Hello, San Francisco

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Hello, San Francisco"

The Times Tech Podcast
Host: Danny Fortson & Katie Prescott
Air date: September 24, 2024
Episode Theme:
This episode explores the paradoxes and pressures of San Francisco, examining how the tech-driven city has become a microcosm for the social, economic, and cultural upheavals tied to the tech industry’s rapid growth. Through on-the-ground interviews and expert commentary, Danny Fortson investigates what the city’s unique blend of innovation and crisis reveals about the future awaiting other global cities.

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Main Themes and Purpose

• San Francisco as a Test Lab:
  The city serves as both incubator and casualty of the tech revolution, embodying all the promise, inequality, and disruption generated by Silicon Valley.

• Unintended Consequences:
  Fortson draws a line between tech’s transformational ambitions and the local realities—soaring inequality, homelessness, a shrinking middle class, and the hollowing out of community life.

• Why It Matters:
  San Francisco’s extremes offer a warning and a preview for cities worldwide impacted by the digital revolution.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. San Francisco’s Gentrified Paradox

• Extreme Wealth vs. Visible Decay

  • Poignant visuals of daily life: Billionaires per square foot alongside dirty streets, increasing homelessness, and rampant public defecation.
    • “San Francisco is by any measure the richest city in the world, but it also has a public defecation problem and it is serious.” – Danny Fortson (01:14)
  • Quote:
    • “This place is one of the great producers of inequality in the world... this is a new gilded age and they are the railroad barons of our time.”
      — Richard Walker, Economic Geographer (02:01)

• Drastic Demographic Shifts

  • More dogs than children; families moving out, young tech workers moving in.
    • Median rent for a 1-bedroom: $3,700/month; median home price: $1.5M.
      — Michael Gibson, Venture Capitalist (07:16)
    • “There are more dogs than kids.” — Danny Fortson (07:30)

2. The Shrinking Middle—A City Divided

• Pressure on the Middle Class

  • Escalating rents driving the middle class out, leaving only elites and an expanding service underclass.
  • “San Francisco is a really powerful lesson right now, and I think there's a lot of power and control here. But I don't see it going to a place that I could call a future. If this is what dominates, then we're just going down.” — Karen Heisler, Mission Pie Owner (05:28)

• Service Economy at Extremes

  • New “service class” for tech elite: examples like doggy daycares and app-driven services highlight the lifestyle gap.
    • “There's more demand for doggy daycare than... a daycare is telling and hints at the forces at work here.”
      — Danny Fortson (09:37)

3. Civic Crisis—Homelessness & Housing Shortage

• Navigation Centers Controversy

  • Neighborhood meeting reveals intense opposition to homeless shelters, even as the need grows.
  • City bureaucracy makes new housing prohibitively slow and expensive— six years and $650–$700k per supportive housing unit; parochial politics block developments.
    • “Getting this property approved has so far taken longer than it took the United States to win World War II.” — Unnamed developer (15:27)

• Community Fracture

  • Opposing groups—NIMBY neighbors vs. billionaire-backed proponents—battle over shelter locations.
    • “The tech executives... are trying to foist onto them a problem that they helped create.” — Danny Fortson (17:23)

4. Tech’s Insular Reality & Global Influence

• Disproportionate Rewards

  • Tech campuses (e.g., Facebook) offer insular utopias—employees buffered from city’s struggles.
    • “Why would you think that anyone else is struggling in the country if that’s your daily experience?”
      — Michael Gibson (11:49)

• Platform Side-Effects

  • Decisions made in San Francisco shape global digital norms, often without grappling with local fallout.
    • “There’s something about the insularity of this town... an immature young person playing with powerful tools.”
      — Michael Gibson (11:49)

• Algorithmic Over People

  • Tech’s code-centric mindset fails to address human consequences.
    • “Silicon Valley seems to prize algorithms over the people they are meant to serve that has created a simmering resentment.”
      — Danny Fortson (22:50)
    • “Because we talk data all the time, we lose all the human stories in that.”
      — Jessica Powell, ex-Google (19:53)

