I wonder when the reverse will happen. As rents in SF dive, will people that were force to outlying parts of the Bay Area return? Will younger LGBT folk be able to afford to live in/near the Castro? Will more people _not_ in tech be able to live here?
SF has felt like such a one-industry town for quite a while, and that can mute some of the richness and diversity that normally makes cities interesting (and perhaps more broadly valuable?).
If some tech workers are happier in the mountains, that's great that they can now live that life and keep their jobs. But I hope that in their places, we see a new diversity of people of range of jobs who can choose to live in a city that was previously out of reach.
For about 30 years cities were relatively undesirable places to live in for the average person. The cities that young people have flocked to in the last decade or so are designed and developed more like large scale open shopping malls than the cities of the 70s and 80s.
The closest comparison to what's happening now was "White flight", a largely racist reaction to the civil rights movement involving increased protests and riots in cities. White flight changed many cities in the 50/60s, in particular Cleveland, Oakland and Detroit. These cities only started to see any kind of revival in the tail end of the last economic boom. For decades cities struggled with violent crime, racial tensions, poor infrastructure, etc.
What we're seeing is a much larger scale than that and will likely change cities for decades to come. In the shopping mall era of cities you live in cities because you are close to work and close to restaurants, bars and other things to do. And cities feel remarkably safe. Nearly every tech person who "loves cities!" today would feel very uncomfortable in SF or NYC of the 1970s.
Virtually every one I know in a major metro is considering leaving because: jobs no longer require being there, pandemic has destroyed much of the food and small business scene, and cities are becoming visibly less safe. The people are moving to other areas and they are very often looking to purchase a home rather than rent (since what you can get for the same mortgage as your current rent is typically an order of magnitude more space). This means they won't be coming back soon. This will cause a feedback loop that will continue to force employers to go remote, reduce the number of restaurants and leave cities more vacant and more dangerous.
It means the city will also change very rapidly and be much less attractive, even at a lower price.
But to your point about the Castro: it's precisely because "average" people didn't want to live in SF that marginalized groups found a home there. The Castro in SF, the Village in N
YC were places that Engineers didn't want to work and live, so artists and outcasts moved in.
My fear is that this collapse is going to be too extreme and too fast to allow for the creation of this interesting space of possibility that NYC and SF of the 1970-80s was. The collapse of commercial and residential real estate in these areas is going to have consequences that I think are very hard to predict right now.
> "White flight", a largely racist reaction to the civil rights movement involving increased protests and riots in cities
I think you have cause and effect reversed here. The original "pull" trigger was the automobile becoming affordable to the middle classes, making suburban living possible and leading to many leaving cities. The racist bit here is that many of these suburbs had covenants prohibiting non-whites.
The "push" factor came when poorer (non-white) people started moving into these vacated, now cheaper inner city properties. This in turn led more whites to leave, but here too the push wasn't just racism, but also concerns about falling property values, rising crime, etc.
Also, FWIW, as a non-American I found the SF of 2019 positively scary. Homeless camps in the Tenderloin, mentally ill people raving about murder on Market St, etc -- you don't see this kind of thing in equivalently wealthy European or Asian cities.
>but here too the push wasn't just racism, but also concerns about falling property values, rising crime, etc.
As a non-American you shouldn't be so quick to relativise the importance of racism because, outside of the US, where cars also exist, there never was a white flight. In fact in Europe the affluent pretty much always move into cities, not out of them, even though those cities also have a lot of the issues surrounding urbanisation. Melting pots and culture clashes, immigration, crime, it's universal to most cities. Pretty much the same in most Asian countries as well, the affluent and poor coinhabit cities. White flight and the giant suburb sprawl is pretty uniquely American.
Even in a place like England, which is traditionally very classist, you don't see the kind of segregation in schooling or housing you have in the US, and London is not super-safe either. This reminded me of a NYT article from a few years ago
I had a hard time understanding the American conception of unsafe city until I ran the numbers and found that in the 80s Belfast (with troops shooting people in the street and bombs going off) was still less lethal than Detroit. (Population adjusted)
It still baffles me how little was done about this in the US and how it was regarded as a local only problem.
> outside of the US, where cars also exist, there never was a white flight.
Outside of the US economic circumstances in the 1950s and 1960 were very different and living in the suburbs and commuting to your job was not a possible option for economic reasons. Also, "slav flight" or whatever your European equivalent is just doesn't have that ring to it. There's plenty of segregation outside the US. It's just mostly between groups of similar skin tones.
I agree that inner city collapse on the sheer scale of a Detroit is a US-only phenomenon, but it's not too hard to find equivalents elsewhere. Most European cities have distinctly sketchy inner city districts, the wealthy have long since fled the old towns of both Manila and Jakarta for both suburbs and various new developments (BGC, Kuningan) etc.
You did mention racism but I would also say racism was a driving force since before white flight. The government precursors to Fannie mae and Freddie mac wouldn't back mortgages that banks created in redlined areas. And the precursor to HUD created segregated public housing, including in the west. The Federal government was pushing redlining and segregation in housing since at least the Great Depression. A lot of this is covered in "The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein.
