>Today, the tech industry is apparently on track to destroy one of the world’s most valuable cultural treasures, San Francisco, by pushing out the diverse people who have helped create it. At least that’s the story you’ve read in hundreds of articles lately.
>It doesn’t have to be this way. But everyone who lives in the Bay Area today needs to accept responsibility for making changes where they live so that everyone who wants to be here, can.
I don't know if drastically changing the housing landscape of SF will destroy the culture that made everyone want into the city in the first place, but asserting that it won't is just as tenuous as asserting it will.
All I ever see is rationalization that it won't, because the tech community takes it as axiomatic that they must pile into the city. By debating the conclusion we are tricked into accepting the form.
For example: "But everyone who lives in the Bay Area today needs to accept responsibility for making changes"
That's a lot of people. Including ones hostile to your goals. You would need to get a smaller and friendlier set of people on board to make a slightly-more geographically disperse tech scene work in the Bay Area. The self-fulfilling business "common sense" about SF is much more momentum than sense.
> A friend is constantly bugging me about moving to SF. I understand it is tech central but the PR of the city is just really not great currently.
Currently? The place is unrecognizable to us Californians since the late 90s; it's been a cesspool created by a long series of events, which at it's core has to do with wealth inequality, and overt NIMBY-ism and gentrification coupled with mental health issues and ends with substance abuse and crime: and it's been like this for some time, but it's only now that the monied interests are having to deal with the very real prospect of having land/building depreciate they call foul and are using the media to leverage the undoing of WFH.
This is big tech's blight, and I want nothing more for them to finally own up to this and do something about it, instead of enabling the squalor that they have created: even as a person in tech it's hard not to give credence to the techno-feudalism arguments many of it's detractors point out as the inevitable outcome from constant wealth and power consolidation given this reality.
>we've had the opposite problem: lots of highly paid tech firms moving into SF.
Quite the problem ... the kind of problem that multitudes of cities and regions in the world are desperately trying to recreate.
>This has changed the nature of San Francisco in a way that many dislike, including me.
This is where progressives don't live up to their name. The nature of cities is constant change. Meanwhile the activists are desperately trying to keep change to a minimum so that the character of neighborhoods never changes. It's an interesting dichotomy.
>because rents have gone up so much, and also it's just not as fun, it's crowded and stressed.
Rents will drop if you increase density ... but that would mean building higher density housing and thereby accepting that the character of cities and neighborhoods change.
>I am aware that I am a part of the problem: my wife and I are white, yuppie, dink tech workers. :)
The fact that you're white and a tech worker isn't the problem. It's that you had the opportunity to move to San Fransciso for work due to the tech boom, and now you're trying to pull the ladder up so others cannot do the same.
> Techies are not an ethnic group. No one goes to SOMA to try the delicious techie food.
They sure as heck try to go to SOMA to recruit technical people and try to get technical advice. How is that any less of a tribe than a specific ethnicity. One tribe has spaghetti, one has dim sum, and the other has layers upon layers of technical expertise.
> The issue is an economically diverse city becoming polarized into a theme park and bedroom community for high earners, and a bunch of poor enclaves, with a service sector that has to commute in from outside the city.
Define economically diverse. The only reason less affluent people can't live in the city is because of the NIMBYism of SF residents, and the fact that they believe real estate should be a good financial investment.
A few decades of compound interest later, you get to where we're at, where either you have to be incredibly wealthy or lived here for a long time to afford anything.
>The real story here isn't the tech companies, its the lack of available housing in the area due to a decades long aversion to building more housing and a huge jobs/housing imbalance amongst almost every city in the SFBA.
Don't you think, say, Mark Zuckerberg buying and bulldozing neighbouring homes for privacy is the epitome of the tech world's affect on this? Tech workers aren't that concerned, are they?
> A large influx of people into your area is almost guaranteed to [lead to] possible demographic shifts that marginalize your culture.
Gentrification sure sounds like an instance of that, and I've been hearing about techies pushing out hippies and artists for about as long as I've been old enough to pay attention. The fear of cultural change in SF is a constant enough thread in SF that a knee-jerk reaction that it's racial seems like an uncharitable reading.
> But when you go home after work, also be prepared to see the dystopia that your industry has created as a by-product.
I think it's a bit narcissistic to believe that tech has somehow caused all of SF's problems and unique qualities. Healthcare is a bigger and faster growing industry, and the homeless situation is caused by lots of factors both supply (zoning/regulation) and demand (tech/finance/healthcare workers).
There is a veneer of tech-induced culture in SF, but the true character and complexity of the city is caused by much, much more.
Haven't SF tech companies, their employees and their voting habits done enough damage to SF as it is?
