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The Bay Area has become a large declining tech company

221 points by uptown 5y ago

TheSocialAndrew 5y ago
As a short-term housing operator in the Bay Area, specializing in hosting tech workers, we've witnessed first hand the decline in quality of life and exile of the tech traveler. It started with homeless people camping out in front of our units in SoMa and Mission (often times blocking the entrance/exit because some units had a direct street-level entrance), petty package theft and occasional car break-ins in the building garages. Police couldn't do anything but take a report. Then the pandemic started and the vacancy rate skyrocketed. We started getting reports from neighbors or the on-site management that are our guests are dealing drugs out of our units. Except that these units were supposed to be vacant. Our lockboxes were getting broken into, keys taken and people have been living there for several days and in some cases weeks. We often had footage of this. We would call the police as we arrived at these units for our protection, but they wouldn't be able to arrest anyone because the people in the unit would say "so and so gave me the keys, told me this is their apartment, I don't know anything about that broken lockbox." This scheme quickly expanded to Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Milpitas and other South Bay cities. We would call the police on a daily basis in the first few months of the pandemic. Sometimes it would take them an hour or two to come, and if the squatters saw our team at the building and got wind of what was going on, they would start packing up their car with our appliances: Apple TV, Nespresso machine, we've even had furniture and major appliances like TVs, washer and dryer rolled out while we were waiting for the police to come. At most they would temporarily restrain these squatters if they had previous warrants (many of them did, but many others didn't produce an ID.) But even with warrants for their arrest, they would get uncuffed and released within an hour. We thought that at least a warrant would have them appear in front of a judge and we'd not have to encounter them again in a few days at another building, but the pandemic gave them a free pass. The officers were very candid in saying that if it was up to them, they would book them, but they have instructions not to bring anyone in for non-violent crime. Theft is not prosecuted. This is how it goes, anyone that has any doubt that crime is not prevented, pursued or prosecuted should go on a ride-along to any of these calls.
- downWidOutaFite 5y ago
  SFPD are scum, they're refusing to do their jobs as part of a political attack on the DA they don't like.
  - gotoeleven 5y ago
    If you're a cop, why do your job if the people are just going to be released with no consequences? Police can't do anything if the DA refuses to prosecute.
    - muststopmyths 5y ago
      Because punishment is not in their purview ?
    - Redoubts 5y ago
      They could at least do it so they could hammer the news with soundbites for the next election: Police took N reports about crime, showing that set stats are undercounting by M; Police arrested X for QoL crimes, but released all but Y because the DA doesn't care about you, etc...
    - long_time_gone 5y ago
      Because it is your job? Plenty of people deal with managers who don't heed their advice, they don't get to opt-out of working. Even if a DA refuses to prosecute anyone, police could also still work to prevent crime in the first place, no?
      - ransom1538 5y ago
        "Because it is your job?" Imagine I worked at a pizza shop and was getting $10 per hour to make pizzas. Every pizza I make my boss throws into the dumpster. My boss refuses to talk with me. The boss publicly tweets: he doesn't believe in pizza. This goes on for 12 weeks. It gets pretty hard to go to work and make pizzas.
lazypenguin 5y ago
I find the “Bay Area exodus” an interesting phenomenon as someone who lives in Austin. I’m curious to see if the same mentality that ruined living conditions there (and other large cities in the US with large tech presence) will repeat itself here or if Austin/Texas have better conditions to avoid that fate. Anecdotally I already feel the changes to Austin are negative, as I assume the old residents felt when I moved here in 2007. What I can’t discern is whether it’s a sign of the times or specifically a consequence of the tech worker affluence/politics coming to the city.
- beebmam 5y ago
  Redmond was a rural town before Microsoft. Now it's one of the best places to live in the US.
- donsupreme 5y ago
  You could argue that people who moved away from Bayarea to other places are not as aligned with the far left, so in theory their ideology and politics should be more deviated from the Bayarea norm.
  - imilk 5y ago
    FYI - what you call "far left" is considered pretty centrist in almost every other highly developed country. And the Bay Area as a whole is in no way "far left".
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      Speaking from Central Europe: economically sort-of, socially helluva no. Especially the awful obsession with race is nowhere near centrist in Europe.
      - imilk 5y ago
        I'm speaking of climate change, healthcare, education, taxes, womens & minority rights, etc.. (central issues that matter to the country). It's entirely on you if you choose to get involved in the hot button social issue discussion of the week. If you don't care to engage in that, it doesn't affect you at all.
npilk 5y ago
5 years ago, I would have loved to move to the Bay Area, despite the expense. Today, I'm looking for a new city and the Bay isn't really even in my consideration set. I will say that as an outsider, the Bay and San Francisco often seem to get conflated when people discuss them. I've heard plenty about the issues the city of SF is facing right now, but my sense is that many parts of the Bay are still thriving - just prohibitively expensive for most. Is that true? Or is the lived experience in other parts of the Bay also getting worse?
- tmp_anon_22 5y ago
  For all intents and purposes the Bay has two parts. The places tourists visit and news org talk about (almost exclusively downtown SF and SOMA), and the places people actually live - like the sunset, mission, san jose, east bay, and the peninsula. Most analysis does not go beyond the first part. I'm not saying the second part is a utopia by any means, but you can carve out a more affordable and generally normal and happy life in the latter part pretty easily. All said the traffic sucks (like all large metros), its still very expensive (particularly for families who can't live with roomates), childcare costs are high, etc.
  - aroman 5y ago
    I understand what you're trying to say, but I find it disturbing to suggest that "people don't actually live in downtown SF and SOMA". Many people, especially many lower income folks, do actually live there. The compartmentalization mentality is real, and highly problematic. (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt though and assume you were just relaying this widespread sentiment, and not yourself supporting it.)
    - tmp_anon_22 5y ago
      Thats an important distinction and you're right that my goal was not to marginalize those regions in any way. My framing was in giving context to housed individuals considering moving into the Bay Area, and to highlight that the Bay Area is incredibly diverse and that there is room if you look outside the more "mainstream" areas.
nradov 5y ago
This is not necessarily a bad thing. The Bay Area used to be a nice place for regular people to live. The successive waves of tech booms kind of ruined that and average quality of life has gone down for everyone except the very wealthy. For our country as a whole it was never healthy to have so much of the tech industry concentrated in one small geographic area. We'll be better off in the long run to distribute it more widely, even if that makes it a bit harder to form a startup and recruit local employees.
- vmception 5y ago
  Yes, some of the artists can move back in when rent dips 50% for a little bit. That seemed to be a goto point for anyone that was in San Francisco in the 90s. “There used to be so many artists in this formerly horrible neighborhood, it was awesome!” Perplexing, but they’re right, this transplant would have never come there as nothing would have been moderately appealing about it to me. Detroit has artists too. So doesnt seem like the strongest argument.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    The truth about the artists argument is that all the people lamenting the loss of the artists are the groupies. I know because up in the Oakland hills my friends throw creative parties with art and music and eclectic talks. But to the groupies, it appears the artists have gone. And that’s because in the mop-geek-sociopath trichotomy, the groupies are the mops. The geeks have hidden themselves from the mops because the latter are creative leeches. So if you don’t know where the artists have gone, it’s because they went to get away from you.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      > And that’s because in the mop-geek-sociopath trichotomy For anyone else who needed a reference for this bit: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
