The Bay Area has become a large declining tech company
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I’m also pretty skeptical this is the bay area’s death knell. Web3 is a pretty bad example if you’re looking at funding, because if you interpret web3 as just “crypto” or decentralized, that suffers a legitimacy problem which makes all VC averse to it, not just the Bay Area VC (though of course a lot of crypto stuff does get funded still). And obviously it’s not only people in the Bay Area who work less than their stated 40 hrs or go to tech conferences…
In the near-term, say 5-10 years from now, I think the Bay Area will represent maybe 50% of the “hot” tech industry (not counting giants based in the Bay Area which have already spread all over the world) whereas it was maybe 80% before. Obviously right now is an aberration because with remote work you don’t benefit much from the network effects.
The Bay Area has chosen stasis. That doesn't bode well for its revival as a cultural center.
SF is an attractive place so it attracts people, the vulnerable communities with less resources get pressure.
The hipster influx that was followed by the tech influx were both fueled by steadily rising disposable income (whether from trust-fund hipsters or highly-paid tech workers, later).
I don't think a starving artist influx is likely though because there's a substantial cohort of independently-wealthy people (from the US tech industry, from other US industries, and from abroad) that are going to continue to live in places with desirable climate/amenities/scenery/cultural centers/etc even if the jobs of the newly-high-income move around. So it'll probably just go back to circa-2010-hipster-less-expensive-but-still-expensive levels.
As an example you only need to look at the amount of money the FAANG companies spend at consuming your data to sell to advertisers - their investments in data mining for that data, various technologies for click-bait advertising, etc. rather than addressing holes in cybersecurity, technology that may help in the climate crisis, tracking child predators, sex traffickers, mass shooters/shootings etc.
The Bay Area is known for caring about Social Networks, Apple products, Amazon's BS, Google (screwing search results around) and just now slowly increasing biotech...it doesn't have a track record of caring about innovation around important items but more around throwing large sums of money at trivially bullshit stuff - yes, my opinion, but this is a fact and has an impact.
The app boom was similarly heartbreaking, only this time most tech workers didn't even need to explore the neighborhoods they lived in -- they could Uber to the front door of any restaurant they wanted, and take tech buses instead of riding their bikes or taking public transportation to get to work.
A few years ago I read that the average tenure of a business on Valencia was less than 18 months, which is nothing short of a death sentence for a neighborhood like the Mission. Long times residents no long feel connected to (or were able to take pride in) their neighborhood, and most new residents don't care to to establish those connections -- why bother if the upscale boutique that replaced a multigenerationally owned family business is just going to be gone in a year an a half?
I mourn what happened to the city I used to love, but I'm optimistic that the decentralization of tech will leave San Francisco a better place.
I mostly get the impression people leave because they don't want to deal with the school lottery system. As for retirees, they tend to have incredible housing wealth built up - and old people being replaced by young people over time, even if bad, is much better than the alternative.
> A few years ago I read that the average tenure of a business on Valencia was less than 18 months, which is nothing short of a death sentence for a neighborhood like the Mission.
If you want to have businesses in the Mission, they need cheaper startup costs. That doesn't happen when SF is designed to make new businesses take 2-3 years to open so the planning commission can determine they're sufficiently quaint and precious, and all their neighbors and competitors can sue them looking for bribes.
In my experience that may be true for the small number of people who leave the city for Marin, Contra Costa or San Mateo counties, but members of the creative communities that gave the city the reputation it had before the tech booms typically don't have children. I can think of countless coworkers with children, but I only know two couples who decided to have children after moving to San Francisco.
Post pandemic and post the past 5 years maybe not so much. You get all the density, they've got some huge budget surplus, but it comes with endless annoying petty crime and poop on the streets about which nothing can be done because of political paralysis. I think I'm too old for that now. But it's silly to assume this is San Francisco's last chapter, no?
It may not be the last chapter, but it might have been the last good chapter for a while.
SF's housing problems are entirely self-created and also very solvable. No one wants to change in order to solve them, so the situation continues to get worse.
Decades of single issue voting for idiot politicians leads to idiotic policies that literally are destroying what used to be one of the finest cities in America.
People need to stop leaving SF and instead clean it up. But they won't. Like locusts that swoop in, destroy everything in sight and then move on they will leave CA, infest other nearby states and then vote for the same utter bullshit that destroyed the areas they came from. I'm watching southern Nevada slide into shithole status more and more from this right now and it's beyond frustrating.
I think you know perfectly well they won't (vote tomorrow to repeal all zoning), so we're already in the territory of wishful thinking. And in any case far outside the realm of "could just do it."
SF's housing problems are entirely self-created
They are not. There are multiple factors involved.
The city has essentially the same housing stock as it did 20 years ago, but it didn't have, at that time, anything like the housing crisis like it has now. I'll leave it to you to guess what some of those intervening factors might be.
This feels like a recurring theme I hear from people who resent the migration of so many "tech" (read: software) workers to San Francisco, but each time I wonder if it's legitimate. I took MUNI twice a day for 6+ years, and walked nearly everywhere else. I don't feel like that caused me to meet many people or form any particular connections with the community. I've certainly had more conversations with strangers taking Lyft than I have on MUNI or BART, despite taking Lyft much less often. Public transit isn't some kind of transformative bonding experience.
