10. san francisco, i don't love you, and you're bringing me down
on new urbanism and the meaning of home
this week’s guest post is from isabelle, another former roommate (not to be confused with isabelle, the character from animal crossing). while she is not particularly good at crossing streets (i have never played animal crossing), she is perhaps one of the most thoughtful people i know — and true to this, she’s written a devastating multi-pronged takedown of SF that doubles as a thoughtful rumination on the dangers of too much resilience. hope you enjoy!
also, something new this week! a reply box! if you have something you’d like to share with the writer — an affirmation, a compliment, a rebuttal, or maybe just a hello — there’ll be a button at the end of every piece where you can reach out to the writer directly with your message :)
and, as always, feel free to sign up to write (or draw or sing or cook or really any verb at all) a guest post here.
happy reading!
-k
I have had many unspectacular first dates during my time in San Francisco. The longest by far, however, has been with the city itself. From her Hinge profile, she (the city) seemed like a perfect balance between the things I hold dear — excellent access to nature, a gorgeous setting perched above the bay, a large and diverse enough city for interesting restaurants and stores, and a smattering of people I already knew. Sure, it wasn’t New York, but I moved here on a provisional basis. I had negotiated into my contract the understanding that I’d move out once I’d onboarded onto my new job sufficiently and my workplace deemed I was ready (which I was anticipating would be six months later). A no-strings-attached fling with California sounded fine to me.
Spoiler: six months later, I’m still here. Turns out, companies don’t work that way. And I’m stuck in this relationship with this city that doesn’t feel right. Believe me, I’ve tried to make it work. I’ve explored all her nooks and crannies (Land’s End is a favorite). I’ve done the day trips — Yosemite, Muir Woods, Big Sur, Mount Diablo. I’ve walked around enough of this 7x7 mile grid. I’ve met so many new people. I’ve strengthened friendships that I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to develop.
There are moments where I walk outside and I wonder why the hell I’m unhappy.
How can you be unhappy when you live right across from the most lively dog park in the entire city? When you’re surrounded by pristinely restored Victorians, painted the most pleasing shades of pastel? When your commute to work is fifteen minutes by bicycle? When the neighborhood farmers’ market features the most luscious peaches and plums and pears you’ve ever seen? Every so often, I’d sit and mope on a bench up on the hill (pictured above), watching twilight fall onto the city skyline, and I’d have these pangs of self-awareness. I’d tell myself: you’re allowed to feel however you want to feel, but how stupid are you to feel it here and now?
When I first moved here, I had subletted a room in a house full of strangers, and it wasn’t until recently that I moved into a new apartment with three friends. Yes, that means I signed a one year lease (more on that later). I also realized how cold these historically-faithful San Francisco Victorians are. The San Francisco Planning Department, in service of “protecting and enhancing neighborhood architectural character,” requires that these Victorians retain the old, single-paned, wood windows that they were originally fitted with. As a result, both of the apartments I’ve lived in in this city have been the draftiest buildings I’ve ever had the displeasure of spending a significant amount of time in. I can feel the cold wind coming in from the door before I even open it. I hear every single one of my upstairs neighbors’ footsteps. Moreover, these windows can’t have screens, so every time I air out my room, I wake up the next morning covered head-to-toe in mosquito bites.
This apartment is emblematic of one of the worst and most unique characteristics of San Francisco as an American city. The long-time residents and the powers-that-be of this city may be politically progressive, but in the practice of living in and governing a city, the vast majority of them are small-c conservative. It seems that San Franciscans hate change, no matter how trivial. Every time a new bike lane, apartment building, or even street pedestrianization is proposed, an impressive number of wealthy homeowners emerge out of the organically-sourced woodwork to provide “community input” against the new. An illustrative example: the wealthy woman who tried to shut down the new pickleball courts in a neighboring public park, complaining of the noise, until people found out she had her own backyard pickleball court. This pervasive attitude of NIMBYism is why this city can’t have nice things.
