The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and
evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public.
They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield,
and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their
passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait
behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take
out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course
wifi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like
limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our
alien overlords have landed to rule over us.
Other days I think of them as the company buses by which the coal
miners get deposited at the minehead, and the work schedule involved
would make a pit owner feel at home. Silicon Valley has long been famous
for its endless work hours, for sucking in the young for decades of
sixty or seventy-hour weeks, and the much celebrated perks on many
jobsites – nap rooms, chefs, gyms, laundry – are meant to make spending
most of your life at work less hideous. The biotech industry is
following the same game plan. There are hundreds of luxury buses serving
mega-corporations down the peninsula, but we refer to them in the
singular, as the Google Bus, and we – by which I mean people I know,
people who’ve lived here a while, and mostly people who don’t work in
the industry – talk about them a lot. Parisians probably talked about
the Prussian army a lot too, in the day.
My brother says that the
first time he saw one unload its riders he thought they were German
tourists – neatly dressed, uncool, a little out of place, blinking in
the light as they emerged from their pod. The tech workers, many of them
new to the region, are mostly white or Asian male nerds in their
twenties and thirties; you often hear that to be over fifty in that
world is to be a fossil, and the two founders of Google (currently tied
for 13th richest person on earth) are not yet forty.
Another
friend of mine told me a story about the Apple bus from when he worked
for Apple Inc. Once a driver went rogue, dropping off the majority of
his passengers as intended at the main Apple campus, and then rolling on
towards San Jose instead of stopping at the satellite location, but the
passengers were tech people, so withdrawn from direct, abrupt,
interventionary communications that they just sat there as he drove many
miles past their worksite and eventually dumped them on the street in a
slum south of the new power centre of the world. At that point, I
think, they called headquarters: another, more obedient bus driver was
dispatched. I told the story to another friend and we joked about
whether they then texted headquarters to get the email addresses of the
people sitting next to them: this is a culture that has created many new
ways for us to contact one another and atrophied most of the old ones,
notably speaking to the people around you. All these youngish people are
on the Google Bus because they want to live in San Francisco, city of
promenading and mingling, but they seem as likely to rub these things
out as to participate in them.
The Google Bus means so many
things. It means that the minions of the non-petroleum company most bent
on world domination can live in San Francisco but work in Silicon
Valley without going through a hair-raising commute by car – I overheard
someone note recently that the buses shortened her daily commute to 3.5
hours from 4.5. It means that unlike gigantic employers in other times
and places, the corporations of Silicon Valley aren’t much interested in
improving public transport, and in fact the many corporations providing
private transport are undermining the financial basis for the commuter
train. It means that San Francisco, capital of the west from the Gold
Rush to some point in the 20th century when Los Angeles overshadowed it,
is now a bedroom community for the tech capital of the world at the
other end of the peninsula.
There
are advantages to being an edge, as California long was, but Silicon
Valley has made us the centre. Five of the six most-visited websites in
the world are here, in ranked order: Facebook, Google, YouTube (which
Google owns), Yahoo! and Wikipedia. (Number five is a Chinese-language
site.) If corporations founded by Stanford alumni were to form an
independent nation, it would be the tenth largest economy in the world,
with an annual revenue of $2.7 trillion, as some professors at that
university recently calculated. Another new report says: ‘If the
internet was a country, its gross domestic product would eclipse all
others but four within four years.’
That country has a capital
that doesn’t look like a capital. It looks like beautiful oak-studded
hills and flatlands overrun by sprawl: suburban homes (the megamansions
are more secluded) and malls and freeways often jammed with traffic and
dotted with clunky campuses, as corporate headquarters of tech firms are
always called. Fifty years ago, this was the ‘valley of heart’s
delight’, one of the biggest orchard-growing regions in the world. It
wasn’t to everyone’s delight: Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers
movement started in San Jose, because the people who actually picked all
those plums and apricots worked long hours for abysmal wages, but the
sight and smell of the 125,000 acres of orchard in bloom was supposed to
be spectacular.
Where orchards grew Apple stands. The work hours
are still extreme but now the wages are colossal – you hear tech workers
complaining about not having time to spend their money. They eat out
often, though, because their work schedules don’t include a lot of time
for shopping and cooking, and San Francisco’s restaurants are booming.
Cafés, which proliferated in the 1980s as places to mingle and idle, are
now workstations for freelancers, and many of the sleeker locales are
routinely populated by silent ranks staring at their Apple-product
screens, as though an office had suddenly been stripped of its cubicles.
The more than 1700 tech firms in San Francisco officially employ 44,000
people, and a lot more are independent contractors doing piecework: not
everyone rides the bus down south. Young people routinely make
six-figure salaries, not necessarily beginning with a 1, and they have
enormous clout in the housing market (the drivers of the Google Bus, on
the other hand, make between $17 and $30 an hour).
