2013

A lot of people are confused when it comes to important facts about the murder of Mario Romero by officers of the Vallejo Police Department. Those who are unfamiliar with proper protocol and are comfortable with hearing the stories of people being shot and killed by police for allegedly possessing a firearm.

It is important to understand that in the case of Mario Romero he did not have a gun before one was planted on him by a corporal with the Vallejo Police department after he was murdered.

Mario Romero was sitting in front of his home when he was preyed upon by officers practicing their normal daily routine of harassing people because of the color of their skin. A lot of people do not understand that it is not against the law to sit in your car in front of your house at any time of the day or night because this is America and we have civil and constitutional rights.

Those rights of Mario Romero were violated to a horrible extent on September 2, 2012 when he was murdered by officers of the Vallejo Police.

Vallejo Police have counted on intimidation, stalking and harassment to silence witnesses and family of those who have been killed at their hands.

Vallejo police were counting on such intimidation to silence everyone who witnessed these crimes of Vallejo police.

Vallejo Police want you believe that a sane man would pull out a fake gun on two officers with real guns and unlimited bullets. A sane man who had just got a new promising job and was preparing to celebrate his 24th birthday.

A sane man who had a family who loved him as much as he loved them. This same sane man who was a hero to his 3 year old daughter.

The Vallejo Police have admitted to not identifying themselves. Before attacking Mario Romero’s car with bullets but have attempted to justify their actions through planting evidence to support their lies and slandering Mario’s name.

The Vallejo Police have not given an explanation for shooting at Mario so many times without any return fire. Shooting at an unarmed man was not enough for these blood thirsty animals. They had to reload and hop onto the hood of Mario’s car and continue to unload while the officer turned his head to have a conversation with a loved one of the victim while continuing to shoot her baby brother to death.

To violate a person’s rights is not enough, to kill an unarmed man unjustly and in front of his home, neighbors and family members is not enough. The Vallejo Police immediately made lies in an attempt to justify their criminal activity.

They changed their stories three different times, none making sense to a family who were so close to the victim as well as friends and neighbors who knew what had occurred on that horrifying night.

The Vallejo police lied saying that Mario got out of his car and pointed a fake gun at two real guns but they did not know that Mario’s car door was broken, his window had to be rolled down and his door had to be opened from the outside for him to exit his car.

They did not know that Mario’s seatbelt was broken and was tied into a knot, which he faithfully tied to prevent himself from getting a seatbelt ticket preventing him from leaving the car in an abrupt manner.

They did not know that their corrupt activities were being recorded. They were unaware that anyone saw the police issued training weapon being planted into Mario’s car. Nor did they know that they were observed stealing the seatbelt that Mario was cut from.

Vallejo Police Chief Slandered Mario’s name, falsely stating Mario as a parolee who was afraid of going back to prison, using this as a reason to say that Mario pulled out a fake gun on two officer’s with two real guns and unlimited bullets. This false statement was relayed to the media by the Vallejo Police Chief who was aware that it was a lie but has refused to publically admit his faults, further proving the agencies lack of accountability practices.

The assassination of a person’s character is the second death that Vallejo Police Department sentences their victims to after they have murdered them in the manner that they murdered Mario Romero.

This assassination is carried out with the hopes of making the lives of the people who have been killed seem insignificant as well as limiting public outcry over police misconduct.

Vallejo Police do not want you to know that Mario Romero was shot in his face and mouth and shot in the palms of his hands and wrists as well as his chest and underarms as he pleaded for his life, Nor do they want you to know that after unloading 30 + bullets into his car his body was stolen from the scene of the crime and hidden for a month as insensitive officers of the Vallejo police harassed and intimidated Mario’s family.

The person that the Vallejo Police have painted Mario Romero to be is far from the person he was. Mario was a very loving person and very easy to love. He met no strangers and was willing to help people that he did not know. Whether it be helping an elderly woman cross the street or giving a man that he did not know a ride. Mario was very close to his family and open about his activity. He was creative and loved making music as well has taking care of his 3 year old daughter who was his world. Mario was a kid at heart who wouldn’t hesitate to sit on the floor and play video games with his nieces and nephews. Or ask his older siblings if his clothes matched. Mario was one person who made sure that you knew that he loved you , never leaving out the door without saying “I Love you”, giving you a hug and a kiss. He was never shy with his affection, never too proud to express his love. He was very respectful always saying Yes ma’am or nor sir to his elders. All he ever wanted was to be was famous and make his family proud. Mario’s life being taken so brutally and unjustly has exposed and evil within the city of Vallejo that has been able to be hidden for so long. Mario’s family has always been proud to call him theirs and will continue to fight for justice for his murder as well as the murder, police brutality and discrimination that has been experienced by others.

We are all Mario Romero!

April 3, 2013

“These are our young people, our future African-American leaders, trying to fight to get an education, and this is who they are cutting services to,” said City College of San Francisco Student Body President Shanell Williams about the recent cutting of the GED van service that provided transportation from “The Point” (Hunters Point) to CCSF GED prep classes. “This was a tiny program with a minimal budget that meant so much to the community and is typical of the moves being made by the corporate-funded forces attacking our communities’ schools locally and nationally,” Shanell explained.

As a formerly houseless, very poor single mama whose life was truly saved by the affordable education, support services, free child care and so much more I received at CCSF, I have been terrified to watch the orchestrated and systematic attack on CCSF, one of the largest community colleges in the country with a student body of over 90,000 people, unfold. Like the sudden closure of 52 public schools in Chicago and more across the country, it is an act of violence against our poor and working class communities of color. To me its insidiousness and covert under-handedness feels like 21st century corporate COINTELPRO.

“This is their fault; they over-budgeted.” “They were sloppy with their accounting.” “They need to clean house.” One after the other, editors of small, wannabe corporate news agencies spoke a strangely similar party line in a press briefing I was invited to a couple of months back in the early stages of this corporate coup of City College, when weekly hit pieces would appear in the SF Chronicle. As these corporate media editors, albeit smaller and less influential than the Chronicle, were all saying the same thing I wondered how they were all so bought in. And then I did a little WeSearch (poor people-led, not philanthro-pimp led, research).

Like the Monsanto Protection Act, the support for all of this corporate destruction of our communities’ schools can be traced to as high up as the federal government and multi-million dollar mandates to privatize most of public education. President Obama’s 2009 American Graduation Initiative for community colleges is directly from the corporate playbook. The plan includes such privatizing measures as partnering with industries and for-profit schools, transferring loans to private lenders, and funding based on student progress.

One of the main players in the corporate coup is the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) who out of the blue gave City College an “F” and a deadline of March 15 to correct supposed defects or face closure. With Board of Trustees’ approval, a very corporate interim chancellor, being paid $1,000 a day, took a wrecking ball to CCSF – in the name of “austerity.”

Behind this huge corporate coup is the Illumina Foundation. It was funded by Sally Mae, the student loan and high stakes testing corporation, which, along with 21st century parachute liberal philanthro-pimps, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “donated” $1.5 million to the WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) or accreditation board so a comprehensive Karl Rove-style campaign of disinformation could be launched against the otherwise stellar and problem-free City College of San Francisco.

Why? Perhaps those 90,000 warm bodies would be generating a lot more profits in tuition and whole more student loan debt if they were enrolled in a private college like Heald, University of Phoenix, DeVry and Pepperdine and/or through the multitude of on-line universities being pushed heavily by the digital sweatshop perpetrators, the Gates Foundation.

And of course these kinds of campaigns work. Or do they? Yes, it’s true that since the disinformation campaign was launched, enrollment in CCSF has dropped from 90,000 to 85,000. People are understandably confused and scared. But the people are also mad and the people can only be lied to so much with a lie so blatantly obvious as this one against a college so large and deeply rooted in our community.

“We aren’t going anywhere,” roared the beautiful, multi-colored crowd of thousands of people who gathered on March 14 at City Hall in San Francisco.

“My ethnic studies teacher, my counselor and my women’s studies teacher all received pink slips. They are all about to lose their jobs if this push goes through,” Terrilyn Woodfin, my sister-mama, PNN poverty skolar, reporter and City College student told me. As I did more Wesearch I discovered that not only were massive layoffs being threatened, but administration staff and teachers are being told not to say anything and just go along with the flow to keep their jobs.

“What makes it so crazy-making is the people are being lied to in so many ways,” Shanell declared, proceeding to describe how Propositions A and 30, giving $14 million and $376 million to save City College, were passed resoundingly by San Francisco and California voters to protect City College. Yet no matter what, the corporate forces say, “It’s not enough,” and proceed with their deadly corporate wrecking ball trying to make sure that our people’s college no longer belongs to the people.

“Whose college? Our College!” The wave of thousands of people’s voices at City Hall rang in our collective ears. If we ever needed to put our bodies in the forefront of this fight, it is now.

Please show up with your bodies and souls to the Southeast Campus of City College, 1800 Oakdale at Phelps, in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco, on Wednesday, April 3, 6 p.m., to get involved and/or go on-line to saveccsf.org.
 

Krip-Hop Nation (KHN):  I’ve been dying to get this interview!  We met on MySpace and I heard your music and read your story about your radio career and your disability.  Give us the full picture.

Shana Williams: Let me try and make this short. Lol.. I’ve been acting, singing and rapping since the 5^th grade, and I was tired of knocking at record labels doors so I decided to become a radio personality and I did, then after 2 years I had a spinal cord injury and spent 3 months in hospitals & nursing homes. After about a year and a half to 2 years of feeling sorry for myself I decided to try and go after my passion then I discovered that its hard if you’re disabled to get into radio. In California all of the radio stations are downtown and in buildings that are 20 plus stories high-they say that they are equal opportunity jobs but in the descriptions they say u must be able to walk up a flight of stairs and be able to hold 30 plus pounds so that exempts anyone who is physically disabled which is sad and that’s what I'm trying to currently change.

KHN:  You use to live in LA now you are in ATL.  What attracted you to ATL?

 Shana Williams:  Ever since the 6^th grade I've wanted to move to ATL , I just looked at a map & said I'm moving there and when I got my money up I did just that. It’s funny because I've never visited Atlanta before I moved here, and everyone said I was crazy to just up and leave to a place I’ve never visited.. also they have a wonder hospital called the Sheppard Center, they do a lot for those with spinal cord injuries, MS among others and the doctors are great..

KHN:  You have been in broadcasting for some time now.  What is the difference when you started out and now?

 Shana Williams: Technology has really taken over the radio industry since I first started. Now in the radio industry many of the on air personalities are celebrities and that increases the competition between those like myself who are earning or have a degree in communications. The internet helps radio personalities like myself to expand my brand between Facebook, YouTube, twitter, and myself.  Now I can control my image and do my own networking.

 KHN:  In the days of internet where do you think traditional radio is going or needs to go?

Shana Williams:  This is a great question because I was just talking to my father about this the other day. I listen to XM radio and Am/FM radio and the only difference is internet radio doesn’t have a censor, you can do or say whatever you want, traditional radio has regulations you have to abide by.  In order for traditional radio to expand it needs to expand its playlist and stop playing the same 5 songs every hour and become less about advertising and more about the music, but advertisements are what keep traditional radio alive so it’s a blessing and a curse.

KHN:  Would you ever go back to singing/raping and if not/or yes why or why not?

Shana Williams: I have been getting asked this question a lot lately and I have a different answer each time I’m asked this.. lol…  my love for music will always flow throw my veins. I do continue to write music but my focus is radio, writing and producing at this time, but I may spit a rap verse here and there just to let u know that I still got it.. 

KHN:  What do you think about Krip-Hop Nation and do you think the Hip-Hop industry is ready for a mainstream physically disabled Hip-Hop artist/s?

Shana Williams:   love krip-hip hop… I think-no in fact I know that it’s the next big thing.. I believe the doors are opening up for those disabled to expose their talent. On TV rapper Drake’s character was a wheelchair user, on the biggest show on TV glee someone is using a wheelchair and on 106 & park a young man named blind fury won the rap battle… the only issue I have with TV is they hire actors to play someone who uses a wheelchair instead of actually hiring someone who is disabled. Really all we need is one rapper who a wheelchair user to make it big then it will open the doors for others… all we need is that 1 big break and I believe that it will happen within the next 5 years.

KHN:  Whom have you interviewed in the past?

Shana Williams: Wow that’s a long list but the artist vary from independent to artist who are known overseas, I have had the pleasure to interview a Jamaican artist Jerri ghetto,  big speech, syrenz, mila j, nina shaw, swanni swisha, tripz, young tage, dolla, and many others..

KHN:  What do you think about Hip-Hop today?

Shana Williams:  I love hip hop, I love all music, but hip hop has evoloved into a business where you don’t have to release an album, to can release one hit record have it sell 1 million ringtones, and have 1 million downloads on iTunes and u could retire. No we don’t have artist  that could spit like 2pac or flow like biggie, but we have artist like jayz & nelly who have ownership in nba teams or Nicki minaj & cee-lo  who has a multi-million dollar soda deals. These days we have country, pop, and rock artist who ask hip hop artist to flow on their tracks. Yes hip-hop does have some songs that some may consider lame, but if you're making music that u love, and that’s one more person who’s off the streets I’m happy with that.

KHN:  We have found it hard to find disabled women in Hip-Hop who are willing to be open or just support what we do.  What do you think about that?

Shana Williams: it’s too bad that in 2013 women are still afraid to speak out and project there experiences,. as woman we are supposed to be strong and stand by our men, or be the rock to our households.  Some women don’t want to be the face of reppin being a woman with disabilities. I was in radio before I became injured and all those other djs I thought were friends were nowhere to be found, and it forced me to reexamine my purpose in life. Some woman are afraid of being judged, and have a fear of telling their story because they’re still trying to comprehend it themselves. Ladies speak up! Our voice must be heard!!!

KHN:  What are you working on now and how can people hear you?

Shana Williams:  Well I just lost over 140 pounds so I’m currently revamping my website to upload new mp3s and photos so u all can see the new me & hear the new me.  Just follow @djshazz & ill be posting the link to myn new website very soon!!!

KHN:  You have a song called Shazz Da World that I love.  Please explain that song for us.

Shana Williams: thanks.. in my song da world I wanted to make a song that will grab your attention once u heard it, and made u think. This song talks about everything from us being at war, sex and drugs.. what’s crazy is I wrote this

Song in 2001 after the terrorists attacks in the United States and its still relevant now, which shows that I was before my time. I just wanted to be the voice for woman who actually had something positive to say, who didn’t have to open their legs to get your attention.

KHN:  What is your advice for Black disabled/non-disabled women who want to get into radio?

Shana Williams: I’m going to tell u what I was told- if u want to be a singer u must sing everyday, and radio is no different.. if u want to be in radio study your craft,  listen to the radio, practice reading out loud so when you're on air u don’t flutter your words. The radio industry is a business so learn the ins & outs of how radio works.. also networking . the more people to know in this industry the better…there are books in any library or online so study, study, study… & good luck!!

KHN:  If you had control of the Hip-Hop industry what would you do  different?

Shana Williams: I would change the image of the women in the industry. In this industry woman have to sell sex before they can sell there music, the men can wear jeans and a t-shirt and jump on stage but us women need 3 hours of hair & makeup & a flat stomach.

KHN:  How can people contact you?

Shana Williams:  Follow me on @djshazz on twitter, MySpace djshazz and my email is shazz4life@aol.com and I’m also starting my own website called

http://www.da-realist.com/  that’s going to spread positivity in music, health, relationships and lifestyle.

KHN:  Any last words?

Shana Williams:  Just continue to follow your dreams, what some may consider your weakness, make it become your strength. Keep your head up and stay ready so you don’t have to get ready!! Remember that I love u but most important god loves u!!!

Wesearch:

Poor people led research and pro-active media deconstructing the lies told about criminalized and mythologized communities.

Ingrid De Leon

I am a migrant woman, mother that day by day I look at the sun

to guide me through this World. I have lived in San Francisco

for nine years. I see how things here are changing in the Misión

district. Before, there were a lot of stores and Latin restaurants.

But everything is changing. Everyday, they build new buildings

for businesses and other races that we cannot afford to buy.

When I walk through 24th street, I see new houses, businesses and

cafes with people who have money, everyone has their coffee cup

and everyone with their own laptops. They all appear quiet,

each in their own world. Us, Raza and those that don’t have a lot of

money cannot go in there. We have no money or computer. Little

by little our spaces are shrinking. And when we are surrounded

by rich houses and rich people, we feel like fish out of water

and we want to move out of here. Our space is already full of

things that us, the poor, cannot have. I am in horror, because I

feel that at any moment I will no longer have a home, because my

current home is very old.  These are the houses that are being

destroyed for new condominiums. I get chills every time I see a new

construction site. I feel as if I’m drowning, since I cannot swim.

Usuario for change (Enrique)- Gentrification

When I arrived in this country, into the city of San Francisco, a

decade ago, I saw how the renters and people that lived in shelters

were being forced into eviction from where we lived by the owners

of the buildings. Forced into eviction by the creation of “CHANGES” by the city of

San Francisco.

During a mass protest, I announced that the ones that should be

criminalized are the originators of Gentrification.  In other

words- the owners of the units and the legislators that approved the

ELLIS ACT.  Just like those who approved the program

“CHANGES,” because those are the originators of this problem.

Me, in my part, I was going to fight for a system of subsidized

housing by the city. Fight for the particular persons that have low income or

temporarily no income who could have good worthy housing according to

their earnings.

