The city's consolidation into tech forced out a lot of the vibrancy that made San Francisco unique. Those people are still residents. It's just they've been unable to afford the space to enact some of the things they used to.
These are also the people making SF expensive. It's not just artists, it's their own children who can't live there, one reason SF has fewer families with children than any other city IIRC.
As for quirky businesses, that's DRs and licensing.
https://sf.eater.com/2021/4/22/22397615/matcha-n-more-ice-cr...
When I graduated from grad school in the mid-80s, I don't think a single one of my classmates who got a job in Massachusetts lived in the city proper.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual richer areas because those had all blocked new housing (actual gentrification.)
But yes, before that it was limited to a few hotspots like St Louis which still had environmental lead problems. Meanwhile DC in 1990 was more dangerous than the Iraq War.
The Mother Jones article referenced above is arguing that the most effective thing that can be done to combat crime is lead abatement, I think that argument has taken a fatal hit. Some cities are in fact seeing homicide rates close to or even above the 1990s rates, that happened suddenly and it happened after leaded gasoline had been banned for 45 years.
You can't explain the massive increase in homicide in large cities in 2020 using environmental factors like lead, the cause has to be cultural or political.
Although I don't remember the "massive upheaval of lifestyles" suddenly happening at the beginning of June last year, is that your recollection of events?
A possible reason everyone was free to protest was they were unemployed.
That doesn't seem to actually be the case, but crime statistics is a notoriously tricky area.
There of course is also an effect where people think all of Portland is on fire because they saw a protest on TV once. But also Portland has had twice as much gun violence this year than all of 2020, which seems like a problem someone should do something about.
You're overlooking the qualitative motives for (somewhat incorrect) purely financial aspects. Younger people continued to move to denser parts of cities for at least a solid decade after in-city rents surpassed suburban ones. A large demographic group got married and started having kids much later than previous ones (this part traces pretty well back to economic factors, though!) so was looking for very different things in housing. As those factors started to change, they started following similar suburbanization patterns, and WFH accelerated that dramatically.
"Friends" is probably the clearest pop culture recording of this, showing the draw of living in the city for single 20-somethings in the 90s, and then the eventual appeal of the burbs for the later married w/ kids stage. Even in the 90s part of it, none of them were there because NYC was the cheap option.
But NYC has always had a singular appeal. And there was long a certain snobbery(?) about living in Manhattan specifically.
Sure. But my point was that, in the aggregate, they weren't. Maybe by the early 2000s, there were more jobs there, their parents lived there, their friends were starting to be there, etc. So, yes, at some point especially college-educated young professionals started to pay an urban premium for the lifestyle. We'll see to what degree that continues.
I actually agree with `astrange that by the early 2000s, if not a tad earlier[0], millennials were moving in-town (though not because their parents lived there! the opposite, if anything!), but I completely disagree on the "why" - their claim was that it was because it was cheaper because suburbs had zoning that caused them to get too expensive. My claim is that it was a lifestyle thing, not a "forced out" thing.
[0] I can't speak firsthand to earlier, but there were a lot of new or newly-redone apartment buildings by the early 2000s, suggesting that the trend had been going for several years already.
But also, the cities aren't naturally cities and the suburbs aren't naturally suburbs - they're suburbs because of restrictive zoning, and that's what caused them to be more expensive to starter homeowners and less appealing to young people.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/
https://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-s...
Continues to happen too. The parts of the world with the most terrorism like Iraq/Yemen also most recently had leaded gas.
Young people tend to be economic migrants and the pockets of mass economic growth start in cities. They're also single and relatively poor so they live in multi-tennant housing near the downtowns where they work. As they get older, richer and more numerous (i.e. married w/ kids) they move out of the core. Cycle repeats with rising prices if growth is still there, or you hollow out the city and only the poorest remain. SF could stay like it is, or become a west-coast steel town, but it's unlikely to return to what it once was.
It's varies over time. With SV-style tech that hasn't been the case until quite recently. And, in the Bay Area, arguably the nexus of jobs is still in the South Bay. And this sort of situation is true for many other areas as well.
Depending upon how you characterize tech, there's still a lot in the northern and western suburbs, especially if you include the defense contractors. But, yes, there's now a lot in Cambridge and the Seaport, especially, as well as all the biotech/pharma in and near Kendall Square.
I'm not too familiar with the startup scene before 2010. But from what I know, it was mostly established in its current form before the Dot Com boom.
It seems like HP, Cisco, Intel, Apple, Oracle, Sun, Adobe, Intuit, & Yahoo! where part of one movement.
eBay, PayPal, Google, Facebook & Netflix obviously added to that.
But now all the newer companies are coming from SF - SalesForce, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, Yelp, Splunk, Dropbox, Square, Instagram (originally), Slack, StichFix, Postmates, Instacart, GitHub, Robinhood, Coinbase, etc.
