Tech remade Seattle and San Francisco over the past three decades, bringing jobs and wealth along with soaring housing costs and a political backlash. Now the AI boom is hitting both cities, before either has resolved the tensions that have repeatedly divided their communities.

That’s the subject of this week’s GeekWire Podcast, a live joint taping with the Blue City Blues podcast at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle. GeekWire co-founder John Cook joins historian Margaret O’Mara, author of “The Code,” and San Francisco journalist Jonathan Weber, author of “City on the Edge,” with Blue City Blues hosts David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the conversation.

The tech industry’s conflicts in Seattle and San Francisco began when the industry moved out of the suburbs and into the middle of both cities.

Silicon Valley grew up 30 to 40 miles south of San Francisco, and Microsoft built a suburban campus in Redmond that O’Mara called “its own kind of bubble far away from the city.”

When Weber arrived in San Francisco in 1990 to cover Silicon Valley for the Los Angeles Times, he said, “there was essentially no tech in the city at all.” That changed with the dot-com boom, which brought the first backlash in San Francisco’s Mission District in the late 1990s.

In Seattle, a similar shift happened with Amazon’s move to South Lake Union, starting in 2010. John said Amazon was “most perfectly positioned” at its earlier headquarters on Beacon Hill, southeast of downtown Seattle, “completely isolated from the rest of the city.”

“When things really shifted for Amazon is when they decided to plant themselves in the middle of the city,” John said. “Then things accelerate, and then these problems start to come in, and Amazon starts to get blamed.”

The tech industry grew up in an era of low taxes and light regulation, and that’s baked into its business model.

O’Mara pointed to 1978, when California voters passed Proposition 13, which capped property taxes and “essentially starved localities of revenue,” she said. Personal computers and video games were taking off in that same era. “Silicon Valley’s kind of grown up in that world,” she said.

In Seattle, John said, Amazon’s view was that it was doing enough by bringing jobs to the city, while the city’s progressive leaders wanted more as prices rose. “Those two philosophies just collided in Seattle in real time,” he said.

Cities have limited leverage, Weber said. “A company can move two miles and avoid whatever taxes the city wants to impose.”

Seattle’s tech and business leaders, unhappy with the city’s political leadership, are organizing to fill the gap themselves.

Asked whether tech leaders think they’ve been getting good leadership from Seattle’s mayors, John said, “Short answer: No.” Businesses feel they’re paying a growing list of new taxes, he said, without seeing results on basics like potholes and clean streets.

In recent months, business figures including Microsoft’s Brad Smith, former Gov. Chris Gregoire and Joe Nguyen of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce have started forming coalitions and pooling their resources. “They’re going on offense,” John said. “They feel there’s a vacuum and a gap here based on this lack of political leadership.”

John said one of a mayor’s big jobs is to be “the chief cheerleader of the region and the city,” and Seattle’s recent mayors haven’t done it.

Weber said San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has made that role a big part of his success: “Even though he’s a billionaire, he comes across as kind of a regular San Francisco guy.”

“That’s kind of a regular San Francisco guy these days,” O’Mara quipped.

San Francisco is the center of the AI boom, but Seattle and the Bay Area have always depended on each other more than they’ve competed.

Weber called San Francisco the undisputed capital of AI, as the home of OpenAI and Anthropic. The boom has brought so much wealth to the city, he said, that “there’s a mansion shortage.”

John said the gap between the two regions in venture funding for AI is “an astronomical difference.” But OpenAI and Anthropic have both opened engineering centers in the Seattle area, he said, hiring people who don’t want to leave.

Microsoft and Amazon both raised early money from Bay Area venture capitalists, O’Mara said.

John cited the longtime advice for Seattle founders: “Start your company and build your company in Seattle, raise your money in the Bay Area.” But Seattle has always run second to the Bay Area, John said, and that’s OK. “Who cares?” he said. “They are their own thing. We’re our own thing.”

The Gilded Age offers a precedent for putting guardrails on AI.

O’Mara compared the moment to the era of Carnegie and Rockefeller, when fast-growing industries overwhelmed a small U.S. government, and the regulation that followed still left room to make a lot of money.

Overemphasizing the novelty of AI, she said, “becomes a very convenient excuse not to regulate it.”

Weber said the AI debate is hard to read because most of the people in it are “talking their book,” with a business interest in the positions they take. The issue is arising, he said, at a time when “we essentially don’t have any national political leadership that’s able to deal with it.”

