WALKING AMONG UNICORNS
in san francisco
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE MAIL & GUARDIAN ON 2018-08-31 | TRAVEL
The City of San Francisco is not big. It is roughly 12 kilometers long as it is wide.
Colonial records of history pin the city’s come-up at the Californian Gold Rush of the late 1840s, but the city’s roots sink far deeper into Latin American soil. This much is evident in the ornate wood-panelled row houses along tree-lined Folsom, Mission or Guerrero Streets: painted in colours that mirror the indigenous scarlet columbine and yellow sand verbena flowers.
THE COSTLY CITY
As of July 2018, the city’s monthly rent mirrored the average annual cost of a tertiary degree at The University of Cape Town. It is officially the most expensive city in the world to live in. The fact that it currently produces the world’s largest number of unicorn companies—disruptive billion-dollar companies like Uber and AirBnb that have shifted entire economies and labour systems—has a lot to do with this.
These are not facts that jumped out at me when I arrived in San Francisco in April this year. No representative from either Wikipedia or Google with a placard reading: “Welcome to SF, Ms Govender. These are the demographics you’re about to get plunged into! Please mind the (unimaginable income) gaps.”
Instead, they are facts that revealed themselves to me over the next three months: from the southern edge of the predominantly Latino district of The Mission where I first lived, to the northern edge of European-ish Marina where I learned the true meaning of “You’ll love San Francisco. It’s just like Cape Town.”
Financial District I by Dinika Govender (2018)
They are facts that wafted through the air and up my nose as I’d walk a daily five-kilometre commute along Valencia Street: assaulting my sense of nostalgia with its (surely illegal) quantities of cardamom diffusing through the windows of Samovar Tea (“chai bar and urban sanctuary”); prickling baby hairs on my thrifter’s hands with the mustiness oozing out of No (“offbeat vintage shop”); or inducing a wild hunger with the salty breeze of aioli fries being tossed at Souvla, the “fast-fine Greek restaurant”.
FAMILIAR DIVISIONS, BUT DIFFERENT
In a letter to loved ones, a month into my stay, I wrote: “There is nothing to see here.” I was, admittedly, in the depths of a crisis of curiosity.
By then, I’d been deeply moved by the proximity of the homelessness (and drug usage) to the high-rolling (and drug usage) I was observing— two symptoms of a regional economy in the depths of its own crisis: a cognitive dissonance one. Still, I could not move myself to document any part of it.
On an evening run early into my stay, for example, I found myself at City Hall at dusk. It was a spectacular sight. To my left, tourists were scuttling into shuttles. To my right, the culturally-inclined were wading into Symphony Hall for a night with the Philharmonic Orchestra. Behind me, the SFPD was warming up for their own performance of night-watch—doing that strange peacocking at the waist by holding onto their holsters and rotating their hips.
Ahead of me: “Tent City”. This is the name I’d heard being used to describe communities of homeless San Franciscans who have created homes for themselves under bridges and in the nooks of under-utilised walkways. I do not know if the residents themselves call it “Tent City”. Something tells me they do not.
I was scolded by housemates and long-term residents for venturing late at night into The Tenderloin, the “dodgy” and “drug afflicted” part of town desperately in need of a “clean-up”. This reaction, to me, had the familiar ring of Swaart Gevaar.
I had been unmoved to document much of the tourist must-do’s, too:
The Golden Gate Bridge (It is red.)
Wine Country (Please refer to Keeping Up with The Kardashians – S9E2 or S14E15 – for surprisingly accurate depictions.)
Silicon Valley (A screenshot of your privacy settings on Facebook will do, although the Sales Force tower is supremely phallic.)
Row houses (These are highly Google-able and not likely to show you how many sub-letters are squeezed into the kitchen crying over spent rent – or the teachers, nurses, and others forced out to live in their cars, or elsewhere, because they can no longer pay said rent.)
Alcatraz (Like Robben Island, only shrouded in fog and legend—but if I could show you my quad muscles after climbing up Russian Hill to get to a viewpoint…)
Row House by Dinika Govender (2018)
Financial District II by Dinika Govender (2018)
Optimise. Optimise. OptimiiIIIse.
Still, none of these facts—not the census data, the varying skin-tones across the city’s hilly topography, the pungency of burritos and miso-soup, or the varying pronunciations of ‘turmeric’—come as close to revealing the city as its soundscape did.
I found myself drawn to what people were saying and how people were saying it. In documenting some of it, it is no more or less intrusive than pointing a camera at it, I know. But I console myself in the knowledge that it was patterns and themes—the rhythm of the city—I was listening for.
That rhythm, I learned, is of a washing machine on a gentle but furious spin cycle. I cannot exactly dance to it, but I can certainly strive toward a Jetsons-like life with it.
Cases in point:
“The housemate seemed to have the right ratio of privacy to friendliness,” said the daughter leading her parents on a university housing hunt, adding that “optimising for personal space is, like, make-or-break."
Then there was the friend of a housemate who complained about struggling to “optimise the proximity of housing to good restaurants”.
And my personal favourite, heard in passing:
“I’m just trying to optimise for an ideal sleep cycle.”
These are not the words of the technology entrepreneurs or venture capitalists now synonymous with San Francisco. They are the words of those deeply embedded in a culture now so data-driven, so codified—so vindicated in reducing life itself to a quantifiable daily dosage of a scientifically developed meal replacement named Soylent whilst gutting out the cultural patchwork of a complex city in favour of investment-friendly filament lightbulbs and fusion foods.
Financial District III by Dinika Govender (2018)
In Chosen Family We Trust
Had it not been for the incredible friends and newfound family I made there—and our shared reluctance to trade home-cooked meals for dystopian milkshakes—it would be hard not to laugh at it all, and to close our eyes while doing so.
Both mechanisms help us avoid crying while we try desperately to figure out how to reconfigure this live-action version of Sim City we’re all hurtling towards under San Francisco’s Uber-fied leadership.