[Wellrowed]

I work for a large foreign (but global retailer) with locations in the Bay Area including San Francisco. The bill for our monthly necessary armed security exceeds $20,000 a month.

My foreign coworker’s minds were blown that even every starbucks location needs security.

[hallway_monitor]

This honestly blows my mind. So SF is basically a third world country now?

[6f8986c3]

Has been for some time.

[oneplane]

Isn't that most of the densely populated city in the US in general?

Fear, weapons and violence as soon as it gets dense. Every large/chain business comes with lots of armed protection.

I haven't travelled to all the cities in the entire US, but whenever you enter/exit such areas is seems very distinct.

[AlexCoventry]

I've personally witnessed more violent crime in approximately two month's total presence in SF over the last seven years than I have in a total of 14 years living in Boston. Maybe I'm an outlier, though.

[adjkant]

Not my experience at all with most cities in the US, as someone who has lived in many and visited far more. I wouldn't categorize NYC, Boston, Chicago, LA, Philly, or DC that way when you're not in literal capitol buildings. I live in one of the densest US cities, take transit all over the place and have felt unsafe maybe one time in the past 3 years. No weapon was involved.

[adjkant]

Why is your first reaction to any description or decrease in safety to go directly to the phrase "third world country"? Even forgetting the phrase, what you likely mean by it is also not true in all or even most aspects. It's incredibly reductive to use a single category classification of "how nice do I feel something is" for everyone to project on their own ideas how they will.

SF can be both having an increase in homelessness and petty crime at the same time as it maintains a top economy of the US, a big arts scene, many diverse cultures, and more. It's not as simple as "is this a country I would label a bad place".

With that said, SF's latter categories have also slowly eroded, but these symptoms needs to be examined individually. The tech industry did much itself to destabilize SF's arts and culture long before any crime issues. More of a tangent there, but the point is you can't forgo nuance here.

[b9a2cab5]

The tech industry didn't do shit, San Francisco NIMBYs were the ones who refused to build housing causing the price of everything to only be affordable for tech workers.

I don't know how you can blame a high paying employer for causing "destabilization". People getting pushed out by gentrification are getting pushed out because there is no new supply of housing but massive new demand for housing.

[adjkant]

You need both NIMBY's and a large population influx to cause the core issue here. The tech industry indisputably caused the latter. You also imply some/many tech workers were also not NIMBY's as well, as if these two groups are entirely separate.

Growth is not inherently good, and the tech industry absolutely did not help alleviate the issues NIMBY's helped to cause. There was no reason SF couldn't have gone on being the same size city it was decades before in a healthy way. It takes two to tango here, and I see no reason why we wouldn't blame both. The tech industry chose profits for its own companies over the good of the city.

They had no legal obligation to make any other choice, but maybe if they cared about the city for itself or even the longterm health of the area, if not only in self interest, they would have regulated their own growth. That's just not in line with the philosophy that took root there though, which was growth at all costs. These ideas expand out beyond the tech world it turns out.

[Gimpei]

The problem with this argument is that, if not for NIMBYs, growth really could have helped all the people of San Francisco. Dense cities are the places with the greatest opportunity and the greatest mobility (see for example Chetty). But for this to be the case, housing has to be affordable enough for working people to afford. So basically, NIMBYs took something that could have been great and made it awful instead. How is tech to blame for this? Tech provided a wonderful opportunity and the people of SF blew it.

I'd also add that I am a San Francisco native and it was not some midsize paradise in the 80s. It was broker, the schools were worse, the public transportation was worse, there were already plenty of homeless, and, like every other major US city, it was far more violent. The only thing that was better was housing affordability and the niners.

[adjkant]

There's plenty of nuance here, but I must say I am a bit surprised "the tech industry was a contributing factor to SF's decline" needs to be explained in this much detail. With that said, a few points:

1. As you said yourself, no city was a paradise in the 80's in the US for many reasons, and SF, regardless of a massive tech influx, would have risen with the same tide many other cities experienced from the 80's to now.

2. There's an implicit implication here that if it were not for NIMBY's, all of SF's problems would be solved. While I think they would be better, there's a lot of challenges with building housing that fast even outside of zoning. SF has a severe lack of density to start with that would cause issues even with aggressive construction. It's also not a large land area. Compare to NYC who had a huge land area that had way more density. NYC is not an exception here, you can find at least more density or land mass for most other major cities that helped alleviate the problem even with a NIMBY population present.

3. I think again, you're separating the tech industry from NIMBY's when there is much overlap. Many early tech workers wanted the picturesque victorian style house and helped to enact the problematic zoning themselves.

4. The larger thesis here is that the companies coming is a gift to the city, which I think completely ignores the social factors. People come to cities for the people as much as the jobs, sometimes more so in the modern era. It's why NYC has had no problem bouncing back in even the past 6 months despite many offices remaining empty. The decline of SF is very much highlighted by the past few months not seeing the same effect there yet.

5. With point 2 and 4 in mind in particular, it's hard to make a case that first it was a reasonable expectation for people, the flawed beings they are, to simply rebrand/build the entire city to accommodate the incoming industry, and second that even if they did it would have done anything more than slow the decline. Heck, the drastic cultural shift could have even killed it faster.

There are again complex reasons for this, but one of the patterns that is somewhat unique to SF due to the bay area is that you have people commuting out of the city rather than into the city often given Mountain View, San Jose, etc. That adds even more housing pressure on the area compared to the jobs in SF proper. Add in building constraints around earthquakes and the large set of towers in the SOMA / Financial District, and that recipe for disaster is going to be hard to avoid.

Hindsight is 20/20 and no single tech company caused this, but at the end of the day I just don't think it's a stretch to say that a big influx in tech companies was a big part of killing SF and we may have a much better version of the city today if that influx was moderated or even was not there at all. A monoculture of any industry is not good for a city. Cities exist for humans, not economic purposes. They are powered and somewhat caused by them, but a city does not have much value to me if it doesn't serve the people who live there primarily. There's lots of urban theory to back this up looking at company towns and the like.

I've posted about this general thread before here, and I fear the tech industry has not learned its lesson and is simply moving on to another city to slowly squeeze the life out of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563775