A San Francisco Techie's Rebuttal to The Gentrification Mudslinging

Yesterday the meagre 21% of San Franciscans who voted in the city's small off-year election rejected a proposed housing development on the Embarcadero (8 Washington) and now everyone is in a tizzy about the long-existing San Francisco housing crisis.

Perhaps because San Francisco is one of the only remaining boom towns in our struggling global economy, we have had an increasing amount of attention focused on the issues surrounding development and gentrification, so much so that even Al Jazeera is talking about it (and these guys too: Reuters, SF Chron, LA Times).

The blame for this housing crisis is consistently lobbed straight at the evil gentrification enacted by the soulless and faceless "tech millionaires" that we keep hearing so much about. Someone is so sure that tech millionaires are at the root of San Francisco's problem that there is an anti-gentrification protest scheduled for the Twitter IPO day and of course, there was that pinata of the Google bus that angry hipster residents of the Mission beat up publicly last May.

After sitting silently, listening to news commentators, politicians, and "activist citizens" share their opinions about the unquestioned source of this crisis - the "tech boom" - I have had enough.

As a native Californian, a democratic, creative and analytical music major who went to college on a scholarship and has been employed by the "tech boom" for basically my entire career, I need to clear the air and put some apparently unknown facts on the table because until we can move on from this finger-pointing, scapegoating argument that has insinuated itself into our city's dialogue, we are not going to be able to create a solution.

So, without further ado, here are my top three considerations from the point of view of a "techie" to put before the citizenry of my fine city, particularly the ones who are unhappy with the fact that I live here:

1) Who we actually are - apparently not who you think we are!

Firstly we are not evil millionaires who swim in pools of money in our penthouses. In fact, the vast majority of us are not millionaires at all (see point number 2). But the tone of the anti-tech argument isn't just about the money, it is about certain assumptions of who tech people are and what they mean for the larger San Francisco community. 

One statement in particular drives me absolutely nuts: "Techies are taking away from the city's diversity." (There is a quote at the end of this New York Times article that makes me steaming mad). In the quote the person is saying, "we don't want 'that kind of diversity'." Which begs the question, is one form of diversity better than another?

Clearly there are varying definitions of diversity, so let's talk about a few common ones and this incorrect, misguided assertion that tech-employed people are not diverse.

      1) Racial & Ethnic - most of the people I know in the tech industry are not white guys. There are people of a very wide range of races and ethnicities, certainly leaning more heavily on the East and South Asian side of the globe than average, but still encompassing great global diversity. I saw more diversity walking around the Google campus than I see walking down Market Street today, so clearly there is not a 1:1 relationship between tech jobs and a lack of diversity. Therefore, there must be some disconnect about the definition of diversity. Are we going to start to argue that some kinds of diversity are better than others, that the diverse people from India (where more than 1,000 languages are spoken) and China, don't count as much as other groups towards our mental image of what diversity means? Is it that because tech employees are highly educated, somehow their diversity doesn't count as much as someone who has less education? When we go down that path, we start to sound dangerously similar to the same judgements that have always plagued America, ever since its beginnings, in which we decide arbitrarily that one group is better than another, "those Irish are a real problem, but let in the Scandinavians..." and I don't like it one bit. The nation's educational crisis that has resulted in few Americans of any race or ethnicity being qualified for the most complicated tech jobs is another issue, and hating on the tech industry for providing white-collar employment that doesn't involve crashing the global financial system is counter-productive on so many levels.

        2) Diversity of interest and creativity - there seems to be some assumption that people who make their livings in the tech industry are somehow one-dimensionally focused on engineering or some other mysterious officey, non-artistic endeavor...An assumption that by having too many techies, there won't be enough room for the bohemian artists and musicians in the city. I have news for you - the tech industry is what allows us to live in the city. I have a music degree. I would love to make my living as a performer but that isn't a realistic career path for most, and it has nothing to do with the tech boom. The fact that classical music is drying up as a genre and that opera singers no longer wear mink stoles and cater to adoring millions has absolutely nothing to do with the tech industry's location in San Francisco. It is a reality of the modern world. Another reality is that many thousands of talented, artistic, creative people go work for tech companies (and many other professional jobs) because their skills provide unique value within the tech world - they understand teamwork, push themselves to create things that are valuable and beautiful at the same time, and they know from experience that if they don't hit a performance deadline, the failure will public and unpleasant -> all skills very useful across a wide range of professions, especially in the tech industry. I host a monthly music salon at my house where engineers, lawyers, teachers, journalists, bohemians and all sorts of other professionals come together and play music. Just because we make our living doing something else does not mean that we are less diverse, that our interests don't matter as much, and that our music isn't as meaningful. 

        3) Economic diversity - the pie isn't finite. When new shops and restaurants go in on Valencia, new jobs are made. Chefs can achieve their non-tech-industry creative dreams, sous chefs and dishwashers can get employment, and every resident of the city benefits from increased choices and decreased crime rates. Are some of the restaurants on Valencia overpriced? Absolutely. But the ecosystem that was fanned by the economic development from the tech boom has created a renaissance of new choices across price ranges and across industries. At Limon Rotisserie on Valencia and South Van Ness you can have a delicious, filling, fancy dinner for two for $20, you can't even say that in cheaper Sacramento. Economic development brings diversity and supports creative endeavors. Does this mean that some people won't be lost in the shuffle? Of course not, but think of all the people who have evolved and blossomed in this new economy, lots and lots of people who do not directly work for the tech industry. It is a common misconception that because someone makes $1 that somehow $1 is removed from the system somewhere else - that's not how it works. It's not a finite pie, but from the dialogue you would certainly believe it. Innovation and growth make the pie bigger and everyone wins. Turning the conversation into an "us versus them" mentality is detrimental to all, because it takes the focus away from the real opportunity that exists for everyone to benefit. 

2) We aren't all that rich.

I have to address this primary misconception.

