Back To The Garden

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"Cities have stories to tell about themselves," explains Starr. For example, "New York's story is that 'if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.' You go to San Francisco--mythwise--to enjoy the hippie Summer of Love, a progressive-politics daydream, a lifestyle as a wine-and-foodie, any number of competing but interlocking visions of the '60s and '70s." But, he adds, "that narrative is over, and San Francisco doesn't have a new story to tell about itself. It doesn't have a metaphor to embrace its new identity."

This may be one reason why those who, like me, migrated to San Francisco for its anything-goes culture have been in such an uproar. "Everybody's just spitting mad," says Carol Lloyd, who writes a column called "Surreal Estate" for sfgate.com , the San Francisco Chronicle's website. "Something essential about San Francisco is changing, and even people who aren't negatively affected are upset." Interestingly, she notes, many of the dotcoms reviled by artists and neighborhood activists started out like a lot of other quirky, creative San Francisco projects. "They just happened to coincide with the rise of Silicon Valley and the high-tech industry," Lloyd says.

The flash point of the crisis is real estate, which is ironic when you consider the antimaterialistic attitudes of the people who drifted west in the '60s and '70s and helped shape the character of the city for the past four decades. For many of us, buying a house was the last thing on our mind. But despite the recent economic downturn, those who haven't already secured their turf are in danger of being priced out--of both the rental and sales markets. "I have several friends who are seriously considering moving to other places because the economic pressures are just too great," says Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin, adding that Mary Ann Singleton, his protagonist in the series first published in the Chronicle, couldn't afford to rent in San Francisco today. Singleton, like Maupin, lived for a pittance in a rustic roof apartment with sweeping views of the bay. "I spent my 20s in San Francisco simply grateful that I could pay the $175 it took to live in paradise," he recalls. "I could practically find the money on the street." Maupin, who purchased a house in 1993 before the market went haywire, says he would be hard pressed to buy something comparable for a similar price today.

Of course, the real estate crisis is not just about real estate. "It feels as though the soul of the place is in jeopardy," says Wes (Scoop) Nisker, a legendary local radio commentator whose smooth voice has been practically synonymous with Bay Area counterculture for 30 years. "Ever since its inception, San Francisco has been a place where adventurers came, the last outpost of the continent, where you could experience a sense of rugged, outlaw freedom. Now it feels like a theme park of itself--the San Francisco Experience."

The place does feel different. You can almost taste the money, especially in the area south of Market Street, where funkiness has given way to flash, symbolized by the brand-new baseball stadium and the dozens of upscale eateries, hotels and condominiums that surround it. The changes are even more nakedly apparent in the Mission District, ground zero in the war between entrepreneurs--dotcom and otherwise--and the artists, community activists and working people, many of them Latinos, who have lived there for decades. Increasingly, standard-issue low riders and banged-up Toyotas are being edged out by Volvos and SUVs. Over on Mission Street, Foreign Cinema, a limo-flanked, chichi restaurant that opened up right across the street from La Taqueria, legendary purveyor of my favorite cheap burrito, has become the latest target of neighborhood rage. And in nearby Noe Valley, the rundown Victorian duplex where I rented a two-bedroom for $600 a month sold last year for $840,000 (a steal, I'm told).

So what's an expat who wants to go back to do? Very little, I suspect--unless the housing market crashes completely, which is unlikely. What's more, in the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that my story, like San Francisco's, has changed. I have also grown up and, in spite of my youthful protestations, acquired a taste for a more comfortable life. Even if by magic I could return to San Francisco and live on a pittance in a ramshackle flat--even one with a fabulous "vu"--I'm not so sure I would jump at the chance. To paraphrase William Butler Yeats: That is no country for middle-aged men and women who, like the city itself, have gone a trifle soft.

Barbara Graham is a contributor to numerous magazines and is currently at work on a memoir