Google and SF Gentrification: Stephen Elliott Needs to Read A Book

Joel Kotkin, the nation’s top urban historian, explains how The City got itself into this fine mess.

By Joe Eskenazi

We all have a relative who feels inclined to tell us how San Francisco used to be. You used to be able to enjoy a Bay view for $120 a month. You used to be able to buy marijuana for a penny a pound.

Well, Joel Kotkin doesn’t remember it that way. When the internationally respected historian of city life first moved to “The City,” he recalls you could still catch a bitter, salty whiff of the Bay wind no matter what neighborhood you were in. But other than that bit of olfactory nostalgia, he’s no romantic. “San Francisco,” in his words, “has always been hard.”

“Even when I was a young puppy journalist, this was always a tough market. There were always more writers than jobs. The Chronicle, even though it was always a crappy paper, it was always a very hard place to get a job at,” recalled Kotkin, the author of “The City: A Global History” (that’s all cities, by the way, not just The City).

“In a way, that’s the curse of being a beautiful, attractive city. Within the country there are not a lot of beautiful, attractive cities. [San Francisco’s] long-term trends have been 30 or 40 years in the making. This was probably among the first American cities to be gentrified – because it’s probably the nicest American city.”

That’s quite a compliment, but, in this case Kotkin is killing us with kindness. He traces San Francisco’s gentrifying binges to three eras: In the 1970s, educated Baby Boomers decided they’d like to live in San Francisco. In the 1980s, that trickle intensified. And then in the 1990s, the dot.comers finished it off.

(Incidentally, for those who would complain that companies like Google are whitewashing the character out of places like the Mission, Kotkin isn’t buying it: “What happened in the ‘90s is much bigger than what’s happening now.” For once, Google is just a drop in the bucket).

San Francisco has become, in Kotkin’s words, “an ephemeral city.” The black population has dropped precipitously and even the Hispanic population is dwindling. At roughly 15 percent, San Francisco has the lowest percentage of children of any city in the United States. So who does live here?

Well, San Francisco enjoys the privilege of having the highest concentration of privileged folks in all the land; Nowhere else in the U.S. has such an astronomic percentage of inherited wealth (“Trustifarians,” Kotkin calls them). San Francisco is also a flame for the moths of Silicon Valley/South Bay tech companies as well as populations such as the Chinese or LGBT communities who have longstanding, traditional reasons to live in the area.

Sure there are folks who come to San Francisco without the benefit of a trust fund or six-figure job. But, odds are, you’ve made a quality-of-life decision to live here. If you lived in Rochester, you’d probably be a homeowner with a car. Here? A one-bedroom apartment in The Mission costs $1,895 a month.

“You have so many factors driving the upper-income migration into San Francisco. And it’s a little place,” said Kotkin, now a Los Angelino.

“So you have a situation very approximate to what we now see in Manhattan. I’m doing a project on the future of New York City’s middle class. Well, we don’t even spend a dime in Manhattan anymore.”

The borough New Yorkers call The City no longer has a middle class to lose, according to Kotkin. And the Bay Area locale that refers to itself as The City – it doesn’t either.

“The history of cities is protean. Attempts to roll it back are probably long-term doomed,” sums up Kotkin. “I try to study what is, what’s happening.”

He pauses.

“I don’t have to like it all.”

Tomorrow: Part II of our interview with Kotkin in which he examines the possible future of San Francisco. And if you can’t wait, here’s a hint.

Art | Kerne Erickson