Hollow City. Rebecca Solnit

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Hollow City - Rebecca Solnit


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       HOLLOW CITY

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       HOLLOW CITY

       The Siege of San Francisco and theCrisis of American Urbanism

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       REBECCA SOLNIT

       Text

       SUSAN SCHWARTZENBERG

       Photographs

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      The artworks on the following pages are copyright by the artists as indicated: Estate of Wallace Berman, 101; Sam Cherry, 96; Bruce Conner, 95; Jaime Cortez, René Garcia, John Leanos, Gerardo Perez, Monica Praba Pilar, 63; Janet Delaney, 50, 69, 70; Eric Drooker, 19; Connie Hatch, 71, 72, 73; David Johnson, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48; Kate Joyce, 137–39; Ira Nowinski, 56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68; Rigo, 110; San Francisco Print Collective, v, 134, 146; C. J. Snyder, 109; Together We Can Defeat Capitalism, 122, 123, 130.

      This paperback edition published by Verso 2018

      Paperback edition first published by Verso 2002

      First published by Verso 2000

      Text © Rebecca Solnit, 2000, 2002, 2018

      Images © Susan Schwartzenberg and the individual artists, 2000, 2002, 2018

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

       Verso

      UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

      USA: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

      Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-134-8

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-135-5 (UK EBK)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-136-2 (US EBK)

       British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

       The Library of Congress Has Catalogued the Hardback Edition as Follows:

      Solnit, Rebecca.

      Hollow city : the siege of San Francisco and the crisis of American urbanism / Rebecca Solnit, text;

      Susan Schwartzenberg, photographs

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references (p.).

      ISBN 1 85984 363 8 (paper)

      1. Gentrification–California–San Francisco. 2. Urban poor–California–San Francisco–Social conditions. 3. Working class–California–San Francisco–Social conditions. 4. San Francisco (Calif.)–Social conditions. 5. San Francisco (Calif.)–Economic conditions. I. Schwartzenberg, Susan. II. Title.

      HT177.S38 S65 2001

      307.76’09794’61—dc2100-054982

      Designed by Steven Hiatt and Susan Schwartzenberg

      Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

       Contents

       Three Photographers and the Transformation of Yerba Buena

       A Real Estate History of the Avant-Garde

       The Last Barricades

       Skid Marks on the Social Contract

       Amnesia Is a Club

       San Francisco in Chains

       Delivered Vacant

       Notes

       Acknowledgements

      dedicated to the artists and activists born in 2000

       and

      in memory of Frances Solnit Gallegos

      East Los Angeles, July 31, 1937–Sonoma County, March 24, 2000

      bohemian, saboteur of bulldozers, supplier of books,

      excellent aunt

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      Hollow City was written and published in a rush, and it now depicts a crisis in amber, a portrait of the perils of a boom economy useful to recall even in a bust one. While nearly everyone expected the tech boom to subside, it did so sooner, faster, harder than anticipated, and the global economy followed. But the real estate boom is still with us—prices have slipped slightly, sale and rental real estate stays on the market longer, but prices are still so much higher than they were only a few years before that they have effectively gated San Francisco (and the same conditions are arising or expanding in other cities, from Dublin, Ireland to Chicago, Illinois). The majority of artists and activists survived the last boom, but the circumstances for generating future generations of such activists and artists here look bleak. There’s good news too, though. The boomtime crisis roused the rabble who are more than and more amorphous than “the progressive community,” and they elected the most radical Board of Supervisors in the city’s history. The new supervisors immediately set about implementing some of the best ideas for protecting the city’s economic and cultural diversity, reforming the corrupt planning commission, and otherwise cleaning house, and with that Mayor Willie Brown’s reign was finally challenged.

      Sometimes I myself think I was too much of an alarmist when I wrote Hollow City, but it is an accurate picture of the time, when there seemed no end to the loss. And after all, the good news amounts to this: the amputation didn’t take the whole limb; the city limps on. Sometimes I remember how dramatic that loss was when I recall all the many nonprofits that folded for lack of affordable space or cracked under the strain of huge rents and all the people who left. Aaron Noble and Marisa Hernandez (pp. 156–59 and in the photochapter “The Last Barricades”) departed for, respectively, Los Angeles and New York. Eighteen months after his home was threatened, René Yañez (pp. 105,


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