You may have noticed that I haven’t yet brought up San Francisco’s seemingly constant evisceration in national media — the doom loop, the homelessness/drug/crime/[insert negative urban phenomenon] epidemic, the right-wing depictions of the city as a real-life rendition of The Purge. It’s all true, to some extent. I commute to one of the worst areas of the city (SoMa) every day for work. The level of human misery on the streets is appalling and genuinely distressing. On my way to the office, I evade piles of human-sized feces, side-step drug deals, and avoid making eye contact with the people sleeping on the sidewalk.
I used to complain about this fairly frequently to friends who would listen. I also used to seek out “doom loop” content, to validate my disdain for the city. But once it became clear that this was no six-month fling, it was no longer fun to read about the city in which I live dying a slow, painful death. Moreover, after all these months of commuting, I’ve grown desensitized in a way I’d never thought possible.
The reason why SF is dying is the same reason it can’t have nice things. A city that refuses to change, that refuses to build market-rate or affordable housing because it would ruin “neighborhood character,” that refuses to adopt sane designs for highly-trafficked bike lanes, a city like this doesn’t deserve to thrive. I’m sorry, but you can’t actively fight against everything that makes a city worth living in (density, housing, commercial districts, social services, transit, bike infrastructure, pedestrian-friendly streets) and expect for your city to, well, be worth living in.
I’m not going to opine on crime in the Bay Area — the responses are so polarized that it’s no longer a productive topic to discuss. But, my bike tires are perennially flat because they’ve been punctured by the broken glass I bike over every morning. I almost rented an apartment with a bullet hole in the front window. Clearly something is wrong.
But, Isabelle, what about the tech industry? A lot of this refusal to change comes from a kneejerk reaction to the influx of tech dollars and workers into the city. The more venture capital money that gets funneled into SF, the more the old-timers want the city to revert to the Summer of Love. I get it — SF used to be counterculture and cool and whatnot and now I walk down the street and see Google employees waiting for their company shuttle and AI founders settling into Café Reveille with their $7 lattes. But these wealthy homeowners who have been here since the 70s and pay a pittance in property taxes (all thanks to Prop 13!) shouldn’t have the power to ruin the city for everyone else just because they don’t want their neighborhood to look different from how it did decades ago. The way to deal with increased housing demand from unprecedented economic activity is to build more housing so residents can still afford to live in the city, not to outlaw buildings over three stories in every neighborhood where people actually want to live.
Some claim that SF is a monoculture of “tech people,” but I think the monoculture at hand is actually that of the “coastal elite.” By coastal elite, I mean you and me — the young professional class who is upwardly mobile, graduated from an elite university, and is career-focused, with a smattering of the same set of hobbies and a network of friends from college and work. The coastal elite floats between the semi-permeable boundary of SF and NYC, circulating amongst the same set of first-, second-, and third-degree connections. Indeed, some say living in SF is just the time in-between all your friends’ moving-to-NYC parties, up until your own moving-to-NYC party. In SF, if you choose an individual at random walking down a city street, that person has a 70% chance of belonging to the coastal elite (and a 30% chance of being a crotchety NIMBY).
Coastal elites are, given our box-checking nature, not particularly interesting; therefore, the culture here is not particularly compelling either. The Bay Area has a lot of money, but surprisingly little taste. This first sunk in for me upon visiting the purportedly charming tourist towns of Carmel-by-the-sea, Napa, and Sausalito. These towns turned out to be commercialized beyond any semblance of their former, possibly more authentic selves. Carmel-by-the-sea seemed to solely feature stores geared towards upper-middle-class middle-aged white women, with nautical-themed signs reading “It’s wine-o-clock!” and a uniquely high density of new age crystal stores.
The consequence of all this money is that SF suffers from a syndrome of what I call the “missing middle.” There are excellent cash-only Chinese bakeries where you can have a full meal of dimsum for two for less than $10 a person. There are also outstanding “New American” restaurants solely featuring organic produce from local farms roasted over an open fire, where entrées don’t go for any less than $35. In much of the city, it’s not easy to find something in the middle — somewhere exciting and tasty, but affordable enough to take your friends on a weeknight. The “missing middle” effect manifests beyond food, especially now that many retail stores have moved out of the city. I’ve recently been looking for an affordable kitchen supply store, and it seems like it’s going to require a 40 minute bus ride.
