I do not live, and have not lived, in San Francisco—in some ways it is not my place to object. Nevertheless there is a kind of visceral pain in seeing what the grey city of my childhood has become, and only in part because it is the image of what will happen to Oakland and Berkeley once the transformation of the city has run its course.
There is a sestina:
We honor founders of these starving cities
Whose honor is the image of our sorrow,Which cannot see its likeness in their sorrow
That brought them desperate to the brinks of valleys;
Dreaming of evening walks through learned cities […]
It is unsettling, in a way it was not five years ago, to walk down Market Street in weekday daylight—see homeless men and women face-down in garbage cans, or milling bright-eyed on street corners, or lying on the pavement, purple-faced and gasping, surrounded by onlookers who exhibit the outward signs of the same compassion one feels for a deer which has jumped in front of one’s car.
The newcomers in the abrupt demographic shift which has turned Valencia into a patchwork of panaderias and upscale coffe shops—and even more creepily, of Taquerias for Hipsters and Taquerias Not for Hipsters—are not malicious, or even unreasonable. They simply find appealing in a neighborhood the same things that the people who alreay live there find appealing, and have ten times as much money. I think reasonable people understand this.
But the ones displaced—both the families who have been here for decades, who have been forced south or east or out onto Market Street, and the bohemeians who have been here for five years—are not unreasonable either. They suspect, correctly, that there exist public policy interventions which will allow them to keep their homes and their rents. These interventions are unpalatable to the powers in the city, but maybe grow less unpalatable when the alternative is permanent protest.
Talk of how to “rescue” San Francisco from its present crisis misses the fact that the it is already lost: there simply is no way to build an affordable city of forty-nine square miles out of three-story houses. What we get to choose, now, is the manner of its destruction.
So: tear down this city. Smash the gorgeous Queen Annes all up and down South Van Ness; raise skyscrapers and tenements in SoMa, glittering luxury condominiums on Twelfth Street. San Francisco cannot be what it has been, but we can at least see that it is stripped of its surface details, and not of its rightful inhabitants—that is, of everyone.