Can Silicon Valley find its moral compass in a fight over homelessness?

Big tech faces a test as San Francisco weighs a ballot measure that would tax companies to help the homeless

For years, a Google search for "tech" and "homelessness" in San Francisco would invariably be populated by various rants and open letters from startup founders and other entrepreneurs decrying the "riff-raff" and "degenerates" they were forced to encounter on their streets on their way to work.

These tone-deaf tech bros came to define the tenor of San Francisco's second dotcom boom, fueling frosty relations between an influx of wealth and a city left ravaged by economic disparities. The common narrative was of Versailles on the eve of the revolution - anti-gentrification protests against tech buses, pointed flyers accusing tech workers of ignoring the suffering around them, sidewalk graffiti declaring that "Queers hate techies".