Greg Ferenstein persistently makes essential geographic and demographic errors. Here, he conflates San Francisco with Silicon Valley.

San Francisco is not the home of Silicon Valley. Palo Alto is not San Francisco. San Mateo and Santa Clara counties are not San Francisco.

At the time Apple was taking off in Cupertino, the dominant industry in San Francisco, aside from tourism, was banking.

The Bay Area tech industry has always been very distinctly centered in Santa Clara County, spreading north into San Mateo County, aka Silicon Valley. It is still centered there.

Until the end of the Great Recession — only about 5 years ago — San Francisco was not at all identified with the tech industry. Although the tech industry has grown in the city, it constitutes only about 8%-10% of 557,000 private sector jobs. In contrast, about 30% of private sector employment in Silicon Valley is tech jobs.

San Francisco has recently experienced an increased rate in tech job growth, which has received a lot of attention and is interpreted as tech taking over San Francisco. But, while the newcomers are very noisy, the demographics do not confirm a tech takeover.

In fact, it is likely the jobs recovery in California overall has peaked. (Greg Ferenstein is also naive about business cycles.) There is no evidence that Silicon Valley as a whole is relocating to San Francisco. Apple is still building an immense new headquarters, and that’s in Cupertino.

Apple alone employs 23,400 in Cupertino.

In short, Silicon Valley is not moving en masse to San Francisco.

Greg Ferenstein has a fantasy about San Francisco, around which he shapes his arguments. Much more likely than Silicon Valley moving to San Francisco and redesigning the city to its needs is that San Jose, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Redwood City, etc. will all become denser in population, more walkable, and more interesting to urbanists. (See http://geography.wr.usgs.gov/science/dasymetric/maps.html)

This process is also underway in San Jose. Pressures of housing cost, traffic congestion, pollution, employee satisfaction, and time management will persuade the cities of San Mateo and Santa Clara county to make more efforts to house the Silicon Valley tech industry.