WEAVE Magazine | MFA Thesis Project

F A LL 2 0 1 9

THE HOME ISSUE

ISSUE 01

Cover artwork by Mengyi Shao

San Francisco is challenging the traditional idea of HOME. This issue will help you understand the unique meanings of HOME in San Francisco.

We hope you will enjoy our first publication!

Have any questions? Ideas?

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Cultural differences should not separate us from each other, but rather cultural diversity brings a collective strength that can benefit all of humanity. —Robert Alan Aurthur, screenwriter and director

WEAVING UNDERSTANDING

10 18 24 30 38

Tech Boom Forces a Ruthless Gentrification in San Francisco

By Joe Kloc Bay Area Gentrification Displacing Communities of Color

By Kiley Russell The Last Black Man in San Francisco

By Alissa Wilkinson

History Review

By SF Chronicle

WEAVING COMMUNITIES

46 50 66 72 76 82 84

THE MISSION

Neighborhood Introduction

THE CULTURE

Mission Muralizations

By Carla Wojczuk Richard Segovia and His Latino Rock House

By Mark Fenichel Saúl Sanchez Barojas

By Galería Citlaltépetl

Has the Soul of San Francisco Changed For Good?

By Greg Keraghosian

Roxie Theater, Once Fading to Black, Now Thriving

By Mick LaSalle Carnaval San Francisco

By Carnaval San Francisco

THE LEGACY

Legacy Businesses Anchor

San Francisco Neighborhoods

By SF Office of Small Business

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A CHANGING MISSION

To Whom Does San Francisco’s Oldest Neighborhood Belong?

By Joe Garofoli & Carolyn Said

108 110 118 142 Ellis Act Evictions

By Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

Big Changes at Adobe Books

By Andrew McKinley

Past & Present: Not All of Them Survive Compiled by Mengyi Shao A Mission for the Mission:

Preserve Latino Legacy for the Future

By Marisa Lagos

WEAVING COOPERATION

152 156 162 166 170 178

Engaging as a Neighbor, Not a Young Professional

By Mengyi Shao Zendesk Hailed as Model of High Tech’s Civic Involvement

By Kevin Fagan Salesforce Workers Volunteer at St. Anthony Foundation

By St. Anthony Foundation Twitter Opens $3 Million Tech Skills Center for SF Poor and Homeless

By Joe Garofoli ‘Mayor’ Del Seymour Raising Hopes in Tenderloin

By Jenna Lyons From Homeless to Six-Figure Salary in San Francisco

By Ted Andersen

Table of Contents

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What does home mean?

San Francisco is challenging the traditional idea of HOME. This issue will help you understand the unique meanings of HOME that San Francisco has had to take on. We interviewed 10 people who live in the city to talk about what HOME means to them.

A home is where you can come in, lock your door, lay down and not have to get up.

—Del Seymour

I think the idea of home is more of a state of mind, instead of a particular place.

I feel at home in certain environments and it could be far away from the place I call home. Then there is the place we live which I call my home. I don’t have a deep connection with my home.

—David Keenan

Home is a safe place that I can be myself.

—Colin Blake

Home is a place you look forward to coming back to.

Home is not always a physical structure, it’s often where you live with people that are close to you. For me, home is quiet and full of books. Home changes too.

It’s not always a physical place, but it’s where you spend most of your time, it’s where you sleep, it’s where you often eat and it’s where you feel most comfortable.

—George Schupp

Home is my shelter, my safe harbor. It brings me comfort and peace. When I am at home, I know I could drop all my guard and just be myself. Home sweet home.

It’s my favorite place in the whole world.

—Phoebe Sun

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Home is a place where you can be fulfilled with love and joy, where you can find peace of mind, and where you can confide in people you trust, which will help us bear our emotional burdens and provide us endless emotional support.

—Stacy Huang

Home to me is a place where you feel safe and secure. It’s where there’re people and things you love and love you back. It’s stable and comfortable. It’s where you can let your hair down. For me, home is consistency, but home can also be found in lots of places.

—Monica Berini

When I am single, it means a safe zone to me. Don’t need to worry about other people’s opinions and can do whatever I want. After I married and have kids, the home means responsibilities. Take care of the people I love and provide a safe zone for them.

Home is where I can just be myself. I can sit around in my pajamas and eat junk food knowing that no one is judging me. If I have a bad day, I can cry my eyes out. If I have a good day I can dance and sing, no matter how silly I look.

—Anna McAllister

Home is a place where I can go and completely have my guard down and just be who I am. Home for me also is very important visually, as well as emotion. I could never feel at home in something that I didn’t like looking at. It’s also the idea of trying to deal with things I don’t want to deal with. That’s the sense of home. In a bigger sense, I feel somewhat protected at home. You can take shelter and have support. It’s a welcoming environment rather than a specific geographic location.

—Susan Pasley

—Nick Ma

What does home mean?

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WEAVING UNDERSTANDING

Highlighting the history and issues of our city

Chapter 01: W E A VI N G UN DE R S TA N DI N G

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COMMUNITY NEIGHBORHOOD PEOPLE SKYROCKETING RENT HOME EVICTION LEAVE MOVE VANISH UNAFFORDABLE LOST FRIENDS FAMILY FORCE CITY OUT PEOPLE ELIMINATE HOMELESS MONEY TENANT RIGHTS COMMUNITY DREAMS HOUSE PLACE HATE LOVE TECH BOOM DEPRESSING TERRIFIED DISAPPEARING MILLIONAIRES TECHIE TRANSFORMING RICH ECONOMY DOT COM SALE CLOSED DISPLACED CHANGES HOUSING CRISIS COMMUNITY NEIGHBORHOOD PEOPLE SKYROCKETING RENT HOME EVICTION LEAVE MOVE VANISH UNAFFORDABLE LOST FRIENDS FAMILY FORCE CITY OUT PEOPLE ELIMINATE HOMELESS MONEY TENANT RIGHTS COMMUNITY DREAMS HOUSE PLACE HATE LOVE TECH BOOM DEPRESSING TERRIFIED DISAPPEARING MILLIONAIRES TECHIE TRANSFORMING RICH ECONOMY DOT COM SALE CLOSED WEALTHY LOCALS HOME NEWCOMERS INEQUALITY JUSTICE HOMELESSNESS DISPLACED CHANGES HOUSING CRISIS SKYROCKETING RENT HOME EVICTION COMMUNITY GENTRIFICATION PEOPLE LEAVE MOVE VANISH UNAFFORDABLE LOST FRIENDS FAMILY FORCE CITY OUT PEOPLE ELIMINATE HOMELESS MONEY TENANT RIGHTS COMMUNITY DREAMS HOUSE PLACE HATE LOVE TECH BOOM DISPLACED CHANGES HOUSING CRISIS COMMUNITY NEIGHBORHOOD PEOPLE

By Joe Kloc

Tech Boom Forces a Ruthless Gentrification in San Francisco Seven months ago, Kerman received an eviction notice informing her she has one year to vacate the rent-controlled apartment where she has lived for decades. She is one of hundreds of longtime San Franciscans being forced to leave their homes and possibly the city.

Versions of Kerman’s story are playing out across the country. In many cities, people are pushed farther from the city centers and must grapple with longer commutes, higher crime rates, and a drop in services. But in San Francisco, where Silicon Valley’s tech boom has driven up evictions by 115 percent in the past year, displaced residents like Kerman face an additional problem: The city is out of room.

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Patricia Kerman was born in Detroit in 1949. That year, the Motor City’s banks reported record-high deposits, unemployment dropped to its lowest level ever, and manufacturers churned out the automobiles, electric refrigerators, stoves and calculators that were fast defining modern life in the second half of the 20th century. It was, as The New York Times wrote in 1950, an “unprecedented industrial boom.”

But for all its postwar prosperity, America’s “Arsenal of Democracy,” as President Franklin Roosevelt dubbed Detroit, was a violent place to live. The city was plagued by police brutality and race riots. Urban planners ripped out electric streetcars and destroyed public housing, evicting thousands for freeway expansion. Like many Midwesterners of her generation, when Kerman saw a way out, she took it: In the summer of 1969, after friends asked her to join them on a road trip to California, she told her parents she’d be back in 10 weeks, hopped in a van and never returned.

“The West was calling me,” Kerman says more than four decades later from her apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District. And now it’s telling her to get out. Seven months ago, Kerman received an eviction notice informing her she has one year to vacate the rent-controlled apartment where she has lived for decades. She is one of hundreds of longtime San Franciscans being forced to leave their homes and possibly the city. “Now,” she told me, “there is nowhere to go. I’m terrified.” Versions of Kerman’s story are playing out across the country. In many cities, people are pushed farther from the city centers and must grapple with longer commutes, higher crime rates, and a drop in services. But in San Francisco, where Silicon Valley’s tech boom has driven up evictions by 115 percent in the past year, displaced residents like Kerman face an additional problem: The city is out of room.

Built atop a thumb-shaped, 49-square-mile peninsula in northern California, San Francisco has nowhere to expand.

South of San Francisco is Silicon Valley and San Jose; north, across the Golden Gate Bridge, is wealthy Marin County; east is the San Francisco Bay and then Oakland; and west is, of course, the Pacific. As a result, San Francisco’s population of just over 800,000 is relatively fixed. “Different cities have different housing supply elasticities,” says Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland research economist Daniel Hartley.

This elasticity dictates the balance between new home construction and rising costs for existing buildings. In San Francisco, he says, geographical constraints and strict development laws skew the city toward the latter scenario. In 2013, for example, there were more eviction notices served on units than there were new ones built. For Kerman, a 65-year-old woman living on $900 a month, her notice means almost certain exile from the city in which she has spent her entire adult life.

According to Hartley, hard numbers for how many residents of San Francisco are in Kerman’s position are difficult to come by, but tenant advocates point to the fact that more than 6,000 homes have appreciated by 70 percent in the past few years. And that tech workers make twice the salary of the average San Franciscan.

Displacement is an elusive subject to study. As Rutgers University researchers Kathe Newman and Elvin Wyly observed in a paper on gentrification in New York, “Displaced residents have disappeared from the very places where researchers or census-takers go to look for them.” For the moment, the only way to understand the forces transforming San Francisco’s neighborhoods is through stories like Kerman’s, told by residents who still occupy, however briefly, the disappearing communities of America’s booming tech metropolis.

Dissolution Properties In many ways, Kerman’s current troubles date back to the 1960s, around the time she first arrived in San Francisco. When developers began erecting downtown skyscrapers like the now-iconic Transamerica Pyramid tower, activists railed against the Manhattanization of the city. By the late 1970s, steep rent hikes were commonplace, particularly in the Mission, where affordability and proximity to downtown made the neighborhood ideal for real estate speculators. During this time, one survey conducted by activists found that apartment buildings in the neighborhood were changing hands every 18 months, on average. When San Francisco city supervisor and gay rights activist Harvey Milk was forced to close his camera store after a $900 rent hike, he began to work for rent-control laws and a movement codified. By 1979, tenants’ rights advocates pushed through the rent-control laws that are still in place.

Tech Boom Forces a Ruthless Gentrification in San Francisco

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The view of the city of San Francisco from Twin Peek. Notice the contrast between the traditional San Francisco neighborhoods and new high-rise buildings in the downtown financial district.

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

Kerman rents one of the more than 217,000 rent-controlled units in San Francisco, a century-old, yellow-and-brown Edwardian on the corner of 20th and Folsom, tucked away from the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare of taquerias, fruit stands, Asian groceries, cocktail bars, vaporized tobacco shops, decaying art deco theaters and “Jesus Salva” posters.

North of 20th, few houses left in the Mission are older than Kerman’s. Most of the original stock was consumed by the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, which destroyed 80 percent of the city’s buildings. At the time of the quake, the neighborhood’s immigrant population was primarily German, Irish, Scandinavian and Italian, with a small Chinese contingent (and, according to a 1900 census, a single Ecuadorean).

But by the 1960s, after many San Franciscans of European descent fled to the suburbs, Latinos made up the majority of residents. They were joined by street performers, poets, ex-Haight-Ashbury hippies, and artists in search of R. Crumb’s underground comics movement.

Kerman moved into her apartment only a few years after the rent hikes were halted. “We’ve always had rich people,” she says, and not all the changes in the Mission have been bad. When she first arrived, Kerman says, her stairs were littered with “used condoms and junkies.” Her roommate, Tom Rapp, who came a few years later with his metal band HOSBRUTEN—“it’s a made-up word,” he says with a shrug, “it was the 1980s”—remembers the waves of hookers outside their building surging and receding with fluctuations in the local economy.

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“The older you get, your friends, family, they die. But you have your community,” Kerman says.

In the late 1990s, that began to change for her. As the first dot-com boom hit the Bay Area, long-familiar faces started disappearing from the Mission.”

It does not permit landlords to offer those apartments for rent at a higher price, but it does let them sell shares of the building to new buyers. When abused, as tenant’s rights advocates argue it often is, the Ellis Act allows real estate speculators to purchase rent-controlled buildings, evict longtime tenants, and sell shares to people who can afford to own their own homes.

Detractors say the law allows speculators to gut neighbor“I’ve always believed there is something special about the hoods for rich new tenants. But defenders point out that the tech worker,” he says. “The reason they are moving to the cost of living goes up for landlords during boom times too, Mission is that they value the diversity, culture and art that and at a far faster rate than the 1 percent annual rent increase make San Francisco what it is.” they are allowed to demand from tenants like Kerman. (As one landlord put it to a local magazine: “You can’t go to the deli on the corner and say, ‘I’ve lived in the neighborhood The question is whether Silicon for 25 years—can I buy a burrito for $1.99?’”) And for 80 perValley is willing to get more cent of small-business landlords in the city, their property engaged with the community its is a lifelong investment. “And now is the time to sell,” says Janan New of the San Francisco Apartments Association. Or as workers are rapidly transforming Walt Baczkowski, CEO of the San Francisco Association of by displacing the artists, immiRealtors, says, “It’s called capitalism.”

This “first wave” of gentrification subsided in the early aughts, when the dot-com bubble burst and the number of Ellis evictions plunged. In 2005, however, after new technology companies like Google began attracting thousands of high-paid employees to the bay, the number of Ellis evictions tripled.

In 2013, Ellis evictions grew 175 percent from the year before.

During that time more than half of the Ellis evictions were carried out less than a year after a building had changed hands.

Behind these evictions, says activist Erin McElroy, “we’ve started seeing repeated names and LLCs” (limited liability companies). One group of property owners, which evicted residents from 15 apartments, used to operate out of New York, until they were banned from selling real estate in the city after one partner attempted to steal trash bags full of personal belongs from the home of a deceased tenant. Another property owner used Ellis to evict 69 apartment dwellers in San Francisco through LLCs with names like “Black Market,” “Hades Group” and “Dissolution Properties,” and is currently facing $15 million in fraud lawsuits. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project has identified a dozen landlords and property owners who have carried out Ellis evictions on multiple buildings in recent years. Among them is Kerman’s landlord, who served her and Rapp with an Ellis eviction notice in the fall.

“Out of the Bars, and Into the Streets!”

Since 2011, 69 percent of the no-fault evictions have occurred within four blocks of a private bus shuttle stop for tech company employees. This has prompted community activists to protest tech workers in the city with slogans like “GET OUT,” a somewhat cumbersome abbreviation for “Gentrification Eviction Technologies OUT.” But Mission Supervisor David Campos, who is fighting to reform the Ellis Act, takes a different view.

grants and merchants who, like Kerman, arrived in the half a century before them.

In the past few years, Silicon Valley has attracted thousands of new programmers, developers and designers to the city, and with them, a massive amount of wealth. Between 2010 and 2012, more than 13,000 technology sector jobs were created in the Bay Area. When, in the last few years, Twitter and Facebook went public, they created thousands of millionaires. With them, the city has flourished. Unemployment shrank to 4 percent, median income went up by 20 percent, and, in both 2012 and 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek dubbed San Francisco “America’s Best City,” citing “the best blend of entertainment, education, safety, clear air, and a prosperous economic base.”

Stats about the “median” and “average” San Franciscan, however, overlook the fact that San Francisco has the second highest inequality gap of any major city in the country.

And according to Jennifer Friedenbach, the director of San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness, despite the city’s prosperity, services for the poor have never recovered from the 2009 recession. Further, such stats don’t account for the city’s lack of affordable housing, which guarantees that many who get evicted must leave San Francisco.

According to one of the Mission’s merchants’ associations, as wealthier residents move in, businesses have had their rents tripled overnight, forcing community bookstores, dive bars and restaurants to close. The loss, says Campos’s aide Nathan Allbee, can be difficult to grasp in the short term. But these types of businesses have, historically, played an important role in the city’s—and the country’s—politics: In the 1970s, he

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explains, “queer politics came out of art and nightlife. One I spent my last six months in San Francisco living on Haight of the only places queer people could come to was bars.”

Street, in a newly renovated apartment house a couple blocks When a short-lived law banning discrimination based on away from Ashbury. The hundreds of thousands of runaway sexual orientation was repealed in Miami in 1977, thousands kids from Kerman’s generation had long ago moved on. Some in San Francisco’s LGBT community filled the thoroughhad gone north to raise families in Marin. Others had become fares of the Castro neighborhood chanting with Harvey Milk, Silicon Valley executives. But one could still find a few crusty “Out of the bars and into the streets!” The action helped punks lingering on the corner with hand-rolled cigarettes spark the gay rights movement that would continue on for and waterlogged guitars. Only now, pushing through them, was decades until, in 2004, then San Francisco mayor Gavin an endless stream of tourists in tie-dyed T-shirts, lined up Newsom began conducting marriages for same-sex couples outside the Haight-Ashbury Ben & Jerry’s to buy a pint of at city hall, before doing so was legal in California or anyCherry Garcia ice cream for $4.99. As Rapp said to me, it is a where else in the country. “I love this city,” Kerman says. “It’s great irony of gentrification that the gentrifiers always end not the bridges. It’s not Golden Gate Park. It’s the people.” up “displacing the people who made them want to live there.”

In her neighborhood, there are the Mission cowboys who walk “Your experiences shape who you are,” Kerman says. “My around with guitars slung over their backs and play Mexican parents came through the Depression—they had a particular folk songs for customers in the neighborhood taquerias; the outlook that we could never have.” She had the civil rights Tamale Lady, who for decades has gone from late-night bar to movement. Tech workers, she says, “didn’t go through that.” later-night bar selling homemade tamales to the tired, drunk According to the workplace survey company PayScale, of 32 and lonely; and the street artists who paint murals of the Silicon Valley companies examined, more than 80 percent had Tamale Lady in the Mission’s alleys. an average employee age under 35. At more than a fourth of those companies, the average worker was, like me, under 30.

The community they’ve built together is disappearing. “Greed has taken over,” Kerman says.

“Everyone’s gone money hungry.”

Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair Like Kerman, I was raised in the Midwest and fled to San Francisco when I got the chance. Growing up, everyone I knew had some friend whose sibling had moved there, a betrayal that offended Midwestern sensibilities in a way that made me want to move there too. It was clearly the place to go if you were determined to go somewhere. As a friend of mine used to say, “Everything grows there.”

In 2011, I lived only blocks from Kerman’s apartment. My rent was only about $200 shy of Kerman’s total monthly income, and according to my neighbor, a Latino man who had been in the city for years, it was four times what he was paying to live in the same building. After I left the Mission in 2012, the rent on my apartment doubled.

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The mural of Anti-eviction Mapping Project in the Clarion Alley of the Mission District, San Francisco.

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

Anti-eviction Mapping Project The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data-visualization, data analysis, and storytelling collective documenting the dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes. Primarily working in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City, they are all volunteers producing digital maps, oral history work, film, murals, and community events.

Check for more information at antievictionmap. com

“They don’t understand what the city really is.

They don’t get engaged.

Groups of girls walk down the street and they all have their thumbs going.

It’s not my world. That’s fine, as long as you don’t kick me out.”

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By Kiley Russell

Bay Area Gentrification Displacing Communities of Color Alma Blackwell was born and raised in West Oakland but after years of intense gentrification followed by waves of displacement, she barely recognizes her old neighborhood. “There’s almost no one left,” Blackwell said of her former neighbors and friends, many of whom were forced out by skyrocketing rents.

Dante Zedd and his daughter Addie, 5, pose on the steps of Dante’s mother’s house in the Dogtown neighborhood of Oakland.

PHOTO BY SCOTT STRAZZANTE / THE CHRONICLE

While the superficial signs of Bay Area gentrification are seemingly everywhere, a look beyond the inconvenient piles of e-scooters littering sidewalks and the proliferation of high-end coffee shops reveals the real consequences of gentrification and displacement that are blowing apart low-income neighborhoods of color.

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While the superficial signs of Bay Area gentrification are seemingly everywhere, a look beyond the inconvenient piles of e-scooters littering sidewalks and the proliferation of high-end coffee shops reveals the real consequences of gentrification and displacement that are blowing apart low-income neighborhoods of color.

“Even families who have been living in Oakland or San Francisco for many decades, their social networks are disrupted, from even going to the same doctor for years or their schools or having friends in the neighborhood,” Blackwell said. Blackwell, the Oakland housing rights organizer for Causa Justa / Just Cause, which, in part, works to help people of color fight evictions, said:

“People are going to areas they aren’t familiar with and having to rebuild that social network. And even the cities they’re moving to don’t have the infrastructure to handle the many people that have been displaced.”

According to the Bay Area Equity Atlas, a website that tracks the metrics of inequality around the region, 54 percent of low-income households of color are either in neighborhoods that are currently gentrifying or that are at risk of gentrification. That number is even higher for some communities, with 66 percent of the Bay Area’s low-income African American households either experiencing gentrification or facing the risk of gentrification. Also, 55 percent of the region’s lowincome Latino households are facing the same pressures, as are 48 percent of low-income Asian or Pacific Islander households and 50 percent of the Bay Area’s low-income Native American households, according to the atlas, a partnership between PolicyLink, the San Francisco Foundation and the University of Southern California’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equity.

The percentage of low-income households of color that are currently gentrifying or at risk of gentrification:

66%

African American

55%

Latino

48%

Asian / Pacific Islander

50%

Native American

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People outside Tartine Bakery in San Francisco’s Mission District. An influx of people working in Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, has contributed to gentrification and raised resentment.

PHOTO BY PRESTON GANNAWAY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“We see our people leaving, the long-time residents with gene- Cash said that as rents rise, many low-income households rations of roots in the Bayview-Hunters Point, the flatlands of color move out of their neighborhoods, often to outlying of Oakland,” said Camilo Sol Zamora, acting deputy director of regions with fewer social services and other resources.

Causa Justa/Just Cause. “It’s a disruption of generations “It’s indicative of the resegregation of the region, and of families.” highlights the need to act now to mitigate displacement,” “People define gentrification differently. It’s talked about so Cash said. much and it means different things to different people,” said Data from the Urban Displacement Project shows that betAnna Cash, associate director of the University of California ween 2000 and 2015: at Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project.

A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia lays out some of the complexities around gentrification, including some benefits such as a reduction in poverty rates, among other things. “This gentrification process reverses decades of urban decline and could bring broad new benefits to cities through a growing tax base, increased socioeconomic integration, and improved amenities,” according to the report.

Housing costs rose while traditionally African American neighborhoods in Richmond, San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley lost thousands of lowincome black households.

Cash said her organization sees gentrification as a process of change in neighborhoods that have historically been passed “Increases in low-income black households during the same over by civic investments and that are often populated by lowperiod were concentrated in cities and neighborhoods with income people of color. lower housing prices and fewer resources—such as Antioch Typically, higher income residents move in, but demographic and Pittsburg in East Contra Costa County, as well as parts differences might also include race and levels of education of Hayward and the unincorporated communities of Ashland attainment, Cash said. and Cherryland in Alameda County,” according to a report by the Urban Displacement Project.

“It’s often associated with the displacement of existing residents,” Cash said. “It can lead to people being pushed out of This has also led to “new concentrations of segregation and their homes; or even with long-term residents who have poverty in the region,” according to the report. the ability to stay, it can, for them, lead to a loss of a sense of community.”

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For example, while the median monthly rent in Pittsburg was $2,198 in 2017 compared to $3,492 for the nine-county Bay Area as a whole, 100 percent of Pittsburg’s population lived in neighborhoods with few social services and other resources, compared to 29 percent of all Bay Area residents, according to data from the Bay Area Equity Atlas.

Because gentrification and displacement are driven in part by the high cost of market-rate housing and the lack of affordable housing, activists and elected officials often focus on the “three P’s” of anti-displacement policy: legal protections for tenants, the preservation of existing affordable housing stock, and the production of new housing, particularly affordable housing.

And as people move farther from the Bay Area’s western cities, the ripple effects of displacement are being felt far beyond the “Part of the reason that, for example, housing has become nine-county region, spreading to places like Yolo, Sacramento so expensive, is because we don’t build it,” said state Sen. and San Joaquin counties. Cash said: Nancy Skinner, a Democrat whose district includes Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond and San Leandro. “I think now what we need to face is how do we get more housing and how “The wave is expanding and that do we get it quickly and how do we do our best to stop this is important for policymakers to displacement of our low-income residents,” Skinner said.

In February, Skinner introduced Senate Bill 330, dubbed “The pay attention to. Gentrification and displacement continue to be Housing Crisis Act of 2020,” which aims to lower bureaucratic barriers to housing construction and protect existing a crisis and at this point the crisis affordable units.

touches the entire mega-region.”

More housing in general is one solution; but in neighborhoods like the Mission District in San Francisco or Uptown in Oakland that face massive displacement pressures, advocates often organize against market-rate development since it can lead to higher rents and neighborhood changes that cater to higherend services, notes Sarah Treuhaft, managing director at PolicyLink, a national research and advocacy group working to advance racial and economic equity.

The bill essentially speeds the approval process for housing projects that meet local zoning rules. It would also prohibit the demolition of existing affordable housing unless the project includes more affordable units than existed in the original building.

Also, under SB 330, affordable housing tenants would receive relocation benefits if the structure were demolished and would also have the first right of refusal—at their existing rent levels—for any of the new units once they were built.

“I don’t have a problem with increasing density in a lot of places, because we need more housing,” Skinner said. “But the approach I’m taking is in our cities’ zoning ordinances, general plans and housing elements, there is conceivably enough housing, it just hasn’t been built.”

The state Senate passed the bill in May and sent it to the Assembly, where it awaits a hearing in front of the Appropriations Committee.

“There’s an existential question of what we want this region to be,” said Cash. “Right now it’s at a point where we need to ask if it’s important to us to preserve diversity and (see to it) that everybody has a fair shot at opportunity and mobility.”

Causa Justa/Just Cause’s Sol Zamora said it’s important that people get involved in their local political environments in order to keep reminding elected officials that gentrification and displacement are trends that need swift solutions.

“Gentrification is not inevitable,” Sol Zamora said. “It’s a man-made system.”

A woman stands in front of her home, where her family members are packing up their belongings in their home of 18 years in the Bayview District, in San Francisco. The family is facing a forced eviction, a battle they’ve been fighting for 8 years.

PHOTO BY YALONDA M. JAMES, THE CHRONICLE

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By Alissa Wilkinson

Photo by A24 Films

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

A wistful odyssey populated by skaters, squatters, street preachers, playwrights, and other locals on the margins, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a poignant and sweeping story of hometowns and how they’re made—and kept alive— by the people who love them.

“When you lose the place, you lose the people too. The people make the community. There is no community without the people.”

C

Critics like to call films “portraits” of things or people, but in the case of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, that’s nearly literal. You could take almost any shot—of faces, buildings, roadside weeds—and hang it on a gallery wall, then look at it for hours. I found myself wanting to pause the movie (impossible in a theater) and just see what the movie beckoned me to see.

That’s to cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra’s credit, of course, but it’s also what elevates the feature debut from merely interesting to something terrific. Director Joe Talbot and his close collaborator, Jimmie Fails, have crafted something special in Last Black Man: Yes, it’s a portrait of San Francisco, but also of dislocation and change and friendship.

And most of all, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a love letter—not a romantic one, but the kind you write when you can no longer hold on to a relationship that nonetheless shaped you profoundly. Richly textured and vividly rendered, it’s clearly the fruit of a lifelong love.

A sort-of true story about two young men and the city they love “You can’t hate it unless you love it,” one character says of San Francisco near the end of the film. No kidding. It takes time, dedication, and careful attention to be specific in your frustration with a city: the way the trash smells on the sidewalk; the funky public transit; the way your favorite places tend to disappear, replaced by something else.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco loves San Francisco more than it hates it. But its specificity suffuses the story. Fails and Talbot, San Francisco natives who’ve been friends

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for more than a decade, wrote the film’s story partly based on Fails’s life. And though those experiences have clearly been smoothed out into a fictionalized film, it still feels like nonfiction. Fails, after all, plays a character named...Jimmie Fails.

Jimmie lives (or really, crashes) with his friend Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) and Montgomery’s grandfather (Danny Glover) in a cramped apartment on the outskirts of town. The two of them belong in this neighborhood; it’s their home. But they also seem like outsiders. A group of young men across the street (credited as the “Greek chorus”) makes fun of them whenever they venture outside. Montgomery spends days scribbling in a notebook, trying to write a play. Jimmie, who spent part of his childhood homeless and living in a car with his father, can’t locate a good job.

The pair often head over to a house in the gentrifying Fillmore District, a part of San Francisco that was previously dubbed the “Harlem of the West.” Jimmie’s family home is there, but it’s been out of his family for a long while. It’s out of place in the neighborhood, with 19th-century architecture, supposedly built by Jimmie’s grandfather in 1946, and Jimmie loves it more than anything. He keeps sneaking over to paint it and water the plants and tend to it, to the consternation of the white couple who’ve owned it for more than a decade.

Then they move out, and Jimmie hatches a plan with his friend Mont to take it back, to recapture the only place where he’s felt at home.

A giant mural entitled “STAY” on a building located in the Tenderloin, San Francisco. The scene is also showed in the movie.

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

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It renders its city through its people The Last Black Man in San Francisco (the title gathers meaning as the story moves along) is heartbreaking and elegiac in all the best ways. Everything that once made up the city, we realize along with Jimmie, is inexorably passing away. You just can’t recapture the past. Time can’t be rewound.

Yet his and Montgomery’s attempts to do so dip into something very fundamental about San Francisco, a city that has changed vastly over the past half-century, becoming in some ways unrecognizable. What’s most interesting about Last Black Man is that it looks backward and forward with gentle sadness about the delusions of both a mythical golden age and the shape of a gentrified future.

Most of all, it loves the people of the city. Last Black Man is populated with minor characters who don’t really figure into the plot—a real estate agent who grew up in San Francisco, an older couple who’ve been there a long time, a preacher

What’s most interesting about Last Black Man is that it looks backward and forward with gentle sadness about the delusions of both a mythical golden age and the shape of a gentrified future. who stands on a literal soapbox and rails against the changes, Jimmie’s mostly estranged parents—and the film treats all of them with affection, even love.

That love is clear in the way the film frames their faces, their eyes, their surroundings. Watching Last Black Man, I found myself thinking of last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which similarly sought to develop a distinct visual vocabulary for depicting the lives of black people on film. Hale County resisted the expectations of its audience, deliberately framing subjects in ways that didn’t let us fill in the gaps in the narrative (what happened before this frame, what will happen next).

I felt, watching Last Black Man, the same sort of resistance.

We see a San Francisco in the throes of change, yet the film concerns itself with that change mainly through the eyes of Jimmie, who loves it and notices every small, odd detail. It feels as much like a document of a place as a narrative film.

And the result is a portrait of a city through its people. It’s moving and a little enchanted by its subject, though there’s a sense that the enchantment is leaking away even for Jimmie.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco shows unusual promise for a debut film, to be sure, but it also testifies to the love that went into it, both in Talbot and Fails’s friendship and in their relationship with their city. San Francisco’s future is uncertain, but I hope their collaboration has a long life.

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“You can’t hate it unless you love it.”

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

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History Review

Read through the history for a look at the many San Francisco neighborhoods that have been affected by gentrification or population displacement since the city was founded.

Rise and fall (and rise again) of Rincon Hill & South Park

PHOTO BY CHRONICLE ARCHIVE, THE CHRONICLE

PHOTO BY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / COURTESY

PHOTO BY MICHAEL SHORT, SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

In the early 1850s, Rincon Hill was just a sandy, tough-to-access point with lovely views of the bay. But as the decade progressed, squatters and shacks began to make way for those wealthy bankers and mansions.

San Francisco’s first truly exclusive neighborhood was South Park, next to Rincon Hill. A Briton named George Gordon designed it in the 1850s to resemble London’s Berkeley Square, with a private oval garden surroun-ded by brick mansions. Politicians and businessmen flocked to new enclave and threw some rowdy parties there.

South Park lay in disrepair for decades in the 20th century, best known for blight and disreputable hotels. But artists began to move in during the 1980s, and the first internet boom in the 90s turned it into what the national press called a “hip and happening” neighborhood. In recent years, amid soaring real-estate costs, the oval park has been redesigned to accommodate everyone from families to the homeless (it’s pictured here in 2017).

After its exodus, Rincon Hill was scarcely a neighborhood—more a place to drive past when you got off the Bay Bridge. But since 2005 it’s gradually become a vertical neighborhood full of gleaming glass skyscrapers—for some, a towering symbol of gentrification. In 2017, it finally got a grocery store—a 9,500-square-footone at that.

A Chinese fishing village of about 150 people at South Beach on the south side of Rincon Hill hung on through the changes, but it was finally displaced by 1868 as the land was filled.

One decision led to Rincon Hill and South Park’s downfall: a bill to grade Second Street, which ran through Rincon Hill.

While bisecting the street did make it more accessible, it also left those opulent homes standing on the edges of a cliff, with property values falling over them.

After the invention of the cable car in the 1870s, Rincon and South Park’s rich fled to Nob Hill and left neighborhoods in decay.

This kind of dramatic neighborhood change “goes all the way back to the Gold Rush and continues to this day,” said Charles Fracchia, founder of the San Francisco Historical Society. “It was amazing what the outcry was when they sliced Second Street.”

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Evictions bring end of “Manilatown” in 1977

“Urban pioneers” of the 1970s in San Francisco

PHOTO BY SUE EHMER

PHOTO BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE ARCHIVE

Mass evictions of minorities in San Francisco are hardly anything new. One high-profile example was in 1977, when almost 200 low-income, mostly Filipino tenants of the International Hotel were forced to leave—about 55 of them late at night with riot police fending off thousands of protesters.

Although the word “gentrification” was not used back then, much of the same lexicon was being reported about San Francisco’s population change in the

early 1970s. A San Francisco Examiner story in 1973 interviews self-proclaimed “pioneers” moving into and fixing up shabby Victorians in Hayes Valley and Noe Valley.

The hotel was part of “Manilatown,” the small ethnic enclave on the edge of A family that purchased a Noe Valley Chinatown, and its land was bought by home described the neighborhood real estate investors who fought over changing from “older ethnic” people to the turf against community groups and “young couples.” future mayor Ed Lee. As if that wasn’t But one class of people moving in meant wild enough, many of the protesters on another class moving out. “You have to eviction night were bused-in members be a fighter to stay in the city,” said one of infamous cult leader Jim Jones’ Peoples person quoted in the story, adding that Temple. The sheriff who busted down San Francisco “doesn’t care about its the hotel’s doors with a sledgehammer middle income population.” had just done jail time for refusing to carry out an eviction order.

Manilatown was swept away, though decades later in 2005, a new International Hotel was rebuilt with below-market housing. The International Hotel fight also galvanized the city’s Asian-American community and helped preserve Chinatown in the years to come.

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Displacement and resilience of Filipinos in SoMa

The dead are evicted from the Inner Richmond

PHOTO BY STEPHANIE HESSION, SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

PHOTO BY WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The many demographic changes after San Franciscans fought a four-decade San Francisco’s first tech boom involved battle for the future of the growing Richits Filipino population. In 1990, the South mond in the early 1900s. That battle was of Market Filipino population was about over what to do with about 150,000 dead 30 percent, but it began a steady decline people buried there. that decade as housing prices rose. The Business and real estate interests pushed Gran Oriente Hotel, bought for $6,000 by for the Richmond’s four cemeteries— Filipino immigrants in 1921 and served Odd Fellows, Masonic, Laurel Hill and as a vital part of the community for decaCalvary—to dig up their bodies and reindes, declined over the years as well. ter them in Colma. Followed by Court But these changes don’t reflect the neat decisions, elections, and passionate narrative of a minority shut out of San arguments followed.

Francisco. SoMa’s Filipino community is smaller but still vibrant, with a new cul“Sentiment must yield to progress,” tural district full of Filipino businesses claimed one side. The Cemetery Defense that was recognized by the state in 2017.

League said, “Are we San Franciscans The Undiscovered Night Market returned more deficient in sentiment and honor for last week for a third year. And though our forefathers than our Eastern brethren?” the Gran Oriente had to be sold and will no longer be solely occupied by Filipinos, it will reopen upgraded and with all its units available for below market rate.

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Ultimately, progress won in the Richmond. Laurel Hill (pictured above) was the last of the four cemeteries to resist a move and its supporters proposed turning it into a public park to keep the bodies in place.

But in 1937, San Franciscans voted roughly 2 to 1 to remove Laurel Hill along with the other cemeteries. Today, a Trader Joe’s stands where Laurel Hill once stood. While most of the bodies were moved, some still make a surprise appearance to residents now and then.

