Rising rents, crime rising in many districts, more and more tech companies moving out of SF to Texas, Miami.<p>San Francisco used to be the leader in tech but right now after speaking with many people they told me to avoid it as it’s become unaffordable to live there, even with remote work now being prevalent now and preferable for engineers, it doesn’t make sense to live in a place with a high cost of living such as SF you might as well live and work remote elsewhere in the US and still get the SF-like salaries for talented engineers.<p>With VCs and billionaires now buying up land and setting up a new city in California, X moving away from SF and many more companies to go, is there any hope for San Francisco to remain the dominant tech hub or is it completely over with its golden years now gone for good.
Spoiler alert (don't read ahead if you like the rose-tint of your glasses): SF never made sense, and the standard-of-living compensation offset was a bubble destined to collapse. The Bay Area artificially displaced the majority of it's service worker population and replaced it with high-turnover middle-managers and product designers. Now everything sucks, and the businesses don't want to blame themselves because it would mean they were wrong about San Francisco. So instead they blame dubious corollaries of their influence, like homelessness and rent costs. Gentrification 101.<p>I've traveled around a bit to the smaller tech communities (Boston, Redmond, Detroit, etc.) and they've never left me wanting for a higher-stakes location like San Francisco. It was an obvious bubble from the start, plainly apparent to anyone with an understanding of economic causality. The only thing keeping it afloat was hype and deliberate ignorance, two trends that aren't yet dead as evidenced by AI and cryptocurrency, respectively.
I always wondered when tech moved to San Francisco, given San Francisco's funky "people-centric" history, including the eccentric, it seemed a shoehorn fit.<p>I used to visit San Francisco in the 80's, pre tech-boom. Multicultural, funky, literate, cosmopolitan, touristy, and a real cool break from the heat in the South Bay. I used to visit a bookstore in "Japan Town" that had to move when rents started to skyrocket.<p>It was expected that business would move to the lower-cost Oakland/EastBay area but I never saw that happen. I think that a lot of tech will remain in San Francisco after some big companies migrate elsewhere. San Francisco probably won't return to its funky roots, just less tech-centric in the downtown, IMO.<p>I briefly worked across from The Pyramid, at the intersection of the Italian, Chinese and financial districts, with the office of Angela Alioto and the first location of the "Bank of Italy," now Bank of America, nearby. Nothing like it.<p>One windy morning, my wife was watching TV, which showed a downtown intersection including me, my 5 seconds of fame.