Why hasn't Silicon Valley fixed the Bay Area's problems? By Justin Fox read by Danny Scott. The San Francisco Bay Area is the most affluent major urban region in the US, and it keeps getting richer. Annual real GDP growth from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty three was five point three percent in the San Jose metropolitan area and three point five percent in Metro San Francisco, compared with two point three percent nationally. The Bay Area accounted for forty six percent of US venture capital investment in twenty twenty four, its highest share ever. Not to mention that the scenery is great and the weather usually is Yet the region's population has been falling, with hundreds of thousands of residents decamping for elsewhere in California and the US since early twenty nineteen. Employment is still below its pre COVID nineteen pandemic level in the San Francisco area and only slightly above it in Metro San Jose. Prominent businesses and entrepreneurs have left, and San Francisco's commercial vacancy rate is now a highest in the nation thirty four point two percent. The city has become a byword for urban dysfunction, and while as a New Yorker who visits frequently I grew up in the East Bay, I think that's been somewhat exaggerated, it's not totally unwarranted. What exactly is going on out there. The failure to build nearly enough housing to accommodate economic growth was already a Bay Area sore spot when the population was still growing, and has clearly helped drive the emigration wave. Other perennial governance failures, mainly related to homelessness, drug addiction, and crime, have also gotten a lot of attention lately, and the sudden shift to remote work catalyzed by the pandemic and enabled by technology developed in the Bay Area, has made it a lot easier to leave. But the problem is also systemic. The economic machine that drove the Bay Area into the global economic lead isn't obviously sputtering see those GDP and VC numbers above, but it does seem to be generating more and more dissatisfaction and distrust among workers, consumers, and bystanders. The Silicon Valley only magic dust that regions around the world have been trying to get their hands on for decades could be developing some toxic side effects, or maybe they've been there all along. The dark side of Bay Area capitalism is the subject of Alexis Madrigal's The Pacific Circuit, A Globalized account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City, Farrar, Strauss and Jeru March twenty twenty five. That city being Oakland, which is hitting bookstores this month. As I read it, I realized I also really ought to finish Malcolm Harris's Palo Alto, A History of California Capitalism in the World, Little Brown and Co. Twenty twenty three, which I had started but put aside, in part because it clocks in at six hundred and thirty six pages before you get to the endnotes. These are very different books in style and approach, but their stories overlap, and both are skeptical of Silicon Valley triumphalism. Palo Alto is the symbolic heart of the modern Bay Area economy, even though Stanford University and the venture capitalists of Sandhill Road are just outside the city limits, and most of the tech giants founded there have departed in search of more space. Oakland, once the region's second biggest city, and now the third after San Jose and San Francisco is the area's perennial also ran occasionally looking like it has found a path to the center of the action, but always getting swatted aside. Oakland is also home to the region's largest black community, which is not unrelated to its outside looking in status. A wartime manufacturing and shipping boom first loured large numbers of black Southerners to the area in the nineteen forties, but those manufacturing jobs disappeared soon after, and while the Port of Oakland then pioneered the container shipping trade with Asia that constitutes a big part of the Pacific circuit. Of Madrigal's title, one of the major economic attractions of containers was that they reduced the need for port workers. Harris memorably writes that black Californians were among the first groups of American workers to face the blunt thump upside the head of de industrialization. Madrigal builds his narrative around the life of Margaret Gordon, a black woman whose parents hail from Arkansas and Texas. They meet in the East Bay in the nineteen forties and are beginning to build a middle class life in fog bounds southwestern San Francisco when progress yanks it away with Interstate two eighty grabbing a piece of their yard, and then the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority coming for their house. After a tumultuous young adulthood that involves mostly positive encounters with President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, stints at three area colleges, and brushes with radical activism during its nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies Bay Area heyday, Gordon finds herself a single mother of three, cleaning houses and living in West Oakland. The