If you want to rile up a San Francisco native, mention the doom loop. They’re pretty sick of that.
Ever since the pandemic, the city has become the scary poster child for the Death of American Downtowns. Liberal newspapers and conservative pundits alike love to point to San Francisco as a cautionary tale of how not to run a city, a post-COVID apocalypse. A parade of national retailers have abandoned San Francisco for want of foot traffic. A quarter of all storefronts in the main shopping district are empty. Commercial real estate is a garbage fire; owners of several major hotels have given the keys back to the bank and split. Nobody’s really sure how bad crime is, but it feels worse, and the police may have quiet-quit. Homelessness is a devastating problem, and it’s not uncommon to see unhoused folks having mental breakdowns amid the outside-dining parklets of ritzy restaurants. I’ve lived in the Bay Area for going on two decades now. It’s not Mad-Max-meets-Omega-Man out here, but it’s bleaker than I’ve ever seen.
Now, you probably think two things about all this. The first one is, this is what happens when super woke pinko commies are allowed to run a government on drugs and pronouns. That’s wrong. San Francisco is actually run by 1,000 pro-business centrists wearing a leftist trench coat. This is a place where the politics of identity have always been more progressive than actual policy and governance. So while it’s tempting to blame Pride marchers and Burning Man pryotechnicians for the current state of affairs, it’s actually the rich oligarchs and technolibertarian geniuses of Silicon Valley who can’t seem to figure out how to finish a new rail line or convert some skyscrapers to condos, much less solve the homelessness crisis. Their only answers for the city’s demise are lower taxes for themselves, and more cops for skid row.
The second thing you’re probably thinking is, phew, at least I don’t live there! But treating San Francisco as some sort of outlier, a sui generis example of urban decay, is wrong, too. California has always been the bleeding-future edge of the continent, a cyberpunk scrying pool. The lives and deaths of American cities are communicable, transmitting along interstate highways and across financial networks. We have to figure out how to fix San Francisco’s problems now, because they’re going to be every city’s problems later.
San Francisco is a beautiful old city — Spanish mission and Eastern beaux-arts plugged into a European hill town full of Western bravado. The weather is dramatic, the food and booze are great, and it has a long tradition of welcoming people looking to make and remake themselves — cults, Black Panthers, labor rabble-rousers, grifters and strivers, counterculture poets, LGBTQ+ people, neurodivergent geniuses. Its history is a scintillating map of human diversity (though the record on immigrants and Black people, to be clear, is not great).
The city even made room for me. I grew up in Los Angeles and then spent a decade on the Acela Corridor — Boston, New York, Washington. After I washed out back there I washed up on the Embarcadero, a typical San Francisco story. The city has always been a landing zone for cultural refugees, even a Californian like me who’d been away long enough for his accent to get messed up.
But that’s culture. The political power in the city has always been California old-money business interests, even before California was part of the United States. The central and unifying action in the city, from early labor struggles to war protests to free speech to gay rights, has been what the Washington Monthly called movement politics, more about social tolerance than wonkish policy. As the head of the city’s transit agency once told me, people who remake themselves in San Francisco sometimes get so attached to the version of the city that welcomed them, they forget to make it possible for others to do the same.
We’re going to have to. Because here’s my one crazy trick to fix San Francisco: homes. Build lots of homes everywhere in the Bay Area. Fill in all the empty lots and surface parking with places to live. Convert commercial buildings to residential ones — SF is actually working on this, but it’s trickier than it sounds because most office buildings built after World War II don’t have floor plans conducive to homes. So do what’s possible. Fix the zoning issues that privilege big single-family homes and make multiplexes illegal. Get rid of rules that require every living unit to include parking for cars. Turn first floors into small retail spaces that local businesses can afford. I’m talking about housing at every income level — market rate and subsidized. And housing of every size, from single-room occupancy cohousing to condo-type units designed for families.
This is just a matter of good old-fashioned supply and demand. More places to live means they get cheaper. Homelessness decreases, which means fewer of my neighbors will be forced to live in mobile homes or tents. It’s no coincidence that the places in the United States with the most new home construction are also those with the fewest homeless people and lower housing costs. But here’s the real reward: Neighborhoods filled with a diversity of homes and businesses are safer and more vibrant. They encourage people to spend their money at nearby shops, which is good for local retail, and they help small businesses find enough workers to serve everyone decaf flat whites and check in back for a bottle of chartreuse. And as a side bonus, denser neighborhoods emit less carbon, because the people who live in them drive less and use less energy per person for heating and cooling. Save the neighborhoods, save the planet.