    - vmception 5y ago
opportune 5y ago
I think in the long run, not being forced to live in the Bay Area if you want to be ambitious in tech will be good for the Bay Area. If you don’t feel forced to live there to make money, you’ll hopefully only go there if you actually like it. So perhaps the tech community will become less “transient”, more invested in the community, and not as big “haters” as they were. Or at least as they were perceived. I’m also pretty skeptical this is the bay area’s death knell. Web3 is a pretty bad example if you’re looking at funding, because if you interpret web3 as just “crypto” or decentralized, that suffers a legitimacy problem which makes all VC averse to it, not just the Bay Area VC (though of course a lot of crypto stuff does get funded still). And obviously it’s not only people in the Bay Area who work less than their stated 40 hrs or go to tech conferences… In the near-term, say 5-10 years from now, I think the Bay Area will represent maybe 50% of the “hot” tech industry (not counting giants based in the Bay Area which have already spread all over the world) whereas it was maybe 80% before. Obviously right now is an aberration because with remote work you don’t benefit much from the network effects.
- anp 5y ago
  I agree with this perspective and it’s part of the reason I’ve been considering moving into the city — it seems like a tech diaspora could relieve many of the pressures on SF in the coming years that would allow it to grow back in the direction of its prior reputation as a cultural center.
  - throwhauser 5y ago
    If the Bay Area struggles to deal with an influx of tech workers, why would it struggle any less to deal with an influx of artists? There would be fewer dollars chasing the housing, but that doesn't make more housing available. The Bay Area has chosen stasis. That doesn't bode well for its revival as a cultural center.
    - almost_usual 5y ago
      You’re getting downvoted but it’s true. After the dot bomb there were the influx of ‘creative’ hipsters with an art degree their parents bought them gentrifying neighborhoods. Then they got priced out by techies. SF is an attractive place so it attracts people, the vulnerable communities with less resources get pressure.
pezzana 5y ago
Go back to 2009 and 2002 and you'll see very similar sentiments. The Bay Area is done. The author compares this to the decline of Yahoo. It started grinding lower and never recovered. But a better analogy might be Amazon. It was finished in 2002 and was worse for wear in 2009. How would you say Amazon is doing today? Some tech companies can come back from the brink. Most can't. I'd compare the Bay Area to a tech company with 9 lives. Rumors of its death have always been greatly exaggerated.
- foolfoolz 5y ago
  as long as the bay area has some of the best weather, easy access to activities like beach, mountains, parks, and and great schools and neighborhoods, this area will be a destination
  - cobalt 5y ago
    the entire western seaboard from like sonoma down is that way (into central america)
vmception 5y ago
Good points here, I got kicked out of my “Nextdoor neighborhood” in SF by pointing out how different things are “outside the building” as the article puts it. Odd distortion field, collective delusion there.
systemsignal 5y ago
The author is clearly heavily invested in getting ppl to Miami. “Rarely sunny” Even in SF isn’t accurate
MattGaiser 5y ago
Aren’t the Bay Area and San Francisco fundamentally different things with SFO just being the largest city? Do tech people even primarily live there? The big corporate HQs do not seem to be in SFO proper.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  San Jose is the largest city in the Bay Area.
- throwaway1777 5y ago
  They’re not different but SF is only one piece. Tech people live everywhere. SF got a lot more big tech companies in the past decade but the rest of the bay is chugging along too. To me it seems many people who moved out of SF moved to the east bay or north bay.
- JJMcJ 5y ago
  South Bay, Silicon Valley in the old historical sense, is still a boring suburban sprawl with above average restaurants and high rents/house prices. Certain amount of extra package thieving but it hasn't changed much in the last 25 years as a place to live. The economics of area is harder to be sure about. San Francisco had reached a point of absurdity, and is poorly run for a city as well off as it is. 4,000 subsidized studio apartments would largely solve the homeless problem, for example.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  SFO is the airport. SF is the city.
g_sch 5y ago
It's weird to see this article reference the Justin Keller open letter and pretend that its intended purpose was to call attention to the problem of unhoused people with mental health issues in SF. As if his "heretical" act that attracted public anger was to point out an obvious injustice. The actual text of the letter[0] argued that people who can't afford homes or who have mental health issues _don't deserve to live in the Bay Area_, and that he _does_ deserve it, because he has money. This is literally spelled out in his letter, not obliquely implied. It's this part of his opinion that got him in public hot water. [0] https://justink.svbtle.com/open-letter-to-mayor-ed-lee-and-greg-suhr-police-chief https://justink.svbtle.com/open-letter-to-mayor-ed-lee-and-g...
- anarchy8 5y ago
  The problem is that many people here agree with him.
- rsync 5y ago
  "I’ve been living in SF for over three years, and without a doubt it is the worst it has ever been." Classic. Almost a self-parody. "... over three years ..."
- jcranberry 5y ago
  I clicked on those links curious what he was talking about and was shocked he was painting this guy as a martyr. I didn't finish reading the second article about another guy comeback since it similarly didn't seem to acknowledge the reality of what he wrote being patently horrible when painting him as some kind of homeless man messiah.
butterfi 5y ago
Theres a lot of truths in this article, but it overlooks that every 10-15 years another new generation of people move to the city and after enough time will write sorrowful creeds about how the city has changed for the worse. I could write how much North Beach has changed since the mid-80's with the disappearance of cafes full of old Italian men, but frankly most of the people in the city now never experienced that. The Bay Area is more than just the tech industry and attempts to label it as one thing or another seem misguided.
Animats 5y ago
The 1980s, 2002, and 2008 were worse.
throwaway1777 5y ago
Better to zig when others zag. Probably the most contrarian and therefore best time to move to the bay is now while everyone is complaining. Even London breed is getting serious about crime, I think SF will bounce back with new energy.
gringoDan 5y ago
There's something to be said here for the Lindy effect: the longer something has survived, the longer its remaining life expectancy. This is why the "decline of New York" at the beginning of COVID was so overblown. NYC has long been the financial (and arguably cultural) capital of the world; I'd place a bet that the city will still be extremely relevant in 100 years. Similarly, the Bay has been the center of tech since 60s. But the Bay is much more fragile than New York; it is largely dominated by the tech industry. So a better comparison might be Detroit. When the car industry left, the entirety of Detroit was hollowed out. Additionally, you need to be in New York if you want to "play in the big leagues" in the world of finance, fashion, art, etc. But tech has already embraced the remote model. 5-10 years ago, I would have felt like I needed to be in SF to further my career in tech. Now, I live in Austin and don't feel like I'm missing out. If anything, it feels like there is way more startup potential here – people actually building cool things, as opposed to resting and vesting at the big companies that dominate Silicon Valley.
- api 5y ago
  Personal anecdote: Even 5 years ago calls with customers and investors invited questions like "so are you in the city or in the South Bay?" Raising money in particular was very hard if you were not in the Bay Area. Now nobody even asks where you are located and if you say you are distributed/remote everyone shrugs. Angels and VCs don't seem to care at all. It's been a stark and noticeable shift and it pre-dates COVID. COVID has just accelerated the geographic diversification trend dramatically.
  - fishtoaster 5y ago
    I feel like this is a key point. There's long been strong financial pressure for the tech industry to disburse: it's incredibly expensive. Ideally you'd start a tech company somewhere where office and engineers are cheap. But the companies stay in SF because employees and VCs are there. VCs and employees are there because companies are here. And even though Sand Hill VCs could fund companies anywhere in the country, in practice, they didn't (much). If that's changing, I feel like that's the trigger for a big tech diaspora as much or more than remote eng work.
