My son and several friends have moved away from San Francisco. Has San Francisco changed?
Moving away from San Francisco is not new. All my friends in public school left the City when they grew up.
The reason was best explained by my good friend Catherine who said San Francisco was a calderon where people come to find out who they were. Nobody introduced themselves based on their job; they said what they were working on or their ‘sign’.
So the people I grew up with knew who they were and they moved to where those talents and inclinations were appropriate: Marin, the Peninsula or the East Bay.
San Francisco was settled by cosmopolitans from everywhere and particularly from New Orleans circa 1850. Many Jews came to this wild west and completely ‘new society’. This was an egalitarian city for the first 50 years.
The world’s first hippies settled here in the 1880-90’s and again in the 1960-70’s because the City was infinitely tolerant and the city government was incompetent. The government was deliberately made incompetent by the large anarchist population from 1875 to 1925.
When California invented the Progressive movement in the 1905-20’s with civil service jobs, non-partisan elections and the initiative process, San Francisco voted against it. A contrarian population.
San Francisco was so radical it had the first and only ‘General Strike’ in America in the summer of 1934. The Longshoremen started it. Later the Longshoremen elected an open communist as their leader; Harry Bridges (I knew Harry).
While San Francisco had an hereditary elite, (from 1900 until 1963) social structure was never powerful here. A.P. Giannini, an Italian immigrant was able to build the giant Bank of America in San Francisco. 'Society' was always convivial and tolerant. That is why the gay men dishonorably discharged from the military after WWII stayed in San Francisco in such large numbers.
This friendly, tolerant and weakly governed City survived until the 1990’s. The national demographic shift that polarized American society geographically had a dramatic effect on San Francisco. The City rapidly became a 100% Lefty socialist city controlled by labor unions. Lefty socialists moved here and gained political control by late 1990.
Over time, these newcomers have changed the character of the City. Their view of tolerance has become individual irresponsibility. The homeless population has grown and the City government now spends $100,000 per year per homeless person. The City is filthy, with light poles falling over from the pee rotting the bottoms of the poles.
The City government spends all its bond revenue money on street maintenance because the operating budget goes almost entirely to retirement benefits for the vast army of union city employees who earn 150% of private market wages.
The City is no longer friendly, it is Democrat-angry and Democrat-class-envy ridden. The city, once noted for its formal dress, women’s hats and gloves and men’s double breasted suits is now a shambles of Friday-dress code every day.
Hippies introduced the casual dress code for the City and it has become the norm today. The hippies also created the right to sleep on the sidewalk, now enjoyed by the street people. The street people rudeness is so outrageous that it is mentioned in surveys by over 70% of all tourists.
The out of control prices of houses and rents are due partially to the large native Chinese population that makes the City a comfortable investment destination for wealthy Chinese from China. The IPO winnings from new computer and Internet markets explains the rest. More than one third of expensive houses are empty because the wealthy only spend a little time here. They avoid the high California taxes.
Crime is returning to the streets of San Francisco despite the shrinking of the black population from a high of 14% to the current 4%. Almost all the crime is due to recent State of California legislation and practices plus to the local police response to the national Democrat war on police.
San Francisco is still beautiful because houses at the street level don’t change much over a century and the hills and water change even less. The people are less appealing, less friendly, less personally responsible every day and the artistic vitality seems to be draining away.
I can’t see the future. What I see now is somewhat grim.