Gentri-FUKing the Mission, One Street at a Time

Original Author
Tiny
Original Body

March 5, 2012

 

Blinking away the autumn sunlight after a week inside with the flu, I walked dazedly across Mission St, up 16th, and turned onto Valencia. My heart will never repeat the confused shock of what I was about to see.

Just a moment before I had been at the herstoric Redstone Building on Capp and 16th St, visiting the POOR Magazine offices. This was my first week living in California. With its dark, womb-like, echoey halls, its years of dirt built up in hard-to-reach places, its muted quiet soulful murals left over from another era of labor organizing, the lived-in homey feel of POOR's offices...I felt the deep contrast with what I saw on Valencia. Trends, and not an inch of forgiveness.

It was the gleaming white sidewalks and small, cutesy storefront banners of Valencia Street. What the...? The spick-and-span aura, the carefully displayed products inside the shop windows that seemed to be judging, sorting passersby from behind the polished veneer. (Can you afford me? If you can't afford me, if you can't attain the affluence and detachment from suffering necessary to enjoy my empty "ahistorical" aesthetic...then move along!) I stopped to put my bag down and write something in my notebook—drawing sidelong glances from everyone nearby on the street for this simple action. What is this place?

That is a question I keep asking myself, whenever I pass by a shop or cafe on what I now think of as the "Valencia Hipster Promenade." What is this place? What is the function? All around I see people who are a lot like me, white and wealthy, voraciously fetishizing the consumption of various kinds of objects—taxidermied animals, Japanese paper goods, $300 old lamps—and I wonder what's it all for. More importantly, who am I when I occupy this space and toward what purpose, surrounded by all this bedazzling commodity fetishism. I am a certain person when I am there, my position in society takes yet another of its daily turns, this turn being simultaneously comfortable and deeply unsettling. It feels imposingly easy for me as a class privileged white person, like I've gotten a lot of practice being in such places. On the other hand it feels...shallow, fleeting and unmoored from a sense of place and people, blank and cynical. Because actually, a lot of what's so novel and shiny about Valencia...is that it has a really goddamn violent history of colonization/gentrification that allows this airtight image of hipster perfection to emerge like a (mutant) phoenix from the ashes (of stolen land). It IS novel and shiny, truly, but not without a lot of human consequences.

With the handful of years I've devoted to educating myself about social justice—growing to more fully recognize the various effects of my queer, white, and class privileged expressions;  learning how to positively transform my relationships so they challenge constructions of privilege and enact the widespread repair I'd like to see—I'm STILL, as much as many would like to deny, in very close proximity with the people who surround me here on Valencia. We have many of the same effects on how this place came to be.

It's draining and sad for me when I find myself on Valencia Street, not only because of what the place feels like currently, but also because the possibility of a future like this for the rest of the Mission is really, really close, thanks to the Eastern Neighborhoods Rezoning and Area Plans, which passed in 2010 in the middle of the housing crisis.

"Residential Builders Association and other Devil-opers are GentriFUKing the Mission one street at a time", said Lisa "tiny" Garcia, co-editor of POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE. POOR Magazine has been dealing with some scary business of gentrification right on our block, on 16th St between Capp and South Van Ness. A group called the Residential Builder's Association has been advocating for a massive redevelopment of the North Mission (our block included), putting up wire fences with plastic laced through the holes, requesting permits to take over more and more parking spots on the block. They are going to build a $15 million, 7-story, 84-unit condo, right next to the Redstone...that is, if they don't get the city to knock the Redstone over and build right over it. These apartments, like the other new housing that's been built, will not be affordable to any but the richest folks in the city. Property owners are falling prey to the increased height limits in the area, as these higher limits also increase taxes and property values.

The contrast between Valencia and Mission St (or the Redstone Building) is a demonstration of how violent gentrification is. It's about big developers moving in, and tacit (or not) agreements with the police about what kind of policing to do where. It's not "nice", it's not slow, because the removal of communities needs to happen swiftly and without compromise. There is little or no asking. It's runaway gentrification and people just get away with all the removal, policing, and culture-killing of entire neighborhoods without any community accountability. Money talks. Developers are sneaky and zoning laws are elusive. There is no accountability for "passive" participants in this process, either: shopowners, the people who move into apartments once the previous occupants have been successfully evicted. It's part of the natural truth and natural selection of our economic system, right? It's about new and exciting ideas, new and exciting businesses, new and exciting people encroaching and encroaching...wait, where did all the old stuff go? This feeling of forgetting, of disorientation, of passivity...these are privileged perspectives to hold. These are perspectives that I, as a class-privileged white person new to California, could easily slip into, and frankly sometimes do for lack of knowledge about this place. Cause with all this privilege folks like me have, we can get convinced that all this violence around us isn't effecting us, as we get our promotions, our nicer apartments, and our advanced degrees. However, I believe the violence of gentrification is effecting privileged people as well, even if they're not disabled, trans, queer, female, brown, black, or affiliated somehow with a historically criminalized and colonized community. At the very least, when I hear someone of similar privileges to myself saying gentrification's not effecting them AND they don't want to do anything to prevent it, I know at the very least that their humanity's been compromised by the lies of Capitalism. To lose a piece of one's humanity is a pretty serious violence indeed.

