Many
in Silicon Valley Cannot Afford Housing, Even at $50,000 a Year
By EVELYN NIEVES
Sunday, February 20, 2000,
The New York Times
It is long past midnight as
the No. 22 bus lumbers down the
spine of Silicon Valley carrying
12 passengers with nowhere to go.
The bus rolls past $1 million,
three-bedroom ranches on
quarter-acre lots, driveways
where Range Rovers are the second car, towns
where millionaires are minted
every day. The passengers keep
their eyes shut, or on the
floor.
They have two hours to catch
a bumpy nap before the No. 22,
the only bus in the valley
that runs 24 hours a day, finishes its
26-mile circuit from here to
Menlo Park and back. Then they
must get off and wait 10 or
15 minutes before they can climb aboard
again, using their $3 all-day
pass for another two-hour run
on the bus known these days,
these hours, as ''the rolling hotel.''
Most of them work full time.
One is a cashier at a toy store.
Another works at a box factory.
Another says he juggles three part-time
jobs. But in the dot-com land
of milk and honey, where the
median family income, $82,000,
is the highest in the nation (and an
average of 63 people hit the
millionaire mark every day),
nontech jobs just do not pay
the rent.
With all the new money floating
around, the most expensive
housing market in the country
and the densest concentration of
investment capital in the world,
there is no other place in
the country that offers a starker
example of the growing gap between the
rich and poor.
Stock option millionaires bid
on houses as though they were
buying Van Goghs. A four-bedroom
contemporary in Palo Alto, for
example, that was priced at
$2.2 million sold for $3.2
million, while a one-bedroom
cottage listed at $495,000 sold for $750,000.
At the same time, more and more
working people are becoming
homeless: 34 percent of the
estimated 20,000, homeless people in
Santa Clara County in 1999
had full-time jobs, up from 25
percent in 1995. And those
figures fail to count the growing number of
families doubled up in single
apartments, or paying $400 a
month to live in a garage or
to sleep on a stranger's living-room floor.
And it is not just the minimum-wage
earner who is scrambling
to survive here. More teachers,
police officers, firefighters,
commissioned salespeople --
all people who make more than
$50,000 a year and would be
comfortably middle-class in many other
places -- are seeking the services
of area homeless shelters.
In Silicon Valley, ''poor''
means a family of four scraping
by on $53,100 a year or an
individual earning less than $37,200,
federal housing officials say.
No wonder, then, that even
some high-tech workers, those
in the entry-level jobs, end up on the
church soup lines.
''Over the last five years,
we have seen a sharp increase in
the number of families and
working poor who become homeless almost
exclusively due to the outrageous
cost of housing in Silicon
Valley,'' said Jan Bernstein,
a spokeswoman for InnVision, a
nonprofit group here that provides
300 shelter beds and
serves 850 meals a day to the
needy.
''More than half the people
staying in the shelter are
employed,'' Ms. Bernstein,
said. ''They lose their housing first, then try
to hang onto their job.''
At the richest time in the richest
region in the richest
nation in the world, less than
30 percent of the households here can afford
to buy a house. The median
price for a house in Silicon Valley,
$410,000, is more than twice
that for the rest of the country. Renting
is increasingly out of range
for the average worker as well.
Two out of five valley residents
cannot afford to rent the average
two-bedroom apartment, which
is about $1,700.
Even studios in inferior neighborhoods
cost more than 1,000 a
month, and that does not include
the three months' rent landlords
typically ask to secure an
apartment.
With waiting time for subsidized
housing up to several years,
the situation will only get
worse, housing officials say. Indeed, the
housing burden is the main
reason why more people are leaving
Silicon Valley these days than
arriving, according to the state's
Department of Finance.
For people who are not rich
in Silicon Valley, getting sick
or laid off or losing a second
income means catastrophe. Tammy
Morales, a $15-an-hour dental
assistant with two teenagers
and a 6-month-old, discovered
that when she and her husband separated
two months ago. The rent on
her two-bedroom apartment in
Campbell, a suburb bordering
San Jose, is $1,425, impossible to
manage on her salary, with
her family's needs. Five days
after she missed paying her
rent, she received an eviction notice.