Most people go to work, socialize with a small circle of friends, and have a private life at home. That's not some uniquely antisocial "tech worker" thing, as if everyone else spends much of their time painting street murals or serving in a soup kitchen. Poll the young people you know in other jobs and ask them how many local civic organizations they're involved in; folks don't have the time. I say this having been on the board of a small SF nonprofit for several years.
Don’t forget that web3 involves NFTs. And you can buy an NFT from yourself to make it appear it’s valuable even though it’s not. Wash sale rules along with plenty of others don’t apply to NFTs, yet.
I don’t think I’ll ever be a buyer of NFT jpegs but I can still appreciate what is possible
What else do you think web3 can offer besides NFTs? I'm genuinely curious because I hear a lot of rumbling about web3 but don't really see much being done other than NFTs.
Now could the blockchain replace or augment dns. Totally. But not sure I’d call that web3.0
Not that we aren't still quite far away making it all fully working and secure...
What will IoT will bring to manufacturing that hasn't already existed for the past few decades? I started my career in manufacturing at a pretty large company around 2010, and quite literally every process was being monitored over a network. I worked with a framework called XMII (formerly Lighthammer[1]) that integrated with SAP and allowed us to read from various sensors collecting data on manufacturing lines and built dashboards for monitoring.
[1]https://www.automation.com/en-us/articles/2004-2/lighthammer...
Ad-supported surveillance media selling behavioural manipulation turns out to be what took off. It's a mix of what pays, what the public would consume, and what regulators were (at least for a time) afraid to touch.
This is the saddest part for me, as someone from here. I get that lots of my childhood friends were priced out. That’s life. But them being priced out by people who want to stay until their thirties and then leave just sucks. Your new friends price out your old friends and then leave too.
It doesn’t exactly help as far as sense of community.
Eventually the Bay Area will find a new equilibrium, but it won't look much like the current Bay Area does. I believe the Bay Area exists in it's current state because of the network effect of having this much tech money/talent in one place. If this goes away, what is left that outweighs high crime, drug abuse and homelessness, taxes, etc?
It started with homeless people camping out in front of our units in SoMa and Mission (often times blocking the entrance/exit because some units had a direct street-level entrance), petty package theft and occasional car break-ins in the building garages.
Police couldn't do anything but take a report.
Then the pandemic started and the vacancy rate skyrocketed. We started getting reports from neighbors or the on-site management that are our guests are dealing drugs out of our units. Except that these units were supposed to be vacant. Our lockboxes were getting broken into, keys taken and people have been living there for several days and in some cases weeks. We often had footage of this.
We would call the police as we arrived at these units for our protection, but they wouldn't be able to arrest anyone because the people in the unit would say "so and so gave me the keys, told me this is their apartment, I don't know anything about that broken lockbox."
This scheme quickly expanded to Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Milpitas and other South Bay cities. We would call the police on a daily basis in the first few months of the pandemic. Sometimes it would take them an hour or two to come, and if the squatters saw our team at the building and got wind of what was going on, they would start packing up their car with our appliances: Apple TV, Nespresso machine, we've even had furniture and major appliances like TVs, washer and dryer rolled out while we were waiting for the police to come.
At most they would temporarily restrain these squatters if they had previous warrants (many of them did, but many others didn't produce an ID.) But even with warrants for their arrest, they would get uncuffed and released within an hour. We thought that at least a warrant would have them appear in front of a judge and we'd not have to encounter them again in a few days at another building, but the pandemic gave them a free pass.
The officers were very candid in saying that if it was up to them, they would book them, but they have instructions not to bring anyone in for non-violent crime. Theft is not prosecuted.
This is how it goes, anyone that has any doubt that crime is not prevented, pursued or prosecuted should go on a ride-along to any of these calls.
how are they not a threat to society?
So in my experience so far bros in finance just out of college renting a 3 million condo are more at fault for stuff getting stolen from my property than the cops, the homeless and politicians.
In most of the US, including many moderate size cities, a garage left open for 4-5 hours would not have anything stolen from it.
The amount of utter BS people in CA are willing to put up with never ceases to amaze me. Which is why I find it harder and harder to have any sympathy. At this time we might as well let it all burn down - maybe then people will finally get off their asses and vote for anyone other than the current crop of utter moron politicians that are literally destroying the state.
When CA goes from the most prosperous state to loosing enough pop to get demoted a representative in the House - you'd think that would be enough of a wake up call that shit democrat policies might not be such a good idea. But here we continue to remain talking about this stuff while nothing changes.
The faster it all just burns to the ground the faster it might get rebuilt into something that's not a literal needle infested pile of shit :/
It didn't lose any population. Because of the fixed size of the House, you can lose a rep while gaining population (in California’s case, gaining more than 2.2 million between the 2010 and 2020 census.) Also, apportionment isn't tied at all to prosperitt; California didn't get any less relatively prosperous to lose a seat, so your “going from...” doesn't make any sense, even ignoring the factual error about losing population.
California experienced a population decline in 2021, the first in its history as a state. That may be what GP was referring.
That couldn't be the population drop GP referred to costing a house seat, since it was after the Census on which the apportionment was based, and would have no effect on apportionment except in how it contributes to the state at the time of the 2030 Census.
