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History suggests San Francisco homeowners will win big from the AI gold rush

San Francisco's last three booms handed large gains to property owners. The windfall from coming IPOs could cause an even bigger transfer of wealth

David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Everyone in San Francisco knows the script. When a new industry takes off, a small group gets very rich very fast. Housing gets bid up, prices quickly climb out of reach, and the city scrambles to respond. It happened with gold. It happened with dot-com stock. And it happened with social media equity.

The AI boom is testing the same pattern now. OpenAI and Anthropic are heading toward IPOs that could create about 12,000 new millionaires, many with nine-figure fortunes, all concentrated in a single city. The dynamics are the same ones San Francisco has lived through before.

But the city itself is shrinking. None of the three previous booms hit a San Francisco that was losing residents before the money arrived. This one will.

Gold Rush wages and San Francisco's first housing crisis

The Gold Rush built San Francisco before the city had the infrastructure to absorb it. The population went from 459 in the summer of 1847 to 20,000 two years later, a fortyfold increase that outpaced housing, sanitation, and governance. Across the state, 80,000 men arrived in 1849 alone, and sailors abandoned 500 ships in the Bay by July 1850. California's total population grew sevenfold in a single year, from 14,000 to 100,000.

Gold Rush wages dwarfed anything workers could earn elsewhere, but prices rose to match, causing a vicious inflation cycle that ate at any prospective gain........

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