> There were plenty of people liberal enough or cheap enough to live in a black neighborhood. Many tried. But they wound up 100% black/0% white anyway.
No, I think when put to the test most liberal people would not do this. If they "tried", why did those neighborhoods wind up 100% black?
Where I grew up, for instance, the second best school in the city (by test scores, at least) was 99% black (mostly the children of alums of a nearby HBCU). White parents would send their kids to worse performing schools with more white kids over sending their kids to that school.
Redlining means that everyone living in or near black neighborhood cant get those mortgages or investments or whatever. It also means services are lower for everyone - including white liberals who have limited options just due to living there.
What that also mean is that if one black family moves into white street, every white on that street is at risk to loose exact same things. They become redlined too.
Redlining means that white people have financial incentive to segregate themselves and to push away incoming blacks. Liberal might not mind living with blacks, but will mind being unable to take mortgage he would be able to get otherwise.
You assume people want more suburbs, more space. There will always be a market for real dense cities, and it’s not like tech folks participate a lot in making the city attractive (and I include myself in this assessment)
It's true in LA at least. Petty crime is unenforced and people are well aware of that fact. I've seen people smoking crack or shooting up in broad daylight plenty of times this year, sometimes in front of city workers who do not care. Seems like there is an assault or a stabbing or shooting every day in Hollywood now. People getting drunk every weekend playing with guns on Hollywood blvd watching some other drunk dumbass do donuts at the intersection and the LAPD doesn't care. 17 year old bystander was killed at one of these events in the summer (1). Yesterday a 70 year old man was killed in Venice when someone tried to steal his bike from him (2).
It's been getting worse the last couple of years, but noticeably more amped up since covid killed a lot of foot traffic and therefore community surveillance that seemingly kept a lot of this belligerent behavior in check. Not sure how things are going back east, but it's getting pretty gritty over here.
> Petty crime is unenforced and people are well aware of that fact.
a. The evidence just doesn't back up that enforcing petty crime in some way makes cities safer. Peaks of petty crime enforcement were in periods like the late 80s and 90s, which were when violent crime exploded.
> there is an assault or a stabbing or shooting every day in Hollywood now.
b. Crime statistics also don't back up the idea that violent crime is much worse now, especially when you consider the fact that we're talking about a comment comparing with the 80s/90s.
Do these things occur? Yes. Is it much worse than it has been historically? You've provided no evidence of that. Is it something likely to happen to you? Not really at all.
We ended the war on drugs and "broken windows" policing for a reason - it had huge negative impacts on people caught up in it and didn't actually succeed in making people safer. It would often create cycles of policing that made violence worse.
The crime in most cities has not substantially increased, if at all, the number of affluent, white people from suburbs who demand heavy enforcement against minor crimes in the city has.
Not enforcing petty "crime with a victim" is a SoCal thing. You don't really have those issues in NYC, heck even in Baltimore, Newark or Trenton the cops won't pass up an opportunity for an easy arrest if they see someone prowling a bike rack with bolt cutters (and it won't be catch and release either, it'll be enough to make that kind of thing not worth the risk of doing flagrantly)
Regarding the public drug use and other publicly visible low class behavior shenanigans, there's a large portion of the public that just DGAF.
> Baltimore, Newark or Trenton the cops won't pass up an opportunity for an easy arrest
Don't know about the others, but this is not true of Baltimore.
Honestly, the largest predictor of how often I hear about "rampant, unenforced crime" seems to be the proportion of people in the city who moved from the suburbs and are unused to cities.
> Regarding the public drug use and other publicly visible low class behavior shenanigans, there's a large portion of the public that just DGAF.
I'm one of them - visible poverty is sad, but it doesn't make me fear for my life or feel like more jailing is needed.
To me, as someone who grew up in a Baltimore-adjacent city, SF just seems like a city full of people who are city-inexperienced.
Depends on what happens with crime and “quality of life.” People will step in human turd to get to a job that pays them $400K. They won’t do that to have access to great coffee shops. You’ll at best get the marginally employed bohemians if you don’t solve the crime and homelessness crises.
The tax rate being so high, and expenses so low that it makes living in SF not clearly the optimal economic output. And multiply that effect by 10 when you have kids.
Just school for 3 kids would be, say, 100k after taxes, which would mean you need to earn 150k just to pay school. At 400k your tax rate in california is through the roof.
That really isn’t unprecedented. SF in the 70s and 80s got pretty grimey, attracting younger and more eclectic people who could afford the rents. Those people in turn make the area more desirable, attracting gentrification and then...well, equilibriums win in the long run.
SF has felt like such a one-industry town for quite a while, and that can mute some of the richness and diversity that normally makes cities interesting (and perhaps more broadly valuable?). If some tech workers are happier in the mountains, that's great that they can now live that life and keep their jobs. But I hope that in their places, we see a new diversity of people of range of jobs who can choose to live in a city that was previously out of reach.