Research paper

7

The Gentrified City

Jimmie Fails feels like San Francisco: breezy, welcoming, a little weird. He’s a beanie-wearing, skateboarding twentysomething who grew up here and who basically only knows here (he left once for about a year, living in New York, but hated the sense of isolation and competitiveness). And he’s known around here because of it—he gets pounds and high-fives and hears “hey, what’s up” all around town.

So as San Francisco has changed, Jimmie’s life and his identity have changed too. He’s lost friends to different, cheaper cities and lost patience with the newcomers who view him, the native, as foreign. He feels less and less like San Francisco is a part of him, and more and more like an anomaly within it, like a relic.

One day Jimmie decided the best way for him to proceed was by dramatizing his life story—by becoming the star of his friend’s movie, The Last Black Man in San Francisco. The movie is a semi-biographical film about a black twentysomething San Franciscan, played by Jimmie, who loses his family’s big Victorian house to foreclosure and tries every trick in the book to get it back. When the film is released, you’ll be able to see him skating around his hometown on the big screen, reminiscing about what’s changed. It’s a kind of elegy to San Francisco.

When I met Jimmie he was in the middle of production. His best friend from high school, Joe Talbot, was behind the camera, directing. The movie was being shot in desaturated color with sweeping vistas, long takes, and backing tracks that sound straight out of Casablanca. So while The Last Black Man is about the new San Francisco, it’s shot as if it were very old—a kind of aesthetic middle finger to the sleek, tech-obsessed veneer currently overtaking the city. Jimmie and Joe are young, but they seem more at home in this old aesthetic than they do in the new San Francisco. They are too disheveled and carry too much swagger to fit into the new city. Seeing them walk around San Francisco is like seeing one of the city’s row houses still standing among a sea of glass condos. As the city speeds into the tech future and cultural irrelevance, they’re like living signposts proclaiming to others that maybe it’s not too late. In that way, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is an act of protest. It’s also Jimmie and Joe’s last shot: if it doesn’t work, if it doesn’t make money on the festival circuit, they, like so many other broke artists in need of a cheap place to produce work, will leave.

Calling Jimmie “the last black man” is obviously an exaggeration, but given the demographics of San Francisco, it’s pretty tame hyperbole: the black population of San Francisco is down to 5.8 percent of the city, less than half of what it was in 1970. The majority of that change took place in the last twenty years. There are still big Hispanic and Asian populations in the city, but their numbers are dwindling too. The Hispanic population of the Mission , San Francisco’s historically Latino neighborhood, for example, has dropped from 60 percent to 48 percent since 2000. If the trend continues, Latinos could make up less than a third of the neighborhood by 2025. San Francisco once was the most diverse county in the region, but now it is the only county that is losing diversity, while every other surrounding county (the suburbs) is making gains. The city will be majority white by 2040 . The exodus is a constant topic of conversation here. Everyone in the city who does not make tech-industry-level money seems to have one foot out the door, ready to leave. The old San Francisco looks woozy, battered, waiting for one last wave of capital to finish it off.

Jimmie is able to stay in San Francisco only because Joe’s parents, two creative types with a stable income, were lucky enough to buy a big house on the border of the Mission several decades ago. Joe and Jimmie live in the basement. But they can’t stay there forever, and being an artist doesn’t pay enough to afford an apartment in a city where the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment is over $5,000.

When I first met the duo they were shooting promo photos in Golden Gate Park to send out to people to raise money for production. They’d convinced five women from a just-concluded outdoor yoga class to hold their poses while Jimmie stood behind them and Joe took pictures.

“This is the closest I’ll ever get to doing yoga,” Jimmie said.

After a quick shot, we hopped in one of the production cars and drove around the city for a bit. Joe, who is a little older than Jimmie, pointed out the changes: the new Starbucks locations (several dozen), the glass condos jutting out between all the colorful old Victorians, the shuttered bars, and, most jarring to them, the new people—the ones working at Apple and Google and Facebook and the myriad other tech companies. They seemed so oblivious to everything around them. In polos and button-downs, they seemed too straight for San Francisco. Joe and Jimmie had observed that the newcomers tended to see the city as a series of commodity choices (tacos? beer? ramen? a condo in the Mission?) and saw none of the gritty weirdness underneath their noses. But you could tell, neighborhood by neighborhood, that they were taking over, now ubiquitous enough to become the norm, compared to which everything else becomes a deviation.

