InterMission
The Violence of Eviction
On the night the Giants won the World Series for the third time in five years, people sprayed each other with bottles of champagne on 16th St. and drivers honked their horns until 2am.
“This is great for me,” said a bearded man to his friend, as they navigated their way through the crowds on the sidewalk.
“What do you mean?” said the friend.
“I’m getting evicted tomorrow, so tonight I’m gonna burn down the building.” It was a dark joke, the kind we make about the least funny moments of our lives. A dark joke on a street soaked with celebration.
When the Giants won the World Series in 2010, there were 1,269 evictions, according to the Rent Board’s Annual Report. When the Giants won again in 2012, the Rent Board reported 1,395 evictions. And this year, this third World Series of 2014, there have been 1,977. This represents a 55% increase in four years. And Ellis Act evictions—the kind where the landlord displaces tenants to sell the apartment or building—have risen by 400%. And these figures don’t include the landlords who got their tenants to leave by offering them buyouts before resorting to eviction.
To live in San Francisco is to be constantly confronted with the humanity of statistics. I hear or have conversations about eviction with an incidence that supports Rent Board’s reports. Maybe because the city is so small, the figures don’t remain anonymous. This 400% takes specific shape; it wears a Giants hat, and tosses and turns at night, and makes jokes with its friends on 16th street.
We know the law can be brutal, violent. Its enactment and enforcement alters its subjects’ normative reality with nothing but a signature or the strike of a gavel. Judicial interpretation decides what your story is. It lays down its narrative on top of yours like dirt over a grave: you are a woman who stole, you are a thief. Or, in the case of eviction, you are a man who has no home.
Which is all to say: if you have been made to believe—or if you have allowed yourself to believe—that the housing crisis here is somehow overstated, that its roots are emotional rather than practical, resentment of new wealth or the age-old resistance to change, you would be mistaken. For hundreds of residents here, the crisis feels like crisis. The act of displacement is an act of violence, regardless of what you believe to be true about progress or good housing policy.
Thanks for reading. Please hit the “recommend” button below if you liked it to make it easier for others to find. Follow the Culture Club Collection and check us out on Twitter and Facebook too. Sign up for the Culture Club Weekly RoundUphere. You won’t regret it.
Photo: AP/RichPedroncelli
