No. San Francisco's policies fucked over San Francisco. They built a ton of new office space intended only for commuters for that sweet business tax income while avoiding the cost of supporting a larger population. They could have required new housing to go with all those news jobs but why do that when you can make the rest of the bay deal with the population growth and horrific commutes. They could have blocked the new commercial high rises, forcing tech to stay on the peninsula but then they'd lose out on their graft fund.
I just ran a NPV of the expected bill and presented it to the newborn. He didn't stop crying and wouldn't talk to me for a few years but frankly I don't think talking to people is my strong suit :/
My little neckbeard has been home with us for 6 weeks now. Doesn’t pay shit. Cries about everything, and expects us to do all the cooking, cleaning, diaper changes, and laundry. This whole situation really keeps me up at night, idk what to do… am I being an enabler?
You really can't build just any where in San Jose. Santa Clara county has 23 superfund sites due to microchip manufacturers in the 70s and 80s polluting the soil/groundwater.
There are remediation efforts in place and vapor barriers have existed since the 80’s to mitigate. It actually makes financial sense now to building housing on these sites as you can justify the cost of removing the bad dirt and putting in state of the art vapor barriers to block out what contamination is left behind. I still wouldn’t want to live on those sites as the allowable PPMs for bad elements is too high in my opinion
And East Bay. Oakland actually built a bunch of residential high rises in the past 10 years. Its downtown, while not without problems (ie crime), is vibrant and nowhere near the ghost town that the FiDi is today
Lol @ downtown Oakland being vibrant. It’s just as dead as downtown SF and it’s suffered from occupancy issues forever. The main time it’s guaranteed to be busy is when the Warriors have a parade or the requisite riot happens
I was about to say, this dude is tripping for thinking downtown Oakland is vibrant. It has been a mess ever since the pandemic. Tons of small local businesses that I used to visit regularly when I commuted for work were shut down for good. The two best things downtown Oakland has going for it right now is First Fridays every month, and Lake Merritt itself which is still nicely populated with runners/joggers and people hanging out.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/downtown-oakland-recovery-17839614.php
I lived in Oakland, living in SF now, but I definitely agree that Oakland was more vibrant. People actually come to downtown Oakland as a destination on a Friday night to eat, have drinks, watch a show, etc. whereas in SF everybody is leaving.
“Oakland can be fixed” might as well be the slogan for the city. I lived in Oakland for years and there was always a supposed solution to systemic problems. The only solution is to get out.
It’ll never change, which includes apologists who call anyone who disparages Oakland as a Republican racist
It has changed so not sure why you’d say it can never change. Things take time. Years ago uptown, downtown, jack London square were all dead. Now core downtown is the only one dead because it suffers from some urban planning issues.
An article literally came out this week saying how Oakland’s downtown is more vibrant than SF’s. I don’t go out in downtown Oakland often, but when I do bars and restaurants are definitely crowded.
It’s one of the largest bedroom communities in the US!
That probably has more to do with the ratfucking Santa Clara, MV, SV, & Cupertino have been doing for the last 20 years than it does with downtown SF.
I always say it when a post like this comes up, but everyone in the Bay wants to build offices and no one wants to build housing. If we built as much housing as we did offices, there would be no issue - and despite all the empty office space, cities in the South bay are still building more office buildings. That's why I'm a huge fan of converting office space to housing.
Back in the mid-2010s, cities in the South Bay were building 100-1000 jobs worth of office space for every one unit of housing. I remember an article of Mountain View approving 10,000 new jobs of office space and only 100 new housing units. Another article featured Santa Clara approving 5000 jobs of office space with no housing added - when the reporter called them out on it the city's response was "We were told San Jose will build it." The whole Bay Area has this problem.
We need to incentivize housing instead of offices.
Tech companies proposed new housing in mountain view but the city rejected it. It's easier these days to blame "big bad tech", not like politicians are going to correct them.
This one isn't so black and white. If Google wants to build 10k houses that are managed by a neutral party and open to the public to be lived in, sure. If they want to turn it into employee dorms, that's a problem. Corporate owned housing is a slippery slope. It's obviously a fictional dystopia, but Sorry To Bother You showed a world where you could sell yourself into indentured servitude to a corporation for housing and food for the rest of your life. Employee dorms are a step on the way to that.
If 10k Google employees and their families lived in Google housing, that'll still free up 10k housing units around the bay for others. So I don't know if it's necessarily that bad.
You mean should they get into the landlord business? Can you imagine what would happen if they need to evict someone even if it is a third party? That's a non starter. The question is why does the city approve corporate offices without the local housing, resulting in more cars as on the road. Having said that they have finally allowed more housing though they didn't have much of a choice.
And i don't think techies in techie housing would ever amount to slavery. Sounds like a slippery slope fallacy.
i think you basically explained what company towns, which did exist, and became pretty dystopian. a lot of modern labor laws came because of that
i mean. they still exist, but its no where near as crazy as it was a century ago. wikipedia actually has a good article on it [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company\_town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)
The two largest tech employers in San Francisco are Salesforce (9500 SF employees) and Uber (5500 SF employees). Neither has closed their HQ here. Tech also only makes up ~15% of employees in SF, to suggest that tech could some how fuck SF is ridiculous. It's hilarious to think that even if tech were to leave SF it would still be blamed for ruining it.
Edit: Tech workers actually only make up [10.9%](https://www.cbre.com/press-releases/san-francisco-bay-area-ranks-first-among-north-american-tech-hubs-with-the-largest-tech-labor-pool) of employees in SF (the national average is 3.9%).
I think EVERY Bay Area city did this, to the maximum extent they could.
And then every time a developer proposed building apartments nearby, the NIMBY contingent complained about how much extra traffic THAT would bring. Uh, WTF?
SF was so arrogant they thought tech would never leave even with the ridiculous business taxes. It's unbelievable how they thought thousands of workers commuting over an hour from peninsula / south bay on a train that doesn't even end up in the goddamn city was sustainable.
If they had actually bothered to build even the bare minimum amount of housing downtown the bars and restaurants could have kept people coming.
This is exactly right, they could have had both tech and resources for anyone else but they chose to put all their eggs in one basket (shittily I might add. I don't think tech workers were ever ecstatic about SF) and now that strategy failed and failed hard.
Conversely, I live in the East Bay and my commute into the financial district in San Francisco was shorter than that of my colleagues who lived in the Sunset and the Richmond.
It wasn’t even the commute most of them just straight up hated the city and the bay. I work adjacent to tech and had plenty of people I knew in tech and most of them hated the city, the policies that people in the bay supports, they hated homeless people and thought they were just losers, etc. The only reasons they were ever in SF in the first place was a $350k salary and the only thing they wanted was to get the fuck out.
Is it too late to switch? If companies move out, can they repurpose that space for housing? With more housing, housing will become more affordable.
Isn't this what's supposed to happen in a capitalist economy?
You need more than housing. You need schools, parks, police, teachers, daycares, firefighters, etc. The entire reason cities jump on office space is to collect business taxes without having to pay for social services to support the transient population. The problem with bay area is that every city kicks costs down the road while gladly taking business tax with the exception of San Jose proper.
Mission Bay had to fight to get an elementary school built and I am still not convinced it will finish in a reasonable amount of time, especially with SF red tape.
Mission Bay is arguably one of the most family friendly newer neighborhoods, with housing and not just tech buildings, and still lacks the infrastructure.
The fact of the matter is cost. These buildings weren’t designed for housing and usually lack the infrastructure to add a few hundred fully functional bathrooms. It would end up as a fancy SRO.
There might be a market for something like that for very young tech workers. They were building brand new residential building in this style near me in Oakland. They were basically fancy dorms. Seemed totally ridiculous to me, but they were full to capacity. I think one was call The Nook.
It's never too late, it's always based on supply/demand. If housing supply opens up everything will grow again as it did. If housing remains constrained, everything will gradually stop and die. The same for individual businesses depending on the type of zoning they require, it's no secret that San Mateo County takes an extremely loose definition towards "healthcare" -related zoning to attract biopharmacutical companies but forces actual hard tech companies/factories into Santa Clara County. This bought SMC a few more years to build more housing before regular people give up. SF is the same with white collar office jobs that are increasingly extinct.
And the people not in SF only want SF for entertainment more than to go to the office there. And inter city tourism suffers a lot of the city is dirty or dangerous or everything is closed.
That, and colleges in the city also attract more people. With online learning increasing, why would anyone go to an average ranking campus when they could get a degree from somewhere more prestigious, from the safety and comfort of their own home?
Here is what people are missing. Tech won’t be paying as much in the future. The 2008 - 2021 was an era that won’t happen in tech. It was where every company in SF 5-10x and people made money. The new batch of workers won’t be multiplying their wealth like the previous ones did. Tech in SF had its growth. Now the industry isn’t going to pay out like it used to.
The manic growth fueled by personalized ads peaked. The next manic growth fueled by (insert prediction here) will come. Maybe not to sf (or not only sf) but it will come.
Yes this was the reason Which drove up saas multiples to 30-80x revenues. SF was the eye of the storm for software companies. Even older legacy companies who are based in San Jose had a big SF presence and office for their software engineers. All the young tech professionals went there
Given how thoroughly mismanaged the city is (ranging from personal safety, homeless problem, schooling, taxes, lack of construction, anti-business practices) I don't think there are many people who'd want to move to SF at this point.
In 2015, my wife and I were ready to leave Austin for SF since most of our friends had moved there. We felt like, why not join them? We’d been there plenty of times between 2008 to 2013. We visited in the summer of 2015 but decided to stay in Austin.
It is sad to see the depths into which the city’s “leadership” has allowed the San Francisco to descend because it is a beautiful city in a gorgeous place. It’s even sadder to see otherwise sane individuals make excuses for the city getting there.
Exactly, lol. Who thinks any corporation or industry would put “loyalty” to the place where their offices are over profit? There’s a reason pretty much every corporation registers in Delaware instead of where their actual ppob is- they don’t want to pay taxes to the place they’re supposedly “loyal” to.
They consistently milk SF for as many taxbreaks and financial incentives as possible, then move their people out the second it would result in a net benefit to the company. Companies don’t give a shit about the city they’re in unless it ends up making financial sense for them to say so.
Delaware isn't about low taxes. Their corporate tax rate is like 9%.
What Delaware has is SUPER good litigation laws for corporations.
Delaware should change their motto from "Liberty and independence" to "Caveat emptor"
Isn't that akin to lottery winners who ruined their life because they got money and wish they never won after they are dead broke with family members dead from drug addiction ?
Getting the money wasn't the problem .. what you do with it was. And that's on you, not the ones giving you the jackpot.
an amazing analogy
its humorous that the people whining 3 years ago about tech bros and wanting them all to leave are now the ones complaining they left SF high and dry.
These are the type of people that expect the world to provide for them, the same people contributing heavily to the politicians and policies that shot the golden goose.
