A Fragmented 49 Miles: Reevaluating San Francisco’s Residential Space

I walk through the Tenderloin every couple of months when I volunteer at Glide’s soup kitchen on Ellis Street. In the Tenderloin homeless men sleep under faded awnings, trans women strut the sidewalks, and mentally ill people talk to themselves. The streets smell of urine. These fifty square blocks house immigrants and squatters, families and elders, the undesirables of a redeveloping city. Lying below an expanse of multilevel lofts is this region of poverty. When I walk down Taylor Street on my way to Glide, I see a disabled street-dweller staring widely into the street. He sits in a mobility scooter, one-leg propped up by a crutch, petting a dog. His leg has been amputated below the knee, and he holds a sign saying “Anything will help.” A biker in business casual dress glares at the the man as he rides down Taylor, but the street dweller remains unfazed, staring through the biker to the other side of the road.

When Clubber Williams, police inspector for the NYPD, was transferred to the red-light district of Manhattan, he reckoned he would receive so many illegal bribes that he would stop eating cheap, chuck steak and start eating more expensive tenderloin beef. Soon after his remark, other cops started referring to this seedy part of Manhattan as the Tenderloin district. San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, reporting one of the highest crime rate in the city, matches Clubber’s nickname. Tenderloin beef is a sliver of meat between a cattle’s top and bottom sirloin that slightly resembles the triangular 225 acres of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Although various groups have recently attempted to rename the district, locals have only ridiculed attempts to change the enduring description.

Glide Memorial Church is on the corner of Ellis Street on the northeast side of the Tenderloin. When I arrive at Glide, I go down to the basement cafeteria. The windows cast almost no light on the floor. A man sits at a table sipping coffee, as a volunteer struggles to put on kitchen gloves. Glide wears the grime of the Tenderloin on its sleeve. On the street above the cafeteria, security guards pass out admit-one tickets to the people in line outside.

At Glide I speak with James, a portly manager who always wears the same Giants cap. A tattoo covers most of James’ neck, and gray hair fishes out of the back of his hat. James blends in among the many bearded, capped, and tattooed individuals at Glide, but my light skin and skinny jeans don’t fit in as well. I now wear a Giants cap like James’ to blend in more, or at least show my allegiance to the city.

Sometimes James will remember me and ask me to help with the coffeehouse. Other times he won’t and I’ll sit at a table near the man drinking coffee and listen to the dull chatter of the new volunteers. As I wait for a task I recall my bus ride down from the unkempt golf course by my house in Outer Richmond to the Taylor street stop two blocks before the bright Macy’s sign of Union Square. When I work at the coffeehouse, a volunteer and I take forty meals to a smaller room where families and disabled people eat. When we run out of the forty meals halfway through breakfast I run between the main café and the coffeehouse, bringing hot trays of lukewarm oatmeal to a ticketholder. As I run back and forth through the basement of Glide, James asks a server for two vegetarian meals, or tells an old woman we’re out of brown sugar, or asks security to escort an impassioned patron out. He passes out volunteer forms to youths logging hours for juvenile hall. When he learns I don’t need a volunteer form today, he smiles.

“So you’re doing it for the love?” He says, almost wryly.

“For the love.” I say back.

James holds a concise belief in Glide’s work. He comes to Glide ready to serve food and unprepared to prejudge his peers. James looks at each volunteer and patron with the same unflinching eye, ready to be compassionate if possible and stern if necessary. Without excess thought, he assists all individuals who walk through Glide’s doors, and so Glide levels San Francisco’s social barriers, leaving only a group of people serving, eating, or complaining about lukewarm oatmeal. In a city overlooking its poor and vilifying its rich, James’ capacity to support all San Franciscans could help the city overcome its differences. Whereas most people choose to either support or protest the construction of new housing complexes in San Francisco, James would not jump to one side or the other. Although he strongly opposes the housing evictions of local Tenderloin residents, he would welcome every new residential building that promises a decent amount of housing for the lower class.

Sometimes after working at Glide I walk four blocks south to Blue Bottle Coffee, an artisan café in Mint Plaza. On the corner of Taylor and Eddy I see a man holding up a sign saying “Jesus Christ Saves.” A few tourists stare at him as he proclaims that God loves all sinners. By the time I reach Turk the smell of urine fades and plaid-shirted men walk by me. The area doesn’t lose its dirtiness, but it begins to hide it in alcoves of a few square feet, in stains on granite walls and cigarette butts on storm drains. When I arrive at Mint Plaza, the “community gathering spot” is empty save for a few homeless men resting in the shade. The plaza, designed to be “vibrant public space” for public gatherings, consists of a few tables and several red chairs strewn about in neglect. To the dismay of its founders, the area surrounding Mint Plaza is noticeably working-class, and therefore not as “safe” as the “Friends of Mint Plaza” hoped it would be.

