11 ms·

How the Internet ruined San Francisco (1999)

84 points by mshafrir 14y ago

potatolicious 14y ago
The more things change the more they say the same. If there's one thing I've learned in life, is to never listen to people moaning about the "good old days" and how [insert group] has "ruined" [insert place], not like those [other group] that were great. The good old days were never actually that good, and [insert group] is neither worse nor better than [other group]. We're all way too young to be curmudgeons yet, so stop acting like it. It's also amusing to see one wave of gentrifiers shake their fists angrily at the next wave of gentrifiers. I heard about the Yuppie Eradication Project - where people who invaded a traditionally Latino stronghold vowed to key the cars of people who later invaded that. FWIW, they can fight for the Mission all they want. No matter how many rose-tinted pairs of glasses you put on, it's still the piss-filled, shit-littered, gun-happy, knife-stabby, gangbanger-filled shitpot we know and love.
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  True. But there's also no way to have another business doing a great job on a corner for 100 years - without waiting 100 years. It IS significant when great, non-obsolete businesses are pushed around by economic upheaval (in the article's case, real estate prices and taxes).
  - tthomas48 14y ago
    Yeah, but he highlights a big reason for this. Nothing new gets built. All those good old days people constricted supply and then got pissed when the demand hiked prices and they could no longer afford it. You see this all over. Cool towns try to constrict supply through regulation to stop people from moving to their town, but ultimately just end up making their towns more expensive.
    - jseliger 14y ago
      >Nothing new gets built. All those good old days people constricted supply and then got pissed when the demand hiked prices and they could no longer afford it. Exactly. I wrote this comment yesterday: >If employers offered significantly higher wages then plenty more supply would quickly appear to clear the market This is really a housing supply question as Matt Yglesias makes clear here: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/facebook_george_lucas_and_nimbyism_the_idiotic_rules_preventing_silicon_valley_from_building_the_houses_and_offices_we_need_to_power_american_innovation_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... and as others have written (see, for example, Ryan Avent's The Gated City). Housing costs in Silicon Valley are insane, which prices out lower skill workers and forces companies to pay more for highly skilled workers. Allowing to higher building heights and reduce setback requirements alone would do a lot to improve the jobs situation.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
        Housing costs in Silicon Valley are insane, which prices out lower skill workers and forces companies to pay more for highly skilled workers. It also reduces the quality of life for those who do live in Silicon Valley, because the salary rises almost never entirely make up for the rise in land prices. (Yes, I've used salary calculators, particularly to compare the Bay Area's and Boston's software engineering salaries to places like Portland and Seattle that are cheaper but still have lots of tech.)
        akgerber 14y ago
        Because if you can't build much-to-any more housing in Silicon Valley, salary increases there just serve to bid up housing prices further, rather than motivating people to build more & better housing.
- hoytie 14y ago
  The Mission looks more like Noe Valley runoff than ever. Sure, some parts are still slightly scary but there are signs of it becoming more bourgeois all over the place.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    Only if you stay strictly on/west of Valencia. The rest of the Mission is as fucked as ever. Let's not forget that the murder rate east of Valencia St is, at least in the last couple of months, working out to be 1 every 2 weeks.
    - wpietri 14y ago
      It's cheating to define "the Mission" as "the part of the Mission that best supports my sweeping generalization".
      - potatolicious 14y ago
        I haven't redefined the Mission at all - quite the opposite in fact. Consult a map if you don't believe me. If you look on a map you will find "the area west of Valencia" is a tiny sliver of the whole neighborhood - coincidentally the only part that is highly gentrified, this is the area GP was referring to. "The rest of the Mission" as I called out, is in fact the vast majority of the neighborhood, but also one that is routinely ignored by wealthy San Franciscans. It is vastly larger than the gentrified little corner, and is still a crack-ridden hole.
        wpietri 14y ago
        From your resume, it looks like you've lived in the area circa a year. Is that your entire baseline for judging the Mission's gentrification?
        potatolicious 14y ago