''I've always worked and have
never asked for help,'' said
Ms. Morales, who had her first
child when she was 15. ''But I never
thought I wouldn't be able
to afford to live where I've lived
all my life.''
The apartment hunting is not
going well. Weeks tick on, and
all she has found for the $1,100
a month she can barely afford is a
one-bedroom walk-up in a falling
down building in south San
Jose, the neighborhood she
knew growing up as the bad side of town.
''It's getting ridiculous,''
Ms. Morales said. ''My friend's
father has a house for rent
here. He was asking $1,800, and he is getting
calls from people offering
twice that much, without even
seeing it.''
Ms. Morales received a one-time
$700 check last month from
the Sacred Heart Community
Service in San Jose, which offers
emergency housing assistance,
meals, job training,
counseling, clothes and other
services to help those who are homeless or on
the verge. More and more, the
Sacred Heart Community Service
helps clients who come from
the ranks of people who would be doing
fine in another part of the
country, said Barbara Zahner, the
executive director.
''People are earning more than
they did 10 years ago,'' Ms.
Zahner said, ''but they're
spending 80 percent of their income on
housing. Food becomes a discretionary
item. We call them the
invisible working poor. Their
jobs are not likely to have stock
options.''
Poor immigrants who have long
made San Jose a portal to the
American dream have fared the
worst. Many of the valley's
landscapers, construction workers
and fast-food workers are
homeless, according to advocacy
organizations that help them. Or, they
live in such terrible conditions
-- 26 men to a house, each
paying $400, for example --
that they are arguably as bad off as if they
were homeless.
''Here, most people are in service-related
jobs --
McDonald's, gardening and that
kind of thing,'' said the Rev. Steven P.
Brown, the pastor of Our Lady
Star of the Sea Catholic Church in
Alviso, a small community near
here.
''They're probably some
of the hardest-working people I've
seen,'' Mr. Brown said. ''But
many with two or three jobs are barely
making it.'' So, in many cases,
he said, immigrant families
share houses.
Maria Perez, 34, is one of the
lucky ones. She came here nine
years ago from rural Mexico
thinking she and her husband, a
landscaper, would make lots
of money and live in a house with
a yard, as she saw on American
television. Instead, for almost eight
years, until she became pregnant
with her second child, she
and her husband lived in rooms
in other people's apartments. A year and
a half ago, when she gave birth,
they moved into an
$1,100-a-month two-bedroom
apartment, a bargain by valley standards.
''I say to my husband, you and
me are very lucky,'' said Ms.
Perez, who learned English
at Sacred Heart Community Service. Now
she is a full-time day care
assistant at Sacred Heart, making
$300 a week. ''I pay half of
it to the baby sitter,'' she said. ''Sometimes
my daughter says, 'Mommy, it's
not fair. How come people here
have cute houses and we don't?
How come other people have cars
and we don't?' I say, 'Because
we are poor and they are rich,
and that's the way it is here.'
''
It is hard not to notice the
Ferraris and Mercedeses all over
the valley these days, and
the columned mansions with swimming pools
that take up virtually whole
backyards. The homeless
passengers waiting at 2 a.m.
the other day for the No. 22 bus spent a good
deal of time chatting all about
the haves shoving their wealth in
the faces of the have-nots.
''This is where all the millionaires
and billionaires live,''
said a 63-year-old woman in
a cowboy hat who called herself Cowboy
Luna. ''I don't understand
how they can't help the people who
can't afford the rent. The
people who are on this bus can't afford the
rent.''
She turned to a sad-looking
young man carrying a backpack. He
had been laid off from his
job, Cowboy Luna whispered. To him,
she said: ''Right, the people
on this bus just can't afford
the rent in this crazy place?''
He nodded. ''And some of us,'' he said, ''never will.''
Copyright 2000 The New
York Times Company. May not be reproduced or
transmitted without permission.
Most
people in this shelter don't have a drug problem. They have a rent problem.
By Jack Chang
San Mateo Times
April, 2000
As rent and housing prices climb
to record highs around the Bay Area
people in every income bracket
have felt the pinch. Those at the bottom of
the economic barrel, however,
have seen the cost
of housing move totally beyond
their reach.
Workers earning the lowest incomes
can now be found in homeless shelters
around the region. And working
people such as
Rudolph Kearse, a 40-year-old
janitorial supplies salesman who earns about
$350 a week, increasingly represent
the new
face of Bay Area homelessness.
