(I wrote this for Carol Silverman's intense and provocative "Dynamics of the American City" summer class at San Francisco State. It was my first school paper in over 7 years! For whatever it's worth, the paper received an A+, and Carol commented on it, "The same objective situation can function in both desired and undesired ways. It's interesting the similarities in what people want -- what differs is how they actualize it." I also wrote a Segway critique for the same class.)
Ever since the 1849 Gold Rush, the San Francisco Bay Area has served as a well-known mecca for migrants seeking their dreams.
While some migrants remain for a few years and move on, many choose to adopt the Bay Area as their home, and become long-term residents. Others expect to spend their lives in the Bay Area, but discover themselves departing by mere fate, or as their values and priorities grow in directions beyond the Bay Area's reach.
What compels people to settle in the Bay Area, often with near-religious fervor, while others find themselves packing their bags in disillusionment? In a word, freedom.
Three Bay Area migrants described the region's qualities that afforded them a lifestyle uniquely available in the Bay Area, offering a freedom of individualism, work and education, an empowering physical climate, the freedom to control their relationships with their family members through spatial separation, and the freedom of diverse consumer opportunities.
Conversely, two former Bay Area residents described the counter-effects of these freedoms: an unfulfilled yearning for open space, the unachievable desire for home ownership in their native community, and a yearning to live and raise their children in a simpler, less-frantic environment.
Kathy & Dean -- Natives of Denver, Colorado. Kathy and Dean migrated together to California in 1987, with Kathy's daughter Melanie. They live in a suburban home in San Leandro.
Catherine -- Although born and raised in Berkeley, Catherine moved away from the Bay Area in 1989, with her husband Paul. She now lives in a rural home in New Brunswick, Canada.
Danny -- A native of Los Angeles, Danny moved to the Bay Area for his undergraduate experience at Stanford, followed by graduate studies at UC Berkeley. Danny lives in El Cerrito.
Mary Ellen -- Born in Detroit, Michigan. Mary Ellen lived in the East Bay for a year in 1985. She and her husband Ed expect to relocate to a rural co-housing group in Vermont next year.
California migrants most emphatically expressed their new-found freedom of individualism. Migrants felt empowered to dress and appear as they wish, and felt accepted despite possessing traditionally marginalizing traits, such as a physical disability or a non-heterosexual orientation.
Kathy and Danny, both members of groups typically disenfranchised in Western cultures, suggested that leaving the Bay Area would likely condemn them to a marginalized life.
An intensely articulate, triply-marginalized "queer disabled Jew", Danny had not previously attended a movie or went shopping independently until moving to Berkeley for graduate studies. In Berkeley, Danny was empowered by wheelchair-accessible transportation on BART, and through city streets and sidewalks that did not excessively hinder wheelchair users. This ease of access to public spaces, otherwise taken for granted by able-bodied individuals, enabled Danny to feel less "shut out from the world" and "more capable".
Danny also described a culture of comfortable familiarity in Berkeley, powered by the presence of a ubiquitous disabled population. "In New York, they say everyone's a little bit Jewish. Here, everyone has a bit of familiarity with queer and disabled people."
Different regions of the Bay Area offer differing levels of ubiquity for members of marginalized groups. Indeed, Danny selected Stanford for his undergraduate experience, to avoid the intimidating experience of becoming anonymized in Berkeley as "just another" person in a wheelchair.
Sharing Danny's sense of empowerment, Kathy spoke excitedly of the spirit of acceptance she's observed towards individuals who transcend traditional strictures of appearance and dress.
Explaining her experiences and newfound freedom from size-discrimination, "In Denver, I was a street singer. Lots of people looked at me strangely. I was heavy. For all the different sizes I was, there were different treatments. People asked me "Why don't you eat less?'. Here [in the Bay Area], people don't look at you twice if you're heavy. Nobody's said a thing about my weight -- ever."
Kathy also experienced the freedom to dress freely, rather than formally. "I [didn't] want to go any place where they'd look at me strange. Nobody here gives a second-look. I'm another person, not something weird". In the Bay Area, Kathy felt free from social ostracism to enforce a social code of formal dress, enabling her to better live as herself without pretensions.
Just as a high-school aged Danny feared the anonymization of moving to Berkeley as a disabled young adult, this relative lack of oppression towards individuals can also encourage a sense of anonymity. Concisely put, "You're gay; so what?".
All but one interviewee described coming to the Bay Area for a work or educational opportunity.
Especially with Silicon Valley's job growth devouring prized young programmers and engineers beyond the output of local universities, software development firms often import younger, less-committed -- and often less-expensive -- workers to fill new positions, ensuring a continuing influx of new residents.
