11 ms·

Act two of the tech's flight will not be so pretty for SF. I don't think the advocates will be thrilled with the results. Given SF has been extremely heavy han

Act two of the tech's flight will not be so pretty for SF. I don't think the advocates will be thrilled with the results. Given SF has been extremely heavy handed with the lockdowns, and a huge number of people leaving, alot of them well paid. Restaurants and businesses are closing(and moving out of the area) at a rapid pace. Expect a historic drop in revenue for the city, this means less services, less funding for education, more filth, more homeless, more drugs everywhere. The residents who have the means will get fed up with the downward spiral, leading to a negative feedback in life quality and revenue. Politicians in SF always money hungry will then try to hit the 'billionaires' where it hurts, 'their wallets', and try to raise taxes leading to more people leaving. Not everyone who is leaving is because of the cost of living, its also people who are fed up. The quality of life thing is huge, half of my Wife's good friends left the bay area the past year or two, a bunch of my co-workers in tech left and alot of it was people are sick of how poorly the place is run and is turning into a dump. I left in the summer and will never return, I grew up in the area so its been bittersweet, but I don't regret moving one bit.

foxtr0t 6y ago
San Francisco, the city in a perpetual death spiral. The number of bad "SF's gonna die!" takes on HN/twitter is so absurd I now read them with a "So bad it's good" type mindset. The number of times WSJ opinions alone have declared California dead is probably 20+. The thing that will stop the oft remarked upon "death spiral" is, ahem, the fucking CA housing market. Where there are fluctuations in expensive asset prices, people see opportunity. If housing prices in SF drop by 5%, it's not like all the wealthy individuals who can buy just sit on the sidelines. Younger people with lesser means see opportunities to get rent control at a decent price etc. I'm looking forward to retractions of all these level zero takes when rent prices spike in July. This is of course nothing new, for instance NY has gone through many ups and downs of its own and all along many in the media claimed "NY is dying!"
- subsubzero 6y ago
  It is laughable with the number of articles that state this recently, I do think things are different as large name brand companies have moved out very recently: Pinterest paid big money to break its lease to move out of SF, Stripe is moving out, Charles Schwab and McKesson, and Bechtel also moved their HQ out of SF and CA in general. These moves were all done pre-covid but as a bay area resident the past year has been horrible like none other, fires raging all summer and toxic smoke, pg&e shutting off the power all the time, crime is really, really bad. I had stuff stolen from my house, a first of living an entire lifetime in the bay area.
  - foxtr0t 6y ago
    I'm a pretty pessimistic individual, at least my wife tells me so, but I am actually very optimistic about California and the Bay Area. I think COVID will end up being the kick in the pants it needs to start dealing with many of the problems in the state and region. A scare or two about companies fleeing the state is necessary to get the state/counties/cities to cut back on suffocating red tape for small businesses. And if there is one place in the world setup to fight a big climate problem like fires, it is the academic and technological hive mind of California. Back to the bad takes: from what I've read the takes are all from people who moved out of the Bay. Some people come here, start their careers, then have the luxury of leaving and working from wherever. That's great, but there will always be a batch of new grads looking for work and honestly the concentration there is so high they could lose 20% of the companies by market cap and this would still be the place to start out, along with a few other large metros. Just because you leave doesn't mean the city stops.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - zapita 6y ago
    > crime is really, really bad Actually violent crime is at an all-time low. See this article about homicides for example: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/With-41-killings-in-2019-San-Francisco-sees-14943532.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/With-41-killings-i... It looks like you were thinking of property crime, but I wonder what the statistics say about that, too.
- mikestew 6y ago
