Every city wants to create the “next Google.” Go to any start up weekend, tech happy hour, or hackathon in any city you will hear the same gospel: the tech industry can save our city. Yet examples from already established tech communities paint a less than delightful picture of the darker impact of tech fueled economic growth.

Right after I had read Lindsey’s post on the the amazing way San Francisco had come together as a community to support a child’s wish, I came across a different view of the city. An article published this week in the New York times discussed the tension boiling between old time San Francisco residents and the new techie influx. Amid higher rent prices, a 98-year-old-woman being forced from her home to make room for new money, and entire districts turned into frat neighborhoods for “tech bros,” the effect of the tech industry that worried me most was what was described in the Mission District.

In a classic example of gentrification, working-class Hispanic residents who once defined the neighborhood were being forced out by the tech elite. The celebration of Day of the Dead, instead of being a cultural celebration, had been transformed by newcomers into a boozy extension of Halloween. Residents and shopkeepers who had been there for decades were being evicted or forced out, no longer able to afford rents in the neighborhood. The culture of the district is rapidly being lost. As one performance artist described it, “One day they will wake up to an extremely unbearable ocean of sameness.”

This wasn’t the first article I read about citizens being pushed out by the new demands from a tech boom. Earlier this month NPR reported on one of the last trailer parks in Silicon Valley. With real estate being at such a premium in the area, the owners of the land want to sell this park, one of the few affordable housing options in the area, to developers. Residents will be forced to move, not only losing their homes in the process, but missing out on the public schools and being forced to have a longer commute. While perhaps this isn’t something these new city dwellers realize, by losing diversity they are losing something too in this equation. One mother of a Palo Alto student explained, “My son has gone on play dates to homes where he found out his friend didn’t have a bedroom. His friend sleeps on a couch. He didn’t even know that that was how some kids grow up. You learn what they don’t have; you learn the richness of what they do have too — the strength of their community and culture and heritage.”

When they push the natives out, they also push the history out, the culture, the weirdness, the part that makes the city unique. In this way technology doesn’t save the city, it simply takes it over. City natives become refugees, forced to find a new home, and not receiving a whole lot of benefit from “the next Google.” This embrace of techies as the saviors of cities is another shining example of what I call Hipster Trickle Down theory. Basically it is the idea that importing bright new creative types whether they be artists, developers, or designers, will lift up the city for everyone. Yet what these Californian examples prove, it does a better job of pushing out people than it does uplifting them.

Can this change? Is there a way of using the technology industry to help everyone in the city? Can tech benefits reach those historically marginalized communities who sometimes sit on the other end of the digital divide? Certainly here in Baltimore we have some programs trying to train Baltimore youth for new opportunities in tech and design. Yet I think we need more than that. We need a city that prioritizes growing from within over looking for new economic saviors. We need policies that focus first on communities struggling the most with poverty and unemployment, and do not wait for the money of tech billionaires to trickle down.

Yes, Baltimore, and cities around the country need more profitable industries but we need these economic behemoths to combine forces with the city residents, not cast them aside. This doesn’t mean some donations to schools or a few hackathons, but a real intention to infuse the people and place of the city into their company, and to work together with the community to make the community better. It’s time for tech companies to ask not what cities can do for them, but what they can do for cities.

Author Robyn Stegman

Robyn Stegman has always been active in her community and has had the chance to try her hand at many different aspects of social change from preserving historic documents at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library to founding Geeks for Good, an organization that matches nonprofits with tech savvy volunteers. Over the years she has worked with 21 nonprofit organizations to create new websites, marketing materials, campaigns, and programs that help build relationships, empower changemakers, and create strong, vibrant, communities.

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