Japantown: Internment Eureka Valley becomes camps & an expressway the Castro

PHOTO BY CHRONICLE FILE PHOTO, THE CHRONICLE

PHOTO BY TERRY SCHMITT

San Francisco’s Japantown came to be after the 1906 fire when its Japanese American population moved from South of Market. The Western Addition enclave held an estimated 5,000 Americans of Japanese descent before the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor changed it forever.

This was proved to be an example of gentrification actually helping a minority population even as others left. As warehouse work dried up and suburbanization increased, Eureka Valley’s working-class Scandinavian immigrants, Irish, German and moved to Daly City and beyond in the 1950s and ‘60s.

In April 1942, San Francisco’s Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps in remote areas of the US, including Topaz camp in Utah. Even when they were allowed to return, many were forced to move elsewhere and, for a time, Japantown thrived as part of the Western Addition’s African-American community. But urban renewal and the demolition that was required to build the massive, below-grade Geary Expressway in 1960 displaced thousands of African-Americans as well. It changed Japantown to this day and remains a testament to what might have been.

Japanese businesses that remain would like to fill the underpassto make the neighborhood more pedestrian friendly, but funding remains elusive.

The families left behind Victorian houses in various degrees of disrepair. The people who saved them were gay and lesbian newcomers to San Francisco who bought the homes for around $30,000.

The Castro and its LGBTQ identity was born and continues to this day, although a new wave of gentrification with the tech boom is forcing out some of those gay residents.

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Overhaul of SoMa in the 60, 70s & 80s

Gentrification of the Haight

PHOTO BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

PHOTO BY MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES

The Gentrification of the SoMA area accelerated in the 1990s and went into overdrive this decade. But its roots go back decades earlier to the city’s urban renewal movement. Criticized for its blight, the neighborhood was marked for a major redevelopment in the early 1960s, with a Feb. 21, 1964 Chronicle story reporting on a “shiny new South of Market” plan that was presented to Mayor John Shelley.

The $60 million plan included the Museum of Modern Art and a stadium / convention center, and it required the removal of 4,000 residents and 700 businesses.

That 1964 Chronicle article quoted the chairman of the Planning Commission, Julia Porter, saying she was “deeply disturbed by what has happened in redevelopment project relocation” involving those who would be displaced.

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Development halted in the 1970s because of lawsuits, but picked up in the early ‘80s with a rapid redevelopment plan led

by Mayor Dianne Feinstein and the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. That change was anchored by the opening of the Moscone Center (pictured) in 1981.

While the Summer of Love symbolizes for some a utopian time in San Francisco’s history, when artists could afford to flourish in the city, some of those hippies were moving in as rents rose in the HaightAshbury in the late 1960s. At the same time, the neighborhood was the subject of daily reports about its blight, drug abuse and crime.

The derisive term of San Francisco “Manhattanization” was born as leather bars A June 30, 1967 Chronicle story reported, and low-rent housing for the elderly made “The Haight-Ashbury’s hippie community way for high-rises. was warned” of rising rents because of a higher tax assessment levied on property owners.

A June 9, 1968 Sunday Chronicle story quotes Zen Buddhism writer Alan Watts referring to hippies the same way people refer to hipsters today: “Whenever bohemians move in, property values go sky high. The same thing happened in Haight-Ashbury as happened in Chelsea in London, Greenwich Village in New York and St. Germain des Pres in Paris— it got too expensive for the bohemians who made it famous.”

The Western Addition & urban renewal

PHOTO BY HANDOUT

PHOTO BY SF REDEVELOPMENT, COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS

The Western Addition went from white and middle class before the 1906 earthquake to highly diverse and working class with a large black community after the quake. The Fillmore, with such clubs as Jim’s Bop City, had a thriving jazz scene.

Though it was conceived in the 1940s, urban renewal in the Western Addition began in earnest in the last 1950s under the watch of Justin Herman. Author James Baldwin called the policy “Negro removal.”

The loss of its black population was the result of more than random gentrification forces—it was part of an official government policy. The neighborhood was perhaps the most notable example of the city’s urban renewal projects, targeted in a 1945 study for its blight and poor health statistics.

Using racially suggestive language, the SF Planning and Housing Association report described the Western Addition’s conditions as “not white. It” gray, brown, and an indeterminate shade of dirty black ... it is an unfortunate blot.”

Bulldozers tore up the neighborhood throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, tearing

down a total of 2,500 Victorian houses, closing down 883 businesses, and displacing up to 30,000 residents. Thanks to redlining that discriminated against blacks, the existing residents couldn not apply for new home loans and had to leave. Although some Victorians were saved by moving them, the Western Addition was never the same.

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The Mission

Chinatown

PHOTO BY LIZ HAFALIA, THE CHRONICLE

PHOTO BY PRINT COLLECTOR / GETTY IMAGES

Name a decade and the Mission was probably something different: As the oldest neighborhood in San Francisco, it is alternately been the center of San Francisco’s Irish Community (anchored

by Hibernia Hall and the Roxie Theatre), as well as a home for Italians (Lucca Ravioli) and Germans, many of whom moved out to the Sunset and the suburbs after World War II. Unlike recent Mission trends, this exodus was more voluntary.

Chinatown’s Asian population has shrunk In some ways, Chinatown has changed by 11 percentage points from 1900 to the least due to gentrification, and in other ways it’s changed immensely since 2013 as its white population increased.

But it’s largely retained its Chinese it was founded in 1848. The neighborhood was a testament to San Francisco’s community and its relatively affordable rents thanks to a strong organizing racial segregation in much of its first century, with Chinese laborers confined movement, led by the likes of the late to the neighborhood’s overcrowded Rose Pak (pictured), that stunted the SROs before the 1906 earthquake. After office development that was happenthe quake, Chinatown was rebuilt by ing downtown. white architects with buildings made “The Chinese told them up front: you to reflect Chinese culture as a way to want us to leave to Hunter’s Point, we’re attract tourism. gonna leave to Seattle,” San Francisco The neighborhood’s Chinese immigrant historian John Freeman said. “The Chinese population continued to boom through played hardball. The bottom line is, they the 1960s and ‘70s, making it one of the have assimilated, and it’s sweet.” city’s densest with little room left for new housing. As pointed out by a UC Berkeley case study on gentrification and displacement, Greater Chinatown’s population stayed virtually the same from 1980 to 2013 while San Francisco’s population grew by 21 percent (the outlying areas of Chinatown did grow significantly).

After the war, the Mission became home to a thriving Latino immigrant community that represented as much as 65 percent of the neighborhood. But with San Francisco’s tech boom and an everrising cost of living, the Mission has lost 2,400 Latino residents since 2000, and white residents became the majority after 2010.

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PHOTO BY LEA SUZUKI, THE CHRONICLE

Bayview-Hunters Point

1990s dot-com boom drives up prices in the Mission, SoMa, and elsewhere

PHOTO BY CHRONICLE FILE PHOTO, THE CHRONICLE

PHOTO BY TERRY SCHMITT

Although the internet boom of the late 1990s was The Bayview was probably named after based in Silicon Valley, its effects were felt acutely a racetrack adjoining an upscale hotel in San Francisco, especially South of Market and in that was built by George Hearst in the early 1860s. By 1868 it became known as the Mission.

Butchertown for having up to 18 slaugh“Rents rose by more than 225% from 1996 to 2000, terhouses, and it had a diverse population as the City became the nation’s most expensive that included Italians, Irish and French. rental market,” author and California history expert The neighborhood’s African-American Richard Walker wrote. “A two-bedroom apartment community grew as the city’s racist by 2000 was typically over $2000 per month, or three urban renewal policies forced blacks to times what it had been in 1993.” leave the Western Addition and Fillmore Walker also noted that San Francisco added 10 in the 1960s and ‘70s. But higher costs million square feet of offices, an increase of about of living have taken a toll here as well— one-sixth. With this, the character of SoMa and the UC Berkeley researchers found the Mission changed—as warehouses converted into Bayview lost thousands of low-income lofts or apartments, blue-collar workers were forced black households from 2000 to 2015. out while tech workers moved in.

A younger, more diverse population has One other result of this gentrification boom? Mission brought some positive changes in the Bay began to be transformed from neglected raillast few years, including artists and new road land that was disconnected from the rest of the restaurants—with locals insisting they city to an upscale neighborhood with luxury housing, won’t let gentrification happen here. San a UCSF medical complex, and the soon-to-be new Francisco’s oldest black-owned bar was home of the Warriors, Chase Center. saved earlier in 2019, a new food park opened in 2019 as well, with the intention of helping black-owned businesses.

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By Greg Keraghosian

Has the Soul of San Francisco Changed for Good?

“I’m not predicting it’s going to implode, but it’s gonna change. That’s the name of the game. This whole town is a series of changes.”

—John Freeman, 78, historian and a lifelong San Franciscan

“Housing is a human right” mural at the Clarion Alley in the Mission District, San Francisco.

PHOTO BY JOSH EDELSON, AFP / GETTY IMAGES

“I’m not ready to call it a death of the city just yet.”

—Rachel Brahinsky Associate professor in Urban and Public Affairs at the University of San Francisco

“It’s a little too late for San Francisco.”

—P.E. Moskowitz The author of “How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood” 42 44

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With San Francisco’s rents up 10 percent in just a year, more than doubling the cost of living, and housing tough to find, a real estate agent told The Chronicle, “When we get a new listing of an apartment dwelling, it’s almost always leased by the same day.”

Each San Francisco neighborhood contains layers of history involving people coming in and out. Take the Rincon Hill/ South Park areas—originally a wooded oasis, then the city’s first exclusive community for the super rich, and then a “slum.” That’s before the 1900s even started.

That was in 1968—the same year minorities were being driven from San Francisco neighborhoods in the name of “urban renewal.” The same year, a neighborhood was becoming infamous for its blight, crime and flagrant drug use (back then it was the Haight).

“You can take the Gold Rush and the Silver Age and say this is comparable,” said San Francisco native Charles Fracchia, the founder and president emeritus of the San Francisco Historical Society. “There are different details. You take a look at old photos of a city growing, contracting, and growing again.”

This isn’t to minimize the disturbing problems San Francisco faces now. But any recent coverage of how the city is losing its “soul”—The Chronicle’s Peter Hartlaub recently pointed out it’s been done many times before—can’t be done without remembering other changes in its past.

Not that San Francisco’s problems of extreme inequality during the most recent tech boom are exactly the same as those in the past. The headlines today are alarming: The three most expensive counties to rent in are all in the Bay Area. San Francisco has the world’s highest density of billionaires. And all this while the city’s homelessness rose 30 percent since 2017.

Several local historians and academics we talked to pointed out that if you don’t like San Francisco’s changes right now, just wait a while. It’s bound to change again, as it always has.

“From World War II forward I’ve lived through all this stuff, and I’ve seen a lot of silliness,” said historian John Freeman, 78 and a lifelong San Franciscan who bought a house in the Richmond in the 1960s when buying in the city was less desirable. “Now we’re in a whole new ballgame. We’re choked, and the infrastructure can’t keep up.

“I’m not predicting it’s going to implode, but it’s gonna change.

That’s the name of the game. This whole town is a series of changes. I don’t get nostalgic for that kind of stuff…I don’t want to get into this whole thing, that the ice cream used to be better and you walked down the street and saw your friends.”

“We Lose Space” Installation by Megan Wilson and Gordon Winiemko, San Francisco Art Commission Grove Street Gallery, 2000.

PHOTO BY MEGAN WILSON

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Chinatown in San Francisco is a complicated place of transition—with longtime residents struggling with gentrification, and owners of new and legacy business trying to either get their footing or stay relevant.

PHOTO BY ANASTASIIA

SAPON, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Meanwhile, the loss of San Francisco’s African American community, which benefited from blue-collar jobs added in the post-World War II boom, has been devastating enough to inspire a movie this year. Once-diverse neighborhoods such as the Mission District have gotten increasingly white and tech-employed.

Rachel Brahinsky, an associate professor in Urban and Public Affairs at the University of San Francisco, responded to the anti-tech backlash in 2014 with an article headlined, “The Death of the City? Reports of San Francisco’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.” But she says the most recent spate of bad news and critical reporting has been enough to make her reconsider, to a degree.

“It’s a question I’ve been asking myself because of all those articles,” Brahinsky said. “How much of this is the media hype of the moment and how much is measuring something that has dramatically accelerated? I think it’s somewhere in between.”

“What’s been one of the most sobering shifts since I wrote that article is the dramatic rise in homelessness and the obvious fact that so many people living on the streets are becoming homeless before our eyes. That’s devastating to me. These articles have been focused on how the culture has been hollowing out, and I think you can certainly see that.

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“But you also see this powerful resilience of a culture. I’m not ready to call it a death of the city just yet. There are so many examples of communities that are building still and not just disappearing.”

It does not permit landlords to offer those apartments for rent at a higher price, but it does let them sell shares of the building to new buyers. When abused, as tenant’s rights advocates argue it often is, the Ellis Act allows real estate speculators to purchase rent-controlled buildings, evict longtime tenants, and sell shares to people who can afford to own their own homes.

Brahinsky said it’s not a coincidence that the same crisis of displacement has also led to creation of things like the SOMA Pilipinas Cultural District in recent years. This included the preservation of Filipino businesses and the Gran Oriente Hotelas a place for affordable housing. At the same time, the Undiscovered San Francisco Creative Night Market is entering its third year.

Another neighborhood to persevere even now is Chinatown, which as Freeman said, “was created to segregate the Chinese” and has survived several waves of gentrification. Even as neighboring “Manilatown” was erased after a violent night of evictions and protests in 1977.

P.E. Moskowitz, who researched San Francisco while writing “How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood,” is less optimistic about San Francisco’s future. “It’s a little late” for San Francisco, said Moskowitz, a native of New York’s West Village who was himself priced out.

“I can’t imagine the activist movement coming out of a $3,000 apartment. To have activism, everything that makes cities great, you have to have affordability.”

We looked back to some of San Francisco’s earliest days to recount similar times that its neighborhoods have changed either due to gentrification or population displacement— the latter includes “urban renewal,” which was an official city policy that fundamentally disrupted the African American and Japanese communities in the 1960s and ’70s.

Graphic designer Erik Schmitt’s “Housing Displacement Facts” piece singles out empty SROs. PHOTO BY ERIK SCHMITT

Has the Soul of San Francisco Changed for Good?

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WEAVING COMMUNITIES

Showcasing a unique neighborhood

Chapter 02: W E A VI N G C O MMUN I TI E S

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The Mission

LA San Francisco is a “neighborhoody� city made up of many diverse neighborhoods. These unique neighborhoods make San Francisco one of the most dynamic and exciting cities in the world. Each neighborhood contains layers of history and culture involving people coming in and out, which fosters many communities in the city that have plenty of stories behind them.

“Once upon a time in the Mission” by Precita Eyes Muralists on 24th St. and Shotwell St. PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

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The history of the Mission District is older than San Francisco. It’s the oldest settled area of San Francisco. The neighborhood is called “The Mission” because of the establishment of Mission Dolores by Francisco Palou in 1776.

During the Gold Rush, the neighborhood became housing for working-class German, Irish and Italian immigrants. The demographics shifted again during the 40–60s with the influx of Mexican and Central American immigrants. The current settlement includes tech workers and gentrifiiers.

The Mission District is located in east-central San Francisco. It is known for its Hispanic community and cultural diversity. There are so many things for people to explore—stunning murals, authentic taquerias, eclectic live music clubs mix with chef driven eateries, craft cocktail lounges, tattoo parlors, gourmet ice cream shops, and Dolores Park. It’s one of the most exciting and surprising neighborhoods in the city.

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The Mural ‌ These images on the wall have come to live among us, to hang out in the neighborhood, to take risks with us, to grow old and wrinkled.

To die among us.

This museum is not open from 9 to 5.

This museum is always open, Always free Always generous Like true love wants to be!

Is that a work of art?

You’d better believe it!

This is where it all came from!

Go ask the cavepeople!

(By Carlos Baron. Dedication of the mural La Raza, by Daniel Galvez, on Adeline St. Berkeley, 1976.)

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“La Misión, La Cultura, La Lucha, La Gente ” (“The Mission, The Culture, The Struggle, The People”) by Francisco Aquino.

PHOTO BY DICK EVANS

“Beyond the magic of coming upon any single mural, living in the Mission means living in what muralist elders call a ‘mural environment’” —Carla Wojczuk, muralist and visual artist

T

The Mission’s mural environment emerged from communities of artists who lived in the neighborhood. The area became a free outdoor gallery where the artists themselves were the curators, and artists were encouraged to create public art with the community to reflect that community’s histories, struggles, and aspirations. As master muralist Miranda Bergman put it, “It [is] a microcosm of the idea that it is possible to transform the world.” Collaboration and community input was a hallmark of many community murals, and the teamwork involved in making a collaborative mural was itself a socially transformative experience.

Balmy Alley was a shooting gallery before it was a mural gallery. Its transformation, beginning around 1972, was not a beautification project in gentrifiers’ sense of the term; it was not a move to encourage a buyer’s market but a move to embrace and respond to what was already there.

Over the years, a number of prominent community artists painted murals in the alley. In 1984, more than 30 artists and activists came together to form a mural collective, called PLACA, after the Spanish word meaning “to leave a mark or make a sign.” PLACA artists painted more than 20 murals in Balmy Alley in one fell swoop: Patricia Rodriguez and Ray The history of the Mission as a mural environment is part of Patlan organized the project to express their collective oppoa larger history of the community mural movement in the sition to the US government’s intervention in Central America United States. In the 1960s and ’70s, artists in poor an working- and to welcome immigrants from Nicaragua, Honduras, El class urban environments across America drew from mural Salvador, and Guatemala, who were arriving in San Francisco’s traditions like those of Mexico and the Harlem Renaissance.

Mission District by the thousands as exiles from the wars in Artists of the community mural movement claimed “contested their home countries. The PLACA murals turned Balmy Alley geographies,” as master muralist Juana Alicia puts it, meaninto the internationally renowned open-air gallery that it ing artists were “painting surfaces [they] couldn’t afford to is today. One PLACA mural still exists in its entirety and was own.” The murals told bold, often politically charged counter- restored just a few years ago: Culture Contains the Seed of narratives to mainstream history: they were a people’s history Resistance, Which Blossoms into the Flower of Liberation. The painted in a library of colors. Within each mural there are alley paved the way for other mural alleys in the Mission, myriad “trapdoor” images—hidden visual details that lead the such as Clarion Alley and Lilac Alley, with each alley’s group viewer down secret pathways of local and ancestral knowledge. of muralists responding to their milieu.

Take Balmy Alley, for example. Balmy Alley is a grandmother to the mural alleys in the Mission, and its history illustrates how a mural environment reflects and is reflected by its surrounding community.

