Tech Boom

Yahoo and other tech companies are squeezing the Chronicle’s newsroom

Sasha Cuttler
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17

With high demand for office space in San Francisco these days — thanks largely to the latest technology bubble, Mayor Ed Lee’s economic development focus, and its amplification by the San Francisco Chronicle — Hearst Corp., which owns both the paper and the Chronicle Building, seems to be more focused on property management than journalism these days.

Following up on blogs that broke the story, Chronicle Technology Columnist James Temple today reported that Yahoo is negotiating with Hearst to move its headquarters into the Chronicle Building at 5th and Mission streets. What Temple didn’t say — and what sources at the Chronicle confirmed to the Guardian, despite the fact that it hasn’t yet been announced to Chronicle staff — is that the third floor newsroom will soon be relocated while the space undergoes a renovation.

It’s not clear whether the two pieces of news are related, and we’re still waiting for a response to our questions on the subject from Chronicle Editor Ward Bushee. But it certainly seems true that Hearst and the Chronicle are doing everything they can to profit from the commercial real estate market that they have helped to heat up while operating a newspaper that has struggled to become profitable in recent years.

Valued at more than $30 million and covering nearly a full city block in the heart of the city, the Chronicle Building has been steadily taken over by outside companies in recent years, many of them technology corporations such as Square, the online payment company. The newsroom that used to occupy the second and third floors has already been squeezed onto the third, and now even that space is getting an overhaul.

Meanwhile, Hearst has been working with Forest City and Strada Investment Group on a plan to redevelop the property, reportedly replacing the old Hearst headquarters and other buildings that share the block with an office and residential tower and trying to win historic landmark status for the Chronicle Building itself.

Chronicle staffers tell the Guardian that they were surprised to hear about the newsroom relocation last week and they don’t have many details, except that they will remain in the building. And given how valuable it has become, they say they’re just happy to not be totally squeezed out by the tech boom.

In tech-dominated Mid-Market, arts center beats the odds

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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In tech-dominated Mid-Market, arts center beats the odds

Is there a place for community theaters and nonprofit arts and education programs in pricey San Francisco? The 950 Center for Art and Education, a project that will be housed on the corner of Market and Turk streets in San Francisco, has gained a foothold against the odds.

Two years in the making, the center will provide permanently affordable performance facilities for the Lorraine Hansberry and Magic theaters, and create affordable space for art education organizations including Youth Speaks, the American Conservatory Theater and All Stars Project. Other groups, such as Lines Ballet, the Tenderloin Boys and Girls Club and others previously unsure whether they could continue to rent in the Tenderloin/SoMa area will get the chance to expand their performance and programming capabilities at the center.

Because the neighborhood is in such high demand in the wake of recent tax breaks and incentives designed to bring tech businesses to SF, it took the Tenderloin Economic Development Project, a part of the North of Market Neighborhood Improvement Corporation, at least two years to secure the property for the arts and education complex. Until very recently, the project’s fate was hanging in the balance, with many groups uncertain whether they would be able to remain in the city.

Three-quarters of the project space that TEDP had long set its sites on is located at 970 Market, and was initially owned by Lone Star, a Texas-based hedge fund. The remaining project space, at 950 Market, was under the ownership of the Thatcher family, known for philanthropy.

Initially, TEDP “had a deal with the hedge fund,” says TEDP director Elvin Padilla, but after property values rose, “they basically walked away from the negotiating table. The crisis moment was, who’s going to control the land – and will they collaborate with us?”

Padilla credits Gladys Thatcher, founder of the San Francisco Education Fund, as “the reason we decided to make the attempt [to acquire these spaces for the 950 Center] in the first place.” 

When TEDP first pitched the idea to her several years ago, “she gave us her blessing we decided to make a go of it,” he explained.

Thatcher is trustee and former board member of the San Francisco Foundation, which worked alongside TEDP and the Rainin Foundation to secure the lion’s share of the land needed for the 950 Center, by facilitating a purchase of the 970 Market Parcel from Lone Star.

On June 7, the property was transferred from Lone Star to Group I, a San Francisco-based real estate development firm that Thatcher is friendly with. Now that the sale has gone through, the space will be devoted to the arts and education programming that TEDP had long envisioned. The San Francisco Foundation plans to facilitate development of the center through the creation of a new sponsoring organization that will be housed at Community Initiatives, a nonprofit. 

While he is grateful for the community support, Padilla likened their quest to gain 970 Market to a climb up Mt. Everest.

A 2011 payroll tax exclusion zone introduced by Mayor Ed Lee vastly increased the property value in the mid-Market area. Although Lee had a soft spot for the 950 Arts and Education Center and even organized events to support bringing that use to mid-Market, his new policy left the project facing an uncertain future in a suddenly pricey strip along Market Street. “He doesn’t have any real authority over private sector transactions,” Padilla says, so all the Mayor could do was stipulate the city’s interest in using this land for “arts and education.”

The city doesn’t offer public funding for projects like 950 Center for Arts and Education. To “subsidize on the front end,” as Padilla puts it, the center will have to rely on the backing of individual investors, philanthropic groups and new market tax credits to reduce and eliminate the debt entirely, so the organizations that will be housed at the center don’t have to carry a mortgage.

In the end, it was only through the efforts of wealthy and connected individuals that plans for the center were nailed down rather than extinguished. “Mid-Market is going through a very rapid transformation,” says Dr. Sandra R. Hernández, Chief Executive Officer of the San Francisco Foundation. “We’re just lucky that Group I, the developer, shares this vision with us for an arts center.”

Looking back on the years of effort it took to piece the plan together, Padilla noted, “When we started this, it was before the tech boom. Now, the pressure on the real estate is many times what it was when we conceptualized the 950 project.” 

That uncertainty finally came to an end for Padilla’s organization when Group I closed the deal with Lone Star on June 7. “That really [did] start the project officially,” Hernández says. “We’re now working with a number of the organizations that have expressed interest in having permanent space or accessible space for their programming or rehearsals for their theater production.”

Anti-gentrification activists “GET OUT” with Pride

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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110

A group of activists used the Pride Parade to make a political statement by marching with a faux Google bus, an action meant to call attention to gentrification in San Francisco. They rented a white coach and covered it with signs printed up in a similar font to Google’s coroporate logo, proclaiming: “Gentrification & Eviction Technologies (GET) OUT: Integrated Displacement and Cultural Erasure.”

Some trailed the faux Google bus with an 8-foot banner depicting a blown-up version of an Ellis Act evictions map.

Others donned red droplets stamped with “evicted” to signify Google map markers, while a few toted suitcases to represent tenants who’d been sent packing.

However, their ranks were thin in comparison with the parade contingents surrounding them, which included crowds of workers representing eBay, DropBox, and, of course, Google.

A member of the small anti-gentrification contingent gazes in the direction of the Google contingent, where a crowd of tech workers is bursting with energy and carrying balloons.

A member of the anti-gentrification part of the march gazes in the direction of the Google contingent, where a huge crowd of tech workers was bursting with energy.

 

Google workers clad in identical tees wore colorful sunglasses, carried balloons and held a banner.

Activist Leslie Dreyer was one of six activists who put together the faux Google bus contingent. She used crowd-funding to raise roughly $2,000 for parade registry, bus rental, and custom-made decals.

