The chess players outside Payless downtown. Go Getters Pizza slinging the best New York slice west of the Rockies. The Embarcadero Theater. Audiences at the Castro hissing — not booing, hissing — when the Baroness appeared during sing-along Sound of Music screenings. The particular shade of blue the sky used to be before wildfire season became a permanent calendar entry.
As one local put it: "I miss the old spirit of SF where you always had a friend to take you in and get you a job. The old hippies that would smoke you out anytime. I don't smell the night jasmine as much anymore either."
That's not just sentimentality. That's a diagnosis.
What happened isn't complicated. The cost of living devoured the social fabric. Another resident nailed it with brutal simplicity: "Having everyone you know move away because they can't afford to live here if they don't live with their parents."
And here's the part where we get uncomfortable: much of this wasn't inevitable. Decades of restrictive zoning, bureaucratic permitting nightmares, and a city government that treated housing supply like a suggestion rather than a crisis drove prices into the stratosphere. Every neighborhood character who got squeezed out, every weird little shop that couldn't make rent — that's a policy failure, not a natural disaster.
Someone even dug up a 1994 Walden Books receipt recently. Tax rate? 8.25%. One commenter's reaction: "What a steal!" We're north of 8.6% now, and that's before you factor in what a dollar actually buys in this town.
Nostalgia is fine. It's healthy, even. But nostalgia without accountability is just grief with no return address. The question isn't whether old San Francisco was magical — it was. The question is whether we're going to keep making the same regulatory and fiscal choices that ensure today's San Francisco becomes tomorrow's nostalgia, too.
Build more housing. Cut the red tape. Let people afford to stay. That's how you keep a city alive — not with AI billboards, but with neighbors who actually stick around.
