San Francisco, 2014

[Genius Gone Insane]

San Francisco is changing and it is bizarre. I went to the Iced Earth show at Slim's last night. Slim's is located in the South of Market area, which used to be a shithole. Now it is a bunch of rich nerds.

We went to a bar across from Slim's after the show, a bar that used to be a hell hole filled with dirtbags. Now the bar is filled with rich nerds. It was all these good looking young google startup stanford NSA nerd people. It's fucking crazy. My friends and I were the dirtbags at that bar last night. Really strange what is going on in the city.

This morning I fought my hangover with a burger in San Francisco. The woman working the register was wearing an "Oakland" T-shirt so we started talking. She said she lived in San Francisco for 7 years but had to move to West Oakland (which has really cleaned itself up) last year because it is too expensive. She said you cannot live in San Francisco if you make less than $100,000/year.

Anyway, thought I would share. I am curious to see what you folks have to say about this. They've been talking about it in the newspapers a lot lately.

 

[Line666]

I heard San Francisco is pretty much one of the hipster capitals of the world at this point in time? Guess that correlates with all the rich white kids mass populating an area in an attempt to 'slum it' and in turn inducing gentrification so that the end result is exactly the opposite.

 

[egan.]

I heard San Francisco is pretty much one of the hipster capitals of the world at this point in time? Guess that correlates with all the rich white kids mass populating an area in an attempt to 'slum it' and in turn inducing gentrification so that the end result is exactly the opposite.

San Fran is the antithesis of hipster at this point. There is lots of young money but that isn't the same thing. I've only lived out here for 5 months (mountain view, south of the city) but GGI is right that the city is nuts. It's similar to what happened in Manhattan where all of the edge and art got forced into other boroughs.
What's unique in SF is that you have crazy stuff where young, rich tech kids live in the city for the urban culture but work in silicon valley which is down where I live. So google and facebook have their own private busses that drive around the city all morning picking up employees from their $4k/month 1 bedroom apartments and driving them thirty minutes out to the suburbs. I believe this is a unique issue. I don't know of any city with a culture of commuting from the city to the burbs. So you have the surplus of people who can and will pay anything to live in the city driving up and some hold outs in rent controlled apartments. Add to that that the city is extremely resistant new development and you have a situation that's caused an insanely rapid change in the city.

 

[Clockwork]

Two of my friends just moved out to SF (both hipster tech kids) because they can easily get dope jobs that pay well into the six figures and they want to live in a "cool" city. I guess they are just part of the problem haha.

 

[JeffTD]

 

[cfh11]

i think vice summed it up nicely:

http://www.vice.com/read/reasons-why-san-francisco-is-the-worst-place-ever

 

[crillemannen]

Ever seen the smell your fart episode with Southpark?

 

[HeadCrusher]

Can't speak for SF but I've seen this happen in other cities myself. Most notably Berlin which is basically Europe's SF in terms of startups. Personally I wouldn't label all tech workers "Hipsters" as this has kind of a negative connotation. It's not like all of them are rich. In fact most people work their asses off in startups and only get paid an intern's salary. I doubt that anyone actually makes decent money unless they are a developer or some sort of CxO (or at least higher-up) in a well-funded startup. While the startup crowd does have a certain style I don't think they really are "the cool kids". At least in Berlin there are tons of (non-tech) people moving there for the coolness factor and then they start to complain about how the rent keeps getting more expensive. This is really the crowd that IS the problem imo because in my experience this kind of people are mostly sons and daughters and spend their days trying to "find themselves". As long as their dad pays the rent it's not really a problem that it keeps going up. There's always someone who can afford it.

Long story short: I don't see gentrification as a problem but as some sort of evolution. Those who always lived in the city mostly have old leases so the rent doesn't change all that much for them. And the new guys? If they can afford it, let them come. The city changes through that, yes. But so what?

 

[egan.]

For the record, San Francisco is still amazing. I've spent significant time in most major cities in the US and IMHO there isn't one with a better balance of culture, scenery, stuff to do and convenience to unbelievable nature.
The issue is that this is gentrification on a different level. This isn't taking a broken neighborhood and making it upper middle class. This is taking every neighborhood and making it 1%. Most cities would kill to have Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Instagram, Pandora, and a million other companies buying tons of building and creating tons of high paying jobs but the concern here is that SF has reached critical mass and that there is undue collateral damage.