While Kathy's visceral emotional attraction to the Bay Area provided the initiative for her family to migrate, their decision was solidified by the abundance of technical job opportunities available to her spouse Dean. As a professional folk musician, she felt attracted to the number of performance venues available to her, and to the larger audience for her work.
Danny, too, migrated to the Bay Area for the educational opportunities at Stanford University, and found himself remaining for graduate school in Berkeley.
Paradoxically, when Danny later searched for a college-level teaching position, he found his work opportunities inhibited. With so many other top students flocking to the Bay Area for their graduate education -- and seeking to remain afterwards -- he discovered that "with so many unemployed Ph.D.'s, you can have [a Ph.D.] as a minimum for teaching one college class".
For individuals with specialized or non-technical skills -- or those lacking in a U.S. citizenship -- the Bay Area can fail to support a viable living.
Catherine's decision to depart from the Bay Area was prompted by her husband Paul, who was unable to obtain work in his specialized field of meteorology. With nearly all meteorology employment controlled by a single government organization, Paul's Canadian citizenship precluded his obtaining suitable employment.
Indeed, as a folk musician, Kathy would almost certainly have been unable to afford a middle-class Bay Area existence, were it not for her spouse's lucrative software engineering work.
Every interviewee mentioned climate as a pertinent factor in their choice of location, citing it for both emotional appeal and functional value.
Bay Area interviewees cited the attraction of "no snow" and a temperature that's "never so cold that you truly can't go out in shirtsleeves or a sweater". Danny explained the value of "good weather", mentioning the difficulties of driving a wheelchair through layers of snow.
Kathy felt that the California climate offered the functional benefits of eliminating dangerous snow driving, and the need to carry around -- and occasionally forget -- a coat. "I'm old and I want to be comfortable. There's not a coat I've found yet that's as comfortable as no coat!"
Those who left the Bay Area didn't feel that their lives would emotionally or functionally inhibited by snow or cold weather.
Catherine explained, "I like winter in general, so that wasn't too bad. The length of it was...Overall, I like having more variety to the seasons than you get in the Bay Area...When there's been snow on the ground for four months straight, you REALLY appreciate spring!"
Mary Ellen shared a lack of antipathy towards cold-weather climates. "Snow doesn't bother me much -- I grew up in Michigan! [...] I can personally imagine living a lot of places -- just not really hot."
One factor interviewees consistently cited was the freedom afforded -- or lost -- by spatial separation from their family. Dean was "happy being away from family" in Denver, a sentiment shared by his partner Kathy.
Danny, too, was happy to be farther enough away from family to render casual interactions impractical, but close enough to enable regular visits home.
Indeed, as Danny noted, the Bay Area and Los Angeles regions offer residents cross-exchange opportunities -- typically upon reaching college age -- and the opportunity to grow separately from family while still remaining an affordable one-hour flight back home.
Further from her family than any other interviewees, Catherine lamented the physical distance and financial expense of traveling between their rural home in New Brunswick and her family's residence in the Bay Area.
With roundtrip airfare approaching $1,000 per ticket, Catherine felt lacking the freedom to visit her family regularly. "I just wish I could hop on a plane every couple of months, and come back for a few days!"
Bay Area interviewees appreciated their ready access to a potpourri of consumer choices, predicated on a large, diverse population to support such a range of choices.
Kathy especially appreciated the Bay Area's diversity of ethnic culinary opportunities, afforded by its diverse population. "The bigger the city, the more likely you'll have strange little cuisines and shops. The more quantity of stuff from the rest of the world. Down the block, we've got Korean, Salvadorean, Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, Philippines, Ethiopian...the bigger the city, the more the city is of the world, and the more you have an international flavor...the more you can explore things about the world."
Dean, an avid collector of videogames and matchbox cars, also enjoys the multitudes of flea markets, swap meets, and electronic surplus stores that enable him to obtain rare ephemera, often unavailable elsewhere in the country.
Although many of the rarities that Dean secures could have been obtained through eBay, he's able to obtain more preferential pricing and access through his access to local, less-competitive informal markets.
Kathy also felt empowered by the Bay Area's opportunities for "night people", which free her from grafting her lifestyle onto a daylight schedule. "In the Bay Area as a whole, there's always stuff happening, or things open. Coffeehouses and shops that don't close until 3:00-4:00, five minutes from home. Groceries are open 24 hours a day. It wasn't like that in Denver."
Even as Internet commerce sites such as Amazon and eBay enable more homogenous access to diverse goods, live marketplaces are necessary to affordably meet demand for perishable products, or for immediate, on-demand receipt.
With entire San Francisco neighborhoods dominated by gay men and lesbians openly accepted by peers and coworkers, from where comes the besieging trébuchets to galvanize a demographic group into a full-fledged community?
