San Francisco’s meteoric transformation into a global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom nearly engineered its collapse. San Francisco’s Doom since the Gold Rush of 1849 and Bust loop after the pandemic when business flight and surging homelessness appeared to threaten irreversible urban decline.  At the dawn of the 1990s, San Francisco was beautiful if troubled mid-sized metropolis. It was still reeling from the AIDS epidemic and the Lome Prieta earthquake, its economy struck in a post-industrial slump. Once considered to be the capital of the American West, and later … Continue reading Politicians who had lost the plot