Halloween
I’ve been told by many a die hard suburbanite that there are more dogs in San Francisco than children. Their point is that cities are a weird aberration that accommodates a sliver of society that’s outside the normal bounds of mainstream culture. My response is always the same. How about those age restricted gated retirement compounds in Florida and Arizona with the rigorous home owner associations where it’s illegal to be under the age of 55? No kids there either. Plenty of dogs. Is that also an example of a cultural aberration for weirdos? The answer in both cases might be… Yes.
The reality, of course, is that there are plenty of kids in the city. And there are lots of older suburbs where the original families have aged, the adult children have moved away, and left behind are empty nesters living down the road from vacant schools. I’m not actually in the business of defending where I live. San Francisco is an outlier in many ways. I came here years ago as a young person looking for something I was unlikely to find in the generic American landscape of cul-de-sacs and strip malls. That world of tract homes and parking lots is the ideal location for some people - quite possibly the majority of the population. But I needed to escape at all costs.
Is the city a Godless place devoid of family values? Not in my experience. Tonight I saw children roaming free and unmolested in tranquil neighborhoods at Halloween. People in tidy homes dispense candy untainted by heroin or razor blades. It’s downright wholesome, contrary to the exposés on the evening news reporting squalor and abductions. Does San Francisco have problems? Absolutely. But most of it is pretty pleasant.
Ah, I hear folks say. But these are the elites. You know… those evil out of touch monsters who got rich doing who knows what on the interwebs. They aren’t real Americans who earn an honest living doing something noble. This is the flip side of the narrative that says cities are full of whores, junkies, and homeless schizophrenics. No matter what, the argument is always and forever that cities are either bad by design or bad because the wrong kinds of people live in them. Too rich. Too poor. Too something.
What I see is a self selecting population of people who want to live here and who made sacrifices to do so. Why do people live in walled compounds way out on the far edge of the metroplex outside Dallas or Atlanta? Quality schools? Low taxes? The right kind of neighbors? Same same. I see these places as giant sponges that soak up the kinds of people who want to live in them. I want those exurban subdivisions to exist because it keeps that portion of the population far away from me and my neighborhood. They’d hate it here and be miserable to live with. It’s a big country. There’s plenty of room for everyone. Why bicker?
