Clearly we've touched a nerve. After running Paulina Borsook's How the Internet ruined San Francisco on Thursday, and Carol Lloyd's follow-up piece on Friday, Salon was flooded with letters to the editor. More than 60 letters came in over the first day and a half, and several more came in over the weekend.

The letters fell roughly into three groups. About a third criticized Borsook for disparaging the improvements gentrification had brought to San Francisco, chiding her for misplaced nostalgia. Another third praised her for expressing the sadness and outrage they felt as their neighborhoods were taken over by SUV-driving commuters. The final third agreed that the city had changed for the worse, but argued that it was unfair to blame only the Internet for changes that had been under way for the last couple of decades.

To show the number and the intensity of the responses, we've published a larger than usual selection below. If you've got thoughts of your own, let us know at letters@salon.com -- or better yet, join the Table Talk debate on San Francisco's fate.

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I found this article incredibly ironic. Let's see, the author of a forthcoming book on high-tech culture, writing an article about how the Internet has killed San Francisco, in a San Francisco-based Internet publication. Paulina and Salon, you have met the enemy and they is you!

-- Eric Murray

I might not make all the same cause-and-effect statements as the author, but there's no denying that recent economic changes in the Bay Area are having enormous, rapid effects on all its less-than-fabulously wealthy residents -- and that local press and legislators are almost entirely ignoring this truly ugly, greed-driven transformation.

May I also point out that, in addition to the displacement of real artists and "interesting" "flakes" the author is concerned about, there is a huge displacement of public servants from the very neighborhoods and cities which they have dedicated their lives to improving. I don't mean "improving" by putting up another high-priced eatery -- these are the people who have worked in clinics, schools, social justice organizations and the many non- or low-profit organizations that have created the very unique (and previously remarkably humane) environment that the new young rich have come here to co-opt. Please don't stop discussing this; I know a lot of people whose lives literally depend on it .

-- Eli Coppola
San Francisco

My heart goes out to poor, poor Paulina Borsook. The big bad men with money ruined her Manhattan and now they're ruining her San Francisco. Too bad the world does change. Too bad progress marches on. Too bad it ain't the '50s anymore, huh? Why do these particular types of rants always smack of jealousy of those who have vision and success? I suspect Borsook wishes nothing more than it could be she sitting in a half-million-dollar condo and driving an SUV. Sounds like she's sat on two coasts watching people zoom by on their way up the economic ladder. There's a trite little homily that's most appropriate: "Lead, follow or get out of the way."

-- John Dinkeloo
writing from Wall Street

Even if the Internet ruined San Francisco, it hasn't ruined Oakland. If San Francisco rents are too high, if the bars are too hoity-toity, if the neighbors think your beautiful old car is an eyesore, just move across the bay. You'll find all the poor, the artists, the anarchists and the ethnics. They all moved out before you did, and they won't ask the cops to tow your car.

-- Steve Mooney

I lived in San Francisco from September 1983 to January 1992, and spent much of those nine years reading about and otherwise studying the city and its environs. I've got some bad news for Borsook: San Francisco is going through yet another "iteration" (to use a valley idiom) of an old story.

More than 40 years ago, William Saroyan famously said, "San Francisco now sells what she once gave away for free." In the mid-1970s, a huge battle was waged over closure of the International Hotel by the leftist forces that -- if one is to believe the subtext implicit in Borsook's article -- were at the zenith of their power and influence. Well, they lost; the International Hotel was torn down and hundreds of low-income housing units were destroyed. Some of the same people I saw living on the street every day as a freshman at San Francisco State landed there after having been evicted from that hotel. They are not there anymore; they are most likely dead.

What is happening now is on the same socioeconomic and cultural continuum as what Saroyan noticed in the '50s, the hippies fought against in the '70s and all those "identity" politicos have been screaming about since the '80s. San Francisco is being ruined by forces of greed masquerading as progress, and there's not a helluva lot we can do about this City we love but watch it burn. Unless, of course, the poor decide to vote in a mayor and supervisors who truly represent them.

