Hollow City. Rebecca Solnit
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Resource Center for the Homeless Is Now Homeless.” And in the San Francisco Independent there’s a double pairing: on the front page of the Neighborhood Section, “Street Tree Planting Programs in Budget Peril” and “Planners OK Pottery Barn for Market and Castro” with the subhead “Neighborhood Divided over Chain Store.” These stories jump to the back page, where the left side has a new story, “Popular Richmond [District] Dance Studio Faces Eviction,” with an aside that dance studios all over the city are losing their spaces. A week later, the Chronicle runs a gossip item on “startup billionaire Marc Greenberg,” his twenty-million-dollar house, his half-million-dollar bachelor party and the million he paid Elton John to play at the wedding, followed a few pages later by passionate letters about what untaxed Internet commerce will do to independent bookstores and to the community such places encourage. San Francisco institutions such as Finocchio’s—probably the nation’s longest running drag-queen revue—have lost their leases. Fear and eviction come up every day. My favorite example is a letter to “Ask Isadora,” the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s sex-advice column, by a masochist who wanted to know whether he really had to obey his dominatrix by sexually servicing their ancient landlord. Though the issue for him was about the extent to which submissiveness must go, the issue for her was preserving the lease by any means necessary. San Francisco’s housing crisis makes even dominatrixes cower.
“Where will you go?” is the question tenants ask each other, and the answer is always another city, another state. A woman who works at a domestic violence shelter tells me that the entire premise of domestic violence counseling—that the spouse should leave the batterer—is being undermined by the lack of places for such victims to go beyond the temporary shelters. For landlords, housing is an investment, but for tenants it’s the terms on which the most intimate aspects of their lives are played out: home. This is a private psychological crisis as well as a public economic one, and just as homelessness can make people outright crazy so the threat of it can strain character.
I drop by Global Exchange, the human rights and environmental organization that did much at the end of 1999 to rally opposition to the World Trade Organization in Seattle, and meet its director, Medea Benjamin. She tells me that a dot-com has just rented the space below them on this scruffy stretch of Mission Street, and they’re probably facing an unaffordable rent increase. A little further down Mission Street, the Bay View Bank Building, an office building housing clinics, Spanish-language media, and nonprofits, was leased to a dot-com, which is evicting them all. In the old days of gentrification, getting bounced from a neighborhood meant you just landed somewhere else, but in this game of musical chairs, the only available chairs are over the horizon. The day I read that the Pacific Stock Exchange is going to close, I run into Cliff Hengst and find out that he’s going to lose his Mission Street home of nine years. The Stock Exchange is closing because the new economy is virtual: it doesn’t require locations. Cliff is losing his home because the people who work in the new economy aren’t virtual, and they make more money than he does. The apartment he shares with his boyfriend Scott and the auto body shop below it will be torn down to make way for condos. Cliff knows four artists who’ve moved to L.A. in the last month, he tells me, and he figures he’ll move there, too, since no one like him can afford to relocate within the city. I figure San Francisco without Cliff will be just a subtle bit bleaker. Your basic half-Indonesian gay San Francisco artist, Cliff has contributed to the city in countless ways, like a lot of the others who are heading into exile.
In times of tyranny, the citizens talk of democracy and justice; in our time we talk of public space, architecture, housing, urban design, cultural geography, community and landscape—which suggests that the current crises are located in location itself. Geography may be the central discipline of our time, as visual art, literature, film, history all take up questions of place. Car-based suburbia has been a particularly nowheresville version of utopia since the Second World War, but the spread of chains, the gentrification of cities, the ability of administrators to control increasingly subtle details of public space and public life all threaten to make urban places as bland and inert as suburbia, to erase place. Much has been said about the New Urbanism, whereby suburbs are designed to resemble small towns, but what is happening in San Francisco and cities across the country is a new New Urbanism in which cities function like suburbs.
This is a story about love and money. Or a story about love, money and location. The new economy is as different from the old economy as a tourist economy is to the remote village it suddenly lands in; the campesinos can’t afford those hotel rooms and drinks, and San Franciscans can’t afford the transformed San Francisco. As things we took for granted vanish day by day, San Franciscans’ love for their city becomes more and more evident. People speak constantly, obsessively, of what is happening and mourn what is being lost. Several photographers devote themselves to documenting the vanishing places—the same kind of salvage photography once used to document vanishing fourth world cultures and crafts or that Eugene Atget and Charles Marville used to capture a vanishing Paris. The artist Chip Lord makes a video documentary on what the new technology is doing to San Francisco’s public spaces and civic life. A few people calling themselves the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project put up posters calling for class war. The Mission Artists Gentrification Insurrection organizes a March of the Evicted, and its posters with a brilliant graphic by Lower East Side artist Eric Drooker linger on the streets long afterwards. People hold meetings, work on eviction defenses, write letters to the editor. Everyone talks about the transformation of the city, and almost every tenant talks about fear of losing his or her perch here. It’s in the news every day. It is the main news here and has been for the last few years. It’s a crisis, a boom, and an obsession.
Love of place should not be confused with nationalism, which is a ferocious identification with an abstract idea or an ethnicity. To love one’s place is to love particulars, details, routines, memories, minutia, strangers, encounters, surprises. It’s common now for lovers of rural places to fight to preserve them, and what they love is usually the appearance of a place, the activities possible in that place, sometimes the fauna as well as the flora and form, but also what that place means. Love of a city is a more complicated thing, in that it’s a love of one’s fellow humans in quantity, for their eccentricities and frailties, as well as a love of buildings, institutions such as Halloween in the Castro or the Chinese New Year Parade, particular places, ethnic mixes; but also a love of one’s own liberation by and in connection to these phenomena. What is happening here eats out the heart of the city from the inside: the infrastructure is for the most part being added to rather than torn down, but the life within it is being drained away, a siphoning off of diversity, cultural life, memory, complexity. What remains will look like the city that was—or like a brighter, shinier, tidier version of it—but what it contained will be gone. It will be a hollow city.
Every day somebody’s apartment or house is turned from a home into a commodity and put on the market, and they join the ranks of the displaced. A steady stream of the displaced is trouping to the East Bay, where they are accelerating the gentrification of Oakland and Berkeley, whose poor are in turn moving further from the center themselves. As Paul Rauber put it in an East Bay Express article about this ripple effect, “That means Arun boots Deidre, who boots Miguel, who crosses the bay to boot Shawana.”10 But many—the poor as well as artists—are leaving the Bay Area altogether. Susan Miller, executive director of New Langton Arts, estimates that 30 to 40 percent of the artists here a few years ago have left: Film Arts Foundation, for example, is not only losing its lease but its constituency of independent filmmakers. American Indian Contemporary Arts, a downtown nonprofit gallery, was evicted last fall in favor of a dot-com, and probably won’t be able to find a replacement location.11 San Francisco’s rich cultural life arises out of a European-style density (it has the densest population in the US outside New York) and out of the combination of many ethnicities, classes, media, resources, seekers after the adventure of making culture, revolution, identity. These things are not portable; you can move the species but not the habitat.
Of course, this is happening because San Francisco is such a desirable place. The story goes that the first wave of technology workers were just electronics and software geeks who were content to live in the suburban sprawl of Silicon Valley, but along with the Internet came a more hip technocracy that demanded nightlife, grit and sensibility. Just as tourists can love a place