Are there places where these people can even afford to live? Once they’re evicted, there’s nowhere to go. San Francisco is an inelastic market. We are surrounded by water. There’s nowhere to build but down or up.
We have to be deliberate—and transparent—about what population we are trying to serve. The mayor is saying we need to build 5,000 new units every year. This is right after the Budget Analyst’s Office of San Francisco said that to even have an effect on rental prices, we have to build 100,000 new units. So is market-rate housing going to solve the affordability crisis—or do we need to focus on building not more housing but affordable housing?
We need to serve the population that has been evicted, the population that can’t afford to live here, or they’re gonna be spending their entire income on housing.
I am drafting legislation for a moratorium in the Mission. It’s not an indefinite moratorium. Legally it can only be eighteen months, and it has to further the cause of preventing any harm to the public, to safety, to the welfare of the city. Many of those criteria can be met. Studies have to be done to understand the populations that are being affected and what they need.
Because there is a dual social experience happening now. You have people who come here and work in tech, who live in a condo, maybe been here for about a year, and never meet someone who grew up here. The flip side of that is you have people who work in the local taqueria, or they work as a bus driver. They’re born and raised here, have three kids here, and they’ve never met a tech worker. I don’t want to isolate those two groups, but that tends to be the conversation nowadays.
Someone says, “You know what? I make a difference. I have five employees. I pay them. I pay my taxes. I pay business taxes. And I contribute every time I go out to eat dinner, every time I use my dry cleaner.”
That’s great. How long have you been here? You’ve been here two years, great. Now, there’s a woman that has lived here for thirty-five years. She has three jobs, working minimum wage. She’s a single mother of three kids. All those three kids go into public school. Now, the taxes that she’s been paying for thirty-five years, let’s add those up. Let’s add the money from the federal government the public school gets every time her kids sit in a chair. Let’s add up the fact that they buy locally, within, I’d say, a four- or five-block radius from where they live. Every dollar they spend goes right back into the community, whether buying produce at the market, paying the salary for an employee who’s probably someone who lives right next to her. So if we weigh that out, I’m gonna say that she has you beat.
People like her hold this city up, because if we wiped the slate clean of all middle- and low-income families, we won’t have an economic floor to stand on. You push them out—tech bust happens—all you have left is U-Penn graduates with a degree in sociology who can only find a job waiting tables. And they’re not going to accept $15 an hour.
So this actually hurts everyone—from the folks who are getting displaced to the ones who are living in the tallest building in the downtown skyline and don’t have enough time to cook their own food.
San Francisco wants San Franciscans that say, “I want to be here forever.” Not that we don’t want new faces, but we can’t start displacing permanent residents for temporary ones. Because when they leave, we’ll be left with a gaping hole.
It’s easy to turn a blind eye and say, “But look at San Francisco. It’s so beautiful.” But you judge a city not by how it treats those that are doing well. Let’s go into the hood, let’s go to Bayview, Hunters Point, let’s go to the Alemany Projects, let’s go to Double Rock. Why is it that we have twenty thousand homeless students attending schools in the San Francisco Unified School District? There’s an underworld that we’ve built, and that we continue to live in.
So let’s walk down a path to a viable city. And that vision is only possible when the city cares for the people who maintain its foundations.
That’s where the public sector comes in. The public sector has to be just as innovative as the tech sector, perhaps even more so. A lot of these things are inextricably bound. They need to help us create a shared vision of how we can all live together.
MARGARET ZHAO
She grew up in the Richmond, a residential neighborhood in the northeast of San Francisco, running along Golden Gate Park to the Pacific. She went to school on the East Coast, thinking she might stay there. But she returned and made her career in tech. She now lives in an old townhouse blocks from her childhood home. She is curled up on the sofa covered in blankets.
