San Francisco's Decline - Social Tech Series Part 2
San Francisco's Decline - Social Tech Series Part 2
What is plaguing the City by the Bay?
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Read Social Tech Series Part 1 if you haven’t already!
On to today’s piece 🤝
I’m outside a subway station in Osaka at 9 pm on a Thursday. Foot traffic is so massive that a circular walkway was built above the nearby 4-way intersection to avoid disrupting traffic. My friend and I just spent the day biking around the city and now we want to see a garden across town but we’re unsure if we can bring our bikes on the subway. So, we lock them outside the station onto a guardrail with a thin cable lock, grab a train, check out the gardens, and return by midnight to find our bikes awaiting us. This behavior is commonplace in Osaka; on the side streets, people often left their bikes leaning against the front of their homes, next to their mailboxes. All in a metropolitan area of 2.75 million people.
Upon returning to San Francisco, a modest city of 873,000, I could feel the mindset of constant vigilance and fear that permeates daily life.
Barred store windows, gated front doors, security guards in front of each mall store entrance, and bikes locked with 1/2 inch thick carbon steel U-locks1. BART bathrooms with doors removed, a lidless, stainless steel toilet inside with no disposable seat cover and an attendant outside telling you, “You’ve got one minute”.
Why can I lock bike with a lock easy enough to cut with a gritty pair of scissors outside a bustling station in Osaka, Japan for hours, and in the midst of San Francisco, I can’t be trusted with a disposable seat cover for 1 minute?
What are Cities?
Cities are a form of social technology that require high degrees of coordination and cooperation. Not everyone can hire private security, so we have police officers. Not everyone can have a giant lawn or backyard, so we agree to have public playgrounds and parks. Not everyone can afford a car or that there’s enough space for everyone to have cars, so we have buses, trains, and subways.
But because cities are such massive machines of social coordination, they also rely on a few foundational agreements.
One such agreement is public safety.
It’s the shared understanding that we will maintain a certain standard of behavior and hold each other accountable to it. It's the belief that we can walk down the street without fear of being harassed, robbed, or assaulted. It's the trust that our property will be respected and that, if a crime does occur, someone will be arrested and prosecuted. This sense of public safety is the bedrock upon which social interactions of city life take place.
And when public safety begins to erode, it's one of the first indicators that a city is struggling. The reason is people don’t necessarily need to be threatened to act; rather, people only require feeling unsafe to act. And when people feel unsafe, they tend to avoid spaces where they feel unsafe and when they can’t, they take measures to protect themselves.
Protecting Yourself
Shops cannot rely on the police to protect their stores so they lock up their chairs & tables and gate their storefronts at night. Bike owners don’t trust police will arrest thieves so they lug around U-locks and steel wire cable locks. Home owners affix Amazon ring cameras and bright lights outside of their doors in hopes of keeping their packages. Widespread public defecation on sidewalks leads to friends thoughtfully pushing friends away from stepping on poop.
This bottoming out of the public good leads to lugging around carbon steel U-locks, deciding if a $12/mth Amazon Ring subscription is worth it and doing an elaborate daily dance dodging feces as opposed to well, walking.
No one person can generate this safety on their own. And when we fail to provide a measure of safety, while everyone is worse off, certain people suffer more.
Women, Families, the Elderly.
Generally, I feel OK walking around San Francisco; I'm a six-foot-one, 180lb+ 25 year-old male. Most people don’t bother me. I can walk amongst a crowd of mentally ill, drug addicted and/or homeless people and not feel endangered. I’m not comfortable and I’m OK.
But what if you're a 115lb, five-foot-four woman walking to the supermarket? What if you're an elderly grandfather playing with your grandchildren in the park? What if you’re walking with your newborn son in a stroller? You don’t feel safe. So how do you adapt?
You don’t stroll down to the supermarket; you stay in to watch Netflix and carry mace in your purse. You don’t play with your kids in the park. You choose between staying in San Francisco with your friends or moving somewhere safer to start a family.