Blue Bottle Coffee offers hope for the not-too-vibrant Mint Plaza, bustling throughout the day with business partners. As I stumble into the café, I select an Ethiopian pour-over and pay the reasonable $5.50, swiping my debit card through the iPad’s register. My best friend James introduced me to third-wave coffee, also known as “coffee connoisseurship, where beans are sourced from farms instead of countries,” during our senior year of high school. Standing at a lean 6’4 and sporting a well-kept undercut hairstyle, he couldn’t look more different than the James I know at Glide. When James first gave me a taste of a Colombian drip-coffee, that was said to have “notes” of peach, vanilla, and bourbon, I couldn’t tell the difference between its flavor and Starbucks’ Dark Roast’s. However, a month into this new habit, I sipped a pour-over that tasted like a flower, and started to crave the flavors hiding in each mug of coffee. James dreams of traveling between the Americas buying and selling coffee beans to third-wave coffee shops. He grew up in a townhouse on Liberty and Noe, two blocks south of Dolores Park, as the Mission rose to the cultural forefront of the city. As we walk to our coffee shops James remarks on the newest apartment complexes, saying “It’s going to change the whole neighborhood,” or “imagine this street ten years ago.”

Although James and I recognize the troubling nature of gentrification, we frequent specialty coffee shops and vintage clothing boutiques just the same. That five-dollar and fifty-cent specialty coffee, a drink I indulge in two or three times on some weekend days, contributes to the displacement of the Tenderloin residents a block or two away from Blue Bottle. Just as I praise Glide’s support of the poor, I paradoxically consume immoderately-priced third-wave coffee. As James and I see the high-rise condo on 20th and Valencia go up, we denounce the homogenized affluence it will bring. Yet once the construction finishes and James’ grandparents take a fourth-floor apartment, we check out the view from the roof. Acting as the privileged natives we are, we hate the idea of gentrification but then use it to our own benefit. Instead of wondering if Valencia 20 will provide housing for the underprivileged, we shake our heads and head to Ritual Coffee, which brews with expensive, freshly roasted beans and is full of young urbanites of all different kinds.

The difference between young San Franciscans, in my inadequate opinion, separates those who have lived in San Francisco for six years or more, and those who have flocked to the city in its most recent gold rush. Those who have lived here for six years or more can be described as “the shock troops of gentrification,” the artistically-inclined, bohemian burn-outs, who ventured into run-down districts of San Francisco and speak in a sunburnt accent. The other half are the infamous “techies” of Silicon Valley fame, the Midwestern transplants brought in from coding academies. For native San Franciscans, the techie encompasses all that is loathsome about San Francisco’s recent transformations. The techie comes from universities inaccessible to the lower-middle-class and drives up housing costs in working-class neighborhoods. The techie takes fancy, WiFi-enabled buses to work in Silicon Valley, while others wait hours for defective Muni buses. The techie, more than a little like me, wants the grit of the urban neighborhood and the luxury of his Victorian home.

In highly unequal parts of the city, especially the Mission, the “techie” has become a common scapegoat for the city’s issues, leading one programmer to relate it to a racial slur. Walking around the Inner Mission, it’s not long until I find “Fuck the Techies” tagged or stickered onto a sidewalk. Although these aggressive messages hint at the resentment working-class residents possess for affluent transplants, the messages do not recognize that many of the techies are already here to stay. Although the message is pointed at the affluent who have evicted natives of the Mission or compared their plight to that of ethnic immigrants, it might dissuade other “techies” from investing in affordable housing, or at least respecting the cultural identity of San Francisco’s public spaces.

Mint Plaza is one of the many new urban spaces of Mid-Market, the commercial area directly south of the Tenderloin, and north of SoMa. A few years ago Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, noticed that San Francisco’s Market Street had far higher vacancy rates and far lower rental costs than most of Silicon Valley. Williams, and leaders of AirBnB, Uber, and Pinterest, additionally enticed by tax-breaks Mayor Ed Lee offered to companies moving into the area, realized Mid-Market could become the newest site of San Francisco’s urban renewal. As Twitter and Uber moved into their new Mid-Market offices, so too did newer tech companies interested in working with bigger groups. This technological conglomerate began to dream of a Mid-Market re-created into a mecca of innovation, where each employee could collaborate and network inside and outside of their respective office, in “vibrant public spaces” like Mint Plaza.