Yes, there are the Sheryl Sandbergs, Mark Zuckerbergs and Marissa Mayers of the world. There always have been and there always will be. The only difference between them and their predecessors is that they manage internet companies instead of car factories, newspapers or steel manufacturing. Through some combination of luck and skill they made themselves a ton of money. But guess what, there aren't that many people in this boat!

I worked at Google and I have tons of friends who work at Facebook and Twitter and I can report, without a doubt, that most people who work for these companies are not millionaires. They can't afford to pay $3,500 to rent a one bedroom any more than any other average professional in the city can.

People seem to think that anyone who works for a tech company has tons of stock and therefore becomes a lottery-esque millionaire the moment of the IPO. The truth is, unless you're senior in a core department and/or started very early on in the company's history, then you're not going to be getting a huge piece of that action. The news loves the stories about the random Google chef who made millions, but this is news because it is the exception, not the rule. 

I know people who were pre-IPO at Google in the sales organization who hardly made more than a few months extra salary from their options. Had they kept their stock until it hit the $1,000 mark, they probably would have done better, but most people don't. They have to cash it in before it hits its prime to pay for housing...average housing...that same unreasonably high average housing that hurts everyone who is trying to live in the city on a modest <$100k salary. Lots and lots of people who work for tech companies make less than $100k. Many make less than $50k, especially young people who are not engineers, many of whom are using their Humanities, Social Sciences, Culinary and Art School degrees to build careers in the vast non-engineering sides of these companies. Those people you see waiting for the Google bus? They are taking a bus for a reason, and it's generally not because they have a Porsche parked in their garage at home. 

In order for the Twitter IPO to make instant millionaires of its employees, the employees will have to have lots of stock and will then have to sell it to acquire the money to buy an expensive condo. In most cases, people don't get money, until they sell their stock. So while there are some big winners in these IPOs, especially the senior people, the very original employees, and the bankers and lawyers who process it, the average tech employee is often not any better off, and in many cases is actually worse off than their investment banking/lawyering/nursing and similar other professional counterparts who no one seems to be blaming for this mess. Not to mention that many, many tech companies go bust all the time. Tech employees live with an uncertainty that is very uncommon amongst other similarly educated professions like law and medicine. But, they do have ping pong tables, so their lives must be amazing...

Let's do a little math about this Twitter IPO, since people are so upset about it. They currently have a total of 2,300 employees. They grew quickly leading up to the IPO, which means that many people squeaked in right before the bell, and therefore, likely did not get huge amounts of stock. The "average" employee stats, btw, are obviously misleading, because the few people at the top are swaying that stat, median would clearly be a better measure. But even if half of the employees became instant millionaires, the sum of the unit stock in these new "gentrified" buildings still exceeds the number of potential customers. One Rincon Hill alone has over 700 units. The rejected Washington 8 was to have 134 units, Linea on Market has 115 units, and so on. So, who are the tech millionaires who are going to buy these condos or pay these astronomical rents?

Why do the numerous high-end condo and apartment complexes popping up in SOMA, the Embarcadero and Upper Market, which are serving as beacons of resentment in the anti-gentrification argument, seem to think that they have an endless supply of people who can and will pay $5,000-$8,000 per month or $2-$5 million (+ high HOAs) for a two bedroom apartment? I certainly can't and the few people I know who can still wouldn't.

Of the people I know who can afford that price range, none of whom made their money in the tech industry, btw, all would rather buy awesome houses in Pacific Heights, Eureka Valley or Ashbury Heights with that money. You can still buy a massive, modern, fantastic-view, walkable, free-standing house in a prime neighborhood for $2 million (check out this current 3,000 sq foot monster in Eureka Valley on the market right now for $1.95 million). So why would anyone spend that kind of money to buy a generic condo next to the Market Safeway drug-dealing centrale? Maybe someone with unique taste would, but hundreds of people? Because that's how many condo units are going up with these expectations - hundreds. It doesn't make sense - there is an assumption about customer-base and price that is off.

So, if there aren't actually enough tech millionaires to buy all of the speculated luxury condos at the insanely high prices used by the developers to woo the city officials into their camps based on projected tax revenue, then it sounds a lot like there is some serious real estate development speculation going on... and if we're not careful, the bottom is going to come falling out of that before a major earthquake shakes it out, and that will be good for no one.

3) If we're going to talk about "haves" and "have nots" we must talk about rent control.

I recently went to a house-party of a friend who works in the tech industry. He lives in a small one-bedroom apartment where he pays over $2,000 in rent, a very large percent of his personal income. During the party, his neighbors, who have lived in their rent-controlled unit since the early 1980's invited us over to view their art collection. Inside their tiny unit was a treasure trove straight out of the Arabian nights filled with art, museum pieces and enormous sparkling geodes (I'm not making this up). At some point, they had bought out an art gallery that was going out of business. These artists had so much disposable income, due to their extremely low rent-controlled rent, that they could afford to buy the entire stock of an art gallery. The art they owned was so valuable that they were in talks with a major museum to sell the collection. This, on the income of two bohemian artists, but with the help of one important detail - rent control. When they sell the collection and become the official millionaires that by tech definitions they already are (since anyone who works for Twitter and holds stock "must be a millionaire"...), they will continue to pay their significantly discounted rent...until the building collapses or they die.

This type of disposable income is completely foreign to practically any person who has tried to move to the city in the last decade, including the vast majority of tech people, and it represents an important side to the argument that conveniently gets brushed over as news of increased evictions outrages the democratic citizenry. Do I think that these nice people should be evicted? Of course not. If I had a rent-controlled apartment in SF, I'd do almost anything to keep it too (especially vote...), and I'd be outraged at the idea that someone could take it away from me. But if we are going to start talking about fairness and unanticipated economic consequences, the extreme market conditions that rent control has created in San Francisco have to be addressed.