5. Small Business Squeeze & Protest Movements

• Local businesses squeezed by delivery app commissions (25–30%), unable to survive without raising prices or cutting benefits.
  • “Food delivery companies... I say it as a parasitic industry.” — Karen Heisler (20:23)
• Worker protests at Uber IPO:
  • “I am 100% disposable garbage to both of them.” — Uber/Lyft Driver (21:46)

6. Personal Stories—Resilience Amid Crisis

• Mission Pie’s closure as a symbol:

  • “Was she hopeful? ‘I am not optimistic. I think we're going into a period of loss beyond anything we've seen.’”
    — Karen Heisler (23:52)

• Anubis Doherty’s Journey:

  • Formerly homeless, now housed and training as a paramedic. Reflects on the city's changing culture, expresses neither blame nor bitterness toward tech workers specifically.
    • “San Francisco is always very weird. It’s become less so now... people can't afford to live here.” — Anubis Doherty (25:55)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Insularity of Tech:

  “It's almost like an immature young person who's playing with powerful tools and doesn't quite know the responsibility that comes with power, right?”
  — Michael Gibson (11:49)

• On Urban Morality and Future:

  “If this is what dominates, then we're just going down. And I'm not ready to believe that yet.”
  — Karen Heisler (05:28)

• On the Ongoing Exodus:

  “You can't have a garage startup if the garage costs a million bucks. You can't have garage bands if the garage costs a million bucks.”
  — Michael Gibson (28:25)

• On Human Impact Behind Data:

  “Because we talk data all the time, we lose all the human stories in that.”
  — Jessica Powell (19:53)

• On Protest and Worker Vulnerability:

  “I am 100% disposable garbage to both of them.”
  — Uber/Lyft driver (21:46)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• San Francisco’s Paradoxes Introduced: 01:14–03:08
• Inequality, Exodus, and the Underclass: 04:44–06:12
• Childless City / Rise of the Dogs: 07:16–09:37
• Neighborhood Meeting on Homelessness: 12:21–17:44
• Tech’s Insular Logic and Broader Impact: 11:22–12:21, 19:07–20:56
• Mission Pie & the Small Business Squeeze: 19:59–23:52
• Personal Story—Anubis Doherty: 24:16–26:29
• Looking Ahead: The City’s Uncertain Future: 28:25–29:34

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Tone & Atmosphere

Reflective, urgent, and atmospheric. Danny Fortson weaves first-hand reporting, lightly sardonic wit, and authentic voices from across the city. The conversations range from critical to compassionate, yet the underlying mood is one of concern—San Francisco is both a city of dreamers and a cautionary tale.

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Conclusion

In “Hello, San Francisco,” Fortson delivers a layered, human-centred look at the city most emblematic of tech’s promise and peril. The episode pulls back the curtain on glossy narratives to reveal messy and unresolved realities: a glittering economic engine facing social divide, civic decay, and a frayed sense of community. The message is clear—the struggles and choices playing out in San Francisco will soon be the world’s to manage, and no app can instantly solve them.

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Required Listening For:

• Anyone interested in the intersection of technology, society, and urban life
• Listeners seeking grounded insights beyond Silicon Valley hype
• Those wanting a pulse on America’s—and the world’s—tech-fueled future

Transcript

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[Danny Fortson]

This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.

[ServiceNow Representative]

Danny One thing we keep hearing from business leaders right now is AI sounds great, but how do you actually make it work inside a company?

[Danny Fortson]

Exactly. Because most organizations aren't neat, shiny systems. They're layers of software, legacy tech and teams all doing things slight.

[ServiceNow Representative]

ServiceNow sits across all that, acting as a control tower for making work move seamlessly through the organization, connecting people, systems,

[Danny Fortson]

data and increasingly AI agents so that things don't happen in silos.