  The number of times WSJ opinions alone have declared California dead is probably 20+. Where I first heard the idea that CA will collapse because "everyone is moving to NV to avoid CA taxes" was the WSJ...thirty years ago. I see that CA is still there, and far more populated than it was 30 years ago. A stopped clock might be right twice a day, but I'll be dead before the WSJ (or anyone) finally strikes gold with their "everyone is leaving CA" prediction.
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    The difference is that there's a hell of a lot more bandwidth available to the average remote worker than there was 30 years ago.
    - nostrademons 6y ago
      I suspect the next big tech wave is going to be software-enabled hardware (think 3D printing, or drones, or robotics) or software-enabled biotech (think Verily, Calico, or DeepMind's protein-folding breakthrough today). Neither of those can be done anywhere with an Internet connection; they're going to require close collaboration between software developers, data scientists, electrical/mechanical/biomedical engineers, and actual scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists, and material scientists). The Bay Area is excellently situated to take advantage of this, having 2 world-class universities, a number of smaller colleges, thriving industries in all of these, and lots of capital. Much of the rest of the country, not so much. I suspect that the days of SaaS and pure web or mobile app developers are numbered. That field is increasingly getting commoditized.
      - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        >I suspect the next big tech wave is going to be software-enabled hardware (think 3D printing, or drones, or robotics) or software-enabled biotech (think Verily, Calico, or DeepMind's protein-folding breakthrough today). Neither of those can be done anywhere with an Internet connection; they're going to require close collaboration between software developers, data scientists, electrical/mechanical/biomedical engineers, and actual scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists, and material scientists). The Bay Area is excellently situated to take advantage of this, having 2 world-class universities, a number of smaller colleges, thriving industries in all of these, and lots of capital. Much of the rest of the country, not so much. This comment is a great example of the SV bubble mindset. The Midwest, Northeast and gulf coast have far better existing infrastructure and workforces if your goal is to create products that have a physical existence in excess of what it takes to represent ones and zeros. I'll be the first to tell you that I'll vote for any despot who promises to screw the people of Boston but even I have to admit that if your goal is to do some BioMed thing the existing industry there is far better poised to take advantage of it than SV is. The Gulf coast is where you go if you want to do things with chemicals. The eastern midwest is where you go for heavy industry type manufacturing. Specialty composites, aerospace, electronics manufacturing capability is sprinkled throughout the area east of the Mississippi (though sprinkled less densely in the more agricultural parts of the south and midwest). It's just laughable that you think that SV, a place that's spent decades driving out anything that doesn't have tech-size margins, has the existing workforce and infrastructure to compete against the places that already have these industries.
- rllearneratwork 6y ago
  what do you expect? The city to actually disappear?? Of course not. But the quality of life in the city is in death spiral. A lot more crime and a lot more homeless and infrastructure is in disarray
  - foxtr0t 6y ago
    I expect Detroit at the very least.
- claydavisss 6y ago
  This is a reddit-grade defense and strikes me as a weird rationalization. Are you suggesting that the Bay Area is destined to be some insulated District 1 that perpetually laughs at quality of life, economics, market forces etc? In any case there's nothing to debate, the exodus has been happening for years and has only been accelerated and highlighted by the Covid news cycle.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  > This is of course nothing new, for instance NY has gone through many ups and downs of its own and all along many in the media claimed "NY is dying!" The same could be said of Detroit. Until the 1960s, it was unquestionably the fastest booming major metro in the US. But at one point or another, the "price discount of a lifetime" just becomes an attempt to catch a falling knife.
  - jgwil2 6y ago
    The weather alone will ensure SF never becomes Detroit.
  - foxtr0t 6y ago
