Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley

by Cary McClelland

Overview

A Stanford University Three Books Selection for 2019

An intimate, eye-opening portrait of San Francisco transformed by the tech boom.

San Francisco is changing at warp speed. Famously home to artists and activists, and known as the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movement, in recent decades the Bay Area has been reshaped by Silicon Valley, the engine of the new American economy. The richer the region gets, the more unequal and less diverse it becomes, and cracks in the city’s facade—rapid gentrification, an epidemic of evictions, rising crime, atrophied public institutions—have started to show.

Inspired by Studs Terkel’s classic works of oral history, writer and filmmaker Cary McClelland spent several years interviewing people at the epicenter of the recent change, from venture capitalists and coders to politicians and protesters, from native sons and daughters to the city’s newest arrivals. The crisp and vivid stories of Silicon City’s diverse cast capture San Francisco as never before.

The book opens with a longtime tour guide recounting the history of the original Gold Rush and observing how little the people of his city pay attention to its history; it ends on Fisherman’s Wharf, with the proprietor of an arcade game museum reminding us that even today’s technology will become relics of the past. In between we hear from people who have passed through Apple, Google, eBay, Intel, and the other big tech companies of our time. And we meet those who are experiencing the changes at the grassroots level: a homeless advocate in Haight-Ashbury, an Oakland rapper, a pawnbroker in the Mission, a man who helped dismantle and rebuild the Bay Bridge, and a woman who runs a tattoo parlor in the Castro.

Silicon City masterfully weaves together a candid conversation across a divided community to create a dynamic portrait of a beloved city—and a cautionary tale for the entire country.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393608793
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/09/2018
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Cary McClelland is a writer, filmmaker, lawyer, and rights advocate whose work has taken him around the world. He met his wife in San Francisco, where they settled down and built their first home. They now live in Brooklyn with their son.

