Roads to Retirement - The Haight

Set in San Francisco's iconic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, this video follows three small business voices — Dave McLean, the self-described "godfather of craft beer in San Francisco," and Kristen Evans and Camden of The Booksmith, a beloved independent bookstore founded in 1976. Each shares their personal journey of building a life and livelihood in a neighborhood steeped in counterculture history, while grappling with the very real pressures of rising costs, razor-thin margins, and the challenge of taking care of their employees.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Haight-Ashbury, perhaps the most iconic neighborhood in San Francisco, made famous by the hippie revolutionaries of the Summer of Love and legendary musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and of course, the Grateful Dead. I sat down with a few local entrepreneurs to learn more about the Haight and its current state. Dave McLean has been referred to by some as the godfather of craft beer in San Francisco.

He originally made his pilgrimage here to follow the Grateful Dead and soon found the Haight to be the perfect place to combine his love for music with his passion for brewing.

Well, the Haight's had lots of histories, not just one, you know. I mean, it goes back to being a playground for the rest of San Francisco in the 1880s or 90s when the park was first built. This neighborhood has always been kind of a festive neighborhood where people have come.

Its most famous era and incarnation was in the 60s when a bunch of hippies were living here and there was a community that formed around them. It's always been changing, but then there's a strangeness to it where the more it changes, the more it kind of stays the same, too.

What's your history in the area? I know you moved here in 91, but what's your history here?

I moved out here from the East Coast largely to see more Grateful Dead shows. At the same time, I ended up also falling in love with beer, with craft beer, and the two aren't completely separate. There was an underground lot scene in the parking lot of Dead shows, and there were a lot of really good beers being sold there because they weren't mass-produced beers.

I really wanted to create things that I hoped would last and ideally outlast me and that were really of the neighborhood and for the neighborhood, a real community. These were really just places that were meant to be true Haight-Ashbury neighborhood places.