[HN Gopher] Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus
___________________________________________________________________
Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus
Author : kyleblarson
Score : 135 points
Date : 2021-05-19 18:23 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sfciti.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (sfciti.org)
| sneak wrote:
| It always struck me as odd that a culture so interested in the
| internet and data and disrupting existing cash flows would itself
| dictate a system in which so, so much cash flows from VCs to
| paychecks to landowners in one single metro.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Surprise: the landlords are in charge of local government.
| sneak wrote:
| Yeah, but AFAIK there isn't huge overlap between the VC funds
| and the landowners, unless there's some hidden corporate
| structure of which I am unaware.
|
| It would be quite silly (and clever) for VC LPs to start
| buying up residential properties, knowing that their funding
| rounds go right into payroll and then right into SFBA rents
| and back into their pockets. :D
| jedberg wrote:
| YC actually considered this (jokingly I think, but maybe
| not?). They realized that many of their startups were
| living in just a couple of high rises in San Francisco.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I don't think it's directly this malicious. I think it's
| more just a blindspot. If you're a 40-something partner at
| a major VC firm, who bought his home in Palo Alto in 2005,
| then the "cost of living" is largely invisible to you. Sure
| you may have a sizable chunk of home equity locked up, but
| that's not a monthly cash flow issue.
|
| Intellectually you know that being located in the Bay Area
| is a major burden to the ramen-eating startup founders that
| you fund. But it's a lot easier to rationalize that away
| with justifications around "cross-pollination of ideas" and
| being in the "intangible benefits of being an innovation
| center". Certainly a lot easier when you're not worried
| about making rent on your 400 square foot studio.
| paxys wrote:
| And VCs are also landowners
| swiley wrote:
| Wait... is ycombinator actually a real estate company? /s
| nradov wrote:
| Peter Thiel made the same point in 2018 and decided to focus
| his investments in other regions.
|
| https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter...
| yesBoot wrote:
| Population decline was greater in 2018 and 2019 than 2020.
|
| Even then it was tenths of a percent.
|
| Are sure "exodus" is the right word?
| runeb wrote:
| > For almost as long as we've been tracking the COVID-19
| pandemic, sf.citi has been closely monitoring the San Francisco
| tech exodus
|
| They say 63 percent of tech companies surveyed have already
| downsized or plan to downsize their office space in the San
| Francisco Bay Area. This is to be expected in a work-from-home
| situation like the ongoing pandemic. I don't see anything about
| the percentage of it being permanent rather than temporary.
| dmode wrote:
| I am actually more surprised that 40% decided not to downsize
| given the WFH model that is popular now
| ska wrote:
| Downsizing is usually complicated and can be expensive and/or
| distracting.
|
| Particularly if you don't think it will last long, I can see
| a bunch of companies taking a wait-and-see approach.
| ghaff wrote:
| One thing you're not accounting for is that companies
| normally plan for growth--whether or not that ends up
| happening. I expect a lot of companies that were likely
| exploring real estate expansion pre-pandemic have stomped on
| the brakes and will wait and see. So they may or may not
| downsize but they probably won't expand like they normally
| would have.
| ghaff wrote:
| I took the pie chart next to the 63% one to be about the long
| term. So about half fully remote or substantially remote.
| [deleted]
| mrwh wrote:
| My Bay Area anecdote: a lot of my colleagues left over the past
| year, some are staying away, most are returning/have already
| returned. Not nothing, not an exodus though.
| llsf wrote:
| Maybe it is an opportunity to convert some commercial space into
| residential space and make the City more affordable ?
|
| If really so many companies are going remote, then all the
| commercial landlords would have to find ways to make money out of
| their commercial space.
|
| Any reasons that could prevent it (e.g. stringent zoning code,
| preventing conversion from commercial to residential) ?
| hedora wrote:
| That would make it easier for people with money to move in.
|
| The best way to ensure fair and equitable housing is to
| constrain the supply as much as possible.
|
| We don't need to worry though, the zoning and planning
| departments will definitely SF from the tyranny of new housing
| units.
| chaganated wrote:
| Potentially leaky vaccine:
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/02/1017161/covid-va...
|
| Leaky Vaccine + Time:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention
| 101001001001 wrote:
| In 2020, San Francisco's sales tax revenue dropped by as much as
| 70 percent in San Francisco's downtown, which relies heavily on
| restaurants and hotels.
|
| Mother of god...
| zirkonit wrote:
| Long overdue.
| verst wrote:
| Businesses shifting to partially or fully remote (the key metric
| surveyed in this article) isn't necessarily an exodus from SF. It
| just means a decline in the need for office space in SF.
|
| Additionally, other sources indicate that most SF residents who
| left moved to nearby areas [1]. (Those areas themselves may see
| their residents moving elsewhere)
|
| [1]: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/exodus-study-reveals-
| dra...
| ghaff wrote:
| That's not really surprising. A lot of people like California
| and, if you don't need to worry about a daily commute, that
| opens up a lot of options that, if not exactly cheap, aren't as
| eye watering as the Bay Area.
| proc0 wrote:
| SF is on a different level of exodus then the rest of the Bay
| Area, and I guess also the state. The leadership of the city
| forgot there are also nearby cities that aren't trying out crazy
| new laws and mandates that obviously make everything much worse.
| One of the richest, most advanced places on Earth, making civic
| problems worse for decades now.
| ClassAndBurn wrote:
| I'm so excited for the possibility of rental prices coming down
| enough to support the artists and quirky businesses that used to
| be around.
|
| The city's consolidation into tech forced out a lot of the
| vibrancy that made San Francisco unique. Those people are still
| residents. It's just they've been unable to afford the space to
| enact some of the things they used to.
| sharadov wrote:
| This is something that really bothers me - all those billions
| of dollars of tech money and you cannot find a way to house and
| support artists. New York billionaires have always found a way
| to support artistic endeavors. Case in point - Bloomberg, he
| personally donated a lot.
| paxys wrote:
| Funny you say that because when I lived in New York a few
| years ago gentrification and high rents was the top complaint
| among residents (mainly around the time Brooklyn started
| getting unaffordable), and people would point to San
| Francisco as a city which had a lot of money but could still
| keep its artsy/counterculture roots intact.
| jinushaun wrote:
| Because SF billionaires are selfish tourists. On the other
| hand, NYC has a long history of patronage and wealthy donors
| that contribute to making their city better.
| randompwd wrote:
| Lol. A billionaire doesn't give money to $causeOfTheDay -
| they're "selfish" assholes. They do give money - they're
| informed they can't buy forgiveness or they should have
| given more or the patronage is paternalistic and heaven
| forbid if the billionaire is a white male American.
