CityReads│San Francisco Bay Area: Beyond the Tech and Prosperity

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San Francisco Bay Area: Beyond the Tech and Prosperity

To learn about the past, present and future of the San Francisco Bay Area, the capital of the digital age，read Richard A. Walker’s new book, Pictures of a Gone City.

Richard A. Walker，2018. Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area, PM Press, reviewed by Martin Nicolaus.

Sources: http://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/05/16/pictures-of-a-gone-city-by-richard-walker-paints-vivid-learned-portrait-of-the-bay-area

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/07/the-dark-side-of-the-silicon-gold-rush/564140/

https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Gone-City-Prosperity-Francisco/dp/1629635103

Pictures of a Gone City is the culmination of the life’s work of Richard A. Walker, a professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley. A student of the great Marxist geographer David Harvey, Walker brings a profoundly historical approach to his scholarship. His lens spans economics, urban design, politics, and the environment. Walker has lived and worked in the Bay Area for most of his life. Walker has a wealth of experience writing about the area; he has published three books on California since 1990 on topics ranging from agribusiness to conservation of ecology.

Richard A. Walker

Walker’s new book is urban geography for our times. This book rests on the claim that the San Francisco metropolis is one of the most important places in the world today. It illuminates the basic crisis and contradiction of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is an example of capitalism at its most innovative and dynamic, and simultaneously the site of severe inequality and failing public policies and infrastructure. This book talks about topics ranging from the real geographic definition of the Bay Area, to its history of innovation (stretching back to the Gold Rush days), to the contemporary movements that might help the Bay Area reclaim its radical roots.

The Bay Area is rarely listed among the top global cities because it has only one-third of the population of monster urban regions like Tokyo. The San Francisco metropolis is a place of virtually unparalleled prosperity and dynamism in our time, and its global connections and influence are far out of proportion to its size. As the global heartland of the new information technology, what comes out of the Bay area affects the daily lives of the billions of people. The Bay region is one of the prime generators of new wealth on the planet, and home to many of the largest and richest corporations astride the globe. It is, moreover, a place in the vanguard of many political and cultural movements, sending forth ideas that are changing life far beyond its borders. It is the best hope for capitalism and its promise of human progress and an ever-better future.

Like London in the 18^th century, Paris in the 19^th century and Detroit in the early 20^th century, it is a city that captures the imagination of an era and embodies the spirit of the times. As the capital of the digital age it is a key player in the 21^st century and a place to be taken very seriously.

Yet the Bay Area reveals the perils of capitalist prosperity in the midst of a world-beating economy and a digital information revolution, the bay region suffers from a host of persistent problems, such as wildly gyrating growth, shamefully unaffordable housing, ghastly homelessness, a plethora of low-wage work, and severe air pollution. These are the inseparable parts of the social machinery that delivers the goods, creates the jobs, and grows the city. These are endemic diseases of the body politic which cannot be cured without reconfiguring the economy, the urban system, and the class structure that breeds them.

The book is divided into three parts. Part Ⅰlays the foundation of the political economy of the region: the astonishing growth of the vanguard tech sector in chapter 1, the broader division of the labor and uneven development in chapter 2, the enrichment of the elite and widening social divide in chapter 3, and the world of work and workers in chapter 4. In part Ⅱ, the book pivots through three chapters on the geography and built environment of the metropolis. The rush to build up the city centers features in chapter 5, the housing bubble and its malignant effects in chapter 6, and the outward explosion of the city-region in chapter 7. Part Ⅲ shifts from the spatial to the temporal to consider the future prospects of the metropolis in three regards. Chapter 8 looks at whether the green legacy of the region can survive in the face of so much growth, chapter 9 reflects on the futuristic and sometimes unhinged ideas of the leading thinkers of Tech World, and chapter 10 wraps things up by considering the future of the Bay Area’s progressive politics.

The “Gone City” in the title comes from a 1951 poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Pictures of a Gone World.” It’s a bit misleading, in that neither Ferlinghetti nor Walker are mourning the loss of a real or imagined better world in the past. What’s “gone” after reading the works — and this applies both to the poem and the treatise — is the illusion of untarnished beauty and glimmering perfection in the present.

Walker doesn’t stint in painting the positives. His is a broad canvas, covering the 12-county greater Bay Area and sometimes much further beyond, as befits a region with dense national and international connections.

