New Geography

Tag: San Francisco

  • 250 Square Feet Condos in San Francisco

    In this famously expensive city, one developer has a plan: Build 250 square-feet condos for singles who can then move on up. The 98 units will sell from $279,000 to $330,000.

    Yes, it sounds like a glorified closet, but you have to admire Hauser Architects’ sense of practicality for these Hong Kong-style apartments. The huge towers going up on Rincon Hill and South of Market are only meant for those earning well into six figures. It’s refreshing that someone is actually building housing not meant for the super-wealthy. It could also serve as a harbinger of housing to come for single middle-class urban dwellers.

  • Excavating The Buried Civilization of Roosevelt’s New Deal

    A bridge crashes into the Mississippi at rush hour. Cheesy levees go down in New Orleans and few come to help or rebuild. States must rely on gambling for revenue to run essential public services yet fall farther into the pit of structural deficits. Clearly we have gone a long way from the legacy of the New Deal.

    The forces responsible for this dismantling are what Thomas Frank calls “The Wrecking Crew,” the ideological (and sometimes genealogical) descendants of those who have waged war against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal since its birth 75 years ago. Few today articulate any vision of what Americans can achieve together because “the public” is the chief and intended casualty in that long war.

    Those whom the mass media routinely refer to as conservatives better know themselves as counterrevolutionaries against what FDR wrought. Ronald Reagan proclaimed that government is the problem as he made it so. Almost two generations after President Roosevelt’s death, President Reagan and his conservative surrogates depended upon the amnesia of those who know little about what the New Deal did and what it still does for them to undo parts of its legacy.

    I was not much more enlightened when I began what became the California Living New Deal Project four years ago. I thought that — with a generous seed grant from the Columbia Foundation — photographer Robert Dawson and I could document the physical legacy of the New Deal in California. Since the New Deal agencies were all about centralization, I thought, I would find their records neatly filed back in Washington at the National Archives and Library of Congress. I was wrong on all counts.

    I discovered, instead, a strange civilization buried beneath strata of forgetfulness, neglect, and even malice seventy-five years deep. Aborted by the Second World War FDR’s sudden death, then covered with the congealed lava of the McCarthy reaction, the half dozen or so agencies that had created the physical and cultural infrastructure from which grew America’s post-war prosperity left few accessible records of their collective accomplishments. So many-pronged and multitudinous was the Roosevelt administration’s onslaught upon the Depression that even FDR’s Secretary of the Interior and head of the Public Works Agency (PWA), “Honest Harry” Ickes, admitted that he could not keep track of it all.

    With the help of hundreds of photographs scanned at the National Archives and other collections, journal articles of the period, historical surveys, mimeographed WPA reports, as well as local historians and other informants, an indispensable matrix of public works was revealed to me. Most of our urban airports and rural airstrips, it now appears, began as projects of the WPA and CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), while California’s many community colleges are similarly New Deal creations. (Between two illustrated talks I recently gave to large audiences at Santa Rosa Community College, Professor Marty Bennett led the first New Deal tour of a campus almost entirely built by Ickes’ PWA.) Committed to public education in all of its manifestations, the WPA and PWA built and expanded literally hundreds of schools throughout the state to replace older buildings that were seismically unsafe, inadequate, or nonexistent. Most are still in use.

    The availability of plentiful and cheap labor as well as PWA grants and loans made the Bay Area one of the most desirable regions in the country by giving it a vast network of public parks and recreational areas. A WPA report on that agency’s accomplishments in San Francisco noted that WPA workers had improved virtually every park in the city: that now appears to be true of most older towns in California where federally employed workers left a legacy of handsome stonework, public stadia, tennis courts, golf courses, swimming pools, baseball diamonds, and restrooms but few markers. Other federal employees built a network of all-weather farm-to-market roads enabling growers to get fresh produce to towns and tourists to visit every corner of the state. Still others completed and expanded public water supplies and electrical distribution systems as well as sewage treatment plants that, for the first time, insured the majority of Americans safe and plentiful drinking water.

