I Left My Home in San Francisco

I remember stepping out of the Powell BART station to the stench of urine and the sight of two homeless men sitting against a wall, across from the Old Navy. I didn’t let that moment distract me as I looked up and grinned in amazement, as the tall buildings of San Francisco tore through the blue skies. I was in awe just looking at the skyscrapers. They were immense, historical beauties. It was my first time in the city, back when I was a few inches shorter than my mother, back when my eyes still saw the city through rose-colored glasses.

For a good 12 years of living in the Bay Area, I thought San Francisco was only comprised of the Tenderloin, Union Square, Financial District, and Fisherman’s Wharf, partly because those were the places I usually visited and were most accessible by BART. In addition, these were the places with the most tourist attractions, scenic spots, and towering skyscrapers. Hence, in my narrow vision, I grew to view the city as a sophisticated and glamorous place. My jaw dropped as my head slowly stretched back to see the tops of the corporate buildings along Market Street. My eyes gleamed with wonder as I looked into the vast stretch of the bay waters from Pier 7. My ears listened closely to the many voices speaking foreign languages in Union Square. No matter how many times I went back, I kept falling in love with the city, always as if for the first time. Paul Kantner precisely described my thoughts when he said, “San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.” However, I soon learned that San Francisco’s dark realities were masked by bright lights and a seemingly posh environment.

Tammy Ho, a San Francisco native, is a second year student at Cal. Tammy was born and raised in a suburban neighborhood of Excelsior District in the city. The Excelsior is supposedly one of the most racially diverse neighborhoods in San Francisco. Even though it boasts of having celebrity residents like Jerry Garcia, Excelsior has a majority of blue-collar workers, and the town maintains a suburban feel.

“I lived in a mediocre neighborhood because my parents initially couldn’t afford a house in a better place,” Tammy said. “One of my earliest memories as a child was going to school when I was three. It was owned by a Mexican couple, and I was one of three Chinese kids among Hispanics.”

While Tammy was fortunate to have a roof over her head, she knew that many of the unfortunate were hidden in the shadows. Tammy feared that tourists only saw the extravagant parts of San Francisco, instead of seeing the whole picture.

“People outside the Bay Area view SF as a big and beautiful city,” she said. “SF downtown is very beautiful compared to many other cities, but most people don’t realize that downtown is only a small portion of SF. The residential areas of SF can be very poor.”

Poverty and homelessness have become prominent issues in San Francisco in the past few years, especially with the changing economy and community lifestyle. While it is almost never brought into limelight, the city’s homeless community lost its structure and organization over time. Many believe that the city is pushing away native San Franciscans and taking in new technology giants; in fact, “what’s going on in San Francisco is deeper than just a fight between well-to-do tech workers and longtime San Francisco residents.” The poor, native citizens who can’t afford to live in these rich Elysiums are forced to live farther away.

“A lot of the local stores, bakeries, and restaurants which are still manned by the local families are getting pushed out,” said SF native Saif Shaikh. “Public school teachers who serve the community can’t afford to live here, so they commute from the East Bay. This has led to a loss of the native culture.”

Saif, a recent UC Berkeley graduate, has lived in two different parts of downtown San Francisco, including the Tenderloin and South of Market, for the past 16 years. The place that he calls home is now being overrun by more affluent young adults and is seeing a decline in the number of families.

“When I used to go to the Mission District a few years ago, I saw a lot of Latino families,” Saif said. “Now I see a lot of youngsters, a lot of people who are not-of-color, but are trying to romanticize the lives of people of color. It’s getting to the point where the crowd is getting a little homogenous.”

Historically, the Mission District was predominantly a Hispanic community. Today, there are cupcake shops and ‘hipster’ clothing boutiques inhabiting the area. Latino inhabitance goes back as far as the 18th century, when Spanish missionaries arrived to the city. For much of the 90s, the “Mission District maintained a precarious balance between its colorful Latino roots and a gritty bohemian subculture,” until the tech workers and start-up moguls started taking up the space. Fresh produce markets where people once spoke Spanish, have become cafes where fluent English is used to talk about the next biggest app and cloud storage. Apple street vendors have been replaced by Apple stores. On the sidewalks of Mission, one can find angry graffiti that reads phrases such as, ‘trendy Google professionals help raise housing costs.’

What was once a cultural melting pot is now becoming a culture drain. With technology booms in the city, more and more young people are moving into established neighborhoods, such as The Mission. For instance, the Mission’s Dolores Park was generally known to be a place for relaxation, recreation, and cultural celebrations.

Now, it’s become “the world’s biggest networking event for dudes who wear khakis to the gym.” The damage that they are causing to the community does not go unnoticed.