“So many things are indeed new,” O’Mara said, “but it doesn’t mean that nothing can be done.”

Both cities need to protect their quality of place, and tech itself can undermine it.

O’Mara said building a tech hub comes down to three things: capital, institutions such as research universities, and quality of place. Asked what Seattle and San Francisco should do differently over the next decade, she picked the third.

“This is not just making things nice for Amazon engineers getting paid $300,000 a year,” O’Mara said. “It is making the city safe, vital and fun.”

Weber said tech threatens that sense of place, because people who can shop, meet and find entertainment online don’t need the city in the same way. In San Francisco’s traditional nightlife districts, he said, there’s little going on after 9 p.m., while the city’s caterers and party planners are busy. “A lot of social life has moved indoors into private spaces,” he said.

To which John joked, “I just want to enjoy San Francisco in the metaverse.”

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Seattle independent radio station KEXP is exploring the possibility of building out a second physical home — far from its beloved base at Seattle Center — in San Francisco.

Three years after expanding its broadcast footprint to the Bay Area with the acquisition of 92.7 KREV FM, the non-profit music institution has set its sights on the city’s historic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood for a potential site.

Under a proposed partnership announced Thursday by KEXP and city preservation group SF Heritage, the station would team up with local nonprofit Blue Bear School of Music to convert the historic Doolan-Larson House and Storefronts at the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets into a multifaceted music and cultural center.

The early-stage plan for the landmark property envisions radio broadcast facilities, a roof venue for live performances and community events, space for group and individual music lessons, and a public “third space” intended for year-round daily gathering.

The proposed hub adds another twist to the long-standing cross-pollination between the two tech capitals. While Silicon Valley giants have routinely set up major engineering outposts in Seattle, and founders and workers migrate between the regions, KEXP’s expansion represents a rare cultural export heading in the opposite direction.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie cheered the proposal as a win for both the neighborhood and the city’s broader economic recovery.

“Art and music have been part of what makes San Francisco special for generations,” Lurie said in a statement. “Innovative partnerships like this one help us reimagine what’s possible and find new ways to activate our neighborhoods. Our artists and cultural spaces make our city stronger, and this new home for music and culture at Haight and Ashbury will inspire generations to come.”

Located at the epicenter of the 1960s counterculture movement, the Colonial Revival-style Doolan-Larson House was originally constructed in 1903 and raised after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to add ground-floor storefronts.

The property — designated San Francisco Landmark No. 253 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places — housed groundbreaking hippie-era boutiques during the Summer of Love. It was gifted to SF Heritage in 2017 by its long-time owner, the late Norman Larson, specifically to ensure the landmark would be preserved and activated for public and cultural use.

Founded in 1972 as KCMU — a small, student-run station at the University of Washington — KEXP has spent over five decades building a global reputation for human-curated music discovery, famously becoming one of the first stations to champion the “Seattle sound” in the late 1980s.

The station’s Bay Area presence officially materialized in late 2023 when KEXP placed the winning $3.75 million bid at a bankruptcy auction to acquire commercial frequency 92.7 KREV FM (now KEXC). Funded by a portion of a $10 million bequest left by a anonymous long-time donor, the station began retransmitting its broadcast signal to Northern California in March 2024 as part of a strategy to ground its growing digital and streaming audience in key cultural markets.

In Seattle, KEXP’s physical hub at Seattle Center — itself a civic landmark — features a public Gathering Space that combines a coffee shop, record store, and live performance venue alongside its open-view DJ booth.

Translating a high-touch, human-centered physical experience into new markets is a core priority for the station: KEXP recently hired its first chief product and technology officer, former SiriusXM and Nordstrom executive Jyoti Shukla, to build digital products and physical spaces that intentionally prioritize human music curation over AI algorithms.

In a post on LinkedIn, KEXP CEO Ethan Raup said the response to the station’s arrival in the Bay Area “has been nothing short of remarkable” and that it gave KEXP “the confidence to start planning for our next big step.”

In its post on Thursday, KEXP stressed the plans are “not a done deal yet.” Over the coming months, SF Heritage, KEXP, and Blue Bear School of Music will focus on gathering community feedback, finalizing an adaptive reuse plan, and determining construction feasibility and project financing.

KEXP and Blue Bear representatives will make their first public outreach push at the Haight Ashbury Street Fair on Sunday to share more about the proposed project.