I’m at the Halloween, I’m at the Voting Booth! I’m at the Combination Pumpkin Patch and Voting Guide
Or, Meet the Witch Who Made a Jack o’Lantern of the Landlord Who Evicted Her
Or, some history, some politics, some lessons in pumpkin carving
If you just want to see the pumpkin pictures, visit the jackass o’lantern on Tumblr. If you just want a straight November 2015 election guide, read the exhaustive and objective Ballotpedia page, the enthusiastic recommendations of The League of Pissed off Voters, or visit Hoodline’s interactive guide to endorsements. Also excellent are nonpartisan guides from the SF Public Press and CrowdPAC.
My friend Elizabeth wanted to have people over to carve jack o’lanterns on Tuesday, the night of the full moon closest to Halloween. She herself was thinking about carving a turnip, because the tradition started with turnips in Ireland. Everyone’s seen this photo, right? One of your Facebook friends has used it for their profile picture. It looks like a mummy.
Turnips were used because they were portable, and the Celts would carve out a ghastly face and walk from place to place with a candle in a turnip.
Hallowtide, to a greater or lesser extent a continuation of the much older Samhain season in Ireland, was a time to honor the nearly departed dead as well as the dearly departed dead, as well as whatever saints came in handy. As an official Catholic feast, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day got people excited, because here was an official holiday combining mirth and reverence, reverie and revelry.
When people die, their souls queue up all year until toward the end of October, when they’re likely to show themselves to see if you remember them. Those who are well loved, or at least appeased, can be encouraged to move along from Purgatory to Heaven, or perhaps the other place.
We have to appease the good dead, and scare away the bad dead, and not take the latter too seriously, or we’d be worshipping the bleak souls rather than ushering them along. So. Out come the knives. For the turnips, but not just.
The turnip was carved to make a ghoulish face, the face of one unloved or unknown, a caricature of what might become of you, if you become unlucky or unloved.
Just as with a pumpkin today, the top of the turnip’s head came off to insert a candle, which candle was said to represent a soul trapped in Purgatory. The light, flickering out through the eyes, mimicked the will o’the wisp, the ghostly fog that appeared and flickered above the bogs. Jack o’the lantern is the same phrase as Will o’the wisp, if a wisp is understood to be a torch.
Whatever other ancient traditions carried on after the Romans banned them, certain features of Samhaintide persisted at least until such innovations as electricity, refrigeration, and antibiotics. After all, the point halfway between Fall Equinox and Winter Solstice is a “this is it” moment. We’re all going to get ready, together, to batten down for winter, with its long nights and short, cold days and with the barrenness of the earth. The cellars and cupboards will only be other than barren if we work together, now, to put up food and fix rooves.
These preparations include culling and slaughter, butchering and composting, extracting marrow, digging fresh compartments in cellars.
After a day spent killing the goats and sheep and even cows and horses who were too old or sick or disabled to make it through the winter, after tilling the field for what root vegetables were neither rotten nor too hard even to cook, the Celts would walk to each other’s houses, where it was said the recently departed would join them and come in and warm themselves by the fire. You’d feed them, of course. They were your relatives.
Neither the preparations for winter nor the sharing of food nor the visitations from ghosts of various temperaments were confined to a single day, but All Hallows’ Eve was the day reserved for a task called souling.
Initially, people of a town would make soul cakes for those processing with souls—in other words, neighbors would cook for each other.
But for one reason or another, the practice perverted so that the poor would walk to the houses of the rich and beg—or rather, barter—for food. Paupers would promise the rich that they would pray for the souls of their departed relatives, and the landlords would give them not just soul cakes but the kind of food you stock up on, and not just food, but money.
Imagine the change in tenor around the turnip carving table after the practice in your town had turned from tasting the neighbors’ cakes to begging for enough food to get through the winter. I imagine you might take to naming your turnips not after a fictitious scary dead soul, but after your wealthy neighbor’s very real and very dead uncle, the one for whom no one wants to pray.
I was only dimly aware of most of this history when I set out to carve a jack o’lantern of my old landlord.
I’ve been doing some homework, though, for a story about why drugstores sell adorable plastic ghosts, and this thing about souling and the turnips struck me.
