The Economist writes:
To judge by the interminable queue outside Boogaloos restaurant in the Mission District, San Francisco is thriving again. …Yet this boom is unlike the one that began ten years ago. For one
thing, it has produced many fewer jobs. Although slowly rising, the number of workers in San Francisco is still 12% lower than during the dotcom era. Since 2000, indeed, the city has shed more jobs than
Detroit. …More than biotechnology or Web 2.0, San Francisco’s economy these
days is built on leisure. That industry is in fine fettle: bucking the
trend, hotels and restaurants employ more people now than they did
seven years ago. … [M]any expensive flats have been bought by people in their late fifties who have grown tired of the suburbs and no longer need worry about schools. Although
lured by the city’s bright lights, they may not see much of them. [A]another trend is towards pieds-à-terre that are empty most of the time. …Younger workers often have a similarly detached relationship with
the city. Google shuttles 1,200 people a day, many of them from the
Mission and other trendy parts of San Francisco, to its headquarters in
suburban Mountain View. Such reverse commuting helps to explain why
property prices in the city barely wobbled during the dotcom crash. …Those prices pose the greatest threat to the city’s future as a
crucible of new ideas.
Your thoughts?
