持续增长和无与伦比的创新

预测这一历史性的运行即将结束已经成为一种家庭手工业, 当然，湾区持续的经济成功并不是理所当然的. 因为它所有的优点, the Bay Area is not inoculated against the impacts of national and international business cycles. 事实上, the region has historically had higher peaks and lower valleys in its economic cycles when compared to the rest of the nation. 最明显的是, the regional economy had to reinvent itself after the dot-com crash of the early aughts. The largest current threats to ongoing prosperity in the region emanate 从 Washington, DC, where a series of policy choices is undermining the international economic cooperation and exchange of people and ideas that help to power the Bay Area’s economy. 这些担忧是真实存在的, 但末日预言者往往过于关注地平线上的乌云, 而不是他们周围的地面上冒出的绿色嫩芽.

这种动态的完美封装发生在Charles Schwab, 这位旧金山经纪公司的传奇创始人, warned in mid-May 2018 that people and companies were fleeing the state due to the federal legislation eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes. This was a policy choice that will have a large impact on high-income earners in the Bay Area, and the company Schwab founded is an example of one that has recently moved many jobs to other states. 就在两周前, 然而, the Charles Schwab Corporation announced that it had chosen San Francisco as one of its two sites for new digital accelerators linked to hundreds of high-wage jobs and a significant new real estate footprint. And although the federal tax reform package will have an unquestionable impact on the region’s high earners, 它也为海湾地区的公司带来了巨大的意外之财. These companies are using the savings to make massive personnel and real estate investments in the region. Not the least of these are the planning of a transit-oriented campus in San Jose by 谷歌, 脸谱网在旧金山租用了一幢43层的办公大楼, 以及苹果公司在库比蒂诺建造的壮观的新“宇宙飞船”园区. 而且这种增长正在整个地区展开, with cranes filling the skies in Oakland as it experiences its biggest surge in residential and commercial development since the 1990s.

The myth that high earners and high-productivity companies are fleeing the region has had it exactly backwards for long enough that more people ought to have noticed. 事实上, during a period when the Bay Area’s economic growth has outstripped that of all of its domestic competitors, the Bay Area—and the state of California generally—have been net importers of higher-income individuals. The challenges have come for lower-margin industries as well as the lower-wage workers who are either leaving the state or traveling increasing distances as mega-commuters 从 the broader Northern California Megaregion that includes the Sacramento and Monterey areas and the San Joaquin Valley.

尽管这里是旧金山湾区经济引擎的故乡, the state of California also has the highest levels of real poverty and child poverty in the nation. Many of the Bay Area’s residents are housing cost burdened, and homelessness has increased. 经常被忽略的东西, 然而, is that housing costs and homelessness are rising across a broad range of geographies in the United States, 并不是所有的城市都像旧金山湾区一样经济发达. 是什么让旧金山湾区与众不同, 因此, 不是它的挑战, 而是它所能带来的资源和创新思维来解决这些问题.

因为私人和公共部门的领导人做出经济和政策决定, they must be informed by the best possible objective analyses and eschew the many myths that attach themselves to culturally significant and economically successful geographies such as the Bay Area. 这份报告努力提供这样的数据和分析. Its first chapter lays out the top-level economic data on the robust and highly-productive regional economy. The second chapter drills down into the specific assets of and advantages provided by the San Francisco-Silicon Valley Bay Area’s innovation economy. The third chapter details some of the challenges facing our regional economy in areas 从 housing to transportation to human well-being. 最后一章将重点扩展到北加州巨区, the area that is increasingly the relevant economic unit for both domestic commute sheds and goods movement, 以及国际经济竞争.