“All of us have either been affected, or are in a position where we wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in the Bay Area if something were to happen to our housing situations,” Dreyer said. “There’s really no security to stay here.”

They selected the Google bus as a symbol because “we think the tech boom is directly responsible for creating a population of people who can actually afford these market-rate rents,” while also fueling real-estate speculation and giving rise to a deep-pocketed political lobby. “It’s not targeting tech workers individually,” Dreyer added.

Zeph Fishlyn, a sculptor and activist who earns a living as a tattoo artist, also helped launch the Pride Parade action. “My communities that I’m a part of – not just the queer community, but also artists and activists – are being forced out,” said Fishlyn, who suffered through two separate evictions in 2012. “I know 34 people who got evicted last year.”

Housing advocates are gearing up for a campaign targeting landlords that are infamous for gobbling up rental properties and serially evicting long-term San Francisco renters. Dubbed Eviction Free Summer, the campaign could get underway in coming weeks.

Activists handed out fliers encouraging people to join them by visiting heart-of-the-city.org.

The end of an era, but not of a legacy

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Tim Redmond has a big heart. He cares deeply about this city and he cared deeply about this newspaper. But last Thursday was Tim’s last day at the Bay Guardian, the place where he worked for the bulk of the past three decades. In typical fashion, he stuck to his principles to the end.

The Guardian is not as economically healthy as it once was, and 2013 has not been kind to the paper. Revenues are down and many issues lose money, a trend that threatens our mission if left unchecked. During the past month, Guardian management had been contemplating some painful but necessary changes that included layoffs. Tim participated in these discussions, but in the end he chose to resign rather than downsize a staff he loved like family.

I understand Tim’s decision, but believe it was shortsighted. During the past year and a half, the Guardian’s two sister papers — the San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly — have undergone similar restructuring, which included layoffs. The goal was not to extract obscene profits — a mission I wouldn’t support even if it were still possible in 2013 — but rather to ensure both papers’ survival and recovery. It was an unpleasant process, and one that Tim could not abide.

But today, the Examiner and Weekly are both significantly healthier than they used to be. The Examiner is no longer the mouthpiece of right-wing buffoons, and in recent months has expanded its Peninsula coverage and enlarged its editorial staff. And the Weekly boasts significantly more new coverage, listings and advertising than it did just six months ago.

I want the Guardian’s future as a progressive voice to be similarly assured. So now, 32 years after selling my first freelance news article to the paper — a brief about BART’s effort to evict the Ashby Flea Market — I find myself replacing Tim as publisher. Longtime Managing Editor Marke Bieschke, aka Marke B., is filling his shoes as interim editor.

I know some Guardian readers assume that this means the end of progressive journalism in the paper. Please let me assure you that will not occur. I have spent the bulk of my career editing investigative newsweeklies and have no intention of going down in history as the guy who dumbed-down the Guardian.

The very night before Tim told me he was leaving, he presided over a packed forum on the topic of economic dislocation in San Francisco. At the height of a tech boom that has inflated rents and led to a wave of migration and evictions, it’s hard to imagine few other topics of greater importance. Tim and the Guardian have reported extensively on this issue in the year since the paper was acquired by the San Francisco Print Media Company. Of course, the Guardian was already writing about evictions long before Tim’s predecessor assigned me to write that 1981 article about the flea market.

Under Tim’s successor, that emphasis will not change.

 

In his footsteps

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
In his footsteps

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE If you are even tangentially connected to San Francisco’s dance community, one name will pop up again and again: Ed Mock. He was part of San Francisco’s awakening as a center for arts on the edge before his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1986.

African American and gay, the performer-choreographer was, above all, a free spirit throughout the two decades he lived in SF. During that time, he influenced and shaped a generation of young artists. For dancers like Wayne Hazzard, Victoria Mata, Shakiri, Joanna Haigood, and Pearl Ubungen, he was crucial to who they became. Mock also collaborated with the young Rhodessa Jones; Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf… premiered in his studio.

One of the dancers whom Mock profoundly marked is Amara Tabor-Smith. To honor him, she created the multi-venue He Moved Swiftly But Gently Down the Not Too Crowded Street: Ed Mock and Other True Tales in a City That Once Was. The piece will wander through the city Sat/15 and June 21-23.

The SF-born Tabor-Smith encountered Mock when, at 14, she tagged along with a friend who had been told that classes with Mock were a must. She joined his Ed Mock Dance Company at 17 and stopped dancing for a year when he died. Eventually, she joined New York’s Urban Bush Women for a decade before returning to her much-changed hometown in 2006.

Talking with her after a rehearsal in early June, it quickly becomes clear that she not only mourns the passing of a pioneering artist but also a period when San Francisco was place for experimentation, openness, and a sense of the possible. The Beats and the hippies may have put their own stamp on the city, but in the 1970s the gay pride movement filled the air with champagne-like effervescence and expectations — until the AIDS epidemic cut it down. Lately, the tech boom has had a negative effect on SF’s artist population.

“Ed was the most fearless person I ever knew,” Tabor-Smith says, “He was the embodiment of freedom, courage, and mischief. I loved the way he embraced the risk of failure and the way he could create on the spot because the spirit moved him. He knew who he was and where he came from. He was an old soul, and he walked with the ancestors.”

Mock left his primary legacy through his classes, teaching wherever he could find studio space. Tabor-Smith remembers them as always packed with all sizes, colors, body shapes, and orientations — unusual for a time when teaching was much more compartmentalized than it is today.

He choreographed for his company, but as a dancer he improvised — a pioneering act in itself. Unfortunately, little documentation has survived. A YouTube search does turn up a video of Possum Slim, an astounding solo from 1979 performed by a naked and body-painted Mock.

Tabor-Smith (in collaboration with Ellen Sebastian Young) conceived of He Moved — part of Dancers’ Group ONSITE Series — as 11 site-specific performances that journey through Mock’s life. Among others, she is working with Jose Navarette on a section about memory; Jesse Hewitt and Laura Arrington will perform “acts of disruption” for Valencia Street’s 24/7 connected crowd.

Hayes Valley’s Salle Pianos and Events — where Tabor-Smith is rehearsing He Moved‘s “A Room of Black Men” section — happens to be next door to one of the studios in Mock’s peripatetic teaching career. She sees its funky elegance, with crystal chandeliers hanging over metal folding chairs, as “an Ed kind of place.” In stark contrast to the traffic roaring by on Market Street, the nine dancers bring a statuesque dignity and stillness to what is a tribute to black manhood. But they also explode into individual solos and help each other find community. At one point the dance becomes what looks like a ceremonial blessing around a seated elder, whose eloquence emanates simply from his presence.

Tabor-Smith also likes the Salle space because it’s located across the alley from Zuni Café, where her piece’s “Window Seat” section will be shown. Appropriately, “Ed was a fixture there. The people who ran it were wonderful. He never paid for a meal. Or a bottle of wine.” *

HE MOVED SWIFTLY BUT GENTLY DOWN THE NOT TOO CROWDED STREET: ED MOCK AND OTHER TRUE TALES IN A CITY THAT ONCE WAS…

Sat/15 and June 21-23, 3:30-8:30pm, free

Various locations (starts at 32 Page), SF

www.dancersgroup.org

 

Young, creative people who work hard

Zelda Bronstein
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173
Young, creative people who work hard

I almost don’t know what to say, except: Finally, someone admits it.

