City of High Spirits

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An unexpected notion occurs: Yuppies are, in a sense, heterosexual gays. Among middle-class people, after all, gays formed the original two-income households and were the original gentrifiers, the original body cultists and dapper health-club devotees, the trendy homemakers, the refined, childless world travelers. Yuppies merely appended the term "life-style" and put a conventional sexual spin on things. Together, the two groups have made the birth rate in San Francisco (12.1 per 1,000) lowest among the 20 largest U.S. cities. San Francisco Yuppies, if they do not commute to a Silicon Valley computer company, tend to work downtown.

Downtown has a newish, rising skyline, with the 48-story Transamerica Pyramid building as the exotic centerpiece. Since 1982, a new skyscraper has been topped off every five weeks. San Francisco's aggregate office space has doubled since the Haight's Summer of Love in 1967, and now, with 55 million sq. ft., there is enough to give every man, woman and child in San Francisco an office. Yuppie businesspeople, lawyers and engineers have prospered in this white-collar boom.

But many are now worried that the triangular district below California Street is becoming too dense and vertical—"Manhattanized." William Hambrecht, 48, co-founder of one of the city's most successful investment banks, has regrets. "When we opened in 1964, Montgomery Street was like a small town," he says of his office's neighborhood. "It had a sense of intimacy and a lot of small bars. Now it's more sterile and more like New York. I enjoy it less than I did." Like New York, San Francisco has welcomed foreign capitalists to invest in the city. Says Samuel Armacost, president of Bank of America: "I could throw a baseball from this window and hit 30 or 40 foreign banks."

Especially Asian ones, such as the Fuji Bank International on California Street and the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp. on Sansome Street. San Francisco now has fifth-generation Chinese Americans. The Census Bureau puts the city's Asian population at 22%, just about equal to that of blacks and Hispanics combined, and the true figure is probably higher. San Francisco has eight Chinese-language daily newspapers and four pages of Wongs in its telephone book. At Father Armand Oliveri's St. Peter and St. Paul Church on Washington Square, the altar boys are Chinese. If the last century's Asian immigrants (and the serpentine fogs) helped give San Francisco its Dashiell Hammett aura, the recent arrivals from the Philippines, South Korea and Hong Kong are giving it an enterprising no-nonsense edge.

San Francisco's compact size (30,000 acres, one-tenth the size of Los Angeles) gives it an advantage over sprawling metropolises. The supply of land is so small and the demand so great that commercial and residential real estate is at a premium (the average house costs $150,900, more than in any other city). Many people and businesses are priced out of the city. The auto assembly plants, the significant port facilities and the sprawling ghettos are across the bay in Oakland; the tract houses are south, out side the city limits. With its affluent tax base and light load of urban ills, San Francisco has been able to build a cushy municipal budget surplus ($130 million).