El pecado de el desaplazamiento y el aburguesamiento (scroll down for English)

En San Francisco, se esta remodelando y construyendo edificios nuevos. Pero lo triste de esto es que estan sacando a los pobres de un barrio que por generaciones a sido de clase trabajadora y latina. Ahora los condominios van a ser para la gente rica.Desde la esquina de la 16 y Mission hasta la avenida Sur Van Ness todos esos edificios historicos van a ser demolidos para hacer viviendas y oficinas de alto costo.

Este plan fue presentado en el 2008, pero como la communiad resistio no se llevo acabo. Hoy en dia la comunidad no esta protestando. Al lo contrario, se esta dejando llevar por las promesas falsas de los inversionistas de una vecindad mejor.

Yo no creo esto porque como todo en lavida prometen mientras logran ganar lo que quieren y una vez lo logran o esten en el poder se olvidan de las promesas. Y pienso que solo estan usando a la gente pobre para lograr sus objectivos de quedarse con las propiedades. Es triste porque los que tienen el poder siempre ofrecen algo pero mientras logran ganr loque se propoen y no les importa lo que les pasa a los pobres. Menos el futuro solo piensen en la comodidad de los ricos.

Y vivo en la mision. Yo estory un mama soltera, costura, y reportera de Prensa POBRE. Yo tendo miedo para mi familia.

    Unete al foro comunitario en donde la comunidad se informen sobre los impactos del projecto de desarrollo de viviendas lujosos en la calle 16 & Mission

Jueves 15 de Mayo 6:00pm - 7:30pm El lugar sera Determinado

Why Gentrification is Not Good for Our Communities

In the City of San Francisco there are many construction projects and building remodels all over the city. The sad part about it is that they are pushing out the low-income and poor folks of our community, especially here in the Mission district. Old buildings are being torn down to build new housing: condos for richer people who can afford an expensive monthly rent.

On the busy corner of 16th and Mission, Walgreens, Burger King, a Chinese Restuarant and a bar will be closed and the buildings they occupy will be torn down to build condominums. The project will go from 16th and Mission down toward South Van Ness Ave. It's been planned since 2008 but the people of the surrounding community have been resisting.

Since the 80s, there has been a war against the rich investors trying to take over and gentrify a working class Latino neighborhood. Twenty-six people died in a fire that almost destroyed historic buildings. I believe the community is indifferent to the gentrifcation process because they are not fighting back anymore. They are fleeing to other cities in the Bay Area that are not as expensive.

The Redstone Building on 16th St turned 100 this year. $14 million are at stake for it. Some folks think this is better for the community and have been promised a safer and more financially stable place to live and work in exchange for demolishing the building. I believe this is a lie to get the property and land, and then push out the lower income mostly people of color who live and work in the area. It seems this demolition project is going to go through, and the organizations that have office spaces in this area are being displaced.

It is sad and shameful because the developers and officials promise a better lifestyle and don't live up to their commitments. Rich affluent people get new condos while low income homeless unemployed suffer displacement and are removed from the neighborhood where they live, work and have lived in for generations and decades. We must fight back! We can't let our community die!

I live and work in the Mission, I am a poor single mother, a tailor and a reporter for POOR Magazine and i am afraid.

Unite to a community forum to get informed on the Gentrification affecting our communities at 16th & Mission

When:Thursday 15th of May

Place to be determined

April 21, 2014

Those who walked this earth long before capitalism, and long before whyte non-supremacy waged war on Mother Earth and her indigenous nations, we had an obligation to tend to MaMa’s sacred soil and to produce plenty of food with her blessings. The deliberate destruction of her soil; the poisoning of our food (by Monsanto) with the intent to “muscle” the masses into buying frankenfood; and the blatant, racist system that discriminated against Black Farmers and other farmers of color for decades, all go hand-in-hand.

In the 1920’s 1 in every 7 farmers was black. In the 1980’s 1 in every 67 was black. In the early 1900’s, black farmers owned about 15 million acres of land altogether. In the 1980’s black farmers owned a little over 3 million acres of farmland. In the 1980's African-Descendant farmers received only 1% of all farmer ownership and soil and water conservation loans given; they received only 2.5% of all farm operation loans. All complaints of racial discrimination about financial support fell upon deaf ears when the Regan administration closed the doors to the USDA’s civil rights office in 1982. The 1.3 billion dollar USDA loan fund for farmers to buy land was a joke also, with only 209 Black farmers receiving the funding.