neighborhood has similarly been through a lot. The former vibrant heart of Black Oakland, it was condemned to decline by Federal Housing Administration redlining, sliced apart by freeways and an above ground bart track, and beset by exhausts spewing heavy trucks hauling containers to and from the port, Gordon became an environmental activist and for a time an Oakland Port commissioner, with the latter part of the book revolving around a political battle over whether the port should be allowed to export coal along the way. Madrigal weaves in brief histories of Silicon Valley, Cold War, US militarism, the Black Panther Party, and tech manufacturing in Asia. A former tech journalist at the Atlantic who lives in Oakland and now co hosts a daily public affairs program for San Francisco's National Public Radio station, Madrigal worked on the book on and off for nine years and has put a huge amount of shoe leather and thought into it. One definitely gets the message from the Pacific Circuit that the Bay Area's rise has caused a lot of collateral damage, But at times it's hard to tell where the story is going or what the point of all of it is. Maybe it's all one long urban crisis, never solved, only hidden, Madrigal writes near the end, and that may be as good as summation as any. With Palo Alto, there's never much doubt about where things are headed or what the author wants you to think about them. Harris is a young Marxist who grew up in the city. Disapproves of the global capitalist hegemony that to some extent originated and is directed from there, and would like to see it replaced with something else. But if you think that doesn't sound like someone capable of producing a book a non Marxist might want to read. Think Again. Harris is a brilliant storyteller, and one thing about well told tales is that the villains are often the most compelling characters. The first half of Palo Alto, which takes the reader from the Anglo conquest of California in the eighteen forties to the beginnings of the area's tech boom in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, is a propulsive narrative that doubles as a how to guide for ambitious and somewhat a moral entrepreneurs. Along the way, the reader is treated to a remarkable rehabilitation of Herbert Hoover, a member of the very first class to attend Stanford University, who is transformed in Harris's telling, from failed president to major shaper of the twentieth century, engineering the rise of everything from zoning rules to federally backed mortgage loans, to commercial aviation to radio to anti communism to nineteen sixties conservatism. Then comes the Bay Area's great political and social upheaval of the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, which Harris recounts in detail, although he's much more interested in political radicals such as the leaders of Oakland's Black Panther Party, than social ones such as novelist and hallucinogen promoter Ken Kesey, who lived in the hills near Palo Alto. There is a voluminous literature, most of it from the nineteen nineties and two thousands, devoted to explaining how Bay Area capitalism is different because of its roots in the counterculture, its tendency toward frequent reinvention, or some other appealing trait. Harris doesn't refute these accounts, but supplies a prehistory and a global political lens that suggests Bay Area capitalism may be distinctive, most of all in the relentlessness of its pursuit of profit. Once it finally gets to the post nineteen eighty triumph of the tech industry centered around Palo Alto, the book does lose some of its focus. This is mainly just because there are too many familiar success stories for the account to have the narrative coherence or revelatory feel of the first half of the book, but it's also because things happen that don't really fit Harris's framework. After nearly a century of exploiting and discriminating against Asian Americans, the Bay Area's capitalist elite begins welcoming them as members. After deploying capital in ways that degrade the environment, the area becomes a center of investment in clean energy sources that might save it. Then again, the once widespread sense that Apple and Google and Facebook were good guys out to empower their users has undeniably taken a beating over the past few years. The main character of the last part of Harris's book, The Stanford Trained Investor and Conservative, would be philosopher King Peter Teel is a figure right out of the pre counterculture history of the region and this year's arrival of Elon Musk and Washington as the bizarro second coming of Herbert Hoover, out to chainsaw the federal government to make the world safer for capitalism. Fitz Harris's framework so well that it's scary. Gary is a good word for a lot of what the tech industry is up to these days. As companies strive to move humans into virtual worlds and develop artificial general intelligence that can take over the real one. Perhaps it's no wonder that the physical places where they're doing most of this work, have lost some of their appeal

