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.
In my observation, this argument, at best, is only describing things as marginally better than pre-2010 build up. But fear not: SF is a Gold Rush town that rises and fades 10x to the rest of the nation during every economic build up. It's not "tech", it's just the way our central banking system works.
I feel like Tech is the scapegoat for San Francisco's pre-existing problems.
It's pretty obvious by now San Francisco is one of the worst places for a fast growing tech industry. They don't want change, it's a tiny peninsula (I've walked from one end to the other), there's not enough land, taxes are high, traffic is awful, transportation is apparently awful, they're overly bureaucratic, their politics are broken (all things I've heard directly from SF natives and expats), prices and living expenses are the highest in the USA, the community is volatile towards the businesses there (compare SF to St. Louis & other cities who are passing incentive packages worth $1+ Billion just to get Boeing to bring 8,000 jobs to their city). The city looks unique, hip and trendy, and just like Vogue has more issues than anyone can count.
They're complaining about gentrification as if it's the worst thing in the world. Meanwhile in St. Louis, we're all praying for gentrification. When neighborhoods become run down and violent no one says anything, everyone just moves away. When those same people move back to fix everything up suddenly they're the villain. In St. Louis, the poor just move to a cheaper place in a nicer house using the money they got from their fixer-upper home. That's something SF natives can't really do because of SF's land size problem. I've spoken to African Americans and minorities who took part in gentrification just above Martin Luther King street and bought homes to fix them up. The world operates in much more rational, logical ways outside of the hipster-bubble. If silicon valley moves, who will SF blame their problems on then?
Pretend that Silicon Valley never existed in the bay area. Would A-N-Y of San Francisco's major problems be solved? They'd still have busted transportation, still have high rent, the politics would still be the same, they'd still ignore Oakland residents, still have a lack of housing, still have the homeless problem, and everything else. This is just another re-occurring pattern in human nature: "Blame your problems on those who have nice things."
While wandering around Vienna a few years ago looking at all the buildings from the height of the empire and realising that it's quite a liveable city, for some reason it made me think about San Francisco. If the tech industry disappeared from the city tomorrow, what would be left in 100 years to show that it was there? It doesn't seem like there have been any meaningful improvements made to the actual city or its infrastructure. Just go on BART and listen to the 1970s robot voice announcements that could easily be done much better by an iPhone and Siri now. Certainly it's easier for tech companies to build parallel private transport networks than it is to invest in better public transportation for everyone.
It doesn't feel like SF has been able to capture any of the wealth being generated in a way that other cities like Vienna have, and now even when it's a century past its peak, people there still benefit. Certainly the homeless in SF don't seem to benefit even now, but maybe there are so many because SF truly is the best place to be homeless.
Contrariwise, I see San Francisco as a city that is struggling with some of the worst demographic issues in the nation, mostly stemming from having an absolutely absurd amount of wealth inequality for various structural and temporal reasons, and doing an admirable job of it. The "homegrown tech industry" was intentionally fostered in response to the valley turning the city into its bedroom community, so the idea that the city is somehow corrupting your vision of what SF could be is disingenuous. I suspect the SF in your recollection is the SF you yourself had a hand in changing into what it is today.
I agree with you. I have lived in SF since 2005. In my opinion, the problem is that the tech workers are not engaged with the city. They are here for the jobs, and resent the city. The high prices chased the old SFers away, the artists and eccentrics who enjoyed and loved SF ... and the influx was such that there was no opportunity to pass along the culture. More people needed to be shown what was fun and groovy about SF, than the existing population had the capacity to do.
What was neat about SF circa 2005-2012 is that folks in general were happy, excited, and proud to be here. Current day tech workers complain a lot, while contributing little (presence, acceptance, consciousness) to help solve anything: viz the comments on this post. Now they dance upon its grave as they decamp to Montana or Ohio, etc. So in a sense part of the problem is just the mood of the place.
If you ever read Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" she describes exactly the cycle we are experiencing: a cheap place is colonized by artists and eccentrics, it becomes cool, this attracts mainstream folks, this makes the place hyped & expensive, the people who made it cool move away, it then becomes lame, eventually it decays, is abandoned, and becomes cheap again.
Be zen, this is all part of the normal life of the world. In the fullness of time, SF will have many more boom and bust cycles.
I think the city is still great - there has been general doomerism about SF for literally half a century at this point: hippies, AIDS, the 90s crime wave, dotcom, gentrification, WFH. A lot of this is motivated more by what SF represents (the American brand of corporate liberalism) than what it is.
Crime is worse but not unlivably so. We have wonderful innovations like Facebook, Citizen, Nextdoor, and Ring to thank for the increased spotlight. While tech decamped from the Bay Area during the pandemic, and SF commercial real estate values are in trouble, plenty of companies are still operating here and people do still want to live here.
SF offers an urban lifestyle/environment you can’t get elsewhere in the Bay Area which draws young tech workers and hence companies. The crime would have to get much, much worse to threaten this. Others may chime in that it got too much for them, but this is a general trend as people hit their 30s and start families. The bigger threat is if young people don’t even give SF a shot at all.
This is a great comment because it recognizes that all of what's happening is cyclical. San Francisco has boomed and busted in the past, it will boom and bust again. People comparing it to Detroit seem to ignore that that city itself is in the throes of a revival. How could S.F., which even without tech is in a prime geographical location and climate, do even less?
Anyone who spent considerable time in SF before the most recent tech boom would likely argue that it was the tech industry that caused the rot in the first place.
The foundation of safe cities is vibrant local communities with historic roots. Parts of the city where people choose to have and raise kids. Places with a sense of shared community where neighbors look out for each other.
