
Is San Francisco about to return to its Bohemian roots? - brundolf
https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/Is-San-Francisco-about-to-return-to-its-Bohemian-15455489.php
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bonestormii_
You can't go home. Not ever.

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.

~~~
brundolf
> 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.

~~~
onecommentman
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...

------
fragmede
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.

~~~
medium_burrito
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.

~~~
dionidium
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.

------
pdx6
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.

~~~
megameter
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".

