San Francisco Is Preparing for Life After This Tech Boom

Honestly, at this point it&#x27;s too late to start &quot;preparing&quot; for a pop. I&#x27;m dubious the city can come up with 6 years of money to ride out any kind of economic turmoil without great pain.<p>Individuals can simply move to a better and cheaper location. There&#x27;s many more mature and cheaper tech hubs now than there were in 2007. The city is stuck with itself and its tax liabilities. And in a place where you can&#x27;t cut down a tree without posting 90 days notice, good luck rolling back some of that spending.

Question for San Francisco tech workers: if there is a massive recession caused either locally (over-funded companies that don&#x27;t make money going bust) or globally (China is expected to hold debt over 300% of GDP by 2020), what will you do to protect yourselves?<p>What languages or frameworks do you recommend learning? Which industries need engineers and are relatively insulated from economic downturns? If the Bay Area slams the brakes on growth, where will you move? What non-tech skills would you recommend brushing up on?<p>Perhaps most importantly: if things went bust today, how fucked would you be?

That chart showing a big bump after 2000 and 2008 was intriguing, I was curious to know how it looked before 1996 Does anyone knows what &quot;bubble&quot; happened in 1990 in San Francisco?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;publicdata&#x2F;explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_&amp;met_y=unemployment_rate&amp;idim=city:CT0667000000000:CT5363000000000:CT0644000000000&amp;fdim_y=seasonality:U&amp;hl=en&amp;dl=en#!ctype=l&amp;strail=false&amp;bcs=d&amp;nselm=h&amp;met_y=unemployment_rate&amp;fdim_y=seasonality:U&amp;scale_y=lin&amp;ind_y=false&amp;rdim=country&amp;idim=city:CT0667000000000&amp;ifdim=country&amp;tstart=631872000000&amp;tend=1447056000000&amp;hl=en_US&amp;dl=en&amp;ind=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;publicdata&#x2F;explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_...</a>

&quot;States are also readying for bad times by squirreling away more cash in reserves.&quot;<p>Now both huge companies and local governments are hoarding cash. Which is problematic for the economy as a whole.

I think by definition, you can&#x27;t &#x27;brace&#x27; for &#x27;a bubble&#x27;. That&#x27;s the central part of the metaphor that the bubble &#x27;bursts&#x27; as a sudden event at a time you can&#x27;t prepare for. The act of anticipating for a &#x27;bubble&#x27; and preparing for it is the exact kind of behaviour that prevents it from happening.

This is wise, just like guv Brown is being prudent with respect to tax receipts while his colleagues insist he&#x27;s bring stingy in a time of plenty. Apparently, those people are unaware of the hole Grey Davis dug while riding high on the wave of late nineties tax receipts.

&gt; The unemployment rate was 3.1 percent in April, the lowest since 2000, and home values are at a median of $1.1 million, the largest among the 50 biggest U.S. cities. Mayor Edwin Lee on May 31 released a record $9.6 billion budget proposal.<p>What goes up must come down. Here&#x27;s my completely opinionated ideas of how an individual in San Francisco can ride out the economic change:<p>1. Sell your home.<p>2. Have a 6 month nest egg saved up.<p>3. Have an up-to-date resume.<p>The &quot;sell your home&quot; part is not valid in the near-zero interest rate world, which who knows how long that will last.

San Francisco is one of the few cities in the US where half the inhabitants <i>wish</i> its chief industry would stumble and the bubble burst.

the next tech bubble bursting in the u.s. will see the reformulation of outsourcing to india and china as the &#x27;solution&#x27; to the next tech recovery.<p>the great depression lasted 12 years from 29 to world war 2.<p>every time the tech bubble has popped since 99 the fed lowered interest rates and increased money supply. i dont think that one will work so easily after the next bubble because interest rates will have to go negative and money supply has EXPLODED in the last 8 years.<p>the fed doesn&#x27;t like high gold or oil prices so how much more can they increase money supply after the next bubble busts?<p>the fed has taken 25 years post volcker to paint itself into this corner. the results of the next bubble bursting will be multi-decade cycle in nature meaning a bigger bustup than any of the 2008, 2004 , 99 bubbles.

Sort of crazy to me that the budget for SF is $9B. Boston, which is around 200k people smaller, has a budget of &lt;3B, which seems like a huge gap. What kind of services does SF provide that a pretty comparable city like Boston doesn&#x27;t?

Very nice to see they have a rainy day fund. Watching the city government here they really believe the TV show title &quot;It&#x27;s Always Sunny in Philadelphia&quot; Wish governments were paying attention to past history

Implicit in this &quot;life after&quot; plan is that things are going okay in San Francisco right now, which is a pretty interesting conclusion to come to.

I wonder how this would affect Silicon Alley?

The SF advantage is so incredibly ephemeral. Everybody wants to go there, because everybody else is there.<p>If that is all there is to it -- and it is -- this process can very easily go into reverse mode. SF is insanely expensive. You do not need any part of SF to write good software. It only makes your software more expensive.<p>Some day -- that could take quite a bit of time though -- SF will crash and burn, simply because there is no reason why it wouldn&#x27;t.