-- Robert Anderson

A quick note before you're hit by a backlash of letters from defensive (read: guilty) yups. The worst part of these San Francisco nouveaux riches is their lack of culture or good taste. You would think an influx of money would mean more of art, ballet, culture or civic projects, but there's nothing of the sort. They'd rather spend their money supporting another pre-fabricated neo-1940s swing club.

A year and a half ago Skyline Realty evicted me on a technicality (I paid my rent late -- twice in seven years). I tried to fight it, but I spent my courtroom time reflecting. I was sick of paying $6 for half a sandwich at Harvest Market, tired of feeling guilty for not wanting a Range Rover. For me, San Francisco got the spirit choked out of it when Klubstitute went under, when the Sick and Twisted Players ran out of performance spaces, before the F Market and the condos with a view of the Market Street Safeway.

I'm one of those renters who left the city (I've heard the poor sap who rented my apartment pays double my rent). In fact, I left the country to find another safe, close-knit neighborhood with character. I grabbed my heart and left S.F. with fond memories of a city that will never again be.

-- Gentry Lane
Paris

I was forced into the Internet industry because I needed to do something creative that would actually support me and my loved ones. I was sick of crack addicts sneaking into my building in the Lower Haight and stealing my jeans out of the laundry machine. I was sick of temping for 10 months at a time at law firms where people didn't even greet each other in the hallways, just so I could live in Bali for two months and spend my time in a place where dreams and reality were similar states of mind, where the community collaborated to create beauty.

I wrote part of a play about women travelers that led to my first Web job -- writing a "tax fairy tale" for a computer geek whose day job was tax attorney. He handed me a few Xeroxed sheets of HTML tags and said, "You should learn this; you'll make more money." That was in 1994.

Fast forward to 1999, San Francisco. I spend my time in a place where dreams and reality are similar states of mind, and the community collaborates to create beauty. I have a washer-dryer in my garage in Bernal. I spend hours doing things like creating interactive slide shows with photos the AsiaQuest expedition team transmits from the Silk Road; animating kangaroo characters; brainstorming in boardrooms where dogs run around and babies coo; collaborating with people with whom I talk and drink and rollerblade and cry and river-raft and attend concerts and play Scrabble and laugh; working in an office with puppets, music and masks, ginger plants and Ashanti wooden combs, seashells and plastic frogs and Legos and origami and balloon animals and a JFK Jr. shrine. We sit on the floor. The CEO went to Germany after college with $24 and invites us to Wildlife Conservation Society events. My boss, who almost became an astronaut, takes us out for margaritas when we ship.

My starving artist friends, some of whom would have had no choice but to take a permanent job in a bank or a law firm or insurance company, or who would have moved back home to Iowa City or to somewhere else where they could live cheaply, like Prague, are now making money in San Francisco expressing themselves: designing, coding, writing, directing, coming up with ideas, starting businesses, influencing others.

I am not rich; I haven't had time to fix the dent in my Ford Ranger pick-up; and the one thing I miss is moving through the jungle with the smell of coffee and jasmine in the air and the birds singing from the trees. But with leftover creative energy from work, I have been going home and writing a novel, finally.

It's 75 pages, so far.

-- Shara Karasic

When discussing urban gentrification, I always find it ironic when "progressives" such as Paulina Borsook employ the "there goes the old neighborhood" nostalgia trip, which they routinely castigate conservatives for using in other situations. It is predictable, too, that such arguments so often rely solely on anecdotes and hyperbole for proof.

I suggest that Borsook move to my hometown, Philadelphia. There's not much of that pesky economic vitality she seems to loathe in San Francisco. And I'm sure she'll be happy to know that the gritty realities of city life that she pines for are driving the yuppies (as well as working- and middle-class people) to abandon their townhouses in droves. Interestingly, the lefties here wag their fingers at them for leaving the city. Go figure.

-- John Griffiths

I've lived in San Francisco now for 18 years. For 10 of those years I've worked for a high-tech company in Cupertino, commuting in a vanpool down the now Lexus-/Mercedes-clogged 280 corridor. Don't suggest carpooling to these people; they all need "their space" and of course time on their cell phones.