Today I live at Casa Quezada where I pay 25 dollars a month for

rent and when I do not have money, I do not pay. This program

was developed with the participation of many non-profit

organizations and other neighborhood centers in the Misión.

Gentrification- Julio Chaves

Gentrification of a neighborhood affects my economy because the

rent of apartments and rooms increase in price.  The owners of the

houses or apartments take advantage of the situation, feeling like mini kings in

their kingdom where they live and pressure the people who live in

their units.  The rent every day is more expensive.  It pushes us to live in places

far from our work centers, making life more difficult. Like

my grandmother says “what doesn’t leave with tears, leaves

with a sigh.”  This is due to the fact that is you have cheap housing,

you have to deal with many stupid discomforts from the mini King

and Esther with how you spend more money on gasoline or on the bus transportation. Gentrification is a silent Invasion, but without bullets-where the one with the most money takes possession of the best commercial places with the great ability to do

business.

Gentrification increases the rent and also the food.  It is a race where

he takes himself out of the race when he has little money or low

paying jobs. It’s a race where the poor get poorer and the rich get

richer.

This economic war grows bigger and bigger each moment like

Monsanto (Monster.) Where the one with money can live where he

wants and the poor where ever we can, or survive if we can.

I like the apartment where I live because it’s cheap, but it is located

on the first floor and I can hear the drainage system from the

neighbors upstairs.  And I can hear them making love with a

rik rik of their mattress. But all these noises and discomforts are

part of my environment.

Gentri- Lex Horan

I'm a young white person who's living in Oakland on a short-term basis. I am passing through, essentially, for four months of my life. Most of the time I live in Minneapolis, MN. Here in this city I am mostly a learner--I came here for training to bring home with me. It feels like a very strange way to be in a place.

Moving here was very easy for me. I am living in an apartment near Lake Merritt with my best friend and another person I hadn't met before moving here. The building I'm staying in was recently renovated and many other people in my building are Black and Latino. (Two of us in my household are white, and one of my housemates is Black. We all went to college; none of us are from the Bay Area.) Gentrification has made it very easy for me to move to Oakland. I know a lot of other people who live here--almost none of them are from here--who have helped me by giving me rides, showing me around, lending me a bike, letting me live with them for low rent. It's like the rails were greased to help me land here easily. I'm also impacted by gentrification in a different way, but how it feels to live here. I'm not used to it yet, if that's ever possible. I think a lot of people like me get used to the way displacement feels in the air, on BART, walking past the people who've been stolen from. I'm afraid that I might too, if I stayed here. But for now it rubs me, feels exhausting and heartbreaking and makes me feel nauseous and uneasy. I am impacted because I watch the way people like me are cogs in the machine of displacement and I feel angry, hopeless, judgmental, confused. It's important for me to grapple with all these feelings and also--at the end of the day, I'm housed, period.

Noa Grayevsky- Gentrification

I am a rich, white queer person living in San Francisco. I'm not from here. My parents immigrated to the United States from Israel where my Palestinian- Jewish ancestors colluded with the British colonizers and became white and rich off of land theft, displacement of their neighbors, and "real estate development." I am a graduate student with owning class parents. I graduated from Harvard and have a lot of educational privilege. I am a housemate to four young, white, queer people, an older sister to my very tall younger brother Eyal, a child of my parents Eli and Tami, a lover of my partner, Ro. My father and brother are business owners, and my mother, like her grandfather, is a real estate agent. This means the money in my family comes from other peoples' labor, from stealing land, from maintaining kkkapitalism and from gentrification and colonization. I moved to San Francisco five years ago to be closer to dear friends of mine, and I am embarrassed to share, to find other young, queer people like myself.

I am impacted by gentrification in San Francisco mostly in that money and access have been funneling to me without almost any effort on my part as a result of it. My parents bought me a house on Bernal Hill this year without me knowing about it, and gave it to me as a surprise, while my friends who are queer, poor folks of color were displaced from Bernal Hill to Oakland. Gentrification and displacement of poor folks downtown was a result of the building of the luxury condo my dad just bought. As the businesses change, I see more people who look like me all around. The police smile at me, It's all set up so that they'll be here to protect me from noticing or feeling the harm I am doing to others by being here in this way. I am a commercial for gentrification, as a young, white, class privileged, queer artist. I walk around and then rich, white, older men want to move here, like my dad, to be hip. My parents, between the two of them, own 6 condos and houses now in this country none of us are from, and each time my mom closes a deal on a "luxury" house or condo she gets paid lots of money, which she then uses to fund my brother's tech start up, my fancy grad school tuition, and my living here and gentrifying this place. I feel like the expectations, access, and inertia in place in my owning class family and culture set me up to displace others and benefit from their harm, and pushing against this feels both necessary to my humanity, like my duty to the earth and to those living around me, and also incredibly confusing- like doing a task that almost all my socialization worked hard to prevent me from doing. Here I am, humbled and hurting, confused and loving inside of it.

The Existentiality of Gentrification

by: Asik the Pirate

I think I might just have hustled rent for this month.

(Perpetual Refrain) I get three extra days next time!

I don’t come from here…it’s obvious.  My hat belongs sixty years in the past, my kicks have had intimate relations with several (I imagine bruised) feet, my shirt has a collar, and my gait betrays an admittedly desperate confidence.

Plus the folks that are left have seen it all after generally 40+ years on the plantation.  They know the new horse on the track.

“How you like the neighborhood?”

“Love it.”

“That’s good.  I’m Andre.  Been here my whole life.  I’ll see you.”

They see that I’m not a gentri-fuckerbut I know that I am sometimes reckless-eyeballed.  I am grateful for the cautious welcome.  I can locate and appreciate the fear.  Yet I wonder about my wife and roommate.  They don’t address them, they just let them pass by.  They might hopethey pass by.

You see I took no home from any man or woman.  I moved in from being briefly homeless to a place where my wife had moved to avoid a bad roommate situation, into an apartment rented by a young lesbian of Chinese descent, who happened to live in one of the last remaining Black sides of town.

Our rent is significantlybelow market rate, which amounts to just a little more than I can pay, and we have not and will not help to raise it!

But did my roommate know she was moving into a neighborhoodor did she just like the flat and the fish-shop on the corner?  Did she want to know and contribute to a community, or build an isolated fort on the Bay for sex and other thought experiments?  How was this space opened for me?

You see I knew this hood before I landed here, have friends, a few enemies perhaps, and have celebrated, cried, and struggled here. My entry was a strange homecoming, and I mean every syllable when I say I love it.  I don’t live in a hip spot, get no cool points for my domicile, yet I am surrounded by one of the most creative, resilient, strong communities that I’ve ever encountered.  But is it visible?  To Who?

And my roommate (my sweet, generous roommate)…Does she know that she is invisible not by race but by perceived class, translucent and gentile, not only able to dodge bullets but able to dodge us all?  Who is more afraid, my roommate, or the people who see a foreclosure sign hanging off of her “general good intentions”, and the bulldozer of green-washed upwardmobility as homespirals further and further from the atmosphere into the deepest recesses of space?

Jenny - Gentrification

Who am I in this City?

I am a class and education privileged (I have a master’s degree) 27-year old queer, White/Puerto Rican/Filipina mixed race woman, not from California.  I am trying to substitute teach in the city to create a more-flexible schedule compared to having more traditional jobs. I live with my Filipina-immigrant, college-educated partner in Berkeley/Oakland border.  I moved to California around 1 and a half years from Chicago with my sister who moved to San Francisco for her residency program as a gynecologist.  Before Chicago, I had lived in Michigan for 13 years.  Before Michigan, I lived in Japan, where I was born.

How am I impacted by gentrification?

 I am impacted by gentrification.  I must be profiting from it.  It allows me to live in a place with affordable rent for me and where a lot of young, like-minded queer people live around me.  I was not raised in California and it was my privilege that gave me a choice to move here.  It was my privilege that helped me find a place to live.  Because I have lighter skin, a masters degree, was a public school teacher, can speak English fluently without an accent, etc…landlords favor people like me and make it easier for me to move in compared to someone else who may not have those privileges.  My P.O.C. family (chosen and nuclear) without class/education privilege would have had a lot harder time renting the place.   They probably would have been denied. You have to show pay check stubs and bank account statements to prove you can pay the rent.  As a result, for the landlords, the more people like me they rent to, the more white people with more money will feel comfortable moving in and the more the rent will rise and the more poor people and people of color are pushed out of the area.  With this said, I am profiting from gentrification and I am being used by the landlords/developers to raise the property value for their profit.

HOW GENTRIFICATION AFFECTS ME

                                                 Ethan Davidson

    I have lived in a section 8 studio apartment since 1988.  It has a nice place with good security.

    Although the Tenderloin is relatively resistant to gentrification, there are definitely people who want it gentrified. 

     It is no longer possible to get section 8 units in San Francisco.  If I lost my unit, I would have to move north to either Marin or Sonoma County.

      I have serious health problems, but I have found good health care providers that accept medical.  In Marin and Sonoma County, it is much harder.  Things are also very dispersed, and the public transportation system is not very good.  It would be hard to get to whatever health care providers I had without a car, especially when I am sick.

HERBERT HOTEL

by

Dennis Gary

I am a resident of the Herbert Hotel on Powell Street.  It is being transformed from a residential hotel (SRO) to a tourist and student hotel.

As my fellow residents die off, their rooms are upgraded to tourist rooms, complete with hardwood floors and built-in televisions.  My room has an aging rug and no TV.

But I can get the Internet after a fight with management, which stated that the free wi-fi was not meant for residents – just tourists and students.

For a month, I could not get on the hotel’s wi-fi because they would not give me a password.  Then Sari of Central City SRO Collaborative appeared on the scene and suddenly I was given the password.

When the light fixture above my mirror burned out, my chest of drawers started falling apart, and paint started peeling from the ceiling, maintenance was suddenly too busy working on tourist and student rooms.

Then Jeannie of  the “In Home Support Services Collaborative” called the general manager and two hours later I had a new light fixture, a new chest of drawers, and a fresh coat of paint on my ceiling.

Zoe Bender

                                                                                                            Gentrification Blog                                       

I am 26 year old white girl with an asymmetrical hair cut who gets in free to most clubs because I dance so good. I am an unemployed college graduate. I have 84 cents in my bank account and I just applied to graduate school that will cost tens of thousands of dollars. I am a radical queer hipster who uses my foodstamps at health food stores. I am an artist and an aspiring revolutionary. I don’t own a car or bike, so I walk most places, at all hours of the day and night, and never feel unsafe.

Two years ago, my parents decided to move out of their rural beach-town house and back to San Francisco. My Dad is a painter who makes his money doing tech support for small businesses and my Mom is a writer who makes money as a development director for a non-profit arts organization. They found a place on 7^th and Market that was not zoned for residential, but convinced the property manager to let them move into what used to be a garment factory. Over the course of a few months, they worked with the property manager to design a community of live-work spaces for artists. Most of the people that moved in are art students in their 20s, about two-thirds of whom are white. In exchange for her work in designing and managing the project, my Mom got a small additional studio rent-free for a year.  When I lost my job and house in October, my mom offered to let me move into her office space.

Gentrification is the reason I live where I do. Rent is very affordable, which is why my parents can live there, and why they have an extra room that I can live in. Part of the reason my parents were able to convince the property manager to let them move in was that the presence of artists in the neighborhood will eventually increase the property value. This neighborhood is a burgeoning hub of gentrification. Some of my wealthy, white friends don’t want to come visit me in this ‘scary’ part of town. Over the last two years I’ve seen bicycle shops, coffee shops and art galleries open up all over the neighborhood. About a year ago, a new nightclub opened up on 6^th and Market. The club is called Monarch, and was recently voted one of the best sound systems in America. Every Tuesday I walk down 6^th Street from Mission to Market to go dance to trap and dubstep at Monarch. I avoid making eye contact with the people I pass who are hanging outside the SROs and liquor stores. When they talk to me, I mostly ignore them. When I get to monarch, it’s like walking into a different universe, with chic Victorian era design and a mostly white crowd. Inside Monarch, I relax, surrounded by my fellow perpetrators of gentrification.  

Theresa Hays -Who am I in this City?

How am I impacted by gentrification?

I am Theresa Hays, an African American woman who about 12 years ago was living with my husband in a 1BR apartment in the Hunter’s Point section of the city…right near the Navy Shipyard.  I had become very ill due to a condition I suffered with which left me so weak from anemia that I wasn’t able to hold down a job.  My husband’s job laid him off so often and so sporadically until our bills and our rent began to get behind and then unpaid.

I feel that there was a blessing in our storm.  The white man assigned to us from the Property Management Company harassed us so much until we felt uneasy whenever we would leave the apartment to go somewhere wondering if we’d be able to get back in when we came home.  I wrote a letter to the apartment owner, (an African American man), which I pointed out some unhealthy conditions that we had been suffering with in the apartment. We had never talked to them about it because we were behind in our rent.  It was put on that owner’s heart to let us sign a “consensual agreement”, that he wouldn’t report us as an Eviction, and he would forgive the now $11,000 in back rents if we just left.  We looked at it to be a blessing in the storm, and we left.

During the time all this was going on, the Navy Shipyard and Lennar Properties were slowly moving in the area, “cleaning up” things.  I attended meetings where Lannar representatives were trying to “push” their cause on the community and San Francisco and the Mayor’s Office.

My husband and I put everything in Storage other than ample clothes that we stacked up and camouflaged behind us inside the back of the truck.  This began our first night of being “HOMELESS”, a word I never thought would describe me/us.  We led this life for 3 years sleeping in our little green pick-up truck not letting anyone know that we were “HOMELESS”.  It was important that we keep our lives looking like “business as usual” and most importantly consistently continuing to give praises to God through it all.

We read articles and heard stories about some shady things happening with Lennar Properties and began to again see that what seemed to be so bad and uncertain, was actually a blessing in the storm.  We were able to escape the experience of being caught up in the clutches of Lennar Properties which we now know is a HUGE EXAMPLE OF GENTRIFICATION in the San Francisco Hunter’s Point section of the city.

Marinette

I am Marinette Tovar Sanchez, Mexican immigrant, living in the Fruitvale area, in the city of Oakland. I am a worker and an artist, an activist, a woman of color. I am, in few or many words, a professional everything-ologist. I am in the constant move to earn the daily bread, in the constant struggle to keep a roof over my head. I rent a room in a warehouse, which I share with 4 other people, also artists, activists and educators who share a space to afford rent.

I have seen gentrification from a couple of different perspectives. The first one is that of an artist who struggles, like many, to make ends meet and pay rent and living expenses. The second perspective is that of a working immigrant woman of color with limited resources and opportunities.

The first perspective helped me understand the impact and effect, negative in many ways, that artists have had in the gentrification of neighborhoods. Women and men who dedicate themselves to creating art often, and in most cases, struggle financially. The money flow of an artist tends to be sporadic, unreliable and unpredictable; this drives artists to look for options that are affordable. Most of the time, the living quarters that artists can afford end up being in low income neighborhoods, considered by many as the ghettos. Little by little, more and more artists move in, following the example and trend of others before them and slowly, the area starts becoming “cool, artsy, hip, quirky, colorful”; as a result, more and more people suddenly want to move in as well, thus driving the demand for housing in those neighborhoods up, along with rent prices and the cost of living in general, making it nearly impossible for the original tenants to afford to stay. Indirectly, especially in places like the Bay Area, artists have been the indirect spear-headers of gentrification; ironically, once other people begin to move in who have the resources that artists don’t have financially, the prices keep escalating and eventually, the artists who moved in to begin with, end up being pushed out of the neighborhood as well.

Iris

Who are you- white, Jewish, owning class, queer, woman, living in Berkeley

How does gentrifukation impact you? I currently live in a mostly gentrified neighborhood in Berkeley, close to 4th street shopping area. This area is less "hip" and close to "cool" places than my old house, near Macarthur bart. At my old place we were the only white people on the block, I felt pretty unsafe and scared, witnessed violence and heard gunshots a couple times, heard a woman moaning outside of my window, and witnessed a sexual assault. It became pretty unbearable to me so I moved out, both because of how scared I felt, and because of how unwanted I knew we all were. Our neighbors were not happy we were there. Part of my decision was also informed by the Rev change session. I know I will be a part of gentrification in my life but I have enough money to avoid being at the forefront of it. I no longer feel at the forefront of gentrification because of where I live, but I do frequently participate in consumerism related to gentrification, such as buying expensive lattes in the Mission or in Oakland, etc. 

“All of the victims (of Po’Lice murder) visited me in my dreams when I was making this movie,” Ansar El Muhammad "Zar The Dip"  spoke humbly to the huge audience of the Black Repertory Theatre after the showing of his first and power-FUL documentary film Crimes of Police at the Oakland Film Festival on Saturday, April 6th.

“Between 2010 and 2012, four unarmed black males were killed by police in San Joaquin County in Northern California. Additionally, within this same time period several unarmed black males were also killed by police in the Northern California cities of Oakland and San Francisco.” From the Oakland Intl Film Festival Synopsis of Crimes of Police documentary

“I started doing the movie because I knew two of the victims, Luther Brown and James Cook but then when I began creating the movie they all began to visit me in both dreams and nightmares,” Zar the Dip told me after the screening. When I heard Zar speak on this I remembered the teaching of my strong Black-Indian mama Dee who always taught me to listen carefully when our ancestors visited us in our dreams. “They have messages for you, they are showing you the way,” she would say, following her Yoruba/Taino spiritual traditions innately as we struggled together through so much poverty and police harassment throughout my childhood.

