Städerna kollapsar

Det ingår att städerna går sönder boksstavligt, när stater börjar kollapsa.

This is the San Fransisco Bay Area. It has been one of the biggest economic HUB’s of the world for the last 50 years. In fact, if this region of just 18,000 square kilometres…were to be its own country…it would have the 19th largest economy in the world…ahead of countries like switzerland, taiwan, sweden, belgium, and the United Arab Emirates.

The bay area has been one of the fastest growing regions in the united states for nearly half a century…but then something changed

In fact, the Bay area, along with many other cities around the world, are going through drastic times that could spell the end of cities as we know them…

The year is 1957. A nobel prize winner named William shockley had recently moved to mountain view california and started a company called the ‘Shockley Semiconductor Company’. You see, he had come up with an idea to build transistors out of Silicon instead of Germanium, which was a revolutionary idea for at the time.

So, the Shockley semiconductor company began making the first modern day transistors that would go on to be used in every computer for the rest of the 20th century.

But there was some trouble. William Shockley rubbed a lot of his employees the wrong way… So 8 of his employees left the company, and went on to start their own semiconductor company in the area, called Fairchild Semiconductor…which was based around the same technology that william shockley invented.

For years afterwards, employees from Fairchild Semiconductor and Bell Labs, continued to innovate in northern california, by inventing the integrated circuit and eventually the microprocessor in 1964.

And it was after this invention that the world as we know it, and the bay area, would change forever.

After the invention of the microprocessor, Tech companies started popping up left and right, around the same area in Northern California.

For example, Intel and AMD were two of the first multi billionaire dollar tech companies to be founded in what is now known as silicon valley.

Then… two twenty something guys in the area named Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, heard about this new chip technology…and started to use these chips in something that they called the ‘Apple 1’.

And after their startup company called Apple, generated an IPO value of $1.3 Billion dollars, and after seeing the success of the now dozens of massive semiconductor companies in the Bay Area…

Venture capital and tech companies began spreading throughout the area in hopes that their startup tech adventure could become the next intel or Apple.

And what followed was one of the craziest economic experiments in history…as every city within silicon valley soon had multiple billion dollar tech companies calling their city, home.

For example,
ORacle was founded in 1977 in Santa Clara,
Seagate was founded in 1979 in Cupertino,
Adobe was founded in 1982 in Mountain View,
Autodesk was founded in 1982 in Mill Valley,
Cisco was founded in San FRanscisco in 1984,
Mcafee was founded in 1987 in Santa Clara,
And dozens of other companies were founded in the late 70s and 80s that are currently worth billions of dollars to this day.

And keep in mind that these companies were all located within about 150 kilometres of eachother.

And the result of this economic and technological explosion in the area, would go on to change the city forever.

You see, as these startup companies like apple and cisco grew, they needed to hire more people and pay them well for their highly skilled labour.

So, the bay area in the 1980s saw a massive increase to its average income. But because of the rapid increase in income, and a lack of supply of things like residential housing and commercial spaces, the cost of living shot through the roof.

In fact from 1984 to 1990, the median housing cost increased by just under 150%…
And this trend was far from over.

Because the 1990’s issued a new age of tech companies called ‘internet companies’

So in 1995, Ebay and craigslist were founded in the area,
PAypal was founded in San Jose in 1998
Google was founded in 1998 in Menlo PArk,
Facebook would begin its operations in menlo park in 2004, And a litany of others like tesla, UBer, and Twitter, have been founded in the area since then.