It is not sustainable for massive numbers of tenants to pay a small percent of market rate for their apartments, and in my humble opinion, it is not fair. (For some imagery, check out this Bold Italic article profiling certain rent controlled apartments and prices).

Is it fair for a landlord to jack up the price of your rent by huge percentages each year? Absolutely not. But there is a middle ground here that everyone seems to be ignoring.

It is also not sustainable for anyone in the ecosystem - new tenants, old tenants and landlords - for a significant % of the city's residents to be paying vastly below the market rate.

Unsustainable for new tenants, aka anyone who doesn't have an old rent-controlled apartment, including people who work for tech companies:

Why should any person who wants to move to the city, just as people have since it was founded, have to pay 3-5x the amount (or more) for the same exact apartment layout as their neighbors? Most new residents end up spending an unsustainable % of their income (many of them over 35% of it) on housing, while their neighbors collect art with the very high % of their personal income that they get to keep thanks to their severely below-market-value housing. There is an added long term problem here, as these young professionals struggle to save anything against their high housing costs while not getting access to a pension or other reasonable retirement portfolio like many of their elder neighbors also enjoy. It's a tough, tough world for the non-rent-controlled person, whether they work for a tech company or not. But they don't have a choice, they, like everybody else, have to figure out how to live in the city on a salary that cannot actually afford it.

Unsustainable for landlords, including the ones who aren't innately evil:

To take the side of the evil landlord for a moment - what exactly are they supposed to do when the rent that they are paid, based on the currency and market value in 1978 (+ a miniscule % increase per year), isn't even enough to cover the expenses of keeping the building up? Should they act like a charity and dump money into improving a building that they will never see the return on investment on because it is illegal for them to kick out the residents? Landlords can't even sell certain apartment buildings because rent control makes it so unprofitable to maintain them that no one wants to buy them.

In order to manage this situation, and make a sustainable business, they do several important things that are bad for tenants and for the city in general:

            1) They keep empty housing stock. In 2011, there were over 30,000 empty housing units in San Francisco. I have seen estimates that now it could be as high as 50,000. Rent control is so unsustainable, that landlords believe it is an appropriate business strategy to keep vacated units empty, sometimes for years, until all of the legacy rent-controlled residents move out or die so that they can finally update and re-rent the units at "market rates." This creates a false lack of supply that pushes the "market prices" higher than they should be.

            2) They charge really high new rents to plan for the future. For any building built before 1978, they know that they can't raise a tenant's rent more than a tiny % every year, so they set a price for an open unit that they believe will be sustainable in the event that someone lives there, basking in rent control, for the next 20 years. This means that while thousands of apartments sit empty and thousands of others sit full with significantly below market value rents, the rest of the stock is expected to balance the books by contributing enough revenue to cover those losses. Non rent-controlled renters in San Francisco are therefore basically paying to cover the entire cost of the city's rent-controlled revenue loss. No wonder "market rates" are so damn expensive.

            3) They let buildings become unsafe and generally crappy. Why would they pay to improve the units when they can't even break even? And so, like any reasonable business, they do not. They squeak by with the absolute minimum allowed by law, in some cases letting buildings crumble to the point that they need to be completely razed, because there is absolutely no way to regain the money that they invest. It's not mean, they just don't have the money. Would you pay for random people to improve their homes when you don't get anything in return?

           4) They evict people. It's sad, sometimes it's mean, but when they can, they evict people. There are very strict laws about who can be evicted, how, and how much they have to be compensated. So, when landlords have the opportunity, say, when a 10-unit building is empty except for one last remaining renter and they can finally update it, they take the opportunity. Maybe it's unfair. But was it really fair for that person to spend in one year what their neighbor spent in one month? It is this inequality and economic mess that has created a situation in which evictions are positive for landlords. Think about it - they have to hire lawyers, do all sorts of paperwork, jump through hoops. They don't do it because they're mean - they do it because they need to make their business work.

Unsustainable for the people who enjoy rent control:

Evictions suck. Living in collapsing buildings with 30-year old appliances suck. And, when they are forced out of their rent-controlled haven or decide to consider another neighborhood, they are faced with the same inflated market prices as the rest of us. No wonder housing is totally unaffordable for lower and middle income people - the market is unsustainable. But before you go and blame scores of tech millionaires who don't exist, you must understand that this market situation is bad for everyone, and that rent control plays a huge role in that unsustainability - tech boom or not.

To be clear, I'm not actually advocating that we eliminate rent control completely. Personally, I suggest we reduce its presence in the market over time by:

1) Instituting updated restrictions to all buildings, including those built after 1978 that address the primary issue that was a problem in 1978 and still is - that landlords can't arbitrarily raise rents by astronomical amounts all the time. This should, however, be a sustainable, balanced and forward-thinking set of restrictions, not the mess that we started in 1978 and that only applies to a % of the population.

2) Reducing the burden of the existing rent control population by phasing it out through attrition - as people move out of rent-controlled apartments, they become subject to the new rules, not the 1978 rules, and transferring rent control legacies is eliminated.

Now, whether our city could actually institute an idea like this without it degenerating into a special-interest flooded extravaganza of corruption is another issue, but in my theoretical world, I believe that this would work. 

Conclusions:

I'd like to bring this back to the hot topic of the day, the debacle of 8 Washington.

Yesterday, San Francisco voters said no to a luxury housing development that had been "in the works" for 7 years, that had somehow managed to gain an exemption from the city to allow it to exceed height restrictions for its 134 condos, and that supposedly expected prices of up to $5 million per unit. The city was drooling over the $350 million in projected tax revenue and the $11 million "donation" to the affordable housing fund, so much so that Mayor Ed Lee participated actively in campaigning for it.

The campaign against the development, "No wall on the waterfront," proposed an apocalyptic vision of Miami-Beach-esque condos blocking the waterfront, creating a physical separation between the "rich" and "everyone else" that struck an emotional and symbolic nerve in many people's stewing discomfort with this larger housing crisis.