[ServiceNow Representative]

Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work

[Danny Fortson]

for [e-mail] San Francisco is by any measure the richest city in the world, but it also has a public defecation problem and it is serious. Once in a month or twice in the month, there's poop in front of my door. Do you have to clean that up yourself? Yeah, I have to clean by myself. Who? I'm gonna clean the city? No.

[Local San Francisco Resident]

People just dropping their drawers and just going wherever they stop at, right? Yeah, that is a problem. But how you gonna alleviate the problem? Portal potties are what every, every mile?

[Danny Fortson]

I don't see one around here.

[Local San Francisco Resident]

Exactly. Very good.

[Danny Fortson]

Many near misses slash might have stepped in some smears. That is the reality of living in San Francisco.

[Richard Walker]

This place is one of the great producers of inequality in the world. And because we have a kind of liberal tradition, because the tech industry is regarded as, oh, they're so enlightened and innovative, we forget that they're simply the latest generation of big capitalists, that this is a new gilded age and they are the railroad barons of our time,

[Danny Fortson]

San Francisco has received nearly 14,600 complaints about piles of poop. This new poop patrol will have a

[Michael Gibson]

staff of six plus two trucks at

[Danny Fortson]

a cost of about 700. You may be asking yourself what is happening? Stick around and I'll tell you how three seemingly Unrelated things, a whole lot of poop, some very pampered dogs, and a delicious chicken pot pie can tell you more about San Francisco than the latest app or tech ipo.

[Anubis Doherty]

Can I tell you something interesting that I've noticed about San Francisco?

[Danny Fortson]

Yes, please.

[Anubis Doherty]

It's a vortex. It's funny, you know, people when they're here, they say they don't want to be here, and then when they leave, they just always want to come back.

[Karen Heisler]

They're accelerating the creation of an underclass A service class.

[Danny Fortson]

Welcome to Tales of Silicon Valley, an eight part documentary series on the tech industry from the inside. I'm Danny Fortson, West Coast Correspondent for the Sunday Times, and this is episode four. Hello, San Francisco. Well over half of the 7.3 billion people walking the Earth today have a smartphone in their pocket, or more likely, in the palm of their hand. We live our lives through apps, and a huge number of the architects of this brave new world live here. Which is why for the next 25 minutes, we're going to take a step back from the tales of hot tub board meetings and viral websites to talk about San Francisco itself. Because just as technology shapes the world, the world shapes technology. And a lot of it is dreamt up in this little world by the bay. It's home to the titans of the gig economy, from Airbnb to Uber and Doordash, and the creators of our social media universe. Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit. Yet amid all those world changing inventions, San Francisco has descended into crisis. Anything you contribute would be helpful, sir. I don't have any change, but it's ATM right there. Atm I'm on. No, no, you're not under arrest. I'm just. I'm a journalist. I'm just.

[Richard Walker]

Oh, I'm a journalist, too.

[Danny Fortson]

Look. Hey, hey, I'm a journalist. Hey. Dope. There are more billionaires here per square foot than anywhere else on the planet. But there are also more injection drug users than high school students and the largest proportion of homeless people of any North American city.

[Karen Heisler]

One in 25 students in every classroom is homeless.

[Danny Fortson]

In our city, it's not just the dispossessed who are feeling the pressure. The middle class is fleeing to escape soaring rents, which are the highest in the world. And what they're leaving behind is an oddity. A city that increasingly is drifting toward two poles, with a privileged elite at one end and a growing underclass at the other.

[Karen Heisler]

So I think San Francisco is a really powerful lesson right now, and I think there's a lot of power and control here. But I don't see it going to a place that I could call a future. I think if this is what dominates, then we're just going down. And I'm not ready to believe that yet.

[Danny Fortson]

This place obsessed with disruption has been so successful in doing just that that it now finds itself the one that has been disrupt. Michael Gibson first noticed it when he was on vacation in Paris. He was walking the streets of the French capital when he heard something unfamiliar.