|
| May as well keep your money and let those fend for
| themselves.
|
| Much better art created when people do it for the passion..
| on their own time.. with their own resources.. after
| they've worked an 8 hour day.
|
| Whingers are going to complain anyway - no point in
| affording them the time and resources to do it more.
| Kalium wrote:
| Thankfully SF has people like Mark Zuckerberg, and is
| appreciative of his donation of a large amount of money to
| the city's hospital in order to improve life in the city.
|
| Right?
| kelnos wrote:
| > _all those billions of dollars of tech money and you cannot
| find a way to house and support artists._
|
| Our problem is never that we don't have enough wealth, it's
| always that it's concentrated among a small percentage of the
| population, and a much larger percentage gets starved out
| entirely.
|
| > _New York billionaires have always found a way to support
| artistic endeavors. Case in point - Bloomberg, he personally
| donated a lot._
|
| If we have to depend on the charity of billionaires, we've
| already lost the war.
| closeparen wrote:
| Concentrated wealth sponsors high culture. There is
| extremely limited political will for public funding, and
| distributed personal spending decisions give you mass
| culture. You are not getting painters without people who
| spend tens of thousands on paintings. You are not getting
| the theater or the symphony or the opera without a class of
| attendees who write checks for hundreds of times more than
| a ticket is worth.
| Kalium wrote:
| How many billions of dollars of tech money, in your opinion,
| is enough to find a way to house and support people in a city
| where planning is fundamentally structured around finding
| ways to _not_ house people?
| rcpt wrote:
| In California you can get whatever crazy thing you want
| passed with O($10M). I bet $1B could get even Prop 13
| overturned which would solve the housing disaster
| overnight.
| Kalium wrote:
| 2020's Prop 19 to reform property taxes just a bit had
| about $20 million behind it, and it didn't even land on
| the ballot.
|
| SF would need to gut its entire permitting system. Today,
| it can't even make small and incremental improvements: ht
| tps://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Is-
| p...
| Apocryphon wrote:
| $20m and $1b is a significant difference.
| Kalium wrote:
| You're absolutely right. That is a significant
| difference.
|
| My point was that O($10m) isn't even enough to reliably
| land something on the ballot, much less get whatever
| crazy thing you want passed.
|
| This of course being distinct from undoing Prop 13.
| skystarman wrote:
| You'd need to end or severely restrict local zoning.
|
| Everyone loves the idea of cheaper housing for people in
| theory.
|
| Once they realize it means their own property value won't
| appreciate as quickly, or may even decrease and then
| suddenly they are against it. And they will vote out any
| officials that support it.
|
| There needs to be state or federal intervention. And that
| doesn't seem likely at any time in the near future.
| paxys wrote:
| Rents are already rapidly going back up since their lows late
| last year, so don't hold your breath.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| All the great eras of any city were gritty. You can't have that
| with a generation of SodaSopans.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Tech didn't out price the people, nimby politics did. Average
| home owners in San Francisco have been owners for about 14
| years. [1] Any new development basically hits a brick wall
| unless it's on a radioactive dump or ultra expensive downtown.
| You all remember the famous laundromat saga, those were not
| tech workers preventing new housing, the locals were. [2]
|
| Anti gentrification policies almost always end up displacing
| the populations they are meant to protect. You don't want new
| apartments in a specific area because it may bring in newer
| crowds? Well guess what, those crowds will come any way, and
| now they can out price the people who live there.
|
| Rent control is another problem, because long time residents
| won't move. And with no new inventory, the prices for pretty
| much any apartment that enters the market goes sky high. It's
| not the tech workers who displace the locals, they are anyway
| hunting for apartments in a different price range from the
| locals. It's the locals now just budgeting higher portions of
| their income towards rent and displacing other locals. This is
| exactly what happened in Berlin. [3]
|
| And last but not the least, I think despite the nostalgia and
| how we remember SF differently from what it is now, yes there
| were quirky businesses all around. But there were only specific
| parts of the city that had them and quite frankly a lot of them
| just used to be replaced by newer businesses every couple of
| years. But what happened at some point was too much
| bureaucracy, red tape and politics crept into the cost of
| starting a business that now you have to sink almost a quarter
| of a million dollars before you can even start an ice cream
| shop. [4] It was partly the "locals" who created these
| problems.
|
| [1] https://journal.firsttuesday.us/california-homeowners-are-
| st... [2]
| https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/08/21/san...
| [3]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin...
| [4]
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-...
| astrange wrote:
| SF didn't have a lot of tech until very recently, when they
| were forced out of the valley by the real gentrifying force,
| homeowners that won't let anyone build more homes in case it
| causes traffic.
|
| These are also the people making SF expensive. It's not just
| artists, it's their own children who can't live there, one
| reason SF has fewer families with children than any other city
| IIRC.
|
| As for quirky businesses, that's DRs and licensing.
|
| https://sf.eater.com/2021/4/22/22397615/matcha-n-more-ice-cr...
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Is there a good article that describes how / why / when the
| startup scene moved from the South Bay to San Francisco?
|
| I'm not too familiar with the startup scene before 2010. But
| from what I know, it was mostly established in its current
| form before the Dot Com boom.
|
| It seems like HP, Cisco, Intel, Apple, Oracle, Sun, Adobe,
| Intuit, & Yahoo! where part of one movement.
|
| eBay, PayPal, Google, Facebook & Netflix obviously added to
| that.
|
| But now all the newer companies are coming from SF -
| SalesForce, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, Yelp, Splunk,
| Dropbox, Square, Instagram (originally), Slack, StichFix,
| Postmates, Instacart, GitHub, Robinhood, Coinbase, etc.
|
| The only recent, pretty big startups in the South Bay I can
| think of are LinkedIn and Quora. YouTube - from San Bruno -
| is kind of in the middle. The rest are subsidiaries.
|
| I mean, the OG companies like Apple and Google and Facebook
| are so big that they dwarf the rest of the startups in the
| Bay by themselves. So in a sense, the Silicon Valley still
| feels like the Peninsula. But the startup scene definitely
| seems to have shifted.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| Short answer: early Silicon Valley needed space for
| fabricators, the dotcom era needed space for data centers,
| then around 2010ish there were enough cloud providers and
| internet connections you could start a company anywhere but
| you already had plenty of talent in the bay and San
| Francisco is _fun_.
|
| Long answer could be a phd thesis but "people needed lots
| of space until they didnt" kind of suffices.
