Just think how many different government agencies there are. You’ve got cities and transit agencies and counties and states and feds and permitting folks. They’re all doing bits and pieces, but there doesn’t seem to be a collective. There are twenty-seven different transit agencies in the Bay Area. Then you have tech playing a larger role, and other industries in the Bay have their agendas.
And so we face this periodic problem of balkanization in the Bay.
The big debate that we’re having now is how to tie transportation and land use. There’s a recognition that we need to make the transit system and the housing system work better together. It doesn’t seem to be sustainable. You can’t keep building out, out, and out and still have the same quality of life that we have today. You start to put all the other overlays on top of it, like water and power, all the other extremes that we’ve got to deal with—that stretching out of your supply line doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.
Our forecasts say that the Bay Area, which is now 7 million people, will be 9 million in twenty-five years. I don’t know how you get enough water to 9 million people or how you build enough housing or how you get people around. So as much as people are concerned about their commute times today—how they get what they need or get where they need—it’s gonna be a shock if we don’t think about how those 2 million extra people are gonna fit in, assuming those projections are true.
Tech and government are very different. And their approaches to how fast things go are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Capital improvement, highway improvement, takes years. The industry represented by Google and Facebook, they don’t see life that way. Things can’t happen in years. So they hire buses, build their own park-and-ride facilities.
But the challenge is good for both sides. On the one hand, some of the bureaucracy that’s involved in the slowness of a big public-works project is for the public’s own good, because I certainly am supportive of our environmental restrictions and concerns. Time gives us the opportunity to educate the public and learn their needs so that we guarantee a good experience.
On the other hand, the public side right now seems to be very cash poor. There’s not a lot of money floating around to make some of these investments. And the industry has a much different perspective on the availability of funds and the opportunity for decisive action.
So I think there’s some good dialogue. A real opportunity to partner and maybe help them help us, and vice versa.
I do worry a little bit that there’s a boom and bust happening. There’s the changing landscape of the financial district, and how many large buildings are going there—exciting. The ballpark and the Warriors moving into town—those are all really positive signs for San Francisco. But I think San Francisco has to be careful. It could change too much, right?
There’s a map of San Francisco. In fact, you can see it at City Hall, in the City Engineer’s office. It shows legal streets that were never built. Development where they were gonna fill in the bay right south of Candlestick Point there and build a bunch of houses out in the middle of the bay.
San Francisco was going to be lined with freeways. It was gonna be a grid of freeways. The Mission Freeway. The 480 and 280 were supposed to connect. They were gonna have double Bay Bridges. There’s all kinds of maps and development plans around that.
It’s pretty amazing what would have happened if there wasn’t pushback. Filling the bay to three feet above sea level. Building vast warehouses, industrial parks, and subdivisions across it and the hundreds of miles of salt ponds and hay fields surrounding.
The bay saved us. The bay is the magnet.
Think about San Francisco, the development of the waterfront. There used to be a highway that stretched along the Embarcadero and cut off the city from the bay. I was suspicious, but when they demolished it, what was left was amazing. Now you look at that open waterfront, and there’s so much activity, physical activity, people running or walking and the little parklets that have been built on some of those wharfs. The view of the bridge from underneath, the lights. There’s no shipping anymore—but the human connection to the bay is just fantastic.
Protecting the bay. It’s not just about quality of life. It’s about maintaining something. There’s been a repeal of the advancement of man. A decision to exercise collective restraint.
Now the focus has been reestablishing the original ecological patterns. The return of nature. Turning the bay back into a marsh. It has made the area more beautiful even as we grow.
So it’s been fascinating to be part of the changing shape of the Bay Area, even as just a small soldier. I’ve had an opportunity to touch every face of the bay, to shape the landscape for years to come.
* Proposition 187 prohibited illegal aliens from using state resources, in particular the public universities and schools that had become an important part of California’s identity. Though federal and state courts blunted the measure, it stayed on the books for twenty years until the state legislature finally repealed the unconstitutional elements of the law.
† Though Proposition 209 has been the subject of several legal challenges and persistent protest, the law remains in effect as of publication.
‡ Modeled after DARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy invests in the creation of advanced energy technologies.
§ That earthquake, measuring 6.9 on the Richter Scale, caused over sixty deaths, nearly four thousand injuries, and an estimated $6 billion in damage. It became one of the most devastating and expensive natural disasters in US history and the largest earthquake since the 1906 quake that leveled the city.
PART VI
A SIXTH SENSE OF RIGHT AND WRONG
In recent years, San Francisco’s skyline has been redrawn: The new Salesforce Tower became the tallest peak downtown. It looms over everything that came before it and represents the new scions who’ve made San Francisco the western capital once again, attracting the admiration and sometimes the scorn of the rest of the nation.