    Detroit is an interesting comparison, it is hard to imagine right now, but I won't count anything out completely. Obviously the factors there were very different. Detroit collapsed because consumers went elsewhere, not the labor. Edit: clarification/wording
mmckelvy 6y ago
Where are you (and these others you mention) moving to?
- Diederich 6y ago
  My family moved from Mountain View (where we were paying $4800/month rent for a 2 bedroom apartment) to rural Olympia Washington state, where we're paying about $1500 a month less for a mortgage on a house with five times the square footage and five acres of woods. We moved to the SF Bay Area in 2009. The 11 minute drive from our house into town (capital of Washington state) is ironically shorter than a drive to the nearest Safeway in Mountain View at certain times of the day. My wife and I daily appreciate the fortune of having the luxury of working full time remote. Most people don't have that. We very much enjoyed our time in the SF Bay Area. It's a beautiful place full of excellent people. "things" just got too out of balance over the past decade plus.
  - Diederich 6y ago
    What the heck, I'll go on a little bit more after noting that we loved living in the SF Bay Area when we did. Our electricity is almost all hydro, and so very green. Our only vehicle is a Tesla which we charge at home. Our home is relatively close to the Puget sound but we're nearly 100 feet above it, which will make us proof against 21st century sea level rise, hurricanes (currently impossible here) and tsunamis. At the same time, the very large amount of water near us strongly moderates our temperature fluctuations, similar to but stronger than the same effect on the peninsula in the SF Bay Area. There's no state income taxes. Property tax is slightly higher than in the SF Bay Area. Sales tax is about the same. Finally, this is my current view: https://www.realms.org/pics/woods-outside.jpg https://www.realms.org/pics/woods-outside.jpg
    - burnthrow 6y ago
      You may not deal with tropical cyclones, but please understand that where you live the weather can become quite violent. https://www.climate.washington.edu/stormking/mainindex.html https://www.climate.washington.edu/stormking/mainindex.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_Storm_of_1962 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_Storm_of_1962 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_windstorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_windstorm
aphextron 6y ago
>"Given SF has been extremely heavy handed with the lockdowns" To great effect, mind you. SF County has the lowest rate of new cases per 100k of any major city in the country by a pretty significant margin [0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...
- kfarr 6y ago
  Exactly. SF is one of the safest places to live in the US right now (as it relates to COVID)
  - mrkstu 6y ago
    The problem, of course, is that you can replicate that level of safety, if it matters to you, anywhere, by locking yourself in your house. Since the US isn't an island, anytime SF loosens up, CV will immediately spike anyway, so no real advantage gained. You end up creating a backlash. If the vaccines live up to their advance billing some small number of lives will be saved, but it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it.
    - mkolodny 6y ago
      > it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it I have yet to see data that shows any evidence of this theory. If you are aware of any existing data that points to this conclusion, I'd love to see it.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
        Did you know that the Spanish flu of 1918 wasn't really Spanish? Edit: Okay so maybe I skipped to the punchline. Just trying to say politics influences data or lack of data.
jseliger 6y ago
leading to a negative feedback in life quality and revenue https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget And the city's budget has grown by about 50% in ten years.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  A good example that free money from the sky rarely bring fortunes...
xwdv 6y ago
I am glad I am no longer living in San Francisco. Going to work there is like the tech equivalent of going to work at an oil rig.
artifact_44 6y ago
Good. Riddance. (SF resident of 30 years). I used to lament having to commute 2 hours to SV, but then SV came here, and boy, the City has gone to shit because of it.
tshaddox 6y ago
