The Cultural Contradictions of the Creative Age

As I stood cramped into a rush hour MUNI bus inching down San Francisco’s Divisadero Street, I heard someone calling out, “Dan? Dan?” Considering I live in Philadelphia and my first name is one of the nation’s most common, I didn’t jump up. But when I glanced towards the back of the bus, I saw an old college acquaintance named Mike.

Strange coincidence, we agreed.

“So what are you doing in San Francisco?” he asked.

“Research for my first book,” I replied.

“How can you live in San Francisco and write a book?” he blurted out.

Though taken aback by Mike’s question - which was tantamount to asking, “So, do you have a trust fund?” - I quickly replied, “I really live in Philly. I’m just out here for two months.” He nodded at my perfectly reasonable explanation.

“How can you live in San Francisco and write a book?” is, to reluctantly borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, a 21st-century question. In the past, the City by the Bay was always considered a writer’s metropolis. A hundred years ago, it was Jack London territory. Mid-century brought Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Today, Michael Lewis, Amy Tan, and Michael Chabon call the Bay Area home. These established celebrity authors can afford to live in San Francisco, but an undiscovered Kerouac or a budding Ginsberg never could.

While San Francisco’s dot-com boom may be over, the high cost of living reflects a “new normal.” Post-bust rents remain 76 percent higher than the pre-boom rents. Writing a first book here sounds preposterous because it is preposterous. That basic commodity Virginia Woolf identified as the prerequisite for the writing life - a room of one’s own - is now a four-figure monthly proposition.

Reflecting on my run-in on the San Francisco bus, I felt a pang of guilt. A few months earlier in Philadelphia, I had a similar encounter with a twenty-something filmmaker working on her first book. Chatting with her after a screening of one of her films, I blurted out, “How can you live in New York and write a book?” - essentially the same question I faulted my college friend for asking. It turns out that she didn’t have a trust fund either. Her parents in Georgia were letting her move back in, at least until the book was finished. 

Having been on both sides of this question, I’ve concluded that we need to be seriously concerned with the cultural implications of hyper-gentrification in our most vibrant cities. It may be gauche to interrogate friends about the phenomenon, but one can politely raise the topic to a more general audience in a public forum like this magazine.

Tennessee Williams once purportedly quipped, “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” His witticism holds much less humor now that an aspiring generation of cultural creators can’t afford to live in New York or San Francisco and New Orleans has been wiped off the cultural map, at least for the foreseeable future. Generations of flawed planning and transportation policy have extinguished vibrant urban life from all but a handful of American cities. For writers, who merely need an affordable room of one’s own, the hyper-gentrification of places like New York and San Francisco is less of a disaster than it is for musicians and artists who need exposure in high-profile cities to get noticed.

One clear result of hyper-gentrification is relocation. Case in point: a flood of young New Yorkers are steadily transplanting themselves into Philadelphia’s central neighborhoods, lured by cheap rents and an urban fabric reminiscent of pre-boom Brooklyn.

When so many of our creative-types move to places like Philadelphia, it creates a disconnect between locations where culture is created and those where it’s shown - a Philly booster myself, even I am hard-pressed to call it a world stage for art. I found a publisher for my own book almost as a fluke. Like a campesino coming to town for market day, I took the Chinatown bus from Philadelphia to New York for lunch with a magazine editor. With my publication credits, he said, I should have no trouble getting book agents to meet with me. The problem was that I didn’t know any agents. I chalked this up to not living in New York and just figured that I was missing the right parties - where the hob-knobbing literati congregate.

Months later, when I told this story to my book editor, she replied, “those parties don’t happen anymore.” As the younger writers have moved out of New York (or more likely, never moved in) and editors have been squeezed by rising rents, New York’s literary scene has been snuffed out. It survives in period pieces like the recent film Capote, more than in real life. There are no cheap bars anymore, and any apartment big enough for entertaining is owned by a Wall Street banker.

What happens when the culture creators get geographically separated from the culture financiers and purveyors? Will more and more cities resemble Washington, D.C., a place where great art is displayed but never created, and Philadelphia, where it is created but rarely displayed?

From my experience in Philadelphia, I’m not entirely pessimistic. While the eyes of the world aren’t on Philadelphia, the city is creatively stimulating without being economically stifling. I wonder, though, whether in a few years Philly too will also become unaffordable as the wealthy elite - currently ensconced in suburbs like Gladwyne and Bryn Mawr - “discover” the central city. Dinner with a few fancy bottles of wine at the upscale Italian restaurant half a block from my apartment can cost nearly as much as my monthly rent. Something’s gotta give - and I suspect it will be my cheap rent.

Draut, Tamara. Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead. New York: Doubleday, 2006.

Pressler, Jessica. “Philadelphia Story: The Next Borough.” New York Times 14 Aug. 2005.