San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bringing the arts back to S.F.
City’s grassroots cultural scene in dire need of recovery plan
For months now, local and national news coverage of San Francisco has bordered on hysterical. Reports focusing on how the city can “recover” following more than two years of pandemic-related business shutdowns, thousands of tech employees opting to work from home or move elsewhere, rising housing costs and headline-grabbing episodes of street crime might give you the impression our hometown is seconds away from tumbling into the Pacific.
But for native San Franciscans like us who have weathered earlier challenging eras, these hyperventilating stories are missing a beat that is equally vital to the city’s future health: How we build back San Francisco’s live music and arts scene.
For half a century, starting around World War II, San Francisco’s verdant arts and culture ecosystem flourished, welcoming and fostering a mind-boggling array of writers, painters, dancers, actors and musicians. But since the early 2000s, that ecosystem of grassroots and institutional arts and cultural opportunities has been in decline, and in 2022, it has all but disappeared, especially for Black women from working-class and middle-class families like ours.
How do we bring it back? By ensuring the city has a healthy mix of ethnic populations, a wide range of job opportunities and relatively affordable housing.
For young artists, securing housing has always been a challenge. But the rising rental costs over the past 15 years has made pursuing one’s artistic ambitions in San Francisco a soul-killing proposition. Although the arrival of busloads of tech workers into the city first drew national headlines in the mid-2010s, the die had been cast a few years earlier. In 2011, when then-Mayor Ed Lee and San Francisco Supervisors, (which included our current mayor,) approved tax credits for big tech companies to open offices in the city, few anticipated the negative downstream impacts to come.
App-based delivery companies like DoorDash and GrubHub enabled an already insulated tech sector workforce to stay insulated even when those workers were not in their brick-and-mortar workplaces. And worse, many startups and established tech companies delivered an extra dose of poison into San Francisco’s fragile arts and cultural ecosystem by declining to hire qualified locals, notably Black and Latino San Franciscans, in high-paying professional level roles.
Consequently, negative outcomes piled up faster than wait lines at Apple Stores on new product release days: Landlords hiked rents out of reach for anyone not earning annual salaries in high-five to mid-six figures, while local independent businesses watched formerly loyal clientele vanish.
This cascade of sadness happened before the pandemic and has worsened since.
Fortunately, as natives, we know better than to count San Francisco out.
Part of what one learns from having come of age in the city is that its kinship with the mythic phoenix is well-earned. We have personally experienced major periods of political, geologic and socioeconomic upheaval in the city, including large street protests by ACT UP that turned into violent police actions, the assassinations of two elected officials in 1978, the massive earthquake in 1989 and more.
Through all those crises, the city and its grassroots arts and culture reemerged due to the same combination of collective action and individual grit that has characterized San Francisco for generations.
Today, we need to do the same.
For starters, city leaders, including elected officials and nonprofit administrators, can focus more on and collaborate with San Francisco’s public schools. Arts education in schools is where many children and teens first obtain interest in creating music, stories and other forms of arts and culture. Moreover, for decades, education researchers have documented improved academic and social outcomes of students who have access to robust arts and cultural learning opportunities in school and in extracurricular settings. Yet for all these benefits, the arts are not being prioritized by the San Francisco Board of Education. Last autumn, for example, the board reallocated $100 million that had been approved by voters to help build a new campus for a public arts school toward addressing facilities needs at other schools.
The Board of Supervisors can play an important role by thinking holistically about economic development in the city. Stronger policies to protect small businesses that provide jobs to aspiring artists in neighborhoods like the Clement Street and Ocean Avenue corridors would make significant impact in helping rebuild the city’s artistic and cultural life.
The Mayor’s Office could aid the cultural preservation of historically Black neighborhoods in the Oceanview, Merced Heights and Ingleside areas by designating them as “cultural districts” and work aggressively alongside the Board of Supervisors to increase affordable housing options in Bay View and in the southwest side of the city, districts that are home to many working-class families.
Similarly, the Board of Supervisors can also demonstrate its commitment to rebuilding the city’s art and cultural ecosystem by channeling a meaningful amount of the federal and state pandemic-recovery funding into the Recreation and Park Department, which provides enriching cultural and environmental programming tailored to young people and families.
There are a wealth of opportunities for building on what remains of the historic ecosystem of grassroots arts and culture in San Francisco and reinventing it for sustainability. For example, the Bandshell in Golden Gate Park was reopened for free events, a welcomed return of a historic venue where all manner of residents and day-trippers can gather outdoors for live music.
As a treasured example of San Francisco’s historic leadership in nurturing creative spaces, Golden Gate Park naturally symbolizes the public service mission of the city’s arts and cultural profile. Elected officials, nonprofit sector and business leaders must start thinking creatively about the next iteration of the pipeline that formerly sourced a worldclass portfolio of organic delights.
If San Francisco genuinely is to holistically “recover,” remaking the grassroots arts and cultural scene must begin right now. There’s always been a surfeit of wealthy people in San Francisco. Now it’s time for those with political, economic and social capital to focus on reimagining the foundational supports for artists and resetting our stages for future generations. Amy Alexander is author of several nonfiction books, including “Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist’s Story of Reporting and Reinvention.” Shaunna Hall is a guitarist, composer and founder of the alternative rock band 4 Non Blondes and producer of ElectroFunkadelica.