Debating the Future of San Francisco
On Tuesday evening -- courtesy of the SF tech investment firm Jackson Square Ventures, which sometimes hosts book forums -- my book Season of the Witch made me the author of the moment. (Yes, the book was published 10 years ago, but it keeps finding new readers.) I shared the stage with billionaire tech investor and San Francisco power broker Ron Conway. The evening was not organized as a debate -- but given the fact that Conway and I have very different visions for the city, how could our "conversation" not have turned into that -- even without the welcome involvement of the 100-plus audience, which was divided between tech industry types and local activists?
I accepted the Jackson Square invitation because, like any author, I was touched by how forum members still felt moved by my book -- which is a valentine to resilient San Francisco, despite its wild and bloody history. I also wanted to engage with Conway -- whom I'd never met -- because he's been the bete noir of city progressives for years.
Conway was the kingmaker behind the elections of Mayor Ed Lee and Mayor London Breed, as well as a key funder of the recall campaign against District Attorney Chesa Boudin and the crusades against a host of other progressive officials and ballot measures.
After more than a decade of big spending, Ron Conway and his tech elite now own San Francisco. They control City Hall and much of the city's political affairs. And how's that worked out for the city?
As I pointed out on Tuesday, San Francisco is in terrible shape. Most working people can no longer afford to live in the city -- nurses, schoolteachers, Muni drivers, waiters, shop workers, craftspeople like my Facebook friend Nancy McNally’s son (who did the beautiful glasswork in Conway's homes), my son filmmaker Joe Talbot and actor Jimmie Fails (who've reluctantly joined the creative exodus to LA), etc. These are the types of people who make a city worth living in --- who add richness and diversity to a city. And they're mostly gone.
Meanwhile, evictions are rising in SF -- and residents bitterly complain about the homelessness, crime and squalor on the streets. And the tech boom -- that Breed and Conway cheered on -- has gone bust. Elon Musk has begun slashing away at Twitter, and many tech companies have fled the city altogether.
Faced with this swarm of problems, the city's leaders -- people like Mayor Breed and the new DA Brooke Jenkins -- can only talk tough. They don't seem to have a clue about how to bring people together and lead this great city into the future. According to a recent poll by the San Francisco Standard (which is quickly eclipsing the Chronicle as the must-read of the day), Mayor Breed's disapproval rating is now up to 64% -- a number that will likely go higher as the next election approaches. She can't blame Boudin anymore for the city's glaring problems -- it's all on her. And voters are turning against her.
So, yes, the sad state of the city is on Breed -- and it's also on the billionaires who put her in office and turned SF into a dystopian poster, with a widening gap between rich and poor and our vaunted San Francisco values -- which I celebrated in Season of the Witch -- fading away.
I politely but firmly pointed all this out to Conway the other night -- how the fall of SF is on him. He's clearly not a man who's used to hearing criticism and he didn't take it well. (He blamed the progressive Supervisors, now a minority on the board, for our urban ills.)
Yes, the hard truth is that San Francisco now belongs to Conway and his crowd. With their endless supply of money and with the city's changing demographics, they win nearly every local election. That's the unavoidable bad news for SF progressives. We can sometimes block their agenda -- their luxury housing projects and their simplistic law & order policies. But we find it harder and harder to prevail at election time.
So here's what I proposed the other night: for the good of San Francisco, centrists should sit down with progressives, hash out our strong differences, and find out where we can agree. Conway, who defines himself as a lifelong San Francisco Democrat -- a man who hates Trump -- floated some ideas that sounded pretty good to me. Like reviving SF's downtown -- which has become a ghost town during the pandemic -- by converting the empty office space into residential units. He said he wants to live in a city where the person who serves him coffee In the morning can afford to live. He hates the tech industry "traitors" who've decamped to Texas and Florida.
Will Conway and members of his political machine sit down at the same table with progressive leaders like Hillary Ronen and Dean Preston for the good of San Francisco? Who knows? But I'm glad I used the opportunity on Tuesday to float the idea.
Once again, San Francisco finds itself at a momentous turning point. SF, like many cities staggering through the variations of Covid and the plague's attendant social problems, doesn't know what it is -- or what it could be -- anymore. We urgently need visionary leaders and thinkers and movers & shakers now.
Let's elevate the conversation.
Ron Conway