Warehouses and metal shops once filled this district around you, now the center of San Francisco's transformation by the technology industry. SoMa — South of Market Street — was for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the city's working industrial district: warehouses, light manufacturing, metal shops, and the cheap residential hotels called SROs that housed the working poor, the elderly, and the transient. The 1906 earthquake started here and the fire burned here first.
The neighborhood's low rents and warehouse spaces made it attractive to artists and alternative communities in the 1980s and to the first wave of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, when internet startups colonized old warehouses and turned them into open-plan offices. The first dot-com crash of 2001 emptied many of those offices. The second wave, beginning around 2010 with the rise of social media companies, brought more money and more displacement.
Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and dozens of other major technology companies established headquarters in SoMa, driving rents to levels that pushed out the SRO residents, the artists, and eventually the middle class. The neighborhood is now a study in extremes: billion-dollar company headquarters and homeless encampments on adjacent blocks. SFMOMA, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Moscone Center convention complex anchor the cultural district.