    As the scale and extent of that often forgotten civilization grew ever larger, cataloging and mapping it fast outpaced my organizational and technical skills. With the joint sponsorship of the California Historical Society, the California Studies Center, and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley, the California Living New Deal Project morphed into an unprecedented collaborative effort to use informants throughout the State to inventory and map what New Deal agencies achieved and to suggest what might have been. In particular, I am grateful to the IRLE Library whose staff maintains and continually expands the CLNDP website with input from research assistants and informants.

    The Roosevelt Administration and those it brought to Washington envisioned a collectively built America whose immense productive capacities could benefit all. A profusion of splendid public spaces such as Mount Tamalpais State Park’s Mountain Theater and the Santa Barbara Bowl would, they believed, make citizens and community of a polyglot populace. Together with a plethora of well-built public schools, libraries, post offices, parks, water systems, bridges, airports, hospitals, harbors, city halls, county courthouses, zoos, art works and more, New Deal initiatives spread the wealth and enriched the lives of uncounted Americans.

    In his last State of the Union address, FDR’s firm and confident voice enunciated the need for a second bill of economic rights that would ensure everyone a modicum of freedom, a freedom that his country promised but so often failed to deliver. If extended worldwide, Roosevelt suggested, that Bill of Rights could short-circuit future wars such as the one still raging as he spoke. “Necessitous men are not free men,” he told the nation, a condition afflicting the vast majority of people today.

    Gray Brechin is a Visiting Scholar at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography and the Project Scholar of the California Living New Deal Project. He is the author of “Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin” and, with photographer Robert Dawson, “Farewell Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream.”

  • The Great Exception: San Francisco’s SoMa Neighborhood

    In recent months, one has not been able to open a newspaper without being reminded of the havoc that is being wreaked on the U.S. economy. The subprime mortgage debacle coupled with skyrocketing energy prices have caused many middle class Americans to lose confidence in taking out home loans and putting a screeching halt to consumer spending.

    But one place that seems somewhat impervious to the chaos: San Francisco. Part of this can be attributed to the continuing popularity of the city as a tourist destination for foreigners. Also keeping the local economy afloat is the investment in luxury real estate from those with disposable wealth purchasing second homes in this geographically desirable locale. Unfortunately, this does not spell good news for the city in terms of middle class aspiration and sustainable socio-economic diversity.

    Nowhere is this discordance with national realities than in the South of Market district. Two decades ago this was largely a hardscrabble district of industrial warehouses and factories. Its transformation to becoming a high income haven began with the dot.com boom of the late 1990s. Even when that boom went bust in the early 2000s — triggering an exodus of some 25,000 people between 2000 and 2003 — the dot-com fortune seekers had left their mark on the transformation of the district, as well as the nearby, largely Latino Mission district.

    Several factors drove this transformation, including the restrictive economics of starting a business in older, more upscale neighborhoods in the northern portion of the city, proximity to freeway access to the peninsula suburbs and Silicon Valley, and abundance of warehouse space contributing to an ‘edgy’ cityscape, SoMa and the Mission District took the crown as the most hip neighborhoods to live and start a business during the late 90’s.

    The character of the two districts, however, are quite distinct. The Mission District continues to be a mecca attracting hipsters and ‘creative’ types, while SoMa is now often derided as ‘sterile’ and rife with ‘yuppies’. One reason is that much of the residential development there is quite new, creating a distinct lack of character.

    Even with the abundance of recently built condos and converted lofts, only during Giants home baseball games at AT&T Park does SoMa feel like the vibrant neighborhood that is shamelessly touted by real estate agents. The elevated freeway, which feeds into the Bay Bridge as one drives east towards Oakland, acts not only as a physical but a psychological barrier between South Beach and the rest of the city.

    Yet not all those who live in San Francisco find the particular conditions of the location to be such a bad thing. Tai Nicolopoulos, an acquaintance who is a resident of the area and works at a technology company in a peninsula suburb, finds the area to be convenient for her commute on Caltrain-the commuter rail line that connects San Francisco with Silicon Valley. She is willing to admit, though, that when it comes to variety in terms of restaurants and entertainment options, she has to leave the area and head out to other neighborhoods.