The only recent, pretty big startups in the South Bay I can think of are LinkedIn and Quora. YouTube - from San Bruno - is kind of in the middle. The rest are subsidiaries.
I mean, the OG companies like Apple and Google and Facebook are so big that they dwarf the rest of the startups in the Bay by themselves. So in a sense, the Silicon Valley still feels like the Peninsula. But the startup scene definitely seems to have shifted.
I saw that in one Google search and it seems incredibly unlikely. This seems much more probable (even if you assign some of the engineering degrees to CS):
Long answer could be a phd thesis but “people needed lots of space until they didnt” kind of suffices.
History time. It's kind of amusing to see these companies referred to as OG, when there were many generations of Silicon Valley startups before them. The real OG was probably Hewlett-Packard, founded in Palo Alto in 1939. Another key company was Shockley Semiconductor, founded in Mountain View in 1956. Eight key employees left Shockley in 1957 and formed Fairchild Semiconductor, gaining the name the "Traitorous Eight". Fairchild led to over 126 startups, sometimes called the Fairchildren, including AMD, Altera, LSI Logic, National Semiconductor, and SanDisk.
Two of the Traitorous Eight, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, left Fairchild in 1968, founding Intel in Mountain View. Later key Silicon Valley companies were Oracle (1977), Sun Microsystems (1982), and Cisco (1984). Although Apple started in 1976, it wasn't a dominant company until years later. Google (1998) and Facebook (2004) are relative newcomers.
Information on Fairchild's influence: https://computerhistory.org/blog/fairchild-and-the-fairchild...
Question - when did the VC model really come into play? Were the Fairchildren like AMD VC funded?
A lot of others have mentioned that space plays a role in this a lot. Companies needed fabricators and data centers, which took up space, so it was too expensive to be in the city.
Is this really all there was to it? Back in these times - there was White Flight from the cities, right? Did most people (even college grads) prefer to work in the suburbs then? Was this even a factor at all?
Personally, I think it was more of a conservative East Coast mentality vs. an anything is possible West Coast Mentality.
Stephen Levy's Hackers is probably a good start (but skip the Stallman The Last Hacker part).
Amazon recently sued an exec for moving to Google cloud (also in WA) – https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-worker-who-...).
Here's an IBM one from New York – https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=84252db4-ccc3....
A quick search yielded a ton of results for large tech companies suing employees and each other over non-competes, and – surprise – none of them are in California.
To the degree that you believe Shockley was an important catalyst, that does seem to have been largely happenstance. There are arguments to be made that the next phase after the minicomputer would logically be somewhere other than the Northeast. On the other hand, a great deal of computer tech prior to the minicomputer was concentrated on the northern part of the East Coast, so why a shift? Finally, given Compaq, Dell, and TI, why not a more robust Silicon Prairie earlier?
This is a very basic fact of the history of SV that many in the VC scene are reluctant to acknowledge.
Here's a list of startups in Palo Alto: https://angel.co/location/palo-alto
Here's a list of startups in Menlo Park: https://angel.co/location/menlo-park
I'm sure if you have crunchbase pro you'd be able to do more analysis. But Silicon Valley is still pumping out a lot of startups, and high-tech firms.
Also your list of South Bay startups is pretty incomplete - there's also WhatsApp (Mountain View), Box (Redwood City), Coursera (Mountain View), Khan Academy (Mountain View), Tesla (Palo Alto, with manufacturing in Fremont), the Signal Foundation (Mountain View), RobinHood (headquarters is Menlo Park, not SF), Zoom (San Jose), GoFundMe (Redwood City), Carbon3D (Redwood City), WealthFront (Palo Alto), Impossible Foods (Redwood City), Roblox (San Mateo), and GoPro (San Mateo). I do agree that the center of gravity of the valley moved northwards in the 2010s though. Prior to then, it was debatable whether SF was even really part of the valley, while since then it's been a major tech hotspot.
The earliest SV companies wanted to be physically located near Stanford and Moffett for the govt subsidies/contracts. Still happens (read The Entrepreneurial State) but physical location is not as important in the internet age.
Frankly I would not give this Sf.citi lobbyist piece much credence. “Migration” could simply be a temporary effect of the pandemic. We may very well see young people come rushing back into SF for the same reasons as before.
And crime? You wouldn’t know it from HN threads but SF violent crime is again at all time lows.[1]
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/ca/san-francisco/crime...
Protip: Anti-housing activists will never tell you their real motivations: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/blacks_ch...
People should be mad, but not at 22-year-olds coming from around the country looking for work. They should be mad at the millionaire rentiers who tell those kids when they show up that it's illegal for anybody to build them housing.
Anti gentrification policies almost always end up displacing the populations they are meant to protect. You don't want new apartments in a specific area because it may bring in newer crowds? Well guess what, those crowds will come any way, and now they can out price the people who live there.