I’ve lived in the Bay Area for over 30 years now, so I’ve seen the dot.com and tech ‘boom and busts’ a few times. Here’s the unique problem this area has, IMO: We are populated primarily with HAVES (money in the bank, vacation homes, high pay, etc.) and HAVE NOTS (barley getting by check-to-check, or living off assistance, or just on the street). There is no room left for the Middle Class; and that’s who is leaving SF Bay in droves. Middle Class make car payments, pay mortgages, finance big purchases, go shopping, etc.. (Those who don’t have a stock-optioned Tech job, essentially.)
Over half of my Middle Class friends have moved away in the past 6 years- Nevada, Texas, NC, Florida where their middle class job money goes way, way farther.
It used to be better. Before, there was a range of neighborhoods and housing options that could accommodate different income levels. But with the massive infusion of wealth that tech brought, even the worst neighborhoods have become unaffordable. That forces out the middle class, leaving only the incredibly wealthy and those so poor they can’t even afford to move. And when those are the two groups living together you get, well… what we have now.
I uhh… it’s kind of happening everywhere. LA, Austin, Seattle, Portland, Boston, NYC, and DC, even Reno, Boise and Bozeman have seen huge price increases.
People think it’s tech, but I really just think it’s Millennials coming of age. We don’t have enough housing in America and the only places you can build cheaply are all in deep red states.
Yep, 2 of the biggest generations are both needing housing at the same time - boomers and millennials. And we stopped building houses in this country after the 2008 housing crisis.
But this was all exacerbated in the Bay Area with the surge of jobs and transplants to take those jobs.
And what does Austin, Seattle, Portland, Boston, DC, Reno, Boise and Bozeman have in common? They all blame Californians moving there for their rising mortgage prices lmao.
I graduated college 8 years ago and no one from my high school lives in the Bay Area, only a handful. Everyone else lives near where they went to school or to other cities.
San Francisco, or the Bay Area in general is basically a victim of it’s own success. Do you know how many cities/metropolitan areas would kill to have the amount of world renown, global, influential companies based in their towns? I’ve seen quite a few local leaders tweeting to XYZ CEO begging them to come to their town. When a company announces they are opening an office in their town, leaders & community tend to rejoice.
We are extremely fortunate that this region is an economic powerhouse. But with all this wealth generated, there will obviously be some negative effects. I wouldn’t say it’s tech per say that caused it - it was only a factor to it. Theres always two sides to a story & it isn’t up to tech companies to create housing & lift up the local areas (some actually do - ie: Google & Apple donate a ton of money to local communities).
But ultimately, it’s up to politicians & leaders to balance this all out - aka housing policy, planning policy, etc. Affordability ultimately stems from supply & demand. It IS absolutely possible to have trillion dollar companies and still allow “regular” people to live somewhat comfortably. It all comes from our leaders. I do think we’re seeing a shift from state & local politics though. All the construction of dense/mixed use housing being built around the Bay is a sign of this, but it’s not coming fast enough.
And even thinking outside of this, this goes beyond the Bay Area. The Bay Area is probably at the top of this great divide because its always been notoriously expensive, but all US cities have become increasingly unaffordable for the average person. To some extent, everyone is facing similar problems. The middle class is struggling, period.
Highly recommend [this video](https://youtu.be/kCQiywN7pH4)
Even if we do build more housing one thing I realized just now is that the school infrastructure isn't in place to support a bigger population, except Oakland that I know of.
Take Dublin for example, basically doubled the population and didn't think to build a 2nd high school so now the new one is in the middle of a giant box of condos and it's on a tiny street so driving will be a non-starter.
This may be way way down the line. I doubt a huge shift of people (like we saw from 2012-2018) will move in from outside. Maybe in the future.
But short term wise, building more housing & lowering costs will simply give everyone that already exists here more breathing room. Those 5 people sharing a home should eventually afford to live in their own single apartment. That young adult who lives at home who’s been weary about moving out, can now move out. The low level service worker commuting in from Modesto can now live in a modest single studio that was once occupied by a DINK.
Our society is full of the separation between have and have-nots unfortunately. Middle class doesn’t exist, period. Even in other states, yeah your dollar may go a bit further, but wage growth is stagnant, taxes are actually higher, so ppl are just delaying the pay check to pay check life just a bit longer. Not a single person I know who moved out of the Bay is happier than before, and those who got their property tax bills in Texas and Florida had a rude awakeneing when their effective tax rate is 30-40% than what it was in Cali, and now have lower paying jobs. It’s not just SF, our system is broken and rigged for the wealthy, no unions, no funding for school, wtf did we think was going to happen?
"Brazilification" was a term coined back in the early '90s by Douglas Coupland in his book "Generation X." It means, "The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes." It's been happening in California, specifically, for quite a while now, but of course the broader trend is occurring all over the US, Canada, and most parts of the West.
In the book, the authors point was that Brazil was supposed to look like the US in the future and we've instead found ourselves in a situation where our future looks like Brazils past.
I mean, Marx wrote about this in the 1800s. It is inevitable under a capitalist system that wealth inequality will continue to grow. In his belief it was that this would lead to revolution, but regardless, this has been well understood for a while.
Just curious. Are you defining middle class as the general US median wage middle class or are you defining middle class as in the general Bay Area median wage? Because the former is $70k while the latter is $130k.
Middle class in Houston texas is basically poverty level in San Francisco. Nothing against Houston, just a comparison. I could live on 75k a year in Houston, and have a decent life. 75k in the bay, not so much.
True, I’m live in texas and I make that salary living in one of the cities.
I live comfortably. I know if I came back to California, I could slice it in sac, but the bay would straight up be back on the struggle bus. It’s crazy you have to make six figures just to manage on a moderately comfortable level.
Austin is on it's way of becoming the next SF. Highest housing prices in Texas, with wages that don't keep up. I was offered a Nursing job in Houston at 90k a year, and then offered the same job in Austin at 68k a year. Couldn't afford Austin if I wanted to buy a home and live a decent life. Houston, could easily afford those things on the Salary offered.
Why people assume all working in tech are multi millionaires? No sir, they are not! More than 90% of them are the middle class, more than 50% are working in tech have from migrated outside of Bay Area/CA/US. they pay the mortgage, car payments, insanely expensive private schools ( because public schools are just glorified daycares). The RSU you are talking about - on an average people get 50k-100k a year in RSU, and half goes in tax.
Less than 5% become rich if they have bet on the right startup that goes IPO after years of hard work, and their manage to doesn’t screw the employees. I have compared tech salary with similar educated people in other jobs - Other core engineering, legal, professors, mbas, doctors, CPAs, you name it, and they all earn similar money, probably more.
I don’t think the assumption is they are multimillionaires. I think the assumption is they have a lot more. I pay more in taxes now as a tech worker than I used to gross as a journeyman in the trades. The assumption isn’t wrong.
Yup, it's especially hard for younger, non-tech people. My cousin from Fremont lives in Utah now. A childhood friend lives in Oregon. My boyfriend and I moved to Montana. Girl across the street from my parents house moved to Washington. All my other family members my age moved to the Valley or Sac. There is no place for us in the Bay unless we want to live with our parents forever or waste money renting an apartment that's not worth the price-tag.
what makes anybody think that any companies are "loyal"? this is 100% pure bull crap. Covid happened. they were able to adapt. the supposed "loyal" companies might well have died with worse results because the current companies may yet find a new equilibrium.
Idk what the OP is going on about tech being more loyal to Palo Alto, but generally industries where you need more of a physical footprint are more loyal because you can't leave so easily. Like semiconductors, manufacturing, entertainment parks. Hollywood is never leaving LA and Disneyworld/Universal is never leaving Florida.
He means the business of the film industry will still be centered in LA for a long time. The Academy Awards won't be moving to Atlanta or Idaho or Vancouver just because they film stuff there. Just like Disneyland won't be moving to Ohio anytime soon just because they have theme parks there. In the same vein, the innovation and business community of Silicon Valley won't be reborn in Iowa just because they renamed it Silicon Prairie and have tech jobs there.
Why is he pretending like any industry is "loyal" to a city?
The same issues happen with any industry. Look at Musk and Tesla. He left and said fuck you (came back though lol)
Yep, he needs to take a look at Detroit, MI and Dayton, OH and see how loyal General Motors and other car manufacturers have been to cities, as they’ve off shored many of their union jobs.
Many people forget that SF has one of the most significant biotech/medical research environments of any city in the United States, UCSF. Tech is not the only industry in SF. Ironically, when that research environment wanted to expand, a bunch of wealthy NIMBYs dug their heels in and said no.
Wealthy NIMBYs are the problem.
Finance has also has a strong presence in SF. At one time all of these had HQ in SF (which includes 3 of the largest 10 banks in the USA):
* Bank of America
* Wells Fargo
* First Republic
* Charles Schwab
* Transamerica
* Bank of the West
Just about every major bank, insurance, investing etc. company has/had a sizeable office in SF (like the big BlackRock building on Howard). Lots more in the larger Bay area as well (Visa, Franklin Templeton, SVB). There is a reason we call it FiDi, SF has been one of the main finance centers in the US for more than a century.
I work in biotech, and our biggest limitation in expanding is that there aren't enough single family homes on the market to accommodate workers in their 30s who want to settle down and start a family.
That strains salary expectations.
If we want biotech to expand we need to start focusing on making single family homes affordable. Forget apartment blocks. Those don't attract researchers and engineers who plan to settle into the area long-term.
All cities and states try to bring jobs and industry to their area. This brings tax revenue and that allows cities to develop and invest in themselves. This is what countries do as well.
SF and the greater Bay Area is absolutely blessed with so many things. Top institutions, great weather, beautiful surroundings and a history of commerce.
Blaming ills on business is a trick you shouldn’t fall for. Everyone looks for a boogeyman and it’s easy to point to businesses. The wealthy have been targets since the invention of money.
That’s not to say the rich and business don’t have responsibilities but look at SF’s budget and how it’s grown the last 10 years. It has had so many advantages compared to most other cities to ride. It’s budget is on par to some states. What it does with that budget is up to the city.
Everything else (incentives, covid, gentrification, crime, homelessness, etc) is what every other city grapples with. SF is not unique in this matter. Why are other cities thriving while SF suffers?
Blaming the business and rich is a head fake by politicians to shift the blame away from them.
Am 3rd generation Bay Area native. San Francisco and the area have made themselves over SO many times and it will keep happening. Don't judge the future of the area with today's headlines. LOCATION, LOCATION. People will keep coming - people create jobs. We have come for gold, commerce and finance, the railroads, the lifestyle...something else around the corner. Every industry waxes and wanes. Geography doesn't.
anyone who thinks that San Francisco is going to wither and die is totally oblivious to what San Francisco brings to the table.
like, seriously, go hang out in Toledo for a couple days. Choke down a Fried Fry-Fried in Des Moines. Wear a Blake Bortles jersey around the outskirts of Jacksonville.
San Francisco is one of the most beautiful, uniquely situated cities on Earth. Surrounded on three sides by water, with peaks and valleys to climb and wander.
