San Francisco: tough times in a golden snow globe

For a decade, Cary McClelland was a documentary filmmaker and human rights campaigner in far-flung parts of the world -- Congo, East Timor, Zimbabwe. He came home and has collected oral histories from well over 100 Bay Area residents, shaping these narratives into Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley. From his introduction:

The problem is that the richer the cities get, the more unequal they get. Specifically, the more young, male, and white they get. And their diversity is being squeezed onto the streets and into distant suburbs by ever-rising rents and living costs. San Francisco’s income inequality grew faster than any other American city, making it the most unequal city in the nation in 2015. Salaries in the Bay Area have been on the rise, but the number of people living in poverty has also grown.

... The different cultures representing the city’s past are at risk of being whitewashed away. If you don’t have a role to play, there may not be room for you in the Silicon City.

... The challenge for the Bay Area is not whether it can choose one identity—libertarian tech supercity or state-sponsored liberal utopia—but whether it can find some harmony where the best of each can merge. We can recognize the inherent potential in the Bay Area’s current growth, and also wish that the change felt informed and intentional—not incidental and out of control—that it finds ways to make a future that includes San Franciscans new and old alike, where those who built the city can live alongside those who have just arrived. If it cannot happen there, with the wealth of the nation, its brightest talent, and most open hearts at hand, then where will it?

For any of us living here, this is all too familiar. As McClelland says elsewhere, the tech economy feels to those of us who have been around awhile (46 years in my case) like a "giant earthquake" we can never quite banish from consciousness.

Colin Rule, who founded a dispute resolution company that works with tech enterprises, catches what the new folks often look like to observers:

Some people get very, very panicky and emotional. It doesn’t have to be massive success, Zuckerberg success. But still they feel like, Look, I came here, and I started this company. I made a lot of money. So clearly the way I see the world is the correct way to see the world. Some of them, in reaction, become very . . . aggressive about it.

Caille Millner who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle and was born and raised here, remembers an early period in the tech explosion which felt less disconnected from the culture of this city on the left coast of the possible.

You see it in those early chat rooms, projects like Wikipedia and Craigslist, the guys who created Netscape. Those were Tech 1.0. A lot of those guys weren’t in it for the money. They were in it because that was how they saw the world. They were just too utopian, really. We’re just gonna do some weird, free-wheeling stuff. We’re gonna start this weird company and call it Yahoo! We’re gonna have “surfers” who are gonna look through the net and order things like librarians. No one took it seriously. No one thought like, Oh, this is going to become a serious business. No one thought this little company was going to become an institution.

But Elaine Katzenberger from City Lights bookstore has seen the big money destroy that sensibility.

The story of San Francisco is that it’s a boomtown. And boomtowns are never particularly good places to live. Those of us who came here for an alternative to that, we’re in the minority now.

San Francisco was always—at least rhetorically, and sometimes in action—a kind of community unto itself. Maybe it still is. But if San Francisco no longer represents an idea of humanism and freedom from the treadmill, then where do we fit in? What’s our role? The thing is, we are still here.

Except, of course, for those who are not still here. Mission District and Bayview activist Edwin Lindo is quoted extensively. He told McClelland:

... there is a dual social experience happening now. You have people who come here and work in tech, who live in a condo, maybe been here for about a year, and never meet someone who grew up here. The flip side of that is you have people who work in the local taqueria, or they work as a bus driver. They’re born and raised here, have three kids here, and they’ve never met a tech worker.

[It's] not that we don’t want new faces, but we can’t start displacing permanent residents for temporary ones. Because when they leave, we’ll be left with a gaping hole. It’s easy to turn a blind eye and say, “But look at San Francisco. It’s so beautiful.” But you judge a city not by how it treats those that are doing well. Let’s go into the hood, let’s go to Bayview, Hunters Point, let’s go to the Alemany Projects, let’s go to Double Rock. Why is it that we have twenty thousand homeless students attending schools in the San Francisco Unified School District? There’s an underworld that we’ve built, and that we continue to live in.

An immigrant Uber driver from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Leon Fikiri, points to one possible outcome of San Francisco's cultural divide:

... I have seen this story already: a society that doesn’t value human beings will end, just fail.

On the other hand, Edwin Lindo still loves this fractured city:

The city is something special. It raises people who seek justice. It provides you a sixth sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. And there aren’t many cities like that.

Unhappily, it seems that Edwin Lindo has gone on to struggle for black culture in Seattle.

It's abundantly clear that Cary McClelland wanted to write an uplifting book about this city. But he's an honest historian. His story is neither optimistic nor upbeat. But there are many sides of truth here, so I can thank McClelland for that.