On top of that, the newcomers to San Francisco didn’t love the city like we did. They arrived from around the world to work for companies who seemed only to be creating apps to do the tasks your mom wouldn’t do for you anymore. They worked too many hours and got fed and boozed at work, so they didn’t spend nearly enough money at the local businesses that made SF unique. Not that they had much money left over, considering they were paying $3,000 a month to live in our loved ones’ former apartments. For a large number of the people who moved here, San Francisco was just a place to work and make money for a few years before going back to wherever they came from. They often didn’t know, or didn’t care, about the cultural carnage they were unintentionally part of as they created massive wealth for a handful of people and their investors.

Those of us who, through a combination of rent control and dumb luck, were able to survive this maelstrom, watched as the city that was such a part of the way we defined ourselves as people became nearly unrecognizable. The betrayal was gut-­wrenching; it was like going to high school and your best friend from middle school became the bully who picked on you.

Cohorts and I from the theater wanted to press the envelope further and founded the Diggers, an anarchist group dedicated to imagining and then acting out a culture that offered us more compelling adult options than “consumer” and “employee.” The Diggers decided that those homeless, hungry kids were “ours” and needed to be looked after. To that end, we devised a way to feed six hundred people a day in Golden Gate Park. We also created a free medical clinic, where UCSF med students saw patients at the Digger Free Store once a week. We did it to prove that the city’s excuses for inaction were lame. In our Free Store, one could find anything required for an urban life—clothes, bicycles, tools, furniture, TVs, radios, books, shoes. The Italian farmers at the market gave us food they couldn’t sell that day. We scored more behind Safeways where ripe-­ that-­day fruits and vegetables were set out for the morning garbage pickup. We repaired and restored castaways and throwaways and put them on display in a clean, bright storefront that implied, by its very existence, the question: “Why become an employee to make the money to become a consumer? We’ll give you the stuff. Now, what do you really want to do?”

San Francisco’s fate may be sealed. Her lovely weather and views, her small size that can be fenced off by a great wall (or uniformly high property values) may finally allow the wealthiest to claim it in its entirety. The new owners will get rid of the trash, the homeless, the poor, and the unsightly. The workers will live in the suburbs, be forced to use cars, gas, and oil to enter Malibu North and serve. The city inhabitants living on trusts, investments, inheritances, and fiscal good luck will glide through the open, no-­traffic zones, from one fabulous wine tasting to another exquisite dinner, displaying their multi-­thousand-­dollar investments in tattoos-­as-­displays-­of-­disposable-­income, stopping en route, perhaps, for a bit of upscale shopping.

The dream of the sociopathic class that never shares will be fully realized. The corpse of the lovely girl dancing in the ’60s has metastasized into a frozen photo—stilling the heart and leaving only the sparkling body of the city as beautiful as ever. Her body is stressed trying to raise the cash for her cancer treatments. Beauty is a rare commodity. It sells designer clothes, expensive perfume, and extraordinary performance. It’s always for sale. And so, alas, is my beloved San Francisco.

We were all doomed, really, doomed without knowing it. We were like a species of an animal that was so comfortable in our habitat that we didn’t quite realize we would soon be hunted to extinc- tion. We drank at the 500 Club when it was an actual dive bar and not just marketed as a dive bar, blind to the tech companies moving in, not truly hearing their utopian promises and fanfare, not realizing that all the money flowing through them like a gushing river would also flow into snatching up Bay Area real estate and juicing San Francisco rents. We dined on heaping platters of Mexican food in the kaleidoscopic festival of bright holiday lights at La Rondalla. We went to poetry readings at the Elephant Café, where street poets like Julia Vinograd read during the weekly open mic and a gruff bartender with the thickest walrus mustache on the planet served the cheapest red wine on the planet. We bought precious books by precious experimental authors at Small Press Traffic, a bookstore that only sold literature published by small presses (imagine that). We bought ravioli and salami at Lucca, an Italian grocer that had been there since the turn of the century, thumbed through magazines on UFOs at Naked Eye while picking out bootleg videos to watch, and then we’d go hear Angela Davis speak at Modern Times Bookstore, which not only carried tracts on Central American politics, but also books in Spanish