But anytime you want truth, follow the money, and when you look at the facts of even this small example, this "us versus them" argument turns out to be a smokescreen for a development battle amongst a small percent of the 1% who skillfully manipulated the public's emotions about this very complicated, very difficult-to-fix issue.

It turns out that the vast majority of the money that paid for the "No Wall on the Waterfront" campaign came primarily from the rich developers and residents in adjacent buildings who didn't want their views to be blocked or their private tennis club demolished (Source: LA Times).

So what it really comes down to is that Simon Snellgrove, the illustrious developer who is clearly a Slytherin based on his name, shouldn't have asked for that height exemption. What was he thinking? Was it a hubristic belief that he could sneak through the back door until it was too late? Could he not have kept his request within the law and avoided this mess? Could he not have offered more of a public good with his proposal that would have made voters feel like the "public" services in the proposal were valuable and sufficient instead of a slap in the face? 

Someone needs to ask Simon and Mayor Lee, what else was going on that made them believe that the project must have this illegal height - was it the financial models that assumed 100 Twitter millionaire owners in order to make the investment profitable? 

Somewhere, within the truth of what happened in this debacle is the truth of what's behind the real San Francisco housing crisis, and the sooner we can move forward from scapegoating our tech-industry neighbors, the sooner we can fix it, and we'd better. It might already be too late.

Amish Farming Fun and Martin Van Buren Mutton-Chops

I am once again in a position that my 12-year-old self would be very, very proud of: I have traveled so much and been to so many places that I can hardly begin a blog post without an avalanche of stories pummeling my time-restricted self.

Second to the actual experiences, swimming in recent memories is one of my favorite states of being, despite the fact that it stands in the way of the perfect fusion of Ira Glass and Paul Theroux that characterizes my blog in my head.

Yet after six countries, hundreds of stories across two months and many rural European villages, I find that before I can continue, I must finish a story which I have already begun, that of spending time in the German-speaking yet uniquely American culture of the Amish.

Photo taken on an average road in Holmes County, Ohio

To rewind a bit: Because I needed to attend my sister's college graduation, I decided to have the most cultural experience I could achieve in Ohio beyond eating a dozen White Castle sliders...Amish Country.

The Amish are fun to have around. You may not expect such a statement, given their strict religious opposition to alcohol and their belief that dancing is the work of the Devil. Yet, with their Little House on the Prairie outfits, super-cute buggies, and Martin Van Buren mutton-chops, they make any place feel like you've traveled back in time.

Martin Van Buren, the 8th president of the US of A

Amish man driving a buggy in Holmes County

The Amish countryside reminded me of Europe, especially France and Romania, and for a while I couldn't put my finger on why. It was some of the most beautiful I've seen in America and I realized after a few days that what was unusual was the prolific presence of old-world pasture grazing and subsistence farms, which give the rolling hills soft contrast and depth rather than destroying the landscape with industrial farming.

 Very old-world Amish farming

The delicate countryside produced without industrial farming

Over the years I've done quite a bit of research on the Amish, including finding a set of BBC semi-reality shows called "meet the amish" that follow Amish teenagers on their Rumspringe - the period of their lives when they are sent to the evil outside world to decide if they want to live in sin or come back and have babies on a farm without electricity. Most choose to come back, which makes them a much more interesting group of people to me. People who choose to live differently are people who I want to know.

I went to this research effort because the Amish often come up under the "weird american religions" discussion that periodically occurs in my life late at night while drinking local spirits and chatting with friends in foreign countries. Fascinatingly, Europeans often confuse the Amish with Mormons. In these comparison conversations, often the Amish come out with the more seemingly logical doctrine than the Mormons, but that is a topic that will certainly distract from the matter at hand...

Where I stayed, Holmes County Ohio, is actually governed with Amish-culture based laws, including the continued prohibition of alcohol. How could the Amish have so much influence? How many Amish could there possibly be? Get ready for this one - there are over 165,000 practicing old-order Amish in the US. Bringing back in the Mormon comparison, that's about the same population as Salt Lake City (189k in the 2012 census).

A buggy plods along the busy road behind a Semi-truck - a very common scene

Buggy crossing

In Holmes county at about 7pm, most restaurants have parking lots full of buggies and most houses have kerosine lamps flickering in the windows. Wooden phone booths stick up by the side of the road even on very rural paths because some Amish are allowed to use the phone...just not inside the house. Moderating the rules of what is and isn't acceptable from modern life are a group of elders, who also interpret the old german language bibles that they use as their doctrine. Recently, young Amish have begun reading the King James bible, and you know what happened the last time that people started reading the bible for themselves instead of having it interpreted from an archaic language by church-elders...uh oh, reformation may be coming...

The hosts at my quaint B&B in "Amish Door, Ohio" were Mennonites, a group somewhat related to Amish that doesn't have the same level of technology and dress restrictions but still adheres to strict and similar fundamentalist religious concepts. They also tend to act more evangelical. While they were very cordial and surprised that San Franciscans would visit them, they kept saying, "we'll pray for you" and "God bless you." I couldn't help but feel a strong subtext in their polite religious offerings, as if they were saying, "and boy do YOU need it."

It's quite a fascinating concept to my agnostic self that any religion in the 21st century can continue to advocate a point of view that there is specifically one correct interpretation of how the universe works and that their specific interpretation is the right one. I did find, however, that the Amish with whom I interacted, unlike the evangelical Mennonite christians I stayed with, seemed far more content to go about their lives with their interpretation without needing to convert outsiders. It was refreshing. And after several days of prayer on my behalf, came a victory for the Amish rather than the evangelicals - a couple of San Franciscans came to appreciate that their logic - the value and pride of work, spending time with their families, living what they were preaching instead of beating it over the heads of infidels - seemed far more christian than anything I've seen on conservative television, pretty much...ever.