The Richmond was one of the last bastions against true gentrification. I wouldn’t say it’s really working class. But it’s normal people. It’s not affluent. Not a lot of people move to San Francisco to live in the Richmond. You had a lot of families, a lot of single-family homes that people owned outright because they’d lived there a long, long time. Only recently, when I tell people that I was born here, they’re like, “Oh, wow. That’s so rare.”
When I was growing up here, it was mostly Asian families, I think. In the early ’90s, post–Soviet Union, a lot of Russians moved in. The first Russian bakery opened up, and I remember in elementary school tasting this heavy rye bread for the first time.
None of my friends were in the Richmond growing up because I went to a private school in Pac Heights. A fancy girls’ school for old, WASPy San Francisco. I carpooled with the one other girl who also lived in the Richmond.
For me, it was never a thing. I never thought of us as being not wealthy and other people wealthy. I was so used to us being different from everybody else in every respect that it didn’t particularly bother me. It was sort of like, Oh, they choose to have big houses. We choose to have a little house because it’s cozy.
Both of my parents found themselves here after having led very itinerant lives. They both had sort of refugee-type experiences, and so they really didn’t want me to have the same, to have to switch schools all the time, to have to move. So they stayed put.
It’s weird now to be moving back to the Richmond. It’s very bizarre—I feel conflicted—being part of this first wave of change. I’m gentrifying my own neighborhood. How weird is that? I am moving back to the place where I grew up in very different circumstances. I’m not going to live the same way. I have different ideas about what I want from a neighborhood, I spend my time differently. Isn’t that kind of a mind fuck?
Growing up, there was no “scene” at all, it wasn’t a young person’s city. “Bohemian” meant my friend’s parents, who were schoolteachers and had a house covered in artifacts from their travels. I remember seeing the first hipster clothing stores on the main drag in the Richmond and just being like, “I can’t believe they can sustain that now.” When I was growing up, it was really just food stores. It was Chinese markets and dollar stores and stuff. Now there are wine bars.
There was this very sad event recently—this old Lebanese grocery store closed. It took me years to go inside, probably twenty years. The windows are filled with stuff, you don’t think that there’s going to be anything appealing inside, but then you go in and there’s amazing homemade halva and baklava, big blocks of it, it’s just delicious. Now it’s some brewpub.
No one is going to open a Middle Eastern grocery store there anymore. There isn’t a place for that. People’s tastes are getting more and more similar—neighborhoods are looking more and more alike—no one could run a store where you don’t open up your windows so people can see what’s inside, where it feels like you’re a hoarder.
The city is so inarticulate about identity, so overly polite about conflict, and yet is dealing with an amorphous cloud of change right now. Everybody sort of looks the same. They kind of dress the same. We don’t know who is a billionaire, but we know some of them are. And if you’re from here, your world is changing, you can’t move, but they can. I imagine that feeling is exceptionally terrifying.
IDEXA
She runs Black and Blue Tattoo, right on the border between the
Mission and the Castro. She’s known for her abstract work: “I’m trying to find it on their body. I’m not really creating something; I believe it’s already there, and I’m just bringing it out. I think Michelangelo said this, the form is already in the stone, and you’re just finding it.” She came from Germany to California as a teenager, hitchhiking all the way from Los Angeles to San Francisco. We sit behind the shop, drinking herbal tea in a garden.
Igrew up in a very homogenous society that I never quite felt like I was part of or fit into. I think a lot of people feel like that about their communities.
When I was twenty-five, I moved here for good and changed my name. My given name is Stefanie, and I was Steffi growing up in Germany. And then once I became an adult, I didn’t fit it anymore. When I moved here, people started calling me Stef, and it was almost right. Idexa is derived from the German word for lizard. Some people call me Dex, which feels even better.
People kind of made space for me. I’d never experienced that. I always felt like I worked really hard to create a little bit of space for myself, a little niche that I could breathe in. I came here and came out really heavy-duty into S&M, and I started tattooing pretty much right away, people kind of went, Ooh, here you are. I’ll move over a little bit. I just kind of stepped up and into that space. And opened my shop when I was twenty-nine.
