The allure of Paris seems sad and grey/The glory of Rome is a thing of the past/I've been alone and forgotten in Manhattan/I'm coming home/I left my heart in San Francisco, sang Tony Bennett.
San Francisco is no longer what it used to be. The cable cars continue to run up and down the hills from downtown to the harbor, morning fog still envelops the Golden Gate and Alcatraz Island, waterfront restaurants still offer sensational seafood, and steep Lombard Street zigzags as ever between colored victorian houses But crime and drugs have taken over the center, which looks like a real dump. There are homeless people everywhere, many of them with serious mental problems. The offices have been left empty. Housing has become inaccessible. Blacks have been displaced. Tourism has declined. If you look at the floor, you will most likely find a fentanyl pill, a powerful opiate from the heroin family that is ubiquitous.
The degradation of one of the most beautiful cities in the world is such that high-end boutiques, department stores and supermarkets (Nordstrom and Whole Foods) have closed their establishments near the iconic Union Square after their employees were victims of hundreds of robberies at gunpoint, with knives and baseball bats, they will steal their cars and get fed up with the bad smell and seeing the homeless doing their business in broad daylight without any shame. Walking Market Street, which crosses the city from the Embarcadero (where the ferries leave for Sausalito) to the bohemian Castro district passing through the financial center, has become an adventure.
Economic activity in downtown is barely a third of what it was before the pandemic after the introduction of telecommuting at companies such as Twitter, Google, Facebook, Instagram and Salesforce, which have laid off thousands of employees; 26% of the offices remain empty, and this results in the stores, which sell less, in the taxis, which make fewer runs, in the cafes, restaurants and food bars, which have fewer customers; four thousand shops have closed; budget surpluses have turned into a deficit of 750 million euros for the next two years.
I left my heart in San Francisco//where the little streetcars climb the streets towards the stars and the morning mist chills the air, above the blue and windy sea//my love waits for me in San Francisco, says the song . Today a walk through the Tenderloin and SoMa (South of Market) neighborhoods, or around the Giants baseball stadium and the Warriors basketball court, a stone's throw from the main tourist attractions, is a depressing experience, amid the tents of the eight thousand homeless (who cannot be expelled under a sentence that blames the authorities for not doing everything possible to house them), the piles of garbage, the landscape of drug addiction, the fear of being robbed, the abandoned stores, with doors and windows covered in cardboard, and “for rent” and “for sale” signs.
San Francisco is the most progressive city in the United States, inventor of what is now called woke culture before the term existed, inclusive, defender of minorities, warrior against discrimination. Republicans make up just 7 percent of the electorate, which means Democrats, often African-Americans like current mayor London Breed, are elected to all public office.
The black population of San Francisco, a good part of which settled in the 1940s to work in the shipyards, has been reduced by half in the last 30 years (today it is 5.7%) due to gentrification, the arrival of young executives with a lot of money from start-ups and high-tech companies, and the consequent increase in purchase and rental prices (some had their homes expropriated to build apartment blocks). Only 45,000 remain, out of a census of 820,000 citizens, most of them concentrated in the Fillmore districts (once “West Harlem”, in whose jazz clubs Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington played) and Bayview-Hunters Point. The rest have packed their bags for Oakland and the poor side of the bay.
Reparations to blacks for slavery is an issue that has been dormant in the United States since the end of the civil war. At the federal level nothing has been done about the impossibility of obtaining a consensus on Capitol Hill, but some states have adopted their own initiatives. The most notable is that of California, the capital of progress, where a commission has recommended compensation of up to one million euros for discrimination suffered in the past (forced expropriation, refusal of bank loans, problems accessing education and health public...). San Francisco has gone even further, and proposed up to five million.
It is a highly controversial issue, with blacks logically in favor and whites divided, which will reach the Sacramento state legislature before July 1 to make a decision. Getting the recommendations approved is not going to be easy for economic reasons. In San Francisco alone, it would mean an expense, if they were applied to the letter, of one hundred billion dollars (seven times the annual budget), difficult to justify when there is no money to put more police on the streets, give shelter to the homeless, fight crime and drug addiction or build low income housing.
When you come to San Francisco, your golden sun will shine on me, says the final chorus of the song. But all is not sunshine in the Californian city, with the second highest rate of drug-related deaths in the United States after Philadelphia. The inequality is staggering. Four of the world's most nominally valuable companies - Apple, Alphabet, Meta and Nvidia - are based in the metropolitan area, but nurses and teachers don't earn enough to even rent a room. The average income of a white is three times that of a black. One percent of the population is homeless, five times that in the country as a whole. Violence is greatest in downtown, but neighborhoods like Haight-Ashbury or Mission Hill aren't spared either. The decadence is evident, and also the disillusionment of the people with the politicians. The current governor of California, Gavin Newsom, was mayor of the city, and the elderly senator Dianne Feinstein also took the reins of it. The impotence of the police is such that the NGO Urban Alchemy is in charge -in exchange for tens of millions of dollars paid by the city council- to "improve the streets", prevent crime, remove glass, syringes and fentanyl pills from playgrounds (more than one child has been on the verge of dying from ingesting them), offering coffee to the homeless, taking them to churches that serve as shelters, preventing dealings at the doors of schools and giving first aid to victims of violence or an overdose. In the fifty blocks that make up the Tenderloin area, they burn incense sticks wherever they can, between window bars and on the metal shutters of closed shops, to temper the smell of human excrement. Some of its volunteers are ex-convicts, recovered alcoholics and homeless people who have escaped the vicious cycle of destruction and misery.
Despite San Francisco's open and progressive tradition, inclusive nature, and counter-cultural spirit, more and more people believe that the leadership has gone too far in permissiveness, such as many robberies and possession cases. drugs are not considered crimes but simple offenses that can be repaired with a small fine. In the 1960s and 1970s, flower power youth came to protest the Vietnam War, do passive resistance, and rebel against their parents. Today that romanticism does not exist, and what there is are fentanyl pills and eight thousand homeless people in the legendary streets. Millionaires complain about taxes and go to Texas or Arizona, in search of a more favorable climate for business.
Gold in peace, iron in war is the motto that appears on the city's shield, which has fallen and risen from the canvas many times, after the gold rush, earthquakes, financial crises, the AIDS tragedy . The metropolis of gay liberation and the Black Panthers has always found a way out. We must not lose hope. Ikea is opening a store where Nordstrom and Whole Foods have closed. More than one has left his heart in San Francisco, and now it is San Francisco that is dedicated to breaking hearts.