“It’s an identity thing. You start to wonder if you belong here,” Jimmie said. “They don’t even see me when they walk by me.”

Although some of them do. A few months back, a white woman accused Jimmie of breaking into Joe’s parents’ house (he was entering at night with his key). A few months before that, Jimmie was walking behind a white man near Dolores Park, a gentrification hotspot a few blocks from Joe’s parents’ house, when the man turned to look at Jimmie and, presumably fearing a robbery, ran through the park and right through an active set of sprinklers, soaking himself.

Jimmie’s view of these kinds of people is surprisingly sympathetic: he said that if he had as much money as they do, he’d probably be doing the same thing, living in condos and running from black people. One activist told me he actually feels bad for the tech workers who’ve descended on the city: they pay previously unheard-of sums for small apartments, get shuttled in buses to Palo Alto at 7:00 a.m. and back home at 6:00 p.m. (and often work through the night), take an Uber to whatever restaurant they might be eating at that evening, and then repeat the process the next weekday. Sure, they’re living lives of privilege, but it’s a particularly banal, almost robotic privilege that feels unenviable. Which makes it all the more frustrating that their presence is destroying the rest of the city.

For an outsider, it’s hard to get what’s at stake in a place like San Francisco. As a gay guy from New York, I can look at the gay bars in the Castro, an area of the city historically home to a large gay population, and think, “This is an okay gayborhood.” But if you’ve lived here for thirty years, your first thought might be, “This used to be a hotbed of political radicalism, and now it’s gay Disney World.” If you’re me, you might walk through the Mission, eat some tacos, and think it’s a cute neighborhood. You might not know that right above the taco shop is an apartment building where families are paying $1,000 a month for a room that’s ten feet by ten feet. You might not know that activist artist collectives such as Las Mujeres Muralistas painted vibrant portraits of working-class struggles and working-class beauty in the 1970s and that many of those artists have now left. But I think I got a taste of the stakes when I was spending time with Jimmie and Joe. I related to them, especially to Joe, who, like me, is white and relatively privileged, but still feels a duty to represent a dying part of his city.

We were in an alley close to downtown, a few blocks from Twitter’s headquarters—the same headquarters that got tax breaks from the city totaling up to $56 million just for locating in a less built-up part of downtown when I really understood the future San Francisco faces. The alley felt like another leftover piece of the city: it was dirty, there were syringes, it smelled like piss. As Joe set up the shot with his small crew—a quick take of Jimmie skateboarding down the alley—Jimmie told me about his childhood: how he grew up in this huge house shared by about a dozen family members, how his parents lost it because they got into some trouble with drugs, how he bounced among different apartments and housing projects around the city for most of his life, and how he feels extremely conflicted about the state of his city today.

“I never want to try to make someone feel bad for me, because everyone struggles,” Jimmie said. “But I feel some type of way about it. Just because they’re fucking up the culture.”

During one of the takes, a window in one of the buildings lining the alley opened. Someone leaned out and shouted, “Are you the Last Black Man people?” This happens all the time, Joe told me. The movie, even though it was years away from release, had struck a chord in the city. People here knew about it. We were invited up by the man in the window to what turned out to be a large loft split into about a dozen different artists’ studios. Two young black artists, Erlin Geffrard and Tim Aristil, took me on a tour. Geffrard’s paintings stylistically resembled ancient Egyptian art but with the iconography updated with things like McDonald’s signs and handguns. Things looked a mess in the studio, and Geffrard explained the building had been bought and would soon be turned into office space for tech companies. Both he and Aristil were likely leaving the city within the next couple of weeks.

“It’s not rewarding anymore,” Aristil told me. “You used to walk around and be inspired by hearing interesting conversations. Now you just hear people talk about business and about how much the city sucks.”

Beyond the intangibles, studio space is simply too expensive. Geffrard said he was looking at places in the East Bay, maybe Oakland. Aristil said he was probably moving to L.A. It’s cheaper there. It seems like all his friends are moving there, or to Philly or to Detroit. The Last Black Man crew chatted with the two artists for a bit longer and then said some cordial but intense good-byes. As I followed the crew out of the building I couldn’t help but hope that Last Black Mansucceeded, critically and financially. We’d just seen two artists’ lives uprooted by San Francisco’s economy. If the movie didn’t work, another two artists would likely be leaving the city too.