People often ask, “How did you think of opening a woman’s shop?” It’s like, well, if you’re a feminist and you’re a dyke and you surround yourself with women, it’s not far-fetched at all. We opened right next to Red Dora’s Bearded Lady, a lesbian café.
Also I came from a culture where women were allowed to separate in a way. We had women’s bookshops in Germany, we had women’s stores. Men weren’t allowed, and it was legal. The mailman got yelled at for coming inside.
We got a lot of resistance. It always felt like there was a tattoo mafia. I didn’t know if it was the Hells Angels, the old guard. They were assholes and they could be assholes.
It was exciting to have a place where men didn’t assume that it was their place. And we had the clientele that didn’t feel comfortable going to the other shops. Tons of people who were like, “I got tattooed there and felt horrible.” Many men wanted to be tattooed by us. Young fags, even grown straight men, where they just felt like, “Those are not my people and I don’t feel taken care of.” It opened my eyes to how many men felt uncomfortable with that kind of machismo.
I really felt every tattoo artist should be into S&M. Because they should know about consensuality, about taking somebody through an intensive experience, about negotiating, about rites of passage. I had a dream of a tattoo shop that was a lot more spiritual.
It’s funny, the Mission used to be “our space.” It was lesbians in the Mission and the fags in the Castro. But before that, the Mission belonged to Latinos. I didn’t speak Spanish. I wasn’t part of that culture in a way where I could feel good about taking apartments away from them.
Now my rent is a lot higher than it used to be. When I moved into this new space, my rent was probably a third of what I’m paying now. And it’s only been twelve years. There’s no limit in commercial stuff. Landlords can just raise it to $20,000, and people just have to move. There’s no protection.
So it’s always happening. It’s just a little too easy to distance yourself from it and not take any responsibility. I’m definitely part of it and I’m even profiting from it. Now if you don’t have a tattoo, you’re an outsider. And we’re a high-end shop. It’s great that people have money, and it’s great that people have credit cards. We’re not a used bookstore that has to leave. We’re still here.
We’re holding on. We’re from a shipwreck, and I actually have a piece of wood.
Oh, it’s horrible what’s happening. People get kicked out. You hear buildings are being set on fire so they can get rid of people. You see people digging in the trash cans. But it’s also beautiful. There’s been a lot of money put into the neighborhood and into the buildings. Buildings that would have fallen apart have been renovated.
Oh, it’s the end of the world soon. We’re not the first generation who thinks that. There’s always a reason. There’s always the doom. There’s always the movement that kicks out the weak. That doesn’t mean it’s okay, but it’s not new. It’s important to be conscious of the cycle that’s been going on forever. There’s no bad guy or good guy. We all participate in it. It’s really hard to make changes on a bigger level.
I’m a lot less militant than I used to be. I really disappeared from the streets when I started tattooing. I don’t want to go to protests anymore. I can’t afford being locked up. I have kids, I have a business. I’m not too sad about it because when I lived like that I was very anxious. It was exhausting.
I’m a little bit more of a homebody these days. I love simplicity now. And I am with a man, which is not boring to me anymore. We have a great relationship, a family. It’s very colorful and very multifaceted. I don’t need to play or have sex with somebody else in order to be fulfilled, which is fairly new for me. I don’t need to be challenged every minute of the day to prove that I’m capable. I don’t have to prove anything anymore, which is really nice. I’ve been really lucky.
And the S&M community seems a lot straighter than it used to. I’ve always felt in the middle of the gender spectrum, and even straight people kind of get that these days. Which I find exciting. But of course, it also washes out the essence, when stuff gets mainstreamed. It makes it less threatening for people, it becomes something more normal.