Regardless of the re-opening of the USDA’s civil rights office under former-president Clinton and the new regulations by the Farmer’s Home Administration (FMHA) to regulate unfair and unjust lending practices, all farmers of color saw little change and relief.

A lawsuit was filed by The Black Farmers for discrimination, winning a share of the $1.25 billion dollar settlement fund that was finally approved by Federal Judge Friedman in 2011. Although it seems as if the racial discrimination barrier was broken when The Black Farmers finally won a slice of the pie, a lot of discrimination claims are still being denied unjustly.

Despite the devastating decline of black farmers, there has been a rise in community gardens. We at POOR Magazine believe in interdependence, in spite of racist laws that create barriers to self-determinated care of MaMa Earth's soil and reaping the bounties of her produce. Gardens such as the Trayvon Martin Garden and the Ujamaa Village in Oakland get people fresh, non-GMO food without spending their whole paychecks. They are beautiful examples of both taking care of and providing for our own communities, and also of keeping our profits circulating in our own hoods. What I love and appreciate is the fact that the community is together: the young and the elder are contributing “sweat equity” into planting and growing food as a unified tribe should.

We shall no more allow for our oppressors to dictate to us our basic human right to be fruitful and multiply here on Mother Earth. The days of the wealth hoarders and land thieves are coming to an end, with the rise of the community black farmers once again.

Lady on the
Corner of 16th
Near Valencia

Pupusa lady
With a pupusa lady’s
Shape and a pupusa
Lady’s smile,
Pupusa eyes

Pupusa lady creating
A new moon in the
Creases of hands whose
Stories live in the silence
Of drums

Pupusa lady, giving
My life
Shape

Giving my
Life weight

soul clappin' pupusas
like a
Church tambourine

Pupusa lady, with her
Pupusa life
Pupusa heart
Pupusa soul

Flattening, shaping
Widening

Proving that the
World is
Flat

Pupusa lady, on
16th street, whose
Hands wrap, fold
And hold the
World together

Hands that clap
And sometimes
Slap when needed

Just to make
Sure everything
Is kept in line

When necessary

© 2014 Tony Robles

(Editor's Note:  Diego Deleo has lived in his North Beach residence for more than 30 years, most of those years with his beloved wife who passed away.  Diego is being evicted from his home by his landlord who is using the Ellis Act to evict.  His landlord is Martin Conyne, the owner of LaRocca's corner, a bar in North Beach.  Call the owner and urge him to rescind the eviction.  LaRocca's phone number, (415) 674-1266.  Diego is speaking out against eviction of seniors and recently took part in a protest action against senior evictions at the SF Association of realtors, demanding a moratorium on senior evictions.  Diego also shared his poetry at the International Hotel event, "Al Robles and Bill Sorro poets in Resistance to Eviction and Displacement)

A poem sits in the skin of Diego Deleo, built up with memories of coming to this country as a 17 year old. In those days the poems formed in his muscles and tendons and limbs as he laid brick—a 17 year old body in a black and white photo, alive with poems built brick by brick, breath by breath, day after day, minute by minute, second by second, flowing in beats of heart into the river of his life.  Diego, a North Beach heart and North Beach spirit that never forgot the young man in the photo, never forgot being an immigrant.  The accented Italian tongue on which he forms his words still flow with music and dance that English could never overcome. 

Diego, the poet greets me on the street not far from St. Peter and St. Paul’s.  He greets me and asks me to accompany him to his home.  I follow.  I grew up in North Beach too.  Diego’s house is across the street from where I went to Kindergarten.  We walk through a garage door and through a dark tunnel, piled with things the landlord has let accumulate--an invasion of space simply because the landlord can.  And the accumulation extends to those stacks of Ellis Act eviction notices that Diego has received, encroaching on his sense of security and peace of mind, its reminder permeating the minutes of his life.  

But we make it to Diego’s place, a beautiful flat that lies hidden yet is there for everyone to see.  And Diego smiles and asks if I want a beer.  Diego’s home is quiet with memories that are thick like the moving fog across the waters.  His limbs hold and connect and cling like a bridge to the memories and people and places of his life. 