Rebecca Pederson, writing in The Bold Italic, explains why she actually likes the idea that San Francisco is becoming so expensive that thousands of longtime residents are being forced out; see, if it’s more expensive to live here, then young, creative people will work harder:

People who want to make a living here from their creative work should have to hustle; it makes the successes much more meaningful.

Ah, yes. “Hustle.” So all the older people who are, say, not trained in the tech field, or might be disabled and unable to “hustle,” or the single parents who “hustle” all the goddam day just to keep the family together, or all the “creative” people who work for nonprofits or (gasp) are artists — and trust me, they “hustle” as much as any tech worker … they don’t get to live here any more. Because

We can’t afford to walk barefoot around Golden Gate Park and write half-sonnets about trees. This city’s too expensive now.

I don’t know anyone who thinks we still live in the Beat era. I don’t know anyone who has ever written a half-sonnet about trees, and nobody with any sense of public health walks barefoot in Golden Gate Park. Get a clue.

But I do know a whole lot of people, including some who work for websites, who are seeing their lives and their community destroyed by rising prices — which are due primarily to greed in the real-estate industry.

I don’t think all tech workers are anywhere near as dumb as Rebecca Pederson, but I do see a lot of her attitude around: We are young and have money, and you are old and in the way. That’s capitalism.

The “older people are losers” attitude was the worst part of the Sixties ethos (although disdain for labor — often reciprocated by conservative unions — was pretty bad, too.) This is a big city, with a diverse population. Not everyone is healthy and able to “hustle.” Not everyone is young and carefree. Please, my friends: Have respect for the community you recently dropped into.

Yes, I was a San Francisco immigrant, too, in a different era, and I know things will always change, but I don’t remember my young friends believing that they were by nature better and smarter than the people who already lived here. It’s called respect.

 

 

Can the tech boom solve our housing crisis? No, but it can make it worse

Sasha Cuttler
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64
Can the tech boom solve our housing crisis? No, but it can make it worse

 San Francisco Housing Action Coalition and San Francisco Magazine posed an intriguing question at a forum they sponsored last night in the W Hotel: “San Francisco’s Housing Crisis: Can the Tech Boom Help Us?” Unfortunately, it wasn’t a question they ever really addressed at an event of, by, and for developers and their most ardent supporters.

Instead, the event was mostly just pro-development boosterism supporting HAC’s goal of building 100,000 new homes in SF over the next 20 years, and the discussion seems to show that the tech boom will exacerbate the housing crisis without ever addressing it, particularly given the local tax breaks and subsidies Mayor Ed Lee keeps giving the industry.

“San Francisco must radically increase its anemic housing production,” HAC Executive Director Tim Colen said during the introduction.

The pro-development cheerleading was slightly offset by the dose of reality offered by panelist Peter Cohen of the San Francisco Council of Community Housing Organizations, who noted that market rate developers aren’t building for today’s San Franciscans, 61 percent of whom make less than 120 percent of the Area Median Income. 

“We don’t believe the market will ever touch the 120 and lower,” Cohen said, later offering, “How do we build for the kind of San Francisco we have now?”

San Francisco Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jon Steinberg, who moderated the panel, said this event grew out of an important and widely acclaimed story that David Talbot wrote for the magazine last fall, “How Much Tech Can One City Take?” that raised critical questions about the wisdom of the big bet that San Francisco has placed on an industry driven by speculative bubbles.

“We got more responses from readers than anything we published in our history,” Steinberg said of the article, before shamefully expressing second thoughts on publishing it. “I felt the writer had been a little hard on our friends in the tech industry.”

He introduced UC Berkeley Economics Professor Enrico Moretti, whose 2012 book “The New Geography of Jobs” argues for reducing regulations that hinder housing production in cities, by saying that if he’d read it before publishing Talbot’s excellent article, “I think it would have had a little different tenor.”

Yet Moretti’s presentation was an overly simplistic Economics 101 argument that housing prices go up when demand is strong and supply is weak. “It doesn’t take a degree in economics to know those workers will bid up the price of housing,” Moretti said after noting San Francisco added 21,500 job but just 2,548 new housing units last year.

That’s the basic line we hear a lot these days, that only a massive housing construction boom will keep housing prices down and prevent mass displacement. “The only answer is to radically increase the supply,” said SPUR Executive Director Gabriel Metcalf, noting that means tossing out many of the city’s historic preservation and height and density restrictions. “All we have to do is get out of the way and allow housing to increase to make it normal again.”

Metcalf confidently predicted that housing prices and rents would drop if the city pursued that kind of unfettered housing boom, offering to buy Cohen a beer if he was wrong. Yet even Moretti’s research shows that Metcalf would probably lose that bet.

Moretti compared San Francisco to Seattle, which is also experiencing a comparable high-tech job boom that exacerbated a housing supply shortage, which Seattle responded to by following the prescription of HAC and building thousands of new condos in the downtown core.

The result was that rents in Seattle have increased 31 percent less than San Francisco’s, which he called significant, despite the fact that rents are still on the rise there even with a massive influx of new people and condos and all the infrastructure challenges that presents (it’s widely accepted that new development in San Francisco doesn’t pay for the full cost of infrastructure needed to serve it, which is a huge issue in the transportation sector alone).

Nobody had a good answer to Cohen’s point that building tons of market rate housing won’t actually do much to prevent the displacement of a majority of current city residents. As he put it, “What’s missing is who is that housing for, who is it actually serving?”

Metcalf welcomes the wholesale transformation of San Francisco – “It will be a change, a total change, and guess what? That could be great.” – but even he argues for the importance of policies that protect those on the bottom half of the economic scale, from rent control to more government-subsidized affordable housing production.

As Metcalf, one of the biggest market rate development cheerleaders in city, said, “If it were not for rent control, I would have been forced out of the city by now.”

Boom life: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore talks about ‘The End of San Francisco’

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Boom life: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore talks about ‘The End of San Francisco’

A picture of Brian Goggin’s iconic site-specific sculpture “Defenestration” (that 16-year-old “furniture leaping out of an abandoned building” piece in SoMa that may be demolished soon) is pictured on the cover of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s latest book, The End of San Francisco — which I reviewed in this week’s Guardian.

It’s an almost too-perfect image to represent the book’s contents — “Defenestration” cheekily channeled the out-the-window frustration of the dawning of the first Internet boom, with its hordes of tech gold-rushers pushing out old San Francisco culture. (And now, in the middle of another tech boom, the artwork itself will be pushed aside to make way for affordable housing — the term for anything under $2500 per month rent pretty much at this point.) The End of San Francisco takes us on an atmospheric, highly personal through the turbulent period of the ’90s and early 2000s, while asking some hard questions about the queer activism, participatory gentrification, and “alternative culture” of the period. Along the way, Mattilda intimately delves into issues like her recovered memories of sexual abuse as a child at the hands of her father; the rampant drug use, mental illness, and hostile attitudes of Mission queer culture; the gynophobia and transphobia of many “underground” scenes, and much, much more. 