| kens wrote:
| > the OG companies like Apple and Google and Facebook
|
| History time. It's kind of amusing to see these companies
| referred to as OG, when there were many generations of
| Silicon Valley startups before them. The real OG was
| probably Hewlett-Packard, founded in Palo Alto in 1939.
| Another key company was Shockley Semiconductor, founded in
| Mountain View in 1956. Eight key employees left Shockley in
| 1957 and formed Fairchild Semiconductor, gaining the name
| the "Traitorous Eight". Fairchild led to over 126 startups,
| sometimes called the Fairchildren, including AMD, Altera,
| LSI Logic, National Semiconductor, and SanDisk.
|
| Two of the Traitorous Eight, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce,
| left Fairchild in 1968, founding Intel in Mountain View.
| Later key Silicon Valley companies were Oracle (1977), Sun
| Microsystems (1982), and Cisco (1984). Although Apple
| started in 1976, it wasn't a dominant company until years
| later. Google (1998) and Facebook (2004) are relative
| newcomers.
|
| Information on Fairchild's influence:
| https://computerhistory.org/blog/fairchild-and-the-
| fairchild...
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Thanks! This is super cool!
|
| Question - when did the VC model really come into play?
| Were the Fairchildren like AMD VC funded?
|
| A lot of others have mentioned that space plays a role in
| this a lot. Companies needed fabricators and data
| centers, which took up space, so it was too expensive to
| be in the city.
|
| Is this really all there was to it? Back in these times -
| there was White Flight from the cities, right? Did most
| people (even college grads) prefer to work in the suburbs
| then? Was this even a factor at all?
| clpm4j wrote:
| You would enjoy the documentary 'Something Ventured'.
| http://www.somethingventuredthemovie.com/
| astrange wrote:
| If you're asking why Silicon Valley is in California at
| all, the answer is that the state bans all non-compete
| agreements and won't enforce ones made in other states.
| This is probably why it's not in Cambridge, though it
| doesn't explain anything more specific than that.
| ghaff wrote:
| Companies generally preferred to be located in the
| suburbs because it was generally cheaper. But employees
| (notably including execs) also preferred to live there.
| Manufacturing facilities had absolutely been in cities in
| the past. Teradyne was in Boston. Gillette was in Boston.
| There are big pharma facilities in Kendall Square today.
| So it was at least in part access to workers that moved
| companies out of cities.
| ghaff wrote:
| Apple wasn't terribly interesting until maybe the
| mid-2000s. OK they were interesting in the Apple religion
| sense but it really took some combination of OS X, the 4G
| iPod, and eventually the iPhone taking off to put them in
| their current category. One could argue that Apple wasn't
| "a force to be reckoned with" until the late 2000s.
| astrange wrote:
| They were pretty good before the 90s when they invented
| the personal computer, there was just a "beleaguered"
| era.
| ghaff wrote:
| They were an interesting hobbyist thing early-on.
| Although there were also the S-100 bus systems, etc. I
| actually used Apple IIs at work in the early 80s and then
| an Apple III. But they were somewhat of a sideshow until
| the mid/late 2000s.
| clpm4j wrote:
| A seemingly significant part of it is because the young
| talent wants to live in SF and not commute 1+ hours to an
| office park in the South Bay. I think SF also offered
| incentives for tech companies to set up shop in the city in
| the 2009-2012 time range... https://www.wired.com/story/no-
| more-deals-san-francisco-cons...
| ghaff wrote:
| It also generally became trendy for that demographic to
| live in (certain) cities after they graduate. My company
| set up an office in the Seaport (partially) for that
| reason because our main location an hour west of Boston
| was a deal-killer for some people.
| clpm4j wrote:
| That's certainly true. A career in tech became widely
| popular and trendy for millenials and now zoomers (I
| believe CS is now the most popular undergraduate major
| across US colleges?). Basically once people realized you
| can make more money in tech than on Wall St, a percentage
| of new grads who would have moved to NYC diverted for SF.
| ghaff wrote:
| >I believe CS is now the most popular undergraduate major
| across US colleges
|
| I saw that in one Google search and it seems incredibly
| unlikely. This seems much more probable (even if you
| assign some of the engineering degrees to CS):
|
| https://www.niche.com/blog/the-most-popular-college-
| majors/
| rogerbinns wrote:
| I've seen several commentators blame AWS! Before AWS,
| startups needed to budget for web servers and similar
| hardware, and a place to put them. That meant bigger
| offices with more floor space, plus power and similar
| services. Once AWS came (2007) startups could be anywhere,
| with the city tending to be more attractive to younger
| folk.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Young people want to slum it up in SF, supposedly.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Zoom is based in downtown San Jose.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of people forget that many now "elite" cities weren't
| that popular until relatively recently. Boston was losing
| population until well into the 90s and there was basically no
| tech left there by then.
|
| When I graduated from grad school in the mid-80s, I don't
| think a single one of my classmates who got a job in
| Massachusetts lived in the city proper.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| At the time there were a lot more tech companies out along
| Routes 128 and 495. This is still true today, but now the
| balance has shifted to Boston and Camberville.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, all the minicomputer companies (which is where most
| of us went to work after school). I'd have actually
| considered living in Cambridge at the time but it would
| have been something like a 45 minute (reverse) commute
| whereas I had about a 5 minute commute until I bought a
| house.
|
| Depending upon how you characterize tech, there's still a
| lot in the northern and western suburbs, especially if
| you include the defense contractors. But, yes, there's
| now a lot in Cambridge and the Seaport, especially, as
| well as all the biotech/pharma in and near Kendall
| Square.
| astrange wrote:
| Yeah, living in cities was unpopular until about 2000 for a
| good reason - they were full of crime. Surprisingly it
| turns out giving the entire country lead poisoning was a
| bad idea.
|
| https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-
| exposur...
|
| Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial
| gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual
| richer areas because those had all blocked new housing
| (actual gentrification.)
