Following on my own two rejoinders to the recent pieces in the New Yorker and Washington Post about San Francisco irreversibly going to shit, the Chronicle's Peter Hartlaub and Mission Local's Joe Eskanazi have each penned their own responses.

My main — and most objective — response to this current wave of sensational trend pieces, which actually dates back a good seven or eight years, is that a) every single person is going to have a different idea about what a city's "soul" represents, and anyway it's a myth of our collective creation; and b) if the main point of these essays is that San Francisco is changing too fast and becoming less culturally "cool" while also getting too expensive, there's a lot to unpack there too. And why don't we talk about how awesome New York or Los Angeles were in the 1970s and how those cities have irreversibly lost their cool? There's a Target in Tribeca for god's sake, and a friend was paying $10,000 a month to live in a two-bedroom on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, and that was five years ago.

Hartlaub digs deep into the archive to support his argument that "The death of San Francisco is an illusion, and it always has been," and it's a city "cursed to always be considered one or two generations past its peak." He finds a comical letter from the Chronicle's Letters page from 1874 in which a reader complains about the construction of the seven-story Palace Hotel, suggesting that it may be too late to remedy such a blight. And he draws on a famous quote given to columnist Herb Caen by another, older newspaperman who had famously written an obituary for San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire. That writer, Will Irwin, said in 1946, "San Francisco isn’t what it used to be. And it never was."

Hartlaub rightly brings up the the horrible ways LGBT people were treated in the city in the 1950s and 60s, and the murderous darkness of the 1970s when many families were fleeing what they saw as a city completely out of control.

In his Mission Local response, Eskanazi recounts his own mother's story of being stoned at a laundromat near Army Street in the 1970s when some random guy walked in to share his Kahlua cheesecake with everyone. When remembered against the backdrop of the Zebra murders that were happening at the time, he gives an example of the contrasts between the intimacy and occasional loveliness of everyday life in a city during a time of great fear and loathing. "The San Francisco of Kahlua cheesecake in the laundromat is also the Zebra Killers’ San Francisco or the Jim Jones San Francisco or the Dan White San Francisco," he writes. "We choose to decouple these memories. But, at the time, they coexisted."

He's careful to suggest, though, that San Francisco "may have gone off book" in recent years, and all the IPOs and million-dollar shacks contrasted with "jarring public misery and filth" could suggest some "transcendence" of other historical moments.

Hartlaub writes that "everything from the invention of radio to rock ’n’ roll to Sutro Tower to video game arcades to electric scooters has been blamed for the demise of San Francisco." And even if income disparity, displacement, and a general antipathy and ignorance among newcomers to town about the glories of The Cockettes, Clothes Contact, or whatever shuttered dive bar you loved fifteen years ago are all depressingly realities of our current moment, the heart of the city beats on. All we can do is learn from past mistakes and debate future legislation that might improve some small piece of the bigger picture.

As the novelist and philosopher Annie Dillard once wrote, "There is no one to send... but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time... There has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day. Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved."

Life hasn't devolved — even if our national politics may have — and neither has San Francisco. It is in some ways a crueler place than it was 30 or 40 years ago — higher rent, more visible mental illness and drug abuse on the street, less racially diverse, with a greater emphasis on wealth and status (in certain circles) — but in some ways a kinder place — more inclusive of LGBTQ people, more aware of our differences and inequities, less trusting of religious mores. Would everyone feel less down on San Francisco if a strongman mayor walked in and swept all visible "vagrancy" off the street the way Giuliani did in Manhattan in the late 1990s? Would that make it feel like a kinder place?

Most who will tell you this place has gone to hell are likely feeling down for other, perhaps personal, reasons. Or maybe a confluence of events that they can blame on "the city" has caused them genuine pain. But meanwhile there are people both less fortunate and more fortunate than they are getting by and possibly having a very fine week. It's a city full of people after all.

