by Marvin Destin, Guest ColumnistEach year my wife and I get a special visit with an old friend. As we were on our way from parking the car to his house in the Fillmore Street area we came upon a very unusual Christmas Tree outlet. Unusual, because it had lots of trees people could buy but only trees that were about two feet tall. They looked strange and somehow sad to me. My initial reaction was a joke, as in, “This must be where the seven dwarfs get their trees”. My wife however chirped up with, “they are for the people in apartments”. But of course. Things like this aren’t created via public policy. They happen to meet demand. But, for whatever reason, there are many things in San Francisco that reflect realities like this relatively minor example.
San Francisco used to be a City not much different than any other City in America in terms of demographics. It also had several industries, that are, if here at all, shadows of what they used to be. Blue-collar industries. Longshoremen, ship building and maintenance which means pipe fitters and electrical and plumbing contractors, printers, crane operators, as well as much larger fishing and various maritime related industries such as boat repair and processing plants. The City also used to have significantly greater manufacturing and building related industries. Go just on the other side south of Potrero Hill and from Bayshore to the bay and you see what remains of an old and sizeable industrial complex. Lumber companies to construction supplies and even the old expansive complex of The American Can Company and go just a little farther to my old neighborhood in the Valley and you found the expansive Southern Pacific Railroad's grand car yard and engine maintenance facility. The Hormel slaughterhouse that used to be on Third Street, and saw daily herding of pigs and cattle on the paved streets parade around, is of course gone.
Blue-collar industries, unlike Doctors lawyers or LGBT counselors consist primarily of “salt of the earth” men and women who married, had kids (more than one), and worked hard their whole lives. These people used to live here in large numbers. Yes, lawyers and doctors have kids (well, maybe A kid). But studies confirm that as societies increase in the numbers of educated professionals the number of children per capita decline.
Over the years several political ideas have set up shop in San Francisco to wit they have become ground zero for such movements. The first is that anything that “harms” the environment is bad and must be rid of. The second is the gay rights movement. A third would be the amorphous concept that involves the Governments right and or duty to intrude into, and micro control, all aspects of real estate development along with numerous other lifestyle related issues i.e. bicycles. The fourth is Western Socialist Liberalism or what is known as “collectivism”. And a big part of all that is progressive politics. Liberal politics translated through the prism of liberalism implies a power group of people who on the one hand KNOW what is good for everyone else, but refuse to believe that what they want to impose on everyone else actually applies to them. See: Independent Counsel Law. Together these philosophies or ideologies have re-written the code by which San Francisco operates.
You don’t legislate ironworkers, as people, out of the City. You outlaw their industry. It’s a dirty industry, someone will get cancer from its poisons and fumes, which some study done in Greenwich Village “proves” will give three people cancer over the next 1000 years. They must go, and with it, go its workers. And with them, their lifestyle, or demographic model. They will go where their skills tell them they need to go. Or they may switch to another industry that rewards their skill with their hands or shoulders; but few will leave welding to become Psychiatrists or LGBT float designers.
And while they are trying mightily to change this fact, few gays have the dinner table filled with three daughters and three sons that the Irish welder who worked South O’ the Slot and lived in the Sunset used to have.
San Francisco has changed in many ways for certain but none has been bigger than its transition from the town that celebrated Harry Bridges and his longshoremen to one that celebrates Bears and Dykes on Bikes.
This has been the legacy of the environmental movement. Get those dirty industries “outta here”, as Duane Kuiper of Giants broadcasts says. The gay demographic growth has had its obvious impact in terms of which demographic replaced the old. Yet gays were always here even as I was a small boy eons ago. It has in fact been the last two of the four factors that have had the biggest impact of all. That turned what could have simply been a shift of industrial policy emphasis into what has been a quiet exodus of families.
Raising kids in the modern world is expensive. Between the many visits to the doctor(s) there is education. On top of that, kids, to develop into well balanced teens or young adults, need to have a spectrum of things from sports to many other activities including the social life that will frequently include arts in some form, lessons in one of many things from music to dancing, and the social activities such as birthday parties. All this implies the “T” word. That’s “T” as in transportation. And if you have, say, two kids, or heaven forbid, three, that whole T-word thing gets beyond complicated in San Francisco.
