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    Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism
    Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism
    Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism
    Ebook250 pages2 hours

    Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism

    By Rebecca Solnit

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    About this ebook

    Reporting from the front lines of gentrification in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg sound a warning bell to all urban residents. Wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as poverty.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVerso
    Release dateNov 6, 2018
    ISBN9781788731362
    Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism
    Author

    Rebecca Solnit

    REBECCA SOLNIT is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and the advisory boards of Dayenu and Third Act.

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      Book preview

      Hollow City - Rebecca Solnit

      San Francisco, Capital of the

      Twenty-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 Church procession on Turk Street.

      The influx of high-tech money is producing a sort of resort economy in the Bay Area, with real estate prices so inflated that the people whose work holds the place together can’t afford to live in it. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the latte-makers and janitors live on the other side of a mountain pass that becomes treacherous in winter; in the Bay Area, the help just faces an increasingly long and hard commute, and air pollution has increased with the sprawl accommodating those who can’t live in the most expensive real estate in the country. What Jeff Goodell wrote about the economy of Silicon Valley is coming true here: The brutality of the Silicon Valley economy is apparent not just to newcomers who arrive here to seek their fortunes but also to anyone who is so unwise as to choose a field of work for love, not money. Schoolteachers, cops, construction workers, nurses, even doctors and lawyers—as the tide of wealth rises around them, many are finding it harder to stay afloat. Despite the utopian rhetoric of Silicon Valley boosters … it’s clear that Silicon Valley is developing into a two-tier society: those who have caught the technological wave and those who are being left behind. This is not simply a phenomenon of class or race or age or the distribution of wealth—although those are all important factors. It’s really about the Darwinian nature of unfettered capitalism when it’s operating at warp speed. And while the divide between the haves and have-nots may be more extreme in Silicon Valley than in other parts of the country right now, that won’t last long. ‘Silicon Valley-style economies are what we can look forward to everywhere,’ says Robert H. Frank, an economist at Cornell University who has long studied the increasing gap between the rich and poor. ‘In this new economy, either you have a lottery ticket or you don’t. And the people who don’t are not happy about it.’⁷

      When the new economy arrived in San Francisco, it began to lay waste the city’s existing culture—culture both in the sense of cultural diversity, as in ethnic cultures, and of creative activity, artistic and political. Both are under siege, and while the racial aspects of gentrification and urban renewal have often been addressed, this book focuses particularly on creative activity (and, of course, the two are extensively overlapping sets—hip-hop and mural movements being two hallowed examples). Cities are both the administrative hub from which order, control and hierarchy emanate and, traditionally, the place where that order is subverted. This subversion comes from the free space of the city in which people and ideas circulate, and bohemia is most significant as the freest part of the free city, a place where the poor, the radical, the marginal and the creative overlap. Bohemia is not so much a population as a condition, a condition of urbanism where the young go to invent themselves and from which cultural innovation and insurrection arise. As that cultural space contracts, the poor and individual artists will go elsewhere, but bohemia may well go away altogether, here and in cities across the country.

      Eviction Defense Network poster, Mission District, 1999, with graphic by Eric Drooker.

      Artmaking has been, at least since bohemia and modernism appeared in nineteenth-century Paris, largely an urban enterprise: the closer to museums, publishers, audiences, patrons, politicians, other enemies and each other, the better for artists and for art. For if cities have been essential to artists, artists have been essential to cities. This complex gave rise to the definitive modernisms of the Left Bank, Montmartre and Greenwich Village. Being an artist was one way of being a participant in the debate about meaning and value, and the closer to the center of things one is the more one can participate. This is part of what makes an urbanity worth celebrating, this braiding together of disparate lives, but the new gentrification threatens to yank out some of the strands altogether, diminishing urbanism itself. Perhaps the new urbanism will result in old cities that function like suburbs as those who were suburbia’s blandly privileged take them over. In the postwar years, the white middle class fled cities, which created the crises of abandonment, scarce city revenue, and depression that defined urban trouble through the 1970s, but the poor and the bohemian who stuck to cities often made something lively there anyway; now those who once fled have come back and created an unanticipated crisis of wealth for those raised on the urban crisis of poverty. Wealth has proven able to ravage cities as well as or better than poverty.

      In discussions about gentrification here, artists are a controversial subject—sometimes because the focus on the displacement of artists eclipses the displacement of the less privileged in general, sometimes because artists have played roles in promoting gentrification as well as resisting it, sometimes because artists and their ilk are conceived of as middle-class people slumming and playing poor. After all, modern bohemians are often people who were born among the middle class but who chose to live among the poor, while some artists socialize with and service the rich. For the time being, remember that painter means both those who have covered the Mission District with murals celebrating radical history and those who sell in downtown galleries (and that some of those in the downtown galleries, like Enrique Chagoya, are making paintings too incendiary to be publicly sponsored murals). And for this book, bohemian refers to all the participants in the undivided spectrum of radical politics and artistic culture here, a spectrum that includes Marxists who look down on culture and artists who don’t notice politics until it evicts them, as well as a lively community of innovative activists and political cultures, or rather dozens of such communities. Whether it was Allen Ginsberg decrying Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! in the first reading of Howl in 1955 or the Sierra Club in the early 1960s lobbying for wilderness preservation with lavish photographic books, art and politics have been all tangled up together here for a long time.

      Artists, however, are just bit-players in a major transformation of cities. Those who really orchestrate urban development have another agenda altogether. Neil Smith and Peter Williams summed it up in 1986: The direction of change is toward a new central city dominated by middle-class residential areas, a concentration of professional, administrative, and managerial employment, the upmarket recreation and entertainment facilities that cater to this population (as well as to tourists)…. The moment of the present restructuring is toward a more peripheralized working class, in geographical terms.⁸ This is the context behind multimedia replacing meatpacking in the South of Market, Fly arriving as the Coltrane church departs in my own Western Addition neighborhood, and valet parking suddenly appearing where lowriders once cruised Mission Street. As for the effects of this gentrification, what is happening in San Francisco is happening everywhere, which is precisely the problem (and because the term gentrification traditionally describes the transformation of a neighborhood rather than a whole city or region, it may be an inadequate term altogether for this awful upgrading). What Bill Saunders, editor of Harvard Design Magazine, writes of the changes in Harvard Square could describe this city and many others: "The new Square reflects the worldwide increase in the imperialism of a small, delocalized number

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