I'm not sure if I buy the quality of life argument, at least in the context of the very well-paid tech employees. The "ambient" quality of life in many prominent areas has been fairly abysmal for years (since long before COVID-19) and these well-paid residents simply avoid this by Ubering from one isolated "nice area" to another. I doubt that incrementally less public funding for education, cleaning, homeless, and drug problems is something that most of these well-paid residents would notice. They'll just keep paying to maintain their "nice areas" and Uber from one to the next, just like it has been for the last 9 years I lived in SF.
ubu7737 6y ago
So you are confirming that your relationship with the Bay Area was transactional, as the article quotes an advocate as saying. Meaning the Bay Area won't miss you or your money, it will only miss your patronage.
industriousthou 6y ago
So, you're saying there's a chance I could afford to move there one day? Sounds dope.
geofft 6y ago
I lived in SF (and worked in tech) 2012-2013. I could see problems, but it certainly wasn't "turning into a dump" at that point. Your argument seems to basically be, once the high-salaried tech workers leave, the city will get worse. But as far as I can tell, the presence of the high-salaried tech workers has been making the city worse over the last decade, and if you think it's anywhere near "a dump," I think a lot of people will be glad to get back the SF of years past (such as the SF of a couple of years before I arrived, before the second startup boom, before modern venture capital existed, before Uber and Airbnb, during the recession and the dot-com bust - the SF about which people like me said, I'd like to move there).
- kmtrowbr 6y ago
  I agree with you. I have lived in SF since 2005. In my opinion, the problem is that the tech workers are not engaged with the city. They are here for the jobs, and resent the city. The high prices chased the old SFers away, the artists and eccentrics who enjoyed and loved SF ... and the influx was such that there was no opportunity to pass along the culture. More people needed to be shown what was fun and groovy about SF, than the existing population had the capacity to do. What was neat about SF circa 2005-2012 is that folks in general were happy, excited, and proud to be here. Current day tech workers complain a lot, while contributing little (presence, acceptance, consciousness) to help solve anything: viz the comments on this post. Now they dance upon its grave as they decamp to Montana or Ohio, etc. So in a sense part of the problem is just the mood of the place. If you ever read Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" she describes exactly the cycle we are experiencing: a cheap place is colonized by artists and eccentrics, it becomes cool, this attracts mainstream folks, this makes the place hyped & expensive, the people who made it cool move away, it then becomes lame, eventually it decays, is abandoned, and becomes cheap again. Be zen, this is all part of the normal life of the world. In the fullness of time, SF will have many more boom and bust cycles.
  - deepakhj 6y ago
    Insert any decade in the past and you can tell the same story...
renewiltord 6y ago
Netcraft confirms: SF is dead! jwz on suicide watch. IMHO SF will survive forever. The geography of the region is just too damned good for the density. I'm in LA for some time because it's nicer this time of year but I have enjoyed my time in SF and all the things I can do there. SF is in a resource curse situation right now. The coming winter will kill the parasitic insects in government off. Few elected governments have the incentives to set up a 'sovereign wealth fund' equivalent because the ones who use it will be seen as heroes and the ones who fund it as villains. So just as the winter helps temperate climate countries survive insect hordes, shocks like this help societies survive their bureaucrats. A good argument could be made that it makes sense to leave people's money to them, but for gold rush states the right thing to do is to extract some rent from transient visitors into a longer term program so that it can weather shocks. If they have the incentives to protect the wealth fund. No CA or SF program can do that, however, since there is a hedonic sink in the shape of CalPERS. Any money you save, CalPERS will eat. And CalPERS will grow whether you feed it or not. And now that CalPERS is big enough, you don't get to choose whether to feed it. CalPERS will feed.
- jl2718 6y ago
  A. CalPers pumps a lot of money into VC (especially those most subject to local regulation). I don’t know if the latest boom would have been possible without that. B. I don’t know. Detroit is just as corrupt as ever.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Well, you don't need to take my tax dollars to give it to CalPERS so they can put it into Private Equity to get a 10% IRR. You can just leave it with me and maybe I'll put it in there myself.

