After a lazy afternoon in San Francisco’s Dolores Park last year, as two friends and I strolled through the bustling Latin Quarter known as the Mission, I noticed a man on the sidewalk of opposite more and more agitated.
He shouted, growled, waved his arms. Shortly after, I heard the bang. My friends and I fell to the ground, crouching behind a large white truck for cover. Brandishing a small handgun, the man fired straight into the air. Then he disappeared into the night.
More disturbing than my contact with a live shooter was the fact that the incident was barely recorded – within minutes everyone was back on their feet and normalcy resumed.
It seems everyone living in San Francisco has a similar story to tell right now. During the pandemic, pre-existing wealth disparities have been exacerbated. In 2020, drug overdoses more than doubled Covid deaths. Homeless encampments line the rows of the city’s famous colorful townhouses.
Organized and opportunistic crime is rampant, particularly property and auto theft. A colleague who came to film in the city said her crew had to hire security guards after a series of robberies targeted film crews at gunpoint. Last month, footage emerged showing residents leaving car doors open so burglars wouldn’t break their windows. “The real epidemic is poverty,” offers a friend, in one of many conversations about the state of the city.
For some privileged residents, unable to cope with despair and anarchy, the answer may have been to flee. This month, Silicon Valley executives began statistics sharing showing that the proportion of staff they hire from the city and surrounding Bay Area has dropped significantly in recent years. Coinbase notes general manager Brian Armstrong that in the first quarter of 2019, 30% of the company’s hiring was outside the Bay Area; in the last quarter of 2021, it was 89%.
The shift has been attributed to the tech world becoming more “global” and decentralized – tapping into a wider pool of candidates. But I wonder if it can also be explained by an exodus of the crowd from Silicon Valley to other urban hubs (with lower taxes).
Start-up founders, computer engineers and venture capitalists abandoned the city of peace, love and progressive politics – many leaving behind a rant about why they felt inclined get out.
“In 2000 or 2010, it made sense to build in San Francisco. That’s where all the talent was, but not anymore,” wrote Joe Lonsdale, venture capitalist and co-founder of Palantir as he left town in November 2020.
LinkedIn data suggests many have landed in Austin, while Manhattan’s Silicon Alley is booming. Miami’s tech-friendly mayor is trying to woo displaced talent. Last week, Airbnb boss Brian Chesky tweeted he was abandoning San Francisco to start jumping on Airbnb: “in a different town or city, each couple [of] weeks”.
In the heyday of the 1990s and early 2000s, tech workers with their personals, their uniform (the Patagonia jacket), and their money seemed to own San Francisco. But steep increases in housing costs since 2012, lackluster nightlife and annual bouts of polluting smoke from wildfires are harder to ignore when safety also becomes a luxury.
Some blame the ultra-loose policies of District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who came to power in 2020 on promises to reduce prison sentences and decriminalize poverty. His perceived inability to ensure public safety is now seized upon by Republicans, and he faces a recall in June. Democrat Mayor London Breed went from preaching ‘compassion’ to ‘tough love’; from definancing to reimbursement of the policy.
What is missing is a thoughtful attempt to tackle the fundamental problems of the “poverty epidemic”. Margot Kushal, who directs the Center for Vulnerable Populations at the University of California, San Francisco, argues that the first step is to address a crippling need for affordable housing. “HLM housing has just disappeared from our landscape. Every day we see people falling into homelessness,” she says. “It’s a huge political crisis at all levels of government.”
Resilience in times of crisis is vital. But if the city wants to reclaim its technological crown, unlike the nightly mobs of the Mission, it cannot afford to carry on as usual.