How the Internet ruined San Francisco (1999)
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If there's one thing I've learned in life, is to never listen to people moaning about the "good old days" and how [insert group] has "ruined" [insert place], not like those [other group] that were great. The good old days were never actually that good, and [insert group] is neither worse nor better than [other group].
We're all way too young to be curmudgeons yet, so stop acting like it.
It's also amusing to see one wave of gentrifiers shake their fists angrily at the next wave of gentrifiers. I heard about the Yuppie Eradication Project - where people who invaded a traditionally Latino stronghold vowed to key the cars of people who later invaded that.
FWIW, they can fight for the Mission all they want. No matter how many rose-tinted pairs of glasses you put on, it's still the piss-filled, shit-littered, gun-happy, knife-stabby, gangbanger-filled shitpot we know and love.
Exactly. I wrote this comment yesterday:
>If employers offered significantly higher wages then plenty more supply would quickly appear to clear the market
This is really a housing supply question as Matt Yglesias makes clear here: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... and as others have written (see, for example, Ryan Avent's The Gated City). Housing costs in Silicon Valley are insane, which prices out lower skill workers and forces companies to pay more for highly skilled workers. Allowing to higher building heights and reduce setback requirements alone would do a lot to improve the jobs situation.
It also reduces the quality of life for those who do live in Silicon Valley, because the salary rises almost never entirely make up for the rise in land prices.
(Yes, I've used salary calculators, particularly to compare the Bay Area's and Boston's software engineering salaries to places like Portland and Seattle that are cheaper but still have lots of tech.)
If you look on a map you will find "the area west of Valencia" is a tiny sliver of the whole neighborhood - coincidentally the only part that is highly gentrified, this is the area GP was referring to.
"The rest of the Mission" as I called out, is in fact the vast majority of the neighborhood, but also one that is routinely ignored by wealthy San Franciscans. It is vastly larger than the gentrified little corner, and is still a crack-ridden hole.
I haven't made any claims on the Mission, say, in early 00s, because I obviously wasn't around then. The main thrust here is that the Mission is not the gentrified yuppie paradise that the media (particularly outside of SF) consistently makes it out to be - that would be the Marina. Only the tiniest sliver of it has seen "colonized" by the hipster/dotcom/yuppie contingent.
In any case, my original comment re: gentrification wasn't aimed at the Mission exclusively - I've lived in numerous other rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods (Belltown and Capitol Hill in Seattle in particular) filled with curmudgeony 20-somethings shaking their fists angrily at gentrifiers who followed their own gentrification.
Actually, the anti-gentrification sentiment in the Mission is substantially less intense than it is in Seattle. Up on Capitol Hill in Seattle, if you have money and live in one of the new housing developments you're practically a persona non grata.
The last year has seen a spectacular boom all along Valencia, but the whole Mission has been getting shinier for 15 years at least. And certainly whiter; Latino population is down 22% between 2000 and 2010.
And yes, you did make claims outside your experience. You opened with "rest of the Mission is as fucked as ever". One year, forever: they're practically the same thing, so I can see how you confused them.
And in regards to your claim that "the rest of the Mission" is "still a crack-ridden hole": go fuck yourself. I especially love the "still". Gosh golly, you've waited a whole year! And nobody has gotten around to living up to your imported standards. How dare they!
Stick around for the next anti-gentrification wave. You'll see that, as with the last one, there is a lot of involvement from people with much deeper roots than the 20-somethings you mock.
Having lived through all this, I can tell you, the City is what it has always been: an amazing collection of high life, low life, and tempered life of every kind imaginable. Today, it has lots of character, just as it always has. It is vain and fruitless to try to glamorize a pickled version of the things of a bygone era, as the author here does. We just need to appreciate it on its own terms.
You're just being a reverse curmudgeon. Creativity thrives in an environment of diversity, and San Francisco became a mecca for creative software people because it was already a mecca for artists, hippies and people of all races and creeds, not because it was packed to the gills with iPhone developers in ironic t-shirts. Maybe there's nothing that can be done about it, but I think there's definitely a loss when a place becomes homogenous due to gentrification.
