This past week, I had the pleasure of going back to the Bay Area. A quick little recap:
I'm a born and raised New Orleanian. I went to the Bay Area for college (undergrad at Cal-Berkeley) and then moved to San Francisco for two years to start my career in mental health/fitness instructing. I moved from SF in 2013 and have been back a few times, but not since COVID.
One of my good friends from college was getting married, so it was the perfect excuse to head back to the Bay!
While I was there, the weather was amazing and I enjoyed a whole ass 30 degree drop in temperatures from NOLA.
As I was walking around, trying to process my experience, the word that kept popping up for me was: nostalgia.
I brought this up to my friend and she told me the root of the word:
Nostalgia comes from nostos (return) and algos (pain).
I love how even the word has nuance: because nostalgia is a weird fucking feeling.
I hadn't lived in San Francisco for 11 years, so walking around felt both so familiar and also so uncomfortable. It's like when you almost know where you're supposed to take that left turn, but not quite.
What really surprised me is how almost everyone I spoke to (who have more or less stayed in the area since college), commented on how much SF has changed since COVID.
I tried to ask everyone what that meant to them- what had changed. People largely commented on downtown: what used to be a full, bustling downtown has become a bunch of empty buildings peppered with a few tech campuses. The population of folks experiencing homelessness has exploded.
Most of them talked about how COVID, the shift to work from home, and the spread of people during the pandemic are a large part of this and I definitely don't disagree.
I would also add that part of the reason I left San Francisco in 2013 was because of this stratification. It had already started back then (and probably even earlier).
At that time, I was working at UCSF as a research assistant. We were working on helping people living with HIV/AIDS to take their medicine more regularly. All day, I'm speaking with folks who are experiencing homelessness, mental health struggles, and economic instability.
At night, I'm hearing everyone in the tech industry discuss the apps they're building and how they're going to make the world a better place. And I don't mean this to be rude, because technology can change lives. It can save lives. It can make life more fun and enjoyable.
But I also can't tell you how weird it was to stand on the same block and have these two disparate conversations, a mere 12 hours apart.
I began to realize that what San Francisco had represented to me (an artistic city focused on human rights) didn't really exist in the same way anymore, it had become a tech mono-culture. I didn't see myself represented in it and I sure as hell didn't see my clients represented in it.
Instead, San Francisco has become more of a representation of something I fear. I worry about living in a world that throws everyone away who isn't part of Insert Money Making Industry Here. I worry it's a model for a world where we talk in big strokes about improving the lives of people while simultaneously displacing them from their homes.
I worry it's a model for a world in which our first reaction to homelessness is "don't go downtown because it's pretty sketchy" and not "wow- there's a lot of people experiencing homelessness- we should look at the large systemic pieces that are creating this".
And I worry about this, not because it's a San Francisco problem, but because it's an American one.
In America, far too often our conversation is about innovation, growth, and individualism. But so often, we leave our fellow humans behind. It's growth, but at what cost?
So: nostalgia. Pain and the return. Maybe what I'm nostalgic for is a time in my life when I didn't know all of this yet. Back when things were "simpler" (are they ever?). Maybe I'm nostalgic for living in a space that required less nuance... but that was never meant to last.
Nuance and reality are far too important to keep at bay (pun intended).
While in SF, I did eat some very delicious foods and enjoy some very delicious non-alcoholic beverages (I don't drink).
Something SF is doing a great job with is the normalcy of mocktails! This was a spicy pineapple mocktail that was very, very good.
What do you think? Have you ever returned somewhere you used to live? How was your experience?
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