Dreamers that Move a Cloud
Taking in the changing landscape of San Francisco
April 2015
In her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” Joan Didion described the inhabitants of San Francisco, the Haight district in particular, as “an army of children waiting to be given the words”. Nearly fifty years later it could be said that that army of children found their words in the form of computer coding. The San Francisco of today is a much different scene from the one Didion explored in 1968. The city of dreamers, where Jack Kerouac wrote in dark cafés, this city of artists, where Joan Baez and the Grateful Dead sang on wet grass, has been over run with the world of technology.
Since its beginning, San Francisco has had as many ups and downs as it does hills. From the Gold Rush through the Dot.com boom of the 1990s and then the Web 2.0 era that shapes the city today San Francisco has seen it all. President William Howard Taft once described San Francisco as “the city that knows how”. It knows how to grow, it knows how to fall, and it knows how to adapt; with every crash the inhabitants hold on because they know there will be a boom soon enough. Yet, today there seems to be some disconnect within the city. With all the technology at our fingertips meant to bring us closer and to help us to grow, there is a gaping gash crossing the city. Maybe not as gaping a hole as an earthquake could cause, but this is a force that could tear the city apart just as easily as a natural disaster. This problem is the clash between the old and the new, the dreamers and the weavers.
The dreamers are those who still hold on to the old San Francisco. The city of artists, where any one could go to find a dream, to live in inclusive tranquility. This side of San Francisco is bright and colorful, enlightened and spiritual. They still wear tie-dye and read poetry in Dolores Park. Maybe they have lived here for a long time, maybe not, but no matter what they hold on to the San Francisco that Joan Didion found during a brief stint after leaving cold, hard New York. The weavers are those laborers of the tech industry who work all day weaving together code to make new apps, better websites, and an easier, more accessible future. These are the children who were part of the 8000 new tech jobs in 2013 alone.
The dreamers accuse these weavers of “gentrification”. It is because of these tech “yuppies” that the average asking price for rentals has increased from $2,700 to $3,057 since 2012. It is because of these techies, moving in with their piles of cash, that many native San Franciscans have had to leave the city—to leave their homes. In an article for “The Bold Italic” local artist Truong Tran explained how gentrification threatens the art culture of San Francisco. “The arts culture of this city is being removed as we speak. When an artist in a community is removed they don’t often come back, they’re replaced by someone else”, he says. Gina Vasquez, a local artist and long time resident of San Francisco has not yet been forced out of the city, but she has lost her gallery space, has had to start working for a bank, and has to rent out the extra rooms in her already small apartment. The city has become nearly unaffordable except for those with a large disposable income. In fact, San Francisco has surpassed Manhattan in real-estate prices. The average listing price for a home in San Francisco was $2,086,228 during the first week of March and the average price per square foot is $886, which is 10.6% higher this year than last.
There are plenty of statistics both in favor and in opposition to the presence of the multitude of tech startups, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, etc. employing youngsters in the city. So let us look at some of the numbers in their favor. The presence of the tech and information industries in the city actually help to create a more balanced economy. From 2012 to 2013 tech driven growth helped generate $480 million in business tax revenue. Furthermore, as the tech industry grows, so does every other industry. As more tech companies move into the city the demand for nearly every other type of company increased. Between 2010 and 2013, there were roughly 46,000 new private-sector non-tech jobs, compared to the 21,000 tech/info jobs at the same time.
However, numbers aren’t everything. Numbers don’t speak to emotion. Economist may continue to spout information about a more balanced economy and additional tax revenue and homeowners may complain about mortgages. While it is certainly true that the cost of living has increased in San Francisco, and the landscape has completely changed from what it was 50 years ago; what is more important is looking at the people. What is frequently overlooked when arguing for or against the tech bubble is that these yuppies are people with hopes and dreams just the same as the artists living here previously. They may be sitting at computers rather than easels, but they still are creative and, more over, they truly believe in the work they do. While enjoying a cup of coffee with app designer Roarke Clinton, he explained to me how in order to make a successful app or website, you have to believe it could change the world. It may not be actually curing cancer, but you have to approach it with the same mentality, he went on to say “an app that puts together a grocery list may not seem too important but if you think about it, that could encourage people to eat more healthily, which would promote a better life style and could eventually lead to lower incidences of obesity and potentially life threatening diseases.” Conrad Irwin, a Cambridge educated computer program who founded a company that became essential to runnings of LinkedIn confirms this “life saving” mentality. He is currently co-founding another start up that is to make email communication easier and more personalized. His goal is simply to help people live their live in as uncomplicated a way as possible. All he wants to do is help others, and “if the best way to do that is by writing code all day, then so be it”.
I think what these young tech workers really offer to the city and society in general is an enormously positive outlook—a confidence that things will work. This is a confidence needed in order to start a start-up, to begin making a website, and to move to such a city in the first place. It should also be mentioned that web design is something that anyone can learn. There are countless free websites that teach how to code, and these basic coding skills are all that is needed to apply for a job in a tech start up. With an industry that provides jobs for anyone willing to learn, creating a bubble around the city, I would think that the artists and dreamers would learn to thrive. This is truly a change for the good; we just need to stop looking at the numbers.