I asked Mattilda a few questions over email in advance of her appearances here at City Lights (April 30) and the GLBT Historical Society (May 9) to help set her book in the context of what was happening then, and what’s still happening now. As always, she pulled no punches. 

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE reads Tue/30, 7pm, free at City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF. www.citylights.com, and Thursday, May 9, 7pm, free at the GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St., SF. www.glbthistory.org

SFBG What was the impetus for writing such a wide-ranging memoir? You cover almost your entire life, from some of your earliest memories to when you officially moved away from San Francisco. Was there a specific purpose when you sat down to write it?

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE With my anthologies, I always have a specific purpose in mind, a political intervention, but for this kind of personal writing – I write to stay alive. So it’s a different kind of intervention. I started with 1200 pages of material, and then separated different sections into themes. So, for example, the chapter called “The Texture of the Air,” originally that was something like 200 pages of writing about cruising and its limitations, about trying to regain a sense of hope in my own sexuality. Now it’s 15 pages. At some point I realized that the book centered around the myths and realities of San Francisco as a refuge for radical queer visions in community building. I first moved to San Francisco in 1992, when I was 19, and it’s where I figured out how to challenge the violence of the world around me, how to embrace outsider visions of queer splendor, how to create love and lust and intimacy and accountability on my own terms. I left San Francisco in 2010, and in some ways this book is an attempt to figure out why or how this city has such a hold on me, in spite of the failure of so many of my dreams, over and over and over again.

SFBG I think the most fascinating parts of the End of San Francisco are your spot-on description of life here in the 1990s, and your detailing of the excruciating decline of that era in the dot-com boom. Now
that we’re undergoing another dot-com boom, what are some of your thoughts as to how that’s once again affecting “alternative culture.” Is there any such thing as “alternative culture” anymore?

MBS Oh, it’s so sad! The way gentrification has progressed over these last 20 years. The displacement, the homogenization, the transformation of cultures of resistance into commodities. The way all of this limits people’s imaginations. At the same time, I don’t want to romanticize the past. In the early-‘90s, it felt like everywhere people were dying of AIDS and drug addiction and suicide; it was a desperate time, even if in some ways there were more possibilities for choosing a life outside status quo normalcy. But, no matter when we are living in this country so responsible for genocide, endless war, the destruction of the environment, we are living in a desperate time and we still need to come up with radical alternatives to giving up.

SFBG I figure a lot of the people who were here in that era (me included) will recognize a lot of truth in what you describe, including some pretty scathing but deadly accurate words about the people who thought they were on the forefront of alternative culture back then — how a lot of it was “vintage store glamour” and the “strung-out junkie look.” Have you had any reactions from anyone about that? Or from any of the people who were close to you back then that you’ve written about?

MBS I offered the manuscript ahead of time to everyone in the book who plays a major role. A few people didn’t respond. Some offered detailed feedback. And some, of course, are featured in conversations about the book, in the book – while The End of San Francisco is about my memories, of course these memories exist in the context of the relationships I’m describing. I want to challenge the notion of one true story, while at the same time I obsess about figuring out all these formative moments for me – politically, socially, sexually, ethically, emotionally. One of the funniest responses was from the first person who I trusted, we moved to San Francisco together in 1992. She wanted me to take out the parts where we do drugs, so she could show her kids!

SFBG Another fascinating part is your account of the rise and peter-out of Gay Shame [the guerilla anti-assimilationist co-founded by Mattilda]. You’ve talked about this before in previous books, like the anthology That’s Revolting — how did you approach writing about it within the context of this memoir?

MBS This writing is more self-critical. It’s more about the relationships I formed through activism, the gaps between our rhetoric of inclusiveness and the more complicated realities. Ultimately I’m looking at this activist group that meant so much to me, that challenged and inspired me in so many ways, but ultimately failed me. I’m not saying that it failed, but it did fail me and I’m trying to figure out why.

SFBG Do you think there’s any space now, in SF or anywhere else, for a true queer resistance movement?

MBS There never is space. We have to create it. There is so much self-congratulatory rhetoric in San Francisco, especially in radical-identified queer spaces, and we’re never going to get to something beyond a cooler marketing niche unless we can examine the ways that so often in radical queer spaces people treat one another just as horribly as in dominant straight culture or mainstream gay culture, and it hurts so much more when this kind of viciousness comes from people you actually believe in.

SFBG I loved your take on the Eagle even while I disagreed with some of it. Have you been following the whole return of the Eagle thing, spearheaded by probably our loudest current voice in queer anti-assimilationism, Glendon Anna Conda Hyde?

MBS In the book, mostly I’m talking about how the Eagle, a bar entrenched in mainstream gay norms of mandatory masculinity, objectification without appreciation, racial exclusion, and fear of all things feminine without beards, became a hipster hotspot without changing its core values. I can’t comment specifically on Glendon Anna Conda Hyde, but I will say that it depresses me when people embrace tragic gay institutions as “community,” as if they have ever offered us anything meaningful beyond a place to get smashed with people we’ll hate in the morning. Yes, it’s also depressing that public sex cultures that used to exist South of Market have basically disappeared, but I think we need to envision new possibilities instead of fetishizing the past.

SFBG You write so boldly and candidly about sexual abuse, drug will addiction, illness, relationships, politics … were there any memoir models you worked off of, and were there any rituals you went through to be able to open up so much?

MBS I think most memoirs take the most fascinating, multifaceted, complicated lives and turn them into Choose Your Own Adventure books without the choice. I wanted to create something more layered and honest — I was drawn to exploring the places where my analysis stops, to using those gaps as openings into something more spontaneous and incisive. As a teenager I needed to create a facade of invulnerability in order to survive, in order to find other kids like myself, in order to go on living. But now that façade leaves me feeling shut off rather than connected. Now I’m drawn towards expressing vulnerability, I think that’s what will save me.

SFBG I felt like you left us with a cliffhanger in terms of your father reconciling with you over memories of your childhood sexual abuse. Was there ever any resolution?

MBS I love that it felt like a cliffhanger for you even though the part about visiting my father before he died was right at the beginning. That was an incredibly intense moment for me, to visit him on his deathbed, to go to the house where I grew up with all that violence and still be able to express everything, to sob and tell him that I loved him, something I would never have imagined I would even want to say, but it’s what I felt in the moment and so I figured why not, he’ll be dead soon and I don’t want to hold anything in. For me that felt really powerful: it meant that all this work I’d done to become someone other than the person my parents wanted me to be, it really had worked. That was a certain kind of closure, that openness. But no, he refused to acknowledge anything. He wouldn’t even tell me that he loved me.

SFBG In terms of queer relationships and friendships, The End of San Francisco speaks insightfully about pain, desire, co-dependence, processing, betrayal, apathy, need, and abuse. Was there ever any love? Could there be?

MBS Yes, there was so much love – I hope that comes through in the book! And nothing has let me down more than love.

The vultures of greed

Zelda Bronstein
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129
The vultures of greed

A small but enthusiastic crowd marched through the Castro April 20 to bring some attention to the rash of Ellis Act evictions that are forcing seniors and disabled people out of the city. The activists stopped at the home of Jeremy Mykaels, whose plight is symbolic of the state of housing in San Francisco today. Mykaels insists he’s not a public speaker, but his remarks were poignant; we’ve excerpted them here:

I have AIDS and I am being evicted through the use of the Ellis Act. I want to welcome you to my home for the past 18 years, and to my Castro neighborhood where I’ve spent the last four decades, or two-thirds of my life.