I make it sound easy, but obviously it isn’t. Right now, despite all kinds of new laws and political pressure, it’s still possible for NIMBY protesters and their political allies to derail a lot of housing developments. It’s also a recipe for corruption, as in the now famous instance of the SF Board of Supervisors killing a project that would have built hundreds of new homes on land being used as a valet parking lot. One way to fight that is to take the power to quash much-needed development away from individual politicians. Create master plans that lay out exactly what kind of buildings are acceptable, and if a proposed building meets those standards, let it get approved “by right” — as opposed to letting county supervisors or zoning boards nix it on a whim or a bribe.
Politicians aren’t the only problem. Thanks to the 1970s law called Proposition 13, people in California pay the same amount of tax on their homes as they did when they moved in, no matter how much the value of the property goes up. Shelter in place long enough, and you’re making big money. It’s probably not true that homeownership automatically makes you more politically conservative — but it does make you pretty touchy about letting developers build more housing in your neighborhood, which would increase supply and thereby drive down the value of your home. “Despite supporting supply citywide,” one researcher observes, “residents individually have an incentive to ‘defect’ and block new housing proposed for their own neighborhood.” In San Francisco, that means people wind up being the kind of progressives who want to end homelessness while opposing new homes.
I’m not saying that communities shouldn’t have a say in what gets built in their midst. We don’t want to go back to the standard operating procedures of the mid-20th century, when cities had a predilection for tearing up trolley tracks and running freeways through Black neighborhoods. But right now, much-needed housing gets scuttled because it might cast a shadow over a park. The rules have to change. No Painted Lady bay window or Arts and Crafts extended rafter is worth letting people die in the street.
The failures of the Bay Area go deeper than a left-right slap fight or a NIMBY outbreak. What’s happening in San Francisco is an apotheosis of a grand, centurylong experiment in American urbanism. City governments have long understood that it makes sense to separate economically valuable but obnoxious things like factories or slaughterhouses from the places where people live. About a century ago, cities started getting even more systematic about that, dividing their geography into zones by function and regulating what could happen in each.
Trouble was, all that zoning created two new problems. First, it divided the city even more sharply by race and class; planners actually drew lines on maps to separate rich from poor and whites from everyone else. And second, it catered to the needs of the growing number of suburbanites who were commuting back and forth to the city every day. Planners built tons of roads to move everybody around, and the parking for all those cars got in the way of all the other things that make a city good. What started out as a 20th-century expression of the American dream turned into an urban nightmare.
Change happens. You build a city around certain needs and trends, and then a key industrial sector collapses, or a new generation wants to live and work in ways you never imagined. That’s why cities have to shrug off the old ways and adapt to the present reality. And that means connecting all their housing and workplaces and shopping and entertainment with something other than cars. That’s true not just in San Francisco, but in cities across the country.
So here’s my fix: bike lanes.
Well, not just bike lanes. I mean, yes, have really nice ones, protected by bollards tough enough to bounce back a Hummer. But also have more lanes on streets dedicated to buses, with more buses on them, so they can carry more people faster. More ferries, more often. Build out public transit. Build a second tube for trains across the bay. Hey, look at all those hills! How about some gondolas? Hell, build more bridges — as long as they carry trains and buses.
I don’t totally trust the Bay Area’s ability to get this done. San Francisco’s public-transportation system nearly collapsed earlier this year from post-COVID budget woes; it took a federal grant to save it. A new subway line took decades to plan and build and ran millions over budget — and doesn’t connect the right neighborhoods. The city’s central transportation hub connects to bus lines but not to the subway system, nor to the ferry terminal a half mile away. The cable cars, one of the city’s most beloved features, are constantly at risk of bankruptcy. The 1970s-era regional subway system, by design, does not connect the city with any of its northern suburbs. Every attempt to put in new protected lanes for people riding bicycles gets met with utter freakouts from the adjacent businesses.