Through a series of interviews with family members of victims, excerpts of protests and press conferences and then conversations with John Burris’ Diante Pointer and Black Panther Elaine Brown, a story of an occupying army who call themselves the police, killing our fathers, our sons, our brothers and our neighbors, is told in this hard documentary.

 “I’m crying so much, my eyes feel tired, Dione Smith, mother of James Rivera, one of several men of color murdered by police in Stockton, California spoke haltingly in one of many clips that featured the families left to tell the tragic stories of so many young Black and Brown men including Oscar Grant, Alan Blueford Jr.,  James Rivera, Kenneth Harding Jr, Ernesto Duenez Jr., James Cook, and Amadou Diallo to name a few.

This first movie by Ansar El Muhammad "Zar The Dip" rolled through stories of broken lives, broken families and eternally broken In-Justice system, which poor peoples and peoples of color must survive under whether we like it or not. While I watched the stories of so many survivors, I was catapulted back in time to when me and my mama were endlessly Po’Lice harassed by Oakland and Berkeley PD for he crime of living in our car, for driving while poor and for being poor and homeless in Amerikkka. But most of all this movie brought me back to the resistance of us families of color to fight the racist, classist occupations of our communities

I spoke up at the Q&A at the end of the movie on the ways that POOR Magazine as a poor peoples-led, indigenous-peoples-led movement has adopted a No Police Calls rule, how this is very hard rule to keep when so many of us poverty skolaz are also in struggle with the poisons so easily accessible in our communities, and our own deep pain and trauma which we sadly and often perpetrate on each other, but that we do through following the ways of our ancestors- through a process we call Family council, which holds each of us accountable and works out consequences through healing practices and personal accountability. Most of all we do it because no matter what we know as poor peoples of color we can’t invite the police into our lives to perpetrate more harm in the name of “security”.

“We have to be strong, as a family, to fight, to keep the community remembering my son, (Ernesto Duenez Jr.), Rosemary Duenez spoke while sitting in unity with her power-FUL family in resistance to the lies, smear tactics and harassment employed against Ernesto Duenez which now extend to Ernesto’s brother who received a restraining order for peacefully protesting the racist police in Manteca, where Ernesto was murdered.

This power-FUL movie’s dedication to the truths of Black and Brown young men and their families, who this amerikkkan system would rather vilify, criminalize and silence reminded me of the many teachings of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, who stressed the importance of writing our own stories, to control our own histories. So the colonizer could not keep telling their lies, un-disputed.

Crimes Of Police does just that, allows us to tell our own stories, in our own voices, to resist the ongoing lies that corporate media and corporate police always disseminates about our fallen sons, which the solemn narration by Zar the Dip reminded us is the standard procedure followed by police departments to discredit the humans they murder, beautiful, peaceful fathers like Mario Romero of Vallejo, community leaders like James Cook and youth skolaz like Alan Blueford Jr..

Crimes of Police serves as a filmic tribute to the truth-telling and fierce activating of so many of our family members like Cyndi Mitchell, (sister of Mario Romero,  Mesha Irizarry, mama of Idriss Stelley, and founder of the Idriss Stelly Foundation, Denika Chatman, mama of Kenneth Harding Jr., Lori Davis, mama of Rahiem Brown Jr, Uncle Bobby, uncle of Oscar Grant,  and so many more mamaz, brothers, fathers, uncles, aunties, sisters, sons and daughters who can’t stop, wont stop until there is some real justice and no more just-US.

Follow the Film on Facebook at Crimes Of Police

Did a company called DMG Asset Management buy your foreclosed home?  It bought Larry Faulks’ Diamond Heights home from Wells Fargo bank after the bank put it up for foreclosure auction via a practice called dual tracking, whereby a bank forecloses and auctions off a home whose loan it is supposedly in the process of modifying.  Larry Faulks is a disabled elder whose heart lives in his home of more than 40 years in Diamond Heights.  He became disabled after a failed surgery and attempted to negotiate a loan modification of his loan, a sky high 8.2%.  After months of faxing mountains of documents, endless phone communication and counseling sessions with a HUD (Housing and Urban Development) certified service, his home was put up for auction and was purchased by DMG investor Gilbert Chung for the bargain price of $705,000.  Gilbert Chung has been charged by the US Department of Justice for conspiracy to rig bids and commit mail fraud at public real estate foreclosure auctions in San Francisco and San Mateo counties beginning January 2010.  Gilbert Chung—a faceless face whose name is a portrait of moral blight that is the shame of our city.

Larry Faulks matters.  African-descended San Franciscan, foreclosure fighter, son and elder—he now lives in his van after a lifetime in the same house in Diamond Heights, a house that he and his father watched being built at a time when developers wouldn’t sell homes to black families.  And that house still whispers Larry’s name, and the names of his siblings and his parents.  The whispers turn to cries in the evening and rage with the rising sun.  But it all comes down to numbers in this society and numbers have a way of forgetting, and its forgetfulness accrues with obliviousness, especially when it comes to San Francisco’s black community.  How does one quantify the struggle to obtain that home? How does one put a value on the days that Larry sat in the car with his father watching their house rise from the ground? The words that were said in that car, the dreams that were said and unsaid in the wind, unfolding like a series of acts before their eyes in a play that was real like the dirt that provided the fertile landscape for the foundation that was laid in those moments.  Those moments matter, those moments still live. 

Larry’s parents made the move from the south and Midwest—his mother from St. Louis, his father from Hot Springs, Arkansas. His mother worked as an account clerk for Muni and the Water Department. After acquiring technical skills in the military, his father worked for KQED and later for KRON. When his father began his career, he was one of the few black television engineers in the entire United States. He spoke of his father who built the family television set from scratch in the late 50’s when the family lived in San Mateo. Maybe that was where Larry gleaned his computer and technical writing skills. “You had to be able to explain things clearly, without jargon,” says Larry when speaking of the work he immersed himself in before his disability. His failed surgery left him with bouts of serious pain—pain so bad that it still requires frequent trips to the Emergency Room. He could no longer do the job he loved and had become so adept at. Most importantly, he feels that both he and his father owe their technical careers to the Tuskegee Airmen, who proved that black people could master technology.

When his father turned on the set what did Larry see?  Could he have foreseen what would happen to his house 40 years later, the house built by Joe Eichler, the only builder at the time that would sell to black families  Would he have seen the banks, our good friends, like Wells Fargo, lose his paperwork repeatedly in his attempt to secure a loan modification?  Or would the face on the screen have belonged to DMG investor Gilbert Chung, slowly fading into the TV snow of the American dream melting into nothing—equity stolen, justice gone.

Larry Faulks wants his house back and for others who have been hurt by DMG Asset Management to be aware of the charges handed down by the Department of Justice.  Gilbert Chung’s guilty plea to the charges of auction rigging and mail fraud are serious charges that could lead to prison and of a million dollars.  If you home was purchased at auction by DMG, please come forward.  Your voices need to be heard. 

Link to the Department of Justice press release: 

Wesearch:

Poor people led research and pro-active media deconstructing the lies told about criminalized and mythologized communities.

Click here for Spanish Translation:   http://poormagazine.org/node/4714

Ingrid De Leon

I am a migrant woman, mother that day by day I look at the sun

to guide me through this World. I have lived in San Francisco

for nine years. I see how things here are changing in the Misión

district. Before, there were a lot of stores and Latin restaurants.

But everything is changing. Everyday, they build new buildings

for businesses and other races that we cannot afford to buy.

When I walk through 24th street, I see new houses, businesses and

cafes with people who have money, everyone has their coffee cup

and everyone with their own laptops. They all appear quiet,

each in their own world. Us, Raza and those that don’t have a lot of

money cannot go in there. We have no money or computer. Little

by little our spaces are shrinking. And when we are surrounded

by rich houses and rich people, we feel like fish out of water

and we want to move out of here. Our space is already full of

things that us, the poor, cannot have. I am in horror, because I

feel that at any moment I will no longer have a home, because my

current home is very old.  These are the houses that are being

destroyed for new condominiums. I get chills every time I see a new

construction site. I feel as if I’m drowning, since I cannot swim.

Usuario for change (Enrique)- Gentrification

When I arrived in this country, into the city of San Francisco, a

decade ago, I saw how the renters and people that lived in shelters

were being forced into eviction from where we lived by the owners

of the buildings. Forced into eviction by the creation of “CHANGES” by the city of

San Francisco.

During a mass protest, I announced that the ones that should be

criminalized are the originators of Gentrification.  In other

words- the owners of the units and the legislators that approved the

ELLIS ACT.  Just like those who approved the program

“CHANGES,” because those are the originators of this problem.

Me, in my part, I was going to fight for a system of subsidized

housing by the city. Fight for the particular persons that have low income or

temporarily no income who could have good worthy housing according to

their earnings.

Today I live at Casa Quezada where I pay 25 dollars a month for

rent and when I do not have money, I do not pay. This program

was developed with the participation of many non-profit

organizations and other neighborhood centers in the Misión.

Gentrification- Julio Chaves

Gentrification of a neighborhood affects my economy because the

rent of apartments and rooms increase in price.  The owners of the

houses or apartments take advantage of the situation, feeling like mini kings in

their kingdom where they live and pressure the people who live in

their units.  The rent every day is more expensive.  It pushes us to live in places

far from our work centers, making life more difficult. Like

my grandmother says “what doesn’t leave with tears, leaves

with a sigh.”  This is due to the fact that is you have cheap housing,

you have to deal with many stupid discomforts from the mini King

and Esther with how you spend more money on gasoline or on the bus transportation. Gentrification is a silent Invasion, but without bullets-where the one with the most money takes possession of the best commercial places with the great ability to do

business.

Gentrification increases the rent and also the food.  It is a race where

he takes himself out of the race when he has little money or low

paying jobs. It’s a race where the poor get poorer and the rich get

richer.

This economic war grows bigger and bigger each moment like

Monsanto (Monster.) Where the one with money can live where he

wants and the poor where ever we can, or survive if we can.

I like the apartment where I live because it’s cheap, but it is located

on the first floor and I can hear the drainage system from the

neighbors upstairs.  And I can hear them making love with a

rik rik of their mattress. But all these noises and discomforts are

part of my environment.

Gentri- Lex Horan

I'm a young white person who's living in Oakland on a short-term basis. I am passing through, essentially, for four months of my life. Most of the time I live in Minneapolis, MN. Here in this city I am mostly a learner--I came here for training to bring home with me. It feels like a very strange way to be in a place.

Moving here was very easy for me. I am living in an apartment near Lake Merritt with my best friend and another person I hadn't met before moving here. The building I'm staying in was recently renovated and many other people in my building are Black and Latino. (Two of us in my household are white, and one of my housemates is Black. We all went to college; none of us are from the Bay Area.) Gentrification has made it very easy for me to move to Oakland. I know a lot of other people who live here--almost none of them are from here--who have helped me by giving me rides, showing me around, lending me a bike, letting me live with them for low rent. It's like the rails were greased to help me land here easily. I'm also impacted by gentrification in a different way, but how it feels to live here. I'm not used to it yet, if that's ever possible. I think a lot of people like me get used to the way displacement feels in the air, on BART, walking past the people who've been stolen from. I'm afraid that I might too, if I stayed here. But for now it rubs me, feels exhausting and heartbreaking and makes me feel nauseous and uneasy. I am impacted because I watch the way people like me are cogs in the machine of displacement and I feel angry, hopeless, judgmental, confused. It's important for me to grapple with all these feelings and also--at the end of the day, I'm housed, period.

Noa Grayevsky- Gentrification

I am a rich, white queer person living in San Francisco. I'm not from here. My parents immigrated to the United States from Israel where my Palestinian- Jewish ancestors colluded with the British colonizers and became white and rich off of land theft, displacement of their neighbors, and "real estate development." I am a graduate student with owning class parents. I graduated from Harvard and have a lot of educational privilege. I am a housemate to four young, white, queer people, an older sister to my very tall younger brother Eyal, a child of my parents Eli and Tami, a lover of my partner, Ro. My father and brother are business owners, and my mother, like her grandfather, is a real estate agent. This means the money in my family comes from other peoples' labor, from stealing land, from maintaining kkkapitalism and from gentrification and colonization. I moved to San Francisco five years ago to be closer to dear friends of mine, and I am embarrassed to share, to find other young, queer people like myself.

I am impacted by gentrification in San Francisco mostly in that money and access have been funneling to me without almost any effort on my part as a result of it. My parents bought me a house on Bernal Hill this year without me knowing about it, and gave it to me as a surprise, while my friends who are queer, poor folks of color were displaced from Bernal Hill to Oakland. Gentrification and displacement of poor folks downtown was a result of the building of the luxury condo my dad just bought. As the businesses change, I see more people who look like me all around. The police smile at me, It's all set up so that they'll be here to protect me from noticing or feeling the harm I am doing to others by being here in this way. I am a commercial for gentrification, as a young, white, class privileged, queer artist. I walk around and then rich, white, older men want to move here, like my dad, to be hip. My parents, between the two of them, own 6 condos and houses now in this country none of us are from, and each time my mom closes a deal on a "luxury" house or condo she gets paid lots of money, which she then uses to fund my brother's tech start up, my fancy grad school tuition, and my living here and gentrifying this place. I feel like the expectations, access, and inertia in place in my owning class family and culture set me up to displace others and benefit from their harm, and pushing against this feels both necessary to my humanity, like my duty to the earth and to those living around me, and also incredibly confusing- like doing a task that almost all my socialization worked hard to prevent me from doing. Here I am, humbled and hurting, confused and loving inside of it.

The Existentiality of Gentrification

by: Asik the Pirate

I think I might just have hustled rent for this month.

(Perpetual Refrain) I get three extra days next time!

I don’t come from here…it’s obvious.  My hat belongs sixty years in the past, my kicks have had intimate relations with several (I imagine bruised) feet, my shirt has a collar, and my gait betrays an admittedly desperate confidence.

Plus the folks that are left have seen it all after generally 40+ years on the plantation.  They know the new horse on the track.

“How you like the neighborhood?”

“Love it.”

“That’s good.  I’m Andre.  Been here my whole life.  I’ll see you.”

They see that I’m not a gentri-fuckerbut I know that I am sometimes reckless-eyeballed.  I am grateful for the cautious welcome.  I can locate and appreciate the fear.  Yet I wonder about my wife and roommate.  They don’t address them, they just let them pass by.  They might hopethey pass by.

You see I took no home from any man or woman.  I moved in from being briefly homeless to a place where my wife had moved to avoid a bad roommate situation, into an apartment rented by a young lesbian of Chinese descent, who happened to live in one of the last remaining Black sides of town.

Our rent is significantlybelow market rate, which amounts to just a little more than I can pay, and we have not and will not help to raise it!

But did my roommate know she was moving into a neighborhoodor did she just like the flat and the fish-shop on the corner?  Did she want to know and contribute to a community, or build an isolated fort on the Bay for sex and other thought experiments?  How was this space opened for me?

You see I knew this hood before I landed here, have friends, a few enemies perhaps, and have celebrated, cried, and struggled here. My entry was a strange homecoming, and I mean every syllable when I say I love it.  I don’t live in a hip spot, get no cool points for my domicile, yet I am surrounded by one of the most creative, resilient, strong communities that I’ve ever encountered.  But is it visible?  To Who?

And my roommate (my sweet, generous roommate)…Does she know that she is invisible not by race but by perceived class, translucent and gentile, not only able to dodge bullets but able to dodge us all?  Who is more afraid, my roommate, or the people who see a foreclosure sign hanging off of her “general good intentions”, and the bulldozer of green-washed upwardmobility as homespirals further and further from the atmosphere into the deepest recesses of space?

Jenny - Gentrification

Who am I in this City?

I am a class and education privileged (I have a master’s degree) 27-year old queer, White/Puerto Rican/Filipina mixed race woman, not from California.  I am trying to substitute teach in the city to create a more-flexible schedule compared to having more traditional jobs. I live with my Filipina-immigrant, college-educated partner in Berkeley/Oakland border.  I moved to California around 1 and a half years from Chicago with my sister who moved to San Francisco for her residency program as a gynecologist.  Before Chicago, I had lived in Michigan for 13 years.  Before Michigan, I lived in Japan, where I was born.

How am I impacted by gentrification?

 I am impacted by gentrification.  I must be profiting from it.  It allows me to live in a place with affordable rent for me and where a lot of young, like-minded queer people live around me.  I was not raised in California and it was my privilege that gave me a choice to move here.  It was my privilege that helped me find a place to live.  Because I have lighter skin, a masters degree, was a public school teacher, can speak English fluently without an accent, etc…landlords favor people like me and make it easier for me to move in compared to someone else who may not have those privileges.  My P.O.C. family (chosen and nuclear) without class/education privilege would have had a lot harder time renting the place.   They probably would have been denied. You have to show pay check stubs and bank account statements to prove you can pay the rent.  As a result, for the landlords, the more people like me they rent to, the more white people with more money will feel comfortable moving in and the more the rent will rise and the more poor people and people of color are pushed out of the area.  With this said, I am profiting from gentrification and I am being used by the landlords/developers to raise the property value for their profit.

HOW GENTRIFICATION AFFECTS ME

                                                 Ethan Davidson

    I have lived in a section 8 studio apartment since 1988.  It has a nice place with good security.

    Although the Tenderloin is relatively resistant to gentrification, there are definitely people who want it gentrified. 

