Ugh. This city does have some bad housing shortages right now, but this kind of whiny name-dropping i-was-here-first essay doesn't help. Neither does this epic rant I am about to write, but I'm going to do it anyway...

My favorite quote so far:

"If San Francisco is swallowed whole by the digital elite, many city lovers fear, the once-lush urban landscape will become as flat as a computer screen."

Lush urban landscape eh? Is that from all the feces on the sidewalks? Who are these city lovers? Are they the same NIMBY types who are trying to prevent any kind of night club or live music scene from being established in the city (google the "War on Fun" for fun). Well, that nameless person made up by the author is boring and terrible and they should probably move out to the suburbs to make room for someone who actually enjoys what this city has to offer now instead of what it was back when you couldn't take your kids to the park, a story which you told us yourself!

"When I moved to this neighborhood in 1993, just before the first dot-com boom, I avoided taking my two toddlers to the playground across the street from the café, because local gangs sometimes stashed their guns in the sand."

Yeah... soo.... that's bad, right? I didn't live here back then but I visited frequently and it was awful! Your fake nostalgia for the grittiness of urban life can go burn in a fire made from hobo shit.

Another stupid quote:

"The unique urban features that have made San Francisco so appealing to a new generation of digital workers—its artistic ferment, its social diversity, its trailblazing progressive consciousness—are deteriorating, driven out of the city by the tech boom itself, and the rising real estate prices that go with it."

Wait, aren't techie types usually considered to be sort of trailblazing and progressive and friendly to the arts? What the hell are you talking about dude?

Okay, rents have gone up in my building by 50% in the last 2 years. It's bad. The building, that is. It's basically been a slum apartment for a hundred years and 3 families do live upstairs from me in one unit. I WISH they'd move out, because I can hear everything that goes on up there. Ugh. We have new employees who are trying to move to the city and there aren't any good options, most of them have ended up in Emeryville or Oakland. I certainly wouldn't recommend my own building. I only stay here because the rent is cheap because I moved here before this current boom. So here I am taking advantage of the very upside-down rental market that's contributing to the whole problem! I don't know what the long term fix is besides building a LOT more new buildings, which seems to be happening... But it's only happening because rents are high enough to justify new construction, which is good for non-tech jobs and city property tax revenue in the long term, right? Would you rather have a bunch of fenced off city blocks with nothing but empty holes in the ground on market street? There's a new Draft House Cinema moving into a theater that's been empty for like 20 years two blocks away from McSweeny's. You don't think that's awesome?

Eventually this mini-boom will end and that's going to suck WORSE than what's going on now. Oh man, it's going to suck. Maybe rents will go down then, but only if a lot of people lose jobs and move away. That's not good is it? In fact, that's a worst case scenario for the city. The cafe you were sitting in when you wrote that article will probably go out of business too. Is that what you'd prefer? Maybe one of those techies who moves to SF this year will invent an alternate fuel generator that runs off baby boomer hand wringing and then we'll all be amazed when you single handedly save the city.

Still, until recently there were dozens of empty city blocks that had no development at all on them. Many stalled projects are in progress now, and it is all going to be high priced brand new luxury stuff. 3 new buildings have been built within a block of my current location in the Mission just in the last year. Sure, they're small and overpriced, and maybe only rich techie types can afford them but I'm FINE with that. When the people who can afford it move in to those places, they'll free up space in the dumps they moved out of and things will probably equalize in a couple of years, and that's probably the best case scenario.