It is not a life that I would choose, but like so many other places I've traveled, I like that others choose it, because like their subsistence farmed fields, they add depth and color to an otherwise increasingly standardized world, and I for one, am glad to live in a country where they are free to do so... as long as they don't start legislating that I join them ;).

 An Amish farm, not in good condition. 

Normally, the Amish community will help those in need. It's possible that this family is one of the many who has left the Amish for the proselytizing evangelical communities in the area, who offer much less social and financial support. 

The proselytizing controversy has caused extensive strife in Amish areas.

Amish women work in the fields and manage the household. Despite the religious view on gender roles, everyone in the family does hard manual work. Many Amish women say that they feel equally valued in society, although they are quick to point out that the man is still the final decision maker, "As the Bible says."

Note: The Amish do not believe in having their photos taken because it is immodest. After a long internal debate about whether to use photos at all, I have chosen for the sake of the story to use photos in which their faces are not clear.

A Love Letter to San Francisco

Dear San Francisco,

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...

I just returned from a month away from you in three beautiful countries and two very different places in America. Most recently I was in Manhattan.

I must admit that I questioned my loyalty to you while indulging in the endless charms of the countryside of France, but my week in Manhattan has solidified my undying love for you.

Most importantly, you are a city where people come to be themselves. 
When they come they are greeted by other people from other places who also came here for the same reason. Living here is like a perpetual freshman year in a college dorm, with a revolving door of unending excitement at the possibility of discovering who you are instead of who you think you should be. You are a city of authentic freedom and happiness for generations of people, gay or straight, rich or poor. The warmth of people who have been let loose to the freedom of being themselves permeates every aspect of your culture, bringing a sense of unbridled optimism to every environment from the mundane quotidien of laundry and dishes to the fast-paced ever-growing technology start-up economy.

Pretention is for the pretentious. 
Manhattan feels like an oppressive cult of people who just have to fit in and prove themselves in a competition in which they don't even really know the prize. Money and power need to be shown to whatever capacity possible, at all times. Winning is for the sake of winning, and proving one's elevated status is the primary objective. You, San Francisco, keep a place for pretention, for those who need it, just like you keep a place for every other personality type with whatever quirks they choose to exhibit, from investment bankers to homeless drug addicts. Pretention, blatant consumption, showing your status don't have the same value as they do in New York. People drive Farraris in t-shirts and wear couture suits on Muni. You assign societal value to originality and authenticity. You value substance and your people in turn give it to you. 150 years after the gold rush, you remain a city of gold not because of metal, but because of mentality.

Nature's air conditioning.
As I sit in the sun on my deck, feeling the warm sun tempered by the natural air conditioning of cool, fresh ocean breeze tickling my skin, I'm thinking about how I will have the chance for this same experience all year long. July or January, it doesn't matter. 65 degrees and sunny is the all-year temperature and it is glorious.

Walking for fun, driving for speed.
I drove my cobalt blue 370z roadster convertible with the top down to an appointment in the middle of the afternoon and found street parking immediately at $2 an hour on a major street. This morning I walked to the best brunch spot in the city, Zazie, past colorful, "painted lady" victorians, well-groomed, impeccably behaved dogs, and laid-back people enjoying the air-conditioned sunshine. I waited 10 minutes to be seated by the owner for the best brunch in town. It cost less than $15 and came with a genuine smile. Beat that, New York.

The best food in America at half the price of New York.
Frances. Aziza. Benu. Zazie. Bistrot l'Ardoise. Limon Rotisserie. Hundreds of others. I can walk to the best restaurants in America in less than 30 minutes. Many are Michelin rated, yet cost under $100 for two people with alcohol. Service is natural and it is clear that the people love what they do. It's truly not about the money, it's about the love of the game.  I've never encountered more nervous waiters than in New York - and for what? The food cost twice as much at half the quality. When you serve good food at reasonable prices, you don't need to be nervous. PS, San Franciscans know their wines. Your people won't put up with a $23 glass of Trader Joe's Bourgogne at a restaurant charging $50 for mediocre lamb. I love you for that.

San Francisco, you are the most European city in America, but you are entirely American. You embody the best that your people have brought to you for 150 years and you make those things better. You don't stagnate or stifle, you embrace and evolve.

Thanks for embracing my twenty-something, straight, celtic-ancestry, suburb-raised self. I'll be sure to high-five the lost, gay, hispanic, small-town raised 18-year old who finishes his long journey from somewhere worse by stepping off a Muni bus at 18th and Castro tomorrow in a scene that repeats itself over and over.

I'll tell him, "this is the place you thought it would be. You've come over the rainbow, and you can make whatever you want of it. Go forth and evolve."

Then he'll do the same. And the cycle of San Francisco will continue.

Thanks again for being authentically and substantially the best city in America.

XOXOXO
-Ashley

PS You're gorgeous too.

Reflections on the not-so-unspoken: Family Politics in Ohio

"Religion and politics are the two topics unfit for polite company." And family reunions...

As a refresher, my parents met in Ohio and moved to California in the 1970's where they raised a family including me. Some summers we would visit our grandparents and aunts and uncles in a green paradise full of iced tea, thunderstorms and fireflies. 

From Trolls to Corn Hole to Sarah Palin

When I was old enough to understand the world of politics and religion while simultaneously discovering that the world can exist without strip malls, Ohio became a more complicated place and I didn't return for several years until the funeral of my 26-year-old cousin who died of the flu. It was a debate for me whether to go back or not because I'd been gone so long that it felt weird just showing up in black for the funeral of a guy I'd played trolls with when I was 10. 

But, the whole family went, including my dad who puts flying along with dogs on his list of most hated things in the entire world. We sat together at Tommy's pizza in Dublin, Ohio drinking Peroni and eating crispy pizza cut in square pieces, and the relatives vowed that it shouldn't take a funeral to get everyone together. Another two years later, I came for my sister's college graduation, barely achieving that seemingly reasonable goal.

What I learned from this portion of the trip was 1) corn hole is harder than it looks...