Why hasn't Silicon Valley fixed the Bay Area's problems? By Justin Fox read by Danny Scott. The San Francisco Bay Area is the most affluent major urban region in the US, and it keeps getting richer. Annual real GDP growth from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty three was five point three percent in the San Jose metropolitan area and three point five percent in Metro San Francisco, compared with two point three percent nationally. The Bay Area accounted for forty six percent of US venture capital investment in twenty twenty four, its highest share ever. Not to mention that the scenery is great and the weather usually is Yet the region's population has been falling, with hundreds of thousands of residents decamping for elsewhere in California and the US since early twenty nineteen. Employment is still below its pre COVID nineteen pandemic level in the San Francisco area and only slightly above it in Metro San Jose. Prominent businesses and entrepreneurs have left, and San Francisco's commercial vacancy rate is now a highest in the nation thirty four point two percent. The city has become a byword for urban dysfunction, and while as a New Yorker who visits frequently I grew up in the East Bay, I think that's been somewhat exaggerated, it's not totally unwarranted. What exactly is going on out there. The failure to build nearly enough housing to accommodate economic growth was already a Bay Area sore spot when the population was still growing, and has clearly helped drive the emigration wave. Other perennial governance failures, mainly related to homelessness, drug addiction, and crime, have also gotten a lot of attention lately, and the sudden shift to remote work catalyzed by the pandemic and enabled by technology developed in the Bay Area, has made it a lot easier to leave. But the problem is also systemic. The economic machine that drove the Bay Area into the global economic lead isn't obviously sputtering see those GDP and VC numbers above, but it does seem to be generating more and more dissatisfaction and distrust among workers, consumers, and bystanders. The Silicon Valley only magic dust that regions around the world have been trying to get their hands on for decades could be developing some toxic side effects, or maybe they've been there all along. The dark side of Bay Area capitalism is the subject of Alexis Madrigal's The Pacific Circuit, A Globalized account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City, Farrar, Strauss and Jeru March twenty twenty five. That city being Oakland, which is hitting bookstores this month. As I read it, I realized I also really ought to finish Malcolm Harris's Palo Alto, A History of California Capitalism in the World, Little Brown and Co. Twenty twenty three, which I had started but put aside, in part because it clocks in at six hundred and thirty six pages before you get to the endnotes. These are very different books in style and approach, but their stories overlap, and both are skeptical of Silicon Valley triumphalism. Palo Alto is the symbolic heart of the modern Bay Area economy, even though Stanford University and the venture capitalists of Sandhill Road are just outside the city limits, and most of the tech giants founded there have departed in search of more space. Oakland, once the region's second biggest city, and now the third after San Jose and San Francisco is the area's perennial also ran occasionally looking like it has found a path to the center of the action, but always getting swatted aside. Oakland is also home to the region's largest black community, which is not unrelated to its outside looking in status. A wartime manufacturing and shipping boom first loured large numbers of black Southerners to the area in the nineteen forties, but those manufacturing jobs disappeared soon after, and while the Port of Oakland then pioneered the container shipping trade with Asia that constitutes a big part of the Pacific circuit. Of Madrigal's title, one of the major economic attractions of containers was that they reduced the need for port workers. Harris memorably writes that black Californians were among the first groups of American workers to face the blunt thump upside the head of de industrialization. Madrigal builds his narrative around the life of Margaret Gordon, a black woman whose parents hail from Arkansas and Texas. They meet in the East Bay in the nineteen forties and are beginning to build a middle class life in fog bounds southwestern San Francisco when progress yanks it away with Interstate two eighty grabbing a piece of their yard, and then the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority coming for their house. After a tumultuous young adulthood that involves mostly positive encounters with President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, stints at three area colleges, and brushes with radical activism during its nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies Bay Area heyday, Gordon finds herself a single mother of three, cleaning houses and living in West Oakland. The