22 ms·

Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

228 points by kyleblarson 5y ago

zirkonit 5y ago
Long overdue.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
There is now enough vacant office space in San Francisco to give every homeless person in the city 2000 square feet. (From the article: 16 Million square feet of vacant office space, and a quick Google search gave me a homeless population of 8000)
- fleshdaddy 5y ago
  Is that an accurate count? That actually sounds surprisingly low. I figured it was quite a bit higher.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    - The reported SF outdoors homeless numbers vary from 5,000 - 10,000 - But it depends on what data you have and how you slice it: - 60% of the $300 - $350 million homeless budget goes to welfare rentals (single women and moms are eligible for that, rarely men), so that's 15,000+ adults plus children alone - there's probably more than 10,000 on the street, and growing daily as average rents are over $3,500/month now. As you can see, with a population of only 500,000 and almost 5% of thoe homeless, SF has a major problem. What the EU learned from African economic migration is that once somebody is in their regionn, authoriities have to process them one by one, which can take years per case. So once a city gets behind, there's no good story.
  - katabatic 5y ago
    That's nearly 1% of the population of San Francisco. It's already shockingly high.
- umeshunni 5y ago
  There's always enough X in San Francisco to give every homeless person X/n of it. What's lacking in San Francisco is the political will to do anything meaningful about homelessness (or crime, or the housing crisis, or infrastructure, or the schools or anything other than vague virtue signaling)
  - throwkeep 5y ago
    To their credit, they've found new ways of using resources in the most inefficient way possible. "San Francisco is paying $16.1 million to shelter homeless people in 262 tents placed in empty lots around the city where they also get services and food — a steep price tag that amounts to more than $61,000 per tent per year." https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-year-for-one-tent-to-house-16001074.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...
    - admax88q 5y ago
      At that cost they could just pay the homeless 61k per year and they could rent their own homes
      - ngokevin 5y ago
        While I imagine there are a lot of detractors here, I like universal basic income. We could try to slice it and have a system to pick and choose who gets it, but as we've seen, the waste that goes into the bureaucracy when it's not just "give everyone a check".
      - rgblambda 5y ago
        That was my first thought as well but then remembered that often the reason for homelessness is mental health issues. Many homeless people are just incapable of taking care of themselves. e.g. not paying rent/bills when they physically have the money to do so, gambling addict so getting into massive amounts of debt, getting evicted due to antisocial behaviour/vandalism of property.
- pengaru 5y ago
  Isn't it already well established SF has far more space allocated to jobs than housing for the workers? In other news, the sky is blue, and water is wet.
- woah 5y ago
  I always wonder what the point of these comparisons is. Can you imagine cramming 8000 homeless people with hardcore drug addictions and untreated mental illness in a vacant office tower?
  - unixhero 5y ago
    It would make for a hellofa janitor survival simulator game. Maybe as a story pack to SimTower.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Note most of them aren't homeless because they did drugs, they're doing drugs because they're homeless because they lost their homes. Ain't nothing else to do.
    - mycologos 5y ago
      I was curious about this claim. A 2004 study of ~500 homeless adults in Pennsylvania found that roughly 70% reported that they did not use more drugs after becoming homeless, though about 80% reported regularly using drugs [1]. But there are other studies that claim the opposite, for example this 1990 study of ~1400 homeless adults in California that finds "[p]revalences of alcohol abuse, illegal drug use, and psychiatric hospitalization when adults first became homeless were 15% to 33% lower than prevalences following homelessness". But it's hard to dig into the second result, because the paper is paywalled, like most of the papers about this topic. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448345/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448345/ [2] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.10.1394 https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.10...
- spoonjim 5y ago
  What’s your prediction for the outcome of doing that? Parceling the office space into 2,000 square foot spaces and giving them free of charge to each homeless person in SF? Please be specific.
- paxys 5y ago
  What would a homeless person do with an office?
  - sky_rw 5y ago
    Start a SoLoMo app company, obviously.
- Decker87 5y ago
  That's great to hear!
eplanit 5y ago
"San Francisco’s office vacancy rate has risen to 19.7 percent" Wow -- when I was there in the "dot-com boom" of the late '90s and early '00s, such a vacancy rate was unheard of (it was 0.5% for housing, and similar for commercial real estate). Oh well, they've earned this outcome.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  What's awful is asking rents have barely budged. Peaked at around $85/sf, now around $75/sf. The landlords can afford to just sit on inventory.
  - brdd 5y ago
    Totally false. We saw many commercial units between $35-50/sf IG and just signed on one at $37/sf.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      "At the first quarter of 2021, the overall citywide asking rent was $73.76 per square foot (psf) down 12.0% from the peak of $83.82 psf with the Class A citywide figure at $77.66 psf, down 10.0% from $86.31 psf,. Direct space continues to be marketed at near record levels for the time being with the citywide Class A direct asking rent at $84.47 psf and the CBD Class A direct asking rent at $85.71 psf" — Cushman and Wakefield "Totally false" — Internet rando
      - jedberg 5y ago
        > Cushman and Wakefield Aka a company with a vested interest in convincing you that the $75 price they are offering you is totally in line with the average and it's really good and you should just take it.
        jeffbee 5y ago
        But an anecdote about a class-C storefront on 7th street is more reliable?
spamizbad 5y ago
Good? Always seemed problematic so much tech was all tied up in SF and the Bay Area.
- ardit33 5y ago
  It is the only true city in the area, where younger people can have a urban lifestyle... the rest is depressing suburbia.... San Jose, and the rest feels like a cultural grave. The only other town that is walkable is Berkley, but that is too small for hosting large companies. Also, parts of Oakland, but the city itself has major governance issues, and crime in general. I think NYC and Austin are booming right now. While nyc is a world class city, the 'progressives' have taken over the NY State legislation, and personally it is worrying. While some of the legislation might be long overdue, and good, there are many parts of the 'progressive' movement that is just nihilistic, and destructive in the long run and it might end up goin the route of SF. So, this year will be the wait and see year on how NY will move forward. If it goes the way of SF (with destructive policies) it might not look good. But, NYC-ers are more rational, and both of the leading candidates for Mayor seem to be more in the centrist, or center left camp, and the far left / super progressive ones are not doing well.
  - thereare5lights 5y ago
    > and crime in general That's no different in SF
    - cyberbanjo 5y ago
      I thought Oakland was worse
      - neltnerb 5y ago
        Oakland is a big place. It varies by neighborhood same as San Francisco. Most is fine, certainly no worse than the Tenderloin.
        5y ago
sneak 5y ago
It always struck me as odd that a culture so interested in the internet and data and disrupting existing cash flows would itself dictate a system in which so, so much cash flows from VCs to paychecks to landowners in one single metro.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Surprise: the landlords are in charge of local government.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Yeah, but AFAIK there isn't huge overlap between the VC funds and the landowners, unless there's some hidden corporate structure of which I am unaware. It would be quite silly (and clever) for VC LPs to start buying up residential properties, knowing that their funding rounds go right into payroll and then right into SFBA rents and back into their pockets. :D