“Culture Contains the Seed of Resistance, Which Blossoms into the Flower of Liberation” at the Balmy Alley in the Mission District, San Francisco. The mural originally painted in 1984 by 30 artists. It depicts a time long forgotten by many, when Central America was besieged with machine guns and civil war, and refugees flooded into San Francisco seeking peace.

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

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Mission Muralizations

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Precita Eyes Muralists Association, Inc. First located on Precita Avenue, it now has an additional storefront on the lower 24th St. cultural corridor. Precita Eyes has been a steward of community murals, cultural heritage, and arts education in the Mission for nearly 40 years, and today you cannot walk through the Mission without seeing the work of Precita Eyes muralists or of the neighborhood youth that have participated in Precita Eyes Urban Youth Arts program.

Precita Eyes Muralists was established in 1977, founded by Susan Cervantes and Luis Cervantes with other artists in San Francisco’s Mission District. As an inner city nonprofit community based mural arts organization, Precita Eyes Muralists has played an integral role in the city’s cultural heritage and arts education, to enrich and transform urban environments and educate communities locally and internationally about the process and the history of public community mural art, maintaining a deep commitment to collaborating with the various communities. Precita Eyes dedication to collaboration guarantees that creative work produced is accessible, both physically and conceptually, to the people whose lives it impacts. It aims to bring art to the people in every community with an opportunity to develop their individuality and confidence through creative activities and to experience unifying, positive social interaction and change through collaboration.

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One of only a handful of community mural arts centers in the United States, Precita Eyes has a direct affect on arts education, tourism and economic development in San Francisco’s Mission District. Precita Eyes currently offers more than a dozen low cost, weekly art classes for children, youth and adults. Additionally they provide programming and workshops in partnership with San Francisco schools and organizations.

Also, they offers monthly Mural Education workshops for adults and seasonal Community Painting Workshops for the community. In addition to sponsoring and painting community murals throughout the Bay Area and internationally, Precita Eyes offers public and private mural tours for all ages educating the public about the history, process, impact and preservation of mural art.

As an inner-city, community-based, mural arts organization, Precita Eyes Muralists work to enrich and beautify urban environments and educate the public about the process and history of community mural art. Working with a wide variety of neighborhoods and communities, they nourish one’s inherent creativity and celebrate the beauty of their community. They maintain a deep commitment to collaboration.

This dedication to the collaborative process ensures that the creative work produced is accessible, both physically and conceptually, to the people whose lives it impacts. We bring art into the daily lives of people through a process which allows them to celebrate their beauty, discover their creativity, and reflect their concerns, joys and triumphs.

Precita Eyes Muralists has played an integral role in the city’s cultural heritage and arts education, to enrich and transform urban environments and educate communities internationally and locally about the process and the history of public community mural art, maintaining a deep commitment to collaborating with the various communities.

Precita Eyes Muralists store front located on the 24th St. cultural corridor.

PHOTO BY DICK EVANS

Mission Muralizations

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MaestraPeace (1994), mural on the Women’s Building. Collaborative work by Juana Alicia, Edythe Boone, Miranda Bergman, Susan Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez. Restored in 2000 and 2012. Described as a “standing ovation to women’s liberation” by Miranda Bergman, the five-story work took the team eighteen months to complete, and became a testament to collaboration between women, as well as a visual history of women artists, organizers, scientists, deities and unsung heroines.

Location: 3543 18th St. PHOTO BY MONICA OROZCO

Be The Change You Want To See in the World (2007) by Precita Eyes Muralists, directed

by Susan Cervantes. It’s a Precita Eyes Community Mural Workshop work done by student participants. The mural conveys the theme of cultural diversity and peace.

Location: Bryant & 25th St. PHOTO BY DICK EVANS

Mission Celebrations (2010) by Precita Eyes Muralists, directed by Susan Cervantes.

It is a mural that honors Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers Union, and celebrates all the things we love the most about beautiful Mission District.

Location: Cesar Chavez & Mission St. PHOTO BY DICK EVANS

Presente: A Tribute to the Mission Community Mural (2015) by Precita Eyes Muralists.

It’s a youth mural project about the respect and admiration for some of local mission heroes, including local teachers, organization founders and long standing businesses that we feel represent the pride and history of the 24th St. corridor and Mission District.

Location: Folsom and 24th (Philz Coffee) PHOTO BY DICK EVANS

Carlos Santana (2015) by Mel Waters and David Cho. The mural represents culture, history, life, death, and the music of the Mission district. The motivation of this mural is the rich history and artistic culture of the Hispanic and Latino community within the Mission district of San Francisco, and the change going on in the neighborhood.

Location: 19th & Mission St. PHOTO BY MONICA OROZCO

By Lyanne Melendez

Richard Segovia And His Latin Rock House

Segovia’s Latin Rock House, Casa Bandido, on York and 25th St. in the Mission District.

PHOTO BY PRECITA EYES MURALISTS

Another San Francisco house is about to become legendary.

Its owner wants to pay tribute to Latin rock stars like Carlos Santana and the band Malo by transforming the house into a huge mural.

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When you think of New Orleans, you think of jazz.

When you think of Chicago, you think of the blues.

When you think of San Francisco, it is Latin Rock. —Miguel Gavilan Molina, friend of Segovia

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Segovia’s Latin Rock House on York and 25th St. in the Mission District.

PHOTO BY ABC7 NEWS

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When it comes to latin rock, no one knows more about its origins than Richard Segovia. “Latin Rock was made here in the Mission District by Carlos Santana and Malo,” he said.

“Just like if you think about Motown and you think Detroit right? Same thing about Latin Rock here, it was created in the Mission District.”

A former band member himself, Segovia wanted to create a shrine of sorts honoring those musicians. The idea for a mural was born.

“I’ve got about 87 people on the mural already and we still need to get more,” Segovia told ABC7 News.

He pointed out his own band, Bandido and said they’ve been touring since 1979. Segovia said Abel and the Prophets were one of the biggest bands that came out in the 60s, and they’ll be on the mural too. Female salsa singers like Maria Medina and the late “Congera” Linda Black are featured as well.

Ismael Verosa is one of the founding members of Malibus, who went on to become the band, Malo. “This is a great representation of what the Mission District stood for,” he said looking at the art. “It was a melting pot of musicians.”

“This is a great representation of what the Mission District stood for. It was a melting pot of musicians.”

The mural is being funded in part by a state grant obtained by the nonprofit Precita Eyes, which supports local artists.

Four of them are currently working on it. They’re still debating on where to put Carlos Santana.

“I’m just really happy to paint and especially paint in public and be part of the history of the neighborhood,” said artist Margie White. “I grew up here and I would have never guessed.”

The house has been in the family since 1963. They paid $28,000 for it. At the very top are its owner and his family as if they were watching over the home. Segovia says he’s “beautiful with” the fact that his home will be one that tourists come to see.

The word of the Latin rock house is already spreading.

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Segovia’s recording studio and practice space in his house, which was covered in memories and expressions of gratitude for his work as a musician, mentor, and activist keeping the spirit and recognition of Latin Rock alive in the Mission.

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

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Richard Segovia Richard Segovia is a producer, songwriter, percussionist.

He’s the band leader and percussionist of Puro Bandido.

Segovia has been a long-time proponent of the Latino rock sound and has taken his band on numerous adventures, opening shows for Tower of Power, Santana, Sheila E, Eddie Palmieri, and Tito Puente just to name a few. In 2002 Puro Bandido performed at the San Francisco Heinekin Regada with special guest Jorge Santana.

Segovia was recognized by the California Arts Commission and awarded a grant for his musical and social achievements.

He took the money and commissioned Rios to paint a Latin Rock mural all over his San Francisco house with many of the musicians that had come there to record and hang out.

The city declared him officially “The Mayor of the Mission” and made September 17 Richard Segovia Day.

Puro Bandido Puro Bandido was born in the Mission District and is well known in San Francisco and the East Bay. It is a Latin-based band. The band has been rolling out the Latin Rock or what they call “Border Rock, crossing all borders and having no boundaries” for 40 years and spread their music throughout the Bay Area and beyond.

Members of the band include guitarist Johnny Gunn, Billy ‘Shoes’ Johnson on drums (he has appeared on albums

by Santana and Patti LaBelle and will be celebrating his birthday July 26), Ron Mesina on congas, Ron Astrada on bass guitar, Steve Salinas on keys and vocals, Segovia on timbales and vocals, Michael Peliquin on sax and harmonica, Marsalis Broussard on trumpet.

Segovia is introducting the mural on his house to a group of people who are having Precita Eyes Mural Tour.

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

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By Galería Citlaltépetl

Saúl Sánchez Barojas and His Dreams

Saúl Sanchez Barojas and his new work in the Clarion Alley, in the Mission District.

PHOTO BY SAÚL SÁNCHEZ BAROJAS

Saúl Sánchez Barojas and His Dreams

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Saúl Sánchez Barojas is working on his new project at the famous mural alley, Clarion Alley, in the Mission District.

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

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“In my creations I consider not having specific influence from the great masters of painting: Surrealism embodied in my paintings was discovered in my dreams.”

The Home Issue

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Saúl Sanchez Barojas was born in 1960, in a peasant family from the Municipality of Coscomatepec, Ver. At the age of 11, his father Vicente Sánchez Olguin dies, his mother Celia Barojas Vasquez, accompanied by his 11 children they move to the city of Coscomatepec de Bravo, Ver. Municipal seat, where they reside for 11 months.

In 1971, Mrs. Celia and her children emigrated to Mexico City, D.F, where Saúl met the teacher Raymundo Álvarez Méndez, who started him in the art of painting.

In the year of 1978 he entered the High School of Advertising Art (ESDAP), in Mexico City. His vocation for painting takes him to the United States of America, settling in the city of Los Angeles California, where he takes private painting classes for a year, to later study free hand drawing, anatomy, color theory, history of art, two-dimensional design and English, at “Camino College” in the city of Torrance, California. Institution recognized throughout the American union for its academic quality.

From 1993 to 2010 he lives “in the beautiful, wonderful and magnificent bay of San Francisco, Cal”. In his own words, in which for a year and a half, due to his own merits and attitude, the Institute of Fine Arts (The Institute of Fine Arts) of this city, houses it and gives him the opportunity to attend as a listener to classes Oil painting: Where he explores more seriously his own pictorial expression.

His pictorial work consists of more or less 200 copies, for which, in some cases he has written literary essays in which he shows the particular perception of his creation.

From his work, the artist himself believes the following: “In my creations I consider not having specific influence from the great masters of painting: Surrealism embodied in my paintings was discovered in my dreams. My work is an experiment of several schools and currents that go from rebirth to expressionism and modernism, through abstract figurative cubism.”

GALERÍA CITLALTÉPETL PHOTO BY GALERÍA CITLALTÉPETL

Galería Citlaltépetl is a non-profit project established by Saúl Sanchez Barojas for the development of plastic arts. It arises from a spontaneous idea, designed to contribute to the cultural heritage of humanity. Originally with the intention of providing the inhabitants of the municipalities of this large region of the high mountains, an educational space to understand the background of the expression of man embodied in the fine arts: Philosophy, architecture, sculpture, dance, music, literature , painting, poetry and cinematography.

Saúl Sánchez Barojas And and His Dreams

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By Mick LaSalle

Roxie Theater, Once Fading to Black, Now Thriving

“The choice was close up shop or fight the good fight,” says Diana Fuller, the longtime president of the Roxie board.

“We decided to fight the fight. The vote was unanimous.”

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

“A big part of my job is the idea of reaching out to the people that surround us.

This has an impact, a social impact, that is about bringing people together.”

—Elizabeth O’Malley, Executive Director of Roxie Theater

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In 2014, the board of directors of San Francisco’s longestback. It’s making money. And it has a new executive director, running movie theater—the oldest continuously operating Elizabeth O’Malley, who is determined to keep it that way. movie theater in the entire United States—huddled at a “I know we have a history of ups and downs,” O’Malley says. table contemplating some grim numbers. The question before “But for us in the internal Roxie community, it’s just understood the board was whether to pull the plug on the Roxie Theater, that the Roxie will never be down in the dumps, ever again.” a part of the city’s cultural life since its opening in 1909.

The financial turnaround is the result of several factors. In the No one doubted the rich history. This is the theater where San past few years, under the leadership of Executive Director Franciscans long gone went to see two-reelers, discovered Dave Cowen and now O’Malley, the theater has embraced its Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford and, later, Clark Gable and place in the heart of the Mission District and looked for ways Bette Davis. For a brief period in the 1970s, it was a porno to interact with the community. It has broadened its presence theater, but it recovered by the end of the decade and became, on social media. And it has made use of its nonprofit status by the 1990s, the most adventurously programmed repertory to pursue donors and grants. house in the country. This glorious past no one on that board once ever questioned. The only question was whether there Just in the past few years, the Roxie has been supported by would be a future. grants from San Francisco, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Phoebe Snow Foundation, the Owsley Brown III Philanthropic “The choice was close up shop or fight the good fight,” says Foundation, the Thendara Foundation and the Northern Diana Fuller, the longtime president of the Roxie board.

California Community Loan Fund. In the case of the last, “We decided to fight the fight. The vote was unanimous.”

O’Malley says, “the Roxie pursued a grant to support capital Flash-forward to 2017. The Roxie—the beloved invalid of the improvements to our theater and partially underwrite our repertory scene, always one fiscal quarter away from padconsiderable rent expenses.” The Roxie was awarded $50,000. locks and boarded-up windows—is back. No, it’s better than

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“Many people weren’t aware that we’re a nonprofit,” O’Malley says.

“My goal is to push forward the Roxie as a nonprofit and to instill a culture of philanthropy that will allow it to thrive in the future.”

Kyle Griffin sells tickets to the evening show out front of the Roxie Theater.

PHOTO BY MICHAEL MACOR, THE CHRONICLE

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As nonprofits go, the Roxie has been bringing in good money.

As O’Malley has observed, the standard for most nonprofit exhibition spaces is 60 percent earned revenue and 40 percent contributed revenue. The Roxie, however, earns 80 percent of its $1.18 million annual operating costs from tickets and concessions.

O’Malley was appointed executive director in August. Before that she was assistant director of individual giving for the Sundance Institute in Los Angeles. But as a native of San Rafael, she welcomed the chance to come back to the Bay Area.

With an audience that has grown by 15,000 people in the past fiscal year. To do the math, that comes to an on-average increase of more than 40 paid admissions daily in a theater that has about 225 seats.

“I grew up on independent film, going to the San Rafael, the Castro and, in my teenage years, getting over to the Roxie to see the weird and the interesting—the edgy stuff that maybe my mother wouldn’t let me see.”

She inherits a theater that was already beginning to turn around, with an audience that has grown by 15,000 people in the past fiscal year. To do the math, that comes to an onaverage increase of more than 40 paid admissions daily in a theater that has about 225 seats.

Part of the success comes as the result of the Roxie’s embracing the best in Spanish-language cinema. Eighteen months ago, Isabel Fondevila, a native of Spain and the theater’s director of programming, launched the Roxie’s RoxCine program, which has brought in films from all over the Spanish-speaking world. To get the word out, the theater has worked with the Cine Mas Latino Film Festival, Spanish radio programs and community organizations.

“The consulates of Spain and Mexico in San Francisco have also helped us spread the word,” Fondevila says. “We started with a few films, here and there, and it worked. You could The popcorn machine at the concession stand in the Roxie Theater.

PHOTO BY MICHAEL MACOR, THE CHRONICLE

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see people coming here who usually never come to the Roxie. We kept going, and then we got a grant (from the San Francisco Arts Commission) and went full force.”

The $20,000 grant allowed Fondevila to twice attend the Guadalajara Film Festival, where she discovered quality films that never found distribution in the United States. “With some films, I think, how is this possible that no one is releasing this?” Fondevila says.

In the past year, among other programs, the Roxie has had two successful Pedro Almodóvar festivals, a “3 Amigos” festival of the early films of Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu, as well as several well-received one-offs.

The early Almodóvar and “3 Amigo” festivals were big box office hits, with several sold-out shows. Fondevilla says that two of the top 10 grossers in the first year of those festivals were “You’re Killing Me Susana” and the documentary “All of Me.” The theater has applied for a second San Francisco Arts Commission grant and will know the results in the spring.

“How can the films that we show represent the community that we serve?” O’Malley asks. “A big part of my job is the idea of reaching out to the people that surround us. This has an impact, a social impact, that is about bringing people together.

The Roxie has taken a grassroots approach. A huge part has been Facebook. We’ve brought back our bimonthly calendar.

Word of mouth has been really good, and so have Yelp reviews.”

Isaac Sherman and Jim Lung, two generations of film projectionists, are working with the reel-to-reel film projection in the Roxie Theater.

PHOTO BY KQED ARTS

Roxie Theater The Roxie Theater, a San Francisco landmark in the Mission District, brings people together to meet and connect through distinctive cinematic experiences. Guided by the passionate belief that engaging with a movie doesn’t end with the credits, they invite filmmakers, curators, entertainers and educators to interact with their audiences. They provide inspiration and opportunity for the next generation, and serve as a forum for the independent film community reflecting the spirit of the diverse Bay Area population. They are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Location: 3117 16th St, between Valencia and Guerrero St. Check for more information at roxie. com

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Carnaval San Francisco Parade 2018 PHOTO BY DAVID YU

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“Cultivates and celebrates the diverse Latin American and Caribbean roots of the Mission District and the San Francisco Bay Area.”

Carnaval San Francisco is a beloved Memorial Day Weekend event featuring a grand parade and 2–day festival, celebrating music and cultural elements from Latin American and Caribbean traditions. It’s the largest multi– cultural celebration on the West Coast. Over 4 decades of celebration, Carnaval San Francisco has been a great opportunity for many cultures to come together in one spirit to share their creative expression. Carnaval showcases the very best Latin American and Caribbean cultural arts and traditions.

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Legacy Businesses Anchor San Francisco Neighborhoods San Francisco is a world-class city known for its many distinctive neighborhoods. Contributing to the uniqueness of the city are the people, architecture, streetscapes, geography, weather, transportation, history, culture— and businesses. San Francisco wouldn’t be San Francisco without its many independent, locally-owned businesses.

Our neighborhood businesses—including retailers, service providers, manufacturers, nonprofit organizations, and more—are the places that give the city its character. They’re the bedrock of our communities and a draw for tourists from around the world.

Preserving our legacy businesses is critical to maintaining what it is that makes San Francisco a special place.

