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Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

That chart showing a big bump after 2000 and 2008 was intriguing, I was curious to know how it looked before 1996 Does anyone knows what "bubble" happened in 1990 in San Francisco?

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_...

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There was a nationwide recession in the United States in the early '90s. The chart reflects that.

And FYI, technology was not a significant factor in the economy of the City of San Francisco at that time.

> technology was not a significant factor in the economy of the City of San Francisco at that time

So was the 80's tech boom in Silicon Valley limited to the valley proper?

For most of Silicon Valley's history, the technology industry was generally no farther north than Menlo Park on the Peninsula, and southern Fremont in the east, with the occasional exception (Electronic Arts in San Mateo, Oracle in Redwood Shores). There were the beginnings of a tech presence in SOMA in the dot-com era, but it died when the bubble burst. Tech didn't start to come back to the City until 2006-07 or so.

There were cuts in defense spending after the end of the Cold War.

Presumably, reconstruction after the earthquake in 1989.

Interestingly, Seattle has a very similar curve throughout this time period.

edit: several major cities actually

Actually the 89 earthquake did a surprisingly small amount of damage to the bay area (in SF primarily the marina and small but significant damage to the bay bridge; outside it was the cypress structure and much of downtown santa cruz).

In addition, the reconstruction was spread over a long period (for example they haven't finished with the bay bridge).

> Actually the 89 earthquake did a surprisingly small amount of damage to the bay area (in SF primarily the marina and small but significant damage to the bay bridge

Also, SR-480, I-280, and US 101 all saw significant damage and closures requiring reconstruction and redesign (either of the freeway itself, or of transport networks because, as in the case of SR-480, the freeway was just deleted entirely after the damage.)

> In addition, the reconstruction was spread over a long period (for example they haven't finished with the bay bridge).

The Bay Bridge damage from the earthquake was repaired fairly quickly; the seismic retrofit to make it better able to survive future earthquakes (and, more specifically, the replacement of the Eastern Span as part of that retrofit) has taken longer.

Yep. My point was that none of those was responsible for any sort of economic "uplift" (in quotes because of the broken windows fallacy).

BTW after writing that comment I just walked by the old chemistry building on the Stanford campus which was closed by the earthquake (I was actually in that building a earlier that summer). They've finally started work on fixing it -- more than a quarter century after it was declared unsafe!

> My point was that none of those was responsible for any sort of economic "uplift" (in quotes because of the broken windows fallacy).

The damage to SR-480 (the Embarcadero Freeway) might be a significant counterexample to that, since it was the earthquake damage that provide the impetus to overcome the resistance to demolishing it that had stopped that from happening two years before the earthquake, and allowed the improvements in that area that took place once the freeway was removed.

There was a major market crash and recession around 1987. The economy stumbled for about 5 years while Bush Sr. was president. That is a primary reason Clinton was elected in 1992. I don't know the primary industry that crashed (like tech 2000 and financial 2008), but the rise in unemployment is likely the aftermath of that recessionary period.

> I don't know the primary industry that crashed...

It depends upon who you ask, but mainstream consensus [1] is financial industry, specifically via the then-newly-common program trading. The supposed resultant market crash is usually identified in mainstream analysis as the incipient early 1990s recession.

US residents at the time possibly more commonly associated the market crash and recession with the savings and loan (aka "S&L") crisis. [3] Significant portions of the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) industries [4] were adversely affected at the time, though IMHO the resultant regulatory response only acted as a perverse incentive to further financialize the US economy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_%281987%29#Causes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_economy

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