11 ms·

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 consolid

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.)
    - peder 5y ago
      Cities are full of crime again today. Is it a problem with lead? Or is it a larger condition of cities in the Americas?
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        Most American cities are way, way below early 1990s violent crime levels, San Francisco included. SF had three times more homicides in 1993 than in 2019.
        astrange 5y ago
        It went up a lot in 2020, quite possibly as a reaction to unemployment and especially not having anything else to do. But yes, before that it was limited to a few hotspots like St Louis which still had environmental lead problems. Meanwhile DC in 1990 was more dangerous than the Iraq War.
        rufus_foreman 5y ago
        You saw around a 30% increase in homicide rates in large cities last year, and that increase began suddenly at the beginning of June. No environmental cause like exposure to lead can cause that. The Mother Jones article referenced above is arguing that the most effective thing that can be done to combat crime is lead abatement, I think that argument has taken a fatal hit. Some cities are in fact seeing homicide rates close to or even above the 1990s rates, that happened suddenly and it happened after leaded gasoline had been banned for 45 years. You can't explain the massive increase in homicide in large cities in 2020 using environmental factors like lead, the cause has to be cultural or political.
        crooked-v 5y ago
        Or, you know, the whole "massive upheaval of lifestyles caused by a pandemic and the responses to it" thing.
        5y ago
  - cbm-vic-20 5y ago
    At the time there were a lot more tech companies out along Routes 128 and 495. This is still true today, but now the balance has shifted to Boston and Camberville.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Yeah, all the minicomputer companies (which is where most of us went to work after school). I'd have actually considered living in Cambridge at the time but it would have been something like a 45 minute (reverse) commute whereas I had about a 5 minute commute until I bought a house. Depending upon how you characterize tech, there's still a lot in the northern and western suburbs, especially if you include the defense contractors. But, yes, there's now a lot in Cambridge and the Seaport, especially, as well as all the biotech/pharma in and near Kendall Square.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Is there a good article that describes how / why / when the startup scene moved from the South Bay to San Francisco? I'm not too familiar with the startup scene before 2010. But from what I know, it was mostly established in its current form before the Dot Com boom. It seems like HP, Cisco, Intel, Apple, Oracle, Sun, Adobe, Intuit, & Yahoo! where part of one movement. eBay, PayPal, Google, Facebook & Netflix obviously added to that. But now all the newer companies are coming from SF - SalesForce, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, Yelp, Splunk, Dropbox, Square, Instagram (originally), Slack, StichFix, Postmates, Instacart, GitHub, Robinhood, Coinbase, etc. The only recent, pretty big startups in the South Bay I can think of are LinkedIn and Quora. YouTube - from San Bruno - is kind of in the middle. The rest are subsidiaries. I mean, the OG companies like Apple and Google and Facebook are so big that they dwarf the rest of the startups in the Bay by themselves. So in a sense, the Silicon Valley still feels like the Peninsula. But the startup scene definitely seems to have shifted.
  - clpm4j 5y ago
    A seemingly significant part of it is because the young talent wants to live in SF and not commute 1+ hours to an office park in the South Bay. I think SF also offered incentives for tech companies to set up shop in the city in the 2009-2012 time range... https://www.wired.com/story/no-more-deals-san-francisco-considers-raising-taxes-tech/ https://www.wired.com/story/no-more-deals-san-francisco-cons...
    - ghaff 5y ago
      It also generally became trendy for that demographic to live in (certain) cities after they graduate. My company set up an office in the Seaport (partially) for that reason because our main location an hour west of Boston was a deal-killer for some people.
      - clpm4j 5y ago
        That's certainly true. A career in tech became widely popular and trendy for millenials and now zoomers (I believe CS is now the most popular undergraduate major across US colleges?). Basically once people realized you can make more money in tech than on Wall St, a percentage of new grads who would have moved to NYC diverted for SF.
- thatfrenchguy 5y ago
  Some of it is immigration too: if you come from Paris or Berlin, you’re not going to want to move to Mountain View, given how ridiculously boring the peninsula is.
  - astrange 5y ago
    If your employer's in South Bay you might as well live there. It's easier to commute to fun than commute to work.
  - bradlys 5y ago
    San Carlos disagrees. Plenty of Europeans love this place.
  - w0mbat 5y ago
    After growing up in central London, Silicon Valley was awesome. No more waiting for the bus, just drive everywhere, parking is easy, everywhere is safe. If you live in downtown Mountain View or Sunnyvale you can walk down the street to pubs and restaurants. Why live in SF with constant crime, begging and no parking, and a giant commute to Apple or Google?
- Lammy 5y ago
  > 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 Protip: Anti-housing activists will never tell you their real motivations: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/blacks_chart_watermark_final.png https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/blacks_ch...