    - jedberg 5y ago
      YC actually considered this (jokingly I think, but maybe not?). They realized that many of their startups were living in just a couple of high rises in San Francisco.
    - dcolkitt 5y ago
      I don't think it's directly this malicious. I think it's more just a blindspot. If you're a 40-something partner at a major VC firm, who bought his home in Palo Alto in 2005, then the "cost of living" is largely invisible to you. Sure you may have a sizable chunk of home equity locked up, but that's not a monthly cash flow issue. Intellectually you know that being located in the Bay Area is a major burden to the ramen-eating startup founders that you fund. But it's a lot easier to rationalize that away with justifications around "cross-pollination of ideas" and being in the "intangible benefits of being an innovation center". Certainly a lot easier when you're not worried about making rent on your 400 square foot studio.
runeb 5y ago
> For almost as long as we’ve been tracking the COVID-19 pandemic, sf.citi has been closely monitoring the San Francisco tech exodus They say 63 percent of tech companies surveyed have already downsized or plan to downsize their office space in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is to be expected in a work-from-home situation like the ongoing pandemic. I don't see anything about the percentage of it being permanent rather than temporary.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I took the pie chart next to the 63% one to be about the long term. So about half fully remote or substantially remote.
- dmode 5y ago
  I am actually more surprised that 40% decided not to downsize given the WFH model that is popular now
  - ghaff 5y ago
    One thing you're not accounting for is that companies normally plan for growth--whether or not that ends up happening. I expect a lot of companies that were likely exploring real estate expansion pre-pandemic have stomped on the brakes and will wait and see. So they may or may not downsize but they probably won't expand like they normally would have.
  - ska 5y ago
    Downsizing is usually complicated and can be expensive and/or distracting. Particularly if you don't think it will last long, I can see a bunch of companies taking a wait-and-see approach.
mrwh 5y ago
My Bay Area anecdote: a lot of my colleagues left over the past year, some are staying away, most are returning/have already returned. Not nothing, not an exodus though.
chaganated 5y ago
Potentially leaky vaccine: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/02/1017161/covid-vaccine-asymptomatic-transmission-pfizer-trial/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/02/1017161/covid-va... Leaky Vaccine + Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention
verst 5y ago
Businesses shifting to partially or fully remote (the key metric surveyed in this article) isn't necessarily an exodus from SF. It just means a decline in the need for office space in SF. Additionally, other sources indicate that most SF residents who left moved to nearby areas [1]. (Those areas themselves may see their residents moving elsewhere) [1]: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/exodus-study-reveals-dramatic-san-francisco-population-change/ https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/exodus-study-reveals-dra...
- ghaff 5y ago
  That's not really surprising. A lot of people like California and, if you don't need to worry about a daily commute, that opens up a lot of options that, if not exactly cheap, aren't as eye watering as the Bay Area.
proc0 5y ago
SF is on a different level of exodus then the rest of the Bay Area, and I guess also the state. The leadership of the city forgot there are also nearby cities that aren't trying out crazy new laws and mandates that obviously make everything much worse. One of the richest, most advanced places on Earth, making civic problems worse for decades now.
ClassAndBurn 5y ago
I'm so excited for the possibility of rental prices coming down enough to support the artists and quirky businesses that used to be around. The city's consolidation into tech forced out a lot of the vibrancy that made San Francisco unique. Those people are still residents. It's just they've been unable to afford the space to enact some of the things they used to.
- astrange 5y ago
  SF didn't have a lot of tech until very recently, when they were forced out of the valley by the real gentrifying force, homeowners that won't let anyone build more homes in case it causes traffic. These are also the people making SF expensive. It's not just artists, it's their own children who can't live there, one reason SF has fewer families with children than any other city IIRC. As for quirky businesses, that's DRs and licensing. https://sf.eater.com/2021/4/22/22397615/matcha-n-more-ice-cream-store-200000-quits https://sf.eater.com/2021/4/22/22397615/matcha-n-more-ice-cr...
  - ghaff 5y ago
    A lot of people forget that many now "elite" cities weren't that popular until relatively recently. Boston was losing population until well into the 90s and there was basically no tech left there by then. When I graduated from grad school in the mid-80s, I don't think a single one of my classmates who got a job in Massachusetts lived in the city proper.
    - astrange 5y ago
      Yeah, living in cities was unpopular until about 2000 for a good reason - they were full of crime. Surprisingly it turns out giving the entire country lead poisoning was a bad idea. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur... Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual richer areas because those had all blocked new housing (actual gentrification.)
godot 5y ago
It's somewhat interesting that some numbers are based on the bay area (drop in bay area tech workers inflow/outflow, what percentage of bay area workforce will remain remote), while other numbers based on San Francisco alone (drop in SF residents, SF GDP, business tax revenue, etc.). I know that outside of California, the world views "SF" and "the bay area" mostly as one and the same. Based on anecdotes I feel like this doesn't tell the full story, though maybe it does give you a high level overview (like this site does). Among both personal friends and coworkers, ex-coworkers (from a decade+ of working in the bay area) -- surely there are people who move out of state (to Denver, Austin, Miami, etc.); but the more common trend is -- people who used to live in SF are moving out to the east bay / surrounding areas; and people who were already in the east bay before move even further away (Sacramento area, etc.). Another interesting bit -- Sacramento doesn't get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it's not supposed to be the "next sexy tech town", but in reality is a lot of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not. I moved here before the pandemic, and witnessed the housing market rise more than the east bay (where there's already an influx of SF people moving to) this past year. All I'm saying is there's a lot of nuances in this general exodus!
- dotBen 5y ago
  Keep in mind SF.citi is a policy advocate/lobbying group for San Francisco legislation rather than the Bay Area more generally. But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives these employers a tacit say and leverage. Remember if you live in Oakland or Redwood City but are employed in San Francisco city/county, some of your payroll tax is being generated to benefit the city of San Francisco even if you are not a resident there. That's why SF City is worried about SF based businesses and SF Bay Area workers. (BTW this is also why cities such as Mountain View and Cupertino want to attract large business campuses like Google and Apple but don't want to build homes - they get more income from growing payroll tax but don't then have to spend more on schools, services etc for a growing population - they shift the burden onto other cities and counties that house those workers as they then have to generate tax revenue from other means)
  - 5y ago
sharadov 5y ago
I think this so called "exodus" is temporary. Young people will come back to SF, it's the only city in the larger Bay Area which has culture and vibrancy. San Jose downtown area has plenty of potential, and it was seeing a renaissance pre-covid - google buying a lot of land and looking to expand is a good sign. I miss the SF of the early 2000s, where there was a bohemian quirkiness. Unless prices come crashing down it's highly likely any artist could sustain himself.