Learn more information at www.sfosb.org and sfheritage.org Facebook: San Francisco Office of Small Business Twitter: SF Office of Small Business

PHOTO BY BRANT WARD, THE CHRONICLE

Legacy Businesses Anchor San Francisco Neighborhoods

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Legacy Businesses Showcase Bi-Rite Market

St. Francis Fountain

PHOTO BY BI-RITE MARKET

PHOTO BY GLOBE AND MAIL

Bi-Rite has been a San Francisco institution for nearly 80 years. It features fresh, farmdirect foods that are freshly cooked and served with the hospitality of a restaurant.

They also run a nonprofit community food education project called 18 Reasons.

St. Francis Fountain is San Francisco’s oldest ice cream parlor and diner place that has been serving the Mission District since 1918. It has been serving old-school diner food, top-rated hamburgers, classic soda fountain desserts and vintage candy for more than 100 years.

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La Taqueria

Doc’s Clock

PHOTO BY CHUO THID FOOD

PHOTO BY SF CHRONICLE

La Taqueria has run their business in the Mission District since 1973, which serves the best burrito in America. La Taqueria is known for its unique riceless burrito. It’s one of the most popular and favorite burrito places in San Francisco.

Doc’s Clock has been in the heart of the historic Mission since 1951. It’s a gem of a dive bar with shuffleboard courts, arcade games, and jukebox tunes that round out the kitschy vibe, while cheap well drinks and $2 beers keep you there all night long.

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El Rio

Uptown

PHOTO BY EL RIO, FACEBOOK

PHOTO BY MISSION LOCAL

El Rio began her life in 1978 as a Leather Brazilian Gay Bar. It’s a LGBTQ+ space that is welcoming to all good people. El Rio actively invests in communities to promote social change. It invests in the local arts and music scene to give space for artists.

Also, it actively pursues underserved communities in the use of its space.

Uptown has been a part of the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco serving up stiff drinks with a killer Jukebox for any mood since 1984. It’s known for its music and artistic events, and all of the unpretentious neighborhood bar amenities like couches, a pool table and a well-curated jukebox. Because it never gets too loud, it has hosted book clubs, debates, and is hospitable to community dialogue.

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Natural Resources

Dog Eared Books

PHOTO BY JEFF AGUERO

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

Natural Resources has become a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization since 2015. It was founded in 1988 to serve new families through education, empowerment, and community. Natural Resources offers holistic classes, the safest, most effective products, and creates a warm and inclusive community.

Since 1992, Dog Eared Books has been supplying a book-hungry San Francisco with new, used, and remaindered books as well as cards, zines, magazines, calendars, and blank notebooks. It is a general interest store that has a little of everything, but it does specialize in offbeat, small press, and local literature.

Legacy Business Showcase

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Acción Latina

Creativity Explored

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

PHOTO BY TRAVEL NOTES

Acción Latina is a nonprofit organization founded in 1970 that is dedicated to promoting cultural arts, community media and civic engagement as a way of building healthy and empowered Latino communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Creativity Explored, founded by Florence Ludins-Katz and Elias Katz in 1983, is a nonprofit art space. They provide people with developmental disabilities the opportunity to express themselves through the creation of art. Additionally, they provide studio artists the opportunity to earn income from the sale of their artwork and to pursue a livelihood as a visual artist to the fullest extent possible.

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Galería de la Raza

Dance Brigade / Dance Mission Theater

PHOTO BY BARTABLE

PHOTO BY DANCE MISSION THEATER

Founded in 1970, the Galería is a non-profit community-based arts organization whose mission is to foster public awareness and appreciation of Chicano / Latino art and serve as a laboratory where artists can both explore contemporary issues in art, culture and civic society, and advance intercultural dialogue. To implement their mission, the Galería supports Latino artists in the visual, literary, media and performing art fields whose works explore new aesthetic possibilities for socially committed art.

Krissy Keefer co-founded Dance Brigade in 1984 as a feminist dance company.

In 1998, Dance Brigade took on operations at Dance Mission Theater at 24th and Mission St. The theater is a nonprofit performance venue and dance school that aims to build a thriving, cross cultural center and dance school fostering artistic work. It focuses on the leadership of girls and women, galvanizes social justice, and creates inclusive and collaborative neighborhood and community partnerships.

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Joe Goode Annex

The Lab

PHOTO BY R.J. MUNA

PHOTO BY SARAHBETH MANEY, SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

In 1986, Joe Goode Performance Group was established as a nonprofit organization with the mission of providing a support structure for the artistic work of Joe Goode.

It promotes understanding, compassion and tolerance among people through the innovative use of dance and theater.

Over the past 30 years the company has performed annually in the San Francisco Bay Area and has toured extensively throughout the U.S. JGPG has appeared in Canada, Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Africa.

The Lab is a nonprofit experimental art and performance space located in the Mission District of San Francisco. It gives funding, time, and space to traditionally underrepresented artists and art forms.

The Lab is, above all, a catalyst for artistic experimentation. As a site of ongoing iteration and indeterminacy, it seeks to transform alongside artistic practices in order to engage meaningfully with diverse communities in San Francisco’s Mission District and beyond.

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Oddball Films

Casa Bonampak

PHOTO BY DOC POP

PHOTO BY MISSION LOCAL

Oddball Films was founded in 1984 on its originator Stephen Parr’s penchant for finding and documenting the unusual and the extraordinary. His offbeat use of images attracted “Blade Runner” director Ridley Scott. Shooting in San Francisco, he looked up Parr, who supplied him with the quirky footage he needed. Oddball Films is a unique stock footage company specializing in offbeat footage. They have an extensive collection of rare, entertaining, eye-opening, eclectic subjects, as well as classic archival, historical and contemporary clips to support projects. Their images have been used in feature films, music videos, industrials, television, and multimedia projects all over the world.

Casa Bonampak is located in the heart of the Mission, and has been serving the community and beyond for 23 years. It’s a FAIRTRADE importing company dedicated to the preservation of Latino culture and traditions. They specialize in retail, wholesale and special events, online, and work directly with artisans in Latin America.

Unfortunately, their retail store has closed, but their wholesale, customer orders and online store will continue.

Legacy Business Showcase

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Instituto Familiar de la Raza, Inc.

Mission Graduates

PHOTO BY INSTITUTO FAMILIAR DE LA RAZA, INC.

PHOTO BY MISSION GRADUATES

IFR is a community-based mental health clinic founded in 1978, which advocates for community health and wellness by developing programs for children, youth, teachers and administrators, people with HIV or AIDS, and the indigenous or Maya population.

Mission Graduates increases the number of K-12 students in San Francisco’s Mission District who are prepared for and complete a college education. Founded in 1972, Mission Graduates provides a wide range of afterschool, in-school, and summer programs helping to establish college education as an expectation and goal for every child. Each year, Mission Graduates reaches over 3,100 low-income children, youth, and families from San Francisco’s Mission District, emphasizing college as a means to achieve economic equity and strengthen the fabric of the community.

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“The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop…”

—Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

PHOTO BY DICK EVANS

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CHANGTo whom does San Francisco’s oldest neighborhood belong?

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For many years, the Mission has been the battleground for protests over evictions, tech shuttles, gentrification and the soaring cost of living. Yet in San Francisco’s oldest neighborhood, the issues are more complicated than two sides of a sharply divided protest. The Mission’s longtime residents are struggling to make businesses work, fighting to keep a foothold in their homes and coping with an unprecedented influx of wealth. For them, the shift is far more nuanced than catchy protest slogans. And for newcomers, life in the neighborhood isn’t always easy.

It is impossible to walk just one block of the Mission these days, east to west, or north to south, and not be crudely reminded that the neighborhood is battling the tides of a monstrous mutation.

Some people use the term hyper-gentrification, others say eviction epidemic, while others just quietly mourn the loss of their neighbors, local businesses, public spaces, and cultural heritage.

New condos with culturally appropriative names have sprouted up overnight, along with unfathomable rents, a backlog of development projects, bourgeoisie cupcake shops, and an onerous police presence. We are all being watched. The panoptic speculators surveil rent-controlled buildings with hawk-eyed calculus, baiting smalltime landlords with cash, just to evict poor and working-class tenants and flip the buildings into realms of unaffordability. Ellis Act evictions are on the rise, along with rates of homelessness, while former homes become short-term vacation rentals through Airbnb. A woman on the corner, deflated, holds up a sign: “I lost my apartment to a tourist.”

—Erin McElroy, the founder and director the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

T

The run-down Edwardian on Folsom Street had hosted countless family affairs, milestones of love, laughter and loss.

In the half century since farmworkers Jesus and Margarita Mosqueda moved in their growing family, there’d been baptisms and first Communions, funerals and weddings. There were celebrations much like this one, with a band blaring music in the backyard and barbecue grills wafting smoke.

But this sun-drenched summer Saturday was different.

It was the last time the 10 Mosqueda children would gather in the home where they grew up. The duplex in the Mission District had been the pride of their parents, Mexican immigrants who bought it in 1964 with money they scraped together picking cherries in Menlo Park, onions and green beans in Gilroy, and lettuce and broccoli in Salinas.

Jesus and Margarita had died, and none of the children could afford to keep the house. The decision to sell was bittersweet.

More than a hundred people—family, friends, neighbors— reminisced at umbrella-shaded tables. After the food and dancing, Father Tom Seagrave corralled the Mosqueda siblings in the iron-fenced front yard to deliver a prayer.

The parish priest had the eldest, Maria, 61, recite the names of the siblings: Mariaelena (herself), Carolina, Ofelia, Guadalupe, Martha, Francisco, Benjamin, Marco, Diana, Juan. “We would name all of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but we don’t have enough time,” he joked.

Then he got serious, thanking the Lord for the blessings he’d bestowed upon the family and bidding goodbye to the parents’ spirits.

After the last amen, Seagrave shook his head. “This block will never be the same,” he said.

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Maria Mosqueda looks at her father’s shirt while cleaning out closets in the family home as she prepares for putting it on the market.

PHOTO BY LEA SUZUKI, THE CHRONICLE

There have long been questions about who belongs in the Mission—and to whom, exactly, the Mission belongs.

San Francisco’s oldest neighborhood was home to the Ohlone when the Spanish arrived and subjugated them. Five days before the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, the first Mass at Mission Dolores was held under a makeshift arbor woven of native tule branches. Soon, Spanish priests and soldiers conscripted the Ohlone to build a structure.

The Mission has at times been grazing lands, a frontier settlement, a home to Italian immigrants, a German neighborhood and an Irish one. It has been a place for immigrants to get their start—until now.

When the Mosquedas moved to their home a mile from Mission Dolores in 1964, they were among an influx of Latino families replacing earlier waves of European immigrants who were heading for the suburbs.

As the Mission’s Latino community grew, it became the city’s Latino stronghold. Taquerias, fruit stands and bodegas nestled next to thrift stores, dive bars and grand Art Deco movie palaces on Mission Street, the main thoroughfare.

Colorful Latino murals weave through its alleyways, celebrating indigenous culture and protesting U.S. involvement in Central America, and the neighborhood spends all year building up for its annual Carnaval parade.

But that neighborhood is changing yet again. Even as the city’s Latino population has grown, the 50 square blocks around the Mosqueda home—once 65 percent Latino—have lost more than 2,400 Latino residents since 2000, according to Census Bureau data. San Francisco’s tech boom is reshaping communities, family by family, business by business, block by block—few as intensely as the block of 24th St between Folsom and Shotwell, near the Mosqueda home.

A new group of settlers is arriving on 24th Street, known to some as El Corazón de la Misión, the heart of the Mission.

Wealthier than previous residents, they are choosing the Mission’s bustling cultural mosaic over the city’s stodgier, old-money neighborhoods and the faceless suburbs of Silicon Valley.

Over eight months interviewing residents and merchants whose lives revolve around the block, The Chronicle observed a situation more nuanced than the pat narrative of rich newcomers forcing out longtime residents.

Families are leaving—sometimes voluntarily, often not. So, too, are artists, musicians, nonprofits and small businesses.

Some face eviction. Some have legal recourse to fight it, though few know their rights.

Some are trying to stay, because they can’t afford to leave and because it is the only home they’ve known. Some are cheering the safer streets, greater diversity and surging property values. Some are fighting the change with bricks and spray paint; others with an unusual legislative attempt to preserve the neighborhood’s Latino character.

Neighborhood demographics

The number of white residents has a dramatic increase between 2010 and 2012, according to census data. Resi-

dents who identify as Hispanic are no longer the majority.

80%

White

70% 60%

Hispanic

50% 40% 30% 20%

Other Asian Black

10% 0% 1980

1990

2000

2010

2012

SOURCE: CENSUS DATA, AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY

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The hightlight area is the area with major changes in the Mission District.

SOURCE: JOHN BLANCHARD, THE CHRONICLE

.

RH OD E IS LA ND ST

22 N D ST .

S.F. General Hospital

23 RD ST .

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Playground

KA NS AS ST .

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Potrero del Sol

22 N D ST .

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PO TR ER O AV E.

E. P R E C IT A A V

HA M PS HI RE ST .

CESAR CHAVEZ ST.

YO RK ST .

26 TH ST .

BR YA NT ST .

Garfield Square

FL OR ID A ST .

AL AB AM A ST .

HA RR IS ON ST .

TR EA T AV E.

FO LS OM ST .

SH OT W EL L ST .

S. VA N NE SS AV E.

CA PP ST .

M IS SI O N ST .

B A RT LE TT ST .

.

V A LE N C IA ST

25 TH ST .

24 TH ST .

A

After months of preparation, the home was on the market, listed at $999,000.

“A million dollars!” Maria marveled. “My parents wouldn’t believe it.”

For immigrant farmworkers like Jesus and Margarita, the $20,000 they scraped together to buy the house in 1964 was a fortune—even with help from relatives and a loan with sky-high interest from a real estate agent.

After the purchase, the farm work continued on weekends, holidays and summers for several years. The kids all remember Jesus and Margarita bundling them, half asleep, into their beat-up station wagon and driving to the fields before dawn.

During the school year, Jesus worked as a day laborer in Daly City. It wasn’t until he became a journeyman welder at the Hunters Point Shipyard that the fruit picking stopped.

That was the turning point—through ceaseless work, family resili-ence and faith, Jesus was a card-carrying union man, an achievement the siblings still speak of with pride.

Income by race

In 1990, Hispanic households earned more than their

white neighbors in the blocks. That had changed by 2000,

amid the dot-com boom. White households in the area

now earn a median income of nearly $37,000 more than Hispanic households.

$100,000

White Hispanic

$80,000

$60,000

$40,000

$20,000

0 1990

2000

2010

2012

SOURCE: CENSUS DATA, AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY

The Mosquedas’ block, with its tidy rows of narrow two-and three-story homes that survived the 1906 earthquake and fire, felt like a protected enclave. The children grew up with boys zigzagging the street on home-built bikes and girls playing jumpsie with elastic ropes made of rubber bands.

But much of the neighborhood was rough—especially around 16th and Mission, which was frequented by drunks, drug addicts, prostitutes and gangs. “You’d always have to be on guard when you walked to school,” Maria said.

Construction of the 16th Street and 24th Street BART stations didn’t help; with the streets torn up and some properties seized by eminent domain, local merchants struggled, said Mirabal, the San Francisco State professor. But the stations’ opening in 1973 made the Mission a more convenient commuter neighborhood, increasing property values. By 1980, the median sales price was almost $100,000—triple its 1973 level.

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Maria Mosqueda carries a portrait of her and two sisters from her father’s bedroom at her home.

PHOTO BY LEA SUZUKI, THE

CHRONICLE

It wasn’t until the dot-com boom crested in 2000 that the Mission’s median sales price surpassed the citywide median, reaching a halfmillion dollars.

As new wealth moved in, Latino residents started leaving, many relocating to suburbs more than one hour from San Francisco— often to brand-new tract houses that later became ground zero for the foreclosure crisis.

The Mosqueda siblings wound up in places like Antioch, Fairfield and Stockton. They are among many first-generation Americans priced out of the cities where they were raised.

Taking their place is a more well-to-do generation gravitating toward urban areas that pack more cultural cachet than the suburbs where they grew up.

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Around the Mosqueda house, the white population has increased 22 percent since 2000, and the number of residents who speak a language other than English at home has dropped 13 percent.

“Most of the Hispanic families in the neighborhood who have been here a long time can stay because they own their home,” Father Seagrave said. “But their children and grandchildren can’t afford to live here anymore.”

Maria and Johnny, the oldest and youngest, stayed home the longest. Maria lived in the upstairs unit until she was 37, working and studying to be a nurse. Eventually she moved to Vallejo. Johnny, who does auto repairs, never moved out.

Their father had always been strict, forbidding his daughters to so much as speak to a boy. But two of the Mosqueda sisters ended up marrying boys from their block—and likewise two of the brothers married neighborhood girls.

“Everyone here is our family in some way,” Maria said. “We all grew up together.”

The Mosqueda children continued returning home to care for their elderly parents, celebrate holidays and visit neighbors.

But after Margarita died in 2011 and Jesus in December 2013, none had the means to buy out their siblings.

They thought that selling, rather than renting the home out, was the best way to address their immediate needs—even though it meant the house and the neighborhood would be closed to them.

The siblings received four offers on the house and picked the highest: $1.3 million.

It was something of a bargain — in this overheated market, the house could have gone for double or triple if it weren’t so dilapidated, said the Mosquedas’ Realtor, Richard Michaels.

Even after paying off a home-equity loan that paid for their parents’ medical care, the $1.3 million split 10 ways will prove a boon for the Mosqueda siblings.

Maria will fix up her house and take a vacation. Ofelia will have the down payment for a house in Oakdale (Stanislaus County). Carolina will have a cushion for extra expenses when she gets her long-awaited kidney transplant. Johnny will pay off some debts.

“My mother’s last wish was that I try to keep the family together,” Maria said. “I will do my best.”

A desirable location

The Mission has historically been a place where homes

were more affordable than the city’s median price. Bet-

ween 2009 and 2010, that shifted, with Mission properties

having higher median sales prices than the city. At 24th

and Folsom Street, the heart of the Mission, that shift happened between 2011 and 2012.

$1000,000

Mission

$930,000

San Francisco $800,000

$600,000

$400,000

$200,000

$30,000 Median sale price

0 1970

1980

1990

2000

2012 2013

SOURCE: ZILLOW

Median rents

The median rent in the Mission District has been inching up alongside the citywide median.

$5,000

Mission

$3,800

San Francisco $4,000

$3,000

$2,000

$2,400 Median rent

0

Dec2010

Dec2011

Dec2012

Dec2013

Sep2014

SOURCE: ZILLOW

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Evictions

From the end of the recession in 2009 to 2013, the number

of Ellis Act evictions rose more than 400 percent. Housing activists, however, argue the number of people being

displaced is far greater. Under the Ellis Act, state law allows property owners to evict tenants if the property will be

I

developed. What’s not tracked is the number who are paid

off by landowners to vacate their homes.

Isabella Pineda felt as if she would collapse.