- idiot900 5y ago
  And perhaps that new construction will reduce the market value of their homes, which they don't have to pay property taxes on and therefore regard as a substantial store of value.
fnord77 5y ago
there's been a few new "below market rate" apartment and condos being built. Most all condo developments have BMR units but some of the new ones are 100% BMR
sharadov 5y ago
This is something that really bothers me - all those billions of dollars of tech money and you cannot find a way to house and support artists. New York billionaires have always found a way to support artistic endeavors. Case in point - Bloomberg, he personally donated a lot.
- Kalium 5y ago
  How many billions of dollars of tech money, in your opinion, is enough to find a way to house and support people in a city where planning is fundamentally structured around finding ways to not house people?
  - rcpt 5y ago
    In California you can get whatever crazy thing you want passed with O($10M). I bet $1B could get even Prop 13 overturned which would solve the housing disaster overnight.
    - Kalium 5y ago
      2020's Prop 19 to reform property taxes just a bit had about $20 million behind it, and it didn't even land on the ballot. SF would need to gut its entire permitting system. Today, it can't even make small and incremental improvements: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Is-proposal-to-cut-S-F-red-tape-dead-Supporters-16186763.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Is-p...
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        $20m and $1b is a significant difference.
        Kalium 5y ago
        You're absolutely right. That is a significant difference. My point was that O($10m) isn't even enough to reliably land something on the ballot, much less get whatever crazy thing you want passed. This of course being distinct from undoing Prop 13.
hindsightbias 5y ago
All the great eras of any city were gritty. You can't have that with a generation of SodaSopans.
paxys 5y ago
Rents are already rapidly going back up since their lows late last year, so don't hold your breath.
darth_avocado 5y ago
Tech didn't out price the people, nimby politics did. Average home owners in San Francisco have been owners for about 14 years. [1] Any new development basically hits a brick wall unless it's on a radioactive dump or ultra expensive downtown. You all remember the famous laundromat saga, those were not tech workers preventing new housing, the locals were. [2] Anti gentrification policies almost always end up displacing the populations they are meant to protect. You don't want new apartments in a specific area because it may bring in newer crowds? Well guess what, those crowds will come any way, and now they can out price the people who live there. Rent control is another problem, because long time residents won't move. And with no new inventory, the prices for pretty much any apartment that enters the market goes sky high. It's not the tech workers who displace the locals, they are anyway hunting for apartments in a different price range from the locals. It's the locals now just budgeting higher portions of their income towards rent and displacing other locals. This is exactly what happened in Berlin. [3] And last but not the least, I think despite the nostalgia and how we remember SF differently from what it is now, yes there were quirky businesses all around. But there were only specific parts of the city that had them and quite frankly a lot of them just used to be replaced by newer businesses every couple of years. But what happened at some point was too much bureaucracy, red tape and politics crept into the cost of starting a business that now you have to sink almost a quarter of a million dollars before you can even start an ice cream shop. [4] It was partly the "locals" who created these problems. [1] https://journal.firsttuesday.us/california-homeowners-are-staying-put-for-longer/70178/ https://journal.firsttuesday.us/california-homeowners-are-st... [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/08/21/san-francisco-sued-by-historic-laundromat-owner.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/08/21/san... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin-s-rent-controls-are-proving-to-be-the-disaster-we-feared https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin... [4] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-ice-cream-shop-hopeful-sees-dreams-melted-by-16116082.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-...
- jonahhorowitz 5y ago
  The laundromat saga happened largely because the owner of the laundromat was a jerk. You may think politics shouldn't work like that, that they rules should be based on the law and not who you are, but in San Francisco, that isn't how it works. I'm not defending it, but the laundromat was very much an example of a guy from Marin being a total jerk and then throwing a tantrum when he didn't get what he wanted.
dionidium 5y ago
Millions of people eat McDonald's hamburgers every day and we all understand why that drives the price of hamburgers down, not up. Demand doesn't make prices go up all on its own. The problem isn't demand; it's supply. The lack of supply is a policy choice -- emphasis on choice*; it's not a natural law -- and you've located the blame 90 degrees to its actual cause: existing homeowners* who benefit by restricting that supply. People should be mad, but not at 22-year-olds coming from around the country looking for work. They should be mad at the millionaire rentiers who tell those kids when they show up that it's illegal for anybody to build them housing.

