That said, 2009 wasn't a tech-specific downturn. New York had it far worse than us, and there were still tech companies doing their thing in SF, albeit on a much tighter budget, since the money wasn't flowing. The dot-com crash (which is essentially what I am describing) had its epicenter in SOMA, and we're a lot closer to that scenario than we are to Lehman -- outside of exports (oops, spoke too soon!) and shale oil/gas (oops, spoke too soon!), tech is the primary bright spot in our economy right now. The dumb money is flooding into tech instead of real estate this time, which means that when it does go away, the hangover is going to be pretty wicked.
Don't get it? Personally, I can't find anything positive about spending so much of one's income on rent? If it's crime, my car is still broken into like its 1999?
In retrospect, my first "this might be insane" moment happened when techcrunch wrote the "airbnb has arrived" article, announcing that they'd grown a horn and become a unicorn. That was June 2011.
Yeah, some of the banks were paying people to defer their offers to a later date.