I’ve been without a home of my own since the middle of May, and the last several months, I’ve been housesitting pretty consistently, staying with friends a few days or a week in between.
And now that winter’s coming, the situation gets more dire, because if my luck runs short for whatever reason, it runs short during cold season, and with any luck for California, rainy season.
So far I’ve been exchanging cat care for soul cakes, but the longer I list about with no home, like a ghost wearing the chains of Purgatory, the more I feel like I’m going to be begging for mercy at the homes of the landed gentry, and offering in exchange to pray for their souls.
YES ON A
First, I got a photograph of my landlord off his real estate agent profile. I’m going to refer to Voldemort as “my landlord” instead of “my old landlord” in this piece because it’s an honorary title you get to keep, like “president.” Voldemort looks like he’s trying very hard to smile like a living human person. He’s evicted people from at least a dozen buildings in San Francisco. Those people have mostly left town, because there aren’t enough units to house the people who move to the Bay Area every year, and the newcomers generally have more resources to spend on finding and renting apartments than the people who just got evicted do. Proposition A is a bond measure to build affordable housing and preserve rent-controlled housing. Out of every organization that put out a slate card, only three are against A: The SF Republicans and SF Libertarians, because they’re against social services of any kind, and the SF Green Party, because there aren’t enough restrictions on how the money can be spent.
Prop B: Yes
I don’t have photoshop, so the next thing I did was just use the annotation tool in the PDF program that came with my computer, and I drew some basic shapes outlining my landlord’s face. Voldemort evicted three women in their eighties and a 3-year-old child from my building alone, not to mention four disabled adults. None of that has anything to do with streamlining the rules around whether City employees have to pool their parental leave when they marry one another, but I think of all this as success or failure in the “love thy neighbor” department. Prop B makes it easier for City employees to get parental leave.
Prop C: Yes
Using the line drawings on the computer monitor in front of me, I took out my trusty sharpy and sketched out portraits of my old landlord. The thing about a jack o’lantern is that the shapes have to be figures you can cut out so that the light shines through, so I made a third sketch, keeping negative space and carvability in mind.
I signed a contract with my landlord that includes a non-disclosure agreement; I can’t tell you what’s in the contract other than that I signed it. KPIX interviewed me about living in the building people got evicted from to make a tech hostel (the home of the $1800 bunk beds), and I didn’t mention a contract or any of its terms. After it aired, though, my landlord wanted to go on television and tell everyone exactly how much money he’d given me to leave after fighting him for a year and a half. He said I couldn’t be homeless, because he gave me money. I don’t have any money, by the way. I owed back taxes from before I became disabled. Proposition C, proposed by the goddamn San Francisco Ethics Commission, would require corporations to register as lobbyist before they buy ads or send out mailers telling people how to vote or that they should email their supervisor. It’s a sunshine law. I like sunshine.
Prop D: Yes
My landlord has a very long, tall, narrow head, resembling a butternut squash more than your standard pumpkin. If I was going to get the proportions right for my jack o’lantern, I would have to find a long, tall, narrow pumpkin to match my landlord’s long, tall, narrow head. He’s also a very tall man. I have no problem imagining how most people, when he tells them he’s the new landlord and he thinks they should move out, just up and move out. Proposition D, called the Mission Rock project, takes 28 acres that’s currently unused dirt and a parking lot down by the ballpark, and converts it into housing, offices, and arts and retail space, still leaving 8 acres of parks. A lot of people say those of us who got evicted and wish there was more housing are against building housing. I say build the fuck out of this place, but instead of stopping at 1,500 units, build 3,000. Intead of your towers being 240 feet tall, make them 480. Instead of 40 percent affordable housing, make it all affordable. I don’t get to decide who lives where, though, unlike some people I know, so I’m voting for this project and hoping there are poor people left in San Francisco by the time it’s built.
Prop E: No
I looked at three different grocery stores over the course of the day on Tuesday and no one had any pumpkins anything like the shape of my landlord’s head. There were the small flat ones, and the pint-sized spheres, and some perfectly classroom-globular ones. I needed one the size and shape of a breadbox, so my portrait could have ample room for the high forehead, the diamond-slope nose, the remarkable frenum, the pointy-apple chin.
