Image source: Merlina McGovern
I’m still recovering from travel-induced jet lag, as I wrote about yesterday. I’ve just come back from a week of vacationing with my family in northern California.
I’m no stranger to this area. I have lived in both southern and northern California for most of my early life. When I moved to be with my partner on the East Coast, it wasn’t long before I was missing the warm ocean air of the left coast. I missed the delicious Mexican food. I missed my friends and family.
Over the years, I grew used to dealing with winter weather. I learned to love fresh seafood. I loved that you could easily get to a variety of different states and cultures with just a few hours of driving. But, the siren call of California was always there, calling to me.
Even when I did live in California, it was always the boogeyman of right-wing fever dreams. A liberal outpost full of all kinds of degenerates and horror of horrors, soy lattes as far as the eye could see. It was a state that taxed you up to your eyeballs, so much so that companies would base themselves anywhere but there.
It was all nonsense, of course. Companies that may have left during and after the pandemic are coming back because of AI. The state is large; according to a 2022 World Economic Forum article, California’s economy was the fourth largest in the world. While it does generally vote reliably blue in national and most state elections, it has large pockets of conservative populations, and it has its fair share of libertarian tech billionaires.
Recently, however, my social media feeds have been overrun with people talking again about how terrible California in general, and San Francisco and the Bay Area in particular, was doing. TikToks of homeless encampments proliferated my feed. News stories talked about retail giants like Target closing stores in blue areas due to high crime rates, including California (stories which turned out to be not really true at all). Even food reviewer extraordinaire, Keith Lee had to cut his Bay Area food tour short because of the poverty-ridden landscape and the fact that “the people in the Bay are just focused on surviving.”
Of course, I’m used to all of this Bay Area bashing, so I felt like I’d be able to ignore all of this hyperbolic criticism. But, I’m not gonna lie. I was a bit afraid of falling victim to a smash and grab. I was worried about where we would be staying.
But I needn’t have worried.
Our week-long trip through San Francisco, Berkeley, and Carmel was wonderful. As soon as I landed and could smell the fresh ocean air, memories of my earlier life there instantly returned. Yes, there were more closed storefronts then I had remembered in downtown SF, but the city was bustling and vibrant. We had the most delicious shrimp tacos in the Mission district and wandered around the foggy beauty of the Presidio in the shadow of the Golden Gate bridge. I met and laughed at fond memories with old friends in crowded Cafe Strada in Berkeley.
Like all large cities, San Franciso is suffering from enormous income inequality and a monumental lack of affordable housing. In my mind, those are the reasons behind rising retail and property crime rates. It’s why I will always vote to properly and fairly tax everyone (including the very wealthy), and I will always vote to increase the stock of affordable housing. The former is something that many conservatives might not get behind, and the latter is something that even liberals afflicted by nimbyism will have trouble swallowing. But these are the things that I believe will actual help these problems we might be seeing (even if the landscape isn’t as dire as outrage-bait videos make them seem).
So, I will wholeheartedly recommend visiting San Francisco: the city by the bay is still as golden and wonderful as it has ever been.