The rapid influx of extremely high income individuals transformed SF over the course of the last decade. Uprooting those communities and replacing them with largely transient techworkers with no real interest in forming communities that don't help them to increase their TC and level up with their next new role.
Then when tech declines you really see the impact this has.
SF was treated as basically a luxury mall for rich tech workers to get whatever they want whenever they want. As tech workers start to leave it's no wonder the city feels like an abandoned mall.
I do not understand the apocalyptic takes so many people have. The major problem SF has had for a long time is housing is too expensive. People leaving the city will help counter this, which is going to probably benefit the city in the long term.
In the short term though SF is still an expensive place to live and you aren't getting nearly the benefit because SF, like all cities, is just a shell of itself right now.
To imagine that once the Pandemic is over SF will not burst back into life is crazy. SF is a wonderful city due to its weather, geography, culture, density, parks, public transit, and many other great things about it. One bad year is not going to destroy the city.
And many people not in the tech community have been a little upset at the monoculture that seemingly has developed in the past 10 years related to the tech boom. Guess what... If a bunch of those tech companies leave, the city is going to be less of a monoculture. That's good! Change isn't always bad.
I've been in SF most of my life. The city has been heavily impacted by tech ever since the dot com era, but it's built on some robust cultural foundations: Waves of arts and landscaping projects dating back to Adolph Sutro, the nearby academic influence of Berkeley and Stanford in addition to smaller local institutions(for example, the Exploratorium - a great place for kids, and still fun for adults), a variety of social movements that have swept through the city from the Gold Rush era onwards, multiple ethnic immigrant cultures, and access to nature.
These are things you appreciate and can grow from by living here in the long term, but are easy to miss if all you do is walk around and see low-rise buildings and homeless people. There are far more exciting cities in terms of bustle and grandeur, and more livable, well-maintained, inexpensive cities for everyday activity.
If tech could address these issues as construed, SF wouldn't be a shithole.
But the current "tech" cohort in San Francisco has (1) the most expensive housing in the U.S., (2) overdoses on the street and fecal matter everywhere, (3) the highest inequality in the U.S., (4) a hugely cutthroat and disingenuous culture, and (5) more bullshit jobs in marketing than you can imagine.
Do you really want the people that have made San Francisco into what it is trying to solve social problems for other people?
I am not going to attack tech or the prosperity that it has brought.. but as someone born in San Francisco a long time ago I have to stress that the city has changed and lost a lot of the creativity that used to make it interesting. SF used to be a place where starving artists and musicians could live. Now they live somewhere else: Oakland, Austin, etc. The same thing happened to Manhattan.
I don't think there is anything you can do about it. I don't think it is bad. But it makes SF a boring scene relative to other places in the same way Manhattan became culturally boring relative to Brooklyn. Or maybe London is becoming boring relative to Berlin. The wealth will stick with these established cities, but new culture will happen somewhere else.
SF is a tech echo-chamber with terrible public transit and rental market that probably wouldn't be so expensive if anyone were allowed to build anything. On top of all that it has managed to attract more douchebags ("tech gold rush") per capita than Manhattan.
I'm not sure the density of craft cocktails bars and farm-to-table restaurants, or the fact that it never gets too hot makes up for the drawbacks.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for 20+ years. Downtown is in bad shape, but the rest of the city is quite lovely. I think techies don’t explore the “villages” (Richmond, Hayes Valley, etc) and only see the more corporate, less flattering side of the city (SoMa). This will lead to an uneven view of the city. And a deservedly negative one.
The rumors of San Francisco death are exaggerated. They are also self-fulfilling because they discourage people from investing in the community.
My advice to techies: move West. Take a pottery class and eat a dumpling. Make friends with artists. It’s a richly cultural city once you get out of the bubble.
The tech industry ruined SF in the late 90s. Live/work spaces and the attraction of the Mission to .commers ruined SF. I don't think anything happening now is making it any worse.
In my opinion, SF has peaked. I personally moved to SF during the pandemic, and am planning to move out when my lease is up. The amount of disarray in the city is wild. Crime seems to be entirely ignored, the homeless problem has exploded and there is a widespread hate if you call it for what it is: a public health and humanitarian crisis. And the most important thing that SF had to make it a tech hub has been broken and moved online: the network effect.
I moved here because I felt like I didn't have a choice if I wanted to build or be part of successful startups, now I feel like living here is hindering that process. You can live anywhere and get cheaper talent across the country, pay less taxes, and have almost the same upsides.
Exactly, people don't remember what SF was like in the 80's. It was a dump. The city was slumping, people were leaving the city (net negative migration). Real Estate was in a funk (RE agents were leaving). Walking Market was a gamble. SOMA was more like 6th and 5th streets --but all over.
The slow rise in tech in the early 90s pushed SJ and SF out of their slumber and downward trend. Now that wealth from tech is permeating the city and bringing economic benefits, non tech people want the benefits derived from tech wealth without the side-effects. Thing is, if everyone of the 6million plus people in the Bay area earned 150k/year, we'd still have the same problems. You can't fit 6 million people in a city with low housing stock and insignificant housing stock coming online. So, some of those 150k earners will do better finances and be able to leverage their earnings to buy --the less financially savvy would be unable to afford SF --and then we'd be back to 'being priced out'.
The Mission is still dangerous at night, for people who don't look like techies, and you still have to hopscotch over human feces.
The downside of the technology boom is that it's turning a living city into a bedroom community for high-income people. And the city has not been able to harness any of this wealth to fix the old problems that plagued it.
The best thing to happen to SF urban planning, and I say this without hyperbole, was the Loma Prieta earthquake. Otherwise the city seems paralyzed and incapable of action.
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