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Is this lead poisoning theory really any more proven than
| say, the access to birth control idea?
|
| Young people tend to be economic migrants and the pockets
| of mass economic growth start in cities. They're also
| single and relatively poor so they live in multi-tennant
| housing near the downtowns where they work. As they get
| older, richer and more numerous (i.e. married w/ kids)
| they move out of the core. Cycle repeats with rising
| prices if growth is still there, or you hollow out the
| city and only the poorest remain. SF could stay like it
| is, or become a west-coast steel town, but it's unlikely
| to return to what it once was.
| peder wrote:
| Cities are full of crime again today. Is it a problem
| with lead? Or is it a larger condition of cities in the
| Americas?
| ska wrote:
| > Cities are full of crime again today.
|
| That doesn't seem to actually be the case, but crime
| statistics is a notoriously tricky area.
| astrange wrote:
| It is actually up a lot in 2020-2021 including murders
| and other "real" crimes.
|
| There of course is also an effect where people think all
| of Portland is on fire because they saw a protest on TV
| once. But also Portland has had twice as much gun
| violence this year than all of 2020, which seems like a
| problem someone should do something about.
| ska wrote:
| Sure, there is a notable bump (with all the usual
| reporting caveats) in 2020-21; but that doesn't change
| the general trend. Or at least so far that doesn't seem
| the case.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Most American cities are way, way below early 1990s
| violent crime levels, San Francisco included. SF had
| three times more homicides in 1993 than in 2019.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| You saw around a 30% increase in homicide rates in large
| cities last year, and that increase began suddenly at the
| beginning of June. No environmental cause like exposure
| to lead can cause that.
|
| The Mother Jones article referenced above is arguing that
| the most effective thing that can be done to combat crime
| is lead abatement, I think that argument has taken a
| fatal hit. Some cities are in fact seeing homicide rates
| close to or even above the 1990s rates, that happened
| suddenly and it happened after leaded gasoline had been
| banned for 45 years.
|
| You can't explain the massive increase in homicide in
| large cities in 2020 using environmental factors like
| lead, the cause has to be cultural or political.
| astrange wrote:
| It went up a lot in 2020, quite possibly as a reaction to
| unemployment and especially not having anything else to
| do.
|
| But yes, before that it was limited to a few hotspots
| like St Louis which still had environmental lead
| problems. Meanwhile DC in 1990 was more dangerous than
| the Iraq War.
| majormajor wrote:
| > Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial
| gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual
| richer areas because those had all blocked new housing
| (actual gentrification.)
|
| You're overlooking the qualitative motives for (somewhat
| incorrect) purely financial aspects. Younger people
| continued to move to denser parts of cities for at least
| a solid decade after in-city rents surpassed suburban
| ones. A large demographic group got married and started
| having kids much later than previous ones (this part
| traces pretty well back to economic factors, though!) so
| was looking for _very_ different things in housing. As
| those factors started to change, they started following
| similar suburbanization patterns, and WFH accelerated
| that dramatically.
|
| "Friends" is probably the clearest pop culture recording
| of this, showing the draw of living in the city for
| single 20-somethings in the 90s, and then the eventual
| appeal of the burbs for the later married w/ kids stage.
| Even in the 90s part of it, none of them were there
| because NYC was the cheap option.
| ghaff wrote:
| Manhattan was something of an outlier. Even in not so
| great in a lot of ways 1980s Manhattan, a _lot_ of people
| moved to "the city." This was especially true in
| finance. (Contra my comment about classmates not living
| in Boston proper, _many_ lived in Manhattan proper. Of
| course, one difference is that the jobs were actually in
| Manhattan. )
|
| But NYC has always had a singular appeal. And there was
| long a certain snobbery(?) about living in Manhattan
| specifically.
| majormajor wrote:
| If we drop NYC we lose the easy TV show example, but I
| would still maintain that nobody young was moving to
| places like Midtown Atlanta or downtown Austin in the
| early 2000s just because they were priced out of the
| suburbs. Places were already "pay for the privilege of
| living somewhere denser and walkable" by that point.
| ghaff wrote:
| >nobody young was moving to places like Midtown Atlanta
| or downtown Austin in the early 2000s just because they
| were priced out of the suburbs.
|
| Sure. But my point was that, in the aggregate, they
| _weren 't_. Maybe by the early 2000s, there were more
| jobs there, their parents lived there, their friends were
| starting to be there, etc. So, yes, at some point
| especially college-educated young professionals started
| to pay an urban premium for the lifestyle. We'll see to
| what degree that continues.
| majormajor wrote:
| > Sure. But my point was that, in the aggregate, they
| weren't. Maybe by the early 2000s, there were more jobs
| there, their parents lived there, their friends were
| starting to be there, etc. So, yes, at some point
| especially college-educated young professionals started
| to pay an urban premium for the lifestyle. We'll see to
| what degree that continues.
|
| I actually agree with `astrange that by the early 2000s,
| if not a tad earlier[0], millennials were moving in-town
| (though not because their parents lived there! the
| opposite, if anything!), but I completely disagree on the
| "why" - their claim was that it was because it was
| cheaper because suburbs had zoning that caused them to
| get too expensive. My claim is that it was a lifestyle
| thing, not a "forced out" thing.
|
| [0] I can't speak firsthand to earlier, but there were a
| lot of new or newly-redone apartment buildings by the
| early 2000s, suggesting that the trend had been going for
| several years already.
| ghaff wrote:
| Oh, definitely lifestyle. And, yeah, much more because of
| friends than family. I'm pretty sure even in the late
| 80s, it wouldn't have been cheaper for me to live in (a
| decent area of) Cambridge than the suburb I lived in.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Lets be real it was abortion
|
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/
|
| https://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-
| who-s...
| astrange wrote:
| It was not (or that was only some of it.) The same crime
| rise and fall happened worldwide - this is addressed in
| the article.
|
| Continues to happen too. The parts of the world with the
| most terrorism like Iraq/Yemen also most recently had
| leaded gas.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| Some of it is immigration too: if you come from Paris or
| Berlin, you're not going to want to move to Mountain View,
| given how ridiculously boring the peninsula is.
| astrange wrote:
| If your employer's in South Bay you might as well live
| there. It's easier to commute to fun than commute to work.
| fnord77 wrote:
| there's been a few new "below market rate" apartment and condos
| being built. Most all condo developments have BMR units but
| some of the new ones are 100% BMR
| webwielder2 wrote:
| People and companies leave SF because it's too expensive, SF gets
| less expensive, people and companies come back to SF, SF gets
| expensive...?
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Except the difference is there's a hell of a lot more bandwidth
| available for telework in Colorado and Nevada than there was
| the last cycle.
| olyjohn wrote:
| It's all about the short term profits. Look how much money we
| saved leaving SF! Then when the next execs come in it's, look
| how much money we saved going back to SF!
| jdhn wrote:
| It's kind of funny reading this, as I know someone from my
| Midwestern state who decided to move to SF in the middle of the
| pandemic. I'm curious as to what happens once everything reopens,
| will people move back, or is this a permanent change?
