Two weeks in the Bay Area
Long enough to stop photographing everything. Not long enough to understand it.
I spent two weeks in the Bay Area. Long enough to stop photographing everything, not long enough to work out what I was looking at.
San Francisco
The contrast is immediate. Teslas outside Victorians worth more than a Paris arrondissement, and around the corner, tents. The numbers don’t land until you’re standing in the middle of it.
What struck me wasn’t the wealth or the poverty. European cities have both. It was how unremarkable the coexistence seemed. Not callousness. More like something people had absorbed over a long time and stopped registering. I’m not in a position to say whether that’s specific to SF or just what a city looks like once you’ve lived in it long enough.
The things that work in SF work well. Good restaurants, a density of ambitious people, interesting work happening everywhere. The things that don’t work are visible and have been for a while. I couldn’t tell in two weeks whether anyone was seriously trying to change that, or whether I was missing the context.
Oakland
Oakland is a twenty-minute BART ride and a different city in almost every way. The revival people talk about is real. Good food, murals, community organizations that seem to actually do things. It doesn’t have SF’s particular self-confidence, 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, and the city doesn’t try to paper over it.
The BART stations say it too. SF’s are clean, full of commuters on laptops. Oakland’s look like the maintenance budget ran out in the nineties. The ride is twenty minutes. The gap is hard to miss.
What to make of it
I don’t have a clean read on the place. The European instinct is 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.