What do I want for the people whose stories populate this book? I want them to win.
In 1992, I drove a delivery truck for a thrift store in San Francisco’s Mission District. I’d loved San Francisco from afar for years, growing up half an hour north. On a typical day, we could pick up a sofa in the Bayview District bric-a-brac on Potrero Hill, and then steal a long lunch staring into the Pacific Ocean. We didn’t just learn how San Francisco’s neighborhoods connected or where to get the best cheap Chinese food or Russian perogies; we were let in on a secret: the mythical San Francisco, the tolerant land of opportunity and wonder, was about to burst at the seams.
In every neighborhood, we received curious donations: the abandoned belongings of the evicted. This was just prior to the official acknowledgement that San Francisco was entering a housing crisis, yet all of the indications were in the back of our truck. The wardrobe left behind by an elderly woman in the Richmond. Children’s toys in the Mission. Occasionally, the landlord would brag about the ouster. One told us, “It took me four months to get them out because of rent control.”
“Where did they go?” I asked.
“Oh, there’s plenty of public housing. I’m sure they will do fine,” he replied.
My co-worker John, who was a little older than I was, was a confirmed socialist. He had quite a reputation as the kind of guy who would show up, newspaper in hand at a rally and denounce everyone around for being soft on capitalism. I never saw this side of him. When we talked about what we were seeing on the job, he would encourage me to read about the unemployed workers’ movements of the Great Depression, where thousands of neighbors militantly defended each other from eviction. He convinced me to read Engels’s “The Housing Question.”1
My activist feet had been wet since high school, politicized through a combination of punk rock, fear of nuclear weapons, and an aborted Nazi skinhead invasion of my hometown. Because of what we saw every day on the job, right to housing stuck in my gut. On the truck I came up with a plan: we would organize tenant councils around specific evictions happening in their buildings or neighborhoods. These tenant councils would form a network, which would then work in solidarity with others for the long-term. The Eviction Defense Network (EDN) was born.
Because I was young, I was certain that no one in San Francisco besides our young organization knew what was to be done. In my mind at the time, the existing tenant rights community was too fixated on electoral fights to be of much use. I believed that affordable housing providers simply compromised politically. (Today, from the vantage point of a nonprofit job, I’m fully aware of my self-righteousness and lack of nuance.)
The EDN played an important role in San Francisco for a while. We were relentlessly independent. Funding a small office and phone with “Rock Against Rent” benefits at a local bar allowed us a degree of autonomy not granted to city-funded organizations. If your grandmother were being evicted, we’d go picket her landlord’s home. If a person with AIDS were being tossed out, we’d find the landlord’s business and shut it down. We were a pain in the ass and proud of it. We never succeeded in building the type of tenant syndicalism we envisioned, but our actions had an impact. Often, the extra pressure would prevent an eviction or at least leverage relocation efforts. When the landlords managed to place a rent control repeal on the ballot, we even ditched our dogmatic stance on electoral politics and joined with others in the tenant movement and helped beat it back by a big majority.
Because of our independence and chutzpah, eventually tenants of public housing reached out for us to join them in their corner of the housing crisis. Their problems were much different than that of the tenants in the private market who we were already working with. Instead of being pushed out solely for private profits, these tenants were caught up in an intricate web of privatization and structural racism. The Clinton administration (as you will read in Chapter 1) decided that the way to deal with public housing’s problems was with a wrecking ball. A typical plan would preclude most of the tenants from returning.
As I got to know the community of North Beach public housing, I learned from them the history of the “other” San Francisco. In 1942, southern black workers were recruited to work in World War II industries in the Bay Area. In San Francisco they settled in the Fillmore District, housed in the homes of Japanese people interned after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Post-war, the Fillmore thrived with black small businesses, jazz clubs, and a strong community. However, this too was not allowed to stand.
The Urban Renewal Act of 1949 allowed local governments to create redevelopment agencies that were able to seize private property through powers of eminent domain. All that was needed was the declaration that a neighborhood was blighted. The fact that the Fillmore had very little blight did not deter the San Francisco Housing Authority from a demolition rampage that displaced over 17,000 residents.
As an outsider, it was impossible to effectively organize alongside public housing residents without understanding the generational impacts of displacement. It would have been easy for me to frame the crisis in terms of cold public policy or my radical utopian aspirations. But for the people I was working with, displacement was just part of a long history of racism and to some minds a genocidal master plan.2
This experience changed me, turning me into the type of urbanist I am today. At the beginning, I didn’t understand the finer contours of institutional racism. If I ever fixate too much on the impacts of white supremacy in the city, it’s because of the stories tenants shared of regular displacement and discrimination.
My love of cities is untarnished and still a little romantic. The city is a place where people from all over the world are concentrated and have the potential to meet and make common cause. Seeing the twin engines of displacement through the market with that of the state has made me extremely leery of complete reliance on either as the only solution for the urban crisis. Today, despite many dozens of well-fought campaigns, San Francisco is even more exclusive and expensive. A modest two-bedroom apartment rents for about $4,000. The city as it is developed and redeveloped bears little resemblance to elected officials’ rhetoric about a sharing economy.3
Cities simultaneously and effortlessly embrace both utopian and dystopian potentials. Most of them were born from human-caused ecological disasters—the clear cutting of forests, the paving of rivers and creeks. Today, the solutions to climate change are in part urban. Density can prevent sprawl and robust public transportation is the best way to cleave drivers from private automobiles. Through zoning and redlining, the political economy of cities has always been shaped by racism and white supremacy. It is in cities where oppressed people most often find each other, demand self-determination, and often forge coalitions. Dour, alienated architecture argues with vibrant design. Cities offer up the worst that popular culture can conjure and also give birth to rebel music such as hip-hop and punk, which in turn become the mass culture of another decade. Displacement replaces radical potential with spectacle. It is the change that kills off all other positive changes.
It doesn’t really matter if one likes or dislikes cities. In 2008, for the first time, the percentage of the world’s population living in cities outpaced those living in rural areas, and that population is likely to grow for the next few decades.4 This makes questions about who governs, lives in, and is excluded from cities all the more critical to those who wish to chart a course for a more egalitarian world.
Throughout this book, I use the word “displacement” instead of “gentrification” in order to emphasize the result of uncontrolled property speculation and the impacts this process has on everyday people. The definition of “gentrification” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is precise enough: the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle-class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces poorer residents. However, the way the term is used often lacks the same precision. It is not uncommon to hear, as one liberal San Francisco supervisor opined, “A little gentrification is a good thing.” Worlds of contradictions live within this deceptively simple sentence. What is usually meant is that neighborhoods need certain things, like grocery stores and basic infrastructure, to