Overview

San Francisco is changing at warp speed. Famously home to artists and activists, and known as the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movement, the Bay Area has been reshaped by Silicon Valley. The richer the region gets, the more unequal and less diverse it becomes, and cracks in the city’s facade—rapid gentrification, an epidemic of evictions, rising crime, atrophied public institutions—are growing wider. Inspired by Studs Terkel’s classic works of oral history, Cary McClelland spent years interviewing people at the epicenter of recent change, from venture capitalists and coders to politicians and protesters, capturing San Francisco as never before.

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9780393357431

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Reviews

McClelland weaves together a narrative of a region under siege by the economic forces of tech, gentrification, and inequality...A refreshing perspective. Thought-provoking...McClelland captures personal snapshots of the changes wrought on San Francisco by the tech industry. Essential...A conflicted and complex portrait of a city starving for solutions.--Brandon Yu Tales of the city for the boom time.--Stephen Philips McClelland has undertaken a herculean feat of sociological cataloguing, and offers an ambitious, thorough look at a city that seems to be ripping at the seams.--Luisa Rollenhagen Silicon City should be San Francisco's next big city-wide read. Short of that, it should be required reading for every employee of Twitter and Salesforce.com. Google and Facebook employees should climb aboard their comfy buses bound for Silicon Valley one fine sunny morning and find a copy on their seats. At the very least, McClelland should send a copy to each of the 11 members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.--Katie Hafner Silicon City is firmly in the Studs Terkel tradition of first-person-based explorations of working-class life...Students of inequality and demographics will find powerful anecdotal evidence for how the changing cityscape brings both harm and good.

Author Information

Cary McClelland is a writer, filmmaker, lawyer, and rights advocate whose work has taken him around the world. He met his wife in San Francisco, where they settled down and built their first home. They now live in Brooklyn with their son.

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