Whether because of its spectacular location, its cultural significance, or simply its romantic image, San Francisco has always occupied a distinctive place in the American mind. In assessing its contemporary relevance, reporter Jonathan Weber has had a front-row seat since 1990, when he was named the first Silicon Valley correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. The product of his close observation is City on the Edge, a well-informed, granular account of San Francisco's history since 1990, and a portrait of how it has served as a microcosm of some of the fundamental changes occurring in U.S. society during that time.
Much of the story of San Francisco's last 35 years inevitably centers on the tech industry, beginning with the dotcom boom of the 1990s and its spectacular bust in 2000. The book is peppered with the origin stories of now-iconic companies with local roots, like Twitter, Uber, and Airbnb, whose growth was spurred by a massive tax break favoring city-based tech businesses enacted in 2011. And in the years following the Great Recession, San Francisco became a place where "initial ground rules, and legal precedents, were being established for new forms of commerce and human interaction."
But even as the tech-fueled fortunes of the city followed a decidedly upward trajectory through the early decades of the 21st century, it faced persistent issues of homelessness and drug addiction and crime, along with rapidly rising wealth inequality and gentrification. Those tensions manifested in many forms but are epitomized in the story of the Google buses, which were designed as a sensible response to the issue of city residents commuting to jobs in Silicon Valley to the south, but quickly became a flashpoint of grievance between powerful tech interests and local residents.
In the concluding section of the book, Weber describes how even as San Francisco benefited from one of the more successful governmental responses to the shock of Covid-19, the virus wreaked major damage on the city's economic life. With businesses enthusiastically embracing remote work, the hollowing-out of San Francisco's downtown during the pandemic exposed "just how little progress had been made on the conjoined problems of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, street crime and wealth inequality."
As he narrates this story, Weber juggles a large cast of noteworthy characters, including Mayors Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom and businessman/philanthropist Warren Hellman. For non-San Franciscans, there will be moments when City on the Edge veers too deeply into the narrow byways of the city's often Byzantine politics, but Weber usually doesn't linger overlong there. With all its triumphs and travails, it is impossible to leave this account without a strong sense that what Weber calls the "boom-and-bust cycles" of San Francisco life are destined to repeat yet again. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Journalist Jonathan Weber offers a stimulating account of the interplay between the worlds of technology and politics in San Francisco over the last 35 years.