Comment by anigbrowl

No, what an asinine construction.

What has changed the city's culture is money. As mentioned in the article, virtually every billboard and advertising surface downtown is for some SAAS or B2B company. Every startup that gets capitalized dumps a load of money into saturation advertising making itself look like the new hotness, and the corresponding rise in advertising prices means nothing is advertised but tech and ways to make money with tech. A lot of the adverts even look the same.

That's not the product of migrants. SF is turning into a ghost town because the entire downtown area increasingly feels like the inside of a conference center. There isn't anything fun to do or places to go besides work, nothing that might appeal to youth, nothing that isn't business focused. Can you imagine being a teenager in SF? You go to the middle of town and every advert is just an elevator pitch for HR services or devops or model training, and most of the them aren't even visually interesting to look at. Entire subway stations are taken over with adverts touting how agentic or accelerant some new brand is. It's boring. A Japanese acquaintance of mine who visited SF recently asked 'don't people here think about anything but work?'

How you ended up blaming this humanity-free environment on 'too many migrants' is beyond me.