It looks like the good old days are back. I mean 1999 and 2000. Those were the good old days here in San
Francisco. We had negative unemployment;
meaning grandparents were working in their kid’s retail stores and anyone who
could write four lines of HTML had a gigantic salary and stock options.
The clue is traffic. Traffic in the streets today, in the middle of winter, is bad. Which is also good since we can soon expect
many new yuppie stores and a boom in apartment rentals. Office space demand will soon be growing. In
a few years we will have big donors supporting
our local non-profits.
The last boom was made up of geeks, lefties and enviros all muddled into one political ball…trying to turn San Francisco into a Cuban version of the workers paradise.
The current boom seems to have a stronger corporate and
technical underpinning. Hopefully the
new people coming to town will have more moderate politics and more imaginative
personal behavior.