Rebecca Solnit and Maxine Hong Kingston's Views of the Changing City

Representative of the sort of mindset present in San Francisco, both of these literary works suggest a distinct and separate ideological perspective that San Francisco holds culturally. Although the two forms of prose and diction are very different, Maxine Hong Kingston's being much more beat infused, they are both very successful at reevaluating San Francisco and it's gentrified yet still racially diverse population.
What Rebecca Solnit is attempting to do with her book Hollow City is depict the urban reality of San Francisco while illustrating the ongoing injustice that has become ingrained in both the institutions and individuals in power throughout the society itself. She accurately describes the police discrimination in terms of their effect upon districts' sense's of community and togetherness. She writes extremely vivid observational prose that values the knowledge and experience of actually wandering throughout the city especially on foot, this activity being part of the reason that most people who appreciate forms of urban beauty travel around so. In such a stroll one might recognize the shifting cultural base of districts such as the Mission, which due to the influx of upper-middle class whites has lost much of it's cultural base to a more modern and trend-founded subculture. By using a series of experiences and interactions throughout the cit as the primary means for making meaningful points about this diverse and complicated society, Solnit takes an original stance on the whole development of the city. Especially poignant in this book is her critical analysis of sites that since being inadvertently tied to one race have become very multicultural such as the black soul churches, and whole districts like the Mission which has become infested with unaffordable condos and towering apartment complexes. Despite the thriving artistic community which may be itself as diverse as the city, cultural clashes result often in discriminatory acts such as the evictions that occur often with illegal immigrants and overcrowded living spaces simply for the cause of inhumane profit.