Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign

“As goes San Francisco, so goes the nation,” goes the famous saying.

Whether it’s the ideal of hippie collectives, or decriminalization of marijuana, or legalizing marriage equality, San Francisco has been known historically for paving the yellow brick road to Utopian Oz.

But now the mainstream media is giving credence to what longtime locals have been reluctantly predicting: Our haunting fears of gentrification have officially given way to glaring globalization, and our Barbary Coast is now home to a barbaric degree of capitalism.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign.

Alexandra Pelosi’s new HBO film, “San Francisco 2.0,” has just confirmed that San Francisco is adding greed capital to the feathers in its countercultural cap. It’s a shocking extreme for a city that typically can’t be shocked. Our traditional laissez faire tolerance apparently has led us past a point of no return.

This public relations awakening about San Francisco’s new 1% status has television talking heads taking an entirely new tone. Our once fair city previously took pride in being a national joke, quite comfortable with being a welcoming home for fruits and nuts, freaks and geeks.

These days, talk of San Francisco sounds like a litany of warnings about impending natural disaster. What’s the biggest emergency… the ongoing drought, the scarcity of affordable housing, the exhausted infrastructure or a newly named culture war… “the invasion of the tech bro”?

Judging from Alexandra Pelosi’s assessment – and she would know, as a daughter of San Francisco, not to mention daughter of Nancy Pelosi, minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives – Babylon by the Bay has reached red-alert status. And for those of us living as rent-control refugees, the struggle to survive is real.

In an interview with “Real Time” host Bill Maher about her 9th HBO documentary, Alexandra Pelosi discussed the misnomer of the new “sharing economy” phenomenon, for which San Francisco is ground zero. This collaborative consumption model, which Maher rightfully re-branded a "desperation economy," allegedly enables economic arrangements in which participants share access to products or services, rather than having individual ownership,

But in San Francisco 2.0, individual ownership of anything, especially real estate, has become a depressing pipe dream. Those of us white-knuckling through the technocratic transformation wonder in fear just how long we can still consider this incubator of income inequality to be living the dream.

Wherefore art thou, San Francisco? Won’t somebody give us a sign that hope is not lost?