neighborhood has similarly been through a lot. The former vibrant heart of Black Oakland, it was condemned to decline by Federal Housing Administration redlining, sliced apart by freeways and an above ground bart track, and beset by exhausts spewing heavy trucks hauling containers to and from the port, Gordon became an environmental activist and for a time an Oakland Port commissioner, with the latter part of the book revolving around a political battle over whether the port should be allowed to export coal along the way. Madrigal weaves in brief histories of Silicon Valley, Cold War, US militarism, the Black Panther Party, and tech manufacturing in Asia. A former tech journalist at the Atlantic who lives in Oakland and now co hosts a daily public affairs program for San Francisco's National Public Radio station, Madrigal worked on the book on and off for nine years and has put a huge amount of shoe leather and thought into it. One definitely gets the message from the Pacific Circuit that the Bay Area's rise has caused a lot of collateral damage, But at times it's hard to tell where the story is going or what the point of all of it is. Maybe it's all one long urban crisis, never solved, only hidden, Madrigal writes near the end, and that may be as good as summation as any. With Palo Alto, there's never much doubt about where things are headed or what the author wants you to think about them. Harris is a young Marxist who grew up in the city. Disapproves of the global capitalist hegemony that to some extent originated and is directed from there, and would like to see it replaced with something else. But if you think that doesn't sound like someone capable of producing a book a non Marxist might want to read. Think Again. Harris is a brilliant storyteller, and one thing about well told tales is that the villains are often the most compelling characters. The first half of Palo Alto, which takes the reader from the Anglo conquest of California in the eighteen forties to the beginnings of the area's tech boom in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, is a propulsive narrative that doubles as a how to guide for ambitious and somewhat a moral entrepreneurs. Along the way, the reader is treated to a remarkable rehabilitation of Herbert Hoover, a member of the very first class to attend Stanford University, who is transformed in Harris's telling, from failed president to major shaper of the twentieth century, engineering the rise of everything from zoning rules to federally backed mortgage loans, to commercial aviation to radio to anti communism to nineteen sixties conservatism. Then comes the Bay Area's great political and social upheaval of the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, which Harris recounts in detail, although he's much more interested in political radicals such as the leaders of Oakland's Black Panther Party, than social ones such as novelist and hallucinogen promoter Ken Kesey, who lived in the hills near Palo Alto. There is a voluminous literature, most of it from the nineteen nineties and two thousands, devoted to explaining how Bay Area capitalism is different because of its roots in the counterculture, its tendency toward frequent reinvention, or some other appealing trait. Harris doesn't refute these accounts, but supplies a prehistory and a global political lens that suggests Bay Area capitalism may be distinctive, most of all in the relentlessness of its pursuit of profit. Once it finally gets to the post nineteen eighty triumph of the tech industry centered around Palo Alto, the book does lose some of its focus. This is mainly just because there are too many familiar success stories for the account to have the narrative coherence or revelatory feel of the first half of the book, but it's also because things happen that don't really fit Harris's framework. After nearly a century of exploiting and discriminating against Asian Americans, the Bay Area's capitalist elite begins welcoming them as members. After deploying capital in ways that degrade the environment, the area becomes a center of investment in clean energy sources that might save it. Then again, the once widespread sense that Apple and Google and Facebook were good guys out to empower their users has undeniably taken a beating over the past few years. The main character of the last part of Harris's book, The Stanford Trained Investor and Conservative, would be philosopher King Peter Teel is a figure right out of the pre counterculture history of the region and this year's arrival of Elon Musk and Washington as the bizarro second coming of Herbert Hoover, out to chainsaw the federal government to make the world safer for capitalism. Fitz Harris's framework so well that it's scary. Gary is a good word for a lot of what the tech industry is up to these days. As companies strive to move humans into virtual worlds and develop artificial general intelligence that can take over the real one. Perhaps it's no wonder that the physical places where they're doing most of this work, have lost some of their appeal