After a full day traveling up
and down the East Bay by BART selling his
wares, Kearse returns every
night to a homeless
shelter in Berkeley that houses
many other working men.
Kearse had lived in a weekly-rate
motel room until the end of last year,
when room rates grew beyond
his means.
A search through the East Bay
housing market failed to turn up anything
affordable. Kearse estimates
he would need $1,400 to afford first and last
month's rent on an apartment
around Berkeley or North Oakland, where he
wants to live.
"Most people in this shelter
don't have a drug problem," Kearse said after
work on a recent night at his
temporary home. "They have a rent problem."
Informal studies have shown
that about one-fifth of Bay Area homeless
people work, and that number
has grown over the past several years.
Three-quarters of that population
is male.
About 60 percent of homeless
adults nationwide are married, and 45 percent
have earned more than a high
school degree, according to a recent study by
the U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development.
Over the past five years, the
rising numbers of working poor in the Bay
Area have been a key factor
in the growth of the general homeless
population,
social service workers said.
Estimates by HomeBase, a nonprofit
group that studies homelessness issues,
pegged the Bay Area's homeless
population in 1995 at about 65,000.
Three years later, that number
had grown by 15 percent to about 75,000, or
about the size of the city
of Livermore.
"We've never been able to meet
the need, but now, there's 20 percent more
homeless people coming in,"
said Pat Wall, executive director of the
Homeless Action Center in Berkeley,
which helps about 500 homeless people
each year apply for federal
aid. "It's pretty simple. If you're poor and you
live in this area, you're going
to have a hard time staying housed."
Numbers tell the story
The growing number of working
homeless people is a direct result of rising
Bay Area rents and living costs,
Wall said.
The proof is in the numbers.
Average annual income in Alameda County rose
by 8 percent to $19,855 in
the two years preceding 1997, while average
home prices grew by 17.5 percent
to $276,000 in just one year, from 1998 to
1999, according to state figures.
In San Mateo County, the rise
in housing prices was even more dramatic
during the same period, growing
by 20 percent to an average cost of $400,000
per unit.
The growing gap between income
and rental costs forced thousands of people
out of their apartments and
houses, said Tony Gardner, HomeBase's
assistant director.
"It's not seen as a major problem
by the counties, whereas we know it is,"
Gardner said. "That's one of
the reasons why we have so much
homelessness now: Those county
systems are failing to meet the needs of the
poorest in the community."
At the Family Emergency Shelter
Coalition in Hayward, more than half of all
homeless families work, said
the shelter's Executive Director Nancy
Schluntz.
"Hayward used to be the affordable
place to live in the Bay Area, and
that's becoming not the case
anymore," she said. "Rents are just
skyrocketing, and
landlords have their pick these
days of tenants. Before, people with some
bad credit history could get
a break and find housing. Now, they're
competing
with so many people. They don't
stand a chance."
"You can have a fairly good
job here and not afford a home," said Linda
Gardner, Alameda County's director
of housing services. "That means people
who are really at the fringes
of the housing market are being pushed out."
At least in the short term,
more social services can solve some of the
homelessness problem.
About 76 percent of homeless
families who receive job training, mental
health and drug counseling
services eventually move into permanent housing,
the HUD study showed.
Homeless service providers estimate
that about 75 percent of homeless
people in the Bay Area use
or have used drugs and desperately need drug
rehabilitation treatment.
Closing the gap
In 1996, HomeBase decided it
could at least step into the social services
gap to address the Bay Area's
growing homeless problem.
With a $7 million startup grant
from HUD, HomeBase launched a regional
effort called the Bay Area
Regional Initiative, or BARI, that enlisted
homeless workers from around
the nine-county Bay Area to build a network of
services helping everyone from
the mentally ill to runaway youth.
Eight programs tackling different
facets of Bay Area homelessness have come
from that effort. One program
helps homeless people apply for federal
supplemental security income.
Another fights resistance in some Bay Area
cities to letting in shelters
and other homeless service providers.
Given the migratory nature of
the homeless population, the initiative's
regional reach is one of its
greatest strengths, said Brooke Nagle, a
program
coordinator for Homeless Youth
101, a BARI project that helps Bay Area
homeless kids.