I was there at some of the earliest Gay Pride Parades and Castro Street Fairs, listening to speakers like Harvey Milk and seeing entertainers like Sylvester with Two Tons ‘O Fun and Patrick Cowley. I proudly voted for Harvey to become the city’s first openly gay supervisor. I participated in the fight against the Briggs amendment, which would have outlawed gay teachers in California schools. I walked in the candlelight march honoring the lives of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone after their assassinations by Supervisor Dan White. And I’ve been here for many other protests and for many other celebrations.

And like most of you, I’ve seen how HIV and AIDS have devastated this community over the years and I have lost most of my closest friends and lovers to this disease. Until 12 years ago I thought I had somehow miraculously escaped it’s clutches, but that was not to be and I have been dealing with that reality as best as I can ever since, with mixed results. And now on top of the great losses this disease has cost our gay community, even more losses are occurring in the form of more and more long-term tenants with HIV/AIDS living in rent-controlled apartments being forced to move out of their homes and/or out of the city after being evicted through the use of the Ellis Act, or who have been scared and bullied by just the threat of an Ellis eviction into accepting low buyout offers to vacate.

I had always thought that I would spend the rest of my life living in this neighborhood and city that I love. Now I know that, like so many others before me who found themselves in similar situations, I will have no choice but to move out.

Tech boom 2.0 has brought out what I call the Vultures of Greed, a de facto alliance of banks, the real estate lobby, and, whether unwittingly or not, city officials like the mayor and several supervisors and the Planning Commission. But the worst Vultures of Greed have been the real estate speculators, many of whom I have listed on my website.

And here I would like to call out my own personal vultures as a prime example of how uncaring real estate speculators can be. The new owners of this property are Cuong Mai, William H. Young and John H. Du, and their business entity is 460Noe Group LLC, based in Union City. These are truly callous individuals who knew from the very beginning that they had a person with AIDS living in the building, and soon after they bought the place they began threatening me with an Ellis eviction if I didn’t accept their low-ball buyout offer and vacate. On September 10th, 2012 they subsequently Ellised the building and served me with eviction papers which means that I will only have until September 10th of this year to legally occupy my apartment. All these men want is the highest profit they can get after they remodel and re-sell this building. They could care less what happens to me when I am forced to move out of the city and no longer have access to all my HIV specialists who have kept me alive for this long. A prospect I’ll admit that, yes, scares me. But these guys, they won’t lose even a seconds sleep over my fate.


Yes, the Vultures of Greed are soaring high with sharpened talons ready to feed upon our city’s seniors and disabled, and on what’s left of our already decimated San Francisco gay community. But we don’t have to allow it. Together with our growing number of allies, we can change minds and we can eventually reclaim this city from the Vultures of Greed.

BTW, we couldn’t reach Mai, Young, or Du, and their lawyer, Saul Ferster, did not return a call seeking comment.

Property resistance in the Bay and beyond

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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40

In 2004, Hannah Dobbz climbed up the drainpipe of an abandoned building in Emeryville and disappeared through a broken window. Outside, her friends waited with blankets, pillows, and food. Making her way down to the first floor, she unsecured the plywood door and let them in.

Dobbz had stayed in squats before—in the East Bay, and in Europe. But now she was finally “bottom-lining” her own. The property, an abandoned boat and turbine warehouse they called the Power Machine, was in legal limbo. The city of Emeryville had claimed eminent domain over the building, but settlement proceedings would continue for the next two years.

In the meantime, Dobbz and her friends made the Power Machine their home. They fixed up the building and collected bikes, books, and art supplies. They threw loud parties. Located under a bridge and next to the railroad, no one seemed to care—not even the landlord, who stumbled upon Dobbz during her second week of residency.

Dobbz’s experience, along with those of other East Bay squatters, became the subject of her film, “Shelter: A Squatumentary” (Kill Normal Productions: 2008). In 2007, she left the Bay Area and moved to Buffalo, but continued to advocate for the practice of seizing abandoned spaces, dubbed “property resistance.” Now, she has published a book on squatting.

The book, Nine-Tenths of the Law: Property and Resistance in the United States (AK Press: 2013), is both a guide for squatters and a history of land occupation movements. It delves into the philosophical justifications for squatting, and challenges the assumptions behind the economic forces of the housing market. For Dobbz, squatting is a tactic: it reasserts that shelter is everybody’s basic human right, not just the privilege of those who can afford it.

“One of those things that I’m hoping to do is rethink how we view property, to try and shift the emphasis from housing as a market value, to more of a use value,” said Dobbz.

Nor could the timing be much better, since recent events seem to have rekindled property resistance activism in the Bay Area. In 2011, the Occupy Oakland movement created a dialogue around public space and private ownership. Now, with the tech boom driving the cost of living ever higher, that dialogue has been infused with newfound urgency. 

Steve Dicaprio is the CEO and founder of Land Action, an organization that offers support and legal information to land occupiers. As Occupy Oakland unfolded, he began to research property foreclosures. He wanted to know which sites could be most easily occupied and defended from a legal standpoint. According to Dicaprio, organizers of Occupy Oakland soon began to consider the occupation of foreclosed homes as an alternative to demonstrations in Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza.

The goal of Dobbz, Dicarprio, and other activists is to foster a discussion around property. The focus needs to be on stewardship, not ownership, said Dobbz.

Both Dobbz and Dicaprio will be speaking at Looking Glass Arts on Friday, April 19th, at 6 p.m. Tickets are $20, with proceeds going to Land Action. A free event will also take place the following night at 7:30 p.m. at the squatter residence Hotmess/RCA Compound (656 West MacArthur Blvd.), with a dance party to follow.

In the meantime, you can read an excerpt of the book here.

Out of place

Andrew Lam
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news@sfbg.com 

In his State of the City address last week, Mayor Ed Lee cheerfully characterized San Francisco as “the new gravitational center of Silicon Valley.” He touted tech-sector job creation. “We have truly become the innovation capital of the world,” Lee said, “home to 1,800 tech companies with more than 42,000 employees — and growing every day.”

From a purely economic standpoint, San Francisco is on a steady climb. But not all residents share the mayor’s rosy outlook. Shortly after Lee’s speech, renowned local author Rebecca Solnit published her own view of San Francisco’s condition in the London Review of Books. Zeroing in on the Google Bus as a symbol of the city’s housing affordability crisis, she linked the influx of high-salaried tech workers to soaring housing costs. With rents trending skyward, she pointed out, the dearth of affordable housing is escalating a shift in the city’s cultural fabric.

“All this is changing the character of what was once a great city of refuge for dissidents, queers, pacifists and experimentalists,” Solnit wrote. “It has become increasingly unaffordable over the past quarter-century, but still has a host of writers, artists, activists, environmentalists, eccentrics and others who don’t work sixty-hour weeks for corporations — though we may be a relic population.”

LIMITED OPTIONS

The issue of housing in San Francisco is highly emotional, and there is perhaps no greater flashpoint in the charged debate than Ellis Act evictions.

