SILICON CITY
SAN FRANCISCO
IN THE
LONG SHADOW
OF THE
VALLEY
CARY McCLELLAND
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York | London
For Lisa
CONTENTS
Introduction
OVERTURE
Joe Massey, tour guide
PART I. THE NEW GOLD RUSH
Regis McKenna, public relations guru
Hendrik Dahlkamp, engineer
Coco Conn, technologist and teacher
Tim Draper, venture capitalist
Colin Rule, startup founder
Lisa Chu, college student
Charles Carter, landscape architect
Caille Millner, journalist
PART II. THE SOUL OF THE CITY
Sami Rahul, cable salesman
Paul Gillespie, cabdriver
Elaine Katzenberger, publisher
Carol Queen, sexologist
Do D. A .T., emcee
Edwin Lindo, native son
Margaret Zhao, corporate lawyer
Idexa, tattoo artist
Bill Fisher, pawnbroker
Lyman Hollins, former longshoreman
PART III. THE BALKANIZATION OF THE BAY
Richard Walker, geographer
Alex Kauffmann, designer
Leslie Dreyer, artist/activist
Matt Gonzalez, former president of the Board of Supervisors
Ron Conway, angel investor
Saad Khan, entrepreneur
Leon Fikiri, Uber driver
James Williams, farmer
Saul Griffith, environmentalist/inventor
Tim Draper, venture capitalist (cont’d)
Regis McKenna, public relations guru (cont’d)
PART IV. THE BREAKDOWN
Titus Bell, former drug dealer
Amanda Machado, teacher
Tony Sagrado, juvenile advocate
Christian Calinsky, once homeless
Maya Williams, ER doctor
Joyce and Eddie, wildfire survivors
Rob Gitin, youth counselor
Sammy Nunez, community organizer
Titus Bell, former drug dealer (cont’d)
PART V. IF WE CAN MERGE THE TWO WORLDS
Nicole Sanchez, diversity expert
Charles Carter, landscape architect (cont’d)
Coco Conn, technologist and teacher (cont’d)
Saul Griffith, environmentalist/inventor (cont’d )
Ron Conway, angel investor (cont’d)
Navida Butler, “Momma”
Maria Guerrero, cafeteria worker and organizer
Andrew Fremier, civil servant
PART VI. A SIXTH SENSE OF RIGHT AND WRONG
Karen Cusolito, artist
Pamela Weiss, Zen Buddhist
Michael Santos, reformer
Oliver and Allen, parents
Saad Khan, entrepreneur (cont’d)
Edwin Lindo, native son (cont’d)
CODA
Dan Zelinsky, antique arcade owner
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I bet you can’t hit me with a quarter.
—Sign of a homeless person, standing beside the King Street I-280 off-ramp
I saw this sign as I was driving back into San Francisco one evening. Rush-hour traffic had gotten so bad it now took a half hour to clear the off-ramp. Rows of commuters all stuck bumper-to-bumper in their sensible Northern Californian cars.
He stood in an island between waves of traffic and teased the sign gently back and forth. Like a dare on a game at the state fair.
And we were lined up to play.
A sort of cringing panic set in—a feeling that had become all too familiar since I moved there. I had honed the Northern California talent of lamenting the problems that surrounded me but freezing if I confronted them face-to-face. He kept waving the sign; I kept inching forward, closer to the intersection. Waving, inching. Wave, inch.
Suddenly, someone rolled down his window and threw a handful of change at him. He dove down, scrambled in the dust trying to find every coin. The light turned green, and we drove off. He disappeared into a sea of vehicles in my rearview mirror. And I thought, We’ve turned everything into a game.
San Francisco—and the Bay Area in general—has become something of an arcade for the young and plugged in. Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, Carbon, Rinse, Instacart, Alfred—a kingdom of cute one-word fiefdoms offering chauffer and butler services for the new tech titans. They are shuttled to their corporate campuses—like summer camp, a world of primary colors and playgrounds and cafés and endless amusement to keep them happy at work. For them, all of life’s conveniences can be had at the push of a button; for others, they’ve got to get running every time the bell rings. The sharing economy meets modern sweatshop. The gamification of life in the city doesn’t mean everyone can afford to play.
Through its history, San Francisco has stood as something like the nation’s western capital. But it has always been something of a funhouse mirror, reflecting a strange yet sublime potential self back to the rest of the nation. It bore witness to the Gold Rush, the Transcontinental Railroad, Japanese internment, the Beat poets, the free speech movement, the AIDS crisis and modern LGBTQ politics, and the birth of the semiconductor and motherboard. It was a city of refugees who turned camps into homes—not just the early settlers, but waves of Asian immigrants, families escaping the civil wars in Latin America. It was one of the great centers of America’s black middle class, born after World War II as good jobs and free education spelled opportunity for many who saw little of the same in the South. For the past fifty-plus years, San Francisco was a place where community was created, not broken.
