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While The New York Times didn’t revel in the schadenfreude of posting about how San Francisco had become unbearable over the past two years, it apparently took great pleasure in reporting on the various missteps of the tech companies that power a lot of the economy here. And while it is undeniable that there was an exodus of city residents during the pandemic which is driving down rents, does the Times need to go with the headline “They Can’t Leave the Area out of the bay quickly enough ”?
The latest post from SF-based NYT columnist Nellie Bowles (formerly of VICE) refers to this current moment as the end of a ‘technological age’, which is arguably true if you assume it will be followed by another technological era. The dot-com collapse was, after all, just a failure in the Bay Area’s steady progress to become a global tech hub – and many predicted that the boom that began around 2010 was destined to explode. at one point, although they didn’t predict that a pandemic would be the cause.
Bowles writes about the flight of digital nomads and tech workers from the notoriously expensive Bay Area as if it were a permanent state of affairs, this exit. “They fled to tropical beach towns. They fled to more affordable places like Georgia. They fled to tax-free states like Texas and Florida.” But then she hints at reasons why such plans may not be suitable for everyone – Austin can be “(very) hot” in the summer, Miami is still a swamp, and Savannah is full of mosquitoes.
And as a 35-year-old founder told her, “I miss San Francisco. I miss the life I had there. But right now it’s just like this: what is God, the world and the government can find ways to reduce this place to “habitable?” (This guy lives in an RV, so it might get old soon.)
After all, the media – especially the New York-based media – have been declaring San Francisco “done” for at least two years now. Remember that depressing New Yorker article from May 2019 about how every tech was dying to get out of here because SF had become dystopian hell?
These trending stories aren’t meant to have a long lifespan, I guess, so when the trend reverses and rents start to rise again in SF and elsewhere in the Bay Area, The Times will likely ignore it for a while. a moment, then will release another trending piece that claims this was, of course, a lost fatality. Because rents in arguably the most beautiful and temperate city in the country never go down for long – at least over the past three decades.
The editor of the San Francisco Business Times, Douglas Freuhling, just wrote an op-ed this week entitled “The exodus can no longer be denied.” From a commercial real estate perspective, with companies like Oracle, Tesla, and Pinterest announcing relocations or lease cancellations, one has to assume that office rents will suffer for an indefinite period – even if it happens after a period of time. which businesses were clamoring for office space in the city and rents were at record highs.
No one has a crystal ball and can say with confidence when the “exodus” ends and the restocking begins, but it’s not like the city is empty – and it’s not like the house prices had fallen a lot, if at all. And there is an argument to be made that many people who leave – like young couples with children – were likely to leave anyway, as not very wealthy couples with children are used to when their children reach the age of 13. school age, because bigger and cheaper homes and better schools abound elsewhere. A September article in the Chronicle suggested, at least anecdotally, that more than half of the people they spoke to who were looking for greener pastures had hope or were planning to return here when the pandemic was over.
Maybe when things change, other reporters will be at The New York Times who have not witnessed this latest “end of the era” firsthand, and once again they will publish an article with little vision from the city. The newspaper’s San Francisco bureau chief Thomas Fuller seemed exhausted enough covering the wildfire season in August already, and it was a good four months before it really ended. Will it have moved once San Francisco – and possibly many other cities across the country – enters a dizzying post-pandemic party phase? Probably.
Also, another interesting note: The NYT article finds that the guy behind two big Facebook groups devoted to the exodus, Terry Gilliam, hasn’t actually left the Bay Area himself. Gilliam started the groups Leaving California (33,500 members) and Life After California (51,400 members), but he still lives in Fremont.
Previously: More than half of people leaving SF say they’ll likely come back, in a small sample of reviews
Photo: Will Truettner
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