Although no one had notified her at the time, new buyers had acquired her apartment building for $1.3 million in September 2013. Ten months later, the owners called a meeting with the tenants.

A building manager, contractor and architect revealed plans to rehab the whole building over the next few years, adding four new units. The six existing units would also get big overhauls.

“They announced that they want us to vacate from here,” Pineda said, her voice quavering.

The owners’ representatives said they had considered paying for temporary housing for the tenants during construction but decided that would be too expensive, according to Pineda and another long-term tenant, Manuel Lobos, 59.

2,000

Mission San Francisco

1,500

1,000

611 evictions

500

0 2001

2005

2010

2013

SOURCE: SAN FRANCISCO RENT BOARD

need to maintain, repair and rehab their rental units as a means to drive long-term tenants from their homes,” he said. “It happens all the time.” Tenants are supposed to have the right to return after construction—but that doesn’t always happen.

Pineda’s situation encapsulates both the benefits and perils of rent control. San Francisco’s strict laws are supposed to protect low-income people like her by limiting annual rent increases. Rent control was enacted in 1979 (so it applies “Once they are out, it gives the landlord so much more ability only to buildings constructed before then) in response to soar- to keep them out,” said Tyler Macmillan, executive direcing rent increases, flipping and inflation—all circumstances tor of the Eviction Defense Collaborative, the main nonprofit just as pertinent today. helping tenants being evicted. “Construction always takes longer. ‘Oh, and we lost your number.’ It becomes part of a But landlords are highly motivated to jettison rent-controlled package of fiction.” tenants—whether by evictions, buyouts or even deceit—as they can command market rents only once units are empty.

Critics of the policy say it actually drives up the asking rents for vacant units.

Landlords are supposed to pay for temporary housing during rehab. But few tenants are aware of the law, Macmillan said, especially those who don’t speak English, like Pineda.

If Pineda loses her rent-controlled unit, with her modest “No fault” evictions—in which owners kick out tenants who budget, her only chance to find housing would be to win a lot- haven’t done anything wrong—spiked 30 percent citywide bettery against thousands of other struggling people seeking ween 2009 and last year. Over that same period, they doubled one of the city’s few subsidized units. to 62 in the Mission.

After repeated requests for comment from the new owners— a company called SF Mission Tierra LLC—Jose Jimenez, the building property manager, e-mailed, “Our renovation plans do not include evictions.”

But there are methods other than eviction to get rid of longtime tenants. Moving tenants out during construction is a common ploy for some unscrupulous landlords, said Eric Lifschitz, a tenants’ rights attorney. “Landlords use the

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Isabella Pineda, who immigrated from El Salvador 27 years ago, looks out the window of the tiny Folsom Street apartment she has lived in for 24 years.

PHOTO BY MIKE KEPKA

Evictions conducted using the Ellis Act have attracted greater attention, though they are comparatively small in number.

They can happen only when a landlord plans to stop renting the entire building, for instance, to sell units as condominiums.

In 2013, the city saw 216 Ellis Act evictions—almost five times as many as there were at the start of the recession.

Many landlords use off-the-books cash payments to get tenants to leave. Housing activists call them “stealth evictions”— and analysts say the number of under-the-radar buyouts may be seven times higher than evictions. New legislation requires the city to start tracking buyouts early next year.

“I have all my life here.

What would I do if I go from here?”

If a landlord wants to buy out someone in Pineda’s situation— a senior who has spent decades in a unit—a payment should be tens of thousands of dollars, Lifschitz said.

Lobos and Pineda say the owners offered renters $5,000 each to move out permanently. They live in a neighborhood with a median asking rent of $3,685.

“With that I don’t even get to the corner,” Pineda said.

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Ellis Act Evictions The Ellis Act is a state law which says landlords have the right to evict tenants in order to “go out of business.” All units in the building must be cleared of all the tenants—no one can be singled out. Most often it is used to convert to condos or group-owned tenancy-in-common flats.

Once a building becomes a condo it is exempt from Rent Control, regardless of the age of the building, and even if a unit owner subsequently rents to a longterm tenant.

There is no limit to the number of times a building owner can “go out of business”.

Rent Board data shows some owners buying and Ellising multiple buildings over time. If these buyers do not want to be landlords, why are they buying buildings full of rental units? These Ellised buildings—now “out of business”—are also showing up for rent as illegal vacation rentals on sites like Airbnb and VRBO. With landlords looking for ways to avoid renting to long-term tenants, the housing crisis in SF will only be exacerbated.

(Source: Anti-Eviction Mapping Project)

Ellis Act Evictions

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By Andrew McKinley

Photo by The Bold Italic

Big Changes at Adobe Books

Andrew McKinley ponders the major shifts in his world.

The storefront of Adobe Books at the 3130 24th St. in the Mission District, San Francisco, 2019.

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

Editor’s Note: As part of our Facing Change package, we invited Mission icon Andrew McKinley to write a piece about having to move his beloved shop, Adobe Books, after his landlord raised the rent by a significant amount. Adobe Books was more than a lit hub, it has also hosted generations of artists thanks to its dedicated owner and volunteer staff. Andrew was kind enough to accept our offer to contribute, with the caveat that his piece would need to be hand written since he doesn’t own a computer or use email. We were thrilled at the idea of publishing such a personalized essay, and have for you here both the transcribed version of Andrew’s story as well as a copy of the original piece, should you prefer to read it in his own writing.

The demolition team was quick, and they did an excellent job.

There is nothing left but fragile, perishable memories.

For 25 years, I had a bookstore in the Mission district. I started with the hope of selling good, interesting, and useful books at low prices. I never expected to attach myself to a locale that would provide me with so much entertainment, stimulation, and cultural connections.

I am pleased with the bargain I have made, for I know there is a rich story from all that occupancy. It was important to take the risk to build a space and then watch it fill not just with books, but with the people who give life to a community and make a place special so that it will always be known as a special place.

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When I first opened Adobe, I remember remarking on how so many of the people who wandered in the door were artistic—lots of young people starting out on their careers and adventures. The place was emptier then, and all those who cared to visit were therefore more precious and more welcome. Perhaps we had the hospitality of the old Western frontier—a welcome way station in what appeared to some as a savage wilderness. Only now do I realize what a rare thing it was to have so many young and vibrant people gathered around—and not in a school situation. I will always be grateful for my school days, but the best part of my education has been right here on 16th Street. Here I came up against the very face of life in all its diverse and sometimes pathetic forms. Never have I lived in a neighborhood so diverse or where the different cultures and races have mixed so harmoniously. People feel comfortable in the Mission, and when you are comfortable, truly great things can begin to happen.

I always wanted great people to congregate in my store—who doesn’t? If something happened, if there was a scene that located in the Adobe space, if we helped to foster an era or an art movement, then I am grateful. But it certainly takes time, and book-selling paid the rent so that other things—artistic things—could happen in the space. In the dense and crowded world of the urban Mission, people needed a place to unwind and entertain—not everyone has a great home life or living situation, and I always wanted everyone to feel welcome. Getting people to hang out was no problem, and letting people put their art up on the walls seemed like the gracious thing to do. I hired artists as clerks, and I made it easy and free for people to use the space for displays. I allowed motivated people to promote their own work or their friends’ work. In the early days, we would never think of charging commissions.

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When Amanda Eicher offered to build a gallery in the back of the store and then curate a few shows, I was delighted. She created an intimate space that focused on the work similar to what more formal galleries offered. The back-room gallery became a cut above showing art in a cafe, with none of the attitude and politics that most traditional galleries seem to foster. It was a perfect place for young emerging artists to start out without the discomfort or pressure of a full-scale gallery.

The times saw the return of making art close to the street level, where artists drew inspiration directly from the things around them—urban decay, graffiti—an almost naive style based on street experience. All this began to command a growing respect.

There was a collaboration not only between artists but also between artists and poets, and between artists and musicians.

I guess this has been happening for years, but it is important when creative people relax and begin to help each other. This spirit of mutual respect and assistance—this’s what helped to mold and shape what some people would like to call a Mission School. The bookstore was a comfortable place for artists of all kinds, and we are lucky if any great attention is now paid to this particular time.

All this great stuff was happening while book-selling paid the bills and subsidized whatever scene was percolating, but over time something happened to book-selling, and what happened is probably why I am writing this as a bit of a historical memoir.

Blame it on the Internet; it is so easy but oh, so true. The number of bookstores diminished quickly. The content and knowledge in them was available elsewhere. When we opened, we were one of five street-accessible shops within one block of 16th Street and Valencia Street. Now there will be none.

We could have stayed on, but a new landlord was ambitious to get a higher yield for his property, and the squeeze between rising rents and diminishing book-selling income led to the present situation. Am I a victim? More like I am someone who tripped—someone who was tripped up by events. The old ways and the old methods of transmitting knowledge have been forever altered, and something has definitely been pushed aside in the process. Even if we could have stayed, the clientele is changing, and all those young people who showed up here now keep arriving but have to hustle so much more just to pay the rent, which is getting to be pretty dear. The “scene” that we helped to make and so very much enjoyed is destined now to erupt and percolate somewhere else.

I am grateful to all the many fine people who banded together to save and preserve the bookstore. It is a wonderful success story, even if we are to never sell another book.

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The new Adobe Bookstore opened in July at 3130 24th Street at Folsom. It is cooperatively run, and all of us are determined to make it a viable new bookstore for the modern era.

What type of character will hang out in the new space remains to be seen. I will always be highly loving of all the people who added to the old store, played upon its stage, emoted in some form, and helped to make it a cultural space and not just a mere business.

When we choose to interact with the public at a public space and in a public way, we all grow richer, sometimes in assets; but in the case of Adobe Bookshop, we are rich because we achieved an intangible—part legend and part living room. I just hope that more such spaces will pop up in San Francisco.

Andrew McKinley (in the middle) uses his trusty Canon 35mm to take photographs of the greater Adobe Books community.

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PHOTO BY GEORGE SCHUPP

Inside Adobe Books’s old location at the 16th and Valencia St. in the Mission District, San Francisco, 2007.

Big Changes at Adobe Books

121 PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

Inside Adobe Books’s new location at the 3130 24th St. in the Mission District, San Francisco, 2019.

PHOTO BY DICK EVANS

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Past & Present: Not all of them survive

Compiled by Mengyi Shao

HOODLINE

PHOTO BY ALISA SCERRATO,

A 12-year-old restaurant and bakery owned by Krystin Rubin and Karen Heisler, their ovens went cold on September 1, 2019. (Location: 2901 Mission St.)

Mission Pie

—The slogan of Mission Pie

“Eat Pie. Live Forever.”

PHOTO BY MISSION LOCAL

PHOTO BY MISSION LOCAL

The Workingman’s Headquarters, a hardware store that sold tools to, and made keys for the Mission for nearly 50 years, has closed for good, more than a year after the proprietor Samuel Joseph Anmuth died in November 2017. (Location: 2871 Mission St.)

Workingman’s Headquarters

—Michael, Joseph’s son

“It’s always been a transient space, but there’s been a cultural shift.

People don’t really appreciate where the city has come from. It seems like they just want to make money.”

PHOTO BY KATRINA D.

PHOTO BY SF SMALL BUSINESS WEEK

After 21 years, Casa Bonampak, a festive Latin American goods store filled with trinkets and indigenous clothing, closed on August 21, 2019.

(Location: 1051 Valencia St.)

Casa Bonampak

—Nancy Chárraga, Casa Bonampak’s owner

“It’s the beauty of Latino culture— the traditions, the indigenous energy of our roots and where we come from.”

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

PHOTO BY THREAD LOUNGE

Thread Lounge closed on June 29, 2019. The clothing and homefurnishing shop has been in the Mission since 2013. (Location: 724 Valencia St.)

Thread Lounge Boutique

—Colleen Schmidt, Thread Lounge’s owner

“All the heart and soul in San Francisco is gone.”

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

PHOTO BY ROBERT COUSE-BAKER, FLICKR

Lucca Ravioli, the last commercial outpost of the Feno family, closed on April 30, 2019, having done business in San Francisco for 94 years. (Location: 1100 Valencia St.)

Lucca Ravioli

—Mission Local

“Not a story of greedy landlords and displacement, but a fear of losing the city’s soul.”

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

PHOTO BY FRIENDS OF FRIENDS

Little Paper Planes, with its handmade art, apparel and jewelry, closed on July 2019 after 5 years on the Valencia corridor and more than a decade online. (Location: 855 Valencia St.)

Little Paper Planes

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

—Kelly Jones, Little Paper Planes’s owner

“San Francisco is not friendly to people who don’t make a lot of money.”

PHOTO BY AIRBNB BLOG

Retro Fit, the place where customers could find the best costume, the coolest sunglasses or prettiest vintage purse, was pushed out of its space because it cannot pay the rent demanded: $9,680 a month. It closed on December 17, 2017 after 20 years. (Location: 910 Valencia St.)

Retro Fit

PHOTO BY MISSION LOCAL

—Steven LeMay, Retro Fit’s owner

“Short and simple: The rumors are true.

Retro Fit received a 30-day notice to vacate 910 Valencia St...so there’s that.”

PHOTO BY SF PLANNING

After 15 years in the Mission District, Valhalla Books closed its doors on April 2015. (Location: 2141 Mission St.)

Valhalla Books

—Joe Marchione, Valhalla Books’ owner and sole employee

“There are no local villains, it’s not a rent issue, I just picked the wrong century to sell books.”

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

PHOTO BY SF LOOKING FLY ON A DIME

After 28 years, the famous thrift store Clothes Contact, which sold vintage by the pound, was forced to close its doors on February 2015 because the landlord raised their rent from $4,000 to $12,000.

(Location: 473 Valencia St.)

Clothes Contact

—Lyrics of Brazilian bossa nova

“Meu violão e uma cruel desilusão foi tudo o que ficou, ficou pra machucar meu coração.” (“My guitar and a cruel disappointment was all there was, there was to break my heart.”)

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

PHOTO BY SARAH HOLDER, CITYLAB

After 20 years, Mission Thrift closed on December 2018 due to the loss of its once-steady client base of artists and creative types who value vintage clothing. (Location: 2330 Mission St.)

Mission Thrift

—Werner Werwie, Mission Thrift’s owner

“It’s sad, but then you can’t stop progress or gentrification or whatever you want to call it.”

PHOTO BY LEA SUZUKI, THE CHRONICLE

PHOTO BY HIVE MIND, FLICKR

After being a Mission neighborhood landmark for 40 years, Discolandia, a place for Latino music that sold classic music records and concert tickets, closed on January 16, 2011. (Location: 2964 24th St.)

Discolandia

—Sylvia Rodriguez, Discolandia’s owner

“I couldn’t live without Discolandia. I wake up and get ready for this. I’m working for the love of the art.”

PHOTO BY HIVE MIND, FLICKR

By Marisa Lagos

A Mission for the Mission: Preserve Latino Legacy for the Future Residents, merchants try to designate corridor a cultural district.

A street sign recognizing the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District hangs at the entrance to Balmy Alley in the Mission District.

PHOTO BY KEVIN N. HUME, SF EXAMINER

S

San Francisco’s Mission District is the nucleus of the city’s Latino culture, boasting a rich history that began in the 1800s with Mexican land grants and the Gold Rush and continued in the 20th century with the Chicano movement, mural projects and the low-rider culture.

It’s also the center of the real estate boom that is sweeping through the city, an economic upswing that is driving up prices and has begun to drive out Latino residents and business owners.

Longtime neighbors want to put a halt to those dramatic changes and make sure the area’s cultural, architectural and artistic history is maintained. Taking a page from Japantown, they are working with Supervisor David Campos to designate the area around the 24th Street commercial corridor the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District in hopes of preserving the area’s flavor and history. Campos will introduce a resolution at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting to establish the district.

“Things always change, but not this dramatically, this fast,” said Erick Arguello, who has lived in the area since his family emigrated from Nicaragua in 1963. “We’ve been fighting battles (to preserve this area) for a lot of years...it’s exhausting. By creating a Latino cultural district, the city would be recognizing its roots, acknowledging the contributions the Latino community has made and who is here.”

Community meetings In the coming months, Calle 24, the merchants and residents association headed by Arguello, will host a series of meetings to gauge what the community wants to see happen in the area, whether it be protecting its famous murals, encouraging more public art, ensuring Latino-owned businesses maintain a presence, or building more affordable housing.

A window ledge on 24th St. contains memorials to businesses that have closed in recent years as home and retail prices have risen in San Francisco’s Mission District, driving many longtime residents out. Johnny Garcia (pictured) carries copies of El Tecolote to his car for delivery.

PHOTO BY LEA SUZUKI, THE CHRONICLE

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The San Francisco Latino Historical Society and SF Heritage are also working on two projects to document San Francisco’s Latino history, including the creation of the first citywide Latino historic context statement. That statement, “Nuestra Historia: Documenting the Chicano, Latino, and Indígena Contribution to the Development of San Francisco,” will not only document the city’s physical and cultural Latino history but also offer recommendations on how to preserve it. It’s funded by the city’s Historic Preservation Fund Committee.

“Many people know about the Mission District’s taco shops and murals, but they are unaware of how long and storied San Francisco’s Latino history is.”

Another project, Calle 24: Cuentos del Barrio, is a walking tour of the 24th Street area based on oral histories collected by high school and college students completed over the past year.

Reshaping city laws Eventually, Campos said, ideas generated by the community as well as information from the historic context statement could help inform new city laws such as zoning restrictions and other protections to ensure the area’s murals, businesses and community groups stay put.

“It’s really about preserving something that is very fragile that could be lost,” Campos said. “Calle 24 has become the focal point of Latino identity and culture in the Mission...This resolution puts it on the record, recognizing this as a cultural corridor, recognizing the cultural heritage and history with the understanding there has to be a much longer community process where (people) can talk about what that means, what we want to preserve, emphasize and protect.”

Many people know about the Mission District’s taco shops and murals, said Anne Cervantes, head of the San Francisco Latino Historical Society, but they are unaware of how long and storied San Francisco’s Latino history is—starting in the 1830s with the Mexican government’s land grants to prominent families, the establishment of Mission Dolores, and up through the 1960s and ’70s, when the neighborhood’s social justice movement spawned several community organizations that still exist today.

“Nobody knows about the history...No one talks about the Latino contributions to the history of the city,” she said, adding that the Latino historical context statement “will be the first plan generated by the community.”

Balmy Alley is the most concentrated collection of murals in San Francisco.

It contains murals on a myriad of styles and subjects from human rights to local gentrification.

PHOTO BY NICHOLAS DOYLE

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Harmony between old, new Arguello said there are already signs of change—condominium projects on 24th Street that displaced longtime tenants, for example—but also signs that the new and old 24th Street can coexist. He pointed toward the restaurant Pig & Pie, at 24th and Harrison streets, which opened in 2012 at the site of the famed, now-shuttered record store Discolandia.