Related: San Francisco Has Always Been A Pretty Expensive Place To Live
Washington Post Calls San Francisco 'Patient Zero' For America's Urban Ills

Another day, another "elegy" for the unrelenting wasteland that is our fair city. In exactly the same vein and tone of that irritating New Yorker piece last week, the Washington Post has published a piece in the Style section all about how San Francisco has finally, irreversibly gone to hell.

It's titled "How San Francisco broke America's heart," and it's another litany of depressing facts: rents that "read like typos," IPO fever, homeless, "poop patrol," modest homes selling for millions to tech executives. I am starting to realize there's an upside to this dominant narrative coming out of the East Coast media about what a shithole San Francisco's become: fewer people will move here and maybe rents will go down!

Writer Karen Heller cites a couple of retail closures in the Mission, Lucca Ravioli and Borderlands Cafe, as evidence of these terrible times we're in. (It's a little dramatic, as many of us know, since Lucca closed after 94 years not because it was evicted, but because the family that ran it decided to cash out on its very valuable Valencia Street property — with no one in the family who wanted to continue the business elsewhere — and the humble Borderlands Cafe may have simply outlived its useful life in a neighborhood best known for $5 pour-over.)

She also speaks to several people well known for their downer attitudes on the city, like writer Rebecca Solnit and VanishingSF curator Julie Levak-Madding, the latter of whom has been managing a Facebook devoted to San Francisco's "hyper-gentrification" since 2013. But she does get a notable quote from former Supervisor and mayoral candidate Jane Kim, who says, "I can’t tell you the number of friends who tell me how much they hate San Francisco. They say it's too homogenous." I'm guessing she said more than that, but that's the only quote that was used.

Longtime LGBT activist Cleve Jones, who began speaking out in 2016 about the need to save "gayborhoods" like the Castro, tells Heller, "I don’t hear people talking about poetry. I still love my town. I still love my neighborhood, but it is changing very rapidly. It’s quite harsh and quite brutal and it frightens me."

She also suggests that you can no longer find a hardware store, independent music club, drag bar, or lesbian bar, and only the latter is true. (And the fact that there's no longer a full-time lesbian bar in San Francisco is hardly unique to San Francisco.)

Heller may not be incorrect in suggesting that SF is "the Patient Zero of issues affecting urban areas." Indeed the density and recent downtown construction boom have pushed more homeless out into the open — and while the current opioid, heroin, and meth epidemics may be slightly different than twenty years ago, I like to remind people that the homeless population here, while currently on the rise, was actually significantly bigger in the late 1990s as the dot-com boom was in full swing. By one count, it was 15,000 people in 1999, twice the number recently released ahead of this year's homeless census.

Homelessness is a problem affecting many cities across the country, and while gentrification may be one contributing factor to some individuals' personal plights, there are often many contributing factors to why a person does not have shelter. And yes, simple capitalism is proving not to be a boon for the middle class or the poor in America's cities.

The dream of bohemian San Francisco, which largely grew out of the post-war period in the 1950s and then took on new meaning with the hippies, was already being lost in the 1990s as rents in the traditionally inexpensive Mission started skyrocketing. But have we really lost everything that's great and beautiful about the city to tech employees? Is it really that easy and quick to destroy a city and drain away its character?

Some are always going to say yes, but as I wrote on this site four years ago, change can suck, and she isn't exactly the city I married either. But I'm still not filing for divorce.

Previously: San Francisco Has Always Been A Pretty Expensive Place To Live

Here's Why Everyone Needs To Stop Bemoaning A Vanishing San Francisco And Move On

A new piece in The New Yorker, part of a recently popular genre of bleak takes on San Francisco losing its soul to tech wealth and tech everything, stands out in part because it was written by someone who moved here for a tech job.

"Almost everyone I know is down on San Francisco these days, and for good reason," writes Anna Wiener. "Few can envision a future here."