foxtr0t 6y ago

San Francisco, the city in a perpetual death spiral. The number of bad "SF's gonna die!" takes on HN/twitter is so absurd I now read them with a "So bad it's good" type mindset. The number of times WSJ opinions alone have declared California dead is probably 20+. The thing that will stop the oft remarked upon "death spiral" is, ahem, the fucking CA housing market. Where there are fluctuations in expensive asset prices, people see opportunity. If housing prices in SF drop by 5%, it's not like all the wealthy individuals who can buy just sit on the sidelines. Younger people with lesser means see opportunities to get rent control at a decent price etc. I'm looking forward to retractions of all these level zero takes when rent prices spike in July. This is of course nothing new, for instance NY has gone through many ups and downs of its own and all along many in the media claimed "NY is dying!"

subsubzero 6y ago
It is laughable with the number of articles that state this recently, I do think things are different as large name brand companies have moved out very recently: Pinterest paid big money to break its lease to move out of SF, Stripe is moving out, Charles Schwab and McKesson, and Bechtel also moved their HQ out of SF and CA in general. These moves were all done pre-covid but as a bay area resident the past year has been horrible like none other, fires raging all summer and toxic smoke, pg&e shutting off the power all the time, crime is really, really bad. I had stuff stolen from my house, a first of living an entire lifetime in the bay area.
- foxtr0t 6y ago
  I'm a pretty pessimistic individual, at least my wife tells me so, but I am actually very optimistic about California and the Bay Area. I think COVID will end up being the kick in the pants it needs to start dealing with many of the problems in the state and region. A scare or two about companies fleeing the state is necessary to get the state/counties/cities to cut back on suffocating red tape for small businesses. And if there is one place in the world setup to fight a big climate problem like fires, it is the academic and technological hive mind of California. Back to the bad takes: from what I've read the takes are all from people who moved out of the Bay. Some people come here, start their careers, then have the luxury of leaving and working from wherever. That's great, but there will always be a batch of new grads looking for work and honestly the concentration there is so high they could lose 20% of the companies by market cap and this would still be the place to start out, along with a few other large metros. Just because you leave doesn't mean the city stops.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- zapita 6y ago
  > crime is really, really bad Actually violent crime is at an all-time low. See this article about homicides for example: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/With-41-killings-in-2019-San-Francisco-sees-14943532.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/With-41-killings-i... It looks like you were thinking of property crime, but I wonder what the statistics say about that, too.
mikestew 6y ago
The number of times WSJ opinions alone have declared California dead is probably 20+. Where I first heard the idea that CA will collapse because "everyone is moving to NV to avoid CA taxes" was the WSJ...thirty years ago. I see that CA is still there, and far more populated than it was 30 years ago. A stopped clock might be right twice a day, but I'll be dead before the WSJ (or anyone) finally strikes gold with their "everyone is leaving CA" prediction.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  The difference is that there's a hell of a lot more bandwidth available to the average remote worker than there was 30 years ago.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    I suspect the next big tech wave is going to be software-enabled hardware (think 3D printing, or drones, or robotics) or software-enabled biotech (think Verily, Calico, or DeepMind's protein-folding breakthrough today). Neither of those can be done anywhere with an Internet connection; they're going to require close collaboration between software developers, data scientists, electrical/mechanical/biomedical engineers, and actual scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists, and material scientists). The Bay Area is excellently situated to take advantage of this, having 2 world-class universities, a number of smaller colleges, thriving industries in all of these, and lots of capital. Much of the rest of the country, not so much. I suspect that the days of SaaS and pure web or mobile app developers are numbered. That field is increasingly getting commoditized.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      >I suspect the next big tech wave is going to be software-enabled hardware (think 3D printing, or drones, or robotics) or software-enabled biotech (think Verily, Calico, or DeepMind's protein-folding breakthrough today). Neither of those can be done anywhere with an Internet connection; they're going to require close collaboration between software developers, data scientists, electrical/mechanical/biomedical engineers, and actual scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists, and material scientists). The Bay Area is excellently situated to take advantage of this, having 2 world-class universities, a number of smaller colleges, thriving industries in all of these, and lots of capital. Much of the rest of the country, not so much. This comment is a great example of the SV bubble mindset. The Midwest, Northeast and gulf coast have far better existing infrastructure and workforces if your goal is to create products that have a physical existence in excess of what it takes to represent ones and zeros. I'll be the first to tell you that I'll vote for any despot who promises to screw the people of Boston but even I have to admit that if your goal is to do some BioMed thing the existing industry there is far better poised to take advantage of it than SV is. The Gulf coast is where you go if you want to do things with chemicals. The eastern midwest is where you go for heavy industry type manufacturing. Specialty composites, aerospace, electronics manufacturing capability is sprinkled throughout the area east of the Mississippi (though sprinkled less densely in the more agricultural parts of the south and midwest). It's just laughable that you think that SV, a place that's spent decades driving out anything that doesn't have tech-size margins, has the existing workforce and infrastructure to compete against the places that already have these industries.
rllearneratwork 6y ago
what do you expect? The city to actually disappear?? Of course not. But the quality of life in the city is in death spiral. A lot more crime and a lot more homeless and infrastructure is in disarray
- foxtr0t 6y ago
  I expect Detroit at the very least.
claydavisss 6y ago
This is a reddit-grade defense and strikes me as a weird rationalization. Are you suggesting that the Bay Area is destined to be some insulated District 1 that perpetually laughs at quality of life, economics, market forces etc? In any case there's nothing to debate, the exodus has been happening for years and has only been accelerated and highlighted by the Covid news cycle.
dcolkitt 6y ago
> This is of course nothing new, for instance NY has gone through many ups and downs of its own and all along many in the media claimed "NY is dying!" The same could be said of Detroit. Until the 1960s, it was unquestionably the fastest booming major metro in the US. But at one point or another, the "price discount of a lifetime" just becomes an attempt to catch a falling knife.
- jgwil2 6y ago
  The weather alone will ensure SF never becomes Detroit.
- foxtr0t 6y ago
  Detroit is an interesting comparison, it is hard to imagine right now, but I won't count anything out completely. Obviously the factors there were very different. Detroit collapsed because consumers went elsewhere, not the labor. Edit: clarification/wording

