Everyone onto the Google Bus

Over at The London Review of Books, there's another recent Rebecca Solnit piece, and this one is provoking a lot of discussion in my previous home, the San Francisco Bay Area. Titled "Google Invades," Solnit, a San Francisco resident who emphatically does not work in the tech industry, describes the migration that takes place every weekday:

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.

She goes on to describe the unintended side-effects of this type of commuting, not the least being that rents are skyrocketing in a lot of previously working or middle class neighborhoods, making them essentially unaffordable for anyone who is not a part of this particular socioeconomic class. And that's when you can find and respond to a vacancy quickly enough to even be considered as a tenant.

Full disclosure here: while I do not work in tech, I used to live in San Francisco myself back in 2005-2007, and for a year's worth of time, I lived with my computer engineer boyfriend, now husband. And a large part of why we stopped living in the city and moved down to the South Bay was because the commute, which he did using his car, Caltrain, and a shuttle bus, was grueling. Solnit writes that "I overheard someone note recently that the buses shortened her daily commute to 3.5 hours from 4.5," and I believe both that the speaker wasn't exaggerating and that this statement was entirely free of sarcasm.

One of the things that we noticed immediately when we moved south--as in, the very day we arrived, while still sitting in the car after pulling up to a grocery store--was that there were kids around again. And not just babes in carriages or ergonomically-designed babyslings in Noe Valley, either, but honest-to-god elementary school students. People like to joke that there are more dogs in San Francisco these days than children, and while this may or may not be true, it captures one of the qualities of the city that is growing more accute: this influx of new tech money is, as Solnit makes painfully clear, starving the city of its celebrated diversity. It's not just that you can stand on a street corner in the Mission or the Marina and watch three versions of the same person walk by (plastic rimmed glasses/skinny jeans/flannel; polo with collar popped/sunglasses/unironic baseball cap); it's that there's an eerie sense that everyone in the neighborhood lives essentially the same life as everyone else. It's the kind of creepy uniformity that used to drive mid-century novels about suburbia. 

And that's what San Francisco is becoming, in many ways--an upscale bedroom community built out of an economic boom. And in an ironic addition to all of the migratory engineers, people who provide the services also commute, but into the city for work, often from San Bruno or South San Francisco, because they simply can't afford to live closer. 

Living five miles or so from where I taught in the South Bay, while I did miss the city and the urban freedom of going carless, my community did feel more like a complete community that welcomed and needed my investment. (Not that it didn't have its own faults and economic pressures, by any means, but that's another post.) For us, the benefits of this life far outweighed what we loved about living further north. That said, I don't think that there's a quick fix for any of this, though better and more efficient public transit in all parts of the bay would be a wonderful place to start. Solnit points out that by simply buying busses to drive up and down the peninsula, companies like Google (and there are many) are sidestepping what companies have often done in the past; that is, pay to develop the local transit system directly or subsidize their employees' transportation costs. The way that the South Bay has grown (read: burgeoning cities sprawling over former orchards, one at a time) didn't (and doesn't) lend itself to centralized planning. 

Honestly, though, from where I sit, half a world away, there's still an elephant in the room: engineers as they are now are not, by and large, the type of people who are creating the artsy and edgy cultures that engineers (as they are now) want to live within. Because that's what's going on, in a lot of ways--Silicon Valley's okay for work and all, but if you want art and shows and brunch and breweries and atmosphere and authenticity and soul, the prevailing belief is that you have to head to the city to find it. And if you're in the city only on evenings and weekends, working the kind of hours that are notoriously standard at places like Google, you might be able to soak some of this soul up, but you certainly won't be able to contribute to creating and nuturing it in any real way. And that doesn't seem very sustainable to me, even if the creative types and blue collar workers who make that soul a reality could afford to stick around in the first place.

As Solnit writes:

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.

A college roommate of mine who was raised in Vermont moved to the South Bay about the same time I did. And, once she began to get over the suburban shock to the system, she told me that one of the things that surprised her most was that within the strip malls that looked like they should house various branches of various chain stores, there were actually a whole bunch of small businesses and restaurants. Not completely, you understand--there's the center in Mountain View with both a Target and a Walmart--but certainly more so than in many other suburban places where I've lived. Does hip and edgy have to exist in traditionally urban environments? Should we be looking to our own neighborhoods, even if that means the theater company or gallery is in a former Indian restaurant instead of a warehouse?

And so where I come down on all this now (sitting in our lovely, overpriced Stockholm apartment in the chicest part of town that still costs less than most San Francisco rentals) is that we need to examine closely what we value about where we live, where we find it, and how we contribute to it. Without that investment and intentional cultivation, it seems to me that we end up with a constantly-shifting target of the most 'desirable neighborhood.' That sort of pattern will do little beyond exhausting and depleting these communities that we love so much.

No one engineer decides to pack up his (and it usually still is a 'he') disposable income and crazy housing budget to move to the city for any reason other than that he likes being there. No one engineer is responsible for this particular, destructive, pattern, and my hands certainly aren't clean. But I would challenge these engineers--and all the rest of us--to examine closely the impact our lifestyles have on the cities where we choose to make our lives.