Unfortunately, the collaborative locale these companies are advocating for seems bent on displacing the lower class currently living in Mid-Market. For the tech world, urban innovation begins with the repurposing of “underutilized” or unsafe public space, which in the eyes of the poor may seem like a way to make public space open to only the affluent. After all, once public space is strategically organized for “innovation,” doesn’t it lose its ability to be public? Whether it’s 5M, a commercial and residential project promising “to activate the public realm” or the Salesforce Tower, set to be at 1070 feet, asking employers to “collaborate freely,” new construction proposals anticipate an age where public and office life overlap. But will the liquor store owners and hairdressers get a say in this social and commercial re-creation, or will their own streets slowly betray them for a new urban ideal? Looking at Mint Plaza from Blue Bottle, I start to think the communal space that the “Friends of Mint Plaza” dream of is a space free of the neighborhood surrounding it.

According to the laws of supply and demand, the reconstruction of Mid-Market is exactly what the neighborhood’s disadvantaged residents need. Enrico Morreti, economics professor at UC Berkeley, argues that new luxury residences will decrease evictions of local tenants. However, Maria Zamudio, a native resident of the mission, argues that luxury residential space will increase economic inequality. And yet Alex Karner, professor of regional planning at Georgia Tech, settles in the middle of Moretti and Zamudio, arguing that more housing must be developed, but must be strongly targeted at low-income renters. Thus hybrid public-residential-commercial spaces become contradictions that I wholeheartedly support and take disgust in. Of course I gasp along with Zamudio when I see new high-rises filling up with tech executives, changing the cultural atmosphere of my native city. Of course I agree with Moretti when he says less low-income tenants will be thrown out of their homes without more housing for the rich. But perhaps most of all, I agree with Karner, who argues that more high-end units won’t reduce the demand for low-income housing.

As is, Mid-Market pressures lower-class residents out of their domestic space and doesn’t offer enough new space for upper class transplants. According to the backlash after some 84 evictions at 1049 Market, more rich still want in and more poor still don’t want to go. More housing must be created in Mid-Market, to either appease the rich or protect the poor. However, at some point the tax breaks Mayor Lee offers to public-residential-commercial spaces will not lower demand but increase it. Once Mid-Market becomes a hotbed for new businesses, further affluence will flood the area, and the poor will be even more compelled to flee. In the Mission and Potrero Hill, in NoPa and SoMa, I see no end to the fervor for urban renewal. In the past year alone, median home sales in the Mission have risen by almost 30 percent, and still a Chronicle writer believes the tech surge is leaving the city for Austin and Seattle. Instead of referring to economic standard, we must refer to previous instances of mass gentrification, and realize the need to invest in low-income housing. No longer will new 400 new residences, with “20% affordable housing,” do in San Francisco. “Subsidized non-profit office space” will not keep the working class in their homes. Eventually, upper-class natives and transplants will have to acknowledge the bitter end-goal of Mid-Market’s current renovation: the exile of the poor.

Whether natives like it or not, the city’s 49 square miles have become the most expensive in the U.S. San Francisco’s median rent came to $3,370 this February, while its current median price for commercial property sits at $350 per square foot. Every inch of this city is sought after, and without more construction, those unable to pay their exorbitant rents will be forced to leave. Before Mid-Market, we saw the working-class districts of the Mission and Hayes Valley warped from poor ethnic districts to havens of the white upper-class. Without a change in our model of renewal, we’ll see the same happen in Mid-Market and the Tenderloin.

If we continue to look at each urban class as if they are isolated and defined, whether that is in my feigned distaste and perpetuation of gentrification, or a Mission native’s general threat attacking the rich, or a tech worker’s complaint of victimization, it will not be long before Mid-Market loses its cultural identity in favor of the highest bidder. Instead of arguing entirely in favor or against the new condos set to rise over Mid-Market, we must support the spaces built with the lower class in mind and the upper class’ provisions. Just as James serves the Tenderloin residents in need of a meal, but gladly accepts the help of other volunteers, we must prioritize those in need by using the resources of the fortunate. The issues surrounding San Francisco’s gentrification will not be solved through the construction of more affordable housing. But if we adapt a mentality that invites each resident, native or transplant, to recognize the economic inequality in Mid-Market, perhaps we will be able to adopt James’ belief in those around him, and lessen the city’s economic tension. The street-dweller will still be on the sidewalk, but perhaps the biker will no longer look at him with the same glare.