Finally, a San Francisco article in national media that doesn't suck

Back in the distant past (ok, 2014) there were so many articles about how SF was gentrifying and becoming uncool because everyone was rich and worked for apps that I started writing Pitchfork-style reviews of the articles. Now, of course, gentrification is out and Doom Loop is in. The very first thing I wrote here at my new home on Substack was about an apocalyptic Financial Times article that was mostly the same old retread stuff you’ve heard before. Your basic SF Is a Doomed Hellhole story in national or international media doesn’t take any time at all; just throw in homeless people in front of City Hall, fentanyl, Westfield closing, Whole Foods finding themselves shockingly unable to sell $9 juices in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, blah blah blah, title it “Immortan Joe Flees San Francisco; ‘Too Dangerous,’ Warlord Reports” FILE IT and go get drinks at Rickhouse.

(I will say one notable exception was former Chronicle writer Heather Knight’s first piece for her new employer, the New York Times, entitled “ ‘Are You OK?’ San Francisco Residents Say They Most Certainly Are” pointing out what I’ve been saying, SF is a city of neighborhoods and most of the neighborhoods are not, in fact, the Tenderloin.

Today a helpful Bluesky user (thx Lisa) brought to my attention the New Yorker’s take on us, called “What Happened to San Francisco, Really?” I was scared. But guess what? It didn’t suck.

I knew I recognized the name of the author, Nathan Heller, who grew up here and has written eloquently about SF over the years, including this lovely 2018 piece in the New Yorker called “Private Dreams and Public Ideals in San Francisco,” tracing his own family’s history here with the history of the city writ large.

So Heller, a native who now has the benefit of distance and maybe perspective, comes back to SF to find out what the hell is going on and does a pretty good job! (Well, he’s a staff writer for the New Yorker and I have no idea where he lives but let’s just say.) Let’s dig in.

OK, first we meet Sarah Dennis-Phillips, who runs the Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

I know, but you have to. Writing a contemporary SF article without talking about Westfield is like writing a piece about Beethoven but not mentioning he composed music. Dennis-Phillips (The New Yorker, confusingly, abandoned the hyphen) comes across as plucky and cheerful, but it’s not clear exactly what her concrete plans are.

Heller drops in on Joel Engardio, the Sunset supervisor who gives a crash course on SF politics. “We have two dominant shades of blue—progressives and moderates,” he said, pointing at a slide. “Now, a San Francisco moderate would be considered liberal anywhere else, and a San Francisco progressive would be considered super far left anywhere else. In San Francisco, they’re both Democrats. But they spar as if they were opposing political parties.” Bet.

The first rage-inducing moment comes not from Heller but from supe Matt Dorsey, who used to work for the SFPD and, unsurprisingly, thinks we need more cops. As of March 2023, SPDF had 1537 officers, which is, in fact, well below the high of 1872 in 2017. But as this excellent Mission Local article points out, “it is tough to argue that more officers unambiguously led to better outcomes.” Cut to Dean Preston, the socialist supe who tech lords love to hate: “ ‘I mean, we still fund, for millions of dollars, a mounted horse unit.’ He looked at me incredulously. ‘We just bought a new horse! In San Francisco! A dense urban city!’ ” Personally, I’d like to see the numbers on horse-mounted arrests for the last few years.

Heller checks out the doomed Westfield Center and finds that, wait, it’s actually fine!

There’s a section on Mayor London Breed, and, in a bow to tradition, it mentions that she grew up in public housing but includes the new-to-me detail that she keeps a sign on her desk reading “What would Beyoncé do?” which seems singularly unhelpful to the running of a major American city because you can’t answer “How do we get fentanyl users off the street” with “Drop an unexpected album and then make a thousand billion dollars on tour” unless you can, I don’t know, train the addicts to dance.

There’s a long section about the Manny who runs Manny’s and about the techbro-funded groups like GrowSF that want to arrest homeless people and put them in camps or something. And Heller talks to City Economist Ted Egan at the Iron Horse on Maiden Lane, nice touch, who basically says everyone should stop freaking out so much. We’re coming around to the hopeful part. The owner of Quince and Cotogna talks about how Jackson Square is undergoing a renaissance of sorts, which unfortunately includes Allbirds. And Bain Capital is looking to open an office to do something evil. Can’t win ‘em all.

So I think Heller did a good job! He’s a good writer and a smart guy and obviously aware enough to fall into the old SF-is-doomed trap like those dumb Brits at Financial Times. I was in noted tourist bar Johnny Foley’s not that long ago talking to out-of-towners and they were all surprised that the city wasn’t the hellscape they’d been led to believe. They were having a blast! Garbage City isn’t dead yet, it’s just resting.