Why I Moved to LA, Part 2: Burnout

I've debated sharing the following thoughts in this public forum, but I'm going to plow ahead, doubts be d@mned. I ask you to read it with an open heart.

I wanted to run for office.  Yes, I even did run for office.  For years I dreamed about what I could accomplish, all the increased investment in high-quality transportation, transit-oriented development, and social infrastructure improvements that I could achieve as a leader in San Francisco.  I was convinced that those dreams would be most achievable in SF - and I was wrong.




A little background...
As a kid growing up in Detroit, I lived through the result of what happened after the automobile companies ravaged the transit infrastructure, promoting policies that put cars first and literally tore out miles upon miles of track to be replaced by asphalt.  Throw in racial and class conflict, and you had a perfect recipe for the prototypical American city, hollowed out at its core and struggling to find its identity.  You ever hear anyone pining for a weekend getaway to Detroit?  There's a reason you don't, unless that person happens to still have family there and is longing to see them.

Understanding this at an early age, I took upon myself the goal of making Detroit and cities like it a better place to live for everyone.  Mind you, I was ten at the time.

Detroit needed massive infrastructure improvements, and I designed a transit system that would shuttle passengers along major Avenues like Woodward, Grand Avenue, Michigan and Gratiot, bringing commerce back to a long-neglected downtown and hopefully injecting life into a city that was the "Murder Capitol of the World" when we moved there in 1986.

I designed a city and made cut-out buildings from scrap computer paper, including a city contained in a single building that would reach higher than the world's tallest building and include housing, offices, shops and restaurants, a ballpark, and community parks.

I dreamed of a city where people could walk, bike and/or take the train to work, shopping, and visits with friends, where whole swaths of underutilized space could be transformed into parks and gardens and homes.  I was a hopeless romantic (and still am, mind you :-).

Not unlike many others on their first visit to San Francisco, I was elated to find an American city which already had a functioning and functional transit system, with a bustling city core, unique and compelling neighborhoods, and gorgeous and ample public parks.  It was almost too good to be true, then, that on the second day of my visit  I was riding the train and saw two men, very obviously a couple, sitting next to each other, one's arm around the other, and not one other passenger seemed to care.  No one blinked - except, perhaps, me.

----

And so it was with great expectations that I moved to my adopted home of San Francisco in July 2000.  I could not only be out and proud about who I was, but I was very hopeful about opportunities to build on the incredible foundation of existing transit and land use development that help make SF the special place that it is.

This hope lasted, unfortunately, only briefly.  After only a month in my new home, I got some advice from a friend who told me to steer clear of both of the city's two main LGBT political clubs until I was absolutely certain where my political inclinations lie, for as soon as I chose one or the other I would forever be branded by that choice in any other action I ever took.  Shortly thereafter, I experienced exactly what my friend meant, as I stood on a street corner handing out signs and registering voters for Al Gore, only to find myself disparaged by numerous passers by as a right-winger for not supporting Ralph Nader.  Having just moved from a state where the outcome was very much in doubt as to who might win - the Republican or the Democrat - it was a real wake-up call to find myself in a city where the outcome was an absolute certainty, and the vitriol so disconnected from reality.

These two moments nearly perfectly set the stage for what was to come.  Ten years later, including seven on one political club's board, six on another, and an attempted run for local office, perhaps the most defining thing in my experience in SF is the challenge the city creates for itself - fighting over lines of division that exist almost exclusively in the minds of the city's own political class.  Ideological tests dominate over substantive discussion, and relationships take precedence over ideology.

These lines of political division take precedence over substantive policy discussion over and over and over again, rendering governing, let alone legislative, progress virtually impossible.  And what frustrated me most about that political detente was that it did not need to be that way.  SF is a city rich with history, culture, wealth, and engaged people, and it simultaneously seems content with eating its own.  To be sure, rare and compelling leaders can and do emerge (a few come to mind), even from a place like San Francisco where the deck is stacked against that outcome, but the forces with the most power in SF have little interest in or willingness to change the status quo.

San Francisco is still that shining city on a hill for the thousands of people who flock to it every year.  It is the place where the dreams of so many people finally appear possible.  It certainly felt like it could be mine.  But in a city where tens of thousands of people come to the table with the same general set of core principles, they still find ways to disagree, and the disagreements become that much more petty, that much more personal, when so much less is actually at stake and the basic reality is that everyone basically agrees on the most basic principles that motivated them to live in a place like SF (among other things) in the first place.

For instance, rather than arguing over giving $2mil, say, or $2.4mil to AIDS services (something everyone agrees needs to be supported) out of the city's limited available funds, those who support one side would proclaim themselves saviors to AIDS services and demonize the other as hating all people with AIDS, and those who support the other side would proclaim themselves reasonable budget managers and demonize the other as being unreasonable and foolish.  Neither of these portrayals are fair to the people involved and they preclude the possibility for a reasonable conversation about how we ensure we provide the most appropriate level of funding and examine the trade-offs involved with any decision.  Perhaps funding should be $5mil, or perhaps just $1mil, but none of those options would be considered because no one would listen to the other and instead make decisions based on relationships first, ideology next, and substance last.

I didn't disagree with the core principles motivating those Nader supporters back in 2000, I just happened to see it from a different perspective - as someone who recognized that Nader was a vote of principle and Gore was a vote of practicality - and preferred to fight from within the existing reality than in opposition to it.  That choice to fight from within rather than from the outside was probably what made me a "moderate" in SF, even as I allied myself more often than not with the "progressive" position on most issues.  Both kinds of opposition - from the inside and from the outside - are necessary to achieve change, and my experience in SF was that there was so little over which to actually disagree that those few disagreements took on a magnified importance.

I did run for office - once.  It was a good effort, but frankly I couldn't beat the anointed moderate or progressive factions and their ability to raise money at the drop of a hat.  On one side you had progressives who claimed to be poor and out, and who were well organized and getting thousands from interests like real estate developers, and on the other side you had moderates who accepted the label of insiders but who weren't well organized yet could raise tons of money for their own individual campaigns from interests like big business.  And there I was, in the same place as a few of us who weren't "sanctioned" on either slate and having failed (apparently) to be insider enough for either faction.

And it burnt me out.  I just stopped caring.  It was the same pithy fights.  The same washed up arguments.  The same old rallies.  And practically the same city as it had been when I first moved there 10 years before.


-----


So it was that, despite all my hopes and dreams in moving to San Francisco, I found myself open to leaving it ten years after I'd arrived.  Rather than realizing many of my deeply held beliefs, even just some portion of them, instead I found a place so inordinately beautiful and filled with opportunity that it apparently could no longer see or act on those traits.  After years of convincing myself that I was destined to be in a place as incredible as San Francisco, I realized that the only thing that I needed to see the beauty in was myself, and it was only by expressing the beauty in me that I would find it around me, regardless of the place I called home.

Now, for the first time in many years, I feel the element of possibility again.  The possibility of starting a business, of having a family, of owning a home, of making a life for myself that isn't dictated by the expectations of others, no matter how well meaning.  The possibility of who I am.

That possibility does not need to come from a place, even a place that shows as much promise and potential as San Francisco.  It has to come from me, and whatever I put into it.  Perhaps if I moved back to SF today, having had this realization, I might not burnout as I had prior to leaving.  And I also would not have come to this realization had it not been for hoping for so much to come from living in such a special place and leaving so disappointed in what I found.  What I needed to find wasn't in the place, but in me.

I love San Francisco and look forward to making many visits back to my former home.  I also recognize that it's not the place that makes the man; it's the man that makes the place.