“What bothers me is that the people moving here now are not economically diverse,” said Saif. “They are affluent; they are mostly of certain demographics, probably White and Asian, and my city is beginning to feel less like a hometown. My childhood has been erased, not because the city isn’t a place for families anymore, but because of the natives who have left.”

While the two starkly different groups attempt to coexist in one neighborhood, there is always an invisible divide between the two. For many poor or lower-middle class families in the Mission, taking the car out means having to pay for expensive parking in the city. Driving the car back into the city means getting charged seven dollars for crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Taking the bus means long commutes, often filled with a mass of clueless tourists. On the other hand, the well-paid new residents, who often work for tech giants, such as Google or Facebook, are being chauffeured by a free corporate bus throughout the Bay Area. However, as much as they try to fit in with the natives, their lack of cultural understanding and their forced attempt “to infiltrate the real San Francisco has pretty much killed the real San Francisco.” Due to the influx of tech workers moving to the city, rent prices have sky-rocketed, and many native San Franciscans are having to move out.

It’s daunting to have realtors come knocking on the doors of homes that aren’t even on sale. It’s daunting to know that if a person had enough money, they could kick a family out of their home. It’s daunting, because there’s no telling of who’s next. And what happens once a person’s evicted? They can choose to move to another home, to another city, or be forced to live on the streets because they cannot afford to do anything else. With the rise of tech companies in San Francisco, rent prices have also steeply increased. In fact, according to a new report from an online real estate marketplace, Zumper, San Francisco is the most expensive place in United States for renting a one-bedroom apartment, with an average cost of $3,100. This comes down to the basic economic principle of supply and demand. Unfortunately, “most of the attention has been placed on the demand side of the problem: people are upset that well-paid software engineers are driving up their rents.” However, supply of homes has become very tight, and the city is not doing much to help that issue, besides running evictions and getting rid of homelessness. In fact, according to the San Francisco Planning Department, from 2007 to 2013, the city built 189.9% of luxury housing and 18.1% of middle class housing. So, for the majority of those who cannot afford housing, they end up getting evicted.

The Ellis Act evictions started taking place at the height of the dotcom era in the 90s. Under the law, landlords were legally allowed to evict all tenants in a building, if they wanted to get out of business. In 2007, more than 300 families were evicted, but that number fell to 89 residents in 2010, due to the housing crisis. As start-ups and tech companies started setting foot in San Francisco, the number of evictions due to Ellis Act correspondingly increased. By 2013, more than 3,693 families were evicted from their homes. Very quickly, the natives become alienated in their own hometown. This change is what Rebecca Solnit refers to as ‘monoculture.’ Monoculture is important not just for “the loss of the unexpected or the creative, but because it rises alongside the forced displacement of people.” Not every resident or family moves out of the city; for families that cannot afford other housing, they are forced to the streets.

“A lot of the homeless population have sort of been pushed and cornered into a smaller geographical area,” said Saif. “Their area has basically been shrunken because of everyone else who’s looking for housing in the city.”

That’s the reason why many don’t think of homelessness when they think of San Francisco. The homeless population is often “shoved [like] grime into one desolate corner, and [the general population and police] kind of hope it goes away.” One of these corners is the plaza at the intersection of 16th and Mission. While it may be a popular BART stop, the plaza is also home to one of the biggest homeless populations in San Francisco. Throngs of “homeless people, activists, sometimes drug dealers, and other passers-by” often congregate at the 16th and Mission intersection.

While it may seem like a crime-ridden area, it’s not the delinquents who cause the trouble, it’s the police. Police shootings have been common in the area, so much so that an activism organization has bloomed out of it. Coffee Not Cops is an organization that works every Sunday to bring food and entertainment to the people on 16th and Mission. The Sunday meetings also serve as an assembly for free speech, where the activists and community members discuss gentrification ideas and talk about police. According to their Facebook event page, the organization’s goal is “to shine a light on the fact that the police presence in the plaza is for the benefit of the new gentrifiers and actually not for the safety of those who have hung out an[d] lived on [that] corner for years.” Nevertheless, the police are taking every action possible to get the homeless off the 16th and Mission intersection.

In June 2013, police found a way to clean up the area, with a campaign put on by the San Francisco Department of Public Works (DPW) called Clean Up the Plaza. While they claimed that their goal was to “pick up litter, human waste and other debris” from the street, clear evidence from hidden cameras, set by the Coalition on Homelessness, show DPW workers hosing down the homeless and physically abusing them. With the Clean Up the Plaza campaign, the city is literally trying to wash away its homeless population; the homeless population that consists of natives and locals. It’s not easy to be pushed around from place to place, to never have a place to call home. At the end of the day, the homeless end up roaming their own city like confused nomads. That being said, this issue is not prominent among all neighborhoods in San Francisco. When I spoke with a friend of mine about social issues in her Sunset borough, she was oblivious to how gentrification was affecting the city.

