How San Francisco Broke America's Heart

San Francisco has always been a special place for me. I grew up a fan of the city's psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and the countercultural movement that was centred there in the late 1960s. I finally got to visit the city in 2006, but by then it had lost much of its lustre.

Now the city seems to be falling victim to the same sort of pressures that have been bedeviling Toronto over the last decade: crazy high real estate prices, high commercial and residential rents, and income inequality driven by the tech boom.

What residents resent now is the shift to one industry, a monoculture.

“What I wanted was this flow of humanity and culture,” says editor and former nonprofit executive Julie Levak-Madding, who manages the VanishingSF page on Facebook, documenting the “hyper-gentrification” of her city. “It’s so devastating to a huge amount of the population.”

To many inhabitants, San Francisco has become unrecognizable in a decade, as though it had gone on a cosmetic surgery bender.

“I can’t tell you the number of friends who tell me how much they hate San Francisco,” says former city supervisor Jane Kim. Which is something given that she ran for mayor in the 2018 special election. (Kim came in third.) “They say it’s too homogenous.”

Too homogeneous. Too expensive. Too tech. Too millennial. Too white. Too elite. Too bro.

Toronto, by comparison, despite facing many of the same economic pressures has embraced its diversity and is now one of the most multicultural cities in the world. If you want to see what its future looks like, see pictures of crowds celebrating Toronto's Raptors as they seek an NBA championship.