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I have the sort of living situation most New Yorkers would kill for: an affordable three-bedroom apartment near Chelsea’s art-gallery scene — on a high floor, with terrace and a vast panorama of the Hudson River. Or at least I have that view for now. The New York City Housing Authority has plans to demolish the crumbling low-income housing project across the street and build a 31-story tower — luxury apartments up top and subsidized units below — that will block out that view to New Jersey and leave us in a Mordor-like shadow at sunset. You’d expect me to be angry. And I am, but not for the reason you probably think: NYCHA claims it will relocate the current residents temporarily and move many of them back into “new, permanently affordable homes.” If you believe that, I have a Lincoln Tunnel to sell you. [1]
As a strong supporter of housing density, I’ve decided not to go all NIMBY over the new tower. After all, nobody guaranteed my view in perpetuity, cities change and grow, and apartments will only become affordable in Manhattan if we build up and up. [2] But many of the residents of my building complex, a hotbed of progressivism built by the Ladies Garment Workers Union in the early 1960s, are dead set against it, and I have to question their motives. Still, when it comes to liberal NIMBY hypocrisy, New Yorkers are rank amateurs compared to the pros in America’s most famously liberal city, San Francisco. Our Justin Fox has been on this for years, and has highlighted a Bay Area paradox: “While per capita (that is, average, or mean) income rose, median household income in the San Francisco-Oakland metro area actually fell from $121,551 in 2019 (in 2021 dollars) to $116,005 in 2021, a 4.6% real decline that was the worst among the country’s 25 biggest metro areas.” In other words, the rich techies got richer, and everybody else fell further behind in the place with the highest average rents in America. Has anybody been doing it right? Yep, the development-friendly place I can see (for now) across the Hudson: Jersey City.
The Covid epidemic no doubt derailed efforts by the tech behemoths — Salesforce in particular — to make San Francisco more livable. But now, according to guest columnist Jonathan Weber, things may be turning back around (emphasis on may), thanks to the two scariest letters in contemporary society: AI. “San Francisco’s AI-driven comeback from its pandemic-era crisis has continued, and even accelerated. OpenAI joined forces with [former Apple design guru] Jony Ive and Anthropic has soared to the top of the industry; both are planning to go public, which will rain enormous riches on their thousands of San Francisco employees,” Jonathan writes. “Daniel Lurie, after winning the 2024 mayoral race, has done well by being pragmatic and accessible; he’s made a visible dent in downtown street conditions. Still, it’s far from clear that San Francisco has its arms around the problems that have dragged it down, especially housing and homelessness.” [3] Also dragging the city down: The Trump administration’s threats to stop processing international air travel in sanctuary cities. This would be a huge problem for the Bay Area, a major hub for international travel. (Los Angeles also makes the blacklist.) “Withdrawing Customs and Border Protection agents from some or all of those cities would massively disrupt travel, particularly as the US awaits throngs of international visitors for the World Cup soccer tournament starting this month,” writes Ronald Brownstein. But Ronald thinks this effort by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin “looks like weakness masquerading as strength” because it “underscores how few options the administration has left, after repeated legal and political setbacks, to coerce reluctant cities into joining its mass deportation agenda.” While the tech bros are making some headway in the San Francisco renaissance, they aren’t doing so well electorally. Consider last week’s “horrible, no good, very bad” primary results for the candidates backed by Big Tech, writes Erika D. Smith: “None of this should really come as a surprise. Polls show that Americans — and Californians are no exception — are increasingly wary of both Big Tech’s signature product, artificial intelligence, and of the billionaires who run the companies developing it.” While enough ballots were tallied quickly to see things were terrible for tech, other races remained unclear for days thanks to the way California processes mail-in votes. “Heading into the weekend, only 14% of voters had returned their ballots, which all registered voters in the state receive by mail weeks before Election Day,” Erika writes in a separate piece. “This unfortunate series of political and electoral events seems to be leading California back to an unenviable situation: with millions of ballots that will take days or even weeks to be tabulated, potentially leaving some high-profile races undecided.” While much of the Golden State seems to be turning into lead, one heretofore obscure Bay Area company, Marvel Technology Inc., has hit the motherlode. All it took was for the company’s CEO to appear alongside Nvidia’s chief, Jensen Huang, at a trade show in Taiwan. “Huang declared the chipmaker, worth about $192 billion on Monday, was destined to be a $1 trillion company,” reports Mark Gongloff. “Marvell’s stock skyrocketed more than 25%, its biggest single-day gain in three years, pushing the Santa Clara, California, company’s market cap to more than $245 billion. What’s possibly even more remarkable is that this 25% of froth was added to a 158% gain in the months preceding it.”
One assumes that many of Marvel’s 7,500 employees made a killing. Perhaps they will join San Francisco’s renaissance by snapping up homes in Russian Hill and Pacific Heights. But they should bear in mind that, just like me and the Hudson River, nobody will promise them that view of the Golden Gate Bridge forever. Bonus California Love Reading:
- Fast E-Scooters Are a Menace. Don’t Lump E-Bikes With Them — Justin Fox
- Want a Friend in the AI Age? Get a Dog — Adrian Wooldridge
- Companies’ AI Bills Are Bigger Than Ever — and Coming Due — Parmy Olson
What’s the World Got in Store ?
- World Cup starts, June 11: World Cup Cities Were Wrong to Ever Expect a Big Payoff — Justin Fox
- ECB rate decision, June 11: Europe Is Stockpiling Enough Gas to Avoid Another Energy Crisis — Javier Blas
- SpaceX IPO, June 12: Get Your SpaceX Bets in Now — Matt Levine
A couple of weeks ago I made the embarrassing admission that I have an irrational fear of the dark and a rational dislike of horror movies. So I am certainly not going to see A24’s Backrooms, which killed it with an $81 million domestic opening weekend. What gives me the creeps apparently gives Hollywood a warm feeling all over: Horror flicks are one of its surest bets. “Backrooms achieved another milestone when Kane Parsons became the youngest filmmaker to direct a movie for the studio,” writes guest columnist Miles Surrey. “But Parsons isn’t an anomaly. He’s the latest proof of an emerging trend in Hollywood driven by a younger generation of filmmakers: YouTube has become one of the industry’s most productive talent pipelines.”
“There could be limitations to how far the YouTube-to-Hollywood pipeline extends,” adds Miles. “For now, the trend remains largely concentrated within the horror genre, which has a history of low-budget films as wide-ranging as The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, and Get Out becoming breakout hits. If more filmmakers can follow in the footsteps of David F. Sandberg, who went from YouTube to directing horror movies before directing the superhero blockbuster Shazam!, then the model has room to grow beyond the genre.” I didn’t realize that Shazam! grossed more than $350 million worldwide, which I find scary. Its sequel (also directed by Sandberg) was apparently the biggest box-office bomb in DC Comics history. For Hollywood, that’s a true horror flick. Note: Please send World Cup tickets and feedback to Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net
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