For the past few years, the hot take industrial complex has been churning out the same story on a loop: San Francisco is over, startups are fleeing to Miami, Austin is the new Silicon Valley, blah blah blah. Turns out, maybe don't write the obituary just yet.

Data from 2024 is painting a surprisingly clear picture — it's genuinely better to build a startup in San Francisco right now than almost anywhere else. And it's not just vibes. Founders who actually packed up and left are coming back, which is about the most honest signal you can get. Nobody moves back somewhere because they felt bad about leaving.

So what changed? Partly it's what didn't change: the density of talent, the access to capital, and the compounding network effects that make SF uniquely good at turning a dumb-sounding idea into a billion-dollar company. Those things never actually left. They just got temporarily drowned out by doom headlines and recall elections.

What did improve is the city's tech ecosystem getting a serious second wind from the AI boom. When your city is ground zero for arguably the most consequential technological shift since the internet, it tends to keep the lights on at the office parks.

None of this means San Francisco has solved its very real, very expensive problems. Housing is still brutal. Office vacancy is still embarrassing. City Hall still finds creative new ways to make simple things complicated. A startup founder paying $4,500 a month for a one-bedroom isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of local governance.

But here's the thing about startups — they don't need a perfect city. They need the right people in the same zip code, at the right time, with money nearby. On that narrow but critical criteria, San Francisco still wins.

The city didn't get its act together. The ecosystem just refused to quit despite it.