In defense of San Francisco's techies

Google employees board a private shuttle bus at 18th and Dolores streets in San Francisco, Calif. that will transport them to Silicon Valley on Friday, June 14, 2013. Google employees board a private shuttle bus at 18th and Dolores streets in San Francisco, Calif. that will transport them to Silicon Valley on Friday, June 14, 2013. Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close In defense of San Francisco's techies 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

On a Saturday evening this month, Ariel Waldman was walking to dinner with friends along Valencia Street when she noticed a line of people snapping pictures of a wall.

As she got closer, Waldman realized why. Someone had tagged the wood panel, near 16th Street in the heart of the Mission District, with the words: "F- your start up."

Waldman, the founder of Spacehack.org, shot an image of her own and posted it to Instagram, where it earned dozens of likes. Other versions of the graffiti in different parts of the Mission popped up on Twitter, including an image of a woman smiling next to the words with, as if to drive home the point, her middle finger in the air.

It would be difficult to make the message any clearer. A growing number of San Franciscans are fed up, not just with startups, but with techies in general. With their apps and buses, their gourmet coffee and skinny jeans, their venture capital wishes and IPO dreams. They're tired of watching rents soar, friends forced to relocate and beloved neighborhoods drained of diversity.

I understand the frustration, but wonder: Are we embracing a soft xenophobia applied to a sector rather than a race, to some cohesive elite tech class that doesn't exist outside of our own minds?

Last month, a group of gentrification protesters unleashed their rage on a piñata of a Google Bus, an act that seemed at once sadly impotent and uncomfortably close to violence.

If the tag on Valencia had read "F- immigrants," or that piñata was made to represent a transvestite, would San Francisco's famously progressive citizens be posing next to it or clapping along?

There is a real risk in indulging visceral responses to this set of issues, as The Chronicle and other publications and activists have. If we blame the wrong things for real problems - like unaffordable housing and gentrification - it's much harder to arrive at the right solutions. And there's simply no question that we're starting with the wrong assumptions whenever we aim a rambling set of resentments and frustrations at a broad category of people.

'Regular people'

"I am a computer programmer in San Francisco," one resident, who asked not to be named, wrote to me in an e-mail earlier this month. "I am not even remotely close to rich - only a tiny percentage of tech workers have gotten rich.

"We are regular people like you, and we are not all the same," he said.

Indeed, many tech workers are stretching to make the region's rents as well. Properly addressing these very real economic challenges requires carefully considering the deeper issues at work here, not scapegoating the latest arrivals.

I too see the signs of conspicuous wealth, attitudes of entitlement and naked greed. And there's no question that there has been displacement in recent years or that the current tech boom is chiefly responsible for rents rising nearly 25 percent in the last two years. No other sector is growing nearly as fast.

At a conference last week, Mayor Ed Lee said that there are now more than 1,800 tech companies in San Francisco, more than ever before. That's up by more than 300 since the end of 2010, according to an analysis of state data by the CBRE Group.

But this boom, like all booms, will end. The trend of American cities becoming wealthier and less diverse, a reversal of the decades-long pattern of suburban flight, preceded this expansion and will outlast it.

So short of some radical plan that allots housing units by skill type or bans tech companies, our only option for solving the part of this problem that we can is to make housing more affordable. We can do that in three basic ways: Build more, set aside a greater portion as affordable and protect the existing stock.

There's room for debate about the appropriate path among these options, but that's where this policy discussion lives. Public airings of resentment toward a particular type of worker is both mean-spirited and a waste of everyone's time.

Hipster hatred

It's worth remembering that, for all the attention the sector receives, the vast majority of San Francisco residents don't work in tech. The city's technology companies create just 7.5 percent of its jobs, CBRE found. And the expansion in the industry also translates to growth in retail, restaurants and other sectors, said Ted Egan, San Francisco's chief economist.

The truth is that a lot of this debate isn't actually about rent, gentrification or economics, or anything rooted in a real class struggle. Some of it is just hipster-on-hipster hatred. Middle-class humanities majors grumbling about middle-class computer science majors.

"It's amusing at some level," Waldman said. "People are complaining that their nice cafe views are being ruined by Google Buses."

And too much of it is just a knee-jerk reaction to change, a point of view for which I have close to zero sympathy.

Change a constant

Generations have arrived here, each in turn believing San Francisco was perfect the moment they crossed the bridge and has been on a downhill slide ever since. That those subsequent beats, hippies or gays were positively ruining the joint.

But that San Francisco draws the most intelligent, creative and open-minded people from across the world, decade after decade, is precisely what's so wonderful about it.

This is a city largely made up of people who have chosen to be here, to live and work alongside others more inspiring and interesting than the folks with whom they grew up. (I'm looking at you, Fremont, Ohio.)

Many of those minds want to work in technology because technology, whether you like it or not, is the dominant economic and cultural force of our time, redefining art, music, media and more.

San Francisco changes because the world changes. It was formed in a gold rush and reshaped by every one that followed.