I'm driving down the 101 toward San Francisco International Airport. A gray blanket of fog pours over the hills in the distance, smothering what would be a luminous California sunset. Eleanor is sitting next to me in the passenger seat taking deep breaths. She does not like to fly.
I hesitate, then finally ask what’s on her mind, cutting the air between us. “I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but since this is the last time we’ll be hanging out for a while, I feel like we have drifted apart over the last year. Is there something I did wrong? Is there something you want to tell me? You know, before you leave?”
We are driving to her one-way flight bound for Pittsburgh. She’s moving out of the San Francisco Bay Area, where we have both lived since we were kids. Our parents, who were themselves mixed transplants from New England and other parts of California, settled in the Bay in the ’70s and ’90s. Eleanor and I met in high school—two weirdos who recognized each other’s outsider-looking-in approach to the world. Now on the cusp of 30, we have 16 years of friendship between us. We did a podcast together. She went to work with me the day after my father died. We have gotten lost in the desert together, twice (before smartphones). On separate occasions, we have cleaned up each other’s vomit. We were once referred to as “hetero life mates.” And today she is leaving. (...)
Setting aside for a moment Oakland’s own gentrification culture war (which would be another 20-minute essay), it is a two-hour drive away from Eleanor’s home in Stinson. It should only be an hour, but the traffic on the 580 moved from “rush-hour average” to “perpetual nightmare” sometime in 2014. With a regular work week, you don’t often have four hours to spare for a round-trip drive to see a friend—even the one who wouldn’t leave your side when your dad died.
by Diana Helmuth, Medium | Read more:
Image: Leonard Peng/Curbed
I hesitate, then finally ask what’s on her mind, cutting the air between us. “I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but since this is the last time we’ll be hanging out for a while, I feel like we have drifted apart over the last year. Is there something I did wrong? Is there something you want to tell me? You know, before you leave?”
We are driving to her one-way flight bound for Pittsburgh. She’s moving out of the San Francisco Bay Area, where we have both lived since we were kids. Our parents, who were themselves mixed transplants from New England and other parts of California, settled in the Bay in the ’70s and ’90s. Eleanor and I met in high school—two weirdos who recognized each other’s outsider-looking-in approach to the world. Now on the cusp of 30, we have 16 years of friendship between us. We did a podcast together. She went to work with me the day after my father died. We have gotten lost in the desert together, twice (before smartphones). On separate occasions, we have cleaned up each other’s vomit. We were once referred to as “hetero life mates.” And today she is leaving. (...)Setting aside for a moment Oakland’s own gentrification culture war (which would be another 20-minute essay), it is a two-hour drive away from Eleanor’s home in Stinson. It should only be an hour, but the traffic on the 580 moved from “rush-hour average” to “perpetual nightmare” sometime in 2014. With a regular work week, you don’t often have four hours to spare for a round-trip drive to see a friend—even the one who wouldn’t leave your side when your dad died.
Had we drifted? Of course we had. But it was more than the traffic and geography that was the source of my guilt. I felt I had played into the system that was financially and culturally kicking her out. And I’d realized it for the first time just as she was leaving. (...)
Moving, especially moving across the country, is an enormous, yet hardly uncommon, life shift. Leaving one’s hometown to forge a better future in a new city is one of the most traditional adult rites of passage that we as Americans have. Eleanor and I had a few friends who left the Bay around 2012 and 2013 for career opportunities, to be with a spouse, or to take a rare internship. We wished them well. It was hard, but normal. We were in our early 20s.
There’s something not normal, however, about the number of people who have taken flight out of California in the past year or so.
If you go to Austin, New Orleans, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and Denver—to name just a few—you can easily find folks transplanted from other cities and states. You can also easily find a band of locals bemoaning, specifically, the “fucking Californians” who are flooding their home, driving up rents, installing yoga studios, polluting the local vibe with new technology, and generally making everything suck while sipping kale juice. We’re threatening Austin’s weirdness and erasing Bozeman’s cowboys. We seem to be everywhere you look, ruining other cities, apparently by not staying where we ought to—back in California.
It would appear we are fleeing California like it’s on fire (which, actually, it literally is lately); only large quantities of “foreign” people moving into one area typically disrupt culture and incite hatred like that. Yet San Francisco rent continues to lead the nation based on white-hot demand. This doesn’t really make sense.
Moving, especially moving across the country, is an enormous, yet hardly uncommon, life shift. Leaving one’s hometown to forge a better future in a new city is one of the most traditional adult rites of passage that we as Americans have. Eleanor and I had a few friends who left the Bay around 2012 and 2013 for career opportunities, to be with a spouse, or to take a rare internship. We wished them well. It was hard, but normal. We were in our early 20s.
There’s something not normal, however, about the number of people who have taken flight out of California in the past year or so.
If you go to Austin, New Orleans, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and Denver—to name just a few—you can easily find folks transplanted from other cities and states. You can also easily find a band of locals bemoaning, specifically, the “fucking Californians” who are flooding their home, driving up rents, installing yoga studios, polluting the local vibe with new technology, and generally making everything suck while sipping kale juice. We’re threatening Austin’s weirdness and erasing Bozeman’s cowboys. We seem to be everywhere you look, ruining other cities, apparently by not staying where we ought to—back in California.
It would appear we are fleeing California like it’s on fire (which, actually, it literally is lately); only large quantities of “foreign” people moving into one area typically disrupt culture and incite hatred like that. Yet San Francisco rent continues to lead the nation based on white-hot demand. This doesn’t really make sense.
by Diana Helmuth, Medium | Read more:
Image: Leonard Peng/Curbed
