I thought this was a nice retrospective on how history rhymes. I think there’s no question in the long run, San Francisco will be just fine. It has too many inherent strengths for it to ever become a wasteland.<p>I do think the city has some pressing challenges in the near and medium term. On a recent visit, for example, I was wandering through the financial district and I was kinda shocked at just how much obsolete office space there is. To the extent that those properties were highly utilized five years ago and still a substantial component of the city’s tax rolls, that’s a problem. There’s going to be a period of painful adjustment as commercial real estate values are adjusted, and the cost of housing is only going to delay the completion of that reckoning.<p>It also seems like the city has a disproportionately large exposure to the homeless and untreated mental health issues that currently affect American society generally right now. I have no idea what the solution is here, and I feel pretty confident saying that San Francisco city leaders don’t either, but I’m not sure anyone else does for that matter. So I don’t really hold that against San Francisco or think that it’ll be the demise of the city.<p>There will be some years of muddling through, but I’d wager a decade from now the storyline today will seem as foreign as predicting NYC’s imminent demise in 1977 or 1989 or 2001.