The prior two paragraphs, when one considers that all get processed through the political gauntlet, decidedly western collectivist, atheist, and socialist, means that as the political came to drive how everything is determined and then decided, step by step, San Francisco has disassociated itself from the real world. One in which two people get married and have children. San Francisco has become the City of the Single. One walk around any section of this town will reveal in stark and ultra clear terms how far out on that limb San Francisco currently sits.
The funny thing is its almost embarrassed by its placement on the scale. Politicians and other well to do San Franciscans will all swear that San Francisco is just as family friendly as any other town. They couldn’t be more wrong. Yet they feel that way because they can not bring themselves any closer to what they have wrought than Pol Pot could when his agrarian paradise witnessed giant piles of skulls all around the countryside. They know that if they actually have to prove what they deny, they would have to accept the utter bias they have built into the system. They instinctively know that if they admitted they have made children unwelcome and their parents with them, they would have to accept the criticism, which is the one thing they cannot do.
Yet virtually every policy created. Every measure passed. Every “solution” to every problem thunk up by anyone. All lead to the same place. Family and children go away.
Housing: Obviously to have kids and a family you need housing. A studio with a view and that snappy kitchenette wont cut it. When San Francisco started down the path of “rent and vacancy control” which buildings were shackled. The old single family dwellings throughout the Richmond and sunset. Which structures were exempted? Angelo San Giacomo's new apartments. If someone wants to start a family what kind of place must they have if it isn’t the SFD in the Richmond? Two and three bedroom condominiums. When San Francisco considered Mission Bay, the last expansive tract where single-family dwellings could have been built what did the City do? Ordered with policy, renter’s apartments. I could go on but perhaps you get the trend. Virtually every aspect of the policies promulgated by the Supervisors in San Francisco when analyzed cater to natural turnover of the occupant, zero reliance on automobiles for transportation, and dare I say inclusion of “low income” (gang related friends next door anyone) housing so people could be moved from the hood to the new Section 8 complex so that guess what can be built where they used to live. It is impossible to actually find a single piece of legislation backed by the SFBOS that augured for single-family housing. All other real property related measures all involve assisting the single renter, the developer of housing for same, at the expense of anyone wanting to create a family unit.
Transportation: Without a larger vehicle than a bio-fueled putt-putt you cannot have a family. I’ve personally TRIED juggling four large and heavy grocery bags for over thirty feet while I pedal my bike and I cant. Forget sports equipment or a cello on the back of the moped along with the groceries. Step by step this town has passed measure after measure after measure designed to rid the city of cars. You simply cannot have families without them. Cars have acquired every thing from increased channeling into fewer and fewer pathways to places, to preposterous ticket costs such as never used handicapped zones at two space parking lots for the local KFC. Again, without personal transportation you cant manage a family with anything resembling convenience.
Education: In spite of the claims to the contrary (or is it screams) San Francisco Public schools, myopically inflicted with the “everybody gets dragged down to the lowest common denominator” attitude (they call it helping the mentally ill ADHD mutant miscreant feel equal to the best and brightest (self esteem comes first!!!) via making the B&B wait until the MIADHD can add the two numbers together- and that my friends is HIGH SCHOOL), are among the worst in the country by any standard with only a couple of institutions here deviating from the norm. To make matters worse, the perception is that given the City’s “Sanctuary” status it has become a magnet for those wonderful kids in the most vicious Mexican and South American street gangs. Now who wouldn’t want their kids educated in that kind of place? Lets hear it for machete’s AND diversity.
