Silicon City

by Cary McClelland

  And that realization, that nobody has designed this experience for you—it’s terrifying.

  LESLIE DREYER

  We meet near City Hall and I make a joke about the number of times she’s probably protested outside this building. Part artist, part activist, she came to San Francisco to build a life with her partner. Then, the financial crisis hit in 2008, and the San Francisco housing crisis followed.

  Many of my friends were being evicted. Rents were skyrocketing. Starting in 2010, 2011, it was just a huge upward curve. And at the same time, the Google buses were all over the streets, the program had really amplified in those two years. So that was on the tips of people’s tongues. At every party: “Fucking Google buses.” “Nobody else can pay rent except tech people.”

  I called the SFMTA to find out what law they were breaking: the curb priority law, which was a $271 fine every time somebody stops in a public bus stop without authorization. There’s no enforcement, of course. So we were like, “If the city just fined them every time, then that would be . . . ” And we calculated it: $271 times how many stops they did per day over the two years when the program had ramped up. It was $1 billion.

  The buses represented a huge class divide—and the city privileging wealth, tech wealth. Since the corporate campuses are in Silicon Valley, the buses were the only visible symbol that we had access to. These corporations were not paying this fine. They were getting tax breaks on top of that. And our public infrastructure—public systems in general—were getting cut. There were Muni fare hikes. Rents were jacked up in the neighborhoods where the buses stop. Real-estate speculators and their agents were charging 20 percent or more around tech shuttle stops, which plays into who can afford to live here in the first place. So there’s a link between tech wealth and evictions.

  Why would you subsidize the richest companies in the world and then make people who can barely afford to live here, who really need to use our infrastructure and public transit, people who live here and work here, pay for that subsidy?

  Heart of the City Collective—that was what we called ourselves—we thought, The problems are getting worse. We need to do something to “visibilize” this. So we organized with a bunch of the housing groups and folks who had been evicted.

  December 9, 2013, was the first blockade. We decided to “enforce the law.” We wrote a fake ordinance from the “San Francisco Displacement and Neighborhood Impact Agency.”

  We surrounded the bus and had all the laws on hand, the state law that they were breaking, the local law they were breaking, the fine, and then the breakdown of the $1 billion in total fines and how it should be used for eviction defense and affordable housing and yada, yada.

  We entered the bus in our fake city vests and we issued the ordinance. Meanwhile, people were surrounding it with street signs that said WARNING: TWO TIER SYSTEM and whatnot. We were careful not to block people from getting on and off.

  A woman from the upper deck came down saying, “You’re not allowed to be on this bus.” I asked to see their permit to use the bus stop, and she said, “We’re working that out with the city.” Some other employee said, “No, no, no. Don’t say anything.” Because really they hadn’t worked anything out yet.

  We tried to have some conversations with tech folks there—I think those personal conversations are productive—but, you know, there’s a lot of defensiveness. People felt vulnerable. We got the kind of typical response: “We didn’t cause this. This is just our job.” But they were all tweeting about it. It was all over Facebook and Twitter, which was funny. There were, like, a hundred-plus articles in one day.

  Google issued a statement that was really benign. It said something to the effect that they were working with the city to do something about it. The mayor issued a statement, like, “Don’t blame them.” Very helpful. And the news was quick to sensationalize it: “They just hate techies.” I guess the us-versus-them story sells better.

  We did it again a week or two later. And then again. It was very planned. Because they can reroute on a dime—text all the riders and say, “We’ll pick up down the street.”

  We started timing them with hearings on the issue at City Hall. So we’d do a big blockade in the morning and then be like, “Everyone go to City Hall! Let’s talk about this!” It was fun.

  Immediately their supporters were quick to say it’s “carpooling,” it’s cutting emissions. This was the justification used in the press and at City Hall. And you know, the numbers that they were crunching to justify subsidizing the Google buses—not one company tried to survey people who were displaced. People getting evicted every day that are driving for hours back to the city. So you can’t say this is taking cars off the road. Actually, it’s most likely putting more cars on the road.

  The protests spread. Folks in Oakland started doing it, and different groups here in SF took it on. There were many blockades over time. Some people took Google to court, and there was a long, drawn-out suit based on their not having to go through a review required by the California Environmental Quality Act.

  But I think as a tactic, it sort of played itself out. We stopped six in a row timed with what was supposed to be the final hearing. Folks came back together to do that final one. The Last 3% was there to try to start making connections for the loss of the black population here.†

  But people had grown used to it, and the media focus became too much about the buses themselves and not the larger systemic problem of inequality and displacement.

  And now it’s legalized. Recently, the SFMTA basically legalized the buses.

