Eye on the Web: So Many Web Geeks, So Little Space

Andrea Dudrow

The 1980s, as I understand it, were a boom time in this fair country. Young masters of the universe crowded New York City fern bars to swap business cards and stock-market tales. Kids just out of college were making millions as investment bankers. The housing market heated up as a moneyed younger class sought the right apartments to match their incomes. And a host of exclusive nightclubs and fancy restaurants cropped up to provide the newly wealthy with a place to show it.

In the ’80s I was a Baltimore high school student who had never been to a fern bar, or swapped a business card, or tried to rent an apartment in a housing crunch. But now it’s 2000, and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’ve got a pretty good idea of what it must have been like in 1980s New York City. Because, thanks to the Internet, San Francisco is the new boom town.

New Year
In San Francisco young multimedia designers crowd Web site launch parties to swap business cards and tales of interface design. Kids just out of college are making millions as employee number two of a successful dot-com. The housing market has heated to the point of boiling as a moneyed younger class displays its willingness to pay $2,000 a month for one-bedroom apartments. And a host of exclusive nightclubs and fancy restaurants has cropped up to provide the newly wealthy with something to do.

No place has been more profoundly affected by the Internet boom economy (the Internet bubble economy to some) than the Bay Area. This, with the possible exception of Seattle and New York’s so-called Silicon Alley, has been ground-zero for the digitizing of the economy (not to mention every other aspect of our lives). I’ve met dozens of bright young college graduates who tell me they moved to San Francisco specifically for the glut of new-media jobs available here. A Palo Alto greasy spoon that a friend used to eat at as a child is the new hot spot for venture capital deals. And I’ve seen dozens of small businesses eradicated from whole downtown blocks that are then turned into huge offices for dot-coms. There’s no getting around it. For better or for worse, this place is changing.

Just how much the Bay Area is changing was driven (quite literally) home to me as I watched Friends reruns on TV a little while back. A commercial for a luxury car came on and the background music was a Breeders track. It was a relatively obscure song from a very short-lived band (they only put out two albums), but one that was wildly popular among the college kids in the early nineties — that is, most of today’s dot-com executives. These people aren’t yet 30 years old, and in a different world, they’d be saving up for their first Ford Focus. But today they are the target audience for a $30,000 luxury vehicle. Pretty crazy.

And here’s something even crazier: I heard a bit on NPR a couple of weeks ago about a therapist who caters exclusively to dot-com millionaires who, with the recent Internet economy hiccup, have found themselves a bit less rich than before. The basic thrust was that they suddenly couldn’t afford the million-dollar house and were consequently plagued by feelings of inadequacy. Not entirely surprising when you consider that these are generally young people who haven’t had the experience of being a less affluent, working class adult.

Unfortunately, the plight of these suddenly not-so-rich executives may become a familiar one. With dot-com businesses already consolidating (such as the pet products sites and the online grocers), and becoming rich on your company’s IPO no longer such a viable option (a friend whose stock options at a well-funded start-up would have netted her all of $300 by the time she vested recently told me that the IPO is a thing of the past), it’s unclear what will happen to all the bright young adults flooding into the Bay Area.

Cannonball
Conversely, if the Internet economy doesn’t settle down soon, it’s unclear what will happen to the Bay Area itself. Already in the midst of an all-out housing crisis (due in part, according to a recent SF Weekly article, to the city’s own rent control laws), San Franciscans are sharply divided between the dot-com growth proponents and those who favor a slower, more neighborhood-centric approach to the current economic boom. San Francisco’s Prop M, passed in 1986, sets a cap on new office space in the city per year, a cap that has already been reached this year, for the first time ever. So far, dot-com businesses have been exempt because of a legal loophole, but an amendment to Prop M due on the ballot in the next election seeks to fix that.

And perhaps none too soon: Macromedia is already planning a new office in the residential Potrero Hill district that would take up an entire city block and include a 500-car garage. Still, while Macromedia may have gotten fat feeding the Internet economy, it at least has actual products and is therefore more likely to be around in ten years. I often wonder what will befall the corporate offices for the dot-coms occupying similarly large spaces in downtown San Francisco, given that a good many seem certain to fail.

Even if we do manage to maintain the dot-com economy in the Bay Area at its present saturation, as almost anyone will agree is unlikely, who will be left in the city to fill the service industry jobs? I’ve seen a frightening number of help wanted signs in the windows of cafes and retail stores lately. These are the kinds of jobs that everyone I knew (myself included) depended on when I first moved here. The sad day may already be here when those jobs simply don’t pay enough to buy a life in San Francisco.

Myself, I have mixed feelings about the Internet economy. I like to see talented young people have the wealth of opportunity that this economy is affording them, but I also want to live in a diverse city where traditional artists and bohemian types, not to mention blue collar workers, have a place as well (San Francisco was the home of the beatniks, after all). Dot-com and computer money, and the opportunities inherent in a young work force, have given me the opportunity to live the kind of life I’ve always wanted. But I still want the twenty-something wannabe deejay daytime Web engineer who lives upstairs from me to go back where he came from. And I especially want to wake up in ten years to a healthy, thriving Bay Area, and not one filled with empty, hulking, dot-com office buildings.

Read more by Andrea Dudrow.