TECH
THE
decide to locate in a specific community,” Warren writes.
“But when negotiating with a company like Broadcom,
with 8,400 employees and revenues over $4 billion last
year, our team appears to have been in way over their
heads. They gave away $7 million to close a deal that was
already done.”
Eugene city leaders’ business savvy explains why
some are less than stoked to see their once-crummy city
climb internet top-10 lists of quaint tech meccas. Other
good reasons for trepidation might be explained in the
deeper layers of Bruckner’s neat Shire metaphor.
Parochial, laid back and out-of-the-way; plentitudes of
greenery and institutional gardening knowledge; decent
brunch options and lots of beer: Many Eugeneans dig
Eugene for the exact same reasons hobbits prefer the
Shire.
Getting noticed, however, doesn’t go well for the
fictional Shire or its native inhabitants. Those who’ve
read Tolkien’s three-part epic know a band of thieves
invade the pleasantly quiet hobbit village. Figuratively
speaking, the same is true of tech cities.
ISSUE
Tenderloin neighborhood. Google, Apple, Facebook and
many others have opened offices in the city.
In the last five years, SF has added roughly 60,000
people and home prices have almost doubled. A couple
years ago Buzzfeed published a list of nine private islands
that cost less than an apartment in the city.
Things have gotten so out of control that even tech
workers find themselves looking for creative housing
solutions. The Washington Post ran a story this year
about a freelance illustrator who moved to SF and now
pays $400 a month to live in a crate in his friend’s living
room.
Bruckner says tech shoulders an undue share of the
blame for social problems like gentrification, which
same-ifies everyplace by reaming the color and flavor out
of cultural centers in order to make more elbow room for
well-to-do Apatow-Americans.
“It’s a matter of optics,” he adds. “Tech is just more
visible than other things going on at the same time.”
The president of web development company Concentric
Sky recommends looking at other mid-sized tech cities
like Boulder, Colorado, and Bend to get a clearer picture
of where Eugene’s headed. But those cities, too, are
experiencing excruciating tech-induced growing pains
that make life particularly difficult for those already
hanging from the bottom rung.
Poor and middle-class families are leaving Boulder
because rents and home prices have gone through the roof
— Boulder surpassed Aspen and Denver to become the
most expensive housing market in Colorado; a Boulder
County business journal reported this summer that the
average home price in the area is more than $1 million
— and Bend is in the process of expanding its urban
growth boundary to deal with a serious housing shortage.
The words Silicon Shire suggest Eugene and Springfield
can have it both ways, but the record speaks for itself. No
city has yet solved the perhaps impossible equation that
balances progress and growth with fairness and humanity.
It’s not tech’s fault, though; business flows mindlessly
to where opportunity presents itself.
Our last prophylactic is only as thick as the integrity
and spirit of our city councilors and county commission,
which is scary given their pro-business votes. A quick lay
of the land suggests that the battle for Eugene’s soul is
over but for the shouting.
When he coined the term Silicon Shire to help raise
Eugene’s tech profile, Bruckner may have inadvertently
doomed the city he loves. At the time this article goes to
press, the relentless all-searching eye of Sauron circles
our neck of the woods in ever-tightening patterns. ■
Seattle morphed into something glassy and sleek. Hearing
what friends pay for even shitty rentals in Portland
nowadays sends chills up the spine.
For the down-and-outs who live on the edges of those
bellwether burgs, tech was the opening through which
crawled a mostly-straight-white plague of skyrocketing
rent payments, clogged roadways and brutal competition
for what’s left over.
Sayre likes to say “a rising tide raises all boats,” and
leave it at that; the whole region benefits from a prosperous
tech sector, he argues.
Sayre is correct to point out that every new tech job
fans employment in other sectors.
UC Berkeley Economics professor Enrico Moretti says
tech’s multiplier effect is greater than that of any other
industry, calling it “almost magical.” In his 2012 book
The New Geography of Jobs, he says that “for each new
high-tech job in a city, five additional jobs are ultimately
created outside of the high-tech sector in that city, both in
skilled occupations (lawyers, teachers, nurses) and in
unskilled ones (waiters, hairdressers, carpenters).”
The words Silicon Shire suggest Eugene
and Springfield can have it both ways,
but the record speaks for itself.
No city has yet solved the perhaps impossible
equation that balances progress and growth
with fairness and humanity.
Tech cities the world over have a lot of the same social
diseases. And the signs are clear as day because we’ve
seen their symptoms before, but never this close.
From hundreds of miles away, Oregonians looked on
with superior Church Lady judgment as overnight
billionaire tech brats took San Francisco by storm and
continued south before nestling into the warm crotch of
the SF Bay. We began to sweat a little after grunge city
Still, that’s cold comfort to those who’ve been priced-
out of their homes and chased from their neighborhoods
by indifferent market forces.
In 2011, then-San Francisco mayor Ed Lee started
giving out tax breaks — calling them “community benefit
agreements” — to tech companies such as Twitter,
Yammer and Spotify in order address high unemployment
numbers and lure businesses to the city’s struggling
The kids, groceries, potting soil…
Take it all with you.
Yuba Mundo, Xtracycle, Surly Big Dummy
Child seats, cargo bags, electric assist.
facebook: arrivingbybike
2705 Willamette St • 541.484.5410
Mon–Fri 11–7, Sat 10–6, Sun 12–5
Asian Food
Market
Now Featuring
Middle Eastern Food
& Vegetarian Items
Including Vegetarian Seafood,
Meat Substitutes & Snacks
Asian Groceries
Seaweed, rice, noodles, frozen products,
deli, snacks, drinks, sauces, spices,
produce, housewares, and more.
Sushi & Asian deli take-out
29TH AVENUE
5
OAK STREET
SHOPPING CENTER
WILLAMETTE STREET
Woodfi eld Station
Sunrise
www.sunriseasianfood.com
M-Th 9am-7pm•F 9am-8pm•Sa 9am-7pm•Su 10am-6pm
70 W. 29th Ave. Eugene • 541-343-3295
eugeneweekly.com • Septemeber 22, 2016
13