Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
San Francisco's anti-development Prop L will squeeze tech firms into a battle for survival. And nothing could be better for them.
Nov 6, 2000 | Most opponents of Proposition L, a San Francisco ballot initiative that would drastically curtail the development of new office space, declare that passage of the legislation would stab the city's Internet economy in the heart. The truth, I will argue, is the opposite. If the proposition is defeated the dot-com industry will be mortally wounded. I've made a good living from San Francisco's Internet economy, and hope to continue doing so. But the defeat of Proposition L would virtually guarantee that my industry will be force fed into oblivion.
If Prop. L fails, I can already see myself joining a high-tech diaspora from this city, displaced with my colleagues to cities where the new economy is just as vital, but where the rent is cheaper and the quality of life more comfortable. Some of these places may even have a worthwhile live music and arts scene. (I seem to remember moving to San Francisco for those very things, when those still existed -- but that seems like a long time ago.)
Meanwhile, developer lobbyists and city officials (with Mayor Willie Brown at the vanguard) have marshaled over two million dollars to defeat Proposition L next week.
The measure would curtail rampant office development in general, while prohibiting it altogether in districts like the Mission. With its promise to close off zoning loopholes which enable high-tech office projects to pretend they're "light industrial" concerns, developers and City Hall initiates do not like Prop. L, not one bit.
To the extent that my Internet peers are aware of Prop. L at all, they believe, paradoxically, that L is a measure aimed against them and their livelihoods. Indeed, Salon's Damien Cave calls Prop L an "anti-dot-com development" measure.
This misapprehension is no doubt fueled by anti-"dotcommie" rhetoric from some of the more ideologically extreme anti-gentrification activists, who comprise Prop L's core constituency.
But the only beneficiaries of L's defeat would be office building and "live/work" developers, who'd continue to gorge on business space at an exponential rate. In all this, it's disappointing to see Mayor Brown, an otherwise exemplary figure of Californian panache, devolve into someone more akin to "The Simpsons"' blustering Mayor Quimby. Mesmerized by the whirl of new technology, he seems hellbent on forfeiting his city to an industry with even less reliability than the Springfield monorail.
If Prop. L fails, hundreds of thousands of feet in office space will be shot into the city's production queue. These spaces will be occupied by tens of thousands of tech workers -- most of whom are not current residents of San Francisco. They will need a place to live, and the fight for housing on this tiny sliver of land, already savage, will break into outright class war, dragging all but the most extravagantly paid Internet employees into the melee. Rents will continue to skyrocket and those who can't afford the bill, like artists and musicians, will continue to flee the city.
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