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.)
  - peder 5y ago
    Cities are full of crime again today. Is it a problem with lead? Or is it a larger condition of cities in the Americas?
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      Most American cities are way, way below early 1990s violent crime levels, San Francisco included. SF had three times more homicides in 1993 than in 2019.
      - astrange 5y ago
        It went up a lot in 2020, quite possibly as a reaction to unemployment and especially not having anything else to do. But yes, before that it was limited to a few hotspots like St Louis which still had environmental lead problems. Meanwhile DC in 1990 was more dangerous than the Iraq War.
      - rufus_foreman 5y ago
        You saw around a 30% increase in homicide rates in large cities last year, and that increase began suddenly at the beginning of June. No environmental cause like exposure to lead can cause that. The Mother Jones article referenced above is arguing that the most effective thing that can be done to combat crime is lead abatement, I think that argument has taken a fatal hit. Some cities are in fact seeing homicide rates close to or even above the 1990s rates, that happened suddenly and it happened after leaded gasoline had been banned for 45 years. You can't explain the massive increase in homicide in large cities in 2020 using environmental factors like lead, the cause has to be cultural or political.
        crooked-v 5y ago
        Or, you know, the whole "massive upheaval of lifestyles caused by a pandemic and the responses to it" thing.
        5y ago
- cbm-vic-20 5y ago
  At the time there were a lot more tech companies out along Routes 128 and 495. This is still true today, but now the balance has shifted to Boston and Camberville.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yeah, all the minicomputer companies (which is where most of us went to work after school). I'd have actually considered living in Cambridge at the time but it would have been something like a 45 minute (reverse) commute whereas I had about a 5 minute commute until I bought a house. Depending upon how you characterize tech, there's still a lot in the northern and western suburbs, especially if you include the defense contractors. But, yes, there's now a lot in Cambridge and the Seaport, especially, as well as all the biotech/pharma in and near Kendall Square.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Is there a good article that describes how / why / when the startup scene moved from the South Bay to San Francisco? I'm not too familiar with the startup scene before 2010. But from what I know, it was mostly established in its current form before the Dot Com boom. It seems like HP, Cisco, Intel, Apple, Oracle, Sun, Adobe, Intuit, & Yahoo! where part of one movement. eBay, PayPal, Google, Facebook & Netflix obviously added to that. But now all the newer companies are coming from SF - SalesForce, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, Yelp, Splunk, Dropbox, Square, Instagram (originally), Slack, StichFix, Postmates, Instacart, GitHub, Robinhood, Coinbase, etc. The only recent, pretty big startups in the South Bay I can think of are LinkedIn and Quora. YouTube - from San Bruno - is kind of in the middle. The rest are subsidiaries. I mean, the OG companies like Apple and Google and Facebook are so big that they dwarf the rest of the startups in the Bay by themselves. So in a sense, the Silicon Valley still feels like the Peninsula. But the startup scene definitely seems to have shifted.
- clpm4j 5y ago
  A seemingly significant part of it is because the young talent wants to live in SF and not commute 1+ hours to an office park in the South Bay. I think SF also offered incentives for tech companies to set up shop in the city in the 2009-2012 time range... https://www.wired.com/story/no-more-deals-san-francisco-considers-raising-taxes-tech/ https://www.wired.com/story/no-more-deals-san-francisco-cons...
  - ghaff 5y ago
    It also generally became trendy for that demographic to live in (certain) cities after they graduate. My company set up an office in the Seaport (partially) for that reason because our main location an hour west of Boston was a deal-killer for some people.
    - clpm4j 5y ago
      That's certainly true. A career in tech became widely popular and trendy for millenials and now zoomers (I believe CS is now the most popular undergraduate major across US colleges?). Basically once people realized you can make more money in tech than on Wall St, a percentage of new grads who would have moved to NYC diverted for SF.
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
Some of it is immigration too: if you come from Paris or Berlin, you’re not going to want to move to Mountain View, given how ridiculously boring the peninsula is.
- astrange 5y ago
  If your employer's in South Bay you might as well live there. It's easier to commute to fun than commute to work.
- bradlys 5y ago
  San Carlos disagrees. Plenty of Europeans love this place.
- w0mbat 5y ago
  After growing up in central London, Silicon Valley was awesome. No more waiting for the bus, just drive everywhere, parking is easy, everywhere is safe. If you live in downtown Mountain View or Sunnyvale you can walk down the street to pubs and restaurants. Why live in SF with constant crime, begging and no parking, and a giant commute to Apple or Google?
Lammy 5y ago
> 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 Protip: Anti-housing activists will never tell you their real motivations: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/blacks_chart_watermark_final.png https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/blacks_ch...
idiot900 5y ago
And perhaps that new construction will reduce the market value of their homes, which they don't have to pay property taxes on and therefore regard as a substantial store of value.

