No City for Poor Men

San Francisco — the bastion of American culture and the farthest-at-sea lighthouse of liberalism in the West — now takes a surprising turn.

At the moment, San Francisco boasts twice as many billionaires as London. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment comes to over $3,000 a month — the most expensive on the U.S. real estate market. In the gap between the poor and the rich, the city has just jumped up to the second position in the country, placed right behind New York.* One reason is that since 2011, when Mayor Ed Lee introduced tax incentives for technology companies, a new class of immigrants has been pouring into the city. They are Silicon Valley employees for whom San Francisco, 40 miles away, has become a new bedroom.

The indigenous citizens quickly started referring to them as “Google Bus People.” Moving silently outside and beyond public transportation, these vehicles, with on-board Internet, have become a constant element of the urban landscape. City districts such as South of Market have become headquarters for Twitter, Dropbox and Angel List (direct investments in startups) as well as a hotbed for new startups (supposedly, there are over 5,000 at the moment). As many as 50,000 people are employed in new technologies. As a result, the unemployment rate in San Francisco is 4.8 percent, whereas in the whole of California it reaches 8.3 percent.

Where is the problem? San Francisco is proud of its history. It boasts that it has never been a city of economic contrasts. However, this is changing now.

While young billionaires are pouring into the city, poor citizens are being displaced. Rent prices are soaring up, causing speculations on the real estate market and mass evictions. Of course, there are plenty of jobs available in San Francisco, but they are exported rather than offered to the locals.

Young IT engineers are coming from outside of San Francisco. Their high salaries are changing the city, adapting it to their new needs. San Francisco is getting more and more elitist and luxurious. Some give up without a dispute, abandoning their small businesses and closing art galleries. They leave, for example, for Oakland, which houses more and more of the alternative culture coming from San Francisco. But there are also those who do not even think about leaving.

Some time ago, the media reported a blockade of Google buses — ivory towers on wheels, moving symbols of isolation. But there is another side of rebellion that is less media-related: the tenants union, which demands a system of controlled rents. Their target is to overturn the Ellis Act, a state law which says that landlords have the right to evict tenants. This is not the first case of its kind. In the ‘60s, the city was populated by artists as well as gays and lesbians who were escaping homophobia, provincialism in conservative America and a general lack of tolerance. At that time, when gays and artists were displacing the labor class — Italians and Irish — rent prices were going up as well. Yet the city dealt with the changes, proud of its social, racial and sexual diversity. Since then, San Francisco has been a symbol of a certain way of perceiving society — gay marriage, legal marijuana, a reasonable minimum wage, bike routes, health care and a spirit of acting in the interest of the community.

This is why citizens of San Francisco, usually proud of their openness, look with reluctance at the culture of new technologies. Its most visible representatives, who impinge on the rest, are people such as Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Ellison. They have a reputation as extreme libertarians, individualists without a sense of community, living in an unreal world of digital capitalism. They don’t touch the city, they float over it, as if they were full-time tourists. The right way of communication for them is communication via the Internet, which symbolizes the decay of interpersonal bonds and an impossibility of putting down roots. One example, which may be controversial and widely discussed, is a statement made by AngelHack CEO, Greg Gopman, who said that San Francisco should “stop being a city of degenerates.”** That means, a city without gay culture and the Castro district — where there is an ongoing battle against a long tradition of public nudity and where benches are being removed from Milk Plaza to get rid of the homeless.

City authorities relied on Gopman. It was him, together with others like him, who were to rescue the local economy after the crash in 2008. The creativity of artists was to be replaced with the creativity of software developers. Money was to flow into the city as promised by the theory of trickle-down economics. The hope that the city pinned on new technologies is also an example of faith in endless economic development and in a self-regulating free market. The San Francisco Chronicle severely criticizes those people who are grumbling at the young in the Valley. It accuses those who advocate regulations on the real estate market of hampering progress.

Progressives hindering progress. The conservative left. “Martyrdom and victimization” is how some describe the book “Hollow City” by Rebecka Solnit, which draws a comparison between the invasion of Silicon Valley and the invasion of Spanish conquistadors. There is no point in stopping something that cannot be stopped. But the old San Francisco points to effective actions in the past to defend the city’s character. Progress at any cost didn’t fulfill the promise of modernity at all. Humanity’s urge for a better life has always been a useful rhetorical tool, but it has never had a chance to materialize. Regardless of the pitfalls of an unfinished project, the left wing in San Francisco is now trying to recover the category of progress. Being confronted with new technologies, it is more difficult than ever.

Even though San Francisco is becoming the showcase of inequality and dysfunction of American capitalism, Fred Turner at Stanford University points out similarities between the culture of hippies and the culture of new technologies. Both groups are characterized by a similar sense of mission and great faith in change. In both cases, the line between life and work practically doesn’t exist; it is work that guarantees self-development. Too young, too white and too heterosexual, IT engineers from Silicon Valley still do have passion, persuades Turner.

The only thing is to convince them to get off the Google bus and start being citizens of San Francisco.

*Editor’s Note: Rankings may vary according to source and criteria.

**Editor’s Note: The author has paraphrased Greg Gopman’s original words (read his quotes here)