At the center of the picture is Tech World — the industry that employs only about one tenth of the region’s working population but touches billions of lives every day. One sixth of all patents issued in the US originate in the Bay Area, twice as many as New York. In terms of its Gross Domestic Product, the Bay Area alone would rank among the top 20 countries in the world. It has been the primary growth engine for the state of California, which itself is the fifth-largest economy in the world, greater than France and Brazil. Of all US regions, the Bay Area has made the fastest recovery from the Great Recession of 2008. Walker marshals a broad range of indicators to underline the stellar achievements of the Bay Area economy, led by tech. In his words, it is “capitalism’s shining star today.”

The top fifth of wage earners are also doing well, although not in the same league as the upper handful. They earn about five times as much as unskilled workers, a much higher ratio than nationwide. They are almost entirely white, with a few Asians, fewer women, and almost no African Americans. But their numbers are shrinking slightly, and the numbers of the middle third are definitely shrinking.

These bright lights sharpen the contrast with the dark side. There is plenty of it, starting with wealth inequality. The top 1% has become vastly more wealthy. The top half of 1% takes home more than 20% of state income, a ratio that is markedly more skewed than in the rest of the country. The Bay Area has more high net worth individuals and more billionaires per capita than any other city, including New York.

There are other contradictions. The Bay Area is famously liberal, with a long history of labor militancy which Walker reviews in colorful detail. Not only labor, but civil rights, feminism, immigrant rights, gay and lesbian rights, Native American and other movements marked the Bay Area as the proverbial “Left Coast.”

The bottom stratum of the workforce are paid less than half of the regional average. A majority of them are women and/or minority, including recent immigrants. Two thirds are paid the minimum wage. Benefits like pensions and health care are mostly not in their reach. The poverty rate is close to 20% by federal measures, higher by other indicators. One in four people in the Bay Area is at risk of hunger. By the Gini coefficient, a measure of social inequality, the Bay area is on a par with Guatemala.

But the most reactionary and punitive vision of criminal justice nationwide also originated in large part in California. California’s gulag is the largest in the world both in absolute numbers and per capita, and its most crushing weight falls on young men of color.

Wages of the upper sections of the tech industry are higher here than equivalent jobs elsewhere in the country. These incomes are possible because the tech industry floats on a flood of capital extracted from huge numbers of underpaid workers in places like China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and others. With these inflated incomes, the tech professionals drive up housing prices and gentrify formerly affordable neighborhoods.

In a lengthy and detailed analysis, Walker contends that a ballooning of housing demand from several sources to demented proportions is the main cause of the housing crisis. The same dynamic that creates enormous wealth at one extreme generates swelling numbers of homeless people at the other. We are living through the worst housing crisis in Bay Area history, says Walker.

A homeless encampment in San Fracisco. Via the San Francisco Chronicle

One byproduct is freeways choked with commuters driving hours back and forth to work every day, creating the fourth worst traffic congestion in the world. Central city budgets, once strapped to the minimum, are enjoying a revival. Outlying towns have trouble scraping up the means for the most basic services.

What we have seen in this millennium, Walker shows, is a historic reversal of the postwar white flight to the suburbs. The children of the suburbs, money in hand, have rediscovered the civilized joys of center-city living: brew pubs, nouvelle cuisine, entertainment venues, bicycling, light rail, gaslight retro districts, and all the rest of it. At the same time, the children of inner-city residents are being squeezed out by high home prices and exorbitant rents, and are fleeing to the suburbs and exurbs where housing is cheaper.

Walker’s  take on the Bay area is decidedly leftist. He is convinced that these classic ideas, such as capitalism, working class, ruling class, ideology, and exploitation, still reveal essential aspects of the contradictions of our present time. The Bay Area is, indeed, a wonderful world if your place in the new Gilded Age is secure; but it looks a lot more hostile if you drive an Uber car though massive traffic jams or cannot find a decent rental within fifty miles of your job. And it appears positively ghastly from the perspective of a homeless person on the sidewalks of San Jose or a young black man facing police armed to the teeth in Oakland. So much has changed since 1950, but the city by the bay is, despite so many good people and ferocious struggle, still far from a shining City on a Hill in terms of equality and social justice, planning and democracy and private virtue and the public good.

With a historical perspective going back to the Gold Rush and a scope covering the entire region, concentrating on the world’s most advanced industry, and surveying a complex, ever-developing diversity of people, Pictures of a Gone City is a masterwork. Although deeply learned, the book is free of jargon and “academese.” Walker writes for the educated general reader. Gone City belongs in the library of every person who wants to know in rich and colorful detail what the amazing Bay Area is really about.

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