These cities have been dying since the 1950s, certainly beyond recovery in the 1960s. What has been going on since then is a combination of willful ignorance, mau-mauing, raiding the carcass, burning the furniture for firewood, propaganda, marketing, and a con game.
The migration of drug addicts and misfits to the "Summer of Love" in 1967 in San Francisco was made possible because so many companies had already left and so many residents had already departed the city for the suburbs.
Tom Wolfe published 'Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers' in 1970.
“The migration of drug addicts and misfits to the “Summer of Love” in 1967 in San Francisco was made possible because so many companies had already left and so many residents had already departed the city for the suburbs.”
You, sir, are 110% right. I’m in San Francisco and am something of a student of the history of the city. A century ago, for example, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco was a very chic, upscale area. The grand old
Victorian homes in the upper Haight were occupied by the likes of ambassadors and physicians and surgeons at nearby UC hospital. But the large apartment buildings and multifamily homes in the lower Haight were more middle class, home to teachers, longshoremen, factory workers etc. Already by the ‘50s, you had the Port of San Francisco losing out to ports in Oakland and Long Beach. The availability of more spacious homes in the suburbs led to flight of middle class families from apartments and flats in neighborhoods like the Haight. That exodus led to super-cheap rents in the Haight which attracted the hippies.