OIKOPHOBIA IN THE STRANGEST PLACES: When Did Young Tech Workers Become The Enemy In San Francisco?

We might start with David Talbot, journalist and founder in 1995 of Salon, which despite its financial and editorial turmoil of recent years, was one of the pioneers of web journalism. One might think that with this background Talbot would recognize the creativity and value of the current young tech entrepreneurs migrating to San Francisco. Instead, he has made it his mission in recent years to cast them as aliens and threats to the city.

Mr. Talbot, now a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, regularly declares that the city doesn’t feel like home to him anymore, with the new tech millennials and their money. In a recent column, he explains that he can at least still find comfort in his Bernal Heights working class neighborhood. He contrasts his warm, supportive diverse neighborhood with the cold, homogenous tech workers who are buying up $3 million houses in the area. “Yes the new tech money is invading our oasis,” Talbot declares, “but the street still feels anchored around the committed San Franciscans who grew up here or came here following a dream that did not simply involve getting rich.”

First, as anyone who lives in San Francisco knows, this picture involves multiple misrepresentations. The neighbors he describes live secure, comfortable lives as non-profit administrators, government officials, and public interest lawyers; none is remotely working class. Further, they are not a diverse group; most hold the same politics and world views. Talbot fails to mention that he and his neighbors were the people who gentrified the neighborhood in the 1990s, and drove out the construction workers, teachers and retail clerks who previously had lived there.

Forget it Jake, it’s San Francisco — not only are young tech workers the enemy there, so are young hippies moving into Haight-Ashbury. Why, it’s as if those who pound the theme of “change” the hardest are those who are most terrified of the notion when it actually impacts their own lives.