Silence, citizens! Once again the techs have discovered a way to finally make San Francisco livable for them and it’s not robot taxis or hacker dorms or even selling $10 rolls of quarters for $15. No, this is much, much bigger and you are invited to look but maybe not touch. LET’S GO TO THE CHRON:
Launching May 11, the nonprofit City Campus envisions turning one square mile of the Lower Haight, Hayes Valley and Alamo Square neighborhoods into a multigenerational campus designed to help residents “meet inspiring collaborators; live, eat, and work near friends; find and build your life’s work; raise kids ‘with a village’; explore your intellectual and creative curiosities; engage in civic life; all in community and within a 15-minute walk,” according to the invitation to their first event.
Now, don’t think for a second they’re just going to buy houses and live in them or whatever.
The campus would be created, in part, by gathering residents in adjacent rental properties and individually owned homes, and knocking down walls and fences and conjoining backyards— no small challenge under San Francisco’s notoriously expensive real estate market and byzantine bureaucracy.
Imagine an episode of “Friends,” in which “Chandler bursts into your apartment without having to plan anything,” said co-founder Jason Benn, a former software engineer and former Sequoia Capital scout. “That’s the vibe.”
Dear God, what a fucking nightmare. I didn’t even want anyone bursting into my apartment when I was in my 20’s. Good thing the area doesn’t have a fraught history with redevelopment!
This is all dumb and it’s never going to happen because a square mile in San Francisco, one of the 49 we have, would probably cost 500 billion dollars or something that’s probably too much for the Gofundme they launched. This SFist piece is much better about getting into the details than my stupid rant. But for me the piece de resistance of the whole thing is the terrible AI-generated images of their Friends-inspired utopia. Check it out:
From this angle we look to be maybe southwest of a more groovy and laid-back Transamerica Pyramid, which means they excavated part of Chinatown and replaced it with what appears to be extremely low-density housing and a field.
This guy has a severely dislocated shoulder, maybe incurred trying to stop his child from swinging that amputated husky tail at can on the ground.
“Don’t drown yourself in the ramen, Matt, you can get another job in Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related products!”
This one’s my fave because the plan will require sawing off the two wings of City Hall, lifting the dome into the air, and turning Van Ness from Grove to about Market into a pedestrian mall (and building a bunch of new faux Victorians.)
Notably, none of the AI-generated images appear to be remotely close to Hayes Valley, Alamo Square, or the Lower Haight (except for the last one, which is kinda Hayes Valley-adjacent). I would very much like to see the one square mile rectangle on a map!
Anyway, anthropologist Setha Law pretty much nails it in the Chron article:
“What seems to be happening is people really want to ‘stay in San Francisco,’ but they want to exit society. They don’t want to have to deal with the complexity, the differences, the poverty, the needs, the caring for others that was always part of urban culture. They want to escape. They want their own currency, their own culture, their own people. And they wanted it to look like Disneyland.”
Given that the renderings already look like Thomas Kinkade on acid, I’d say they’re halfway there.
Someone should tell them that co-ops already exist