Identity is the crux of the question...What is this place? What is the function? When I am here on Valencia, by whom am I making choices; on whose behalf and with what in mind am I moving about this space; on whose terms am I learning about it; and upon what human sacrifice does my physical presence here on the street rely. Who do I become when I am here on Valencia in the Mission, and how do I treat community members and ways of life that were here before me, just a few years ago, or hundreds of years ago?

What are your relationships? When you have money and you're tourist-new to San Francisco (like me), it's particularly easy to just become another consumer demanding space with the Capitalist law of imminent domain. It's easy. Make way for capital to flow from me to other privileged communities, create yet another justification for policing and criminalizing poor people of color, just for being in the street, or on the sidewalk, or in an SRO, or anywhere (cause who wants to be reminded, by the sight of someone in "unsightly" struggle, that Capitalism is violent, right? Cause struggle is wrong and being Black and brown is shameful and wrong too, right? Cause it's important for our fair city to quash criminal behavior, right?).

To me, gentrification is disorientation from place and its herstory, whether it be a place of visible wealth or visible poverty. It means not knowing the back-story, speaking and not listening, carving your own path with contrived, ungrounded, bought desires, deferring to the consolidated power structures. Gentrification is the default for class-privileged white folks like me, cause we're getting by in this world as purchasing individuals, and apparently our money is worth something. I'm still brand-new to the Bay, just like that bright autumn day I walked from POOR Magazine to 16th St: I'm blinking back some of the truths I have yet to learn about this place, but I'm trying to get adjusted.

It's hard though, cause gentrification will happen in the blink of an eye: it's constant on the human scale. Cesar Chavez St is a seriously DIFFERENT place these past few months from how it was last year. And it's going to be different again when all the construction clears out and what we're left with is a green divider like the one they have on Dolores...What's to follow? And they're about to re-pave Mission St over the next year. What is that going to look like when it's done? What's going to happen to folks who sleep there in the meantime? What about all the businesses and people using underground economic strategies? Folks who rely on the bus traffic up and down Mission? Did they give permission about what's gonna happen there? And what also is going to happen to the Redstone Building, a really special place in the city with a rich history of organizing that now serves as a home to lots of amazing POC-led and poor-people-led organizations? How will the culture and people of the Mission be effected if orgs operating on small budgets, like POOR and CISPES and El La and the Idriss Stelley Foundation, get kicked out?

One place where I can ground myself and get some perspective on the Mission and on myself is at the Redstone Building. The Redstone is like a healing salve on all that burning glaring newness and ahistoricism and violence swept under the rug up on Valencia. With its cooling shady entryway, quiet echoey flights of stairs, stoically grounded on its corner, I understand why the Redstone is there. I talk about and witness others' relationship to the building, and through them develop my own love and set of spiritual connections with the place, by building relationships with people IN this place. Folks working on various project for social justice in the Redstone by and large care deeply about their place in community, have a sense of their OWN herstory that WE are making. In the Redstone I can begin to address the questions about on whose behalf am I moving about this space, on whose terms am I learning about it, and upon whose sacrifice does my presence here walking the streets of the Mission rely.

If the Redstone Building is knocked down in the process of gentrification, or if it is sold to become condos, a sense of myself will be wounded. A lot of peoples' sense of self and sense of place will be wounded more deeply than I can know. That sense that relies on others who live in the neighborhood, who keep this place going, who train each other toward a place of vision, balance, safety, and community. Folks in poverty are the carriers of some survival histories that must be honored for collective survival. The act itself, of resisting getrification, is a revolutionary act of community. Saving the Redstone Building would foster these histories, this practice of community, for various communities and for myself, a person trying to orient themself in this Mission landscape.

Click here to watch POOR Magazine's GentriFUKation Tours "R" US project

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