[Michael Gibson]

I like, hear this noise and I'm thinking, what is that? It's like children playing. And it felt strange to me. And I was like, why is this? And I was like, oh yeah, there's no one between the age of 4 and 18 in San Francisco because if anyone has kids, they move out.

[Danny Fortson]

Gibson is a venture capitalist who's lived in San Francisco for a decade. That moment on a Paris sidewalk struck a chord with something that he had been thinking about for a while. One sunny morning, I walked over to Gibson's office, a cramped room in a co working space near the waterfront. He had written an op ed for the National Review magazine in which he decried a lot of the things that he feels have gone wrong here. An exodus of artists and entrepreneurs, the death of the music scene, a general sapping of the energy that makes a city a city. In his words, San Francisco is committing, quote, slow motion suicide, end quote. The root of all of it, he argues, is a soaring cost of living. And I can attest, unless you make gobs of money, it's simply hard to exist here.

[Michael Gibson]

It's about $3,700 median price for a one bedroom apartment. The median price for a single family home is 1.5 million. So this is extraordinary. And what does that do to the character of a city?

[Danny Fortson]

One of the most striking casualties of this reality is kids. According to the census, San Francisco, a city of 880,000 people, has just 118,000 under the age of 18, which is the lowest ratio of any of the US's big cities. New York, a city of 8.4 million people, has 1.7 million children, which is 50% more based on population. But even stranger than the declining number of children is the rising number of dogs. The city estimates that there are at least 120,000 of them in the city. That's right, there are more dogs than kids. It could be because families are simply moving out, leaving behind those who are more likely to have a pet instead. Or perhaps it's a reflection of the influx of young professionals who are less interested in starting a family. At least for now. But what is clear is that the dog kid divide is real and manifests itself in surprising ways. For example, a friend mentioned that their gym has a doggy daycare. Like a good investigative journalist, I headed down to SF Fitness on a rainy weekday night to see for myself. I'm not a member. I have a totally random question for you. So I'm a journalist. Yeah. I'm doing a story on dogs in San Francisco.

[Karen Heisler]

Yeah.

[Danny Fortson]

And I was told that there is a doggy daycare here.

[Michael Gibson]

Yeah, There is little pup in there right now.

[Danny Fortson]

There's two of them. Usually there's like. Oh, you can see this little guy. Yeah, he's a cutie.

[Michael Gibson]

Usually comes in with a rain jacket

[Danny Fortson]

on the rainy days. Really?

[Michael Gibson]

Yeah.

[Danny Fortson]

Oh, there's one. Oh, she's tied to a weight.

[Michael Gibson]

Yeah.

[Danny Fortson]

They have to, though, because it's like

[Michael Gibson]

you can't have them running around gyms.

[Danny Fortson]

They're like doggy gyms.

[Local San Francisco Resident]

They have those.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah. What they like. There's a. I think there's a place in the city like that's called.

[Michael Gibson]

Let me see.

[Danny Fortson]

I'm so interested in this. Yeah.

[Anubis Doherty]

San Francisco is a. Is wild

[Danny Fortson]

Happy Hounds massage. Okay. The dog point, I admit, is a bit silly. But the fact that there is more demand for a doggy daycare than, you know, a daycare is telling and hints at the forces at work here. San Francisco is small, a seven square mile swatch of land wedged between the Pacific on one side and the Bay on the other. In that way, it's like a petri dish. It's the place where this GR technology experiment in which we are all participants is playing out first and crucially, where the financial rewards of all that transformation are being funneled and, yes, spent.

[Richard Walker]

Google, Facebook, they control, you know, 80% of the searches, 75% of all the social media. Facebook, they are the new platforms in which we live today. This is life. Life is electronic. It's on these platforms. They've got it. They're just raking in.

[Danny Fortson]

This is Richard Walker, an economic geographer who's written a book about San Francisco called Pictures of a Gone City.