San Francisco has gone through economic ups and downs, but it never experienced the same slow bleed of residents and money as Detroit, nor the same kind of crash New York had in the 1970s. There was a bad earthquake in 1989, but San Francisco rebounded relatively quickly—it was not analogous to Hurricane Katrina’s effect on New Orleans. Like most cities, San Francisco did have its own FHA-spurred white flight. But, as San Francisco–based writer and activist Rebecca Solnit points out , because there was never a large industrial sector as in cities in the East, when the city emptied out half a century ago it was filled in not solely by working-class people but also by hippies, artists, and various other outcasts. That long and unique history of progressivism has also given San Francisco one of the strongest tenant activism movements in the country. After years of pressure, in 1979 the city’s Board of Supervisors approved a rent control bill that pegged rent increases in any apartment built before 1979 to yearly inflation. The bill also made it relatively hard to evict tenants in the city. There are some exceptions: if you live in a single-family home, which many San Franciscans do, you’re not protected, and if you live in a place built after 1979, you’re not eligible for rent control. Still, the city’s rent control ordinance is more stringent than probably anywhere else in the country. The fact that evictions are at record highs despite those laws shows just how valuable the land is.

A report from Board of Supervisors member David Campos found there were 2,120 notices of evictions filed between February 2014 and February 2015—55 percent more than five years prior. That number counts only the landlords who followed the letter of the law and filed notice with the city. It doesn’t count those who illegally pressured tenants out of their homes. Buyouts, where a landlord offers money for families to leave their apartments, are becoming common here too. People are being offered anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000 to leave their homes, according to activists. One of the only legal ways to evict someone who’s a good tenant is an Ellis Act eviction, in which the landlord “goes out of business”—that is, completely removes all the apartments in a building from the rental market. Those apartments can then come back on the market as condos. There were nearly 450 Ellis Act evictions in 2013 (a subset of the more than 2,000 total evictions). Ellis Act evictions can also be used as threats—a landlord tells a tenant to take a buyout offer or face an Ellis Act eviction. The nonprofit San Francisco Tenants Union estimates that for every Ellis Act eviction there are about three buyout offers. If you conservatively estimate there are 200 Ellis Act evictions a year, add in the 600 or so buyouts that might represent, plus another 1,900 or so regular evictions, and multiply that total by the average San Francisco family size of about 2.2 (according to the San Francisco Association of Realtors), you’re left with 5,500 people evicted from their homes each year. With rental prices sky-high, it’s likely many of those evicted from rent-protected apartments leave the city completely or become homeless.

Some areas, such as the Mission, are particularly vulnerable. The Mission is San Francisco’s main Latino neighborhood. Its relatively affordable housing stock, the fact that it’s serviced by both of San Francisco’s train systems (Muni and BART), and its proximity to downtown made it a perfect target of gentrification. There’s little neighborhood-level data on evictions, but between 1990 and 2011, the number of Latino households fell by 1,400 , while white households increased by 2,900. There’s less data on Chinatown, but Joyce Lam, an organizer for a progressive organization in Chinatown, told me that evictions are increasing. “Recent immigrants, they end up on the streets, or moving out to the suburbs,” she said. “Or mostly they just don’t come to San Francisco anymore.” Pressure on people of color has spread to other parts of the Bay Area too: in Oakland, the black population fell from 43 to 26 percent between 1990 and 2011.

It’s also hard to know how many people are leaving for reasons that don’t fall under any official rubric. Here’s an example: I was walking around the Mission with a friend named Anabelle Bolaños when we bumped into a family sitting in their small concrete yard outside their three-story row house, just a block off the Mission’s main strip. Leticia Guzman, sixty-six, told me she and her family had lived there since they bought the place in 1971. Many of her friends have already left, for Oakland, Richmond, Daly City, or South San Francisco (a separate city from San Francisco). Over the past few months, several men in suits had been coming to Guzman’s door. Some offered to buy her house. One said he was from the insurance company and wanted to check inside, but when she called her insurance company a representative said they hadn’t sent anyone. She assumed he was a real estate agent trying to get a look at the inside of the house. If Leticia leaves San Francisco, either because a buyout offer is attractive enough to consider or because she’s gotten tired of dealing with the increasing harassment, she won’t be counted on any official reports. Her sister Carmen, fifty-four, who has already left, doesn’t show up on those reports either. There wasn’t enough space for Carmen plus her husband and kids in the family row house, so she looked everywhere in the city. Finally she found a place, but it was across the border in South San Francisco. She’s not officially displaced, but she grew up in San Francisco and now cannot afford to live here.