Sports: Have you ever dared to traipse around on a City playground or playing field? You would swear that the last time any of them saw a rake was oh, maybe the 1950s. Between holes randomly spaced to increase the odds on injuries to grass that was cut by the imaginary gardener, some rare species of weeds that can devour kids and small dogs when mating, drainage that would make any self respecting Sudanese jealous but leave quick sand like puddles ONLY in the batters boxes and pitchers mounds, and numerous other policies that relegate kids programs and teams to insulting conditions, even shunting them aside and canceling their games so that corporate beer games can get priority. THAT folks is only ONE of my true stories. San Francisco has loads of run down horrible parks and playing fields (see Excelsior), yet wont even ALLOW one to get fixed by an independent group lest the gardeners union gets miffed. SF athletic facilities do not need money. They simply need work. Yet the city does nothing. The funny thing is that many of the people that work in youth programs is hard working and in fact do care a whole bunch but they are thwarted at every turn by the bureaucracy and the Supervisors. They are stonewalled at every turn in terms of fixing up what needs to be fixed.
Recreation: To the powers that be, they think that something like the Exploratorium is what teens and young adults do in their recreational time. Or maybe they think that if they take away enough fun things to do, the kids will be forced to dole our mashed potatoes at St. Anthony’s so they can learn about being poor. Simply stated kids need places to hang out and pass the time hopefully in relatively healthy pursuits. Drive by any athletic field and you will find exactly ZERO teens playing some kind of game. Either they need permits (expensive and complicated) or it is closed. Outdoor basketball courts are basically in schoolyards, which are closed with high barbed wire and barricaded against entry under penalty of arrest (liability concerns you know), or in the hood where white kids (for instance) are not welcome. The ocean is dangerous. The golf is frighteningly expensive. Even the museum is closed for rebuilding. That leaves…what? Your friend’s house? See “housing”.
The rest of the environment kids must exist in: OK so healthy sports pursuits are impossible. What remains? The Library? You mean the one that the ACLU demands that it allow portals to porno? The one that insists that screaming stinking vagrants be allowed to vent off their meds while THEY hang out there? Pier 39? Try spending a day there for under $100. Much of the rest of San Francisco environment is a microcosm of the city itself, which is overtly sexualized from the gay culture and the singles culture. If a kid walks (as part of a group of say 5 10 year olds) anywhere in several “popular” parts of the city he wont just pass by some adult store or watering hole, they will be encountering the people who go in them. Try Fisherman’s Wharf and just try to NOT see tits, ass, and postcard invitations to adult stores being handed to every young person (toddlers excepted, maybe) who accidentally passes by. And those snacks they serve there by the metric ton are about as healthy as a fried ball of butter coated with candy. In short everyone, kids no exception, is bombarded with sleazy come-ons and slimy products from eatable panties to see through jock straps in storefront windows. Throw in the endless magazine racks readily observable in magazine stores, the rows of adult oriented “news” rack paper dispensers all over numerous streets in most districts, and if your kid can possibly end up innocent to any degree good luck. And don’t forget the condom dispensers in all the restaurant restrooms. “Let dad finish his salad and then Ill explain what that is OK”?
It is an understatement to say I could go on. You can add “and on” about twenty times to the last sentence. The point is that San Francisco is not just “Family unfriendly”. It is beyond that. From policies that “favor” certain demographic groups in housing, to the narcissistic NIMBY-ness that the people behind them in the first place are inflicted with, which prevents any attempt to rectify the disparity, especially in favor of families. And like communist inspired planned economies and societies, the very idea of doing something for normal families would run counter to too many special interest groups that demand all the money the City might have to do something that might benefit kids or teens. After all they let the only bowling alley (The Japantown Bowl), the one final meeting place for so many teens, be converted to apartments for singles. No thought about eminent domain for THAT purpose now was there.
Like most Communistic places, it may be hopelessly beyond fixing or even changing, any more than all the other places in the world that cling to collectivism with all its inherent pathologies. San Francisco may already have gone so far in its building policies favoring small apartments and ultra pricey condos and anti-automobiles or heaven forbid SUVs that the very concept of “family in SF” is now nearly impossible to see as feasible again. IF, a big if, anyone in power actually cared.
Marvin Destin is a lifelong City resident and is a frequent contributor to ChronWatch.
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