Forever burned into my memory is some stupid hippie liberal (disclaimer: I am also a stupid liberal) professor type talking to some NPR-voiced reporter shortly after 9/11. Very shortly, like a few weeks.
"I think this will be a good thing for our culture in some ways. We'll see an awakening of youthful counter cultural movements, art, and music inspired by these difficult times. It will be like the late 60's all over again." Something like that. Never mind how vile of a viewpoint it is that 9/11 may be good because some anthropology professor misses the 1960s. It simply never happened.
Wars occurred. Freedom contracted. Culture moved forward, not backward. New small renaissances did occur in that time. I'd consider the ~2005-2015 internet to be a pretty special moment and place, for example. But the 1960's never came again. Nor will the renaissance of the early internet. Nor will the bands of San Francisco.
Special moments of the future belong to different people, located elsewhere, doing different sorts of things.
> And it won't be a regression to the romanticized scenes of the past. North Beach won't suddenly fill with Beat poets, the Fillmore won't regain a jazz scene that was desecrated by crooked urban development. The Haight won't be teeming with rock-and-roll bands again. But after the unprecedented chaos of 2020, San Francisco will change again.
A distinction needs to be made between the Zeitgeist of a time and the Genius Loci of a place. Is it part of the Genius Loci of the Bay Area to be Bohemian? I get the air for sourdough, and terroir for wine, but culture? It’s a deep question, and requires a comparison with other US cities.
Zeitgeist-wise, I’d note that San Francisco is an infant from a world culture standpoint, reaching all the way back to the...1950s? Maybe include Carmel to go all the way back to the early 1900s. All the rest of the world yawns. And the Spanish colonial and indigenous cultures are at best window dressing on the SF vibes...another costume to wear. Most other cultures would probably think that SF doesn’t have enough Zeit to be able to support much of a Geist.
But I agree personally that the attempt to intentionally physically and socially recreate an imagined past is a recipe for disaster. That past can be a powerful inspiration for future exploits since, although the physical elements of past visions are gone, the essential visions underlying the imagined past remain today in some real, if not physical sense, to be revisited, refined and perhaps manifest, or perhaps rejected.
Now I will take my staff and robe and be on my way...
Rent has got a long way to fall before you can find a room in a house for $300/month. It needs to be around there for it to be truly Bohemian, where rent can be paid off after only a days of work, by artists, many of whom don't code, and just aren't suited for a 9-5 corporate job. The Beatles didn't suddenly decide to quit high-profile jobs at law firms, they lived off government welfare before making it big.
Art makes do, just maybe not here. Some has already been gentrified and priced out of Oakland and have moved further, up into Richmond or south to Hunters Point. Others have looked at coming back to the city, and still found that 20% discount off $4,000/month is still utterly unaffordable, with no private garage space, and with so many neighbors all working from home that aren't appreciative of impromptu 4am Tuesday nightjam sessions.
I'd love it for San Francisco's culture to undergo a revival and for the arts to flourish, but with this much money in the area, San Francisco could just as easily go the way of LA or Miami with conspicuous consumption. Maybe that helps the arts, but Teslas aren't Bohemian.
I think that rent figure is a key insight. IIRC in Berlin, one of the cooler cities in the world, even six years ago one could find a nice apartment to share for 400 Euros a month.
Several acquaintances basically worked 3-6 months per year to pay their rent and food costs, and then did whatever they wanted the rest of the year. This included artists, musicians, architects and engineers. It seemed like a good enough deal that I seriously considered moving there, but I stayed in the US scene as I would like to retired in my 40s.
Berlin has excellent transit, cheap flights via one of Europe's shittiest airports, and decent train links. Beer cost a euro per liter, food at the grocery store is pretty cheap, entertainment is cheap- you can live nicely off very little money.
For everybody that cannot hope to retire, ever, a big cheap city with excellent transit, lots of lower income jobs, and lots of old buildings is really the ideal situation. Berlin meets all of these criteria, but of course the developers moved in hard recently.
Detroit always seemed like a sort of ideal American candidate, apart from all the horrific crime and weather.
Detroit is also strongly conformist. But, ever present threat of crime lords 90% of the hold-up. Look what happened when Dan Gilbert go the cops to clean-up a couple blocks of downtown!
