What to do now that cities are not feared in the way that they were fifty years ago? Politicians and pundits frame displacement as either an unfortunate side effect of urban progress or—in unguarded moments—a welcome cleansing. But it doesn’t have to be this way; cities can grow, change, and welcome new citizens without running roughshod over the existing population. It is a mistake to frame anti-displacement politics as anti-change. After all, change is one of the things that made cities interesting places to live in the first place. Immigrants fleeing Latin American death squads and poverty represented change in the Mission District. The difference then was that the old-school Irish, Italian, and Jewish residents did not leave the neighborhood under the duress of an eviction notice. Working-class blacks who arrived in cities during the southern diaspora not only contributed their labor but also helped develop a strong urban cultural life. Those who come to a city fleeing homophobia, wanting to start a band, or to go to school are exactly what a good city is built upon. How then have monoculture and commodity come to dominate?
If the working-class spine of a city is broken, then no one but the moneyed get to dream big dreams in the city.
These dispatches defend the communities that make cities an amazing place to live: the working classes, artists, immigrants, and communities of color. They also make two modest proposals: first, that extending to the excluded the right to the city benefits all, and second, that excluded people can be active participants in building better cities, not just passive beneficiaries of progressive social policies.
The idea of the “right to the city” stems from the writings of Henri Lefebvre, an unorthodox Marxist who proposed that cities were the primary sites of contestation between capital and working-class movements.5 This came as a bit of a shock to his contemporaries, who prioritized struggle at the point of production, such as factories. Today, with so few factories left in “First World” cities, Lefebvre’s work is nothing short of prophetic. Alongside the conflicts over the production of goods, cities are also the sites of clashes over the production of space (campaigns against luxury housing and for neighborhood protections), services (domestic and fast food workers), and human rights (immigrant rights, school-to-prison pipeline organizing). Central to the idea is that “everyone, particularly the disenfranchised, not only has a right to the city, but as inhabitants, have a right to shape it, design it, and operationalize an urban human rights agenda.”6 Thanks to their direct engagement with grassroots organizations, Lefebvre’s intellectual descendants have had an enormous influence on contemporary urban organizing; thinkers such David Harvey, Peter Marcuse, and Harmony Goldberg have been central to popularizing, updating, critiquing, and challenging Lefbvre’s vision.
Today, the right to the city has truly never been further away from reality. Every year, the National Housing Law Project (NHLP) produces Out of Reach, a survey of housing costs, unique because of its emphasis on the links between wages and housing. Its methodology is based on what an average worker must make in order to afford a two-bedroom apartment, a figure they call the Housing Wage. The report has consistently shown that rents far outpace the means to pay not only in high-investment, hyper-gentrified cities like San Francisco, but also in shrinking cities such as Detroit. In 2014, the national Housing Wage is $18.92 per hour, which means there is no state in the entire United States where a typical low-income worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment. San Francisco’s Housing Wage is $37.62, almost four times the municipal minimum hourly wage of $10.74. If current campaigns to raise the minimum wage to $15 prevail, the wage-to-rent gap will still render most housing in the private market out of reach for many.7
Perhaps the moment when one becomes a political radical is the day one stops blaming all of the two-bit players for the problem and starts hating the game. Some of the individual landlords the EDN protested weren’t just greedy, they were a cog in a much more complex urban machine—though I still don’t have a problem with camping outside of a mansion to bring the crisis of displacement to the doorstep of a landlord. The system of real estate practiced in the United States in a dismal one, a cocktail of some of the worst features of serfdom and feudalism. Some of the landlords we pestered were small potatoes—part of the sandwich generation who had to simultaneously take care of parents and children. They bought rental property when it was cheap and they had decent jobs and wanted to cash in on their investment. With the money flooding in from the first dot.com rush, it was hard for small property owners not to. Some didn’t feel like they had a choice. The profits represented college tuitions for their kids, an early retirement, health care and elder care. It was the real estate industry that relentlessly marketed San Francisco as the new frontier.
It wasn’t uncommon for advertisements to read, “Be a pioneer in the former Wild West of the Mission District,” or, “Up and coming neighborhood ready for a new sheriff in town.” As someone who moved sofas for the minimum wage, I couldn’t understand how in hot hell I could be part of the gentrification problem. But just as pioneers were manipulated by robber barons to clear the West, the presence of non-affluent artists, politicos, and punk rockers was needed to soften up the neighborhood.
Beyond the presence of the tattooed and the restless, there was something else going on: it was neoliberalism, something that my generation of activists associated with Chiapas or Bolivia but rarely connected to the home front.
In 1999, the American Friends Service Committee asked me to travel to Seattle to cover the WTO protests for their magazine Street Spirit. Thanks in part to the Zapatistas, the term “neoliberalism” was on everyone’s tongue. I struggled with this; I thought it was strange that so many people who wanted to change the world ignored what was going on in their own backyards. After all, if neoliberalism was simply capitalism with the happy face torn off, weren’t there plenty of signs of it in San Francisco?
“Neoliberalism” is one of the most abused terms in the political lexicon. Like “fascism,” it is hurled as an epithet against any form of disagreeable political or economic activity. Simply put, neoliberalism is both an ideology and an economic strategy aimed at deregulating corporations, removing barriers to trade and commerce, and privatizing public resources. Commonly associated with international trade, neoliberalism has found a second home domestically, imbedding itself in the governance of major American cities.
San Francisco’s economy has often been held hostage by neoliberal thinking, in turn fueling displacement and causing economic well-being and cultural diversity of communities to suffer. In 2001, fifty-two corporations sued the city of San Francisco over a dual payroll–gross receipts tax. The Board of Supervisors, fearing that the suit would bankrupt the city, voted to approve an $80 million settlement. The city paid for this by selling general obligation bonds—meaning that it sucked close to $100 million dollars out of the city coffers in tough economic times. The subsequent years were marked by severe budget cuts to housing, health care, and other essential services.
It would be a mistake, though, to say that the corporate agenda has ruled San Francisco without challenge and compromise. Grassroots organizing has extended workers’ rights and protections to non-unionized service workers through municipal minimum wage and anti-wage-theft ordinances. The city boasts 26,000 units of permanently affordable housing. San Francisco even has its own form of universal health coverage for its residents, regardless of formal citizenship or ability to pay. And, despite the best efforts of the landlord lobby, rent control still offers basic protections for renters who live in buildings built before 1979.8
Yet the fact that San Francisco is even more exclusive and expensive can be traced directly to the embrace of neoliberalism in a progressive city. In 2011, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors granted a tax holiday to Twitter, Inc., the micro-blogging and social networking company founded in the city. Twitter threatened to move south to neighboring Brisbane unless its municipal payroll taxes were forgiven. Local politicians responded not only by granting a $22 million dollar tax break but by also approving a plan that has contributed to displacement citywide. At the time of the tax break, the deal was valued