    It’s not just the architecture and street life that is lacking. So too is the prescence of children. In SoMa and the adjacent Mission Bay neighborhood you hardly see the little tykes. Much hype surrounds the the Arterra, for example, a brand-new 16-story, 269 unit condominium building in Mission Bay designed to be “San Francisco’s first LEED-certified, green high-rise.” The building, called and developed by Intracorp Companies on a former brownfield site, has already sold 60 percent of its units. Despite this success, according to the sales agent, not even one family with young children has purchased a unit. The townhouse units, which are marketed more towards families with children, are having a harder time being sold than tower units. This is not surprising considering that there is a lack of amenities for children in the neighborhood.

    Yet in many ways, what is happening in SoMa and Mission Bay represents the future of San Francisco. Some of this has to do with politics. Since the 1960s, San Francisco has had a reputation for being a city where vocal citizens who take a ‘Not-In-My-Backyard’ attitude towards any new development are prominent. In the storied well-established neighborhoods of the city — Nob Hill, Russian Hill and North Beach — getting a building permit for even just a home remodel can be an arduous task.

    But for the former warehouse and industrial areas like SoMa, the story is completely different. Here the San Francisco Planning Department can press densification without significant opposition. In fact, the new pro-development attitude is visible in the handful of new high-rise buildings that dot the skyline. One of the most visually prominent new buildings is the 45-story One Rincon Hill condo tower just north of the western approach of the Bay Bridge. Dubbed the ‘Ionic Breeze’ for its resemblance to an object from a Sharper Image catalog, the One Rincon Hill tower foreshadows things to come.

    In May of this year, the city of San Francisco presented a new zoning plan for the Transbay Terminal area in SoMa. This plan allows for significant height increases for new buildings built in this zone, crowned by the proposed 1200’ tall Transbay Tower at 1st and Mission Streets. Other areas of SoMa are currently being studied by the city block by block to see what impact rezoning would have on the resulting skyline. To appease the vocal citizens who are concerned about losing their view of the topographic landscape San Francisco is famous for, the city is basing the rezoning effort around a conceptual height scheme that will make the skyline appear to “mimic” the rolling hills with “peaks and valleys” – the Transamerica Building and proposed Transbay Terminal tower being the “peaks.” The jury is still out on how this overly didactic scheme will fly with developers and NIMBYs alike.

    Conveniently, the current zeitgeist has a green tint provided by the density movement, something that has blunted NIMBY opposition to the city’s ongoing Manhattanization. And to be sure, dense housing makes sense when there is a demand for it like there is in San Francisco.

    But the question remains: what kind of city are we building? Current trends suggest the new residents of these largely “luxury units will be independently wealthy individuals buying second homes and Silicon Valley weekend warriors whose careers are based on the Peninsula but who party on in San Francisco in their often meager space time.

    Unlikely to settle there will be the old timers who live in rent controlled apartments in North Beach or Russian and Chinese immigrant families who call the Richmond and Sunset districts home. The developments in SoMa may well show that there is a future for a high end urban core, but the kind of diversity that long made cities such as joy may increasingly be harder to find.

    Adam Nathaniel Mayer is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. Raised in the town of Los Gatos, on the edge of Silicon Valley, Adam developed a keen interest in the importance of place within the framework of a highly globalized economy. He currently lives in San Francisco where he works in the architecture profession.

  • The Entrenchment of Urban Poverty

    How high urban housing costs and income inequality have exacerbated urban poverty

    A few years ago, on a drive from New York to Washington, I turned off I-95 in Baltimore to see H.L. Mencken’s home. Abandoned row houses lined the street, some boarded up with plywood, others simply gutted. Signs offering fast cash for houses and a number to call for unwanted cars outnumbered pedestrians. It was a landscape of rot and neglect with few signs of renewal and investment.

    Writers have expended vast amounts of ink about the recent resurgence of cities, yet pockets of great poverty like West Baltimore have proven disturbingly resilient. Maryland has one of the nation’s lowest poverty rates, but is one of eight states where 70 percent of the poor are concentrated in one city. In most of the city’s schools, close to 50 percent of students qualify for federally assisted meals.