From the top of the tower, you can see up to Marin, across the East Bay, and nearly over Bernal Heights to the peninsula. You can see the bay, the Berkeley and Oakland hills, the small townhouses lining up Russian Hill—but no people. The view tells a grand story, a shining El Dorado, finally discovered. But it’s a story that neglects many of the characters at its feet. And from the top of that tower, the other golden city—the city of the Beats, of Harvey Milk, of Cesar Chavez, the one forged in the friction of diversity and conflict, the one that gave us new definitions for human dignity—that city seems submerged. For now.
Perhaps the right analogy for this time is not the Gold Rush but the Transcontinental Railroad. The train collapsed distance, made it possible for people to travel in days what once took months, and changed the country’s sense of time. It was disorienting. Suddenly, California was no longer a distant frontier, but a close-tied part of a new American story. And let us not forget the blood and exploitation and pain that pooled underneath those tracks, the people who laid the steel, who fed coal into the furnace of the engine, who repaired the cars and hauled freight and waited patiently on passengers.
Today’s technology has done something similar: distorted space and time, put San Francisco at the center of the world, brought us closer together (and yet we’ve never felt further apart). It sometimes feels as if we are all in the train’s engine: The quicker things change, the faster we move to adapt, the hotter the economy gets, the more we are all getting cooked. A perpetual motion machine that will never bust.
But there has to be a way to free ourselves from the furnace. There has to be a way to unearth the forgotten city and breathe it back to life. To wash off the dirt and soot, to feel clean, and to see each other clearly again. If San Francisco has stood for anything, it is that: the ability—really, the necessity—to take dangerous risks in the name of an almost naked idealism. The city demands bravery, creativity, and also joy. It has proven time and again that we can imagine our way out of the priso
ns of our own making and conjure an impossible future.
KAREN CUSOLITO
In 1996, she moved to the Bay Area for what was supposed to be one year. Her mother had passed away, and the goal was to come to a place where she was anonymous. She stood on the coastline for the first time and could see for a hundred miles in all directions. “You just can’t get that in New England. We have these tiny little squiggly coastlines and little tiny trees. Out here you’ve got redwoods. Everything is bigger and more open.” So was the creative community in San Francisco, so much support and collaboration. She worked out of an abandoned warehouse in Oakland, the American Steel Studios, that she converted into an incubator for hundreds of other artists—until developers from New York bought the property and canceled her lease. She continues to move from space to space, studio to studio, searching for a new home that can handle the scale of her vision.
I am a large-scale industrial artist. I do large, fabricated steel sculptures that are as tall as forty-five feet, and weigh up to eleven to fifteen tons. Everyone comments, “How can such a small person make giant art?” A push of a button will move a ten-ton crane. A forty-foot boom lift will get me up to the top to work on things. There’s no magic involved.
The scale of my work expanded when I got to the Bay Area. I was always interested in how things worked, how things were built. I went through a period of time where I was putting doorknobs on things that weren’t doors. Just because I think art has a really powerful and playful ability to engage people about how they perceive things around them. I would watch people try to open a tree. They knew it wasn’t going to open, but they still wanted to grab the knob and turn it.
Most of the work I do is built with salvaged steel. I’ve always believed nothing ever needs to get thrown away. It can always be turned into something or fixed. Minimizing my environmental footprint.
The Bay Bridge was always fascinating to me. It was built with steel from US foundries, and it was built with rivets that were forged by hand. One guy melting it, tossing it up to another guy, who drove it home. I mean, we just don’t do stuff like that anymore.
It represented possibility.
When I heard it was going to be dismantled, I put a call out to the creative community: “What would you build with the steel from the Bay Bridge?” And I got drawings, sketches on cocktail napkins. I posted an online petition, and I got signatures and input from bus drivers, librarians, lawyers, welders. People from all walks of life—young, old, different ethnic groups, different classes, different levels of education, working in different kinds of industry—because it touched all of those lives.
It made me weep. One kid wrote, “I just want enough steel to make a picture frame for my grandfather who helped build that bridge.” You feel how thick the passion is for this structure that unified everybody for so long.
The final meeting to get approval for the project, I remember sitting at the table and I showed them pictures: Here is what people would build with this.
And they said, “Karen, do you actually know how to build things like this, these big steel objects?”
I looked down. My nails are filthy. My hands are massive. And I said, “Yeah, I build big stuff.” That was the day they gifted me a chromed rivet from the bridge. It remains in a place of prominence in my home.
I got to climb all over that bridge. It was like a dream. Up there, the “pedestrian passageway,” as they call it, is just one cable that you hold on to. You don’t get a harness. There’s a 400- or 500-foot drop to the surface of the bay on one side and cars whizzing past at seventy miles an hour on the other. I was almost paralyzed, but I still was grinning ear to ear.
One of the engineers asked, “Why do you want this? It’s just a piece of an I beam.”
