Quote:
Originally Posted by whatnext
... this coruscating city of hills, bordered by water on three sides, was a beloved haven for reinvention, a refuge for immigrants, bohemians, artists and outcasts. It was the great American romantic city, the Paris of the West.
No longer. In a time of scarce consensus, everyone agrees that something has rotted in San Francisco.
Conservatives have long loathed it as the axis of liberal politics and political correctness, but now progressives are carping, too. They mourn it for what has been lost, a city that long welcomed everyone and has been altered by an earthquake of wealth. It is a place that people disparage constantly, especially residents...
...San Francisco has less of what makes a city dynamic. It has the lowest percentage of children, 13.4 percent, of any major American city, and is home to about as many dogs as humans under the age of 18.
The city was once a center of black culture, and Breed is its first black woman mayor. But the African American population has withered to 5.5 percent compared to 13.4 percent a half century ago. ...[/I]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...=.d662c31eeb53 |
I have lived in San Francisco now for 37 years. That entire time, people have been saying the city used to be different and better than now and with some justification on certain details. In a way, the roaring Gold Rush city or the Metropolis of the West that it was just before the Great Earthquake or, if you are gay, the no-holds-barred gay party town of the late 1970s before AIDS appeared in 1982 or so were its high marks (although I moved to town in 1982 and remember talking with friends about the "gay plague" that had just appeared, I was a regular visitor from 1976 onward).
I do agree that several trends have combined to give the city a bland uniformity in which everybody you meet seems to be a Millennial Tech Bro (or sistah) and the things they favor, from Audi dealerships (Audi seems to be the new Porsche) to designer ice cream (Bi-Rite in the Mission) are everywhere.
The trends I'm mainly referring to are not just tech coming to utterly dominate the economy but also:
1. The death of local retail engendered by Amazon.com and other online sellers (nobody needs even Lucca any more when you can buy Italian groceries online and have them delivered to your door).
2. The swamping of the city by mentally ill long-term homeless people and the city's inability to devise a plan to deal with them (it pours money--which it has plenty of--on them but it makes no demands on them to respect the housed or normal social rules like don't take sh*t on a main downtown sidewalk in mid-afternoon as crowds walk by).
3. The complete victory of left-wing--and moving farther left by the day--politics which seems to believe there is nothing that shouldn't be taxed including the geese currently laying golden eggs (currently they want to tax IPOs--numerous local tech companies are taking that step this year--and Uber rides--Uber is headquartered in the city). Another manifestation of Progressive domination is the $15/hr minimum wage combined with mandatory health insurance and paid leave to care for sick friends etc which are well on their way to eliminating low-priced restaurants which were once one of the city's most attractive features (chain fast food was never big but now it's almost gone--I'm talking more about ethnic eateries). I had lunch last week with a friend at a small Middle Eastern place (and I'm on a diet so I just had a plate of hummus and baba ganoush and salad): The bill was almost $50 plus tip (no alcoholic beverages). This may have been the straw that broke Lucca's back (that and the land their store sat on being worth more than the business could make in generations).
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