- htormey 5y ago
  Oakland night life isn’t that bad :)
  - nkellenicki 5y ago
    I moved from SF to Oakland last year during the pandemic, and honestly, Oakland is just as great as SF for restaurants, bars, and nightlife... as long as you have a car or method of transportation.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      That is quite a caveat. Public transportation is a must to have a cultural scene that is both vibrant and not homogeneously upper-class at scale.
      - baby 5y ago
        I’d say density is a must, and neither cities have it
        bradlys 5y ago
        SF is one of the most dense cities in the US. It’s pretty dense... If you’re expecting manhattan then that’s never going to happen and you should let people know Manhattan is the only place you consider a dense city.
webwielder2 5y ago
People and companies leave SF because it's too expensive, SF gets less expensive, people and companies come back to SF, SF gets expensive...?
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Except the difference is there's a hell of a lot more bandwidth available for telework in Colorado and Nevada than there was the last cycle.
- olyjohn 5y ago
  It's all about the short term profits. Look how much money we saved leaving SF! Then when the next execs come in it's, look how much money we saved going back to SF!
yesBoot 5y ago
Population decline was greater in 2018 and 2019 than 2020. Even then it was tenths of a percent. Are sure “exodus” is the right word?
- LimaBearz 5y ago
  It’s not. I was born and raised in the Bay Area, late 30s, have family in the city thats owned in the city proper since the 70s. My entire working career was in the peninsula, 10 of which in SOMA. I don’t want to make this political it’s always been the same story ever since I was a kid. 1 - People who want to live here but priced out hoping to come at a “reasonable” price. 2 - Conservatives looking at the massive amount of talent, money, influence, power, and an intellectual power house of the world and finding any reason to possibly hate cause… we’ll I don’t know. It’s fine. Nowhere is without issue, yes it’s gotten more expensive, but so has everyone salary. Dirty little secret to the outsiders, a lot of places are matching or competing with FAANG salaries, and even with cost of living being so high you make more in the BA then you would otherwise even after factoring out the roof over your head, in more then a few jobs by quite a healthy margin too
  - refurb 5y ago
    Most of the complaints I hear about SF are from residents and they ain’t conservatives.
llsf 5y ago
Maybe it is an opportunity to convert some commercial space into residential space and make the City more affordable ? If really so many companies are going remote, then all the commercial landlords would have to find ways to make money out of their commercial space. Any reasons that could prevent it (e.g. stringent zoning code, preventing conversion from commercial to residential) ?
- hedora 5y ago
  That would make it easier for people with money to move in. The best way to ensure fair and equitable housing is to constrain the supply as much as possible. We don’t need to worry though, the zoning and planning departments will definitely SF from the tyranny of new housing units.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  Its certainly possible to convert COM to RES but its not likely to happen at significant capacity unless the WFH trend really destroys commercial real estate. Some obstacles are the basic requirements of housing (kitchen, bathroom, windows) don't really match office space. You need lots of water/waste/electric/hvac pipes distributed across a space for residential, not the same for commercial where they can be more centralized in the floor. The space distribution is also not the same - eg. "deep" buildings are worse for residential because the ideal window frontage to room depth ratios don't match - you can have a desk or communal space very far from the window in commercial real estate and its usable, but you can't really put residential rooms far from a window because no one wants a windowless room and laws usually prevent it. Additionally, I've seen office windows that don't open but you usually need (by law) to allow opening windows for residential use (for ventilation purposes I think). This can be a VERY expensive fix. Most people also want windows that open too. On the other hand, the way these are often overcome is with huge "loft-style" apartments - very high ceiling and large spaces. The bigger window height helps with the depth issues. The big spaces are then catered to rich people, who fund the massive Reno bills. (note: historically, lofts existed because artists could bypass zoning laws to live in warehouses they used as a studio, then it became trendy)
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
101001001001 5y ago
In 2020, San Francisco’s sales tax revenue dropped by as much as 70 percent in San Francisco’s downtown, which relies heavily on restaurants and hotels. Mother of god...
jdhn 5y ago
It's kind of funny reading this, as I know someone from my Midwestern state who decided to move to SF in the middle of the pandemic. I'm curious as to what happens once everything reopens, will people move back, or is this a permanent change?
nscalf 5y ago
In my opinion, SF has peaked. I personally moved to SF during the pandemic, and am planning to move out when my lease is up. The amount of disarray in the city is wild. Crime seems to be entirely ignored, the homeless problem has exploded and there is a widespread hate if you call it for what it is: a public health and humanitarian crisis. And the most important thing that SF had to make it a tech hub has been broken and moved online: the network effect. I moved here because I felt like I didn't have a choice if I wanted to build or be part of successful startups, now I feel like living here is hindering that process. You can live anywhere and get cheaper talent across the country, pay less taxes, and have almost the same upsides.
- 762236 5y ago
  You have to live someplace with a moonlighting law to have the same upsides. Otherwise, prepare to sign a work contract where the employer owns every thought in your head, and every piece of code that you write on you own time (like when trying to make a startup on the side).
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Or just don't work for a company that has such requirements in their contracts. Just because something is allowed doesn't mean most/many/all companies do.
    - itake 5y ago
      any advice on how to filter that? Seems like I don't find out that information until I've completed a ~8 hour interview process and need to review the final employment offer. I've also never worked at a company that didn't have that clause.
      - LimaBearz 5y ago
        Bring it up during the initial contact from the recruiter. When they ask about you’re “salary requirements” is when it can be brought up. Ignore the parts on working for competitors (that’s illegal in CA anyways just let the dog be), focus on you’re property only. When listing projects and ideas last time I got the waiver even while keeping the ideas extremely vague and broadly encompassing. Having said that it isn’t required to even disclose persay. There aren’t a lot of cases of employers going after an employee unless you directly rip them off or rip off even a part of their valid IP you create. Though if you plan to take VC money at any point they’ll want to see that waiver even if it’s unrelated. If it’s open source there is substantially more leeway. I’ll let the commenters argue the pedantry. As for OP that’s a very conservative bootlicky answer, every employer has standard boilerplate language against it, you cant filter it out but you can negotiate it away. It’s not an issue usually it’s just some lawyer covering his bases. Edit: and as a side note California is special in the sense that our economy and brain power is massive. The courts know this and are very worker friendly in this regard. If the lawyers and employers had their way with their insanely restrictive contracts it would severely stifle competition and economic growth/health
mbgerring 5y ago
Important context for reading this is that sf.citi is Ron Conway's organization through which he acts as a political power broker and secures political favors for the tech industry. It is in his interest to create the impression that the tech industry in SF is experiencing some kind of crisis in order to extract money, tax breaks or other favorable treatment from the Board of Supervisors.
- x0x0 5y ago