     It is no longer possible to get section 8 units in San Francisco.  If I lost my unit, I would have to move north to either Marin or Sonoma County.

      I have serious health problems, but I have found good health care providers that accept medical.  In Marin and Sonoma County, it is much harder.  Things are also very dispersed, and the public transportation system is not very good.  It would be hard to get to whatever health care providers I had without a car, especially when I am sick.

HERBERT HOTEL

by

Dennis Gary

I am a resident of the Herbert Hotel on Powell Street.  It is being transformed from a residential hotel (SRO) to a tourist and student hotel.

As my fellow residents die off, their rooms are upgraded to tourist rooms, complete with hardwood floors and built-in televisions.  My room has an aging rug and no TV.

But I can get the Internet after a fight with management, which stated that the free wi-fi was not meant for residents – just tourists and students.

For a month, I could not get on the hotel’s wi-fi because they would not give me a password.  Then Sari of Central City SRO Collaborative appeared on the scene and suddenly I was given the password.

When the light fixture above my mirror burned out, my chest of drawers started falling apart, and paint started peeling from the ceiling, maintenance was suddenly too busy working on tourist and student rooms.

Then Jeannie of  the “In Home Support Services Collaborative” called the general manager and two hours later I had a new light fixture, a new chest of drawers, and a fresh coat of paint on my ceiling.

Zoe Bender

Gentrification Blog                                       

I am 26 year old white girl with an asymmetrical hair cut who gets in free to most clubs because I dance so good. I am an unemployed college graduate. I have 84 cents in my bank account and I just applied to graduate school that will cost tens of thousands of dollars. I am a radical queer hipster who uses my foodstamps at health food stores. I am an artist and an aspiring revolutionary. I don’t own a car or bike, so I walk most places, at all hours of the day and night, and never feel unsafe.

Two years ago, my parents decided to move out of their rural beach-town house and back to San Francisco. My Dad is a painter who makes his money doing tech support for small businesses and my Mom is a writer who makes money as a development director for a non-profit arts organization. They found a place on 7^th and Market that was not zoned for residential, but convinced the property manager to let them move into what used to be a garment factory. Over the course of a few months, they worked with the property manager to design a community of live-work spaces for artists. Most of the people that moved in are art students in their 20s, about two-thirds of whom are white. In exchange for her work in designing and managing the project, my Mom got a small additional studio rent-free for a year.  When I lost my job and house in October, my mom offered to let me move into her office space.

Gentrification is the reason I live where I do. Rent is very affordable, which is why my parents can live there, and why they have an extra room that I can live in. Part of the reason my parents were able to convince the property manager to let them move in was that the presence of artists in the neighborhood will eventually increase the property value. This neighborhood is a burgeoning hub of gentrification. Some of my wealthy, white friends don’t want to come visit me in this ‘scary’ part of town. Over the last two years I’ve seen bicycle shops, coffee shops and art galleries open up all over the neighborhood. About a year ago, a new nightclub opened up on 6^th and Market. The club is called Monarch, and was recently voted one of the best sound systems in America. Every Tuesday I walk down 6^th Street from Mission to Market to go dance to trap and dubstep at Monarch. I avoid making eye contact with the people I pass who are hanging outside the SROs and liquor stores. When they talk to me, I mostly ignore them. When I get to monarch, it’s like walking into a different universe, with chic Victorian era design and a mostly white crowd. Inside Monarch, I relax, surrounded by my fellow perpetrators of gentrification.  

Theresa Hays -Who am I in this City?

How am I impacted by gentrification?

I am Theresa Hays, an African American woman who about 12 years ago was living with my husband in a 1BR apartment in the Hunter’s Point section of the city…right near the Navy Shipyard.  I had become very ill due to a condition I suffered with which left me so weak from anemia that I wasn’t able to hold down a job.  My husband’s job laid him off so often and so sporadically until our bills and our rent began to get behind and then unpaid.

I feel that there was a blessing in our storm.  The white man assigned to us from the Property Management Company harassed us so much until we felt uneasy whenever we would leave the apartment to go somewhere wondering if we’d be able to get back in when we came home.  I wrote a letter to the apartment owner, (an African American man), which I pointed out some unhealthy conditions that we had been suffering with in the apartment. We had never talked to them about it because we were behind in our rent.  It was put on that owner’s heart to let us sign a “consensual agreement”, that he wouldn’t report us as an Eviction, and he would forgive the now $11,000 in back rents if we just left.  We looked at it to be a blessing in the storm, and we left.

During the time all this was going on, the Navy Shipyard and Lennar Properties were slowly moving in the area, “cleaning up” things.  I attended meetings where Lannar representatives were trying to “push” their cause on the community and San Francisco and the Mayor’s Office.

My husband and I put everything in Storage other than ample clothes that we stacked up and camouflaged behind us inside the back of the truck.  This began our first night of being “HOMELESS”, a word I never thought would describe me/us.  We led this life for 3 years sleeping in our little green pick-up truck not letting anyone know that we were “HOMELESS”.  It was important that we keep our lives looking like “business as usual” and most importantly consistently continuing to give praises to God through it all.

We read articles and heard stories about some shady things happening with Lennar Properties and began to again see that what seemed to be so bad and uncertain, was actually a blessing in the storm.  We were able to escape the experience of being caught up in the clutches of Lennar Properties which we now know is a HUGE EXAMPLE OF GENTRIFICATION in the San Francisco Hunter’s Point section of the city.

Marinette

I am Marinette Tovar Sanchez, Mexican immigrant, living in the Fruitvale area, in the city of Oakland. I am a worker and an artist, an activist, a woman of color. I am, in few or many words, a professional everything-ologist. I am in the constant move to earn the daily bread, in the constant struggle to keep a roof over my head. I rent a room in a warehouse, which I share with 4 other people, also artists, activists and educators who share a space to afford rent.

I have seen gentrification from a couple of different perspectives. The first one is that of an artist who struggles, like many, to make ends meet and pay rent and living expenses. The second perspective is that of a working immigrant woman of color with limited resources and opportunities.

The first perspective helped me understand the impact and effect, negative in many ways, that artists have had in the gentrification of neighborhoods. Women and men who dedicate themselves to creating art often, and in most cases, struggle financially. The money flow of an artist tends to be sporadic, unreliable and unpredictable; this drives artists to look for options that are affordable. Most of the time, the living quarters that artists can afford end up being in low income neighborhoods, considered by many as the ghettos. Little by little, more and more artists move in, following the example and trend of others before them and slowly, the area starts becoming “cool, artsy, hip, quirky, colorful”; as a result, more and more people suddenly want to move in as well, thus driving the demand for housing in those neighborhoods up, along with rent prices and the cost of living in general, making it nearly impossible for the original tenants to afford to stay. Indirectly, especially in places like the Bay Area, artists have been the indirect spear-headers of gentrification; ironically, once other people begin to move in who have the resources that artists don’t have financially, the prices keep escalating and eventually, the artists who moved in to begin with, end up being pushed out of the neighborhood as well.

Iris

Who are you- white, Jewish, owning class, queer, woman, living in Berkeley

How does gentrifukation impact you? I currently live in a mostly gentrified neighborhood in Berkeley, close to 4th street shopping area. This area is less "hip" and close to "cool" places than my old house, near Macarthur bart. At my old place we were the only white people on the block, I felt pretty unsafe and scared, witnessed violence and heard gunshots a couple times, heard a woman moaning outside of my window, and witnessed a sexual assault. It became pretty unbearable to me so I moved out, both because of how scared I felt, and because of how unwanted I knew we all were. Our neighbors were not happy we were there. Part of my decision was also informed by the Rev change session. I know I will be a part of gentrification in my life but I have enough money to avoid being at the forefront of it. I no longer feel at the forefront of gentrification because of where I live, but I do frequently participate in consumerism related to gentrification, such as buying expensive lattes in the Mission or in Oakland, etc. 

To be a black poet with a severe disability is to speak from the margins of the dominant culture. You have the responsibility to be your own griot and sing your history and life experiences because no one else are going to do it for you. No one else will have your perspective of how to see the world and will have the words to make people see what you see. With out your poetic art people will be led by their own assumptions and will try to define your blackness and disability in ways that you will not want them to.

You are often a stalwart against the mainstream media who tries to ignore you or represent you as a helpless invalid who may or may not deserve government benefits or as a heroic figure who overcame your disability against tremendous odds to accomplish phenomenal feats. You give the more realistic model of a person who is vulnerable enough to share his flaws, but is strong enough to have many triumphs. This makes you an artist that adds vital information to the culture tapestry that surrounds you. You then can call yourself a poet who represent the best of all your identities and the communities that you belong to.

By Lateef McLeod

I was in line at the Civic Center post office in downtown San Francisco when the far off smell of salty air hit me.  I looked around for something that resembled the ocean and saw a passel of light blue shirt clad postal clerks weighing and affixing postage to letters and parcels, each doing the job with a personalized diligence gleaned from years of repetition.  How can one inhale the vast blueness of oceans and seas in a post office?  I was in line, in whose juxtaposition I occupied a place behind 15 others whose postures ranged from assertive, hurried, bored, fatigued, ambivalent or misguided aplomb—each holding sway to the pendulum of impatience moving within.  The post office is always crowded but I don’t mind standing in line.  Standing in line at the post office to send a handwritten letter is a resistance to our techwashed reality where everything is done via a click or press of a button.  As the second hand on the clock ticks its tiny steps of supplication towards eternity, the salty air smell becomes stronger and soon my face is awash in a breeze coming from somewhere. 

“Excuse me” a voice cut though from behind.  I turned and saw him—an African-American man who I’d seen around the city since I was a kid.  The man was about 5 foot 5 or 6.  He was dressed the way I remembered from back then—rugged pants, boots, denim jacket, turtleneck sweater—topped with a wide-brim leather hat.  “Do you know how much it costs to send a certified letter” he asked.  I’d sent only 2 certified letters in my life and didn’t remember what I’d paid.  “No, I sure don’t” I replied.  His thick fingers held a fanned out set of certified mail forms as if they were US currency.  He looked about for a list of postal rates.  If they are posted they are well hidden, along with the machine for those whose only wish is to purchase a single stamp.

On the man’s jacket was a patch that read: Karate.  I tried to imagine what he’d look like in a Karate gi.  He is short but solid.   I remember driving somewhere with my uncle years ago when he spotted the man walking down the street carrying a shoulder bag.  “That guy is a karate man” my uncle said.  My uncle practiced Okinawan Karate and came across the man in that world.  I looked at the man was we passed him.  He looked as if he’d just returned from a long journey by ship.  A merchant seaman, maybe?  I’d see him from time to time, always with that shoulder bag and sometimes a guitar case.  He’d pop up in different places in the city, always unexpectedly.  Somehow I felt I knew him.  Hey there’s that guy…I’d think upon seeing him.  I was just a little kid living in the Projects of North Beach, running in every direction except the right one.  Once while running, I came upon the man again.  This time he was among a crowd of tourists.  “Do you speak German?” he asked someone in the crowd.  “I do too”.  He smiled and strummed his guitar and said something that sounded like:

                                    Spreck-a-dee doych

                                    Spreck-a-dee doych

                                    Stop ‘n drop…thank you!

And the tourists showed teeth that spread as far and wide as the bridges that connect one place or person to another, smiling and dropping coins and dollars in that guitar case.  I was just a kid watching.  Hey, it’s that guy…I thought again, offering only a smile exposing the bashfulness of a boy in the presence of a guitar case that was a wide mouth that knew about laughter and hunger in any language. 

The man stood jotting information on the certified mail receipts.  I’d never spoken to him yet I felt I knew him.  He was someone from the landscape of my childhood, the feel of which is on the bottoms of my feet--in the sand and pebbles and shards of glass that have collected in my shoes.  I looked at the man’s face.  It seemed he hadn’t aged at all.  He didn’t have his shoulder bag or guitar case.  He glanced at his cell phone that was tucked into his denim jacket pocket.  Standing in that line, I wanted to ask him his name, where he was from, what he did for a living.  The only thing I could say was, “I remember you when I was a kid”. 

Displayed on the circumference of his leather hat rests a multinational array of pins proudly bearing the flags of many nations as well as the emblem of the state of California.  Had he been to all those places?  I remembered him talking to those German tourists long ago.  I mentioned this to him.  He explained that he spoke 15 different languages, including Asian, African and Polynesian tongues.  I wanted to know more.  Where did he live?  Was he married?  Where was his guitar?  The line was moving and now I was at the head.  The postal worker at the counter called out, “Next in line!”  I turned to the man and said, “It was really nice seeing you again, sir.  By the way, my name is Tony”.  The man just smiled and nodded.  I went to the counter to take care of my transaction.

I wanted to hug the man.  I was so glad to see him.  The feeling I had was ineffable.  Seeing him gave me the feeling that the city was still mine, still strumming with memories which move slowly though the crowds, the traffic—memories still alive, memories that still breathe.  I wanted to thank him for still being here.

I walked out of the post office and the smell of salty air hit me again, reminding me of where I was and of that brother who didn’t—who won’t—go away.  Neither will I. 

Nuestra Investigación:

Gente de el pueblo conduce medios de communicacion y investogacion sobre aburguesamiento

For English, click here:

http://www.poormagazine.org/node/4713

Ingrid De Leon

Yo soy una mujer migrante, madre que día a día miro el sol para guiarme en el mundo. Vivo desde hace nueve años en San Francisco. Veo como todo está cambiando en el barrio de la Misión. Antes, habían muchas tiendas y restaurantes latinas. Pero todo está cambiando. Cada día construyen edificios para negocios de otras razas, donde nosotros no podemos comprar. Cuando paso por la calle 24, veo casas nuevas, negocios, y café con gente con dinero, con una taza de café y todos con sus propias computadoras. Se ven todos callados, pues todos están en su propio mundo. Los latinos y los que no tenemos tanto dinero no podemos entrar allí, pues no tenemos computadoras ni dinero. Y poco a poco el espacio se va reduciendo. Y cuando nos sentimos rodeados de tantas casas y gente rica con mucho dinero, nos sentimos como peces sin agua y queremos movernos de allí. Pues nuestro espacio ya está invahido por las cosas que nosotros, los pobres, no podemos tener. Yo me siento temerosa, pues pienso que en cualquier momento no voy a tener ni donde vivir, porque donde vivo son casas viejas y estas son las que están tirando por los nuevos edificios. Me de escalofrío ver mas construcciones. Me empiezo ahogar, pues no se nadar.

Usuario del Cambio- Aburguesamiento

Cuando lluegé a este país, a este ciudad de san Francisco, hace una decada ví como los inquilinos y los que vivíamos en refugios estabamos siendo obligados a DESALOJARNOS de allí donde vivíamos por los dueños de las viviendas y por la creación de CHANGES por la ciudad de San Francisco.

En una manifestación popular dije que a los que deberian criminalizar es a los que estan originando el aburgesamiento, es decir, a los dueños de las viviendas y a los legisladores que aprobaron la ELLIS ACT. Así como, a los que aprobaron el programa de CHANGES, porque ellos son los que han originado esta problema.

Yo, por mi parte, iba a luchar por una sistema de vivienda subsidiado por la ciudad o personas particulares para que los que tengan bajos ingresos o temporalmente, ningunos, pudieran tener vivienda decorosa, y digna de acuerdo a sus ingresos.

Hoy, vivo en Casa Quezada donde pago 25 dolares mensuales por renta y cuando no tengo ingresos, no pago. Esté programa se desarrollo con la participación de varios organizaciones sin fines de lucro y otras centros de vecindarios de la Misión.

Julio Chaves

El aburguesamieto

Aburguresamiento del vecindario afecta mi economia pues la renta de los apartamentos y cuartos, aumentan de precio, los dueños de casa o apartmentos agravan la situación sintiendose como pequeños reyes y su reino es el lugar en que viven y presionan a las personas que viven con ellos.

La renta cada ves es más cara empuja a vivir en lugares alejados de los centros de trabajo, esto hace la vida más difícil y como dice mi abuela lo que no se va en lágrimas se va en suspiros, esto es debido que en un lugar barato se debe soportar muchas incomodidades y estupideces del pequeño rey y además se gasta más en gasolina o en gastos de trasporte por bús.

Aburguesamiento es una invasión silenciosa y sín valores en donde el que tiene dinero toma poseción de mejores lugares comerciales con vocación de negocios.

Aburguesamiento incrementa la renta y también la comida en una carrera donde el se saca del camino a la gene con poco dinero y bajos ingresos econonomicos. Es una carrera donde al pobres se le hace más pobre y al rico más rico

Esta guerra economica se hace cada momento mas grande cómo un monstruo, donde el que tiene dinero puede vivir donde quiera y el pobre donde pueda, o salvese el que pueda.

El apartamento donde vivo me gusta porque es barato pero esta ubicado en primer nivel y escucho el drenaje de los vecinos de arriva, el suitch del baño, cuando toman la ducha y además cuando mis vecinos hacen el amor con el ritmo del rik rik de su colchon: pero todo estos ruidos e incomodidades son ahora parte del medio amviente.

Gentri- Lex Horan

Soy una persona jóven y blanca que vive en Oakland ahora a corto plazo. Estoy pasando por aquí, en esencia, por cuatro mesas de my vida. Por lo general vivo en Minneapolis, Minnesota. Estoy aquí en está ciudad para aprender--vine aquí por entrenamiento para llevar conmigo cuando regreso a Minneapolis. Es una manera muy extraña de estar en un lugar.