It’s not just San Francisco—the working class is being pushed out of the Bay Area too. Leticia Rios, a nanny for a couple who both work in tech, lives in Mountain View, about forty-five minutes south of San Francisco, where Google’s main campus is located. She’s been there for fourteen years, but her rent was recently raised by $1,000 a month. Even though she and her husband have full-time jobs, they can no longer afford Mountain View. They began looking farther and farther afield until they realized it might not be worth it: between their jobs at opposite ends of Silicon Valley and the housing prices, moving out of the area entirely began to seem more appealing. Rios told me she’s planning on moving her kids to Nevada or Chicago. Her husband will stay behind until they settle into a new life, and then he will come to look for work. Because Mountain View does not have rent control laws, Rios’s eviction-by-rent increase will not be recorded on any official forms. It will not register in any future statistics about the Bay Area. Without such data, it’s hard to paint an accurate picture of the extent of the crisis. Most of what we know comes from census data and anecdotal stories. And that makes it harder to fight back against gentrification.

With rents so high, housing has become precarious not only for low-wage workers but also for police officers, lawyers, and those in other middle-class professions that once bought you a relatively stable life. I talked to several public school teachers in the Mission. They make good middle-class salaries, starting at about $50,000. That’s not enough for one teacher I spoke to, Jake Harris, to afford an apartment with his partner in the city. So he lives an hour away on the Oakland/Berkeley border.

“There are a lot of kids who come to school who need extra support,” he told me. “I don’t think it’s healthy for me. I don’t get enough sleep. It’s hard on my patience and I need a lot of patience to deal with these kids. From an emotional standpoint, it’s not sustainable.”

What happens to a city when artists, teachers, lawyers, and anyone else making less than $100,000 cannot afford to live in it? Where will the people making coffee for the tech workers in the Mission live if only 4 percent of one-bedrooms in the neighborhood cost below $2,500 a month, making the area essentially off-limits to working-class people? Rebecca Solnit calculated that back in the 1950s and 1960s artists had to work about sixty-five hours a month at minimum wage to afford an apartment. San Francisco’s minimum wage today is high for the United States, at $12.25, but a $2,500 apartment (which is on the very cheap end these days), would account for about 200 hours of minimum-wage work. That’s more than a full-time job, just to pay the rent.

San Franciscans’ complaints—that the culture of the city is being crushed by its rents, that the people who make the city function can no longer live within its borders—seem to go unregistered at city hall. While prices rose and tech firm after tech firm came to the city, its politicians chose to use the city’s limited resources to court even more investment. Ed Lee, the current mayor of the city, has been accused of having corrupting ties to the real estate industry here. Three people who have done fund-raising for Lee have been charged with felonies for accepting bribes from undercover agents who were looking for favorable access to real estate deals. And while Lee hasn’t been convicted of anything, his public actions have been enough to elicit protests. At virtually every public speech the mayor gives these days, he’s booed by activists for actively courting the tech industry and ignoring its impact on everyone who works outside of it. Lee’s most infamous tax break was a $30 million deal to Twitter to locate its office in already booming downtown San Francisco. In 2016, when the Super Bowl came to Santa Clara, about thirty miles south of San Francisco, the city threw a party for the National Football League. To get its streets ready, Lee increased police patrols, spent city money on banquets for NFL officials, and pushed homeless camps out of the downtown area. To activists, the event highlighted everything wrong with the new San Francisco, a city more concerned with the welcome offered to outsiders than with the lives of the city’s most vulnerable. Hundreds took to the streets.

“You have mass displacement, you have homeless people being pushed from one neighborhood to another,” Miguel Carrera, the housing justice organizer for the Coalition on Homelessness, told me. “And the mayor throws a party.”

This is in many ways exactly what the city asked for. The tech industry here is for the most part greeted with open arms. People recognize the problem of gentrification, but this is a company town, and anything perceived as anti-tech gets blasted by well-funded industry groups, by the mayor and most of the city council, and usually by many of the city’s residents. A ballot measure that would have limited Airbnb rentals in an attempt to preserve housing for people who actually live in the city failed to garner enough votes in 2015. So did one that would have put a temporary moratorium on development in the Mission. A proposed 1.5 percent tax on tech companies that would have raised millions for affordable housing was killed even before it made it out of the Board of Supervisors’ finance committee. San Francisco has decided not to bite the hand that feeds it, even if that hand is also signing its eviction papers.