    Looking at data from the 2006 US Census American Community Survey, many urban cities have poverty rates that far exceed the national level of 13.3 percent. Bronx County tops the list at 29.1 percent. The city of St. Louis and Baltimore as well as Philadelphia, Wayne (Detroit), Kings County (Brooklyn) and Denver counties all have poverty rates hovering between 19 and 27 percent.

    The poverty in these communities testifies to a widening schism of income inequality distressingly common across America but most pronounced in the nation’s cities. Cost of living in cities is one key factor. The federal poverty threshold for a family of four in 2004 was only $19,157, but this number does not make an adjustment for the high rents that low-wage workers must pay to live in an urban environment.

    Deborah Reed of the Public Policy Institute of California found that the poverty rates in wealthy cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles were actually significantly higher than the official rate. In San Francisco, the poverty rate was 19 percent adjusted for housing costs compared to the official ten percent; Los Angeles had a 20 percent poverty rate with the factored adjustment compared to the 16 percent official number.

    Furthermore, numerous studies have documented the “high cost of being poor” in many urban areas. Low-income neighborhoods like Compton in Los Angeles (where one third of the residents are in poverty) or the Tenderloin in San Francisco suffer from a paucity of services that are plentiful in surrounding communities. Manhattan Beach has one bank for every 4,000 residents. Residents of Compton, on the other hand, can access barely one for every 25,000. Residents must make do with corner stores that sell inferior food goods at higher prices and check cashing outlets that often deduct three percent of the customer’s paycheck.

    What is all this leading to? The unsettling contrasts between rich and poor of John Edwards’ “Two Americas” narrative is all too real in many American cities. Walking down Minna Street in San Francisco this week, I saw a homeless man drying his socks in the sun, just twenty yards from restaurants with $30 entrees and nightclubs so discrete in their hipness they need only signify their sign with a small letter.

    And although often more startling in affluent, white-collar havens like San Francisco, this contrast exists in almost every city. In Baltimore the gap between high-earning skilled professionals living in gentrified neighborhoods with waterfront view and a procession of hard-pressed, violence-plagued communities nearby is equally striking.

    The celebratory accounts of gentrification of small parts of cities like Baltimore – or large parts of sections of San Francisco or Chicago – needs to be balanced with a far greater concern with creating upward mobility for those large populations left behind. These lower income populations need to be treated as potential assets that will require investments in skills training and childcare subsidies, all the while nurturing high wage blue collar industries and improving basic public infrastructure.

    In the past, poverty reduction never stuck around long enough to become a major issue in the presidential campaign, partly because voter turnout in these communities is low and, as we suggested earlier this week, there is little doubt which party will win urban voters.

    But there is some reason, perhaps, to feel more optimistic this year. Senator Obama’s community organizing background in Chicago’s South Side has led him to adopt a broad anti-poverty platform targeting greater federal resources for working parents and low-income children. The presumptive Democratic nominee also proposes tripling the popular Earned Income Tax Credit that supplements low-income workers and supports pegging the minimum wage to the cost of living. Interestingly, Obama has also voiced support for creating a White House Office of Urban Policy.

    Coming from a party skeptical about increasing poverty spending, McCain has supported tax credits being used to attract businesses to low-income neighborhoods and also favors increasing childcare subsidies for low-income families.

    Mencken once wrote that his house in Baltimore “is as much a part of me as my two hands. If I had to leave it I’d be as certainly crippled as if I lost a leg.” However, given its current condition, it is highly unlikely today he would linger in his old neighborhood for long. Hopefully, after November, there may be reason to reassess that assumption.

    Andy Sywak is the articles editor for Newgeography.com.

  • Homeless IT Worker in San Francisco

    Yesterday, an article appeared in the SF Chronicle by C.W. Nevius about an Internet salesman who lives in a tent in Golden Gate Park because housing costs are too high. He works by day at a cafe and pitches his tent at night getting up before dawn when the police do raids to evict illegal campers.

