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This is part of the cycle that makes the Bay Area wonderful. People come, people go, some people stay. In my opinion some of the most interesting work (includin

This is part of the cycle that makes the Bay Area wonderful. People come, people go, some people stay. In my opinion some of the most interesting work (including but not exclusively in tech) is going to happen in the next few years in the Bay Area precisely because of the opportunities and breathing space this outflow of people (and perhaps eventually money) is going to open up. I lived in the Bay Area for 20 years, including college and 2-3 tech booms (depending how you count). From what I saw, there is always some portion of local people (like the angry anti-skyscraper guy in this article) that is too xenophobic and anti change, just as there is always some portion of newcomers that is too transactional, extractive, and ready to skip town when the going gets tough. Both postures are perfectly defensible; it's tough living in a place where rents are as unpredictable as they can be in the Bay Area, and tech leaders have not historically shown (IMO) enough commitment to the community and tax base, meanwhile those who move to the Bay Area for work are under no obligation to like it and stay, even if their complaints (about rent control, regulation, "dirty" streets, etc) are totally cliched. Somewhere out there in the city some bleary eyed veteran of the scene is negotiating a tiny, bargain sublet for a few desks and a slice of a server closet in SoMA and will release something quietly revolutionary in the next year or so that in five years will be the next big thing. Or maybe it will be a cheery eyed newcomer leasing factory time in Hayward for a hardware thing, or someone testing robots in a warehouse in West Oakland, or whatever. Right now is one of the times when things get interesting.

Apocryphon 6y ago
This is a great comment because it recognizes that all of what's happening is cyclical. San Francisco has boomed and busted in the past, it will boom and bust again. People comparing it to Detroit seem to ignore that that city itself is in the throes of a revival. How could S.F., which even without tech is in a prime geographical location and climate, do even less?
asdff 6y ago
There is a fallacy here. Yes, these things are cyclical, but rents are still not crashing to levels affordable to the working class. The bay area is getting the worst of both worlds: a crisis on the streets and, even despite recent decreases, rents unaffordable to normal working people. This is sort of unprecedented uncharted territory beyond the boom and bust cycles up until this point. The people you wrote about in the last paragraph still can't afford to get in, and it's not like there is a lot of work in, say, the restaurant industry right now to finance these side efforts.
- mapgrep 6y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if the Bay Area remains on the whole more expensive after this boom than it was before the boom started. I'm pretty sure that's how it has historically worked. I don't profess to know how far things will fall. I will note that historically the busts take time to play out just like the booms do. Dot-com 1 burst around April 2000 but I don't think the rents fully bottomed out for nearly two years. Anyway you're right that things don't come back ever exactly as they were before. I just think more breathing room will open up.
  - mepiethree 6y ago
    Intuitively this makes sense: Moving takes time. My wife and I have talked about moving almost every day since the pandemic started, but haven't done anything about it
- refurb 6y ago
  I don’t think rents have been “affordable for the working class” in SF since before the city’s revival in the 70’s. That’s why rent control was enacted. SF has always been an expensive city. If you look at historical data, a house was $200k back in the 1980’s, or about $650k today. So cheaper than now but nowhere close to affordable.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    The rate of rent increase in San Francisco was higher before the tech boom than after.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Sure. But before the tech boom it wasn’t affordable for lower income people.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  It doesn't have to be affordable to the working class, it just has to be affordable enough for a few engineers who saved up a bit in the last boom to take a ~5-year sabbatical. Then fear of falling into the struggling working class motivates them to keep inventing, while a desire to replace all the working-class employees who can no longer afford to live in the city gives them a ready-made market. There's no guarantee that the working class as we know it today (i.e. those who perform repetitive tasks with their hands) will continue to exist. Most of the Bay Area's history has been about automating and replacing progressively higher-level portions of the economy with machines.

Apocryphon 6y ago

This is a great comment because it recognizes that all of what's happening is cyclical. San Francisco has boomed and busted in the past, it will boom and bust again. People comparing it to Detroit seem to ignore that that city itself is in the throes of a revival. How could S.F., which even without tech is in a prime geographical location and climate, do even less?

asdff 6y ago

There is a fallacy here. Yes, these things are cyclical, but rents are still not crashing to levels affordable to the working class. The bay area is getting the worst of both worlds: a crisis on the streets and, even despite recent decreases, rents unaffordable to normal working people. This is sort of unprecedented uncharted territory beyond the boom and bust cycles up until this point. The people you wrote about in the last paragraph still can't afford to get in, and it's not like there is a lot of work in, say, the restaurant industry right now to finance these side efforts.

mapgrep 6y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the Bay Area remains on the whole more expensive after this boom than it was before the boom started. I'm pretty sure that's how it has historically worked. I don't profess to know how far things will fall. I will note that historically the busts take time to play out just like the booms do. Dot-com 1 burst around April 2000 but I don't think the rents fully bottomed out for nearly two years. Anyway you're right that things don't come back ever exactly as they were before. I just think more breathing room will open up.
- mepiethree 6y ago
  Intuitively this makes sense: Moving takes time. My wife and I have talked about moving almost every day since the pandemic started, but haven't done anything about it
refurb 6y ago
I don’t think rents have been “affordable for the working class” in SF since before the city’s revival in the 70’s. That’s why rent control was enacted. SF has always been an expensive city. If you look at historical data, a house was $200k back in the 1980’s, or about $650k today. So cheaper than now but nowhere close to affordable.
- shuckles 6y ago
  The rate of rent increase in San Francisco was higher before the tech boom than after.
  - refurb 6y ago
    Sure. But before the tech boom it wasn’t affordable for lower income people.
nostrademons 6y ago
It doesn't have to be affordable to the working class, it just has to be affordable enough for a few engineers who saved up a bit in the last boom to take a ~5-year sabbatical. Then fear of falling into the struggling working class motivates them to keep inventing, while a desire to replace all the working-class employees who can no longer afford to live in the city gives them a ready-made market. There's no guarantee that the working class as we know it today (i.e. those who perform repetitive tasks with their hands) will continue to exist. Most of the Bay Area's history has been about automating and replacing progressively higher-level portions of the economy with machines.