By Jen Sullivan Brych
What if Jack Kerouac couldn’t find a cheap place to crash in San Francisco so he could drink at Vesuvio Café and bang on his typewriter? Would he have been forced to remain in the “sanitarium” of San Luis Obispo, as he referred to it? Would he have been forever missing what a biographer called the “feverish intensities” of San Francisco, never inspired to write again?
Even worse, what if the next generation of Kerouacs and Alice Walkers and Michelle Teas can’t afford to live in San Francisco anymore? The frightening Proposition 98 on the June 3 ballot would eliminate all rent control in California. If San Francisco loses rent control, it loses writers and its literary scene.
“If rent control goes, I know I’d lose my apartment soon enough,” said writer Peter Orner via email. Orner wrote The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. He was also a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award for Esther Stories.
Orner has lived in the Mission for about five years. “They’d replace me with an investment banker in about forty seconds,” he said.
So why should people care if writers like Orner leave the city en masse? Richard Florida, University of Toronto business professor and author of the book The Rise of the Creative Class, argues that this group of people is creative, makes good money, and values diversity. The creative class includes writers of all genres, as well as educators, financiers, scientists and techies.
The group is attracted to urban areas like San Francisco, which ranked number one in Florida’s creativity rankings for large cities, because of its theater venues, its cafes and spoken word performances, its rock musicians and art galleries; in other words, because of its writers and artists and the quality of life they provide. Florida argues that cities which are successful in attracting this creative class are prospering, while cities that don’t are not. So, if rent control vanishes and the writers and artists disappear, our city by the Bay will suffer.