Howdy, and happy Tuesday! I’ve been to the Bay Area more times than I can count. But after a recent visit and reading through this stellar article by Devon Zuegel, I have some thoughts on the place and what makes it so weird. Enjoy!

San Francisco is a weird place. Whether you’re a political progressive who loves the place, or a stalwart conservative who fears its streets, we can probably all agree that it’s one of the stranger cities in the United States.

But why is that?

There’s plenty of discussion in the media about why the rest of the United States should look more or less like San Francisco. They have a great transportation network! But they have a huge homeless population! They have great cuisine! But they have drug- and crime-riddled streets!

But none of these conversations discuss why San Francisco is the way that it is. They don’t discuss the confluence of factors that makes San Francisco a unique place, for better and worse. And they debate ad nauseam whether there’s anything to learn from the city without understanding that no other city could look like San Francisco if you wanted it to.

Here’s why I think that is.

High diversity, low assimilation

San Francisco’s population, like the populations of surrounding towns, is incredibly diverse. The Bay Area is home to three of the top ten most diverse populations in the country, and the highest proportion of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants of any major city in the US:

But we’re not just talking about demography here. It’s not just important that a lot of people have migrated to the Bay Area; it’s important when they migrated.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, large percentages of Asian immigrants came to Northern California, the same way that many Irish and Italian immigrants arrived on America’s Eastern shores in decades prior. And like their Italian/Irish counterparts, many of them migrated in clusters.

Now, we should take a step back to think about how people tend to migrate to the US. Immigrants to the United States tend to come as individuals or small groups, and eventually may have family immigrate to join them. But at the turn of the 20th Century, immigrants came in much larger clusters.

The effect of this is that these clusters of immigrants had less of a need to assimilate into their new environments. This is the reason that many larger cities in the Midwest have a German quarter (like Cincinatti’s Over-the-Rhine), and it’s also the reason that cities like San Francisco have neighborhoods like Chinatown or Japantown.

But while the white skin and similar cultures allowed their Irish, Italian, and German counterparts to assimilate over time, cultural differences and racial prejudice delayed/diminished the assimilatory effects of time. Combined with the Mission District’s largely Hispanic population and the historically redlined/white neighborhoods of the city, San Francisco’s population is geographically segregated far more than most cities.

The result is that while many other cities have large, somewhat diverse populations that have shared a local culture for the past few decades, San Francisco consists of a confederation of highly differentiated populations with wildly different experiences of living in the city.

The process fetish

It’s one thing that San Francisco is diverse. It’s another thing that due to immigration patterns and discrimination, the diverse population is highly segregated. It is another thing still that the city actively keeps this from changing.

In the aforementioned article in Asterisk, Devon Zuegel explains how San Francisco responded to the Federal government’s plans for the Interstate Highway System. I really recommend giving it a read, but in short:

• Plans included carving up San Francisco with nine different highways cutting through various neighborhoods

• San Franciscans banded together and formed various associations composed of residents across neighborhoods to protest the highways, including the Property Owners’ Association of San Francisco

• The backlash caused six of the nine to be denied (as well as two later proposed highways)

Don’t get me wrong, this was a great outcome for San Francisco and its residents. While many other cities had historic districts torn down and were cut in half by massive highways, San Franciscans had saved their town from the same fate.

The problem was not the success of the protest, but the learnings from it.

The article goes on to explain that the activist culture of San Francisco continued to grow, bringing the focus on communal planning into the local government. This is where things start to go wrong. Zuegel says:

Following the successful use of public participation to keep new highways from slicing San Francisco to pieces, local bureaucrats began setting up processes to leverage public participation to prevent other developments from coming to fruition in the future.

Over time, the desire to have community involvement in decision making processes around development became an end, rather than a means to a more noble end. Good policy and good development was no longer the focus; process and participation were.

This is what Law professor and Niskanen Center Senior Fellow Nicholas Bagley calls “The Procedure Fetish”. And while rules around processes, participation, and best practices can be helpful tools to achieve the best outcome for the citizenry, too much of a dose can be poisonous to the common good.

Bagley explains:

So you have a diverse, segregated population and a government that prevents significant structural change to the status quo. Sounds like a recipe for some awkwardness.

What could possibly make it weirder?

Silicon Valley, of course

If you’re reading this, you probably know what Silicon Valley is. But if not, a quick explainer:

Starting out at the turn of the century as a military hub, Silicon Valley sprouted into a technological hub by the 1970s that rapidly changed the cultural and economic landscape of the Bay Area. Cities like San Jose, Mountain View, Santa Clara, and Palo Alto reinvented themselves to grow alongside the technology sector in ensuing decades.

But not San Francisco.

Partially due to its being boxed in by geography, and partially due to its “process fetish”, San Francisco adapted significantly less than its southern neighbors to the tech boom. Because of this, the city captured much of the disruptive spirit coming from Silicon Valley without having much space or political willpower to actually disrupt any of its neighborhoods.

For example, San Francisco needs to build approximately 12,000 units of housing per year to hit its housing goals. How many did it build in 2023? Closer to 1,000. Those who run the city have no desire to build new housing on par with what is required, because it would require rethinking how the city is currently set up. It would require increasing density in areas for which increased density was never planned.

It would require disrupting the processes in place.

Out of frustration, weirdness

So what happens when you take a highly diverse, highly unequal confederacy of cultures, create bureaucratic inertia that prevents any significant change, and then let slip to everyone that disrupting the status quo is a good thing?

They look for an outlet.

While some activists pick hard battles worth fighting, in many cases the energy of activism follows the path of least resistance. And when there is an entrenched bureaucracy dedicated to stymying tangible local change, the intangible becomes far more appealing.

When you can’t build new housing, you build new ideas.

Ideologies can be complex, but one of the benefits of their complexities is that there’s no real way of testing if they are right or wrong absent a long-term experiment.

For the activist, the ideological arena is much more appealing than the infrastructural one, because the lack of a bureaucracy to prevent new ideas and the lack of immediate feedback to punish bad ideas gives free range to any assortment of plans for utopia.

While debates around housing, highways, and utilities quickly become discussions of tangible things like costs, logistics, and timelines, ideological debates can remain unconstrained and free. And the same way that the Silicon Valley spirit of structural disruption made its way into San Francisco, the spirit of ideological disruption rapidly makes its way out of San Francisco into the surrounding Bay Area.

So the bay has become ground zero for many new, whacky ideological fads and trends. From fad diets that tech bros from the Valley swear by, to the emergence of anti-vax trends in wealthy Marin County, ideological disruption has supplanted structural innovation.

Until San Franciscans are able to make structural changes to their city to suit their needs, this disruption will continue. For better and worse, San Francisco and the Bay Area will continue to be weird. And comparisons to other cities will continue to be moot.