[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

[JumpCrisscross]

There are good points here. But San Francisco is woefully less dense than most major cities on this planet, including those like Tokyo which are subject to earthquakes. Blaming anything other than NIMBYism is a red herring.

Tech is the proximate, not ultimate, explanation foe the problem. The bed was laid by San Francisco’s housing policy. At the end of the day, most other cities and polities would have turned a massive influx of wealth into an asset, not a symbol of institutional failure.

[dragonwriter]

> But San Francisco is woefully less dense than most major cities on this planet, including those like Tokyo which are subject to earthquakes.

San Francisco is denser than Tokyo by about 2,000 people/mi.² (now, whether it is fair to compare tiny—both in geography and population, for a “major city”—SF to massive Tokyo—where the “city proper” by UN terms is roughly twice the population of the 9-county bay area—is another question.)

San Francisco isn't a major city except in the sense of GDP. Which makes it more impressive that it is a major city considering economic footprint, but makes attempts to compare it to cities that are among the world’s largest urban centers kind of ridiculous.