BILL FISHER
In the 1930s, his family opened a pawnshop downtown. Over the years, the shop grew. They counted famous artists, boxers, and actors among their clients. Eventually he took over the shop. There are three glass cases full of jewelry, watches, and rare coins. Musical instruments hang silent on pegs. He sits in the back, desk covered in paper, family photos on the wall, and a six-foot iron safe behind him.
We’re here for people that don’t have money or don’t have ID—or don’t have enough ID that they can open a bank account. That’s our function.
People have the Rod Steiger look in their mind, think I’m that guy from The Pawnbroker. Even my friends say things like, “Can you bring a diamond home?” So you have that stigma. But I am very private. My father taught me years and years ago: Stay low. You’ll do a better job, and you’ll look better. Don’t make enemies, because you might meet them on the way down. We’ve been very, very lucky.
With the economy, I’ve started to feel bad. The fall can happen quickly. I see my customers’ names in the newspaper at this party or that party. Some have loads and loads of money on paper, but no cash. They can’t go to the bank. Or real-estate brokers, they have to spend the money to look the part. People drive up in their Mercedes and pawn their Rolex wristwatch. They don’t have the money to keep up with the game.
I’ve started really hating my business—crying. Families are getting kicked out by landlords. My Spanish customers, Hispanic customers, three generations or more—are going somewhere else. I talk to them about their family. I know their family. “My daughter, she just got married.” Or they’ll call me up, “I just want to let you know that my husband passed away.”
I’m like a doctor. We do a lot of good for a lot of people. I’m not going to fold my business up. We’re going to stay.
LYMAN HOLLINS
A former longshoreman who was born and raised in the area, he points to all the signs of change: the black church fielding noise complaints from recent transplants, the new development downtown that is all shopping but no affordable housing, no schools. He calls it “Manifest Destiny made local.” And thinks nowhere is it more apparent than along the San Francisco waterfront, where the shipping industry once thrived and he worked as a longshoreman.
I was texting a friend, trying to say “gentrifying neighborhood.” And my spell check corrected it to “terrifying neighborhood.” And it took me a couple times to get it right, becaus
e it kept on replacing “gentrifying” with “terrifying.”
I used to love going down to the port. As a kid, we’d go down to the union hall in San Francisco, near Pier 39, and hang out there with my dad. And the guys would be playing cards and dominoes waiting for a job to come. A lot of these guys—that was their life, that or the bar. Work, work, work.
Friday mornings, we’d go out to the city early, seven o’clock in the morning. The longshoremen had their pay window at the Ferry Building. My dad would pick up his paycheck. Then we’d head further south, down Third—and there was the life of the port, industrial life, happening. The warehouses and the rail tracks. Trains and trucks and motion and movement.
But then, the waterfront started closing up. The city started losing worksites. Workers were retiring. The union wasn’t hiring anyone new. Modernization and mechanization. And nothing has really resolved, right? Everything’s still in motion . . . which is too bad. Because that’s the place that I grew up.
Now it’s brick and steel and cement. Office buildings, tech buildings, apartment buildings, bars, restaurants. It’s just . . . eerie. I’m thinking, This is a neighborhood . . . this is a neighborhood now with people doing things. But there’s not the same motion that was happening before. It feels like a tomb.
My dad signed up as a longshoreman in the late ’60s, early ’70s. There was so much work in San Francisco. They needed people to unload cargo. And if you were willing to keep on showing up, you worked your way up. So he stuck it out. There were lean times, times when there wasn’t much work; you had to tighten your belt and trust that it was gonna get better. But you thought, It had been better before, so it was gonna get better again.
He was sensitive, gregarious, social, adaptable—open to speaking to different kinds of people, and able to be in different environments. But it was still odd to see him in this whole other environment with a bunch of hard-drinking, gambling longshoremen. There was a respect for him. People would, you know, smile when they saw him. The same kind of feeling that I had for him. And at the union hall, I realized he had these options. I thought, He could be sitting here all night long, but he comes home.
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