报道回顾：互联网如何毁掉旧金山（1999）

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I had the misfortune to live in Manhattan during the ’80s, when all conversations turned ineluctably to real estate and the shops and people that made New York interesting were being wiped out by a boom economy. Then, you’d see a slightly faded kosher butcher shop replaced by an Italian fusion restaurant, what was the rehearsal space for a dance troupe become a lawyer loft.

Now in late-’90s San Francisco, you can have all the Manhattan greed-is-good bull-economy moments you like. Freed, Teller and Freed, the oldest coffee and tea seller in the city (established 1899, its handcrank cash register in use until the end) survived all — earthquakes, the Depression, Starbucks — but it couldn’t survive the Internetting of San Francisco: It closed Oct. 15, its building to become condos. You can stand on Sixth Street smack in the middle of SOMA (where Wired got its start) and the flow of traffic now evokes Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Parking is bad all over the city, the gratuitous kindness from strangers and service personnel I always so pleasantly contrasted with New York is fading fast, and it’s beginning to be all too clear that people have no slack in their lives.

Commercial real-estate prices have gone up 42 percent since 1997 in San Francisco’s Mission District, a formerly working-class, affordable, largely Latino neighborhood where in the old days auslanders only ventured to get burritos at Taqueria La Cumbre and sex toys at Good Vibrations. Now it’s the scene of some of the most bitter class struggles in the city, the Yuppie Eradication Project (let’s key those SUVs!) vs. sleek dot-com people, who look like nothing so much as the slickers I cowered from in the ’80s, who lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and commuted to Wall Street. On happening Valencia Street, where druggies and minimum-wage immigrants walk past their economic superiors, a fenced-in parking lot has appeared, where a white-coated valet protects a phalanx of Mercedes and Lexus SUVs from the neighborhood. By 1998 two-thirds of the people living in the Mission were new arrivals — mostly from Wharton or MIT, not Honduras, you may be sure.

The median price of a San Francisco condo was $410,000 in August 1999, more than a 40-percent increase from August 1998. The median rental price for a two-bedroom apartment was $2,000. Avalon Towers, the first high-rise apartment to go up in San Francisco in more than a decade, has had no trouble attracting tenants who pay rents ranging from $2,400 to $4,000 a month. Eighty-five percent of them earn more than $100,000 per year, 60 percent are under 40, and two-thirds are new to the city. Good bet these aren’t the bad poets, malcontents, and fruits and nuts looking for a new start that the city has always attracted.

Evictions, legal or illegal, are at an all-time high — and 70 percent of those evicted leave the city. Ted Gullickson, office manager for the San Francisco Tenants Union, says his nonprofit’s business, that of protecting renters’ rights, more than doubled in 1995-96, and has increased by 25 percent every year since. He has watched the Internet-induced housing crisis (astronomic prices, abysmal vacancy rates, economic exclusion) move north up the Peninsula through Santa Clara and San Mateo counties into San Francisco as the Way New Economy has overtaken the Bay Area. Silicon Valley creates nine new jobs for every new housing unit: What does it mean for San Francisco to become a suburb of Palo Alto?

In San Francisco, he says it’s now the case of “the richer gentrifying the rich,” meaning renters in the most whitebread and affluent neighborhoods in the city — the Marina and Pacific Heights — are also being evicted or forced out.

According to state income-tax returns, the gap between rich and poor in San Francisco increased 40 percent between 1994 and 1996 — just about the time the new parking enclosures started happening and the Net started making investors very, very happy.

So what’s the big deal? Isn’t the dot-com invasion just the latest example of gentrification — a phenomenon that started in the go-go ’80s? In a sense, yes — but the speed, libertarian ethos, irritating hipster pose and chilling finality of this invasion put it in a different league from earlier ones. Sure, San Francisco in the Reagan years also had its share of Jay McInerney types in suits hitting the clubs. But in those days the city had temporarily ceded its status as financial center of the West to L.A., so some of those corporate sharpies had to have been here for at least some reasons beyond revenue and career-enhancement. Now San Francisco has become a city of 22-year-old Barbie-bunny marketing girls who don’t realize the Web is not the Internet, and guys who have come to San Francisco because the dot-com version of Dutch tulip-mania offers better odds of instant wealth than making partner at Merrill Lynch. The result is a city whose unique history and sensibility is being swamped by twerps with ‘tude.

When I lived in Potrero Hill in the 1980s, my landlord was my next-door neighbor, the kind of kindly, eccentric bohemian this historically most-lefty-in-the-city nabe had always attracted. The Slovenian union hall is situated here. Traditionally, journalists and low-rent architects and artists were drawn here, in part because of the cheap rents and good light. Joe’s grandparents had owned a cattle ranch on what is now part of the greenbelt surrounding Stanford University; Joe got a degree in theater arts from San Francisco State, had lived in Paris and North Beach in the ’50s, in a loft in the Haight in the ’60s, and for years made his living making architectural models. He also owns a 1949 Ford truck, which he always kept parked near the intersection we lived on — not an issue in a neighborhood where there is lots of on-street parking.

