The smart city that stopped talking only about sensors
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
San Francisco can show something few cities can match: it turned its human diversity into raw material for its tech model. It became the first large U.S. city to ban facial recognition by its own government, it created an office of racial equity, and it translates its services into four languages. That bet on inclusion coexists with a market that pushes out the very communities the city says it celebrates.
When the smart city stopped talking only about sensors
For years, selling a smart city meant plugging in sensors, cameras, and data dashboards. UN-Habitat rewrote that script with its People-Centered Smart Cities program, which calls for using technology to guarantee inclusion, sustainability, and human rights before efficiency. In June 2023, the 193 countries in its Assembly asked for international guidelines on smart cities centered on people. The United Nations Development Programme sums it up with a useful warning: being smart does not mean having more technology or brighter screens.
That framework raises two uncomfortable questions. The first asks who gets in and who stays out of the digital world. The second looks at whether technology serves people or people end up serving technology. San Francisco answers half of that exam with honors and the other half with a failing grade you can see on its streets.
Diversity as a starting point, not decoration
San Francisco is a majority-minority city. Fifty-eight percent of its residents do not identify as white, according to the municipal health indicator system SFHIP. Close to a third of the population was born outside the United States. Twenty-four percent of residents over the age of five speak English on a limited basis, and among them Chinese and Spanish predominate. The city’s diversity index hovers around 71 percent and keeps climbing.
That mix does not decorate the city, it sustains it. The National Foundation for American Policy calculated in 2026 that 69 percent of the Bay Area’s unicorns have at least one immigrant founder. The 2025 Silicon Valley Index added another telling figure: 66 percent of the region’s tech workers were born abroad. Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, said it plainly: Silicon Valley is not an American phenomenon but an international one, built by the best and brightest who came from every corner of the planet.
Academia documented that link decades ago. AnnaLee Saxenian, of the University of California, Berkeley, showed that skilled immigrants already ran a quarter of the Valley’s tech companies in 1998, and she coined the idea of brain circulation. Richard Florida went further with his thesis on tolerance and innovation, though it deserves treatment as a theory under debate rather than a proven law, because several critics fault him for confusing correlation with cause.
The concrete policies that shaped the model
The most remembered move arrived on May 14, 2019. The Board of Supervisors approved, by eight votes to one, the Stop Secret Surveillance ordinance, which barred the city’s 53 departments, the police included, from using facial recognition. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who wrote the measure, defended the idea that supporting good police work does not require accepting a surveillance state. The equity motive carried weight: in other cities that technology had already produced false arrests against Black people.
That same July saw the birth of the Office of Racial Equity, championed by supervisors Sandra Lee Fewer and Vallie Brown and signed into law by Mayor London Breed. Its mandate requires every city agency to draft and apply a Racial Equity Action Plan, and to measure the racial impact of each ordinance. The office grew out of organizing by Black public workers and union leaders who had spent years demanding results rather than speeches.
Language inclusion has an even longer history. The Language Access Ordinance has been in force since 2001 and requires agencies to inform people with limited English about their right to translation and interpretation. A reform in June 2024 lowered the threshold from 10,000 to 6,000 residents and added Vietnamese alongside Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino. The 2026 compliance report showed a sharp rise in use, with Cantonese surpassing Spanish for the first time as the most requested language.
Digital equity took the shape of measurable programs. Fiber to Housing brings free high-speed internet to residents of affordable and public housing, drawing on the fiber network the city has been building since 2002; the project won the national NATOA award in 2024. SF Connected has added more than 90,000 hours of training across more than 50 labs, designed for seniors, communities of color, and low-income households. The DataSF portal, running since 2009, publishes 554 datasets from 67 departments.
The city also wrote one of the country’s first municipal guidelines for generative artificial intelligence, in December 2023 and revised in 2025. The text bans deepfakes, forbids inventing fictional survey respondents, requires expert human review, and recalls a simple rule of responsibility: you answer for everything you share, whether a person or a machine wrote it. The LGBTQ+ history rounds out the picture, with a detail that is unique in the world: in 2017, three Black trans women, Aria Sa’id, Honey Mahogany, and Janetta Johnson, founded the first legally recognized Transgender District.
The cracks the story cannot cover
San Francisco County carries the highest Gini coefficient in the Bay Area, 52.8 points, one of the most severe inequality marks in the country. The median price of a single-family home topped 1.3 million dollars in early 2024, and buying an average house in the region demands a household income close to 321,000 dollars a year. The world capital of technology pushes out those who do not trade on the stock market.
The official count in January 2024 recorded 8,323 homeless people, 7.3 percent more than in 2022. The figure hides a brutal racial bias: Black people make up less than 6 percent of the population and close to 37 percent of those living without shelter. Dr. Margot Kushel, of the University of California, San Francisco, insists that the proven way out runs through affordable housing with services, not through penalties.
Displacement left two wounds the city has yet to close. So-called urban renewal flattened the Fillmore, known as the Harlem of the West, between the 1950s and the 1970s: it demolished 2,500 Victorian houses, shut down 883 businesses, and displaced thousands of Black families. The city’s Black population fell from roughly 96,000 residents in 1970 to about 45,000 in 2020. In February 2025 the Board of Supervisors created a reparations fund for Black residents, though without money assigned up front.
The Mission District lived through its own expulsion during the tech boom. Between 2000 and 2013 the neighborhood’s Latino community lost 8,000 residents, a 25 percent drop, according to the development agency MEDA. Google’s private buses became the visible symbol of that clash between tech wealth and the lifelong neighborhood. Despite being a digital capital, close to 8.4 percent of the city’s households still lack broadband, concentrated precisely in the populations the equity programs aim to serve.
The rankings picked up the discontent. The 2024 IMD Smart City Index dropped San Francisco nine spots, and for the first time since the index began no North American city entered the top 20. Bruno Lanvin, of IMD, attributed the fall to the end of the federal investment push and to citizen frustration with infrastructure and safety. Other indices, with different methodologies, still place it among the best, which forces us to read these tables as a symptom rather than a verdict.
What Latin America can learn
The institutional part of the model is cheap and easy to copy. Mandatory equity frameworks by agency, language access ordinances with clear thresholds, open data portals, and above all, early regulation of surveillance and artificial intelligence before deploying them. San Francisco reversed the usual order: it set rules first, then let the technology in. Bogota, Medellin, Mexico City, or Santiago can adopt that method without needing a Silicon Valley budget.
The hardest lesson concerns techno-solutionism. Technological prosperity does not solve structural inequality on its own and, without counterweights, it worsens it through real estate pressure. Any smart city strategy needs tenant protection, social housing, and anti-displacement policies, like the MEDA model that buys buildings to keep them in community hands. It pays to measure verifiable results rather than announcements: how many people got connected, how many got housed, and who was left out.
In short
San Francisco built a smart city with a human face and proved it with laws, offices, and equity programs that few cities can match. That same diversity feeds its innovation engine thanks to migrant talent. The problem shows up on the street: inequality, the lack of housing, and tech-driven gentrification push out the communities the city celebrates. Including people in the rules and excluding them in the rent happen at the same time.
References
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Alta Journal. (2023). Urban renewal and San Francisco’s Fillmore. https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a70460410/urban-renewal-san-francisco-fillmore/
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