Mudarme aquí fue muy facil para mí. Vivo en un apartimiento cerca de Lake Merritt con mi mejor amigo y una persona más que no conocía antes de mudarme aquí. El edificio donde vivo fue recién renovado, y la mayoría de la gente en este edificio es Afro-Americano y Latino. (Dos de nosotros en mi apartimiento somos blancos, y uno de mis compañeros de hogar as Afro-Americano. Todos asistimos a la universidad; ninguno de nosotros somos de la Bahía originalmente.) El aburguesamiento lo ha hecho muy facil mudarme a Oakland. Conozco a mucha gente que vive aquí--casi ningunos de ellos son de aquí--que me han ayudado por conducirme, mostrarme la ciudad, prestarme una bicicleta, dejarme vivir con ellos por renta barata. Es como las vías fueron engrasadas para ayudarma a llegar aquí facilmente.

El aburguesamiento también me afecta de una manera diferente, por como se siente vivir aquí. Ya no estoy acostumbrado al aburguesamiento, si aun es posible. Pienso que mucha gente como yo se acostumbran a la manera en que el desplazamiento siente en el aire, en BART, caminando por delante de las personas que han sido robadas de su tierra. Temo que yo me acostumbraría tambien, si me quedaría aquí. Pero ahora me fronta, siente agotador, desgarrador, me siento con nauseas e intranquilo. Mi impacta porque miro la manera de que la gente como yo somos un eslabón más de la cadena de aburguesamiento y me siento enfadado, inútil, critic, confuso. Pienso que es importante que lidíe con estos sentimientos y también—en fin, tengo vivienda, y punto.

Noa Grayevsky

Soy una lesbiana, rica y blanca viviendo en San Francisco. No soy de aquí. Mis padres imigráron a los Estados Unidos desde Israel, donde mis ancestros Palestinos- Judeos se confabularon con los colonizadores Englateros y se convitaron a estar blancos y ricos en el proseso de robar tierra, desplacar sus vecinos, y desarollo immobilario. Estoy una estudiante universitaria con padres de la clase proprietaria. He graduado de Harvard y tengo mucha privilegia de educacion. Soy una compañera de pisa a cuatro personas homosexuales y blancas de casi mi edad, una hermana mayor a mi hermano pequeño, Eyal, que es mucho más alto que yo, una hija de mis padres Eli y Tami, y una amante a mi pareja, Ro. Mi padre y hermano son dueños de negocios, y my madre, como su abuelo, se trabaja en immobilaria. Este quiere decir que el dinero de mi familia viene del trabajo de otras personas, del robo de tierra, de mantener la sistema capitalista, y de aburguesamiento y colonizacion. He movido a San Francisco hace cinco anos para vivir mas cerca a unas amigas muy amigas, y tambien me da verguenza contar, a encontrar mas jovenes lesbianas y maricones como yo.

Estoy impactada del aburguesimiento principalmente en que dinero y accesso vienen a mi sin casi ningun esfuerzo de mi parte. Mis padres me han comprado una casa en Bernal Hill sin mi conocimiento, y me lo ha regalaron como una sorpresa mientras que mis amigos que son afro y latino americanos y pobres habian dezplacado de Bernal Hill y han tenido mover a Oakland. Aburgezimiento y desplazamiento de gente pobres en el centro resulto de la construccion del condominio de lujo que mi padre recien acaba de comprar. Mientras los negocios cambian, veo mas personas que aparecen como yo en el alrededor. La policia me miran con sonrisas, ellos estan aqui para ayudar a la aburgesimiento y para proteger me de ver o sentir el dueno que estoy haciendo a otras personas en viviendo aqui. Soy un commercial para aburgesamiento, como una joven, lesbiana, blanca artista con privilegia economica. Cuando camino aqui, promoto a gente mas poderoso y rico que yo, como mi papa, que se pueden mover aqui para estar mas modernos. Mis padres, entre las dos, son duenos de seis condominios y casas aqui en este pais que no es nuestra patria, y cada ves que mi mama vende la casa luja de alguien se gana mucho dinero que se usa a invertir en la compania technologica de mi hermano, en mi educacion universitaria lujosa, y en mi abilidad a vivir aqui y contribuyendo al aburgesimiento de este lugar. Siento que las esperanzas de heredar, accesso, y inercia en mi familia de la clase proprietaria y cultura me propelan a desplazar otras personas y aprovechar de su dano. Resistir este siente al mismo tiempo como algo necessario para mi humanidad y mi deber a otras seres humanos y a la tierra y tambien muy confuso- como hacer una tarea que casi todo mi socializacion trabaja fuerte para prevenir. Aqui estoy, humilde y en dano, confundida y amorosa entre todo este.

El aburguesamiento

Pirata Asik

Pienso que acabo de completar la renta para este mes.

(Perpetro Rifran) Pa la otra me dan tres extra dias!

Yo no soy de aqui … es obvio. Mi sombrero pertenece en los anos 60 anos de tras, mis zapatos han tenido carias relaciones intimas con otros pies (me imagino con moretones), mi camisa tiene collar y mi paso traiciona una confianza ciertamente desesperada.

Ademas, la gente que se queda se han visto todo despues de mas de cuarenta anos en la plantacion. Ellos conocen el caballo nuevo en la pista.

“Que te parece el vecindario?”

“Me encanta.”

“Muy bien. Soy Andre. Habia vivido aqui todo mi vida. Nos vemos.”

Ven que no estoy un gentriFUKator (contribuyendo al aburguesamiento) pero yo se que a veces tengo ojos temerarios. Me siento agradecido por la beinvenida cautelosa. Puedo localizer y apreciar el miedo. Aun, me pregunta acerca de mi esposa y companera de habitacion. Ellos no los abordan,  simplemente los dejan pasar. Es possible que ellos esperan que los pasarian de largo.

Ves, no robe ningun casa de ningun hombre ni mujer. Me mude desde estar brevemente sin hogar a un lugar donde mi esposa se ha mudado para evitar una mala situacion con una companera de cuarto, a un lugar alquilado por una lesbiana joven de origen chino, que paso a vivir en uno de los ultimos barrios afro-americanos en la ciudad.

Nuestra renta es significamente menos del precio de Mercado, que equivale a un poco mas de lo que puedo pagar, y nosotros no hemos y no vamos a ayudar a aumentarlo!

Pero, habia sabido mi companera de piso que habia mudido a un barrio, o solo le gustaba el piso y la tienda de pescado en la esquina? Habia querido contribuir a un barrio o queria construir una fortaleza aislada en la bahia para sexo y otros experimentos mentales? Como este espacio habia abierto para mi?

Ves, yo habia conocido este barrio antes del momento que aterrice aqui, tengo amigos, y tal vez algunos enemigos, celebraba, lloraba, y luchaba aqui. Mi entrada habia un regreso a casa, y intento cada silaba cuando digo que me lo encanta. No vivo en un lugar moderno, ni obteno puntos modernos para mi domicilio, pero estoy rodeado por una de las communidades mas creativas, resistentes, y Fuertes que habia encontado. Pero es visible? Y a quien?

Y mi companera de piso (mi companera de piso tan generosa y amable)… Sabe ella que es invisible no por raza pero por clase percibido, translucida y gentil, no soloen capaz de esquivar las balas, pero tambien de esquivar todo nosotros? Quien tiene mas miedo, mi companera de piso, o la gente que veen un un signo de la ejecución hipotecaria que cuelga de sus buenas intenciones, y la excavadora de movilidad ascendente que esta verde lavado mientras hogar se calla mas y mas lejos de la atmosfera al huecos mas profundos del espacio exterior.

Jenny - Gentrification

¿Quien soy en esta ciudad? 

Soy una persona con privilegio de clase y educación (tengo una maestría) 27-años de edad, queer, blanco / Puertoriqueno / Filipina mujer mestiza, y no soy de California. Estoy tratando de sustituir enseñar en la ciudad para tener un horario más flexible en comparación con tener empleos más tradicionales. Vivo con mi pareja quien es filipina-inmigrante con educacion de la Universidad.  Vivimos en la frontera de Berkeley / Oakland. Me mudé a California hace 1 año y medio de Chicago con mi hermana que se mudó a San Francisco para su programa de residencia para la ginecóloga. Antes de Chicago, viví en Michigan por 13 años, antes de Michigan, viví en Japón, donde yo nací. 

 ¿Cómo estoy impactado por aburguesamiento?

Estoy impactado por aburguesamiento. Estoy aprovechando de aburguesamiento.  Lo  me permite vivir en un lugar con la renta barata, donde muchas personas queer que comparten mis mismas ideas viven alrededor de mí. Yo no crecí en California y fue mi privilegio que me dio la oportunidad de mudarse aquí.   Fue mi privilegio que me ayudó a encontrar un lugar para vivir- porque tengo piel clara, tengo una maestría (master's degree), fue una maestra de la escuela pública, puedo hablar en Inglés con fluidez sin acento, etc ... los propietarios a favor las personas como yo y es más fácil para mí para mudarse a mi apartemento en comparación con alguien que no tenga esos privilegios . Mi personas de color familiar  (escogida y nuclear) sin privilegios de clase / educación habría tenido un tiempo mucho más difícil alquilar el apartemento. Probablemente habría sido denegada. Tienes que mostrar los pagos de tu trabajo y los papeles de tu cuenta bancarios para demostrar que puedas pagar la renta.  Más gente como yo, los propietarios pueden alquilar a más personas blancas con más dinero porque ellos se sentirán cómodos vivir allá y la renta aumentará y las personas más pobres y las personas de color son expulsados de la área.  Estoy beneficiando de aburguesamiento y me siento utilizado por los propietarios / desarrolladores para aumentar el valor de la propiedad para su beneficio.

COMO EL ABURGUESAMIENTO ME AFFECTA

Ethan Davidson

Yo he vivido en un apartamento estudio sección 8 desde 1988. Es un bonito lugar con buena seguridad.

     Aunque el Tenderloin es relativamente resistente a la aburguesamiento, hay gente que definitivamente quiere que sea aburguesado.

      Ya no es posible obtener la sección 8 unidades en San Francisco. Si pudiera mi cuarto, yo tendría que mudarse al norte - a Marin o el Condado de Sonoma.

       Tengo serias problemas de salud, pero no he encontrado buenos profesionales de la salud que aceptan médica. En el Condado de Marin y Sonoma, es más difícil. Lugares están lejos, y el sistema de transporte público no es muy buena. Sería difícil llegar a los proveedores de la salud sin coche, especialmente cuando estoy enferma. 

HOTEL HERBERT

Dennis Gary

Soy residente del Hotel Herbert Powell Street. Está transformando de un hotel residencial (SRO) a un hotel de turismo y estudiantes. Mientras mis compañeros residentes mueren, sus habitaciones cambian a las habitaciones turísticas, con suelos de madera y televisiones construidas . Mi habitación tiene una alfombra vieja y no hay televisión.

Pero puedo conseguir a Internet después de un argumento con la la administración que me dijo que el wi-fi no era para residentes - sólo para turistas y estudiantes.

Durante el primer mes, no pude conseguir en el wi-fi del hotel porque no me dieron el código del internet.

ya que me daría una contraseña. Entonces Sari Billinck de Central City SRO Collaborative apareció  y de repente me dieron el código.

Cuando la luz de la lámpara en la encima de mi espejo, se acabó, calzoncillos empezaron a romper, y la pintura empezó a caer del techo, los trabajadores fueron de repente muy ocupados de trabajando en las habitaciones turísticas y estudiantes.

Entonces Jeannie Mon de "En-la-casa de Servicios de Apoyo de Colaboración" llamó el director y dos horas más tarde tuve una lámpara nueva,  calzoncillos nuevos, y una nueva capa de pintura en mi techo.

Zoe Bender- Gentrification Blog

      Soy una güera de 26 años con un peinado asimétrico. Entro gratis en
los clubs por bailar tan bien. Soy una graduada de la univdersidad que
no tiene empleo. Tengo 84 centavos en mi cuenta de banco y acabo de
solicitar mi entrada a la escuela de posgrado que costará miles de
dólares. Soy una hipster queer que usa vales de comida en tiendas de
comida saludable. Soy una artista y una revolucionaria esperanzada. No
tengo ni coche ni bicicleta, pues camino generalmente, a todas horas,
de día y de noche, y nunca me siento insegura.

        Hace dos años, mis padres decidieron mudarse de su casa en un pueblo
rural y playero y regresar a San Francisco. My papá es un pintor que
gana la vida ofreciendo el servicio técnico para negocios pequeños, y
my mamá es una escritora  que gana la vida recaudando fondos para una
organización sin lucro de arte. Encontraron un lugar en la 7 y Market
que no era clasificada para viviendas, pero convencieron al jefe de la
propiedad a dejarles mudarse en lo que había sido una fábrica de ropa.
Dentro de unas meses, trabajaron con el jefe de la propiedad a diseñar
una comunidad de espacios de vivir-trabajar para artistas. La mayoría
de la gente que se mudaron allí son artistas en sus años 20. Dos
tercios de ellos son blancos. A cambio por su trabajo de diseñar y
mantener el proyecto, mi mamá recibió un otro estudio pequeño en que
no tendrá que pagar la renta durante un año. Cuando perdí mi trabajo y
my casa en octubre, my mamá ofreció que vivera en su oficina.
Es por el aburguesamiento que vivo dondo vivo. La renta es muy
razonable: es por eso que mis padres pueden vivir allá, y que tienen
un cuarto extra en el cual puedo vivir. Un parte de la razón que
pudieron convencer al jefe de la propiedad de dejarles mudarse allí
fue que la presencia de artistas en el vedendario va a aumentar el
valor de la propiedad. Este vecendario es un centro creciente del
aburguesamiento. Algunos de mis ricos amigos blancos no me quieren
visitar en este parte “temeroso” de la ciudad. Dentro de los dos años
pasados he visto tiendas de bicicleta, cafés, y galerías de arte que
han abierto por todo el vecendario. Hace un año, un club nuevo abrió
en las 6 y Market. El club se llama Monarch, y fue recién votado uno
de los mejores equipos de sonido en los EEUU. Cada martes caminio por
la calle 6 de Mission a Market para bailar a trance y dubstep en
Monarch. Evito miraro a los ojos con la gente que paso que pasan el
rato afuera de los SROs y las licorerías. Cuando me hablan,
generalment les ignoro. Cuando llego a Monarch, es como entrar en un
universo diferente, con diseño de la época Victoriana y un público en
su mayoría blanco. Dentro de Monarch, me relajo, rodeada por los otros
perpetradores de aburguesamiento.

Theresa Hays –

¿Quién soy en esta ciudad?
¿Cómo me impacta el aburguesamiento?

Me llamo Theresa Hays, una mujer Afro-Americana que, hace doce años,
vivía con mi esposo en una vivienda con un cuarto en Hunter’s Point,
cerca de la astillera del Navy. Me había enfermada debido a una
condición que me dejó tan debil de anemia que no pude durar un
trabajo. El trabajo de mi esposo le despedió frecuentamente: tan
frecuentamente y tan esporádicamente que nuestras cuentas y nuestra
renta pagamos tarde, y pues no las pagamos para nada.

Siento que había una bendición en la tormenta. El güero que la
dirección de la propiedad nos asignó nos atormentó tanto que nos
sintimos intranquilos cuando salíamos del apartimiento, preguntándonos
si podríamos reingresar a nuestra vivienda. Escribí una carta al
dueño, un hombre Afro-Americano, en que indicó unas condiciones
insaludables en que sufríamos en la vivienda, de que nunca le habíamos
avisado porque estábamos tarde con la renta. Fue puesto en la corazón
de este dueño de dejarnos firmar un “acuerdo consentido” que no nos
reportara como un desalojo, y nos perdonaría la $11,000 en renta, si
nos fuéramos de la vivienda. Lo miramos como una bendición en la
tormenta, y nos fuimos.

Mientras todo esto, la Astillera de Navy y Lennar lentamente entraban
en la area, “limpiándola.” Asistí a sus reuniones cuando las
representativas de Lennar trataban de empujar su causa en la
comunidad, en San Francisco, y en la oficina del alcalde.

Mi esposo y yo pusimos todo en un depósito, aparte de ropa abundante
que apilamos y camuflamos detrás de nosotros en la camión. Así empezó
nuestra primera noche de estar “sin hogar:” una palabra que pensaba
que nunca describiría a mí ni a nosotros.  Vivimos así durante tres
años, viviendo en nuestra pequeña camión verde, sin dejar que nadie
sepa que estábamos “sin hogar.”Fue importante que nuestras vidas
aparezcan “normal.” Lo más importante fue continuar a dar alabanzas a
Diós mientras todo.

Leímos artículos y oímos historias de cosas sospechosas ocurriendo con
Lennar Properties, y empezamos a ver otra que lo que parecía tan mal e
incierto fue, de hecho, una bendición en la tormenta. Logramos escapar
la experiencia de atrapados en los agarrados de Lennar Properties—que
sabemos ahora son un GRAN EJEMPLO DEL ABURGUESAMIENTO en la área de
Hunter’s Point en San Francisco.

Marinette

Soy Marinette Tovar Sanchez, inmigrante Mexicana, viviendo en el area de Fruitvale, en la ciudad de Oakland. Soy una trabajadora y artista, una activista, mujer de color. Soy en muchas o pocas palabras, una todologa profesional. Me muevo constantemente en busqueda del pan de todos los dias, en la lucha para mantener un techo sobre mi cabeza. Rento un cuarto en una bodega, la cual comparto con otras 4 personas, tambien artistas, activistas y educadores.