        I lived at 24th/Mission for a year, and as a photographer have been all over every nook and cranny of that neighborhood, the good and the bad - I don't think I'm unqualified to say that the area of the Mission west/on Valencia is an entirely separate universe from the rest of the Mission. I haven't made any claims on the Mission, say, in early 00s, because I obviously wasn't around then. The main thrust here is that the Mission is not the gentrified yuppie paradise that the media (particularly outside of SF) consistently makes it out to be - that would be the Marina. Only the tiniest sliver of it has seen "colonized" by the hipster/dotcom/yuppie contingent. In any case, my original comment re: gentrification wasn't aimed at the Mission exclusively - I've lived in numerous other rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods (Belltown and Capitol Hill in Seattle in particular) filled with curmudgeony 20-somethings shaking their fists angrily at gentrifiers who followed their own gentrification. Actually, the anti-gentrification sentiment in the Mission is substantially less intense than it is in Seattle. Up on Capitol Hill in Seattle, if you have money and live in one of the new housing developments you're practically a persona non grata.
- grellas 14y ago
  Yes, I will forever miss Carol Doda, the go-go "swing joints," the disco clubs, the Mitchell brothers, the Pavarotti operas where the star never showed up, the old SP trains with their smoking cars where you couldn't take a breath without choking, the no-growth mindset that caused the City to turns its collective nose up as the tech boom began and to wave to it as it passed by, the exodus of businesses that fled high taxes and silly regulations in favor of friendlier climes, and, of course, Playland, where you could ride bumper cars to your heart's content without having to consider anything more serious than how to find the sun amidst the continual fog that hung over the place. Having been afflicted already with such grievous losses, I imagine the City will survive an influx of talented young entrepreneurs who seek to build great new companies and maybe just to have a little fun to boot. Having lived through all this, I can tell you, the City is what it has always been: an amazing collection of high life, low life, and tempered life of every kind imaginable. Today, it has lots of character, just as it always has. It is vain and fruitless to try to glamorize a pickled version of the things of a bygone era, as the author here does. We just need to appreciate it on its own terms.
  - mcmatterson 14y ago
    A thousand times this. I moved away from San Francisco (not by choice) last year, and miss it terribly. This summarizes everything I love about SF.
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    Human-excrement-filled-escalators must be a metaphor for something...
- timr 14y ago
  "If there's one thing I've learned in life, is to never listen to people moaning about the 'good old days'" You're just being a reverse curmudgeon. Creativity thrives in an environment of diversity, and San Francisco became a mecca for creative software people because it was already a mecca for artists, hippies and people of all races and creeds, not because it was packed to the gills with iPhone developers in ironic t-shirts. Maybe there's nothing that can be done about it, but I think there's definitely a loss when a place becomes homogenous due to gentrification. I've only been here since 2008, but even on that limited timeframe it's been pretty damned annoying to see useful places (like hardware stores, markets, dry cleaners, etc.) shut down so that room can be made for yuppie bars and overpriced restaurants. So we replace shops with co-working spaces and bookstores with boutique dealers of objets d'art and we pretend that it's "progress", but we make the neighborhoods less attractive to the people who made the neighborhoods attractive. In short: if you're giving me a choice, I'll take "stabby" neighborhoods over luxury condos. At least the former gives an artist or a musician a place to squat while earning nothing and doing something truly novel; the latter gives a software engineer a place to live while working for Zynga.
  - mc32 14y ago
    >Creativity thrives in an environment of diversity I don't know how that assumption would correlate with SV. The Peninsula and the SR237 triangle aren't known for their creative diversity --they were orchards just a few decades back -but those valleys were the primary genesis for the information technology we have today. When the HPs, Fairchildren, NatSemis, Intels, etc. began all the Beatnicks were in SF. The valley was a kind of backwater --well, it was mostly orchards, from what I can tell. Despite that those companies were able to find bright people who brought forth progress and ideas which profoundly affect us today. So, I don't really see the correlation between creative types and the discoveries by the engineers. That's not to say engineers can't enjoy the creative arts as pleasure, but to say they are related directly seems a stretch, to me. It's not a detriment to have creatives, but not sure they were a necessary ingredient. > I think there's definitely a loss when a place becomes homogenous due to gentrification. I think the premise is an old canard. Post WWII Tokyo had a choice to make. Change rapidly and modermize and progress or remain chained to its old ways and remain a kind of defeated backwater. They chose the former, and while modern, Tokyo is not "boring" and homogenous. There are thousands of distinct neighborhoods with their own unique character, despite the fast pace of building and modernization.
- rsingel 14y ago
