#ellisact

I've lived in San Francisco most of my adult life (having moved to the city after I graduated high school in the late 90's), and the current tech boom has been bittersweet for me and a lot of my friends. To be honest, I agree with -- and for the most part fit into -- the portrait painted of Bay Area engineers ("more of them go to Burning Man than to church") by David Auerbach in his Slate article The Silicon Valley-ization of San Francisco, but what's heartbreaking as a San Franciscan is how much influence on the city's culture the vocal minority of "loudmouthed techies" has had; neighborhoods I used to live in and love -- namely the Mission, South of Market, and Lower Haight -- would be unrecognizable in their current forms if my 2002 self were to see them.

I understand cities are living things, and they grow and change and people come and go, but the complete disregard for the city's culture is what's been so difficult for me. When I moved here I was young and naive, too, but I like to think I used the opportunity to learn about different cultures, backgrounds and perspectives, not marginalize them.

It's difficult to cite specific examples because the zeitgeist (the defining spirit, not the bar) was completely different at that time. The Mission and SOMA used to be neighborhoods where you could live relatively inexpensively and still have space to make art or music or raise a family, so most of us who lived there had a vested interest in seeing the neighborhood thrive culturally.

Of course parts of those neighborhoods were terrible -- it's difficult to argue that 6th and Mission isn't better now than it was 10 or 15 years ago -- but to define entire neighborhoods by those types of intersections would be wrong. 16th and Mission was -- and honestly, still is -- often overrun with drug dealers and prostitutes, but if you were to have walked two blocks in any direction back then you would have passed countless independent art galleries, rehearsal spaces, and performance studios, not to mention an even greater number of family owned restaurants, grocery stores and shops.