The enterprise zone economic development strategy grants corporations tax breaks and other advantages in exchange for doing business in an economically downtrodden neighborhood. Even though it is a conservative approach, based on incentives, most enterprise zones at least require the beneficiary businesses to commit to certain levels of local hiring and other community benefits. One problem is that after four decades of existence, they have shown little positive impact. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, employment rates within enterprise zones are no different than similar areas outside of them.9
The Twitter agreement didn’t secure any benefits in a specific, legally binding manner. Tech companies have been widely criticized for promoting media stunts such as community cleanup days in place of grassroots economic development initiatives. Steve Woo, a community organizer with the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, remarked, “The enterprise zone in the middle of Market Street was created by city officials without any specific commitment of addressing [the community’s] needs and instead prioritized the needs of Big Business.”
Even a progressive official such as Kim, who described herself as philosophically against such tax breaks, felt that she had to do business with Twitter. She pointed out in a public hearing that, without the legislation, all of the revenue from Twitter’s payroll tax would leave San Francisco for the suburbs, and four hundred jobs would disappear from the local economy. Three years later, the tax break has cost the city $56 million. Advocates for the legislation pointed to the boarded-up storefronts on Market Street, and to the “seediness” of the area, claiming it was ripe for renewal. Kim was right—the choice to grant tax breaks was one choice among many that were all nearly as bad. It is a shining example that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic strategy but also works to narrow what people see as possible options. After all, progressives hadn’t put forward their own plan to breath life into boarded-up Market Street—it’s no surprise that new money allied with old corporate property owners and built a coalition to reap massive profits with little thought to community impact.
Other community voices, such as the South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN), cited fears of displacement from a second dot-com economic boom. Neighborhoods bordering the “Twitter Zone” are largely working class and consist predominantly of renters. Supporters of the zone pointed out that these neighborhoods were in need of jobs and uplift and argued that because of decades of progressive zoning changes the neighborhoods were immune to gentrification.
The Twitter tax break has proved that many of the community’s fears are correct. A non-subsidized one-bedroom apartment in the neighboring South of Market area starts at about $2,800 and can rent for as much as $8,000 a month. Angelica Cabande of SOMCAN, who led the attempt to defeat the Twitter tax break, explained, “City and state officials have been preaching that everyone needs to buckle down and make responsible decisions and make due sacrifices for the betterment of everyone; it doesn’t make sense that big companies like Twitter get a tax break.” Such is the dilemma facing politicians and policy makers. Employers like Twitter are able to move their offices much more easily than factories and plants did in the past, and this, combined with the current dearth of large employers, leaves cities hostage to corporate demands. It’s the neoliberal economic model applied to local neighborhoods.
Twitter’s economic blackmail has started a trend. Even before the ink had dried on this deal, another company, Zynga.com, delivered a demand of its own: stop taxing stock options, they told the city. Again the Board of Supervisors and the mayor obliged. What this is may be as simple as the politics of a hostage situation: give us the money or we’ll kill the jobs. As you will read, the neoliberal fingerprints are also found all over the demolition of public housing and the weakening of rent control protections.
Looking for the North Star: Radical Community Organizing in the 1990s Bay Area
When I first started organizing, many veteran activists took it upon themselves to buy me a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. At one point, I had about a dozen copies on my bookshelf, all of which remained unopened until the latter part of the decade. Although community organizing had been going on in the United States since the first Native uprising, Alinsky, a brilliant and cantankerous Jewish man from Chicago, was often portrayed as its “godfather.” In the early 1990s, several authors and organizers were starting to question Alinsky’s large footprint on social justice work, pointing out a conflicted history of racial justice as well as an economy that was shifting from surplus to austerity.10
What Alinsky contributed was a coherent model, a set of tactics and strategies that were appropriate to large portions of America’s working and middle classes in post-WWII America. He was not ambivalent about the need to shift power away from what today’s activists call the 1 percent toward the 99 percent. Alinsky upheld that conflict, embodied in creative direct action, was essential in empowering the powerless.11 He advocated permanent organizations, rooted in neighborhoods. He wasn’t a Leninist and despised authoritarian versions of socialism. He believed that economic inequality within capitalism would always destroy the potential for freedom. In that sense, he would have been a logical grandfather for a new generation of anti-authoritarian organizers.12 The fact that so many of the organizations that still upheld Alinsky seemed to be tied to the Democratic Party prevented us from a serious study of his ideas.13
He was a complex thinker, and I encourage anyone whose understanding of Alinsky stems from either right-wing Obama conspiracy theories or left-wing diatribes to get to know him in his own words. Alinsky was firmly a man of the progressive left and would have been saddened to know that people who wanted to reinforce the privileges of the already intensely privileged used his teachings.14
Alinsky believed that the United States held unlimited potential for deep democracy. He was a patriot who encouraged organizers to build on beliefs and traditions of the people they organize and situate their stories within American democratic traditions. This would later put him at odds with those radical organizers inspired by Third World revolutions, who had arrived at the conclusion that the United States was an unreformable and oppressive power, corrupt to the core. When considering Alinsky’s importance today, it is more useful to focus on the challenges he posed to organizers, rather than on some of his own flawed conclusions. What forms of radicalism can everyday people actually relate to? How do you organize in a country where most workers identify with, or aspire to be part of, the middle class?15
Much has been written about Alinsky’s struggles with organizing in the context of racialized capitalism. It’s worth exploring this in order to gain an understanding of why so many activists of my generation discounted his importance—and also to complicate simplistic interpretations of his chauvinism. Alinsky’s signature organizing project was in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, the one made famous by Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle.16 The neighborhood council he created, the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC), helped to transform a beaten down area into a healthier (white) working-class area with improved housing, social services, and improved conditions in the neighborhood’s warehouses.
Alinsky’s critics point out that his reluctance to face race with working-class whites allowed the virus of white supremacy to fester. Alinsky’s friend and biographer Nicholas Von Hoffman commented on the irony that BYNC’s motto was “We the people will determine our own destiny,” and that destiny was purely white.17 The same community organizing skills used to improve the neighborhood could be employed in the service of reactionary racism. This pointed to one of the limits of the Alinsky model, which was dependent on winning the favor of established institutions like churches and unions. If these institutions were contaminated with racism, so would be the community organization they supported.
Alinsky hated this state of affairs but was ultimately caught inside the box of his own framework. Too much of what we now call popular education integrated