anarchy8 5y ago
The article peddles the falsehood that the crime rate in SF is exploding, while retail crime is actually at a historic low: http://www.cjcj.org/news/13165 http://www.cjcj.org/news/13165
subsubzero 5y ago
As a 4th generation Californian this article really hits the mark. I spent a majority of my life in the sfbay area and moved out of there when the pandemic started and will never move back. Everyone of my friends and my Wife's friends left along with the last of my direct family as well. It really boils down to alot of things, cost, dysfunction and environmental degradation. For me I know that life is short and I don't want to live in a crime infested dump that costs a fortune and is extremely crowded where everyone is miserable and has overreaching laws for decent people and lawlessness for criminals. We had packages stolen off our porch, liquor bottles/trash thrown on our lawn, cars broken into, illegal fireworks being fired off almost every night(scaring our dog to where she was having serious issues), driving anywhere I saw huge piles of trash, homeless camps and shopping carts. Oh and all houses run about $1.3M for a non dump and schools are terrible. And I didn't get into the non-stop fires that have happened the past few years(which has really never happened in California before).[I lived in San Jose]
- blueski 5y ago
  You say in another post you spent only a year in SF?
  - subsubzero 5y ago
    I lived in SF in 2012-2013, and then moved to san jose
    - blueski 5y ago
      Where have you moved? Do you like it better?
- majormajor 5y ago
  You, in what sounds like a reasonably-well off position, struggle with the 1.3M home costs, etc. Imagine how it must be to be surrounded by 1.3M homes and multi-thousand dollar apartments when you're broke, not well paid, and can barely afford any of it? Homelessness and crime are both things that people are much more likely to resort to in a society with wildly inequal distributions of wealth than in one where everyone is in a similar place. So we could build more jails and prisons, throw more people in them. Punish people very harshly for stepping out of line as we continue to worsen the ability of the less-wealthy/less-paid to thrive. "There's no excuse for resorting to crime," etc. Criminalize sleeping on the street so that we can toss them somewhere too. We could build massively more. That seems much more humane. But a lot of people don't want to do that! So we could push people out, lower the demand. That would put pressure on prices and open up housing... nobody wants to do that, though! We just sorta "unintentionally" do it by choosing not to do anything else - let the problems push people away on their own! The crime isn't a direct symptom of government dysfunction, it's a symptom of the ever-growing divide. The government dysfunction is trying to have your cake and eat it too, but that's not actually just the government that wants to do it - tons of citizens want to both keep housing scarce and less dense and get rid of visible homelessness. What do you think the government alone could do that wouldn't result in their being rapidly voted out by people who don't want change?
scotuswroteus 5y ago
>A scant five years ago, a “tech bro” wrote an open letter to San Francisco mayor about street conditions, including being assaulted by a homeless person and pervasive drug use on the streets. He was lambasted in tech and national press, and his letter effectively ended his career. If he had written that letter in pretty much any other city, everyone would have agreed with him. In San Francisco today, everyone now publicly states what he wrote five years ago. This has been a part of SF culture since Tom Wolfe wrote about City Hall. I really don't understand folks who have lived here for a quarter century and don't know the City's history and culture.
- BryantD 5y ago
  It's also a misleading paragraph. The "tech bro" who wrote the open letter is Justin Keller. I'll reserve judgement on whether or not his career is over; he's currently running a devops consultancy, and I don't know how successful it is. However, the "effectively ended his career" link goes to a story about someone else completely: Greg Gopman. Justin Keller factors in only in a few paragraphs at the end of that story, and there are no conclusions drawn about whether or not his career is over.
renewiltord 5y ago
Prediction: SF will be stronger than ever. The locals will continue to extract massive benefits from the resurgence of tech.
jedberg 5y ago
> When I first moved to San Francisco in 1997, it was a magical and inspirational place. Remember the Flying Saucer and Survival Research Labs parties? I do remember that! I started working in 1999, and my coworkers and I were in SF a few times a week at various nerd parties. They used projectors to cat out the linux kernel on the wall as the decor. I miss those parties, because they were fun and also you got to meet other really cool nerds and talk about nerdy things.
iskander 5y ago
Breathless admiration of Miami as a "tech city" based on tweets by the disempowered mayor of the City of Miami (population bupkis) are a red flag that the author isn't thinking very seriously or speaking from direct experience, rather just regurgitating memes and shortcut thoughts. If you have ever lived in Miami (the 3M person metropolis, whose mayor is not Francis Suarez), you know that techies goes there to party, vacation, or retire but the actual startup scene suffers from perennial brain drain with no end in sight.
- ruddct 5y ago
  The thing that's confusing to me about the Miami-tech-hub story is the lack of universities. Good universities + big companies + lots of money floating around, that's the holy trinity of tech/startup hubs, no? Miami has maybe 1.5-2 out of 3?
  - gavinray 5y ago
    I worked for a year at a startup that had space in FIU's (Florida International University) startup accelerator program -- unshockingly called "StartupFIU". When I moved down here, I was surprised. FIU is a massive and very nice school; University of Miami is also nice. I had never even heard of FIU before I worked on campus there. They're no Ivy League but I would say they're better than a lot of other schools.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  It seems like Miami is currently a hotspot for VCs, particularly the social media influencer set, to relocate to. What actual well-known tech companies are currently located there? Even Magic Leap is based in Plantation, not Miami.
  - pcwalton 5y ago
    A bunch of cryptocurrency startups. For a while now I've been wondering whether the cryptocurrency bust—which is inevitable in my view—will mean the end of these kinds of articles and the resurgence of the Bay Area. Many of the other up-and-coming tech areas, particularly Miami, are disproportionately composed of cryptocurrency ventures, which doesn't strike me as a sustainable tech scene.
dekhn 5y ago
This empire has a long way to fall. The way I think of the Bay Area is that it is just after the local peak of a form of civilization- the ascendancy of the techno-elite- that is currently taking over the world, or rather, taking its place alongside energy, medicine, and agriculture as major pillars of wealth and power. We are witnessing a micro-Rome, micro both in time and space. Instead of an empire rising and falling over centuries, the Bay Area rose and is now falling within the period of after WWII to now. Certainly the Bay Area didn't create the internet on its own, or develop the first micros or personal computers, nor invent all the machine learning algorithms, solely "solve search", or ad revenues. But it played a critical role in all those areas because the BA has, through a number of factors (some intentional, some not) been poised to do this since the end of WWII. At the end of WWII, the Bay Area was already a technological center with plenty of money about to undergo a population and building boom, but civic leaders and others recognized that the Bay Area's unique combination of attributes (weather, business, intellectual climate) made it ideal for a revolution based on companies depending on heavy technology development and smart well-payed employees funded by VCs. Those combination of attributes have reliably caused people to migrate here to go to school or get jobs or just bum around since 1945. Unfortunately, while that growth at the beginning worked out pretty well, the Bay Area has a number of limitations (some physical, some mental) that affect its ability to resolve the underlying infrastructural and social problems that occurred due to the "climate" (both political and atmospheric) and which have grown especially bad during a series of unbelievably good economies which have led to high housing prices, congested roads, etc. Don't worry- the bay area will muddle on in this state for some time and won't just crash immediately into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But, unless we change our ways significantly, the relative importance and power of the Bay Area will wane, being replaced by other areas which have found circumstances leading to rapid growth of a techno-elite.
