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The technicians leave town. Oracle moves to Texas. Hewlett-Packard withdraws. It’s hard to drive around town avoiding all those double-parked moving vans. This is the speech of the city. The boom has burst. The high life in Silicon Valley is toast. San Francisco is over.
The main story in last Monday’s Chronicle Business section told the story – how the techs got a tough deal with the Bay Area. How they traded high rents, rough commutes, high taxes, and all manner of urban ailments for high quality of life and the California dream. But then the coronavirus left a hole in the dream. They found they could work remotely. “They fled,” the story goes. “They fled to tropical seaside towns. They fled to more affordable places like Georgia… Texas and Florida… ”And so on.
Well, a lot of us have thought, good riddance. Anyway, these people were just transients. Don’t let the door knock on you on your way out.
But the technological exodus is a cruel blow in difficult times. In a region that likes to celebrate itself, it’s hard to accept rejection. Like others, I was confined to the house. So I turned off the television, put the newspaper in the recycling bin, and went to see for myself.
I went to the top of the neighborhood hill one afternoon and looked at San Francisco. The high winds had cleared the air and there were long winter shadows. The setting sun was shining on the glass towers of the city’s new skyline, and as the afternoon wore on the windows of the houses in East Bay turned red as if they were on fire. I could see everywhere – Mount Tamalpais and Mount Diablo and down the peninsula. I even saw a commuter train heading into town and a big boat pass under the Bay Bridge.
The top of the hill was packed with people and dogs, for an afternoon walk. If it’s a ghost town, I thought, it sure is a pretty town.
But I’m one of those city guys who grew up here and stuck with it. My family lived on Potrero Hill and I went to school in the Mission. I could see everything from the top of the hill; the old house that was still falling and is now worth a million dollars, the old school.
When I was a child, the mission was mainly Irish and Italian. Of all the people we knew at the time, only a handful are still in the city. They were eager to get out of the Mission – first to the Richmond and the Sunset, then out of town, out of the fog, out of town.
The same thing happened in North Beach. They didn’t like the old apartments, the parking problems, the city problems. You would see them at Christmas, back in the old quarter of Original Joe’s or the Italian Athletic Club, back for an afternoon. “You know,” they were saying, “It’s still enough here, but it’s not the city I grew up in.”
A few decades ago, there was a huge diaspora in San Francisco. Many blue collar and waterfront jobs have dried up. Schools have experienced a decline. There has been a wave of crime. San Francisco’s population has plummeted. “The summer of 1967 of love gave way to a score of winters of discontent,” David Talbot wrote of these times in “Season of the Witch.”
But the exodus stopped. New people have moved in and the city is reborn. The workers’ valley of Eureka has turned into Castro. Immigration laws have changed and the Asian population has exploded from Chinatown to the Sunset and Richmond. San Francisco is now an Asian third. The demographics have changed. The black population has dropped dramatically from the old fortresses in the Western Addition and even the Bayview. The mission has become predominantly Latino and is changing again.
So these big changes are nothing new. This time, however, could be different. Scott Fuller, who founded a company called Leaving the Bay Area three years ago, says business is “very, very strong right now.” His business helps people relocate, find new homes, new schools, new neighborhoods and a new life outside of the Bay Area.
Leaving the Bay Area lists 50 cities from Atlanta to Virginia Beach – places where the average cost of housing is 50% to 60% lower than in the Bay Area. The main destination, he says, is Austin, Texas. “They don’t have income tax,” he says, “and Texas is very business friendly.”
It wasn’t that long ago that Texas would have been a tough sell. The people of the Bay Area have convinced themselves that they are living in the best of all possible worlds. “There is a certain level of arrogance in California,” he says. But it turns out that the grass might just be greener elsewhere. “I saw it coming,” Fuller said.
And what about those of us who stayed? In San Francisco, there has always been a hard core of indigenous and transplanted people who have remained loyal to the city, who have tried to put steel behind the backs of officials who have left issues such as the homeless. sheltering getting out of hand. And these are hardened residents who are simply doing the right things – hundreds of small neighborhood projects ranging from urban trees to the adoption of storm drains.
It’s the little things that matter. Lynne Carberry has deep roots in the city. Her late father, Matt Carberry, was a sheriff for years. She and her husband lived in East Bay for a long time, but returned to San Francisco.
“We and our contemporaries have tried to support the city during the pandemic by supporting restaurants, donating to charities and following COVID guidelines,” she said. She has two grown sons. “Our family is committed to staying here,” she said.
“I think when the phoenix rises again, San Francisco will be better than ever,” said Carberry, of the mythical bird that is the symbol of San Francisco, not this low-rent city in Arizona.
The Carl Nolte column airs on Sundays. Email: [email protected]
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