One can only hope other cities with emerging tech industries act proactively to prevent current-Californian tech residents flocking from the problems they've caused to cause the same problems in these new cities.
> kind of orthogonal and non-scalable to the problem of the Bay Area housing crisis.
The problem can be attacked from two angles. Either ramp up housing development to take care of the population influx, or slow down the population influx to match the rate of housing development. Obviously, the people of the area have a vested interest in keeping the area attractive; but for the rest of us, I think it's important to remember there are other places to live and you can be just as happy or happier elsewhere. I'm someone who could have used that reminder a year ago.
There's a lot of justification that goes into paying $3000 per month to live in a one bedroom apartment. You have to recoup that value elsewhere. A lot of it has to do with the job opportunities available to tech workers. That's undeniable. But some of the other justifications I used were more or less lies I started telling myself about why I had to stay.
> Are you proposing that everyone in SF move to places like the Central Valley (driving up price)
It's already happening, so maybe we should embrace it as a valid option. The town I'm living in has become sort of a telecommuter town, precisely because of rents in SF.
> and start driving around cars (increasing traffic and pollution)?
I actually went about 8 months without a car in SF. I took Uber, bike, and muni as my get around. Between me and my wife, we were spending $700 per month on transportation, so we ended up buying a car to get around -- it was just more convenient. Out in the valley, we actually put fewer miles on it, because it's easier to bike out here, and things are actually closer to us than they were in the city (both in miles and minutes).
> "San Francisco is overrun by tech conjurers who are rapidly annihilating its remarkable diversity"
I really hate this attack angle but its important to see because this is what serious local political candidates actually believe. If we would only build housing this would not be the case.
> so many people resent what the influx of tech wealth has done to the character of communities.
My parents met in the bay area, and... that ship has sailed. It used to be orchards and farms and rather bucolic, apparently. The fact that there are even "so many" people to resent the new arrivals is evidence of how much that area has changed in the past 50 years.
> A secondary factor caused by real estate hyperinflation is that all the stuff that once made the SF Bay Area so interesting has been priced out. I remember the Bay Area in the 1990s. It was a hub not just of tech but of art, music, and culture. It was a magical in a way that's hard to explain today, and I say this as someone who only visited. My main experience of it was from the culture and "vibe" it exported. All that is gone now.
That recapitulates my experience as well from living in SF. There was a feel of the city that has since disappeared. For me the breaking point was in the early 2010s, when I noticed all my nontech friends disappearing - they were getting priced out and moving, mostly out of state. And the conversations in tech changed too, from doing interesting and weird and exploratory things, to conversations about money, getting vc funding, and working on things that will make even more money.
The vibe was turning into a 90s wall street, and not the old city where everybody was a misfit and did their own weird thing. That's probably the part I miss the most.
> Also, I've always refused to move to Silicon Valley
> The author is in denial.
> it is a really expensive shithole
I'm always amazed by people who have visited a place a few times as a tourist and think "I'm qualified to shit on people who choose to live here". What makes you think you have any say in the situation?
SF has massive neighborhood diversity as far as living situations go. Yeah, the downtown and tourist areas suck. So what? That's the case in a ton of cities. I've lived in a neighborhood here for 7 years that has low crime, no shit on the streets, and is generally a great place to live.
Yeah, we've got a shit DA right now which hurts the city with increased petty crimes. We'll turn it around eventually.
To the extent that this means the freedom of poor people to get out of the way of rich people, you can see how some would not be excited. SF's black population has fallen by half in recent decades, for example.
Honestly, the geographic narrowness of the tech boom has always been weird. At the same time we've been selling the limitless power of the Internet to connect people, we've also been working for companies whose structures didn't demonstrate that, and in a financing ecosystem where physical proximity to VCs was a major advantage. So San Francisco got turned into a bedroom community for South Bay companies in areas that refused to build adequate housing for their workers.
Thanks to the pandemic, that is evaporating. We'll see what happens in 6-12 months, when everybody's vaccinated. But the people I'm talking to are unable to remember why commuting every day was ever a thing, and they're very reluctant to go back to it. In which case, we'll write SF's housing issues off as just another bubble.
> If you don't assume the model has predictive power
I am assuming that for the sake of discussion. Part of the reason I link to that article is because the author seems to me to be data-driven and careful about how much you can accurately predict from the data he collected and analyzed.
> people don't want the city to change.
I can't speak for everyone, but for me it's not about preserving the city in amber, I don't want it to become like Manhattan or Tokyo. Like I said above, I want to make cool high-tech arcologies and revitalize the ecology of the Bay.
> The city has changed and its a hellscape. No one can live there unless they bought their house in the early 90's or before. Teachers, Police, Firefighters, and every other kind of public servant is paid below the poverty line for the city they are supposed to serve. Low income people are forced further and further out, and entire economic sectors are starting to experience people insolvency. The city is being slowly turned into a monoculture of tech workers, and office buildings.