Still: People need to be able to move around their neighborhoods easily, without a car, to work and school and maybe a decent cup of coffee. Early research suggests that contrary to business fears, trading street parking for bike lanes and better walking paths actually increases revenue. On a street in one Australian city, every square meter allotted to bike parking generated 31 Australian dollars an hour for nearby shops, compared with AU$6 per square meter of car parking. Redesigning streets for alternate forms of transportation also improves the way people feel about their neighborhoods, and big, citywide programs for bikes in Barcelona and Paris have boosted local businesses. The right transit infrastructure, it turns out, puts money that would normally go to cars back in people’s pockets. Urban mobility is upward mobility.
A couple of weeks ago I took my kid to a cool, strange museum built by the head of a longtime SF circus troupe in a house in St. Francis Wood, a verdant neighborhood of gently curving streets with views of the Pacific. It’s in the southwestern part of the city, outside the defensive-shield wall created by the famous hills, and houses there run $3 million a pop. In some sectors, at least, reports of San Francisco’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.
But even up there with the rich folks, the museum reminded me of the kind of weird delights San Francisco can offer — and, frankly, offered more of when I first got here. Which brings me to my last proposal: Have fun.
Cities are supposed to surprise and delight. Now, look, I’m old; I know there’s already plenty more going on in San Francisco than I have access to or the stamina for. But there should be more, and for a wild town with a Barbary coast, it’s weirdly abstemious. People are having too much fun at the beach on a roadway closed to cars? The city wants to open it. The Ferris wheel in Golden Gate Park is making money? That can’t be good. Let bars stay open until 4 a.m.? Nah.
Look, San Francisco’s problems are real, and I don’t mean to minimize them. But they’re fixable.
To revive the city, San Francisco needs to get back to its freak-flag-flying roots. Let bars stay open late. Tell restaurant owners who complain about food trucks and taco stands to shut the eff up and let 1,000 bacon-wrapped hot dogs bloom. Close busy streets on weekend evenings and fill them with street musicians and buskers. Give scrappy theater troupes $1 leases on the vast empty spaces vacated by Walgreens and Nordstrom and see what they come up with. Let visual artists apply for free spray paint and bubble guns and set them loose. Turn the Bay Bridge light show back on. Play locally produced artisanal porn on the Salesforce Tower-top LEDs. And above all, please, please, deploy more lasers. There’s a reason that the actors, artists, musicians, dancers, and the providers of intoxicants in any urban demimonde are called an avant-garde. They’re the true defenders of city life.
Look, San Francisco’s problems are real, and I don’t mean to minimize them. But they’re fixable. Great cities all over the planet are fixing them. I don’t need the Bay Area to look like Hong Kong, but I wouldn’t hate a little Barcelonian block-building, some Parisian bike lanes, maybe some Mexico City-style tree canopies. Even Los Angeles is building trains. Los Angeles! If you’re lucky enough to have a home and decent work in the Bay Area, that’s the worst part — not what’s happening, but what isn’t.
I’ll be the first to admit that the solutions I’ve proposed — more housing, more bike lines, more fun — won’t provide an immediate fix for crime and homelessness. Long term, housing is what’ll help, just as it has in cities from Houston to Helsinki. In the meantime, we need to find ways to deal with nonviolent crimes and people in crisis that don’t involve the police. Across the bay from San Francisco, Berkeley has created a Specialized Care Unit to handle mental-health-related 911 calls. But the most important thing is to remember that crime and homelessness aren’t the cause of San Francisco’s spiral — they’re symptoms of a deeper crisis, one that can be fixed only by creating a vibrant urban economy.
And wherever you live, you should be rooting for San Francisco to succeed, not sneering at its demise. The problems we face here are coming to a city near you, if they haven’t already. Downtowns everywhere are struggling — just check out the Midwest. Ask not for whom the doom loop tolls.
I’m a Californian, so I have a Californian’s ideology. Not the techno-libertarian stuff; that’s nonsense. But that idea that the future’s going to be great? I have that. I see the homes going up along boulevards in the East Bay, on Treasure Island, in Emeryville. I remain hopeful that city leaders will stop falling for robot cars and robot cops and start building houses and bus lanes and bike lanes and little parks and libraries, and just generally doing what the leadership in good cities does. San Francisco has been glorious, and can be again. It was built on a spot that the universe clearly intended to host the city of the future. If it cannot abide, no city can.
Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Insider.
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