The San Francisco Bay Area is currently the tech capital of the world and a gusher of wealth from the Silicon Gold Rush. It has been generating jobs, spawning new innovation, and spreading ideas that are changing lives everywhere. So what could be wrong? It may seem that the Bay Area has the best of it in Trump’s America, but there is a dark side of success. Walker’s timely book examines San Francisco’s exploding inequality; its millions of underpaid workers; a boiling housing crisis, mass displacement, a delusional tech elite and complicity with the worst in American politics.
Richard A. Walker is professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1975 to 2012. Walker has written on a diverse range of topics in economic, urban, and environmental geography, with scores of published articles to his credit. He is coauthor of The Capitalist Imperative (1989) and The New Social Economy (1992) and has written extensively on California, including The Conquest of Bread (2004), The Country in the City (2007) and The Atlas of California (2013).
Walker is currently director of the Living New Deal Project, whose purpose is to inventory all New Deal public works sites in the United States and recover the lost memory of government investment for the good of all. Walker now splits time between Berkeley and Burgundy.
Walter Thompson (Moderator) is a journalist who's worked in tech startups for two decades. He's the Community Editor for Hoodline, a hyperlocal news service, his work has appeared in San Francisco Magazine, and he's working on Golden City, a documentary about how technology has transformed housing and transportation in San Francisco.
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