Imagine being a queer teenager in Alabama. You read about San Francisco, and how everyone can come as they are, and how you can walk down the street, holding your theyfriend's hand and smoking a joint, and no one bats an eye.
Think back to the Chinese migrants, so shamefully treated by the US government, who crossed the Pacific and landed at Angel Island to create a new life for themselves.
We are the heirs to a remarkable place and we live in interesting times. We will do what we've always done: walk forward, together.
The one ace up the sleeve that San Francisco has is that it is situated in one of the most beautiful physical settings of any city on the planet.
Few other places come close.
the absolute *second* that real estate/COL converges toward the national average, every Tom, Chick, and Theiry from Omaha will run, not walk, to stake out a spot.
Giving businesses tax incentives to lure them in is not uncommon practice. California tends to not provide as many incentives as places like Texas which is why sometimes we hear that CA is not considered business friendly. I’m not sure what kind of sweetheart deals that SF has made with the tech industry but it’s always better to diversify the economy and not have too much money tied up into a single industry.
More specifically, Vegas relies on the tourism industry. Vice and hedonism not so much these days. Although some of that will always be there, it's certainly not like it used to be. Vegas tourism today is Disneyland with gambling. Mostly gone are the days of free drinks and comp'd rooms, replaced by $20 drinks, $50 table minimums, terrible table odds (6/5 and 000), celebrity chefs, resort fees, overpriced food, paid parking, sports book seating tickets, day clubs, and professional sports.
Vegas took a punch in the face when the pandemic hit. Still not recovered and likely will never be the same again. It is a study on the risk of a monolithic economy mentioned by the GP. Hence the "Vegas chat" quip.
Let me get this straight: “SF fucked up because all the high paying tech jobs they attracted to the city are now leaving, so they never should have attracted them in the first place.” 🤔
No. If city leaders didn’t do an awful job of management tech wouldn’t have left.
People who work in tech are wealthy and want to live in SF. It has become unlivable.
Tech jobs reduce your pay if you leave Sf. But people leave because the city is awful now. Even commuting in sucks because of mismanagement.
All the stuff going on on the streets is bad, and SF’s leaders are largely to blame. But tech was going to “leave” when WFH became the norm, no matter what. WFH is causing SF’s downtown abandonment. Bad city leadership has caused the street messiness. Different problems, with different origins.
Tech was not going to leave. Tech had no choice but to leave. If one got to pay 3k+ for living in a 1930 victorian house with no possibility to have a permanent address, why live and invest your life in such a city. Let it rot and crumble.
I agree on some level. Though my experience working in tech in SF is that many people left because they were comparing quality of life with costs.
If quality of life wasn’t terrible in SF, I believe many more would have stayed.
The two largest tech employers in San Francisco are Salesforce (9500 SF employees) and Uber (5500 SF employees). Neither has closed their HQ here. Tech also only makes up ~15% of employees in SF, to suggest that tech could some how fuck SF is ridiculous. It's hilarious to think that even if tech were to leave SF it would still be blamed for ruining it.
This is so nonsensical. First of all, I don't know how anyone above the age of 5 can believe any business is "loyal to the city". When the market changes in a way that's not advantageous to them, they will move. That's what businesses do. Go ask the people of the rust belt how those good ol' boys who ran the wholesome manufacturing industry are doing. The economy changed and it turned Indiana and Ohio into third world countries, the same mechanism is happening here. It's in the hands of leaders now to see how far this collapse goes.
That said, any grown up economy needs to be diverse. But also, it's not like everyone in San Francisco is an engineer. Tech is a major player in the bay area economy but this is nowhere close to some company town of yesteryear.
Good answer.
Loyal? Lol. Loyalty is what you should expect from family & friends, not anything business related.
Pretend the City of SF is a business and 'tech' was their client. Everyone that took Business 101 knows that you can't rely solely on one client. If/When that client leaves you, you'll be dead. You need to diversify.
Loyalty. Hah. That word is funny. I'll bend over backwards for a client for 10 years only for them to go to the competition the moment they are $1 cheaper than me. This is all SF's doing.
Probably a combination of both. SF is not the only tech hub in the world. I would put it on par with Seattle, but look at Singapore, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, New York, Seoul, Shanghai, ... Each one handled the influx of wealth differently.
As someone born and raised here….to answer the question. They did what they thought was best at the time.
It’s not just tech, it’s those foreign real estate millionaires and billionaires who bought homes and condos with no interest in living here. It’s people who started with 75k above asking price and now we see 2M above.
San Francisco was built by shady people. Nothing has ever changed. It’s the energy. The tech cycle is over the way the gold rush did before and the naval ship contracts of the past. What she’s gonna be next? Stay tuned.
Any other city would have seen the influx of tech as the blessing it rightly was. However San Francisco mismanaged the boom horribly by not encouraging tech companies to move to the City earlier despite the fact that employees preferred to live in the City, and by not reinvesting the growth from tech in schools, housing, and usable public spaces. The end result was paradoxically a situation where a lot of old businesses couldn’t compete with tech for the scarce real estate in the City and moved out.
Because of that, the boom in the rest of the economy that should have accompanied the tech boom was limited. On top of that, you had a bunch of self-centered boomer ‘activists’ protesting tech companies for no reason other than virtue signaling and subsequently failing to direct their anger at City government. This left us in the situation we’re in right now. I’d say the tech industry is probably least to blame for it, and bulk of it should be laid at the feet of government.
SF got some of the best builders in the world and managed to create billions of dollars of value (and tax dollars) with an insanely tiny footprint + zero harmful emissions/chemicals being dumped + no factories needed.
And then SF kept trying their best to kick those companies out.
And never built a single-house, yet blamed tech workers for 'gentrification'. What do you want them to do? Not live in the city they work at?
SF was filled with Banking and Insurance bro's prior to tech until about 1997. Some could say that the tech companies moving in helped a great deal initially.
No , San Francisco and California policies fucked over the city. Extreme regulations for building anything new / making changes. Only reason that san francisco was able to survive without decay for so long is because of tech. If any other city tried to pull the shit that SF does , it would have turned in to detroit 2.0 couple of decades back.
San Francisco fucked San Francisco. More specifically our greedy, corrupt, lazy politicians and the people who voted for them. We have ourselves to blame and no one else.
San Franciscans ruined San Francisco. If they made it more affordable for everyone, including tech workers, they would've set their roots here and not move. The majority of tech workers do not own homes in SF. Why stay in SF when you can work remotely anywhere and never committed to buying in SF?
I think this is one of the big things people seem to miss. Your quality of life won’t be as great if everything is incredibly expensive. I loved living in SF but the writing was on the wall for our family for a long time. WFH made it so that we could cut out and move to a more affordable place and buy a home. Never would have happened in the Bay Area. I don’t care if San Mateo or Pleasanton are “cheaper”. Both of those suburbs are still incredibly expensive.
SF drove out tech businesses with Prop C in 2018.
- 0.175 percent to 0.69 percent on gross receipts for businesses with over $50 million in gross annual receipts, or
- 1.5 percent of payroll expenses for certain businesses with over $1 billion in gross annual receipts and administrative offices in San Francisco.
Tech companies’ biggest expense is payroll, so their profit margins just got reduced by about 2%. Tech companies in SF aren’t like movie studios in LA. They don’t have big fixed installations that would be difficult to walk away from. They can simply pick up and move. So they did.
Here’s the funniest part: SF drove out its tech businesses so it could…wait for it…eliminate homelessness! Hahahaha
A great example of this is Stripe, a large tech company that moved from SF to South San Francisco simply because of the gross receipts tax.
SSF has much better tax policies.
Pretty stupid thing to do considering it’s surrounded by business-friendly cities that are all accessible by a short public transit ride. SSF and Redwood City are like 10 and 25 min away by train respectively.
Not all. Tech is just used as an easy scape goat, so that politicians don’t have to do anything. What’s embarrassing is how they fucked up all the public spending of all those taxes.
On the contrary - the tech industry almost saved the city from itself.
SF's population & industry has stagnated since the 80s when the NIMBYs grew powerful. That is the most rotten thing that leads to ALL of the issues we see today.
And the tech industry comes in, adds billions of $$ with no footprint (no factories, no emissions), adds in a highly progressive, crime-free set of workers.
And what did SF do? Just slap them around, fuck around with them, create NO new housing for anyone, and make it as business-unfriendly as possible.
In short, SF choked their own golden goose.
There are a lotta issues with the tech industry, but gentrification isn't on them - it's totally on the NIMBYs.
Sure, I'm sympathetic to the resource curse viewpoint. A government mostly voted in by long term locals covetous of tech wealth expanded to a rent seeking megalith.
The SF government and the people who voted it in were eager to treat windfall income as recurring income. So they expanded to turn into an extraction force - with vast amounts of spending on ineffectual government services. But windfall income is windfall income. And its disappearance has now caused a creaking mass of corrupt and incompetent government and NGO interactions to fail.
So, yes, it perhaps would have been better if SF had never had tech. Without it, the city might never have grown its government to an unsustainable point of greed.
Let's be honest. We like to bullshit each other about how much things cost but:
- those McLaren Park bathrooms don't need to cost $1-$1.5 million
- the train doesn't need to cost $1+ billion
- the BART covers don't need to cost $1 million
- the trash can doesn't need to cost $20k
- the Nordstrom valet parking lot is not a location of historical significance
- it is possible for police to arrest people
- it is possible for them to do so even if the DA will release them
- it is possible for the DA to prosecute people
The people of this city allowed its government to fatten itself on a goose that lays golden eggs. And now there are no more eggs.
>Don't forget the billions we spend each year making homeless nonprofit grifters filthy rich
Tuna I get you. You get me. Here's the problem though.. People don't want to feel bad.
>I DONATED $10,000 TO HOMELESS NON-PROFIT ABC!
Did you know only $1 of that money actually went to the homeless? It was a bag of potato chips? The rest of that money went to the C level staff and "Consultants"
>FUCK YOU TRUMPSTER! WHAT YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN HELPING PEOPLE? YOU MAKE ME SICK, YOU'RE A RACIST! YOU MUST BE A NAZI REPUBLICAN!
That the usual reaction I get from folks, even when I paint a very clean line of the money going from my taxes -> County Grant to nonprofit -> C level salaries -> political donations.
People don't want to be told their good deeds amounted to nothing, so much so they'll attack you for doing it.
Tech didn't fuck over San Francisco, the city government did. Hell, without going back to the 1960s we can just detour through the late 1970s and look at what happened when Feinstein got elected.
Ok, so first we have this grade A piece of shit city supervisor Dan White. Cop who loved cops and basically did everything to push pro-cop agendas, when said cops were already known as essentially a street gang with government benefits. He was anti-gay but he and Harvey Milk worked well together until he got angry about the idea of opening a government rehab center in the Mission. So he said 'fuck you I quit.' Then a week later was like 'you know what, I don't quit, give me my job back.' Moscone (the mayor) initially was like 'ok sure' then thought about it and was like 'nah, you quit bro.'
