In a 2016 essay for The Atlantic — the same year Hillbilly Elegy was turning him into a household name — Vance casually dropped this line: "A few Saturdays ago, my wife and I spent the morning volunteering at a community garden in our San Francisco neighborhood." Our. San Francisco. Neighborhood.

So which neighborhood? One local claims to have heard it was Bernal Heights, adding that Vance "didn't seem super conservative" at the time. Which, honestly, tracks. This was 2016 Vance — the Yale Law grad married to a fellow attorney, working in venture capital, writing thoughtful essays about the opioid crisis. San Francisco was a perfectly logical landing spot.

His wife, Usha, had clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, and the couple was embedded in the Silicon Valley orbit through Peter Thiel's investment world. Vance was reportedly involved in some VC plays during this era, including an investment in AppHarvest — a company one Bay Area resident noted was later taken public via SPAC and promptly cratered to the point of delisting. "Sad to see a promising company get demolished by them," they added.

The broader point here isn't to relitigate Vance's political evolution — plenty of people have done that. It's that San Francisco has a funny way of being everyone's origin story. The guy who's now a heartbeat from the presidency was once just another Bernal Heights transplant pulling weeds on a Saturday morning.

Love him or loathe him, there's something almost poetically San Franciscan about reinvention. This city has always been a place people come to before they become whoever they're going to be. Vance just happened to become the Vice President.

File this one under: things you definitely didn't know about your former neighbor.