In the Bay Area and LA many apartment buildings don't have a front desk, they have a leasing office that may or may not be open, and typically keeps odd hours.
With the exception of high-rises, new developments in SF and South Bay with under 200 units typically don't have a front desk.
They do have security patrol come in for a couple of hours nightly, but they're not supposed to get involved and just take notes of suspicious activity, then email it to the leasing office to review the next day. Security will call the police if it's blatant theft of break-in, but they rarely catch it because this is one person patrolling a garage and endless hallways for just a few hours each night. When the security patrol car is by the building entrance, they can return a couple of hours later to steal packages, break into the bike room, break into cars, open lockboxes, etc.
However, things got out of hand significantly during the pandemic. Package theft and mailbox theft started happening during daylight hours. At one building in Mountain View they stole the USPS master key as the mail carrier had the boxes open putting in the mail. One leasing agent was assaulted during a tour and the keys & fobs were stolen.
You can't fight this type of crime by having a security guard in every area of every building. The issue is rooted in that the thieves and squatters know that they will get away with it. The criminals became bolder and even if confronted by a security guard, they have no more power than your average citizen has. They can just observe and take notes.
I'm not sure why it's so hard to for people to understand when you don't prosecute all crime, crime starts to bubble up and grow rampant but here you go. None of this is a surprise to anyone paying the least bit of attention to what has been going on in CA for a long time now. We are seeing in real time the effects of this grand experiment - how many people's lives and livelihoods have to be destroyed before CA residents start demanding real accountability?
I'm not holding my breath. Just stay in CA. Do not leave and then start to shit up other states with your batshit crazy politics too.
There are a lot of voters who are not taxpayers.
that it's the Democratic Party we're talking about here is irrelevant—this is just a natural consequence of the two-party system.
There’s far fewer homeless in the Midwest because homes are actually affordable. The poverty, squalor, heroin addiction is just as bad. It’s just out of sight.
I suspect it also has to do with that fact that if you are homeless in winter you will die.
In a transient place like the bay area, the voters also do not experience the consequence of their votes and follow along with whatever trendy compassion based arguments is around at the time, the one year they vote.
The people who run for office are not many. Most of these positions are uncontested.
But, see, your financing would require you to cough up cash if the basis changes. And everything related to housing has become a Ponzi scheme to extract money from the people trying to simply find somewhere to live.
In this case, you have chosen to prefer to leave the rent high and let squatters break into your units rather than drop the rent and have residents.
I believe we refer to this as "the hand of the free market".
In other words, low-cost short-term housing attracts people that can book a stay for one month that will continue to occupy the space and stop paying until the eviction is processed. Eviction is a 3 to 6 month process in most counties in California, and it typically costs $10k-$15k. That was before the pandemic, evictions were completely suspended since.
Short-term housing / corporate housing does not require proof of income, credit check, etc. That would create a barrier of entry that would deter the majority of the clients; they would flock to the first available Airbnb. These travelers are typically staying for a couple of months and don't want to go through the hassle of lease approvals, agreements, credit checks, etc. Many of them are foreign and unable to provide the documentation necessary for a typical lease agreement.
You do make a valid point, however. Rent should be driven down as the market dictates.
For long-term rentals (your typical 1 or 2 year lease agreement with the building) there is another reason why rent does not drop significantly: most of the large rental buildings are owned by banks. There are clauses where if the rent per unit drops under a certain amount, the interest rates increase. There are several other clauses that disincentivize rent decreases. In addition, not every investor in a real estate investment trust has the same terms. When things go south (rent drops, operating costs increase, rate of evictions increases), investors that hold a fraction of the REIT will be the ones taking that loss, while institutional investors that provided the majority of the loan are protected. Thus it's in the interest of the more powerful investors or lenders to keep the rent where it is, and let the smaller investors take the loss.
We as property managers, whether long term or short term, can only fluctuate the rent within a certain margin. It's easy to oversimplify as "why can't you just drop the price", but there are bigger players that hold the cards, and they decide what the rent is, and if units are to remain vacant, who will be taking that loss. And it's the new guy that just entered an REIT with a mere $100k.
I suspect SF may move towards this model soon. You can already see it around Union Square. They are hiring off duty cops to monitor the stores.
But honestly even that euphemism is an insult to state capital systems that incorporate marxist ideology, as those systems tax lower and have better private property assurances
It really boils down to alot of things, cost, dysfunction and environmental degradation. For me I know that life is short and I don't want to live in a crime infested dump that costs a fortune and is extremely crowded where everyone is miserable and has overreaching laws for decent people and lawlessness for criminals.
We had packages stolen off our porch, liquor bottles/trash thrown on our lawn, cars broken into, illegal fireworks being fired off almost every night(scaring our dog to where she was having serious issues), driving anywhere I saw huge piles of trash, homeless camps and shopping carts. Oh and all houses run about $1.3M for a non dump and schools are terrible. And I didn't get into the non-stop fires that have happened the past few years(which has really never happened in California before).[I lived in San Jose]
Imagine how it must be to be surrounded by 1.3M homes and multi-thousand dollar apartments when you're broke, not well paid, and can barely afford any of it? Homelessness and crime are both things that people are much more likely to resort to in a society with wildly inequal distributions of wealth than in one where everyone is in a similar place.