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| There is no amount of money that I would take to live in that
| abomination of a city.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| There is now enough vacant office space in San Francisco to give
| every homeless person in the city 2000 square feet.
|
| (From the article: 16 Million square feet of vacant office space,
| and a quick Google search gave me a homeless population of 8000)
| pengaru wrote:
| Isn't it already well established SF has far more space
| allocated to jobs than housing for the workers?
|
| In other news, the sky is blue, and water is wet.
| woah wrote:
| I always wonder what the point of these comparisons is. Can you
| imagine cramming 8000 homeless people with hardcore drug
| addictions and untreated mental illness in a vacant office
| tower?
| astrange wrote:
| Note most of them aren't homeless because they did drugs,
| they're doing drugs because they're homeless because they
| lost their homes. Ain't nothing else to do.
| unixhero wrote:
| It would make for a hellofa janitor survival simulator game.
| Maybe as a story pack to SimTower.
| spoonjim wrote:
| What's your prediction for the outcome of doing that? Parceling
| the office space into 2,000 square foot spaces and giving them
| free of charge to each homeless person in SF? Please be
| specific.
| paxys wrote:
| What would a homeless person do with an office?
| sky_rw wrote:
| Start a SoLoMo app company, obviously.
| Decker87 wrote:
| That's great to hear!
| umeshunni wrote:
| There's always enough X in San Francisco to give every homeless
| person X/n of it.
|
| What's lacking in San Francisco is the political will to do
| anything meaningful about homelessness (or crime, or the
| housing crisis, or infrastructure, or the schools or anything
| other than vague virtue signaling)
| throwkeep wrote:
| To their credit, they've found new ways of using resources in
| the most inefficient way possible.
|
| "San Francisco is paying $16.1 million to shelter homeless
| people in 262 tents placed in empty lots around the city
| where they also get services and food -- a steep price tag
| that amounts to more than $61,000 per tent per year."
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-
| pays-61-000-a-...
| admax88q wrote:
| At that cost they could just pay the homeless 61k per year
| and they could rent their own homes
| rgblambda wrote:
| That was my first thought as well but then remembered
| that often the reason for homelessness is mental health
| issues. Many homeless people are just incapable of taking
| care of themselves.
|
| e.g. not paying rent/bills when they physically have the
| money to do so, gambling addict so getting into massive
| amounts of debt, getting evicted due to antisocial
| behaviour/vandalism of property.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Convert the empty real estate to the mental health
| facilities that Reagan emptied?
| kelnos wrote:
| Maybe that's the case, but instead why not rent
| apartments on behalf of the homeless people, put them
| there, and get them evaluated and treated by a mental
| health professional?
|
| Living in an actual building rather than a tent in a
| parking lot ("protected" or otherwise) seems like a great
| first step and healing some of those mental health
| issues.
|
| When the treatment starts working to a degree that the
| formerly-homeless person can be trusted with the cash,
| give it to them, along with the rent bills.
| ngokevin wrote:
| While I imagine there are a lot of detractors here, I
| like universal basic income. We could try to slice it and
| have a system to pick and choose who gets it, but as
| we've seen, the waste that goes into the bureaucracy when
| it's not just "give everyone a check".
| acchow wrote:
| Not if there isn't enough housing.
| fleshdaddy wrote:
| Is that an accurate count? That actually sounds surprisingly
| low. I figured it was quite a bit higher.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| - The reported SF outdoors homeless numbers vary from 5,000 -
| 10,000
|
| - But it depends on what data you have and how you slice it:
|
| - 60% of the $300 - $350 million homeless budget goes to
| welfare rentals (single women and moms are eligible for that,
| rarely men), so that's 15,000+ adults plus children alone
|
| - there's probably more than 10,000 on the street, and
| growing daily as average rents are over $3,500/month now.
|
| As you can see, with a population of only 500,000 and almost
| 5% of thoe homeless, SF has a major problem.
|
| What the EU learned from African economic migration is that
| once somebody is in their regionn, authoriities have to
| process them one by one, which can take years per case. So
| once a city gets behind, there's no good story.
| katabatic wrote:
| That's nearly 1% of the population of San Francisco. It's
| already shockingly high.
| eplanit wrote:
| "San Francisco's office vacancy rate has risen to 19.7 percent"
|
| Wow -- when I was there in the "dot-com boom" of the late '90s
| and early '00s, such a vacancy rate was unheard of (it was 0.5%
| for housing, and similar for commercial real estate).
|
| Oh well, they've earned this outcome.
| jeffbee wrote:
| What's awful is asking rents have barely budged. Peaked at
| around $85/sf, now around $75/sf. The landlords can afford to
| just sit on inventory.
| brdd wrote:
| Totally false. We saw many commercial units between $35-50/sf
| IG and just signed on one at $37/sf.
| jeffbee wrote:
| "At the first quarter of 2021, the overall citywide asking
| rent was $73.76 per square foot (psf) down 12.0% from the
| peak of $83.82 psf with the Class A citywide figure at
| $77.66 psf, down 10.0% from $86.31 psf,. Direct space
| continues to be marketed at near record levels for the time
| being with the citywide Class A direct asking rent at
| $84.47 psf and the CBD Class A direct asking rent at $85.71
| psf" -- Cushman and Wakefield
|
| "Totally false" -- Internet rando
| jedberg wrote:
| > Cushman and Wakefield
|
| Aka a company with a vested interest in convincing you
| that the $75 price they are offering you is totally in
| line with the average and it's really good and you should
| just take it.
| jeffbee wrote:
| But an anecdote about a class-C storefront on 7th street
| is more reliable?
| jedberg wrote:
| I'd say both are anecdotes with bias, but honestly, the
| random internet commenter has less incentive to massage
| the data than WC.
| htormey wrote:
| Also, are these figures factoring in things landlords are
| doing now to sweeten the deal without dropping the per
| month/sq price?
|
| I.e giving months away for free or other incentives like
| that? Anecdotally I've heard office rent is way down as
| well.
| pradn wrote:
| Some loans are backed by certain rent levels. So commercial
| real estate owners don't have as much freedom to reduce their
| prices as you might think.
| acchow wrote:
| Commercial leases are often multi-year. If they expect the
| high vacancy rates to evaporate within a year or two, why
| would they drop the rates now to fill the vacancy?
| ttul wrote:
| At those vacancy rates, the only thing holding up rents is the
| overwhelming amounts of liquidity in the economic system. Land
| owners still have cash, in other words. Back in 2001, I rented
| an office for free. The landlord could then reduce his property
| tax rate by showing the city that it was occupied at zero rent.
| Stranger things might happen this time around with 20% vacancy.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| You missed out on the "dot bomb" in 2000.
