As these things so often, so tragically do, my affair with San Francisco ended. The City That Knows How became the Internet cash cow. I won't lie to you: I got a raise out of the deal. But there was a price.
Cheap places to live and eat and drink and listen to (and play) music vanished, and with them, a whole culture began to dry up. Every day brought news of some scruffy dance troupe or band rehearsal place or community group or nightclub being evicted to make way for the ubiquitous and corruptly named "live-work spaces," so called not because anybody works in them but to exploit a zoning loophole.
For most of its history, people have gone to San Francisco for its wildness, its tolerance, its eccentricity and its beauty. They went there and became instant natives, jingoists, fierce defenders of the city's agreed-upon status as, in the words of one TV station's commercials, "the best place on earth." One hipster bar captured the dynamic perfectly with ads in the free weeklies bragging that it had been serving good, cheap drinks "since before you moved here."
Suddenly, in the dot-com era, people were moving to San Francisco for high-paying jobs, the same reason people moved to places like Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix. They didn't care about San Francisco's loopy culture, about its thriving bohemian world, even about its physical beauty. They were there to work and make money. They came in and wiped out the things that made my adopted hometown so lovable like loggers wiping out old-growth forest. And I suspect that, like old-growth forest, those things won't just sprout back now that the dot-commers are flowing out again -- a month ago USA Today quoted local moving companies saying that outbound moves in the Bay Area had skyrocketed, up from 39 percent of all moves to 53 percent at United Van Lines, from 20 percent to 60 percent at a local affiliate of Allied.
While they were there -- and make no mistake, most of them are still there -- the yuppies wanted things San Franciscans had never made a priority, like convenience and quiet, the things you can get in any number of suburban towns or small cities across the country. Some of those places are lovely, but there are a lot of them.
There was only one San Francisco, and it was turning into all those other places. Walking down Valencia Street, not long ago the hippest street in the Mission, the hippest part of town, I came to feel like I could be in the reasonably hip part of pretty much any city in America with a population of half a million or more. I was living in Middle America, but paying San Francisco prices, which were going nuts.
In 1995 I moved up in the world from a big, beautiful $575-a-month studio -- a studio so big my friends used to ask me to let them use it for their parties -- to a one-bedroom apartment for $750. That was a nice deal, but not spectacular. At the time, the average asking rent for a vacant one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was $889, according to Rent Tech, a local listings service. Two years later, when my girlfriend and I decided to move in together, we discovered that, even combining our incomes, we couldn't afford a decent place in the city. The average rent for a one-bedroom had gone up 37 percent, to $1,220.
We squeezed into my one-bedroom, and eventually got a little more space by moving to Oakland and paying quite a bit more for a two-bedroom, but still only about half of what we would have paid for the same place in San Francisco. The average asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city at the end of June was $1,802, Rent Tech says, down from a high of $1,895 last year. Inflation alone would have pushed that apartment that was $889 in '95 only up to about $995.
I was at a party earlier this year and a group of us were talking about the soaring prices. "Remember when you could move?" one woman said wistfully. "Remember when you could just decide, 'I don't like my apartment anymore. I think I'll move'?"
My girlfriend had since become my wife. She never really liked California. A Midwesterner, she hated the pace and the traffic and the pretentiousness and the lack of seasons. It had been a source of conflict in our marriage. But now I was starting to come around. Remember when you could move? What kind of place had this become? And here's a better question: What was I still doing here?
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