  I'm pretty happy for anyone to hammer on this fact over and over again... > Between 2010 and 2018, San Francisco produced only one new unit of housing for every 8.5 new jobs. ps -- "securing [sic] political favors for the tech industry"... that's loaded language to refer to industry lobbying. And sf has received an enormous amount of money for the tech industry; I think it will have a really rough time if / as the industry starts locating elsewhere.
- fairity 5y ago
  Perhaps worth mentioning that the fact that someone has a hidden agenda doesn't automatically make everything they say incorrect. In this case, the article tells its story through various statistics that seem to not be cherry-picked.
rpearl 5y ago
The article they cite (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/People-are-leaving-S-F-but-not-for-Austin-or-15955527.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/People-are-leavi...) for claiming 10% of SF left is kind of misleading; 8 of the top 15 places they went to are _also_ in the bay area, and all but one was in California. "SF residents move to Oakland and Berkeley" isn't a very exciting headline though
rubyist5eva 5y ago
There is no amount of money that I would take to live in that abomination of a city.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sQL_inject 5y ago
I'd posit a unpopular viewpoint: that the attachment to the 'Bohemian' culture is more or less an unhelpful, unprogressive fixation with the past, shamelessly fueled by hypocritical NIMBYs in the city with obvious incentives regarding home value. Can anyone explain why the old SF culture is any more relevant than Byzantine culture? As an Artist and an Engineer who used to live in SF and moved south recently, I'd argue most of the folks I interacted with in this oft-cried-over demographic were more aptly described as aspiring artists, and that their net contributions to the 'culture' were mimetic and surface-level at best. If you take away the weed, bob marley shirts, and hemp shopping bags, what exactly can we say they did? None of this is to say the 'nerds' were contributing much to the culture themselves, but I don't think there's much of an argument against them other than that they're boring, rich, and talked about Apps. These same people brought in quickly consumed tax revenue which the city has gorged into in its gluttonous waste. The root of the problem is the mistrust of the 'Other,' the 'Outsider' as new folks (often Nerds) immigrate to the city, which IS a net benefit to the blending of cultures and ideas. The fixation of preserving the crumbling vestige of the past is what prevents the service level workers from ever regaining a foothold, and the scapegoat is the Nerds, when it should be the landlords and Old Guard.
- compiler-guy 5y ago
  The Beatniks; The Summer of Love. The Grateful Dead; Janis Joplin; and many, many others are all cultural touchstones of several generations of Americans and largely products of San Francisco. Many of today’s looser sexual mores got their start or took root in San Francisco, particularly around lgbtq issues. Sure, 90% of everything is crap, including San Francisco culture, but that last ten percent is a very big deal and the only reason it seems less so today is because it is so pervasive. Whereas it wasn’t before SF and environs produced it.
  - sQL_inject 5y ago
    Those are all culture adders I'd agree, my case is that those are many decades old, and the newer generation you're likely to meet are just a sort of cheap shell of what was, and there hasn't been much cultural innovation, for lack of a better word.
aerosmile 5y ago
This exodus is universally seen as a bad thing. For many stakeholders, it certainly is - restaurants, landlords, employers who need cheap labor, etc. For renters, it's a wonderful thing. For people commuting to SF on a daily basis, it's the best thing ever (either because they can move closer to work, or not commute at all and work from home, or simply deal with less traffic). I doubt that many people will disagree with these arguments. Here's the contrarian part: I think that early-stage startups might benefit as well. After the dot com boom, the only people applying to startups were the die-hards. To some extent, you also noticed a better signal to noise ratio right after the housing crisis. I have no doubt that fewer startups will be started now in SF, and that fewer local people will apply for jobs. But it was never about the quantity and instead always about finding the needle in the haystack. I think there's a chance that the size of the haystack will shrink much more quickly than the number of needles.
01100011 5y ago
What happens to tech hubs now that tech stock prices have already been priced with future growth in mind? When people like me got tech jobs 2+ years ago, stock prices were low and stock grants were set accordingly. Now, new grads are likely going to get less shares and won't see the sort of windfall that previous generations received. Will this put downward pressure on real estate prices or reduce the overall draw of the Bay Area?
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  If you worked at (eg.) FAANG 2 decades ago, someone might say said this. If you worked at FAANG a decade ago, someone might say said this. If you worked at FAANG in 2019, someone might say this. Its now 2021 and you just said this. Sure the windfall might not be what they were years ago for any one example company, but that "priced for growth" isn't a single event - people will still see some windfall since growth will probably still happen.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shinymark 5y ago
Anyone sign an office lease recently? Any negotiation tips? I’m looking for new space in SF, moving from a current lease near Union Square to something bigger.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tasty_freeze 5y ago
I lived in the south SF bay from 1985 to 2004. Things were already changing by the time I left, but it strange to hear SF being a tech center. Sure, tech workers loved visiting SF for food and culture, and some loved it enough to move there and put up with the daily commute south. Back then there were a few tech companies and tech-serving creatives (ad agencies and such), it wasn't a tech hub. My guess is that this shift occurred in unison from the shift away from hardware startups (requiring deep-pocketed investors) to the current game of funding hundreds of small software/web startups and hoping one of them makes it big enough to pay for the losses of all the others. Note I'm not saying the good old days were better or worse, just different.
egypturnash 5y ago
Oh good, the city I left Seattle for a couple years ago is not mentioned anywhere on this list. My rent has one less factor to push it into unaffordability.
gerash 5y ago
[Anecdote]: pros of SF bay area is that it is a large metro area where tons of businesses have point of presence. No complaints re. the climate and the geography. However crime and overall cleanliness are bad even though the cities must be rich with cash and this is coming from someone who used to live in a "third world" country (even though the term original usage wasn't about wealth). So some meaningful changes in policy need to happen.
kordlessagain 5y ago
If you want a $15 salad for lunch from a crappy salad chain, just work in SF! You'll few lines and plenty of outdoor seating all to yourself.
tqi 5y ago
If you stay, you're a gentrifier. If you leave, then it shows you were never committed to this place anyway. Why wouldn't you stay?
justinzollars 5y ago
I see a lot of skepticism about the Tech Exodus (techxodus?) in this thread but what I see is very real. The city is dead. It's a ghost town. The vibe went from amazing to pretty scary. Many of my friends have left for good. Moving to Texas, Florida, Hawaii, New York, Arizona and they all have no plans to return. Personally, I still, deep down inside really love California, even though its become a high tax hell hole. But I still love it. I love the climate, I love the topology of the area, I love the opportunity. The big Silicon Valley players will stay. Apple isn't going anywhere, Netflix, etc etc. So I've decided to get out of the city. So I'm moving to Silicon Valley to get away from the problems that are spinning out of control in the city. Personally I'm pessimistic about this decade and I see the way things are trending in the city. I just don't want to be there anymore. Its not a happy place, so the numbers outlined in this article aren't really that surprising.
likeabbas 5y ago
I never enjoyed SF or the Bay Area. I reluctantly moved there for work. I'm very glad the pandemic gave me an opening to leave :)

