San Francisco in 1996 was a city organized for artists. The city of the creative class, the nonconformists. A city for full-­hearted romantics. And the sad truth is there isn’t much room left for the artist in San Francisco today. It’s just too expensive. The San Francisco I love has become colorless and shallow due to an elusive race to becoming the richest, the freshest, the most disruptive in a self-­satisfying vacuum of cash and innovation. Yet, besides the never-­satisfied tech crowd and the obnoxiously rich, many artists who were lifers in SF in 1996 are still lifers in SF today. Lifers may be all that are left to define this city. Because some of us never left it.