In a study by the Alameda County
Homeless Continuum of Care Plan, about
half of all homeless people
surveyed said they had moved three or more
times within the past six years.
"Young people are transient,"
Nagle said. "They're moving from county to
county. To get them on track,
there needs to be this seamless network of
services that's almost unapparent
to them and works for them across county
lines."
But beyond services, the region's
homeless population simply needs more
affordable housing, Gardner
said. And filling that need is an unpopular
challenge in the booming Bay
Area.
"Despite all the good programs,
there's been a constant flow of homeless
people," Gardner said. "The
reason is that the need versus the supply of
affordable housing in this
county has not been matched in the last 20 years."
According to Wall and Gardner,
no major affordable housing projects are
planned for the Bay Area; that
means the needs of homeless and low-income
people will not even come close
to being filled.
What is needed
A study by the Association of
Bay Area Governments this year showed that in
the next five years, about
74,000 additional housing units must be built in
the nine-county Bay Area to
meet the needs of low-income families.
Middle- and upper-class people
will also need more housing; that demand
will surely be met more quickly
by private developers than the demand for
low-income housing, said Peter
Stiehler, director of the Catholic Worker
Hospitality House in San Bruno,
which provides 10 beds for area homeless.
"The cost of land is so high
here that when there is a new development,
it's for $300,000 to $500,000
houses and condos," Stiehler said. "What's
needed right now is affordable
houses, apartments, single-room occupancy
hotels. So far, there's been
a total hands-off approach by a large number of
local city governments to address
that need."
That attitude is changing, however,
among state and city officials, said
Tim Iglesias, deputy director
of the Nonprofit Housing Association of
Northern
California. As the Bay Area
housing crisis grows more acute and, most
importantly, as it gets more
publicity, local governments will be compelled
to
act.
"It is putting pressure on more
local officials," Iglesias said. "It's a
bubbling pot. It's not boiling
yet, but it's simmering and moving."
A lot of hopes have been pinned
on the passage of President Clinton's
proposed 2001 budget, which
would allocate $55 million in federal grants --
a
$11.3 million increase from
last year's allocation -- to Alameda County
officials for low-income rent
vouchers, homeless assistance and other
housing
services.
Also, 239 units of permanent
and transitional housing for local homeless
people are planned on the now-closed
Alameda Naval Air Station, said Steve
Belcher, Alameda's housing
development manager.
The city is required by law
to dedicate 15 percent of all housing units
developed with federal funds
to low-income housing. The naval air station
project,
which will include a total
of 739 housing units, is getting $5.4 million of
city and federal money, Belcher
said.
Closed military bases in Alameda
and on Treasure Island will present more
opportunities to build affordable
housing, said John Brauer, a staff member
of the Alameda County Homeless
Collaborative, which supervises such base
conversions.
"But I'm still not optimistic
at this point," Brauer said. "The trend is
not necessarily toward making
more affordable housing. Local governments
need to
think about housing in terms
of a spectrum of housing needs."
© 2000 by MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers
E.
Palo Alto chips away digital divide
Presidential visit underscores
progress and remaining room for improvement
BY THAAI WALKER
Mercury News Staff Writer
Sunday, April 16, 2000, the
San Jose Mercury News
As the nation wrestles with
how to bridge the
digital divide, President Clinton
arrives
Monday in East Palo Alto to
hold up the city
as a symbol of both hardship
and hope.
The contrast here could hardly
be more
dramatic between those who
use computers and
the Internet, and those who
don't. While the
rest of Silicon Valley basks
in the glow of
its technology prowess, many
in East Palo
Alto have yet to send their
first e-mail
message.
Few places have been working
as hard and long
to bridge that gap. The efforts
provide
valuable lessons for the rest
of the nation
as it confronts the digital
divide.
Clinton will use East Palo Alto
as the
backdrop for his initiative
to provide computers
and Internet access to everyone
in the
nation. While the city will
serve as an obvious
example of the divide, Clinton
also intends
to highlight the work in progress
to bring
residents into the high-technology
era.
In this city of working-class
people of
color, where computers are
harder to come by and
the Internet is still a mystery
to many,
non-profits and schools have
formed partnerships
with high-tech corporations.