I've only been here since 2008, but even on that limited timeframe it's been pretty damned annoying to see useful places (like hardware stores, markets, dry cleaners, etc.) shut down so that room can be made for yuppie bars and overpriced restaurants. So we replace shops with co-working spaces and bookstores with boutique dealers of objets d'art and we pretend that it's "progress", but we make the neighborhoods less attractive to the people who made the neighborhoods attractive.
In short: if you're giving me a choice, I'll take "stabby" neighborhoods over luxury condos. At least the former gives an artist or a musician a place to squat while earning nothing and doing something truly novel; the latter gives a software engineer a place to live while working for Zynga.
I don't know how that assumption would correlate with SV. The Peninsula and the SR237 triangle aren't known for their creative diversity --they were orchards just a few decades back -but those valleys were the primary genesis for the information technology we have today. When the HPs, Fairchildren, NatSemis, Intels, etc. began all the Beatnicks were in SF. The valley was a kind of backwater --well, it was mostly orchards, from what I can tell. Despite that those companies were able to find bright people who brought forth progress and ideas which profoundly affect us today. So, I don't really see the correlation between creative types and the discoveries by the engineers. That's not to say engineers can't enjoy the creative arts as pleasure, but to say they are related directly seems a stretch, to me. It's not a detriment to have creatives, but not sure they were a necessary ingredient.
> I think there's definitely a loss when a place becomes homogenous due to gentrification.
I think the premise is an old canard. Post WWII Tokyo had a choice to make. Change rapidly and modermize and progress or remain chained to its old ways and remain a kind of defeated backwater. They chose the former, and while modern, Tokyo is not "boring" and homogenous. There are thousands of distinct neighborhoods with their own unique character, despite the fast pace of building and modernization.
It isn't an assumption. There's a lot of literature backing up the association (for a popularization, read Where Good Ideas Come From, by Stephen Pinker).
In any case, for many years the city was a bedroom community for Silicon Valley -- people worked in the valley, and lived in the city for the diversity and culture (which is part of the reason we have Caltrain). San Francisco has always been a draw.
Now, engineers and scientists might enjoy and even admire artists for their literary imagination, expressiveness, showship, fame, etc. In popular culture, perhaps perpetuated via the products of these same artists, people tend to stereotype engineers as socially inadequate and dull. So that's a bit ironic. Personally, I think it's somewhat incidental. Engineers and scientists have some of the 'artist' in the old Renaissance sense of the word, but they are primarily innovators and not expressive artists.
I've visited and/or spent significant time and/or lived in numerous other communities, large and small, since considerably before that.
Here's a little secret: things change.
Hardware, drug, and book stores have been closing across the country and around the world with consolidation.
High-quality fresh/organic food markets, good cafes, restaurants, museums, and of course, restaurants, have largely increased in number over the same period. Even art-and-creativity friendly places such as the Crucible (in Oakland), Makerspace, and the like have popped up.
Do I miss some of the things that were and now are not? Sure. Do I appreciate some of the things which were not, and now are? You better believe it. Are there still fascinating reminders squirreled away in strange nooks and crannies that remind us of the old times? Yep.
The 1950s - 1970s creative boom occurred in large part because Northern California was an inexpensive place to be. Other parts of the country are now inexpensive (including such near-range locations as California's Central Valley, or even Alameda County -- no need to go back to Ohio, not that there's anything wrong with that). It's part of the dynamic. Art's still got to pay the rent, and if there's not much money in that, it needs to go where the rent is cheap.
And if you didn't think the Hippie culture was ironic, well, brother, do I have a grass bridge to sell you.
It was a complicated time, and we're in another one right now. I just hope the newest wave of dotcommers - who thankfully include way more programmers and fewer smarmy bizdev guys -- finds a way to avoid feeling entitled.
It's easy to say 'too bad, you're a gentrifier complaining about further gentrification', and I agree with that to some extent.
On the other hand, I think what the sentiment of this article is getting at is the frustration that comes with watching culture and community being washed away at a large scale. Sure, enclaves of artists/musicians/hackers may set up shop in various neighborhoods throughout a city, but early on it's never enough to really remove the feeling of culture and community of where one is on a whole. But then at a certain point you hit some sort of inflection point where the flood gates open and the entire city feels foreign. This happened to Manhattan a while ago. Sure it's still uniquely New York, and it's still an amazing place that I love, but it's a borough for the wealthy now.