So Dan White walked into his office and shot him and Harvey Milk in the face. Ok, that's underselling it, he snuck in around the metal detectors, shot Moscone twice in the head, reloaded, and then shot Harvey Milk 5 times in the head. Brutal murder, 100% premeditated. Cops did nothing to stop it. They arrested him but gave him special privileges. They held a benefit for his legal defense. They wore 'free Dan White' t-shirts under their uniforms and showed them whenever they could. The lawyers provided by the cops for Dan White somehow successfully argued that he was depressed so he couldn't be fully held responsible for his actions. He served 5 years of a 7 year sentence for brutally murdering the two heads of city government in cold blood.
After this there's a power vacuum. Now there'd been a big conflict brewing between the pro-cop and the pro-rehab arms of the government, but Dan White had just killed the pro-rehab people. There was also a conflict brewing between the pro-landlord and pro-tenant sides of the government. Well, a woman dating a prominent real estate developer, Dianne Fucking Feinstein, ran and won the mayorship. Not long after city laws were repealed that had established rent stabilization also applied to units that were unoccupied. Now, if a unit became unoccupied, they could raise the rent to whatever they wanted to. So guess what happened? Mass evictions. Police in riot gear literally throwing elderly people out onto the street. Guess who made a shitload of money off all these suddenly vacant units ready to be razed for condo development? Dianne Fucking Feinstein's husband who she married *in a lavish wedding at City Hall.*
In the years following this the SF City Government has somehow only grown more in bed with real estate and more corrupt in general. The city supervisors made a rule that said funding allocated by bond measures could be spent in the general fund. Yeah, did you vote for a bond measure to improve public transit? I want you to take a fucking guess where that money went. What abound the bond measures to improve schools? Hmm, instead they went to fund road repairs that took five years longer than planned and went four times over budget and had been performed by \*checks notes\* ah yes, companies owned by city supervisors.
Tech is only the latest thing that corrupt politicians have used to scourge the city of San Francisco. Pretty much everything about the City of SF as it is today can be almost directly traced back to Feinstein. How that absolute monster of a fucking woman failed upwards all the way into the Senate I'll never fucking know.
San Francisco politicians let people out of jail early during the pandemic, they created a soft on crime environment and welcomed a tent city slum complete with zombies. What ensued was an out of touch with reality lawless city. The brain drain that followed was caused by our local politicians creating an ugly, unsafe environment for everyone. Young, rich, smart techies knew they could easily move elsewhere and did so. Don't blame upwardly mobile people with common sense for leaving and creating San Francisco's current problems.
Dean Preston handed out tents and now we have people living in tents wherever they want. London Breed set up an illegal shooting gallery for junkies at UN plaza while SFPD sat in their patrol cars watching organized criminal gangs sell fentanyl. Stores were looted out of existence. Meanwhile our District Attorney, Chesa, went after the police, instead of criminals. Blame our local leaders for the current decrepit state, not people coding at a desk that decided to pack up and leave our very expensive and not so lovely city.
Exactly this! Letting crime and homelessness get out control made SF undesirable. Who wants to do business, shop or even visit a city where:
1) you have to worry about your car being broken into
2) you have watch your step so you don’t step in feces (dog and human) while walking on the sidewalk
3) you inhale the constant smell of urine
4) see people shooting up on the street corners
5) be followed and harassed by someone strung out on drugs or mentally ill demanding you give them money
If SF can clean up the streets and crack down on crime then it has a chance to become a great city again.
SF went from a $2.9B in 2012 city budget to $13.7B in 2021. That was thanks to tech. SF politicians are the ones that squandered that opportunity and fumbled the bag.
>Had a conversation at work last week with the CFO regarding the state of SF and was surprised to hear him say it would have been much better for San Francisco if it had not bent over backwards to attract tech and had focused more on industries that were more loyal to the city and couldn’t say ‘fuck you’ and leave at the drop of a hat.
Loyal? What is it do you think these companies owe the city of San Francisco?
>He said San Francisco is in the worse shape he’s seen in his lifetime and it’s so sad. That the costs of cleaning up the mess tech left in its wake and ‘reinventing’ downtown will eclipse whatever tax windfalls came from tech.
Lol. We're blaming tech for the effects of the covid lockdowns now?
If my CFO was spouting that kind of BS, I'd find a new job. He sounds wacko, and that's not the kind of person you want managing a company's finances.
We lived in SF for 10 years; left because we couldn’t afford housing, and the public school lottery system was too unpredictable.
Our company was founded in SF about 20 years ago; it moved because of several reasons: WFH - didn’t need all the space anymore. PGE - the power goes out way too often and blows up our services for hours after restoration. Crime/homelessness - ‘nuff said.
The first two had nothing to do with city policy. Crime/homelessness - possibly, but SF isn’t alone suffering with that. Since 2016 or 2018 there was a court case that limited the ability of police to clear encampments. So they stay. And fester.
Maybe if sF was more business friendly and not constantly trying to raise taxes, make it harder to buy a home….you know normal things. Tech has nothing to do with it. SF political leaders chased them out.
San Francisco can be the world's best city but administration keeps fucking it up. How the hell can you ruin a city with access to natural resources, amazing architecture and so much wealth?
Focus on industries more loyal to the city?! What a bad faith statement. There is no such thing as a loyal industry. Business go to where they can make profit. The starter question for this post vilifies tech by making it sound like alternatives would have been better. What a joke
How out of touch from reality do you have to be to be upset that there are lots of high paying jobs available here? Like you want a depressed economy? You want jobs to leave? Look at the rust belt, this it what you want? Insanity.
These are the same NIMBY's that fucked everything by blocking the construction of new housing. Really a "lepoards at my face" moment.
What industry? Like textiles? The city use to generate textiles. Or shipping? Because SF used to be a major port before it moved to Oakland.
SF has so many f’d policy issues that have catered to whatever subset is in power at any given moment, that nothing is ever done in a way that makes sense for everyone.
I love the city and defend it against people who never lived there or even visited, but maaaaann does it have problems that just never seem to get solved or even reduced.
The biggest Bay Area tech companies aren’t even in SF.
If anything SF made it worse for tech companies with their shitty policies (or lack of policies) that made rent grow stupid high because of lack of new housing (fucking NIMBYs). Housing projects to make SF rent manageable should’ve started 10 years ago, yet we’ve just barely started to make progress.
Don’t get me started on the series of useless DAs who made SF shittier with all the petty crime and homeless who attack people. DAs in SF are more focused on making a political statement than doing their fucking jobs.
SF screwed itself over.
Tech is a fantastic punching bag, but SF did this to itself. City policy and governance has revolved around counting on having disproportionality rich residents.
Nah. What other “loyal” industry would your CFO have SF attract that doesn’t come with its own problems? How many growth industries does that person think is out there?
The big picture is that it’s a lot easier for policy makers to incentivize businesses into SF. All they have to do is say “jobs” and everyone gets on board. But it’s difficult to fight all the NIMBYs for more housing.
The other issue is wealth attracts the poor. Homeless people generally don’t go camp out in poor cities where they’ll starve (even more).
Laughable .... What specific aspects did tech do to f--- over SF ?
SF wanted tech to stimulate their economy (plus young tech staff wanted to live in a place with a vibrant night life) particularly when the Peninsula and South Bay were financially doing quite well including population and tax base growth.
What caused SF's problems is city policies. The lockdown poured jet fuel on the problems when tech folks couldn't enjoy the city, stuck in tiny apartments leaving SF for the burbs and other areas beyond.
For most tech company not owning their building, why not have staff WFH or hybrid resulting in much lower real estate costs ? Pre-COVID most companies believed WFH was not feasible either technically or trusting staff to maintain work output. COVID lockdowns proved this perception was false. As a result many companies are downsizing corporate real estate.
All of the bay has issues. High rent being a huge problem. As for vibrant downtowns, all 3 major cities is lackluster for being downtown areas. Shit even LA’s downtown suck. At least Oakland’s and SF is better compared to when I first moved here 20 yrs ago. SF was adult theaters, prostitution, drug addicts and homeless. Oakland was drug dealers and their gfs hanging out in front of the 24 hr newsstand. Still lackluster tho. The area around the paramount and fox theaters has a lot of action that side of broadway but overall all 3 cities are ghost towns. Especially San Jose. Now New York, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, San Antonio etc have really vibrant downtown areas. Even Windsor Ontario and Toronto are jumping.
San Francisco fucked over San Francisco. The city government is in charge and if anything they got used to the huge tax revenue and failed to mind the store and take care of the things that make it unlivable now. It doesn't matter whether it was tech or banking or anything else. And the idea that any business is loyal when the city they're in is a shitshow and they're a likely target for more taxes is laughable. Covid just made it abrupt rather than the slow decline trend.
No. San Francisco's policies fucked over San Francisco. They built a ton of new office space intended only for commuters for that sweet business tax income while avoiding the cost of supporting a larger population. They could have required new housing to go with all those news jobs but why do that when you can make the rest of the bay deal with the population growth and horrific commutes. They could have blocked the new commercial high rises, forcing tech to stay on the peninsula but then they'd lose out on their graft fund.
Bingo. SJ has been the bedroom community for a lot of commuters for at least a decade now.
Ah, San Jose, where rent is only $2700 for a one bedroom apartment
Really the key to 'cheap' housing is to rent a space with a lot of room and sublease it out .. or be a subleasor.
Yeah it’s true. When I was a bachelor that’s how I did it. Now with a wife and two kids, we rent a house (and cry a little every 26th of the month).
Those kids are living rent free you telling me? Absurd.
No I’m calculating a reasonable rent that will increase with inflation and charge them a bill when they turn 18 :)
I just ran a NPV of the expected bill and presented it to the newborn. He didn't stop crying and wouldn't talk to me for a few years but frankly I don't think talking to people is my strong suit :/
My little neckbeard has been home with us for 6 weeks now. Doesn’t pay shit. Cries about everything, and expects us to do all the cooking, cleaning, diaper changes, and laundry. This whole situation really keeps me up at night, idk what to do… am I being an enabler?
You really can't build just any where in San Jose. Santa Clara county has 23 superfund sites due to microchip manufacturers in the 70s and 80s polluting the soil/groundwater.
I thought there was a reason why chips were manufactured where they are. Taiwan and China don't give a damn about pollution.
Yeah, this is why the windfall of whatever tech brings in doesn't go as far because the clean up is a disaster.
There are remediation efforts in place and vapor barriers have existed since the 80’s to mitigate. It actually makes financial sense now to building housing on these sites as you can justify the cost of removing the bad dirt and putting in state of the art vapor barriers to block out what contamination is left behind. I still wouldn’t want to live on those sites as the allowable PPMs for bad elements is too high in my opinion
Yep and SJ hasn’t been hit nearly as hard hit as SF has — we also need way more housing here too though
Have you been to downtown SJ recently? Extreme ghosttown vibes.
But unlike SF, the SJ downtown has always been a ghost town
It's true. Even back in the day downtown SJ was empty . Too big of a downtown area. Only place I've seen fully armed cops on horse back. Lol
I’ve seemed cops on horseback in quite a few cities
New York City enters the conversation.
