Standing Up For San Francisco

A city that doesn't need defending

I saw the article and my heart sank. I thought, here we go again. 

The headline was anodyne enough: “What I Found in San Francisco,” 

Because it was in The Atlantic, maybe I convinced myself it wouldn't be so bad. 

For years, a doom-and-gloom genre has gripped out-of-town reporters who come to my hometown looking for evidence to support their biases. Could this finally be a corrective?

Sadly, no. I suppose it was a fair treatment of San Francisco — when compared to Fox News. 

It wasn’t so much that the reporter, John Hendrickson, got anything technically wrong. He focused on the drug and homelessness problems which are very acute and real. But the article was infused with an undercurrent of extrapolation, using the long-blighted blocks of the Tenderloin district and Market Street to make a judgment about the city as a whole.  

Hendrickson noted that he “felt safe” after an Italian dinner at a restaurant in the North Beach neighborhood. How nice for him. Most of us do. And he met with some real San Franciscans who shared their views about the complexities of the city’s downtown post-pandemic problems. Fair enough.

Maybe one of these people could have told him that writing a line such as, “We headed toward what appeared to be one of the cleanest parts of the city, the Financial District” might not be the best way to bolster your credibility with the locals. (The Financial District is not even close to being one of the cleanest parts of the city, says anyone who has visited the swaths of real estate where the vast majority of San Franciscans actually live.)

What bothered me most is that he, like many before him, used a myopic magnifying glass to depict a vibrant, creative, trend-setting, historically complicated, and uneasy city. It’s irresponsible to parachute in for a few days, meet a handful of “sources,” and then make broad pronouncements to the world. 

If Hendrickson had framed his article around its initial premise, that the cleanup for the international APEC conference last November masked deep-seated and persistent problems of the city’s post-pandemic downtown, that would have been fine. But he keeps inferring and speaking of San Francisco as if what he saw is all that this city is. 

I don’t mean to pick on Hendrickson. Many other out-of-town reporters have been worse. There are also legions of San Francisco haters who don’t even bother coming here. They just sit on their computers and phones and traffic in the corners of social media dedicated to images of the city’s dirty streets, tent encampments, retail crime, and people using drugs or showing their effects.

It’s a lot easier to share a meme than to get to the truth. 

If you go looking for it, you can find everything that people say is failing about the city in real life. San Franciscans are all too aware of our challenges. But to think that this is the only place with homelessness, poverty, drug use, or blight is ridiculous. Last time I checked, even Republicans say fentanyl is a national emergency. 

Recently, when I travel and tell people where I am from, they act as if I live at the intersection of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and HBO’s The Last of Us. Namely, a post-apocalyptic zombie hellscape.  

My wife and I have had visitors, including prominent people you’ve probably heard of, shocked when they come here. They can’t reconcile what they see when we drive them around the city (one of the most beautiful places on Earth) with what they see online. 

Quite simply, San Francisco remains a largely safe, clean, and exciting place to live.

We are raising our daughters here. And it’s been wonderful. Our children go to public schools. They ride all over town on public transportation — which is free for those under the age of 18. Our older daughter even goes with friends to the supposed wasteland of downtown to shop, ice skate, and take in a movie.

We enjoy the abundant urban hiking. The parks and the beaches. The museums. The well-stocked libraries. The many walkable neighborhoods, each with its local businesses and flavors. 

There is great food. Great sports. Great art. And great music. The views are unbeatable.

To be sure, there are a lot of real challenges here. The city is too expensive for many people to live in. It has the problems listed above — drug use, homelessness, and hopelessness. We need to reimagine our downtown as work and life routines have changed after COVID. Our schools face a deficit. So does the region’s public transportation systems. And on and on. 

These are the difficulties that come from trying to live together as a community in a complicated world. We search for balance as we build for the future. But I can also say that this is a resilient city and always has been.

Three years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub wrote a column entitled, “Here’s a history lesson for all the people saying San Francisco is ‘over.’” He walked through the end of the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake, the end of World War II, the Summer of Love, the violence of the 1970s, tech businesses moving out of the city in the 1980s, the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, and our current troubles. The subtext could be found in the article’s subtitle: “We read our East Coast-written obituaries and keep on living.”

Hartlaub asked questions that are on the minds of many San Franciscans:

Is a eulogy in order for San Francisco? Or is it possible that a cycle of change, rebirth and bitching-on-the-way-out has perpetually kept our Golden Age in the rearview mirror — even as we move on to greater things?

I’m betting on the latter. I can’t wait to see how the city reinvents itself in ways that make it even better. And most people I know here share that optimism.

San Franciscans tend to be caring, helpful people. We are committed to this city, even as we try to address current and historical injustices. We want to live purposeful lives and try to leave the world better for those who will inherit it.

In these ways, are we really different from anywhere else? 

One thing I have never understood is why so many on the political right take such glee in cheering our struggles. They publicly root against San Francisco — as if our tragedies make them feel better about themselves. Some even turned the violent assault on the husband of our congresswoman — Nancy Pelosi — into a joke. Why? Aren’t we all one country?  

There is pain and failure in every corner of this nation if you look for it. When I see the poverty in Appalachia, I want our government to do something to ameliorate it. I cheer efforts to tackle underperforming educational systems in the Deep South. And I am happy when my tax dollars help those dislocated by shuttered factories in the Rust Belt. 

I am well aware that the residents of these areas also have to deal with reporters who drop in and twist their communities into simplistic narratives. Can’t we all bond over the fact that our lives are not stereotypes? 

The Los Angeles Times recently released a poll that said: “​​50% of U.S. adults believe the state (of California) is in decline.” But even more striking was this finding:

48% of Republicans believe the state is “not really American,” the survey found. Three in 10 Republicans say the home of Yosemite’s sheer peaks, Sequoia’s towering redwoods and Malibu’s beaches has a worse natural environment than other states.

I am not offended as much as I am saddened. It’s farcical but expected — the result of a years-long effort by reactionary forces to “other” those on the political left, or just the “left coast.” 

California is not a caricature. It’s home to nearly 40 million people going about their lives like anyone else. 

One of the great strengths of this nation is the promise of e pluribus unum: “Out of many, one." History teaches us that tragedy results when we descend into disunity. But a sense of common purpose must be shared by all who call this country home. From sea to shining sea. 

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln famously channeled scripture by warning, “A house divided against itself cannot stand." He was speaking of slavery. But the sentiment remains true today. 

Whether that house is an apartment building in the Bronx, a farmhouse in Iowa, or an old Victorian in the city by the bay. 

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With appreciation,
Elliot