The Great San Francisco Bubble (FreeRepublic Mentioned)

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | day, May 9, 2003 | Mark Morford

[nickcarraway]

It's that odd dumbstruck jolting feeling you get as soon as you step more than 25 miles away from this most progressive and funked-out and deeply flawed and self-consciously screwy of kaleidoscopic American urban metropoli: oh my freaking God, what is happening to the world? This is what you say. To yourself. Probably.

[viaveritasvita]

You have no idea how truly sorry I am about what has happened to the late, great State of California and, in particular, your once grand city of San Francisco. All I can say is that I don't want "THEM" to come here now that they've trashed Kali.

[viaveritasvita]

Pass the hand sanitizer!!!

[buwaya]

With regard to Lincoln and Washington, I am referring to objective measures, their STAR Math scores. These are high, out of proportion to their middling API's.

I like to stick to Math scores in judging educational results from the STAR and other tests, it is much more objective, you are correct about the subjectivism of other results.

Yes, Lowell is Asian in large part, as it has been since my wife's day twenty years ago. Her yearbook has three pages of Wongs.

I certainly do disregard the value of humanities as a course of study in college, deliberately. It is too subjective, prone to faddism, prone to pointless pedantry. It is also irrelevant economically or strategically, other than for specific skills. Most is something interesting you can pursue for pleasure, not worth wasting four to eight years at great expense.

Math, science and engineering are also close to impossible to politicize.

Your ten year old may be an exceptional person. That is not conclusive.

[buwaya]

I read this and look around me and I am most sincerely puzzled. I was downtown this afternoon with my little boy on BART; I went to Macy's, Stacy's, Borders, CompUSA, was disappointed by FAO Schwartz closing, showed him the cable cars at Powell, and had a hotdog with him at Union Square. I was living here in 1991. It doesn't seem any different.
Better in a way. There was no Borders or CompUSA then.
There were bums then too.

One of us is out of our minds.

[buwaya]

As I recall, the Sutro Baths and Playland burned down over 60 years ago. They have been ruins since before the Eisenhower administration.

[buwaya]

You will miss out on Fort Point (very, very cool, particularly when the re-enactors are in), the Golden Gate, the Exploratorium, Twin Peaks, and the Zoo (better than the Oakland Zoo). Mission Dolores is also worth a trip from SJ.

[rivercat]

I was living here in 1991. It doesn't seem any different.

Go away for awhile and then come back. You'll see what I'm talking about. Sure, we always had bums, but now there are so many more, and they are so much more aggresive. As a teenager in the late 70s, I used to wander the streets of SF at night. I seemed safe then, it doesn't seem safe now. SF was "fun" strange back then, now it's just filthy and strange. ...and BART, don't get me started about that.

[RWG]

The terrorist states that don't rant about wmd are the ones to watch. this guy is the north korean in san francisco.

[vikingchick]

Does anybody remember a restaurant called The Hippopotamus that served chocolate hamburgers? I do. My parents used to take us there.

[Grampa Dave]

My sons loved it, but they never ate the chocolate hamburgers.

I don't know if it is still open!

[luckystarmom]

I've been to all of those places. Like I said, I prefer the South Bay or Sacramento to SF.

[luckystarmom]

How about San Jose.

[buwaya]

There are some pretty rotten parts of SJ.

The schools are about the same on average, but without the bright spots that SF has, and not much in the way of affordable private school options compared to SF.

Property prices and rents are the same or worse.

And it certainly doesn't come close to being as pretty.

I'll grant that there is less crime.

[buwaya]

Hippo burger (way North on Van Ness) closed.

They had huge burgers with pineapple on them for instance.

My wife says it was hideous.

[buwaya]

De gustibus and all that.

[vikingchick]

We never tried the chocolate hamburgers either, but I remember them on the menu. :)

[GOP_1900AD]

Thanks for your candor. I would imagine that your own personal situation may therefore filter the impacts of SF's social decline on your own experience. I agree that Asian immigrants are one of the few positive trends in the City. Unfortunately, even the most cursory review of the political structures of SF and the Bay Area in general reveals that it's Leftist whites, and their various Leftist indoctrinated "lapdogs of color" who define the sociopolitical atmosphere here. Folks like you and I do not have a seat at the table and are marginalized. That's the essence of my own anger and why I wrote the things I did. Indeed, any "take over" by Asian immigrants has been effectively outdone, if not in number than in power, by the take over by Leftist whites from the Eastern US.

[GSWarrior]

Got news for ya, even with Pacbell park the tent cities are still there

Whatever....