San Francisco is looking to Detroit for ideas on how to rehab its image
Are we a model for other cities hoping to turn things around?
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It’s been wild seeing Detroit’s image in the national imagination go from “Murder City” to “Comeback City” — and the same thing happen to San Francisco in reverse. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the city has earned a reputation for its perceived decline, as the tech industry’s pivot to working from home led to record office vacancies, empty streets, a rise in crime, and lay bare the city’s problem with homelessness.
An Oct. 16 article in The New Yorker discusses the decline of San Francisco in the last few years, and says that now, some officials are researching cities like Detroit for ideas on how to turn things around.
According to The New Yorker, Sarah Dennis Phillips, San Francisco’s executive director of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, has studied “communities that turned their stories around — formerly depressed cities like Nashville and Detroit that had shown an aptitude for ‘constructing that narrative that makes people want to come.’”
“If downtowns aren’t a place you have to be, then they have to become places you want to be,” she said.
Ever since billionaire Dan Gilbert started going on a building buying spree more than a decade ago, Detroit’s downtown has become built up with a new arena, a new streetcar, and Gilbert’s big under-construction Hudson’s site skyscraper, all funded with generous tax incentives, and all of which created an image of a rejuvenated city that likely helped Mayor Mike Duggan cruise to a third term. But Detroit still has plenty of problems; census data showed a continued population drop this year, with Black Detroiters leaving the city at a high rate.
The New Yorker states that initially, San Francisco took on this widespread task of “urban renewal” better than most U.S. big cities, growing rich with “lush, landscaped parks, tree-lined boulevards, and world-class museums where there had been none.” But the article also compared San Francisco to being a company town like Detroit, and the risk that comes with that.
“If industry fled greater San Francisco, as car-making left Detroit in the fifties, a vortex could begin,” the article states. “And if tax revenue were so depleted that it required stripping services, the city could spin out.”
As the article also makes clear, San Francisco is still a bustling city, and a city’s “decline” or “rebirth” is much a matter of perception.
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