History and Forgetting in San Francisco

There is a lot in San Francisco's history that can help us understand the challenges the city faces today.

San Francisco has long had a complex relationship with its past. We see this in the national cultural gestalt where San Francisco is understood as a place to which people go rather than from which people come.

This dynamic has brought energy and opportunity to a city that has reinvented itself many times over the last century or so, but it also makes it more difficult to learn from our past-and easier to ignore the wisdom of some people who have been in San Francisco longer and possess valuable institutional memory.