11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
In May 2017, the combined market capitalization of the top 10 publicly traded Bay Area companies was $2,588 Billion. Today, it's $8,783 Billion. That's an IRR of 31% over the last 5 years. It's hard to see that as declining. Company culture and social circumstances are changing, yes. But the companies are doing just fine.
France_is_bacon 5y ago
[dead]
blueski 5y ago
As someone who works in tech and enjoys the outdoors (mainly hiking and biking, meaning I'm looking for sunny/temperate weather year round) I haven't found many better options than the Bay Area. Visited Miami and Austin in the last year, but the Summer temperatures are stifling and there's not the same wealth of natural beauty on their doorstep - Portland is great, but the grey skies would eventually wear me down. I'd love to find somewhere more affordable but San Francisco still checks a lot of boxes. Where else to consider?
educaysean 5y ago
I have a hard time trying to justify the Yahoo / SF comparison the article tries to establish. Yes I see the surface-level similarities; Yahoo was the leading website until it wasn't, and SF was the leading tech hub until one day it won't be. How does the relationship evolve beyond that? The symptoms of a once-giant slowly losing its lead will be similar no matter which industry or entity you look at. You could probably force similar parallels about Blockbuster, Brittany Spears, the Soviet Union or even GM. The author never bothers to develop any meaningful connection between the the reasons for their decline. They seem to hint at the fact that maybe hubris played a part - but it's all extremely unclear and I'm not going to read into it anymore than I need to. In the end it's yet just another "SF ain't the hot thing anymore" article with a sensationalized title.
wonnage 5y ago
> Key influencers like Elon Musk, Jason Calcanis, and Keith Rabois Oh no, a bunch of Twitter hot take artists, what ever shall we do
a-dub 5y ago
i sort of expected to not like this piece just from the title, but it was even worse than i expected. it didn't take long, but he really lost me when he defended the writing of these words: “The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that’s okay. In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city…You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us It’s a burden and a liability having them so close to us. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I’d consider thinking different, but the crazy toothless lady who kicks everyone that gets too close to her cardboard box hasn’t made anyone’s life better in a while.” i think that maybe when a culture emerges that thinks that sort of thinking is okay, something is very wrong. if that culture is on the decline, then i think that maybe not only the bay, but maybe the entire world is made a better place for it. in truth though, the tech/office diaspora does scare me a little bit. there is so much power and influence that is wrapped up in the white collar world. if the power brokers decamp for country fiefdoms and homesteads, their reduced interaction and engagement with the problems of the real world may change how they perceive the world and those problems. i fear this could manifest as reduced political will and financing to help the less fortunate in the long run, leading to a worse off society overall.
president 5y ago
If you think about what the Bay Area tech boom was, it was essentially a huge make-money-at-all-costs operation. Investors, tech startups, and the money that dominated the region set the tone for the culture. Despite all the talk about "making the world a better place", that was all a facade for making people filthy rich and trashing everything else that stood in the way of money. None of these companies cared about the things that make a healthy community and society. Certainly none of the politicians in the area did, many of which had symbiotic relationships with these entities, and that showed in the policies that manifested over the past decade.
mistrial9 5y ago
news from the Bay Area -- my low-tech trendy colleague hooked up with a merciless real-estate investor landlord, they both became serious alcoholics/multiple times wealthier. One is moving back to Ohio with a bundle of legal money and the other is just fat now, showing off to relatives back home; both boomers, no party in their future, no culture making, not interested in being friends with anyone. It seems that they ate a lot of expensive food, lived mediocre lives, got rich and now running away.
boringg 5y ago
"The report of my death is greatly exaggerated" San Francisco, Dec 17, 2021. Every article about the death of SF since the 80s has a litany of commentators saying how true that rings for them validating the article (and validates their own decision) - and yet it is still stands. The comment section is obviously HIGHLY biased towards sour grapes. Anyways while the litany of problems will always need to be fixed I just don't see any major city in the lower 48 that competes. Sorry all you valley emulators - best of luck re-branding your city the next valley - probably better to strike out on a different marketing campaign then trying your we are the next silicon ___ (insert geologic formation here).
syntheweave 5y ago
As I read further into the article I increasingly disagreed with the thesis and the influencer hyperbole used to support it. Cities are not tech companies. They have to provide services, infrastructure - housing, health, education, transportation. They can't be "disruptors" in the move fast break things sense, they are almost entirely a legacy maintenance job with thirty year planning horizons. The post pandemic quandary is really one faced by every developed-world city: where are the jobs gonna be? What's the economy gonna be? SF and California had a stunning run of attracting new jobs over the past century or so. But the housing issue and its side effects are built on issues that are primarily to do with broad aspects of national demographics and wealth distribution - landlords get rewarded because homes are investments, and homes are investments because we set up the financing that way when the Boomers were young. But that game has played out. The population is represented by younger generations now, and they aren't on this ladder. All of the rest follows from that, and little of it has anything to do with tech, except for that tech can be applied to shape the next economic model. With the "Great Reset", that's the kind of thing being referred to. It's not unique to SF, SF was just unusually impacted by being thrust into the global power center role.
tncpeterd 5y ago
The thing that bothers me a lot about all the people fleeing and moving out of the bay area is that.. it just feels to me like giving up. These people complain about all the problems in the bay area, and the same people being the most vocal about the crime problems and homelessness and drug issues, also happen to be people that have the tools (financially, socially, etc) to actually help solve the problems. But instead they just choose to leave and join another community that they envision will be a new utopia. If people thought Tech bro's were hated before.. just wait until all the tech people move to other states and work remote and just get up and move every time they disagree with whats going on in their new communities. Never truly becoming part of the communities and only taking advantage of policies and circumstances they had no hand in building or creating. To me that is a toxic cycle and no community anywhere can evolve and get better if the communities members are not invested and are only temporarily aligned when it suits them.
- skrbjc 5y ago
  There's this concept of voice vs exit. When things aren't going well in an organization or politically, you either decide to speak up and say there is something wrong or leave to find something else. One of the points in the article is that speaking up has been and currently feels like something you can't really do for fear of being ostracized by the greater community. Try mentioning you think there should be something done about the homeless problem, and the response always seems to be that we shouldn't criminalize homelessness, it's not their fault, more housing would fix everything. At a certain point you realize that if you can't speak up, or those in power/those that elect the people in power aren't going to listen, then you might as well seek a place that is a better fit. The crazy thing that happened recently is that before you had to make the decision to leave your job and hope to find an equivalent job in a new place. Which as challenging and probably led more people to try to speak up vs exit. But with remote work it is so much easier to leave, and there are even benefits to the cost of living calculation coming from the Bay Area, that exit becomes not only much easier, but also beneficial in terms of buying power for your dollars.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

