In 2011, then San Francisco mayor Ed Lee, recently appointed after Gavin Newsom vacated the role to become California’s lieutenant governor, signaled the city elite’s further embrace of Silicon Valley when he helped facilitate the transformation of a vacant department store on Market Street into Twitter’s new headquarters.
Working to avert the social media app’s threat to flee the city, Lee helped it relocate its headquarters from “SoMA” (short for South of Market, an industrial neighborhood dominated by, increasingly, converted warehouses) to a more centrally located 1939 art deco building spanning an entire city block that, since the mid 1980s, had been vacant of its former retail tenants.
To lure Twitter, Mayor Lee designated “Mid-Market” as a new tech corridor. Inserted into the hollowed-out physical spaces of the city’s industrial past, the growth of tech held the promise of trickle-down economic development. At least, this was the justification for allowing Twitter and the tech firms who followed it to the neighborhood to be exempt from payroll taxes — the value of this tax break was later estimated to be about $70 million.