San Francisco the Confounding
It's tough to know what to make of San Francisco. How can a place so dramatically beautiful, so awash in wealth, so jam-packed with brilliant minds, also embody everything that makes American cities an absolute shame?
I stepped out for a walk today after lunch on Market Street, that city's spine, the glue of its wayward grids, once the city's proud commercial heart but now devoid of the office workers who gave it life. Their companies, lured to the Mid-Market district by lavish tax incentives, once briefly offered a glimmer of hope to that beleaguered district. It's all looking a bit vacant now as post-pandemic return-to-work plans falter and the future of the tech giants surrounding the little udon shop where I slurped my lunch looks very uncertain indeed.
I turned north. Before the streets make their alpine ascents toward patrician Nob Hill they at first rise gently, almost imperceptibly. The lowland between Market Street and those imposing heights is the Tenderloin, an old-fashioned name for a neighborhood which tenaciously reinvents its reputation for urban misery.
Here are all the ills for which the new San Francisco has become infamous. Men and women on evidently hard times end up here, in the stink and filth of a place that never gets the riches that flow endlessly and in defiance of gravity up toward any neighborhood whose name ends in "Hills” or “Heights.”
Here are shit-smeared doorways and sidewalks reeking of piss. Here is the erratic movement and confused speech of the mentally unstable. Here is the sidewalk alcoholism that announces every skid row.
Here are people of potential. Here are human beings, every one with a story of love, of effort, of failure, of regret. Here are neighbors, friends, parents, children. Here are people just like you and me, people who try to make their way through this wretchedly difficult world, but who—maybe due to misfortune or missteps or maybe due to the gross incompetence of a culture gone mad on wealth—find themselves without options, without help, without the friendship and empathy and compassion that we owe to them.
And so here they find themselves, with others who might understand their pain and their striving better than we wish to, in such a startling concentration, in a quarter robbed of dignity and toward which the rest of the city has turned its back, the better to keep its mind on its money.
I had to see this side of the city. This is San Francisco, too. These are San Franciscans. These people have dignity. They don't deserve to have their needs, however tough, to be ignored. Squalor is not their fate; it is our choice.
My feet carried me onward and up, up, up, as they always do, a direct and automated physical response to my brain's insatiable curiosity and the draw of a good view. Climb high enough and the Tenderloin gradually and then completely yields to the graceful riches of Nob Hill and the historic atmosphere of Russian Hill beyond it. The bay came into view ahead of me and to my right. Gorgeous blue. This is the city I love. These are the city's most inimitably atmospheric quarters.
From the heights of northeast San Francisco the city gleams, bright California sunlight bouncing off white wood-sided houses. A million bay windows adorn multi-million dollar abodes that tumble in a perfectly coordinated line down streets rigidly straight and joyfully ignorant of the city's ruthlessly vertiginous topography. Each window gazes toward the glittering bay, whose wind-whipped whitecaps sparkle back in reflection on the window glass.
I imagine the people who wake every morning to these spectacular views. They part the curtains at first to a city shrouded in its trademark veil of fog. As the day warms the mist lifts slowly, transforming from grey soup to curling white wisps and then simply dissolving to reveal the blazing blue that embodies the very optimism, the limitless possibility, that is California itself.
What good luck, or correctly guided choice, or phenomenal foresight, vaulted the bay window dwellers to these glorious hills named Nob and Russian and Telegraph, these most charmed and favored quarters at the very center of this city that sees itself with pride as leading us into a bright future?
And was it just bad luck, or a fateful mistake, or some regrettable failure to plan ahead, that yanked other unfortunate souls downward in a terrifying spiral to the very bottom, to the Tenderloin and Mid-Market and SoMa, to those squalid and ignored street corners and alleys that are the dark Dickensian answer to the ignorant thought that this is a city of progress?
A thick and dark wall of fog loomed on the western horizon, its cold fingers licking the air above me, as I headed back the hill. I descended again from the lush heights into a scene of chaos, of addiction, of confusion, and of despair.
I pondered this city's spectacular and confounding contradictions. Soaring, unfathomable, and cannibalistic wealth next to profound, unspeakable, and utterly avoidable destitution.
Could it be that we do not—indeed, we cannot—have one without the other?