After talking to neighbors, Arguello said, owner Miles Pickering opted to keep the Discolandia signage—an important nod to the area’s past and a big tourist attraction.

“We worked with him to preserve it,” he said. “A lot of people don’t want this to be like Valencia Street or Noe Valley—we want to be who we are. We’re not down on anybody else, but we want to keep the character here, keep it special.”

Maintaining and encouraging that unique character will also allow the area’s businesses to thrive, Arguello and Campos agreed. Calle 24, the neighborhood group, changed

“A lot of people don’t want this to be like Valencia Street or Noe Valley—we want to be who we are.

We’re not down on anybody else, but we want to keep the character here, keep it special.” its name from Lower 24th Street Merchants and Neighbors Association to let visitors and the rest of the city know what sets them apart.

“I think part of what you see with Calle 24 is a focus on rebranding, highlighting the history,” Campos said. “We want to make sure we preserve the murals, make sure some of landmarks that have been there a long time are protected—but it’s also about promoting the area, too.”

“By creating a Latino cultural district, the city would be recognizing its roots, acknowledging the contributions the Latino community has made and who is here.”

—Erick Arguello, president of Calle 24 and longtime residents in the Mission

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Discolandia, a former record store on 24th St. has been turned into a restaurant but kept the Latino signage.

PHOTO BY MENGYI SHAO

CALLE 24 LATINO CULTURAL DISTRICT Calle 24 was created in 1999 by a group of long time residents, merchants, service providers and art organizations concerned with quality of life issues in the community.

Learn more information at callesf24.org

A Mission for the Mission: Preserve Latino Legacy for the Future

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WEAVING COOPERATION

Giving back to the community

Chapter 03: W E A VI N G C O O P E R A TI O N

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PHOTO BY ROBBY VIRUS

Question:

“As a person who is working for a tech company, how can I find a sense of place?”

—Anna Diaz Hernandez, 2-year newcomer working for a San Francisco startup tech company Table of Contents

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By Mengyi Shao

Answer:

Engage as a Neighbor, Not a Young Professional Susannah Shattuck, a young tech professional and a newcomer, provides her solutions. What does she do?

PHOTO BY MEDIUM

Mengyi: Could you do a brief introduction about yourself?

Susannah: My day Job is an IBM product manager working in the AI space, but I also have a big passion for connecting young people with their communities and helping them get involved. I volunteered in the organization, SEED, a consulting group which connects young professionals with nonprofits to help nonprofits work with their projects. I have been living in the Mission District for almost 6 years. I consider myself as in-between a newcomer and local.

M: As a member working in the tech industry, if you could do something to help bridge newcomers and locals in SF, what would you do?

S: I think the biggest thing is to help newcomers understand some of the problems that the city has in a deeper way.

There are a lot of issues we see when walking down the streets. Homelessnesses, general disparity, income equality, lack of housing, lack of opportunities for a large segment of the population. It is important to help them understand how and why these issues have come about. Educating them on the reasons of these issues in the city is a really important first step because people can’t really do anything about a problem if they don’t understand what’s causing it.

“I think the biggest thing is to help newcomers understand some of the problems that the city has in a deeper way. This’s a really important first step because people can’t really do anything about a problem if they don’t understand what’s causing it.”

M: In your article, you wrote about Zendesk, Facebook, Salesforce, and Prezi, and now they’re doing tech philanthropy to benefit local communities. Do you know any other companies or organizations interested in bridging the gap between newcomers and locals?

S: SEED, as I mentioned before. It’s not specific to the tech industry. It’s open to young professionals working in any industry. They do a really good job of connecting those young people with nonprofits that need help. It’s not like you go andvolunteer once. You’re actually working on a project for 8–10 weeks with the nonprofit. So I think that’s a really great example of nonprofit organization that’s bridging those communities. I think there’s a lot of tech companies, pretty much every single company in San Francisco that I know that have some kind of volunteer program. I think Salesforce and Zendesk do a really good job.

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M: Is there good way to let locals or local communities know that some tech companies do some works to benefit the local communities instead of just ruining the city as they think?

S: I think it’s really hard because you don’t want people to think that the tech companies are just doing this for good press. They don’t want people to think that they’re doing this to look good. So in a way, I think it’s okay that people don’t realize that tech companies are doing as much because it should be as much about the nonprofit organizations that the tech companies are working with. The nonprofits are the ones in the communities everyday, so it’s more about them and the work they’re doing. The tech companies are supporting nonprofits by either giving their money or having their employees volunteer. That shouldn’t be about the tech companies, it should be about the nonprofits.

M: Since you used to be a newcomer in SF, do you remember when you first come to the city? Can you share some experiences you had?

S: I fell in love with San Francisco from the moment I set foot here. I absolutely love the city in a lot of ways that started the moment I moved here. I first came to SF just to visit for a summer. I feel so deeply in love with the city and I decided to move here. And I moved here about 6 months later. When I was a newcomer in the city, there were a lot of amazing things that I loved. I think I wasn’t as aware of the terrible things that were happening to the city, in the way a lot of communities are falling apart, because I was so overwhelmed at how great this place was in other ways. So being here longer actually helps me understand better the problems that the city has, in a way I really didn’t understand when I first came here.

M: How did you realize these problems and how you connect with local communities when you first came?

S: Educated myself by reading articles and books. Season of the witch is a really good book. It’s about the history of San Francisco, and some of the challenges we have today.

I talk to people who were willing to talk to me, and learn about the history of the city. Also, my neighbors and other people who have been here longer help me have a better understanding of what’s going on here. And part of the reason why I was able to do that is that I’m living in the Mission District which is neighborhood that has very strong roots.

I’m not living in a new apartment. I live in an apartment building that has a lot of old residents who have lived there for many many years. My next door neighbor has lived in his apartment for 11 years. So he’s been in the city and the neighborhood for a long time. It’s great to get to know people who have that kind of history

“Educated myself by reading articles and books. Talk to people who were willing to talk to me, and learn about the history of the city.”

M: Have you ever met with some people who are not that friendly to the people who are new to the city, especially young professionals?

S: I’ve never had a direct interaction with somebody who has been unfriendly to me. But I think maybe part of the reason is that I often talk to these people, I’m engaging with them as a neighbor not as a young professional. I’m trying to get to know them. I’ve seen graffiti that says “Get out of the neighborhood, Techie!” I know there’s a lot of negative sentiment, but I’ve never had a personally into negative interaction with somebody.

“Real relationships are built on a foundation of trust—and if these companies want their neighbors to trust them, they need to start talking about the work that they can do together.”

—Susannah Shattuck, “City in Flux: The Impact of San Francisco’s Tech Industry on Local Communities and the Non-Profit Organizations that Serve Them”

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“I go to the grocery stores, talk to the shop owners, and interact with people in your daily life.

I think the isolated are not really interacting with people in the communities, which causes this sort of tension.”

M: Do you have any good ideas to motivate some introvert newcomers to reach out or connect with locals and local communities?

S: I think one of the big ways that you can build relationships with local communities is by spending time. I think that a big problem that a lot of big tech companies gave their employees all of their meals, all of their services, the employees don’t really have to do anything except go to work and then go home to sleep, so they don’t spend any time in the community. And this is something I think that Zendesk realized and did a really good job of trying to solve by actively encouraging employees to go out for lunch, so instead of doing catered lunch , they gave their employees a stipend. So the employees got the same benefit. Another company would offer to pay for lunch, but they’re actually going to the restaurants, to businesses that are in the communities. That is one of the easiest way that you can connect with the place.

I go to the grocery stores, talk to the shop owners, and interact with people in my daily life. I think the isolated are not really interacting with people in the communities, which causes this sort of tension.

M: What is the intention of these tech companies are doing tech philanthropy to benefit the local communities?

S: I think this depends on the companies. I think Salesforce is a really interesting example because they obviously gave a lot of money to different organizations within San Francisco, even the San Francisco government. And I think the CEO of Salesforce, he seems generally well intentioned. But I think some of that is also trying to establish Salesforce as the San Francisco company. I’m looking out the window of my office right now at the Salesforce transit center downtown and Ithink Salesforce wants their name as major public space because this is great publicity for them as a major player in San Francisco. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I think as long as the companies are giving money to causes that are actually valid, and they’re giving money to nonprofits that are actually going to use that money to help the community. I don’t really care about what their intentions are. I think the bad thing is when they do something and make a big show of it. That’s not actually helping the community.

Susannah Shattuck Susannah Shattuck is currently a MBA / MPP Candidate at Stanford Graduate School of Business. When I interviewed her, she was a IBM product manager focusing on the impact of AI on business and society. Prior to IBM, she worked at Prezi, a cloud-based presentation software company, as a content marketing manager. She is also a senior fellow of Human in Action, an international nonprofit that supports democracy, pluralism and human rights through educational programs for college students, recent graduates and emerging leaders. She wrote an article “City in Flux: The Impact of San Francisco’s Tech Industry on Local Communities and the Non-Profit Organizations that Serve Them” which talks about tech philanthropy and the relationship between tech community and local community in San Francisco.

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By Kevin Fagan

Zendesk Hailed as Model of High Tech’s Civic Involvement

Zendesk was the first company to apply for a community benefit agreement when the city began offering them in 2011 to lure Twitter and other tech titans to the long-downtrodden Mid-Market area.

Seniors laugh as they get a ride from Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svanel (back, center) in a tricycle rickshaw in San Francisco. Zendesk partnered with the Copenhagen-based non-profit, Cycling Without Age, to take local seniors out for rides in their community.

PHOTO BY GABRIELLE LURIE, SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

“With Zendesk, they really do want to get involved and to contribute—and not just to follow the letter of the community benefit agreement.”

—Erica Kisch, Executive Director of the Homeless Aid Center of Compass Family Services

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Lex Topher spooned in rice and beans at the Episcopal Sanctuary shelter before he stopped to think about who had just served him that chow. He peered at the counter, and there, with hairnets on, were four young women. They looked like techies in clean jeans and nice tops, or what passes for business casual in the computer world.

“I’ll be darned,” he said, as his tablemates speculated on where the crew was from. He walked up to ask.

“Zendesk,” one of the women answered with a smile.

“Fascinating,” Topher said back at his table. “Making all that money at a tech company, and they don’t even have to be here.”

“Agreement or not, we feel like we are a part of the community and really need to connect with it and help out,” said one of the four women serving at the Eighth Street shelter, Tiffany Apczynski, who directs the company’s charity efforts. “It’s really not a stretch for us.”

Zendesk was the first company to apply for a community benefit agreement when the city began offering them in 2011 to lure Twitter and other tech titans to the long-downtrodden Mid-Market area. The firm settled in at Sixth and Market streets, common ground for drug deals, bottom-end residential hotels and other byproducts of poverty.

It has been an eye-opening ride.

Well, yes and no.

Under a community benefit agreement signed in 2011 by Zendesk, a customer-service software firm helping lead the tech boom on Mid-Market, the company has to perform a checklist of tasks to improve the neighborhood to receive a 6-year break from city payroll taxes. This band of Zendeskers was helping to fulfill the obligation.

‘Need to connect’ But when it comes to Zendesk, there’s something extra involved. Its employees actually seem to enjoy the do-good work.

That’s not just them talking, it’s city agreement overseers and battle-hardened poverty aid managers who say the Danish company, with 300 workers locally, sets the standard for carrying out a benefit pact.

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A Zendesk volunteer is helping a senior from Curry Senior Center get on a tricycle rickshaw.

PHOTO BY ZENDESK

Curry Senior Center Curry Senior Center is a nonprofit organiztion located in the Tenderloin, San Francisco. It was founded by Francis J. Curry, MD in 1972. They provide services to low-income and homeless seniors that promotes wellness, dignity, and independence.

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Seeing Tenderloin’s need On their three-block stroll from their office to the shelter the other day, the Zendesk volunteers passed three open-air crack and heroin deals, several discarded hypodermic needles and condoms, and a dozen homeless people hawking junk or hanging out. One middle-aged man wore no pants, lay in a pool of his urine and grimaced at the women.

“It’s not like you walk by anyone with blinders on,” Apczynski, 37, said as she stepped past the grimacer.

“Well, sometimes you have to,” chimed in Paige Bayless, a 25-year-old Zendesk finance specialist. “This kind of thing can still be pretty shocking. But it does bring home the need and why we need to help out.” are so loosely worded that it’s impossible at times to tell if the Under Zendesk’s agreement for 2013, it is supposed carry out companies are complying with the intent of the concept.

22 categories of outreach and uplift. Those include assisting students in area schools, helping develop the Tenderloin Tech “So far, I haven’t seen that the CBAs (community benefit agreements) overall are as strong as they should be,” Avalos said.

Lab for low-income users, and using Mid-Market caterers and “The outcry we hear about the Market Street economy is that restaurants for at least 40 percent of its events. the businesses doing well there aren’t paying their fair share, Similar benefit pacts were signed this year by five other and I think people expect more. tech companies with payrolls of more than $1 million to get “There needs to be an enforcement mechanism to make sure a the tax exemption. Last year, the agreement saved Zendesk CBA is followed through correctly, that they are stronger with $217,000 in payroll taxes. lots of community input,” Avalos said. “We really should hold forth a high standard.”

Skepticism over benefits

Although city managers say all but one of the 6 tech firms are on track for fulfilling their obligations—21Tech withdrew from its deal—the benefit plan is not drawing unanimous cheers.

Supervisor John Avalos and others have said the agreements

Co-founder sets example Zendesk, however, has managed to avoid direct public hits.

The city administrator’s office, which oversees the agreements, calls Zendesk “a model” for them.

“Zendesk really does ingrain in its employees being part of the community and not just staying in the office,” said Bill Barnes, a spokesman for the city administrator.

At least part of that ethic comes from Mikkel Svane, who co-founded Zendesk in 2007 in Denmark to put some chill-out Zen into the frenetic craft of customer service. He now lives and works in San Francisco, where the company’s laid-back offices feature the usual kitchen with salads and beer along with meeting rooms sporting esoteric names like “herb” and “pen.”

“We could all just be sitting in our rooms drinking tea and writing code, I suppose,” Svane said as he joined a half-dozen Zendeskers who tutor students in reading at the Tenderloin Community School. “But if our workers do this, they become richer in understanding life. They open their eyes.”

Tenderloin school Principal Julie Norris called Zendesk’s tutoring “awesome.”

A Zendesk volunteer is tutoring in the Tenderloin Tech Lab. PHOTO BY ZENDESK RELATE

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“There was some real concern around here when the techies all arrived that they wouldn’t fit in, but I find they are reaching out,” she said. “It’s really fantastic to see.”

During 2013, Zendesk hosted career panels for dozens of underprivileged college and high school students, and donated 10 hand-built rocking horses and 150 toiletry kits to homeless programs. Employees logged 1,400 hours of volunteer service at nonprofit organizations including the Tenderloin Tech Lab and Glide Memorial Church.

Wide-ranging assistance The company and its employees also made donations including $142,000 to the St. Anthony Foundation Free Medical Clinic and $10,000 to the Tenderloin Community School’s garden.

It hired Episcopal Community Services Chefs, which trains homeless people in food service, for $5,000 worth of catering.

Erica Kisch, executive director of the homeless aid center Compass Family Services, said Zendesk is helping to streamline the nonprofit’s hot line for help, which has been overwhelmed frequently this winter.

“Contributing to the community is the ethical, morally right thing to do, and it’s in everybody’s interest,” Kisch said.

“With Zendesk, they really do want to get involved and to contribute—and not just to follow the letter of the community benefit agreement.”

“It really is just who they are.”

Zendesk Neighbor Foundation The Zendesk Neighbor Foundation is a nonprofit that aims to engage with and provide financial, strategic and other forms of support to organizations committed to local neighborhood renewal and improvement, addressing poverty, homelessness and healthcare, improving education and promo-ting gender equality, workforce development and technical literacy.

Zendesk employees volunteered in the St. Anthony’s Dinning Room.

PHOTO BY ZENDESK NEIGHBOR FOUNDATION

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By St. Anthony Foundation

Salesforce Workers Volunteer at St. Anthony Foundation Serena has not only volunteered herself, but organized groups of her Salesforce co-workers to join every month.

PHOTO BY ST. ANTHONY FOUNDATION

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Just two and a half years since she first volunteered, Serena Schlaile is well on her way to making a lasting impact through her service hours as a volunteer. A Bay Area native, she grew up seeing our neighbors in the Tenderloin struggling and knew she needed to do something. “I think it’s hard not to want to get involved,” Serena says.“You think, what can you do about it? You can volunteer. I researched organizations working with the homeless population and St. Anthony’s kept coming up.” Serena volunteered for the first time in the Dining Room in July of 2016, and since then, she hasn’t only volunteered herself but also organized groups of her Salesforce co-workers to join every month. “Everyone raved about it,” she

“Everyone raved about it,” she says of the first time she brought a Salesforce group. “We asked, ‘why don’t we do this monthly?’

And it’s been going ever since.”

Some of her coworkers have also become regular volunteers. says of the first time she brought a Salesforce group. “We asked, ‘why don’t we do this monthly?’ And it’s been going ever since.” Some of her coworkers have also become regular volunteers, Serena says. “It’s about dignity and respect,” she continues. “Sitting down with people, seeing their face,

looking them in the eye, shaking their hand.” In two and a half years, Serena has brought more than 300 volunteers to the St. Anthony’s Dining Room for a total of 1,280 hours of service.

When a group volunteers with St. Anthony’s, it receives an education in the history of the Tenderloin neighborhood that explains how densely populated and diverse the area is.

It’s one of Serena’s favorite parts of her shifts. Julia Sills, our Volunteer Services Manager, estimates that Serena has sat through at least 25 of these sessions. “We tell her, ‘You don’t have to sit through these!’ and she always says, ‘I want to,’” Julia explains. “Serena exemplifies the Salesforce mantra of ‘drive the positive change you seek.’”

On their walks back to Salesforce Tower, Serena and her colleagues process their shifts. “The thing I walk away with is that reality check, that perspective,” she says. “No matter how bad of a week or month it’s been.” Serena also ensures that her coworkers take advantage of Salesforce’s Volunteer Time Off policy (Salesforce employees get seven paid days of volunteer time off each year). Many tech companies in San Francisco and the surrounding area have similar programs, though not all workers are aware of them.

Serena is committed to St. Anthony’s for the long haul. “I’m striving for the embroidered apron,” she says, referring to the customized aprons volunteers receive after 10 years of service in the Dining Room. We are grateful Serena is so excited to continue serving alongside us and believe the apron will be in her future for sure.

“I think it’s hard not to want to get involved,” Serena says. “You think, what can you do about it? You can volunteer. I researched organizations working with the homeless population and St. Anthony’s kept coming up.”

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“It’s about dignity and respect, sitting down with people, seeing their face, looking them in the eye, and shaking their hand.”