  We were leaked the memo that Google sent to their employees to go testify at City Hall during the hearings about the tech shuttles. They gave them talking points: how much their community means to them, how they contribute, all the volunteer work they do. There’ve been moments we get some information that we can use. We gave the info to TechCrunch to expose that their so-called “community engagement” was scripted from the top. Eventually we tried to get the tech companies on board to defeat the Ellis Act.‡ Some of them did throw down, but I don’t know how hard.

  It’s impossible to measure if they exerted legitimate pressure. These companies know how to use the language of helping the little guy, suggesting that they care. Google is a great example of such propaganda. They funded Free Muni for Youth for a few years, a $6.8 million “gift.” Meanwhile, they dodged billions of dollars in taxes. This act is largely symbolic, and it’s a fraction of what they should be doing.

  People are used to making too much money and they don’t feel a personal responsibility for what’s happening. They could start an initiative with their coworkers for housing justice, maybe consider giving away a huge portion of their income to mirror the median income of their neighbors. Because until you’re on equal footing, you’re not gonna experience what it’s like to survive on what many of your neighbors make. So you’re not incentivized to fight alongside them.

  And because money controls the government, you start hearing people making excuses for this: “Don’t we have the right to earn more money and send our kids to better schools? Because San Francisco’s schools are just crumbling.” That’s where you go? You should have the right to send your kids to private schools because public programs have been defunded? Thanks, in part, to tax-dodging tech corporations? Instead of fighting for everyone to have the right to housing and education? One public school class in San Francisco had thirteen teachers in one school year, because teachers keep moving. They can’t afford housing in the city.

  Recently, the Board of Supervisors reclassified “affordable housing” to be for people earning 100 percent to 120 percent of the median income. That is no longer affordable; that’s just a developer giveaway. But developers fund their campaigns. It’s just this constant squeeze.

  It’s a global crisis. In Austin and Seattle—tech companies are growing there and a housing crisis along with it. Berlin and Barcelona and London and all these places are trying to deal with deregu
lated housing markets because of “home sharing” companies like Airbnb.

  The Bay Area’s history of resistance is helpful, but it seems the minute the movement gets in the way of capital, then it gets blocked or coopted. And it’s hard to sustain the movement we need, when people are being displaced from their families, their networks. The support we need to do the long-haul work is being torn apart.

  There’s a blatant classism and racism underneath this history. White, wealthy folks are returning to cities because this is where the money is concentrated now, thanks to real-estate speculation and redevelopment schemes. People still blame poor people all the time—the myth of the poor person who’s responsible for their own fate. If they just worked harder . . .

  For everyone else, you pay rent or die.

  Some of the stories tell the whole history of the city. The city has lost a huge percentage of its black population; the demographics of the Fillmore have completely changed. We had a big case: Iris Canada was a hundred-year-old being evicted from her apartment. Some of the owners wanted to evict her so they could condo-convert and make 40 percent more. They thought it was their right to have a higher return on their investment, of course. At the expense of a woman who’d been there since 1962. The last black woman in the building.

  We did many demonstrations in front of the house. We did a big twenty-foot banner drop from the rooftop. We did a march through the Fillmore. We would show up at her court hearings and do demos outside of the courts. But we lost. She had two or three strokes because of all this.

  After her eviction, she was in the intensive care unit for a month before she died.

  They’re continuing to cut funding for repairs in some of the last public housing that’s left here. These are already practically slum shambles, mold, really dangerous living situations. Some of them are giant complexes, so that’s thousands of people stranded in the only homes they can afford that are just rotting.

  It’s a systemic problem. And we have to have regional solutions, because no matter what we do in San Francisco, somebody gets displaced to Oakland, which has weaker renter protections. And then folks get pushed from Oakland to places like Martinez, which are further out and are really expensive already. And then, even if you find a place, you’ll be kicked out the next year because there’s no rent control in most of the surrounding cities. So that’s why we have to look much broader.

  People say, “Save this sector,” or “Save the teacher,” “Save the artist.” But we need much broader legislation that’s for all poor people. Because we shouldn’t be competing or fighting each other for a basic necessity that we all need to survive.

  This is the richest state. This is the richest region in the richest state. And we can’t find a way to capture some of that wealth and spread it out? It’s ridiculous.

  MATT GONZALEZ

  He got into politics because he was fed up. Working as a public defender, he had seen enough abuse in the criminal justice system, so he ran for district attorney. He didn’t win, but the bid put him on the road to the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco’s city council. He joined with a group of reformers and served from 2000 to 2005, the last two of those years as board president. Today, he is back in the Public Defender’s Office, serving as chief attorney. His office walls are covered in works of abstract art, many painted by friends in the city.

  In the 1980s voters passed a ballot measure called Proposition M that capped how much office space could be built in San Francisco each year. It was promoted to stop the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco: that if we built too much office space, it might attract too many workers to compete for the available housing. And that could drive rents through the roof.