Before my landlord emptied my building of people, and before he filled it back up with people paying more per person than we’d been paying per unit, it was full of Victorian details like potato drawers and a built-in china cupboard. You could argue no one actually needs that stuff, but if you rip out built-in antique wooden shelves and counters, you have to replace them with poorly built shelves made of composite and particle board from Ikea, or at least that’s what he did. You don’t need anyone’s approval to gut a Victorian, unfortunately, but I can see why that expensive and invasive approval headache isn’t on the books. As it is now, all you have to leave untouched or get approval for when you renovate a Victorian is altering the facade and replacing the windows. The face your neighbors see, and the spaces the light shines through. Proposition E sounds like a great idea unless you’ve ever been to a meeting with public comment. The fact that people from anywhere in the world could back up the votes in every committee and commission with hours and hours of prerecorded comments is enough to make this one a flat no. That’s before you even get into the expense. Make it easier to stream meetings, but leave out the requirements for video recordings submitted by pundits, please.
F YES ON F for real I MEAN YES YES YES ON F, FUCK YES
I found the pumpkin I was looking for at Safeway, but it was enormous. It only cost $7, but it weighed at least 25 pounds. It didn’t seem to weigh that much as I carried it through the store, but as I crossed the street and got on the bus with it, I realized I should have taken a cab. My friend’s house was far enough from a bus stop I could injure myself carrying a giant pumpkin. If I had injured myself carrying a giant pumpkin, I could not have sued Safeway. I picked out and purchased the pumpkin. Similarly, you can’t sue your neighbors just for being rich and not giving a shit about other people. On the other hand, if your neighbors are running an illegal hotel, you can already sue them, and if your landlord is doing so or even tolerating it, look up “the covenant of quiet enjoyment.” Prop F clarifies some rules that already exist, and narrows another: A 90-day cap on how many days a year you can rent out your property to tourists, and a requirement you get a license in order to run a hotel out of your home. If you want to rent out your property to actual tenants—which would help a bunch with this housing crunch you may have heard about—you can do it all year round!
Airbnb ads and paid bloggers have tried to fearmonger about this law; here’s a good debunking of Prop F scare tactics from a local lawyer.
Airbnb has spent $8 million trying to defeat this measure, and that’s the tip of the iceberg of Airbnb’s unsavory business practices.
I haven’t yet mentioned my landlord in this section. That’s because he doesn’t like it when I say he evicted me to turn my building into an airbnb. He claims he doesn’t have anything to do with the way his tenants use the space they rent from him and sublease bed by bed, even though many of the buildings he owns were once rent-controlled apartments and are now unregistered, full-time, illegal airbnb hotels. He also wants you to think that since I took a buyout, he didn’t evict me. That isn’t true. Buyouts, as of March 2015, are a category of eviction under the San Francisco Rent Ordinance.
Prop G: No; Prop H: Yes
I finally got the pumpkin over to Elizabeth’s house, and I was afraid I’d break her dining table putting it down. She had a tarp on her table and a selection of knives and a bowl for pumpkin guts. I asked for a piece of parchment paper and some tape and scissors. I taped the parchment paper to the pumpkin to measure the size of my canvas, cut it down to size, and then sketched my landlord’s face onto the parchment paper.
Prop G would create separate definitions of renewable energy for PG&E and for its new competitor, CleanPowerSF. Prop H cancels G out, by specifying “clean energy” definitions will adhere to California’s. Prop G has been abandoned and disavowed by everyone, including its authors, but it’s still on the ballot. It must feel lonely and betrayed. Or perhaps it doesn’t feel anything, because it’s a real estate speculator, and you have to clamp down on your feelings—or just be born without empathy—if you want to put profits before the lives of people who have grown up in San Francisco and have nowhere else to go.
Prop I: I’ve gotten to Yes
I cut a lid for my pumpkin at an inward angle with a jagged edge, so the jack o’lantern would have a suitable hat with Voldemort’s quiff of hair sticking out. I scooped out satisfying fistfuls of pumpkin viscera with my bare hands and dropped them in the bowl. I scraped the inside of my pumpkin’s head with a spoon, and it made a beautiful sort of woodland-activity sound, like beavers or woodpeckers. My compatriots were also hollowing out their pumpkins with spoons, but theirs were not the shape of their landlords’ heads.