|
| There were tunbleweed-like plants blowing around the streets of
| SOMA, and you could park on the sidewalk and nobody would
| notice or care.
|
| The vacancy rate was probably over 50%, and in some blocks
| 100%.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Good? Always seemed problematic so much tech was all tied up in
| SF and the Bay Area.
| ardit33 wrote:
| It is the only true city in the area, where younger people can
| have a urban lifestyle... the rest is depressing suburbia....
| San Jose, and the rest feels like a cultural grave. The only
| other town that is walkable is Berkley, but that is too small
| for hosting large companies. Also, parts of Oakland, but the
| city itself has major governance issues, and crime in general.
|
| I think NYC and Austin are booming right now. While nyc is a
| world class city, the 'progressives' have taken over the NY
| State legislation, and personally it is worrying.
|
| While some of the legislation might be long overdue, and good,
| there are many parts of the 'progressive' movement that is just
| nihilistic, and destructive in the long run and it might end up
| goin the route of SF. So, this year will be the wait and see
| year on how NY will move forward. If it goes the way of SF
| (with destructive policies) it might not look good.
|
| But, NYC-ers are more rational, and both of the leading
| candidates for Mayor seem to be more in the centrist, or center
| left camp, and the far left / super progressive ones are not
| doing well.
| spamizbad wrote:
| All of the cities you mention have progressive leadership and
| that's not likely to change. Most non-progressives have
| decamped to the suburbs (or "depressing suburbia" as you call
| it) decades ago.
| gfodor wrote:
| When you have young kids 'depressing suburbia' can be a
| feature not a bug.
| closeparen wrote:
| Until they need to go places during the day and your whole
| life becomes dedicated to driving them around.
| astrange wrote:
| NYC is just about as bad at housing as the Bay Area is, but
| the problem hasn't gone on for as many decades so you haven't
| noticed yet. NYC population is actually shrinking for this
| reason, and there are several silly rules (not by modern
| progressives) like high IZ for "affordability" that prevent
| all construction, and I think they're about to essentially
| ban new hotels.
|
| Btw, the reason progressives didn't take over before is that
| Cuomo was actually conspiring to make his own party the
| minority in the legislature, because he thought if he was
| forced to ever actually do anything it'd hurt a future
| presidential run.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| > and crime in general
|
| That's no different in SF
| cyberbanjo wrote:
| I thought Oakland was worse
| neltnerb wrote:
| Oakland is a big place. It varies by neighborhood same as
| San Francisco. Most is fine, certainly no worse than the
| Tenderloin.
| astrange wrote:
| How does SF have so many neighborhoods when it's so
| small, anyway? You can walk across the city and back in a
| day.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| How big does a neighborhood need to be / how many should
| it have?
|
| The neighborhoods in SF as most people think of them are
| larger than the areas that many suburb residents tend to
| think of as defining their neighborhoods.
| astrange wrote:
| It's more than suburban areas bleed into each other less
| because you can't walk between them - instead there's
| some dense areas you drive between.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| That's not exactly a high bar
| neltnerb wrote:
| And the vast majority of Oakland is fine. I used an
| extreme example to demonstrate that the idea that Oakland
| has worse crime issues than SF is highly dependent on
| where you happen to be. Oakland is just physically huge,
| suggesting it has an issue with "crime in general" is
| myopic and ignores that almost all of it is fine, same as
| SF.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| Ah OK, gotcha - I misinterpreted your comment as meaning
| things are fine in the Tenderloin.
| jackfruitpeel wrote:
| I'm living in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Oakland,
| and I would definitely not consider it "fine". The area
| is beautiful, but we're plagued by gunpoint robberies,
| burglaries, dumping, etc -- people coming in and treating
| us as a place to loot and leave.
|
| I love Oakland, but I'm gone as soon as our rent is up.
| There's a general lawlessness here that's incredibly
| frustrating.
| 101001001001 wrote:
| My friend lives in the Oakland hills which is one of the
| nicest areas in oakland. His car has been stolen three
| times in the past five years. They've had an attempted
| break in and a contractor they hired had his truck
| stolen. Oakland is a hell hole.
| godot wrote:
| It's somewhat interesting that some numbers are based on the bay
| area (drop in bay area tech workers inflow/outflow, what
| percentage of bay area workforce will remain remote), while other
| numbers based on San Francisco alone (drop in SF residents, SF
| GDP, business tax revenue, etc.).
|
| I know that outside of California, the world views "SF" and "the
| bay area" mostly as one and the same. Based on anecdotes I feel
| like this doesn't tell the full story, though maybe it does give
| you a high level overview (like this site does).
|
| Among both personal friends and coworkers, ex-coworkers (from a
| decade+ of working in the bay area) -- surely there are people
| who move out of state (to Denver, Austin, Miami, etc.); but the
| more common trend is -- people who used to live in SF are moving
| out to the east bay / surrounding areas; and people who were
| already in the east bay before move even further away (Sacramento
| area, etc.). Another interesting bit -- Sacramento doesn't get
| talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related
| articles, because it's not supposed to be the "next sexy tech
| town", but in reality is a _lot_ of people have moved here since
| the pandemic, both tech and not. I moved here before the
| pandemic, and witnessed the housing market rise more than the
| east bay (where there 's already an influx of SF people moving
| to) this past year.
|
| All I'm saying is there's a lot of nuances in this general
| exodus!
| eagsalazar2 wrote:
| Anecdotal but this isn't my personal experience at all. Almost
| everyone I know is moving home to be closer to family like the
| midwest, east coast, etc or to awesome lifestyle towns like
| Park City, Truckee, Jason Hole, Boise, SLC, Boulder, etc, etc.
| Of 20 people I can name off the top of my head who've left SF
| area, only a couple migrated from SF to Oakland, etc.
| lacker wrote:
| I would like to counteranecdote and say that the nice east
| bay neighborhood I live in is getting flooded by families
| leaving San Francisco right now.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Anecdotal but this isn't my personal experience at all
|
| Yes, but there have been plenty of nonanecdotal studies, and
| the surge in Bay Area (and broader urban coastal California)
| outmigration around the pandemic has been overwhelmingly to
| inland California, particularly (in the Bay Area case) the
| Sacramento region. (California had a preexisting net domestic
| outmigration, too, but that's separate from the more recent
| "San Francisco tech exodus", which is specifically part of
| the pandemic urban outmigration.)
|
| Unfortunately for my finances (being a Sacramento-area
| homeowner that isn't going to sell right now), that'll
| reverse when the reasons people valued the coastal urban
| centers are restored with full economic reopening.
