Comment by robbyking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robbyking | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in San Francisco most of my adult life (having moved to the city after I graduated high school in the late 90's), and the current tech boom has been bittersweet for me and a lot of my friends. To be honest, I agree with -- and for the most part fit into -- the portrait this article paints of Bay Area engineers ("more of them go to Burning Man than to church"), but what's heartbreaking as a San Franciscan is how much influence on the city's culture the vocal minority of "loudmouthed techies" has had; neighborhoods I used to live in and love -- namely the Mission, South of Market, and Lower Haight -- would be unrecognizable in their current forms if my 2002 self were to see them.

I understand cities are living things, and they grow and change and people come and go, but the complete disregard for the city's culture is what's been so difficult for me. When I moved here I was young and naive, too, but I like to think I used the opportunity to learn about different cultures, backgrounds and perspectives, not marginalize them.

I'm curious - what were Mission, Soma, and Lower Haight like in 2002?

As am I! Also, what was the place like during and shortly after The Bubble?

There were lots of tech layoffs, and a lot of people were leaving the city around that time, so it was a _little bit_ tumbleweed-y. The Mission is the most markedly changed. Back then it was still a little sketchy with all the heroin addicts and prostitution on happening around Capp. Lower Haight was also iffy. Though it had its fair share of gentrification during the dotcom boom, there were still regular shootings in that area.

For those of us that don't live in the city, or the valley, or the west coast at all (though I work in Mountain View), wouldn't anything else be considered an improvement?

I've been to the Mission, the Tenderloin, and while yeah, there's the occasionally deranged individual doing the occasionally deranged thing, the situation I saw wasn't anywhere close to what you described, so I assume it's been improved?

> For those of us that don't live in the city, or the valley, or the west coast at all (though I work in Mountain View), wouldn't anything else be considered an improvement?

It was considered an "improvement" even then! And by "improvement", I mean the whole gentrification and character-of-San-Francisco arguments were bubbling around at all the hip tech parties attended by the VPs of XML Operations of every TomDickHarry.com dotcom!

From my (very limited) perspective, the Tenderloin actually hasn't changed much at all.

Now that you mention it, I think it was exclusively the Tenderloin wherein those deranged people were doing those deranged things, specifically, while waiting in line for breakfast at Dottie's (which I find to be slightly overrated, but that's subjective).

SoMa didn't have the ball park yet so it was kinda sketchy anywhere past the highway, and there were a bunch of weird muggings/knifings when a person of the wrong race would go to the wrong bar or place. We knew not to go the Korean club on Harrison. Meth heads would surround the happy donut and south park was a bit of a homeless tent city, and while there were some of the same hotels near the convention center, the west hall hadn't been built yet and it was all kinda run down the way most of moscone is.

I used to do a fair amount of work in the Potrero hill area in 2000 or so and dreaded parking there. Then the bust happened and not only did a lot more parking appear, but many of the good restaurants in that area shuttered almost overnight.

We lived in lower Haight until 1999, and it was okay, if you could roll with a little bit of homeless person screaming in the middle of the night just outside the place we rented. Our cars were broken into a few times and we got a few parking tickets a year but that was the price one paid to live in SF. It largely wasn't worth it. First me, then my soon to be wife got a job in the south bay, we moved to los altos to skip the commute.

The funny thing is the big 'displacement' story in the city around 2000 was the gentrification of the Castro, where older more established gay folks were making it difficult for younger, poorer gay people to find places to live near the Castro (which is sort of the traditional gay nexus in SF)

IMO SF is in much better shape nowadays, and it has a lot to do with the thousands of tech companies in and out of the city employing people who add their money and the rest to the city.

Coming from San Francisco, but not living there right now, I continue to be dismayed about the city government. They're about average for a local government in most respects, very good in some, and abysmal in a couple of important ways. The one that I see most often lately is about the most basic fundamentals of economics. The city, very broadly, would like to see the price of housing flat or falling - "affordable." Leaving aside the many possible negative side effects, the only way to get to a falling cost of housing is for less of it to be demanded or more of it to be supplied. The city government can't much affect the former, and has resolutely, bullheadedly, stubbornly refused to improve the latter. It's disastrous. It is is fine and worthy to say - hey let's keep the character of our neighborhoods. Great! But in pursuit of that, they've basically given existing residents a veto on anything new, nearly down to the single-block level in some cases. There are many aspects of the current issues with San Francisco. One aspect that is fully under San Francisco's control is, "shall we build more housing or not?" - and the city government is working as hard as possible to make the situation worse in that aspect. Drives me to tears.

Exactly, people don't remember what SF was like in the 80's. It was a dump. The city was slumping, people were leaving the city (net negative migration). Real Estate was in a funk (RE agents were leaving). Walking Market was a gamble. SOMA was more like 6th and 5th streets --but all over.

The slow rise in tech in the early 90s pushed SJ and SF out of their slumber and downward trend. Now that wealth from tech is permeating the city and bringing economic benefits, non tech people want the benefits derived from tech wealth without the side-effects. Thing is, if everyone of the 6million plus people in the Bay area earned 150k/year, we'd still have the same problems. You can't fit 6 million people in a city with low housing stock and insignificant housing stock coming online. So, some of those 150k earners will do better finances and be able to leverage their earnings to buy --the less financially savvy would be unable to afford SF --and then we'd be back to 'being priced out'.

It's difficult to cite specific examples because the zeitgeist (the defining spirit, not the bar) was completely different at that time. The Mission and SOMA used to be neighborhoods where you could live relatively inexpensively and still have space to make art or music or raise a family, so most of us who lived there had a vested interest in seeing the neighborhood thrive culturally.

Of course parts of those neighborhoods were terrible -- it's difficult to argue that 6th and Mission isn't better now than it was 10 or 15 years ago -- but to define entire neighborhoods by those types of intersections would be wrong. 16th and Mission was -- and honestly, still is -- often overrun with drug dealers and prostitutes, but if you were to have walked two blocks in any direction back then you would have passed countless independent art galleries, rehearsal spaces, and performance studios, not to mention an even greater number of family owned restaurants, grocery stores and shops.

And the best thing about all of these places was their accessibility: nearly anyone could afford to go out to dinner or an art opening, see a band play, or just have a couple drinks down the street from their house. It's that accessibility that's missing now: working class families, artists, and musicians can't afford the neighborhoods they helped build, so slowly, through Ellis Act evictions or sheer frustration, they start to trickle out of the city, taking with them what made the area desirable in the first place.

Can you give specific examples of things you saw that make you say that? I'm genuinely curious. I'm not a native San Fransciscan but I've been to the city many times and have many friends there.

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