It didn't need to be like this

Remember me?

I started blogging in 2008. At the time, it was just intended to be a one-year project, so I used my age at the time and called it 40 going on 28, which was how I felt at the time. But then I just kept going and people started reading it and I got semi-well-known for my dumb Bachelor/Bachelorette recaps. I quit that one in 2016 because I just didn’t feel like it any more. Then more recently I did a project where I listened to all of the albums on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums list and wrote about them. That was fun but it fucked up my Spotify recommendations beyond repair.

Anyway, back at 40 going on 28, I used to write about San Francisco a fair bit because I live here, it’s an interesting place, and there’s lots of good content ore to mine. At some point I started calling it Our Garbage City as kind of a joke, I think parodying the unfortunate doomer voices that were popping up. What kinds of problems did I write about? How about this one, about the Super Bowl City they plopped into downtown and the fact that the Palace of Fine Arts was going to maybe become a luxury hotel? Or this one, about people who complain about Outside Lands?

Back then, the biggest problem we had was the g-word: Gentrification. Remember being worried about gentrification? It seems so quaint now, and you know why. There’s a new garbage in town, and his name is homeless people using drugs in the street and stealing from Walgreens and just generally being around some parts of town. CNN did an hour-long special about it!

So I’m back. I want to talk about a lot of things, but my starting point is going to be the New San Francisco. Are we doomed? Is it a failed city? And if it is, why is everything so fucking expensive? Garbage City FC is here to investigate.

And by “investigate,” I mean “spout off with semi-informed opinions,” in my bravest and most noble tradition.

Why are we suddenly saturated with “San Francisco is in a doom spiral” stories? There’s a prolific Twitter guy named Will Stancil who writes mostly about politics and makes a lot of people angry but has an interesting theory about this that I find kinda convincing. He proposes that there is a “main signal” that media coalesces around and propogates and it becomes the default way of thinking about a thing, whether or not it’s true.

So obviously the San Francisco Main Signal is that the city is a smoking crater, everything good and valuable is gone, and the whole thing is probably going to collapse pretty soon. So just like clockwork, we get one story after another like that.

BEFORE YOU START YELLING, yes, there are thousands of homeless mentally ill and drug-addicted people on the streets of San Francisco. There are parts of town that are objectively less pleasant than they were 10-15 years ago (and they weren’t that great then). Shoplifting appears to be a chronic problem. Stores are closing. These are all real facts and I’m not here to gaslight anyone. But I want to propose two ideas: (1) these problems are very difficult to solve, and (2) the city is not the wasteland that is currently depicted.

So I’m gonna start doing this again.