Thursday, February 22, 2024

San Francisco is Just Fine

(winter harvest) 

One type of post I normally avoid is the “I told you so” variety. One reason is that it would probably have to be balanced with a “Maybe I was wrong” variety — not a favorable option.

But I couldn’t help but notice the Wall Street Journal headline this week: “Tech Leaders Fled San Francisco During the Pandemic. Now, They’re Coming Back.”

The subhead for that story added some detail: “Founders and investors who moved to Miami and elsewhere are returning to a boom in artificial intelligence and an abundance of tech talent.”

Well, I told you so. From time to time over the past few years, I’ve reported on my infrequent trips into the city. On those visits, San Francisco has seemed just fine to me.

That’s because I visit the neighborhoods, not downtown.

In neighborhoods like Potrero Hill, Bernal Heights, the Mission, Now Valley, the Inner Richmond and Sunset, the Marina, the Haight, the Fillmore, the Castro, North Beach and Chinatown, the local cafes and shops are doing a booming business, crowded with customers, both locals and tourists.

While it is true that there have been since Covid a large number of vacancies in the office towers downtown, and thousands of layoffs in the tech sector, San Francisco’s economy is and always has been about much more than technology.

In fact the latest figures indicate the tech sector accounts for just 18.7 percent of the city’s economy.

But that piece of the pie is extremely volatile, given to rapid expansion and contraction in its business cycles.

Another important factor in understanding this city is historical. San Francisco has always had an exaggerated pattern of boom and bust ever since the Gold Rush of 1849. Nothing much has changed in that sense over the past 175 years.

As for the homelessness, open drug use and car break-ins, these are real problems and similar to other large cities, but mainly prevalent in the Tenderloin, which has been a persistent slum since at least the 1880s.

Violent crime rates in San Francisco are extremely low, despite occasional national headlines to the contrary.

These are a few of the relevant local details that those in the east coast dominated national press corps never seem to be able to master. Thus, periodically those of us who know the city and its history well are subjected to their predictable diet of “San Francisco is in a doom loop” headlines followed inevitably by a wave of “San Francisco is booming again” headlines, as if these outsiders have discovered anything new or significant.

Neither set of headlines is completely wrong, nor are they completely right. One highly relevant and recent development is the practice of billionaires to interfere in our local elections, like that of the recall of former D.A. Chesa Boudin. 

But except for that, the bottom line is that as major cities go, San Francisco is just fine, thank you, like it always has been.

HEADLINES:

 

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