228 points by kyleblarson 5y ago

Long overdue.

There is now enough vacant office space in San Francisco to give every homeless person in the city 2000 square feet. (From the article: 16 Million square feet of vacant office space, and a quick Google search gave me a homeless population of 8000)

fleshdaddy 5y ago
Is that an accurate count? That actually sounds surprisingly low. I figured it was quite a bit higher.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  - The reported SF outdoors homeless numbers vary from 5,000 - 10,000 - But it depends on what data you have and how you slice it: - 60% of the $300 - $350 million homeless budget goes to welfare rentals (single women and moms are eligible for that, rarely men), so that's 15,000+ adults plus children alone - there's probably more than 10,000 on the street, and growing daily as average rents are over $3,500/month now. As you can see, with a population of only 500,000 and almost 5% of thoe homeless, SF has a major problem. What the EU learned from African economic migration is that once somebody is in their regionn, authoriities have to process them one by one, which can take years per case. So once a city gets behind, there's no good story.
- katabatic 5y ago
  That's nearly 1% of the population of San Francisco. It's already shockingly high.
umeshunni 5y ago
There's always enough X in San Francisco to give every homeless person X/n of it. What's lacking in San Francisco is the political will to do anything meaningful about homelessness (or crime, or the housing crisis, or infrastructure, or the schools or anything other than vague virtue signaling)
- throwkeep 5y ago
  To their credit, they've found new ways of using resources in the most inefficient way possible. "San Francisco is paying $16.1 million to shelter homeless people in 262 tents placed in empty lots around the city where they also get services and food — a steep price tag that amounts to more than $61,000 per tent per year." https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-year-for-one-tent-to-house-16001074.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...
  - admax88q 5y ago
    At that cost they could just pay the homeless 61k per year and they could rent their own homes
    - ngokevin 5y ago
      While I imagine there are a lot of detractors here, I like universal basic income. We could try to slice it and have a system to pick and choose who gets it, but as we've seen, the waste that goes into the bureaucracy when it's not just "give everyone a check".
    - rgblambda 5y ago
      That was my first thought as well but then remembered that often the reason for homelessness is mental health issues. Many homeless people are just incapable of taking care of themselves. e.g. not paying rent/bills when they physically have the money to do so, gambling addict so getting into massive amounts of debt, getting evicted due to antisocial behaviour/vandalism of property.
pengaru 5y ago
Isn't it already well established SF has far more space allocated to jobs than housing for the workers? In other news, the sky is blue, and water is wet.
woah 5y ago
I always wonder what the point of these comparisons is. Can you imagine cramming 8000 homeless people with hardcore drug addictions and untreated mental illness in a vacant office tower?
- unixhero 5y ago
  It would make for a hellofa janitor survival simulator game. Maybe as a story pack to SimTower.
- astrange 5y ago
  Note most of them aren't homeless because they did drugs, they're doing drugs because they're homeless because they lost their homes. Ain't nothing else to do.
  - mycologos 5y ago
    I was curious about this claim. A 2004 study of ~500 homeless adults in Pennsylvania found that roughly 70% reported that they did not use more drugs after becoming homeless, though about 80% reported regularly using drugs [1]. But there are other studies that claim the opposite, for example this 1990 study of ~1400 homeless adults in California that finds "[p]revalences of alcohol abuse, illegal drug use, and psychiatric hospitalization when adults first became homeless were 15% to 33% lower than prevalences following homelessness". But it's hard to dig into the second result, because the paper is paywalled, like most of the papers about this topic. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448345/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448345/ [2] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.10.1394 https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.10...
spoonjim 5y ago
What’s your prediction for the outcome of doing that? Parceling the office space into 2,000 square foot spaces and giving them free of charge to each homeless person in SF? Please be specific.
paxys 5y ago
What would a homeless person do with an office?
- sky_rw 5y ago
  Start a SoLoMo app company, obviously.
Decker87 5y ago
That's great to hear!

eplanit 5y ago

"San Francisco’s office vacancy rate has risen to 19.7 percent" Wow -- when I was there in the "dot-com boom" of the late '90s and early '00s, such a vacancy rate was unheard of (it was 0.5% for housing, and similar for commercial real estate). Oh well, they've earned this outcome.

jeffbee 5y ago
What's awful is asking rents have barely budged. Peaked at around $85/sf, now around $75/sf. The landlords can afford to just sit on inventory.
- brdd 5y ago
  Totally false. We saw many commercial units between $35-50/sf IG and just signed on one at $37/sf.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    "At the first quarter of 2021, the overall citywide asking rent was $73.76 per square foot (psf) down 12.0% from the peak of $83.82 psf with the Class A citywide figure at $77.66 psf, down 10.0% from $86.31 psf,. Direct space continues to be marketed at near record levels for the time being with the citywide Class A direct asking rent at $84.47 psf and the CBD Class A direct asking rent at $85.71 psf" — Cushman and Wakefield "Totally false" — Internet rando
    - jedberg 5y ago
      > Cushman and Wakefield Aka a company with a vested interest in convincing you that the $75 price they are offering you is totally in line with the average and it's really good and you should just take it.
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        But an anecdote about a class-C storefront on 7th street is more reliable?

spamizbad 5y ago

Good? Always seemed problematic so much tech was all tied up in SF and the Bay Area.

ardit33 5y ago
It is the only true city in the area, where younger people can have a urban lifestyle... the rest is depressing suburbia.... San Jose, and the rest feels like a cultural grave. The only other town that is walkable is Berkley, but that is too small for hosting large companies. Also, parts of Oakland, but the city itself has major governance issues, and crime in general. I think NYC and Austin are booming right now. While nyc is a world class city, the 'progressives' have taken over the NY State legislation, and personally it is worrying. While some of the legislation might be long overdue, and good, there are many parts of the 'progressive' movement that is just nihilistic, and destructive in the long run and it might end up goin the route of SF. So, this year will be the wait and see year on how NY will move forward. If it goes the way of SF (with destructive policies) it might not look good. But, NYC-ers are more rational, and both of the leading candidates for Mayor seem to be more in the centrist, or center left camp, and the far left / super progressive ones are not doing well.
- thereare5lights 5y ago
  > and crime in general That's no different in SF
  - cyberbanjo 5y ago
    I thought Oakland was worse
    - neltnerb 5y ago
      Oakland is a big place. It varies by neighborhood same as San Francisco. Most is fine, certainly no worse than the Tenderloin.
      - 5y ago

sneak 5y ago

It always struck me as odd that a culture so interested in the internet and data and disrupting existing cash flows would itself dictate a system in which so, so much cash flows from VCs to paychecks to landowners in one single metro.

