So when someone recently asked around about the distinctive woman who used to frequent Chinatown and Nob Hill before the pandemic — the one with the striking, heavily applied red makeup that was impossible to miss — it hit a nerve. Not because she was controversial, but because her absence says something about the city we've become.

The pandemic reshuffled San Francisco's deck in ways we're still tallying up. We track the closed businesses, the office vacancies, the population dips. But we don't have a spreadsheet for the neighborhood characters who just... stopped appearing. The elderly man who used to sing opera on Stockton Street. The woman who fed pigeons in Union Square like it was her sworn duty. The red-faced lady of Chinatown.

These aren't people who made the news. They're people who made the neighborhood. And when they vanish, there's no press release — just a slow, creeping realization that something's missing.

It's worth asking why we notice these absences now more than ever. Maybe it's because San Francisco's street life has thinned out in ways that make each missing face more conspicuous. Maybe it's because the pandemic accelerated a hollowing-out that was already underway — rising costs pushing out the eccentric, the elderly, the people who gave neighborhoods their character but couldn't justify the price tag.

We spend a lot of time in this space talking about policy, budgets, and accountability. But fiscal responsibility isn't just about dollars — it's about whether the city you're paying a premium to live in still feels like a city worth living in. When the cost of living is so high that only the optimized survive, you lose the beautifully unoptimized people who made the place worth caring about in the first place.

If anyone knows what happened to the red-faced lady of Chinatown, we'd genuinely love to hear it. Some questions don't have policy solutions. They just deserve to be asked.