I'm from St. Louis, so while acknowledging some pretty obvious bias, I'd argue that the decline of rust-belt cities has been totally misunderstood, and a lot of it has to do with a pretty simple accounting error. Many of these old cities have narrow urban municipal borders and what happened is that as the cities grew beyond these borders their statistical presentation disconnected from the actual reality of what it's like to live there.
For example, "St. Louis" (as in the city itself) consists only of the innermost 62 sq/mi of the St. Louis metro area.
This has numerous perception-distorting effects:
1. First of all, there's raw size. The region has 2.8 million people. It's much bigger than, say, Austin, Portland, or San Antonio, but you wouldn't know that from a list of the country's biggest cities. This is entirely an artifact of how the municipal boundaries are drawn. In every meaningful way, St. Louis is bigger. These rust-belt cities didn't "lose" as many people as you think. Those people just moved slightly out from the core across across arbitrary municipal borders.
2. Second, because of how the city developed, most of region's poorest people live within those core-city boundaries, so the region appears much poorer than it really is, which generates a chorus of statements like, "I'd move to the Midwest, but there are no jobs." The region's median household income is $62,790. It's $78,478 in NYC. Do you think the cost of living difference between the two is only $16k per year? It most definitely is not.
3. Related to the second point: because nearly all the violent crime in St. Louis occurs in a handful of neighborhoods in the core city and because most of the region is not included in those statistics, the region also appears much more dangerous than it actually is. The crime in those neighborhoods is a tragedy and a serious problem, but the way we do the statistical accounting makes the region appear to be much more dangerous than other regions that more or less have the exact same crime patterns. You are not less safe in most parts of St. Louis than in other similarly-sized metros.
This country is full of people who are discounting places they'd likely be very happy living in. The antidote is to always normalize regional comparisons. You can use MSAs or urban agglomerations or whatever floats your boat. But what you should basically never use are political designations, which are arbitrary, historically-contingent, and generally not very useful.
This is absolutely it. You can't get the weird, good and bad, unless your cost of living is so low that subsistence can be met with minimal effort. That free time is necessary to do acid and work on the crazy stuff that people don't understand, yet.
I, a millenial that pays $2k/bedroom, am always struck by the portrayals of the 1960s where people in their 20s live 10 to a loft and make rent working a few nights a week at the bar downstairs.
hardly limited to the 1960s, you can still do this in 2020 even in an expensive place like los angeles. pandemic aside, people living cheaply with many roommates and getting by on the wages of a bartender or minimum wage film set production assistant aren't even rare - the old pabst brewery on the eastern fringe of downtown LA is an entire campus of it. it just requires compromises on things that one is less likely to make if $2000/mo/bed is an option.
Some ideas might be taken from what happened in Santa Fe New Mexico. Their art boom started in the 1910s, real estate went high in the 1960s, climbed even higher through the 1990s.
My understanding/recollection is the living vital artists bought cheap mobile homes with propane tanks and water cisterns and stuck the homes on incredibly cheap land scattered across Northern New Mexico. Walled the exteriors with adobe when they had the chance and built adobe additions later on. They then went deep into historical New Mexico culture(s) for inspiration. For example, their life blended organically with their art, as inspired by the Puebloans who, although they produced objects of great beauty, had no word for “art” in their languages.
The PR in the 1990s was that there were more artists living between Santa Fe and Taos than were in Paris at the time. Santa Fe became a leading arts market (still is), and de facto artists retirement village, where aging artists redirected their efforts on developing a lifestyle, rather than product. Did a fine job at it, too.
Might be worth contacting those elders still living in New Mexico to pick their brains about what worked and what didn’t. There was probably a good reason the 1960s SF hippies started their 1970s communes in Taos, etc. Pro tip: if you follow that trajectory, skip the drugs...they are most likely a dead end in many senses.
Articles like this are an extremely strong buy signal for anyone wanting to get a house or condo. For renters, it is a good chance to get a rent cram down on your rent control unit, or move to a larger and cheaper unit.
For those wanting to start a business, it is also a good time to sign a deal on a good lease in an excellent location. Any entrepreneur will have to think ahead about when revenue will recover, depending on the business.
I say this because this is a boom and bust city. Earthquakes , gold, 9/11, fires, finance bubbles, tech bubblies -- each time San Francisco has recovered from the ashes stronger, and those that invested, richer.