  I moved to SF in the midst of the dot-com boom, looking for a job writing, only to soon find myself working at a dotcom. For those who didn't live it, it's hard to explain how much money was floating around and how arrogant many "dotcommers" were and how many oozed an entitlement to IPO riches. The crash was in some ways a relief for many, who then pursued careers they really wanted. It was a complicated time, and we're in another one right now. I just hope the newest wave of dotcommers - who thankfully include way more programmers and fewer smarmy bizdev guys -- finds a way to avoid feeling entitled.
- mtalantikite 14y ago
  I have very mixed feelings about this. It's easy to say 'too bad, you're a gentrifier complaining about further gentrification', and I agree with that to some extent. On the other hand, I think what the sentiment of this article is getting at is the frustration that comes with watching culture and community being washed away at a large scale. Sure, enclaves of artists/musicians/hackers may set up shop in various neighborhoods throughout a city, but early on it's never enough to really remove the feeling of culture and community of where one is on a whole. But then at a certain point you hit some sort of inflection point where the flood gates open and the entire city feels foreign. This happened to Manhattan a while ago. Sure it's still uniquely New York, and it's still an amazing place that I love, but it's a borough for the wealthy now. I encountered this feeling of resentment towards post-flood-gate gentrifiers recently on a subway ride on the Q train back into Brooklyn. If you've ever spent any significant time on the Q train you've probably experienced the emergency doors on one side of the train open, followed by a group of young guys entering the car exclaiming "It's show time!", followed by all sorts of acrobatic break dancing. It might not be all that amazing the 20th time, but it is what it is. A couple weeks ago this familiar act began happening and, at the risk of sounding prejudiced, a new-wave gentrifying girl yelled "Oh, no! Stop! I hate this!" while giving a stank face to everyone. My initial reaction: this is NYC, specifically Brooklyn, and it's for moments like this that we live here, so what are you doing here? I had realized that Brooklyn had changed significantly, but for some reason this made me realize it's nearing the point of no return. You see people charging $2700 for 1 bedrooms in Bushwick and Bentleys cruising on Flatbush and realize the charm of the entire place is in danger of being lost.
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    I think about this in my own city (Seattle), where the quirky artists have been progressively priced out of several neighborhoods. And sure, something is lost when this happens, but I don't think anyone should be assured that their place in the world is theirs forever. So, you have to move from Fremont to Georgetown, and maybe then from Georgetown to South Park. Sure, something is lost, but is it a real tragedy?
    - mtalantikite 14y ago
- pjlegato 14y ago
  Even the Hispanics in the Mission are a relatively recent influx - the Mission was traditionally an Irish and Italian neighborhood.
jongold 14y ago
San Francisco doesn't belong to anyone.
api 14y ago
There's a sort of ugly urban cycle. First, you get an interesting place. Then interesting people move in. These interesting people do interesting things. Wages go up. Money moves in. Then you have real-estate hyperinflation, and the place becomes unaffordable to anyone who isn't already rich or grandfathered in. Trouble is: the next wave of interesting people usually start out as starving artists/hackers/entrepreneurs just like the previous wave did. It's almost as if regional success beyond a certain point accomplishes nothing but inflating real estate, which redirects further success into keeping that real estate bubble inflated. This primarily benefits banks. Imagine what would happen if this didn't happen... imagine living in a place as inexpensive as a medium-sized Midwestern city, but with Silicon Valley salaries. Imagine how many other places that wealth could go: more startups, more gadgets, better infrastructure, world-class everything, better health care, even generosity. But nope, real estate just soaks up wealth beyond a certain point and redirects it back into the financial pyramid. Sometimes a place is so unbelievably interesting, like New York, that people are willing to live in a catbox in order to be there. But even then people have a tendency to get sick of this after a while, and anyone contemplating reproducing or wanting to do anything that requires space is out of luck and has to leave.
- Tipzntrix 14y ago
  I think part of the reason salaries are so high is that employers have to compete with these costs. If the real estate price / cost of living went down, salaries would be down as well. There is quite a bit of data showing that Bay Area salaries are higher than anywhere else in this industry.
  - iyulaev 14y ago
    How much of it is baked into the cost of living? If my rent is 30% of my salary, and I'm looking at a job that pays 30% more but the rent is double in the area, isn't it a wash?
    - khuey 14y ago
      No, it's probably actually a negative, because that new 30% is almost certainly taxed at a higher rate than your current salary.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
charonn0 14y ago
The part I liked was when the author complained that there were too many jobs.
mynameishere 14y ago
A truly bizarre complaint. You could say something similar about Los Angeles, and many other Californian cities, but opposite in every way.
sksk 14y ago
