By one of San Francisco’s foremost chroniclers, the story of the city’s meteoric transformation into a global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom nearly engineered its collapse.
At the dawn of the 1990s, San Francisco was a beautiful if troubled mid-sized metropolis. The mythic, fog-shrouded city at the edge of the continent was still reeling from the AIDS epidemic and the Loma Prieta earthquake, its economy stuck in a post-industrial slump. Once the undisputed capital of the American West, and later the beating heart of the global counterculture, San Francisco faced an uncertain future.
But in that very moment, a band of free-thinking technology enthusiasts was meeting the unique creative zeitgeist of the city, and inventing the contemporary internet. The companies they spawned would change the way we work, play, socialize and engage in politics. San Francisco would undergo a transformation unlike any in modern American history, becoming an economic and cultural juggernaut that could fairly claim the title of tech capital of the world. Local politicians like Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris advanced to the national stage, even as a union of underground culture and technological optimism gave rise to the annual reverie known as Burning Man.
This should have been a happy story for San Francisco. But while the city’s tech economy roared, a host of urban ills lurked in the shadows: homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness, and a crippling lack of new housing. The city’s famously liberal political establishment struggled to get its arms around the mounting problems in the streets, becoming a punching bag for President Trump and the new right. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, it didn’t just create new crises but laid old ones bare, and shattered a “City Family” that had ruled for thirty years.
Reporter and newsroom leader Jonathan Weber was an eyewitness to these events. He offers a sweeping history of a city that rose to dizzying heights, only to be all but undone by the greed of a tech industry it did so much to spawn, and politicians who had lost the plot. Drawing on nearly two hundred interviews with mayors, CEOs, activists, investors, artists, and beyond, City on the Edge is more than a than a simple chronicle of a city. It’s the story of a war waged for the heart of San Francisco—one that both anticipated and reflected the culture wars raging around the world. Its outcome would have an impact far beyond the city’s famed Golden Gates.