After the Great Recession in 2008, while the rest of the country crawled forward, the tech meccas of San Francisco and San Jose sprinted ahead, becoming the two wealthiest cities in the nation. Now the area attracts more educated and wealthy new citizens than ever before. Many believe the region is the engine of a new American economy—a new financial center rivaling those back east—offering much-needed opportunity to the young and brave. If you’re thirty and haven’t made your mark, you’re late to the party.
The problem is that the richer the cities get, the more unequal they get. Specifically, the more young, male, and white they get. And their diversity is being squeezed onto the streets and into distant suburbs by ever-rising rents and living costs. San Francisco’s income inequality grew faster than any other American city, making it the most unequal city in the nation in 2015. Salaries in the Bay Area have been on the rise, but the number of people living in poverty has also grown. Now the region is peppered with pairs of twin cities—one rich, one poor, neighboring each other. Compare San Francisco and Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond, Palo Alto and East Palo Alto.
As a result, many of the area’s longtime residents are among the first to leave—a worrisome exodus of the very citizens who built these cities. As if radiating from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, economic pressures are pushing whole communities outward. They include rising numbers of veterans, elderly, vulnerable minorities, and others unable to qualify for lucrative jobs in the new tech economy. The current version of San Francisco (2.0, 3.0?) feels deaf to history in favor of a future of its own invention. The different cultures representing the city’s past are at risk of being whitewashed away. If you don’t have a role to play, there may not be room for you in the Silicon City.
You can feel the pace of change in the city. It has an epidemiology. Quiet blocks in a forgotten neighborhood could have a restaurant, then a few shops, then a condo complex within a year. Busy streets filled with
more and more young people in athletic wear, more homeless, and fewer children. (It is a strangely childless city.) Friends moving to the East Bay, to Portland, to the Midwest. Families uprooted not one generation at a time, but in whole genealogies. Sure, San Francisco is changing—and some say it changes all the time—but under stress, cracks in the city’s façade are beginning to form.
This project looks into these cracks, through a series of interviews, to document how people are thriving, growing, coping, struggling with the forces transforming the city of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the surrounding Bay Area. Part excavation of the forgotten city and part blueprint for what is to come, the book invites us to hear the region speak in chorus: tech innovators, angel investors, social entrepreneurs, political leaders, LGBTQ activists, environmental warriors, recent transplants, old money, homeless youth, kids in schools, poets, pawnbrokers, public defenders, tattoo artists, tour guides, Uber drivers, and union leaders.
I sat with more than 150 people, speaking with many of them for hours: from rural areas to suburbs to cities, across socioeconomic strata and across the lines of gender, race and ethnicity (imagined and constructed as they may sometimes be), native sons and daughters, new residents, and those in and out of the tech industry. Those who participated in this project opened their homes, their thoughts, their feelings to an admittedly lost stranger. For that, I will always be grateful. Our conversations have been transcribed and edited for length and clarity—my voice has largely been removed, and names and identifying details have been changed where prudent—so that these people could speak to readers directly, openly, and honestly.
Each participant tells their story against the backdrop of the region’s rapid change, to memorialize the people and values that matter to them, and to mark their place in space and time. No single voice is intended to represent a monolithic feeling of the “community” from which they emerge. These are individuals sharing the world as they—and they alone—see it. Hopefully, they will suggest the silent nuances that remain to be articulated by others whose voices could not be recorded here. These stories are like photographs of a constantly changing kaleidoscope—each turn revealing some truths and admittedly concealing others.
Nevertheless, together they speak to shared experiences: the exodus of the middle class and the poor from the cities; stable structures shaken; the area’s unique embrace of and indifference to diversity; tensions between the real and the artificial; loneliness and family; a search for recognition and personal meaning. As if in one voice, they recognize ways in which government and policy seem inadequate and yet never more necessary to address the challenges around them. All, even those who feel they are building the future, beg for a moment to pause, and perhaps pivot. This book offers an opportunity to do both.
These stories speak not just to San Francisco or California, but to America. San Francisco isn’t a petri dish sealed off from the rest of the country. It is the product of historical forces and shaped by national and international trends. Wealth inequality is an American problem. The changing workforce, rapid gentrification, infrastructure collapse, climate change, overcrowded prisons, struggling schools, atrophied public institutions—these are problems in any city, in any state across the country. The Bay Area is an experiment in what happens when each of these problems is turned up to 11—what happens when the tech sector fuels changes in the private sector without the public sector being able to keep up—what happens when diversity and disparity combine and combust.
The American Dream shatters—and it has to be rebuilt. We all live in “imagined communities.” It’s not just the tech community that lives in a bubble. The internet told us we could define the borders of our lives, build our own communities online, drawn for some by our background, our values, our work, our play, our family, our aspirations, our love. And now powerful forces of change have broken many of the happy illusions we had about our communities, cities, neighborhoods, neighbors, even ourselves. It is uncomfortable. Far easier to live in a fantasy world of our own making. America loves the dream but doesn’t know how to confront the dream deferred. It explains the panic many of us feel when we are confronted face-to-face with the crises of a diverse society and we cannot step aside or drive away.