So we could build more jails and prisons, throw more people in them. Punish people very harshly for stepping out of line as we continue to worsen the ability of the less-wealthy/less-paid to thrive. "There's no excuse for resorting to crime," etc. Criminalize sleeping on the street so that we can toss them somewhere too.
We could build massively more. That seems much more humane. But a lot of people don't want to do that!
So we could push people out, lower the demand. That would put pressure on prices and open up housing... nobody wants to do that, though! We just sorta "unintentionally" do it by choosing not to do anything else - let the problems push people away on their own!
The crime isn't a direct symptom of government dysfunction, it's a symptom of the ever-growing divide. The government dysfunction is trying to have your cake and eat it too, but that's not actually just the government that wants to do it - tons of citizens want to both keep housing scarce and less dense and get rid of visible homelessness.
What do you think the government alone could do that wouldn't result in their being rapidly voted out by people who don't want change?
Sure housing costs are high, how about just stealing it instead?
> The crime isn't a direct symptom of government dysfunction
does everyone have to live in SF? if you provide them with enough infrastructure, then the answer is "no". if you don't provide infrastructure then you have a problem. anyway, all of these issues have been solved around the world. the US and CA governments just need to look to other countries for examples.
What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires
Similarly, the Bay has been the center of tech since 60s. But the Bay is much more fragile than New York; it is largely dominated by the tech industry. So a better comparison might be Detroit. When the car industry left, the entirety of Detroit was hollowed out.
Additionally, you need to be in New York if you want to "play in the big leagues" in the world of finance, fashion, art, etc. But tech has already embraced the remote model. 5-10 years ago, I would have felt like I needed to be in SF to further my career in tech. Now, I live in Austin and don't feel like I'm missing out. If anything, it feels like there is way more startup potential here – people actually building cool things, as opposed to resting and vesting at the big companies that dominate Silicon Valley.
Even 5 years ago calls with customers and investors invited questions like "so are you in the city or in the South Bay?" Raising money in particular was very hard if you were not in the Bay Area.
Now nobody even asks where you are located and if you say you are distributed/remote everyone shrugs. Angels and VCs don't seem to care at all.
It's been a stark and noticeable shift and it pre-dates COVID. COVID has just accelerated the geographic diversification trend dramatically.
There's long been strong financial pressure for the tech industry to disburse: it's incredibly expensive. Ideally you'd start a tech company somewhere where office and engineers are cheap. But the companies stay in SF because employees and VCs are there. VCs and employees are there because companies are here.
And even though Sand Hill VCs could fund companies anywhere in the country, in practice, they didn't (much). If that's changing, I feel like that's the trigger for a big tech diaspora as much or more than remote eng work.
I'm still a little worried about these (less finance); I keep hearing about people moving back home and not looking back because broker fees + rents shot up to where they used to be. Currently only 60% of jobs lost in NYC came back, vs ~90% nationally.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/nyregion/nyc-economy-jobl...
Besides, many of the current problems of the bay area could be solved by building denser housing and better public transportation. The whole region would be improved if so many of the NIMBYs weren't opposed to "Manhattanization".
> Besides, many of the current problems of the bay area could be solved by building denser housing and better public transportation. The whole region would be improved if so many of the NIMBYs weren't opposed to "Manhattanization".
High crime and political instability are California’s biggest issues. Fixing “the markets”, be it the housing market or Wall Street, is unlikely to be a panacea for this. America’s problems go much deeper than markets, and it may already be too late to course correct.
Basically I think as long as Northern California is a relevant political and economic entity the bay area will stay vital
To think anything like that would happen to SF anytime in the next 50 years is absolutely absurd.
If you have ever lived in Miami (the 3M person metropolis, whose mayor is not Francis Suarez), you know that techies goes there to party, vacation, or retire but the actual startup scene suffers from perennial brain drain with no end in sight.
When I moved down here, I was surprised. FIU is a massive and very nice school; University of Miami is also nice.
I had never even heard of FIU before I worked on campus there.
They're no Ivy League but I would say they're better than a lot of other schools.
For a while now I've been wondering whether the cryptocurrency bust—which is inevitable in my view—will mean the end of these kinds of articles and the resurgence of the Bay Area. Many of the other up-and-coming tech areas, particularly Miami, are disproportionately composed of cryptocurrency ventures, which doesn't strike me as a sustainable tech scene.
I remember a boat ride up the intracoastal, and there was a guy with a million-dollar mansion with a yacht docked next to his backyard that had a beautiful gigantic statue of a hand with a raised middle finger. That pretty much sums up South Florida's mindset.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-al-goldstein-b...
If you grew up down here and know the history of South Florida it's just a history of tech failing to launch since WWII. We have a giant runway in the middle of the Everglades for supersonic jets and space craft, and that fizzled. We have a decommissioned rocket plant and missile silos in Everglades National Park. The IBM PC was invented here, but IBM shipped that whole division to North Carolina. Miami could have a been a Silicon Valley when the valley got created during the Cold War but we lacked the leadership and funding.
So here we are trying to become the capital of crypto which I feel still won't make us another Silicon Valley but another Las Vegas.
