From the highway packed with crawling traffic heading downtown you can see the tangle of buckled carriages skewed across the track. Final test runs of the AirTrain, San Francisco’s state-of-the-art driverless airport link, don’t seem to be going to plan.
One of the trains has come off the rails and crashed into another travelling in the opposite direction. The taxi driver points and shrugs; this is not a city that runs smoothly.
It’s three years since the dot com bubble burst and San Francisco, despite having been its birthplace, is still having trouble getting to grips with technology. It isn’t just the AirTrain that has problems, the police are struggling too.
With the city’s crime rates soaring, the San Francisco Police Department has conceded – some 20 years behind other forces – that perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep a central database of information on known criminals. The last attempt to introduce this – eight years and $167 million ago – failed because cops balked at using the specially provided in-car laptops for anything other than a handy place to rest their coffee and doughnuts.
But technological ineptitude isn’t the only blight in the lives of San Franciscans. Parking a car in a city where there are three vehicles to every two parking spaces is a subject that inflames passions. The San Francisco Chronicle recently broke the shocking story that author Danielle Steel, who keeps many a bored housewife entertained with her .sugar-coated romantic novels, owns 26 parking permits.
Quite how she wangled them no-one knows. Perhaps the parking authorities don’t have a central database either.
And it seems ironic that at a time when unemployment is touching 7%, trains are crashing because they have no drivers. Over 110,000 jobs have disappeared in the Bay area since the end of 2000. Statistics like these offer a stark reminder of the fact that this is a city that was successful – once. But that seems a long time ago now.
When the internet companies crashed and burned they dragged down their investment banks with them. International houses have long since shut down their offices and Robertson Stephens, the last of the local boutiques – which ran 230 IPOs in a year during its halcyon days – folded this summer, making 950 people jobless. Citigroup’s recent acquisition of Golden State means that another 2,000 redundancies are on the cards.
The fizz has gone out of San Francisco. According to the latest Beige Book – anecdotal information published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco eight times a year – commercial property vacancy rates are still rising fast, while rental prices are decreasing.
Along the Embarcadero – the sweeping boulevard that runs around San Francisco Bay – fishermen are reclaiming land where modish bars used to be. A glance through the window at Clicks Weekly, the self-proclaimed “talk of Silicon Valley”, suggests that very little talking has been going on there recently. Not since the beer taps were sealed off anyway. Further along, at Bauer’s Limos, stretch vehicles of every variety – limousines, jeeps, 4x4s – wait hopefully on the tarmac.
Early in the morning the nearby pier is lined with comatose bodies, some in sleeping bags, most not. They are just the tip of the iceberg – 12,500 people are currently homeless in San Francisco, many pushed out of lower-cost homes by the influx of knowledge workers during the late 1990s. There’s still a chronic shortage of affordable housing.
The new homeless
City authorities claim to be spending $22,000 an hour to solve the problem of homelessness but if past efforts are anything to go by they might as well not bother. The worst was the Matrix project, which involved harassing homeless people and fining them for offences such as illegal camping in the hope of making life in San Francisco so intolerable that they moved elsewhere. Mayor Willie Brown’s latest plan involves a system to track the homeless, ostensibly the better to provide for their needs, combined with random sweeps of public places. Plus ça change…
Fortunately for sports fans, Brown is unlikely to let such minor inconveniences as a growing homeless population stand in the way of his Olympic ambitions. In 1999 he granted permission for developers to demolish a night shelter to make room for a parking lot for the new Giants stadium, Pacific Bell Park. If San Francisco wins the contest to host the 2012 summer games no doubt he’ll prove equally flexible.
Some claim, though, that despite its flaws, the city is now by far a better place to live in. One venture capitalist says he enjoys his twice-daily drive along highway 101 from home to work again because it now only takes 30 minutes, compared with the 90 minutes he had to allow for during the dot com era.
And from his office overlooking the bay, another senior executive explains why he’s relieved that the party’s over. The invasion of bankers from New York was defeating the whole point of choosing San Francisco as the site of his headquarters. “Now I never get a call from any of my bankers after 1pm,” he says, grinning.
