All of this is to say that one should not be surprised when "bipping" is a very Bay Area thing to have happen to you, when you see the current "crime" in the Bay Area. You have affluence next to the people who are down trodden, defeated or simply who do not care, who are acting out against the system!
In china all the things that happen in the bay would get squashed. Lying Flat (doing the bare minimum) is their version of rebellion. Their 996 set is our tech scene (was, that's shifted somewhat now). The labels, the reactions, are different, are local... but the motivations and the underlying causes are NOT... Those who have a path and those who do not and the gulf between.
I lived in the Bay Area for five years, and I'm so glad I got out. On paper, the area should operate very similarly to New York City: good public transit, relatively active building, and a variety of neighborhoods and places to live that are relatively safe.
In reality, it's effectively impossible to get around in the bay area deprived of housing with no new building, no solution to public transit (good luck getting the peninsula towns to allow for BART to expand there), and from what I've read the property crime rates are higher than NYC in the 90s.
Of course, New York has its own problems, and the Subway is rapidly degrading. With that, local politics in the Bay Area are out of control, and it seems there's no real easy solution to the political clusterfuck of the various towns. Individuals can only really vote with their feet: move out. There are plenty of other attractive towns for tech.
Jobs were plentiful. You could be a hippie, work a chit job, or union job.
You bought a house, and had three kids. People were more spiritual. People didn't know about other cultures because we didn't know about them.
They just built homes.
One of the priciest places to live is Marin County. In the 70's, it was mainly blue collar workers. Before that it was a vacation spot for San Francisco residents. Now--the price of a average home is far from the reach of most Americans.
My point is they just built a bunch of single family homes without much planning.
Tech took off, and made the place some utopia?
You all came here, and look at the place.
In all honesty, I'll be glad when tech money dries up. The traffic is just terrible. Along with too many people who didn't fit the part of a tech worker are homeless now, or have to live with a bunch of strangers.
Bay Area is usually just 10-15 years ahead of the rest of the country, because it's a region that culturally tends to embrace the future (good and bad) and run toward it.
Bay Area in 2000 was complaining about illegal immigration, bilingual education, and the lights not staying on, all of which are contemporary issues facing the rest of America from 2015 onward. Bay Area in 2010 was in relative boom times from the tech industry, which again is spreading nationwide as tech jobs start getting more dispersed (though it may reverse thanks to RTO). Starting in 2012, housing prices became utterly unaffordable, which again started spreading nationwide around 2022.
Give it another 5-10 years and yes, people will probably be walking through a Walgreens in western Minnesota shoving everything they can into their bags.
That is an interesting take on it. When you combine it with the article on 'mega cities' [1] it makes you wonder if the bay area is destined to either embrace it or die.
I agree on almost all of your points with a few caveats.
- Cars : The Bay Area is very walkable but that’s mainly SF. The tech burbs of Palo Alto , Menlo Park are not super walkable and you are relying on the BART and other public transport . But Covid has destroyed public transport and cuts in funding threaten them further.
LGBT : This is not really the 80s and 90s . Most big cities from DC, Atlanta, Austin ,Chicago, Phoenix, Miami have strong LGBT presence . And a lot of racial heterogeneity there too.
Art and Culture: Almost all artists that I met in Austin, Chicago , Miami , Portland , Asheville left the Bay Area . They were priced out by tech . Everything is tech in the Bay Area . Even artists have to align or suck up to tech .
High quality food: Yes, again a lot of other cities are replicating that.
The Bay Area is truly great and very beautiful . But I cannot constantly hustle at 45 while raising 2 kids , pay a million dollars for a shack . I am sort of tired of constantly competing and hustling . I am tired of being told that we are counter culture since we are not Wall Street bro’s but I need a million dollars for a 1950s 2 bedroom house .
How it came to be is related to a variety of factors.
But it has incumbency in some things and will be impossible to compete with in some ways.
Better for regions to develop competencies in which they have some kind of advantage. Alberta makes some kind of specialized natural resources extraction tech. Makes sense!
The obvious counterargument is that the Bay Area has been trying exactly what you propose for years, and the result has been a crisis instead of a shifting of gravity to other locations.
It is worth noting that the Bay Area is impressively diverse already, especially when considering how remarkably not-diverse cities were not that long ago. Cities like San Leandro went from 99.3% white in the 60s to having no racial majority today.
I'd argue that one should step out of their tech bubble and experience the awesome cultures that already exist within the Bay.
I've only lived in the Bay Area for 6 years and I've watched it change dramatically for the worse. My friends who have been here since the 90s talk about it in biblical, apocalyptic terms. It isn't "just like that". Something fundamental has changed.
Governance and land use decisions definitely play a big role in how the Bay Area has become messy. The Bay Area doesn't have a regional transit authority empowered with the final word on routes and infrastructure, it has at least one agency per county, plus additional ones for each railway - dozens of services that have difficulty coordinating.
The anti-development climate also played a big role in how things played out. Regional planning in the midcentury wanted something more like LA - lots of freeways, cheap land and cheap development. Public backlash prevented the bay from being filled, and stopped most new freeway construction. [0] BART planning started in the same era, and it was also more ambitious than what ultimately came to pass. [1] Yet despite that, or maybe in part because of it, the jobs, and subsequently new population, continued to stream in. As a result, there's a lot of "development debt" that has been kicked down the road until now.
The governance issue and the land use issue are correlated; since authority is heavily localized across many departments, even on basics like water(SF enjoys a direct line to the good Hetch Hetchy water), every city and county tries to avoid "taking one for the team" and focuses on its immediate self-interest instead, favoring NIMBY policies, unbalanced commercial development, and services and infrastructure favoring the wealthiest demographics. Governance is also generally inefficient; SF's spending is far beyond other cities of its size. The new Bay Bridge span is an embarrassment on many levels. Politicians regularly play the liberal base for fools by using a framing of concern to avoid useful analysis, decision, or action; at the same time, they are willing to bend over backwards for the VC-backed tech club, cutting special deals and ignoring or downplaying misbehavior.
It's a highly dysfunctional place, albeit not yet melting down.
I think the whole thing is another symptom of the local government's dysfunctional incentives. There's no unified agenda for the Bay Area, and it hurts everyone. It shows in the approach to housing and transportation, in business development, and in the nature of political campaigns.
To some extent, I would venture to say that the region suffers from a form of Resource Curse - nice location and weather, and a tech ecosystem that, these days, spins money out of "nothing." Lots of wealth, lots of idealism, but nobody with both the privilege and the responsibility to organize it all in a way that would fix the issues.
This smacks of the folk threatening to move to Canada every time a Republican president gets elected (although with this particular one, they may really be onto something). If the Bay area's hold were this fragile, it wouldn't have got this way to begin with. Clearly, living within driving distance of 90% of the world's tech giants outweighs a great many other considerations, despite the rent pressure cooker.
Disclaimer: don't live in the Bay Area and don't plan to, so have no dog in this fight.
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.
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