I encountered this feeling of resentment towards post-flood-gate gentrifiers recently on a subway ride on the Q train back into Brooklyn. If you've ever spent any significant time on the Q train you've probably experienced the emergency doors on one side of the train open, followed by a group of young guys entering the car exclaiming "It's show time!", followed by all sorts of acrobatic break dancing. It might not be all that amazing the 20th time, but it is what it is. A couple weeks ago this familiar act began happening and, at the risk of sounding prejudiced, a new-wave gentrifying girl yelled "Oh, no! Stop! I hate this!" while giving a stank face to everyone. My initial reaction: this is NYC, specifically Brooklyn, and it's for moments like this that we live here, so what are you doing here?
I had realized that Brooklyn had changed significantly, but for some reason this made me realize it's nearing the point of no return. You see people charging $2700 for 1 bedrooms in Bushwick and Bentleys cruising on Flatbush and realize the charm of the entire place is in danger of being lost.
Sure, something is lost, but is it a real tragedy?
It's not only a question of these being expensive places to live, but if the entirety of the city is filled with bougie restaurants and bars, is that even attractive anymore? Do I really care to live in a place filled with $15 burger joints, art galleries that don't take risks because they are targeting wealthy buyers in order to pay their leases, and music venues that have to have 7 acts a night rotating through so the space can sell enough $7 beers to stay open?
I mean Bill and Hilarie Clinton even had an event at Roberta's in Bushwick (Brooklyn) this week. The Clintons hanging out in Bushwick?! At what point do people just start looking elsewhere?
These are all questions I don't have answers to. I do love New York, and every time I leave I can't wait to get back. It's a magical place. But sometimes I can't help but think nearly free rent and a blank canvas like Detroit sounds mighty appealing.
I honestly hope that the nearly free rent and blank canvas does appeal to a lot of creative/artist/hacker types.
As shameful as it is to say, I've thought about buying property there (or somewhere similarly cheap) just so I could do cool stuff with it. My small residential lot doesn't have enough room (or a proper tree) to build a tree house with my kids, and I don't have nearly enough room in my shop to experiment with the crazy building stuff I want to do.
My husband and I loved living in SF, but left because event though we both have great, well paying jobs, we can't afford a place large enough to be comfortable, let alone have a kid. So we moved and many of those we know have done the same.
I lived for some time in Belltown (Seattle), a former starving-artist neighborhood that then got hit by the gentrification bug really hard. At this point the artist population in that neighborhood hovers around zero, and has all been replaced by high-rises and expensive but mediocre bistros. From the long-timers (well, longer-timers) I've spoken to, Belltown is actually less expensive than at its peak, as the complete eradication of everything interesting about the place has caused it to lose a lot of the appeal - to the point where it may actually be cheap enough for art to exist again :P
The artists are alive and well - we're simply seeing a slow, decades-long process where different demographics ebb and flow in the different parts of a city. On a larger scale, we're also seeing a decades-long process where populations ebb and flow amongst different regions in response to economic pressure. Detroit has now established itself as perhaps the next "it" place in large part due to its affordability. I highly doubt America will ever run out of compelling environments for art to thrive.
FWIW, I'm a little skeptical about your Q train experience. I ride that train (and the F, more the F than the Q) regularly and have very, very rarely encountered that kind of attitude. IMO you're making a mountain out of a molehill - I would be very hesitant about guessing at demographics from it.
> "and realize the charm of the entire place is in danger of being lost."
Sure, and I'll agree with you - but my point also is that you weren't there first. Williamsburg was interesting and artsy before the new demographic moved in, but it was also completely different and interesting before the starving artists moved in. The existing charm you now miss was, in its time, an usurper of existing culture as well, and that turned out ok. I suspect this will also.
My main questions though are around what happens when the whole city becomes so expensive that it's impossible to live here on a budget. Sure, you can keep going further and further out, but at what point does it not make sense to even live here anymore, if you are an artist that wants to spend time creating and have no intention of trying to pull in 6 figure salaries? It's not like all of a sudden Chelsea got cheaper as Fort Greene got more expensive -- the entirety of Manhattan is out of reach, and now most of the western part of Brooklyn and Queens is as well.
