#collapsing middle class

C let me sleep way late, since the supplemental estrogen I’m on finally got to me last night and I was emotionally wrung out, so we got a bit of a late start. While I brushed my teeth, he researched the best Goodwills in San Francisco and made a game plan. We started with the one in the Haight. We found a perfect, and unmetered, parking spot. For all San Francisco’s activism, it doesn’t care if it’s MLK day. Lincoln’s birthday? SF doesn’t give a fuck. Independence Day? Nope. There’s no such thing as free parking on holidays in SF unless it’s Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s Day. Stepping out of the car, C found a shiny quarter on the ground. Spending money for our adventure!

The Goodwill on Haight was not too busy. A few people were in line, and a few more browsed. There were no signs advertising an MLK Day sale. C frowned. “The store in Sacramento was always packed. It was insane.” I browsed pants while he found an employee to ask. The news wasn’t good. “Apparently the Bay Area is a zone that opts out,” he said. It was a bummer. Everything in San Francisco costs about 30% more than the rest of the country, even thrift stores. We were looking forward to trying to cross some things off our thrift wish list.

“Well, want to try to catch a matinee?” I asked. We went back to the car and Googled the movie. It was only playing at two theaters city-wide. One was all the way across town, and the show didn’t start for a couple hours. We dithered about going to the downtown theater, which meant garage parking, but decided to go for it. We had a plan after all!

The theater, the AMC Metreon 16, had self-pay kiosks. When I chose our show time, the screen showed a layout of the theater and told me to pick our seats. The theater only had about 50 seats, and all were reserved except four in the front row. We decided to go for it, and I selected two tickets at $14 each. Fourteen dollars. Each. For a matinee. We hoped the seats wouldn’t be too close to the screen.

The seating capacity made sense when we entered the theater and saw that each seat was the size of a Barcalounger. Ours were in the very front, maybe eight feet from the screen. I sat down. C sat down. We craned our necks up. I couldn’t focus on the whole screen at once. I couldn’t even see the whole screen by moving my eyes; I had to turn my head to see the left side of the screen. Usually C is more willing than I am to pull the plug, but this time I called it. “Let’s get a refund,” I said with resignation. I expected the cashier to give some pushback, but she was sympathetic.

We decided to walk around, instead of paying our outrageous parking fee and going home tail tucked between our legs. C said there was a coffee shop he thought I might like, so we struck out in that direction. Construction surrounded us, and the gaudy architecture tech companies seem to favor loomed over us. Every once in a while we passed a two-story holdout, and I thought of how the buildings of San Francisco from the last century feel so much more comfortable to me, accessible instead of ostentatious. Maybe it was the estrogen, but the day bubbled over and I told C I wanted to vent. “I fucking hate this city!” I seethed. “I hate that even thrift stores aren’t affordable. I hate that instead of a regular goddamn movie theater with a couple hundred sticky seats, they have limited seating you have to reserve with an app and pay out the nose for. Fourteen dollars a ticket? What if we wanted to take the kids? That’s $71 just to get in the door, maybe a little less if there’s a child rate, but what family can afford that? I hate that rents are going up and pushing out the little museums, and there’s not a single second-run theater in this city. I hate that unless you’re single, or maybe partnered with no kids, and everyone’s making a hundred grand a year, you can’t live here. I hate that we will never, ever, ever be able to buy a house here. I hate that the public spaces generally suck. I hate that a medium pizza costs thirty dollars. We cannot live here forever.”

“No, we definitely can’t,” C agreed. That gave me pause, because he loves San Francisco. Of everywhere in the world he loves California most, and of California he loves northern California most, and of northern California he loves San Francisco most. He went on to say that even though there’s a lot he loves about San Francisco, he’s got the same frustrations. That’s why he’s trying to build a business that’s portable. This city is not tenable for us.

We talked about things San Francisco could do to be better. The city could crack down on real estate speculation, perhaps by taxing the hell out of people who buy homes and sell them again in less than two years, or who own multiple homes. A city of renters is less stable; homeowners have more investment in the properties and in their communities. Public spaces could be incentivized. We could zone for civic and cultural organizations. The city leaders could get more serious about cracking down on crime. We could institute common-sense sanitation and public health measures, because the flourishing homeless population is not going to go away.