During the years 2022 through 2024 when San Francisco’s doom loop narrative was at its height, much of the local media as well as conservative groups and observers in San Francisco were committed to the belief that the city was being ravaged by crime with danger lurking on every street corner. In those years whenever I wrote anything as mild as suggesting that maybe the story was a little overblown, or even just posted on social media that I’d survived a morning run and seen no crime at all. I got a lot of angry pushback both in comments and on social media.

Many of these comments stressed that I should talk to older San Franciscans because they knew how bad it was and they were the most threatened. This struck me as strange because, well frankly, I’m old. By the beginning of this decade, I was in my 50s and almost all my good friends in San Francisco were my age or older. Additionally, I spend a lot of time in San Francisco with my mother and her husband who are both octogenarians. It is apparent to me that my San Francisco, social world and social network is, in fact, much older than that of the average San Franciscan.

The reason I raise this is because the gaps in my understanding of San Francisco politics and in strategic thinking about progressive politics in the city is not because I don’t speak to enough old people, but rather because I don’t interact enough with young people. Just as at the national level, there is a disconnect between older, progressive, San Francisco, and younger progressive San Francisco, one that continues to be exploited by more conservative forces in the city.

For example, the few San Franciscans in their 20s with whom I spoke regularly during last year’s mayoral campaign told me that outside of their very small personal friend group almost nobody their age had heard of Aaron Peskin, and if they had, those young people thought of him as just another politician. That is not a criticism of Peskin, a dedicated and progressive public servant of a quarter century by the time of the election, but it a reflection of the generation gap in progressive San Francisco.

The disconnect goes deeper than that. For example, regardless of your age, you don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to know that San Francisco has an affordability problem, particularly with regards to housing. All my friends in their 50s understand that. However, for my age cohort that is frequently much more of an abstract than a lived daily reality. Many of us either bought our homes or secured rent controlled flats decades ago. While we have noticed how prices are going up, we are not looking for a new place to live every year or two or trying to find roommates who can reliably split the rent with us.

The gap is also cultural as San Franciscans is in their 50s and older can remember a time when the city was distinguished, not primarily by its role in the global tech economy, but for its avant-garde culture and politics, while for many younger San Franciscans the city’s image during the final third of the twentieth century is not a frame of reference. Accordingly, although it is important to recognize the significance of, and to maintain, some of the progressive cultural and political energy that made San Francisco special a quarter century or even half century ago it is also critical to recognize that we can’t bring that period back.

The point of all this is that older progressive San Francisco needs to find a politics that is forward looking and can cross generational lines because there needs to be some kind of synergy between older progressive San Francisco, and younger progressive San Francisco. Moreover, it may not be the most visible element of younger progressive San Francisco, but there is clearly an avant-garde, political and cultural energy there, one that can and should play an important role in the city going forward. 

A problem arises because these two generations don’t speak to each other enough. Because of that, the disconnect is easily exploitable. There are many young people in San Francisco, who would rather be folded into a progressive, cultural and political space then end up at workshops led by GrowSF but reaching out to those people and letting them know the alternatives has been a challenge for progressive San Francisco of my generation.

Progressive coalitions in San Francisco have always been more complex than textbook progressive politics suggest. These coalitions have necessarily had to be multi-racial, but also multi-generational and appeal to a broad range of constituencies on different grounds. 

The popularity of the current mayor Daniel Lurie, fueled largely by a changing narrative about the city and the Mayor’s nebbishy yet catchy social media presence, may make some think progressives are in a tough place right now. However, the recall of Joel Engardio, failure of the Mayor to respond coherently to the threats MAGA fascism raise for the city and increased resistance to Mayor Lurie’s upzoning plans are all building blocks for San Francisco’s next progressive coalition. The success of that coalition will rest substantially on how multi-generational it is.