[Richard Walker]

People don't understand, I think, how much cities are in upheaval when you get this kind of a boom. This city, this whole metropolitan area has just been turned on its head. This place, the GDP of the metropolitan area has increased almost 50% in this decade. It's astonishing. We have a quarter of our workers who make minimum wage. We have reports coming out of San Francisco Silicon Valley that 20% of the people suffer serious hunger. Their kids or the parents. 20%. This is as bad as it's been since the late 19th century.

[Danny Fortson]

So why should we care that San Francisco has no kids or is overrun with packs of well massaged dogs? The platforms on which we live are crafted and policed here. The reality on the ground here matters because in ways both direct and subtle, it seeps into the decisions that are made, the values that are prioritized, and the products that define our digital world. What happens here affects all of us.

[Michael Gibson]

You go to Facebook's campus, they have a main street that's like the main street in Disneyland. There's all you can eat food. Like why would you think that anyone else is struggling in the country if that's your daily experience? There's something about the insularity of this town and yet its ability to scale to a global level. It's almost like an immature young person who's playing with powerful tools and doesn't quite know the responsibility that comes with power, right?

[Danny Fortson]

On a balmy spring evening, I showed up at a neighborhood association meeting for District 6. It's a wealthy, heavily touristed part of the city that offers breathtaking views of the Bay Bridge. I need a dot. That's the deal. You don't get a dot.

[Karen Heisler]

You don't get a dot.

[Danny Fortson]

How disappointing.

[Karen Heisler]

You just look like press, I guess.

[Danny Fortson]

I guess.

[Michael Gibson]

Yeah.

[Karen Heisler]

So this is really just a neighborhood association meeting. It's not like a public meeting and we're way over subscribed. We have no idea who's going to walk in the door.

[Danny Fortson]

There was only one item on the agenda, a so called navigation center, which is what San Francisco calls temporary homeless shelters. The recently elected mayor, London Breed promised last year to increase the number of beds for San Francisco's homeless population, which is huge.

[Jessica Powell]

We want to take care of this young population so that they don't continue to live in this kind of situation. And so today we are proud to

[Danny Fortson]

announce in District 6 she proposed the biggest shelter yet. It's on the site of a parking lot across from the city's iconic Ferry Building. It's a gorgeous structure accentuated by a big white clock tower. They have a farmer's market there every Sunday. It's overrun with people toting overpriced produce in canvas bags and jostling to buy fresh oysters and guzzle champagne. I'll admit I've been there on a sunny day. It's glorious. Locals, as you might imagine, were furious about the mega shelter. At the meeting, city officials showed up to unveil a slightly pared down version, I met Carol, who was corralling people near the sign in desk. She supported the navigation center, but she was the minority.

[Karen Heisler]

They say they're worried about needles on the street and crazy people on the street, but they're not opposed to the homeless. But the navigation center will have a perimeter safety zone that's patrolled by the police. It'll have interior security. The people are already on the street using needles and pooping. This way they can poop inside at the potties.

[Danny Fortson]

In so many ways, the fight over the navigation center is the crystallization of San Francisco. In 2019, homelessness has become the issue in the city. The last count found that there are more than 8,000 people who are sleeping on the street. Public pooping, of course, is one of its many byproducts. Tent cities have sprung up everywhere, under overpasses and in parking lots and storefronts. It's always been a problem in San Francisco. The tech industry isn't responsible for homelessness, but it has exacerbated it. The biggest challenge, though, is Housing. Since 2008, the Bay Area has generated 700,000 new jobs, yet has only built 100,000 new housing units. That pressure has sent property values and rents soaring. San Francisco's byzantine building rules have made it worse. They were typified by one developer's six year fight to demolish a laundromat and replace it with a tower of luxury homes.

[Michael Gibson]

I applied to the city in early

[Danny Fortson]

2014 to turn my coin operated laundry into housing. Getting this property approved has so far taken longer than it took the United States to win World War II. He won his fight last year, but not before the city forced him to pay $20,000 for a 137 page report into whether the laundromat was a building of historic significance. It wasn't. Locals are given huge power to oppose developments, meaning that laws requiring up to 30% of new housing units be built for those on lower incomes, so called supportive housing, have provided little relief.

