If the New York Times was not reveling in the fury of publishing articles about how unbearable San Francisco had become in recent years, they were apparently taking great pleasure in reporting on the various missteps of technology companies that feed a good part of the economy here. And while there is no denying that there has been an exodus of city residents during the pandemic that is reducing rents, the Times needed to headline “They can’t leave the bay area fast enough”?
The latest article by NYT columnist Nellie Bowles (ex-VICE) refers to this current moment as the end of the “age of technology”, which is arguably true if you assume it will be followed by another age of technology. The dot-com bust was, after all, just a speck in the Bay Area’s steady progress in becoming a global technology hub – and many predicted that the boom that started around 2010 was destined to break out at some point, although I did not predict that a pandemic would be to blame.
Bowles writes about the flight of digital nomads and tech workers from the notoriously expensive Bay Area as if it were a permanent state of affairs, this outflow. “They fled to tropical coastal cities. They fled to cheaper places, like Georgia. They fled to states without income taxes, like Texas and Florida.” But then she suggests why such plans may not be for everyone – Austin can be “(very) hot” in the summer, Miami is still a swamp and Savannah is full of mosquitoes.
And as a 35-year-old founder said to her, “I miss San Francisco. I miss the life I had there. But now it’s like: What else can God, the world and the government invent to make the place less habitable? ” (This guy is living in a camping van, so this can get old at some point).
After all, the media – especially New York-based media – has been declaring San Francisco “finished” for at least two years. Remember that depressing New Yorker article from May 2019 about how every tech worker was dying to get out of here because SF became a dystopian hell?
I suppose these trend stories don’t have much expiration date, so when the trend reverses and rents start to rise again in San Francisco and elsewhere in the Bay Area, the Times will probably ignore it for a while and then publish another one. trend piece that pretends that this was, of course, a lost inevitability. Because rents in the undoubtedly most beautiful and temperate city in the country never tend to fall for long – at least in the past three decades.
The editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Business Times, Douglas Freuhling, just wrote an editorial this week entitled “There is no longer any way to deny the exodus.” From the point of view of the commercial real estate market, with companies like Oracle, Tesla and Pinterest announcing lease relocations or cancellations, it must be assumed that office rentals will be adversely affected for an indefinite period of time – even if this occurs after a period of companies were clamoring for offices in the city and rents were at record levels.
No one has a crystal ball and can safely say when the “exodus” ends and restocking begins, but it is not as if the city is empty – and it is not as if house prices have fallen much, if at all. And there is an argument to be made that many of the people who leave – as young couples with children – would probably leave anyway, as non-super rich couples with children usually do when their children reach school age, because they are older and older. Cheaper homes and better schools abound elsewhere. A September article in the Chronicle suggested, at least anecdotally, that more than half of the people they spoke to who were looking for greener pastures had hopes or plans to return here when the pandemic ended.
Perhaps, when things change, there will be other reporters in the New York Times who have not witnessed this last “end of the age” firsthand, and will once again publish an article without a broad view of the city. The newspaper’s San Francisco office chief, Thomas Fuller, already looked quite exhausted when covering the August forest fire season, and that was a good four months before it really ended. Will it change as soon as San Francisco – and probably many other cities across the country – enters a post-pandemic phase of a dizzying party? Probably.
In addition, another interesting observation: the NYT article finds that the guy behind two large Facebook groups dedicated to the exodus, Terry Gilliam, did not actually leave the Bay Area. Gilliam launched the groups Leaving California (33,500 members) and Life After California (51,400 members), but the whole time he still lives in Fremont.
Previously: More than half of those who leave SF say they are likely to return, in a Small Chronicle sample
Photo: Will Truettner