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Who Am I?
I was not born in San Francisco. It’s important, I think, to preface this Substack with that bit of context, given that it will be focused on covering the local Board of Supervisors. I say it’s “important,” not because I believe my interest in local politics warrants a disclaimer, given I’m uninvited. Rather, I say it because San Francisco’s history and soul are defined, for better and worse, by its complicated relationship with the outsider—a relationship that has also defined my perception of politics in this city. At its best, San Francisco has embodied the ideals of the shining city on a hill, providing an unparalleled opportunity for queers and immigrants and weirdos to create a sanctuary here. At its worst, it barred Asians from the city limits at the turn of the 20th century, banned new housing throughout the city in the 1970s, and it continues to denigrate new residents into the modern day.
The similarities between San Francisco’s struggle and that of the United States are obvious, and as a liberal, I find them compelling. But what I see all the more frustrating is that San Francisco is not an embodiment of or metaphor for America; it is simply an old American city. As an American, there are no laws against moving within the country. I don’t need a passport to visit San Francisco, no matter how nativist some residents may be. There are no city-states within our borders. And as in vogue as it is on the left to bemoan the American Empire or as in vogue as it is on the right to inflict pain on blue areas, we are all in this together. That means we have an obligation as Americans to care and fight for the betterment of our country wherever the winds of life push us.
As it happened, the winds of life pushed me to San Francisco. I was born in Boulder, Colorado, to two climate scientists, and it was only after graduating high school that I made the daunting leap to study undergrad in Berkeley—a city in diametric contrast with the hyper-educated, liberal, and housing-abundant enclave I was used to. During my sophomore year, I suffered a nerve injury that neither myself nor any of the countless doctors or physical therapists I shoveled money onto could wrap our heads around, but as a result, I was left with a peculiar condition: sitting was excruciating. It’s not something you think much about if you don’t need to, but modern human life revolves around sitting. Some of it I learned to work around. Can’t sit in class or at work? Find a standing desk. Can’t sit for a first date with a girl? Just use Tinder and bypass all that.
Travel proved more difficult. I soon realized that if you can’t sit, then cars become something of a nightmare. And so it was that the mixture of my condition and my penchant for doomscrolling Twitter that I found myself increasingly interested in the ideas of urbanism and dense housing and public transit that would allow me to live in a place that did not hurt me when I wanted to go from A to B. Angry at the sprawling suburbs of Berkeley and the hypocrisy of the city’s progressivism, I ultimately wrote my senior thesis on the history of NIMBYism in Berkeley. But I didn’t want the fight there. Instead, it was San Francisco that offered what I needed: the density and transit infrastructure to move around in addition to the chance to fight on the frontlines of the battle over urbanist reforms. So after college, that’s where I headed, soon interning in Supervisor Matt Dorsey’s office working on CEQA reform (when they remembered I was there) before working as a staffer on Bilal Mahmood’s successful bid to oust Dean Preston as a representative of District 5.
On the whole, this is admittedly a preposterous story. Maybe it’s funny, maybe it’s inane. I can’t really tell. But it is what it is, and now I am here in a city of hundreds of thousands of souls, and I want that city to prosper like I want my country to prosper. In spite of the madman who rules over us in Washington, SF has the potential to thrive, and for many residents here who either command ostentatious salaries or were lucky enough to buy into the city decades ago, prosperity is guaranteed. But not for the rest, and especially not for those born outside the city walls.
No, whether the city as a whole improves and offers a chance for the outsiders that the city has rescued in the past depends on our ability to effect policy change now. From combating the housing crisis that has made SF unfathomably expensive to confronting the fentanyl crisis that has drowned our streets, to doing our part to promote public transit and walkability, the fate of San Francisco rests in the political decisions we make today. On this Substack, I hope to continue to play a small part in the struggle for reform by covering nitty-gritty updates from the Board of Supervisors and highlighting what I can in my city. I don’t know exactly what that will look like—god knows there are a lot of Board meetings—but I’ll figure something out.