I weathered the
dot-com boom of the late 1990s as an observer, but I sold my apartment
to a Google engineer last year and ventured out into both the rental
market (for the short term) and home buying market (for the long term)
with confidence that my long standing in this city and respectable
finances would open a path. That confidence got crushed fast. It turned
out that the competition for any apartment in San Francisco was so
intense that you had to respond to the listings – all on San
Francisco-based Craigslist of course, the classifieds website that
whittled away newspaper ad revenue nationally – within a few hours of
their posting to receive a reply from the landlord or agency. The
listings for both rentals and homes for sale often mentioned their
proximity to the Google or Apple bus stops.
At the actual open
houses, dozens of people who looked like students would show up with
chequebooks and sheaves of resumés and other documents and pack the
house, literally: it was like a cross between being at a rock concert
without a band and the Hotel Rwanda. There were rumours that these young
people were starting bidding wars, offering a year’s rent in advance,
offering far more than was being asked. These rumours were confirmed.
Evictions went back up the way they did during the dot-com bubble. Most
renters have considerable protection from both rent hikes and evictions
in San Francisco, but there are ways around the latter, ways that often
lead to pitched legal battles, and sometimes illegal ones. Owners have
the right to evict a tenant to occupy the apartment itself (a right
often abused; an evicted friend of mine found a new home next door to
his former landlord and is watching with an eagle eye to see if the guy
really dwells there for the requisite three years). Statewide, the Ellis
Act allows landlords to evict all tenants and remove the property from
the rental market, a manoeuvre often deployed to convert a property to
flats for sale. As for rent control, it makes many landlords restless
with stable tenants, since you can charge anything you like on a vacant
apartment – and they do.
A Latino who has been an important
cultural figure for forty years is being evicted while his wife
undergoes chemotherapy. One of San Francisco’s most distinguished poets,
a recent candidate for the city’s poet laureate, is being evicted after
35 years in his apartment and his whole adult life here: whether he
will claw his way onto a much humbler perch or be exiled to another town
remains to be seen, as does the fate of a city that poets can’t afford.
His building, full of renters for most or all of the past century,
including a notable documentary filmmaker, will be turned into flats for
sale. A few miles away, friends of friends were evicted after twenty
years in their home by two Google attorneys, a gay couple who moved into
two separate units in order to maximise their owner-move-in rights.
Rental prices rose between 10 and 135 per cent over the past year in San
Francisco’s various neighbourhoods, though thanks to rent control a lot
of San Franciscans were paying far below market rates even before the
boom – which makes adjusting to the new market rate even harder. Two
much-loved used bookstores are also being evicted by landlords looking
for more money; 16 restaurants opened last year in their vicinity. On
the waterfront, Larry Ellison, the owner of Oracle and the world’s sixth
richest man, has been allowed to take control of three city piers for
75 years in return for fixing them up in time for the 2013 America’s
Cup; he will evict dozens of small waterfront businesses as part of the
deal.
All
this is changing the character of what was once a great city of refuge
for dissidents, queers, pacifists and experimentalists. Like so many
cities that flourished in the post-industrial era, it has become
increasingly unaffordable over the past quarter-century, but still has a
host of writers, artists, activists, environmentalists, eccentrics and
others who don’t work sixty-hour weeks for corporations– though we may
be a relic population. Boomtowns also drive out people who perform
essential services for relatively modest salaries, the teachers,
firefighters, mechanics and carpenters, along with people who might have
time for civic engagement. I look in wonder at the store clerks and
dishwashers, wondering how they hang on or how long their commute is.
Sometimes the tech workers on their buses seem like bees who belong to a
great hive, but the hive isn’t civil society or a city; it’s a
corporation.
Last summer, I went to look at a house for sale whose
listing hadn’t mentioned that the house was inhabited. I looked in
dismay at the pretty old house where a family’s possessions had settled
like silt over the decades: drum set, Bibles, faded framed portraits,
furniture grimed with the years, cookware, toys. It was a display of
what was about to be lost. The estate agent was on the front steps
telling potential clients that they wouldn’t even have to evict: just
raise the rent far beyond what the residents can afford. Ye who seek
homes, come destroy the homes of others more frail.
I saw the same
thing happen in the building next door to the rental I eventually found
through word of mouth after failing to compete in the open market.
These families are not going to live like that again, in pleasant homes
in the city centre. Other buildings I visited had been emptied of all
residents, and every unit was for sale, each furnished with brushed
steel appliances, smooth surfaces and sleek neutral tones to appeal to
the tastes of young technocrats.
In the poorer outskirts of the
city, foreclosures and short sales (an alternative to foreclosure where
the house is sold even though the sale won’t cover the debts) go on as
they have across much of the country since the crash in 2008, and a
group called Occupy Bernal Heights (a neighbourhood spin-off of Occupy
San Francisco, co-founded by the sex activist Annie Sprinkle) has shown
up at the banks and at the houses to defend many owners, one home at a
time. Poverty is cruel and destructive. Wealth is cruel and destructive
too, or at least booms are. The whole of the US sometimes seems to be a
checkerboard of these low-pressure zones with lots of time and space but
no money, and the boomtowns with lots of money, a frenzied pace and
chronic housing scarcity. Neither version is very liveable.
