If the New York Times did not delight in the shyness of publishing pieces about how unbearable San Francisco has become over the past few years, they have apparently had great pleasure in reporting on the various flaws of technological ventures that have been a major part of the the economy here. And while there is no denying that during the pandemic there was an exodus of city residents dropping rents, did the Times have to go with the headline “They Can’t Leave the Bay Area Fast Enough”?
The latest piece from SF-based NYT columnist Nellie Bowles (formerly of VICE) refers to this current moment as the end of “a technological era”, which is undoubtedly true if you assume that through another technological era will be followed. The dot-com bust was, after all, just a flash in the Bay Area’s steady progress towards becoming a global technology hub – and many predicted that the boom that began in 2010 was destined at some point would be, although they do not predict that a pandemic would be the culprit.
Bowles writes about the flight of digital nomads and tech workers from the infamous Bay Area as if it were a permanent state of affairs, this outflow. ‘They fled to tropical beach towns. They fled to more affordable places like Georgia. They fled to states without income taxes like Texas and Florida. ‘ But then she points out the reasons that 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 one 35-year-old founder tells her, “I miss San Francisco. I miss the life I had there. But at the moment, it’s just like: What can God and the world and the government still think about the place? to make less? livable? ‘(That guy lives out of a caravan, so it may be old soon.)
The media – especially the New York-based media – has been declaring San Francisco for at least two years now. Do you remember the depressing New Yorker piece of May 2019 about how every tech worker dies after the chance to leave here because SF has become such a dystopian hell-hole?
These trend stories are not supposed to have a long shelf life, I suppose, so if the trend reverses and rents start to rise again in SF and elsewhere in the Bay, the Times will probably ignore it for a while and then publish another trend piece that pretends to be a foregone conclusion, of course. Because rents in probably the most beautiful and moderate city in the country never tend to last long – at least in the last three decades.
The editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Business Times, Douglas Freuhling, just wrote an editorial this week entitled “There is no denying the exodus anymore.” From the perspective of commercial real estate, with companies like Oracle, Tesla and Pinterest announcing relocations or cancellations of leases, we have to assume that office rents will get a hit indefinitely – even if it comes after a period in which companies were looking for office space in the city and rents were at record levels.
No one has a crystal ball and can say with confidence when the “exodus” ends and the repopulation begins, but it’s not as if the city is empty – nor is it as if house prices are falling by much. And there is an argument that many of the people who leave – like young couples with children – are likely to leave anyway, as non-super-rich couples with children usually would not do when their children reach school age, because older and bigger cheaper houses and better schools abound in other places. A September piece in the Chronicle at least anecdotally suggested that more than half of the people they spoke to who wanted greener pastures hoped or planned to return here when the pandemic was over.
Maybe other reporters, when things change, will be at the New York Times who have not seen this first “end of an era” firsthand, and again they will publish a piece without a long look at the city. Thomas Fuller, head of the San Francisco office, already sounds pretty exhausted by discussing the wildfire season in August, and it was a good four months before it really ended. Will he move once San Francisco – and probably many other cities across the country – enter a dark party phase after the pandemic? Probably.
Also another interesting remark: the NYT piece finds that the man behind two large Facebook groups dedicated to the exodus, Terry Gilliam, did not leave the Bay himself. Gilliam launched the groups Leaving California (33,500 members) and Life After California (51,400 members), but all the while he still lives in Fremont.
Previously: More than half of the people who leave SF say they are likely to return in small chronic sampling
Photo: Will Truettner