>each time San Francisco has recovered from the ashes stronger, and those that invested, richer.
I mean that's true for anything, until it doesn't. Not saying that you're claim isn't true in this particular case, but the logic of "BUY THE DIP!" is entirely tautological and more or less just blind faith.
There's no natural law that stops a city from going into terminal decline, there's an exodus, and that's that.
The investment angle is definitely one way of selling it. As a native resident, I have been around just long enough to fully grasp the boom-bust cycle and what it means in a broader sense. The city is in wildfire season, and will again rise from the ashes. Just give it a few years to start recovery in earnest. For now the streets are emptier, and a little less safe.
Our last boom, for all the downsides of gentrification and transience that it wrought, added another layer of cosmopolitan influences which has helped defuse old local tensions. While the local leadership isn't doing everything right(as we'd expect), they aren't actively moving in the wrong direction either - they are working reasonably quickly to address and attempt solutions for each crisis as it comes up, and indeed, the crises of 2020 have been hugely transformative for the city already, leading to a whole new set of traffic and transit policies, reforms in law enforcement policy, and more. It won't be long before the officials have to start choosing between making cuts to essentials and throwing out old pork constituents, and they have a riled up, locked down population watching every move.
The only thing I'm truly concerned about is the state and national situations falling into the kinds of scenarios Robert Evans depicts in "It Could Happen Here".
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 35.8 ms ] threadForever burned into my memory is some stupid hippie liberal (disclaimer: I am also a stupid liberal) professor type talking to some NPR-voiced reporter shortly after 9/11. Very shortly, like a few weeks.
"I think this will be a good thing for our culture in some ways. We'll see an awakening of youthful counter cultural movements, art, and music inspired by these difficult times. It will be like the late 60's all over again." Something like that. Never mind how vile of a viewpoint it is that 9/11 may be good because some anthropology professor misses the 1960s. It simply never happened.
Wars occurred. Freedom contracted. Culture moved forward, not backward. New small renaissances did occur in that time. I'd consider the ~2005-2015 internet to be a pretty special moment and place, for example. But the 1960's never came again. Nor will the renaissance of the early internet. Nor will the bands of San Francisco.
Special moments of the future belong to different people, located elsewhere, doing different sorts of things.
Zeitgeist-wise, I’d note that San Francisco is an infant from a world culture standpoint, reaching all the way back to the...1950s? Maybe include Carmel to go all the way back to the early 1900s. All the rest of the world yawns. And the Spanish colonial and indigenous cultures are at best window dressing on the SF vibes...another costume to wear. Most other cultures would probably think that SF doesn’t have enough Zeit to be able to support much of a Geist.
But I agree personally that the attempt to intentionally physically and socially recreate an imagined past is a recipe for disaster. That past can be a powerful inspiration for future exploits since, although the physical elements of past visions are gone, the essential visions underlying the imagined past remain today in some real, if not physical sense, to be revisited, refined and perhaps manifest, or perhaps rejected.
Now I will take my staff and robe and be on my way...
Art makes do, just maybe not here. Some has already been gentrified and priced out of Oakland and have moved further, up into Richmond or south to Hunters Point. Others have looked at coming back to the city, and still found that 20% discount off $4,000/month is still utterly unaffordable, with no private garage space, and with so many neighbors all working from home that aren't appreciative of impromptu 4am Tuesday nightjam sessions.
I'd love it for San Francisco's culture to undergo a revival and for the arts to flourish, but with this much money in the area, San Francisco could just as easily go the way of LA or Miami with conspicuous consumption. Maybe that helps the arts, but Teslas aren't Bohemian.
Several acquaintances basically worked 3-6 months per year to pay their rent and food costs, and then did whatever they wanted the rest of the year. This included artists, musicians, architects and engineers. It seemed like a good enough deal that I seriously considered moving there, but I stayed in the US scene as I would like to retired in my 40s.
Berlin has excellent transit, cheap flights via one of Europe's shittiest airports, and decent train links. Beer cost a euro per liter, food at the grocery store is pretty cheap, entertainment is cheap- you can live nicely off very little money.
For everybody that cannot hope to retire, ever, a big cheap city with excellent transit, lots of lower income jobs, and lots of old buildings is really the ideal situation. Berlin meets all of these criteria, but of course the developers moved in hard recently.
