San Francisco’s tech fiefdom is dying

The refusal of 3 American cities to grow has made us all substantially poorer (New York, San Jose, and San Francisco): https://www.econlib.org/a-correction-on-housing-regulation/

> revitalize the American heartland while moving America toward a greener, high-tech future

Every time someone moves from the suburbs to a transit connected apartment building in SF their carbon emissions are cut in half.

My hope is we'll start seeing the next wave soon-- I'm seeing a lot of potential SFBA groundwork relating to CRISPR and genetics, neural links with AR+AI, and biopharma coupled with human potential advancements.

Living in SF is a different thing.

The traffic really sucks and the public transportation is inadequate.

During major conferences the city gets completely saturated with people and transportation sucks even more.

Commuting from outside the city is a via crucis that will destroy your spirit.

Public works take fucking forever to complete, blocking streets for years.

Air quality is nice, except during wildfire season. You will need to seal your windows, doors, AC, buy air filters and masks. It sucks.

The cost of living is fucking absurd. The will keep raising your rent every goddamn year.

The homelessness situation is pretty bad, and since the city has not installed public bathrooms, they have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars removing poop from the streets.

And needles. Fucking used needles everywhere.

I saw a video recently about the Ogallala Aquifer (a large body of water that feeds the agricultural belt in central US). It argued that because state lines were drawn in a nearly arbitrary fashion, states are incentivized to compete against each other to develop/maintain their agricultural industries, even if that means draining the water unsustainably. It argues that a hypothetical megastate whose area encompasses the entirety of the aquifer would see that it's in its own interest to manage the aquifer efficiently and sustainably, rather than fight against neighbouring states in a tragedy of the commons.

`s/water/VC money + talent/` and I think you can see where we're going with this. Could the next Apple be born in Denver? Could the next Google be born in Miami? You could arguably look at Toronto, Canada as an example of what sort of level of innovation one could reasonably expect from a local growing hub. But if hypothetically, the SF tech scene were to actually die (or be irreparably crippled by the tech exodus), I'd think the US as a whole would lose a major economic/technological edge, especially compared to places like China.

Is that "good for the US"? Perhaps so for the folks that can ride the growth in the local hubs. Perhaps their locals will also come to loathe techies. But alas, perhaps it won't be so good after all, if it means the existing tech giants will never again see worthy competition/disruption, and if it means that the US starts seeing technological advances originating from other countries while no longer able to sprout them at the scale that today's tech giants have been able to in the past.

Has its homeless and high tax issues as well, but at least there is lots of room and nimby's have lost their tight grip preventing development.