June 30, 2014 7:50 AM

San Francisco: Dedicated to wealth and the pursuit of it...with no effort made to hide the truth

That San Francisco is a very expensive place isn’t exactly newsworthy. It seems as if EVERYTHING is ridiculously overpriced- from our $281/night hotel room to the food and drink…even public transit. I paid $27.00 for a buffet (which probably says more about my foggy morning incomprehension than anything), a one-way street car ticket is $6, and a meal at a halfway decent restaurant will set you back $100…or more.

I raise this issue not because it’s expensive being a tourist in San Francisco. We chose to be there, and we went in knowing what we’d be up against. No, I’m thinking more about trying to live in a city that not only worships wealth, but actively endeavors to crowd out those unfortunate enough not to be well-off financially. Gentrification is in overdrive, even in places you might not initially suspect. The Tenderloin, as gritty and hardscrabble as ever, is now where more and more poor and low-income inhabitants find themselves priced out of place. It’s not unusual to find rents for a one-bedroom apartment anywhere to be upwards of $2000/month…and that’s for a place some might consider barely habitable.

Everything from food to housing to transportation to entertainment is ridiculously expensive, and it’s become part of a vicious and evidently unbreakable cycle- prices keep spiraling because prices keep spiraling. If you live in the city and aren’t one of the tech workers pulling down six figures (or more), chances are that you’re struggling to make ends meet. It’s clear that San Francisco is a city that worships wealth and is completely and single-mindedly dedicated to the pursuit of it. Progress waits for no one, certainly not those unfortunate enough to find themselves at the bottom of the economic food chain.

What makes San Francisco such a fascinating and depressing place is that it’s a sociological laboratory. It’s a city which displays the very best and most modern that humanity has to offer alongside the very worst and most disturbing. Homelessness is rampant and caring for the mentally ill doesn’t appear to be a priority. Even New York, with all its myriad warts, displays a greater commitment to the “lesser” among them than San Francisco, which appears seems to sweep the problem under the rug as high-end office buildings and apartment complexes reach toward the sky.

After five days in the city, I left simultaneously thrilled and appalled by what I saw. It’s a wonderful place to be wealthy and well-off, but it can also be very disturbing when you see how those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale are ignored utterly. If it’s true that you can tell a lot about a city by examining how they treat the least among them, San Francisco is falling progressively farther behind when it comes to displaying a basic level of humanity and compassion.

And yet I find myself endlessly fascinated by the city….

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on June 30, 2014 7:50 AM.

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