Call it the Early Twenty-Teens Tech Boom, or whatever you want to call it, but it has officially surpassed the late-'90s Dot-Com Boom with no slowing in sight. In fact, as Ted Egan of the city controller's office tells Matier & Ross, this economic surge grew in about three years, while the dot-com boom took six years to get to this point. And while many say that all bubbles must burst, Egan points to strong earnings in the tech sector that set this era apart from the untethered stock speculation of fifteen years ago.
San Francisco may just be at the front of a larger wave of economic recovery happening across the country, and we happen to be home to several industries that are performing the strongest in today's economic, including tech and biotech.
It isn't just tech, though: There are now a record 600,000 jobs in San Francisco proper, with 5 percent unemployment (down from a high of 10 percent a couple years ago), and only about 20,000 of the new jobs are in tech. The rest are in health care, business services, hospitality, and other traditional industries some of which may, arguably, be growing as a result of the deep pockets and high-paid workers of the tech industry.
Earlier this month we noted that this boom had already exceeded the last in terms of office leases, and now it's official that the job numbers back that up. It's only worrying that Kozmo.com is trying to make a comeback, because that seems like the first signal of doom, but we digress.
Sunday's column stands in sharp contrast to Matier's writings of just two months ago, in which he was using the Twitter IPO to expound on his theories about the economy, calling this just the latest in the Bay Area's long history of booms and busts. He was sounding pretty gloomy then, but maybe this chat with the Controller's Office has cheered him up.
Meanwhile, coverage of last week's Google bus protests is ongoing.
[Chron]