Diego, the poet, shares his poem with me, poems of life, poems of nature, poems of walking; poems of his life’s journey.  Diego’s home is quiet with poems, quiet with his smile, quiet with pictures, quiet with fire memories, quiet with the built up voices and feelings and poetry and songs that are in the skin of the walls and in the floor and in the fixtures and in every utensil, every chair and in the skin of Diego that is covered by poems.  The poet Diego gets up and recites his poem in the kitchen:

“To The Wood”

Out of my house

To the wood

Among perennial trees

And the rose bed I planted

For the sweetness of my dream

I unroll a blanket beside it

Where I lie

Birds, squirrels deer

Familiar with the ritual

Coming ever close

While I enjoy the scenery

And the dream

Dusk approaches

I leave for my place

Rose petals scattered

By the gentle wind

Land softly on my home

To stay

And in his home I am in the wood, in the heart of Diego.  And the photos come alive, the young man with the tight fitting white t-shirt, unable to hold back the whole that is Diego, building the laborious muscles of an immigrant’s poem, story—dream.  And in 80 years of living, he is a poem that moves, flows, that will not stop feeling and living.  I look at the picture of his wife Josephine in which they renewed their vows—a vow to each other, to life, to heart, to poetry—to being alive. 

I am in the wood, in the house of Diego and Josephine.  Who are those that evict?  Who are they that evict poets and poems, who evict life itself?  Diego, the poet with a heart of fire, in his quiet home that is loud with poems, loud with the song of his life, calling for justice for elders in this insanity of eviction in the name of greed that will never be satisfied. 

The poet Diego and his poems sing out every morning as the grass grows under his feet and the trees grow beside him.  We can’t afford to lose his poems, his voice, or his love.  Let him remain in his home sanctuary that is an open door that leads us to the wood.

© 2014 Tony Robles

May 6, 2014

This story is about something that can happen to you. Let’s take the way-back machine to the end of March 2012 in San Francisco. Kathy Galves had just been kicked out of her house in San Francisco that she loved and adored. An evil bank named Wells Fargo and an unfair court system with a judge that violated her civil rights had booted her out.

When this reporter got on the scene at Kathy Galves’ house, all the commotion was over. All I noticed was this poor woman trying to get her dog off the stoop. As a gentleman, I helped her out. I didn’t know her that well but we started talking. After we parted she began her travels through the wonderland of do-nothing social workers. Being a babe in the woods in this weird, weird land of unknown jargon, where this poor woman knew none of the rules and regulations, she could not fight back. Coupled with her health deteriorating, she was feeling every hit of the social worker wonderland blow by blow.

She was introduced to this world when the woman she had been staying with post-displacement was harassing her. Kathy had hurt her ankle on MUNI and felt like she needed help in this situation. She went into a social worker’s office lost and confused to ask for help. The social worker said that she would help. But she did absolutely nothing. She did not call her for a month. By the time she called, the problems had already settled in and she was deeper into the woods.

The second time I met Kathy she didn’t recognize me. I called her aside and told her I could get her back into her house. She looked at me confused. She thought I was blowing smoke. I do not blow smoke. My word is my bond. I had access to people that are not from the mainstream, who know how to get stuff done and work inside or around the system. (Also, I was looking for another story. As in a 1930 writer, I look for opportunity...)

Kathy went through one agency and another looking for help. This city is like a maze. She did not know her way through through this land and got lost many times. Social workers would tell her lies and send her to wrong locations. At the Mayor’s Office on Housing (MOH), a social worker said to Kathy, “We do not have housing, we work with contractors to build new housing.” Kathy asked some questions and the cryptic social worker replied, “We do nothing with existing housing. We just build new housing.” Kathy kept getting led deeper and deeper into the woods. But one friendlier agency helped her at this time. This was the Mayor’s Department of Disability. They decided to dub Kathy’s companion, the lovely dog Betty, a proper Service Animal. And she went on her way.

The next time I met Kathy, It was October 12, 2012. I had been arrested the night before, for reporting a story for POOR Magazine on an Occupy action to take back housing. It took the police 24 hours to process me, and by the time I got on the bunk they kicked my ass out of jail. When I got out I reported to the Travelodge on Valencia Street, where Kathy was getting evicted yet again and people were protesting. Patel Management was going to evict her because she stayed over the 30-day limit. She had residency qualifications so they could not instantly evict this woman, and yet there they were doing it anyway. Kathy would have to go through the court system for the second time. But she does not meet the criteria because she paid her rent on time. She did not break any known procedure for a lawful eviction.

She was then shuttled from one motel to another, and starred in a spoof performance on bedbugs. She also learned about other agencies in the City that could have helped her at the time. One of them was the Housing Rights Committee and the other was Independent Resource Center. They give classes to the newly homeless. She also played the wonderful lottery game for housing. If you don’t know it, you don’t want to try it. She moved from Bayview to Chinatown and back.

