Mike Solana

New blogpost: The San Francisco That Could Have Been https://jayriverlong.github.io/2020/12/16/sf.html …

When I first moved to SF many years ago, people kept telling me that it was like Vienna around 1900: somehow, everyone who shaped the next 50 years of history was in Vienna at that time. Wittgenstein, Hitler, Lenin, Freud -- they were all there.

The same seemed to be the case for SF in 2010 or 2015. It seemed that everyone who was going to shape the future had concentrated here. In 2020, that's no longer true, and it seems to become even less true every week.

I am very bitter to see the dramatic wasted potential of the Bay Area. A government that spends all its time deciding whether a Bagel Shop should be allowed to open or not. A government so deep in red tape it manages to spend $70 billion on a few miles of regional train.

San Francisco could be the greatest city in the world. It could be a technological metropolis, a smoothly running engine generating compound growth of wealth every year, the altar of innovation. A testament to the power of courageous people coming together to build the future.