[Michael Gibson]

So right now, to build permanent supportive

[Danny Fortson]

housing in San Francisco takes upwards of six years and costs upwards of 650 to $700,000 a unit. And of course, no one wants a homeless shelter in their backyard. And the not in my backyard crowd are empowered here like nowhere else. When the mayor announced the Ferry Building navigation center, locals organized. Opponents started a GoFundMe page and quickly raised 100 grand for a legal fund. Not to be outdone, supporters started a rival page and quickly raised $175,000 pledges rolled in from several of the city's tech billionaires, including Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce and the owner of Time magazine.

[Karen Heisler]

Centers in residential neighborhoods. And with the increased enforcement, increased cleaning.

[Danny Fortson]

The meeting went on for two hours. One lady crafted a thought bubble like you see in the comic strips, it said, sounds like. And every time one of the city officials spoke, she silently held it to her temple. The meeting ended bitterly and with no solution. Can you confirm my understanding that needle

[Jessica Powell]

users will be forced to go out into the neighborhood neighborhood to use their drugs?

[Danny Fortson]

It's clear to me that the only way to get the city to compromise or change your plans at all on this is to file a lawsuit. It seems that these people resent the tech executives who they see as trying to foist onto them a problem that they helped create. Oh, I think that they're funding it because they don't want it in their neighborhood. He doesn't want one where he lives,

[ServiceNow Representative]

so why wouldn't he give money? And him giving $10,000 is like us giving a nickel.

[Danny Fortson]

It struck me that this is what is happening everywhere. I grew up in San Jose, the self styled capital of Silicon Valley. My first job in journalism two decades ago was to cover the dot com boom and bust. I've been writing about tech on and off ever since. And this is the conclusion I've come to. There's no grand nefarious plot to make us all feel bad about ourselves or to undermine democracy or screw over the little guy. The problem is that is what is happening. Why the tech industry approaches every problem from a narrow perspective. What thing can I create? What code can I write to make something work better or to beat my competitors to win? Success means making something that is used by millions or billions of people and unintended consequences, be they skyrocketing rents or political polarization, can be fixed with more code. From London to rio to Washington D.C. people are reacting, revolting against this machine into which they have often unwittingly been ingested. Jessica Powell used to be the head of press at Google and she has

[Jessica Powell]

a unique perspective because we all speak tech, because we all know how platforms work, because we all know that this is all done at scale. We would jump right past the first 50 questions that probably a journalist say, who was new to tech, might immediately ask about why does terrorist content appear here? Or how does fake news happen? Those kinds of things. And because we jump past all of that, because we all have this shared vocabulary, we Never stop and say, but wait a second, why wouldn't you have a human involved? Why is it that you're saying that it's okay to have this very, very small percentage of content? That's kind of horrific. Because what happens here is that because we talk data all the time, we lose all the human stories in that.

[Danny Fortson]

And in San Francisco, those human stories are unfolding every day.

[Karen Heisler]

We're at Mission Power, which is a small independent bakery and restaurant in San Francisco at the corner of mission and 25th.

[Danny Fortson]

I'm here at Mission Pie to speak to its owner, Karen Heisler. Heisler spent all but one of her 58 years in San Francisco. She's gained a bit of notoriety recently for taking a stand against food delivery companies like uber Eats and DoorDash.

[Karen Heisler]

Food delivery companies in their contracts with restaurants are asking for and charging a 25 to 30% commission to participate. The only way we and other restaurants can do that is to jack up prices, to even begin to get close to that. But that kind of margin from restaurants is a good year. I mean, this is a strong word, but I say it as a parasitic industry.