It's no surprise then that in a city like San Francisco, I don’t see many young women, families or old people walking alone in our public spaces or at night. How often have you seen kids dashing by you as you walk in the Mission at night or seen kids playing around on the grass while their grandmother watches on?
Families, young women and the elderly are the canaries in a coal mine. And when exiting is an option, they take it.
Exiting the Public Good
Exiting comes in various forms; Ubering instead of taking the Muni, moving to South Bay to start a family, buying a $5 coffee to use a coffee shop’s bathroom instead of a public one.
Exiting is not wrong; if I don’t feel comfortable walking through the Tenderloin at night, I'll Uber.
But exiting is privileged. If you're working a $15 an hour job and you take a $30 Uber, that's two+ hours of your work. Heck even to go to the bathroom; that’s 20+ minutes of your labor!2 Only wealthy people can afford to exit these kinds of situations.
This leads to public goods becoming for a certain class of people. Chris Arnade noted this in his time in NYC.
Ride a NYC subway from the outer boroughs at 4am and you’ll find that it’s jammed with overnight construction workers, office cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel employees — all coming from late shifts, or going to early shifts, carrying tool bags, hard hats, work clothes. The “help” coming in and out of the city…And what I see is that, in the US, larger cities are basically two-tiered. A wealthy downtown professional class relies on inexpensive labourers who can’t afford to live near their workplace or drive a car; who are forced into long commutes on public transport systems in terminal decline.
- Why American Cities are Squalid -
In other words, if you can afford it, why take the Muni when you can Uber? Exiting from the public space encourages a distancing from the public good but also an othering of it. Buses, trains, Munis are for the people who can’t Uber; they become the “poor man’s way” of getting around.
However beyond exiting, having a more permanent stake matters too.
Buy A Home, Plant Your Flag
Buying a home involves a mental shift, not unlike marriage. You're choosing a place, staking your flag in the ground, saying this is my home, my community, my people. Here, similar to public safety, the perception of being able to buy a home is incredibly important. If I believe I could live in a community, I might get to know the local grocer, my neighbors, and the kids in parks. Hey that guy pissing on my store corner? Not cool. Whoa, someone dumped trash outside this kids’ preschool; would I want my future kids to feel that? No way. Someone chased my coworker; she seems pretty rattled. Would I want my future wife to feel this way? The city should do something; if not, I will. But if I can't purchase a home, if I can’t join this community in a more permanent manner, why bother?
Due to skyrocketing home prices, the San Francisco Bay Area cultivates a nihilistic view among the youth. You’re thought of as just another renter, and you don’t feel that you have a stake in what goes on around you.
San Francisco, New York, Bali; what’s the difference?
That stake, that feeling of having a say, is vital for social capital.
Social Capital
Social capital is the value of our social networks and the intangible and tangible benefits they provide.3 If social technologies like democracy are a car, then social capital is the gasoline.
And we have failed to recognize that cities, like many forms of social technology, require people to get to know each other.
But our cities aren’t built for people to meet each other and create new relationships.
The third space is the place outside of work and home for people to gather; it’s where people mingle, celebrate and chat. When you’re in college, you’re constantly surrounded by 3rd spaces. It’s the libraries, the classroom, the grass outside the lecture hall, the paths to the dorm, your dorm room, the bus; everywhere.
In cities, it’s bars, restaurants, clubs, squares, and parks; it’s MacLaren’s Pub in How I Met Your Mother where Ted, Barney, Robin, Lily and Marshall crash after work & start all their shenanigans from.
While each of these are cool places to hang out with friends, they don’t necessarily encourage new relationships.
- How To Date in the Internet Age -
So it’s no surprise that people don't know how to meet each other because we haven't built the infrastructure for them too! This is true across from people in their 20’s to their 80’s. Without frequent and deep social connection, the glue and accountability of social bonds unravels and security becomes emphasized.