He visto el aburguesamiento de un par de puntos de vista diferentes. La primera es la de una artista que lucha, como muchos, a fin de mes a pagar la renta y los gastos de subsistencia. La segunda perspectiva es la de una mujer trabajadora inmigrante de color con escasos recursos y oportunidades.

La primera perspectiva me ayudó a comprender el impacto y el efecto negativo de muchas maneras, que los artistas han tenido en el aburguesamiento de los barrios. Mujeres y hombres que se dedican a la creación de arte a menudo, y en la mayoría de los casos, tienen dificultades financieras. El flujo de dinero de un artista tiende a ser esporádico, poco fiable e impredecible, lo que impulsa a los artistas a buscar opciones que sean asequibles. La mayoría de las veces, las viviendas que los artistas pueden permitirse pagar están en los barrios de bajos ingresos, considerados por muchos como los guetos. Poco a poco, cada vez más artistas se mueven a estos barrios, siguiendo el ejemplo y la tendencia de otros antes que ellos y poco a poco, la zona comienza a ser "cool, artsy, moderno, peculiar y colorido", y como resultado, más y más gente de repente quiere moverse alli también, por lo que se hace la demanda de vivienda en los barrios mas, junto con arribar los precios de alquiler y el costo de la vida en general, por lo que es casi imposible para los inquilinos originales permitirse el lujo de quedarse. Indirectamente, especialmente en lugares como el Área de la Bahía, los artistas han sido los indirectos iniciadores del aburguesamiento, irónicamente, una vez que la gente comienza a moverse allí que tienen los recursos que los artistas no tienen, los precios siguen aumentando y, finalmente, la artistas que se mudaron allí antes, al fin estan expulsados ​​del barrio.

La segunda perspectiva, o más aún el efecto directo que el aburguesamiento ha tenido en mí, es la que he experimentado como una mujer recien inmigrante de bajos o ningúno ingreso. Después de haber estado sin hogar durante un par de meses, he arreglado de ahorrar un poco de dinero. Cuando busce un lugar para vivir, mis opciones eran increíblemente estrecho y casi específico. Yo, básicamente, tenía que elegir entre las áreas dentro de Oakland, donde la mayoría de las personas han sido desplazadas, gracias al aburguesamiento. Estas áreas eran más o menos del Este de Oakland y el area de West Oakland que todavía no había aburguesada; barrios de bajos ingresos de las personas de color con altos índices de violencia y poco o ningún acceso a alimentos saludables, aunque el acceso fácil a las tiendas de licores. Yo acabé eligiendo este de Oakland, porque por suerte, pasa a estar donde mi gente, personas, latinas se han concentrado. Es una bendición que de todos los barrios en los que podría haber terminado, me encontré con un con un hermoso grupo de gente fuerte que viven en una lucha constante y que están profundamente comprometidos e involucrados en la construcción de una comunidad resiliente y autentica.

Iris

Quien eres- blanca, Judea, clase proprietaria, queer, mujer, viviendo en Berkeley

Como el aburguesamiento

¿Cómo el aburguesamiento me impacta? Actualmente vivo en un barrio de mayoría aburguesado en Berkeley, cerca de la zona comercial del calle 4. Esta área es menos "moderno" y cerca de "cool" lugares que en mi casa de antes, cerca de Macarthur bart. En mi casa vieja eramos  las únicas personas blancas en el bloque, me sentí muy insegura y con miedo, hemos testigos a la violencia y escuchó disparos un par de veces, escuchó a una mujer gimiendo fuera de mi ventana, fue testigo de un asalto sexual. Llegó a ser bastante insoportable para mí, así que me mudé, tanto por el miedo que sentí, y porque sabia que los vecinos no nos querían alli. Nuestros vecinos no estaban contentos que estábamos allí. Parte de mi decisión fue informado también por la sesión de cambio revolucionario de prensa POBRE. Sé que voy a ser parte del aburguesamiento en mi vida, pero tengo dinero suficiente para evitar estar en la vanguardia de la misma. Ya no me siento a la vanguardia del aburguesamiento donde vivo, pero sí participo con frecuencia en el consumo relacionado con el aburguesamiento, como la compra de cafés con leche caros en la Misión o en Oakland, etc.

As terrifying as being on the outside looking in is, being on the inside wanting out is worse.

Needing to feed my face and pay the rent, I had taken a low paying job at the old Crocker Bank and after five years was making only around four dollars an hour doing office work.  Having come to the point of overdrawing my checking account, I asked a bank officer if she would advance me twenty dollars until pay day.  How many others have asked that question?

“No, because that would lower my savings account to a point where I would not be drawing top interest,” replied the bank officer to my inquiry

“The New York Times reports that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is setting new records, and on the same page notes that the numbers of homeless people and people living in poverty are also setting records.”  – Tim Redmond, San Francisco Bay Guardian blog, February 13, 2013.

The next day the bank officer gave me a canned tamale.

Who corrected the bank officer’s writing for the bank procedures manual as it was put into the computer?  I did.

Echoing through my mind are such remarks as, “How would you know I made a mistake in my statistics?  You’re just a word processor with a Master’s degree in English.  I am a bank vice president with an MBA.”

But did the VIP thank me when she found out I was right?”

No.

Trying to escape the bank, I discovered that it did not give employees seeking outside employment recommendations.  It just verified employment and whether the bank would hire us again.

As Edward R. Murrow reported in his television report “Harvest of Shame, the plight of the migrant farm worker,” one landowner stated, “We used to own our slaves.  Now we just rent them.”

And what in 2013 is the solution?  You tell me.

Saw this cat named Terry on the bus the other day. Some guys are like a breath of fresh air. Not Terry. He’s a breath of cologne. I don’t wear cologne but there’s something about Terry’s cologne. It’s a subtle scent that doesn’t overpower you. You just know it’s there. He wears these velvet jogging suits that are smooth and loose. That’s Terry, smooth and loose.

We ran into each other on the #5 Fulton heading downtown. Riding the #5 can be depressing. All those faces, that twisted mass of tech-washed gentrification that has overrun the city of my birth. I can barely stand it, that sense of entitlement of the techies, the coffee sippers—those financial sector technocrats whose presence radiates so much death of spirit. I try not to look but they’re all over the place so I close my eyes. He got on board on Fillmore Street. The door opened and that cologne hit me. I looked up. “Hey Anthony” a voice called out. I was drawn in by his gaze. His eyes are somewhat unfocused yet radiate a smile contrived only of an honesty of the moment. “What’s happening, Terry?” I said. Terry moves a bit unsteadily, having been in a car accident years ago. Sometimes when talking, his attention drops off. Perhaps it is the area of lost consciousness that hangs like a cloud, those precious moments when he slips into the subconscious street of his mind, where words and songs echo to the surface. Terry—Fillmore born, still here.

We got off downtown. We walked a couple blocks to Market Street. I remembered the way he walked from when I first met him. I was a vocational rehabilitation counselor for an employment training program run by a local non-profit organization. Most of the participants in the program had developmental disabilities. The training facility was an assembly center where the workers sorted, counted, weighed and packed mosaic tiles for shipping to retail outlets. My job was to supervise the workers, which is always uncomfortable because I see myself as a worker and not a supervisor. I hit it off with Terry. We’d laugh and he’d sit and count those tiles like they were poker chips. But he would sometimes lose count and have to start over again. His eyes would drift to the women in the program. He liked talking to the girls, always complimenting them on what they were wearing. I’d say, “Hey Terry, you can’t do that. Ain’t you ever heard of sexual harassment?” Terry’s gaze would drift away for a few seconds. “You’re a motherfuckin’ killjoy” he’d answer, smiling. “You’re right about that” I’d answer.

We walked to Market Street. Terry has moved on to a profession better suited to his passion. He sells mix CD’s. Five bucks a pop. He pulls out a small binder filled with CD’s in transparent sleeves. He asks me what I like. I ask him what he has. Fast jams or slow jams, whatever you want, he tells me. I tell him to set me up with slow jams. He pulled a CD out of its sleeve. He had a playlist to go with it, not digitized and impersonal but handwritten on good, old-fashioned lined paper:

“Ole School Mixed Slow Ballads”

1. Sho’ Nuff must be love—Heatwave 2. Do Me Baby—Prince 3. I’ll be there—Jackson 5 4. Hanging Downtown—Cameo 5. Got to Be there—Jackson 5 6. Do Me—Rick James 7. Never Can Say Goodbye—Jackson 5 8. Between the Sheets—Isley Brothers 9. What’s your sign—Danny Pearson 10. Natural High—Bloodstone 11. Oh Honey—Delegation 12. Be My girl—Dramatics 13. What’s come over me—Blue Magic 14. Sparkle (in your eye)—Cameo 15. Fell for you—Dramatics 16. Didn’t I blow your mind this time—Delfonics

We parted ways. I had my mix CD. It sat in my bag a couple of days. Terry called me and asked me what I thought of the CD and I told him that I hadn’t listened yet but would soon. He called again and again I told him I’d listen as soon as I could. I finally found a perfect time to listen—at work. I popped in that CD and let it play. Now, I don’t know how it happened but I got mellow and loose and hell if I didn’t look at myself and see that I was wearing a velvet jogging suit. And that smell, is it cologne? Damn, Terry got me again. How am I going to get any work done today?

Hey Terry, thanks for the music, thanks for being here. I never knew a jogging suit could fit so well. Thanks.

Going to school at first for me was very overwhelming, not knowing if (after being out of the educational institution for 20+ years) I could succeed at it and feeling inadequate to keep up with those that are fresh out of high school. But now going into my third month, I enjoy going.

Waking up on Tuesday and Thursday mornings feeling fresh ready to see what I will learn today that I hadn't known before makes me feel productive. I normally show up an hour or so early because school is the only place I can go and have that moment of peace without distraction, so when I exit the bus or train I make my way to the ocean campus at 50 Phelan Drive and mount the steps or ramp leading to the Science building then on the elevator to the second floor down the hall and around the curve to room 215 where I am alone for a least 30 to 40 minutes before my fellow classmates join me to wait for our Instructor Neela Chatterjee.

After that class is over, I have a brief break but if I've got food I do as everyone does, eat as you go because I'm rushing to get to my other class which has become my passion: Ethnic Studies 37 with Professor Paliata in Bungalow 706. I rush because I want to get a good seat and I want to be on time. In order to do that I've got to descend 74 steps and a sidewalk that leads to Batmale Hall where I go in and take the elevator to the first floor and out the doors to the sidewalk that separates the track field from the soccer field and down the steps leading to the bungalows.

That all sounds wonderful and it's true for me, but the overall vibe on campus is anything but a smooth transition. It doesn't matter what the forecaster has predicted for the day in the city because at City College it's a whole different "ball game". With rumors swirling around like the fierce winds that push through at any given time without warning and the stress coming from student and faculty alike is overwhelming. Not knowing from one day to the next what's going to happen. Are we closing? Are we staying open? If we're closing then do I get my credits that I've already accumulated? For people like me this being my first semester are wondering, what about us? The faculty are wondering, will my department be cut today? Will I have a job to come to? What about my students? The Professors, Instructors and Teachers aren't here just for a paycheck, they're also here because it's their passion, they love being here, they love what they do and we as students feel that and appreciate them for it.

I am a very talkative people person. I don't really shun away from people but rather embrace them, and that's what I felt when I first entered the campus, I felt that sense of belonging too, no matter what, who or where you come/came from you fit in at "City," like one big family.

While in my classes I talk to my classmates and in passing I talk to different people, I don't know their names but if they want to talk I listen, if they ask questions I answer and the one thing that's been common is, "What's going to happen?" You can't focus on your studies when you're stressed out about the state of affairs at hand. We should no longer be in the dark about where we stand. That's why drastic measures have to be taken, that's why we have the sit-in's, the meetings going on on campus. Is it to much to ask for the truth?

The other day I was in the annex bookstore waiting to make a purchase when a lady walked in and started up a conversation. During our talk she said something interesting to a comment I made. She said "I don't think the Chancellor likes any of us and I have yet to meet her, I don't even know what she looks like". That struck me because, how do you not know what your boss looks like? Yes, that's right, the lady I was talking to is an employee at City and has yet to meet/see her boss. The emails are informational, Dr. Skillman, but your presence would speak volumes. We've seen your representatives on a few occasions but we haven't seen you.

Recently one of our students passed away in a tragic car crash with three of her other siblings (Rachel Fisi'iahi). There was a candlelight vigil held in the Student Union building where friends, teachers, well wishers and family came to share their memories of Rachel. But was the Chancellor in attendance? No, but one of her representatives was.

During the sit-in, students and staff wanted to meet with the Chancellor, some had been there all day long but around 3:00pm her representatives showed up in her place. When asked where was she, we were told "she isn't here, she's out of town at a conference."

What message is she sending out? I know for me it's to say I don't give a damn!

Maybe she is a loving, kind, and compassionate person. I don't know, but if you don't make yourself available to the people how are we really to know who she is? How are we to really know if she is with us or against us? If she never makes herself available. One thing we know she's good at is....laying people off. In my first article I stated that she had laid off 33 staffers. Well, I stand corrected: that number is actually 60 staffers as told to me by Shanell Williams (President-Associated Student Council).

On March 15, 2013 the Acceditation Committee will return to City College, but on the day before (March 14, 2013) there is going to be a walk out @ 1:00pm-RAM PLAZA(Ocean Campus). There will be a BIG RALLY @4:00pm SF-CIVIC CENTER. (All campuses will meet at the Mission Campus(1125 Valencia) at 2pm to march together to City Hall).

We want to make a statement, we want to save our school. City College of San Francisco is widely known and acknowledged to be one of the best community colleges in the country.This current crisis is largely the joint creation of two groups: the Accreditation Commission (ACCIC); secondly the interim administrators who have no long-term commitment to the school. We feel like this is an attack on tens of thousands of Bay Area residents, particularly from low-income, peoples of color and immigrant communites.

Please join us March 14, 2013 to call on the city's ELECTED officials to take immediate action. City Hall must ensure that Prop A funds are used for education as the voters intended. Stand with us in unity and in solidarity!

Dedicated to Melvin Burley, Ernesto Xe and Kiante Campbell and all of our lost fathers, sons, uncles, nephews, brothers, neighbors, teachers, mentors, friends and  warriors

“They were shooting up the neighborhood like it was a shooting range. Gunshots flying hitting walls and buildings, we had to duck down in our own little room, my blind wife was almost shot.” Donald, Deep East Oakland poverty skola and neighborhood elder speaking at Street Newsroom on Deep East-TV

Donald’s words whispered into the wind as I sat there holding a picture of Ernesto Xe, a 22 yr young peace-bringing brother and son who never had a bad word or angry voice for anyone or anything. Shot dead by a “stray” bullet in the post-gentrified streets of the Fillmore district of San Francisco. In my other hand I held a picture of Jose Antulio Matias Aguilon, a young hard worker, uncle and smile-bringer who crossed three plantation walls (borders) to come here and work to support his family in Guatemala, shot dead by two youngsters in the post-gentrified streets of the Mission for his phone. And at my feet were two pictures, one of Melvin Burley, an uncle, a father and positivity carrier, shot dead by stray bullets in the pre-gentrified streets of East Oakland and Kiante Campbell, a son, a student, a young man, shot in currently-being-gentrified downtown Oakland.  All dead. All taken on their spirit journey when we still needed them here. To father, to brother, to neighbor, to cook, to dream, to teach, to pray, to make music, to heal, to care-give, to smile, to love.

“The chickens have come home to roost..” William C, former Black Panther, Oakland resident on the killing of Kiante Campbell

The reasons are none. None of them “did anything” not that that would be a reason to end someones life. They just lived and worked, and shopped, and walked home in the killing fields of Amerikkka.

“When a pig kills 1 of us i think its easy to see an us and them. Its easy to point the finger and see the enemy clearly. And the injustice and hypocrisy of a peace officer who supposed 2protect and serve and uphold the law is so blatant. When 1 of us kills 1 of us i think the lines get blurry. The hypocrisy is absent. And i think trauma, being overwhelmed, and helplessness sets in. I think our apparent self destruction is too much to deal wid. And we dont even kno where to start to solve us killing us,” said sista-mama-revolutionary artist/chef Needa Bee when promoting an Oakland 1^st Friday’s Peace celebration in honor of Kiante Campbell.

As I was holding all of them in my heart, in my mind and now in my memory, already cluttered with so much loss from my own hard life of too much struggle, I started to hear the shots from the deepest recesses of my ancestral memory, the shots of another time, a time of settler-colonizers killing each other and themselves. I started to hear the genocide and smell the blood of my indigenous brothers and sisters, lives taken too early to their spirit journeys because the settler had perfected this man-made killing machine known as a gun.

“I didn’t like the way he looked at me, so I shot him,” Wild Bill Cody – kkkowboy from the 1800’s

 And as I tripped on the present day similarities of all these shootings to 18^th century gratuitous shooting from the Amerikkkan kkkowboy times, my mind wandered to the incessant killing in present day Syria, Mali, Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, where paid murderers known as “soldiers” routinely kill children and fathers and mothers and aunties and grandmothers and grandfathers for false reasons crafted by empires and colonizers and “rebels” and landlords and banks…

“15 innocent children killed in “border violence” in Palestine… kkkorporate NewsNetwork(CNN) report”

And then I remembered the ongoing Po’Lice killing of our young warriors like Kenneth Harding Jr, killed because he didn’t happen to have a $2.00 Muni bus token with him or Alan Blueford and Derrik Gaines killed because they “ran” or Ernesto Duenez because he got out of his van or Mario Romero because he got out of his car, and so many more, all of them by occupying armies called Police.

