I love this book, even though I don't see politically eye to eye with Solnit, or her artist-activist allies. It is, as another commenter noted, a panegyric, a grief-stricken song in praise of a certain vision or mythos of San Francisco, a San Francisco seeming to be slipping through the fingers and lost to the winds -- and that vision and image is worthy even if that stage was ephemeral, partially illusory, misapprehended, or completely real. I believe in the importance of mythology, and the significance of each person's mythic vision, and this book contains a perspective which I sense is partly real, and partly mythic. Which is as it should be.

Solnits' writing is eloquent, and she shows herself more artist than political activist in avoiding finding easy answers and easily assigning blame in the exodus of artists from San Francisco, and the loss of old neighborhood fixtures, shops, community and cultural centers. Far from being outdated, as commenters in 2002 wrote about this book published in 2000 (since the dot com bubble had brief blip....), the problems the book describes have continued and the city has become even more unaffordable and exclusive. Solnit doesn't really blame any group of people in particular, but rather says, "wealth has proven able to ravage cities as well as or better than poverty."

Some describe this book as myopic, and though I wouldn't use that term, I found myself disliking and disagreeing with the link made between artist and activist or artist and disaffected person in an urban setting. I'm an artist -- and one of my views of artists is as people of a certain creative, unconventional temperament, who, whether or not they create much art, or sell their art, or live in cities, or rural areas, with communities, or in hermitages, have a sensitivity that the "worker drones" or worker bees of the world, the 9 - to -5 -ers, are just lacking. And I don't think we have to live in San Francisco, or any particular place, to have this sensitivity, to be creative artists. If art is in your soul, you're going to do it and live it, no matter if you are in San Francisco or Siberia.

In her gathering up of the disaffected, and the disgruntled, Solnit casts her net a bit wide in her search for those to share the shade of the umbrella "artist." She gathers up the hippies who "would move into a neighborhood and then stop paying rent..." and also the punks for whom, in the 1980's, "squatting had become part of punk rock culture, because affordable, let alone free, housing wasn't available." (p 98-99) She likens gentrification to air pollution (p 100) and tells the story of a Mission district artist who made posters urging people to vandalize the expensive cars that yuppies owned. In my book, people aren't artists simply because they dont' want to work, or resent yuppies (now the reviled group is "tecchies"). As for me, I wouldn't want to live near spoiled brats of either end of the financial spectrum.

One of the most powerful series of images in this book show a series of buildings, formerly home to various small businesses, which have now all become Starbucks outlets. I actually think the book is more successful in terms of the theme of loss of culture, loss of soul from neighborhoods, loss of small businesses and unique neighborhood characters, than in any argument about the problem of displacement of the poor by the middle class. One of the problems I have with the term "gentrification" is that, particularly as it is being used today, it romanticizes poor, non-white areas, and many use the term in an overtly racist way, bemoaning the influx of white individuals into formerly black or hispanic areas, as if, in a reversal of the racism of the 1950's, white people invariably bring problems with them. But it isn't really poverty, or non-whiteness, which make areas lively, interesting, and appealing to artists, or the ghettos of East Oakland would be highly desirable to them. Nor is relative wealth or middle class status inherently problematic, and neighbors who pull out weeds and plant flowers, paint their houses or have junk cars removed, are not enemies of artists or of bohemia. I don't see wealth itself as the problem, as much as loss of soul.

Something Solnit doesn't mention, in her coverage of the loss of affordable housing in San Francisco, is that San Francisco has perhaps the stringent rent control and tenant protection laws on the planet. It is a city where property owners (which include small-time property owners that Solnit doesn't adequately mention, as the book is mostly focused on the "greedy" large ones) have to actually PAY tenants a very hefty "relocation fee" when evicting them. San Francisco tenants may not know what takes place in the rest of the world, but if they look around they would see that in most places in the nation, not only are landlords not prohibited from evicting tenants or raising rent, but they are not required to pay a king's ransom to get their property back from their renters. San Francisco has some of the world's strictest rent control laws and the nations' most powerful pro-tenant forces and progressive, pro-tenant politics & culture, but simultaneously has the nation's highest rents. This is important to mention so it can be seen that "rent control" does not create affordable housing, as some would be led to believe. Rent control simply forces private property owners to become de facto charity organizations, and pretty much guarantees that a newcomer, wanting to move into an apartment recently vacated by someone who for the last 30 years was paying a rent that was market rate 30 years ago, will be paying through the nose to make up for the forced charity that some lucky renter received for half his lifetime. So yes, it is true, as Solnit asserts, that the reason she was able to write this book was that she lives in a rent controlled unit, but it may also be fair to say that the renter who moves into her apartment after she vacates it, will also be paying for her book, and probably many other books, for many years to come. To create affordable housing, we need a system better than rent control.

Given the increasingly unaffordable housing in SF, something may have been lost in San Francisco for artists, but art can't be lost -- the creative soul always seeks new opportunities, and is not bound to one place. It will never die, but always be reborn in new form.

Hollow City is both a panegyric and requiem to San Francisco. Beautifully written and assembeled, it opens up ever relevant debates on gentrification, evictions, changing flows of capital and how a complex biodiversity of native San Francisco labour is being clear-cut and replaced with a the tech industry mono-crop.

alas, this is not an outdated book. sf has only become more homogenized since its publication (a topic that is crucial to the book, and covered very well in terms of past creative types who've inhabited sf).

the book's overview of sf history is fascinating, and well-presented. solnit did a thoughful, unbiased job of evaluating the housing crisis in sf and its effect on the creative energy of the city. her metaphors are apt, and overarching points are salient.

a highly recommended read to anyone who cares about san francisco history, or who has bemoaned the exodus of its artistic inhabitants.

Although Rebecca Solnit writes with a deliberate and sometimes myopic agenda, her style is extraordinarily effective in evoking sympathy. It is elegaic in nature and the entire book reads as a eulogy, a fact reinforced by the shuttered structures and funeral processions presented in Schwatzenberg's photo essays. The digressions into such realms as the origins of Bohemia don't seem irrelevant or excessive but merely an extension of the beauty of the writing and presentation.
Although the issue has become less pressing with the collapse of the fervor of the internet economy, it should be noted the type of mass evictions in favour of live/work lofts is still a common occurrence in San Francisco, and that housing is still beyond the means of many ordinary San Franciscans. Despite the less fervent pace of gentrification, those in the funeral procession presented in the opening pages will not be returning to their homes; the character of their neighbourhood will not be restored.
The work is a mild success. Although somewhat obsolescent, it is still relevant, whether because of its still necessary impressions on the hearts of those who read it, or as a presentation of a historical phenomenon. But furthermore, as a literary work, and as a visual work, it is beautiful both in its prose and photography.

This book has an interesting subject and lovely photography. I am sympathetic to the plight of gentrification. However, the tone of this feels as though she were a professional complainer. Neighborhoods change, that is a fact of life. The residents who were displaced in this book were undoubtedly not the same residents from the time it was built. You get the sense that the author feels like everything about every neighborhood is worth saving. It isn't. I'm not going to cry about a neighborhood with less crime. And what solutions are offered? Should one never try to improve a distressed neighborhood, so that no one ever has to move? What sort of building *should* be allowed in a city? Ms. Solnit has some very valid points in this book, but she comes off as anti-change and not really offering anything close to a solution, other than fossilizing San Francisco in the "good old days", whenever that was for her.

Rebecca Solnit's prose is beautiful and Susan Schwartzenberg's photos are visionary as well. Thought provoking. I recommend this book as well as Gary Brechin's Imperial San Francisco and the classic by Jane Jacobs on cities as required reading for urban residents!