221 points by uptown 5y ago

As a short-term housing operator in the Bay Area, specializing in hosting tech workers, we've witnessed first hand the decline in quality of life and exile of the tech traveler. It started with homeless people camping out in front of our units in SoMa and Mission (often times blocking the entrance/exit because some units had a direct street-level entrance), petty package theft and occasional car break-ins in the building garages. Police couldn't do anything but take a report. Then the pandemic started and the vacancy rate skyrocketed. We started getting reports from neighbors or the on-site management that are our guests are dealing drugs out of our units. Except that these units were supposed to be vacant. Our lockboxes were getting broken into, keys taken and people have been living there for several days and in some cases weeks. We often had footage of this. We would call the police as we arrived at these units for our protection, but they wouldn't be able to arrest anyone because the people in the unit would say "so and so gave me the keys, told me this is their apartment, I don't know anything about that broken lockbox." This scheme quickly expanded to Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Milpitas and other South Bay cities. We would call the police on a daily basis in the first few months of the pandemic. Sometimes it would take them an hour or two to come, and if the squatters saw our team at the building and got wind of what was going on, they would start packing up their car with our appliances: Apple TV, Nespresso machine, we've even had furniture and major appliances like TVs, washer and dryer rolled out while we were waiting for the police to come. At most they would temporarily restrain these squatters if they had previous warrants (many of them did, but many others didn't produce an ID.) But even with warrants for their arrest, they would get uncuffed and released within an hour. We thought that at least a warrant would have them appear in front of a judge and we'd not have to encounter them again in a few days at another building, but the pandemic gave them a free pass. The officers were very candid in saying that if it was up to them, they would book them, but they have instructions not to bring anyone in for non-violent crime. Theft is not prosecuted. This is how it goes, anyone that has any doubt that crime is not prevented, pursued or prosecuted should go on a ride-along to any of these calls.

downWidOutaFite 5y ago
SFPD are scum, they're refusing to do their jobs as part of a political attack on the DA they don't like.
- gotoeleven 5y ago
  If you're a cop, why do your job if the people are just going to be released with no consequences? Police can't do anything if the DA refuses to prosecute.
  - muststopmyths 5y ago
    Because punishment is not in their purview ?
  - Redoubts 5y ago
    They could at least do it so they could hammer the news with soundbites for the next election: Police took N reports about crime, showing that set stats are undercounting by M; Police arrested X for QoL crimes, but released all but Y because the DA doesn't care about you, etc...
  - long_time_gone 5y ago
    Because it is your job? Plenty of people deal with managers who don't heed their advice, they don't get to opt-out of working. Even if a DA refuses to prosecute anyone, police could also still work to prevent crime in the first place, no?
    - ransom1538 5y ago
      "Because it is your job?" Imagine I worked at a pizza shop and was getting $10 per hour to make pizzas. Every pizza I make my boss throws into the dumpster. My boss refuses to talk with me. The boss publicly tweets: he doesn't believe in pizza. This goes on for 12 weeks. It gets pretty hard to go to work and make pizzas.

lazypenguin 5y ago

I find the “Bay Area exodus” an interesting phenomenon as someone who lives in Austin. I’m curious to see if the same mentality that ruined living conditions there (and other large cities in the US with large tech presence) will repeat itself here or if Austin/Texas have better conditions to avoid that fate. Anecdotally I already feel the changes to Austin are negative, as I assume the old residents felt when I moved here in 2007. What I can’t discern is whether it’s a sign of the times or specifically a consequence of the tech worker affluence/politics coming to the city.

beebmam 5y ago
Redmond was a rural town before Microsoft. Now it's one of the best places to live in the US.
donsupreme 5y ago
You could argue that people who moved away from Bayarea to other places are not as aligned with the far left, so in theory their ideology and politics should be more deviated from the Bayarea norm.
- imilk 5y ago
  FYI - what you call "far left" is considered pretty centrist in almost every other highly developed country. And the Bay Area as a whole is in no way "far left".
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Speaking from Central Europe: economically sort-of, socially helluva no. Especially the awful obsession with race is nowhere near centrist in Europe.
    - imilk 5y ago
      I'm speaking of climate change, healthcare, education, taxes, womens & minority rights, etc.. (central issues that matter to the country). It's entirely on you if you choose to get involved in the hot button social issue discussion of the week. If you don't care to engage in that, it doesn't affect you at all.

npilk 5y ago

5 years ago, I would have loved to move to the Bay Area, despite the expense. Today, I'm looking for a new city and the Bay isn't really even in my consideration set. I will say that as an outsider, the Bay and San Francisco often seem to get conflated when people discuss them. I've heard plenty about the issues the city of SF is facing right now, but my sense is that many parts of the Bay are still thriving - just prohibitively expensive for most. Is that true? Or is the lived experience in other parts of the Bay also getting worse?

tmp_anon_22 5y ago
For all intents and purposes the Bay has two parts. The places tourists visit and news org talk about (almost exclusively downtown SF and SOMA), and the places people actually live - like the sunset, mission, san jose, east bay, and the peninsula. Most analysis does not go beyond the first part. I'm not saying the second part is a utopia by any means, but you can carve out a more affordable and generally normal and happy life in the latter part pretty easily. All said the traffic sucks (like all large metros), its still very expensive (particularly for families who can't live with roomates), childcare costs are high, etc.
- aroman 5y ago
  I understand what you're trying to say, but I find it disturbing to suggest that "people don't actually live in downtown SF and SOMA". Many people, especially many lower income folks, do actually live there. The compartmentalization mentality is real, and highly problematic. (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt though and assume you were just relaying this widespread sentiment, and not yourself supporting it.)
  - tmp_anon_22 5y ago
    Thats an important distinction and you're right that my goal was not to marginalize those regions in any way. My framing was in giving context to housed individuals considering moving into the Bay Area, and to highlight that the Bay Area is incredibly diverse and that there is room if you look outside the more "mainstream" areas.

nradov 5y ago

This is not necessarily a bad thing. The Bay Area used to be a nice place for regular people to live. The successive waves of tech booms kind of ruined that and average quality of life has gone down for everyone except the very wealthy. For our country as a whole it was never healthy to have so much of the tech industry concentrated in one small geographic area. We'll be better off in the long run to distribute it more widely, even if that makes it a bit harder to form a startup and recruit local employees.