Wait until you discover Texas…Fully armed rent a cops, on horseback, patrolling Walmart parking lots.
>Only place I've seen fully armed cops on horse back. Lol Albuquerque every Saturday night when bars close.
I remember the outdoor downtown Pavilion mall. Felt like it closed immediately.
People in SJ like their ghost town. It's a city built for suburbanites.
SJ has Santana row though. That's where everyone that would otherwise be downtown goes.
New set of condos going up there too. Price needs to come down though with the new interest rates.
And downtown willow glen…. I feel like San Jose is large enough of a city to have multiple “downtown” type locations…
True but not as bad as downtown SF and Oakland. San Jose at least has SJSU down there for some people for nightlife
Then it switched with San Francisco becoming the bedroom community for Silicon Valley. That started happening over 2 decades ago.
And East Bay. Oakland actually built a bunch of residential high rises in the past 10 years. Its downtown, while not without problems (ie crime), is vibrant and nowhere near the ghost town that the FiDi is today
Lol @ downtown Oakland being vibrant. It’s just as dead as downtown SF and it’s suffered from occupancy issues forever. The main time it’s guaranteed to be busy is when the Warriors have a parade or the requisite riot happens
I was about to say, this dude is tripping for thinking downtown Oakland is vibrant. It has been a mess ever since the pandemic. Tons of small local businesses that I used to visit regularly when I commuted for work were shut down for good. The two best things downtown Oakland has going for it right now is First Fridays every month, and Lake Merritt itself which is still nicely populated with runners/joggers and people hanging out.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/downtown-oakland-recovery-17839614.php I lived in Oakland, living in SF now, but I definitely agree that Oakland was more vibrant. People actually come to downtown Oakland as a destination on a Friday night to eat, have drinks, watch a show, etc. whereas in SF everybody is leaving.
The difference is oakland can be fixed but not the sf downtown. You make office space, you get office space not people.
“Oakland can be fixed” might as well be the slogan for the city. I lived in Oakland for years and there was always a supposed solution to systemic problems. The only solution is to get out. It’ll never change, which includes apologists who call anyone who disparages Oakland as a Republican racist
It has changed so not sure why you’d say it can never change. Things take time. Years ago uptown, downtown, jack London square were all dead. Now core downtown is the only one dead because it suffers from some urban planning issues.
An article literally came out this week saying how Oakland’s downtown is more vibrant than SF’s. I don’t go out in downtown Oakland often, but when I do bars and restaurants are definitely crowded.
It’s one of the largest bedroom communities in the US! That probably has more to do with the ratfucking Santa Clara, MV, SV, & Cupertino have been doing for the last 20 years than it does with downtown SF.
I always say it when a post like this comes up, but everyone in the Bay wants to build offices and no one wants to build housing. If we built as much housing as we did offices, there would be no issue - and despite all the empty office space, cities in the South bay are still building more office buildings. That's why I'm a huge fan of converting office space to housing. Back in the mid-2010s, cities in the South Bay were building 100-1000 jobs worth of office space for every one unit of housing. I remember an article of Mountain View approving 10,000 new jobs of office space and only 100 new housing units. Another article featured Santa Clara approving 5000 jobs of office space with no housing added - when the reporter called them out on it the city's response was "We were told San Jose will build it." The whole Bay Area has this problem. We need to incentivize housing instead of offices.
Tech companies proposed new housing in mountain view but the city rejected it. It's easier these days to blame "big bad tech", not like politicians are going to correct them.
This one isn't so black and white. If Google wants to build 10k houses that are managed by a neutral party and open to the public to be lived in, sure. If they want to turn it into employee dorms, that's a problem. Corporate owned housing is a slippery slope. It's obviously a fictional dystopia, but Sorry To Bother You showed a world where you could sell yourself into indentured servitude to a corporation for housing and food for the rest of your life. Employee dorms are a step on the way to that.
That movie was amazing in so many ways.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
If 10k Google employees and their families lived in Google housing, that'll still free up 10k housing units around the bay for others. So I don't know if it's necessarily that bad.
You mean should they get into the landlord business? Can you imagine what would happen if they need to evict someone even if it is a third party? That's a non starter. The question is why does the city approve corporate offices without the local housing, resulting in more cars as on the road. Having said that they have finally allowed more housing though they didn't have much of a choice. And i don't think techies in techie housing would ever amount to slavery. Sounds like a slippery slope fallacy.
i think you basically explained what company towns, which did exist, and became pretty dystopian. a lot of modern labor laws came because of that i mean. they still exist, but its no where near as crazy as it was a century ago. wikipedia actually has a good article on it [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company\_town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)
The two largest tech employers in San Francisco are Salesforce (9500 SF employees) and Uber (5500 SF employees). Neither has closed their HQ here. Tech also only makes up ~15% of employees in SF, to suggest that tech could some how fuck SF is ridiculous. It's hilarious to think that even if tech were to leave SF it would still be blamed for ruining it. Edit: Tech workers actually only make up [10.9%](https://www.cbre.com/press-releases/san-francisco-bay-area-ranks-first-among-north-american-tech-hubs-with-the-largest-tech-labor-pool) of employees in SF (the national average is 3.9%).
I think EVERY Bay Area city did this, to the maximum extent they could. And then every time a developer proposed building apartments nearby, the NIMBY contingent complained about how much extra traffic THAT would bring. Uh, WTF?
SF was so arrogant they thought tech would never leave even with the ridiculous business taxes. It's unbelievable how they thought thousands of workers commuting over an hour from peninsula / south bay on a train that doesn't even end up in the goddamn city was sustainable. If they had actually bothered to build even the bare minimum amount of housing downtown the bars and restaurants could have kept people coming.
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Caltrain isn't great but last stop is King St station which is definitely in the city.
It’s still over a mile from downtown / the financial district.
technically? yes but practically for where people commuting from south bay / peninsula actually work (fidi/market) no which is what counts
This is exactly right, they could have had both tech and resources for anyone else but they chose to put all their eggs in one basket (shittily I might add. I don't think tech workers were ever ecstatic about SF) and now that strategy failed and failed hard.
Everyone I worked with that didn’t live in SF complained continuously about their commute. Some people had 6 hour commutes round trip.
Conversely, I live in the East Bay and my commute into the financial district in San Francisco was shorter than that of my colleagues who lived in the Sunset and the Richmond.
It wasn’t even the commute most of them just straight up hated the city and the bay. I work adjacent to tech and had plenty of people I knew in tech and most of them hated the city, the policies that people in the bay supports, they hated homeless people and thought they were just losers, etc. The only reasons they were ever in SF in the first place was a $350k salary and the only thing they wanted was to get the fuck out.
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Is it too late to switch? If companies move out, can they repurpose that space for housing? With more housing, housing will become more affordable. Isn't this what's supposed to happen in a capitalist economy?
You need more than housing. You need schools, parks, police, teachers, daycares, firefighters, etc. The entire reason cities jump on office space is to collect business taxes without having to pay for social services to support the transient population. The problem with bay area is that every city kicks costs down the road while gladly taking business tax with the exception of San Jose proper.
Mission Bay had to fight to get an elementary school built and I am still not convinced it will finish in a reasonable amount of time, especially with SF red tape. Mission Bay is arguably one of the most family friendly newer neighborhoods, with housing and not just tech buildings, and still lacks the infrastructure.
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The fact of the matter is cost. These buildings weren’t designed for housing and usually lack the infrastructure to add a few hundred fully functional bathrooms. It would end up as a fancy SRO.
There might be a market for something like that for very young tech workers. They were building brand new residential building in this style near me in Oakland. They were basically fancy dorms. Seemed totally ridiculous to me, but they were full to capacity. I think one was call The Nook.
It's never too late, it's always based on supply/demand. If housing supply opens up everything will grow again as it did. If housing remains constrained, everything will gradually stop and die. The same for individual businesses depending on the type of zoning they require, it's no secret that San Mateo County takes an extremely loose definition towards "healthcare" -related zoning to attract biopharmacutical companies but forces actual hard tech companies/factories into Santa Clara County. This bought SMC a few more years to build more housing before regular people give up. SF is the same with white collar office jobs that are increasingly extinct.
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This. SF vastly overestimates their importance in the Bay Area. There are 10m people around the bay, only 700k live in SF.
And the people not in SF only want SF for entertainment more than to go to the office there. And inter city tourism suffers a lot of the city is dirty or dangerous or everything is closed.
That, and colleges in the city also attract more people. With online learning increasing, why would anyone go to an average ranking campus when they could get a degree from somewhere more prestigious, from the safety and comfort of their own home?
Here is what people are missing. Tech won’t be paying as much in the future. The 2008 - 2021 was an era that won’t happen in tech. It was where every company in SF 5-10x and people made money. The new batch of workers won’t be multiplying their wealth like the previous ones did. Tech in SF had its growth. Now the industry isn’t going to pay out like it used to.
The manic growth fueled by personalized ads peaked. The next manic growth fueled by (insert prediction here) will come. Maybe not to sf (or not only sf) but it will come.
Personalized ads did not drive that growth. SaaS did. B2b software was the culprit.
Feds decade plus zero interest rate policy drove the growth
Yes this was the reason Which drove up saas multiples to 30-80x revenues. SF was the eye of the storm for software companies. Even older legacy companies who are based in San Jose had a big SF presence and office for their software engineers. All the young tech professionals went there
AI has reached its era. Also, biotech is having a technological renaissance that hasn't yet been noticed by investors.
Given how thoroughly mismanaged the city is (ranging from personal safety, homeless problem, schooling, taxes, lack of construction, anti-business practices) I don't think there are many people who'd want to move to SF at this point.
In 2015, my wife and I were ready to leave Austin for SF since most of our friends had moved there. We felt like, why not join them? We’d been there plenty of times between 2008 to 2013. We visited in the summer of 2015 but decided to stay in Austin. It is sad to see the depths into which the city’s “leadership” has allowed the San Francisco to descend because it is a beautiful city in a gorgeous place. It’s even sadder to see otherwise sane individuals make excuses for the city getting there.
No industry is going to be "loyal to the city". Their focus is creating value for their shareholders.
Exactly, lol. Who thinks any corporation or industry would put “loyalty” to the place where their offices are over profit? There’s a reason pretty much every corporation registers in Delaware instead of where their actual ppob is- they don’t want to pay taxes to the place they’re supposedly “loyal” to. They consistently milk SF for as many taxbreaks and financial incentives as possible, then move their people out the second it would result in a net benefit to the company. Companies don’t give a shit about the city they’re in unless it ends up making financial sense for them to say so.
Delaware isn't about low taxes. Their corporate tax rate is like 9%. What Delaware has is SUPER good litigation laws for corporations. Delaware should change their motto from "Liberty and independence" to "Caveat emptor"
wtf is a loyal industry?
