I spent the nineties growing up in San Francisco, which, like many cities in that decade, churned with swirls of startling change. Boulevards were beautified (although a shaggy indie scene managed to thrive on side streets). Coffee changed from canteen sludge to crisp black java, and still cost less than a sandwich. New museums opened. Trendy people pursued “desktop publishing” in warehouses long left to rot. Urban life means riding a pendulum between extremes: a city is always en route to being either a gritty nightmare or a bourgeois snooze. But, for a year or two late in the decade, San Francisco seemed to feel like many things to many people. Starter homes turned into desired properties. Middle-class homeowners unexpectedly woke up house-rich. For those lucky enough to avoid the era’s darker spectres—AIDS, an early wave of rental evictions—the nineties often brought the winning ticket in a lottery they hadn’t meant to enter.
Today the winnings have been paid out, and the landscape of local concern has changed. In this magazine, I’ve written about the housing and inequality challenges facing the Bay Area and the nineties nostalgia haunting much of San Francisco’s current growth. The city’s long-held notion of itself as a home to the progressive middle is harder and harder to sustain. As in many quarters (think of Brooklyn), living on a normal salary—the type available outside tech or some similarly well-heeled industry—is getting hard. The quandary became flagrant last week: news circulated that the Palo Alto City Council had moved to explore subsidized housing for families earning between a hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.
[For more of this story, written by Nathan Heller, go to http://www.newyorker.com/cultu...?mbid=social_twitter]
Comments (0)