And 2) I'm glad my extended family doesn't have to get together on Thanksgiving or Christmas because I'm pretty sure it would result in an almost immediate political and religious shouting match of epic proportions. 

Even with everyone on their best behavior we existed dangerously on the line of a Bill O'Reilly v. Jon Stewart showdown. I don't want to get distracted by a rant about the role media plays in citizen political debate, but suffice it to say, the hypocrisy of the debate in this country is shocking and discussing it in a swing state with my relatives somehow made the topic hit home even harder for my California "your vote doesn't really count, but donate money so we can run ads in Ohio" self. 

Basically several family members extolled the virtues of Sarah Palin totally non-ironically, and then argued on and on about how Obamacare was ruining their lives. What made this particularly difficult was that while they argued using talking points provided by FOX news, they were simultaneously and explicitly milking the current healthcare system for everything they could get, far more than anyone I've ever met in California does. The stated reasoning was "I have to take my piece or someone else will steal it, but if the pie wasn't there I wouldn't care" (when, of course, they would care if they had to pay for their expensive healthcare). In other words, it's in many ways the battle between individual and society - sometimes what's best for society isn't the optimal situation for the individual, but because what you see before you is more influential in your world view than a theoretical mass consequence, you focus on that, sometimes to the detriment of everyone else.

It's a similar logic behind why there aren't very many orderly lines in India (because someone will often cut to the front) and why there are massive empty yet "fully sold" apartment buildings in China (must buy now before someone else does even if we can't use it). If that chinese example sounds familiar, it's also the same reasoning behind the US financial crisis and more importantly, why Wall Street feels no remorse for its primary role in destroying the financial system ("hey, you bought it!"). Everyone wants a piece of the pie, but not because they understand the pie - because they want to make sure they get their fair share of whatever it is.

 or 

Apple pie or cow pie? What does getting your fair share of the pie really mean? 

What this kind of competitive consumption leads to is an environment of snake-oil sales of epic proportions in which smart, unscrupulous people take advantage of this feeling in every way they can. Usually, the people buying the snake oil don't find out until too late that it is worthless and then we have an economic crisis on our hands. 

Somehow though, the consequence of this logic doesn't seem obvious enough, and for that I blame high-school micro-economics. In high-school, many people learned about supply and demand. They influence each other, and if supply screws up then demand will keep it in check. Vis-a-vis, if supply sells you snake-oil then eventually demand will dry up as people realize it's worthless. Unfortunately, the reality of this system and attitude is much more complex and its societal impact is much more negative than the simplified theory suggests. 

The trouble is a) this never happens in real life and b) I've been to a wide range of countries where this attitude of "it's the consumer's responsibility if they get screwed" rules more than it does in the US, and generally, they're hard to live in. The water isn't drinkable, diseases are more rampant, and people are generally less trusting. The gap between the rich and the poor is wider, and the quality of life between them is defined not only by money, but by safety and health in a way unfathomable to an average American, especially one in the suburbs of Ohio. This is obviously correlation versus proven causation, but there are certainly clear examples of the attitude impacting quality of life and vice versa.

The basic high school argument also assumes that there is no corruption, collusion, or monopolies, and that there is full transparency in the market, which obviously there isn't in any real world example. What that leaves us with is a revolving door of new schemes dropped into a marketplace (ie, our daily life), that consumers must protect themselves against without transparent information. This situation actually stifles markets because it leaves them ripe for corruption and over time corruption will erode consumer confidence and drop a bomb into the center of a thriving, false economy, leaving a few extremely rich people richer and the rest of society picking up the shattered pieces (2007 -> today). 

Commencement speeches for doctorates and open corruption in America

This point about corruption is particularly poignant due to an experience I had in Ohio that demonstrated a unique brand of American corruption that is particularly insidious and growing more acceptable every day.

My sister graduated after four years of hard work with a degree in nursing from Otterbein University, a small liberal arts college in the suburbs of Columbus. The commencement speaker of this college graduation was a VP at Disney who was in some way involved in running their theme parks. She also happened to receive an "honorary doctorate" at this graduation ceremony for her "public service" and also happened to be the sister-in-law of the University's president. 

Here's how I picture the solicitation went:

University president: "Hey sis, we're family. Can you do me a favor and do the commencement speech?"

VP: "I've never heard of that college. If it's not a brand name, then I don't care. What's in it for me?"

University president: "How about an honorary doctorate?"

VP: "Fine. But I'm going to throw in Disney marketing so I can expense the trip."

University president: "Yay!"

*Dear lawyers: Dramatization. Not a transcript of a real conversation.

However the agreement happened, the reality was that first a doctorate was bestowed upon someone, clearly in exchange for a service (the commencement speech, which was also seemingly lifted from some Disney corporate training BS about your "personal brand"), and then later it was made proudly clear in the speech by the university president that this person also happened to be related to her.

What is particularly striking to me about this is that a) it was so proudly extolled and b) no one batted an eye. Since when was a combination of nepotism and bribery acceptable enough in this culture to not only do it, but to proudly state in front of the graduates, friends, families and trustees of the university that that is what you are doing?

I took a poll among random people I talked to in Ohio, liberal and conservative, and I asked, "Do you think it's OK to give a doctorate in exchange for a speech to your relative" and the unanimous response was "absolutely not" yet, there it was, wide open in front of an audience of people who either didn't notice at all or thought, "hmm, well if they're so open about it, it must be OK."

This differentiates America from other countries that suffer corruption and it is a dangerous direction. In other countries the corruption is known to happen but the individual details are kept secret. Indian politicians taking bribes are expected to be shocked and outraged at the accusations of corruption. Chinese communist officials who do back-door real-estate deals are dealt with by the party if it becomes too obvious what they are doing. Corruption is known and feared, but is still expected to be carried out in the shadows because it is societally unacceptable. Yet, in America right now, there is a new way of dealing with it. Be open from the get go, and market it as a positive thing.