    With much of the new development in SF geared towards the flush Web 2.0 crowd, there are fewer and fewer places for the lower middle-class to live. The resident hotels in SF are not pleasant places to live or even visit (I went voter canvassing in a few three years ago).

    What is the housing solution for the Tom Sepas of the world? If we ever start seeing 21st Century Hoovervilles, they could be populated by people like him.

    A very sobering tale that shatters the popular vision of the everyman Internet worker as some high-flying urban hepcat.

  • Is Narcissus also a success story?

    In sharp contrast with its arch-rival, Los Angeles, San Francisco historically has won plaudits from easterners. Writing in his 1946 landmark work, Inside USA, John Gunther compared “tranquil and mature” San Francisco with LA, a city he loathed as “the home par excellence of the dissatisfied.” The City by the Bay, he wrote, “possesses a incomparable quality of charm” unsurpassed by any American city.

    But no group extols San Francisco’s virtues more than San Franciscans. Indeed when journalist Neil Morgan wrote about the place he labeled it “Narcissus of the West.” Perhaps nothing exemplified this self-reflecting modality than the old tendency to refer to the place simply as “The City,” as if, in real terms, there was no other.

    Over the past few decades, this combination of urban charm and narcissism has transformed San Francisco. The city I got to know as a young journalist in the early 1970s working for the alternative weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian was already changing. Areas once habituated by old-fashioned bohemians (i.e., those without trust funds) – North Beach, Union Street – already were being displaced by new age enthusiasts, investment bankers and young corporate executives.

    But still, in the 1970s, San Francisco remained very much a city of neighborhoods, each one very much a world unto itself. If the east face of the city – North Beach, Russian Hill, Downtown, Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf – was being transformed into a kind of high-end theme park, much of the western ends of the city, as well as places such as the Mission and Potrero Hill, remained bastions of ethnic diversity, middle and working class families.

    As our articles editor Andy Sywak, who is also editor of the Castro Courier neighborhood newspaper, points out in his first rate analysis, this San Francisco still exists, although it may be holding on for its life. Demographically, San Francisco has changed in ways that may well signal the future for at least a series of American urban geographies – Portland, Seattle, Boston, DC and even Manhattan come to mind – that although quick to celebrate diversity are in many ways becoming increasingly less so.

    In some ways, this may be the curse of too-good looks. Ever since Haight-Ashbury caught on as the epicenter of the 1960s hippy movement, San Francisco has lured ever more affluent and well-educated people. In the process, the price of real estate has skyrocketed, making the city virtually unaffordable for almost everyone outside the upper middle class. Once known as a rough, brawling union town, San Francisco likely now boasts the highest percentage of people living off wealth – rents, dividends, interest – of any major American city.

    A recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California showed that virtually every income group from households making $50,000 to $150,000 a year dropped between 2002 and 2006. In contrast, households making between $150,000 and $200,000 surged 52 percent and those earning even more expanded by 40 percent. Housing prices, although slightly off last, have more than doubled since 2002 to nearly $800,000; it takes an income near $200,000 to afford a median priced home.

    This upper class shift has fostered, indeed encouraged, a strange form of ultra-liberal politics. Perhaps no major American city wears its leftism on its sleeve more than San Francisco. When it comes to imposing “green” controls and standards, as well as any embracing gender and cultural liberalism, The City is not to be outdone.

    But such lifestyle liberalism should not be confused with traditional urban reform, which focused on how to expand the benefits of urban life and economy to broad sections of the population. To maintain and even expand this largely childless city – San Francisco has the lowest percentage of children per capita of any major American city – major reform of city institutions, notably schools, no longer commands priority. Instead, efforts can be concentrated in consolidating what University of Chicago urban theorist Saskia Sassen calls “the urban glamour zone.”

    In this sense, San Francisco is a place that combines the characteristics of an exclusive resort, with extremely expensive real estate and concentrations of high-end amenities, with an exclusive economy based on elite services fields such as finance, media and design. Even in hard times, its real estate economy can be propped up by purchases by the wealthy, both full and part-timers, who wish to imbibe The City’s urban charms.