When the housing market bounces upward, Ellis Act evictions tend to hit long-term tenants whose monthly payments, protected by rent control, are a comparative bargain. Even if they’ve submitted every payment on time and upheld every lease obligation for 20 years, these renters can find themselves in the bind of being forced out.

And they don’t just lose their homes; often they lose their community. San Francisco has become so expensive that many Ellis Act victims are tossed out of this city for good.

Enacted in 1986, the state law allows a landlord to stop renting units, evict all tenants, and sell the building for another purpose. Originally construed as a way for landlords to “go out of business” and move into their properties, the Ellis Act instead gained notoriety as a driving force behind a wave of evictions that slammed San Francisco during the tech boom of the late 90s. Between 1986 and 1995, just 29 Ellis evictions were filed with the San Francisco Rent Board; in the 1999-2000 fiscal year alone, that number ballooned to a staggering 440.

Under the current tech heyday, there are indications that Ellis Act evictions are gaining fresh momentum. The San Francisco Rent Board recorded 81 this past fiscal year, more than double that of the previous year, and there appears to be an upward trend.

TIC CONTROVERSY

Buildings cleared via the Ellis Act are typically repackaged as tenancies-in-common (TIC), where several buyers jointly purchase a multi-unit residence and each occupy one unit. Realtors often market TICs as a path to homeownership for moderate-income individuals, creating an incentive for buyers to enter into risky, high-interest shared mortgages in hopes of later converting to condos with more attractive financing.

The divide between TIC owners and renters came into sharp focus at a contentious Jan. 28 hearing, when a Board of Supervisors committee met to consider legislation that would allow some 2,000 TIC units to immediately convert to condos without having to wait their turn in a requisite lottery system.

One TIC owner said he was financially burdened, but had only entered into the arrangement because “I wanted to stay here and raise my family, but we couldn’t afford a single family home.” Yet tenants brought their own set of concerns to the table, saying the temptation to create TICs was putting a major dent in the city’s finite stock of rent-controlled units — the single greatest source of affordable housing in San Francisco.

“My feeling is, let’s stop doing TICs,” Tommi Avicolli Mecca, a tenants right activist with the Housing Rights Committee, told the Guardian following the hearing. “The city has to just start making sure that the condos that are built are the kind of thing [TIC buyers] can afford. Instead, we cannibalize our rental stock? That’s a reasonable way? You evict one group of people to house another: How does that make sense?”

The grueling five-hour hearing illustrated the sad fact that San Franciscans in a slightly better economic position were being pitted against economically disadvantaged renters. The two groups were bitterly divided, and all seemed weary, furious, and frustrated by their housing situations.

The condo-conversion legislation, co-sponsored by Sups. Scott Wiener and Mark Farrell, did not move forward that day. Instead, Board President David Chiu made a motion to table the discussion until Feb. 25, to provide time for “an intensive negotiation process.” Chiu, who rents his home, added: “While I myself would like to become a homeowner someday … I do not support the legislation in its current form.”

Sup. Jane Kim sought to appeal to the tenants as well as the TIC owners. “It’s very tragic that we have set up a situation where [TICs and renters] are pitted against one another,” she said. She hinted at what a possible alternative to might look like. “We should be looking at a ban of scale,” she said. “If we allow 1,800 potential units to go thru this year, are we willing to do a freeze for the next 8 to 10 years?”

It’s unclear what will happen in the next few weeks, but if this legislation makes it back to the full board in some form, the swing votes are expected to be Sups. London Breed, Malia Cohen and Norman Yee.

CASH OR EVICTION?

New protections were enacted following the late-90s frenzy to discourage real-estate speculators from using the Ellis Act to turn a profit on the backs of vulnerable seniors or disabled tenants. Yet a new wave of investors has discovered they can persuade tenants to leave voluntarily, simply by offering buyouts while simultaneously wielding the threat of an Ellis Act eviction. “The process got more sophisticated,” explains San Francisco Rent Board Deputy Director Robert Collins.

Once a tenant has accepted a check in lieu of eviction, rent-controlled units can be converted to market rate, or refurbished and sold as pricey condos, without the legal hindrances of an eviction blemish. Buyouts aren’t recorded with the Rent Board, and the agency has no real guidance for residents faced with this particular dilemma. “We don’t have the true number on buyouts,” says Mecca. “We don’t know how many people have left due to intimidation.”

Identity-wise, renters impacted by the Ellis Act defy categorization. A contingent of monolingual Chinese residents rallied outside City Hall recently to oppose legislation they believed would give rise to evictions; in the Mission, many targeted tenants are Latinos who primarily speak Spanish. From working immigrants, to aging queer activists, to disabled seniors, to idealists banding together in collective houses, the affected tenants do have one thing in common. When landlords or real-estate speculators perceive that their homes are more valuable unoccupied, their lives are susceptible to being upended by forces beyond their control.

The upshot of San Francisco’s affordability crisis is a cultural blow for a city traditionally regarded as tolerant, forward thinking, and progressive. In the words of Rose Eger, a musician who faces an Ellis Act eviction from her apartment of 19 years, “it changes the face of who San Francisco is.

Out of the Castro

By Tim Redmond

You can’t get much more Castro than Jeremy Mykaels. The 62-year old moved to the neighborhood in the early 1970s, fleeing raids at gay bars in Denver. He played in a rock band, worked at the old Jaguar Books, watched the rise of Harvey Milk, saw the neighborhood transform and made it his home.

He’s lived in a modest apartment on Noe Street for 17 years, and for the past 11 has been living with AIDS. Rent control has made it possible for Mykaels, who survives on disability payments, to remain in this city, in his community, close to the doctors at Davis Hospital who, he believes, have saved his life.

And now he’s going to have to leave.

In the spring of 2011, his longtime landlords sold the building to a real-estate investment group based in Union City — and the new owners immediately sought to get rid of all the tenants. Two renters fled, knowing what was coming; Mykaels stuck around. In September of 2012, he was served with an eviction notice, filed under the state’s Ellis Act.

He’s a senior, he’s disabled, his friends are mostly dead and his life is in his community — but none of that matters. The Ellis Act has no exceptions.

Mykaels spent a fair amount of his life savings fixing up his place. The walls are beige, decorated with nice art. Dickens the cat, who is chocolate brown but looks black, wanders in and out of the small bedroom. Mykaels has been happy there and never wanted to leave; “this,” he told me, “is where I thought I would live the rest of my life.”

There’s no place in the Castro, or even the rest of the city, where he can afford to move. Small studios start at $2,500 a month, which would eat up all of his income. There is, quite literally, nowhere left for him to go.

“A lot of my friends have died, or moved to Palm Springs,” he said. “But this is where my doctors are and where I’m comfortable. I’m not going to find a support system like this anywhere else in the world.”

Mykaels is the face of San Francisco, 2013, a resident who is not part of the mayor’s grand vision for bringing development and high-paying jobs into the city. As far as City Hall is concerned, he’s collateral damage, someone whose life will have to be upended in the name of progress.

But Mykaels isn’t going easily. The former web designer has created a site — ellishurtsseniors.org — that lists not only his address (460 Noe) and the names of the new owners (Cuong Mai, William H. Young and John H. Du) but the addresses of dozens of other properties that are facing Ellis Act evictions. His message to potential buyers: Boycott.

