From the California Gold Rush in the 1840s to the summer of love in 1969, San Francisco has long been the incubator for social and economic change that revolutionizes America. For better or worse.
Silicon Valley is now synonymous with the invigoration of tech startups that are transforming the shape of the U.S. economy. That boom is also transforming the ways San Francisco operates.
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi explores what the tech boom means for her hometown in "San Francisco 2.0," which premieres on HBO tonight.
“There is an affordability problem,” in San Francisco, Pelosi tells Yahoo Finance. “We have this gold rush of all these young techies moving to the west coast. San Francisco is a small peninsula, we don’t have that much space there, so there is a problem where you have people who have lived there for generations getting pushed out.” Pelosi points to middle class families in the Mission area of the city who can no longer afford to live there.
San Francisco 2.0 explores what these affordability changes mean and whether they’re affecting the spirit of the city itself. “San Francisco has long enjoyed its reputation as the counter-cultural capital of the world…it’s always been very welcoming,” says Pelosi. “And now you have all these disruptors that want to go there and be near that history of art and poetry…the irony is that the people who are gravitating to the city because they want to be around the art and culture are pushing out the artists.” It’s not only artists—schoolteachers, firemen and “people who protect our families are also being pushed out.”
What really matters, says Pelosi, is what happens after the tech boom dies down. “San Francisco is like the hot club, everybody wants to be there…at some point they’re going to say ‘San Francisco isn’t so cool anymore.'’’ It’s important that San Francisco doesn’t turn into a wasteland like it did after the last tech bubble burst in the early 2000s.
The bottom line for Pelosi is to make room for everybody in San Francisco and make it a town that everybody can enjoy, “not just the rich newly minted tech millionaires.”
