On Living in San Francisco as a Stanford-Educated Gentrifying Public School Teacher from New Mexico
As of June 2021, I’ve been living in San Francisco for five years now and only recently, like…three weeks ago, that I started to feel like maybe I could write about living and loving this city from my own vantage point.
When I was working towards my undergraduate degree, not once did I ever really consider that I could live in San Francisco after graduating from Stanford. Even as a high school senior in 2012, adults warned me about gentrification in San Francisco, a word I had heard before but couldn’t fathom in my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. I heard it often when listening to organizers talk about East Palo Alto and I didn’t want anything to do with displacing other people, to the best of my ability.
After I knew in college that I wanted to be a high school teacher and was accepted into the Stanford Teacher Education Program, it seemed like everything in my life was pointing towards living in San Jose, where I had family and where I thought maybe I could be of service to the Vietnamese American community and stay with my partner at the time, whom I’d dated for most of college and planned to work in the peninsula at a big-time, old school computer and technology company. But a nasty, ugly breakup threw the whole plan off-course.
It was in this complete crisis of my life that I found out that Stanford’s program had a partnership with San Francisco Unified School District in something called the San Francisco Teacher Residency. For the first time ever, I entertained the idea of living in San Francisco. I was excited by the prospects of working in a district that pretty much originated district-wide Ethnic Studies at the high school level. I had always enjoyed my visits to San Francisco, however brief. Many of my very closest friends in college were making the move to SF, and in fact there was an opportunity to sleep on the couch and save money while I commuted every day back to Palo Alto for my grad school program.
I graduated on a sunny day in Palo Alto in June, and moved into the fog of San Francisco the day after. And thus began my life here in The City.
I’ve been hesitant to share any of this up until this point because, straight up, when I first moved here there was no escaping that I was a gentrifier. I graduated from Stanford, and just like many of the Class of 2016, took up residence in a place where its born and raised could no longer afford. I think a lot of people very kindly have tried to give me some grace because I slept on a futon in the living room for a year, because the neighborhood I chose to live in wasn’t one of the coveted ones, because I make an underpaid teacher salary with a lot of debt, because I was committed to teaching in San Francisco’s public schools — but I personally didn’t see any value in excusing myself from that truth. I’m a gentrifier, and I had to put my head down and shut up and observe and immerse and be humbled, many, many, many times over. I still do, every day.
What I’ve seen in the last five years is that my path, while it started out the same way as many Stanford classmates, it hasn’t quite followed the same direction. I still don’t think this changes much of anything, just offers a different perspective. And in truth, I’ve found this city a really difficult one to live in. I think most people who live here would say it’s a difficult city to live in, but for a wide range of reasons.
Here are the things I love about San Francisco: I love the beautiful views you get from its many hills; the strange, rolling thick fog that feels so much older than anyone; the ocean and the bay. I love its many bookstores, from the iconic City Lights to Green Apple (both locations) to Alley Cat and Black Bird. There’s a really curious cultural fusion here, like walking into a gelato shop named after an Italian explorer and finding that all the flavors are Asian. Or that San Francisco Vietnamese restaurants almost always include five spice chicken and garlic noodles, which I’ve never seen anywhere outside of the city, not even in San Jose. I love specific taquerias and their fight to claim the best Mission burrito. I appreciate that this city is really good at building sandwiches. I love the large and beautiful parks.
I love my students and their shoe game. I think old school San Franciscans are so funny and sharp and so good at having fun. There’s definitely an edge to Frisco folks that I am too sensitive and too baby for, but I admire the resilience and the willingness to protect and defend your space and your own. I think folks here really value freedom to make your own decisions and live your own life, and that’s so beautiful. I admire (though I do not at all understand) “erray” and 415 and Frisco and the thizzle dance and lowriders and bombing hills.
Here’s what I don’t like about San Francisco: sure, I find the cost of living difficult and the rent very expensive, and that’s exhausting. But the big thing is that it’s really painful to live in a city where one city is layered on top of the other, crushing the underclass. There’s an aggression and a tendency towards punishment and carcerality that scares me in the city’s powerful people, like infamous ‘San Francisco Karen 2020’ Lisa Alexander. I grew up around mostly white people for a good portion of my life, and while I definitely experienced racial microaggressions or outright ignorance, there’s an insidiousness to San Francisco’s white (and oftentimes nonwhite) liberals. They’re narcissistic and self-absorbed, constantly patting themselves on the back for being “soooo progressive” and a “beacon to the rest of the United States.” There’s just a certain lack of humility to these people and I feel like when I talk to them about my hometown, I want to give up immediately because they just can’t possibly conceptualize anything being as great as their politically perfect San Francisco. Personally, I see a throughline between these dominant attitudes and Kamala Harris walking back her campaign commitment to refugees and immigrants. I see this in Nancy Pelosi’s performative kente cloth kneeling. I see this in London Breed’s initial commitment to Black communities, but ultimately making decisions that reinforce police presence with little attention to a literally dying community in Bayview, Hunter’s Point, Sunnydale, etc.
Then there are other things, like a certain contour to Bay Area antiblackness, and Bay Area misogyny and misogynoir. There’s the exhausting nature of Bay Area Asian Americans, and how oftentimes I meet them and it feels like they’re still trying to get into college well into their late adulthood. There’s a strange relationship to nostalgia and politics here that I can’t quite articulate.
Then there’s the disconnect I feel with recent transplants to San Francisco. I once had a nice meal outdoors to celebrate my complete vaccination, and I overheard a youngish Asian American woman say that “San Francisco’s really become a toilet. Only the Marina, Pacific Heights, and maybe Potrero Hill are worth it anymore.” I felt such a violent rage then, the audacity that she could call such a beautiful and special place a ‘toilet’ and I feel shades of that rage when I hear the repeated talking points that “San Francisco is dirty” or “There’s poop and trash everywhere [because of the homeless people], someone should do *something* about it.” I feel strange walking past people, usually tech workers, with their Allbirds and North Face or Patagonia jackets, who do things like “park hangs” or speak highly of La Taqueria and Boba Guys. I feel a pained disconnect when I see the fnnch honey bears everywhere and how people praise him for being a “street artist that represents everyone in San Francisco” but folks don’t notice the graffiti that honors Sean Monterrosa all over the city, or the stickers that say “I ❤ Thuy.” I may have not known these people directly, but I know these people were important to the people who are *from* the city by the bay. They matter to me because they matter to the people I work with and love. They matter because they’re part of a rich history here, one that doesn’t disappear just because you’re trying to make its people disappear.
I love San Francisco. It scares the shit out of me, but I learn so many necessary things by living and being in this city.
