San Francisco, let's chat. All my San Franciscophiles out there, let's put our heads together. Something is happening to our fair city. It's not a surprise nor is it a new thing. It's been happening for years. The exact nature of it is hard to define but the broad outlines are clear: San Francisco is losing its edge. Whether it be Borderlands closing this week, the end of the Anon Salon house, the loss of the Yoga Punx house, or maybe passing a law prohibiting certain kinds of public nudity; whatever your personal "bright line", we can all agree that something is happening. Of course, some people think it's a good thing, and I'm not here to argue with them. But for those of us who don't think so, the question is: what to do about it? Can anything be done? *Should* anything be done? Is Borderlands an artifact of an old and outdated San Francisco, or something worth saving?
I like to tell the story about how years ago, I found myself needing to get from one party to another across town. I wanted to walk, which was totally reasonable. Less reasonable was that I was dressed head to toe as the Tick; a giant blue costume with antennae. And it was decidedly not Halloween. In other cities, that might be odd. In SF, I never even thought about it. Nor did anyone else; nobody commented on the six foot tall blue guy with antennae.
SF, in the old days - long before I got here - was the home of the Barbary Coast. It was the place where the term "shanghai" was invented - the name for soldiers who were drugged in bars and hustled on to ships bound for China, where they would wake to 6 months of imprisonment. It was, in a word, not a very nice place. Modern SF is continuously undergoing a process of sanitization. It's not that it's a bad place to live, per se - it's more that it's becoming just like everywhere else.
Another great example: Bob's Donuts. Bob's is over on Polk street, and if you've never been you should go. For one thing, they make the best donuts I've ever had, and that's reason enough. But in addition to that, Bob's represents something: one of the last stomping grounds for the old San Francisco. I remember going in there years ago and listenning to a conversation between a hooker and her John. He had decided he wasn't really out for sex after all and just wanted to take her out for a donut and some coffee. So, there they were, in Bob's. Try that at Flour & Co. Nothing about Bob's is pretentious. They were, until recently, cash only. 6 or 7 chairs are lined up along a table near the front. A sign on the wall advertises the fastest recorded times for customers to eat their head-sized donut. Often a Chinese man is seated at the front table reading a Chinese daily newspaper. Bob's is home-away-from-home for the sort of person San Francisco used to be about.
My point here, though, is not simply to rehash all of this. Nor is it to be excessively negative. There are some advantages to increased standard of living. There is a danger in romanticizing the old days. Nobody wants to get shanghaied. However, the irony is that, during this process, one of the main draws to San Francisco is being destroyed by the very people it attracts. I am often amused to watch apps, like Sosh, scrape the city for "fun things to do". Techies - especially hip, urban, young ones - *want* to do something a little bit exciting and different. But they've priced out the very people who make those exciting things happen; the artists, the hippies, the lunatic fringe.
We all know what's happening - the rise in cost of living, especially rent, driving out those who can afford to sit around and think about the absurdity that is life, especially modern life. The question is: what can we do about it? Would creating affordable housing options bring back the art? Can technology help? Should we all move to Oakland? Austin? Memphis? Is this just a natural evolutionary process?
I don't have the answers - but I think the question is worth asking.