I use the anecdote of the Q train not to make a generalization as to how the train is -- this was certainly an exception -- but to illustrate the fact that I'm finding myself unable to socially understand many of the current wave of people coming into the boroughs.
The charm I miss isn't really hipsters running around Williamsburg, in fact I don't miss that at all. It's more about the diversity of a place, both racially and economically. Seeing people drive down Union Street in Rolls Royces makes me second guess why I live here.
Trouble is: the next wave of interesting people usually start out as starving artists/hackers/entrepreneurs just like the previous wave did.
It's almost as if regional success beyond a certain point accomplishes nothing but inflating real estate, which redirects further success into keeping that real estate bubble inflated. This primarily benefits banks.
Imagine what would happen if this didn't happen... imagine living in a place as inexpensive as a medium-sized Midwestern city, but with Silicon Valley salaries. Imagine how many other places that wealth could go: more startups, more gadgets, better infrastructure, world-class everything, better health care, even generosity. But nope, real estate just soaks up wealth beyond a certain point and redirects it back into the financial pyramid.
Sometimes a place is so unbelievably interesting, like New York, that people are willing to live in a catbox in order to be there. But even then people have a tendency to get sick of this after a while, and anyone contemplating reproducing or wanting to do anything that requires space is out of luck and has to leave.
That said, most people who move to SF don't give up their cars.
Also, cars are, sadly, much cheaper than houses. My spouse and I share a car and the TCO is not anywhere near our rent. At least an order of magnitude, maybe two.
An "ugly urban cycle" is not when property values rise and people move IN to the city, it's when people flee to the suburbs (see: Detroit, or most U.S. cities in the 1960s).
That said, I agree it's annoying that people tend to pile into city in herds, because it takes on the order of 5 years for real estate to be approved and built to meet demand, and by then there's often been a reversal and you get a flood of supply at exactly the wrong time. But that's actually good for the city too - lots of new housing at low cost.
The problem isn't real estate, it's people - our herd instincts and inconvenient relocation patterns. Similarly, the solution isn't to try and divert money people _choose_ to spend living in preferable locations into health care (where inefficiency and costs are already too high) or "gadgets" (what?) but to get better ways of mitigating the discrepancy in speed between how populations shift and how long it takes to develop new places for people to live.
(PS Downtown Oakland is fantastic and still cheap. Maybe if SF rents get high enough people will get over their hangups about a demographically young downtown with bustling nightlife that's 5 minutes by BART from SOMA)
(PPS You'll notice implicit in my comments is the fact that real estate developers do NOT reliably get rich as the result of a boom. It takes 5 years or more to entitle and build an urban mid- or high-rise housing development, which means it's a crapshoot whether a boom will be on when you're done. In fact developers can go broke if they build now assuming the economy will stay hot because if it's cooled when they are on the market selling they'll miss their numbers. The people who make money in the boom are existing owners who sell and landlords who can jack up rents. As it happens these are the same people who will take a bath when things cool off again.)
Kawasaki, and even Yokohama, for instance, are very much suburbs of Tokyo if you look at how people live (a huge proportion of the population commute to Tokyo for work and play), but are also a large cities in their own right, and very densely populated.
It's less obviously "progress" if you are somebody who wants to live near the rest of your family, or has a landlord who's decided he'd like a richer tenant, or are in an "urban renewal" zone, which has been bitterly joked about as "negro removal".
I'm a tech guy who has lived in SF a dozen years, so it's all wine and roses for me. But that doesn't stop me from noticing the downsides for others.
Others include lottery, kleptocracy, autocracy, social-welfare state, theocracy, anarchy, communism, socialism, despotism.
It's complicated and there is suckage all around, as I tried to acknowledge, but having tech companies clustered in the urban core is better on many levels than having them dispersed out into suburbs or the midwest or whatever the OP was envisioning. Was Mid Market REALLY better off with just strip clubs, liquor stores, greasy spoons, and scattered social service agencies than it is with some of those things plus Twitter, a VC firm, and some other tech startups? Really?
Also, I think the mid-Market area is perhaps not the only place we can look at in evaluating the effects on San Francisco.