Children are learning Web design
in computer
labs funded by high-tech companies.
Adults are enrolling in community
training
programs to prepare them for
technology
jobs. And one charter school
sends every
child who wants one home with
a new desktop
computer.
``The momentum has been building
-- long
before (Clinton) decided to
come around,''
says Magda Escobar, executive
director of
Plugged In, the local non-profit
group that
will serve as Clinton's stage
Monday. Plugged
In is known nationwide for
its efforts to
bring computer access and instruction
to East
Palo Alto.
Clinton's visit ``will add to
that
momentum,'' Escobar said. ``But
when all the lights go
away and everyone goes home,
the momentum --
at the grass-roots level --
is what will
have to continue.''
The challenge is enormous, especially
since
surveys show the digital divide
has grown
markedly in the Bay Area in
the past two
years. While all racial and
ethnic groups
showed gains in home computer
ownership,
whites pulled ahead 10 percentage
points
faster than Latinos and 9 percentage
points
faster than African-Americans
during this
time.
There are no figures specifically for East Palo Alto.
Whether Plugged In and other
similar East
Palo Alto groups have had any
substantial
effect on the divide is hard
to know. There
is no data that shows whether
people who
have taken advantage of programs
made
available in East Palo Alto
over the past few
years have incorporated technology
into their
lives.
Progress cited
But those involved in efforts
say lives have
been touched in both small
and large ways.
There's Diane Puga, a school
secretary who
couldn't afford a computer
for her family.
Now everyone uses the purple
iMac her
daughter was given by her school.
There's
Nathan Kuriger, 22, who didn't
finish college
but because of training he
received from
Plugged In, today works as
a systems
administrator for Cosmoz.com.
And there's Karen Davis, whose
8-year-old
son, after being exposed to
computers by
his school, dreams of being
an engineer.
``There are tremendous (technology)
models
here in East Palo Alto that
are providing
some of the most innovative
services to youth
in the entire country,'' said
Butch Wing,
West Coast coordinator for
Jesse Jackson's
Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. Jackson's
group
opened an East Palo Alto office
in March,
pledging to fight for computer
access for
under-served communities and
for the
integration of minorities in
the high-tech industry.
Next month, the organization
will join others
in giving away 25 new computers
to East
Palo Alto youth.
``What is needed is the resources
to expand
these efforts so services can
be provided to
even more in the community,''
Wing says.
That is where Wing and many
in East Palo Alto
expect the government to step
in.
Although efforts undertaken
in East Palo Alto
have been worthwhile, the job
is far from
over.
The city's struggling school
district, using
corporate help and federal
funding, was able
to install a high-end computer
network with
two high-speed lines to every
school. Each
school has a corporate-sponsored
computer
lab, and Ravenswood District
Superintendent Charlie May
Knight boasts that
every classroom will have 10
computers
each by summer.
But the district doesn't have money to train teachers.
``If teachers aren't trained,
it's like
having a Cadillac in your front
yard and not having a
driver's license,'' Knight
laments. ``What's
the point of having this technology
if no one
knows how to use it?''
Residents can find computers
at a handful of
community centers. But the
centers often
have to rely on donated pieces
of equipment
that are typically outdated
castoffs.
And throughout the community,
perhaps the
biggest hurdle is the sense
that many
residents still don't see the
relevance of
technology in their day-to-day
lives.
Julian Lacey, a former Plugged
In instructor,
said the first Internet class
he taught was
less than successful. As he
showed people how
to surf the Net, some were
able to grasp
its usefulness. But not everyone
saw the
point. He changed his strategy
in his second
class.
Practical applications
``I'd visit the Safeway (Web)
site and show
them how they could print out
coupons,''
says Lacey, now a Web designer
for Lockheed.
The East Palo Alto-raised resident
was
commended for his work by Clinton
during the
president's digital divide
initiative
kickoff in Washington, D.C.,
on April 4.
``I'd go to the Bank of America
site and say,
`Did you guys know you can
get an online
checking account? Or that you
can use a
computer to finish your high
school
education?' ''
But the cost of technology can
often
overshadow the usefulness of
a computer. A
computer with a monitor can
be had for under
$700 at East Palo Alto's Office
Depot.
That is a lot of money, however,
for many in
this city where 20 percent
of the
households are below the federal
poverty line.
