Welcome to the Future: Middle-Class Housing Projects

I spent the nineties growing up in San Francisco, which, like many cities in that decade, churned with swirls of startling change. Boulevards were beautified (although a shaggy indie scene managed to thrive on side streets). Coffee changed from canteen sludge to crisp black java, and still cost less than a sandwich. New museums opened. Trendy people pursued “desktop publishing” in warehouses long left to rot. Urban life means riding a pendulum between extremes: a city is always en route to being either a gritty nightmare or a bourgeois snooze. But, for a year or two late in the decade, San Francisco seemed to feel like many things to many people. Starter homes turned into desired properties. Middle-class homeowners unexpectedly woke up house-rich. For those lucky enough to avoid the era’s darker spectres—AIDS, an early wave of rental evictions—the nineties often brought the winning ticket in a lottery they hadn’t meant to enter.