Four or five nights later I would find myself shivering on the back patio of a bar in Potrero Hill, soaked through with summer drizzle, huddling under a burner while the few people I knew in town caroused at a nearby table. Two jockish strangers, thinking me drunk and alone, started to hassle me. “What’s up, bro? Having fun?” They tried to drag me out to the street; my friends didn’t notice. “I’m just cold,” I whimpered. But I wasn’t just cold. I was thirty-­three years old, single, a barely published fiction writer starting to suspect that the life of the starving artist wasn’t as glamorous as advertised. Later that night, walking the dog up a steep hill in an unfamiliar neighborhood, I thought about packing the car and heading back to broiling Albany, then groaned at what a sad little fantasy that was.

“I don’t know about this,” I told Jack, crouching to smooth her damp fur. The rain, at least, had stopped. It was very quiet. In the distance I could see a slick of moonlight glimmering on the bay.

In my choice to let go of that apartment, there’s guilt that I still carry, if I choose to examine it. It’s guilt that I didn’t cherish that San Francisco while I still could, or even appreciate my dad while he was still scribbling in his notebooks at Café Flore, which is now gone, like so many other cafés and landmarks of my youth. When my father was still alive and I was a callous teen, I used to complain to him about what I thought of as his irrelevance as a writer. No one I met had ever heard of him, and money was a constant struggle for us. I was too young to know how few writers, even the talented and influential ones, can support themselves with their writing.

But in the aftermath of his death, it felt like he was completely erased from the city. In the half hour after he died, in his room at the Maitri hospice, I gathered Dad’s personal belongings—his wallet and his glasses, a bag of his clothing—and waited for a ride from a friend. Haphazardly I opened his wallet and stared: here were all his IDs, his driver’s license, his First Interstate Bank card, his membership cards. Items once so precious—signifying a citizen, a history, a point of view—were now worthless. And so, I felt the same about the city. Its value evaporated before my eyes.

Rookie agreed. “That never happens!” he exclaimed happily. “But watch out for sneaker waves.”

“What’s a sneaker wave?”

“That’s a sneaker wave.” He pointed behind me at the sudden wall of water coming our way and quickly paddled out and over the rising swell. Contrary to my usual risk-­averse instinct, I went the other way and paddled in. The wave reared up as it caught me, and it was not just a sneaker but a screamer: the biggest I’d ever ridden in my life, an overhead freight train of water that blew my hair back and roared in my ears. Even now, I can’t believe that I managed to stand up. By the time I realized I was still alive—still standing! still riding that wave! all the way to shore!—a shit-­eating grin had colonized my face. The fact that it took me thirty minutes to paddle back out, and the fact that I got hooked by a fisherman in the process, failed to scrape off that smile. I’d tasted what was possible.

I’m first-­ generation, nothing special; I know people whose roots stretch much deeper. But I still see newcomers as an invading force—here to colonize, pillage, vanquish. The gold rush all but obliterated the Ohlone. Hippies displaced Black families from the Haight. The gay liberation crowd took over the Castro. Techies overran the home I remember. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the balance again. Businesses that had been around my whole life ran desperate fundraising campaigns. Many went dark forever, dragging chunks of our collective culture into the murk of history. Change is always violent to that which came before.

The city is less familiar every day. The extreme poverty in our expanding tent cities is heart-­wrenching. And I’m irked by the entitlement, the flashy cars, the souped-­up strollers. And yet, those strollers carry San Franciscans, homegrown sons and daughters like me. They may come of age feeling inseparable from this new San Francisco, as I felt inseparable from the version that made me. Someday they’ll be usurped, too. Understanding that your hometown thrives on cycles of mass migration and collapse doesn’t make the loss less keen. That bitter backward glance is part of growing up in a chameleon place.

When I moved here, I imagined some kind of consensus that we were all players on the same “good team.” After all, each of us wakes up each morning to see the most beautiful mountains and somehow-­still-­blue water as we listen to the public radio report on the state’s governor signing one bill after another that will make our state a better place: nonprescription HIV medicine; healthcare for gig economy workers; a sanctuary city for immigrants. I was returning to a place where a lot of us go to sleep at night thinking about how we can wake up and make the California dream available for all.