Clinton's initiative calls for
connecting
every classroom to the Internet,
community
technology centers and job-training
programs.
He will hold a Round Table
with CEOs at
Costaño Elementary School
on Monday to
discuss where to go next in
this initiative. For
a start, he wants more corporations
to
shoulder part of the task,
as they have in East Palo
Alto.
Seed funding for Plugged In,
for example,
came from Sun Microsystems
Inc.
Hewlett-Packard Co. has provided
$85,000
worth of computer equipment
and funding.
Intel Corp. provides grants
and volunteers.
Agilent Technologies Inc. recently
pledged
$250,000 for an arts-and-science
room.
Other companies have been clients.
Two years
ago, Pacific Bell hired Plugged
In to
build a Web site. Plugged In
put five teens
aged 12 to 18 on the job --
a $25,000
contract.
Each week, as many as 300 people
may walk
through Plugged In's doors
to take
classes, check e-mail and design
résumés.
About 100 children weekly attend
an
after-school computer program.
And 35 teens
this year participate in the
center's Web
design program.
But other, lesser-known non-profit
groups
trying to do similar work in
East Palo Alto
haven't had the same success.
At the
Mid-Peninsula Girls Club, director
J.D. Williams
feels talk about closing the
digital divide
has been a lot of lip service.
Williams' ire rises whenever
she talks about
her efforts to bring computer
classes to the
girls' center.
Ask her what the problem is
and she pulls you
into a small closet filled
with outdated
monitors, keyboards and hard
drives. She is
grateful for the donations.
But she thinks
her girls deserve the same
up-to-date
equipment as children in a
wealthier community.
The club doesn't have the corporate
connections of the school district,
the national
reputation of places like Plugged
In or even
the know-how to build such
partnerships.
She hopes Clinton's initiative
calls for more
funding for small neighborhood
centers like
hers that also want to carry
out the mission
of pulling the community into
the new
technology era. ``When I look
in here I see
equipment that is barely usable,''
Williams
says. ``Plugged In received
a lot of
attention and rightly so. But
what about the rest of
us?''
Mission District Fights Case of Dot-Com Fever
By EVELYN NIEVES
November 5, 2000, The New York
Times
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 4
By day, the Mission District still looks like
the workhorse immigrant neighborhood
it has been for a hundred
years.
Old women wearing kerchiefs,
pulling shopping carts to mom-and-
pop grocery stores, still own
the streets. Young mothers wheeling
strollers chat in Spanish on
street corners. TaquerÌas selling $3
burritos are packed.
But by night, it becomes
clear why the Mission is at the center of
one of the most tense battles
over the future of San Francisco in
decades. This is when the newcomers
mostly young, white and
affluent come home
from the jobs that afford them $700,000 loft
condominiums in former warehouses,
and when the limousines pull up
to the bistros that have taken
over the butcher shops and bakeries
on Valencia Street. This is
when the warnings "Artists Evicted!"
stenciled in red paint on the
sidewalks, posters that say "Gentrify
Me" under the head of Medusa,
graffiti that says "Dot Com" with a
line across it on buildings
in progress begin to make sense.
It was only a matter of
time before San Francisco rebelled against
its latest incarnation as a
combination bedroom, home office and
den for Silicon Valley. The
city's artsy, bohemian soul could only
absorb the biggest, fastest
money-making machine ever for so long
without a crisis. And as artists,
nonprofit organizations and
working-class tenants are being
evicted in record numbers to make
way for richer, glossier arrivals,
the hue and cry against the
dot-com world has reached fever
pitch.
This is not to say that
San Francisco, where two competing
initiatives on the Nov. 7 ballot
are being promoted as the solution
to unbridled growth, is the
only city in the Silicon Valley web
saying "enough is enough."
Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley,
has enacted an emergency ordinance
banning companies from setting
up in street-level retail spaces.
Redwood City, the headquarters of
Oracle, Excite@Home and Napster,
imposed a moratorium on most new
office development to assess
the consequences of such growth. Other
strongholds of the new economy,
including Menlo Park, San Carlos
and San Mateo, have either
enacted or plan to enact similar
moratoriums on high-tech development.