Joe isn’t running a meth lab, nor routinely scheduling raves, nor kenneling yappy dogs, nor, unlike my next-door neighbors in Santa Cruz, running an illegal car repair and refinishing business out of his house. He rides his bike far more than he drives. He’s lived in that sun-drenched flat for close to 20 years, and been a good neighbor to all. Yet someone, starting about three years ago, began phoning into the Department of Parking and Traffic, complaining about his abandoned eyesore truck — and they succeeded in getting it towed if he didn’t move it often. Why live in Potrero Hill — a neighborhood that abuts a light-industrial area, where Anchor Steam beer is still made and until only a few years ago you could smell the Hills Brothers’ coffee roasting that always made the entrance to the Bay Bridge smell like toast — unless you can appreciate the beauty of a museum-quality mid-century truck? We both suspect that if it were an SUV parked in front of his house, and not his trusty steed of 40-plus years, the anonymous informer would never have acted. Joe, whose duplex with smashing views is long paid off, tells me he feels like he’s being forced out by the dot-com people.

Artists and arts organizations have been and continue to be economically harassed out of the city — a trend exacerbated by the new gold rush. With no rent control on commercial property (modest 1,200-square-foot spaces now routinely rent for $3,000 a month), all kinds of rehearsal spaces and performance spaces and exhibition spaces and true live/work spaces (not the slapdash gimcrack monstrosities being thrown up by powerful contractor Joe O’Donoghue’s Residential Builders Association, where chief technology officers live for their work) are in jeopardy. To take just one example: Artists’ Television Access, a Mission District exhibition space where the best and worst of non-commercial films have been shown for years, is in jeopardy.

As Carren Shagley, a San Francisco realtor, asks, “What artist can pay $650,000 for a live-work space?” Still, these tenements of tomorrow would make a techno-libertarian proud: They don’t pay into the city’s public-school taxes, and their developers are not required, as they would be with other kinds of developments, to make any of them affordable housing. Ah, the beauties of the free market and the freedom from despised regulation.

Creating work that you hope might have value beyond a Webweek, or not intended to be monetized on the Web, requires time and space enough to be able to live at least at subsistence level while you rehearse or paint or go against City Hall as a skateboard activist.

But the Internet culture that celebrates all work all the time doesn’t accord value to anything that isn’t easily monetized — or corporatized. The importance of leisure time, of being able to support yourself with a day job to pursue other ends, to rehearse and canvass and organize and noodle and reflect, is totally at odds with the all-connected-all-the-time upside-potential lifestyle of the dot-com people.

Gabriel Metcalf, deputy director of San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), says that the newcomers to the city are “much less politically active; don’t join neighborhood associations.”

Larry Rothstein, a San Francisco plaintiff’s attorney for 20 years, talks about the “I’ve got mine so screw you” attitude of the dot-com folks he has been running into “in the last couple of years” on San Francisco juries. “They’re just here to make a buck and quickly leapfrog up the corporate ladder,” he says. “They grew up under Reagan-Bush and parrot the line about how frivolous lawsuits are bad for business and how nothing must interfere with profit flow of a company. They’re under- and un-educated — they’ve only ever worked in high tech, can’t imagine what it’s like to not have insurance, not be able to afford a car, not be able to get a job. They have sick pay, they have a safety net, they have money, and can’t understand that there are people who don’t. They have a total lack of spirituality or soul. They’re a new generation of Republicans.”

This in San Francisco, the city that all the world likes to deride for the silliness of its political correctness? Truly, these are end times.

A friend who’s an exec at a high-tech P.R. firm commented to me on what he called “the voracious sense of entitlement” he runs into in the dot-com kids he employs, fickle creatures with no loyalty. Yet we both know that while he and I came of age during the era of guys with Ph.D.s in economics driving cabs and stagflation, the dot-coms have never known anything but a bull market.

I don’t want to demonize the entire dot-com world. Long before the Net boom, many liberal-arts flakes ended up working in computing because in the Bay Area, that’s where the jobs were. And it’s a good thing that former English majors from Cal can go on to become productive members of society working as sys-admins. There are carpetbaggers, yes, but there are also plenty of newcomers who both live and work in the city, and proudly so. Take bike riding, an important measure of good urban citizenship: The Net start-ups are much more bike-friendly (and thus, sensitive to the stressed city infrastructure they are located in) than more established companies. CNet, for example, has space for about one-third of its employees to commute by bike.

But the good dot-com citizens, at least at this point, seem to be in the minority. Take politics. The in-flow of new people into the political process is what a city relies on to keep it vital. But San Francisco’s newest arrivals seem utterly disengaged. Admittedly, the city’s current mayoral race, an embarrassing three-way battle between a corrupt, out of touch, master-of-machine-politics mayor, a scary, slimy political consultant and a well-meaning anti-charismatic former mayor/cop, doesn’t inspire much passion — nor does the who’s-a-bigger-victim identity politics that have dominated much of San Francisco civic discussion for the past decades. But there’s a lot more to politics here than that. Besides, what has San Francisco always been bu