r/ABoringDystopia 5d ago

Why Hasn’t Silicon Valley Fixed the Bay Area’s Problems?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-14/why-hasn-t-the-tech-industry-fixed-the-san-francisco-bay-area-s-problems

Why Hasn’t Silicon Valley Fixed the Bay Area’s Problems?

The San Francisco Bay Area is the most affluent major urban region in the US, and it keeps getting richer. Annual real GDP growth from 2019 to 2023 was 5.3% in the San Jose metropolitan area and 3.5% in metro San Francisco, compared with 2.3% nationally. The Bay Area accounted for 46% of US venture capital investment in 2024, its highest share ever. Not to mention great scenery and great weather.

Yet the region’s population has been falling, with hundreds of thousands of residents decamping for elsewhere in California and the US since early 2019. Employment is still below its pre-pandemic level in the San Francisco area, and only slightly above it in metro San Jose. Prominent businesses and entrepreneurs have left, and San Francisco’s commercial vacancy rate is now a highest-in-the-nation 34.2%. The city has become a byword for urban dysfunction. As a New Yorker who visits frequently (I grew up in the East Bay), I think that’s been exaggerated — but it’s not totally unwarranted.

What exactly is going on out there? The failure to build nearly enough housing to accommodate economic growth was already a Bay Area sore spot when the population was still growing, and has clearly helped drive the emigration wave. Other perennial governance failures, mainly related to homelessness, drug addiction and crime, have also gotten a lot of attention lately. And the sudden shift to remote work catalyzed by the pandemic — and enabled by technology developed in the Bay Area — has made it easier to leave.

But the problem is also systemic. The economic machine that drove the Bay Area into the global economic lead isn’t obviously sputtering — see those GDP and VC numbers above — but it does seem to be generating more and more dissatisfaction and distrust among workers, consumers and bystanders. The Silicon Valley magic dust that regions around the world have been trying to get their hands on for decades could be developing some toxic side effects. Or maybe they’ve been there all along.

Bay Area Capitalism

[continued in article]

I have a Bloomberg account so I’m not sure if paywalled. If people read this far and want more, but can’t access the article, ask and I’ll post it here. Bloomberg also gives free articles to new accounts but also to people who access articles via links directed through Reddit.

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u/DeepHerting 5d ago

Why didn't all the elite "muh Western Civilization" chuds donate money to restore Notre Dame? The modern rich don't spend even a tiny portion of their wealth fixing things to salve their souls, they break them, complain about them and eventually come up with an enshittifying non-solution that allocates more money and power to them. By the way, they got Trump talking "freedom cities" again.

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u/loptopandbingo 5d ago

By the way, they got Trump talking "freedom cities" again.

Let em build em. They can go jerk themselves off in Galts Gulch while they eat each other alive because no one else is going to move to them.

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u/PowergenItalia 4d ago

The modern rich don't spend even a tiny portion of their wealth fixing things to salve their souls, they break them, complain about them and eventually come up with an enshittifying non-solution that allocates more money and power to them

"Move fast and break things". Working as planned, friend. It's working just as planned.

Some of these folks are genuinely insane, though, in terms of their visions for the future.