You're preaching to the choir here brother. You left out the traffic and insane drivers.
> The only thing the people of the city can bring themselves to do is try to legislate ever more controls on change and try to keep the city in some sort of 80's time warp. However they just banned selling e-cigarettes, and passed a law making sure the government doesn't use facial recognition software so I guess they don't feel the crisis of homelessness or high rents is something that should be given their attention.
Yeah, SF city politics is a shit-show. Everyone is so busy being Progressive that they can barely make any progress. (You like that line? You can use it. ;-) But you're being unfair IMO. I watch SFGOVTV and I can tell you that people are very much concerned about and working on homelessness and out-of-control rents (along with a lot of other weird stuff. Like "Legacy Businesses", what's up with that? I'm kind of a lefty and even I feel that that's "commie-pinko" level economic meddling. But then again, I like most of the businesses that get on the registry and receive money. I can't really hate something too much that if it helps them stay viable through the rough seas. But then again again, it's such a blatant political machination: you have to get a Supervisor to sponsor your business to be considered. Or what about this new system they're rolling out to make homeless people use a special card and account with the city to receive any help. Orwellian surveillance is fine if we are using it to help them, eh? Or the police whose job it is to board buses and trains and "check your papers" to make sure you're not evading fare. That's not progressive, it's imperial. What would be progressive is making the buses free to ride. Or doing like in Seattle: it's not the drivers' job to collect fares. You can ride the bus in Seattle without paying. You're supposed to, but if you're broke you can just mumble an apology to the driver and ride anyway.)
Er, um, rant over. Sorry about that. SF city politics is a hellofa drug...
Anyhow, we need to come together and think clearly about things to solve any of this. We have to balance growth (population and economic) with quality of life, advances in technology, ecological harmony, international politics and financial stuff, etc...
> Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining.
You see why it’s become that, and why your blue collar friends have had to move though, right? It’s not just that it’s close to San Francisco; it’s that being close to San Francisco means lots of people want to live there, and there aren’t enough places near San Francisco for them to live.
The idea that any town should effectively push its existing residents out in pursuit of “preserving the character of the area” just seems wrong to me. Are the aesthetics more important than the people who live there?
> the utter lack of ethics and values of the people who have descended like rabid vultures to manipulate the tech utopian thinkers
a lot of these people, having destroyed SF as a livable city, are now moving on to Seattle. Which is rapidly also turning into a city with feces laden sidewalks and a tech dystopia.
> 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).
> At the beginning of the current tech boom, it seemed that “old” San Francisco—activists, artists, immigrants—might continue to set the terms of the city, as it grudgingly acclimated to, and resisted, the influx of entrepreneurs and tech workers.
It's funny that someone who embraces the immigrant culture of San Francisco, is so anti-immigration when other people also want to immigrate to San Francisco in search of higher wages and a better life.
"Personally I feel that we are really getting close to killing the golden goose. At some point, companies will leave or grow large satellite offices elsewhere if housing becomes unattainable even to well-paid employees."
Good! Fantastic! Brilliant! Because that's the start to an actual, sustainable solution for this problem. I have no problem with construction, but diversification of the tech industry is far more important.
It is absolutely insane to believe that you can continue to cram the global tech industry into the popular third of the SF peninsula (i.e. the ~20 square miles east of Divisadero and north of Cesar Chavez), and maintain affordable housing. No matter how much you build, it's going to be ridiculously expensive, because developers do not build into falling markets. Manhattan and London and Tokyo are not cheap places to live, despite decades of construction. Moreover, even in "high-rise" cities like Tokyo, most of the residential construction is under 5 stories. Those cities sprawl to accommodate their population. SF doesn't have that option.
At this point, the only rational solution is for the tech industry to diversify geographically. It's better for SF, it's better for the companies, and it's way, way better for the employees.
>It doesn’t have to be this way. But everyone who lives in the Bay Area today needs to accept responsibility for making changes where they live so that everyone who wants to be here, can.
I don't know if drastically changing the housing landscape of SF will destroy the culture that made everyone want into the city in the first place, but asserting that it won't is just as tenuous as asserting it will.
All I ever see is rationalization that it won't, because the tech community takes it as axiomatic that they must pile into the city. By debating the conclusion we are tricked into accepting the form.
For example: "But everyone who lives in the Bay Area today needs to accept responsibility for making changes"
That's a lot of people. Including ones hostile to your goals. You would need to get a smaller and friendlier set of people on board to make a slightly-more geographically disperse tech scene work in the Bay Area. The self-fulfilling business "common sense" about SF is much more momentum than sense.
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