Pretty sure NY had a pretty heinous violent crime streak in the 70s. If memory serves SF was pretty gritty in the 70s/80s as well.

The thing with SF is that the media and a large portion of the US loves to hate it - theres a narrative that keeps getting the replay button. They always will, and it will always die just like Silicon Valley is over and the next Silicon Valley will be in (insert any city, or china). These stories have been around forever, and they will continue forever. Yes SF will go through a down cycle as a result of pressure being taken off of the rental market, and it will fill right back in when people want to live in the city again and the pandemic has passed.

Pretty sure college is going to be in person again (UCB, UCSF, Stanford) as are the National Labs.

The media has overhyped this ... of all sources Business Insider.

I felt the same way about the source. Business Insider is pretty far from a serious news source.

I know a couple of medium sized VC people who are going to start living outside of SF proper (not the Valley), but the people I know who live in the city love being in the city of San Francisco. The people who are leaving the bay area were probably always going to leave some day if they weren't happy there.

And you're dead on about schools and research centers that require in person. Hardware or R&D need a physical space for work and security. And some people do like a cool office experience.

Anyway, tl;dr I agree with you, ha ha.

I agree with your agreement with me :)

Crime or not, NYC seems to be doing pretty well. Top dog in the entire country for the past decades and the foreseeable future.

They're not looking so hot at the moment. Huge outflow of people and businesses due to the one-two punch of COVID and rising crime + defund the police.

The recent announcement by Goldman Sachs about moving a large chunk of their operations to Miami is not a good sign for NYC.

Depends on the metrics you are ranking by.

I don't think New York in the 70s can be explained by its own governance alone, so I object to your characterization of New York in the 70s being the result of its own failings. The state and federal governments basically abandoned the place ("Ford to City: Drop Dead"), and something similar is happening to San Francisco as well. What a loss for the country, as the next Silicon Valley, if there is one, likely won't be in the United States.

Becoming so hated that people want you to fail is arguably "the result of its own failings" regardless of whether the subject is NYC then or SF now.

The urban vs. rural culture war in politics has little to do with inherent value and everything to do with resource allocation in an government system that allocates highly leveraged influence to the individuals on one side.

This isn't about urban vs rural. Thinking SV is such a joke it must be run by clowns is one of the (few, but these kinds of people have more in common than you'd think) things that inner city types and people from the panhandle of any state that has a panhandle have in common.

Comments like this make me wonder if the end of SV meme is some kind of psyops campaign.

It's not. It really is just that disconnected from the everyday realities of the rest of the country.

Silicon Valley has a single major drawback, cost of living, which is downstream of land use and transportation policy that’s virtually identical throughout the country. Basically every large and growing metropolitan area in the nation sees the same relative price trends. Famous low cost alt-SV Austin has seen its Case-Schiller index move within 15% of San Jose. To argue that its governance is especially backwards or selfish and, thus, deserving of failure is to indict the entire nation.

That's a San Francisco issue, the South Bay is doing much better in that regard.

It's not just SF, it's the region and it's inability/refusal to act like a cohesive region. But SF has certainly suffered the most.

5 Bay Area counties coordinated in going into lockdown earlier than the state required. Sometimes we do act like a region.

You bring up the perfect example, because in the current lock down San Mateo county refused to participate in the shelter in place mandate that their 2 neighboring counties opted in to. So, you cannot dine outdoors in Palo Alto, but can walk 1/2 mile north to Menlo Park and dine at a restaurant.

Yea....except for how many decades have we struggled to build Bart into Menlo Park and south?

I get it. I would settle for a smooth timed transfer between Bart and Caltrain at Millbrae. In some ways, the exceptional cases where we do act more like a coordinated unit make the normal cases more exasperating because we know what is possible.

Hello from Portland (Oh boy, here it comes)

You're not wrong that many people do seem to prefer the petty crime to tech.

But you seem to be condoning that preference, and that preference is ridiculous. An economic boom should not be a bad thing. And tech is not raising rents, it is raising housing demand which could easily be met with a corresponding rise in supply that would limit the price increases, but new housing has been being actively blocked for decades.

You also leave out an important factor, most of the city that is supporting the policies that enable petty crime here have no skin in the game. They live in nice neighborhoods where they've owned their houses for decades making them massively wealthy and don't have to interact with the undesirables. It's easy to look the other way and ignore the downtown problems of homelessness and street crime, and to be so woke that you don't want any crime prosecuted, when it doesn't affect you.

"An economic boom should not be a bad thing"

You're right, but the reality is it has been a bad thing for many people. As long as they're being outmaneuvered by homeowners and landlords, having the boom simply end would work just as well as winning the housing supply fight. Few people are going to miss tech elites if they leave.

Rents in San Francisco rose faster in the 20 years before 1995 than they did in the 20 years after.

Maybe it is a tough call, because the guy shitting on the sidewalk isn't living in your previous apartment at twice the price.

Rich people don't want to live in your 100 year old apartment with 50 year old finishes. Unfortunately, in San Francisco, they don't have any other choice.

That, I agree with. San Francisco should have built more housing to accommodate the growth. Though if people are leaving already, I can also see why developers might have been reluctant to bet too big on new construction.

Developers were more than willing to bet on new construction, but it's mostly outlawed in the city.

San Francisco's housing stock also suffers because they have made renovation of rental properties illegal.

(Technically, they've only enforced price controls which make made profitable renovation illegal, but it has the same effect.)

> I can also see why developers might have been reluctant to bet too big on new construction

Why would that be?

Because if "tech elites" actually are leaving, then the increase in demand will have been proven to be transient

Surely many developers would have made the bet anyway, at least in 2010-2019, but going forward it'll be worth considering whether building housing for people who are likely to leave en masse is worth the risk.

"transient" for 30 years? It takes much less to gather investments, build houses and sell them.

People are building houses in countries where they sell at 20x lower prices.

Unless construction workers in SV are paid 1 million $ / year, the reason for not building is not that it's not (hugely) profitable.

Rents are still among the highest in the country. There is plenty of demand.

Despite the idiotic downvotes you are absolutely right.

A minority of people can afford living in an expensive and safe area.

The majority is forced to choose less expensive, even if less safe, areas.