“Do not buy properties where seniors or the disabled have been evicted for profit by real estate speculators using the Ellis Act,” the website states.

Mykaels is a demon researcher — his site is a guide to 31 properties with 94 units where seniors or disabled people are being evicted under the Ellis Act. In some cases, individuals or couples are filing the eviction papers, but at least 14 properties are owned by corporations or trusts.

Mai told me that he knew a disabled senior was living in the building when he and his two partners bought it, but he said his plan all along was to evict all the tenants and turn the three-unit place into a single-family house. He said he hasn’t decided yet whether to sell building; “I might decide to live there myself.” (Of course, if he wanted to live there himself, he wouldn’t need the Ellis Act.)

Mai said he “felt bad about the whole situation,” and he had offered to buy Mykaels out. The offer, however, wouldn’t have covered more than a few months of market rent anyplace else in the Castro.

By law, Mykaels can stay in his apartment until September. If he can’t stave off the eviction by then, San Francisco will lose another longtime member of the city community.

 

Dark days in the Inner Sunset

By Rebecca Bowe

The living room in Rose and Willie Eger’s Inner Sunset apartment is where Rose composes her songs and Willie unwinds after playing baseball in Golden Gate Park. Faded Beatles memorabilia and 45 records adorn the walls, and a prominently displayed poster of Jimi Hendrix looms above a row of guitar cases and an expansive record collection.

It’s a little worn and drafty, but the couple has called this 10th Ave. apartment home for 19 years. Now their lives are about to change. On Jan. 5, all the tenants in their eight-unit building received notice that an Ellis Act eviction proceeding had been filed against them.

“The music that I do is about social and political things,” explains Rose, dressed from head-to-toe in hot pink with a gray braid swinging down her back. Determined to derive inspiration from this whole eviction nightmare, she’s composing a song that plays with the phrase “tenants-in-common.”

Cindy Huff, the Egers’ upstairs neighbor, says she began worrying about the prospect of eviction when the property changed hands last summer. Realtor Elba Borgen, described as a “serial evictor” in online news stories because she’s used the Ellis Act to clear several other properties, purchased the apartment building last August, through a limited liability corporation. The notice of eviction landed in the mailbox less than six months later. (Borgen did not return Guardian calls seeking comment.)

“With the [average] rent being three times what most of us pay, there’s no way we can stay in the city,” Huff says. “The only option we would have is to move out of San Francisco.” She retired last year following a 33-year stint with UCSF’s human resources department. Now, facing the prospect of moving when she and her partner are on fixed incomes, she’s scouring job listings for part-time work.

The initial notice stated that every tenant had to vacate within 120 days, but several residents are working with advocates from the Housing Rights Committee in hopes of qualifying for extensions. Huff and the Egers are all in their fifties, but some tenants are seniors—including a 90-year-old Cuban woman who lives with her daughter, and has Alzheimer’s disease.

Willie works two days a week, and Rose is doing her best to get by with earnings from musical gigs. Both originally from New York City, they’ve lived in the city 35 years. When they first moved to the Sunset, it resembled something more like a working-class neighborhood, where families could raise kids. The recent tech boom has ushered in a transformation, one that Rose believes “changes the face of who San Francisco is.” Willie doesn’t mince words about the mess this eviction has landed them in. “I call it ‘Scam-Francisco,'” he says.

The trio recently joined tenant advocates in visiting Sup. Norman Yee, their district supervisor, to tell their stories. Yee, who is expected to be one of the swing votes on an upcoming debate about condo-conversion legislation vehemently opposed by tenant activists, reportedly listened politely but didn’t say much.

As for what the next few months have in store for the Egers? “I can’t really visualize the outcome,” Rose says. “I can only visualize the day-to-day fight. And that’s scary.”

 

Fighting for a home in the Mission

By Tim Redmond

Eleven years ago, Olga Pizarro fell in love with Ocean Beach. A native of Peru who was living in Canada, she visited the Bay Area, saw the water and decided she would never leave.

Fast forward to today and she’s built a home in the Mission, renting a small room in a basement flat on Folsom Street. The 55-year-old has lived in the building for eight years; polio has left her wearing a leg brace and she can’t climb stairs very well, but she still rides her bike to work at the Golden Gate Regional Center. She’s a sociologist by training; the walls in her room are lined with bookshelves, with hundreds of books in Spanish and English.

The place isn’t fancy, and it needs work, but it’s hard to find a ground-floor apartment in the Mission that’s affordable on a nonprofit worker’s salary. Since 2011, when she moved in, she and her three housemates have been protected by rent control. And Pizarro’s been happy; “I love the neighborhood,” she told me.

The letter warning of a pending eviction arrived Jan. 16. A new owner of the building wants to turn the place into tenancies in common and is prepared to throw everyone out under the Ellis Act. There’s no place else in town for Pizarro to go.

“I’ve looked and looked,” she said. “The cheapest places are $2,500 a month or more. Maybe I’ll have to move out of the city.”

Pizarro’s building is owned by Wai Ahead, LLC, a San Francisco partnership registered to Carol Wai and Sean Lundy. I couldn’t reach Wai or Lundy, but their attorney, Robert Sheppard, had plenty to say. “San Francisco is going the way of New York,” he told me. “Manhattan is full of co-ops that used to be rentals, and lower-income people are moving to Brooklyn and Queens. That’s happening here with Oakland and further out.” He argued that TICs, like co-ops, provide home-ownership opportunities for former renters.

Sheppard, who for years represented tenants in eviction cases, said the Ellis Act is law, and America is a capitalist country, and “as long as there is a private housing market, there will be shifts of people as the housing market shifts.” He agreed that it’s not good for lower-income people to lose their homes, but “the poor will always be hurt by a changing economy. It’s called evolution.”

Pizarro told me she’s shocked at how expensive housing has become in the Mission. “It’s gotten so gentrified,” she said. “People show up in their BMWs. It’s starting to feel very isolated.”

She’s fighting the eviction. “I didn’t intend it to be this way,” she explained. “I just want to live here.” Lacking any family in the area, the Mission has become her community — “and I’m frustrated by the violence of how expensive it is.”

 

Affordability goes out of style

By Rebecca Bowe

Hester Michael is a fashion designer, and her home doubles as a project space for creating patterns, sewing custom clothing, weaving cloth, and painting. She’s lived in her Outer Sunset two-bedroom unit for almost two decades, but now she faces an Ellis Act eviction. Michael says she initially received notice last June. The timing was awful -– that same month, her husband passed away after a long battle with terminal illness.

“I’ve been here 25 years. My friends are here, and my business. I don’t know where else to go, or what else to do,” she says. “I just couldn’t picture myself anywhere else.”

Michael rents the upstairs unit of a split single-family home, a kind of residence that normally isn’t protected by rent control. Yet she leased the property in 1994, getting in under the wire before that exemption took effect. Since she pays below-market-rate rent in a home that could be sold vacant for top dollar, a target was essentially inscribed on her back when the property changed hands in 2004. That’s about when her long battle with the landlords began, she says.