David Talbot, founder and CEO of Salon.com recently participated in KQED Forum talking about 'How much tech can one city take?'. Somewhat similar to the above article but a 2012 view. For those of you who are interested you can hear it here: http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201209250900 http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201209250900
khuey 14y ago
The problem is lack of supply of real estate. The proper response here is to build higher density real estate, or to build transit systems that effectively expand the amount of land that can be reached quickly enough to be "in" the city, or both. San Francisco has failed miserably at both. Development is a four letter word due to the attitudes of many of the existing residents and the legal process that allows anyone to stall and delay anything. BART meets the threshold for tolerable transit, but there's not enough of it, and even if there were fast rapid transit to the peninsula or Marin the residents there are even more opposed to density than San Franciscans. Most of the new development is happening in parts of the East Bay near BART because that's where people are willing to allow it and where transit can get you downtown quickly. If the city were to permit and construct 10 story buildings in the Sunset tomorrow that wouldn't do much to alleviate real estate prices because it takes longer to cross the city on transit than it does to BART in from the good parts of Oakland.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  True that. It used to take an hour to get downtown from the Sunset. Finally we gave up and moved to North Oakland. The weather's nicer, and it takes 20 minutes to get to downtown SF.
  - khuey 14y ago
    Yeah, it is inexcusable that the N Judah takes close to an hour to travel 7 miles from the ocean to the Embarcadero, half that in tunnels/dedicated right of way.
    - geebee 14y ago
      Agreed, but when you say "half", are you talking distance or time? My experience is that once you're in the tunnel, it's pretty quick. Surface streets are achingly slow.
      - khuey 14y ago
        Distance. The surface streets (and entering/exiting the Market Street subway) are the slow parts.
salem 14y ago
I find it curious that the same people that complain about evictions complain about high rises getting built. This sort of article gets written year after year. People have to live somewhere, any if there continues to be resistance to higher density housing, rents will keep skyrocketing.
Apocryphon 14y ago
This seems like a timely article: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-micro-apartments-20120924,0,5210788.story http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-micro-apartments-201...
johnnymonster 14y ago
Anyone can die at any moment and everything is gone doesn't that suck. You can't control death and you can't control change! Life always moves on no matter what you do. Thats why you have to enjoy the moments as they pass and stop trying to keep them from passing, forcing them to stand still! Life would be boring without new things happening. I know some people get stuck in their ways and can't stand change, but I can't imagine that life is very fun or enjoyable at all!
TheMagicHorsey 14y ago
There's always at least one person whining about certain cosmetic characteristics as though they are cultural treasures. Characteristics of neighborhoods are always changing. In the past they changed over a generation, now technology and a rapidly transforming economy create changes in decades and half-decades. This isn't a bad thing. All the little things the author opines romantically about are relatively recent developments that were decried by earlier generations no doubt. OH THESE FILTHY BUTCHERS HAVE DISPLACED THE PICTURESQUE HUNTSMAN AND HIS MEAT CARRIAGE WHICH USED TO PLY THE STREETS OF MINE YOUTH. You see what I'm saying? This woman has no idea. She's all shriveled up and unstuck in time. She can't see things with a long lens. All she knows is that things she is comfortable with are changing, and she doesn't want to learn to see something beautiful in what is still to come. She wants everything to be frozen in crystal for all time. These people are spacewankers of the worst sort. Don't let the fact that they are good at writing English seduce you to this stupid hipster way of thinking.
DoogieF 14y ago
This town is flavorless, There's many things that are great about it, but there is simply no vibe...IMHO.
ultraswank 14y ago
I moved to The Mission in 1996 So I'm likely included in the internet crowd that ruined the city. I loved living there, but I when I visit now its not the lack of artists that I notice, its the (relative) lack of crack addicts. Lets not let the glasses get too rose colored. It might be more difficult for people just starting out or on limited income to make it there, but if they do there is a base line improvement to their quality of life that comes with living in a safer and cleaner environment. I took my son to play at the newly renovated park at Valencia and 19th the other month and I couldn't believe that there was an outdoor water park in SF, much less The Mission, that I felt OK with him playing in. The locals looked pretty excited about it too. Besides the young and hip are doing what they always do, find new areas to make hip. I've been living in the East Bay for a decade now and I can't believe that Oakland is the new hip spot in the Bay Area. Hope it does something for my property values.

