place is to love particulars, details, routines, memories, minutia, strangers, encounters, surprises. It’s common now for lovers of rural places to fight to preserve them, and what they love is usually the appearance of a place, the activities possible in that place, sometimes the fauna as well as the flora and form, but also what that place means. Love of a city is a more complicated thing, in that it’s a love of one’s fellow humans in quantity, for their eccentricities and frailties, as well as a love of buildings, institutions such as Halloween in the Castro or the Chinese New Year Parade, particular places, ethnic mixes; but also a love of one’s own liberation by and in connection to these phenomena. What is happening here eats out the heart of the city from the inside: the infrastructure is for the most part being added to rather than torn down, but the life within it is being drained away, a siphoning off of diversity, cultural life, memory, complexity. What remains will look like the city that was—or like a brighter, shinier, tidier version of it—but what it contained will be gone. It will be a hollow city.
Every day somebody’s apartment or house is turned from a home into a commodity and put on the market, and they join the ranks of the displaced. A steady stream of the displaced is trouping to the East Bay, where they are accelerating the gentrification of Oakland and Berkeley, whose poor are in turn moving further from the center themselves. As Paul Rauber put it in an East Bay Express article about this ripple effect, “That means Arun boots Deidre, who boots Miguel, who crosses the bay to boot Shawana.”10 But many—the poor as well as artists—are leaving the Bay Area altogether. Susan Miller, executive director of New Langton Arts, estimates that 30 to 40 percent of the artists here a few years ago have left: Film Arts Foundation, for example, is not only losing its lease but its constituency of independent filmmakers. American Indian Contemporary Arts, a downtown nonprofit gallery, was evicted last fall in favor of a dot-com, and probably won’t be able to find a replacement location.11 San Francisco’s rich cultural life arises out of a European-style density (it has the densest population in the US outside New York) and out of the combination of many ethnicities, classes, media, resources, seekers after the adventure of making culture, revolution, identity. These things are not portable; you can move the species but not the habitat.
Of course, this is happening because San Francisco is such a desirable place. The story goes that the first wave of technology workers were just electronics and software geeks who were content to live in the suburban sprawl of Silicon Valley, but along with the Internet came a more hip technocracy that demanded nightlife, grit and sensibility. Just as tourists can love a place into unrecognizability and homogeneity, so these young workers and their older bosses and backers may eviscerate the city. Some of them are buying art, and sales are booming for a few artists—but that doesn’t counterbalance the impact on the arts community as a whole. Even the Wall Street Journal notes that the dot-com newcomers like cover bands more than innovative ones, and so San Francisco’s famously creative music scene is withering as well.12 Whatever the Internet may be bringing the masses stranded far from civilization, the Internet economy in its capital is producing a massive cultural die-off, not a flowering.
San Francisco used to be the great anomaly. What happened here was interesting precisely because it was different from what was happening anywhere else. We were a sanctuary for the queer, the eccentric, the creative, the radical, the political and economic refugees, and so they came and reinforced the city’s difference. In some ways the city’s difference goes all the way back to the Gold Rush, when the absence of traditional social structures, the overwhelmingly young and male population, and wild fluctuations of wealth produced independent women, orgiastic behavior, epidemics of violence and an atmosphere of liberation. “They had their faults,” the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth once remarked of San Francisco’s original inhabitants, “but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather.”13 For many decades afterwards, the city was celebrated as a cosmopolitan version of the Wild West town, with malleable social mores, eccentrics and adventurers a big part of the social mix. By the twentieth century, it was becoming a center for immigrant Italian anarchists, Wobblies and union organizers—“not only the most tightly organized city in America but … the stronghold of trade unionism in the United States,” asserted Carey McWilliams.14 Conscientious objectors flocked here after World War II, and the poets who would later be celebrated as beats and as the San Francisco Renaissance started coming in the 1940s and 1950s; African-American emigration to the wartime jobs of San Francisco produced another postwar cultural flourishing of jazz and nightlife. With bars like the Black Cat, it was also a haven for gays and lesbians early on, and remains one today for those who can afford it. It was the place where the counterculture of what gets called “the sixties” flourished most, as well as a major center for punk culture and related subversions after 1977.
Labor Day parade on Market Street, 1935 (damaged photo). Courtesy San Francisco Public Library.
Throughout the 1980s, it was a sanctuary city for refugees from the Central American wars, and the movements sometimes called multiculturalism flourished here, from the environmental justice movement to the 1980s explosion of visual arts dealing with questions of ethnicity and identity. And of course since the Sierra Club was founded here in 1892, the San Francisco Bay Area has been a major center for environmental activism and the evolution of environmental ideas. Feminism, human rights activism, pacifism, Buddhism, paganism, alternative medicine, dance, rock and roll, jazz are some of the other phenomena infusing the local culture. The city has also changed radically many times. In 1960, it was 78 percent white, but by 1980 whites were less than 50 percent of the population and it was the nation’s most ethnically diverse large city (with a diversity similar in many ways to what it had during the Gold Rush).15 But San Francisco’s is a history of pruning as well as blooming: since the 1950s it has been mutating from a blue-collar port city of manual labor and material goods to a white-collar center of finance, administration, tourism and, now, the “knowledge industries.” Since 1997 this change has accelerated spectacularly. As Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, put it, we have had fifteen years of change compressed into a couple of dozen months, and nobody saw it coming.
This is a story about love, but there is also a lot of anger. Some people have focused on “newcomers,” and a sardonic discussion of what constitutes a San Franciscan—how many years, what kind of habits—filled the letters page of the SF Weekly for a while. Some people have focused on yuppies, and there is definitely tension on both sides of that divide—those who know they are considered yuppies, and those who hate whoever qualifies as a yuppie in their eyes. Some people have said that it’s not the fault of those who came here looking for a job that there’s a housing crisis, and it’s the local politicos, real estate speculators, greedy landlords and developers who should be targeted. Some fault a system in which a basic human need—housing—exists largely as a free-market commodity, so that need takes a back seat to profit.
My own writing has been about culture and politics in other senses. I have written about senses of place, and the geography of culture, about specific issues and sites, as well as about particular artists and movements. Lately it seems to me that even to be able to recognize and resist the forces that threaten the environments and communities that sustain us requires time and space that are rapidly eroding: time eroding as an ever-more-expensive world presses us to produce and consume ever more rapidly, catapults information and distraction at us, eliminates the unstructured time for musing and meeting; space eroding as public space, access to the sites of power, culture and protest—and also the unexploited space where one can hear one’s own thoughts—is undermined. My last book was a history of walking, and it is in part an exploration of the circumstances in which culture, contemplation and community are possible and of the embodied and geographically grounded basis of thinking and imagining. This book is about a more gritty version of the same subject: San Francisco has been not only the great refuge for the nation’s pariahs and nonconformists; it has been the breeding ground of new ideas, mores and movements social, political and artistic. To see the space in which those things were incubated be homogenized into just another place for