| slownews45 wrote:
| This for sure. East bay, north bay all getting SF exodus. Then
| my friends in richmond moved even further away but still
| extended bay area. The place with the most at risk is SF. Still
| huge concentration of wealth, but the non- employment factors
| have been hurt.
|
| Gone very light on crime - super light. At some point folks
| just get tired of dealing / seeing consequence free crime right
| in front of them. I think families with kids being impacted
| there particularly.
| SiVal wrote:
| _I think families with kids being impacted there
| particularly._
|
| Yes, one example that is not widely known of what happens
| when the Lions of the Left have the power to do what they
| really want is public middle school algebra in SF. ("The Lion
| of the Left" was the self-given nickname of one of SF's most-
| loved talk show hosts back in the 90s.)
|
| SF grandees noticed that some races tended to take geometry
| (the class after algebra I) more than others. The number one
| goal of public education, they claimed, was to "close the
| achievement gap", so they eliminated geometry from middle
| school. If no one took it, no one who didn't take it would be
| behind, so no gap.
|
| But then they noticed that some races still took algebra I
| more often than other races. So they eliminated that, too.
| [1] No one, no matter how well prepared, would be allowed to
| take algebra in any public middle school. The best students
| would be required to take the same classes as the worst, for
| great justice. Achievement gap closed.
|
| Except that better students still had four years in high
| school to try to catch up to where they would have been if
| not held back, and not all races were equally likely to do
| this.
|
| So, for more justice, all public schools in SF were required
| to keep their best math students in the same classes with the
| worst all the way from K-10. They are now only allowed to be
| different individuals the final two years of HS. Anyone who
| wants to take calculus in a SF high school now has to
| scramble to cram two years (algebra II/trig & pre-calc) into
| 11th grade to (poorly) prepare for calculus in 12th--until
| that miscarriage of justice can be eliminated, too.
|
| Those who can afford it go to work at tech companies where
| they use various means to silence the "haters" who resist,
| while sending their own children to private schools that
| don't have these policies.
|
| Many of those who can't afford it have been moving out of the
| city to suburbs that have begun the process (lots of
| districts have now eliminated middle school geometry and
| advanced placement classes) but are still lagging behind SF
| in implementing full justice. (Big Tech is working on it, but
| pockets of resistance remain.)
|
| SF Chronicle, a big proponent of policies like this,
| describes it as positively as they can: [1]
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-schools-
| mov...
| BurritoAlPastor wrote:
| What crime? I've got complaints about living in SF, but it's
| basically crime-free from my experiences.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Not the OP, but while I was living in SF I saw drugs sold
| on the street, needles left on the ground in public parks,
| people stealing registration stickers off license plates,
| smashed car windows, people blocking sidewalks and
| harassing pedestrians, ridiculously unsafe driving (e.g.
| running reds including cops, ppl cutting across three lanes
| to make a left from the right lane, etc), guests who
| visited me were flashed by randos, a dude was jerking into
| a newspaper box by the BART, neighbors would smoke inside
| nonsmoking apartments with shared ventilation, etc.
|
| I'd move back again for work if I have to, but it would
| take a lot of $$$$ to convince me.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Sounds like parts of just about every big city.
| mc10 wrote:
| Many of these are absent in New York, including very
| visible homeless encampments, so no, these are not in
| "just about every big city"; many of these are specific
| to West Coast cities due to a failure in public policy.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I think it's really easy how normalized a person can get to
| petty crime. Like a frog in boiling water. You'll talk to
| people in SF who totally brush off smash-and-grabs. They'll
| say something like "stupid me, shouldn't have left my
| AirPods visible in the center console." You don't even
| realize that it's not normal to have to worry about stuff
| like that.
| mercutio2 wrote:
| It is normal to worry about smash and grabs in every US
| urban area I've ever lived in or visited.
| [deleted]
| duderific wrote:
| Anecdotally, my sister moved to SF from the east coast a
| couple of years ago. After her patio was burgled a few times,
| she didn't feel safe so she and her husband moved to Santa
| Rosa, about 90 minutes north. She's happy as a clam there.
| gopalv wrote:
| > Sacramento doesn't get talked about in tech circles and sites
| like this and related articles, because it's not supposed to be
| the "next sexy tech town", but in reality is a lot of people
| have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not.
|
| Sacramento also has a train line that takes you to Santa Clara,
| which is better than driving - this has made it a better choice
| for a few of the folks to consider that over Dublin or
| Pleasanton in the most recent migration (Amtrak is close to a
| lot of hardware-lab specific jobs like Nvidia, Lockheed,
| Marvell, GlobalFoundries and Arista), though that connectivity
| might shift if BART finally loops around to SJC.
|
| Also Sacramento has good schools, decent federal funding pull
| (over say Tracy) and an airport with a few direct flights from
| Seattle or NYC.
|
| The only downside pretty much is the weather in comparison and
| that too not by much.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > The only downside pretty much is the weather in comparison
| and that too not by much.
|
| Sports, bars, culture, muni metro, proximity to the ocean,
| proximity to nature (I can be alone in natural parks with
| less than 30 minutes of driving from my house in SF), jobs,
| dating, restaurants, I could go on.
|
| I'm not even someone that plans on staying in SF (I actually
| don't like it that much), but there are lots of downsides if
| I left for Sacramento. I realize there are upsides as well,
| but I think it's disingenuous to say 'Sacramento is as good
| or better than San Francisco except for the weather'
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Endless homeless people and camps, needles on the streets,
| feces on the streets, yelling drunks, crime and burglaries.
|
| Yeah, SF definitely has a "lot" going for it. Glad I left.
| dotBen wrote:
| Keep in mind SF.citi is a policy advocate/lobbying group for
| San Francisco legislation rather than the Bay Area more
| generally.
|
| But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this
| is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives
| these employers a tacit say and leverage. Remember if you live
| in Oakland or Redwood City but are employed in San Francisco
| city/county, some of your payroll tax is being generated to
| benefit the city of San Francisco even if you are not a
| resident there.
|
| That's why SF City is worried about SF based businesses and SF
| Bay Area workers.
|
| _(BTW this is also why cities such as Mountain View and
| Cupertino want to attract large business campuses like Google
| and Apple but don 't want to build homes - they get more income
| from growing payroll tax but don't then have to spend more on
| schools, services etc for a growing population - they shift the
| burden onto other cities and counties that house those workers
| as they then have to generate tax revenue from other means)_
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because
| this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which
| gives these employers a tacit say and leverage.
