In late February / early March of 2023, I spent a week visiting San Francisco to see if I’d want to live here. I had been looking to move to the West Coast for a few years, but never seemed to be able to line things up properly (job, finances, etc.). For a lot of different reasons (mostly related to doing “progressive” anti-poverty work in conservative Central Pennsylvania and not finding much of what I wanted in rural PA) I decided to take the leap. The day I landed for my week-long scouting visit, I had lined up a date with a woman in Oakland. Not knowing my way around, I took an Uber to the restaurant and an Uber back to my hotel (I learned to take the train later in the week). In my Uber ride over the Bay Bridge, I made small talk with the driver. I told him I was thinking of moving here, he told me he was thinking of moving away from here. From his point of view, San Francisco had gotten too expensive and the vibe had changed. As a long-time resident, he could cash out on his property and go anywhere more affordable. He started to say, “this place used to be so much better before…” He paused, looked at me in the rear view mirror, and asked, “so what do you do for a living?” I knew what he was going to say. I told him, “don’t worry, I’m not in tech. I work in the nonprofit sector.” Relieved, he continued, yeah, this place used to be so much better before tech ruined everything.
That statement, “this place used to be so much better…” is a refrain I hear a lot. It comes up most frequently when I’m talking to new acquaintances. They’ll ask me why I moved here. I’ll usually say the weather, the beauty, the diversity, and access to so many things to do. That’s usually when the “used to be better” phrase is trotted out. They’ll reminisce about bars or music venues that have closed down, and how the city felt like a nonstop party. Better art scene, better music scene, better social scene. And then all of the artists and musicians were priced out by tech money, along with many of the city’s minorities. Neighborhoods became more gentrified and more mono-cultural. The city lost some of its weirdness, spark, and spunk.
A slightly different version of that story, one that I overheard in coffee shops on that trip in 2023, was that this place was so much better before the pandemic. The people sharing this narrative seemed to be well-off (probably working in tech or finance) and their standard for comparison seemed to be much more about law and order or “cleanliness” than about a disappearing art or music scene. They too lamented the financial situation, but for them it seemed to be about missing out on the cash cow before the bust. For them, the market had dropped out, and the city had emptied out. They were stuck in higher rent apartments where vagrants shit on the sidewalks while some of their friends were able to take their remote work to other, cheaper, and presumably more orderly, cities. Because I was thinking of moving here, I intentionally listened in to these conversations to see what the locals were complaining about. So much of what I heard seemed transactional and devoid of the wonder that the city might inspire. It was in the middle of the “doom loop” narrative, and these were the people who seemed most down on the city.
A third version of this story comes from some of the old guard of the city, the hippies who came here in the 60s and 70s looking for drugs, free love, sexual liberation and gay rights, and music. They were anti-establishment and loved that this was ground zero for the counter-culture movement. Some of them, maybe many, grew more conservative over time and adapted to the changing economic landscape. They had seen the city change many times over the years. They witnessed the decline of the 60s movement, and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Skate and punk culture eventually replaced much of the hippie scene. Tech came and went, came and went. Some of these folks, remained mildly ungovernable and progressive. For many, I suspect today’s city is unrecognizable from that San Francisco. Their lament is probably more nostalgic than the others and also more realistic or accepting. Cities change and few cities cycle through booms and busts the way San Francisco does.
I’ve been here a little over two-and-a-half years. I can no longer claim to be a newbie, though I still have so many places to explore. And while I can’t claim to be a newbie, I still wear newbie-tinted glasses. I still see this place with the perspective of where I came from – Central Pennsylvania by way of a year in Memphis, Tennessee by way of a lifetime in the Philadelphia region. I lack the long perspective of how it used to be, but I can unequivocally say that this city strikes me as being better than most. If and when I’m a skeptic of broad generalizations of the city’s vibe, it’s when some of our politicians use the city’s rise and fall for political advantage. I’m not sure the doom loop was what some made it out to be. Moreover, as current politicians tout that the city is making a comeback or the city is on the rise, I find myself asking, for whom?
I get a little frustrated with the “it used to be better crowd.” While I don’t want to invalidate their complaint – it very well may have been better – I think it lacks a sense of appreciation and suggests a lack of effort. Art and music scenes may not be as visible as they once were, but scratch the surface and you’ll still find people doing the work.
Depending on the nature of my relationship with the person lamenting the way it used to be, I will sometime push back and ask what they’re doing to improve things. During a recent conversation with a friend, he reminisced about the old music scene and lamented the bars and music venues that have been closing down. We’re losing two storied venues this year – one of them a 250-person capacity venue that hosted Oasis, Green Day, Beastie Boys, and White Stripes. My friend and I talked about affordability, how artists have been priced out, how venues struggle to compete against corporate conglomerates, how bars struggle under current economic conditions. I pointed out that there are several efforts underway to mitigate these losses (affordable housing for artists, spaces for collaboration). He said, perhaps rightfully so, that you can’t manufacture a scene. I tend to agree with him. The Beats, the hippies, the skaters and punks all happened organically and during times when one could afford to live in San Francisco. Movements and scenes are, by their very nature, a little unruly and unplanned. We may never see something like that again. While I was willing to concede this point, I asked him if he had any solutions. Because he seemed to poo-poo the political and philanthropic efforts to support art and culture, I asked when was the last time he went to see a local band at a local bar or if he buys art from local artists. The complaint, in my mind, loses some validity if he’s not willing to support the things he fears we’re losing.