84 points by mshafrir 14y ago

The more things change the more they say the same. If there's one thing I've learned in life, is to never listen to people moaning about the "good old days" and how [insert group] has "ruined" [insert place], not like those [other group] that were great. The good old days were never actually that good, and [insert group] is neither worse nor better than [other group]. We're all way too young to be curmudgeons yet, so stop acting like it. It's also amusing to see one wave of gentrifiers shake their fists angrily at the next wave of gentrifiers. I heard about the Yuppie Eradication Project - where people who invaded a traditionally Latino stronghold vowed to key the cars of people who later invaded that. FWIW, they can fight for the Mission all they want. No matter how many rose-tinted pairs of glasses you put on, it's still the piss-filled, shit-littered, gun-happy, knife-stabby, gangbanger-filled shitpot we know and love.

JoeAltmaier 14y ago
True. But there's also no way to have another business doing a great job on a corner for 100 years - without waiting 100 years. It IS significant when great, non-obsolete businesses are pushed around by economic upheaval (in the article's case, real estate prices and taxes).
- tthomas48 14y ago
  Yeah, but he highlights a big reason for this. Nothing new gets built. All those good old days people constricted supply and then got pissed when the demand hiked prices and they could no longer afford it. You see this all over. Cool towns try to constrict supply through regulation to stop people from moving to their town, but ultimately just end up making their towns more expensive.
  - jseliger 14y ago
    >Nothing new gets built. All those good old days people constricted supply and then got pissed when the demand hiked prices and they could no longer afford it. Exactly. I wrote this comment yesterday: >If employers offered significantly higher wages then plenty more supply would quickly appear to clear the market This is really a housing supply question as Matt Yglesias makes clear here: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/facebook_george_lucas_and_nimbyism_the_idiotic_rules_preventing_silicon_valley_from_building_the_houses_and_offices_we_need_to_power_american_innovation_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... and as others have written (see, for example, Ryan Avent's The Gated City). Housing costs in Silicon Valley are insane, which prices out lower skill workers and forces companies to pay more for highly skilled workers. Allowing to higher building heights and reduce setback requirements alone would do a lot to improve the jobs situation.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      Housing costs in Silicon Valley are insane, which prices out lower skill workers and forces companies to pay more for highly skilled workers. It also reduces the quality of life for those who do live in Silicon Valley, because the salary rises almost never entirely make up for the rise in land prices. (Yes, I've used salary calculators, particularly to compare the Bay Area's and Boston's software engineering salaries to places like Portland and Seattle that are cheaper but still have lots of tech.)
      - akgerber 14y ago
        Because if you can't build much-to-any more housing in Silicon Valley, salary increases there just serve to bid up housing prices further, rather than motivating people to build more & better housing.
hoytie 14y ago
The Mission looks more like Noe Valley runoff than ever. Sure, some parts are still slightly scary but there are signs of it becoming more bourgeois all over the place.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  Only if you stay strictly on/west of Valencia. The rest of the Mission is as fucked as ever. Let's not forget that the murder rate east of Valencia St is, at least in the last couple of months, working out to be 1 every 2 weeks.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    It's cheating to define "the Mission" as "the part of the Mission that best supports my sweeping generalization".
    - potatolicious 14y ago
      I haven't redefined the Mission at all - quite the opposite in fact. Consult a map if you don't believe me. If you look on a map you will find "the area west of Valencia" is a tiny sliver of the whole neighborhood - coincidentally the only part that is highly gentrified, this is the area GP was referring to. "The rest of the Mission" as I called out, is in fact the vast majority of the neighborhood, but also one that is routinely ignored by wealthy San Franciscans. It is vastly larger than the gentrified little corner, and is still a crack-ridden hole.
      - wpietri 14y ago
        From your resume, it looks like you've lived in the area circa a year. Is that your entire baseline for judging the Mission's gentrification?
        potatolicious 14y ago
        I lived at 24th/Mission for a year, and as a photographer have been all over every nook and cranny of that neighborhood, the good and the bad - I don't think I'm unqualified to say that the area of the Mission west/on Valencia is an entirely separate universe from the rest of the Mission. I haven't made any claims on the Mission, say, in early 00s, because I obviously wasn't around then. The main thrust here is that the Mission is not the gentrified yuppie paradise that the media (particularly outside of SF) consistently makes it out to be - that would be the Marina. Only the tiniest sliver of it has seen "colonized" by the hipster/dotcom/yuppie contingent. In any case, my original comment re: gentrification wasn't aimed at the Mission exclusively - I've lived in numerous other rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods (Belltown and Capitol Hill in Seattle in particular) filled with curmudgeony 20-somethings shaking their fists angrily at gentrifiers who followed their own gentrification. Actually, the anti-gentrification sentiment in the Mission is substantially less intense than it is in Seattle. Up on Capitol Hill in Seattle, if you have money and live in one of the new housing developments you're practically a persona non grata.
grellas 14y ago
Yes, I will forever miss Carol Doda, the go-go "swing joints," the disco clubs, the Mitchell brothers, the Pavarotti operas where the star never showed up, the old SP trains with their smoking cars where you couldn't take a breath without choking, the no-growth mindset that caused the City to turns its collective nose up as the tech boom began and to wave to it as it passed by, the exodus of businesses that fled high taxes and silly regulations in favor of friendlier climes, and, of course, Playland, where you could ride bumper cars to your heart's content without having to consider anything more serious than how to find the sun amidst the continual fog that hung over the place. Having been afflicted already with such grievous losses, I imagine the City will survive an influx of talented young entrepreneurs who seek to build great new companies and maybe just to have a little fun to boot. Having lived through all this, I can tell you, the City is what it has always been: an amazing collection of high life, low life, and tempered life of every kind imaginable. Today, it has lots of character, just as it always has. It is vain and fruitless to try to glamorize a pickled version of the things of a bygone era, as the author here does. We just need to appreciate it on its own terms.
