Luring High Tech Companies

"Six years ago, when the first online companies hit San Francisco's South of Market area, they seemed to fit right in with the artists, writers, and bohemian blue-collar types who called the warehouse district home. The Internet was then still a place for renegades, people who were more excited about the new medium itself than about its economic potential. Today, the City by the Bay-something of a haven for anticapitalists-has become the urban personification of dot.com greed. Under a pro-development city administration, entire blocks of industrial space are being ripped apart and renovated into pastel-colored, stucco-covered office space for Web startups and technology firms. "It's definitely too late from a strict preservationist's point of view," says Mark Tully, an organizer with the Political Ecology Group, a local nonprofit located on Mission Street, the center of the local Internet boom. "The amount of development we're going to see in the next five years is huge. It's definitely going to change the face of the city." -The full text of this article is available to ULI members only.

Thanks to Christian Peralta