vmception 5y ago
Yes, some of the artists can move back in when rent dips 50% for a little bit. That seemed to be a goto point for anyone that was in San Francisco in the 90s. “There used to be so many artists in this formerly horrible neighborhood, it was awesome!” Perplexing, but they’re right, this transplant would have never come there as nothing would have been moderately appealing about it to me. Detroit has artists too. So doesnt seem like the strongest argument.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  The truth about the artists argument is that all the people lamenting the loss of the artists are the groupies. I know because up in the Oakland hills my friends throw creative parties with art and music and eclectic talks. But to the groupies, it appears the artists have gone. And that’s because in the mop-geek-sociopath trichotomy, the groupies are the mops. The geeks have hidden themselves from the mops because the latter are creative leeches. So if you don’t know where the artists have gone, it’s because they went to get away from you.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    > And that’s because in the mop-geek-sociopath trichotomy For anyone else who needed a reference for this bit: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
  - vmception 5y ago

opportune 5y ago

I think in the long run, not being forced to live in the Bay Area if you want to be ambitious in tech will be good for the Bay Area. If you don’t feel forced to live there to make money, you’ll hopefully only go there if you actually like it. So perhaps the tech community will become less “transient”, more invested in the community, and not as big “haters” as they were. Or at least as they were perceived. I’m also pretty skeptical this is the bay area’s death knell. Web3 is a pretty bad example if you’re looking at funding, because if you interpret web3 as just “crypto” or decentralized, that suffers a legitimacy problem which makes all VC averse to it, not just the Bay Area VC (though of course a lot of crypto stuff does get funded still). And obviously it’s not only people in the Bay Area who work less than their stated 40 hrs or go to tech conferences… In the near-term, say 5-10 years from now, I think the Bay Area will represent maybe 50% of the “hot” tech industry (not counting giants based in the Bay Area which have already spread all over the world) whereas it was maybe 80% before. Obviously right now is an aberration because with remote work you don’t benefit much from the network effects.

anp 5y ago
I agree with this perspective and it’s part of the reason I’ve been considering moving into the city — it seems like a tech diaspora could relieve many of the pressures on SF in the coming years that would allow it to grow back in the direction of its prior reputation as a cultural center.
- throwhauser 5y ago
  If the Bay Area struggles to deal with an influx of tech workers, why would it struggle any less to deal with an influx of artists? There would be fewer dollars chasing the housing, but that doesn't make more housing available. The Bay Area has chosen stasis. That doesn't bode well for its revival as a cultural center.
  - almost_usual 5y ago
    You’re getting downvoted but it’s true. After the dot bomb there were the influx of ‘creative’ hipsters with an art degree their parents bought them gentrifying neighborhoods. Then they got priced out by techies. SF is an attractive place so it attracts people, the vulnerable communities with less resources get pressure.

pezzana 5y ago

Go back to 2009 and 2002 and you'll see very similar sentiments. The Bay Area is done. The author compares this to the decline of Yahoo. It started grinding lower and never recovered. But a better analogy might be Amazon. It was finished in 2002 and was worse for wear in 2009. How would you say Amazon is doing today? Some tech companies can come back from the brink. Most can't. I'd compare the Bay Area to a tech company with 9 lives. Rumors of its death have always been greatly exaggerated.

foolfoolz 5y ago
as long as the bay area has some of the best weather, easy access to activities like beach, mountains, parks, and and great schools and neighborhoods, this area will be a destination
- cobalt 5y ago
  the entire western seaboard from like sonoma down is that way (into central america)

vmception 5y ago

Good points here, I got kicked out of my “Nextdoor neighborhood” in SF by pointing out how different things are “outside the building” as the article puts it. Odd distortion field, collective delusion there.

systemsignal 5y ago

The author is clearly heavily invested in getting ppl to Miami. “Rarely sunny” Even in SF isn’t accurate

MattGaiser 5y ago

Aren’t the Bay Area and San Francisco fundamentally different things with SFO just being the largest city? Do tech people even primarily live there? The big corporate HQs do not seem to be in SFO proper.

jandrewrogers 5y ago
San Jose is the largest city in the Bay Area.
throwaway1777 5y ago
They’re not different but SF is only one piece. Tech people live everywhere. SF got a lot more big tech companies in the past decade but the rest of the bay is chugging along too. To me it seems many people who moved out of SF moved to the east bay or north bay.
JJMcJ 5y ago
South Bay, Silicon Valley in the old historical sense, is still a boring suburban sprawl with above average restaurants and high rents/house prices. Certain amount of extra package thieving but it hasn't changed much in the last 25 years as a place to live. The economics of area is harder to be sure about. San Francisco had reached a point of absurdity, and is poorly run for a city as well off as it is. 4,000 subsidized studio apartments would largely solve the homeless problem, for example.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
SFO is the airport. SF is the city.

g_sch 5y ago

It's weird to see this article reference the Justin Keller open letter and pretend that its intended purpose was to call attention to the problem of unhoused people with mental health issues in SF. As if his "heretical" act that attracted public anger was to point out an obvious injustice. The actual text of the letter[0] argued that people who can't afford homes or who have mental health issues _don't deserve to live in the Bay Area_, and that he _does_ deserve it, because he has money. This is literally spelled out in his letter, not obliquely implied. It's this part of his opinion that got him in public hot water. [0] https://justink.svbtle.com/open-letter-to-mayor-ed-lee-and-greg-suhr-police-chief https://justink.svbtle.com/open-letter-to-mayor-ed-lee-and-g...

anarchy8 5y ago
The problem is that many people here agree with him.
rsync 5y ago
"I’ve been living in SF for over three years, and without a doubt it is the worst it has ever been." Classic. Almost a self-parody. "... over three years ..."
jcranberry 5y ago
I clicked on those links curious what he was talking about and was shocked he was painting this guy as a martyr. I didn't finish reading the second article about another guy comeback since it similarly didn't seem to acknowledge the reality of what he wrote being patently horrible when painting him as some kind of homeless man messiah.

butterfi 5y ago

Theres a lot of truths in this article, but it overlooks that every 10-15 years another new generation of people move to the city and after enough time will write sorrowful creeds about how the city has changed for the worse. I could write how much North Beach has changed since the mid-80's with the disappearance of cafes full of old Italian men, but frankly most of the people in the city now never experienced that. The Bay Area is more than just the tech industry and attempts to label it as one thing or another seem misguided.

Animats 5y ago

The 1980s, 2002, and 2008 were worse.

throwaway1777 5y ago

Better to zig when others zag. Probably the most contrarian and therefore best time to move to the bay is now while everyone is complaining. Even London breed is getting serious about crime, I think SF will bounce back with new energy.

gringoDan 5y ago

There's something to be said here for the Lindy effect: the longer something has survived, the longer its remaining life expectancy. This is why the "decline of New York" at the beginning of COVID was so overblown. NYC has long been the financial (and arguably cultural) capital of the world; I'd place a bet that the city will still be extremely relevant in 100 years. Similarly, the Bay has been the center of tech since 60s. But the Bay is much more fragile than New York; it is largely dominated by the tech industry. So a better comparison might be Detroit. When the car industry left, the entirety of Detroit was hollowed out. Additionally, you need to be in New York if you want to "play in the big leagues" in the world of finance, fashion, art, etc. But tech has already embraced the remote model. 5-10 years ago, I would have felt like I needed to be in SF to further my career in tech. Now, I live in Austin and don't feel like I'm missing out. If anything, it feels like there is way more startup potential here – people actually building cool things, as opposed to resting and vesting at the big companies that dominate Silicon Valley.

api 5y ago
Personal anecdote: Even 5 years ago calls with customers and investors invited questions like "so are you in the city or in the South Bay?" Raising money in particular was very hard if you were not in the Bay Area. Now nobody even asks where you are located and if you say you are distributed/remote everyone shrugs. Angels and VCs don't seem to care at all. It's been a stark and noticeable shift and it pre-dates COVID. COVID has just accelerated the geographic diversification trend dramatically.
- fishtoaster 5y ago
  I feel like this is a key point. There's long been strong financial pressure for the tech industry to disburse: it's incredibly expensive. Ideally you'd start a tech company somewhere where office and engineers are cheap. But the companies stay in SF because employees and VCs are there. VCs and employees are there because companies are here. And even though Sand Hill VCs could fund companies anywhere in the country, in practice, they didn't (much). If that's changing, I feel like that's the trigger for a big tech diaspora as much or more than remote eng work.