- mcmatterson 14y ago
  A thousand times this. I moved away from San Francisco (not by choice) last year, and miss it terribly. This summarizes everything I love about SF.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  Human-excrement-filled-escalators must be a metaphor for something...
timr 14y ago
"If there's one thing I've learned in life, is to never listen to people moaning about the 'good old days'" You're just being a reverse curmudgeon. Creativity thrives in an environment of diversity, and San Francisco became a mecca for creative software people because it was already a mecca for artists, hippies and people of all races and creeds, not because it was packed to the gills with iPhone developers in ironic t-shirts. Maybe there's nothing that can be done about it, but I think there's definitely a loss when a place becomes homogenous due to gentrification. I've only been here since 2008, but even on that limited timeframe it's been pretty damned annoying to see useful places (like hardware stores, markets, dry cleaners, etc.) shut down so that room can be made for yuppie bars and overpriced restaurants. So we replace shops with co-working spaces and bookstores with boutique dealers of objets d'art and we pretend that it's "progress", but we make the neighborhoods less attractive to the people who made the neighborhoods attractive. In short: if you're giving me a choice, I'll take "stabby" neighborhoods over luxury condos. At least the former gives an artist or a musician a place to squat while earning nothing and doing something truly novel; the latter gives a software engineer a place to live while working for Zynga.
- mc32 14y ago
  >Creativity thrives in an environment of diversity I don't know how that assumption would correlate with SV. The Peninsula and the SR237 triangle aren't known for their creative diversity --they were orchards just a few decades back -but those valleys were the primary genesis for the information technology we have today. When the HPs, Fairchildren, NatSemis, Intels, etc. began all the Beatnicks were in SF. The valley was a kind of backwater --well, it was mostly orchards, from what I can tell. Despite that those companies were able to find bright people who brought forth progress and ideas which profoundly affect us today. So, I don't really see the correlation between creative types and the discoveries by the engineers. That's not to say engineers can't enjoy the creative arts as pleasure, but to say they are related directly seems a stretch, to me. It's not a detriment to have creatives, but not sure they were a necessary ingredient. > I think there's definitely a loss when a place becomes homogenous due to gentrification. I think the premise is an old canard. Post WWII Tokyo had a choice to make. Change rapidly and modermize and progress or remain chained to its old ways and remain a kind of defeated backwater. They chose the former, and while modern, Tokyo is not "boring" and homogenous. There are thousands of distinct neighborhoods with their own unique character, despite the fast pace of building and modernization.
rsingel 14y ago
I moved to SF in the midst of the dot-com boom, looking for a job writing, only to soon find myself working at a dotcom. For those who didn't live it, it's hard to explain how much money was floating around and how arrogant many "dotcommers" were and how many oozed an entitlement to IPO riches. The crash was in some ways a relief for many, who then pursued careers they really wanted. It was a complicated time, and we're in another one right now. I just hope the newest wave of dotcommers - who thankfully include way more programmers and fewer smarmy bizdev guys -- finds a way to avoid feeling entitled.
mtalantikite 14y ago
I have very mixed feelings about this. It's easy to say 'too bad, you're a gentrifier complaining about further gentrification', and I agree with that to some extent. On the other hand, I think what the sentiment of this article is getting at is the frustration that comes with watching culture and community being washed away at a large scale. Sure, enclaves of artists/musicians/hackers may set up shop in various neighborhoods throughout a city, but early on it's never enough to really remove the feeling of culture and community of where one is on a whole. But then at a certain point you hit some sort of inflection point where the flood gates open and the entire city feels foreign. This happened to Manhattan a while ago. Sure it's still uniquely New York, and it's still an amazing place that I love, but it's a borough for the wealthy now. I encountered this feeling of resentment towards post-flood-gate gentrifiers recently on a subway ride on the Q train back into Brooklyn. If you've ever spent any significant time on the Q train you've probably experienced the emergency doors on one side of the train open, followed by a group of young guys entering the car exclaiming "It's show time!", followed by all sorts of acrobatic break dancing. It might not be all that amazing the 20th time, but it is what it is. A couple weeks ago this familiar act began happening and, at the risk of sounding prejudiced, a new-wave gentrifying girl yelled "Oh, no! Stop! I hate this!" while giving a stank face to everyone. My initial reaction: this is NYC, specifically Brooklyn, and it's for moments like this that we live here, so what are you doing here? I had realized that Brooklyn had changed significantly, but for some reason this made me realize it's nearing the point of no return. You see people charging $2700 for 1 bedrooms in Bushwick and Bentleys cruising on Flatbush and realize the charm of the entire place is in danger of being lost.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  I think about this in my own city (Seattle), where the quirky artists have been progressively priced out of several neighborhoods. And sure, something is lost when this happens, but I don't think anyone should be assured that their place in the world is theirs forever. So, you have to move from Fremont to Georgetown, and maybe then from Georgetown to South Park. Sure, something is lost, but is it a real tragedy?
  - mtalantikite 14y ago
pjlegato 14y ago
Even the Hispanics in the Mission are a relatively recent influx - the Mission was traditionally an Irish and Italian neighborhood.