[Danny Fortson]

Mission Pie is the type of business you want in a city. It provides good food, gives full time employment to its workers, complete with benefits, vacation time, health coverage, and it serves a need. Yet it is caught in the middle of the revolution. We love the platforms that bring us piping hot food or delivered diapers at the click of a button, but there's a cost that is much less obvious than people living on the pavement. Let me hear you say yeah. When Uber went public in May, drivers staged protests around the world, including at the headquarters on Market street in downtown San Francisco. CEOs accountable for how they treat their workers. So when I say 1, 2, 3, you say solidarity. 1, 2, 3. Solidarity. 1, 2, 3. Solidarity. 1, 2, 3, solidarity. The IPO turns scores of rank and file coders and executives into millionaires. The drivers, on the other hand, were left out in the cold. They claim that in order to lure investors, Uber had been systematically cutting the rates that it pays for taking people from A to B. How do you feel as a driver? How do you feel Uber views you? Or Uber or Lyft? I think you do. You drive for both? Yeah, Yeah, I am 100% disposable garbage to both of them. I thought about the drivers as I sat with Heisler at the corner table of her restaurant. Her complaints were the same. She was under pressure to shift the burden to others. Either increase prices, making it harder for her neighbors to buy her pies or offer worse terms for her employees to save on costs. It is that underlying conceit that Silicon Valley seems to prize algorithms over the people they are meant to serve that has created a simmering resentment.

[Karen Heisler]

I think that's why people are fascinated by San Francisco right now, is it's rarely been so easy to see. But this is happening throughout our country and many people have been trying to bring it, you know, to call attention to that. We should probably offer seminars here so that our populace can wake up to what we're doing. But this, the feeling that you describe of insecurity and of a hollowing out of the middle, I think is affecting everybody, even those people who is not sort of at the top of the heap. I feel it and I've lived here my whole life. It's really interesting to feel insecure in my own town. My daughter, who's in her early 30s, you know, it's heartbreaking. All of the kids who I watch grow up, they kind of can't come home.

[Danny Fortson]

A rush of early afternoon pie seekers began forming a line as we spoke. Short on staff, Heisler had to get back to work, but had one last question. Was she hopeful?

[Karen Heisler]

I am not optimistic. I think we're going into a period of loss beyond anything we've seen.

[Danny Fortson]

But for Heisler was right not to be optimistic. A month after we spoke, she announced she was closing her doors for good in September. This is Anubis. How's it going?

[Karen Heisler]

This is Danny.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, a little wider, wide, I think. Oh, you're not?

[Jessica Powell]

Well, whichever side is sound, I assume

[Anubis Doherty]

it's that my name's Anubis Doherty.

[Danny Fortson]

Anubis Doherty, that's a really unique name.

[Anubis Doherty]

That's the street name, the Anubis part, not the Doherty part. That's my actual last name.

[Danny Fortson]

What's a street name?

[Anubis Doherty]

A street name is a name that is given to you on the street. And someone gave me that name because Anubis is the Egyptian God of death. And he looks like a jackal or he is a jackal. His head is that of a jackal. And my spirit animal is a jackal.

[Danny Fortson]

These days, Anubis is housed. Before he was given a subsidized apartment, he'd been on the streets for six years, prostituting himself, drug addled and panhandling.

[Anubis Doherty]

I smoked a lot of weed and I did a lot of LSD and mushrooms and other hallucinogens. It became a problem because I just become so disconnected with reality that I would need to be 5150'd which is a 72 hour hold, psychiatric hold and I've had so many of those and sometimes I'd stay at a hospital for a month.

[Danny Fortson]

Anubis has quite the deadpan delivery, even when the subject is his own brutal experience. He was born and raised in San Francisco, but he doesn't blame the tech industry or really bear any ill will to the intruders of his beloved city, even if they have transformed it.

[Anubis Doherty]

The change I saw, mostly it's just, you know, a lot more techies with money. It's really changed the culture and the vibe of the city.

[Danny Fortson]

How so?

