Hollow City

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Of course, such a culturally dynamic city has also changed radically many times. In 1960, it was 78 percent white; by 1980, whites were less than 50 percent of the population (an ethnic diversity similar in many ways to what the city had during the Gold Rush). It has gone from being a blue-collar port city to a white-collar center of finance, tourism, and now dot-com culture. But the pace of this change has accelerated spectacularly in recent years. As Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, put it, we have had 15 years of change compressed into a couple of dozen months, and nobody saw it coming.

Among the many who lament this development is Chris Carlsson, a respected advocate of the city’s public life who runs a typesetting shop out of a big, friendly, cluttered room on Market Street. In 1981 Chris co-founded the legendary Processed World, a magazine that promoted subversion of the white-collar workplace. In the 1990s he co-founded Critical Mass, a monthly street rally of bike riders that, among other things, graphically demonstrated the role bicycles could play as sustainable transportation. Critical mass rides modeled on San Francisco’s are now held across the world.

"There’s something very exciting about the endless influx of new energy looking for something inexplicably magical," he says. "Everybody keeps coming here to renew that quest, or had until now. And that’s exactly what I think we’re losing at this moment, this endless arrival of the young, the radical, the political, the marginal, and the edgy. And if they do come, they can’t stay, or they have to find themselves a six-day-a-week job."

As Carlsson and others know, San Francisco is not only a refuge for the nation’s pariahs and nonconformists, but also a rich breeding ground of social, artistic, and political ideas. To watch this great cultural incubator become just another address for overpaid-but-overworked producer-consumers is to witness a great loss, both for the experimentalists and the wider world they have in turns entertained, outraged, and profoundly transformed. Nevertheless, the city’s capacity to sustain this profound creativity continues to decline. The diversity, memory, and complexity so crucial to its soul are being drained away. And if the trend continues, what remains may look like the city that was (or a brighter, tidier version of it), but what it once contained will be gone. San Francisco will be a hollow city—and a model of what awaits so many places in the years to come.

Rebecca Solnit lives in a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco. Excerpted with permission fromThe Hollow City: Gentrification and the Eviction of Urban Culture (Verso, 2000) by Rebecca Solnit with photography by Susan Schwartzenberg.
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