If you are blessed enough to have friends from the Bay Area, you would know why you are not blessed enough to live in the Bay Area. They cannot help but make you painfully aware of the beautiful weather, the great food, and glorious culture. No argument, no data, no experience seems capable of swaying someone from The Bay into speaking poorly of it. If you don’t see the Bay Area as the best place on earth, you just haven’t looked. San Francisco and the wider Bay Area make up Silicon Valley, the epicenter of digital change for the modern era. My Baysian friends can grow exhausted from the challenge of listing even a fraction of San Francisco’s admirable qualities.
Here’s just a quick example from food. If I bring up the diversity of traditional food choices from across the globe presented around Houston through restaurants founded by enterprising immigrants, the true cacophony of tastes and smells afforded to such a flat land, I am quickly reminded that “the Bay has such good food”. When rankings place Houston among the top cities for cuisine in the country, with reviewers specifically noting how vast the choice of delicious affordable options are, I am quickly reminded that “San Francisco has such good food though.”
San Francisco, the shining city on an island which smells of fresh sea breezes and which looks as pristine as an unused napkin. The sun rises only for it. When it sets it does regretfully, waiting to rise again the next day to behold its love, its garden, its San Francisco.
A recent visit to San Francisco allowed me to finally understand the hype (spoiler: and reject it). Upon exiting the airport, I felt buoyed by the lightness and cleanliness of the air. The temperature outside hovered around 70 degrees. The weight of the Houston summer fell off in layers as I breathed in each successive breath. The BART public transport system took me downtown quickly and cheaply. I love effective public transportation, so I really appreciated the chance to travel around easily at a low price through a publicly run and publicly accessible system (*cough* unlike Houston *cough*).
Even when I arrived downtown, I couldn’t help but smile. To actually be in the Bay! I spent the day walking through streets and grabbed lunch with a friend working in an architecture firm a block from Washington Square Park. On the second day, I felt lavishly pampered while doing some work at Facebook’s headquarters and enjoy the free espresso bar and organic snacks. On my last day in town I took the ferry to visit Angel Island State Park. By this point the gears of the city had worn me down and I needed to get away, to interact with nature and hike on a dirt trail, surrounded by trees and water. I loved the ferry ride and state park, perhaps even more so because of their simplicity and genuineness. In a way, I felt largely that San Francisco lacked these things.
I spent a good amount of time during my trip trying to understand why I didn’t feel right, and why I was growing weary of the city, considering all its beauty, pace, and good qualities. I kept mentioning to the friend I stayed with how something felt a bit off, and we laughed about it because I really did sound a bit ridiculous, because despite everything nice about the area it seemed I refused to accept it. Perhaps my thoughts toward the city beforehand colored my experience negatively, and so I felt a lingering uneasiness despite what I experienced when I actually got there. But rather than diminish, the uneasiness grew during my time in the Bay, which suggests more causation on the part of the location than on the part of my prior questioning of the Bay’s splendor.
As an aside, the Bay really doesn’t hold much of a candle’s flame to Houston in the culture of food. Due in part to the high cost of space and living, and the limited diversity compared to Houston, The Bay let me down in this regard. But I still appreciated the food, and accepted the higher prices and increased levels of pretension in part due to San Francisco being a town with many tourists.
Back to the point, my uneasiness toward the city spiked during my morning runs, when I passed through Market Street and observed the high priced, shuttered shops contrasted with groups of homeless men and women living in abject poverty a few feet away on the side walk. Streets with pricey houses held the fresh scent of the coast, but many others smelled of urine and trash, and indeed were covered in the latter noticeably, and the former through conjecture. When I spent time at the tech headquarters, be it Uber or Facebook, people around me talked so candidly about social progress, the effects of AI on humanity in the next 50 years, and how new economic models like ride sharing would pave the way for cheap efficient transportation through self-driving cars. Cloud computing became an abstract concept beyond the services offered by Amazon or Microsoft, such that not just their servers but their minds, it appeared, were in the clouds.
The city reflected in many aspects the progress of humanity, but also represented how humans don’t change. In understanding history, it is evident that in the constant pursuit of wealth and power, a small portion of individuals inevitably appears at the top of the heap. Again, and again, and again, and again this system of triumph and oppression has occurred both in American society and more broadly in general western society. It is why Kings believed in a flat earth and leveled society, and Marx believed in a round earth and flat society, and why communist ideals became so popular in the 19th to 20th century and ultimately were corrupted in such a predictable way through the state. There within humanity is an essential desire to be set apart, placed above the rest.
A brilliant article by Thomas Fuller for the New York Times highlights some of my feelings toward the city. His commentary on coming home from abroad and observing different forms of poverty were particularly relatable for me. Check it out here.
As wealth shifts into the hand of generally highly educated people the path of history appears to be seeking to repeat itself beneath the liberal sheen of intellectualism. The rich influx of money, which has caused San Francisco’s housing market to balloon so incredibly, passively establishes the haves and have-nots through ruthless economics. I am still not able to fully speak to what afflicted my thoughts toward the city, but often human intuition towards a situation can be inexplicably poignant. Tell that to the hyper rationalist tech mogul.