Moreover, San Franciscans, despite their reputation as tech innovators, are not innovating in… any other field. On the positive side, they aren’t constantly trying to be slightly cooler, edgier, artsier than you. San Franciscans are earnest and simply enjoy what they enjoy without the ironic twist (contrast this to NYC). But, as a result, cafés and stores and restaurants in the city just feel a little bit behind the times, like it’s still 2017 and Edison bulbs and matcha lattes are the hot new thing. If you have any suggestions, I’m actively looking for the cool side of San Francisco — I think it might be in Oakland.
But if I’m being truly honest, none of this is why SF is not for me. It’s not the doom loop, not the inane zoning laws, not the (fellow) silly techies. I’ve been thinking about it recently, and I’m not sure if the problem lies with San Francisco at all. Maybe the problem is me.
Maybe it’s my post-grad angst. I’m one of the people (along with seemingly everyone else who has guest-written for Kalos’ Substack so far) who chose to take time off of school during COVID because I placed my college experience on a pedestal. I tried to wring every last drop of togetherness from my time at school, knowing that life would never feel that way again after graduating. And I was right. It took a while to get used to lack of belonging I felt as a graduated adult, far from the comforting swaddle of an undergraduate institution. For the first time, I was truly alone and free to make my own destiny. The problem was: SF had never been part of what I had envisioned for myself and I could not see my own future here.
Maybe it’s my break-up. When I moved here, I was reeling from the end of a long and happy relationship, which ended largely because I was moving across the country. It’s very hard to say goodbye to something that was good and that could have lasted, for reasons that were out of your control. I wouldn’t wish that sort of heartbreak upon my worst enemy. When a relationship ends, the feeling of home and the vision of a future that you had created with this person dissipates into nothing. And during my first few months here, with my scant support network and transient housing situation, I felt totally unmoored from anyone or anything that I could tie myself down to.
It’s difficult not to scapegoat a place that brought you there somewhat involuntarily, a place that irrevocably took away the relationships that were most important to you, and a place that just never feels like it fits and you can’t quite put a finger on why.
But maybe, at the root of it all, the reason I’m unhappy is that I try to rationalize and ruminate and frame my circumstances in terms of problems to be solved and challenges to overcome. I like to think of myself as someone who asserts her self-determination, who has the ability and the agency to change any situation that I’m in. As a result, I choose to stay in unideal situations, determined to fight my way through them.
I think if I had really tried, I could have found some way to move away after my six month stint. I didn’t, though, and when my sublet was up, I signed a lease instead. Kalos, among other friends, have asked me — with befuddlement — why I might do such a thing if I’m unhappy here. I tell them that adapting to SF is my current challenge to overcome. Some part of me believes that if I can emerge victorious from this, then it means that I’ve gotten over my post-grad angst, gotten over my past relationship, and undergone a transformative experience, emerging as a fully-fledged adult.
If I’m unhappy here, then I’m the one that’s not strong enough, because shouldn’t normal adults be able to be happy anywhere they go? If I stay here and I do everything within my power to achieve happiness, there’s no way that I won’t be happy in a year’s time, right? Some part of me believes that if I say yes to every trivia night, every pregame, every hike and run and birthday party then I might create the conditions for my own happiness. I’ll climb up every damn hill in this city if each one brings me a rush of dopamine.
I visited some of my dearest friends in NYC a couple weeks ago, and honestly, I hoped that I would see it in a new, less favorable light. Maybe every city dimmed with the post-grad blues, and it wasn’t just SF. This didn’t pan out — maybe it was just because I was visiting, but every morning, I’d walk to the subway station and feel like I was Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain. I’m not delusional enough to think that moving to NYC will solve all of my problems. But I did give up a little bit, on my battle to love SF.
I don’t think everyone can be happy anywhere they go. A relationship to a place is as important as a relationship to any person. I wanted to make it work, but at this moment in time, San Francisco isn’t right for me, and I’m not right for San Francisco. I know I made this choice and I have to live with it. But I’m not sure that I will ever think of San Francisco as home.
Have a message for Isabelle? Wanna say “thank you” or “i feel that” or “i disagree” or “please marry me”? You can do so using the Reply Box below!