What Happens to San Francisco, Really
I never understood the New Yorker’s desire to visit San Francisco and complain until I went to New York and felt similarly.
Nathan Heller's recent New Yorker piece, "What Happened to San Francisco, Really?" is happily not a complaint: I would even say it is an informed and urbane look around by someone who knows how to look. He stoops to the usual New Yorkerism of measuring our city's breadth against a stretch of Midtown, but we forgive him. New Yorkers love saying San Francisco is small; I think it galls them that we were able to capture the world's imagination, too, with a quarter of the space. But overall, he alludes to the truth, which is that staying in San Francisco requires the same thing as staying in New York: madness.
In countless other beautiful, thriving American cities, the rent is cheaper, the houses bigger, the parking easier, the crime lower, the streets cleaner — yet San Franciscans and New Yorkers remain. It does not make sense and yet it happens regularly to those who open themselves up to the city and do not insulate themselves in offices, Ubers, private clubs and networks. Since it was born, San Francisco has always been dying, which is to say: it is alive. There is unquestioned magic here, and protective madness too, which you contract by breathing in the piss fumes of sidewalks minutes before you inhale eucalyptus-laden fog.
For some reason, we refuse to read our Herb Caen and see this has always been the case, that the whole country has always felt San Francisco an impossible and foolish place perched on a stub of land. We panic and invite money, which is to America what cement was to the Romans. Despite having too little humanity already, we welcome a vocal, well-funded contingent of AI acolytes, servants of server farms, who would replace even more of us if they could, because they will sign one-year leases downtown. Waymos and Cruise automobiles plague our streets like golems. And yet the magic persists.
Being "The City That Knows How" implies we know a way better than others, and I don't think Francisco becomes any better following any one's lead, Manhattan's, Mountain View's or San Jose's. It must be for all San Franciscans and by all San Franciscans, as Heller concludes: the ones who are neither bums nor billionaires, the ones who are already here and not the ones we wish were here. That’s the sort of bright-eyed rationality that only earthquakes have been able to draw from us — or a supposed doom loop, as the Disco Trash program and SF New Deal prove. What happens to San Francisco next is what has always happened: it survives.
