I grew up on the East Coast and used to hitchhike to the west coast pretty frequently, and SF was a frequent stop. This was in the late 60's and early 70's. But after I was in my early 20's, I didn't visit SF again until the 2010's, when I'd get sent out there because I was in tech. The change was jaw-dropping. It felt like a movie set of SF. Completely hollow, with hardly a vestige of the city I had known. It seemed to have become an amalgam of a bedroom community suburb and a tourist spot, with no reality under it anymore.

But to tell you the truth, it's just an extreme case of what's happening to all of the cities. NYC is hot on SF's heels. The country has become much more middle and upper middle class than it was fifty years ago, and most of those people want to live in cool cities, not in the suburbs. It reminds me of a line from Lonesome Dove "Hell, we killed off all the people who made this place interesting." Replace "killed off" with "priced out".

IMO, this is a calamity for the arts. Poor and decaying cities were a haven for musicians and artists. When I moved to NYC at the end of the 70's kids could still afford to live in Manhattan, and easily in Brooklyn. They could rent old funky spaces and put on plays, make music, make art, etc. The art scene has now been all but driven out except for a monoculture of trust fund kids, usually from fancy schools.

As the artists and musicians are driven to the periphery where they can still afford to live, they tend to be too dispersed for there to be any kind of creative ferment that is not mediated by the internet. That went away when the idea of a rent party became an absurdity, and you had to compete for loft space with Wall Street people and techno-gazillionairs.