jongold 14y ago

San Francisco doesn't belong to anyone.

api 14y ago

There's a sort of ugly urban cycle. First, you get an interesting place. Then interesting people move in. These interesting people do interesting things. Wages go up. Money moves in. Then you have real-estate hyperinflation, and the place becomes unaffordable to anyone who isn't already rich or grandfathered in. Trouble is: the next wave of interesting people usually start out as starving artists/hackers/entrepreneurs just like the previous wave did. It's almost as if regional success beyond a certain point accomplishes nothing but inflating real estate, which redirects further success into keeping that real estate bubble inflated. This primarily benefits banks. Imagine what would happen if this didn't happen... imagine living in a place as inexpensive as a medium-sized Midwestern city, but with Silicon Valley salaries. Imagine how many other places that wealth could go: more startups, more gadgets, better infrastructure, world-class everything, better health care, even generosity. But nope, real estate just soaks up wealth beyond a certain point and redirects it back into the financial pyramid. Sometimes a place is so unbelievably interesting, like New York, that people are willing to live in a catbox in order to be there. But even then people have a tendency to get sick of this after a while, and anyone contemplating reproducing or wanting to do anything that requires space is out of luck and has to leave.

Tipzntrix 14y ago
I think part of the reason salaries are so high is that employers have to compete with these costs. If the real estate price / cost of living went down, salaries would be down as well. There is quite a bit of data showing that Bay Area salaries are higher than anywhere else in this industry.
- iyulaev 14y ago
  How much of it is baked into the cost of living? If my rent is 30% of my salary, and I'm looking at a job that pays 30% more but the rent is double in the area, isn't it a wash?
  - khuey 14y ago
    No, it's probably actually a negative, because that new 30% is almost certainly taxed at a higher rate than your current salary.

deleted 14y ago

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charonn0 14y ago

The part I liked was when the author complained that there were too many jobs.

mynameishere 14y ago

A truly bizarre complaint. You could say something similar about Los Angeles, and many other Californian cities, but opposite in every way.

