Tag: san francisco

It took eight years to write the story of Richardson Bay’s boat community, known as the anchor-outs.

Living off the grid isn’t just for landlubbers.

An entire subculture of Bay Area residents survives by reselling wealthy residents’ trash.

After his parents pushed him out of their home, a teenager descended into the drug-fueled counterculture of the 1970s American West.

What happens when you ride an e-scooter out of the city limits — until its battery dies?

Beat poet and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 100 on March 24. Here’s a reading list to celebrate the centenarian.

In the Bay Area, there are two migrations: young people in tech moving in, ready to disrupt, and young people with other dreams — the artists, teachers, blacksmiths, therapists, mechanics, musicians — who leave because there’s no longer a place for them.

After years of feeling hopeless and barely human, one talented writer manages to find her will to live.

Many American cities offer the homeless free bus tickets to move somewhere, but do these relocation programs do vunerable populations more harm than good?

The merchants of Haight-Ashbury advertised a summer of free food, free lodging, and free love. What they got instead was a civic nightmare.

It’s not the pace of housing construction. It’s that the world’s most successful companies are gathered in a small number of cities.

Tech wizards may say they want driverless cars or the hyperloop, but what they really, really want is a bus.

The Golden Gate Bridge has long embodied the contradictions of the city it overlooks: ambition, connection, innovation, a beginning and an end.

Essayist Lynell George muses on California and the two cities—Los Angeles and San Francisco—that own a part of her heart.

In Wired, Chris Colin writes about the determined reverend whose church provides services to the Tenderloin’s most disenfranchised residents, and helps gentrifying tech industry workers engage with the marginalized neighbors their presence directly effects.

Have dinner with Harold McGee, the academic-turned-cookbook author who paved the way for Alton Brown and a whole generation of culinary scientists.

How learning to swim at 24 led Syam Palakurthy to first-hand lessons in gentrification.

In Radio Silence, Ian S. Port writes about the way musicians continue to get squeezed out of cities like San Francisco, Paris and New York.

What happened inside the Latitude Society? In September, we featured a Longreads Original by Rick Paulas, “‘We Value Experience,’” which told the story of artist/entrepreneur Jeff Hull and his group’s attempts to build a sustainable “secret society” in the Bay Area. Paulas has shared the following postscript on what happened after his story about the […]

They have astonishingly well-paid jobs that they don’t like. Some plan to stay only until their options are vested. Then they will move on to their “actual” careers. This population of the possessed waiting to be dispossessed spends an inordinate amount of time comparing the gourmet kitchens of different website headquarters. The top digital companies […]

Princess Anastasia was homeless, and lived and died in the Castro. Two different families piece together a life.

Alysia Abbott recalls being raised by her poet father—a single, openly gay man—in the San Francisco of the nineteen-seventies and eighties.

Save the date! On June 24, Longreads will be hosting a free night of storytelling at the Booksmith in San Francisco, featuring: Clara Jeffery (Mother Jones) Mat Honan (BuzzFeed) Susie Cagle (journalist & illustrator) Elizabeth Lopatto (The Verge) Emily Thelin (writer, Food & Wine) Dan Stone (Radio Silence) * * * Wednesday, June 24, 7:30 p.m. The Booksmith […]

The problem of wage theft is not confined to any one industry, ethnicity, size of business, or corporate structure, says Labor Commissioner Julie Su. Each year, California loses approximately $8 billion in tax revenues to wage theft, and Su’s office has investigated millions of dollars’ worth of violations committed by, among others, a hospital, assisted living […]

Fifty years later, he awoke one fine morning like Rip Van Winkle, and found himself again with his sea bag on his shoulder looking for anywhere he could live and work. The new owner of his old flat now wanted $4,500 a month, and many of his friends were also evicted, for it seemed their buildings weren’t owned by San Franciscans anymore, but by faceless investors with venture capital. Corporate monoculture had wiped out any unique sense of place, turning the “island city” into an artistic theme park without artists. And he was on the street.

One of the ways the site reduced danger for workers was by making it easier for them to weed out bad dates, from poor tippers to full-on abusive creeps. Providers could choose to meet only customers who were well known and well liked on RedBook’s forums, and some workers even required references from other escorts on the site before taking on a new client.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * *

In Guernica, Nathan Deuel visits the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and daughter and writes about how the recent tech boom has changed the city. Here, Deuel recalls being in college during the first dot-com boom when working for a website felt like a novel idea, and before, as he later writes in […]

Stories about San Francisco’s latest wave of gentrification—perhaps exemplified by the tech bus battles—have been everywhere as of late. But this isn’t the first time critics have mourned the end of San Francisco-as-bohemian-enclave. From “Gentrification’s Price: Yuppies In, the Poor Out” which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 3, 1985: In short, San Francisco has become perhaps the most gentrified […]

Wired senior editor Bill Wasik on the public’s changing relationship with both Silicon Valley and the technology it creates and promotes: One of the most toxic memes to waft out of the industry recently has been the idea of quasi-secession, whether it was Peter Thiel’s dream of floating hacker communities or Tim Draper’s plan to make Silicon […]