I Promised Myself I’d “Do Something” About San Francisco’s Problems Four Years Ago—Here’s What I've Learned

From the time that I first moved to San Francisco in 2013 I felt like I constantly heard the same story from my privileged peers: tech was killing the “old” San Francisco. Skyrocketing rent prices were replacing a rich cultural history with rinse-and-repeat high streets filled with overpriced lattes.

This type of conversation usually didn’t go very deep. It often ended with a few guilty grimaces before evaporating as we moved on to a more comfortable topic. Maybe we went home and retweeted articles about it. 

The more I heard this narrative, the more curious—and skeptical—I became. An expensive shop on the corner replacing a family-owned restaurant was really sad. But few American cities were ever the harmonious melting pot our popular narratives claimed. Could San Francisco really have been so utopian before tech’s “founding fathers” bore their legendary behemoths in their garages? I suspected that when my peers talked about their guilt over the city’s changing landscape, they were actually bemoaning their personal lack of community and civic engagement. As it turns out, this is a modern trend across America, underscored by the 2016 election, and not unique to San Francisco. 

Curious to see if this was actually the case I made a vague and private pact with myself to “get more involved” in local issues and see what happened. Since I made that promise four years ago, I found that not only do myself and many of my peers misunderstand San Francisco’s problems, we also don’t know how to engage with them. As the pandemic continues to rage across our country and social movements follow, I have more hope that will change—and some suggestions for how to help it do so.

American Civic Engagement: from coalitions to clicks

First, I did research. Some reading on mid-century urban renewal offers historical insight. After World War II, our government—at federal, state, and local levels—segregated neighborhoods and even outright barred residents of color from purchasing homes under the guise of improving certain neighborhoods they deemed crime-ridden and economically depressed. Even though these large-scale redevelopment policies didn’t work as promised, and by the 1970s opposition to them was helping San Francisco form its hippie identity, the roughly 30 years they were in place had a lasting effect on the city’s demographics. When we hear activists talking about systemic racism, this is a prime example. Those housing policies were racist, and they got baked into the anatomy of the city, closing down vibrant centers of African-American life so that upper-middle-class white residents could move in. They laid the groundwork for tech’s early entrepreneurs to thrive, and attract others like them. Companies like Google and Facebook have footprints that stamp out local culture, but the policies that allowed millennials to thrive in the city while residents of color are pushed increasingly farther to the outskirts were in place long before we were even born. It didn’t surprise me that we latched onto the narrative of tech vs. the city, though. The social structure of working in San Francisco, which began well before the advent of the current version of the tech industry, allowed us to move through the world interacting only with those like us: affluent, mostly-white professionals. 

The idea that people-oriented life has been replaced by a success-oriented life and a lack of civic engagement among the upper-middle class is the thesis of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. I saw a lot of truth in what the author, Robert D. Putnam, argued, and I wasn’t just drawing examples from my life in San Francisco. I had seen my peers where I grew up in Portland, Oregon and where I went to school, at Harvard, focus more on individual achievement than interpersonal connection. That had always made me, a person who regularly baked cookies for office coworkers, started a music program for underserved youth in Portland, and built a school in Namibia, feel conflicted. That conflict returned when I moved to San Francisco. Half the time I felt like the office fun committee, and the other half I had grand ideas about starting my own company or doing something else that would dazzle people. The truth was, I didn’t feel like I was being encouraged to join a community; I felt like I was being encouraged to look out for myself and my own success. 

I wasn’t alone: A 2018 Pew Research study found that 41 percent of adults didn’t feel attached to their communities, and a spate of articles pointed out that work time was increasingly seeping into leisure time for American workers. Americans also speak to their neighbors less frequently than ever before, and even more alarmingly have less social trust than ever. 

At the time, I couldn’t stop thinking about this William James quote.

“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.”

San Francisco’s tech vs. the city narrative isn’t entirely wrong. Yet we get distracted by it because talking about it makes us feel like we were doing something about it. But that was what my pact with myself was about, I thought. I wanted to find my place among the rootlets.

More than a gold star

After I made my pact to get more involved, I sent a flurry of emails to nonprofits and community organizers across the city offering my services as an effective young professional who could send emails, run social media accounts, and give a fresh perspective on how to get things done. I started taking coffee meetings with the few people who actually got back to me. I continually left those meetings feeling dejected. Most of the people I met with directed me to a monthly volunteer event or suggested I work in their kitchen serving meals. But I didn’t want to just be another volunteer. I was willing to go deeper. I was putting in the work. I wanted to make genuine connections, and I thought I would get there by doing more than what was expected of me.

Then a marketing leader at Stripe brought in a coordinator from an organization called Back On My Feet, which organizes morning runs and employment assistance for people experiencing homelessness. After that, I had a slam-dunk idea: a mobile coffee cart that would employ Back On My Feet participants experiencing homelessness.