    Increasingly – and likely more the case in the future – these wealthy people (and their progeny) will settle in San Francisco more for lifestyle than purely economic reasons. Instead of nurturing the traditional middle class, the city can depend on the kind of young temporary sojourners (remarked upon by our Adam Mayer, who recently moved back to the Bay Area) to provide relatively low-cost skilled labor as well as the legions of waiters, toenail painters, dog walkers, performance artists and the like.

    Such an urban economy, of course, also requires people willing to do very hard labor – busboys, janitors, cleaning ladies, gardeners – many of whom will have to commute from distant locales to service the “needs” of the cognitive elites. The one impoverished constituency tolerated in the new order, the homeless, will incongruously now share the glamour city with the glitterati. This is why, notes the great California historian and San Francisco native Kevin Starr, The City has become “a cross between Carmel and Calcutta.”

    Can such a society work, and, if so, is its model applicable elsewhere? Certainly you must be a place with inherent attractions to the wayward and affluent. Seattle, Portland, Boston as well as Manhattan could also evolve in this direction, and may already being doing so. It’s difficult, however, to see such an economy working out so well in other less powerfully attractive urban centers, particularly those with large concentrations of poverty.

    But for a lovely place like San Francisco the trajectory is not entirely negative. As the country’s population expands to 400 million in 2050, there will be a growing, albeit small niche, for high-cost places that appeal to those with requisite high-end skills or at least the right heredity.

    We can see this with the economy. Even as it has lost corporate headquarters, manufacturing and other generators of middle-class jobs, San Francisco’s appeal to high-end workers and as an entertainment center – Dr. Starr dubs his hometown “a theme park for restaurants” – has helped secure its position as kind of PR office, party town and alternative hip location for the far less charming, if more productive, nerdistan further south.

    San Francisco already has twice successfully hitched itself to the Valley’s surge, first in the late 90s dotcom surge and more recently in the Google-centric 2.0 boom. The city’s total jobs likely have not recovered their 2000 levels, but there has been a notable improvement over the last two years.

    The future progress, however, may prove more difficult. Although the administration of Mayor Gavin Newsom has trumpeted what it claims as a major economic as well as demographic turnaround, the inevitable popping of the 2.0 bubble could wreak some damage. Already layoffs in the hard-hit financial sector – some of it tied to the venture capital industry – last quarter saw tenants give up almost a Transamerica Pyramid’s worth of space.

    The picture is at least murky on the demographic side. Yet although state population numbers record a return to population growth, the census numbers, which we rely on at NG, are less impressive, recording a loss of roughly four percent since 2000.

    These competing claims will not be fully resolved until after the 2010 census. But population growth may be somewhat beside the point. San Francisco’s emerging identity is not as a bustling, growing city that attracts middle class families. Instead, its destiny – or karma as locals may prefer to see it – may be to lure the wealthy, the well-educated and talented to the communal self-celebration that long has stood the trademark of the place they call The City.

  • Community and a Sense of Place in San Francisco

    On any given weeknight in San Francisco, some professional, political or social association throws a cocktail hour. From black-tie galas in the latest hip restaurant to arts fundraisers held at dingy watering holes, these mixers are a staple of young professional life where people go to network, flirt and unwind.

    A recent event was packed with young, clean-cut white and Asian office workers. Everybody was affable, ambitious, smartly dressed and beaming with apparent confidence. In conversation, I learned that almost nobody was from here; some had only been here a few months. We talked about our careers, the coming summer’s travels and, being a largely twenty-something crowd, the best places to get fall down drunk. It was not an unpleasant way to pass the evening.

    Yet, as I walked back to my car through the cool streets, an emptiness lingered: the déjà vu of too many jaunty conversations at other cocktail hours. They reminded me of the breezy talks had in youth hostels the world over; and like any youth hostel, it seemed obvious that if I were to go to the same place a year later it would be an entirely different group of people. The exuberance would remain the same, but the faces would not.

    Undoubtedly, San Francisco is one of the great American cities – and perhaps its most beautiful. The thick fog that charges into the city at all times of year and the colorful Victorian homes that line the streets like dominoes create a charm few other cities anywhere can match. Certainly, it is not the cleanest American city, but it feels among our most loved judging by the stream of visitors and the upkeep of its buildings.