I moved to Miami in 2017, couldn't find any kind of interesting work in machine learning or genomics. I started the machine learning meetup, which did end up with an enthusiastic but inexperienced community. My friend also moved to Miami at the same time and the only interesting graphics related jobs in the whole area were in Magic Leap. The startup scene was anemic and superficial. People we met who had deep technical skills all had one foot out the door, bound for Austin, SF, Durham, New York, &c. Eventually we both left and now live in Durham.
Furthermore, Miami, like a lot of Florida, is mostly driven by real estate and money laundering of illicit money, not by any tech whatsoever. It's also become a playground of the uber-rich libertarian subset of the PayPal mafia, but otherwise, there is no startup activity out of Miami.
Using this as some sort of exemplar instantly diminishes the credibility of the article. Also, the comparison to Yahoo is weird. It has ceased to be a big name for the longest time, but as a mismanaged and dysfunctional company that missed the bus several times, it is second only to Hewlett-Packard. H-P is a far better analogue of what SV has become.
This is really amusing to read on a site owned by Y Combinator.
The actual text of the letter[0] argued that people who can't afford homes or who have mental health issues _don't deserve to live in the Bay Area_, and that he _does_ deserve it, because he has money. This is literally spelled out in his letter, not obliquely implied. It's this part of his opinion that got him in public hot water.
[0] https://justink.svbtle.com/open-letter-to-mayor-ed-lee-and-g...
Classic. Almost a self-parody.
"... over three years ..."
The author compares this to the decline of Yahoo. It started grinding lower and never recovered.
But a better analogy might be Amazon. It was finished in 2002 and was worse for wear in 2009. How would you say Amazon is doing today?
Some tech companies can come back from the brink. Most can't. I'd compare the Bay Area to a tech company with 9 lives. Rumors of its death have always been greatly exaggerated.
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?
Most analysis does not go beyond the first part.
I'm not saying the second part is a utopia by any means, but you can carve out a more affordable and generally normal and happy life in the latter part pretty easily.
All said the traffic sucks (like all large metros), its still very expensive (particularly for families who can't live with roomates), childcare costs are high, etc.
My framing was in giving context to housed individuals considering moving into the Bay Area, and to highlight that the Bay Area is incredibly diverse and that there is room if you look outside the more "mainstream" areas.
New York, Boston, Pasadena, South Loop Chicago, Austin, Seattle, Northern Virginia, etc.
Outside of SF, life goes on as it always has. The major crime issues are (a) catalytic converter theft which costs the victim thousands and (b) car window breaks to grab any visible bags because too many techs leave their laptops in a visible bag.
Housing prices have always been rising, traffic is always getting worse. It's annoying, but not new. Companies have always been leaving and new places are always touted as the new "Silicon XYZ." The Silicon Glen. The Silicon Prairie. Silicon Forest.
I'm old. All this has happened before. All this will happen again.
You can replace "SF" with any developed city and you make the same point. It sounds like you're more against urban living in general than SF specifically.
Without unique events taking place, people more often than not settle into a set routine that causes them to recede mentally at a much faster rate.
And "dependent on car" varies. If you can easily walk distances and take public transit, not being dependent on a car can be a plus. But if you can safely drive but aren't very mobile otherwise, using a car can be more liberating.
My entire career (since 2005) has been in tech and mostly at startups. The bay area is done has been a trope my entire life. What I've noticed in my adult life and as a professional is that people move here regularly, but there is also a bit of a hype cycle that draws and repels people. I also see a whole lot of people that come here to get rich and get jaded pretty fast when they don't while having to pay a whole bunch more than if they lived elsewhere. I have a great group of friends that are mostly from other places around the world and I think some of them are here to stay, but inevitably some will leave. I don't think this is specific to the bay though.
Yes, it is expensive - that is very true. Yes, taxes are high. But despite those, there is no lack of people moving here so there must be something right, right?
I have lived in 6 states in the US and 5 countries globally including most that people throw out as alternatives to the Bay Area. In my experience, Bay Area has the highest concentration of smartest and open minded people that I have come across. You want to build something? Bay Area energizes you because everyone will be encouraging and ready to help. Weather is nice. There are plenty of gorgeous places to visit, within the area and even more with a short drive.
However, I'll repeat - it is expensive! This is the most expensive place I have lived. We are a dual income household and money is less important than it used to be so for us it is totally worth it. Some years ago, we probably couldn't afford to live here.
There are two kinds of people I am seeing moving to the Bay Area - 1) high earners that can afford it and 2) those early in their careers who don't mind living in a less than optimal situation and moving here gives them a wage bump .
By large, the people moving away are those with average to good incomes who have kids and can't afford the lifestyle that they want. In the end, it comes down to what you value more. In the Bay Area, one thing you do NOT get is value for money. Will we be here long term? Who know but right now, I am in love with this place.
So I would say most folks saying the center tech will just move to Texas are discounting the needs for first generation immigrants to travel home to Asia Pacific as well as have a local support network.
It's trivially easy for Keith Rabois, Jason Calacanis or Peter Thiel to move to Miami or Elon Musk to Austin. It's another thing for Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang to move to Miami/Austin and feel more at home versus just staying put.
I use this as a barometer of first generation immigrant tech friendliness.
Also its not that it wouldn't be great if all places had built in support for first generation tech immigrants - its just not the current reality.