When I set up a lunch meeting with the representative who’d visited us at Stripe to pitch her my idea, she said: “That’s a great idea. I’d encourage you to come to one of our morning runs first and see how you like volunteering with the organization.”

So I swallowed my pride and started going to the runs. Pretty immediately, I understood that the work of spending significant one-on-one time with people who were different from me, from the runners experiencing homelessness to people like the case manager for Back on My Feet, Cricket, who has a wealth of knowledge about this issue, was the real rootlet work. I knew that because the feeling I got from it was a feeling of expansion, not validation. I became curious about the lives of the people I met. That’s when I started to really see the inner workings—and failures—of the system designed to “help” people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. I saw that failure when I tried to get my new friends entry-level jobs at tech companies and initially couldn’t because they didn’t have the necessary resources to pass employment screening processes. I saw it when I went to City Hall meetings with Cricket and watched the people at the upper echelons of the government hash out homelessness in terms that were unrecognizable to me as someone who understood my friends’ issues getting beds in shelters or navigating the Medicare system.

That’s when I had my first “big realization” since committing to getting involved. My initial desire to look beyond what I saw as a shallow narrative of a changing San Francisco and my desire to start a mobile coffee cart instead of being “regular” volunteer were borne of the same cause: a lack of conditioning to look for the rootlets. The instinct to try to stand out was so ingrained in me, I didn’t even realize I was employing it. And it was making me miss important information, connections, and experiences. I knew that the dissolution of American community must be happening on some level, because I was proof of it.

Another person I reached out to in my initial email blitz was a candidate running for district supervisor. Around the same time I started working with Back on My Feet, I also started helping him out on his campaign. When we did voter outreach, I was shocked by how many voters (and my own friends) said they didn't even know what a district supervisor was, let alone who they planned to vote for and why. That was my second “big realization”: a lot of people really were asleep at the wheel when it came to civic engagement. It wasn’t surprising—things had been pretty good for affluent people for a long time, and they trusted someone else would take care of it. That was another reason why we had been so content to repeat a story about the problems of our city while doing nothing to fix the problems or even see them up close. But now I had seen the problems up close, and I couldn’t turn away. 

Where we go from here

In March 2020, I co-founded TogetherSF, an organization that connects volunteers with opportunities to lend a hand to their neighbors during the pandemic. In the 10 months since we’ve started we’ve created a network of over 4,000 volunteers and have distributed food and emergency supplies to 40,000+ people in San Francisco.

I’m proud of that work and how many people we’ve supported. But I’m also proud of the space we’ve created for people to find a community beyond the ones we’ve grown accustomed to and get actual experience with the issues our city faces. When you show up to a TogetherSF event, you’re opening yourself up to a new experience and a new perspective. For example, we deliver a lot of our meals to Bayview Hunters Point, which some people call San Francisco’s “last black neighborhood.” I often hear from white volunteers that they’d never been to Bayview Hunters Point before, or known that a neighborhood with those demographics existed so close to where they live. 

I also see volunteers making the kinds of connections I made when I started working with Back On My Feet—the kind that last. People make long-term commitments to movements because of other people, not because of Tweets or online posts. So when I see volunteers making friends and professional connections, and finding their place with our organization, I know they’ll be back.

We also want to make it easy for people to volunteer during a complicated time. If you want to get involved, just visit our website, find an event that works with your schedule, sign up, show up, and we’ll take care of the rest (including COVID-19 safety measures). 

Over the summer Barack Obama wrote a Medium post about how to leverage racial justice protests for lasting change. In what is turning out to be a fight for the soul of our country, we can’t afford to choose between protest and politics, he said. We have to do both. He wrote that getting involved at the local level is powerful because local politicians are the people responsible for implementing the types of reforms protests are calling for. 

Yet participating in local elections is exactly what we’re not doing—in the past decade turnout in "off-year" elections has hovered between just 30% and 40% of registered (not even eligible) voters in San Francisco. How can we both recognize the importance of this basic act but not follow through on it? 

What I’ve learned in the past few years is that people join—and stick with—groups, causes, movements, and cities when they feel like they’ve found genuine connection within them. I went from feeling like I should care to actually caring after I did the work of collecting personal examples and stories of friendships I’d formed, challenges I and others had faced, and contradictions I’d noticed when examining the issue of inequality up close in San Francisco.

What works is not the attention-grabbing stuff that’s readily re-tweeted. It’s not an Instagram post (although they help). It’s not even necessarily just showing up once. It’s showing up as your authentic self, finding something that grabs your attention and your heart, and following those rootlets in your community to see where they lead without thirst for clicks, likes, or accolades.