jeffbee 5y ago
Surprise: the landlords are in charge of local government.
- sneak 5y ago
  Yeah, but AFAIK there isn't huge overlap between the VC funds and the landowners, unless there's some hidden corporate structure of which I am unaware. It would be quite silly (and clever) for VC LPs to start buying up residential properties, knowing that their funding rounds go right into payroll and then right into SFBA rents and back into their pockets. :D
  - jedberg 5y ago
    YC actually considered this (jokingly I think, but maybe not?). They realized that many of their startups were living in just a couple of high rises in San Francisco.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    I don't think it's directly this malicious. I think it's more just a blindspot. If you're a 40-something partner at a major VC firm, who bought his home in Palo Alto in 2005, then the "cost of living" is largely invisible to you. Sure you may have a sizable chunk of home equity locked up, but that's not a monthly cash flow issue. Intellectually you know that being located in the Bay Area is a major burden to the ramen-eating startup founders that you fund. But it's a lot easier to rationalize that away with justifications around "cross-pollination of ideas" and being in the "intangible benefits of being an innovation center". Certainly a lot easier when you're not worried about making rent on your 400 square foot studio.

runeb 5y ago

> For almost as long as we’ve been tracking the COVID-19 pandemic, sf.citi has been closely monitoring the San Francisco tech exodus They say 63 percent of tech companies surveyed have already downsized or plan to downsize their office space in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is to be expected in a work-from-home situation like the ongoing pandemic. I don't see anything about the percentage of it being permanent rather than temporary.

ghaff 5y ago
I took the pie chart next to the 63% one to be about the long term. So about half fully remote or substantially remote.
dmode 5y ago
I am actually more surprised that 40% decided not to downsize given the WFH model that is popular now
- ghaff 5y ago
  One thing you're not accounting for is that companies normally plan for growth--whether or not that ends up happening. I expect a lot of companies that were likely exploring real estate expansion pre-pandemic have stomped on the brakes and will wait and see. So they may or may not downsize but they probably won't expand like they normally would have.
- ska 5y ago
  Downsizing is usually complicated and can be expensive and/or distracting. Particularly if you don't think it will last long, I can see a bunch of companies taking a wait-and-see approach.

mrwh 5y ago

My Bay Area anecdote: a lot of my colleagues left over the past year, some are staying away, most are returning/have already returned. Not nothing, not an exodus though.

chaganated 5y ago

Potentially leaky vaccine: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/02/1017161/covid-vaccine-asymptomatic-transmission-pfizer-trial/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/02/1017161/covid-va... Leaky Vaccine + Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention

verst 5y ago

Businesses shifting to partially or fully remote (the key metric surveyed in this article) isn't necessarily an exodus from SF. It just means a decline in the need for office space in SF. Additionally, other sources indicate that most SF residents who left moved to nearby areas [1]. (Those areas themselves may see their residents moving elsewhere) [1]: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/exodus-study-reveals-dramatic-san-francisco-population-change/ https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/exodus-study-reveals-dra...

ghaff 5y ago
That's not really surprising. A lot of people like California and, if you don't need to worry about a daily commute, that opens up a lot of options that, if not exactly cheap, aren't as eye watering as the Bay Area.

proc0 5y ago

SF is on a different level of exodus then the rest of the Bay Area, and I guess also the state. The leadership of the city forgot there are also nearby cities that aren't trying out crazy new laws and mandates that obviously make everything much worse. One of the richest, most advanced places on Earth, making civic problems worse for decades now.

ClassAndBurn 5y ago

I'm so excited for the possibility of rental prices coming down enough to support the artists and quirky businesses that used to be around. The city's consolidation into tech forced out a lot of the vibrancy that made San Francisco unique. Those people are still residents. It's just they've been unable to afford the space to enact some of the things they used to.

astrange 5y ago
SF didn't have a lot of tech until very recently, when they were forced out of the valley by the real gentrifying force, homeowners that won't let anyone build more homes in case it causes traffic. These are also the people making SF expensive. It's not just artists, it's their own children who can't live there, one reason SF has fewer families with children than any other city IIRC. As for quirky businesses, that's DRs and licensing. https://sf.eater.com/2021/4/22/22397615/matcha-n-more-ice-cream-store-200000-quits https://sf.eater.com/2021/4/22/22397615/matcha-n-more-ice-cr...
- ghaff 5y ago
  A lot of people forget that many now "elite" cities weren't that popular until relatively recently. Boston was losing population until well into the 90s and there was basically no tech left there by then. When I graduated from grad school in the mid-80s, I don't think a single one of my classmates who got a job in Massachusetts lived in the city proper.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Yeah, living in cities was unpopular until about 2000 for a good reason - they were full of crime. Surprisingly it turns out giving the entire country lead poisoning was a bad idea. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur... Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual richer areas because those had all blocked new housing (actual gentrification.)

godot 5y ago

It's somewhat interesting that some numbers are based on the bay area (drop in bay area tech workers inflow/outflow, what percentage of bay area workforce will remain remote), while other numbers based on San Francisco alone (drop in SF residents, SF GDP, business tax revenue, etc.). I know that outside of California, the world views "SF" and "the bay area" mostly as one and the same. Based on anecdotes I feel like this doesn't tell the full story, though maybe it does give you a high level overview (like this site does). Among both personal friends and coworkers, ex-coworkers (from a decade+ of working in the bay area) -- surely there are people who move out of state (to Denver, Austin, Miami, etc.); but the more common trend is -- people who used to live in SF are moving out to the east bay / surrounding areas; and people who were already in the east bay before move even further away (Sacramento area, etc.). Another interesting bit -- Sacramento doesn't get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it's not supposed to be the "next sexy tech town", but in reality is a lot of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not. I moved here before the pandemic, and witnessed the housing market rise more than the east bay (where there's already an influx of SF people moving to) this past year. All I'm saying is there's a lot of nuances in this general exodus!

dotBen 5y ago
Keep in mind SF.citi is a policy advocate/lobbying group for San Francisco legislation rather than the Bay Area more generally. But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives these employers a tacit say and leverage. Remember if you live in Oakland or Redwood City but are employed in San Francisco city/county, some of your payroll tax is being generated to benefit the city of San Francisco even if you are not a resident there. That's why SF City is worried about SF based businesses and SF Bay Area workers. (BTW this is also why cities such as Mountain View and Cupertino want to attract large business campuses like Google and Apple but don't want to build homes - they get more income from growing payroll tax but don't then have to spend more on schools, services etc for a growing population - they shift the burden onto other cities and counties that house those workers as they then have to generate tax revenue from other means)
- 5y ago

sharadov 5y ago

I think this so called "exodus" is temporary. Young people will come back to SF, it's the only city in the larger Bay Area which has culture and vibrancy. San Jose downtown area has plenty of potential, and it was seeing a renaissance pre-covid - google buying a lot of land and looking to expand is a good sign. I miss the SF of the early 2000s, where there was a bohemian quirkiness. Unless prices come crashing down it's highly likely any artist could sustain himself.

