Two weeks in the Bay Area

I spent two weeks in the Bay Area. Long enough to stop photographing everything, not long enough to figure out what I was actually looking at.

San Francisco

The contrast is real and immediate. Teslas outside Victorians worth more than a Paris arrondissement, and around the corner, tents. The numbers don't fully land until you're standing in the middle of it.

What struck me wasn't the wealth or the poverty on their own — European cities have both. It was more how unremarkable the coexistence seemed. Not callousness exactly. More like something people had absorbed over a long time and stopped actively registering. I'm not in a position to say whether that's specific to SF or just what cities look like when you've lived in them long enough.

The things that work in SF work well. Good restaurants, a density of smart and ambitious people, interesting work happening everywhere. The things that don't work are visible and have been for a while. I couldn't tell from two weeks whether anyone was seriously trying to change that, or whether I was just missing the context.

Oakland

Oakland is a 20-minute BART ride and a different city in almost every way. The cultural revival people talk about is real — good food, murals, community organizations that seem to actually do things. It doesn't have SF's particular brand of self-confidence about itself, which I found refreshing.

Some neighborhoods have been pulled into the Bay Area economy. Others clearly haven't. You can tell the difference in a few blocks. The city doesn't seem to try to paper over that.

The BART stations say it too. SF's are clean, full of commuters on laptops. Oakland's look like the maintenance budget ran out sometime in the '90s. The ride is 20 minutes. The gap is hard to miss.

What to make of it

I'm not sure I have a clean read on the place. The European instinct is to try to diagnose it — find the policy failure, name the contradiction, feel like you've understood something. After two weeks, that felt like the wrong move. Two weeks as a visitor gets you proximity without getting you inside it.

I saw a lot, understood some of it, and probably got parts of it wrong.

I'd go back.