Turns out S.F. doesn’t blame the tech bros for ruining the city, Chronicle poll finds
CAROLYN SAID Sep. 16, 2022 Updated: Sep. 16, 2022 2:20 p.m. Comments Loathing tech workers seems ingrained in San Francisco culture, as much as mocking under-clad tourists in August.
Except, it turns out, many San Franciscans don’t really hate the techies.
A San Francisco Chronicle/SF Next poll of more than 1,000 city residents showed that people who believe the influx of tech companies and workers benefits the city outnumber those who think their presence is detrimental. Overall, 41% of the surveyed residents said that tech companies and workers are a good thing, compared to 25% who said they were a bad thing and 34% who picked neither good nor bad.
“It’s not the tech bros who ruined out city; it’s the antigrowth NIMBYs,” said David Levine, 55, who lives in the Presidio with his wife and two kids (one now off to college) and recently launched a small e-commerce business after 30 years in the financial-information industry. “It’s 50 years of accretion of regulations and laws (that make it hard to build housing). It’s knuckle-headed thinking.”
The SF Next poll, conducted in late June and July, posed some 90 questions about aspects of life in San Francisco to a random sample of 1,653 residents who reflect the city’s demographics.
About the poll SF Next logo As part of the SFNext project to help San Francisco residents solve some of the city’s problems, we polled more than 1,650 people to measure attitudes on what’s working, what isn’t, performance of city government, the future of the city and more.
Send feedback, ideas and suggestions to sfnext@SFChronicle.com
More poll news Poll methodology More on SFNext @SFNext on Twitter The ‘Fixing Our City’ podcast Data and facts index Newsletter The specific poll question read: “As you know, during recent decades, tech companies have set up new offices in the city of San Francisco, and many people living here are now working for those companies. Would you say that overall, this has been a good thing for the people living in the city, a bad thing, or neither good nor bad?”
Levine was among the respondents who see tech’s flourishing as positive.
“Economic growth is crucial to the success of anywhere,” he said. “The tech boom is a great thing for people. The growth of that industry has created jobs for people in it and people around it. The city has benefited from all the money that those people earn and spend locally. It’s your classic economic multiplier effect.”
Ted Egan, San Francisco chief economist, had similar thoughts, and data to back it up.
“There is no doubt that tech has really transformed the city’s economy,” which was slow-growing before the tech surge, he said. “San Francisco has had much faster economic growth than the country as a whole. For many people in San Francisco, the growth of the tech industry led to broad benefits.”
The city’s GDP — the value of all goods and services produced — grew an average of 7.1% per year from 2011 to 2019 (with a pandemic drop of 0.8% in 2020), Egan said.
The share of San Francisco jobs in tech grew from 3.6% in 2006 to 18.7% in 2021, Egan said. Looking at tech’s share of the private-sector payroll, the trajectory is even steeper: It went from 5.4% of payroll in 2006 to 32.8% in 2021.
Tech’s prosperity boosts the city’s general fund. In 2021-22, San Francisco collected $1.27 billion in business taxes, more than triple the $354 million in 2009-10, Egan said. Some business tax laws were changed during this time.
Tech also cushioned the pandemic downturn. Office industries, which tech dominates, have added 50,000 jobs since the start of the pandemic; all other industries lost 60,000 jobs in the same time period, Egan said. However, it’s unclear how many of those jobs are currently remote versus inside an office building.
Salesforce Tower puts on a light show as the fog returns after a brief storm earlier in the day in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, August 17, 2022. Salesforce Tower puts on a light show as the fog returns after a brief storm earlier in the day in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, August 17, 2022.Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The Chronicle Despite all its economic upside, the tech industry is still criticized for spreading its benefits to an affluent few — as evidenced by start ups’ initial public offerings that mint many new millionaires in San Francisco.
Poll respondent Alexandra Gonzalez, an 18-year-old San Francisco native, criticized former Mayor Ed Lee for championing “millions and millions of dollars of tax breaks” approved in 2011 to tech companies, like Twitter in the Mid-Market area, in a bid to create jobs. She doesn’t feel that existing residents benefited.
“It created jobs for outside, out of state people to just come in, take all the money, take our homes, take our opportunities,” she said. “The gentrification has drastically impacted the entire city.”
Today, many of those Mid-Market tech workers have left the city thanks to remote work, and Twitter is downsizing its office space.
Yet, as tech’s footprint in the city may be shrinking, its influence in San Francisco politics is not. From Silicon Valley wealth funding recall elections to tech-influenced groups like GrowSF influencing the issues on ballots, tech’s reach extends beyond the simple economics of high salaries and whimsical lifestyles.
It’s partly why some residents had mixed feelings about tech.
Survey respondent Jan Masaoka, 69, fell into the “neither good nor bad camp.” The Noe Valley resident, who is CEO of the California Association of Nonprofits, has lived here since 1972.
“I like the prosperity that it’s brought,” she said of the tech industry. “A constant influx of young people is really important to maintain.”
But that’s a double-edged sword. Too many new people flooding the city can overwhelm an infrastructure that best handles about 750,000 people, she said. And she feels that too much of the tech money is concentrated among too few individuals and has exacerbated wealth disparities.
Austen Coles, 28, has lived in San Francisco since she came to work with Teach for America seven years ago. She now teaches special ed at an adult continuation school.
She was torn about whether to say tech company influence has been a negative, or neither good nor bad.
“There are so many more residents of the city who could get into those tech fields, but I don’t feel like there’s a lot of effort from the tech companies to recruit locally,” she said.
And the high tech salaries fuel the spiraling cost of housing, Coles said. She was just able to afford her first place without roommates, an $1,800 studio in Portola/Visitacion Valley.
She’s noticed that new businesses, such as restaurants and bars, seem as if they are trying to cater to a tech crowd “with a big emphasis on how cool, modern and sleek” they are.
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How the poll was conducted
The survey results varied by demographics. Men, Asian-Americans, seniors, people earning more than $200,000 and homeowners were more strongly in the “good thing” camp.
Among men, 48% were pro-tech, versus 22% saying it was a bad thing and 29% picking neither. Age-wise, people over 65 felt the most strongly that tech was beneficial, with 48% saying yes, 15% saying no and 36% neutral. Asian-American respondents were 50% in favor, 17% opposed and 32% neutral, similar to the breakdown for people earning more than $200,000 and homeowners.
Levine, who has lived in San Francisco since 2000, said that the city should consider a cautionary tale of what happens if the dominant industry contracts.
“If there was no growth, we’d be Detroit,” he said.
Chronicle staff writers Roland Li and Mallory Moench contributed to this report.
Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
Details on the survey’s methodology are here .
Photo of Carolyn Said Written By Carolyn Said Reach Carolyn on Carolyn Said, an enterprise reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, covers transformation: how society, business, culture, education and other institutions are changing. Her stories shed light on the human impact of sweeping trends. As a reporter at The Chronicle since 1997, she has also covered the on-demand industry, the foreclosure crisis, the dot-com rise and fall, the California energy crisis and the fallout from economic downturns.