    Of course, many cities are beautiful, but what makes the town truly unique is its sense of place. Take a snapshot of a street in Los Angeles and it could pass as Denver, Dallas or Orlando, but when I walk on Irving, Hayes, Mission or Grant streets, I know without doubt that I am in San Francisco and no other place. The large stone edifices and doormen of Nob Hill recall Manhattan, but the ring of the cable car and the sudden, unexpected views of the Bay remind me that I am nowhere but here.

    And yet, there lies the great paradox of “the City” as locals like to call it: it is a place at once very personal and impersonal. Its geography, architecture and quirky culture are truly unique, and yet much of the City’s population consists of a revolving door of restless youth who stay for a few years before leaving.

    The concentration of entertainment, great cuisine, culture, and educated people give the city a verve and zest that few can match, but this lifestyle does not translate as well to young families: the City has the lowest percentage of its population under the age of 18 of any U.S. city. The City’s famously high cost of living makes it difficult to buy a home within city limits for under $700,000. Lots of condominiums cost more than that. Faced with this unpleasant economic reality, it is no wonder that many people move on after a couple of years.

    It is very tempting to want to place a value judgment on all this, to say that a city with as restless a population and few families offers only fleeting moments of adult enjoyments to a rotating list of players; certainly the more sublime satisfactions of being firmly rooted in one community, owning property and raising a family are increasingly out of reach for many residents.

    Besides the cost of living , the uber-liberal climate may also eventually nudge many people and business from San Francisco. But perhaps it’s OK — in a nation of 300 million headed towards 400 million — for a city to thrive as a “one-industry town, strictly in the pleasure dome business,” to quote Tom Wolfe’s description of Manhattan a few years ago. Few towns exhibit the urban high-life as well as San Francisco while retaining a close proximity to mountains, beaches and pristine forests.

    The real question then becomes: how much meaningful community can one find in cities like this, where people move in and out with great frequency, where transience is a norm rather than an exception? What sort of lives do we lead when we move on every few years and when friendships that we’ve invested time into do the same?

    As Robert Putnam writes in his seminal work Bowling Alone, “Communities with higher rates of residential turnover are less well integrated… Mobility undermines civic engagement and community-based social capital.” Not suprisingly social capital indexes generally ranks cities like San Francisco rather poorly.

    Thinking back to the cocktail party, I wish I could put tags on the people I met that night and see where they would be in five years. I think if I walked into the same place then, I would be greeted by a fresh group of well-manicured and confident peers talking about the newest excitements to be experienced in this land of high cosmopolitania.

    But where would be the people I saw? My guess is not in San Francisco. In Redwood City or Benecia, perhaps, or in the Midwestern or East Coast towns they grew up in, watching their toddlers run through their backyard talking about the time in their youth when they did “the San Francisco thing.” And man, it was a blast.

  • Letter from the Ephemeral City

    “How is it living in a real city now?” friends and family ask with smug earnestness now that I reside in much coveted San Francisco. The response ranges from a straightforward ‘nice’ to a heated diatribe against their assumption that the city to the south I resided in for the previous seven years was not a ‘real’ city. The defense of Los Angeles is futile to those who won’t listen – those who judge it based on what has been projected through television and movies: unrelenting smog, apocalyptic fires, drug addicted actresses, road rage wars and the like.

    Yet there is never any need to defend my recent move to San Francisco – a supposed paragon of progressiveness loved by people from all corners of the globe (aside from the right wing media who will use any opportunity to poke fun at the political lunacy that often takes place here). Even the critics of San Francisco cannot deny the sheer beauty of the city’s geography: at the tip of a peninsula bounded by San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Taking its georgraphy into account, it becomes readily apparent that San Francisco is what it is because of the Bay and ocean around it – the inhabitants and architecture are secondary. The city as we know it is merely an homage to the forces of nature.