Also, there are plenty of places where you can make money working in tech and have a relatively low cost of living. Austin, San Diego, Spokane, even Seattle isn't too expensive, compared to the bay area.
What would San Francisco look like right now if they'd allowed high rises to be built for the past 30 years?
The problem with SF and NY is that the people living there are selfish and want to pull up the ladder behind them. They like their cute little low rise buildings and won't allow new high density housing to be built.
I am thinking of moving to the Chi and was surprised that rent is less than half of the average bay area price. A lot of craigslist ads even tell applicants that they require a check for eviction court as part of their deposit. In total contrast to SF's rent controls.
(2) Definitely move here. Chicago is a fantastic city and the reason you don't hear about it more is that it's underrated.
If there's a kind of neighborhood you're interested in living in, I'm happy to help point you in the right direction. You should have no trouble finding a place.
But the issue here is there is nothing good in soma besides jobs. In the weekend, I don't want to go to soma. I want to go to Northbeach or the mission or the castro.
All that being said, I haven't lived in Dogpatch, so it could be fantastic.
Eventually there will be enough tech workers able to vote in the city that we can push through changes to the zoning rules.
We just have to:
a) get to that point and
b) be politically engaged enough to actually go and do it.
The SOPA reaction has given me hope about b).
Everybody has a price at which they'll sell, and as more people arrive wanting housing more property owners will get offers from developers that are too good to turn down.
I have little respect and some disdain for the supes . They have driven the city's progress into the ground. Anywhere else, these policies would have driven the place into a Detroit West, but they get propped up the the surrounding valleys' wealth.
I could only wish the city was governed a bit like SJ --without the sprawl.
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED: shoot me an email at dan@dangrover.com and if there's enough interest, I'll try to coordinate a meeting/discussion!
In fact, the person most harmed probably becomes the more ferocious defender of the zoning restrictions. Because they paid the highest prices, they stand to lose the most by voting away the restrictions that contributed to those astronomical prices.
Actually, this may be how policies like the mortgage deduction or prop 13 can get so entrenched. They may be unfair, but the only thing that seems even more unfair to new buyers is that the benefits would be taken away only after they've paid the heavy toll.
I'm imagining myself waking up every morning wondering what good it is to be making $XX0,000 if I have to live in this place. My cousin makes ~$220,000 in Yakima WA as a doctor -- her main expenses are weekly flights to NYC.
The reason why people want to be in big cities is because other people are there -- supply and demand explains the high prices. I came from Sacramento, but I wouldn't live there for even double my salary because nobody is doing anything interesting there. The startup scene is non-existent and there are no major universities turning out bright minds. Just more fat people having kids at age 22.
Or are you asking why a SF-style city can't be as inexpensive as Topeka? To that, I would answer: because nobody wants to be in Topeka.
Unless you're ready to disconnect in real life, living outside the hubs for your tribe is not terrifically great. Believe me, I live that. :-)
If the zoning were changed, the market could easily supply a lot more housing, perhaps looking like this: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=park+slope+brooklyn&ll=40... or this: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=barcelona&ll=41.389334,2....
Instead of limiting things to this: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=san+francisco&hl=en&l...
The NYC & Barcelona examples can hold 5 or more families in the space that one takes up in the SF example. Both are very desirable places to live.
Perhaps very few readers of HN would like to be in Topeka, but there are also families that have lived there for generations and all kinds of people who I'm sure absolutely love Topeka.
In fact, I suspect they would tell you that you can take NYC or SF and have it (or worse.) The bottom line is to each their own - no reason to disparage other's interests and life choices because you choose to live in a big city and have found a community of like-minded people, it just makes you sound like a pompous jerk.
As an additional note, there are also families that have lived in New York City for generations and all kinds of people who absolutely love New York.
Then they get priced out, too. This is why my family moved us to New Jersey at age 5: between crime and school zoning, my parents couldn't stay in their home city of New York and raise children. So to the suburbs we went (in roughly 1994) and by even the mid-2000s we were completely priced out of the city all four of us were born in and very much feel culturally attached to (what with our families having lived there for 100 years or so).
And both my parents had white-collar, professional jobs with salaries and benefits packages!
