Why San Francisco is wrong to turn against the ‘techies’

It seems to be anti-"techie" month over here in California. I don't recall ever hearing as much vitriol directed towards the tech industry, not even during the dotcom collapse.

Something is definitely eating at people.

Money and privilege for a start. An ongoing issue here has been annoyance, sometimes boiling over into street protests, against what is seen as the techie-fication of San Francisco.

Ever more technology – particularly internet – companies base themselves in the city. And several of the big tech firms down in the heart of Silicon Valley have so many employees living in the city that they provide big white buses to transport them back and forth.

Some long-time San Francisco residents are riled. They say these well-heeled young employees are driving up already high rents and house and apartment prices.

There’s particular anger over the use by landlords of an obscure law that allows them to evict all tenants in a building, even those who might have rent-protected dwellings.

Residents of some neighbourhoods, such as the somewhat scruffy Mission District, feel their ethnically rich neighbourhoods are becoming a mix of bedroom community and hipster haven. They lament that the Mission is losing its tacquerias and little Hispanic corner grocery stores to goateed baristas, trendy cafes, and urban clothing boutiques.

There’s also a perceived arrogance in “the techies”, as they are disdainfully called. They’re said to be self-focused and detached from the neighbourhoods they live in.

Even former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown is giving out.

'Object of scorn'
"Every day in every way, from rising rents to rising prices at restaurants to its private buses, the tech world is becoming an object of scorn," he sniped in his newspaper column last Sunday.

"What the tech world needs to do is nip this thorny plant in the bud. They need to come off their high-cloud efforts to save Africa or wherever they take adventure vacations and start making things better for folks right here."

Evictions were highlighted this week in an irritable piece in the New York Times, headlined "Backlash by the Bay: Tech Riches Alter a City", and accompanied by an online photo essay entitled "Technology Boom Breeds Hostility".

And at the start of the month the Wall Street Journal weighed in on what it called Silicon Valley's "arrogance problem".

"Silicon Valley's superiority complex . . . sure is an ugly thing to behold . . . And now [its luminaries] seem to have lost all humility about their place in the world," wrote WSJ writer Farhad Manjoo.

What strikes me most is that I have heard it all before – 25 years ago when I lived in San Francisco. There were “techies” living in the city then too, though the dotcom invasion of the dilapidated South of Market (“SoMa”) area was years away yet.

San Francisco had among the highest rents in the nation then – I struggled to pay my share. And stellar house and apartment prices. The neighbourhood gentrification annoying people then was in the Haight Ashbury district.

No one noticed the geeks. The industry everyone loved to hate then was the booming financial sector, centred in New York but with its West Coast incarnation in San Francisco. Remember yuppies? They were the reviled hipsters then.

Then and now, these tensions have some legitimate grounding, but also seem to gather together vague, zeitgeist irritations looking for a target.

Yes, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg bought a place in the Mission. But most "techies" in the city are not billionaires or millionaires but, like me back in the 80s and 90s, young people who fall in love with the energy, bohemian mix and beauty of the city and scrimp to pay the painful rents.

Yes, gentrification is irritating and can be arrogant, but it also helps revive
grim, dying, crime-ridden neighbourhoods.

Energy of the sector
I think that, as tech boomed in an otherwise dire economy, the growth and energy of the sector, and confidence of its employees, may just have rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

People who complain, even as they use their iPhones, apps, tablets and online services, of “the techies”.

As the Nasdaq, heavily loaded with tech companies, nudges highs it hasn’t seen in more than a decade, there are murmurings of a looming bubble. If there is indeed a bubble, and it bursts, I predict a lot of people currently whinging about “the techies” and the Valley are going to miss that “techie” money flowing into local and national economies. A lot.