David Streitfeld writes in the NYT that cities do not usually cheer the downfall or even the diminishment of the hometown industry, but the relationship between San Francisco and the tech community has grown increasingly tense as the consequences for people who do not make their living from technology become increasingly unpleasant.
“It’s practically a ubiquitous sentiment here: People would like a little of the air to come out of the tech economy,” says Aaron Peskin.
“They’re like people in a heat wave waiting for the monsoon.” Signs of distress are plentiful. The Fraternite Notre Dame’s soup kitchen was facing eviction after a rent increase of nearly 60 percent.
Two eviction-defense groups were evicted in favor of a start-up that intended to lease the space to other start-ups.
The real estate site Redfin published a widely read blog post that said the number of teachers in San Francisco who could afford a house was exactly zero.
“All the renters I know are living in fear,” says Derrick Tynan-Connolly.
“If your landlord dies, if your landlord sells the building, if you get evicted under the Ellis Act” — a controversial law that allows landlords to reclaim a building by taking it off the rental market — “and you have to move, you’re gone.
There’s no way you can afford to stay in San Francisco.”
Even some tech folks think things are out of kilter. “There are valid concerns that San Francisco is becoming a plutocracy,” says Donna Burke.
“Silicon Valley traditionally valued changing the world over money.
We need to get back to that ethos.”
Some San Franciscans also lament what they see as a high degree of tech cluelessness as some tech people regularly issue electronic broadsides that irk San Franciscans.
The latest came in late February from a start-up founder, Justin Keller, who complained about the homeless and “riffraff.”
“The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city,” Keller wrote in an open letter, adding:
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