Technicians are leaving town. Oracle is moving to Texas. Hewlett-Packard is leaving. It’s hard to drive around town dodging all those moving vans parked in a double row. It’s the city’s business. The boom broke out. Life in Silicon Valley is toasted. San Francisco is over.
The main story in last Monday’s Chronicle Business section told the story – how the technicians made a difficult bargain with the Bay Area. How they traded high rents, difficult trips, high taxes and all kinds of urban ills for a high quality of life and the California dream. But then the coronavirus opened a hole in the dream. They found that they could work remotely. “They ran away,” said the story. “They fled to tropical coastal cities. They fled to cheaper places, like Georgia … Texas and Florida … “And so on.
Well, many of us think, safe trip. These people were just transitory anyway. Don’t let the door slam at you when you leave.
But the exodus of technology is a cruel blow in difficult times. In a region that loves to celebrate, it is difficult to accept rejection. Like others, I was confined at home. I turned off the television, put the newspaper in the trash, and went out to see for myself.
I went to the top of the hill in the neighborhood one afternoon and looked at San Francisco. The strong winds had cleared the air and there were long winter shadows. The setting sun shone on the glass towers of the new city skyline, and as the afternoon progressed, the windows of the houses in East Bay turned red as if they were on fire. I could see everything – Monte Tamalpais and Monte Diablo and going down the Peninsula. I even saw a train going into town and a big ship passing under the Bay Bridge.
The top of the hill was packed with people and dogs, taking an afternoon walk. If this is a ghost town, I thought, it is certainly beautiful.
But I’m one of those guys from the city who grew up here and kept it. My family lived on Potrero Hill and I went to school at the Mission. I could see everything from the top of the hill; the old house that was always 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 town. They couldn’t wait to leave the mission – first to Richmond and Sunset, then out of town, out of the fog, out of town.
The same thing happened in North Beach. They did not like the old apartments, the parking problems, the city problems. You would see them at Christmas time, in the old neighborhood of Original Joe’s or the Italian Athletic Club, for an afternoon. “You know,” they said, “It’s still beautiful here, but this is not the city I grew up in.”
There was a huge diaspora in San Francisco a few decades ago. Many blue collar jobs near the sea have ended. Schools went into decline. There was a wave of crimes. The population of San Francisco has declined. “The summer of love in 1967 gave way to about 20 winters of discontent,” “wrote David Talbot of those times in” Season of the Witch. “
But the exodus stopped. New people moved and the city was reborn. The working class Eureka Valley became Castro. Immigration laws have changed and the Asian population has moved from Chinatown to Sunset and Richmond. San Francisco is now an Asian third. Demographics have changed. The black population has fallen dramatically from ancient fortresses in the Western Addition and even Bayview. The mission has become mostly Latin and is changing again.
Therefore, these major changes are not new. This time, however, it may be different. Scott Fuller, who founded a company called Leaving the Bay Area three years ago, says business is “very, very strong now”. Your company helps people move, find new homes, new schools, new neighborhoods and new life outside 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 charge state income tax there,” he says, “and Texas is very business friendly.”
Not long ago, Texas would have been difficult to sell. The Bay Area people have convinced themselves that they live in the best of all possible worlds. “There is a certain level of arrogance in California,” he said. But it turns out that the grass may well be greener elsewhere. “I saw it coming,” said Fuller.
What about those of us who stayed behind? In San Francisco, there was always a central group of natives and transplants who stayed with the city, who tried to put steel on the backs of employees who left problems like homelessness out of control. And these are radical residents who simply do good things – hundreds of small neighborhood projects, from urban trees to the adoption of culverts.
It’s the little things that count. Lynne Carberry has deep roots in the city. Her late father, Matt Carberry, was a sheriff for years. She and her husband lived for a long time in East Bay, but returned to San Francisco.
“We and our contemporaries tried to support the city during the pandemic by supporting restaurants, donating to charities and following COVID guidelines,” she said. She has two adult children. “Our family is committed to staying here,” she said.
“I think that when the phoenix rises again, San Francisco will be better than ever,” said Carberry, talking about the mythical bird that is the symbol of San Francisco, not that cheap rental town in Arizona.
Carl Nolte’s column is published on Sundays. Email: [email protected]