Lyle Foster shares his experiences in San Francisco where he attended the American Sociological Association meetings from August 16-19.
Quite simply the conference theme of “Hard Times” is very close to my interests in inequality and poverty, as well as the energy that is usually generated from learning and hearing from other colleagues and experts. I also find that I benefit a lot from the experience of city exploration as I consider myself an “urbanologist” of sorts. I will share more pictures with you. The picture that is attached is nothing exceptional and we can find similar in Springfield and in many places of our nation, but it was poignant for me because of the extremely high costs of living in San Francisco and the current concern of rapid gentrification in the city. Several workshops as well as walking tours focused on this. The situation is so out of hand that bidding wars that offer 10 to 30 percent above the listing price are not uncommon and many of the offers are in cash. It is no secret that the tech boom is creating a substantial sector of the population that has income to spend. Yet, as evidenced in many media reports recently in several demographic studies (some attention has been on Apple in particular), the tech sector is overwhelmingly white, Asian, and male.
So back to the picture…On the positive side San Francisco has a vibrant retail sector downtown which I think is wonderful, as many cities have had to reinvent themselves in their center cities as the big stores headed to suburbs and lifestyle centers. Downtown “San Fran” has every store imaginable. A number of them are high end and their footprint is very noticeable. However, it also abuts the Tenderloin district which is still an area that has a lot of homelessness, crime, vice, drugs, etc… and has been resistant to change. In fact, while I was looking at more history, I noticed a news story that a tourist was shot in the Tenderloin district this past Sunday morning. I was struck by the sight of this single man sleeping on the sidewalk in the shadows of some of the greatest wealth in the world and the sheer vibrancy of Market Street and Union Square. There were many occasions when I saw groups of people that had shopping carts and were sleeping in parks and other areas, but the solitude of this man who seemed to have been here for a while sleeping, with Bloomingdales and Nordstrom just blocks away, spoke volumes to me. And just a few blocks in the other direction were construction cranes erecting new high rises for condominiums that many can only whisper the price. It is easy to get accustomed to the growing homeless population and recognize that it is a simple fixture of urban life – as a Sociologist and simply as a human – I don’t want to be comfortable with it, or to not consider the question of how we can have such affluence and stare in the face of such lack literally in the same moment and breath.
So my reflection of the time I spent in San Francisco for the American Sociological Association meetings was ….”is there a room for this man?”