Reasons to be proud of this hot mess we still call home

Sooner or later, every San Franciscan is going to have to answer this question: Why is the best city in the world such a mess?

The Washington Post is the latest to be on San Francisco’s case. It was once the Paris of the West. Now it’s “Too homogenous, too expensive, too tech, too millennial, too white, too elite, too bro.”

Like a true San Franciscan, I read every word. Wincing. The piece is pretty much true. Everybody’s Favorite City is in big trouble.

And everyone knows it. I heard from a woman who was one of the neighbors when I lived on 21st Avenue, years ago. She was a kid then and played with my daughters on the sidewalk — jump rope, games like that. “This is not the city I grew up in,” she wrote. “I will never come back.”

You hear that a lot from expatriate San Franciscans. They moved out for a hundred good reasons, but a lot of us loyalists stayed with the city. We still like the city — the feel of it, the small-town nature of San Francisco, the neighborhood restaurants, the corner stores, the nutty vitality of the place.

But this is no little “cable cars climbing halfway to the stars” view of the city. People who have lived here for a long time can see clearly what’s wrong with the city. But it’s San Francisco. It’s like a romance gone awry. It’s complicated.

The reason the Bay Area is so expensive is beyond the control of the people who live here. Global forces are at work. The Bay Area has become the epicenter of a tech revolution that has generated huge fortunes and brought in a class of people who have invented a new world of technology. That happened for lots of reasons: This was a region that welcomed innovation, had great educational institutions, and was beautiful to boot. The world rushed in.

Millionaires and billionaires and Uber drivers and Google buses. All the problems that were here before got worse: traffic, housing prices. Even in the good old days there was a Skid Row. Now the beggars, drug addicts and lost souls are all over the city.

To cope with these problems, the citizens have continued to elect weak city governments, all built on compromise and deals with competing pressure groups. At City Hall everybody is responsible for everything and nobody is responsible for anything.

To make a complex problem worse, the city has so many rules and regulations that it has become nearly impossible to build anything. And the city desperately needs new housing. San Francisco has the highest building costs in the country. Architects and builders say it costs an average of $650,000 to build an ordinary San Francisco home these days. Even affordable housing is not affordable.

The city is out of control. Traffic is a mess, but it’s rare to see a traffic control officer. Trucks are doubleparked everywhere. The city is dirty — a friend just back from Mexico City was astounded to find the streets there far cleaner than the ones in her native city. There is so much human waste on the streets of San Francisco the city formed a “poop patrol” where workers are paid $71,000 a year, about same as the average schoolteacher.

And so on. The Washington Post is right. It’s too too. So why do we loyalists stay? Why don’t we cash out, sell our modest homes for a million bucks and buy a mansion in Broken Bow, Neb.?

It’s the people you find here. People like Fran Martin and Anne Seeman and their neighbors, who turned a neglected eyesore in an out-of-the-way neighborhood into a 6-blocklong showplace called the Visitacion Valley Greenway. People like Nancy Windesheim and Joan Carson, who headed an effort to repair and landscape a oneblock section of Esmeralda Avenue in Bernal Heights and turn it into a small treasure, complete with a children’s slide.

Or older San Franciscans like Amy Meyer, who helped turn old military posts into what became the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, now one of the most visited national parks in the country.

There are other people with smaller visions who built community gardens all over the city; the neighbors who put in a kids’ swing just off San Jose Avenue. Or the Gum Tree Girls, who stood up to the city and stopped a freeway that would have destroyed Glen Park Canyon. Those people.

Many of these people are not native San Franciscans pining for the good old days and complaining about how the city has gone to the dogs, dammit.

They moved here because they saw something special in this place. They did a lot of work to make San Francisco better. Not just talk. Hard work.

These people and people like them are the real reasons San Francisco is still The City and why some of us are still proud to be San Franciscans.

Photos by Paul Chinn / The Chronicle Left: A man sleeps in Civic Center Plaza in front of City Hall, in a neighborhood that teems with San Francisco’s homeless population. Below left: A woman reclines with her dogs at the top of the BART escalator at the city’s Embarcadero station.