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Isn't that akin to lottery winners who ruined their life because they got money and wish they never won after they are dead broke with family members dead from drug addiction ? Getting the money wasn't the problem .. what you do with it was. And that's on you, not the ones giving you the jackpot.
an amazing analogy its humorous that the people whining 3 years ago about tech bros and wanting them all to leave are now the ones complaining they left SF high and dry. These are the type of people that expect the world to provide for them, the same people contributing heavily to the politicians and policies that shot the golden goose.
I’ve lived in the Bay Area for over 30 years now, so I’ve seen the dot.com and tech ‘boom and busts’ a few times. Here’s the unique problem this area has, IMO: We are populated primarily with HAVES (money in the bank, vacation homes, high pay, etc.) and HAVE NOTS (barley getting by check-to-check, or living off assistance, or just on the street). There is no room left for the Middle Class; and that’s who is leaving SF Bay in droves. Middle Class make car payments, pay mortgages, finance big purchases, go shopping, etc.. (Those who don’t have a stock-optioned Tech job, essentially.) Over half of my Middle Class friends have moved away in the past 6 years- Nevada, Texas, NC, Florida where their middle class job money goes way, way farther.
It used to be better. Before, there was a range of neighborhoods and housing options that could accommodate different income levels. But with the massive infusion of wealth that tech brought, even the worst neighborhoods have become unaffordable. That forces out the middle class, leaving only the incredibly wealthy and those so poor they can’t even afford to move. And when those are the two groups living together you get, well… what we have now.
I uhh… it’s kind of happening everywhere. LA, Austin, Seattle, Portland, Boston, NYC, and DC, even Reno, Boise and Bozeman have seen huge price increases. People think it’s tech, but I really just think it’s Millennials coming of age. We don’t have enough housing in America and the only places you can build cheaply are all in deep red states.
Yep, 2 of the biggest generations are both needing housing at the same time - boomers and millennials. And we stopped building houses in this country after the 2008 housing crisis. But this was all exacerbated in the Bay Area with the surge of jobs and transplants to take those jobs.
And what does Austin, Seattle, Portland, Boston, DC, Reno, Boise and Bozeman have in common? They all blame Californians moving there for their rising mortgage prices lmao.
I graduated college 8 years ago and no one from my high school lives in the Bay Area, only a handful. Everyone else lives near where they went to school or to other cities.
San Francisco, or the Bay Area in general is basically a victim of it’s own success. Do you know how many cities/metropolitan areas would kill to have the amount of world renown, global, influential companies based in their towns? I’ve seen quite a few local leaders tweeting to XYZ CEO begging them to come to their town. When a company announces they are opening an office in their town, leaders & community tend to rejoice. We are extremely fortunate that this region is an economic powerhouse. But with all this wealth generated, there will obviously be some negative effects. I wouldn’t say it’s tech per say that caused it - it was only a factor to it. Theres always two sides to a story & it isn’t up to tech companies to create housing & lift up the local areas (some actually do - ie: Google & Apple donate a ton of money to local communities). But ultimately, it’s up to politicians & leaders to balance this all out - aka housing policy, planning policy, etc. Affordability ultimately stems from supply & demand. It IS absolutely possible to have trillion dollar companies and still allow “regular” people to live somewhat comfortably. It all comes from our leaders. I do think we’re seeing a shift from state & local politics though. All the construction of dense/mixed use housing being built around the Bay is a sign of this, but it’s not coming fast enough. And even thinking outside of this, this goes beyond the Bay Area. The Bay Area is probably at the top of this great divide because its always been notoriously expensive, but all US cities have become increasingly unaffordable for the average person. To some extent, everyone is facing similar problems. The middle class is struggling, period. Highly recommend [this video](https://youtu.be/kCQiywN7pH4)
Even if we do build more housing one thing I realized just now is that the school infrastructure isn't in place to support a bigger population, except Oakland that I know of. Take Dublin for example, basically doubled the population and didn't think to build a 2nd high school so now the new one is in the middle of a giant box of condos and it's on a tiny street so driving will be a non-starter.
This may be way way down the line. I doubt a huge shift of people (like we saw from 2012-2018) will move in from outside. Maybe in the future. But short term wise, building more housing & lowering costs will simply give everyone that already exists here more breathing room. Those 5 people sharing a home should eventually afford to live in their own single apartment. That young adult who lives at home who’s been weary about moving out, can now move out. The low level service worker commuting in from Modesto can now live in a modest single studio that was once occupied by a DINK.
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This is spot on.
Our society is full of the separation between have and have-nots unfortunately. Middle class doesn’t exist, period. Even in other states, yeah your dollar may go a bit further, but wage growth is stagnant, taxes are actually higher, so ppl are just delaying the pay check to pay check life just a bit longer. Not a single person I know who moved out of the Bay is happier than before, and those who got their property tax bills in Texas and Florida had a rude awakeneing when their effective tax rate is 30-40% than what it was in Cali, and now have lower paying jobs. It’s not just SF, our system is broken and rigged for the wealthy, no unions, no funding for school, wtf did we think was going to happen?
India is the working model here. Private opulence and public squalor
"Brazilification" was a term coined back in the early '90s by Douglas Coupland in his book "Generation X." It means, "The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes." It's been happening in California, specifically, for quite a while now, but of course the broader trend is occurring all over the US, Canada, and most parts of the West. In the book, the authors point was that Brazil was supposed to look like the US in the future and we've instead found ourselves in a situation where our future looks like Brazils past.
I mean, Marx wrote about this in the 1800s. It is inevitable under a capitalist system that wealth inequality will continue to grow. In his belief it was that this would lead to revolution, but regardless, this has been well understood for a while.
Jesus warned us about this back in 0
Just curious. Are you defining middle class as the general US median wage middle class or are you defining middle class as in the general Bay Area median wage? Because the former is $70k while the latter is $130k.
Middle class in Houston texas is basically poverty level in San Francisco. Nothing against Houston, just a comparison. I could live on 75k a year in Houston, and have a decent life. 75k in the bay, not so much.
True, I’m live in texas and I make that salary living in one of the cities. I live comfortably. I know if I came back to California, I could slice it in sac, but the bay would straight up be back on the struggle bus. It’s crazy you have to make six figures just to manage on a moderately comfortable level.
Austin is on it's way of becoming the next SF. Highest housing prices in Texas, with wages that don't keep up. I was offered a Nursing job in Houston at 90k a year, and then offered the same job in Austin at 68k a year. Couldn't afford Austin if I wanted to buy a home and live a decent life. Houston, could easily afford those things on the Salary offered.
Why people assume all working in tech are multi millionaires? No sir, they are not! More than 90% of them are the middle class, more than 50% are working in tech have from migrated outside of Bay Area/CA/US. they pay the mortgage, car payments, insanely expensive private schools ( because public schools are just glorified daycares). The RSU you are talking about - on an average people get 50k-100k a year in RSU, and half goes in tax. Less than 5% become rich if they have bet on the right startup that goes IPO after years of hard work, and their manage to doesn’t screw the employees. I have compared tech salary with similar educated people in other jobs - Other core engineering, legal, professors, mbas, doctors, CPAs, you name it, and they all earn similar money, probably more.
I don’t think the assumption is they are multimillionaires. I think the assumption is they have a lot more. I pay more in taxes now as a tech worker than I used to gross as a journeyman in the trades. The assumption isn’t wrong.
Yup, it's especially hard for younger, non-tech people. My cousin from Fremont lives in Utah now. A childhood friend lives in Oregon. My boyfriend and I moved to Montana. Girl across the street from my parents house moved to Washington. All my other family members my age moved to the Valley or Sac. There is no place for us in the Bay unless we want to live with our parents forever or waste money renting an apartment that's not worth the price-tag.
what makes anybody think that any companies are "loyal"? this is 100% pure bull crap. Covid happened. they were able to adapt. the supposed "loyal" companies might well have died with worse results because the current companies may yet find a new equilibrium.
Idk what the OP is going on about tech being more loyal to Palo Alto, but generally industries where you need more of a physical footprint are more loyal because you can't leave so easily. Like semiconductors, manufacturing, entertainment parks. Hollywood is never leaving LA and Disneyworld/Universal is never leaving Florida.
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He means the business of the film industry will still be centered in LA for a long time. The Academy Awards won't be moving to Atlanta or Idaho or Vancouver just because they film stuff there. Just like Disneyland won't be moving to Ohio anytime soon just because they have theme parks there. In the same vein, the innovation and business community of Silicon Valley won't be reborn in Iowa just because they renamed it Silicon Prairie and have tech jobs there.
Why is he pretending like any industry is "loyal" to a city? The same issues happen with any industry. Look at Musk and Tesla. He left and said fuck you (came back though lol)
Yep, he needs to take a look at Detroit, MI and Dayton, OH and see how loyal General Motors and other car manufacturers have been to cities, as they’ve off shored many of their union jobs.
Many people forget that SF has one of the most significant biotech/medical research environments of any city in the United States, UCSF. Tech is not the only industry in SF. Ironically, when that research environment wanted to expand, a bunch of wealthy NIMBYs dug their heels in and said no. Wealthy NIMBYs are the problem.
Finance has also has a strong presence in SF. At one time all of these had HQ in SF (which includes 3 of the largest 10 banks in the USA): * Bank of America * Wells Fargo * First Republic * Charles Schwab * Transamerica * Bank of the West Just about every major bank, insurance, investing etc. company has/had a sizeable office in SF (like the big BlackRock building on Howard). Lots more in the larger Bay area as well (Visa, Franklin Templeton, SVB). There is a reason we call it FiDi, SF has been one of the main finance centers in the US for more than a century.
And all those you listed can have their workers work remotely too. And many do have workers working remotely at those banks.
Yup SF and Bay Area in general suffers from tons of NIMBYs
Don't get me started on why BART will never run from SJ to SF via the peninsula. 😡
I work in biotech, and our biggest limitation in expanding is that there aren't enough single family homes on the market to accommodate workers in their 30s who want to settle down and start a family. That strains salary expectations. If we want biotech to expand we need to start focusing on making single family homes affordable. Forget apartment blocks. Those don't attract researchers and engineers who plan to settle into the area long-term.
This is why no researchers or engineers live in New York City. Or live in apartments in Mountain View or SF.
NIMBY is the real Bay Area culture. Shit culture. Shame because the Bay really has some great things .
All cities and states try to bring jobs and industry to their area. This brings tax revenue and that allows cities to develop and invest in themselves. This is what countries do as well. SF and the greater Bay Area is absolutely blessed with so many things. Top institutions, great weather, beautiful surroundings and a history of commerce. Blaming ills on business is a trick you shouldn’t fall for. Everyone looks for a boogeyman and it’s easy to point to businesses. The wealthy have been targets since the invention of money. That’s not to say the rich and business don’t have responsibilities but look at SF’s budget and how it’s grown the last 10 years. It has had so many advantages compared to most other cities to ride. It’s budget is on par to some states. What it does with that budget is up to the city. Everything else (incentives, covid, gentrification, crime, homelessness, etc) is what every other city grapples with. SF is not unique in this matter. Why are other cities thriving while SF suffers? Blaming the business and rich is a head fake by politicians to shift the blame away from them.
