San Francisco is eternally dying

For some time now I’ve wondered why San Franciscans are so interested in stories of people leaving the Bay Area.

The obvious answer is that they want to leave themselves, but I think it goes deeper.

San Francisco is becoming increasingly inhospitable to the average person. The average rent for a one bedroom one bedroom apartment is $ 2,695. A family of four is considered “marginal” if they earn less than $ 97,000. This place is difficult to survive in the long run.

I think this obsession with “leaving SF” narrative comes from a healthy amount of bitterness – bitterness that you can’t stay here, bitterness that you can’t buy a home and take root, and bitterness that doesn’t plague others Indolence, can see these facts and go.

As San Franciscans, we will always look over the shoulder of Austin and Portland and Denver and wonder what life is like in a more hospitable city. Yet so many of us stay.

A new collection of essays questions the idea of ​​”loving and (sometimes) leaving” San Francisco. Published by Chronicle Books, The End of the Golden Gate: Writers on Loving and (Sometimes) Leaving San Francisco ($ 17.95) includes essays by Margaret Cho, Daniel Handler, and Michelle Tea, among others. The essays are fun, heartbreaking, insightful – and sometimes provocative – and many grapple with the question I asked above: why are we staying here when we know better?

For many of the writers, it’s a matter of memory, history, and nostalgia.

“The End of the Golden Gate: Writers on Loving (and Sometimes) Leaving San Francisco” (Chronicle Books).

There is a moment in “The End of the Golden Gate” that seems to embody all three things, written with a light hand and scrutinizing gaze by comedian W. Kamau Bell:

“I once did a show at the Vesuvio Cafe where Allen Ginsberg opened with a new poem. Margaret Cho stopped by to try new material. Metallica’s Kirk Hammett and Jerry Garcia played folk songs on acoustic guitars. Annie Sprinkle wrote a visual history of porn. … Armistead Maupin sat in the back and wrote a book that ended up being ‘Tales of the City’. And, unnoticed by all of us, Willie Mays and Rick Barry were in there the whole time. ”

In his essay, Bell admits, “Um, I don’t think the timeline is working” of the fictional gathering he conjures up above, only to get his friends to reply, “You missed it man. It was so cool. ”

Bell captures what I consider to be the current dominant discourse in San Francisco. The city will never be what it was, and damn it, you’ve already missed it. Oh, and I have to remind you that it will never be as cool, as cheap, as counterculture as it was when I first came here.

That is the challenge for writers writing about San Francisco. Many of the essays deal with this self-mythologizing of the city and its inhabitants. But how do you write about a missing place? How do you separate memory from reality?

When I look back on my memory of childhood San Francisco – I was born at the start of the dot-com boom – my memories of the city are hazy like fog. They come in scraps of pictures: shopping for back-to-school clothes in the huge, shiny Westfield Mall, buying a pretzel from a vendor on Market Street, drinking coffee with my best friend’s aunt in Muddy Waters on Mission.

In my memory, the Tech Bros do not exist. Neither the high rents nor the housing crisis nor the traffic. I remember the first time I saw him get off the BART train at Powell Street Station: imposing and lively and energetic and lively.

The purpose of this reflection is to point out that looking back causes us to turn our memories pink. But I think that’s also the majesty of a place like San Francisco: It belongs to each of us, like a shimmering jewelry box that contains the tiny gems of individual memories we made along the way. My San Francisco will never be your San Francisco, and that’s the dizzying, wonderful, and crazy thing about this place.

But maybe I’m naive. Although I grew up in the suburbs of the Bay Area, I’ve only lived in San Francisco for five years. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I still see it the way I was when I was a bored, nerdy teenager who itches to get out of the suburbs and get out of this glittering city of hills. Memory plays such tricks on us, coloring our present and future perceptions in ways we seldom see or acknowledge.

The villains in “The End of the Golden Gate” are well known. Technology, capitalism, Mayor Ed Lee’s tax laws. All authors seem to agree on one point: San Francisco has changed, and in many ways for the worse. The city is of course the standout character in the book and sometimes plays the villain too.

Many of the book’s essays are downright melancholy and long for the San Francisco the author knew and loved. Before techn. Before widespread gentrification. Before all of that.

“The San Francisco that I knew and loved was modernized, smooth, chrome-plated, polished, colonized, homogenized and marginalized as a cultural innovation force,” writes Peter Coyote in “San Francisco, For Sale by New Owners”. “The transformation was carried out smoothly and seamlessly through money and an addiction to power.”

“San Francisco,” he wrote earlier in the essay, “is too expensive, too monoculturally wealthy. A wealth of technology and privileges have turned it into a cozy enclave for the heartless. ”

There is an undertone of acidity and melancholy in all of this, and I understand why. The idealized version of San Francisco only ever slips a little out of hand. It will never be the same again. The people who made it special fled and died. The rents are too high.

The question I kept asking while reading The End of the Golden Gate was: What’s next? People are leaving the city, technology has changed them, all artists are gone. But where do we go from here?

I found an answer in Gary Kamiya’s outstanding essay “San Francisco Is My Home”. Kamiya acknowledges the downside of this city: “The exorbitant housing costs, the influx of technicians, traffic, crime, dirty streets and an ever-worsening homelessness crisis.” But he also ignores the now familiar complaints and tries to explain why he despite all want to live here.

“Every moment you move through the winding terrain of this city, behind a shop front or a neon sign, a strange hill or a piece of unknown water will suddenly rise in the distance, as mysterious and alluring and otherworldly as one of these unknown landscapes in the background of a Renaissance painting, ”he writes. “San Francisco gives you the universe for free every step of the way.”

I recently returned to San Francisco from Los Angeles, and one of the things I missed most – as silly as it may be – was the hills. I now live downstairs in one, and just 90 paces from my door I can climb the sloping sidewalk to see the city glow as the sun sets. There’s still magic here.

Sometimes I worry that the discourse about people leaving San Francisco will harm the city more than it will help it. I should know I was SFGATE’s de facto Exodus reporter in the Bay Area for years, writing about people who moved from the Bay Area to Austin, Portland, the Midwest. But this discourse feels so tired to me now.

If people want to go, let them go. I’m much more interested in those who stay – the “Lifer”, as musician Terry Ashkinos calls them in “Lifer”.

“A lifer is someone who cannot give up life,” writes Ashkinos. “A life artist cannot stop trying to live the artist’s life in its purest form. And they do this because they have no other option. ”

I think so of San Francisco. For me there is no other place I would rather be.

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