I said, “It is now, but once I get my hands on it, it will become something else.” And I saw it click in his head, these shapes and forms that he had been working with for years, suddenly he was looking at them differently.
The steel went all over California. It went as far as the Mojave Desert. There have been installations across the state.
And I still have hundreds of tons. I keep moving it from space to space. But I envision some connective installation through and around the Bay Area with that steel. To encapsulate all of the shoreline around the Bay with this illuminated structure, forged from the steel.
Once I finish this project, I am hoping to just rent or buy a small RV and go cross-country. Go to these little towns, and go to the deserts and the mountains, and go get lost.
I remember a couple of years ago, driving out to Kings Canyon, and on the last stretch before you get to the foothills was this huge, single-story housing development, like a massive, cookie-cutter neighborhood, that was just abandoned. Empty streets, stores, churches, homes. It was just locked up. There was nothing.
I wonder, as the economy shifts, as many cities are becoming so similar, as the monoculture builds, whether one day we will abandon it too. If we don’t hold on to everything that keeps these cities interesting, maybe they will be empty one day too.
PAMELA WEISS
Years ago, she walked into the San Francisco Zen Center, searching for answers: why she had lost her closest friend to a car accident, why she suffered from a chronic illness, why society felt irreparably fractured by race, culture, and religion. On the path, she became the first woman to have achieved “dharmic transmission”—the prerequisite to becoming a Buddhist priest. Today, she teaches the “dharma,” or Buddhist teaching, as applied to modern life and encourages her students to walk the path of the bodhisattva, to become a “wise, feeling being.”
The Zen answer cuts several ways across the current Bay Area narrative. It certainly asks some people to recognize their success is not going to cut it. It would also ask many people who lived here for a long period of time, who perhaps built a lot of the culture that made the Bay Area attractive to people, who may not have as deep a toehold in it as they once did, to sort of respect the temporariness of things a little bit. Basically we all need to be less busy putting up walls and trying to protect our stuff.
We can only do that in community. We heal through intimate relationship, through really getting to know each other, to walk in each other’s shoes, to be personal. Because we all share the same roots: “us” and “them.” I’m not over here, and you’re not over there. I’m not right, and you’re not wrong.
The piece that we have trouble with—we, humans—is that we have this binary brain that wants a yes-no, good-bad answer. And if we’re willing to actually be in the fluid, alive, creative, sometimes scary and chaotic reality that is really unfolding, then it just doesn’t work that way. So, the willingness and the ability to live with ambiguity, with not being so sure, this is really what “practice” gives us. It gives us a kind of grappling-in-the-dirt humility. And that is not an easy path, to be able to hold complexity and paradox like that. It’s what the Buddha called “going against the stream.” It’s going against the stream of our own habits, and it’s going against the stream of our culture. It’s hard, but what else is there to do? Have a war?
Technology is like fire, right? It’s neither good nor bad. It is whatever we use it for. We’re probably not paying attention to the right problem or the right solution either. There’s something to all this technology, too, that makes us need to wander the planet less and burn up less carbon. It may have answers that we don’t realize. It’s not like racism and police brutality weren’t happening before. It’s just now more of us see it. It’s not that there weren’t transgender people before, but now more of us see them.
There are a lot of bodhisattvas running around who are quiet. They’re not famous. They don’t have anything. They’re not wearing a big T-shirt that says, I’M A BODHISATTVA. They’re just people. They are people who are going about—as well intended as possible—doing good work in the world.
There’s a story from the Jewish tradition about the Lamed Vov. “Lamed Vov” is High Hebrew;
it’s “thirty-six.” And there’s a myth that there always have to be thirty-six wise or holy—I think traditionally it was considered men—people on the planet maintaining the balance between good and evil. If there were less than thirty-six, then we would melt down into complete self-destruction.
But the thing is that nobody knows who they are. Everybody you meet could be one of these all-important people. In fact, you too could be one of these all-important people. You just don’t know. Because not only are they invisible to others, but they’re also invisible to themselves; the thirty-six don’t know they are the thirty-six. And that’s a beautiful way of thinking about how to hold the incremental, little pieces of good that we try to do in the world.
That radical reorientation of how we see the world—primarily how we see each other and the planet itself—I think that is what’s needed now. It’s not an easy thing. But it’s happening all the time. There are people doing amazing things every moment. That stuff just doesn’t get to the press. Maybe that person who is bagging your groceries, or clearing your table, or driving the bus, maybe he or she is also in that category. Maybe what we’re doing really is important.
MICHAEL SANTOS
His favorite movie used to be Scarface, and in 1986 he was arrested in Miami for trafficking cocaine. During his twenty-six years in prison, he earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree, published fifteen books, saved over $100,000, and married the love of his life. He “returned to society” in 2012 and chose the Bay Area as his home. From California, he planned to start a movement, challenging the prison-industrial complex and teaching other inmates the skills that helped him to not merely survive but grow behind bars.
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