It might have been confusing in an early era of San Francisco. It’s not any more — not when some entitled people want the rest of us to get out of their way … now
By Stephen Talbot
SEPTEMBER 14, 2015 — They’ve been working on the house across the street for more than a year. My morning wake-up call: jackhammers, cement mixers, buzz saws. A local Irish contractor and his Latino crews gutted the place, leaving only the Victorian facade, like a house on a Hollywood backlot.
Mind you, there was nothing particularly wrong with the old house before they started to strip it bare. But it’s located on prime urban real estate with a sweeping view of downtown San Francisco. By updating the modest wooden home, developers can sell it for the kind of money that wild-eyed ‘49er prospectors could only conjure in their fevered dreams.
Massive Google, Yahoo and Facebook buses, windows ominously tinted, cruise the narrow, hilly streets of my once sleepy Glen Park neighborhood like ocean liners navigating the waters of a small Caribbean port. Real estate agents have dubbed the area “Apple Hill” because of all the Silicon Valley types moving in.
As the tech boom reverberates across the city, the wealth disparity glares.
Renters grow desperate. The young flee to Oakland and beyond. For many long-term residents of San Francisco like me this is disorienting and disturbing but it also feels strangely familiar. We experienced something similar in the late 1990s during the last high-tech surge.
Back then, I remember going for a haircut in Noe Valley, the old working-class neighborhood whose main artery, 24th Street, had already been transformed into a boutique shopping district. That Saturday, however, the street was shut down by marchers protesting the city’s rapidly escalating rents.
Instinctively, I side with tenants. But I could see these protestors were not hard-pressed Mexican or Central American families from the Mission district, where rent increases were forcing evictions. This was a less serious crew: a few aging agitators and some young bandanna-wearing anarchists. Not many at that. I found myself feeling less sympathetic.
I glanced up the street at the target of their protest: the upscale real estate agencies that had proliferated on 24th St. Not my people, really. But this was a new generation of real estate agents, many of them gay, some survivors of the AIDS epidemic. They were urban pioneers who had spread out over the hill from the Castro trying to make a living by doing a little more home-staging.
I was finding it harder to work up my normal antipathy for the avaricious real estate crowd.
Then I noticed the police separating the protestors from the glass-windowed real estate offices. I had too many run-ins with cops back in ‘60s to look with unalloyed appreciation at the forces of law and order. Yet, I couldn’t help noticing this thin blue line was not a collection of mugs with clubs, but a rainbow of Asian guys, a black sergeant, some Latinos, a couple of baby-faced white kids and quite possibly a lesbian or two. Looked like the Democratic Party.
Now, I was deeply confused. I was having a mid-life moral crisis. Who did I identify with? Which side was I on?
Later, driving home, I stopped at the intersection of 24th and Church.
The marchers were retreating, calling it a day. There had been no smashed windows, no angry graffiti. The real estate boys were breathing sighs of relief and waving goodbye. The cops had quite competently re-routed traffic and kept the peace.
All of a sudden someone started blasting his car horn behind me. Loud. Insistent.
I turned around and immediately spotted some “yuppie scum” (as we used to say in the old days) in an enormous, luxury vehicle. Couldn’t he see he just needed to chill out for a minute or two and let the marchers pass?
Apparently not. He kept hitting the horn.
The renters jeered, the real estate agents scolded “hush,” and the cops gave the driver menacing looks. But he appeared unmoved. He was fuming. He wanted us all out of his way … now.
In a flash, I knew, we all knew, what side we were on.
If I may paraphrase, we all seemed to be thinking something like: “Shut up, asshole! This is San Francisco, we’re doing our thing. We’ll move when we’re ready to move.”
Exasperated, he shoved his Lexus SUV into reverse and sped away, tires screeching.
I have no idea whether he was a tech exec, a venture capitalist or just another rich kid high on privilege. But back then, there was a notable influx of guys like him: rude, aggressive, entitled.
Then, suddenly, the tech bubble of the late ‘90s burst, and they were gone. The swaggering, narcissistic guys vanished. For years, actually. But now they’re back. “With bags of cash and bad manners,” as poet LawrenceFerlinghetti says.
The Whole Foods parking lot in Noe Valley is hectic. Attendants are constantly trying to mollify belligerent customers in BMWs and Range Rovers jostling to claim parking spaces.
There’s feverish construction in the ‘hood — not just re-modeling, but removing entire houses and replacing them, all too often, with cold metal and glass structures that look like office buildings.
They finally finished working on the house across the street. It sold for $3 million.
Just a few years ago, you could have bought four houses on my street for that kind of money.
My unassuming Queen Anne house now stands in a neighborhood besieged by developers. It’s over 100 years old, built by working class survivors of the Great Earthquake who fled the conflagration downtown and settled on the first rocky hill they came to. They’d be stunned to know what it’s worth now.
Realtors call constantly to ask if I’d like to sell.
I admit I am sometimes tempted to cash in during this gold rush. But I’ll be damned if I’m selling my house to one of these digital bullies who think we all need to get out of their way…now.
