San Francisco ia a sideshow. America is a suburban country and the Bay Area is a suburban place. There are ten times as many people in the metro area as in the city. Only Salesforce and Uber are in the city; the rest of Big Tech is in the suburbs. The social and physical infrastructure is built for someone who has a family and works in an office to live in the suburbs.

American postwar suburbia has a well-oiled machine for metabolizing growth, but it has to be fed with virgin land. The Bay Area long ago ran out. The growth kept on going, so it manifests in house prices and dysfunction instead.