“I don’t know. You try
to build housing
in this city and they sue you.”
“What are you building here?”
“Condos—higher end.”
– Conversation with a developer
There are too many projects happening at the same time and none of them are managed in any sensible way. No one has time, or cares to pay attention to the details—we do, but we lose money because we care. It’s pure greed—everyone wants to develop as much as they can and make as much money as possible. It’s crazy.
– Landscape architect
Gas station at the edge of South Park and Fourth Street
Architect’s office
Condiment City, 2000.
San Francisco, Capital of theTwenty-First Century
The St. John Coltrane congregation’s ceremonial march to a temporary site after their eviction.
Saturday night a new bar called Fly opens on Divisadero Street and immediately becomes a mecca for white kids. Sunday evening the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church a few blocks down the boulevard holds a benefit to help it relocate from its home of twenty-nine years. And this bar and this church aren’t even in the San Francisco neighborhoods that are being most rapidly changed. What’s happening on Divisadero Street in the Western Addition is just the spillover from the wild mutation of the Mission District, once a bastion of Latino culture and cheap housing, and of the formerly industrial South of Market, districts that are becoming the global capital of the Internet economy.
San Francisco has been for most of its 150-year existence both a refuge and an anomaly. Soon it will be neither. Gentrification is transforming the city by driving out the poor and working class, including those who have chosen to give their lives over to unlucrative pursuits such as art, activism, social experimentation, social service. But gentrification is just the fin above water. Below is the rest of the shark: a new American economy in which most of us will be poorer, a few will be far richer, and everything will be faster, more homogenous and more controlled or controllable. The technology boom and the accompanying housing crisis have fast-forwarded San Francisco into the newest version of the American future, a version that also is being realized in Boston, Seattle, and other cities from New York and Atlanta to Denver and Portland.
A decade ago Los Angeles looked like the future—urban decay, open warfare, segregation, despair, injustice and corruption—but the new future looks like San Francisco: a frenzy of financial speculation, covert coercions, overt erasures, a barrage of novelty-item restaurants, websites, technologies and trends, the despair of unemployment replaced by the numbness of incessant work hours and the anxiety of destabilized jobs, homes and neighborhoods. Thirty-five percent of the venture capital in this country is in the Bay Area, along with 30 percent of the multimedia/Internet businesses, and the boom that started in Silicon Valley has produced a ripple effect throughout the region from south of San Jose to Napa and Sonoma in the north.1
San Francisco has had the most expensive housing of any major American city in the nation for two decades, but in the past few years housing prices—both sales and rents—have been skyrocketing, along with commercial rents. New businesses are coming in at a hectic pace, and they in turn generate new boutiques, restaurants and bars that displace earlier businesses, particularly nonprofits, and the new industry’s workers have been outbidding for rentals and buying houses out from under tenants at a breakneck pace. Regionally, home sale and rental prices have gone up by 30 percent over the past three years, but the rate of increase is far more dramatic in San Francisco (where rents rose 37 percent from 1996 to 1997, before the boom really hit, and nowadays can go up 20 percent in less than six months in some neighborhoods, vacancy rates are below 1 percent, and houses routinely sell for a hundred thousand dollars over offering price).2
Part of the cause is the 70,000 or so jobs created in the Bay Area annually, nearly half a million since 1995.3 Evictions have skyrocketed to make way for the new workers and profiteers of the new industries; at last estimate there were seven official evictions a day in San Francisco, and 70 percent of those evicted leave the city.4 For decades San Francisco has been retooling itself to make tourism its primary industry, but in late 1998 a city survey found nearly as many people were employed in the brand-new Internet/multimedia industry as in the old hotel industry, 17,600 compared to 19,200, and that doesn’t count the huge number of freelancers working in multimedia who bring the numbers to more than 50,000 (in a city whose population is about 800,000).5 Construction and business services to accommodate this boom have also expanded rapidly, though the construction workers are not building housing they themselves are likely to be able to inhabit. All over the city, buildings are being torn down and replaced with bigger ones, long-vacant lots are being filled in, condos built and sold, old industrial buildings and former nonprofit offices turned into dot-com offices and upscale lofts. As San Francisco’s Urban Habitat Program puts it, “The growing gap between low wage and high wage workers and the scarcity of housing, especially affordable housing for low income households, is resulting in the displacement of low income people by middle and high income households in historically urban communities of color.”6 San Francisco and many Silicon Valley cities are exacerbating this housing crisis by encouraging the influx of new enterprises and new jobs without addressing the housing needs such jobs create, thereby ensuring a brutal free-market struggle for places to live and an aggravation of traffic problems that are already among the worst in the nation.
Brian Goggin, Defenestration Building, Sixth and Howard Streets (public artwork of furniture leaping from the windows of a condemned building on Skid Row, with murals on ground level).
Silicon Valley was the sprawling suburban capital of the first wave of new technology—computers, electronics and software design. In recent years San Francisco has become both a bedroom community for the Valley’s highly paid workers and the capital of the next technological wave—the Internet, aka multimedia, with biotechnology about to become a huge presence in Mission Bay. The newness of this new technology is celebrated everywhere, but in some ways it’s just continuing by other means an old history in San Francisco: an assault on the poor that began with urban renewal programs in the 1950s and has taken many forms since. And in some ways, the new technology is returning us to an old era, perhaps to the peak years of the Industrial Revolution, with huge gaps between rich and poor, endless work hours and a spartan work ethic, a devout faith in progress and technology. The manic greed at work here also recalls the Gold Rush, another nineteenth-century phenomenon often referenced in the Bay Area; but the differences matter, too. In 1849, California was a remote outpost and prices on everything soared when the world rushed in: laundresses and farmers could charge prices in proportion to the wealth being dug out of the Motherlode and join the boom, a prospect impossible in globalized contemporary California.
St. John Coltrane