No Clear Cutting Our Community ...

A few weeks ago, I was awakened early in the morning by the wailing of a woman and child somewhere outside, near our apartment building. It sounded like the woman was speaking with someone, but after several minutes, it was just the heavy sobs of the woman and the whimpering of the child. This continued for at least half an hour. I wish I could say I was driven to get up and go outside to see what I could do, but no, instead I curled up in a ball and cried uncontrollably, unable to stop. It felt like something in me had finally broken, the blow to my fighting spirit, which has been teetering on the edge of that abyss of ‘I can’t do this anymore’. The this being the trigger to the unknown of what will happen when I eventually just give up; interpret how you will, I’m still unsure myself.

As I lay rocking myself and crying while listening to the insufferable distress I could hear outside, I couldn’t stop thinking about the cruelty of those who have the power to stop the pain and suffering of so many, yet they don’t. They somehow can always find the resources to help those who already have far more than they need and who inflict pain, directly or indirectly, yet they’re at a loss when it comes to the ability to support those who are seriously struggling.

A clip from the documentary Golden City, by Walter Thompson in 2014 interviewing me and Christopher about how the tech industry was reshaping housing in San Francisco.

More specifically, I was thinking about our city leaders and the extreme mismanagement and lack of vision we’ve been witnessing for over a decade. It’s obviously not exclusive to San Francisco or the Bay Area, but my home is here, and this is where I’ve witnessed what has led up to our current crisis of tens of thousands of people who are living on the streets and tens of thousands more who are weeks or months away from stuffing what they can of their belongings into a few bags and walking out onto the street not knowing where to go.

While I don’t know if that was the case of the woman and child weeping outside my window, it’s entirely possible. There had also been a man sleeping near the stoop of the house next door to us for several weeks; I’d set bottles of Gatorade and cranberry juice out for him at night while he was sleeping so he’d have something to drink when he woke up in the morning.

I obviously found a way to pull myself back from the edge after that morning. Today my fighting spirit is back and fierce, but my center will only hold for so long.

For the past year I’ve been working in community with a citywide coalition of organizations to support two multigenerational Filipino families (one family has five generations living in their home) with children, elderly, and differently-abled, who have lived in their homes off Clarion Alley for 35+ years each, and who are facing an Ellis Act eviction from the speculative real estate owners who purchased the property, specifically with the intent of flipping it and making a profit.

Clarion Alley, photo by Preston Gannaway for The New York Times, 2017

Over the past eight months, our coalition has succeeded in talking the landlords into selling the property to San Francisco’s Small Sites Program at an equitable rate. In addition to stopping the evictions of the two longtime Mission District residents, the purchase would also provide two more affordable housing residences through an existing in-law, and the creation of another ADU.

However, rather than providing the assistance needed to stop these families, who are terrified of losing their homes and their community, from being evicted, while also having the opportunity to create new affordable housing through a program that was created specifically for the purpose of protecting families in situations like this, the City, and more specifically the Mayor’s Office of Housing is sitting on the money and instead catering heavily to the wealthy – in every way, shape, and form – and leaving everyone else struggling, and desperate, and many on the street with no alternatives.

Sadly, San Francisco has become a city over the last ten years that has invested heavily in shit – literally – as it cultivated a culture that has spent much of its money on high-end restaurants and boutique foodie ventures so that its new 1% residents could blow hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars in an hour or two – so they could just shit on the rest of the city … while many of the folks they’ve pushed out are now on the streets and starving … as our centers cave in around us.

See the forest from the trees. No Clear Cutting Our Community ...