St. Anthony Foundation The St. Anthony Foundation is a nonprofit social service organization in the Tenderloin, San Francisco. They are best known for their operation of the St. Anthony Dining Room. It was founded in 1950 by Franciscan friar Alfred Boeddeker to serve free meals to the poor in an ordinary restaurant-like setting. Their programs include the Dining Room, the Medical Clinic, and the Tech Lab.

Serena and her co-workers volunteered in St. Anthony’s Dining Room.

Serena is second from right, front row.

PHOTO BY ST. ANTHONY FOUNDATION

Salesforce Workers Volunteer at St. Anthony Foundation

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By Joe Garofoli

Twitter Opens $3 Million Tech Skills Center for SF Poor and Homeless Not only does the 4,000-square-foot Twitter funded learning center offer child care next to its computer lab, but it’s also staffed weekdays with Twitter employee volunteers and social service workers, offering coaching on everything from basic tech skills to housing and job assistance.

Twitter NeighborNest located at 95 Hayes St. San Francisco.

PHOTO BY JEREMY REISS

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There are computers in the transitional living space where Lindsay Moodie lives, but it’s hard for her to learn how to use them when her 1-year-old daughter is climbing all over her.

She finds it easier to concentrate inside the new $3 million Twitter NeighborNest a few blocks from her home. Not only does the 4,000-square-foot Twitter-funded learning center offer child care next to its computer lab, but it’s also staffed weekdays with Twitter employee volunteers and social service workers, offering coaching on everything from basic tech skills to housing and job assistance. It’s a vast upgrade from her previous options to improve her lot in life.

“Some people don’t have a space to go, to do what they need to do,” said the 27-year-old Moodie. “But here you do.”

Moodie, who was homeless for 10 years after she left home at 15, is among the low-income residents already using the NeighborNest, one block from Twitter’s Market Street headquarters and within walking distance of many homeless and low-income Tenderloin residents of Compass Family Services, the tech company’s partner on the project. The facility officially opened Wednesday evening with a ceremony attended

by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Mayor Ed Lee. It is a centerpiece of Costolo’s goal of public service.

‘Stronger ties’ “Twitter employees care deeply about giving back to the community, and the Twitter NeighborNest will allow us to cultivate stronger ties with our local partners and neighbors,” Costolo said.

In Twitter’s case, being part of the community is not just a goal, it’s an obligation. In a deal to keep the company from leaving San Francisco, the city allowed certain Mid-Market companies to avoid payroll taxes for six years by signing a

A Twitter volunteer is tutoring in the NeighborNest.

PHOTO BY CAMPASS FAMILY SERVICES

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“Twitter employees care deeply about giving back to the community, and the NeighborNest will allow us to cultivate stronger ties with our local partners and neighbors.” community benefits agreement that promises contributions to nearby areas, some of the poorest parts of the Bay Area.

Twitter’s $3 million investment over the next four years in the NeighborNest is included in its agreement, but company officials expect its contribution to the neighborhood to go beyond that. It has also committed an additional $3 million in financial grants to nonprofits serving residents of the Tenderloin and central Market Street neighborhoods over the next four years.

Twitter expects 10 percent of its San Francisco workforce— about 200 people—to hop across the street to volunteer at the center over the next six months.

Twitter NeighborNest offers child care next to its computer lab.

PHOTO BY COMMUNITY

TECH NETWORK

Officials at Compass, a 100-year-old nonprofit that is that is the main organization serving homeless families in San Francisco, hope to serve 800 clients at the center within its first year, said Compass executive director Erica Kisch.

Just being at the center—in a building christened with the Twitter imprimatur—is something providers hope will be aspirational for the low-income kids and adults who use it.

“A lot of these kids likely don’t know someone who works in the tech sector,” said Coreen Clark, a teacher with Catholic Charities who has accompanied children from the neighborhood to the center several times for computer skills instruction. “For the rest of the week, they’re not part of the San Francisco that everybody talks about. But now they say, ‘Are we going to Twitter today?’ They call this place ‘Twitter.’”

Comfortable space Twitter officials spent several months meeting with potential clients and service providers to see what they wanted in the learning center. As a result of those talks, they tried to create a homier space that isn’t just a lab where people can learn tech skills.

The kitchen area is stocked with healthy snacks and dinerstyle booths. The children’s play area is filled with plush furniture and toys. Meeting rooms are designed as places that people not only can learn how to navigate the Internet, but also listen to presentations about housing and jobs programs.

Residents will be able to gain access to the center with a card they obtain through their service provider.

While younger people might seek out the center’s help more readily, it might be harder for older people at first. Some may feel ashamed that they’re not tech literate.

“I think the challenge will be people who are not motivated,” Moodie said. “For me, when I was homeless, I had no computer, no computer access. But if you’re not motivated to get a house or a home, then it will be hard for you.”

Kami Griffiths, executive director of Community Technology Network, is helping to program the center. She cautioned that “nothing is going to happen overnight.”

“It’s going to take time for clients to know it’s there and feel comfortable,” she said, adding that Twitter will gradually make adjustments. “They’re starting small and trying new things. I think it’s going to grow from here.”

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There are two mayors in San Francisco: the one who governs over the entire municipality, and another in a fedora and pinstriped suit who presides over about 16 square blocks northeast of City Hall.

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By Lyanne Melendez

‘Mayor’ Del Seymour Raising Hopes in Tenderloin PHOTO BY STEPHEN MCLAREN, THE GUARDIAN

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There’re two mayors in San Francisco: the one who governs over the entire municipality, and another in a fedora and pinstriped suit who presides over about 16 square blocks northeast of City Hall.

The unofficial mayor would be Del Seymour, and in the Tenderloin he’s arguably better known than Mayor Ed Lee. A Vietnam veteran turned philanthropist, Seymour was chronically homeless for 18 years. He’s a former cocaine addict, and at one point was the biggest dope dealer off Market Street.

At 69 years old—and after multiple felony drug-related arrests—Seymour made it his job to ensure that as gentrification takes hold, natives of the neighborhood don’t get left behind.

He has been nicknamed Mayor of the Tenderloin.

On the block where he used to sell drugs and sleep, he runs a nonprofit called Code Tenderloin, which helps the formerly incarcerated, homeless and similarly marginalized residents of the community develop job readiness skills and find work.

Since getting clean roughly seven years ago, Seymour has started the nonprofit and helps lead a number of city organizations, from Swords to Plowshares to the city’s Homeless coordinating board, working to revitalize a neighborhood whose plagues he contributed to not long ago.

“I took a lot out of this neighborhood when I was doing my crazy stuff outside,” Seymour said. “I made an agreement with my lord, Jesus Christ, that I would put this back.”

A historically high-crime district of San Francisco, the Tenderloin is often typecast by such cliches as “seedy” and “gritty,” but boasts a vibrant, diverse history from its role in the LGBTQ movement to its legendary jazz scene and reputation as a theater locale.

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His journey from the jailhouse led in mid-November to the White House, where he met with first lady Michelle Obama and a number of mayors from cities around the country to discuss mitigating the level of homelessness among veterans.

He likes to proudly show cell phone video of the first lady shaking hands with other guests before shouting, “Southside,” and clasping hands with Seymour—a native of the Obamas’ hometown, Chicago.

Thirty-two years ago, he took the exit off Interstate 280 and drove into the Tenderloin alone, leaving his children with a relative in Oakland. Within 30 days of arriving in San Francisco, he was an addict. Sometimes he found himself living underneath the same freeway he had taken into the city, far from the responsible family man he once tried to be.

In the 1980s, he worked as an electrician in Oakland. Before moving to the Bay Area, he had spent more than a decade in Los Angeles, where he had been a paramedic and owned his own construction company. During the late 1960s, he was stationed in Cambodia as an evacuation medic with the U.S. Army.

In the now hazy years of Seymour’s downward spiral, the Tenderloin was known as the city’s red-light district, with its corners teeming with prostitutes, drug dealers and addicts like himself.

In the past 5 years, tech giants such as Twitter, Spotify and Zendesk have moved into the neighborhood. But according to the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp., it is still a district where more than 50 percent of households live with incomes below the federal poverty line.

Many feared the Tenderloin’s longtime residents were being cast aside in the name of progress. Seymour is now trying to pick them up, but he had to pick himself up first.

Around seven years ago, his life changed when he met Walter Hughes, a San Francisco resident and financial consultant who used to live in the Tenderloin.

PHOTO BY AMY OSBORNE, THE CHRONICLE

Hughes’ church was doing outreach one Saturday at the Tenderloin’s Boeddeker Park, where he saw Seymour, gave him a suit and business card for San Francisco Christian Center, then invited him to attend services on Sunday.

Hughes didn’t notice Seymour when he first showed up to the service—in the suit—until he felt him lay his head on his shoulder after the sermon.

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“I just want to take people around and show them what the Tenderloin really is, it’s not a place to avoid.”

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Del points out landmarks on Market St. to a group of Adobe employees on his Tenderloin Walking Tour.

PHOTO BY AMY OSBORNE, THE CHRONICLE

He began hosting his own community walking tours, which continue now. Recently, he led a group of Dolby employees through the heart of the neighborhood, pointing out the century-old Romanesque revival-style Saint Boniface Catholic Church—a safe haven for the homeless—and St. Anthony’s shelter, where he once spent several nights himself.

“I just want to take people around and show them what the Tenderloin really is,” said Seymour, who carries a binder his children gave him with the words “Mayor of the Tenderloin” inscribed on the cover. “It’s not a place to avoid.”

In the first year of his tours, Seymour said, he met with local drug dealers to smooth things over as he brought newcomers through. And as the walking tours took off, so did Seymour’s clout in the tech side of the Tenderloin community.

Locals call him, “the brother that brings the white folks to the Tenderloin,” and Seymour used that platform to urge investment in the community. It worked. Code Tenderloin was born in 2015, now largely funded through the city’s office of economic and workforce development and tech companies like Dolby and Twitter, he said.

Seymour used that platform to urge investment in the community. It worked. Code Tenderloin was born in 2015, now largely funded through the city’s office of economic and workforce development and tech companies like Dolby and Twitter.

Classes are held at 144 Taylor St. inside the entertainment venue, PianoFight, the old home of the Tenderloin staple Original Joe’s before the restaurant relocated to North Beach.

During the day, Seymour brings in experts from around the bay to teach enrollees everything from financial planning— offered by Hughes—to interview etiquette.

The organization offers two classes: a four-week course on job readiness and interviewing and a five-week, fast-paced course on front-end web development.

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But Seymour said the nonprofit’s name actually has nothing to do with coding. It was meant as a play on hospital language.

“Code Tenderloin is a medical term,” he said. “Our African American population is facing a 68 percent unemployment rate. That’s code…We’re dying.”

In the nearly three years of Code Tenderloin’s existence, 64 graduates of the program have found employment, according to Seymour, including 16 in entry-level positions at tech startups. Some of the graduates are the same people he used to hang with on the corner.

“They want to work. These people want to work. They don’t want to be outside turning dope. We ain’t making no money,” he said. “Every one of those folks outside will tell you, ‘I hate doing this.’”

With Seymour’s help, Fluker landed a job as a desk clerk at Solutions, an affordable housing nonprofit. Seven months ago, he received his first paycheck in 15 years.

Seymour seems to fight for the Tenderloin in the same way he continues to battle prostate cancer, which is showing signs of remission. He considers the Tenderloin his home even if he can’t afford to live there anymore, driving through 2½ hours of traffic from his town house in Fairfield every day.

“I know everyone in the Tenderloin,” Seymour said.

“Everyone, not most. And they all know me.”

That was the case for Alonzo Fluker, who met Seymour 25 years ago when he moved from Hunters Point to a single room occupancy unit in the Tenderloin and started dealing crack on the streets.

“I always thought I was doing the right thing by doing the wrong thing,” said Fluker, who now lives in Oakland.

“I always thought I was going to be able to take care of my family and myself that way.”

Del stands in front of a mural in the Tenderloin entitled “Everyone Deserves a Home”.

Del walks ahead of the group on the Tenderloin Walking Tour.

PHOTO BY AMY OSBORNE, THE CHRONICLE

By Ted Andersen

From Homeless to Six-Figure Salary in SF

Preston Phan was homeless before he got a job at LinkedIn’s Reach program with the help of Code Tenderloin.

PHOTO BY AMES TENSUAN, SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

The homeless sits on the side walk in San Francisco.

PHOTO BY JESSICA CHRISTIAN

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It was Christmas Day when Preston Phan, 29, stood on the streets of San Francisco’s Mission District chatting with his family over FaceTime, careful not to allow the building where he was staying to slip into view.

Phan had left Seattle jobless and was now broke and living in a homeless shelter. Interest on his student debt was growing, and his hopes of making it were shrinking.

Three months later he would be living in the South Bay, earning a six-figure salary at a major tech company. This’s the story of how he turned his life around in tech’s heartland.

Phan, the son of Vietnamese immigrants, was born in Port Arthur, Texas, and raised by a single mother who moved him and his brother to Seattle when he was a toddler. He attended nearly a dozen public schools growing up and was forced into English as a second language classes even though he is a native speaker.

After taking auto shop in high school, he found a job with Boeing working on 777s. It seemed like a dream job at the time, he said, but what it really amounted to was low-wage, dronelike work with little chance of advancement.

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He was living with his mother in 2010 when he quit Boeing and decided to go back to school. He signed up for classes at ITT Tech but said he didn’t learn much, so he dropped out and instead enrolled in biology classes at North Seattle Community College.

He soon landed a job in Los Angeles as an on-call surgical recovery technician at OneLegacy. His job: extracting the eyes of the newly deceased for donation, for $18.50 an hour.

The irregular hours and exposure to tragedy put him into a deep depression.

Then he heard a story about a co-worker’s cousin who found success after going to a tech boot camp. This inspired Phan to quit his job, move back to Seattle and get into tech. But there was a catch: The boot camp came with a $10,000 price tag. Phan didn’t have the money and still had student loans to pay. But his older brother agreed to front him the money and give him a place to live.

Phan said he was finally feeling focused when he heard news that his best friend had committed suicide, and after finishing the boot camp, he languished in a deep depression for months.

“That was a really tough time in my life,” he said.

That was when he said his older brother leveled with him: He wanted his girlfriend to move in and needed his younger brother to move out.

Each day would start with being forced out of the homeless shelter at 5:30 a.m. He would then go to Peet’s for a coffee and work on his computer for an hour. To earn pocket money, he found a job at Ross as a security monitor from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Saddled with debt and deflated by a series of dead-end jobs, Phan had to do something fast.

Phan left Seattle, and with $250 remaining in his bank account, flew to San Francisco for an employment program he had researched called Code Tenderloin, which promised connections and interviews with big tech companies like Twitter, LinkedIn and Github.

After eight hours at Ross and three hours of Code Tenderloin classes, Phan would often make deliveries for Postmates on his skateboard while waiting for a place to sleep at a shelter. Then at 5:30 am, the lights would go on in the shelter and he would do it all again.

But Phan had no place to sleep or store his belongings. He had no family in the city, no friends.

“My first three days I actually slept under a stairwell on upper Market Street,” Phan said.

He stored his belongings in a 24 Hour Fitness locker, which was risky because the gym warned it would cut illegal locks and donate the items.

Next he needed a bed, so he started making calls, found a shelter and waited in line for three hours. They drew a lottery for beds and he lost, so he ended up sleeping in a chair the next three nights.

Rock bottom came on Christmas as he video-chatted with his family outside a homeless shelter. Pride ate at him, and he held back the truth.

“I didn’t want to face the embarrassment of my family finding out I was homeless,” Phan said.Phan started the program at Code Tenderloin in mid-January. The classes, held from 5 to 8 p.m., focused primarily on skills like job interviewing and resumes.

“I was doing store protection, like protecting their assets, and the people I often got were homeless people that I would have to lie down and sleep next to, so that was kind of like an awkward thing,” he said.

At the shelter, Phan noticed a problem: The process for finding a bed was complicated and involved making a reservation by phone or in person, something many found frustrating because calls often go unanswered. Then it hit him—most of the people waiting for beds had cheap cell phones that ran on Google’s Android operating system, which he knew how to program.

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“I started developing an application where you can make the bed reservation through your phone and walk to the nearest location,” he said. “I think that was the start of my career.”

He started working on the app in the mornings and showed Code Tenderloin Director Del Seymour, who encouraged him to present it at a City Hall meeting on homelessness. The idea was not warmly received for various reasons—there’s already a host of apps available for the homeless, including the one that was designed by Zendesk called Link-SF—but Phan was undaunted.

The rejection stoked a fire and he began working harder on his app, stretching his own coding skills each morning before work. This continued through February until he graduated from Code Tenderloin.

Code Tenderloin, started in 2015, is just one of several Bay Area organizations that train people with nontraditional backgrounds to work for tech companies.

Its director, Seymour, came through for Phan with representatives from LinkedIn, who just happened to be scouting for such people.

The Sunnyvale company, now owned by Microsoft, had started a new candidate-vetting program in January called Reach. According to LinkedIn spokesman Stephen Lynch, it’s an effort to remove bias from the hiring process by focusing less on theory in interviews and more on a candidate’s finished projects. The program initially attracted 700 applicants, 29 of whom were hired and began working in April. Phan was one of them.

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LinkedIn offered him a job as an apprentice software engineer with a $115,000 salary and corporate housing near LinkedIn’s Sunnyvale headquarters.

He said yes.

“I was actually on my lunch at Ross when they gave me the call,” Phan said. “Then I ran outside the break room and said, ‘I quit! I quit!’ But not right away. I wanted to be nice, and I gave my two weeks.”

Phan remembers the day in March when he moved out of the homeless shelter. “I felt great,” he said. “I told them I was moving out to Sunnyvale, but I didn’t want to give them too many details.”

To some, Phan’s story may resemble a rags-to-riches tale akin to Will Smith’s portrayal in “The Pursuit of Happyness,” but Code Tenderloin’s Seymour insists that it’s not that kind of story.

“He does not fit that concept,” Seymour said. “He was already super sharp—we just needed to remove some barriers.”

Homelessness was a barrier Code Tenderloin was prepared to deal with, according to Neil Shah, a former financial analyst at Gap Inc. and Trulia who designed the boot camp. He said of the 10 people who graduated from the first program, five were living on the street.

“There’s racial and socioeconomic discrimination in tech, and those factors combined don’t make an equal opportunity for people coming out of the training program,” Shah said.

“The overall trend is moving in the right direction and moving the needle—it would just be nice to see it move faster.”

Phan said he is now paying back the loan to his brother and moving ahead with his life, but he said there is a nagging feeling that keeps pulling him back to the project he started while at the homeless shelter.

People are learning technology and computer with the help of Code Tenderloin. A man is asking his tutor questions.

PHOTO BY CODE TENDERLOIN

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