Multimedia Gulch, the dynamic cluster of multimedia firms that coalesced in San Francisco’s South of Market area (SOMA) in the early 1990s, emerged from a depressed, high-unemployment, high-crime area in less than a decade. This article describes how the revitalization of SOMA was the product not of economic development planning but, rather, of the convergence of several independent cultural and economic factors. These factors, which the author explores, range from the diffusion and adoption of the loft-living lifestyle among urban creative communities in the 1970s to the elimination of barriers to entry into the media industry from technological innovations in the 1980s.
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