Now in the coffee shops (increasingly Starbucks, not locally owned) the talk is of IPOs, options, SUVs and "bargain" $500,000 homes. Books, art and alternative scenes are not part of their reality. And these new people are very disengaged from city life: They're very white, usually with an MBA, and definitely wanting an urbanized version of Palo Alto. Their idea of diversity is having expensive tequila shots South of Market. They honk and rush through red lights with disdain for the strange, the edgy, the very things that made San Francisco what it was. I believe they will be very happy when the convergence of Carmel and Hong Kong is here. Then they won't have to move out of the city to Marin when their kids need to go to school. The city will then be just like Marin!

-- Tony Hinojosa

I agree it's a shame that so many of San Francisco's unique qualities are being diluted. However, I also think the characteristics of a city are tough to machinate. You can't keep the fairy-tale, bohemian San Francisco forever because the world is in ineluctable flux. So what can we do? We can't command people to care and be engaged. I think the best thing we can do is to make sure San Francisco's population remains diverse and representative by increasing the availability of affordable housing. Let's make sure a wide spectrum of people can afford San Francisco living; that in turn will lead to the continued evolution of the political, artistic and cultural diversity we cherish about San Francisco.

-- Alex Leung

Paulina Borsook's take on San Francisco's demise as being caused by the Internet just doesn't ring true to me. I've lived in the 'burbs here in the Bay Area for most of my 48 years. The high rents, parking and traffic problems have always been problems in the city ever since I became old enough to drive. People have been flocking to California for a very long time for our temperate weather, closeness to the beaches and mountains and often-quoted "laid back" attitude. There are high paying jobs here, a pleasant climate and a ton of other good things happening here. Let's not blame the Internet for everything.

-- Rich McIntosh
Fremont, Calif.

The article by Paulina Borsook is priceless. It's particularly funny when you consider that every group that moves to San Francisco thinks that the next group is spoiling things. I'm sure if you take the time to dig in the archive you'll find articles that despair at the hippie invasion and the great post-Stonewall coming out that swept the city. Somehow it's become fashionable to be poverty-conscious and to decry anybody else who makes money; perhaps it's an overreaction to the Reagan years. But then what do you expect from a city that has taxed many of its major employers out of town? Just one request: Call us anything you like, but please don't accuse us of being Republicans.

-- John Pettitt
Sausalito

My first husband and I lived in Berkeley while he went to law school there. We moved down to L.A. in 1965, a few weeks before the first free-speech riots. I was an artist and a reviewer for Artforum back in its salad days. All my friends were artists.

Except for a few who had inherited money or homes in San Francisco, the artists I knew in the city were all struggling desperately. The public schools in San Francisco have been a horror for the 35 years I lived on the West Coast, making San Francisco a very difficult place for middle-class families to live. One artist family I knew (he was a sculptor) had to pull their white children out of the public schools in spite of their liberal orientation because their small children were coming home bloodied and beaten up. (I think they eventually moved out of the city because of the schooling problem and the difficulty finding good studio space.)

Public transportation is another nightmare. Without a car you can't get anywhere useful in the city -- and never could. The horribly expensive and socially destructive BART runs from one minority slum to another. I took it a couple of years ago, looked at all the stops, noticed the deserted and dangerous-looking stop in Oakland where I was boarding, observed that the damn thing wasn't all that cheap and vowed to never take it again. Back in the old days, I and everyone I knew, no matter how poor, drove everywhere (of course, gas was 30 cents a gallon then, too).

Finally, San Francisco has never had cheap rents, or even reasonable rents. When my husband and I were paying $85 a month in Berkeley, the artists I knew were struggling to find places under $200 a month in the city. One of the reasons we moved to L.A. was because housing was so much more affordable.

San Francisco is -- and always has been, for those willing to look -- a city with a smiley-face pasted over its dirty and rot-encrusted body. All its wonderful Italian pastries, its pseudo-liberalism and its formerly excellent opera cannot make up for its historical and persistent failure to care for and about any but the richest and whitest of its citizens. Why shouldn't it be a happy home for the dot-com masters of the universe?