They tend to build in places with large immigrant communities, so having a 99 Ranch Market could be seen as a sign of diversity.
That being said I personally tend to shop at smaller Asian stores which don't have websites or multiple locations. Just because the store doesn't have a website doesn't mean there isn't an strong immigrant community in that area.
A more time intensive but perhaps more useful/fair measure is Yelp 3.5+ star ratings designated at $$$ with more than 100 reviews for things like Indian chaat, Cantonese dimsum, Taiwanese boba, Korean BBQ, Japanese Izakaya etc.
It extends to the buildings that are built, shops that are run and overall feeling of the neighborhoods.
They're not all in the city for sure, and none of them are as big or as connected as areas you would find in say Orange County but still quite strong and really add to the cities themselves.
I'd only point out - for a first generation immigrant with a tech salary and tech stock options - all things being equal - I'd imagine the vast preference would be to go where there are 99ranches and Din Tai Fungs and high end chaat at a density where its in proximity to high end housing versus being in the traditional "ethnic" end of town.
It will change for sure as tech slowly disperses - so it should be fun to watch.
Aside from housing prices, the issue with most of the South Bay is that a lot of it is pretty boring suburban sprawl with a few cute little downtowns. But I don't love the area in general until I get into the Santa Cruz mountains.
Buuuut, crime actually is abnormally high there.
If you just look at crime trends, violent crime in San Francisco has trended downward pretty consistently for decades, but slower than nationally and across California. Property crime has actually gone up, which is the most atypical thing, because it's gone down most everywhere else. San Francisco is the fourth biggest city in California. So what about the fourth biggest in Florida? Orlando has seen both property and violent crime rates drop quite a bit, but they were absurdly high for some odd reason 20 years ago. They're still higher than San Francisco on violent crime, but lower on property crime. Fourth biggest city in Texas is Austin, which is quite a bit lower than both Orlando and San Francisco on both property and violent crime, close to Texas and national averages. New York only really has one city, and it's a little bit lower on violent crime, and drastically lower on property crime.
So all in all, it seems like San Francisco has an abnormally high property crime rate. People seem to love pinning this on Prop 47, but property crime rates have actually always been abnormally high in San Francisco. It's worth noting Prop 47 is statewide, yet property crime rates double the state average is just a San Francisco thing. Los Angeles is almost the same as the statewide average.
So whatever the heck is actually the problem, it's specifically a San Francisco thing. Unfortunately, since I don't think it really fits standard red/blue culture war narratives, no one is incentivized to figure out the real reason and do anything about it.
Something interesting is to compare to other places that were the site of some type of "gold rush" that is the reason the city even exists. South Africa and Congo have been in terrible shape forever, at one point murder and kidnapping capitals of the world. Even the Yukon Territory in Canada has among the highest crime rates in the country, in spite of being largely rural.
Way before anyone ever wrote Twitter take downs of tech bro gentrifiers, California's first millionaire, Samuel Brannan, was the richest man from the gold rush, but he never even found gold. He just bought up all the retail space and sold shovels, pick axes, and pans at a ridiculous markup. When his speculation drove up the price of land, it led to something called squatter's riots when people being made homeless got pissed, and he formed an extra-legal "vigilance committee" to be a sort of private police force that rounded up and hanged people before California became a real state and has actual laws.
I'm not sure there's a real point there, except to speculate about the possibility of some sort of centuries spanning cultural inertia that forces a place to maintain the same character it was founded with long after there is still any good reason for it.
One of my wife's classmates wrote a B-school paper on this (having a certain intimate acquaintance with it). It's corruption and dysfunction between the SFPD and the DA's office. The two organizations have a uniquely antagonistic relationship, such that the SFPD actively does poorly at their job to spite the DA's office, and then the DA's office actively refuses to charge to spite the SFPD.
Uncertain what the set of incentives is that led to this, but I suspect it may have something to do with the DA being an elected official and hence responsible to the people of SF (who are fairly wary of the SFPD because of past history), while the SFPD are career civil servants who want to avoid taking any action that could endanger their life or job but aren't ultimately responsible to voters.
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).
Yes, from an outside perspective SF and South Bay (clasically Silicon Valley proper, though in the last decade many companies have settled in SF) are mingled together. I know I used to say "SF" when I meant the Bay Area, before I lived here.
But SF is about an hour north (or way more if traffic is bad) from the classic Silicon Valley. And a very different place with its own unique problems. I go to SF once a year or less and it always feels like an alien place.
The rest of the Bay Area is still mostly pretty great, if you can somehow deal with the expense.
Source: Just my observations, closing in on 25 years living in Silicon Valley.
For our country as a whole it was never healthy to have so much of the tech industry concentrated in one small geographic area. We'll be better off in the long run to distribute it more widely, even if that makes it a bit harder to form a startup and recruit local employees.
That seemed to be a goto point for anyone that was in San Francisco in the 90s.
“There used to be so many artists in this formerly horrible neighborhood, it was awesome!” Perplexing, but they’re right, this transplant would have never come there as nothing would have been moderately appealing about it to me.
Detroit has artists too. So doesnt seem like the strongest argument.
But to the groupies, it appears the artists have gone. And that’s because in the mop-geek-sociopath trichotomy, the groupies are the mops. The geeks have hidden themselves from the mops because the latter are creative leeches.