Like so many of our young folks today, I have lived through multiple forms of seen and unseen violence my whole life. I have been houseless, gentrified and evicted so many times I can’t count. My poor Black/Indian mama lived through violent foster homes and orphanages,  her poor body of color was abused over 200 times by the time she was 2 years young, which continued throughout her childhood and then again later as an adult when she was abused by my father and my stepfather. I was almost killed by my stepfather and later by someone I depended on for support for many years of my adult life.. Violence is and was an outgrowth of our lives in this abusive and brutal system of kkkapitalism. And saying it isn’t ok or calling CPS or the occupying armies known as po’lice on us wasn’t going to end the violence of our poor single mother and child poverty in Amerikkka.

How do we heal our young folks and ourselves from this violence together. Perhaps it begins with us realizing we are all violent. We are all engaged, even if unintentionally, in the violence of capitalist separation and individualism. That it is us together, old and young, single and parent, child and elder who are involved and therefore complicit. And all of us have a role in healing and activating. And not just in come idealistic anti-war protest, not in some futile, terrified search for occupying armies (Po’Lice) or government saviors (CPS) but in the daily and very difficult acts of deconstructing the system of violence that has built us all.

We could start with the violence of gentriFUkation, displacement and poverty that happens due to many peoples with race and class privilege’s casual/capitalistic desire to “have a new life” or “find a more interesting neighborhood” or live in a more “convenient” location. I have witnessed (and fought for and cried for) entire working-class families of color  who were struggling, but still holding it together, who had the rooted strength and eldership and connected-ness of their neighborhoods of origins be gentriFUked out of their neighborhoods of origin only to be dwelling in places where they have no access to jobs, elders watching or friends caring. And similarily the peoples  they left were now out their grandmothers, their compaz, their friends, their support networks.

The nuances of survival and thrival are many and are rarely understood. They are never discussed by the politricksters, the real estate spekkkulators, bank gangsters and the profit-gainers who steal our lives and communities away from us. The multiple families I have witnessed who have suffered the violence of displacement, including my own, never recovered from this loss and in many of the cases, they have lost their young folks to this gratuitous violence I speak of now.

And then there is the violence of “independence” which we are all pitched so hard in the US and how it ensures that we all leave our homes and our elders and our communities in pursuit of college and a “job” and a career and a new car and more and more blud-stained dollars, until we are miles and miles away from the peoples who would teach us and care for us and help us learn what it means to be human, and then when we are there, we are dependent on strangers to love us and care about us and most of the time all they do is abuse us and leave us and hurt us and then we are left alone and isolated, seeking corporate poisons or more dangerous people to soothe our deep pain even if it causes more pain.

And in pursuit of these dollars which leaves us with no time for each other we send our children away to factory schools or to sit in front of corporate TV’s and computers to be alone with other alone and away children and one or two un-related, underpaid adults. And in these factory skkkools or in front of these technologies they only learn more about independence and alone-ness and technologically crafted answers and violence and racism and colonizers histories and propaganda and empire crafted notions of success and above all to not respect or care or listen to elders or even to their own parents. And many times the only thing they learn is to alternately fear or hate un-related authority.

Not to mention the violence of racist school policies, environmental racism, poor peoples hellthcare and poor peoples poison food choices leaving us sick and bloated to die in our separated, isolated housing.

There are so many parts of capitalism and colonization to dis-connect from, and thousands to un-learn. If you are reading this article you have begun to try to think through some of them. In our family at POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE we have begun this lifelong un-learning, healing project with PEopleSkool, PNN & Homefulness. As indigenous, landless, poor peoples we are working to liberate mother earth from the real estate lie of property ownership. We are working to grow our own food and teach our children back their lost indigenous herstories and languages, re-define work as taking care of Mother Earth, our families and our communities and write and tell our own stories about our oppression and our self-determined liberation.

We will be starting a Grandmothers/ Mamaz/Grandfathers/Uncles council to bring eldership back to our communities in real time. In the summer as part of our Healing the Hood series we will be launching a free karate and Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) training for youth and adults with elders from POOR Magazine in collaboration with power-FUL young leaders the Black Riders Liberation Party. We are bringing spirit and inter-tribal prayer ceremonies to heal us all from these corporate poisons (drugs and alcohol) in our own indigenous traditions, we are fund-raising now to build housing for landless families not tied to how much money each of us have access to, and in the future we are hoping to create a gentriFUkation/Po’Lice free corner in this small slice of East Oakland and eventually completely move off the lie of blood-stained dollars.

A few other examples of this kind of decolonizing work is RBG street skolar and Ujaama Villages, Community Medics in Oakland, 5050 Collective in San Jose, as well as the many forms of Danza Azteca, Afro-Taino, Afro-Caribe and other forms of prayer and spirit and culture from our many different and beautiful indigenous peoples traditions being practiced and launched locally and globally-(Calpulli Coatlicue, Pueblo de Guatu Ma-cu to name a few) and the indigenous resistance movement, IdleNoMore. And big ups to the Urban Peace Movement, Silence the Violence marches and movements like the United Playaz and even pastors and preachers and healers who speak and teach and work on this violence everyday.

In the mean-time these multiple forms of violence continue, our separation from each other and the accountability to each other widens, the po’lice perpetration increases and the 21^st century world of lies and blood-stained ekkkonomies is held up as the only way to live.

Right now I am praying for all of our lost brothers, uncles, fathers, friends, mentors, and neighbors to stand with us as well as to Creator, Great Spirit and all the Orisas so that we can affect change before all of us chickens kill all of us other chickens while we are all trying to collectively dismantle the roost.   

Wesearch:

Poor people led research and pro-active media deconstructing the lies told about criminalized and mythologized communities.

Click here for Spanish Translation:   http://poormagazine.org/node/4714

Ingrid De Leon

I am a migrant woman, mother that day by day I look at the sun

to guide me through this World. I have lived in San Francisco

for nine years. I see how things here are changing in the Misión

district. Before, there were a lot of stores and Latin restaurants.

But everything is changing. Everyday, they build new buildings

for businesses and other races that we cannot afford to buy.

When I walk through 24th street, I see new houses, businesses and

cafes with people who have money, everyone has their coffee cup

and everyone with their own laptops. They all appear quiet,

each in their own world. Us, Raza and those that don’t have a lot of

money cannot go in there. We have no money or computer. Little

by little our spaces are shrinking. And when we are surrounded

by rich houses and rich people, we feel like fish out of water

and we want to move out of here. Our space is already full of

things that us, the poor, cannot have. I am in horror, because I

feel that at any moment I will no longer have a home, because my

current home is very old.  These are the houses that are being

destroyed for new condominiums. I get chills every time I see a new

construction site. I feel as if I’m drowning, since I cannot swim.

Usuario for change (Enrique)- Gentrification

When I arrived in this country, into the city of San Francisco, a

decade ago, I saw how the renters and people that lived in shelters

were being forced into eviction from where we lived by the owners

of the buildings. Forced into eviction by the creation of “CHANGES” by the city of

San Francisco.

During a mass protest, I announced that the ones that should be

criminalized are the originators of Gentrification.  In other

words- the owners of the units and the legislators that approved the

ELLIS ACT.  Just like those who approved the program

“CHANGES,” because those are the originators of this problem.

Me, in my part, I was going to fight for a system of subsidized

housing by the city. Fight for the particular persons that have low income or

temporarily no income who could have good worthy housing according to

their earnings.

Today I live at Casa Quezada where I pay 25 dollars a month for

rent and when I do not have money, I do not pay. This program

was developed with the participation of many non-profit

organizations and other neighborhood centers in the Misión.

Gentrification- Julio Chaves

Gentrification of a neighborhood affects my economy because the

rent of apartments and rooms increase in price.  The owners of the

houses or apartments take advantage of the situation, feeling like mini kings in

their kingdom where they live and pressure the people who live in

their units.  The rent every day is more expensive.  It pushes us to live in places

far from our work centers, making life more difficult. Like

my grandmother says “what doesn’t leave with tears, leaves

with a sigh.”  This is due to the fact that is you have cheap housing,

you have to deal with many stupid discomforts from the mini King

and Esther with how you spend more money on gasoline or on the bus transportation. Gentrification is a silent Invasion, but without bullets-where the one with the most money takes possession of the best commercial places with the great ability to do

business.

Gentrification increases the rent and also the food.  It is a race where

he takes himself out of the race when he has little money or low

paying jobs. It’s a race where the poor get poorer and the rich get

richer.

This economic war grows bigger and bigger each moment like

Monsanto (Monster.) Where the one with money can live where he

wants and the poor where ever we can, or survive if we can.

I like the apartment where I live because it’s cheap, but it is located

on the first floor and I can hear the drainage system from the

neighbors upstairs.  And I can hear them making love with a

rik rik of their mattress. But all these noises and discomforts are

part of my environment.

Gentri- Lex Horan

I'm a young white person who's living in Oakland on a short-term basis. I am passing through, essentially, for four months of my life. Most of the time I live in Minneapolis, MN. Here in this city I am mostly a learner--I came here for training to bring home with me. It feels like a very strange way to be in a place.

Moving here was very easy for me. I am living in an apartment near Lake Merritt with my best friend and another person I hadn't met before moving here. The building I'm staying in was recently renovated and many other people in my building are Black and Latino. (Two of us in my household are white, and one of my housemates is Black. We all went to college; none of us are from the Bay Area.) Gentrification has made it very easy for me to move to Oakland. I know a lot of other people who live here--almost none of them are from here--who have helped me by giving me rides, showing me around, lending me a bike, letting me live with them for low rent. It's like the rails were greased to help me land here easily. I'm also impacted by gentrification in a different way, but how it feels to live here. I'm not used to it yet, if that's ever possible. I think a lot of people like me get used to the way displacement feels in the air, on BART, walking past the people who've been stolen from. I'm afraid that I might too, if I stayed here. But for now it rubs me, feels exhausting and heartbreaking and makes me feel nauseous and uneasy. I am impacted because I watch the way people like me are cogs in the machine of displacement and I feel angry, hopeless, judgmental, confused. It's important for me to grapple with all these feelings and also--at the end of the day, I'm housed, period.

Noa Grayevsky- Gentrification

I am a rich, white queer person living in San Francisco. I'm not from here. My parents immigrated to the United States from Israel where my Palestinian- Jewish ancestors colluded with the British colonizers and became white and rich off of land theft, displacement of their neighbors, and "real estate development." I am a graduate student with owning class parents. I graduated from Harvard and have a lot of educational privilege. I am a housemate to four young, white, queer people, an older sister to my very tall younger brother Eyal, a child of my parents Eli and Tami, a lover of my partner, Ro. My father and brother are business owners, and my mother, like her grandfather, is a real estate agent. This means the money in my family comes from other peoples' labor, from stealing land, from maintaining kkkapitalism and from gentrification and colonization. I moved to San Francisco five years ago to be closer to dear friends of mine, and I am embarrassed to share, to find other young, queer people like myself.

I am impacted by gentrification in San Francisco mostly in that money and access have been funneling to me without almost any effort on my part as a result of it. My parents bought me a house on Bernal Hill this year without me knowing about it, and gave it to me as a surprise, while my friends who are queer, poor folks of color were displaced from Bernal Hill to Oakland. Gentrification and displacement of poor folks downtown was a result of the building of the luxury condo my dad just bought. As the businesses change, I see more people who look like me all around. The police smile at me, It's all set up so that they'll be here to protect me from noticing or feeling the harm I am doing to others by being here in this way. I am a commercial for gentrification, as a young, white, class privileged, queer artist. I walk around and then rich, white, older men want to move here, like my dad, to be hip. My parents, between the two of them, own 6 condos and houses now in this country none of us are from, and each time my mom closes a deal on a "luxury" house or condo she gets paid lots of money, which she then uses to fund my brother's tech start up, my fancy grad school tuition, and my living here and gentrifying this place. I feel like the expectations, access, and inertia in place in my owning class family and culture set me up to displace others and benefit from their harm, and pushing against this feels both necessary to my humanity, like my duty to the earth and to those living around me, and also incredibly confusing- like doing a task that almost all my socialization worked hard to prevent me from doing. Here I am, humbled and hurting, confused and loving inside of it.

The Existentiality of Gentrification

by: Asik the Pirate

I think I might just have hustled rent for this month.

(Perpetual Refrain) I get three extra days next time!

I don’t come from here…it’s obvious.  My hat belongs sixty years in the past, my kicks have had intimate relations with several (I imagine bruised) feet, my shirt has a collar, and my gait betrays an admittedly desperate confidence.

Plus the folks that are left have seen it all after generally 40+ years on the plantation.  They know the new horse on the track.

“How you like the neighborhood?”

“Love it.”

“That’s good.  I’m Andre.  Been here my whole life.  I’ll see you.”

They see that I’m not a gentri-fuckerbut I know that I am sometimes reckless-eyeballed.  I am grateful for the cautious welcome.  I can locate and appreciate the fear.  Yet I wonder about my wife and roommate.  They don’t address them, they just let them pass by.  They might hopethey pass by.

You see I took no home from any man or woman.  I moved in from being briefly homeless to a place where my wife had moved to avoid a bad roommate situation, into an apartment rented by a young lesbian of Chinese descent, who happened to live in one of the last remaining Black sides of town.

Our rent is significantlybelow market rate, which amounts to just a little more than I can pay, and we have not and will not help to raise it!

But did my roommate know she was moving into a neighborhoodor did she just like the flat and the fish-shop on the corner?  Did she want to know and contribute to a community, or build an isolated fort on the Bay for sex and other thought experiments?  How was this space opened for me?

You see I knew this hood before I landed here, have friends, a few enemies perhaps, and have celebrated, cried, and struggled here. My entry was a strange homecoming, and I mean every syllable when I say I love it.  I don’t live in a hip spot, get no cool points for my domicile, yet I am surrounded by one of the most creative, resilient, strong communities that I’ve ever encountered.  But is it visible?  To Who?

And my roommate (my sweet, generous roommate)…Does she know that she is invisible not by race but by perceived class, translucent and gentile, not only able to dodge bullets but able to dodge us all?  Who is more afraid, my roommate, or the people who see a foreclosure sign hanging off of her “general good intentions”, and the bulldozer of green-washed upwardmobility as homespirals further and further from the atmosphere into the deepest recesses of space?

Jenny - Gentrification

Who am I in this City?

I am a class and education privileged (I have a master’s degree) 27-year old queer, White/Puerto Rican/Filipina mixed race woman, not from California.  I am trying to substitute teach in the city to create a more-flexible schedule compared to having more traditional jobs. I live with my Filipina-immigrant, college-educated partner in Berkeley/Oakland border.  I moved to California around 1 and a half years from Chicago with my sister who moved to San Francisco for her residency program as a gynecologist.  Before Chicago, I had lived in Michigan for 13 years.  Before Michigan, I lived in Japan, where I was born.

How am I impacted by gentrification?

 I am impacted by gentrification.  I must be profiting from it.  It allows me to live in a place with affordable rent for me and where a lot of young, like-minded queer people live around me.  I was not raised in California and it was my privilege that gave me a choice to move here.  It was my privilege that helped me find a place to live.  Because I have lighter skin, a masters degree, was a public school teacher, can speak English fluently without an accent, etc…landlords favor people like me and make it easier for me to move in compared to someone else who may not have those privileges.  My P.O.C. family (chosen and nuclear) without class/education privilege would have had a lot harder time renting the place.   They probably would have been denied. You have to show pay check stubs and bank account statements to prove you can pay the rent.  As a result, for the landlords, the more people like me they rent to, the more white people with more money will feel comfortable moving in and the more the rent will rise and the more poor people and people of color are pushed out of the area.  With this said, I am profiting from gentrification and I am being used by the landlords/developers to raise the property value for their profit.

HOW GENTRIFICATION AFFECTS ME

                                                 Ethan Davidson

    I have lived in a section 8 studio apartment since 1988.  It has a nice place with good security.

    Although the Tenderloin is relatively resistant to gentrification, there are definitely people who want it gentrified. 

     It is no longer possible to get section 8 units in San Francisco.  If I lost my unit, I would have to move north to either Marin or Sonoma County.

      I have serious health problems, but I have found good health care providers that accept medical.  In Marin and Sonoma County, it is much harder.  Things are also very dispersed, and the public transportation system is not very good.  It would be hard to get to whatever health care providers I had without a car, especially when I am sick.

HERBERT HOTEL

by

Dennis Gary

I am a resident of the Herbert Hotel on Powell Street.  It is being transformed from a residential hotel (SRO) to a tourist and student hotel.

As my fellow residents die off, their rooms are upgraded to tourist rooms, complete with hardwood floors and built-in televisions.  My room has an aging rug and no TV.

But I can get the Internet after a fight with management, which stated that the free wi-fi was not meant for residents – just tourists and students.

For a month, I could not get on the hotel’s wi-fi because they would not give me a password.  Then Sari of Central City SRO Collaborative appeared on the scene and suddenly I was given the password.

When the light fixture above my mirror burned out, my chest of drawers started falling apart, and paint started peeling from the ceiling, maintenance was suddenly too busy working on tourist and student rooms.

