Central to the Bay Area’s historical identity are its sheer number of financial success stories. Since the Gold Rush of the mid-nineteenth century, Northern California has been unequivocally associated with economic prosperity. Richard Walker, a historian and urbanist at the University of California, Berkeley, explains the significance of the Gold Rush as one of San Francisco’s structuring myths, which has recycled itself in various incarnations since literal gold “spilled out of the mountains” of the Bay Area, ushering in the mining era and the region’s reputation for financial opportunity.7 For over 150 years, Northern California has continued to be associated with entrepreneurialism, risk-taking, and affluence, from the gold and metal fortunes of the 1850s, to the railway companies of the early twentieth-century, to the more recent dot com and silicon booms of the 90s and 2000s.