The more acceptable it is to brag about your corruption, the more corruption itself becomes acceptable - even praised, and unfortunately this particular variation seems to be happening more and more. 

How many politicians have re-emerged from a scandal stronger than ever before with some BS about "being saved" or "learning their lesson" that makes them even stronger candidates? Certainly more now than 40 years ago. Watergate, anyone? Can anyone imagine Nixon re-running for president on a platform of, "come on, guys, it wasn't that bad..."

How many wall street executives maintain that they didn't do anything wrong, and that it was in fact, their job to F* up the financial system? Lots. And society mumbles about it and then lets it go because exposing the corruption isn't the smoking gun it used to be. Now it's followed by a proud, "explain to me why it's wrong." To me this tone of unabashed public abuse of power is reminiscent of ancient Rome, and we all know how that ended. 

Alternative views in the home of America's (somewhat) recent massacre

In an experience that rounded out my family political discussions for the trip, my fiance and I also met up with his uncle at a bar near Kent State University, home of the famous massacre of students by the Ohio National Guard in the 1970's. This uncle had a surprisingly liberal outlook and a deep passion for the importance of voting, "You young people need to vote. You need your voice heard, yet you don't vote, just like I didn't when I was your age. That is the single most important thing you can do for this world." 

He is, of course, right, and young people overwhelmingly do not exercise their right to vote to the same degree as older people. But, when they do, they can achieve important things. Ohio is a swing state for a reason, and despite the on-going loud religious and conservative drum-beating, it voted for Obama in the 2012 presidential election. College students and people under 30 played an important role in that political win, as they did in other swing states. 

Yet, after my week in rural Ohio, I felt a little funny in that bar talking liberal politics, especially after spending several days in fundamentalist conservative Amish country (next post). I was somewhat afraid that someone would overhear us and come yell at us, perhaps with a Bible in hand. Perhaps that was exactly what should have happened, if it could have created a personal and pragmatic discussion between two differing viewpoints in which both parties would benefit from a deeper understanding of the issue. 

Unfortunately, this trip only reiterated for me that we aren't really at a stage in which logical discourse between differing viewpoints can even happen. It didn't happen between my relatives, to the benefit of everyone else in the restaurant, it didn't happen amongst strangers (as it rarely does), and so it is left to the media pundits who make careers stirring up fear and resentment through half-truths and open corruption that permeates our daily lives and national consciousness to such a degree that even siblings must often sit in awkward polite conversation, avoiding an elephant in the room that hardly reflects reality at all.

Conclusions

In the end, Ohio remains strange for me because it feels foreign in ideology and lifestyle, yet there is a cemetery with generation after generation of my family with my name lying in wait between a Wendy's and a vinyl-sided housing development. My cousin was buried there and my grandparents, like their grandparents will be buried there too. I will not. 

I don't know what will happen to me, but in the end while my roots are a part of who I am, my culture and upbringing is fundamentally different than my relatives who stayed put, in the same way that children of immigrants become citizens of their new country, versus the generations before them who remain steadfastly entrenched in the old. For those people who choose to remain, there is comfort and stability in the known, which may contribute to the fear of change so associated with conservatism and why areas with people who have more recently moved (such as big cities and newer states like California and Hawaii) tend to be more liberal. 

Going home can be an interesting experience full of complex and confusing factors. Meeting people with your nose and your chin provides a link to your larger biological footprint that can be interesting and feel meaningful, but I believe that these things only define you to the degree that you let them. 

For me, just as my parents did, I will embrace the forward movement to new places and cultures, always remembering where I came from as part of the journey, but steadfastly aiming ahead at the unwritten, unpredictable and exciting future. 

And I'll vote.

Rest and Rewind in Manhattan

New York, New York:

At the moment, I am sitting on a hotel bed in Manhattan looking at this:

I'm staying at the Standard hotel in the meatpacking district, which conceivably at some point packed meat, but which is now one of the poshest areas in Manhattan, in a distinct opposite to the "tenderloin" of San Francisco, where despite Twitter's optimistic tax-break-motivated office presence, you are still more likely to see a drug overdosed homeless guy in your path than anything that could be considered posh, even by the most hipstery hipster.

I can tell that it's posh because I had to push my way into an elevator jam-packed full of teenagers wearing a weird combination of clubbing dresses and pool gear as they headed up to the roof top bar at 4pm on a Saturday. As I was squeezed up against a screen in the elevator showing an animated image of Hitler burning in Hell, I reflected on two things: 1) I feel really old and 2) it is really easy to become posh. Rooftop bar + hipster staff + artsy hipster elevator statement = THE place to be in town.

The whole hotel, from the annoying upside down logo to the permed hair of the hipster front desk clerk, feels so marketing-contrived to me that I find it hard to believe that so many people think it's original - especially in New York. However, I have a clue as to why; In 10 minutes of standing out front waiting for a table at the popular hotel restaurant (which made my local brunch place in SF, Zazie, feel like it deserves 3 Michelin stars), I saw at least 25 guys wearing plaid shirts, "risky business" glasses and hipster beards. If fashion is an institution that embraces looking uniquely the same as everyone else, then I can see why New York is the center of fashion, and why having an animated video of Hitler in the elevator is "shocking" and hip. I just expected it to take more in New York to be unique. 

Before I go on a riff about New York using one day of data, I need to set some context. In my mind, New York is truly one of the world's most advanced megacities, and it has long eluded me as a place I should know but for one reason or another, I never quite got the chance. I visited a couple times when I was a teenager, always driving in for a few hours with my uncle who lives in New Jersey, for a "city lite" experience - just enough to feel the overwhelming vastness that encompasses you when you pull up out of the crowded lincoln tunnel into the jungle of tall buildings, followed by a quick return to the quieter, easier suburbs of Wayne, New Jersey. 