I scraped for a long time. I figured it would be easier to cut through a pumpkin if there were less of it. That’s what my landlord figured about our building. The fewer of us there were left, the easier it would be to get the remainder to cave. That’s what people like my landlord feel about the Mission: The fewer activists and anarchists and communists and artists and miscreants there are left, the easier it will be to roll over whatever is left of the Mission.
Most people who believe that their own opinions about housing are facts believe that supply and demand is such an immutable, natural law that it bends the laws of physics like a black hole, and all other laws must bow before it. That the people who created and who rally around Prop I must be “misguided,” if the critics are being nice, or “idiots,” if the critics are being not only mean-spirited but ableist and probably racist on top of it.
Probably the nastiest thing I’ve read online all year was from someone I thought I knew, respected and liked, on Twitter, saying that people who wanted the focus on development in San Francisco to be on affordable housing, were against building housing. Period. Anti-housing. NIMBY. Progressives are the new conservatives. Preservationist. That’s the new tactic, apparently: Try to make housing activists look like the bad guy, put them on the defensive, call them names, taunt them until they feel bad about themselves—and that’ll get things built and people housed.
It’s often easy to vote in San Francisco based solely on your intuition and prior knowledge of the players: The bad guys holding the canvas bag with the dollar sign on it, full of bribes or ill-gotten gains, spending millions of dollars to stamp out community activists, are usually for the thing you’re against. But in the case of Prop I, it gets more complex than that. A lot of knowledgable people I respect are saying that Prop I will exacerbate the housing shortage, but City Economist Ted Egan, in his official report, says it will have little impact on gentrification or evictions, a statement that both sides have run with as supporting their point.
As far as I understand the law, units—luxury or not—currently in the pipeline will not be stopped. The organizers in the Mission and Bernal that I’ve talked to are excited just to have a protest vote, but what if Prop I passes?
The goal behind Prop I is to slow down the development cycle for 18 months in the Mission District, which to be honest is not that much of a slowdown in the approvals process in San Francisco, and that’s not just me being snarky. Those 18 months will be used to draw up a strategic long-range plan for developing the Mission, which is seeing its Latino residents flee in droves, with hundreds of units being taken off the market through Ellis evictions, owner move-ins, and full-time airbnb rental.
I was skeptical for a long time about Prop I. People are swearing up and down that it will immediately raise prices by restricting supply, but you know what? Rent prices for vacant units are already way out of the range of those this provision is meant to protect. Tenants have more places to get help, and better understanding of their rights. And we need a strategic plan that’s better than praying for earthquakes and market crashes. Prop I’s proponents have released their Mission Stabilization plan proposal already.
I only came around to endorsing Proposition I while I was writing this piece for you, and what turned my head the most was two things: the number of endorsements from all corners, and the fact that this op-ed in the Examiner was getting a lot of posts on Twitter from members of the Planning Commision. I’ll understand why you don’t vote for it, but please try to understand the position of those of us who do.
Prop J: Yes
I finished my sketch and filled in the shapes with Sharpie and taped it back onto my landlord’s head. I don’t have a place to live, because I was already paying a third of my income in my last place, and there aren’t any more $450 rooms in San Francisco. I’m on a fixed income, and everything I know and need and do and use is in San Francisco—doctors, City College, the storage locker my life landed in, my religious community, 20 years of friends and colleagues—and so I’m in a bind. Proposition J allows small businesses that have been around 30 years or more and that support and define their neighborhoods to be listed on a Legacy Business Registry, and when times get tough, to apply for funding to stay in business if they’re in immediate risk of displacement. Nonprofits and art spaces can qualify. I’m sure you can picture a business near you that’s been around forever and wouldn’t belong anywhere else. I know what it’s like to be that shoe repair store, or that diner, or that bookstore or gallery or butcher shop.
Prop K: Yes
I took my paring knife and traced around the shapes making the my landlord’s face, poking little holes through the parchment paper and simultaneously tranferring the sharpie from the paper into the little cuts. It’s like I was tattooing my drawing onto the pumpkin. This took a while. It took a while for my landlord to evict me. He bought my building nearly two years before he finally got us out; after escrow cleared he introduced himself by basically saying “here’s where you’ll mail your rent until you move out.” During that time, he filed for two different kinds of evictions and we defeated both of them.
