The Emptiness of Downtown San Francisco

One of the inherent problems with unsustainable free-money-fueled business is that it's inherently unsustainable.

It emerges, blows up, drives out the local / native / intrinsic business, industry, and culture, collapse, and disappears, leaving a vacated wasteland.

This is part of the overall cycle and criticism.

The one possible bright light is that there's been another cycle of infrastructure development which, if not obsoleted by recent developments (tech itself, shifting culture, COVID-19 / post-Covid, etc.), might be the fertiliser for a new round of growth, whether that's native/local or yet another over-inflated investment bubble.

There are of course regions which never did recover from previous booms, notably rustbelts throughout the world of previously-industrialised areas.

If this results in more affordable housing and helps mitigate some of the issues with the vast homeless population, one can hope. I say this as someone who lived in SF for 3 years from about 2016 to 2019 and hated most of my time there, besides the career growth that allowed me to get more into mainstream DevOps vs a niche hybrid approach.