sksk 14y ago

David Talbot, founder and CEO of Salon.com recently participated in KQED Forum talking about 'How much tech can one city take?'. Somewhat similar to the above article but a 2012 view. For those of you who are interested you can hear it here: http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201209250900 http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201209250900

khuey 14y ago

The problem is lack of supply of real estate. The proper response here is to build higher density real estate, or to build transit systems that effectively expand the amount of land that can be reached quickly enough to be "in" the city, or both. San Francisco has failed miserably at both. Development is a four letter word due to the attitudes of many of the existing residents and the legal process that allows anyone to stall and delay anything. BART meets the threshold for tolerable transit, but there's not enough of it, and even if there were fast rapid transit to the peninsula or Marin the residents there are even more opposed to density than San Franciscans. Most of the new development is happening in parts of the East Bay near BART because that's where people are willing to allow it and where transit can get you downtown quickly. If the city were to permit and construct 10 story buildings in the Sunset tomorrow that wouldn't do much to alleviate real estate prices because it takes longer to cross the city on transit than it does to BART in from the good parts of Oakland.

anigbrowl 14y ago
True that. It used to take an hour to get downtown from the Sunset. Finally we gave up and moved to North Oakland. The weather's nicer, and it takes 20 minutes to get to downtown SF.
- khuey 14y ago
  Yeah, it is inexcusable that the N Judah takes close to an hour to travel 7 miles from the ocean to the Embarcadero, half that in tunnels/dedicated right of way.
  - geebee 14y ago
    Agreed, but when you say "half", are you talking distance or time? My experience is that once you're in the tunnel, it's pretty quick. Surface streets are achingly slow.
    - khuey 14y ago
      Distance. The surface streets (and entering/exiting the Market Street subway) are the slow parts.

salem 14y ago

I find it curious that the same people that complain about evictions complain about high rises getting built. This sort of article gets written year after year. People have to live somewhere, any if there continues to be resistance to higher density housing, rents will keep skyrocketing.

Apocryphon 14y ago

This seems like a timely article: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-micro-apartments-20120924,0,5210788.story http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-micro-apartments-201...

johnnymonster 14y ago

Anyone can die at any moment and everything is gone doesn't that suck. You can't control death and you can't control change! Life always moves on no matter what you do. Thats why you have to enjoy the moments as they pass and stop trying to keep them from passing, forcing them to stand still! Life would be boring without new things happening. I know some people get stuck in their ways and can't stand change, but I can't imagine that life is very fun or enjoyable at all!

TheMagicHorsey 14y ago

There's always at least one person whining about certain cosmetic characteristics as though they are cultural treasures. Characteristics of neighborhoods are always changing. In the past they changed over a generation, now technology and a rapidly transforming economy create changes in decades and half-decades. This isn't a bad thing. All the little things the author opines romantically about are relatively recent developments that were decried by earlier generations no doubt. OH THESE FILTHY BUTCHERS HAVE DISPLACED THE PICTURESQUE HUNTSMAN AND HIS MEAT CARRIAGE WHICH USED TO PLY THE STREETS OF MINE YOUTH. You see what I'm saying? This woman has no idea. She's all shriveled up and unstuck in time. She can't see things with a long lens. All she knows is that things she is comfortable with are changing, and she doesn't want to learn to see something beautiful in what is still to come. She wants everything to be frozen in crystal for all time. These people are spacewankers of the worst sort. Don't let the fact that they are good at writing English seduce you to this stupid hipster way of thinking.

DoogieF 14y ago

This town is flavorless, There's many things that are great about it, but there is simply no vibe...IMHO.

ultraswank 14y ago

I moved to The Mission in 1996 So I'm likely included in the internet crowd that ruined the city. I loved living there, but I when I visit now its not the lack of artists that I notice, its the (relative) lack of crack addicts. Lets not let the glasses get too rose colored. It might be more difficult for people just starting out or on limited income to make it there, but if they do there is a base line improvement to their quality of life that comes with living in a safer and cleaner environment. I took my son to play at the newly renovated park at Valencia and 19th the other month and I couldn't believe that there was an outdoor water park in SF, much less The Mission, that I felt OK with him playing in. The locals looked pretty excited about it too. Besides the young and hip are doing what they always do, find new areas to make hip. I've been living in the East Bay for a decade now and I can't believe that Oakland is the new hip spot in the Bay Area. Hope it does something for my property values.