Posted on 09/20/2002 10:15:09 PM PDT by chance33_98
Goodbye to San Francisco BY SAMANTHA SPIVAK Special to The Examiner
IF SHE WERE YOUR wife, once beautiful and loving, but now shrewish, unkempt and manipulative, you would leave her.
If she were a business, unconcerned about providing service after you paid a hefty premium, you would buy from someone else.
She is neither, but she exhibits the worst traits of both. She is the city of San Francisco. I, for one, am taking my business elsewhere. I'm filing for divorce. She's slovenly, self-destructive, disrespectful, hates my friends, and regularly entertains some pretty repugnant companions on my dime. She never listens to me. All she wants is money, money, money, and all I get in return is contempt.
Who needs it? I'm looking for a city that will appreciate me, an average, hardworking, tax-paying citizen. I'm available to keep a tidy home and be a good neighbor in a city that will love me back.
It's a heartbreaking decision. Since the sixth grade, when I made weekly trips to the Richmond district for ballet lessons, all I ever wanted was to live here and love the city. I fell in love with the majestic, Russian-influenced Victorians, and dreamed of buying one some day.
Years later, my fantasy home had become both an impossible dream and a nightmare investment. Rent control and bushels of other city regulations had created an imbalance between housing supply and housing demand. Single-family homes were out of reach. Multi-unit Victorians came with inherited long-term tenants who pay permanently tiny rents. Those fabulous old buildings were a big-money gamble against unfavorable odds.
For a couple of average residents -- I have a husband now -- the prudent plan featured a newer building in the Mission, exempt from rent control, with a rental unit for income. With dueling calculators, we did the math over and over, to make sure we weren't getting in over our heads. Then we plunged into a 40-year mortgage and bought a modern building with two flats. We moved into one and rented out the other.
That purchase transformed us overnight from something The City loves -- two single people with little at stake -- into something The City hates. We became property owners, and, as providers of a desperately needed commodity, a unit of housing, we also became that most-hated breed of small businesspersons -- landlords.
Each day's front page provided at least one uncritical account of our homeownership as the cause of other peoples' misery. Rarely in the 1990s were intelligent questions raised about the real cause of the housing shortage. We heard no talk, except from other average residents, about the insanity of imposing legal obstacles on builders and landlords in a market starved for housing.
City leaders mouthed their intentions to expand housing, even as their daily decisions resulted in a tight housing supply and higher prices. Then, in their eagerness to be perceived as renter friendly, they were only too happy to stand silently behind rent control activists who cast the blame on us, recent homeowners. Few politicians said it aloud, but most lent their tacit support to the oft-repeated premise that our greed (a word I have come to despise) must be reined in to protect everyone else.
We began to notice that a lot of average residents get the blame for things they didn't cause, and there's always a price to be paid. In our neighborhood, we've seen honest merchants prosecuted by The City because criminals spill into their establishments from the surrounding streets. They are forced to spend thousands of dollars on fines, and thousands more on attorneys, to defend their right to stay open. The police testify against the merchants rather than control the criminals. This is how The City rewards people who try to serve customers and provide jobs in a poor neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the City Attorney's Office has achieved a certain prominence by profiteering off merchants who are accused of "allowing" crime to take place in their stores. Hailed by the legal press for shaping a code enforcement team into a brigade of revenue generators, San Francisco raises the bar for run-of-the-mill city attorneys everywhere.
San Francisco blithely assigns to average residents such public tasks as policing crime and housing the poor, yet we are granted little control over our private decisions. The City decides our private matters for us. The City's decisions are not recommendations, they are mandates, enforced with threats of fines, criminal prosecution or confiscation of property. As landlords, we are presumed guilty. As businesspeople, we are presumed destructive, or at least inept.
A landlord who was stabbed by a drug-dealing tenant, for instance, must continue to rent to the stabber, even though he is violent, and the other tenants complain about unsavory activity in the building. This is The City's way of protecting renters. A merchant who runs a shop on the first floor of her building wants to rent out the second floor to another business. But new zoning controls dictate the type of business she can consider. Nonsensically, most of them are not appropriate for a second-story location. Her upper floor sits empty, because the Planning Department decides what's best for the neighborhood, and to hell with the average citizens whose neighborhood it is.
Now and then, someone calls a summit of stakeholders to discuss how our investment can be more useful to others. We are not treated as stakeholders, even though we are the ones who hold the financial risk. In the political parlance of San Francisco, stakeholders are the people who benefit from our investment, the nonprofits -- oddly called "non-governmental organizations" -- and their constituents, who are perpetually positioned as victims of our success. They receive our taxes as grants from The City's coffers, and use them to fight us at City Hall when we try to live our lives. These organizations define the terms of the discussions, and set the agenda for the Board of Supervisors. This seems, to borrow from their vernacular, unfair.
Average residents don't count in San Francisco. All the while we are being held in contempt, we are paying for the privilege of living in a city that hates us. The money disappears into a black hole, earmarked for special schools never built, homeless left unsheltered and ballot boxes set afloat in the Bay. City leaders, unashamed, press us for more. They exhort us to pay our "fair share."
November's ballot brings, as always, another set of expensive new bonds, and an astonishing request for a pay raise by the Board of Supervisors, who harbor a childlike belief that average residents have an infinite capacity to pay, even after suffering several years of layoffs, pay cuts and declining business. If we vote them a pay raise, will they honor all of our other votes? They've had no qualms in the past about overturning the will of the voters when it doesn't coincide with their own.
We've had enough. With great sadness, and enormous anger, we are packing up and leaving. Common sense and a concern for our future tell us to get out. We fear growing old here.
Goodbye, my once beloved San Francisco. See ya in the funny papers. Maybe after some time apart, I'll be able to look back and laugh.
Sell your house, move to the midwest, and raise some chickens :)
I left the state of my birth when I was 40, have never looked back, and if I didn't have a few relatives there I'd never see or think about CA again. Don't miss it even a little bit. My sole concern about CA is as a source of idiotic humor.
Pretty much the reason I go. Have a daughter there (third pic on my profile page) and my wife's family is there (sadly, they are democrats and in power, one heads a union the other is president of a school board - we don't discuss politics when I go there....)
Soon to be WAS I think :) And I posted it, your right I did miss it - thank you!
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