Table of Contents

Introduction xv

Overture

Joe Massey, tour guide 3

Part I The New Gold Rush

Regis McKenna, public relations guru 12

Hendrik Dahlkamp, engineer 18

Coco Conn, technologist and teacher 22

Tim Draper, venture capitalist 24

Colin Rule, startup founder 27

Lisa Chu, college student 32

Charles Carter, landscape architect 35

Caille Millner, journalist 37

Part II The Soul of the City

Sami Rahul, cable salesman 47

Paul Gillespie, cabdriver 48

Elaine Katzenberqer, publisher 55

Carol Queen, sexologist 58

Do D.A.T., emcee 61

Edwin Lindo, native son 64

Margaret Zhao, corporate lawyer 69

Idexa, tattoo artist 71

Bill Fisher, pawnbroker 74

Lyman Hollins, former longshoreman 76

Part III The Balkanization of the Bay

Richard Walker, geographer 84

Alex Kauffmann, designer 87

Leslie Dreyer, artist/activist 92

Matt Gonzalez, former president of the Board of Supervisors 98

Ron Conway, angel investor 100

Saad Khan, entrepreneur 103

Leon Fikiri, Uber driver 107

James Williams, farmer 116

Saul Griffith, environmentalist/inventor 119

Tim Draper, venture capitalist (cont'd) 123

Regis McKenna, public relations guru (cont'd) 125

Part IV The Breakdown

Titus Bell, former drug dealer 132

Amanda Machado, teacher 135

Tony Sagrado, juvenile advocate 139

Christian Calinsky, once homeless 145

Maya Williams, ER doctor 149

Joyce and Eddie, wildfire survivors 152

Rob Gitin, youth counselor 156

Sammy Nunez, community organizer 163

Titus Bell, former drug dealer (cont'd) 166

Part V If We Can Merge the Two Worlds

Nicole Sanchez, diversity expert 172

Charles Carter, landscape architect (cont'd) 176

Coco Conn, technologist and teacher (cont'd) 178

Saul Griffith, environmentalist/inventor (cont'd) 181

Ron Conway, angel investor (cont'd) 185

Navida Butler, "Momma" 188

Maria Guerrero, cafeteria worker and organizer 192

Andrew Fremier, civil servant 200

Part VI A Sixth Sense of Right and Wrong

Karen Cusolito, artist 210

Pamela Weiss, Zen Buddhist 213

Michael Santos, reformer 216

Oliver and Allen, parents 220

Saad Khan, entrepreneur (cont'd) 226

Edwin Lindo, native son (cont'd) 230

Coda

Dan Zelinsky, antique arcade owner 237

Acknowledgments 241

Editorial Reviews

10/01/2018
Writer and filmmaker McClelland showcases the voices of a wide swath of Bay Area residents in this compilation of interviews detailing the transformation of San Francisco from hippie paradise to techie playground. The Bay Area, McClelland writes, used to be a place where communities were formed, not broken. From the black middle class of the Fillmore to the beat poets in North Beach, marginalized people flocked to San Francisco and came together. With the tech boom, McClelland writes, the peninsula’s fragile ecosystem has come under threat from young white tech bros who are slowly hollowing out the city’s soul, making it harder than ever for teachers, sanitation workers, and even doctors to afford living in the city. The book consists of six thematically arranged sections of interviews with Bay Area residents, reproduced seemingly verbatim. The interview subjects, who include a newly arrived software engineer, a longtime cab driver, and a union organizer, tell fascinating stories, but the book’s apparently random choice of subjects and lack of authorial interpretation can leave the reader adrift. The brief expository pieces that introduce each section give only limited direction. McClelland provides an open-ended, glimpse into the lives of several San Francisco residents, but readers looking for a comprehensive take on the city’s vast transformation will be disappointed. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"McClelland has undertaken a herculean feat of sociological cataloguing, and offers an ambitious, thorough look at a city that seems to be ripping at the seams."

Bookforum - Luisa Rollenhagen

"Tales of the city for the boom time."

San Francisco Chronicle - Stephen Philips

"Essential…A conflicted and complex portrait of a city starving for solutions."

San Francisco Chronicle - Brandon Yu

"Thought-provoking…McClelland captures personal snapshots of the changes wrought on San Francisco by the tech industry."

Booklist

"With dazzling omniscience, Silicon City delivers the voices of the people, each one sharing their own understanding of the city, like an oral history of the present…An almost poetic picture of San Francisco that proves the world isn’t as simple—or as discouraging—as it’s often made out to be."

The New Stack - David Cassel

"McClelland weaves together a narrative of a region under siege by the economic forces of tech, gentrification, and inequality…A refreshing perspective."

Oakland Magazine

2018-08-20

Whither San Francisco? The way of all places, it seems, overrun by high tech and big money, the familiar villains of this oral history-based portrait.

By many accounts, San Francisco is the engine of a new kind of economy, one driven by young tech workers from all over the country who need only fast transportation and good bars to stay happy. What about the other workers? Writes documentary filmmaker McClelland, "as if radiating from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, economic pressures are pushing whole communities outward." This is especially true of the elderly and the poorer working class, who simply cannot afford to live in the places where they work. Some of the older bohemian types whom the author interviews lament the passing of times when the place sported "a wild group of people…[who] knew that money doesn't drive everything." There are a few moneyed, techie types aboard, of course, including a pioneer of the self-driving car who has a cleareyed vision of "cool systems that bring us further as a society," just as there are representatives of the various intellectual schools, mostly of the left, that have long characterized the region. Notes one, "a few hundred thousand professionals may think they make the Bay Area great, but they forget about all the people doing the other work," from cooking the food to driving the subway to taking care of the kids, all of whom could do better for their buck almost anywhere else in the country. The descriptions are long and the prescriptions few, but it's striking how many of McClelland's respondents, no matter what their work or background, are concerned with building a better, more equitable city. The book is firmly in the Studs Terkel tradition of first-person-based explorations of working-class life; if it lacks some of Terkel's literary and sociological power, it's still a solid contribution to popular urban studies.

Students of inequality and demographics will find powerful anecdotal evidence for how the changing cityscape brings both harm and good.

Kirkus Reviews

"A people’s history of the Bay Area.… McClelland carefully layers each dot, each narrative, and with it, a little window into the Bay Area widens until you step back and see it: the full picture."

Mercury News - Erin Baldassari

"Silicon City should be San Francisco’s next big city-wide read.… It should be required reading for every employee of Twitter and Salesforce. Google and Facebook employees should climb aboard their comfy buses bound for Silicon Valley one fine sunny morning and find a copy on their seats. At the very least, McClelland should send a copy to each of the 11 members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors."

Fast Company - Katie Hafner

"McClelland weaves together a narrative of a region under siege by the economic forces of tech, gentrification, and inequality… A refreshing perspective."

Oakland Magazine - Francesco Guerrieri