San
Francisco’s tech boom has often been compared to the Gold Rush, but
without much discussion about what the Gold Rush meant beyond the cute
images of bearded men in plaid shirts with pickaxes looking a lot like
gay men in the Castro in the 1970s. When gold was discovered in 1848,
employees left their posts, sailors abandoned their ships, and San
Francisco – then a tiny port town called Yerba Buena – was deserted. In
the Mother Lode, some got rich; many died of contagious diseases, the
lousy diet, rough life and violence; some went broke and crawled back to
the US, as the settled eastern half of the country was called when the
gold country was an outpost of newcomers mostly arriving by ship and the
American West still largely belonged to the indigenous people.
Supplying
the miners and giving them places to spend their money became as
lucrative as mining and much more secure. Quite a lot of the early
fortunes were made by shopkeepers: Levi Strauss got his start that way,
and so did Leland Stanford, who founded the university that founded
Silicon Valley. The Mexicans who had led a fairly gracious life on vast
ranches before the Gold Rush were largely dispossessed and the Native
Californians were massacred, driven out of their homes; they watched
their lands be destroyed by mining, starved or died of disease: the
Native population declined by about four-fifths during this jolly spree.
San
Francisco exploded in the rush, growing by leaps and bounds, a
freewheeling town made up almost exclusively of people from elsewhere,
mostly male, often young. In 1850, California had a population of
120,000 according to one survey, 110,000 of them male. By 1852 women
made up ten per cent of the population, by 1870 more than a quarter.
During this era prostitution thrived, from the elegant courtesans who
played a role in the city’s political and cultural life to the Chinese
children who were worked to death in cribs, as the cubicles in which
they laboured were called. Prices for everything skyrocketed: eggs were a
dollar apiece in 1849, and a war broke out later over control of the
stony Farallones islands rookery thirty miles west of San Francisco,
where seabirds’ eggs were gathered to augment what the chickens could
produce. A good pair of boots was a hundred dollars. Land downtown was
so valuable that people bought water lots – plots of land in the bay –
and filled them in.
Wages were high too, until 1869, when the
Central Pacific Railroad (built by Stanford and his three cronies)
connected the Bay Area to the East Coast, and the newly unemployed
railroad workers and the poor of the east poured in.
The Annals of San Francisco describe the city twenty years earlier, in 1849:
As
we have said, there were no homes at this period in San Francisco, and
time was too precious for anyone to stay within doors to cook victuals.
Consequently an immense majority of the people took their meals at
restaurants, boarding-houses and hotels – the number of which was
naturally therefore very great; while many lodged as well as boarded at
such places. Many of these were indeed miserable hovels, which showed
only bad fare and worse attendance, dirt, discomfort and high prices. A
few others again were of a superior class; but, of course, still higher
charges had to be made for the better accommodation.
The
oil and gas boomtowns of the present, in Wyoming, North Dakota and
Alberta, among other places, follow this model. Lots of money sloshes
around boomtowns, but everyday life is shaped by scarcity, not
abundance. The boom workers are newcomers. They work long hours, earn
high wages, drive up the cost of housing for the locals, drive out some
locals, eat out, drink a lot, brawl, overload local services, often get
addicted or injured. In Wyoming last year I met a disability counsellor
who told me about the young men who go into the coal and gas mining
business, make more money than they’ve ever seen, go into debt on a
trailer home, a fancy truck, extravagant pleasures, and then get
permanently disabled on the job and watch their lives fall apart. A
journalist who’d been reporting on the boom in North Dakota told me
about ranches ruined by toxins and a trailer park full of Native
Americans who’d lived there for many decades evicted to make room for
higher-paying miners with brand-new trailers. Like a virus, mining
destroys its host and then moves on. There are ghost towns across the
west full of dying businesses with the landscape around them ground into
heaps leaching toxic residue.
There are ways in which Silicon
Valley is nothing like this: it’s clean, quiet work, and here to stay in
one form or another. But there are ways in which technology is just
another boom and the Bay Area is once again a boomtown, with transient
populations, escalating housing costs, mass displacements and the casual
erasure of what was here before. I think of it as frontierism, with all
the frontier’s attitude and operational style, where people without a
lot of attachments come and do things without a lot of concern for their
impact, where money moves around pretty casually, and people are ground
underfoot equally casually. Sometimes the Google Bus just seems like
one face of Janus-headed capitalism; it contains the people too valuable
even to use public transport or drive themselves. In the same spaces
wander homeless people undeserving of private space, or the minimum
comfort and security; right by the Google bus stop on Cesar Chavez
Street immigrant men from Latin America stand waiting for employers in
the building trade to scoop them up, or to be arrested and deported by
the government. Both sides of the divide are bleak, and the middle way
is hard to find.
