Skepticism About the Tech Economy

We all know that technology is the future of the global economy. Both the Florida and the Moretti article talked about the tech boom as a indicator of which cities are going to survive and which cities will die. I think what they glossed over the most in their articles was the role that city governments can have in the viability of their cities. San Fransisco is a example of a city that has been almost entirely lost to a ravenous tech boom that eradicated the charm of the city and replaced it with a business class starved of authenticity. Cities that hear the sounds of money rolling in will fling the doors open without a second thought. We saw in “My Brooklyn” that Bloomberg worked closely with developers and corporations to initiate his own kind of revitalization of Downtown Brooklyn. Glaeser is guilty of making his argument for the total urbanization of the world without considering what governments can do to strike a balance between vitality and quality of life. The city government of San Fransisco allows Google buses to drive their employees to and from their $2,000 lofts and past the homeless that crowd the neglected parts of the city and the cities parks. That is the future of the tech boom in New York, we kick out all the poor people and go after the middle class until all we have left is highly educated people making a lot of money walking around buying stuff. De Blasio seems like he has a robust plan to combat over saturation but it is not enough to stop what the market seems to be making inevitable.

Glaeser also wants to go after historic areas of a cities and build taller and taller buildings to expand the real estate market and make things cheaper for everyone. Does he not get what the market is like in New York? If there are more apartments in areas that are already completely desired and gentrified there will just be more rich people living there. The financial industry is a good parallel and all three authors reference it. New York was partially brought back to life by the finance boom but it was regulated by the federal, state and local governments. The people who worked at the banks and on the trading floor were more educated than other New Yorkers and had more money but wanted to blend in and enjoy establishments that had allured them in the first place. The millennial tech boom conglomerate is made up of people who go places based on opportunity, and expect where they move to bend to their needs, if they are given free reign in New York, there is no saving what little authenticity we are clinging to right now. Hipsters and others are at least pretending to be struggling artists and bohemians.