So if you don’t know where the artists have gone, it’s because they went to get away from you.
For anyone else who needed a reference for this bit: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
I read everything I could about that, and yeah I would have gotten out of there as fast as I could
It was the most obvious sign to me that the society there simply is too incongruent to work
Transplant that wasnt even supposed to be there calls cops on a licensed security guard eating in the park who had legally had a holstered taser on, transplant watches behind the bushes as the state hit squad pulls up on the guy in the fog and shoots him without question due to his uniform being “gang colors”. All while the transplant is texting trayvon martin references to his buddy about how he was looking for an excuse to handle this himself if he was in another state, and then winds up dodging police bullets while on the phone with 911. All cops acquitted.
it didn't take long, but he really lost me when he defended the writing of these words:
“The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that’s okay.
In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city…You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us It’s a burden and a liability having them so close to us. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I’d consider thinking different, but the crazy toothless lady who kicks everyone that gets too close to her cardboard box hasn’t made anyone’s life better in a while.”
i think that maybe when a culture emerges that thinks that sort of thinking is okay, something is very wrong. if that culture is on the decline, then i think that maybe not only the bay, but maybe the entire world is made a better place for it.
in truth though, the tech/office diaspora does scare me a little bit. there is so much power and influence that is wrapped up in the white collar world. if the power brokers decamp for country fiefdoms and homesteads, their reduced interaction and engagement with the problems of the real world may change how they perceive the world and those problems. i fear this could manifest as reduced political will and financing to help the less fortunate in the long run, leading to a worse off society overall.
I'd love to find somewhere more affordable but San Francisco still checks a lot of boxes. Where else to consider?
Since I don't exist in that bubble, can you define "woke" & "woke culture"?
chiefly US slang
: aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
But we will only succeed if we reject the growing pressure to retreat into cynicism and hopelessness. … We have a moral obligation to "stay woke," take a stand and be active; challenging injustices and racism in our communities and fighting hatred and discrimination wherever it rises.
— Barbara Lee
… argued that … Brad Pitt is not only woke, but the wokest man in Hollywood … because he uses his status—and his production company Plan B—to create space for artists of color, with such films as 12 Years a Slave, Selma, and the upcoming film Moonlight.
— Giselle Defares
And does "woke culture" just mean a culture of being "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)"?
It's similar to using words like "sheeple" to describe people who you disagree with. As you said, it's impossible to take you seriously when you use terms like that. That's what the outraged conservative commentators are latching on to. They're telling their listeners, "They think they are woke and you are asleep". Things are tribal. It's a powerful message.
But what if (and it's a big what if) there is a whole side of thought in America that believes issues of racial and social justice are not worthwhile and have already been settled? Would the term "woke" still be offensive then, based on what you just said?
I don't really know if the 2nd paragraph of your comment is supposed to be satire or serious, but that often happens when these undefinable words are thrown around as if they are cannon.
It's entirely on you if you choose to get involved in the hot button social issue discussion of the week. If you don't care to engage in that, it doesn't affect you at all.
It is certainly an outlier in the developed world, too, especially when the total wealth of the region is taken into account.
Some people are very poor while others are very rich. The poor people feel desperate/trapped and want what the people living near them have. The only places with as much economic disparity as America that have less crime most often have authoritarian governments.
Blaming a local city government for country-wide issues is quite short-sighted in perspective and not helpful when talking about solutions.
See also: https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
If you look at wealth inequality, they are pretty much exactly the same:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...
But that also leaves out large programs in Sweden that vastly narrow the gap between rich & poor, which America does not have. Namely universal healthcare, free child care, free prenatal care, free school lunches, free college, union participation in 70% of the workforce (which provides additional unemployment benefits & pensions), and most retired persons being able to receive multiple public & private pensions. You cannot measure the desperation of poor in America vs Sweden without taking all of this into account.
Furthermore, I'm struggling to see what your point is. All of the policies I listed above are considered "far left" by many people in America, yet seem to reduce the desperation of lower classes (and crime). So are you saying the America and cities like SF should adopt these "far left" policies? Because that's the exact opposite view of the parent comments that I've been replying to.
This would seem to contradict your earlier statement:
> [Crime is] much more a result of the gross economic disparity found in America than any "far left" policies.
The reason this can’t be true is China and Sweden have comparable wealth disparity to the US, yet vastly better public safety outcomes. If “gross economic disparity” were as predictive of crime as you claim, surely China and Sweden would have comparable crime rates to the US, irrespective of social programs. The fact they have much lower crime rates than the US disproves economic determinism along this axis.
If you look at income inequality (with a few exception), it is not the sole predictor, but it gets you pretty damn close. Of course there are many other factors, but there is still an extremely strong correlation. After all, if the poor are not extremely disconnected from wealth, there is less incentive to resort to crime.
Income inequality is a much better measure of inequality than wealth inequality. Just like how a cash flow statement is much better at describing the health of a business than their balance sheet. If you don't have the cash to pay the bills, you're screwed. I have explicitly said that countries with authoritarian governments are an exception to the correlation and factored in how massive social programs (like the ones in Sweden) decrease inequality. And you would see those decreases if you looked at income inequality, where the US is 2-3x as unequal as Sweden by almost every measure.
