Nothing will ever be the same in SF

Watch carefully. This could be the year that changes everything. A watershed year, a landmark year. A year to remember, a year when San Francisco became a different city.

There are years like that - think 1937, when the Golden Gate Bridge opened. Think of 1941 when the U.S. got into World War II and 1945 when the war ended.

Consider 1958, when the Giants came to town and put San Francisco in the big leagues. Everything was different after 1967, the Summer of Love. This was a whole new city after 1977, when Harvey Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors, and a different ballgame after 2011, when Ed Lee was sworn in as the city's first Chinese American mayor.

Times change; everything changes.

Year of the techies

This is the year of the techies. They are earnest, they are smart, they are young, they are mostly white. And they are all over. They ride to work on huge unmarked buses with tinted windows, the kind Darth Vader might ride. The passengers can see out, but you can't see in. The bus stops are not marked, either. You have to know.

Their destination signs are in code: GBUS TO MTV, means this bus is headed for Google world headquarters in Mountain View. Other buses use other private codes for other Silicon Valley destinations.

There are more of these buses than ever, more than last year. I counted the buses the other morning: between 8 o'clock and 8:20, 17 of these buses passed a single block on 30th Street between Dolores Street and San Jose Avenue and headed south - a rate of nearly one a minute.

To find out more, I Googled the Google buses. Stamen Design, a Mission District outfit, did research on them. Eric Rorenbach, Stamen's founder, said they carry 7,500 passengers a day on four main San Francisco routes. This is more riders than the entire population of Sausalito, more passengers than the bay ferry system, which has a heavy public subsidy.

"Sometimes," wrote Rebecca Solnit, the author, "I think of them as spaceships in which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us."

But the Google buses are only a symptom of the new world. There are two things to remember about the techies: they have lots of money and they don't want to live in San Jose.

They want to live here and are willing to pay. This is the year when my colleague, the estimable C.W. Nevius, discovered the $82,000 parking spot. This is the year when a real estate agent sent all our Bernal Heights neighbors a card announcing his latest triumph: selling a 97-year-old, two-unit building on 21st and Dolores streets for $2.1 million. There were 15 offers, 10 of them all cash, the agent said. The building sold for $500,000 over the asking price.

The 21st and Dolores site is up the hill from Mission High School in an area they are now calling Baja Noe, formerly part of the Mission District.

There are construction cranes all over the city: 22,000 apartment units are under construction or are planned. You think those apartments are for San Franciscans? Fugetaboutit, as they say in Manhattan. Remember when we were worried about Manhattanization? That is so 20th century.

All new people

These new apartment dwellers will all be new San Franciscans, with different values. In a couple of years we'll think of the progressive politicians, circa 2012, as quaint antiques, like the old waterfront Commies your grandfather used to worry about.

It will be a sea change, like when Eureka Valley became a gay mecca called the Castro, like when the Richmond and the Sunset became largely Asian.

This is already a high-tech city, an expensive city, a city where middle-class families can't afford to live. It is a city where the African American population has dropped precipitously, where the Latino Mission District is gentrifying more every day. You think it's expensive here now? Just you wait.

These are the good old days, but it won't last. We are at a tipping point.

Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His column appears every Sunday. E-mail: cnolte@sfchronicle.com