From the get-go, her landlords indicated that she should look for a new place, Michael says, yet she chose to remain. The years that followed brought things falling into disrepair, she says, and a string of events that caused her feel intimidated and to fear eviction. Finally, she consulted with tenant advocates and hired an attorney. A complaint filed in superior court alleges that the property owners “harassed and retaliated [Michael] when she complained about the defective and dangerous conditions …telling [her] to move out of the property if she did not like the dangerous conditions thereat … repeatedly making improper entries into [the] property, and wrongfully accusing [her] of causing problems.”

Records show that Angela Ng serves as attorney in fact for the property owner, Ringo Chung Wai Lee. Steven Adair MacDonald, an attorney who represents both landlords and tenants in San Francisco housing disputes, represents the owners. “An owner of a single family home where the rent is controlled and a fraction of market has virtually no other choice but to terminate the tenancy,” MacDonald said when the Guardian reached him by phone. “They’ve got to empty it, and the only way to empty it is the Ellis Act.”

While Michael received an extension that allows her to remain until June 5, she fears her custom sewing business, Hester’s Designs, will suffer if she has to move. There’s the issue of space. “I have so much stuff in this house,” she says. And most of her clients are currently located close by, so she doesn’t know where her business would come from if she had to relocate. “A lot of my clients don’t have cars,” she says, “so if I live in some suburb in the East Bay, forget it. I’ll lose my business.”

The prospect of eviction has created a major dilemma for Michael, who first moved to San Francisco in 1987. While moving to the East Bay seems untenable, she says renting in San Francisco feels out of reach. “People are renting out small, tiny bedrooms for the same price as I pay here,” she says. With a wry laugh, she adds: “I don’t think there’s any vacant apartments in San Francisco -– unless you’re a tech dude and make seven grand a month.”

Ed Lee’s State of the City: What evictions? What displacement?

Zelda Bronstein
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Ed Lee’s State of the City: What evictions? What displacement?

Mayor Ed Lee punctuated his State of the City speech with a nice little quip: “Every San Franciscan deserves a clean, safe place to call home.” I agree.

So why, in a speech lasting more than an hour, did the mayor not once mention that thousands of San Franciscans are facing the loss of their homes — and will be forced out of the city — because of the same policies that he’s proudly promoting?

These things are always self-congratualtory and full of the requisite bullshit. But Lee’s description of the State of the City was nothing more than a fantasy to the two-thirds of San Franciscans who live in rental housing, many of whom are living with an unacceptable level of insecurity. Much of the city’s rental stock — and the effectiveness of rent control — is at risk at speculators are buying up properties, tossing the tenants out with the Ellis Act, and converting them to tenancies in common. This is a massive civic crisis, brought on in part by the boom in tech jobs and the consequent boom in high-paid young people who want to live in a city that has virtually no vacant housing.

We saw this before, under Mayor Willie Brown; we called it the Economic Cleansing of San Francisco. It was awful, and it’s happening again.

But you wouldn’t know that to hear the mayor completely ignore the issue.

Oh, Lee gave it a toss-off line; gee, the rent is too high, but we can’t ignore the laws of supply and demand. Gee, we’re going to build 45,000 new housing units, and that will fix everything.

But Lee, of all people, ought to know that housing in San Francisco has never followed the laws of supply and demand. This is a highly irregular market, because demand is essentially unlimited. Housing fills us as fast as you build it. And none of the new housing that’s currently under construction or in the pipeline will be affordable to current SF residents who live in rent-controlled units and are at risk for eviction.

When you’re evicted under the Ellis Act in San Francisco today, to make room for someone with more money, you wind up having to leave the city. That’s the bottom line. And everywhere you turn, tenants are facing that ugly prospect.

The mayor spent much of his time talking about jobs. That’s fine; he’s proud that the unemployment rate in the city has fallen to 6.5 percent, but he insists he won’t rest until everyone has a job. Actually, most economists would say that’s impossible; capitalism, by its nature, exists with a structural unemployment rate that rarely falls below 4 percent. In fact, 4 percent is generally considered “full employment.”

More important, the overall rate is 6.5 percent, but it’s way higher for people without college degrees, for youth, and for African Americans. (It’s above 50 percent for transgender people.) The tech boom isn’t providing jobs for all of the unemployed current San Francisco residents; a lot of the jobs are going to people who don’t live here and are moving here for employment. They are putting pressure on the existing housing stock. That always leads to displacement.

None of this is to say that tech jobs are bad or that we shouldn’t have companies that pay high wages locate in San Francisco. What it means is that the city first has to protect its existing vulnerable populations — and that’s not happening.

I would encourage Mayor Lee to talk to the Housing Rights Committee, or the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, or any of the other tenant lawyers who are fighting desperately every day to state off evictions. He’d get a very different picture of the state of the city.

Was it a great year?

Zelda Bronstein
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Was it a great year?

At noon Dec. 19, a group of about 50 housing activists led by the Housing Rights Committee gathered at 18th and Castro, next to the giant Shopping Season Tree, to discuss the wave of evictions tenants are facing at the end of 2012. Tommi Avicolli Mecca held up a list of 26 buildings that are currently being clear of tenants under the Ellis Act, a state law that allows landlords to evict all their tenants and sell the property as a single-family home or tenancies in common. With him was a long line of tenants who are facing holiday homelessness thanks to landlord greed.

“There are too many tenants being evicted to fit in front of the tree,” he said.

We heard story after story: A man living with AIDS facing the loss of his home after 17 years. A family being forced out after 18 years. Seniors, kids, disabled people … all of them almost certainly displaced from San Francisco.

“San Francisco is becoming a city of the rich, and we are being pushed aside,” said Lisa Thornton, who works at Rainbow Grocery and is losing her home.

“This,” Mecca said, “is an epidemic of evictions.”

And we all know why: As the second tech boom roars in to San Francisco, high-paid young workers are able to afford to buy TICs or single-family homes, and long-term rent-control-protected tenants simply can’t compete. It’s not a pretty pciture.

So I almost barfed when I say Randy Shaw’s glowing paen to Mayor Ed Lee. “San Francisco had one of its greatest years in 2012, as the city’s job growth and vibrancy outpaced nearly everywhere else,” he wrote.

Oh, gee, he says, there are some problems:

Few want San Francisco to become a city where only the rich and subsidized poor can live. But these same fears were felt in the 1980’s. When I was moving to San Francisco in 1979, the lines for vacant apartments were just as long and the competition for vacant units as fierce as what we read about in 2012. We couldn’t believe we had to pay $375 for a Mission one bedroom apartment, a rate that is less than half the cost of an SRO room without private bathroom today. San Francisco has long been an expensive city that keeps getting pricier.

So what — because we were worried about displacement in the 1980s means we shouldn’t be worried today? Those worries were real — gentrification of San Francisco neighborhoods has been rampant for decades. It’s changed the city, for the worse.

In the 1980s, Shaw was part of a broad coalition that fought to get rent control laws and eviction protections and limits on condo conversions. Now he’s acting as if none of that was worth the fight, as if protecting affordable housing wasn’t, and isn’t, the most critical issue in the city today.

A great year? Fantastic vibrancy and job growth? Not if you’re one of the growing numbers of people who are losing their homes to Ed Lee’s vision of economic development.

 

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