Rent control is another problem, because long time residents won't move. And with no new inventory, the prices for pretty much any apartment that enters the market goes sky high. It's not the tech workers who displace the locals, they are anyway hunting for apartments in a different price range from the locals. It's the locals now just budgeting higher portions of their income towards rent and displacing other locals. This is exactly what happened in Berlin. [3]
And last but not the least, I think despite the nostalgia and how we remember SF differently from what it is now, yes there were quirky businesses all around. But there were only specific parts of the city that had them and quite frankly a lot of them just used to be replaced by newer businesses every couple of years. But what happened at some point was too much bureaucracy, red tape and politics crept into the cost of starting a business that now you have to sink almost a quarter of a million dollars before you can even start an ice cream shop. [4] It was partly the "locals" who created these problems.
[1] https://journal.firsttuesday.us/california-homeowners-are-st... [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/08/21/san... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin... [4] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-...
By the way I never saw a “tantrum” from him; he followed the law methodically and for that he was ridiculed by the press as a deviant (“kamikaze” according to Joe Eskanazi https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-sa...). He publicly shared his research (e.g. https://groups.google.com/g/sfbarentersfed/c/mHT2l4zDyKg/m/X...) and I think would have wanted his project to be an example to others of how to make the rule of law the norm in San Francisco, but that was not the agenda of the politicians and the press.
I get that people (such as Supervisor Hillary Ronen, gatekeeper Erick Arguello, and so-called “Progressive” journalist Tim Redmond) are upset about people profiting off the housing shortage. But if they are upset about a landowner making ~$130k per unit for investing in alleviating the shortage, they should be livid over every single homeowner in the neighborhood who sells a house for $2 million and makes more profit per unit without increasing the housing supply at all. That they asymmetrically target housing producers while remaining silent to idle speculators gives a perverse disincentive against creating housing and reveals a NIMBY preference by these so-called “Progressives”. In the end I think their advocacy does more harm than good in San Francisco even when it is in the name of capturing some value for the poor.
But the jerks succeed some of the time.
What should he have done differently that would have made the process work? Is it perhaps possible that his plans might have worked had he presented them with kindness, centered his words in compassion, and experienced a genuine blooming of human empathy? Greeted Calle 14 and Arguello with sympathy and real emotional engagement, acknowledging the legitimacy and validity of their concerns and pain, before refusing to donate?
Or was he a jerk because he didn't want to play ball with an unwritten shadow system that exists to make arbitrary and extrajudicial demands, and no amount of framing or emotional performance was going to make him into less of one? Can you help me understand?
SF would need to gut its entire permitting system. Today, it can't even make small and incremental improvements: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Is-p...
My point was that O($10m) isn't even enough to reliably land something on the ballot, much less get whatever crazy thing you want passed.
This of course being distinct from undoing Prop 13.
In a state that's nearly majority renters it should be possible to outspend HJTA and win.
Probably never because management don't care, highly-compensated workers will find a way, and many are moving to at least hybrid-remote anyway. But imagine what if big SF corporate money finally got sick of their headquarters being surrounded by homeless suffering and public sanitation problems and put some money towards systematically fixing it.
At the same time, I can think of few things with worse optics than big, fat, cash-rich tech companies full of big, fat, rich techies banding together to raise taxes on regular homeowners.
Prop 13 is possibly illegal: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3012949
Correction: in 2020, Proposition 19 (which limited Proposition 13/58 property tax breaks for parent-child transfers to only farms and owner-occupied “family homes”) did pass 51%-49%, whereas Proposition 15 (which would have eliminated Proposition 13 tax breaks for commercial property) was on the ballot but failed 48%-52%.
Everyone loves the idea of cheaper housing for people in theory.
Once they realize it means their own property value won't appreciate as quickly, or may even decrease and then suddenly they are against it. And they will vote out any officials that support it.
There needs to be state or federal intervention. And that doesn't seem likely at any time in the near future.
New York is possible for artists because of public transit.
Artists don't live in Manhattan, they live in the outskirts, or once were the "outskirts", and commute to where is needed because the MTA works (for the most part).
The Bay Area's transit system is a mess (too many different agencies with inconvenient transfers between lines) so affordable, yet accessible neighborhoods beyond Oakland/San Leandro/Richmond are nil.
Right?
May as well keep your money and let those fend for themselves.
Much better art created when people do it for the passion.. on their own time.. with their own resources.. after they've worked an 8 hour day.
Whingers are going to complain anyway - no point in affording them the time and resources to do it more.
Our problem is never that we don't have enough wealth, it's always that it's concentrated among a small percentage of the population, and a much larger percentage gets starved out entirely.
> New York billionaires have always found a way to support artistic endeavors. Case in point - Bloomberg, he personally donated a lot.
If we have to depend on the charity of billionaires, we've already lost the war.