anarchy8 5y ago

The article peddles the falsehood that the crime rate in SF is exploding, while retail crime is actually at a historic low: http://www.cjcj.org/news/13165 http://www.cjcj.org/news/13165

subsubzero 5y ago

As a 4th generation Californian this article really hits the mark. I spent a majority of my life in the sfbay area and moved out of there when the pandemic started and will never move back. Everyone of my friends and my Wife's friends left along with the last of my direct family as well. It really boils down to alot of things, cost, dysfunction and environmental degradation. For me I know that life is short and I don't want to live in a crime infested dump that costs a fortune and is extremely crowded where everyone is miserable and has overreaching laws for decent people and lawlessness for criminals. We had packages stolen off our porch, liquor bottles/trash thrown on our lawn, cars broken into, illegal fireworks being fired off almost every night(scaring our dog to where she was having serious issues), driving anywhere I saw huge piles of trash, homeless camps and shopping carts. Oh and all houses run about $1.3M for a non dump and schools are terrible. And I didn't get into the non-stop fires that have happened the past few years(which has really never happened in California before).[I lived in San Jose]

blueski 5y ago
You say in another post you spent only a year in SF?
- subsubzero 5y ago
  I lived in SF in 2012-2013, and then moved to san jose
  - blueski 5y ago
    Where have you moved? Do you like it better?
majormajor 5y ago
You, in what sounds like a reasonably-well off position, struggle with the 1.3M home costs, etc. Imagine how it must be to be surrounded by 1.3M homes and multi-thousand dollar apartments when you're broke, not well paid, and can barely afford any of it? Homelessness and crime are both things that people are much more likely to resort to in a society with wildly inequal distributions of wealth than in one where everyone is in a similar place. So we could build more jails and prisons, throw more people in them. Punish people very harshly for stepping out of line as we continue to worsen the ability of the less-wealthy/less-paid to thrive. "There's no excuse for resorting to crime," etc. Criminalize sleeping on the street so that we can toss them somewhere too. We could build massively more. That seems much more humane. But a lot of people don't want to do that! So we could push people out, lower the demand. That would put pressure on prices and open up housing... nobody wants to do that, though! We just sorta "unintentionally" do it by choosing not to do anything else - let the problems push people away on their own! The crime isn't a direct symptom of government dysfunction, it's a symptom of the ever-growing divide. The government dysfunction is trying to have your cake and eat it too, but that's not actually just the government that wants to do it - tons of citizens want to both keep housing scarce and less dense and get rid of visible homelessness. What do you think the government alone could do that wouldn't result in their being rapidly voted out by people who don't want change?

scotuswroteus 5y ago

>A scant five years ago, a “tech bro” wrote an open letter to San Francisco mayor about street conditions, including being assaulted by a homeless person and pervasive drug use on the streets. He was lambasted in tech and national press, and his letter effectively ended his career. If he had written that letter in pretty much any other city, everyone would have agreed with him. In San Francisco today, everyone now publicly states what he wrote five years ago. This has been a part of SF culture since Tom Wolfe wrote about City Hall. I really don't understand folks who have lived here for a quarter century and don't know the City's history and culture.

BryantD 5y ago
It's also a misleading paragraph. The "tech bro" who wrote the open letter is Justin Keller. I'll reserve judgement on whether or not his career is over; he's currently running a devops consultancy, and I don't know how successful it is. However, the "effectively ended his career" link goes to a story about someone else completely: Greg Gopman. Justin Keller factors in only in a few paragraphs at the end of that story, and there are no conclusions drawn about whether or not his career is over.

renewiltord 5y ago

Prediction: SF will be stronger than ever. The locals will continue to extract massive benefits from the resurgence of tech.

jedberg 5y ago

> When I first moved to San Francisco in 1997, it was a magical and inspirational place. Remember the Flying Saucer and Survival Research Labs parties? I do remember that! I started working in 1999, and my coworkers and I were in SF a few times a week at various nerd parties. They used projectors to cat out the linux kernel on the wall as the decor. I miss those parties, because they were fun and also you got to meet other really cool nerds and talk about nerdy things.

iskander 5y ago

Breathless admiration of Miami as a "tech city" based on tweets by the disempowered mayor of the City of Miami (population bupkis) are a red flag that the author isn't thinking very seriously or speaking from direct experience, rather just regurgitating memes and shortcut thoughts. If you have ever lived in Miami (the 3M person metropolis, whose mayor is not Francis Suarez), you know that techies goes there to party, vacation, or retire but the actual startup scene suffers from perennial brain drain with no end in sight.

ruddct 5y ago
The thing that's confusing to me about the Miami-tech-hub story is the lack of universities. Good universities + big companies + lots of money floating around, that's the holy trinity of tech/startup hubs, no? Miami has maybe 1.5-2 out of 3?
- gavinray 5y ago
  I worked for a year at a startup that had space in FIU's (Florida International University) startup accelerator program -- unshockingly called "StartupFIU". When I moved down here, I was surprised. FIU is a massive and very nice school; University of Miami is also nice. I had never even heard of FIU before I worked on campus there. They're no Ivy League but I would say they're better than a lot of other schools.
Apocryphon 5y ago
It seems like Miami is currently a hotspot for VCs, particularly the social media influencer set, to relocate to. What actual well-known tech companies are currently located there? Even Magic Leap is based in Plantation, not Miami.
- pcwalton 5y ago
  A bunch of cryptocurrency startups. For a while now I've been wondering whether the cryptocurrency bust—which is inevitable in my view—will mean the end of these kinds of articles and the resurgence of the Bay Area. Many of the other up-and-coming tech areas, particularly Miami, are disproportionately composed of cryptocurrency ventures, which doesn't strike me as a sustainable tech scene.

dekhn 5y ago

This empire has a long way to fall. The way I think of the Bay Area is that it is just after the local peak of a form of civilization- the ascendancy of the techno-elite- that is currently taking over the world, or rather, taking its place alongside energy, medicine, and agriculture as major pillars of wealth and power. We are witnessing a micro-Rome, micro both in time and space. Instead of an empire rising and falling over centuries, the Bay Area rose and is now falling within the period of after WWII to now. Certainly the Bay Area didn't create the internet on its own, or develop the first micros or personal computers, nor invent all the machine learning algorithms, solely "solve search", or ad revenues. But it played a critical role in all those areas because the BA has, through a number of factors (some intentional, some not) been poised to do this since the end of WWII. At the end of WWII, the Bay Area was already a technological center with plenty of money about to undergo a population and building boom, but civic leaders and others recognized that the Bay Area's unique combination of attributes (weather, business, intellectual climate) made it ideal for a revolution based on companies depending on heavy technology development and smart well-payed employees funded by VCs. Those combination of attributes have reliably caused people to migrate here to go to school or get jobs or just bum around since 1945. Unfortunately, while that growth at the beginning worked out pretty well, the Bay Area has a number of limitations (some physical, some mental) that affect its ability to resolve the underlying infrastructural and social problems that occurred due to the "climate" (both political and atmospheric) and which have grown especially bad during a series of unbelievably good economies which have led to high housing prices, congested roads, etc. Don't worry- the bay area will muddle on in this state for some time and won't just crash immediately into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But, unless we change our ways significantly, the relative importance and power of the Bay Area will wane, being replaced by other areas which have found circumstances leading to rapid growth of a techno-elite.