The piece, titled "In San Francisco, Tech Money Doesn't Buy Happiness," contains a litany of downtrodden observations about gentrification, the retail environment, the Uber driver strike, traffic, and everything that's changed in San Francisco since the 1960s — or the 1990s?  It naturally references that alarmist and much discussed New York Times piece about the city "drowning in millionaires" following our current spate of IPOs. And it manages to suggest that "developers are gutting elegant Victorians and mid-century homes and painting them staid shades of gray," as if that is actually happening all over town.

"The emerging city is a tapestry of boutique fitness studios and finicky New American restaurants, of private clubs (including one for dogs) and cryotherapy spas," Wiener writes. But is that really all she sees in San Francisco? Does somebody need to invite this woman to a party?

Don't get me wrong: I know we're in a somewhat discouraged moment as a populace. Between Muni being broken, the housing shortage, and the homeless crisis surging unabated, the plight of the common San Franciscan stands in sharp contrast to Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires, of which we have the nation's lion's share.

Also, given how difficult it is to survive here these days on creative or journalistic pursuits, it should be no wonder that writers and journalists are particularly depressed on the topic of San Francisco. (Ms. Wiener herself, who moved to SF to work for a startup in 2013, sounds like she's dying to move back to New York and is working on a book titled Uncanny Valley, "a memoir of her time in the tech industry.")

This parade of sad takes on San Francisco may be reflective of the sad takes that blue-state dwellers have on our country at large in this present moment. Economic inequality is everywhere, and is particularly stark in the Bay Area, no doubt. But I encourage everyone to take a step back and ask whether the city is losing a "soul," or if it's just in a particularly bad mood — and also ask whether cities have souls, or moods.

Local writer Scott Lucas recently questioned this idea of "the soul of the city" in a piece for City Lab. He points to the dozens of stories that have been penned in recent years about battles for the "souls" of dozens of cities, from Europe to the US to Australia. He looks back on how Salon founder and Season of the Witch writer David Talbot foretold in 2012 how the current tech boom was going to be "potentially more damaging to the soul of the city" than the dot-com boom was 20 years ago. And he harkens back to when then Supervisor David Campos wanted a moratorium on all new construction in the Mission District in 2015, saying he was "fighting for the soul of San Francisco."

This is an emotional subject, but Lucas is right to suggest that everyone's idea of what the "soul of San Francisco" is varies from person to person. "Typically, whatever a person claims the soul of a city is, it coincides with that person’s political or aesthetic preferences," Lucas writes. "It’s a synecdoche that picks out some element of urban life, something of emotional importance that is seen as under threat, and inflates it to become the city as a whole."

But cities are many things, and they change in ways that are good and bad all the time. Cities are "dense with human friction, from the neighborhood level on up. And that pluralism is as it should be," Lucas writes.

While "tech" has been the prime industry dominating the larger narrative here for a couple decades, there are of course a number of less headline-grabbing industries here too, and there always will be. Tech money continues to trickle down to support the arts and SF's ever-crowded restaurant scene — even if artists and line cooks have a hard time finding anyplace to rent. (PianoFight founder Dan Williams recently told the Chronicle that tech people living and working in and around mid-Market have been boon for his theater/cabaret, saying, "Without tech our business would be far worse off.")

New York has the pleasure of having no one industry be seen as particularly dominant — though finance and banking pretty much always has been. It also has the advantage of being nine times the size of San Francisco, so no single narrative about its crumbling infrastructure or gentrifying neighborhoods tends to rule the headlines. It's just getting real tiresome having New York-based publications control the narrative about San Francisco, getting all transplanted New Yorkers in SF to nod in unison about how everything sucks. Do we need another big bank-driven recession and stock market crash to shift back to hating on New York?

Previously: The New York Times Profiles A Guy Who Regularly Picks Over Mark Zuckerberg's Trash

Photo by Zac Nielson on Unsplash

Image credit: Percy & Cecil

Contest ends May 4th so go, go, go!