Author: Paul Lyons

Cities always go through changes. These changes are viewed in broad strokes like the tide. It rolls in and out and somehow all the details are lost in the generalities. Here are some of the details with the tech invasion of 2015 in San Francisco.

In San Francisco, one thing is for certain. In 2015, it is very expensive to find a place to live. Busloads of young tech workers have moved to San Francisco and everyday they ride the large, usually plain white, employer-provided buses back and forth to Silicon Valley. Their generally high wages have pushed rents up in San Francisco to insane levels. The local folks have been hanging on for dear life but many have been pushed out to Oakland and beyond. Rent increases. Shady landlords. Better housing opportunities inland. If you are an artist or musician scraping by a living, it is really tough.

These “Google Buses” have many consequences. Besides the increase in cost of living they have the effect of turning places like Valencia Street into something like Walnut Creek. Bedroom communities where people do not actually live in the neighborhood but basically just sleep there, come home exhausted to their modern million dollar 600 square foot condo, then occasionally go out to eat at one of the fancy new restaurants with white table cloths that have sprung up. Maybe hit a SOMA bar.

From a telephone pole in Potrero Hill in San Francisco

It is indeed a strange irony that the tech workers actually have little understanding of the actual history of cultural dynamics of the neighborhoods they have invaded. I know this from simply going to Carnival in the Mission and seeing very few of them. Or witnessing “The Box” try to schedule out the local kids out of their pick up soccer games at the Mission Playground. The tech workers have yet to bring anything culturally to the equation. But with all the building, if you are in the trades, you are doing well.

Not a Tech Worker in Sight Here at Carnival 2015

What I also find very interesting about these new tech workers and these buses is just how vanilla every thing is. The commuters stand in line waiting for their bus, staring morosely at their iPhones, rarely interacting with one another. They then get in their massive buses, like the tour bus B.B. King would ride, but it is all white and definitely does not say B.B King on the sides. The fact that these buses do not have any marketing on the sides is indeed strange. Companies like Google have made their billions by marketing and advertising. You would think a bus going down the roads and highways of one the most expensive places in the world would garner some advertising revenue. But in the end Google and LinkedIn probably decided to that being incognito with the buses was more important. Keep peace with the natives. But there is no hiding. When you ride your bike down Valencia during commute hours, these Google Buses travel in herds.

Furthermore, I do not find anyone of these commuters documenting this commute. Do a Google search. Nothing. No one is blogging about this who actually does the commute. With all the publishing tools at their disposal, what a bunch of bores.

A few months ago a friend asked me what I would recommend to some newly arrived tourist who were interested in touring Silicon Valley. You see, for outsiders there is this sense that Silicon Valley and billionaires being made in this very dynamic environment. I told him it probably is not that exciting. It is usually a lot of people not interacting with each other, simply staring into computers in a nondescript office building. Perhaps in meetings trying to figure out how to position a product that does very little as something you absolutely have to have. I suggested to my friend that their visitors should simply try to sneak on to a Google Bus and get an inside view. Anyone done that one yet just for kicks?

San Francisco Carnival 2015 and some folk who have been holding down the neighborhood for decades.

There have been many requests for the Pelican Café to have a privacy policy posted and I think somewhere there is a law that states that we must. For crying out loud, we are only a little café! If you want privacy, stay home or crawl into a hole somewhere!!

Pelican Café Privacy Policy

1. The Pelican Café reserves the right to refuse service to anyone including people who never have visited the café or website. –So there! When you fill out one of the forms on this website, we may gather information such as your name and email address. We may use cookies. We may not. It all depends if we have a sweet tooth on that day and if we actually have eggs in the house to make cookies. We may some day even capture your IP address if we get around to it, but just let it be known, if you spend hours and hours in the Pelican Café, espousing your amazingly intelligent comments or blasphemous nonsense, we may simply email you and ask you to look out a nearby window, get some fresh air and get a life. But if you are worried about remaining anonymous in this world, we wish you the best of luck. Unless your name is Bill Smith, live in a tree fort in Maine and never have had a computer, just about anyone can find you, including strange people you do not even remember from high school.
2. The Pelican Café may use your personal information for online promotions and special offers but this is quite unlikely. We are presently at a complete loss as to what these online promotions and special offers would be. We know that if we tried, our email promotions and newsletters would all end up in your email “spam-bulk” folder. We know better.
3. The Pelican Café may indeed sell your email address and other important information (i.e. your name) to a large evil company that wants you to buy sexual enhancement drugs, a get rich pyramid scheme or home refinancing. We are presently fielding offers for the highest bidder. All of our readers are from that mysterious 1% of the most wealthy people in our society that seem to just get more and more loot, so make an offer today.
4. Clothing is required at the Pelican Café. I know that many people like to use the café as a home base for their streaking ventures around the block, but using the café as base camp to bring back a fad from the 1970s is going too far. You have no idea how many miscellaneous items of clothing I find lying around behind the couches. The socks I can deal with but the underwear is sometimes really gross; please pick up your items from the lost and found. So let it be stated that the only place you can pull down your pants is in the bathroom stall and that is if you have to relieve yourself.
5. Speaking of the bathroom, let it be known that we have but one bathroom and that it gets a lot of traffic. Please do not use it as your preferred place for reading. I know the batting averages of the National League West are extremely captivating and that you must read an article until the very end, but in the morning, after a cup of Joe, some people need your favorite seat as well. Remember to flush, turn on the fan and for the love of God, wash your hands.
6. The Pelican Café is outfitted with a free wireless network. Being a café though we ask that you take the time to actually interact with your friends and others in the café. Instant messaging others who are just at the next table is just strange.
7. On the topic of technology, let it be stated that it is fine to make cellphone calls from the café, but if you are going to rant and rave about the party you went to the night before, please take it outside to the tables on the sidewalk. Do realize that everyone within a two-block radius can hear everything you are saying, so choose your words and topics accordingly. Stories of so-and-so throwing up may be entertaining to some, but unappetizing to someone at the next table eating an “Omelet of the Day.”

Above is the Pelican Café Privacy Policy. We reserve the right to change any part at any time depending on whether it is to our advantage – SO THERE!