11thEarlOfMar 5y ago

In May 2017, the combined market capitalization of the top 10 publicly traded Bay Area companies was $2,588 Billion. Today, it's $8,783 Billion. That's an IRR of 31% over the last 5 years. It's hard to see that as declining. Company culture and social circumstances are changing, yes. But the companies are doing just fine.

France_is_bacon 5y ago

[dead]

blueski 5y ago

As someone who works in tech and enjoys the outdoors (mainly hiking and biking, meaning I'm looking for sunny/temperate weather year round) I haven't found many better options than the Bay Area. Visited Miami and Austin in the last year, but the Summer temperatures are stifling and there's not the same wealth of natural beauty on their doorstep - Portland is great, but the grey skies would eventually wear me down. I'd love to find somewhere more affordable but San Francisco still checks a lot of boxes. Where else to consider?

educaysean 5y ago

I have a hard time trying to justify the Yahoo / SF comparison the article tries to establish. Yes I see the surface-level similarities; Yahoo was the leading website until it wasn't, and SF was the leading tech hub until one day it won't be. How does the relationship evolve beyond that? The symptoms of a once-giant slowly losing its lead will be similar no matter which industry or entity you look at. You could probably force similar parallels about Blockbuster, Brittany Spears, the Soviet Union or even GM. The author never bothers to develop any meaningful connection between the the reasons for their decline. They seem to hint at the fact that maybe hubris played a part - but it's all extremely unclear and I'm not going to read into it anymore than I need to. In the end it's yet just another "SF ain't the hot thing anymore" article with a sensationalized title.

wonnage 5y ago

> Key influencers like Elon Musk, Jason Calcanis, and Keith Rabois Oh no, a bunch of Twitter hot take artists, what ever shall we do

a-dub 5y ago

i sort of expected to not like this piece just from the title, but it was even worse than i expected. it didn't take long, but he really lost me when he defended the writing of these words: “The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that’s okay. In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city…You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us It’s a burden and a liability having them so close to us. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I’d consider thinking different, but the crazy toothless lady who kicks everyone that gets too close to her cardboard box hasn’t made anyone’s life better in a while.” i think that maybe when a culture emerges that thinks that sort of thinking is okay, something is very wrong. if that culture is on the decline, then i think that maybe not only the bay, but maybe the entire world is made a better place for it. in truth though, the tech/office diaspora does scare me a little bit. there is so much power and influence that is wrapped up in the white collar world. if the power brokers decamp for country fiefdoms and homesteads, their reduced interaction and engagement with the problems of the real world may change how they perceive the world and those problems. i fear this could manifest as reduced political will and financing to help the less fortunate in the long run, leading to a worse off society overall.

president 5y ago

If you think about what the Bay Area tech boom was, it was essentially a huge make-money-at-all-costs operation. Investors, tech startups, and the money that dominated the region set the tone for the culture. Despite all the talk about "making the world a better place", that was all a facade for making people filthy rich and trashing everything else that stood in the way of money. None of these companies cared about the things that make a healthy community and society. Certainly none of the politicians in the area did, many of which had symbiotic relationships with these entities, and that showed in the policies that manifested over the past decade.

mistrial9 5y ago

news from the Bay Area -- my low-tech trendy colleague hooked up with a merciless real-estate investor landlord, they both became serious alcoholics/multiple times wealthier. One is moving back to Ohio with a bundle of legal money and the other is just fat now, showing off to relatives back home; both boomers, no party in their future, no culture making, not interested in being friends with anyone. It seems that they ate a lot of expensive food, lived mediocre lives, got rich and now running away.

boringg 5y ago

"The report of my death is greatly exaggerated" San Francisco, Dec 17, 2021. Every article about the death of SF since the 80s has a litany of commentators saying how true that rings for them validating the article (and validates their own decision) - and yet it is still stands. The comment section is obviously HIGHLY biased towards sour grapes. Anyways while the litany of problems will always need to be fixed I just don't see any major city in the lower 48 that competes. Sorry all you valley emulators - best of luck re-branding your city the next valley - probably better to strike out on a different marketing campaign then trying your we are the next silicon ___ (insert geologic formation here).

syntheweave 5y ago

As I read further into the article I increasingly disagreed with the thesis and the influencer hyperbole used to support it. Cities are not tech companies. They have to provide services, infrastructure - housing, health, education, transportation. They can't be "disruptors" in the move fast break things sense, they are almost entirely a legacy maintenance job with thirty year planning horizons. The post pandemic quandary is really one faced by every developed-world city: where are the jobs gonna be? What's the economy gonna be? SF and California had a stunning run of attracting new jobs over the past century or so. But the housing issue and its side effects are built on issues that are primarily to do with broad aspects of national demographics and wealth distribution - landlords get rewarded because homes are investments, and homes are investments because we set up the financing that way when the Boomers were young. But that game has played out. The population is represented by younger generations now, and they aren't on this ladder. All of the rest follows from that, and little of it has anything to do with tech, except for that tech can be applied to shape the next economic model. With the "Great Reset", that's the kind of thing being referred to. It's not unique to SF, SF was just unusually impacted by being thrust into the global power center role.

tncpeterd 5y ago

The thing that bothers me a lot about all the people fleeing and moving out of the bay area is that.. it just feels to me like giving up. These people complain about all the problems in the bay area, and the same people being the most vocal about the crime problems and homelessness and drug issues, also happen to be people that have the tools (financially, socially, etc) to actually help solve the problems. But instead they just choose to leave and join another community that they envision will be a new utopia. If people thought Tech bro's were hated before.. just wait until all the tech people move to other states and work remote and just get up and move every time they disagree with whats going on in their new communities. Never truly becoming part of the communities and only taking advantage of policies and circumstances they had no hand in building or creating. To me that is a toxic cycle and no community anywhere can evolve and get better if the communities members are not invested and are only temporarily aligned when it suits them.

skrbjc 5y ago
There's this concept of voice vs exit. When things aren't going well in an organization or politically, you either decide to speak up and say there is something wrong or leave to find something else. One of the points in the article is that speaking up has been and currently feels like something you can't really do for fear of being ostracized by the greater community. Try mentioning you think there should be something done about the homeless problem, and the response always seems to be that we shouldn't criminalize homelessness, it's not their fault, more housing would fix everything. At a certain point you realize that if you can't speak up, or those in power/those that elect the people in power aren't going to listen, then you might as well seek a place that is a better fit. The crazy thing that happened recently is that before you had to make the decision to leave your job and hope to find an equivalent job in a new place. Which as challenging and probably led more people to try to speak up vs exit. But with remote work it is so much easier to leave, and there are even benefits to the cost of living calculation coming from the Bay Area, that exit becomes not only much easier, but also beneficial in terms of buying power for your dollars.

deleted 5y ago

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