For years, there was this symbol of how San Francisco was changing, adapting to the tech industry and its army of workers.

The Google Bus.

Google's buses were shiny white, with double-decker seating.

Yeah, with like, you know, kind of darkened windows.

You couldn't really see in.

Rachel Levin lives in San Francisco.

And they'd pick up in different neighborhoods around the city

so people could live in the city where they wanted to,

as opposed to, you know, down in Mountain View and Sunnyvale, which was suburban and not much going on other than

the tech campuses. Rachel was doing the same commute as all these tech workers. And like a lot of

San Francisco residents, she eyed these buses with just a bit of jealousy.

I had to drive myself every day, and it took an hour and a half, and it was the worst.

And I would see the Google bus just leave my neighborhood.

And I'm like, can I get on that?

I want to get on that bus.

It wasn't just the bus that made people roll their eyes.

The influx of techies drove up rent in the city. Some people worried these folks were changing the character of the place. For them, tech industry workers became the bad

guys. And then the pandemic hit. And the city was quiet. I mean, it was, I loved it.

I had never really driven down Lombard Street. You know, that's super famous Kirby Street. Yeah, that's super touristy. And my kids, one day, we were just sitting in our house. And I think we weren't supposed to leave our neighborhood. But I was like, let's go see Lombard Street. And we drove there and parked and ran down it.

It was like, you know, you never be able to do that, you know, in normal times.

Did you get the sense people were leaving, like leaving, leaving, leaving?

Um, yeah.

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