The good news is,POOR Magazine, which is a poor people-led movement i am a proud member of became a part of Kathy's impossible situation, helping her with poor people-led solutions to impossible poltrickster and bankster created problems, and fast foreward many months, Kathy and I got married and are now living together. In retrospect, Kathy’s story is only the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands more. It could happen to you!

The rest of this will be boring to people that are not into figures. This comes out of your taxpayers’ costs that banks will never have to pay…. at the cost of courts, sheriff’s deputies and other budget-related activities.

Using Google Scholar and along with SFGov (The City’s website) and then also simple mathematics, I found these numbers. Court costs in the year 2012, just counting Wells Fargo’s evictions, in the City and County of San Francisco, amounted to $2,000,000.00. These are not my figures. These are the figures of the Controller of San Francisco. Plus the costs paid by the 216 people Wells Fargo evicted and the services they received from nonprofits. My lovely wife Kathy is one of them.

Thank you very much for reading this article. And think of the $2,000,000.00 in eviction court costs that could be used for the poor, in addition to the millions more eviction-related dollars spent in mental health facilities, relocation costs, and homeless shelters.

Dear San Francisco,

I have walked the length of your streets, have felt your fog breath in my face, have stood shoulder to shoulder on your buses with the generation that came before and the one before that.  I have seen the poetry written in the walls and on the floors of those who gave the city life and nourishment.  I have seen you dance and I have seen your streets swallow whole the dreams born on the tongues of poets.  I have sat in your churches with one eye open to see if it was true that ghosts float between the pews.  I have sat in your schoolrooms where my real teachers were the faces and bodies and voices and landscape in murals that attached to my skin and moved my blood, taking me deeper into myself.  I have washed the dishes in the backroom while artists and businessmen and daughters and sons and visitors and transplants contemplated their plates, washing down fear and insecurity with the veneer of wine.  I have seen the empty lots and empty houses come alive in the poetry of my uncles.  I have heard the voices echo from the past, from the heart of the city in an empty can of beer.  In the blink of a heart I have seen the murals of our faces and bodies and minds—the landscape of our spirit—painted over in florescent hues.  I have seen our buildings and bodies and dreams knocked down, crushed by the wrecking ball mind. I have seen your children and elders vanish silently. I have seen the story in our skin fade, and I have seen the names of those children, who are now grown, names carved into their necks in cursive loops and circles and lines that travel to the pit of the heart. And I have seen the trees bear silent witness, recording everything in their leaves and in their skin. 

I have seen the city’s heart in spring, in summer, fall and winter.  I have felt every tongue lap into my ear the sweet and bitter curled notes of struggle and love and tragedy.  San Francisco, I have known your two-face, three-face, four-face—your many shades that blended into a gumbo stew of fire and tears that settle in the belly that doesn’t rest.  I have heard your silence, loud silence that fills the ears and mind like the resting silence of a pawn shop asleep, encased in a glass tomb.  I have seen the trees pulled up by the roots and discarded like a Christmas tree on New Years.  I have seen buildings stab the sky, stab into our eyes and blind us.  I have heard the raven’s cry in the morning as the metal rails whip around our minds, grinding into the ground, disturbing the resting bones of abuelitas, abuelitos, grandmothers and fathers and the sacred indigenous dream paved over by a sunless sun.

San Francisco, your eyes are empty, your houses are empty, your canvas is bare of poems.  Your mirrors and windows are missing reflection.  Your flowers are drained of color.  Your eyes hold no murals, your skin is scrubbed raw.  Your canvas contains no art.  Your poems are eviction notices.  Your skin is a thin postcard that reads non-deliverable.  Your tongue is a torn bus transfer out of town. 

I don’t know you anymore

© 2014 Tony Robles

(image of an eviction notice posted on now houseless single mama Sabrina Carter's door, evicted from privatized public housing in San Francisco)

“We are calling on San Francisco to take swift action to both prevent further displacement of San Franciscans by investing ineviction prevention, while reapidly re-husing up to 700 househilds through fixing up vacant public housing units and subsdizing households in private and non-profit housing.  These intitiaves are exactly what SF needs right now.”  According to Julia D’Antonio of the SRO Families United Collaborative. 

The Coalition on Homelessness, along with the Emergency Services Providers Association is putting forward four proposals, one to fund homeless prevention  which would stave off displacement for 2,700 households.  The other three are to fix up vacant public housing units and move homeless families into them, expand current private market housing subsidy and lastly, subsidize households in turn-over non-profit affordable housing units so that homeless households can afford to move in.