Detroit always seemed like a sort of ideal American candidate, apart from all the horrific crime and weather.
For example, "St. Louis" (as in the city itself) consists only of the innermost 62 sq/mi of the St. Louis metro area.
This has numerous perception-distorting effects:
1. First of all, there's raw size. The region has 2.8 million people. It's much bigger than, say, Austin, Portland, or San Antonio, but you wouldn't know that from a list of the country's biggest cities. This is entirely an artifact of how the municipal boundaries are drawn. In every meaningful way, St. Louis is bigger. These rust-belt cities didn't "lose" as many people as you think. Those people just moved slightly out from the core across across arbitrary municipal borders.
2. Second, because of how the city developed, most of region's poorest people live within those core-city boundaries, so the region appears much poorer than it really is, which generates a chorus of statements like, "I'd move to the Midwest, but there are no jobs." The region's median household income is $62,790. It's $78,478 in NYC. Do you think the cost of living difference between the two is only $16k per year? It most definitely is not.
3. Related to the second point: because nearly all the violent crime in St. Louis occurs in a handful of neighborhoods in the core city and because most of the region is not included in those statistics, the region also appears much more dangerous than it actually is. The crime in those neighborhoods is a tragedy and a serious problem, but the way we do the statistical accounting makes the region appear to be much more dangerous than other regions that more or less have the exact same crime patterns. You are not less safe in most parts of St. Louis than in other similarly-sized metros.
This country is full of people who are discounting places they'd likely be very happy living in. The antidote is to always normalize regional comparisons. You can use MSAs or urban agglomerations or whatever floats your boat. But what you should basically never use are political designations, which are arbitrary, historically-contingent, and generally not very useful.
I, a millenial that pays $2k/bedroom, am always struck by the portrayals of the 1960s where people in their 20s live 10 to a loft and make rent working a few nights a week at the bar downstairs.
My understanding/recollection is the living vital artists bought cheap mobile homes with propane tanks and water cisterns and stuck the homes on incredibly cheap land scattered across Northern New Mexico. Walled the exteriors with adobe when they had the chance and built adobe additions later on. They then went deep into historical New Mexico culture(s) for inspiration. For example, their life blended organically with their art, as inspired by the Puebloans who, although they produced objects of great beauty, had no word for “art” in their languages.
The PR in the 1990s was that there were more artists living between Santa Fe and Taos than were in Paris at the time. Santa Fe became a leading arts market (still is), and de facto artists retirement village, where aging artists redirected their efforts on developing a lifestyle, rather than product. Did a fine job at it, too.
Might be worth contacting those elders still living in New Mexico to pick their brains about what worked and what didn’t. There was probably a good reason the 1960s SF hippies started their 1970s communes in Taos, etc. Pro tip: if you follow that trajectory, skip the drugs...they are most likely a dead end in many senses.
For those wanting to start a business, it is also a good time to sign a deal on a good lease in an excellent location. Any entrepreneur will have to think ahead about when revenue will recover, depending on the business.
I say this because this is a boom and bust city. Earthquakes , gold, 9/11, fires, finance bubbles, tech bubblies -- each time San Francisco has recovered from the ashes stronger, and those that invested, richer.
I mean that's true for anything, until it doesn't. Not saying that you're claim isn't true in this particular case, but the logic of "BUY THE DIP!" is entirely tautological and more or less just blind faith.
There's no natural law that stops a city from going into terminal decline, there's an exodus, and that's that.
Our last boom, for all the downsides of gentrification and transience that it wrought, added another layer of cosmopolitan influences which has helped defuse old local tensions. While the local leadership isn't doing everything right(as we'd expect), they aren't actively moving in the wrong direction either - they are working reasonably quickly to address and attempt solutions for each crisis as it comes up, and indeed, the crises of 2020 have been hugely transformative for the city already, leading to a whole new set of traffic and transit policies, reforms in law enforcement policy, and more. It won't be long before the officials have to start choosing between making cuts to essentials and throwing out old pork constituents, and they have a riled up, locked down population watching every move.
The only thing I'm truly concerned about is the state and national situations falling into the kinds of scenarios Robert Evans depicts in "It Could Happen Here".