We Will Survive — Creating a Post-Pandemic San Francisco

As the Covid shock and awe begins to wear off cities like San Francisco, we are predictably being caught up in an ideological war over the city's future. Right-wing media outlets, like Legal Insurrection, fret and fume about crime and homelessness and blame progressive city officials like District Attorney Chesa Boudin for an exodus of solid, tax-paying citizens from SF. According to a recent Chamber of Commerce poll cited in this conservative article, over 40% of San Franciscans are now considering leaving the city because of its increasing squalor. (Of course, these conservative pundits never blame officials like Mayor London Breed, the corporate-backed official who's actually responsible for the decline in San Francisco's quality of life, not to mention the spike in City Hall corruption.)

Now I've been advocating a deep, post-Covid soul-searching by San Francisco for months. SF, like many cities coming out of the pandemic, doesn't know what the hell it is anymore. In fact, San Francisco began losing its identity long before the plague hit -- with the sudden influx of tech wealth, and the massive dislocation of longtime residents and the surge of homelessness triggered by this corporate tsunami. The shuttering of the city during the pandemic, with scores of stores and restaurants boarded up, many forever, completed the city's loss of identity.

Now, as work-at-home mandates have become the new norms for many corporations, and tech towers once stuffed with employees become empty or half-filled echo chambers, I feel that SF has a chance to throw off the tech domination of the past decade and reinvent itself. I don't freak out about the exodus of some of our newer residents -- especially those techies who never sunk roots in SF and never contributed anything to the life of the city.

But I do think that San Francisco's progressive leaders -- not just elected officials, but activists, commentators and all engaged citizens -- need to step up now and begin the process of urban self-renewal. We must not leave this process to the billionaires and right-wing grievance crowd. These moneyed elites are predictably targeting public leaders like Chesa Boudin now, throwing a fortune into a recall campaign against him.

Instead, WE need to take charge of the debate about SF's future. Nobody likes urban squalor. But we need to advance our own agenda for how to clean up SF. And beyond that, we need to hash out a new economic plan for the city -- one that seeks to restore San Francisco's diversity and affordability. I'm calling on visionary leaders like Supervisors Hillary Ronen​ and Dean Preston​ and Matt Haney​ and many other longtime city activists to start this process of urban introspection and revival.

And if we lose some techie taxpayers and "disruptors" in the process of reinventing our city, that's not the end of the world. In fact, it's probably for the good of San Francisco. As the tech industry is always telling us, you can't have progress without disrupting the status quo.