San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cover story
An exodus is surging, but S.F. is still home.
This is adapted from the essay “San Francisco Is My Home,” which appears in the forthcoming book “The End of the Golden Gate: Writers on Loving and (Sometimes) Leaving San Francisco,” to be published in May by Chronicle Books.
Is there any reason to stay in San Francisco? You hear that question asked more and more these days. Ravaged by the pandemic, many of its most beloved restaurants, bars and cafes shuttered for good, its downtown and Financial District deserted, much of its cultural life on pause, its schools closed, its homelessness crisis worse than ever, its houses unaffordable except to plutocrats, and even its rents creeping back up to their ridiculous old levels, San Francisco is starting to feel like a ghost town with alltooreal prices. It’s not surprising that in the last several months a lot of people have decided to move somewhere — anywhere — else.
But I’m not leaving. Despite all of its flaws, I still love the old city. In fact, I love it more than ever. Let me count the ways.
The first is beauty. To invoke San Francisco’s beauty is so obvious as to be banal. But not to bring it up would be like discussing New Orleans and not mentioning jazz or food. The stunning collision of the natural world and the human one that San Francisco specializes in makes it a spectacular reality movie, one that’s playing all across town, in every neighborhood, day and night. At any moment, as you move across this city’s convoluted terrain, behind a storefront or a neon sign, a strange hill or piece of unfamiliar water will suddenly rise up in the distance, as mysterious and enticing and otherworldly as one of those unknown landscapes in the background of a Renaissance painting. At every step, San Francisco offers you the universe, free. To walk its streets and hills is to take a permanent course in Beginner’s Mind.
The second reason is that I’ve learned to embrace, or at least accept, the changes that have befallen this city. This has not been easy.
My imaginary San Francisco, the place I visit in my mind, is inhabited by a ghostly tribe of wise Native Americans, bold FortyNiners, exuberant pioneers, suave antiheroes, rebellious Beats and intellectual hippies. And that dream city also happens to look like a 1949 film noir version of San Francisco, with nothing but beautiful postquake skyscrapers adorning the skyline, women in dresses and gloves stopping at flower stands on Powell Street, hardboiled journalists in fedoras cracking wise with laughing doormen, fruit vendors speaking Italian in North Beach and cheap apartments in Bernal Heights.
Coming to terms with the actual San Francisco, which is now populated not by a Platonic exaltation of mavericks and dreamers but by an Aristotelian army of systems analysts from Ohio, and where the most visible building is not the ClayJones but the Salesforce Tower, has taken some effort. But — because I know that all Golden Ages are myths, but mostly because I have a deathly horror of becoming a grumpy old man, an agingboho version of Mr. Wilson yelling at Dennis the Menace, now metamorphosed as a tech bro, to get off my lawn — I’ve done it.
The third reason I’m staying in San Francisco is the most personal, but also the most universal. This is my home.
A city, like a house, becomes your home the moment you move into it. But the longer you stay, the deeper the sense of home becomes. Like a relationship, or a good wine, the experience of having a home ripens over time, grows more complex and nuanced. And also like a relationship, the cracks and flaws that inevitably attend that experience become an essential part of it, and make it stronger. The hearth deities are powerful. Our attachment to home is umbilical: It transcends its good or bad qualities.
San Francisco is a beautiful, historic and ineffably romantic city. But even if it were not as beautiful, historic or romantic, I would not now leave it. It is the anchorage of my existence. When I return to it after going away, its familiar and friendly things receive me back, smilingly, without rancor. The years we have spent together have built up a treasure trove of mutual understanding and unspoken trust that is without price. Everything we have been through together, good, bad and indifferent, has created a bond that I do not want to break and could not even if I wanted to.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestselling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. His new book, with drawings by Paul Madonna, is “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City.”