What I Found in San Francisco
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“People seem really happy, and they think San Francisco is beautiful,” London Breed proclaimed last November. Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, was praising what had been criticized by many as a last-minute cleanup before the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference. Ahead of President Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, and others gathering in the city, a swath of San Francisco had undergone a rapid revitalization. Homeless encampments? Cleared. Sidewalk feces? Scrubbed. Pedestrian plazas? Beautified.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California, who himself previously served as San Francisco’s mayor, went so far as to say the quiet part out loud. “I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town,’” Newsom remarked during a press conference. “That’s true because it’s true,” he said, adding that, throughout months of conversations, “we’ve raised the bar of expectation between the city, the county, and the state.”
Could San Francisco keep the bar raised after all of those world leaders left town? And what was the daily reality of the city that for years had been derided as a leftist wasteland? A few weeks ago, I went to San Francisco to find out.
[Gary Kamiya: If it can happen in San Francisco, it can happen anywhere]
One day I took a long walk across downtown with Joe Creitz, an employment-litigation attorney and a law professor who has lived in the city for 35 years. He’s liberal—by no means the type of San Franciscan who might recommend that I read the best-selling treatise. He has a deep love for his adopted hometown, and pointed me toward much of its still-there beauty, both cultural and aesthetic. But he also spoke matter-of-factly about the city’s problems.