  That’s what the dot-com fight was about. Mayor Willie Brown, seeing an opportunity to attract business growth, got around the Prop-M limits by just decreeing a middle category. He renamed dot-com construction as something other than office space. The planning commission argued it was “research and development” space, so shouldn’t be part of the growth limits. That was the first crunch: they allowed too much office space to be built, so there was insane competition for housing.

  Activists flooded City Hall to urge compliance with Prop M. There were protests on a weekly basis, urging commissioners not to vote a certain way, asking the board to get involved. It was exciting, because you could see the opposition was real.

  Fast-forward to now, and it’s totally different. Because of Wi-Fi, tech workers can work down the peninsula yet live in San Francisco. They can board a bus and work during their commute each way. So you can’t keep track of workers—for the purpose of calculating how much office space to build, how much housing is needed, how much tax revenue should be received. That’s why everyone is confounded: this isn’t happening within city jurisdictions anymore.

  Suddenly you realize it’s actually an indictment of municipal taxation. The whole idea of taxing a business located in your jurisdiction is to offset the impact of the workers on housing availability, transit, parks, other city services. Today, cities like Palo Alto and Menlo Park are collecting business taxes from tech companies headquartered there, but they aren’t dealing with the impacts of the workers on housing. The link is ironic: the money to offset the housing crisis just isn’t available.

  The old rules are meaningless against the new technology—it allows these companies to pretend they are ungovernable. That’s why everybody is confused. There are virtually no protests at City Hall because nothing is being voted on. The crisis isn’t driven by decisions at City Hall or the planning commission. As things stand, City Hall is powerless to control it. And for the most part, the left can’t even articulate what’s going on.

  Even the old powers that be—mostly conservative chamber of commerce businesses—have been damaged by the positions they took in the old political battles in the ’80s and ’90s. Many of them fought commercial rent control and now are being wiped out by tech companies that choose to headquarter here. They don’t even get what happened to them, in the sense of being eaten up by their own choices. It’s like one shark eating a smaller shark.

  The whole problem cries out for regional taxation. But nobody knows how to do it. You typically vote within city boundaries where you also collect municipal taxes. Are we now going to be electing regional mayors? What would that look like? We have regional boards, but cities are at odds with one another: what we’ve lost, another city has gained.

  It’s slow. It’s going to take time to sort out the new rules. And that’s the thing about tech—they’ve benefited by the fact that government isn’t agile enough to keep up with their blurring of the lines.

  RON CONWAY

  A San Francisco native, he made his start in computer hardware and software, but quickly realized his talents lay elsewhere. “I don’t like managing people—this is why investing is perfect for me. I can go give five entrepreneurs advice, not get into day-to-day management, and watch them succeed.” He made early investments in Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and on and on, becoming one of the industry’s most prominent “angel” investors.

  And he has done the same for local politicians. He was an influential donor to the past three San Francisco mayors. Like many Californians, he expresses passionate support for various liberal causes—gun control, open immigration, gender parity in the tech industry. And yet, he wrestles with the dissonance that plagues many of the area’s most influential executives: Why does he face so much criticism from people to his political left?

  I’m speaking at the Crunchy Awards tonight. The Crunchies is a celebration, it’s like the Oscars for tech. So, I can’t go off berating people. I’m going to say the tech community has to take control of the problems in this city.

  It’s not just good-citizen stuff, it’s about putting sweat into the city. You have to give up something. Government’s not functioning, so you’ve got to jump in and do it yourself. It’s just a philosophy I was born with. It’s your duty to be civically engaged. />
  If you can’t donate money, donate time. If you’re not high-net-worth, fine, go out and do volunteer work. Get your company to adopt a school and volunteer in that school. That’s the least you can do. Probably less than 5 percent of the tech workforce in San Francisco, around seventy thousand people, go out and do volunteer work once a week.

  If you don’t want to do that, then go do something else. Like Square: great example. Every Friday, they go out and pick up trash around their office. They weigh it. They compete with each other. They make it a game. They’re all about getting clean streets around here.

  San Francisco schools are getting better because Salesforce went in and adopted all the middle schools. That has given teachers all kinds of money to innovate. They gave every principal $100,000 conditioned on the school district not telling them what to do with it, and you can’t believe what these principals have done. You can even look at the test scores. Principals are comparing best practices. And that will spread to the rest of the city.

  I started this group called One City because of the gentrification issue. Believe me, everyone in San Francisco knows about it. We’re trying to say, Hey, wait a minute, this is one city, let’s all treat it like it’s one city. That’s our new mantra. Tech people, and the people in Chinatown, and the progressives, and the haters—the ones who are stopping Google buses—all of us are one.

  Because everyone says this new tech wave’s another gold mine. This area is prone to gold. But this time, we can’t let people make dough and leave.

  We have such an opportunity with this new generation of tech kids. They’re not computer-science engineers, they’re designers. Designers don’t want to live in the suburbs. These are people who want culture and art. They’re artists themselves.