5. Silicon San Francisco and the West Bay Wall

Silicon Valley as we know it emerged in part from encounters between the technology of the valley and the Bohemian culture of San Francisco. This San Francisco–Silicon Valley nexus would produce one of the most dynamic economic growth stories any region has ever seen. Over the course of the latter part of the twentieth century, this encounter eventually turned both San Francisco and Silicon Valley into massive jobs engines. This chapter examines the spaces where this engine was most powerful, the places that drove the economic cart which attracted so many new residents and so much investment. These are also the places that largely did either very little or not enough to house the people who held these jobs. They did even less for those who had suffered under the segregated conditions of the earlier era.