San Francisco Is Burning
As a software developer from the southeast, my two visits to San Francisco taught me one thing: you couldn&#x27;t pay me enough to live there.<p>It&#x27;s overcrowded, it&#x27;s overly-expensive, and it&#x27;s jam-packed with two kinds of people: naive overpaid tech-startup people who are convinced <i>their</i> selfie app will be the one that saves the world, and the most aggressive homeless people I&#x27;ve ever met -- that is, the world that needs more than a selfie app to save them, but who are effectively &quot;pigeons&quot; (to borrow this landlord&#x27;s crass terminology) in the eyes of the self-styled superheroes on their way to an overpriced bistro or a meeting about how to reinvent the bus system but with a prohibitively-high price tag.<p>The city reeks of marijuana smoke, and spending more than 20 minutes at Fisherman&#x27;s Wharf left me lightheaded. You may scream loudly about your right to smoke this medicinal herb, but what of my right not to be compelled to feel its effects just because I dared to walk down a public avenue?<p>It&#x27;s nigh-impossible to get around any way other than just walking for miles -- including to overpriced grocery stores and back -- or paying for another app startup&#x27;s glorified taxi service, gallantly offering highly-priced &quot;solutions&quot; to a problem they helped create. This may be an unfair criticism, though; my own hometown has notoriously-bad public transit. It&#x27;s a hard problem to solve, just made harder by the sheer crowded density of San Francisco.<p>There are no trees, except in tiny parks. At least one of those few parks is comprised of artificial turf (the plasticky kind), and would take about 1 full minute to leisurely stroll from end to end. If you combined all the parks, you might get something roughly the size of New York&#x27;s Central Park. Maybe. The city has decided that the natural ecosystem which it boasts so loudly about protecting has no place within its boundaries. And so, you have nothing but cement, asphalt, and concrete as far as the eye can see.<p>As much as people talk about the &quot;Bible belt&quot; and how it&#x27;s so hard to be left-leaning or 
 atheist there (because you&#x27;re considered &quot;odd&quot;), it&#x27;s much harder to be right-leaning or Christian in San Francisco, where the assumption is that people of that ilk are knuckle-dragging trogdolytes to be scorned or ignored until the commonly-shared blue-tinted dream vision of history renders such people somehow obsolete. It&#x27;s an attitude of &quot;we respect all people, just...not you.&quot;<p>There&#x27;s lots of talk to be found on street signs and in meeting rooms about celebrating cultural diversity and indigenous peoples, but in practice the people who are celebrated are rich CEOs or incoming tech workers riding in on H1Bs to displace the &quot;indigenous&quot; people of the area, crowding them out and motivating the kind of hostility mentioned in this article.<p>My business travel to San Francisco felt like I was walking into a foreign country; one that was on the decline, one that had some deep-rooted enmity for my own homeland (the &quot;rest of the country&quot;), like you might find between India and Pakistan.