The Problem with My City Is That It’s a City. “I moved to this city as a wide-eyed twenty-year-old, ready to take on the world with energetic abandon. Now, I’m no longer twenty years old. Something really has changed with this city.”
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From I can tell you moved out of NYC just as things transitioned from the up-swing towards the fentanyl issues and danger that comes with not enforcing laws, rampant drug use, as anti-social behavior rose around COVID.
As a 4th generation San Francisan who has been here during good and bad times I'm not confused on the fact that things have been bad in previous times, but when I talk to my Mom she definitely says it's way worse than it's been in the past. Mostly the threat of violence either property or physical is much more wide spread, even though murder is less likely. Add to that car drivers have given up all pretense of civility and drive aggressively while staring at their phones. It's getting harder and harder to defend to myself subjecting my son and wife to the risk of life altering violence towards them.
What doesn't help is the hyper liberal and hyper conservative suburbanites all sneering at us for "deserving what we voted for" or "this is how cities are dummy" as they battle over the Overton window. There are real problems that we have created, there are a small percentage of people that are causing a disproportionate amount of crime and not locking them up does a ton of damage. Enabling folks to slowly kill themselves on the streets is inhumanity I stare in the face daily.
Why, then, you should move to one of those rural cities, you know, the ones without all the people in it. ; )
I do agree that how we treat the poor in this country makes me wanna holler and throw up both my hands.
I think about this a lot as a parent now, but if I'm honest with myself, when I moved to SF a couple decades ago things were objectively much worse. Drive-by shootings were not uncommon in western addition. Upper Haight had a string of murders and parents wouldn't let their kids go there. Hayes Valley was full of prostitution and drugs. But I was young, these things didn't really impact me, and they weren't reported on incessantly. Social media and Citizen apps and Ring Camera crime reports and nefarious wealthy folks spinning narratives of fear to gain power weren't really a part of the fabric of most of our daily existence. (And crime stats back up that things are much better today!)
There's a LOT to work on, to improve, and to make better. There are a ton of big changes happening in society from work, to retail, to cost of living, to inequality, to how we treat our fellow humans. The flip side to awareness is fear and frustration. Ideally, our next step is action. As we know, relying on elected officials isn't a good answer, though it's hard to always know what that action is. We certainly agree that how our country handles (and creates) poverty, addiction, and mental health crises is incredibly frustrating, though, unfortunately, nothing new.
I agree, having lived in SF for 15 years until moving a couple years back, it was definitely much worse. And by the time we left it felt like there was a certain segment glued to Citizen apps posting the same warped opinions over things that used to go unnoticed.
I moved away from SF years ago (and the Bay Area) but on visits I can tell it’s been worse recently. But worse than 2008, not worse than 1998. SF in the ‘90s and even into the early 2000s was very different. As a whole, the city is just nicer/fancier so back then the people Fox News are talking about were in neighborhoods that nice tech folk just didn’t go to, and certainly not on foot. Hayes Valley was under a bunch of overpasses! That where the prostitutes were!
As an outside observer from NYC who visited SF this year and last versus my last trip in 2005, it feels to me like this: in 2005 Tenderloin was rough. Now it seems like the whole city has become Tenderloin to varying degrees. Yet the streets are kept remarkably clean.
I mean, I can't figure out how to be young again to test it out but cities also just seem less fun for young people than they used to be? More expensive, fewer good third spaces. I mean, young people seem less willing (able?) to live in some dump and eat crap food and a lot more willing to just live with their parents, and who can blame them when no one can even afford that anymore. But as a result they don't go out and do questionable shit with modest consequences anymore? Where's the fun in that?
When I moved to Brooklyn, I made $10/hr and paid $800 in rent (which I barely made work with lots of overtime). I just did a bit of Googling and the same job would pay $18/hr and my share of the rent in the same apartment would be $2400. So yeah, I’d be living with my parents.
I say this all the time. I couldn't imagine not living in the city, but i want a backyard, good schools, a huge supermarket, a humongous target, low crime... oh.. wait.
Fran Lebovitz says, "pretend it's a city."
I think about this line a lot. Recently I got invited to dinner on the western side of town (I'm in SF) and I just didn't have the energy to do that and the thought of being in an Uber for 20 minutes was preemptively exhausting. And then I began to crave Italian food for dinner. I opened up DoorDash to order something and then realized that I live in a city. I grabbed a weeks-old New Yorker and headed down the hill to a great Italian joint in my neighborhood where I proceeded to have an excellent meal and read that entire New Yorker. (This is as much about the joys of being an introvert in a city and how it's one of the best places to be an introvert (if you know what you're doing).)
I just came across this article about Portland, and I'm pretty sure they actually meant to write the McSweeny version: https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2025/05/opinion-portland-the-city-that-works-for-28-year-olds.html
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