Column: They say San Francisco is coming back as a tech hub, but it never really left

Elon Musk chose to locate Tesla’s “global engineering headquarters” in Hewlett Packard’s former headquarters — not in Austin but in Palo Alto. The key to its enduring stature atop the innovation economy has been the Bay Area’s infrastructure of institutions and legal, technical and financial professionals, and its population of technology workers — all having created “dense social networks and open labor markets.” By contrast, the Silicon wannabes tend to put all their eggs in one basket, and when that basket’s contents spill out, there’s little to fill it up again. “Obviously, you have the AI revolution being driven from here,” Diab says, “but you also have powerhouse enterprise software companies like Salesforce and Slack.” Collective Health also discovered that the cost of office space in San Francisco was lower than elsewhere in the Bay Area, including Silicon Valley proper. Diab was an early critic of the “doom loop” argument against San Francisco, observing in a mid-October op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle that “as a Bay Area native, I’ve had to listen to people predict the demise of my city for my entire life.” In truth, he wrote, “the oft-cited challenges San Francisco faces are no different from those experienced by any other major city in the United States.” Housing is “prohibitively expensive in almost every major American city,” he added. When Elon Musk sought a location for Tesla’s “global engineering headquarters,” the seat of the company’s innovative brainpower, he found it in Hewlett Packard’s former corporate headquarters — not in Austin, but Palo Alto.