“The one thing I don’t like about San Francisco is the bipolar weather,” said Sylvia Lin, currently a senior at UC Berkeley. Sylvia has been living in the city for the past 20 years. “Oh, and I also don’t like the horrible traffic. But SF is so cool, because there are so many attractions here!”

The longer I spoke with her, the more it became obvious to me that homelessness was not an apparent issue in Sylvia’s neighborhood. She knew that the Tenderloin had a highly impoverished community, but she was not aware of the fact that established families are being evicted just so that some young application developer could buy that home. It surprised me that a native San Franciscan, who lived just miles away from these streets, was not aware of the growing problem in the city.

“Sunset’s a really nice area, especially for families,” she said. “We have a couple homeless people and crackheads on the streets, but nothing major. It’s really safe here.”

It’s no surprise that Sylvia said that, because the Sunset is nearby some of the most well-developed neighborhoods of San Francisco. While many districts in the east side suffer with poverty, homelessness, and crimes, those on the west side, specifically the northwest side, live an undisturbed, safe, and wealthy lifestyle. According to the US Censes Bureau in Spring 2014, neighborhoods such as Sea Cliff, Balboa Terrace, Richmond, and Presidio Heights were some of the most expensive residential areas in the country, based on household income. Because the poverty is being pushed to a corner, it makes it harder to directly see the struggles of the people.

“For a lot of San Francisco natives on the east coast, we always talk about how hard it is to find people who are actually from San Francisco,” said Sarah Chan. A recent college graduate, Sarah was born and raised in San Francisco, but currently lives in New York City. “What’s harder is to find people who are actually from San Francisco and not someone who grew up in the Richmond, Sunset, Noe Vally areas; the ones who didn’t go to Lick Wilmerding or whatever. Aside from the whole immigrant, low-income upward mobility experience, there are things that they will never really understand.”

So many lives are being affected and their stories are being silenced, and there are many solutions that the city could be implementing to fix these issues. First, the landlords could the pay the difference for rent in rent-controlled buildings, instead of evicting tenants. City Supervisor David Campos proposed the idea earlier this year, but it was overturned by landlords and land developers. That’s not surprising, because the landlords would have had to “pony up the difference between the controlled rents and whatever the going market rate for that apartment would be, for the equivalent of two years.” Another idea came from City Supervisor Scott Weiner who proposed that “the city raise density limits for any [housing] project that is made up of at least 20% affordable housing units and completely eliminate density limits for any projects that are 100% affordable housing.” While this could provide more housing for the evicted families or just middle-class families, it would also mean less privacy and smaller living areas. In addition, Mayor Ed Lee proposed to build 30,000 homes by 2020, with a third of those allocated for low-income residents. Nevertheless, these are all potential solutions that will take a much longer time to put into effect, if and when the local government approves of the plans.

On the other hand, tech giants are also working to fix the damage that they have created on the streets of San Francisco. Many companies are donating to the city to help improve conditions for the homeless community. Just this month, Google donated 2 million dollars towards homeless shelters and organizations that work with the homeless. San Franciscans have long resented Google because of the giant corporate buses that occupy the city streets. While it may just be a drop in the bucket for Google, it’s a start. Justin Steele of Google told the SF Gate, “This is our community and these are our neighbors.” If other companies start pitching in, the quality of life for the homeless can be improved greatly. At the moment, however, homelessness is in a dire state, and the city needs to give immediate attention and priority to fixing the problems.

At the essence of it all, this issue is basically a vicious cycle. The cycle works like this: “anger from displaced residents has been aimed at many of those successful companies, which are drawing well-paid workers to town, who in turn give developers another reason to build those luxury condos,” which then evicts more native residents and families. If a solution or plan is not put into place soon, San Francisco could lose its hometown glory, and rent prices may become unreasonably higher than the current price. The San Francisco I grew up knowing always hid its secret of homelessness and poverty. It was never just the three or four homeless people I saw coming out of that Powell BART station. There were always throngs of them shoved together in specific corners of the city. If the housing problem is not solved, the homelessness problem is also going to suffer. Neighborhoods are being torn down, along with memories etched onto those walls. What Tony Bennett once sang as, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” many now sing as, “I Left My Home in San Francisco.”

“For me, what is lost were those formative walks through the Tenderloin to get to the Main Library, or all the dead cats in the alley behind Redding,” said Sarah. “Yes, the library will still be there in ten years, but the surrounding community, the visceral experiences are gone. And yes, it’s definitely problematic for me to romanticize the level of poverty in the area and make it about my own development.”

“But that was a thriving community and there’s nothing to be ashamed of it, and its erasure is scary.”