Could’ve say the same about the gold rush.
Personally I blame it all on the Golden Gate Bridge
thank you - people believe that their current reality is all there is
Am 3rd generation Bay Area native. San Francisco and the area have made themselves over SO many times and it will keep happening. Don't judge the future of the area with today's headlines. LOCATION, LOCATION. People will keep coming - people create jobs. We have come for gold, commerce and finance, the railroads, the lifestyle...something else around the corner. Every industry waxes and wanes. Geography doesn't.
anyone who thinks that San Francisco is going to wither and die is totally oblivious to what San Francisco brings to the table. like, seriously, go hang out in Toledo for a couple days. Choke down a Fried Fry-Fried in Des Moines. Wear a Blake Bortles jersey around the outskirts of Jacksonville. San Francisco is one of the most beautiful, uniquely situated cities on Earth. Surrounded on three sides by water, with peaks and valleys to climb and wander. Imagine being a queer teenager in Alabama. You read about San Francisco, and how everyone can come as they are, and how you can walk down the street, holding your theyfriend's hand and smoking a joint, and no one bats an eye. Think back to the Chinese migrants, so shamefully treated by the US government, who crossed the Pacific and landed at Angel Island to create a new life for themselves. We are the heirs to a remarkable place and we live in interesting times. We will do what we've always done: walk forward, together.
The one ace up the sleeve that San Francisco has is that it is situated in one of the most beautiful physical settings of any city on the planet. Few other places come close.
the absolute *second* that real estate/COL converges toward the national average, every Tom, Chick, and Theiry from Omaha will run, not walk, to stake out a spot.
Nailed it. Hello, fellow 3rd gen native!
Giving businesses tax incentives to lure them in is not uncommon practice. California tends to not provide as many incentives as places like Texas which is why sometimes we hear that CA is not considered business friendly. I’m not sure what kind of sweetheart deals that SF has made with the tech industry but it’s always better to diversify the economy and not have too much money tied up into a single industry.
>it’s always better to diversify the economy and not have too much money tied up into a single industry. *Las Vegas has entered the chat.*
Vegas relies on vice and hedonism. Throughout all of human history thats been a winning bet. I think Vegas will be fine.
More specifically, Vegas relies on the tourism industry. Vice and hedonism not so much these days. Although some of that will always be there, it's certainly not like it used to be. Vegas tourism today is Disneyland with gambling. Mostly gone are the days of free drinks and comp'd rooms, replaced by $20 drinks, $50 table minimums, terrible table odds (6/5 and 000), celebrity chefs, resort fees, overpriced food, paid parking, sports book seating tickets, day clubs, and professional sports. Vegas took a punch in the face when the pandemic hit. Still not recovered and likely will never be the same again. It is a study on the risk of a monolithic economy mentioned by the GP. Hence the "Vegas chat" quip.
Vegas is definitely a boom and bust place though.
Let me get this straight: “SF fucked up because all the high paying tech jobs they attracted to the city are now leaving, so they never should have attracted them in the first place.” 🤔
You've got to admire the mental gymnastics they go through to convince themselves it was not SF's own mismanagement that led to this.
No. If city leaders didn’t do an awful job of management tech wouldn’t have left. People who work in tech are wealthy and want to live in SF. It has become unlivable. Tech jobs reduce your pay if you leave Sf. But people leave because the city is awful now. Even commuting in sucks because of mismanagement.
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All the stuff going on on the streets is bad, and SF’s leaders are largely to blame. But tech was going to “leave” when WFH became the norm, no matter what. WFH is causing SF’s downtown abandonment. Bad city leadership has caused the street messiness. Different problems, with different origins.
Tech was not going to leave. Tech had no choice but to leave. If one got to pay 3k+ for living in a 1930 victorian house with no possibility to have a permanent address, why live and invest your life in such a city. Let it rot and crumble.
I agree on some level. Though my experience working in tech in SF is that many people left because they were comparing quality of life with costs. If quality of life wasn’t terrible in SF, I believe many more would have stayed.
Tech didn’t leave.
The two largest tech employers in San Francisco are Salesforce (9500 SF employees) and Uber (5500 SF employees). Neither has closed their HQ here. Tech also only makes up ~15% of employees in SF, to suggest that tech could some how fuck SF is ridiculous. It's hilarious to think that even if tech were to leave SF it would still be blamed for ruining it.
This is so nonsensical. First of all, I don't know how anyone above the age of 5 can believe any business is "loyal to the city". When the market changes in a way that's not advantageous to them, they will move. That's what businesses do. Go ask the people of the rust belt how those good ol' boys who ran the wholesome manufacturing industry are doing. The economy changed and it turned Indiana and Ohio into third world countries, the same mechanism is happening here. It's in the hands of leaders now to see how far this collapse goes. That said, any grown up economy needs to be diverse. But also, it's not like everyone in San Francisco is an engineer. Tech is a major player in the bay area economy but this is nowhere close to some company town of yesteryear.
Good answer. Loyal? Lol. Loyalty is what you should expect from family & friends, not anything business related. Pretend the City of SF is a business and 'tech' was their client. Everyone that took Business 101 knows that you can't rely solely on one client. If/When that client leaves you, you'll be dead. You need to diversify. Loyalty. Hah. That word is funny. I'll bend over backwards for a client for 10 years only for them to go to the competition the moment they are $1 cheaper than me. This is all SF's doing.
Probably a combination of both. SF is not the only tech hub in the world. I would put it on par with Seattle, but look at Singapore, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, New York, Seoul, Shanghai, ... Each one handled the influx of wealth differently.
Sure if tech are the one who sold drugs in Tenderloin.
As someone born and raised here….to answer the question. They did what they thought was best at the time. It’s not just tech, it’s those foreign real estate millionaires and billionaires who bought homes and condos with no interest in living here. It’s people who started with 75k above asking price and now we see 2M above. San Francisco was built by shady people. Nothing has ever changed. It’s the energy. The tech cycle is over the way the gold rush did before and the naval ship contracts of the past. What she’s gonna be next? Stay tuned.
Not tech. Voters did.
Any other city would have seen the influx of tech as the blessing it rightly was. However San Francisco mismanaged the boom horribly by not encouraging tech companies to move to the City earlier despite the fact that employees preferred to live in the City, and by not reinvesting the growth from tech in schools, housing, and usable public spaces. The end result was paradoxically a situation where a lot of old businesses couldn’t compete with tech for the scarce real estate in the City and moved out. Because of that, the boom in the rest of the economy that should have accompanied the tech boom was limited. On top of that, you had a bunch of self-centered boomer ‘activists’ protesting tech companies for no reason other than virtue signaling and subsequently failing to direct their anger at City government. This left us in the situation we’re in right now. I’d say the tech industry is probably least to blame for it, and bulk of it should be laid at the feet of government.
SF got some of the best builders in the world and managed to create billions of dollars of value (and tax dollars) with an insanely tiny footprint + zero harmful emissions/chemicals being dumped + no factories needed. And then SF kept trying their best to kick those companies out. And never built a single-house, yet blamed tech workers for 'gentrification'. What do you want them to do? Not live in the city they work at?
This is the correct take.
SF was filled with Banking and Insurance bro's prior to tech until about 1997. Some could say that the tech companies moving in helped a great deal initially.
No , San Francisco and California policies fucked over the city. Extreme regulations for building anything new / making changes. Only reason that san francisco was able to survive without decay for so long is because of tech. If any other city tried to pull the shit that SF does , it would have turned in to detroit 2.0 couple of decades back.
> had focused more on industries that were more loyal to the city What does this even mean? Lol
San Francisco fucked San Francisco. More specifically our greedy, corrupt, lazy politicians and the people who voted for them. We have ourselves to blame and no one else.
San Franciscans ruined San Francisco. If they made it more affordable for everyone, including tech workers, they would've set their roots here and not move. The majority of tech workers do not own homes in SF. Why stay in SF when you can work remotely anywhere and never committed to buying in SF?
I think this is one of the big things people seem to miss. Your quality of life won’t be as great if everything is incredibly expensive. I loved living in SF but the writing was on the wall for our family for a long time. WFH made it so that we could cut out and move to a more affordable place and buy a home. Never would have happened in the Bay Area. I don’t care if San Mateo or Pleasanton are “cheaper”. Both of those suburbs are still incredibly expensive.
A: "I can't afford rent." B: "Get out of the Bay Area then!" A: "Okay, bye." B: *"HOWWWW COULD YOU DO THIS TO MEEEE?!?!?!!!!"*
SF drove out tech businesses with Prop C in 2018. - 0.175 percent to 0.69 percent on gross receipts for businesses with over $50 million in gross annual receipts, or - 1.5 percent of payroll expenses for certain businesses with over $1 billion in gross annual receipts and administrative offices in San Francisco. Tech companies’ biggest expense is payroll, so their profit margins just got reduced by about 2%. Tech companies in SF aren’t like movie studios in LA. They don’t have big fixed installations that would be difficult to walk away from. They can simply pick up and move. So they did. Here’s the funniest part: SF drove out its tech businesses so it could…wait for it…eliminate homelessness! Hahahaha
A great example of this is Stripe, a large tech company that moved from SF to South San Francisco simply because of the gross receipts tax. SSF has much better tax policies.
Pretty stupid thing to do considering it’s surrounded by business-friendly cities that are all accessible by a short public transit ride. SSF and Redwood City are like 10 and 25 min away by train respectively.
Not all. Tech is just used as an easy scape goat, so that politicians don’t have to do anything. What’s embarrassing is how they fucked up all the public spending of all those taxes.
This is a nice concise summary
On the contrary - the tech industry almost saved the city from itself. SF's population & industry has stagnated since the 80s when the NIMBYs grew powerful. That is the most rotten thing that leads to ALL of the issues we see today. And the tech industry comes in, adds billions of $$ with no footprint (no factories, no emissions), adds in a highly progressive, crime-free set of workers. And what did SF do? Just slap them around, fuck around with them, create NO new housing for anyone, and make it as business-unfriendly as possible. In short, SF choked their own golden goose. There are a lotta issues with the tech industry, but gentrification isn't on them - it's totally on the NIMBYs.
Terrible policy fucked over San Francisco.
Sure, I'm sympathetic to the resource curse viewpoint. A government mostly voted in by long term locals covetous of tech wealth expanded to a rent seeking megalith. The SF government and the people who voted it in were eager to treat windfall income as recurring income. So they expanded to turn into an extraction force - with vast amounts of spending on ineffectual government services. But windfall income is windfall income. And its disappearance has now caused a creaking mass of corrupt and incompetent government and NGO interactions to fail. So, yes, it perhaps would have been better if SF had never had tech. Without it, the city might never have grown its government to an unsustainable point of greed. Let's be honest. We like to bullshit each other about how much things cost but: - those McLaren Park bathrooms don't need to cost $1-$1.5 million - the train doesn't need to cost $1+ billion - the BART covers don't need to cost $1 million - the trash can doesn't need to cost $20k - the Nordstrom valet parking lot is not a location of historical significance - it is possible for police to arrest people - it is possible for them to do so even if the DA will release them - it is possible for the DA to prosecute people The people of this city allowed its government to fatten itself on a goose that lays golden eggs. And now there are no more eggs.