mmckelvy 6y ago

Where are you (and these others you mention) moving to?

Diederich 6y ago
My family moved from Mountain View (where we were paying $4800/month rent for a 2 bedroom apartment) to rural Olympia Washington state, where we're paying about $1500 a month less for a mortgage on a house with five times the square footage and five acres of woods. We moved to the SF Bay Area in 2009. The 11 minute drive from our house into town (capital of Washington state) is ironically shorter than a drive to the nearest Safeway in Mountain View at certain times of the day. My wife and I daily appreciate the fortune of having the luxury of working full time remote. Most people don't have that. We very much enjoyed our time in the SF Bay Area. It's a beautiful place full of excellent people. "things" just got too out of balance over the past decade plus.
- Diederich 6y ago
  What the heck, I'll go on a little bit more after noting that we loved living in the SF Bay Area when we did. Our electricity is almost all hydro, and so very green. Our only vehicle is a Tesla which we charge at home. Our home is relatively close to the Puget sound but we're nearly 100 feet above it, which will make us proof against 21st century sea level rise, hurricanes (currently impossible here) and tsunamis. At the same time, the very large amount of water near us strongly moderates our temperature fluctuations, similar to but stronger than the same effect on the peninsula in the SF Bay Area. There's no state income taxes. Property tax is slightly higher than in the SF Bay Area. Sales tax is about the same. Finally, this is my current view: https://www.realms.org/pics/woods-outside.jpg https://www.realms.org/pics/woods-outside.jpg
  - burnthrow 6y ago
    You may not deal with tropical cyclones, but please understand that where you live the weather can become quite violent. https://www.climate.washington.edu/stormking/mainindex.html https://www.climate.washington.edu/stormking/mainindex.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_Storm_of_1962 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_Storm_of_1962 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_windstorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_windstorm

aphextron 6y ago

>"Given SF has been extremely heavy handed with the lockdowns" To great effect, mind you. SF County has the lowest rate of new cases per 100k of any major city in the country by a pretty significant margin [0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...

kfarr 6y ago
Exactly. SF is one of the safest places to live in the US right now (as it relates to COVID)
- mrkstu 6y ago
  The problem, of course, is that you can replicate that level of safety, if it matters to you, anywhere, by locking yourself in your house. Since the US isn't an island, anytime SF loosens up, CV will immediately spike anyway, so no real advantage gained. You end up creating a backlash. If the vaccines live up to their advance billing some small number of lives will be saved, but it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it.
  - mkolodny 6y ago
    > it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it I have yet to see data that shows any evidence of this theory. If you are aware of any existing data that points to this conclusion, I'd love to see it.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
      Did you know that the Spanish flu of 1918 wasn't really Spanish? Edit: Okay so maybe I skipped to the punchline. Just trying to say politics influences data or lack of data.

jseliger 6y ago

leading to a negative feedback in life quality and revenue https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget And the city's budget has grown by about 50% in ten years.

cosmodisk 6y ago
A good example that free money from the sky rarely bring fortunes...

xwdv 6y ago

I am glad I am no longer living in San Francisco. Going to work there is like the tech equivalent of going to work at an oil rig.

artifact_44 6y ago

Good. Riddance. (SF resident of 30 years). I used to lament having to commute 2 hours to SV, but then SV came here, and boy, the City has gone to shit because of it.