|
| SF doesn't have local payroll tax, it has a local _income
| tax_ that applies both to residents and to nonresidents on
| income earned in SF.
|
| EDIT: Actually, this is wrong, too; despite a lot of sources
| indicating it. Sab Francisco _had_ a 1.5% payroll expense
| tax, but voted to phase it out in 2012, and then (while it
| had declined to a much lower but nonzero number), voted to
| eliminated it last year, both times in favor of a gross
| receipts tax on business
| lemoncucumber wrote:
| > SF doesn't have local payroll tax, it has a local income
| tax that applies both to residents and to nonresidents on
| income earned in SF.
|
| This is false. There are some low-quality websites that
| have incorrect information about a nonexistent 1.50% SF
| income tax, if that's where you're getting your
| information.
|
| San Francisco used to have a payroll tax up until last
| year, when Prop F replaced it with a gross receipts tax.
| [1]
|
| [1] https://sftreasurer.org/prop-f-overhaul
| bumby wrote:
| Do you happen to know the reason for favoring a gross
| receipts tax over the previous payroll tax? Just curious
| as someone who previously lived in an area with a Griggs
| receipt tax, it seems it was universally despised.
| [deleted]
| burlesona wrote:
| This matches my experience as well. Sacramento is underrated
| IMO. It's a nice city, and being under 3 hours to both SF and
| Lake Tahoe is great.
| nr2x wrote:
| I'm relocating to Bay Area right now, would love to live in SF,
| but the schools are grossly mismanaged so I'm going to MV
| instead. I doubt I'm the only person.
| davidw wrote:
| > but the more common trend is -- people who used to live in SF
| are moving out to the east bay / surrounding areas
|
| Emily Badger had an article in the NYT recently showing exactly
| this. People are moving from the core to the "suburbs".
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I have heard a lot of people say online that most people are
| suburbizing but not leaving the bay, but this does not match my
| experience.
|
| Many, many people only moved to the bay in the first place
| because of job availability and not for the reasons others
| describe (e.g. the weather, the people, the policies, the
| cosmopolitanism). And many of us left behind our families and
| friends to do so. Of this group of people, many many have
| returned, almost my entire group of friends from college. I
| myself moved closer to my parents and embraced fully remote
| work.
|
| The bay area is lionized, especially on sites like this, but
| many tech workers dislike it for various reasons and are happy
| to get the ticket to jump ship.
| sQL_inject wrote:
| I'd posit a unpopular viewpoint: that the attachment to the
| 'Bohemian' culture is more or less an unhelpful, unprogressive
| fixation with the past, shamelessly fueled by hypocritical NIMBYs
| in the city with obvious incentives regarding home value. Can
| anyone explain why the old SF culture is any more relevant than
| Byzantine culture?
|
| As an Artist and an Engineer who used to live in SF and moved
| south recently, I'd argue most of the folks I interacted with in
| this oft-cried-over demographic were more aptly described as
| aspiring artists, and that their net contributions to the
| 'culture' were mimetic and surface-level at best. If you take
| away the weed, bob marley shirts, and hemp shopping bags, what
| exactly can we say they did?
|
| None of this is to say the 'nerds' were contributing much to the
| culture themselves, but I don't think there's much of an argument
| against them other than that they're boring, rich, and talked
| about Apps. These same people brought in quickly consumed tax
| revenue which the city has gorged into in its gluttonous waste.
|
| The root of the problem is the mistrust of the 'Other,' the
| 'Outsider' as new folks (often Nerds) immigrate to the city,
| which IS a net benefit to the blending of cultures and ideas. The
| fixation of preserving the crumbling vestige of the past is what
| prevents the service level workers from ever regaining a
| foothold, and the scapegoat is the Nerds, when it should be the
| landlords and Old Guard.
| nscalf wrote:
| In my opinion, SF has peaked. I personally moved to SF during the
| pandemic, and am planning to move out when my lease is up. The
| amount of disarray in the city is wild. Crime seems to be
| entirely ignored, the homeless problem has exploded and there is
| a widespread hate if you call it for what it is: a public health
| and humanitarian crisis. And the most important thing that SF had
| to make it a tech hub has been broken and moved online: the
| network effect.
|
| I moved here because I felt like I didn't have a choice if I
| wanted to build or be part of successful startups, now I feel
| like living here is hindering that process. You can live anywhere
| and get cheaper talent across the country, pay less taxes, and
| have almost the same upsides.
| 762236 wrote:
| You have to live someplace with a moonlighting law to have the
| same upsides. Otherwise, prepare to sign a work contract where
| the employer owns every thought in your head, and every piece
| of code that you write on you own time (like when trying to
| make a startup on the side).
| ghaff wrote:
| Or just don't work for a company that has such requirements
| in their contracts. Just because something is allowed doesn't
| mean most/many/all companies do.
| mbgerring wrote:
| Important context for reading this is that sf.citi is Ron
| Conway's organization through which he acts as a political power
| broker and secures political favors for the tech industry. It is
| in his interest to create the impression that the tech industry
| in SF is experiencing some kind of crisis in order to extract
| money, tax breaks or other favorable treatment from the Board of
| Supervisors.
| sharadov wrote:
| I think this so called "exodus" is temporary. Young people will
| come back to SF, it's the only city in the larger Bay Area which
| has culture and vibrancy. San Jose downtown area has plenty of
| potential, and it was seeing a renaissance pre-covid - google
| buying a lot of land and looking to expand is a good sign. I miss
| the SF of the early 2000s, where there was a bohemian quirkiness.
| Unless prices come crashing down it's highly likely any artist
| could sustain himself.
| kilbuz wrote:
| Everyone misses the SF of their youth. As will current
| residents.
| htormey wrote:
| Oakland night life isn't that bad :)
| nkellenicki wrote:
| I moved from SF to Oakland last year during the pandemic, and
| honestly, Oakland is just as great as SF for restaurants,
| bars, and nightlife... as long as you have a car or method of
| transportation.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| What neighborhoods? Downtown is pretty quiet.
| mtc010170 wrote:
| I know very little about the Bay area, so I'm not saying
| you're wrong. But I don't understand how that evaluation
| could be accurately made during the pandemic.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| That is quite a caveat. Public transportation is a must to
| have a cultural scene that is both vibrant and not
| homogeneously upper class at scale.
| rpearl wrote:
| The article they cite
| (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/People-are-leavi...)
| for claiming 10% of SF left is kind of misleading; 8 of the top
| 15 places they went to are _also_ in the bay area, and all but
| one was in California.
|
| "SF residents move to Oakland and Berkeley" isn't a very exciting
| headline though
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