-- Joanna Koss

Returning to San Francisco in summer of last year, after being away three and a half years working as a journalist in the Pacific Northwest and the Caribbean, the changes in the city at first shocked me. But my surprise was soon replaced with the kind of gut-gnawing epiphany of fear that Europeans must have felt as Mongol hordes approached their cities -- no hope, no succor, just carnage. Finding an apartment was damn near impossible and I became fed up being trapped in the crossfire of rental bidding wars at apartment showings. And finding a roommate situation was even more Republican, commercial and mercenary -- no one was curious to know whether I was a student, activist, did a bunch of volunteer work or even about my worldly experiences, like the "old days." They wanted the cold, hard financial facts of my credit report before anything else. After all, they had to get the right roommate to pay $800 a month -- for an 8-by-10-foot room -- to help them pay off their mortgage in a neighborhood a few years ago they would've been terrified to have walked through in broad daylight.

The artists, activists, creative and wacky sorts, blue-collar types, musicians, students and freaks are fading from the cityscape, replaced by "Brave New World" clones from elsewhere. The Mission and the Haight are now neighborhoods of SUVs, $200 shoe stores and wannabes trying to be "hip." Bar conversations devolve into stock-option comparisons and how soon "broadband" will be in their house. My alma mater, San Francisco State University, formerly a place where freaks could find a place, now looks spliced together from various WB and Fox network TV shows.

Freaks are like the triangles in those intelligence tests they give monkeys -- we got a place, but the monkey as society can't quite figure out what to do with us. In San Francisco, the triangles had plenty of slots to fit into. Now, who knows? All the people that move here now are doing it because of what all the people who can't afford to live here anymore created. I wish I could cry for a manning of the ramparts, freaks of all sorts aligned in a common effort to repel the invaders. But the Mongols are here and they've traded in their ponies from the Asian steppes for Ford Explorers.

-- Carl Holcombe
San Francisco

I think the problem is really caused by something that has never occurred before in this area: It's just full. True the new arrivals are mainly due to Internet mania, but if we weren't near the saturation point it wouldn't matter so much.

And it's not just the Bay Area that has this problem. I now live near Monterey and housing costs have gone through the roof, not just because of new wealth, but new people. We have very limited resources here in California -- not just land, but water and energy needs too. And adding more people to the mix means that housing will be scarcer and dearer as a result.

-- Tom Galczynski

Carol Lloyd's article gave me some new insights into the changes happening in the Mission, and provided good examples of the complexity of the situation. However, I found she confused racism with class hatred. They are often intertwined. Racists often hide behind the more socially acceptable class hatred and individuals subjected to the ravages of gentrification often see the color differences between the rich and poor as a defining factor. Paulina Borsook's article showed a better understanding of the mentality that easily justifies stomping all over other people with the quote describing the incoming yuppies as having a "voracious sense of entitlement." Such is the defining quality of that class -- far more than the skin color of its members.

Lloyd describes "downward mobility as a lifestyle choice." Words that could only come from someone who always occupied the middle class, even when she herself made poverty a lifestyle choice. Real poor people call that behavior "slumming" and it's never a pretty sight. Lloyd describes the contempt she had for her own class and attempts to disassociate herself from it when she first arrived in San Francisco. But like most everyone else who engages in some form of slumming she dropped it when it no longer gave her the satisfaction it used to. She blithely assumes that anyone else can do the same. Perhaps because she spent most of her "impoverished" time with others of the same class? Beware of the do-gooder anarcho-liberal-lefty: The speed with which they can change will forever astonish me.

But a society needs all of its members (yes, even the techno-weenies). As a city increases its percentage of wealthy people, an adverse phenomenon occurs. People who normally do not get much pay have to receive bigger paychecks just to live in or even near the city. But people in the other classes cannot get their minds around the idea of a bus driver or janitor making the kind of money one needs in order to make the new, higher rent. Recall the public outrage during the BART strike over news reports that some BART operators made as much as $40,000. For the dot.com bunch that's chump change -- but how dare a mere prole even dream of making that much money? I'm all in favor of talented people making a good living and those who do more receiving more -- it's only fair and works out well for everyone in the long run. But must we leave hard-working (but less educated or talented) people behind?

Again the Borsook article showed a better understanding of the overall situation: For whom does the economy boom? It booms for a select class of people and a relatively small number of others who have the skills and opportunities necessary to join that class. To Carol Lloyd (judging by her article), no one else exists.

-- Steven Dunlap
San Francisco