fnord77 5y ago

there's been a few new "below market rate" apartment and condos being built. Most all condo developments have BMR units but some of the new ones are 100% BMR

sharadov 5y ago

This is something that really bothers me - all those billions of dollars of tech money and you cannot find a way to house and support artists. New York billionaires have always found a way to support artistic endeavors. Case in point - Bloomberg, he personally donated a lot.

Kalium 5y ago
How many billions of dollars of tech money, in your opinion, is enough to find a way to house and support people in a city where planning is fundamentally structured around finding ways to not house people?
- rcpt 5y ago
  In California you can get whatever crazy thing you want passed with O($10M). I bet $1B could get even Prop 13 overturned which would solve the housing disaster overnight.
  - Kalium 5y ago
    2020's Prop 19 to reform property taxes just a bit had about $20 million behind it, and it didn't even land on the ballot. SF would need to gut its entire permitting system. Today, it can't even make small and incremental improvements: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Is-proposal-to-cut-S-F-red-tape-dead-Supporters-16186763.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Is-p...
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      $20m and $1b is a significant difference.
      - Kalium 5y ago
        You're absolutely right. That is a significant difference. My point was that O($10m) isn't even enough to reliably land something on the ballot, much less get whatever crazy thing you want passed. This of course being distinct from undoing Prop 13.

hindsightbias 5y ago

All the great eras of any city were gritty. You can't have that with a generation of SodaSopans.

paxys 5y ago

Rents are already rapidly going back up since their lows late last year, so don't hold your breath.

darth_avocado 5y ago

Tech didn't out price the people, nimby politics did. Average home owners in San Francisco have been owners for about 14 years. [1] Any new development basically hits a brick wall unless it's on a radioactive dump or ultra expensive downtown. You all remember the famous laundromat saga, those were not tech workers preventing new housing, the locals were. [2] Anti gentrification policies almost always end up displacing the populations they are meant to protect. You don't want new apartments in a specific area because it may bring in newer crowds? Well guess what, those crowds will come any way, and now they can out price the people who live there. Rent control is another problem, because long time residents won't move. And with no new inventory, the prices for pretty much any apartment that enters the market goes sky high. It's not the tech workers who displace the locals, they are anyway hunting for apartments in a different price range from the locals. It's the locals now just budgeting higher portions of their income towards rent and displacing other locals. This is exactly what happened in Berlin. [3] And last but not the least, I think despite the nostalgia and how we remember SF differently from what it is now, yes there were quirky businesses all around. But there were only specific parts of the city that had them and quite frankly a lot of them just used to be replaced by newer businesses every couple of years. But what happened at some point was too much bureaucracy, red tape and politics crept into the cost of starting a business that now you have to sink almost a quarter of a million dollars before you can even start an ice cream shop. [4] It was partly the "locals" who created these problems. [1] https://journal.firsttuesday.us/california-homeowners-are-staying-put-for-longer/70178/ https://journal.firsttuesday.us/california-homeowners-are-st... [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/08/21/san-francisco-sued-by-historic-laundromat-owner.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/08/21/san... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin-s-rent-controls-are-proving-to-be-the-disaster-we-feared https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin... [4] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-ice-cream-shop-hopeful-sees-dreams-melted-by-16116082.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-...

jonahhorowitz 5y ago
The laundromat saga happened largely because the owner of the laundromat was a jerk. You may think politics shouldn't work like that, that they rules should be based on the law and not who you are, but in San Francisco, that isn't how it works. I'm not defending it, but the laundromat was very much an example of a guy from Marin being a total jerk and then throwing a tantrum when he didn't get what he wanted.

dionidium 5y ago

Millions of people eat McDonald's hamburgers every day and we all understand why that drives the price of hamburgers down, not up. Demand doesn't make prices go up all on its own. The problem isn't demand; it's supply. The lack of supply is a policy choice -- emphasis on choice*; it's not a natural law -- and you've located the blame 90 degrees to its actual cause: existing homeowners* who benefit by restricting that supply. People should be mad, but not at 22-year-olds coming from around the country looking for work. They should be mad at the millionaire rentiers who tell those kids when they show up that it's illegal for anybody to build them housing.