San Francisco – I fucking LOVE that town! Yesterday as I emerged from my befogged jet lagged state, I discovered that, here at home, we were in the midst of a messy winter storm. Yup, it was cold, dark and there was all this frozen water falling from the sky. YECH! While it’s very good to be home with my beautiful warrior kitten in our cozy cottage on the bay, I WANTED the warmth, the hippy cool, the colorful architectural pulchritude of San Francisco.
Why don’t I live there? Oh yeah, the dart landed, in New England, not California. Would I, now that my hero’s gone, move? Spectacularly unlikely. My docs are here – some of the world’s best research and Nf2 work happens at MGH, my home away from home. Neurofibromatosis Type 2 isn’t your garden variety, common disease. No, no, no. Why would I get some old run-of-the-mill affliction when I can rock on with something deeply rare? Ya know, that’s how I roll.
Why else, at this point in my life, wouldn’t I move to San Francisco? Jen and Oni are here. We’ve all lived together for 16 years. We’ve been to hell and back together. They are my family and I don’t want to live apart from them.
Also too, just like Boston, San Francisco is wholly unaffordable to all but the upper, upper middle class and the rich. The rents, JUST LIKE BOSTON, are obscene.
What’s affordable to a person making, fer instance, $15 an hour. That’s $2600 a month BEFORE taxes, medicare, social security and other deductibles.
In the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, a spacious seeming studio apartment on Buena Vista goes for $2,650. A two bed on Clayton runs four large. In North Beach, one beds rent for over three grand per month. Sorry Ms. $15 an Hour, Mr. Minimum Wage Earner, Madam Pensioner – yur shit outta luck
Wanna actually buy one of those stunning Vics or even a condo in one of ‘em? Got a spare 1.5-5 mil hangin’ around collecting dust? Yeah, me neither.
Where are the West Coast young and otherwise unmonied going? The SF Chronicle says Amador County, 130ish miles away, is the new hot locale. OK. The ocean's not in their backyard though.
Why do landlords price their cribs so astronomically high? Because they can. They don’t care that they’re making the city less diverse, less interesting, less vibrant. They don’t care that they’re destroying the very things that made the town so fabulously alluring in the first place. San Francisco and Boston alike. Harvard Square, which used to be colorful, fun and alive is now, more or less, moribund – bland. Most of the shops found here now are the same as in the malls.
Joints like City Lights, Vesuvio's, Grolier's and Grendel's have been in place for eons, from before the neighborhoods became money grubbingly insane. They survive but new cool, interesting, independently owned businesses are unable to make a beachhead.
I suppose though, San Francisco and Cambridge's losses are Amador and Lowell's gains, eh?
I have fond memories of San Francisco, having spent part of both my youth and misspent youth there, but it wouldn't hurt my feelings in least if it slid off into the ocean. I published an abstract the other about the great California floods of the 1860s. While I harbor no ill will nor wish any harm, and those people will move here, but I'd like to see it happen: the central valley flooded 300 miles north to south, 30 miles wide and 30 feet deep, the LA basin and SF bay area washed out to sea. Washed out to sea.
ReplyDeleteI can't rent a house in the town that has been home to my family for seven generations. We built this place, and are now thinking of migrating to the Yukon. En masse.
Migrating to the Yukon--sounds tremendous! Where I'm at is still affordable, relative to Boston proper and its wealthier suburbs, but who knows how long that'll last. Bob used to caution me "don't blog about how great, how beautiful and peaceful it is here or all the rich assholes will move in." I see it happening, if slowly.
DeleteWhile politics of South Carolina turn my stomach, I love the city of Charleston. Its been overrun for years and like you, I don't wish anyone harm but I wish they would all leave and return Charleston to the sleepy little city it was back in the early 70's.
DeleteClimate change and rising sea levels might just do that very thing. I remember the streets of Charleston flooding back in the 70's from either heavy rains or an abnormal high tide.
Why do landlords price their cribs so astronomically high? Because they can.
ReplyDeleteWhile having only visited Key West twice, and for less than a day both times, I've read and heard enough that the eclectic and diverse spark the place once held has long since been strangled to death. The main reason is that when it became trendy, rent and property values went into orbit.
Like I said, I've only been there twice but from the conversations I've had with actual residents they tend to say it's just a glorified theme park now.
It was pretty much like that the one time I was there in the early '80s. Up here, P-town's over too. There are still a LOT of great galleries but summer crowds are insane and it's no longer, in any way, affordable.
DeleteIn my little hometown, home to my family for seven generation, which in my memory has gone from ten thousand to over a hundred, my homebase a region larger than Vermont from fifty thousand to well over a million, I can not rent a house. We are, we have been, driven out. It's not like we can go back to Mississippi, where we came from nearly a hundred years ago, or Acadia. [head shaking resignedly] Ahh the asinine futility of it all.
ReplyDeleteRoad my motorcycle down through there after the Army, like N'Oleans all that water creeped me right out.
Not necessarily a tangent: The Book of Revelations includes an interesting snippet, the only survivors of the apocalypse will be a 'few faithful in the far northwest.' Can't get much farther northwest than the Yukon.
I wouldn't let that "few faithful in the far northwest" out lest you find yourself in Haines Junction, swamped by religious "right" types.
DeleteHard to keep a lid on beauty. I do hope Valahalla remains unappealing (for whatever reason) to the rich folk who live in Concord, Lincoln and Newton.
Must be horribly jarring to see your home become so overwhelmed. People--there's too damn many of us!