Showing posts with label city:. Show all posts
Showing posts with label city:. Show all posts

Vexed in the City: Welcoming new techies with a middle finger salute

Protesters rally against evictions in San Francisco's Mission District. James Martin/CNET

This story is part of a CNET special report that examines the controversy gripping San Francisco as a massive influx of techies feeds an unprecedented economic boom -- and backlash.

"Die Techie Scum."

So reads the bumper sticker that a local activist group calling itself Defend The Bay Area has directed at the thousands of new city dwellers who moved here in the great migration of software companies to San Francisco in the last few years.

Defend The Bay Area's website is powered by Wordpress and it uses Twitter to help organize its movement, but its tagline is "Fight the Tech Takeover."

From playing host to California's Gold Rush in the late 19th century and the Summer of Love in 1962 to electing the first gay openly official in the country, San Francisco has coped with radical cultural transitions. So it's not surprising the latest tech boom is ushering in change -- and causing hostility among groups that aren't happy with how the city has fared.

Vexed in the city: San Francisco strife spurs tech defectors elsewhere

The view outside the Valley isn't so bad: The office of Automated Insights, a 30-employee startup based in North Carolina, overlooks the baseball stadium for the Durham Bulls. The company lists free Bulls games from the "porch" as a job perk when hiring, as well as free lunches and take-it-when-you-need-it vacation. Brandon Sewell/Automated Insights

This story is part of a CNET special report that examines the controversy gripping San Francisco as a massive influx of techies feeds an unprecedented economic boom -- and backlash.

The heat was turning up on San Francisco-based startup SocialProof.

But it wasn't competitive pressure or the fight to gain attention that got SocialProof's co-founder Nathan Labenz down. It was the simple cost of operating in the city's trendy SoMa neighborhood back in 2012.

After two years toiling in the center of the tech universe, he realized that whatever money his company collected wouldn't last long there. "It just seemed crazy," Labenz said. "A million dollars or a million and a half, or whatever it was going to be, should go farther."

Vexed in the city: Silicon Valley's invasion of San Francisco

Zendesk was the first tech company to take advantage of a tax exemption in 2011 that brought the firm to the Tenderloin, a blighted neighborhood in San Francisco. James Martin/CNET

This story is part of a CNET special report that examines the controversy gripping San Francisco as a massive influx of techies feeds an unprecedented economic boom -- and backlash.

SAN FRANCISCO -- From the sixth-floor boardroom where Zendesk holds its most important meetings, CEO Mikkel Svane has a unique view of San Francisco. It's not the iconic snapshot of the city -- no Golden Gate Bridge or Transamerica Pyramid. Instead he sees a jumble of grit and gild: a housing project, the gold-trimmed dome of City Hall, and a cryptic, crudely spray-painted message scrawled atop a nearby building: "Snakes get out or we flood."

"I still don't know what it means," says Svane, laughing while peering out the window on a clear day in late July.

The enigmatic view is a fitting one for the leader of a company doing business on relatively unfamiliar terrain. Instead of settling in Silicon Valley, some 40 miles south of the city, the customer service software firm decided to set up shop in San Francisco.

Vexed in the city: The 'sharing' economy's hidden toll on San Francisco

Margarethe Wichert/Getty Images

This story is part of a CNET special report that examines the controversy gripping San Francisco as a massive influx of techies feeds an unprecedented economic boom -- and backlash.

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Brad Worrell visited San Francisco on business last summer, he stayed in an Airbnb rental for the first time in the city's Castro district. He wasn't sure what to expect. He typically stays in hotels, but his company booked him a "Castro Gem" just a short walk to the studio where he'd be working for a few weeks.

He loved it. "I thought it was a really cute neighborhood. I was psyched when I got there," Worrell says. "It was one of those classic San Francisco apartments with high ceilings."

Vexed in the city: If you're moving to San Francisco, bring cash. Lots of cash

Protesters march on the house of Jack Halprin, a Google lawyer, in April after he purchased a multi-family house and moved to evict his tenants. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

This story is part of a CNET special report that examines the controversy gripping San Francisco as a massive influx of techies feeds an unprecedented economic boom -- and backlash.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Two years and 18 bids after they first tried to find a place to live in San Francisco, Julia Knittel and her fiance Rasheq Zarif finally nabbed an apartment.

The couple, New York transplants, started scouring the city in 2012 for a place to buy that met their needs -- at least two bedrooms, sunny, close to a park, and not in a high rise. About eight months after starting the search, they found the perfect apartment in February 2013. But the couple lost out to a higher bidder.

The same thing happened again. And again. And again.

"There were times through that process we were like, 'What are we doing wrong?'" said Knittel, a 39-year-old marketing director. "Are we asking for too much? Can we get what we want with the money we have, or is it just never ever going to be possible?"

Vexed in the city: Tech's fraught transformation of San Francisco 2014

Amid a time of tech-fueled prosperity, San Francisco faces myriad questions about how the venerable city is evolving. George Rose, Getty Images

This story is part of a CNET special report that examines the controversy gripping San Francisco as a massive influx of techies feeds an unprecedented economic boom -- and backlash.

SAN FRANCISCO -- On a sunny day in April, San Francisco's skyline offered a handy prop for Mayor Ed Lee, who seized on the can-you-believe-this view moment to ham it up for the news cameras.

"I know we're in the cloud, but there's nothing cloudy about what's being unveiled today," Lee told a room packed with civic and business representatives.

From their vantage point 25 stories above downtown, the crowd gathered at Salesforce.com's corporate offices watched as construction workers used cranes to lay girders for what will be the city's tallest building -- a 61-floor high skyscraper bearing Salesforce's name. The company, already San Francisco's biggest tech employer with 14,200 workers, will lease more than half of the 1.4 million square foot tower, creating even more private sector employment once the project is completed in 2017.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)