The
other night I had this crazy dream. In the background there were
police in riot gear cordoning off the surging masses; you couldn't
really hear what they were saying. Right smack dab in center foreground
was a roller coaster. It was kind of a generic-looking roller coaster;
maybe its hills were a little taller and steeper than usual. So
like all these people in suits and nice clothes would get on the
roller coaster holding scotches and martinis, chatting and making
business plans. A minute or so later, they would get off at the
other end, hair windblown and clothes slightly sweaty and wrinkled.
But the weirdest thing was the scene at the end of the ride, which
was swarming with press and official-looking people flashing photos,
patting everyone on the back, and handing out shiny little trophies
that read, "SURVIVOR."
According to the
mainstream media, the story goes: First came the boom, then came
the bust, then came the "survivors": the rugged individualists of
entrepreneurial spirit who put their college degrees, personal connections,
and millions of dollars in venture capital to good use, creating
an industry that boomed and busted in the space of a few years.
But there is another
side to this story: the dot-com boom trashed San Francisco. Throughout
the city, long-term residents, community-serving local businesses,
arts and cultural organizations, and even charter schools were displaced
by skyrocketing rents and replaced by dot-coms with inflated budgets.
San Francisco's Mission District, long an important Latino, immigrant,
working class, and artists' community, was particularly hard-hit.
According to the
San Francisco Rent Board, 1000 Mission District households were
evicted from 1990 to 2000. The Rent Board's numbers do not include
evictions that went unreported, such as legal or illegal evictions
that went unchallenged; false owner-move-in evictions (OMIs), where
the owners later changed their minds about occupying the units;
and effective evictions through unchallenged legal or illegal rent
increases. The drastic and permanent increase in market-rate rents
made possible by these evictions has contributed to a severe loss
in affordable housing in the neighborhood and the city.
The fact that
84 percent of neighborhood residents are renters contributed to
the severe level of displacement of long-time residents by newly
arrived owners. About half of the 1,000 registered evictions in
the Mission District were through OMIs. Ellis Act evictions - where
property owners remove their units from the rental market for ten
years - increased dramatically in the late 1990s, from 61 to 881
units per year throughout the city of San Francisco. Many Ellis
Act evictions were for conversions to condominiums - single housing
units free from rent control. San Francisco's Planning Department
reported that in 1999, while 854 units of affordable housing were
lost under the Ellis Act alone, only 240 affordable units were built.
Community-serving
non-profits, small businesses, and industrial jobs were also displaced
by a disproportionate increase in commercial rents and conversions
to office and live/work spaces or lofts in the city's Industrial
Protection Zones (IPZs) - designated to protect lower-priced industrial
land and local blue collar jobs. In a massive eviction in the heart
of the Mission District, Bigstep.com
displaced twenty-six non-profit tenants in the Bayview Bank building.
The San Francisco Planning Commission allowed thousands of square
feet of office space to be developed in the city's IPZs. Developers
and realtors took advantage of city agencies' lax enforcement of
zoning guidelines, using the live/work loophole to dodge affordable
housing and childcare fees. Companies like Zephyr Realty then illegally
converted live/work units to house cyber-businesses such as Zing.com
and Sony's ImageStation.com.
The real survival
story can be told by any low- to moderate-income tenant or community
organization - the people who were here before the boom and who
remain after the bust, who held on and fought for what they could
and are now pulling together the scraps - vacant commercial spaces
and luxury lofts where landlords are slowly, slowly letting go of
exorbitant rent expectations - and rebuilding their community. The
dot-com roller coaster for communities across the San Francisco
Bay area and the country was not an entrepreneurial thrill, but
only the latest crisis to real social and economic stability, growth,
and sustainability.
In San Francisco's
Mission District, community organizations pulled together and ran
a campaign denouncing the mass displacement of community members
and institutions in the name of free-ranging development and this
latest economic craze. The San Francisco Day Laborer program, for
example, compared their ten-year struggle for a building to house
their program to the ease with which cyber-serving developers rolled
right through zoning controls to slap up more and more unaffordable
housing and now-empty office space. This work recently resulted
in passing important interim zoning controls for the neighborhood
that will limit any live/work, office and business services development
and promote affordable housing and community spaces for the next
twelve months. In the meantime, members of the Mission community
will use this hard-won breathing room to implement a community planning
process, establishing community priorities and long-term controls
for development in the neighborhood - a direct and permanent counter
to the capital-driven development that has trashed this neighborhood
and others across the country.
With all the media's
current fascination with "survivors," where are the real survivors?
How about just a tiny corner of the public consciousness, a moment
of reflection devoted to the entire communities that continue to
struggle with the displacement of thousands of long-term residents
- disproportionately elderly, disabled, and families with children
- community-serving businesses, and community-based organizations
in exchange for the latest ephemeral thrill of the moneyed, entrepreneurial,
and now survivor class? In my book, they are the real survivors
and the heroes of this story. If there is any stability and sustainability
in our communities and our economy, we have them to thank.
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