Or, in a not-uncommon Cupertino neighborhood where half the block works on top-secret projects at Apple Computer and owns the same expensive consumer goods, from where can one develop a sense of uniqueness, and of a true, self-defined individuality?
Danny felt that the Bay Area offered "less gay community supportiveness" than one would find in a typical American city or town, due to the abundance of gay individuals lacking a tangible mission to bond around.
To attain meaningful community in a suburban San Leandro home, Kathy and Dean live in a commune arrangement with others of common interests, enabling a sense of community through group dinners and household discussions, often joined by friends of their household.
Kathy dislikes being pressed into an arbitrary community bound solely by coincidental geography or physical proximity. She instead practices the freedom to choose her own community, enabled by the Bay Area's diversity of people.
Mary Ellen expects her means of community in Vermont to be driven by her co-housing group. "When living in the city, and especially the suburbs, you often don't know neighbors very well, and don't have friends who live right near you. People who want to live in the group read and agree to a group values statement. For example, ours lists "We respect differences in spirituality, ethnicity, age including children and the elderly, income, sexual orientation, and ability.' So someone who wanted to live a life as free as possible of children would not want to live in our community. I like it because although there are general shared values it is not based on any one ideology -- not a Christian group, vegetarian group -- it's all kinds of different people."
Catherine derives her sense of community participation through her rural lifestyle. "It turns me into a key player -- I'm known to a fair number of people. Wouldn't have had that in the Bay Area. I'm in a situation where more people know me than I know. I go play [piano] in the schools, and the kids see me somewhere else and say "Hi, Mrs. McDonald!'"
Over time, nearly all interviewees described becoming integrated over time into their local environments through their networks of friends, and established reputations within their communities. Or, to parrot a truism, the longer you live somewhere, the harder it is to leave.
Catherine and Mary Ellen, who both yearn for the freedom of space afforded by a rural lifestyle, nonetheless described forces driving them towards a more urbanized area. They both described a tension between a visceral hunger for open land, balanced with their practical needs to live in a higher-density environment that affords jobs, transportation, and more urbanized amenities.
Catherine lamented the lack of modern internet access or bus service in her rural community, and expressed her desire to move closer to town. Living a 20 minute car trip from town, her teenage son Brian lacks the transportation to enable participating freely in after-school activities, and feels isolated from his town friends. Although she believes her children are better off for having moved, she's not certain that "they see it that way".
Still, Catherine feels well-connected in her rural residence. "With computers, access to the world is still there. There's not as many drama or theatre groups, but my life is too busy as it is. I'm in a good position now, as accompanist for two choirs, a church organist, and a music festival that I play for."
Catherine felt that "there was a long time, where I thought that if [my husband] Paul dies, I'd come back to Berkeley." But, the hustle and bustle that enabled Kathy to feel "uncurtailed" leaves Catherine feeling alien when she returns to visit. "It's like I've turned into a rural person. There's so many choices, but there's so many people, and so many cars, and so many buildings, and it never rests. There's no downtime...the Bay Area has just turned into Los Angeles north. Just the pressure of that many people at the same time is overload."
Although Catherine notes "there's been times in my life where I've really enjoyed that, too", she no longer seeks it as her dominant lifestyle.
Mary Ellen "really liked" the Bay Area and could "easily have imagined settling there", but her husband Ed has strong emotional ties to Vermont, dating back to his childhood.
While Mary Ellen and her co-housing group seek a rural area to settle, they expect to land between the cities between Montpelier and Burlington, where her husband Ed would be most likely to obtain work as a computer programmer. A purely rural area would limit him to consulting work, which would be especially difficult to obtain in a recession.
In describing her ideal location to settle, Mary Ellen, too, described a desire for a balance between rural seclusion and urban amenities. It would be "naturally, physically beautiful, that has a lot of rural area that I could live in. But, it would be relatively close to a university town -- preferably not huge. Some cosmopolitan, decent, interesting restaurants, a good bookstore, and a hospital. Like Burlington [Vermont] or Ann Arbor [Michigan]."
Therein lies the paradox in choosing 'ones place of residence -- a region's abundance of people both creates and curtails freedom.
The same masses of consumers and businesses that enable Kathy to "grab a latte at midnight" also comprise what Catherine sees as crowding and undesirable density. And the same abundance of performing opportunities that lead Catherine to experience anonymization provides Kathy with the empowerment of reaching new audiences.
The same Castro block teeming with comfortably openly gay people -- enabling a gay adolescent from out-of-town to experience the liberating realization that he's "not the only one" -- can also eliminate the community-building activities of necessity within another region's smaller, more oppressed gay community.
And the same freedom to live among open, unexplored Vermont wilderness that Mary Ellen and her husband crave hinders their access to higher-end technical employment opportunities.
But it gives home to their spirit.