What San Francisco Says About America
Tom Fuller is one of the best reporters at The New York Times. He covered the Arab Spring in North Africa. He covered the military junta in Myanmar, sneaking over the Thai border. His life work deserves a Pulitzer, and now we&#x27;re lucky to have him in SF. I&#x27;ve worked with him directly, and he&#x27;s the real deal and also a nice guy.<p>The big questions about San Francisco are: How does it manage to be so rich and so poor at the same time? What does it mean for a city to have one of the highest number of millionaires per capita among its inhabitants, and also a large and growing homeless population?<p>When you think about San Francisco, you think about tech and homelessness. It&#x27;s a city that&#x27;s the seat of a global industry trying to grapple with a regional problem. That is, both the tech and the homelessness are part of larger systems over which San Francisco has little control.<p>The city has more to offer the homeless than many other US cities: weather that won&#x27;t kill you, laws that support free healthcare, a citizenry that, until recently at least, believed the problem should not be swept under the rug or erased like LA took care of Skid Row.<p>But the weird thing about SF is how the city is becoming more and more disjointed. It has become a city that attracts people from around the world with economic opportunity. The tech workers that form the middle and upper middle class here don&#x27;t have much else in common besides the economic opportunity they sought. They didn&#x27;t come to solve homelessness in SF, and we can&#x27;t blame them for that. And the homeless themselves come from many other places in the US.<p>So tech workers and homeless come to a city, but many of them are not <i>from</i> here, and therefore don&#x27;t identify as belonging to the same community, a community which under other historical conditions might have tried to care for itself and solve its own problems.<p>I&#x27;m aware of a few attempts in SF to address homelessness: Handup, LavaMae, etc. And they&#x27;re great, but they aren&#x27;t the norm for tech.<p>There&#x27;s also something strange about tech as an industry, which shapes its impact on SF. Older industries like carmakers employed hundreds of thousands of people, and employed them locally (at least until NAFTA). That is, organizations devoted to the accumulation of capital were also the source of a lot of employment in the cities where they were based.<p>Tech is different. Google employs an order of magnitude less than that. And it is addressing a global market rather than a national or local one. The bits at the base of its business have no ties to SF. It&#x27;s solving problems and offering services worldwide, and doesn&#x27;t really have to think much about the state and fate of the local economy. Maybe that&#x27;s just the weirdness of globalization.