Some of the best writing I’ve ever done was in emails to him specifying how he was violating this or that part of the Rent Ordinance. Prop K is a complex set of interlocking rules that, taken together, should make it easier for San Francisco to use land it already owns for affordable housing developments. San Francisco should also be able to use eminent domain to seize properties back from landlords who turn spacious rent-controlled Victorians into compartmentalized tourist hotels, but that’s not what this ordinance is about.
Mayor: 1–2–3, Anyone But Lee
Once I had transferred the drawing onto my pumpkin, I started carving. Drawing a knife through fleshy matter isn’t a skill I’m practiced at. I’m not a surgeon or a butcher. You’re using a weapon to exert your will over dense material, and once you know precicely how the lines are drawn, you have to get the extraneous flesh to cooperate.
I have good boundaries. I’m good at saying no and I try hard to practice my principles and I’m aware that principles have to be flexible if you want them not to break when pressed. My landlord’s operating principles are “Make money, do what it takes, and don’t get caught.” Ed Lee, I have no qualms about saying, has the same principles. People support him because he looks malleable to them. He has been operated like a robot costume by competing branches of the San Francisco political machine since he was appointed, and certainly ever since he ran for reelection after promising he never would. He’s never surprised anyone by taking an unpopular but principled stance. He’s never surprised anyone by taking an expedient or pandering stance, either, but that’s because those stances are predictable. His current man behind the curtain is Ron Conway, a billionaire who treats San Francisco like a golf course he’s developing behind a mansion.
We have ranked-choice voting in San Francisco, which means that if no single candidate gets the majority in the election, an instant runoff process happens where the candidate with the least number of votes is dropped, and the votes are retallied again and again until someone has 50 percent of the vote. The three candidates running as the “Why not me? I’m not Ed Lee!” slate are Ferrera, Schuffman, and Weiss, and any of them are smart enough to put a good team together and listen to their constituents. Read an explanation of the 1–2–3 strategy by those three candidates, and a very smart and self-aware take by candidate Stuart Schuffman, who is tired of hearing that Lee is running unopposed.
District 3: If I lived there I would vote for Aaron Peskin because Christensen Is Part of the Ron Conway Machine
Sheriff: Ross Mirkarimi
Community College Board: Tom Temprano
I saved the eyes for last. I didn’t even draw them on the pumpkin until the rest had been carved out. And when I finished the eyes, I saw that I had room for the ears, and so I added the ears. I broke the mouth while carving, because it was too thin. Too lifelike.
And then we put a candle in and lit it.
And then we walked our pumpkins around the neighborhood, singing witch songs.
And then we stopped by my old building, which is still under construction on the side I lived in. As we were getting the pumpkins set on the steps, a young lady who lived in the airbnb half heard me say this was my old building. I said I’d been evicted, as I advise everyone to do, and she said “well, this is a dog-eat-dog world!” I am, if not exactly, then very close to twice her age. I said, “It hasn’t always been,” and we went back to our pumpkins. Her voice changed. “It’s good to see someone doing something festive and homemade in the neighborhood,” she said. She thanked us and took her bike inside and I wondered if she was paying $1,800 for her bunk bed or just $1,200. Prices seem to be seasonal. I wish her well.
We and had a long conversation about what kind of spells we’d like to cast. I don’t do spells of vengeance, and I don’t do banishing. One friend wished for him to feel emotions and to sense them in others, to give him a gift of empathy. One friend wished for him to check in with his conscience, if he has one; to have a moment of clarity about the history of Ireland and what it means for him to be a landlord evicting the peasants.
I wished that my old building would be purchased by the land trust and converted into affordable housing, and that my old neighborhood be a safe home for those feeling the risk of displacement.
I forgot to say a prayer for myself, again. Join me in one now:
May I stay safe, and sane, and may I find a home in the Mission I can afford. And this or better for the greater good, and the greater good for all beings. So mote it be.
If you want to get people to see this, go ahead and hit that green Recommend button! You can follow my travels through eviction and displacement here on Medium, on Twitter, on tumblr, and on tinyletter. All my places.
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