Is San Francisco losing its soul? | Hacker News Reader

Is San Francisco losing its soul?

theguardian.com

17 pointsTazeTSchnitzel18 comments

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SF lost its soul when the Native Americans settled the land.

Then it lost its soul when the missionaries arrived and stamped out all the Native American culture.

Then it happened again when the ranchers showed up.

Then another time when the US won the Mexician-American war and got rid of the old "Yerba Buena" name.

Then it really lost its soul in 1849.

Then it happened again when the US Army and Navy made the bay into a military town.

Then those hippies and gays showed up and ruined SF's tough "Iron in War" reputation.

Then the Mexicans caused the Mission to lose its traditional German-Irish-Italian soul. Oh, and those groups killed its soul earlier when they moved in, too.

And then they opened the ballpark and suddenly SOMA was no longer a charming cluster of warehouses anymore. Also when Noe Valley lost its working-class roots.

Did I miss any other times the city lost its soul?

Let's not forget SF was founded for one purpose: the Gold Rush. So in reality, it's getting its original soul back.

I wish this article had mentioned restrictions on development as the major cause of insane rental prices. Just build more high rises. It's not that hard. There is room for a dozen more Rincon and Infinity like towers around downtown.

Let's keep an eye on the huge new proposal at 16th and Mission. If it gets to be a ten-story residential tower, as its developers propose, I think that's a very good sign.

If it gets chopped down to 6 or 8, then it's a sign we're in for six more weeks of winter. (By winter I mean skyrocketing rents, and by weeks I mean years.)

Only in San Francisco would a 10 story residential building be considered huge...and that's part of the problem. Even when SF does try to add new residential units, it adds the bare minimum. (From a social POW, at least. The developers do this deliberately to maintain scarcity so they can derive greater profits.)

As somebody who's in his 15th year in San Francisco, I think it's a reasonable concern.

For me, it's not about change as such. One of the things that defines San Francisco for me is its openness to change, its endless mutability. Change is great. It's about a specific sort of change that is destroying potential for future interesting change.

For me it goes back to why San Francisco is an important center of Internet innovation in the first place. It's a cultural center that is close to major universities and a major technology center. When a technological innovation (the Internet) became a cultural medium (the web), San Francisco had the right ingredients for incredible innovation.

Why was it well placed for that? I think it was San Francisco's 150 years of acceptance of seekers, immigrants, artists, bohemians, and freaks. Not just a cultural acceptance, but an economic one. You didn't need to be rich to move here. You could find a workaday job and an adequate place to live while having time for your writing, your art, your tinkering, your cultural experimentation. That's important: pioneers rarely fit in well to contemporary society; in a sense, they're already living in a possible future.

But the incredible shift in rents and the Gini coefficient here is wiping that out. To me the problem isn't change. It's the destruction of an incubator for new ideas, new ways of thinking.

> One of the things that defines San Francisco for me is its openness to change

I'm shocked that you say that. My impression of SF today is almost the exact opposite: that one of the most defining characteristics of the city's current population is its extraordinary resistance to change.

Could you say more about what you mean? And how you're getting that impression? I'm not following.

Props B and C

Discretionary Review

CEQA abuse

Nativism

Height restrictions

Bus protests

U-Verse protests

Articles about how the Mission is changing, and how that's a bad thing

So your entire impression of San Francisco's history comes down to a few years of stuff related to the recent economic situation? You might want to expand your horizons a bit.

Consider the beats, the hippies, the summer of love, the gay and lesbian rise, Burning Man, and the rise of cycling. And hey, the web. Having lunch in South Park with the Wired folks in 1997, I sure didn't notice any hostility from the neighbors.

The obvious difference to me in these lists, beyond the time scale, is the use of power. That a ~$200 billion communications oligopoly gets a little pushback while trying to increase their market dominance is not something I'm going to shed a lot of tears over, and I don't think you can reasonably call it a smoking gun for generalized resistance to change.

> So your entire impression of San Francisco's history...

My comment was quite clearly addressed at SF's current population, not previous ones.

In fact, that's one of my major gripes with them: they benefited by riding a previous wave of change, but now that they're the status quo, they want to stop the next one.

It's the classic, "I got mine, now slam the door" mentality.

The current population is by and large the one that has been quite welcoming to the tech industry -- when we aren't totally jacking the rents up, flooding neighborhoods, and paying for the eviction of long-term residents. So again, I think you're overgeneralizing.

As an interesting data point, watch the settings and backgrounds crowds in Dirty Harry movies to see what San Francisco looked like in the 70s.

I always found it hilariously ironic that Dirty Harry was set in San Francisco. Then again, I am a fan of both, so maybe it's not so crazy!

You mean the nude people in the picture window?

The idea of San Francisco losing its soul was much of the content of Herb Caen's columns in the San Francisco Chronicle for decades.

Don't you just wish every city and place could just stay the same forever?

No.

"Losing its soul" = Changing in a way I don't agree with, and maybe I'll try and use government to stop the change. I'm more important than the people causing the change.

'"Losing its soul" = Changing in a way I don't agree with, and maybe I'll try and use government to stop the change. I'm more important than the people causing the change.'

Or equally important, if the attempt at change is democratic.

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