With a New Influx of Wealth, Is San Francisco Over?

Is New York over? Is Hong Kong over? Is London over? Financial and business capitals worldwide morf and change as they mature. San Francisco is in the process. This article is shallow and doesn’t even begin to describe and predict the future for this vibrant city.

The house next to us sold for close to a million dollars, a small 950 sq ft 1 story home without central heating. We live in the East Bay on an ordinary street. While driving across our country we stopped in various places like Kentucky and Missouri and rural Illinois. One can buy a mansion for one quarter the price. Near us here in million dollar homeville, just down the road, tents line the streets. People live on thoroughfares in them. There are increasingly more mad people screaming bloody heck all the time in the underground subway or on street corners or on buses. There are people lying on the sidewalks here. There are desperate people everywhere. They come to the Bay Area because the weather is more amenable to life outside. if I were homeless, this would be my first choice. The disparities and contradictions are almost too much to take in. The beggars on the streets seem like they appeared out of a George Grosz painting depicting street life in Weimar Germany. Ragged men and women on crutches. Armies of people digging in garbage cans for recycling income with huge bags of recyclables balanced on shopping carts. Another ordinary day. Why can't we take care of each other? I sometimes stop and think what would happen if we had a serious economic implosion, how would we fare? What about the viability of Google and Facebook and Amazon and Lyft etc. What do they make? Not sure where this is all leading, but our oceans are dying as the money keeps rolling in.

I live in the Bay Area and love it. However, SF is now a disgusting toilet bowl, literally.

San Francisco was over a long time ago. You don't have to play Sid Meier's Civilization to know that culture is important. When the people that make a city "cool," the artists, the musicians and the writers, the people who haven't "made it" leave, the city is only a ghost of what once was. I can't give you an exact date; some people will tell you it was after the gold rush, some people will tell you it was after the Great War, some after the tumult of the sixties ended, or after the Latinx population was forcibly removed from the Mission by means of gentrification and the almighty dollar, but at this point, it doesn't matter. The people that drew the adventurous to this city can't even afford Oakland anymore.

The problems are real, but so are the solutions. In fact, we really have only one problem that causes all the others: grossly insufficient housing stock. And we got to this point after nearly fifty years of disallowing dense development paired with intense greenery and open space. Slowly, too slowly, we are turning toward creation of much more housing, particularly affordable housing. It is a crisis in my hometown of San Francisco, a statewide problem, a problem for almost all thriving areas in the United States. It will take a fundamental reorientation of the housing and construction markets, a re-commitment of government resources, and a cultural shift from blocking housing development to encouraging it in intelligent ways. In the meantime, can we stop calling this vital city, bursting with new residents and jobs, inventions, and ideas, dead? It remains exciting, wonderful, beautiful, and always my favorite place.

The City is fast losing its charm and diversity. I live in the East Bay and almost never go to San Francisco because it's getting impossible to get around town, the streets are dirty and filled with the unhoused. The new construction, mostly market rate, is ugly. It's just an unpleasant place to live and the plague is spreading across the Bay. If i hadn't bought my home many years ago I couldn't live in the entire region.

A fifth generation San Franciscan, one of the original families supporting the French-American Bilingual School with a current years long waiting list, this is not good news for an old port city, tolerant, open to all, neighborhoods with strong ethnic ties, and restaurants with prices at all levels. The best Mexican food was in a diner in the Mission. The original boundaries for an island kept the population at a steady 750,000. Now with high rises built on fill, tilting and unsteady, will go down with first big earthquake, as did those stucco buildings built on fill in the Marina. There is no way to build on fill unless you can afford to sink pilings as deep and strong as those for the GG Bridge; those eventually reached bedrock. No developer is going to spend that much money and energy. My grandmother remembered the big quake; she lived in a Victorian on upper Market. The house survived; it was wood and flexible. The gas mains cracked; water storage tanks came up empty. Fire boats saved much of the No. Beach and Marina areas. My grandmother remembered going to GG Park as a great adventure; of course she was 16; her mother didn't have the same memory. I remember several quakes, waiting for the after shocks. Many of the tall buildings have been retrofitted; the newer buildings have foundations capable of moving, sort of like ball bearings. I love my home town, and hope she survives all natural events.

It’s sort of karmic that all these tech people are pricing themselves out. On NPR yesterday, I heard that restaurants are closing because the chefs and waitstaff can’t afford to operate/work in SF anymore. So the silver lining here is that as income inequality increases, the lifestyle that so many of these people seem to be after will become less achievable precisely because of their money; the service industry required to support that lifestyle will be understaffed. Replace them all with robots, sure. But what kind of life is it, ultimately? Most of the multimillion dollar homes I saw in Palo Alto last year could be had for a couple hundred thousand in many other cities — where, by the way, you can also find pour over coffee, organic micro greens, hipsters, delivery service, etc.

The South of Market area of San Francisco, which used to be zoned light industrial, is being overwhelmed by new building of 10 + story "office parks". In forty years of living here I have never seen anything like this scale of development. One hopes some of these unfinished structures will be housing (apartments or condos). If not, adding office space for 50,000 new employees is going to crush the local metro transportation system. Downtown development in the 80's and 90's had some code requirements for setbacks, and "green space", but now it's all building right to the edge of a nominal sidewalk. Newcomers won't be phased by the sudden phenomenon of "Manhattanization", but this is definitely transforming the city into something that is not "San Francisco".

Great news for those of us planning to cash out of the Bay Area in the next few years :-) In my opinion, San Francisco has been "over" since the original dot-com boom.

San Francisco proper is a small area that can be walked from one end to the other in a few hours (it could be walked in a shorter time, if not for the hills). California is a drought prone semi-arid state. Realistically, there is no space or water for unlimited population influx and the housing to go along with it.

This is a sensationalist title with absolutely no content in the article. Is SF over? From what, an influx of money into local businesses?

San Francisco is roughly Manhattan at this point. A place for the Rich with a few dots of low-income to make Americans feel like society is balanced. We are historically at a point where the Wealthy have it all and the rest are here to serve - and this is what we've allowed to happen since 1980. Monopolies the rule the Nation. So the questions becomes, when will it all break? Obviously the Great Recession wasn't scary enough to get us out of this cycle and considering the lack of wage growth, just compounds the fact that a good part of Americans are too stupid to know better and many of those just vote for more oppression! Is it time, perhaps, to Eat the Rich - for will there be anything left on the plate of society to satisfy the hunger that rages, but as yet, not out of control?

I just abandoned San Francisco. The filth and poverty on the street are horrifying. Right at Twitters doorstep. I couldn’t do it anymore. I took a gigantic pay cut and moved. It looks like my timing may have been good.

What will happen now are impacts on the remaining Bay Area cities that might have held out hope for a modicum of affordability. If the city or community is accessible from a BART stop, it will start pricing up and out. Think of Brooklyn, NY where for the first time average home prices have tipped $1M, culminating in a trend of migration from Manhattan. Cities in the Bay Area can expect to follow a similar pattern along their transit-accessible routes as San Francisco becomes even further out of reach. There is no solution to staunch this trend at the order of magnitude that it is impacting.