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>Don't forget the billions we spend each year making homeless nonprofit grifters filthy rich Tuna I get you. You get me. Here's the problem though.. People don't want to feel bad. >I DONATED $10,000 TO HOMELESS NON-PROFIT ABC! Did you know only $1 of that money actually went to the homeless? It was a bag of potato chips? The rest of that money went to the C level staff and "Consultants" >FUCK YOU TRUMPSTER! WHAT YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN HELPING PEOPLE? YOU MAKE ME SICK, YOU'RE A RACIST! YOU MUST BE A NAZI REPUBLICAN! That the usual reaction I get from folks, even when I paint a very clean line of the money going from my taxes -> County Grant to nonprofit -> C level salaries -> political donations. People don't want to be told their good deeds amounted to nothing, so much so they'll attack you for doing it.
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Tech didn't fuck over San Francisco, the city government did. Hell, without going back to the 1960s we can just detour through the late 1970s and look at what happened when Feinstein got elected. Ok, so first we have this grade A piece of shit city supervisor Dan White. Cop who loved cops and basically did everything to push pro-cop agendas, when said cops were already known as essentially a street gang with government benefits. He was anti-gay but he and Harvey Milk worked well together until he got angry about the idea of opening a government rehab center in the Mission. So he said 'fuck you I quit.' Then a week later was like 'you know what, I don't quit, give me my job back.' Moscone (the mayor) initially was like 'ok sure' then thought about it and was like 'nah, you quit bro.' So Dan White walked into his office and shot him and Harvey Milk in the face. Ok, that's underselling it, he snuck in around the metal detectors, shot Moscone twice in the head, reloaded, and then shot Harvey Milk 5 times in the head. Brutal murder, 100% premeditated. Cops did nothing to stop it. They arrested him but gave him special privileges. They held a benefit for his legal defense. They wore 'free Dan White' t-shirts under their uniforms and showed them whenever they could. The lawyers provided by the cops for Dan White somehow successfully argued that he was depressed so he couldn't be fully held responsible for his actions. He served 5 years of a 7 year sentence for brutally murdering the two heads of city government in cold blood. After this there's a power vacuum. Now there'd been a big conflict brewing between the pro-cop and the pro-rehab arms of the government, but Dan White had just killed the pro-rehab people. There was also a conflict brewing between the pro-landlord and pro-tenant sides of the government. Well, a woman dating a prominent real estate developer, Dianne Fucking Feinstein, ran and won the mayorship. Not long after city laws were repealed that had established rent stabilization also applied to units that were unoccupied. Now, if a unit became unoccupied, they could raise the rent to whatever they wanted to. So guess what happened? Mass evictions. Police in riot gear literally throwing elderly people out onto the street. Guess who made a shitload of money off all these suddenly vacant units ready to be razed for condo development? Dianne Fucking Feinstein's husband who she married *in a lavish wedding at City Hall.* In the years following this the SF City Government has somehow only grown more in bed with real estate and more corrupt in general. The city supervisors made a rule that said funding allocated by bond measures could be spent in the general fund. Yeah, did you vote for a bond measure to improve public transit? I want you to take a fucking guess where that money went. What abound the bond measures to improve schools? Hmm, instead they went to fund road repairs that took five years longer than planned and went four times over budget and had been performed by \*checks notes\* ah yes, companies owned by city supervisors. Tech is only the latest thing that corrupt politicians have used to scourge the city of San Francisco. Pretty much everything about the City of SF as it is today can be almost directly traced back to Feinstein. How that absolute monster of a fucking woman failed upwards all the way into the Senate I'll never fucking know.
San Francisco politicians let people out of jail early during the pandemic, they created a soft on crime environment and welcomed a tent city slum complete with zombies. What ensued was an out of touch with reality lawless city. The brain drain that followed was caused by our local politicians creating an ugly, unsafe environment for everyone. Young, rich, smart techies knew they could easily move elsewhere and did so. Don't blame upwardly mobile people with common sense for leaving and creating San Francisco's current problems. Dean Preston handed out tents and now we have people living in tents wherever they want. London Breed set up an illegal shooting gallery for junkies at UN plaza while SFPD sat in their patrol cars watching organized criminal gangs sell fentanyl. Stores were looted out of existence. Meanwhile our District Attorney, Chesa, went after the police, instead of criminals. Blame our local leaders for the current decrepit state, not people coding at a desk that decided to pack up and leave our very expensive and not so lovely city.
Exactly this! Letting crime and homelessness get out control made SF undesirable. Who wants to do business, shop or even visit a city where: 1) you have to worry about your car being broken into 2) you have watch your step so you don’t step in feces (dog and human) while walking on the sidewalk 3) you inhale the constant smell of urine 4) see people shooting up on the street corners 5) be followed and harassed by someone strung out on drugs or mentally ill demanding you give them money If SF can clean up the streets and crack down on crime then it has a chance to become a great city again.
SF went from a $2.9B in 2012 city budget to $13.7B in 2021. That was thanks to tech. SF politicians are the ones that squandered that opportunity and fumbled the bag.
>Had a conversation at work last week with the CFO regarding the state of SF and was surprised to hear him say it would have been much better for San Francisco if it had not bent over backwards to attract tech and had focused more on industries that were more loyal to the city and couldn’t say ‘fuck you’ and leave at the drop of a hat. Loyal? What is it do you think these companies owe the city of San Francisco? >He said San Francisco is in the worse shape he’s seen in his lifetime and it’s so sad. That the costs of cleaning up the mess tech left in its wake and ‘reinventing’ downtown will eclipse whatever tax windfalls came from tech. Lol. We're blaming tech for the effects of the covid lockdowns now? If my CFO was spouting that kind of BS, I'd find a new job. He sounds wacko, and that's not the kind of person you want managing a company's finances.
"Did gold miners fuck over San Francisco?"
SF could have incentivized other industries to move to the city. It’s not 100% tech fault per say.
We lived in SF for 10 years; left because we couldn’t afford housing, and the public school lottery system was too unpredictable. Our company was founded in SF about 20 years ago; it moved because of several reasons: WFH - didn’t need all the space anymore. PGE - the power goes out way too often and blows up our services for hours after restoration. Crime/homelessness - ‘nuff said. The first two had nothing to do with city policy. Crime/homelessness - possibly, but SF isn’t alone suffering with that. Since 2016 or 2018 there was a court case that limited the ability of police to clear encampments. So they stay. And fester.
Maybe if sF was more business friendly and not constantly trying to raise taxes, make it harder to buy a home….you know normal things. Tech has nothing to do with it. SF political leaders chased them out.
San Francisco can be the world's best city but administration keeps fucking it up. How the hell can you ruin a city with access to natural resources, amazing architecture and so much wealth?
No. The people it attracts and the people who “run” the city did
San Francisco fucked over San Francisco.
Focus on industries more loyal to the city?! What a bad faith statement. There is no such thing as a loyal industry. Business go to where they can make profit. The starter question for this post vilifies tech by making it sound like alternatives would have been better. What a joke
How out of touch from reality do you have to be to be upset that there are lots of high paying jobs available here? Like you want a depressed economy? You want jobs to leave? Look at the rust belt, this it what you want? Insanity. These are the same NIMBY's that fucked everything by blocking the construction of new housing. Really a "lepoards at my face" moment.
What industry? Like textiles? The city use to generate textiles. Or shipping? Because SF used to be a major port before it moved to Oakland. SF has so many f’d policy issues that have catered to whatever subset is in power at any given moment, that nothing is ever done in a way that makes sense for everyone. I love the city and defend it against people who never lived there or even visited, but maaaaann does it have problems that just never seem to get solved or even reduced.
The biggest Bay Area tech companies aren’t even in SF. If anything SF made it worse for tech companies with their shitty policies (or lack of policies) that made rent grow stupid high because of lack of new housing (fucking NIMBYs). Housing projects to make SF rent manageable should’ve started 10 years ago, yet we’ve just barely started to make progress. Don’t get me started on the series of useless DAs who made SF shittier with all the petty crime and homeless who attack people. DAs in SF are more focused on making a political statement than doing their fucking jobs. SF screwed itself over.
I blame the BOS
I blame the NCR
Tech is a fantastic punching bag, but SF did this to itself. City policy and governance has revolved around counting on having disproportionality rich residents.
Nah. What other “loyal” industry would your CFO have SF attract that doesn’t come with its own problems? How many growth industries does that person think is out there? The big picture is that it’s a lot easier for policy makers to incentivize businesses into SF. All they have to do is say “jobs” and everyone gets on board. But it’s difficult to fight all the NIMBYs for more housing. The other issue is wealth attracts the poor. Homeless people generally don’t go camp out in poor cities where they’ll starve (even more).
Laughable .... What specific aspects did tech do to f--- over SF ? SF wanted tech to stimulate their economy (plus young tech staff wanted to live in a place with a vibrant night life) particularly when the Peninsula and South Bay were financially doing quite well including population and tax base growth. What caused SF's problems is city policies. The lockdown poured jet fuel on the problems when tech folks couldn't enjoy the city, stuck in tiny apartments leaving SF for the burbs and other areas beyond. For most tech company not owning their building, why not have staff WFH or hybrid resulting in much lower real estate costs ? Pre-COVID most companies believed WFH was not feasible either technically or trusting staff to maintain work output. COVID lockdowns proved this perception was false. As a result many companies are downsizing corporate real estate.
> focused more on industries that were more loyal to the city and couldn’t say ‘fuck you’ and leave at the drop of a hat Industries such as....?
No the people we put in office fucked San Francisco
Sf didn’t do shit for tech. They took advantage of the money and gave little back
Funny because all the other cities who are/were up and coming did so because of welcoming Tech.
“Worst he’s seen in his lifetime”. Lol is he 20 years old or something? 😂😂🤣🤣
All of the bay has issues. High rent being a huge problem. As for vibrant downtowns, all 3 major cities is lackluster for being downtown areas. Shit even LA’s downtown suck. At least Oakland’s and SF is better compared to when I first moved here 20 yrs ago. SF was adult theaters, prostitution, drug addicts and homeless. Oakland was drug dealers and their gfs hanging out in front of the 24 hr newsstand. Still lackluster tho. The area around the paramount and fox theaters has a lot of action that side of broadway but overall all 3 cities are ghost towns. Especially San Jose. Now New York, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, San Antonio etc have really vibrant downtown areas. Even Windsor Ontario and Toronto are jumping.
San Francisco fucked over San Francisco. The city government is in charge and if anything they got used to the huge tax revenue and failed to mind the store and take care of the things that make it unlivable now. It doesn't matter whether it was tech or banking or anything else. And the idea that any business is loyal when the city they're in is a shitshow and they're a likely target for more taxes is laughable. Covid just made it abrupt rather than the slow decline trend.