Hollow City

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The influx of high-tech money has inflated real estate prices to the point that the people who hold the Bay Area together can’t afford to live there. "The brutality," writes Jeff Goodell about the region in Rolling Stone, "is apparent not just to newcomers who arrive here to seek their fortune but also to anyone who is so unwise as to choose a field of work for love, not money. Schoolteachers, cops, construction workers, nurses, even doctors and lawyers—as the tide of wealth rises around them, many are finding it harder to stay afloat."

Cities traditionally are both the administrative hub from which order, control, and hierarchy emanate and the place where that order is subverted. This subversion rises out of the free space of the city where people and ideas circulate, and bohemia is the freest space of all, a place where the poor, the radical, the marginal, and the creative overlap. Bohemia is not so much a population as a condition, a condition of urbanism to which the young go to invent themselves and from which cultural innovation and insurrection arise. As that free space contracts, the poor and individual artists will go elsewhere, but bohemia may well go away altogether, here and in cities across the country. (I use the word bohemian to mean all the participants in the undivided spectrum of radical politics and artistic culture, a spectrum that includes Marxists who look down on the arts and artists who don’t notice politics until it evicts them.)

There’s a cruel irony here. The white middle class fled America’s cities over the past 50 years, spawning the crises of disinvestment and poverty that plagued most cities from the ’60s through the ’90s, and still affects many. But the poor and the bohemians stuck with urban life, often creating a lively culture amid all the problems. Now the privileged are coming back from the suburbs, setting off a new kind of crisis. As the new economy arrives in San Francisco, it is laying waste to the city’s existing culture—in the sense both of cultural diversity and of creative artistic or political activity. It may turn out that wealth can ravage a city’s vitality even more than poverty.

And what has happened in San Francisco is beginning to happen across the country. Changes comparable to those William Saunders describes in Cambridge’s Harvard Square are happening across the country. As Saunders notes in The Boston Globe, "The square is now: more impersonal (e.g., the sales and service people are rarely familiar or interested in the buyer); more expensive (after inflation); more exclusionary (less welcoming and less affordable to eccentrics, the middle and working classes, and the marginally employed); more predictable, more uniform, and more like other places (a Gap is a Gap is a Gap). . . . Along with the square’s greater polish, luxury, and upscale taste come new subtle pressures to be rich and beautiful, constrained, and role-bound. The new red brick architecture—often replacing low, tippy, wood-frame buildings—is decorous and solid but boring. One longs for more bad taste, for more surprise, dirt, and looseness, more anarchic, un-self-conscious play. . . . I think of appealing college towns as at least somewhat bohemian. That word now applies to nothing in the square."

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