While I often tend to land in a Zen-like mindset – things will change when they need to change, I do spend a lot of time thinking about issues of diversity and culture and what makes a city or community vibrant. I have many days when I wish I could contribute more than what I’m currently doing. Right now, I’m mostly a consumer (extractor) of the beauty and vibrancy that this city offers. Right now, I’m not sure how or where to give back. Sometimes, I have the urge to start something or find an existing community to support. I have yet to do that.
When I think about these things, I usually try to think about the problem from both ends: how did we get here and what could be done. As with almost all change, the only constant is the passage of time. New generations move in, old generations die off, tastes change and the market adjusts. Or at least that’s how it used to be. A working theory that I have is that the newer generations are a wildly different beast than what has come before and their tastes change far more rapidly than they used to. They are among the first generations to have almost all of their cultural tastes and preferences influenced by the algorithm. They are also among the first to be raised by helicopter parents. While they were given free reign and almost unfettered access to the online world, they were taught that the physical world was a dangerous place. Their sense of community, I suspect, is far more influenced by their online behaviors than in-person behavior. They’d rather DoorDash and order from Amazon than go to a physical store or restaurant. This poses a significant impediment to place-based communities and scenes. At the same time, the pace of life has quickened – scenes and eras have been replaced by fads, memes, and trends. The summer of love was a place-based movement that drew 100,000 young people to San Francisco and had an impact that lasted for years. Brat Summer was a music-inspired meme that barely lasted a year before becoming “cringe.” Having a moment in the past might have meant a good run of a few years to a decade or so and now, it might be a few months. Community, and movements often take time because community and movements require trust and focused urgency. We live in a world where trust is hard to come by and everything is urgent. And when everything is urgent, our attention is fractured, and momentum is fleeting.
As for San Francisco’s dynamics, I think today’s tech boom is different from prior tech booms. I listen to and overhear a lot of conversations among younger people. Many of them are of the get in, make money, and get out mentality. I don’t think that was quite as true for the earlier tech proponents. A few weeks ago, I went to a dinner with strangers event. Two of the people at my table were about my age and came to San Francisco in the earlier tech days (Apple, Yahoo, etc.). They talked far more substantively about the world than what I hear from today’s younger tech crowd. They were interested in art, music, writing and history. They also had an appreciation for the city that seemed to run deeper than the idea that SF is a stop along the way to early retirement or the next “it” town.
Another thing I’ve noticed, another thing working against building unique cultural movements is that we’ve seen a homogenization of our physical spaces. Coffee shops in almost every city look the same. Apartment buildings look the same. Our bars are beginning to look the same. It’s a new McDonald’s-ization of our physical world. It is, first and foremost, a business model – one that promotes mimicry for the sake of profit. Find something that works and feels familiar and scale up, optimize, repeat. Traditionally, art, music, writing, and community have had little to do with optimization. They don’t work at scale, and are terribly inefficient. Our fast-paced world demand efficiency. If I have my doubts that a true scene will ever emerge again (will we ever have another Summer of Love, Hudson River School, Grunge, or Beat Poetry scene), it’s because I believe commerce and the algorithm have changed the rules of the game and the speed at which it’s played. In some respects, we have access to too many influences, and nothing seems to take hold.
I began this post a few weeks back after an intense conversation with a friend about “the scene” (or lack thereof) in San Francisco. I was feeling frustrated that he’s probably correct in asserting that any scene is global and no longer local. I was also struck by the idea that prolonged cultural movements – ones in which there’s cohesion around an idea or aesthetic, ones that have the power to change the world – may be a thing of the past.
In the weeks since I started writing this, one of the city’s notable writer’s, Camille Peri, passed away. In reading her obituary, I learned what a force she and her husband David Talbot (founder of Salon.com and author of Season of the Witch) were. In addition to their writing, the two of them had transformed their old Victorian home into a kind of literary/artistic salon. According to the obituary, friends spoke of the couple’s home as having, “the best breakfast table banter of any couple I’ve ever known” and of Peri specifically, “Camille was somebody with a zest for life and a gift for happiness that was at the center of this household where people really were coming and going — rappers, poets, activists and writers of all kinds. It was a circus in the best possible way.”
I was sad to hear that we lost another artist who was an institution, yet hopeful in the idea that others might be hidden in plain sight. I can’t speak to how the city used to be, and I’m fairly certain those things aren’t coming back. Though what evolves, who’s to say? I have plenty of days when I lament the new guard’s obsession with startup culture which seems completely disconnected from the concept of community and/or institutional and cultural history. But I also believe SF is vibrant enough and still attracts the kind of quirky outsiders that it might yet foster another movement, build another scene.