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I agree wholeheartedly. I first moved to San Francisco in 1998 for reasons unrelated to tech, and despite becoming a software engineer I cheered the effect the dotcom crash had on the city. The people who made the city great were being forced out and replaced by young tech workers who largely didn't care about anything other than their careers.

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.

> The people who made the city great were being forced out and replaced by young tech workers who largely didn't care about anything other than their careers.

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.

> I mostly get the impression people leave because they don't want to deal with the school lottery system.

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.

Lol, right it's the school lottery (which tbh is shitty) and not all the astronomical cost of housing, high taxes or basic safety/quality of life.

SF could just build a lot more housing, and that would essentially solve the problems many lament: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

Pre-pandemic if they had done that I probably would have moved there despite passing on a reasonably priced penthouse condo in the mission that has tripled in value back in the early 00s.

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?

Detroit is still clinging on. San Francisco would be wise to learn from its example.

It may not be the last chapter, but it might have been the last good chapter for a while.

SF cannot "just" build massive amounts of housing, in any reality-based sense.

They could if the government and NIMBY neighbors would get out of the way.

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.

They could if the government and NIMBY neighbors would get out of the way.

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.

Building more housing wouldn't solve the overcrowding problem. While some people love living in dense cities, most consider having some space and quiet important for quality of life.

> 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.

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.

> So perhaps the tech community will become less “transient”

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.

Define "good". I agree that the people in SF will be happier to be there (I'm someone moving out of SF because I feel like I can now, I moved there because I "had to"). But this tradeoff includes a massive decrease in the tax base, and losing the security of knowing that they will have a growing tax base from the creation of new billion dollar tech companies. The tech people that the Bay Area loves to hate pay for a huge amount of what the government does, and we all know they're not efficient with that money.

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?

You make it sound SF was a basket case before tech arrived. It's a city literally created from the Gold Rush. And probably has seen more boom and bust than most cities. I assume SF will find a happy medium where part of the population isn't forced onto the streets by overwhelming capital.

I more so meant that taking away capital is a much more painful process than adding in capital. But you make a good point, it's not the first boom/bust the city has seen.

I agree with this perspective and it’s part of the reason I’ve been considering moving into the city — it seems like a tech diaspora could relieve many of the pressures on SF in the coming years that would allow it to grow back in the direction of its prior reputation as a cultural center.

If the Bay Area struggles to deal with an influx of tech workers, why would it struggle any less to deal with an influx of artists? There would be fewer dollars chasing the housing, but that doesn't make more housing available.

The Bay Area has chosen stasis. That doesn't bode well for its revival as a cultural center.

You’re getting downvoted but it’s true. After the dot bomb there were the influx of ‘creative’ hipsters with an art degree their parents bought them gentrifying neighborhoods. Then they got priced out by techies.

SF is an attractive place so it attracts people, the vulnerable communities with less resources get pressure.

That sort of art scene is famously broke, so there's a financially-imposed limit on the influx.

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.

A lot of people are trying hard to reverse the stasis. I think eventually we will be successful, but it will take a long time.

You have excellent points here. I would also add that the Bay Area really missed the point from an innovation perspective when they started investing billions by and not leading with solving real problems.

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.

Innovation takes money and the BS tech is where they are made.

web3 is an extended rug pull on the entire tech attention economy, nobody is missing out on anything there.

Web3 and crypto based businesses are absolutely the future and VCs are already actively dumping money in to highly risking projects.

Still to early. People said the same about IoT, VR, BLE, and 5G. Most of it was marketing buzz.

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.

It’s definitely early, but not too early to see it once you dive in. NFTs are a very small off shoot of what web3 is about to offer. Jpegs and songs will be part of it, but not likely the biggest part.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a buyer of NFT jpegs but I can still appreciate what is possible

>NFTs are a very small off shoot of what web3 is about to offer.

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.

Storing Media assets on the chain itself would be incredibly expensive. It’s why 99% of app NFTs is just a receipt pointing to a url.

Now could the blockchain replace or augment dns. Totally. But not sure I’d call that web3.0

IPFS is decentralized storage and is a big part of what web3 is. Many NFTs use IPFS urls and many dapps are hosted on it. Browsers can resolve them today via centralized gateways like ipfs.io and some browsers (like Brave) support IPFS natively.

IoT is pretty great for manufacturing (talking billion dollar manufacturing). I don't like seeing my precious IoT lumped in with NFTs.

Home IoT might be crap, but it really has a place in manufacturing and monitoring. It can help with maintenance services.

Not that we aren't still quite far away making it all fully working and secure...

>Home IoT might be crap, but it really has a place in manufacturing and monitoring.

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...

That sounds more like Intranet of Things, and is probably better for anything where security matters.

It seems like the consumer side is the one catching up and IoT is the buzzword marketing calls it, kinda like "the cloud".

As I understand it, the difficulty with IoT is it tries to combine together millions of small markets into one big one. But you compete with specialized products designed with expertise in those niches, or else you're trying to sell general technologies to specialists who have no idea how to use them. I think the consensus is largely that IoT hasn't overcome this yet. Aren't they trying to rebrand it with new names now?

Don't forget multimedia (South Park was briefly known as "multimedia gulch" before the Web took off), 3DTV, "smell-o-vision", and a bunch of other crud.

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.

I've yet to see a real business case involving anything "crypto" that isn't either a scam or simply foolish.