San Francisco

Every generation of capitalism that has reshaped San Francisco has also threatened to destroy it. The Gold Rush (1848) transformed a sleepy Mexican port into a boomtown of 300,000 within two years. The 1906 earthquake and fire leveled 80% of the city. The counterculture (1960s), AIDS crisis (1980s), first dot-com boom and bust (1995–2001), social media era (2005–2020), and now the AI wave—each cycle attracts capital, inflates real estate, displaces existing residents, and generates cultural output that defines the era.

The pattern is biological: San Francisco operates as a succession ecosystem that never reaches climax. Each wave of colonizers (miners, longshoremen, hippies, software engineers, AI researchers) displaces the previous occupants while building on the infrastructure they created. The Haight-Ashbury counterculture occupied Victorian houses built for Gold Rush merchants. Tech startups occupied SoMa warehouses built for maritime commerce. AI companies now occupy office towers that social media firms abandoned during post-pandemic remote work.

The numbers capture the current cycle. Median home prices exceed $1.5 million. Tech employment dropped 8% from 2022 to 2023 as social media layoffs cascaded. But the AI boom—centered in San Francisco rather than Silicon Valley—has reignited demand. OpenAI, Anthropic, and dozens of AI startups cluster within a few square miles, creating a specialized ecosystem more geographically concentrated than any previous tech wave. The city permitted just 50 housing units in April 2025, ensuring that supply constraints will amplify every demand shock.

San Francisco's 865,000 residents occupy 47 square miles at the tip of a peninsula—geographic compression that intensifies every boom-bust cycle. The city that built the Golden Gate Bridge, birthed the Summer of Love, and launched the smartphone era now bets its recovery on artificial intelligence. The pattern suggests AI will transform San Francisco before San Francisco absorbs AI's consequences.