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Comment by sammalloy | Hacker News Reader

> 20-30 years ago San Francisco was considered... a nightmarish hellscape.

Not true in the slightest. There was little crime, you could walk everywhere safely, day or night, and the food was still incredible, and cheap.

Major parts of the city were on a roadmap towards revitalization before dotcom was ever a thing. Yerba Buena Gardens was competed in 1993, for example. No disruption required.

> Until the first dotcom boom the city was in decline, or at least that's how the story goes.

It’s the exact opposite. The city was undergoing major revitalization before the dotcom era. The first dotcom boom brought major gentrification, and with it, people who didn’t care for the values and culture of the city.

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Sorry, I never experienced it in 1990's - I just heard that's what people thought of SF at the time.

My point was a bit more optimistic but not well expressed - usually when places are considered 'bad' or 'poor' they often rebound with an awesome vibrant scene and culture. What I wanted to say was more along the lines that 'negative' reputation is usually a great cover for something special going on.

I personally do believe SF has a boom/bust cycle in it's DNA. When I was in my early 20's and living there around the late 00's, people were talking about how 'SF is over'. I vividly remember an older fellow telling me that he's been hearing that line since the 60's, and yet somehow the city always manages to evolve into something new and 'legendary'.

I agree about the major first dotcom bringing people who didn’t care for the values and culture of the city but disagree about the roughness. The mission and the part of soma near the old trans bay terminal were pretty rough. People got mugged in broad daylight kinda rough

I was living in the Mission and working near SOMA. Never had a problem in ten years, and we would be walking to and from work and to the bars until close. There was 1% of the homelessness back then that you see now, and almost no sign of drug addiction on the streets except for a few blocks of some rough areas. The city was generally considered one of the safest to live in the country at the time, and easily affordable. Inequality changed everything, because the people who moved into the city did so to exploit its workers, its housing, and its resources. That’s when all the true creatives moved out and the bean counters and disrupters and fake privacy advocates moved in. While it’s popular to blame midwest software engineers, the true blame lies in vast swaths of old money from back east, which attempted to turn San Francisco into Manhattan, and destroy all of what made the city great to begin with. They succeeded.

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