The cities of San Francisco

This is the year “doom loop” entered the lexicon and, true to form, once a narrative emerges and a consensus is reached, it is slavishly adhered to, at least in the media. How about all those abandoned hotels? (Except they’re not abandoned, the owners can’t make the payments and they’re walking away, the hotels will still be open.) And Westfield Mall closing? (Westfield is unloading all of their US malls.) But most of all, the city is a ghost town.

“San Francisco tech mogul: Woke city remains a ghost town post COVID-19,” shrieks the New York Post. (The “tech mogul,” btw, is Michelle Tandler, who has built a career on talking about how awful SF is.) “Video of Deserted Street Sparks San Francisco Ghost Town Debate” says Newsweek. “Ghost Town Brewing talks 2023 San Francisco Beer Week,” oh wait, that’s about something else, my bad.

It is absolutely true that downtown is not the same as pre-pandemic, and will never be the same again, probably. I used to go downtown five days a week and go shopping on my lunch break (and, fuck it, whenever else I wanted, if we’re being honest here) and get lunch out and meet other worker bees and the whole nine. Now I work from home 3 days a week and I imagine a lot of other people do too. Who’s gonna go to Old Navy on one of their two office days? Nobody, that’s who. NO WONDER everything is in upheaval.

But what a lot of out-of-towners doing these stories miss is that San Francisco is both the singular entity SAN FRANCISCO and a collection of smaller cities, villages really, that each have their own character and denizens and vibe. (I realize this is true for every city, but Death of Cleveland stories are not making national news.) If you live in San Francisco and someone says they live in the Marina, you immediately have a few preconceived (and probably accurate) ideas about what kind of person they are.

And here’s the thing: Downtown Village is hurting because nobody goes there any more. BUT a lot of other villages are doing just fine. There’s a long line at my local sandwich place every fucking day! We went out to dinner with friends in Cole Valley (a village I used to live in, which is great) and we had to wait 20 minutes for a table in a crowded restaurant and there were lots of people on the sidewalks. On Outer Balboa Street, there’s always a throng outside Simple Pleasures cafe (they have a great parklet) and even the New York Times says the Outer Sunset is “thriving”!

(I stole this picture from the New York Times piece about Outer Sunset, thank you New York Times.)

As it happens, I was in North Beach (where I also used to live) a few weeks ago and granted, it’s a touristy part of town, but Washington Square Park was full of people hanging out and there was tons of foot traffic and of course a line out the door at Molinari (speaking of sandwiches, oh my god, you have to) and it was just generally like no one thought to tell North Beach that San Francisco was dead.

The problem with Downtown Village, like every other problem in San Francisco, is this: housing. No one lives there (or very few people live there), and so there’s no foot traffic without the Office People and no one shopping at Whole Foods and no one going to the lunch places. I had a really interesting talk with the bartender (and part-owner) at Murphy’s Pub on Kearny and he said their busiest days used to be Thursday and Friday (duh) but now it’s all Tuesday-Thursday, because nobody goes to the office on Monday or Friday. Makes sense. And without them, voila, dead downtown.

This is also partly why, even in good years, tourists can get a little freaked out: we put a historically challenged neighborhood (the Tenderloin), which, for lots of reasons, has been a locus of poverty and neglect, right next to one of the biggest tourist areas (Union Square). It’s like if LA moved Skid Row right next to Universal Studios. Of course people would notice!

The bottom line, which I’ve now taken forever to get to, is that the Dominant SF Narrative would have you believe that the entire city is a collapsed wreck, news that would come as a complete shock to someone like my kid, who exists in the Greater Richmond village and of course has encountered homeless people and closed stores (there is almost an entire block of stores on Balboa between 5th and 6th that have been vacant for more than 10 years) and she would look at you with genuine puzzlement if you told her she was living in a war zone disaster. Like the Outer Sunset of the NYT article, parts of the city - maybe even a lot of the city - is absolutely THRIVING. Can a Failed City do this?

(That’s actually pretty cheap for a 2-bedroom in Russian Hill, damn, maybe the sky has actually fallen and I didn’t notice.)