[Anubis Doherty]

Well, San Francisco is always very weird. It's become less so now. You know, we're losing a lot of our culture just because people can't afford to live here. That's not really the techies fault. They don't control the real estate prices or the rents. They got to pay those too. They just, they just simply have the money to afford it.

[Danny Fortson]

Do you get a sense of that, like you know, the people that are living here, the techies, etc, that they, that you were treated differently as the population of the city changed?

[Anubis Doherty]

When I was homeless, yeah, oh yeah, yeah. I was treated less than human.

[Danny Fortson]

It's not all doom and gloom. Anubis is studying to be a paramedic. He's one of the lucky ones who found a way to come in off the street. But he is the exception. San Francisco can feel like the future, a utopia. Here, anything is possible. Where San Francisco leads, the world follows. But when you walk past someone shooting up in broad daylight, when you go to your favorite pie shop to find it shuttered because it's it can't afford to pay its staff feels dark. You can't help but question the price of progress. And in these moments people look for someone to blame, a target at which to direct their anger. And many times the target is the tech industry. And I think I knew why. Almost any techie I meet for my day job as a Sunday Times west coast correspondent will swear up and down that they are changing the world, bringing us closer together, making our lives better, richer, fuller. There's a clear eyed optimism, even arrogance, about bending the world to their will that is just in the air. Yet alongside that is an odd inability to deal with or even consider the fallout from the changes they are pushing to reckon with the world in which they operate. Fairly or not. It leaves the impression that perhaps all those mission statements are just marketing a cynical repackaging of what is really happening. Hailing cabs, selling ads, walking dogs. Alongside all the innovation, Silicon Valley seems to have fashioned itself something else. A tin ear. So where to from here? The doomsdayers reckon that these are San Francisco's dying days as the beating heart of the tech revolution. As a venture capitalist, Michael Gibson specializes in. In finding startups at the earliest stages, often when founders are still at school or have dropped out.

[Michael Gibson]

I think what's happening is that to create an ecosystem that has some vibrancy to it and color and energy and vitality, you can't have a garage startup if the garage costs a million bucks. You can't have garage bands if the garage costs a million bucks. And so it's not just that from my point of view, I see fewer and fewer companies, companies starting here and at the earliest stages, choosing to move here. But so on the lowest level, I see fewer companies, and I want to say I see fewer artists. I see fewer. They're like, there's no music scene here. There's no, like, like grunge emerging because there's nowhere for these people to live and, like, bust through walls and turn up the amps.

[Danny Fortson]

A rash of recent IPOs, Pinterest, Uber, Lyft, Slack has just minted a whole new crop of millionaires and billionaires who will quit their day jobs and start looking to put their riches into the next generation of dreamers. But in a city unaffordable to all but the wealthiest, Will the next generation even come to San Francisco? We would all do well to keep an eye on the city by the bay, because what happens here will tell us a lot about what is about to happen to the rest of us.

[Local San Francisco Resident]

Can you tell me a place or city that I can go to where I don't have to pay no rent? Where I could be in dope fiend and I can get free meals every day? And they told me to come to San Francisco.

[Danny Fortson]

Next week on Tales of Silicon Valley. We look to the moon and see that if you're a billionaire, the sky is not the limit.

[Michael Gibson]

People only live once, and, you know, they'd love the chance to go to space, which. Which NASA and the Russian governments would never be interested in letting people do. And they can afford it. Why shouldn't they have the pleasure of being able to do it?

[Danny Fortson]

Tales of Silicon Valley was written and narrated by me, Danny Fortson, with production by Chica Ayers at Rethink Audio. Matt hall is the executive producer for Wireless Studios. It was a Wireless Studios production for Times Newspapers. And one more thing. If you Enjoy this series, Head over to my other podcast, Danny in the Valley, where you can hear interviews with everyone from Bill Gates and Marc Andreessen to the anonymous startup founder working on what they hope will be the next big thing. That's Danny in the Valley. Wherever you get your podcasts,

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[Danny Fortson]

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