But if the people in these interviews offer us new ways of seeing the problem, they also offer solutions. Their stories reveal that presence, physical engagement, and exposure to difference may be the best answer to a transformation that feels alien and lawless. If you want to understand homelessness, go out and meet the homeless; you want to understand students, talk to them; you want to fix a problem, you have to live with it, experience it. This book is maybe the beginning of that process, bringing voices together that live in proximity to one another but are not often part of the same conversation.
The challenge for the Bay Area is not whether it can choose one identity—libertarian tech supercity or state-sponsored liberal utopia—but whether it can find some harmony where the best of each can merge. We can recognize the inherent potential in the Bay Area’s current growth, and also wish that the change felt informed and intentional—not incidental and out of control—that it finds ways to make a future that includes San Franciscans new and old alike, where those who built the city can live alongside those who have just arrived. If it cannot happen there, with the wealth of the nation, its brightest talent, and most open hearts at hand, then where will it?
OVERTURE
JOE MASSEY
He picked the restaurant: an old faithful in North Beach, good red sauce, good wine, red leather booths. “There aren’t many places like this left,” he lamented, tucking a napkin into his collar and ordering a carafe of house red.
I came by train. I had so much luggage, but I wanted to see the landscape rather than just floating in a plane. When I left Detroit, there were a couple of feet of snow on the ground. So I watched the seasons change from winter to spring to summer.
I got to Emeryville and took the Amtrak bus over to San Francisco. When we peaked at the top of the Bay Bridge, the suspension section, I looked over at the city, and my only thought was, I’m home.
I’ve been here ever since with no regret. It’s an aesthetic feast. I’d wanted to live in a city that was diverse enough to hold my attention, and there’s a lot of diversity here.
San Francisco, it has a great history of jazz. I know Sonny Buxton quite well, real icon, real artist. We used to go to Yoshi’s, Yoshi would come out and make an acknowledgment. It is a great pleasure to live in a city that has a respect for local artists—Calvin Keys, one of the greatest guitarists in the world, first seat in the Ray Charles Orchestra; Cal Tjader; Larry Vuckovich, the principal pianist of a real innovator, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.
I used to sing. I used to sing! I had a great voice, baritone, and it’s always been easy to get up and jam with anyone. I never pursued it on a professional level, an artistic level, because that demands and commands obedience near to perfection. The difference between mediocrity and genius is measured in patience and commitment.
But I’m a great lover of the art itself. There’s no length, except the limit of my pocket, that I wouldn’t go to enjoy good music. I enjoy reading, I enjoy travel. I have a kind of curiosity like a butterfly in a flower garden. I’m always happy when I look out, something catches my interest, and I need to learn something new. I want to see it all.
My first real job here was as a tour guide for the Gray Line. I had driven a bus in Detroit, and so converted my license to California. But they weren’t hiring anybody to just stand there and talk. The economic mode required you to multitask. I had to drive and speak too. The driving wasn’t the hard part. What I had to do, of course, was to find out something about San Francisco.
I felt handicapped not being from this area. So I immersed myself in CDs and history. I started checking out books. After a few months, I realized I started to know a little something. And the more I learned, the more I began to like it. San Francisco has a gre
at story. It grew up at a very crucial time in this country—the end of slavery, end of the Civil War. The Gold Rush. The Big Four—Huntington, Stanford, Crocker, and Hopkins—tycoons who built the western end of the Transcontinental Railroad. On and on.
You know how they got that name, Big Four? The government paid subsidies to any entrepreneur who could build a railroad. And the mileage on flat ground was quite different from mileage in the mountains, because you had to build trellises et cetera. They got, say, $16,000 or $17,000 per mile on flat ground, but $40,000 per mile through the mountains.
Rumor has it, a reporter uncovered a bit of chicanery going on. Turns out they hired a cartographer to “move” the Sierra Mountains some eighty miles further than where they should have been, which of course increased their monies tremendously. The reporter said, “Any four men that can lift up the entire Sierras, those are big people.” He coined the name “Big Four.” They were like any other big corporation now, completely industrious. Resources came, of course, in the way of gold, as opposed to coal, as opposed to oil.
I think I stayed too long at the party, because I reached a point, on every tour, where I was talking too much. At every corner, I would stop for fifteen minutes. Turns out the layman doesn’t care much about history and the discourse is wasted. They can’t see the significance—the overall picture of things—how it was, how it used to be. To them, it’s all landfill, crazy.
California, thanks to several significant people, has changed the course of history, touched every part of this globe. I’ve been around this ball of dirt two and a half times, once as a military person, once as a civilian. I’ve seen the influences of California with my own eyes. It is the melting pot of innovation. What happens in San Francisco, ergo the world.
But I think Steve Jobs’s message was completely lost. This era gives us such an opportunity to learn. But instead, the dumbing down of America started many years ago. And our cities, of course, feel it the worst because that’s where the population is at its densest.
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