> If “gross economic disparity” were as predictive of crime as you claim, surely China and Sweden would have comparable crime rates to the US, irrespective of social programs.
Why would it be irrespective of social programs when social programs (largely supported by the "far left") reduce inequality? That doesn't make any sense.
You are straw-manning my argument to that of "wealth inequality is the sole determining factor of crime". This is something that I have explicitly not said and given you multiple reasons why. It's an extremely weak and disingenuous way to have a discussion, and frankly makes this entire exchange pointless. Try to actually engage with the people your speaking to in the future and you'll have more meaningful interactions.
Show me video from other major American cities of smash and grab looting flashmobs of ANY frequency comparable to what is routinely happening in the bay area today.
Hell it's gotten so bad the SF mayor was recently ranting, sounding more like a conservative. Of course talk is cheap. Will they fire their useless DAs and actually support the police? I'm not holding my breath.
Your framing and perspective is interesting to say the least.
That seems to be such an amazing benign statement that it's not really saying anything at all.
Can you come up with mainstream centrist parties in Western nations that match what you believe are being described as “far left” here?
If you're talking about hot button social issues of the week that right wing commentators care/talk about 1000x more than anyone else, I don't know because I don't care about that at all.
There are other things wrong besides the housing crisis, but that's certainly a component of why people leave.
Part of the problem (a huge part) is our land use decisions in the US, which require that people possess and store an automobile for even the most basic things in life.
Who gets to "define" the goals and strategy of the region?
Do the original techies get to define it or is it the new media techies or the original residents or the service workers supporting the techie lifestyles?
Just like Los Angeles used to be fairly homogenous and conservative prior to embracing the creative economy, eventually any city which has any success attracting the diversity of views required by a creative economy well face these issues.
This has been a part of SF culture since Tom Wolfe wrote about City Hall. I really don't understand folks who have lived here for a quarter century and don't know the City's history and culture.
The "tech bro" who wrote the open letter is Justin Keller. I'll reserve judgement on whether or not his career is over; he's currently running a devops consultancy, and I don't know how successful it is.
However, the "effectively ended his career" link goes to a story about someone else completely: Greg Gopman. Justin Keller factors in only in a few paragraphs at the end of that story, and there are no conclusions drawn about whether or not his career is over.
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.
How does the relationship evolve beyond that? The symptoms of a once-giant slowly losing its lead will be similar no matter which industry or entity you look at. You could probably force similar parallels about Blockbuster, Brittany Spears, the Soviet Union or even GM.
The author never bothers to develop any meaningful connection between the the reasons for their decline. They seem to hint at the fact that maybe hubris played a part - but it's all extremely unclear and I'm not going to read into it anymore than I need to.
In the end it's yet just another "SF ain't the hot thing anymore" article with a sensationalized title.
I do remember that! I started working in 1999, and my coworkers and I were in SF a few times a week at various nerd parties. They used projectors to cat out the linux kernel on the wall as the decor. I miss those parties, because they were fun and also you got to meet other really cool nerds and talk about nerdy things.
“Rarely sunny” Even in SF isn’t accurate
Today, it's $8,783 Billion.
That's an IRR of 31% over the last 5 years.
It's hard to see that as declining. Company culture and social circumstances are changing, yes. But the companies are doing just fine.
Odd distortion field, collective delusion there.
If people thought Tech bro's were hated before.. just wait until all the tech people move to other states and work remote and just get up and move every time they disagree with whats going on in their new communities. Never truly becoming part of the communities and only taking advantage of policies and circumstances they had no hand in building or creating.
To me that is a toxic cycle and no community anywhere can evolve and get better if the communities members are not invested and are only temporarily aligned when it suits them.
Every article about the death of SF since the 80s has a litany of commentators saying how true that rings for them validating the article (and validates their own decision) - and yet it is still stands. The comment section is obviously HIGHLY biased towards sour grapes.
Anyways while the litany of problems will always need to be fixed I just don't see any major city in the lower 48 that competes. Sorry all you valley emulators - best of luck re-branding your city the next valley - probably better to strike out on a different marketing campaign then trying your we are the next silicon ___ (insert geologic formation here).
Do tech people even primarily live there? The big corporate HQs do not seem to be in SFO proper.
Certain amount of extra package thieving but it hasn't changed much in the last 25 years as a place to live.
The economics of area is harder to be sure about.
San Francisco had reached a point of absurdity, and is poorly run for a city as well off as it is.
4,000 subsidized studio apartments would largely solve the homeless problem, for example.
The post pandemic quandary is really one faced by every developed-world city: where are the jobs gonna be? What's the economy gonna be? SF and California had a stunning run of attracting new jobs over the past century or so. But the housing issue and its side effects are built on issues that are primarily to do with broad aspects of national demographics and wealth distribution - landlords get rewarded because homes are investments, and homes are investments because we set up the financing that way when the Boomers were young. But that game has played out. The population is represented by younger generations now, and they aren't on this ladder. All of the rest follows from that, and little of it has anything to do with tech, except for that tech can be applied to shape the next economic model.
With the "Great Reset", that's the kind of thing being referred to. It's not unique to SF, SF was just unusually impacted by being thrust into the global power center role.
Oh no, a bunch of Twitter hot take artists, what ever shall we do