It's not as if I want to live in the Bay Area and spend 1.5X+ on living merely because the population is larger. It's because I have a chance to work for 5-10 years, collect options at some up and coming companies, network with many very successful people, build a career and then retire at age 40 with a 7+ digit net worth. And if I fail to achieve that, I can still land somewhere on a spectrum of outcomes bookended by that goal. The opportunity to do this is very small in Topeka and elsewhere.
So when you say "... no reason to disparage other's interests and life choices because you choose to live in a big city and have found a community of like-minded people, it just makes you sound like a pompous jerk," you're missing the point. I'm not "disparaging" Topeka because there is a community of like-minded people. I'm disparaging the idea that a town like Topeka could just become like SF, only cheaper.
Such a notion embodies no understanding of the reasons why SF is objectively better than Topeka. You are confusing my comparison of the cities on objective criteria with a claim about certain subjective qualities of the places. Yes, some people don't want to put up with the cost, noise, filth etc. involved with big city life and they don't highly value the opportunities we have here -- in my personal opinion, those people have poorly chosen their life's priorities, but objectively stated, they will not enjoy living in SF.
That sounds at least a little bit like where I live now. We don't have SV-level salaries, but the tech industry can pay roughly $60k-$80k per year in a place where $45k is the median dual-income household and $33k is fairly comfortable for a single adult.
A few key differences from, say, most of the United States, that I think can transfer over to other places without getting into local culture:
* There's no state/provincial/regional government, except in rural areas, where a group of villages is governed by a regional council. If you live in a city, you've got the municipality and then the national government. One less layer of abstraction, and the municipality is entitled to take decisions that in the USA would fall to the state-level government.
* The municipality levies "arnona" (our word for the old English "rates" system) as a tax on the square-meterage of dwelling units. The occupant pays the tax, but like a VAT, the arnona is factored in as part of the price you pay for a rental unit. The effect is to discourage the development of very large dwellings in favor of dense buildings full of smaller dwellings. The other effect is that we don't have conflicts over assessments of property values, because they're not taxed. Living in a beautiful, well-located house won't stick you with extra property taxes unless the city specifically decides to zone your area for a higher per-square-meter rate. It works pretty decently, overall, although there is a problem of schools being underfunded (though this may be a political/national problem rather than structural).
* Urban planning here is pro-urban rather than anti-urban like in the States. The typical family dwelling is a three-bedroom apartment (one master bedroom for the parents, one bedroom each for your two children), building is planned in terms of semi-self-contained neighborhoods, and zoning consistently sprinkles in a certain amount of parks, a certain amount of schools and clinics, a certain amount of community centers and houses of worship, a certain amount of sports fields, and a certain amount of mixed-usage residential/commercial/office space per neighborhood.
* Public transit here is not just for poor people. Bus and minibus systems operate extensively, including between cities, and there's also a coastal intercity rail line and a small subway that goes up and down the mountain we're built atop. I estimate I can reach anywhere in this city that I might work within 30 minutes of automotive commuting, 30-60 minutes on the bus system, and that's if I can't actually walk to it.
* NIMBY is not a thing here. Period. Only major real-estate developers go around actually thinking their land holdings are so freaking important that they should have the power to block other people's projects, particularly municipally-sponsored ones. There are whole neighborhoods built around the shipping port, the oil refinery, and the High-Tech Park where the BigCos live.
* As far as I know, you can't actually build things outside cities or towns. The countryside is countryside, and nobody is necessarily entitled to land rent or real-estate tax from it. So big things like tech parks and office buildings get built in cities, because you have to build them inside some municipality recognized by the national government and once you have that requirement, you might as well put it near your prospective employees and customers.
TL;DR: No, cities and urban living do not innately cause ultra-high real-estate prices. Yes, public policy matters, because urban planning, transit infrastructure, land taxation, and a strength of property titles appropriate to urban life all provide rules and incentives for building a city that's actually nice to live in. There is absolutely no reason a place like Silicon Valley can't make itself a very nice and even affordable place to live, except that the existing residents enjoy feeling privileged. They get to feel privileged, because in SV and in many other desirable American places (Boston-Cambridge and New York City come to mind), real-estate has become a status good with a permanently fixed supply. They'd feel somehow insulted to find out that their land is a mere commodity, to be bought and sold in bulk as common families want or need.
