Maybe this photo is a microcosm, a metaphor for what has happened to my hometown, the unique and incomparable city of San Francisco.
It’s just a lousy parking space, but that’s the point. It’s a downright lousy parking space, in a public underground parking garage in what used to be the best part of The City— those capital letters being the signature of San Francisco, coined by a long-gone newspaper columnist whose love for The City was strong enough to capitalize each word. The scuff marks aren’t mine by the way (that’s my story and I’m sticking with it), but during a family visit to San Francisco on Friday, when I backed into this space in my compact-size rental car, I was just an inch from disaster on one side, only a foot on the other.
It is a typical space in the overcrowded, undersized, overpriced parking garage under a square block called Union Square (twenty bucks for the four hours I was there). Once, a premium price made sense. Union Square is at the foot of luxurious Nob Hill and always has been the center of San Francisco’s high-end retail universe. The best galleries, the best stores, some of the best hotels have been on Union Square or close to it. When I was growing up, it was Chicago’s Michigan Avenue or New York’s Fifth Avenue or L.A.’s Wilshire Boulevard, but with respect to those other cities, classier. It is only a couple of blocks from the spine of what is still called, somewhat surprisingly in this day and age, Chinatown, immortalized by the song “Grant Avenue, San Francisco” in the Broadway play Flower Drum Song. It is flanked by Powell Street, the most popular line in The City of hill-climbing cable-clutching cable cars.
But getting into that parking space, in that best part of San Francisco, I was an inch from disaster. And that’s my metaphor for The City itself. An inch from disaster with homelessness, with drug abuse, with crime, with political correctness, with dysfunction. And because of incomes swollen by fortunes from High Tech, an inch from disaster with wealth gaps wider than any city in America. They have forced middle class denizens out of homes they no longer can afford to inhabit, and with the domino effect that follows, raised rents for modest apartments to thousands of dollars a month. According to commentator Nellie Bowles, who wrote “How San Francisco Became A Failed City” in The Atlantic, a $117,400 salary for a family of four counts as low income.
That dank, dark garage under Union Square has seen its better days. Many now argue, between the economic cost and the social price people pay to live in The City, so has San Francisco.
It makes me sad because I was born in San Francisco, I did kindergarten through high school there, even went to college just across the bay in Berkeley, which is close enough that I could take my dirty laundry home on the weekends for my mother to lovingly wash and fold. (She too is long gone, or I wouldn’t be able to get away with the “lovingly” part.) Anyway, I don’t root for San Francisco’s teams any more— I’ve got my own in Colorado— and beyond family who still live there, I don’t have much stake in the success of The City. But through all the years when I worked for ABC News and New York City was my mother ship, I could only laugh at the insular attitude of New Yorkers, whose sense of superiority was epitomized in this New Yorker magazine cover from 1976 by the artist Saul Steinberg. Although a prettier, friendlier, easier city than New York, San Francisco was no more than an imperceptible pimple on the far side of the continent.
We who had ever loved it knew better. I was forever proud of my roots. Now, not so much.
Because it wasn’t just my parking place that pained me. It was what I saw in another, right around the corner.
This poor soul must have felt that it was safer on the cold concrete of the Union Square garage than any space he’d find on the street. When you look at encampments in every corner of The City, you might say he made a wise choice. San Francisco has no monopoly on homelessness, but statistics show that it now has the distinction of having, per capita, as many homeless as New York City.
When it comes to crime, the comparison’s not even that good. According to the demographic data base of Sperling’s Best Places, San Francisco’s violent crime rate is almost half again higher than New York’s, and for violent crimes, twice as high. Seven years ago, there were fewer than a hundred drug deaths in The City. Two years ago, there were 700.
San Francisco is one of the most liberal cities in America, if not the most liberal. So to the degree that The City’s governing leaders let things slide too far— too tolerant of all the conditions that have degraded The City— it was inevitable that eventually even its most liberal inhabitants would become intolerant.
And they did. The District Attorney, demonstrably soft on crime, got himself recalled. Three members of the school board, demonstrably devoted to political correctness, got themselves voted out.
The school board became an interesting if ultra-sensitive issue in The City. At one point in 2020, it created a spreadsheet showing every school in the district, and elected to change the names of 44 of them. They wanted to give my high school a new name— the only public high school in San Francisco that admitted students based on tests, or to use a more snobbish word, merit— because it was named after a 19th-Century American poet named James Russell Lowell, who apparently got credit from the school board for being an abolitionist but lost points because “his commitment to the anti-slavery cause wavered over the years.”
For heaven’s sake they even wanted to take George Washington’s name off one public high school because, as we always have known, he owned slaves. Abraham Lincoln didn’t, but his name was slated for the dustbin because of his treatment of Native Americans. In other words, as the website Education Next put it, Lincoln and Washington were “insufficiently pure.” Forget the fact that in the larger context of American history, when you put their merits and demerits on a scale, these two men showed the best traits of a president and in each case, successfully held this nation together when others might have failed.
The school board recall reversed that whole fiasco about names but still, it represented the pinnacle of political correctness in San Francisco. The D.A.’s recall represented the pinnacle of progressive extremism.
In short, in the broad band of markers that make up a city, San Francisco is a mess.
You can’t take away the beauty of The City: the hills, the bridges, the bay…
… not to mention the best sourdough French bread this side of France. But the city Tony Bennett eulogized when he left his heart in San Francisco— “where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars”— has changed. Not for the better.
So has every city of course. None that I know of has found ways to successfully erase the scourge of drugs or crime or homelessness, at least not on a massive scale, which is what’s needed. But in San Francisco, whether by calculating statistics or by contrasting it to the city it once was, it all seems worse. This city of classic hills, where I once left my heart, has been going downhill. I can only hope it doesn’t reach rock bottom.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Excellent, but so sad. Used to be our favorite weekend retreat when living in Carmel.
Greg: This is one of your finest, albeit disturbingly accurate, essays. Thank you. Ken