htormey 5y ago
Oakland night life isn’t that bad :)
- nkellenicki 5y ago
  I moved from SF to Oakland last year during the pandemic, and honestly, Oakland is just as great as SF for restaurants, bars, and nightlife... as long as you have a car or method of transportation.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    That is quite a caveat. Public transportation is a must to have a cultural scene that is both vibrant and not homogeneously upper-class at scale.
    - baby 5y ago
      I’d say density is a must, and neither cities have it
      - bradlys 5y ago
        SF is one of the most dense cities in the US. It’s pretty dense... If you’re expecting manhattan then that’s never going to happen and you should let people know Manhattan is the only place you consider a dense city.

webwielder2 5y ago

People and companies leave SF because it's too expensive, SF gets less expensive, people and companies come back to SF, SF gets expensive...?

dcolkitt 5y ago
Except the difference is there's a hell of a lot more bandwidth available for telework in Colorado and Nevada than there was the last cycle.
olyjohn 5y ago
It's all about the short term profits. Look how much money we saved leaving SF! Then when the next execs come in it's, look how much money we saved going back to SF!

yesBoot 5y ago

Population decline was greater in 2018 and 2019 than 2020. Even then it was tenths of a percent. Are sure “exodus” is the right word?

LimaBearz 5y ago
It’s not. I was born and raised in the Bay Area, late 30s, have family in the city thats owned in the city proper since the 70s. My entire working career was in the peninsula, 10 of which in SOMA. I don’t want to make this political it’s always been the same story ever since I was a kid. 1 - People who want to live here but priced out hoping to come at a “reasonable” price. 2 - Conservatives looking at the massive amount of talent, money, influence, power, and an intellectual power house of the world and finding any reason to possibly hate cause… we’ll I don’t know. It’s fine. Nowhere is without issue, yes it’s gotten more expensive, but so has everyone salary. Dirty little secret to the outsiders, a lot of places are matching or competing with FAANG salaries, and even with cost of living being so high you make more in the BA then you would otherwise even after factoring out the roof over your head, in more then a few jobs by quite a healthy margin too
- refurb 5y ago
  Most of the complaints I hear about SF are from residents and they ain’t conservatives.

llsf 5y ago

Maybe it is an opportunity to convert some commercial space into residential space and make the City more affordable ? If really so many companies are going remote, then all the commercial landlords would have to find ways to make money out of their commercial space. Any reasons that could prevent it (e.g. stringent zoning code, preventing conversion from commercial to residential) ?

hedora 5y ago
That would make it easier for people with money to move in. The best way to ensure fair and equitable housing is to constrain the supply as much as possible. We don’t need to worry though, the zoning and planning departments will definitely SF from the tyranny of new housing units.
vineyardmike 5y ago
Its certainly possible to convert COM to RES but its not likely to happen at significant capacity unless the WFH trend really destroys commercial real estate. Some obstacles are the basic requirements of housing (kitchen, bathroom, windows) don't really match office space. You need lots of water/waste/electric/hvac pipes distributed across a space for residential, not the same for commercial where they can be more centralized in the floor. The space distribution is also not the same - eg. "deep" buildings are worse for residential because the ideal window frontage to room depth ratios don't match - you can have a desk or communal space very far from the window in commercial real estate and its usable, but you can't really put residential rooms far from a window because no one wants a windowless room and laws usually prevent it. Additionally, I've seen office windows that don't open but you usually need (by law) to allow opening windows for residential use (for ventilation purposes I think). This can be a VERY expensive fix. Most people also want windows that open too. On the other hand, the way these are often overcome is with huge "loft-style" apartments - very high ceiling and large spaces. The bigger window height helps with the depth issues. The big spaces are then catered to rich people, who fund the massive Reno bills. (note: historically, lofts existed because artists could bypass zoning laws to live in warehouses they used as a studio, then it became trendy)
- 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

101001001001 5y ago

In 2020, San Francisco’s sales tax revenue dropped by as much as 70 percent in San Francisco’s downtown, which relies heavily on restaurants and hotels. Mother of god...

jdhn 5y ago

It's kind of funny reading this, as I know someone from my Midwestern state who decided to move to SF in the middle of the pandemic. I'm curious as to what happens once everything reopens, will people move back, or is this a permanent change?

nscalf 5y ago

In my opinion, SF has peaked. I personally moved to SF during the pandemic, and am planning to move out when my lease is up. The amount of disarray in the city is wild. Crime seems to be entirely ignored, the homeless problem has exploded and there is a widespread hate if you call it for what it is: a public health and humanitarian crisis. And the most important thing that SF had to make it a tech hub has been broken and moved online: the network effect. I moved here because I felt like I didn't have a choice if I wanted to build or be part of successful startups, now I feel like living here is hindering that process. You can live anywhere and get cheaper talent across the country, pay less taxes, and have almost the same upsides.

762236 5y ago
You have to live someplace with a moonlighting law to have the same upsides. Otherwise, prepare to sign a work contract where the employer owns every thought in your head, and every piece of code that you write on you own time (like when trying to make a startup on the side).
- ghaff 5y ago
  Or just don't work for a company that has such requirements in their contracts. Just because something is allowed doesn't mean most/many/all companies do.
  - itake 5y ago
    any advice on how to filter that? Seems like I don't find out that information until I've completed a ~8 hour interview process and need to review the final employment offer. I've also never worked at a company that didn't have that clause.
    - LimaBearz 5y ago
      Bring it up during the initial contact from the recruiter. When they ask about you’re “salary requirements” is when it can be brought up. Ignore the parts on working for competitors (that’s illegal in CA anyways just let the dog be), focus on you’re property only. When listing projects and ideas last time I got the waiver even while keeping the ideas extremely vague and broadly encompassing. Having said that it isn’t required to even disclose persay. There aren’t a lot of cases of employers going after an employee unless you directly rip them off or rip off even a part of their valid IP you create. Though if you plan to take VC money at any point they’ll want to see that waiver even if it’s unrelated. If it’s open source there is substantially more leeway. I’ll let the commenters argue the pedantry. As for OP that’s a very conservative bootlicky answer, every employer has standard boilerplate language against it, you cant filter it out but you can negotiate it away. It’s not an issue usually it’s just some lawyer covering his bases. Edit: and as a side note California is special in the sense that our economy and brain power is massive. The courts know this and are very worker friendly in this regard. If the lawyers and employers had their way with their insanely restrictive contracts it would severely stifle competition and economic growth/health

mbgerring 5y ago

Important context for reading this is that sf.citi is Ron Conway's organization through which he acts as a political power broker and secures political favors for the tech industry. It is in his interest to create the impression that the tech industry in SF is experiencing some kind of crisis in order to extract money, tax breaks or other favorable treatment from the Board of Supervisors.