I met Hugo Vargas, a sixteen-year-old who grew up in the Mission, when I was wandering around the neighborhood one day. Hugo was volunteering at a local community center and agreed to show me around. He grabbed his fixed-gear bike and walked me down Mission Street, past the dollar stores and fresh fruit stands and the smattering of hipster-filled coffee places and bars. Hugo told me about his parents: one’s a barista, the other’s a cook, and both work at Blue Bottle Coffee, one of the hippest and most expensive coffee chains in the city. They each make about $45,000 a year, yet Hugo and his family are constantly thinking about leaving the city, maybe for Richmond, about an hour north, maybe for somewhere else even farther afield. The idea that he might have to leave is constantly at the back of Hugo’s mind. As we walked, I wondered how two good salaries could equate to a life of precariousness—until Hugo showed me what $90,000 a year gets you in San Francisco.

We stopped in front of a four-story building and Hugo rang the bell. A security guard let us into what turned out to be SRO, or single-room occupancy, housing—buildings divided into rooms big enough to fit a bed, a dresser, and not much else. San Francisco’s SROs have been a backbone of the city’s housing stock since the gold rush. They’ve housed transient workers, new immigrants, the homeless, and, increasingly, working families. SROs were once much more common throughout the United States—they aren’t exactly ideal affordable housing, but they nonetheless were and are important sources of housing for low-income people. But since the 1970s, more than 1 million SRO units have been demolished across the country. They’ve been replaced mostly by market-rate housing. San Francisco still has some 30,000 SRO units. That’s enough to house about 5 percent of the city’s population. The city has a law requiring any SRO owner who converts a building to market-rate housing to pay a fee to the city to build new affordable housing, but that hasn’t stopped dozens of demolitions.

Hugo’s parents had rented two SRO rooms here, one for themselves and one for Hugo and his younger sister. Hugo showed me his room, which was about twelve by eight feet. His sister was there watching a small TV, holding their little Chihuahua, Novio. Clothes and books were piled everywhere, though the room was not messy—this is just what it looks like when you need to fit the lives of two teenagers into less than 100 square feet. His parents’ room, upstairs, was the same size. They pay $1,900 a month for the two rooms.

Hugo’s living situation was not ideal, but that wasn’t what made him the angriest about the city changing around him. That wasn’t what turned him into a young community activist. In the fall of 2014, Hugo and some friends were playing soccer at a local city-owned field when a group of white men came over and started explaining to the kids, who like Hugo were all Latino, that they’d paid $27 an hour to reserve the field via a city website. They asked the kids to leave, arguing that the field should go to whoever followed the rules and paid the fee. One of the older kids asked the men how long they had lived in the community.

“Who gives a shit?” the man responded. “Who cares about the neighborhood?”

A video taken of the incident went viral , and journalists discovered the men mostly were employees of Dropbox, a web storage company, and Airbnb, the apartment-sharing service that many here accuse of profiting off of real estate that could otherwise be used to house full-time residents. If you watch the video, it’s obvious why it became so popular: it showcased the sense of entitlement among many gentrifiers, and it encapsulated the mounting tension between the new and old San Francisco—the community on one side and the tech sector on the other. It also highlighted a huge philosophical gap that’s at the crux of gentrification: the kids believed that because they’d been in the community longer, because this was their routine, because they were on the field first, they had a right to play soccer there. The tech workers believed that because they’d purchased a ticket to the field, it was theirs. In the minds of the tech workers, it seemed, everything was a commodity—not just tacos and apartments, but the city itself. They had the technological access, the know-how, and the money to buy it. The kids did not.

This mentality is what New York–based writer and activist Sarah Schulman has called “ the gentrification of the mind .” As our cities’ landscapes have changed, we have too, increasingly viewing ourselves not as community members with a responsibility to each other but as purchasers of things and experiences. This is what pissed off Hugo the most—the idea that these people felt they had more of a right to space than he and his friends; that the amount of time spent in a community and the traditional ways of doing things, of accessing public space, did not matter, and only money did.