If you're running a company, you have a limited amount of capital to work with. Your pay scale is determined by the markets you operate in - the prices competitors are paying for employees, and the prices competitors are charging for their product or service. You can't just say, "Well, I'm generous, I'm going to pay a million dollars a year to all of my employees." You'll be bankrupt in a month that way.
The real estate price inflation you describe is a side effect of this process, not a main element. With the exception of situations where external capital enters the system to finance a bubble, as in much of the US and Spain in the early 2000s, it's the sign of a healthy local economy where functioning businesses can employ large numbers of people because they're all generating enough cashflow to do so.
The alternative scenario -- Detroit -- is far, far uglier.
That's not the only reason Detroit crashed, but it's a contributing factor. The others were racism and "white flight." Detroit sort of got a perfect storm.
If something ever does massively disrupt Silicon Valley, I could see the Bay Area undergoing a nasty crash too. Probably nowhere near as bad as Detroit since it's a prettier place to live and is more diversified, but still ugly.
SV today really doesn't appeal to me because it is nothing but hackers. There are no artists, no hippie bohemian weirdos, no writers. These people can't afford to live there. In fact, I'd say it's even worse. There aren't even many hackers doing truly creative projects outside startups running around looking for funding, because you can't do anything that isn't going to get you that big cash out effect. Not if you want to afford to live there. You also can't easily bootstrap without outside funding, which means you can't own your own stuff. You have to have a financier with deep pockets.
All of that is the fault, primarily, of real estate hyperinflation.
I tend to believe these places become interesting due to the fact that so many people live there. There's bound to be interesting people based on sheer numbers.
Keep in mind NY and SF were founded on industrial business and immigration; not founded on interesting people.
San Francisco has failed miserably at both. Development is a four letter word due to the attitudes of many of the existing residents and the legal process that allows anyone to stall and delay anything. BART meets the threshold for tolerable transit, but there's not enough of it, and even if there were fast rapid transit to the peninsula or Marin the residents there are even more opposed to density than San Franciscans. Most of the new development is happening in parts of the East Bay near BART because that's where people are willing to allow it and where transit can get you downtown quickly. If the city were to permit and construct 10 story buildings in the Sunset tomorrow that wouldn't do much to alleviate real estate prices because it takes longer to cross the city on transit than it does to BART in from the good parts of Oakland.
Muni needs to reduce the number of stops a bus/train makes.
Aside from bart or muni in the tunnel, I found the fastest public transportation in SF was the various limited or express buses that go from the richmond to downtown. They make very few stops and move quickly.
The thing is, the express buses can easily pass the slower regular bus that make every stop. That wouldn't be possible with the streetcars, which I think would have to be all or nothing.
I was also recently surprised by the number of otherwise reasonable friends I have who are just completely unaware of life outside of SOMA and the Mission. I've had a lot of people tell me that they didn't know where the Inner Sunset was located. If they can't walk there in 15 minutes or get there by BART from the Mission stations, it doesn't exist.
Public service announcement to 20-something SF newbs: there is life outside of the Mission and SOMA, kids. The rent's cheaper, too.
For those of you who are interested you can hear it here: http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201209250900
Besides the young and hip are doing what they always do, find new areas to make hip. I've been living in the East Bay for a decade now and I can't believe that Oakland is the new hip spot in the Bay Area. Hope it does something for my property values.
All the little things the author opines romantically about are relatively recent developments that were decried by earlier generations no doubt. OH THESE FILTHY BUTCHERS HAVE DISPLACED THE PICTURESQUE HUNTSMAN AND HIS MEAT CARRIAGE WHICH USED TO PLY THE STREETS OF MINE YOUTH. You see what I'm saying?
This woman has no idea. She's all shriveled up and unstuck in time. She can't see things with a long lens. All she knows is that things she is comfortable with are changing, and she doesn't want to learn to see something beautiful in what is still to come. She wants everything to be frozen in crystal for all time.
These people are spacewankers of the worst sort. Don't let the fact that they are good at writing English seduce you to this stupid hipster way of thinking.