On “progress” in San Francisco and wine country
It had been a year or two since I was last in Hayes Valley. I’m not sure what I expected when I met Allison there for lunch yesterday (at The Grove), but gone were the second-hand shops I used to love to browse. In their place: shoe stores. Lots of shoe stores. Designer shoes, expensive shoes, three or for per block. And boutique clothing stores. Home décor shops. The obligatory wine stores. And tons of pricy new dining palaces, although a few oldies, like Hayes Street Grill, remain from the bad old days, when Hayes Valley was hidden in the dark, stinky shadows of the Central Freeway, and junkies and johns gave the streets a menacing frisson.
Then the Lesbians moved in, and suddenly all those old tenement windows sprouted pots of geraniums. It was the Lesbians who opened the second-hand stores, and the little tea parlors and cafés, too. I liked that era of Hayes Valley: it was still gritty enough to feel like traditional San Francisco, but it had that buzz of transition—not quite gentrified, but almost, an interesting neighborhood worth an exploration.
I can’t say I like the new Hayes Valley. There’s nothing especially unique about it anymore. It looks like every other neighborhood in San Francisco. If there’s an International Style to wine, then surely there’s an International Style of neighborhood. And Hayes Valley is the poster child.
So much new construction, a condo development on every block, sprouting like mushrooms after an Autumn rain. But are they edible mushrooms, or toxic Death Caps? I suppose if you’ve been forced out of your apartment by quadrupling rents, it’s pure toxic shock. If you have a good job and are making some bucks (I hesitate to say “techie” but that’s where the S.F. money is), then you welcome the new Hayes Valley—and the NoPa, TenderNob, Mission Bay, FulSoMa, South Park and all the other neighborhoods, old and new, that are making the same transition.
San Francisco still maintains the glory and wonder of the City I moved to in the late 1970s. It always will, no matter what changes occur. It has something that’s magically ineradicable—a soul that cannot be destroyed. But I know a lot of people who have been forced out of the City by unaffordable rents, and they’re pretty pissed. They feel like they have to be angry at someone: techies, Google buses, billionaires, landlords. I can’t blame them, although none of those entities is entirely to blame for the situation. People complained about crime and bad neighborhoods, and now that the bad neighborhoods are going away, they’re complaining about the new neighborhoods. I guess it’s just a part of human nature to gripe.
I can find a connection to wine in almost any cultural phenomenon. I’ve already mentioned the International Style as a concept linking both gentrified neighborhoods and the kind of wine that started with Cabernet Sauvignon and now sweeps across all varieties and continents. I find, too, this style sweeping across all wine regions in California. There seems to be an imperative that when the economy of a wine region improves, they have to start looking like St. Helena: the same fancy “wine country furnishing” stores that look like Martha Stewart’s brain on steroids—the same kind of chichi boutiques and palaces of cuisine you now see in Hayes Valley. There’s something ersatz, synthetic about it, and so boringly same. I can’t tell the difference anymore between Los Olivos, the Healdsburg Plaza or downtown Napa—or Hayes Valley, for that matter. But you might as well try to stop an oncoming train than to halt this “progress,” and I put that word in quotation marks because I’m not sure that it is.
It’s not just San Francisco; it’s happening in Portland, Brooklyn, Austin…
Progress is not always orderly or fair, esp to those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. What is happening in SF today is not pretty at times.
But, while Hayes Valley is changing, it has already changed from a virulent ghetto to a gentrified white folks neighborhood forty or fifty years ago and it was those same folks on the low rungs that got pushed out then who are getting pushed out now.