tshaddox 6y ago

I'm not sure if I buy the quality of life argument, at least in the context of the very well-paid tech employees. The "ambient" quality of life in many prominent areas has been fairly abysmal for years (since long before COVID-19) and these well-paid residents simply avoid this by Ubering from one isolated "nice area" to another. I doubt that incrementally less public funding for education, cleaning, homeless, and drug problems is something that most of these well-paid residents would notice. They'll just keep paying to maintain their "nice areas" and Uber from one to the next, just like it has been for the last 9 years I lived in SF.

ubu7737 6y ago

So you are confirming that your relationship with the Bay Area was transactional, as the article quotes an advocate as saying. Meaning the Bay Area won't miss you or your money, it will only miss your patronage.

industriousthou 6y ago

So, you're saying there's a chance I could afford to move there one day? Sounds dope.

geofft 6y ago

I lived in SF (and worked in tech) 2012-2013. I could see problems, but it certainly wasn't "turning into a dump" at that point. Your argument seems to basically be, once the high-salaried tech workers leave, the city will get worse. But as far as I can tell, the presence of the high-salaried tech workers has been making the city worse over the last decade, and if you think it's anywhere near "a dump," I think a lot of people will be glad to get back the SF of years past (such as the SF of a couple of years before I arrived, before the second startup boom, before modern venture capital existed, before Uber and Airbnb, during the recession and the dot-com bust - the SF about which people like me said, I'd like to move there).

kmtrowbr 6y ago
I agree with you. I have lived in SF since 2005. In my opinion, the problem is that the tech workers are not engaged with the city. They are here for the jobs, and resent the city. The high prices chased the old SFers away, the artists and eccentrics who enjoyed and loved SF ... and the influx was such that there was no opportunity to pass along the culture. More people needed to be shown what was fun and groovy about SF, than the existing population had the capacity to do. What was neat about SF circa 2005-2012 is that folks in general were happy, excited, and proud to be here. Current day tech workers complain a lot, while contributing little (presence, acceptance, consciousness) to help solve anything: viz the comments on this post. Now they dance upon its grave as they decamp to Montana or Ohio, etc. So in a sense part of the problem is just the mood of the place. If you ever read Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" she describes exactly the cycle we are experiencing: a cheap place is colonized by artists and eccentrics, it becomes cool, this attracts mainstream folks, this makes the place hyped & expensive, the people who made it cool move away, it then becomes lame, eventually it decays, is abandoned, and becomes cheap again. Be zen, this is all part of the normal life of the world. In the fullness of time, SF will have many more boom and bust cycles.
- deepakhj 6y ago
  Insert any decade in the past and you can tell the same story...

renewiltord 6y ago

Netcraft confirms: SF is dead! jwz on suicide watch. IMHO SF will survive forever. The geography of the region is just too damned good for the density. I'm in LA for some time because it's nicer this time of year but I have enjoyed my time in SF and all the things I can do there. SF is in a resource curse situation right now. The coming winter will kill the parasitic insects in government off. Few elected governments have the incentives to set up a 'sovereign wealth fund' equivalent because the ones who use it will be seen as heroes and the ones who fund it as villains. So just as the winter helps temperate climate countries survive insect hordes, shocks like this help societies survive their bureaucrats. A good argument could be made that it makes sense to leave people's money to them, but for gold rush states the right thing to do is to extract some rent from transient visitors into a longer term program so that it can weather shocks. If they have the incentives to protect the wealth fund. No CA or SF program can do that, however, since there is a hedonic sink in the shape of CalPERS. Any money you save, CalPERS will eat. And CalPERS will grow whether you feed it or not. And now that CalPERS is big enough, you don't get to choose whether to feed it. CalPERS will feed.

jl2718 6y ago
A. CalPers pumps a lot of money into VC (especially those most subject to local regulation). I don’t know if the latest boom would have been possible without that. B. I don’t know. Detroit is just as corrupt as ever.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Well, you don't need to take my tax dollars to give it to CalPERS so they can put it into Private Equity to get a 10% IRR. You can just leave it with me and maybe I'll put it in there myself.