The Bay Area's 1 Percent Forces Out the 99
Carl Gibson, Reader Supported New
n the movie "Boyz in the Hood" with Ice Cube and Lawrence Fishburne, Fishburne's character, Furious Styles, explains gentrification to members of his community in South Central Los Angeles.
"It's called gentrification. It's what happens when the property value of a certain area is brought down. You listening? They buy all the land at a lower price, then they move all the people out, raise the property value, and sell it for profit."
On a sunny Sunday afternoon, the bustling foot traffic of Market Street in San Francisco slowed for over a hundred people playing chess all over the block. The San Francisco Police Department recently took all of the community chess tables on Market Street that the homeless community frequently used to play chess games, and the community, along with homeless allies, organized a "chess-in" to show that people have the right to have a harmless way of passing the time without being hassled by the city. Most of the foot traffic consisted of wealthy white people hoisting bags festooned with the names of clothing and shoe designers, spending their excess income in droves at the stores that lined the street.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian highlighted how speculators and hedge funds have figured out ways to game the system to their benefit by exploiting a loophole in housing law. Apartment complexes can declare they're "going out of business" and get bought out by one of the big hedge funds like REO Homes LLC (a key REO investor is Tom Steyer, who has hosted Democratic Party fundraisers). They then sell it to developers for a profit, and the building re-opens as condominiums for sale instead of apartments for rent.
"It's gotten too expensive to live in San Francisco," said Leslie Dreyer, a community activist living in Oakland. "Rent for a basic one-bedroom apartment is close to $3,000."
Dreyer organized an anti-gentrification action at the Oakland pride parade. Her group rented a bus with "Gentrification and Eviction Technologies OUT" written on it in a font imitating Google's homepage. They were protesting the fact that Twitter, Google and other major tech companies received a 6-year tax break from the city of San Francisco for $22 million as an incentive to get them to relocate. Twitter is relocating to the Market Street district, where all the chess tables were recently removed.
"After this tax break passed, we warned that low-income and working class people were going to be evicted and people thought we were crazy," said Tommi Avicolli Mecca, counseling director for the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco (HRCSF). "Now they're buying up places for cheap where the rent is low and evicting all the tenants. This mainly affects seniors, the disabled, Latino working families, artists, and others who can't afford high rent."
The 54 tenants of 1049 Market Street, most of whom are lower-income and artistically-inclined, and who pay low-market rent, are one of the many recently targeted by eviction. Tommi said eviction defenses have been organized to save that space along with others spaces on Market Street where 120 more tenants are subject to eviction. The HRCSF also organized a successful eviction defense on behalf of the Lee family, an elderly couple with a disabled daughter who had their Jackson street eviction postponed after enough people put their bodies on the line to stop the eviction.
"Big money is coming into our town to make even bigger money," Mecca said. "And they're getting away with it, because the people at the tech companies will pay anything to live in San Francisco. We don't currently have the votes on the city council to count on them to do anything about it, or a mayor who is radical enough to do it." For Mecca, an acceptable solution would be for the city to declare a state of emergency for housing, whereby city officials could call for an immediate moratorium on evictions.
"This is forcing people to leave the city, increasing homelessness, and changing the diversity of our community," Mecca said. "We're seeing a lot of lesbian bars and alternative bookstores be replaced with overpriced cafes and coffee shops."
I asked Mecca if he had heard about Richmond mayor Gayle McLaughlin's attempts to fight evictions and foreclosures by threatening to seize underwater mortgages from the banks with eminent domain, and about her requirements for developers to include low-income housing in all projects for the city.
"There are people who work inside the system, and I won't put them down, because we need to do this on multiple fronts to succeed," Mecca said. "But I personally believe in agitating outside the system. Because of our action for the Lee family, the city was backed up into a corner. What else could the mayor do, except call the landlord and postpone the eviction?"
Representatives of REO Homes LLC and the city of San Francisco could not be reached for comment on this story.
Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at carl@rsnorg.org, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.
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