Housing, Housing, Housing

Over the past two decades, we’ve seen a modern great migration as more and more Americans move from suburban and rural America to cities. This trend cuts across all demographic groups but has been especially true for millennials and aging boomers.

As a result, our great cities have experienced skyrocketing rents, displacement of the poor, gentrification and protracted conflict between NIMBY homeowners, landlords, and renters

What was once a local debate has become a national story. How it plays out, is a kind of petri dish of our collectives values and how we see our communities in this first quarter of the 21st century.

Randy Shaw, a longtime housing activist in San Francisco, has lived these issues. Now he delivers a broad view in Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America.

My conversation with Randy Shaw:

San Francisco, Silicon Valley and the Future of Cities

Social, cultural and technological change is all around us. We live in an era of upheaval, not unlike the movement from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy that took place 100+ years ago. At the time, many thought it was, to borrow a phrase, the end of history. Many spoke about the evils of cities. They thought that leaving the farm was anti-American, that it went against the Jeffersonian ideal of America.

It produced anger, sometimes violence, labor strife, and in the end a whole new economy that some long for today. The current shift that is far from done. As AI, crypto, virtual reality and whole new ways of looking at the world change the landscape of just about everything.

Arguably ground zero for this remarkable change is San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. Ground zero in a time of monumental change is never an easy or safe place to be. And certainly, it is having its impact on a City that once saw itself first as a bastion of manners and old wealth and then as the center of progressive cultural revolution. Today, it’s the center of another kind of inevitable and inexorable revolution that Cary McClelland details in Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley.

My conversation with Cary McClelland:

The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles.

We’ve seen that different cities often emerge as the the center of their times. This has been true from the Greek city states, through the Roman Empire and right up until the present, here in America. It seems that every major cultural, social and political movement of the modern era seems to be anchored in its own place.

New York became a kind of capital of the 50’s. In the 60’s places like San Francisco and Berkeley were the center of gravity. New York and to a certain extent L.A. seemed to launch the post war economy of the 70’s. Washington seemed to dominate the 80’s and with the decline of New York, it seemed like the 80’s would belong to L.A.

But something happened. Something that moved the locus of the knowledge economy to San Francisco and the Bay Area.

What happened and why is at the core of the years of research done by Michael Storper and his colleagues and put forth in their book The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles.

My conversation with Michael Storper:

The City that punches above its weight class

Given all the accolades that come to San Francisco, from its role in shaping our culture, and its inspiration for Tony Bennett, it’s often hard to believe that there are conflicting views. Recently, the co-founder of a start-up, credit card processing company, who was forced to move to San Francisco by his financiers, took to Medium with a different view.

He said, “San Francisco! It's the worst. The weather, the people, the cyclists, the dreary architecture and glum landscape... just ugh--why would any sane person want to live in this urine-scented homeless wasteland? Without the skrillions of available venture funding dollar and generous tech tax breaks, it's obvious San Franawful would drift off into an ocean of irrelevance.”

This is not the view held by Gary Kamiya, a Bay Area native, and a founder of Salon, who has just written Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco.

My conversation with Gary Kamiya:

The Dark Magic of San Francisco

Every major cultural, social and political movement of the modern era seems to be anchored in its own place and its own decade. Post war sensibilities were shaped by and centered in New York in the1950’s. It was the time of Mad Men and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. In the mid to late 70’s the youthful freedom of the time was enshrined by the golden age of a new independent Hollywood film industry. In the 80’s Washington was front and center, as the Reagan revolution changed America. There’s no question that in the 90s Wall Street, set the stage. In the 60s however San Francisco was the center of gravity.

The culture wars that still shape every aspect of our lives today, had their roots in the San Francisco of the late 60’s; what we hear proclaimed today as San Francisco values. It was a unique flowering, that would ultimately destroy The City. But San Francisco would fight back. Its’ people, its geography its intellectual heft would ultimately make its day. David Talbot, founder of Salon.com, recounts the turbulent years of San Francisco between 1967 and 1982 in Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love.

My conversation with David Talbot:

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LA & SF in the 1930s

Maybe it says something about the state of urban history today, but to better understand the history and culture of our two great California cities, San Francisco and Los Angles, we need to go back to the 1930’s and look at two volumes originally produced by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) at the height of the depression. Both truly capture the beauty and authenticity of LA and San Francisco. Add to these volumes an introduction by former SF Chronicle book critic David Kipen and you have far more then just a passing vision of time gone by. University of California Press has just reissued these two beautiful guides, to Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1930s. Great photos, great writing and a new introduction by David Kipen.

My conversation with David Kipen:

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Rebecca Solnit's San Francisco Atlas

Sometimes we live in places for years, without actually knowing them. To a real extent we live in a kind of "state of mind." Our connection to our City often has many layers of meaning, both personal and geographical. This is as true in a small towns as it is in the beautiful City of San Francisco.

National Book Critic Circle Award winner Rebecca Solnit, has created Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, a new kind of atlas of San Francisco, that allows us to see what really makes a place and examines the many layers of meaning inside a City like San Francisco.

My conversation with Rebecca Solnit:

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