Thousands Say Ciao to Deeply Troubled San Francisco.⁠↗

Today, it’s nearly impossible to build anything in San Francisco. Infrastructure projects balloon indefinitely. In 2001, the city proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness, one of the main arteries. Nearly 20 years later, the new lane’s opening is slated for 2021; Van Ness remains a mess of potholes, equipment, and detours. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge was built in three and a half years. To commemorate its completion, as an encore, the city created an artificial island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Treasure Island took under three years to finish.

Even after getting permission to build—following years of scrambling through a dysfunctional approval process—it costs about $700,000 to construct a single new apartment unit. Consequently, the cost of housing has skyrocketed. The median price for a one-bedroom rental is the most expensive in the nation, at about $3,700 per month. To buy a single-family home, a family needs $1.5 million, on average—and they’d better be a cash buyer.

For the seventh straight year, more people have left California than have moved in. Tech companies are reconsidering the importance of being in San Francisco. Oracle, for example, has moved its yearly conference to Las Vegas. After nearly 50 years, Charles Schwab is moving its headquarters out of town. And in a recent earnings call with investors, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, said that the company planned to have a more distributed workforce in the future and be less concentrated in San Francisco.