So, with that, the experience of fully immersing for a week in the life of this megacity is quite a novelty and I have all sorts of pre-conceived notions based on some combination of Sex and the City,  The New Yorker, my 12-year-old obsession with broadway musicals and my 15-year-old 5-hour impression of this metropolis. In particular, I am curious how my previous impressions as an overwhelmed teen from the Sacramento suburbs will compare to my worldly current self having now lived in some arguably crazier crazy places in the world, like India, Singapore and San Francisco. 

How much does the unique character of a city's craziness matter, versus craziness in general (fewer homeless people here than SF, traffic better than India, not as many tall buildings as Singapore). Will New York seem like the cluster-f*ck that I felt so many years ago? How much does acclimatizing to unique brands of local craziness prepare one for such a vast, diverse megacity? This week, it is my task to find out. 

Embarking on the next "original" adventure

The day after tomorrow I will embark on another adventure, quite different from India but in some ways equally foreign.

To start with, the people zealously follow a religion hardly seen and only talked about disdainfully in my adopted home of San Francisco. They advocate different political and social values and embody a different, sometimes inward-focused world view (~70% of them don't have passports, for example). They eat food so entirely foreign that after a few days I long for access to my own California grocery store full of thirty kinds of greens, impeccably fresh fruits, local artisan soft cheeses handcrafted in organic farming collectives and hundreds of nuanced red wines from near and far with thoughtful descriptions ranging from "enormously complex with intense dark berry fruit complemented by savory pepper, vanilla, coffee and mint tones," to "rainbow of tastiness."

I am going to a place where people drink Bud Light more than water, call BBQs "cook-outs" and soda "pop," and where eating anything less than a pound of steak is considered a very bad deal.

I am going to...Ohio.

To start with, here's a map of the United States, with Ohio highlighted. I must start this way, because in my past I've mentioned the state of Ohio and had entire conversations before someone inevitably said something like "So, that's the one next to Nebraska, right?"


View Larger Map


Now that I've cleared that up, I'll also set the stage with a screenshot of the Ohio tourism board's current homepage. I have to assume that the tourism board's webpage is the most official representation of what the state's citizens want to highlight about their unique and tourism-worthy culture.

Let's take a look:

As delicious as that hamburger looks, I may have to pass in favor of the "Ohio to Go" 744-calorie, 64 ounce coke at McDonalds that will give me exclusive tourism discounts. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe I can just have burgers at both places; Wasn't I just talking about needing danger to make my travel feel like an adventure?

Arterial dangers aside, this is actually an adventure, because as snarky as I sound making fun of the caloric weight featured as the primary tourist attraction for this mid-western state, deep down, Ohio has far more meaning than this, and Tomorrow Somewhere is going to help me explain why.

If India represents the place on earth that is most different from where I grew up, Ohio holds another unique distinction in my life - it is the place of my forefathers and therefore the origin of my family's culture. That unique feature makes a visit there a familiar and foreign experience at the same time. It allows me to observe cultural norms that shed light on personal characteristics that have been otherwise unexplainable by my California upbringing, such as why the grammatical construction "this needs cleaned" sounds totally normal to me. Yet, in other ways it is entirely foreign in a way that feels wrong - I should know it, but upon arrival in the land of corn fields, buckeyes, big burgers and even bigger trucks, I am always reminded that I don't really know it at all.

It's probably the closest I'll get to the feeling that children of immigrants must feel growing up in a country that is entirely theirs yet is foreign to their parents. They stand out as foreign at school due to their physical features and unusual names, yet come home every day to a culture that is foreign to them too. They are stuck in limbo between origin and future in a more obvious way than I am, yet returning to Ohio is my little piece of it. In America, most people have come from somewhere else at some point, as much as we'd like to pretend otherwise, and my travels to Ohio bring up the same questions and answers that lead to more questions that everyone comes upon when they are faced with the foreign place of their origin.

My parents met at Ohio State University in the 1970's, in the era of the Vietnam War, hippies, protests, and the Kent State massacre in which the Ohio National Guard (ie, the government-sponsored military) shot unarmed college students, some of whom weren't even part of the protests. It was a time of tremendous social change, where entire ways of life were disappearing and new world views emerged like a phoenix from their ashes. Some people clung to the old ways, others embraced the new. It was a time of great discussion and upheaval, and my parents emerged from the frigid winter cold with their own personal revolution - they packed up their Dodge Colt and headed for California.

To me, this story exists chiefly in family legend, brought up at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and on occasional winter days when the weather reports from Ohio showed particularly frigid temperatures. "How would you like to be shoveling snow off the driveway?" my dad would ask at the warm California breakfast table, "I want to go to the snow!" I'd enthusiastically respond. He'd shake his head. Clearly I had never shoveled a driveway...and indeed, I had not.

In my childhood mind, snow was a magical substance that you'd drive up to for the day, splash around in, throw at your brother, and then drive home from to your warm, green-lawned house. In that same childhood mind, Ohio was a place of fireflies, thunderstorms, bunnies hopping around in storybook gardens and lazy summer afternoons eating pretzels and staring at the TV at my grandparents' house.

As an adult I have only returned a few times, always for family visits. It is only recently that I have come to recognize that these cultural origins, and particularly the differences that I find startling, represent clues about who I am, in ways that are important but not obvious.

Ohio offers up experiences and perspectives that are quintessentially American, and from which my family came. From my grandfather's special muskets used in the war of 1812, to the family cemetery with 200 years of Roofs buried in a field South Bloomfield, there is a lot of my origin to explore there.

It is from this origin that my family will continue, and if, for one moment it seems that perhaps this origin does not play a role in who I am, I will be reminded by my fiance. I met him on the other side of the world, yet he was born and raised in California like me. He is accompanying me on this mid-western journey to his family origins too. They moved from Ohio to California in the 1970's. His grandmother may have even worked in the Ohio State University hospital at the exact time that my parents met there. They didn't know each other.

Our origins play a mysterious role in who we are - sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle. It's time to dig deep and learn more about this foreign place. I'd better start my diet now.