If change is going to happen, it might as well be something that benefits the city, the state, and the whole world, rather than something that causes a degeneration of the city. So, as far as I am concerned let the dreamers dream on and the weavers weave on, we are all moving to the same cloud anyways– an i-Cloud that is.
Since its beginning, San Francisco has had as many ups and downs as it does hills. From the Gold Rush through the Dot.com boom of the 1990s and then the Web 2.0 era that shapes the city today San Francisco has seen it all. President William Howard Taft once described San Francisco as “the city that knows how”. It knows how to grow, it knows how to fall, and it knows how to adapt; with every crash the inhabitants hold on because they know there will be a boom soon enough. Yet, today there seems to be some disconnect within the city. With all the technology at our fingertips meant to bring us closer and to help us to grow, there is a gaping gash crossing the city. Maybe not as gaping a hole as an earthquake could cause, but this is a force that could tear the city apart just as easily as a natural disaster. This problem is the clash between the old and the new, the dreamers and the weavers.
The dreamers are those who still hold on to the old San Francisco. The city of artists, where any one could go to find a dream, to live in inclusive tranquility. This side of San Francisco is bright and colorful, enlightened and spiritual. They still wear tie-dye and read poetry in Dolores Park. Maybe they have lived here for a long time, maybe not, but no matter what they hold on to the San Francisco that Joan Didion found during a brief stint after leaving cold, hard New York. The weavers are those laborers of the tech industry who work all day weaving together code to make new apps, better websites, and an easier, more accessible future. These are the children who were part of the 8000 new tech jobs in 2013 alone.
The dreamers accuse these weavers of “gentrification”. It is because of these tech “yuppies” that the average asking price for rentals has increased from $2,700 to $3,057 since 2012. It is because of these techies, moving in with their piles of cash, that many native San Franciscans have had to leave the city—to leave their homes. In an article for “The Bold Italic” local artist Truong Tran explained how gentrification threatens the art culture of San Francisco. “The arts culture of this city is being removed as we speak. When an artist in a community is removed they don’t often come back, they’re replaced by someone else”, he says. Gina Vasquez, a local artist and long time resident of San Francisco has not yet been forced out of the city, but she has lost her gallery space, has had to start working for a bank, and has to rent out the extra rooms in her already small apartment. The city has become nearly unaffordable except for those with a large disposable income. In fact, San Francisco has surpassed Manhattan in real-estate prices. The average listing price for a home in San Francisco was $2,086,228 during the first week of March and the average price per square foot is $886, which is 10.6% higher this year than last.
There are plenty of statistics both in favor and in opposition to the presence of the multitude of tech startups, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, etc. employing youngsters in the city. So let us look at some of the numbers in their favor. The presence of the tech and information industries in the city actually help to create a more balanced economy. From 2012 to 2013 tech driven growth helped generate $480 million in business tax revenue. Furthermore, as the tech industry grows, so does every other industry. As more tech companies move into the city the demand for nearly every other type of company increased. Between 2010 and 2013, there were roughly 46,000 new private-sector non-tech jobs, compared to the 21,000 tech/info jobs at the same time.
However, numbers aren’t everything. Numbers don’t speak to emotion. Economist may continue to spout information about a more balanced economy and additional tax revenue and homeowners may complain about mortgages. While it is certainly true that the cost of living has increased in San Francisco, and the landscape has completely changed from what it was 50 years ago; what is more important is looking at the people. What is frequently overlooked when arguing for or against the tech bubble is that these yuppies are people with hopes and dreams just the same as the artists living here previously. They may be sitting at computers rather than easels, but they still are creative and, more over, they truly believe in the work they do. While enjoying a cup of coffee with app designer Roarke Clinton, he explained to me how in order to make a successful app or website, you have to believe it could change the world. It may not be actually curing cancer, but you have to approach it with the same mentality, he went on to say “an app that puts together a grocery list may not seem too important but if you think about it, that could encourage people to eat more healthily, which would promote a better life style and could eventually lead to lower incidences of obesity and potentially life threatening diseases.” Conrad Irwin, a Cambridge educated computer program who founded a company that became essential to runnings of LinkedIn confirms this “life saving” mentality. He is currently co-founding another start up that is to make email communication easier and more personalized. His goal is simply to help people live their live in as uncomplicated a way as possible. All he wants to do is help others, and “if the best way to do that is by writing code all day, then so be it”.
I think what these young tech workers really offer to the city and society in general is an enormously positive outlook—a confidence that things will work. This is a confidence needed in order to start a start-up, to begin making a website, and to move to such a city in the first place. It should also be mentioned that web design is something that anyone can learn. There are countless free websites that teach how to code, and these basic coding skills are all that is needed to apply for a job in a tech start up. With an industry that provides jobs for anyone willing to learn, creating a bubble around the city, I would think that the artists and dreamers would learn to thrive. This is truly a change for the good; we just need to stop looking at the numbers.
If change is going to happen, it might as well be something that benefits the city, the state, and the whole world, rather than something that causes a degeneration of the city. So, as far as I am concerned let the dreamers dream on and the weavers weave on, we are all moving to the same cloud anyways– an i-Cloud that is.