    Beyond the spectacle of the Bay and the favorable weather, what impressions come to mind when San Francisco is mentioned? Aside from icons such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and cable cars, most people remember the city for its historically liberal political climate.Who can forget about the Beat Generation, the Summer of Love and the Gay Rights Movement? There is no doubt that these social benchmarks have had positive reverberations throughout the world –leading to broader acceptance of a diversity of cultures and lifestyles and the elevation of the peace movement.

    Unfortunately, because of these successes, the city is currently suffering from an identity crisis in an attempt to live up to its past glory. The city is not unlike a child prodigy, who at a very early age garnered a lot clout but burned out before it was able to fully mature.

    It is a tragic observation that liberal politics has become a parody of itself within San Francisco. Just recently, when the Olympic torch for the 2008 Beijing Games arrived in the city, Mayor Gavin Newsom was forced to abruptly reroute the path of travel in order to avoid violent protests from disrupting the event. Even though the good Mayor was looking out for the reputation of his city, the majority of people who waited hours to witness the historic event ended the day in bitter disappointment.

    Also in the headlines recently, Barack Obama was chastised for making a disparaging remark about the people of rural Pennsylvania – a key voting block for that state’s primary election – at a dinner party in a donor’s mansion. Of course, the media subsequently put every effort into emphasizing the fact that Mr. Obama’s blunder was made in none other than San Francisco, the poster child of leftist elitism. Even pop culture outlets like the television show South Park and the stand-up comic Dave Chapelle have notably poked fun at the city and its hypocrisy.

    There is nothing wrong with liberal political viewpoints. After all, the United States is a country where individuals can freely express their voice for what they believe is fair and just. The breakdown occurs at the point in which the residents and politicians of San Francisco fail to realize that we have entered an era that has superseded identity politics. Instead of focusing on critical issues facing the city, being identified as part of the ‘left’ or any number of ‘special interest groups,’ is actually more important; hence, nothing gets done and real progress is hindered. In other words, the city no longer has a can-do attitude.

    Part of the reason for this has to do with the fact that for those who can actually afford to live comfortably in San Francisco, the quality of life is really good. It is not difficult for one to become complacent with the numerous cultural venues and fine dining and drinking establishment in this small city.

    It is also easy to forget about what actually makes a city function – like maintaining basic infrastructure, keeping the streets safe and clean, and making sure that the service workers, who are so critical to the prominent San Francisco tourist industry, are treated justly. These issues are not as glamorous to someone more focused on saving the world by ‘going green.’ For someone with a higher than average income, purchasing a sustainable good from a trendy yet over-priced ‘green’ boutique is sufficient for self-satisfaction – there is no need to face more urgent issues head-on.

    Like the fog that oftentimes comes in and shrouds the city in a white mist blurring the landscape, so is the ephemeral quality of the city itself. Only 760,000 residents strong and 47 square miles in area, the city can seem provincial. Trumped both in area and population by San Jose, just 50 miles to the south, the Silicon Valley has for the last 30 years or so become the business center of the Bay Area. Many outside the area are not aware that companies like Apple, Google, and Yahoo are headquartered in no-name suburbs with names like Cupertino, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale – a good 45-minute to an hour drive outside San Francisco.

    Actually, businesses have been leaving the city for some time now, yet many people who commute outside San Francisco still choose to live within the city limits, contributing to what is ironically called a ‘reverse commute.’ Lifestyle, in essence, is beating out commerce when it comes to the desirability of living in San Francisco. The implications are many for this observation due to the fact that in order for a city to continually be successful, it must promote the possibility of upward mobility and have an entrepreneurial spirit. In this regard, San Francisco is failing.

    Growing up in the Bay Area, my impressions of what a city is has been defined by my excursions with my family as a youngster to San Francisco. I would beg and plead my parents every weekend to take me to the city, just so I could be among the tall buildings, be in awe at the topography and views, and people watch in Union Square. Now I live here and the ephemeral feeling of being in a dream state is ever present. Yet, as I have grown older, I am savvy to the nuances of city life and complexities that go into making a place successful. I just hope that San Francisco can wake up out of its slumber, get out of its collective social hangover and take advantage of what cultural capital is left by once again becoming a place where change is possible and ordinary citizens have the opportunity to dream.