x0x0 5y ago
I'm pretty happy for anyone to hammer on this fact over and over again... > Between 2010 and 2018, San Francisco produced only one new unit of housing for every 8.5 new jobs. ps -- "securing [sic] political favors for the tech industry"... that's loaded language to refer to industry lobbying. And sf has received an enormous amount of money for the tech industry; I think it will have a really rough time if / as the industry starts locating elsewhere.
fairity 5y ago
Perhaps worth mentioning that the fact that someone has a hidden agenda doesn't automatically make everything they say incorrect. In this case, the article tells its story through various statistics that seem to not be cherry-picked.

rpearl 5y ago

The article they cite (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/People-are-leaving-S-F-but-not-for-Austin-or-15955527.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/People-are-leavi...) for claiming 10% of SF left is kind of misleading; 8 of the top 15 places they went to are _also_ in the bay area, and all but one was in California. "SF residents move to Oakland and Berkeley" isn't a very exciting headline though

rubyist5eva 5y ago

There is no amount of money that I would take to live in that abomination of a city.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sQL_inject 5y ago

I'd posit a unpopular viewpoint: that the attachment to the 'Bohemian' culture is more or less an unhelpful, unprogressive fixation with the past, shamelessly fueled by hypocritical NIMBYs in the city with obvious incentives regarding home value. Can anyone explain why the old SF culture is any more relevant than Byzantine culture? As an Artist and an Engineer who used to live in SF and moved south recently, I'd argue most of the folks I interacted with in this oft-cried-over demographic were more aptly described as aspiring artists, and that their net contributions to the 'culture' were mimetic and surface-level at best. If you take away the weed, bob marley shirts, and hemp shopping bags, what exactly can we say they did? None of this is to say the 'nerds' were contributing much to the culture themselves, but I don't think there's much of an argument against them other than that they're boring, rich, and talked about Apps. These same people brought in quickly consumed tax revenue which the city has gorged into in its gluttonous waste. The root of the problem is the mistrust of the 'Other,' the 'Outsider' as new folks (often Nerds) immigrate to the city, which IS a net benefit to the blending of cultures and ideas. The fixation of preserving the crumbling vestige of the past is what prevents the service level workers from ever regaining a foothold, and the scapegoat is the Nerds, when it should be the landlords and Old Guard.

compiler-guy 5y ago
The Beatniks; The Summer of Love. The Grateful Dead; Janis Joplin; and many, many others are all cultural touchstones of several generations of Americans and largely products of San Francisco. Many of today’s looser sexual mores got their start or took root in San Francisco, particularly around lgbtq issues. Sure, 90% of everything is crap, including San Francisco culture, but that last ten percent is a very big deal and the only reason it seems less so today is because it is so pervasive. Whereas it wasn’t before SF and environs produced it.
- sQL_inject 5y ago
  Those are all culture adders I'd agree, my case is that those are many decades old, and the newer generation you're likely to meet are just a sort of cheap shell of what was, and there hasn't been much cultural innovation, for lack of a better word.

aerosmile 5y ago

This exodus is universally seen as a bad thing. For many stakeholders, it certainly is - restaurants, landlords, employers who need cheap labor, etc. For renters, it's a wonderful thing. For people commuting to SF on a daily basis, it's the best thing ever (either because they can move closer to work, or not commute at all and work from home, or simply deal with less traffic). I doubt that many people will disagree with these arguments. Here's the contrarian part: I think that early-stage startups might benefit as well. After the dot com boom, the only people applying to startups were the die-hards. To some extent, you also noticed a better signal to noise ratio right after the housing crisis. I have no doubt that fewer startups will be started now in SF, and that fewer local people will apply for jobs. But it was never about the quantity and instead always about finding the needle in the haystack. I think there's a chance that the size of the haystack will shrink much more quickly than the number of needles.

01100011 5y ago

What happens to tech hubs now that tech stock prices have already been priced with future growth in mind? When people like me got tech jobs 2+ years ago, stock prices were low and stock grants were set accordingly. Now, new grads are likely going to get less shares and won't see the sort of windfall that previous generations received. Will this put downward pressure on real estate prices or reduce the overall draw of the Bay Area?

vineyardmike 5y ago
If you worked at (eg.) FAANG 2 decades ago, someone might say said this. If you worked at FAANG a decade ago, someone might say said this. If you worked at FAANG in 2019, someone might say this. Its now 2021 and you just said this. Sure the windfall might not be what they were years ago for any one example company, but that "priced for growth" isn't a single event - people will still see some windfall since growth will probably still happen.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

shinymark 5y ago

Anyone sign an office lease recently? Any negotiation tips? I’m looking for new space in SF, moving from a current lease near Union Square to something bigger.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tasty_freeze 5y ago

I lived in the south SF bay from 1985 to 2004. Things were already changing by the time I left, but it strange to hear SF being a tech center. Sure, tech workers loved visiting SF for food and culture, and some loved it enough to move there and put up with the daily commute south. Back then there were a few tech companies and tech-serving creatives (ad agencies and such), it wasn't a tech hub. My guess is that this shift occurred in unison from the shift away from hardware startups (requiring deep-pocketed investors) to the current game of funding hundreds of small software/web startups and hoping one of them makes it big enough to pay for the losses of all the others. Note I'm not saying the good old days were better or worse, just different.

egypturnash 5y ago

Oh good, the city I left Seattle for a couple years ago is not mentioned anywhere on this list. My rent has one less factor to push it into unaffordability.

gerash 5y ago

[Anecdote]: pros of SF bay area is that it is a large metro area where tons of businesses have point of presence. No complaints re. the climate and the geography. However crime and overall cleanliness are bad even though the cities must be rich with cash and this is coming from someone who used to live in a "third world" country (even though the term original usage wasn't about wealth). So some meaningful changes in policy need to happen.

kordlessagain 5y ago

If you want a $15 salad for lunch from a crappy salad chain, just work in SF! You'll few lines and plenty of outdoor seating all to yourself.

tqi 5y ago

If you stay, you're a gentrifier. If you leave, then it shows you were never committed to this place anyway. Why wouldn't you stay?

justinzollars 5y ago

I see a lot of skepticism about the Tech Exodus (techxodus?) in this thread but what I see is very real. The city is dead. It's a ghost town. The vibe went from amazing to pretty scary. Many of my friends have left for good. Moving to Texas, Florida, Hawaii, New York, Arizona and they all have no plans to return. Personally, I still, deep down inside really love California, even though its become a high tax hell hole. But I still love it. I love the climate, I love the topology of the area, I love the opportunity. The big Silicon Valley players will stay. Apple isn't going anywhere, Netflix, etc etc. So I've decided to get out of the city. So I'm moving to Silicon Valley to get away from the problems that are spinning out of control in the city. Personally I'm pessimistic about this decade and I see the way things are trending in the city. I just don't want to be there anymore. Its not a happy place, so the numbers outlined in this article aren't really that surprising.

likeabbas 5y ago

I never enjoyed SF or the Bay Area. I reluctantly moved there for work. I'm very glad the pandemic gave me an opening to leave :)