This Pinterest meme stands ever true.
Community is valuable and it as fundamental a necessity for being human as having running water, proper electricity and food.
It is an absolute necessity for a healthy city and society.
Second Order Effects
In San Francisco, you see people drugged out, lying on the streets with open wounds bursting out of swollen legs. Feces accumulate on their clothes until the stench is overwhelming even when walking by. Half-naked men cover themselves with a blanket while they walk around mumbling incoherently next to stores selling $150 pants.
The people who are suffering the most are the homeless, the mentally ill and the drug addicted; without question. However, there is a subtle, secondary cost that is far less spoken of even by those experiencing it.
Humans are generally empathetic beings and to see such indifference to suffering produces cognitive dissonance.
Out of this cognitive dissonance comes intense frustration and nihilism.
It’s 6:15 pm on a brisk Thursday evening in San Francisco. I’m riding the bus home from work in the financial district. I like to sit by the window and watch the city as I go. We pass south through Union Square, a prominent shopping area and tourist hotspot. Each retailer has security guards stationed outside, but it doesn’t even seem strange to me anymore.
We continue south and then stop just after crossing Market Street. The sidewalks are busy. People heading home from work, concert goers getting ready for a night out, shoppers dipping in and out of stores. But in the middle of the crowd waiting for the bus is a bench, and on that bench are two people who aren’t on their way anywhere.
They’re folded over in a heap, surrounded by a tattered suitcase and small piles of trash. They’re desperately unwell, but no one reacts. The bystanders do nothing, but of course there’s nothing to do. Heartbreaking, frustrating. The passengers stream around the bench and onto the bus. Just like that, the doors close and we’re off again heading down 4th Street through SOMA.
- Good Government Requires Good Citizenship -
Constant exposure to this reality schism extracts a very real cost; I’ve come across quite a few people, who, while enthusiastic around their startup, profession or hobby, are glaringly indifferent or nihilistic about the condition of others and the world. 4
This indifference and nihilism is a feature, not a bug of the environment that we’ve created. Social isolation, unsafe streets, high housing costs and seeing immense suffering without a clear path to help degrades a person’s mental well-being and encourages self-centeredness.
The Fabric of Our Cities
The government is us: we are the government , you and I.
- Theodore Roosevelt
Ultimately, the state of our cities mirror the values we hold and how we act upon them. While changing San Francisco won’t be easy, by understanding some of the root causes of dysfunction, we can better chart a path forward for our Golden City. We’ll explore how in Part 3; our future depends on it.
- Kiran
Thanks to Claude and ChatGPT for editing.
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Kiran’s Gems 💎
“When we look at what separates us from geniuses it may not be their speed we want to pay attention to, but the quality of work they were eventually able to produce by settling in for the long run.”
really cooked in his essay, Riding Different Waves of Mastery & Slow ProductivityEmmett Chen-Ran’ So You Want to Build in Consumer Social: A Manifesto; contains a lot of his learnings from starting and shutting down his consumer social app.
“But honestly, wouldn’t it be weird if you could solve large political problems that fast? For the same reasons that you wouldn’t expect to learn a foreign language to fluency or train your body to superior speed/strength in an evening, you should not expect to take politics seriously without a medium- and long-term mentality.”
’s Taking Politics Seriously was an great clarifier for anyone interested in better understanding politics.
That too just for an hour or two while the owner hangs out in the vicinity.
In some cases, exiting can even require approval of gatekeepers. There have been times where I have been allowed to use a restroom simply because they determined I wasn’t a threat based how I dressed.
If you want to get in the weeds, social captial is a measure of the value of resources, both tangible and intangile, and the impact that these relationships have on the resources involved in each relationship and on larger groups. Check out Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.
I can see an argument that it’s easier from wealthy people to distance themselves as they tend to be less personally connected to people suffering on the streets.