Then Jeannie of  the “In Home Support Services Collaborative” called the general manager and two hours later I had a new light fixture, a new chest of drawers, and a fresh coat of paint on my ceiling.

Zoe Bender

Gentrification Blog                                       

I am 26 year old white girl with an asymmetrical hair cut who gets in free to most clubs because I dance so good. I am an unemployed college graduate. I have 84 cents in my bank account and I just applied to graduate school that will cost tens of thousands of dollars. I am a radical queer hipster who uses my foodstamps at health food stores. I am an artist and an aspiring revolutionary. I don’t own a car or bike, so I walk most places, at all hours of the day and night, and never feel unsafe.

Two years ago, my parents decided to move out of their rural beach-town house and back to San Francisco. My Dad is a painter who makes his money doing tech support for small businesses and my Mom is a writer who makes money as a development director for a non-profit arts organization. They found a place on 7^thand Market that was not zoned for residential, but convinced the property manager to let them move into what used to be a garment factory. Over the course of a few months, they worked with the property manager to design a community of live-work spaces for artists. Most of the people that moved in are art students in their 20s, about two-thirds of whom are white. In exchange for her work in designing and managing the project, my Mom got a small additional studio rent-free for a year.  When I lost my job and house in October, my mom offered to let me move into her office space.

Gentrification is the reason I live where I do. Rent is very affordable, which is why my parents can live there, and why they have an extra room that I can live in. Part of the reason my parents were able to convince the property manager to let them move in was that the presence of artists in the neighborhood will eventually increase the property value. This neighborhood is a burgeoning hub of gentrification. Some of my wealthy, white friends don’t want to come visit me in this ‘scary’ part of town. Over the last two years I’ve seen bicycle shops, coffee shops and art galleries open up all over the neighborhood. About a year ago, a new nightclub opened up on 6^thand Market. The club is called Monarch, and was recently voted one of the best sound systems in America. Every Tuesday I walk down 6^thStreet from Mission to Market to go dance to trap and dubstep at Monarch. I avoid making eye contact with the people I pass who are hanging outside the SROs and liquor stores. When they talk to me, I mostly ignore them. When I get to monarch, it’s like walking into a different universe, with chic Victorian era design and a mostly white crowd. Inside Monarch, I relax, surrounded by my fellow perpetrators of gentrification.  

Theresa Hays -Who am I in this City?

How am I impacted by gentrification?

I am Theresa Hays, an African American woman who about 12 years ago was living with my husband in a 1BR apartment in the Hunter’s Point section of the city…right near the Navy Shipyard.  I had become very ill due to a condition I suffered with which left me so weak from anemia that I wasn’t able to hold down a job.  My husband’s job laid him off so often and so sporadically until our bills and our rent began to get behind and then unpaid.

I feel that there was a blessing in our storm.  The white man assigned to us from the Property Management Company harassed us so much until we felt uneasy whenever we would leave the apartment to go somewhere wondering if we’d be able to get back in when we came home.  I wrote a letter to the apartment owner, (an African American man), which I pointed out some unhealthy conditions that we had been suffering with in the apartment. We had never talked to them about it because we were behind in our rent.  It was put on that owner’s heart to let us sign a “consensual agreement”, that he wouldn’t report us as an Eviction, and he would forgive the now $11,000 in back rents if we just left.  We looked at it to be a blessing in the storm, and we left.

During the time all this was going on, the Navy Shipyard and Lennar Properties were slowly moving in the area, “cleaning up” things.  I attended meetings where Lannar representatives were trying to “push” their cause on the community and San Francisco and the Mayor’s Office.

My husband and I put everything in Storage other than ample clothes that we stacked up and camouflaged behind us inside the back of the truck.  This began our first night of being “HOMELESS”, a word I never thought would describe me/us.  We led this life for 3 years sleeping in our little green pick-up truck not letting anyone know that we were “HOMELESS”.  It was important that we keep our lives looking like “business as usual” and most importantly consistently continuing to give praises to God through it all.

We read articles and heard stories about some shady things happening with Lennar Properties and began to again see that what seemed to be so bad and uncertain, was actually a blessing in the storm.  We were able to escape the experience of being caught up in the clutches of Lennar Properties which we now know is a HUGE EXAMPLE OF GENTRIFICATION in the San Francisco Hunter’s Point section of the city.

Marinette

I am Marinette Tovar Sanchez, Mexican immigrant, living in the Fruitvale area, in the city of Oakland. I am a worker and an artist, an activist, a woman of color. I am, in few or many words, a professional everything-ologist. I am in the constant move to earn the daily bread, in the constant struggle to keep a roof over my head. I rent a room in a warehouse, which I share with 4 other people, also artists, activists and educators who share a space to afford rent.

I have seen gentrification from a couple of different perspectives. The first one is that of an artist who struggles, like many, to make ends meet and pay rent and living expenses. The second perspective is that of a working immigrant woman of color with limited resources and opportunities.

The first perspective helped me understand the impact and effect, negative in many ways, that artists have had in the gentrification of neighborhoods. Women and men who dedicate themselves to creating art often, and in most cases, struggle financially. The money flow of an artist tends to be sporadic, unreliable and unpredictable; this drives artists to look for options that are affordable. Most of the time, the living quarters that artists can afford end up being in low income neighborhoods, considered by many as the ghettos. Little by little, more and more artists move in, following the example and trend of others before them and slowly, the area starts becoming “cool, artsy, hip, quirky, colorful”; as a result, more and more people suddenly want to move in as well, thus driving the demand for housing in those neighborhoods up, along with rent prices and the cost of living in general, making it nearly impossible for the original tenants to afford to stay. Indirectly, especially in places like the Bay Area, artists have been the indirect spear-headers of gentrification; ironically, once other people begin to move in who have the resources that artists don’t have financially, the prices keep escalating and eventually, the artists who moved in to begin with, end up being pushed out of the neighborhood as well.

The second perspective, or more so the direct effect that gentrification had on me, was which I experienced as a low-to-no-income recent immigrant woman. After being homeless for a couple of months, I managed to save up some money. When looking for a place to live, my options were amazingly narrow and almost specific. I basically had to choose from the areas within Oakland where most of the people have been displaced to, thanks to gentrification. These areas were pretty much East Oakland and the not-gentrified side of West Oakland; low-income neighborhoods of people of color with high rates of violence and little to no access to healthy foods, although high and easy access to liquor stores. I ended up choosing East Oakland because luckily, it happens to be where my people, Latin@ people, have concentrated. It is a blessing that out of all the neighborhoods where I could have ended up, I stumbled upon one with a beautiful group of strong people who live in a constant struggle and who are deeply committed and involved in building a resilient, true community.

Iris

Who are you- white, Jewish, owning class, queer, woman, living in Berkeley

How does gentrifukation impact you? I currently live in a mostly gentrified neighborhood in Berkeley, close to 4th street shopping area. This area is less "hip" and close to "cool" places than my old house, near Macarthur bart. At my old place we were the only white people on the block, I felt pretty unsafe and scared, witnessed violence and heard gunshots a couple times, heard a woman moaning outside of my window, and witnessed a sexual assault. It became pretty unbearable to me so I moved out, both because of how scared I felt, and because of how unwanted I knew we all were. Our neighbors were not happy we were there. Part of my decision was also informed by the Rev change session. I know I will be a part of gentrification in my life but I have enough money to avoid being at the forefront of it. I no longer feel at the forefront of gentrification because of where I live, but I do frequently participate in consumerism related to gentrification, such as buying expensive lattes in the Mission or in Oakland, etc. 

On the crisp August night when everything came grinding to a halt between me and mom, I found myself losing track of her cold, confusing words, feeling only the poly-blend hotel comforter scratching against my skin. “I know what you’re doing,” she argued, having collected herself after her sobbing collapse earlier in the evening. Now, she was a lawyer again, making her case about me based on the evidence she had gathered. “Just don’t. Don’t do this transgender thing.” She had always told me she loved me unconditionally, but suddenly I found myself standing, nauseous, my toes curled over the edge of the line in the sand she’d just drawn, scared I was about to crash into dangerous territory that our relationship couldn’t survive. Like a lot of other queer and trans people, my relationship with my parents strained and felt like it might break when they had to reckon with their panic about my gender.

According to a 2011 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 57% of transgender people surveyed experienced rejection from their families for being trans. 40% reported that a family member chose not to speak or spend time with them after learning they were transgender. 19% experienced domestic violence because they were transgender. The most powerful statistic explains that family acceptance is correlated with “positive outcomes,” and family rejection is connected with “negative outcomes.” What that really means is that people who are rejected by their families are more likely to become houseless or commit suicide.

My experience with my mom falls somewhere in the gray area between all of these numbers: no one in my family ever refused to speak with or see me for being trans, let alone hurt me physically. I don’t know if I would say I experienced “family rejection” or not. But my relationship with my mom was fundamentally changed by her feelings about me being transgender. Most of the trans people I know have had some kind of struggle with their families. Sometimes these struggles are transformative, reshaping the foundations of relationships to be more loving and honest; sometimes they are destructive, and people are disowned and forcibly separated from their families because of them. 

In the worst moments of my relationship with my mom, which came in the three years after our night in the hotel, I was afraid that we had reached an impasse. It felt like the wall between us—at first only built by rocks and pebbles that accumulated over time—was cementing into place quicker than I could stop it. My head and heart were filled with stories of trans people whose relationships with their families had collapsed under the pressures of transphobia, frozen communication, and separation. I was terrified, but I was committed to my mom—and she was committed to me. I did everything I knew how to do to hold our relationship together temporarily until it could start to heal permanently. During the time that my mom and I were shut down to each other, I was surrounded by chosen family that helped keep me afloat emotionally.

Transgender people and our families will struggle with each other as long as transphobia and gender policing are the norms in the society we live in. What the statistics can’t explain is how families arrive at “acceptance” of their trans family members, and what I’ve witnessed is that it’s both simple and difficult: it takes work. Most non-trans people need an immense amount of support to confront their own judgments, fears, and transphobia. This support can come from friends, family members, and from people who can teach on trans experiences without pathologizing them. As trans people, we need support from people who don’t question the decisions we need to make to survive and be well; we need access to respectful holistic health care; and we need allies who can talk to our families when we can’t. Many of us—children and parents—need to unlearn the ideas of separation and individualism that we have internalized, which have taught us that we don’t need our families and that we should leave them behind when it’s hard. We need to push ourselves to go back to our families to fight for healing when the time is right. Being good children, daughters, and sons to our parents doesn’t mean accepting their transphobia, but it does mean committing not to give up on each other.

(Also listen to our audio conversation about her essay and more)

Hip Hop music is most often derided for it's homophobic and
misogynistic lyrics with few or any critics examining the way ableism operates in the genre. This article engages several lyrical tropes in hip hop that rely on problematic constructions of disability. Looking at the "left" coast hyphy sound, I examine the use of disability as metaphor for freedom and abandon. This metaphorical use of disability leaves much to be desired for people with actual disabilities.

I write,

"By examining ableism in hip hop through the multiple lenses of disability, queer, critical race, and feminist theories we can go beyond the ineffective dichotomy of positive and negative representation and possibly discover useful theorizing derived outside the insulated world of academe. Ableism is the system of oppression that privileges able-bodied people and culture over and above those with disabilities. In the liminal spaces of hip hop the reappropriation of ableist language can mark a new way of using words that departs from generally accepted disparaging connotations. Though this project makes a case for a transgressive reading of ableism in hip hop, ableism in and of itself is still oppressive. Additionally, not all of it can be reimagined. Some of it is simply the vile invective that maintains hierarchies of oppression through able bodied privilege. Though other genres of music and popular culture generally reinforce ableism (Pop Music’s love of “crazy” love), its presence in hip hop speaks, I argue, to centuries-old stigma management strategies of politics of respectability that remain futile."

Screenings
Not Home Screens at Abilities Expo LA

Saturday, March 16th 2:30pm – 3:30pm
Los Angeles Convention Center
West Hall A
1201 South Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Screening of “Not Home” A Documentary About Kids Living In Nursing Facilities

Presented by Narcel Reedus, Director
Can you imagine how a child feels growing up in a nursing home? Celebrating Christmas, birthdays and other milestones alongside elderly bedridden patients is the mainstay for thousands of children with a developmental disability throughout America. Award-winning filmmaker, Narcel Reedus, reveals the stories of children growing up without a childhood in the heart-felt documentary, “Not Home.” Abilities Expo is pleased to screen a portion of this 99-minute film that examines the complex national phenomenon of children living in nursing homes and state-run institutions. Often times parents of medically-fragile children feel forced to make the decision to institutionalize their child because some states disproportionately allocate funding for brick and mortar institutions rather than the less expensive home and community based living. Time for questions and answers will be available following the session. Learn more at www.nothomedocumentary.com. A limited number of DVD’s will be available for purchase following the screening.

http://www.abilitiesexpo.com/losangeles/index.html

Not Home: A documentary about kids living in nursing facilities is an official selection of the North Carolina Black Film FestivalMarch 14-17, 2013 in Wilmington, NC. In its 12th year, the four day juried and invitational festival of independent motion pictures by African-American filmmakers will showcase features, shorts, animation, and documentary films at Cameron Art Museum on Thursday and Sunday; Friday at UNCW Warwick Center, and Saturday at the Hannah Block USO Community Arts Center on Saturday.Prizes of $500 will be awarded in each category. Opening night tickets are $10; otherwise admission is $5 per screening block and $25 for ALL-ACCESS festival passes.
North Carolina Black Film Festival March 14-17, 2013 in Wilmington, NC. In its 12th year, the four day juried and invitational festival of independent motion pictures by African-American filmmakers will showcase features, shorts, animation, and documentary films at Cameron Art Museum on Thursday and Sunday; Friday at UNCW Warwick Center, and Saturday at the Hannah Block USO Community Arts Center on Saturday.Prizes of $500 will be awarded in each category. Opening night tickets are $10; otherwise admission is $5 per screening block and $25 for ALL-ACCESS festival passes.

Not Home Documentary Screens UC Berkeley

Narcel Reedus’s documentary “Not at Home” will be shown on Tuesday March 19, 5pm, with a talk by the filmmaker, at UC Berkeley, 300 Wheeler Hall (Media Room).

The documentary follows four people, two young people and two parents, exploring how parents of medically-fragile children (especially but not exclusively in poor families, many of them families of color) feel forced to make the decision to institutionalize their child because some states disproportionately allocate funding for brick and mortar institutions rather than the less expensive home and community based living. Sponsored by UCB’s Disability Studies Research Cluster, Diversity and Health Disparities Research Cluster, and Dean Christopher Edley, Berkeley Law School. Wheelchair accessible. For disability accommodation, contact sschweik@berkeley.edu

Not Home Documentary Screens in San Jose

Silicon Valley Independent Living Center
2202 N. First St, San Jose, CA 95131
Monday, March 18, 2013
Doors Open at 6:30 PM
Film Screening at 7:00 PM
Panel Discussion at 8:30 PM
Program Ends at 9:00 PM

In the largest, creaky-est, most beautiful Victorian house on the block of a suburb of Detroit, resides the most beautiful Puerto-Rican, Filipina, Japanese, and White family. Each member of the family locks themselves in their own room.  The silence and loneliness in a house that is a home to 9 people is unnatural- frightening even.

Sounds like no one is home. But, we are all home- with me in my big, empty room, sitting on my bed, sobbing, using any sharp school supplies in my room to pierce through my skin of my stick-thin arm.  Wanting to control the pain on the outside cause I wasn’t able to control the pain- the cycling self-deprecating thoughts on the inside.

“One of the ways abusers gain control over their victims is by isolating them.  It is often one of the earliest signs of a domestic violence relationship.”  Perpetuators control their victims this way.

Not only that, “One in three adolescents in the U.S. is a victim of physical, sexual, emotional or verbal abuse from a dating partner.”  That was my reality- at 15 years old.  With my then boyfriend-17 years old.

But I thought it was okay because that is what my mom said.  My dad treated her worse.  She was stronger cause she endured mistreatment longer.

We didn’t know that capitalism forced us to disconnect us women of color from each other.  Made us feel like being in relationship with white man (who colonized our brown bodies) made us more successful. Or that the cycle of violence in families are often passed down from generation to generation. 

I didn’t know that. And I was fast to blame my own mother.  (Mommy-what I still call her, at 27 years old)  Why did she model that it was okay to date a white guy that treated us, women of color inferior?  Why wasn’t she there to support me when I needed her the most?

Clearly the men were committing the abuse, but the deep pain I felt inside was from my own mom. Because she was really me too.

There is an urgency to immediately decolonize our own minds. 

I just need reframe the questions to-

What can we do to heal from the pain from these patriarchal white supremacist systems?  How can we (my mom and I) feel closer and rebuild our relationship??

It is a revolutionary act-challenging the cycle of isolation and bringing my beautiful family together. Talking about issues without the resentment brewing inside, as we sit in our rooms alone.

As Tiny Aka Lisa Gray-Garcia from POORmag puts it:

“Colonization destroyed women of color, Our mamaz, internalize and perpetrate pain, depression and anger on their own poor bodies of color, bad-food- eating, unexercise-getting bodies. And then we, their daughters, are encouraged by the same colonizers, and Euro-centric, western belief systems who destroyed us and our indigenous ancestors.   We’re tryin to survive and resist Capitalist lies and teaching ourselves back what was stolen from us. It isn’t easy. Inter-Dependence Never is.”