Many San Franciscans who did not used to be millionaires, who perhaps even couch-surfed in your living room once in the last decade, are going to become suddenly wealthy if they happen to work for Twitter and have a nice stock package, once that IPO happens. Also, if they happen to work for any of a variety of startups that are being showered with VC cash these days. What this means for the rest of us is that housing prices are going to continue to go up, and pretty soon you will need to earn six figures to live in the fucking Tenderloin.
Bloomberg reports on the "hyper-gentrification" that is likely coming our way, or has already come our way, as more affluent people flock to the city and drive out everyone paying modest, below-market-rate rents. This is, of course, a boon for CIty Hall's coffers, and it means that the big tax break Twitter got to move here that everyone complained about has already paid off in a big way both in the investment by other companies and service businesses as they move to mid-Market, and in the bolstering of the tax base overall. Twitter's also looking to double the amount of office space they already have, signaling that their 2,300-person workforce (they only had 400 when they moved here), is about to become a lot bigger. All this even though they just disclosed a $65 million loss this past quarter!
And they quote SPUR's Gabriel Metcalf saying that a splashy IPO like Twitter's will be, assuming it's successful, "the seedbed for further rounds of innovation and startup activity because people reinvest the money in new companies."
So it's a good thing, but a bad thing. Bad for many of us who would like to keep living here, good for the local economy and the City's bottom line, and good for tech in general. But bad bad bad.
