City on the Edge: How Tech Remade San Francisco

At the dawn of the 1990s, San Francisco was a beautiful if troubled mid-sized city—still reeling from the AIDS epidemic and the Loma Prieta earthquake, its boom-and-bust economy stuck in a long decline. Then a band of free-thinking technology enthusiasts immersed themselves in the city's singular creative zeitgeist and helped invent the modern internet. What followed was a transformation unlike any in recent American history: an economic and cultural juggernaut that could fairly claim the title of tech capital of the world—and, in the shadows, a mounting crisis of homelessness, addiction, and a political establishment that had lost the plot.

In City on the Edge, reporter and newsroom leader Jonathan Weber—an eyewitness to these events—delivers a sweeping history of a city that rose to dizzying heights only to be all but undone by the heedlessness of the tech industry it did so much to spawn. Drawing on some two hundred…