San Jose expects a long legal
battle and Seattle-style protests
after approving a $1.3 billion,
20,000-worker complex for Cisco
Systems.
But it is here in San
Francisco, a city that boasts that it is one
of the top cultural destinations
in the country, that the dot-com
backlash is seen and felt the
most.
In part, this is because
the city's quirky landscape has changed
so much so quickly. No vacant
lot is safe. Neither is any small
company with an expiring lease.
The dot-com economy, which hit its
stride here in 1996, has dictated
real estate costs, which have
reached unaffordable levels
downtown for all but the richest
companies. The price of prime
downtown commercial real estate has
more than tripled in five years,
to $85 per square foot today from
$25.25 per square foot in 1995.
These costs have reverberated
throughout the city. Small companies
eager to be in San Francisco
have set up shop in a former warehouse
district known as South of
Market, or SoMa, and, more and more, in
the Mission. At least a dozen
arts groups have been forced to close
because of rents that have
jumped to $10,000 a month from $2,500,
or because they were evicted
when buildings were sold for new
offices.
Just the fact that the
Mission, with its homely tenement
buildings, squashed-together
houses and teeming streets, has come
to symbolize the housing crisis
underscores how desperate the real
estate situation has become
in this city. The neighborhood, which
is 62 percent Latino, is poorer
than most in San Francisco: 83
percent of the residents are
tenants, compared with 65 to 70
percent in San Francisco as
a whole, and the per capita income is
$20,112, versus $32,441 citywide.
In recent years, rents here have
gone from about $500 for a
250-square-foot studio apartment to
$1,200 for that same studio,
in a plain building with no amenities.
But because the Mission
is the neighborhood of choice for the
city's large array of activist
groups, it is not taking its
new-found popularity among
the wealthy lying down.
Several groups have been
formed to fight gentrification, including
the Artists Eviction Defense
Coalition and the Mission
Anti-Displacement Coalition,
an umbrella group of at least a dozen
neighborhood organizations.
The antigentrification groups have
organized sit-ins at dot-com
buildings and protest rallies, and
they plan more in the coming
weeks.
"I think it's O.K. to
say that in residential neighborhoods,
especially in low-income neighborhoods,
we can't go with the whole
idea of supply and demand,"
said Luis Granados, executive director
of the Mission Economic Development
Association, which assists
residents and small businesses.
"If we were to do that, the entire
neighborhood will become a
giant dot-com office park, and it's
coming to that. It's really
coming to that."
Even now, when Internet
companies are shaky, with seemingly more
of them shutting down than
starting up, the hideous traffic jams,
housing prices that are the
highest in the country and record
numbers of evictions have led
to such resentment that Mayor Willie
Brown, in his recent state-of-the-city
speech, sternly lectured
residents against blaming dot-coms
for the city's problems.
"There is absolutely no
justification for scapegoating anyone," he
said. "Dot-commers! If I hear
that one more time, I'm going to
scream!"
The mayor also used his
state-of- the-city speech to campaign for
an initiative known as Measure
K, which is backed by his main
campaign contributors, the
downtown development interests.
Measure K would impose
a two- year moratorium on new projects
larger than 25,000 square feet
in the Mission and an adjacent
neighborhood, Potrero Hill,
and allow a one- time lifting for the
next 15 months of the city's
annual limit on office space of
950,000 square feet to ease
the space shortage. It would also
exempt many areas from the
growth limit and create the post of
development czar, appointed
by the mayor, to oversee projects.
The competing initiative,
Measure L, which is sponsored by artists
and neighborhood activists,
bans new development in parts of the
Mission and South of Market
districts, applies an indefinite
moratorium on new development
in two neighborhoods and other parts
of SoMa, and bans so-called
live-work loft construction, with far
fewer exemptions from the annual
growth limit.
Live-work lofts have become
contentious. They were designed to
create affordable housing for
artists. But larger developers have
used loopholes in the live-work
loft laws to put up buildings
exempt from certain development
taxes that dot-com companies have
used for office space only,
or affluent renters or buyers have used
only for housing.
For some longtime residents
of the Mission, however, neither
measure much matters; the neighborhood
is already nearly gone.
Pedro Linares, a drummer who
moved here from Lima, Peru, 10 years
ago, said most of his neighbors
had moved. "No one can afford it
here anymore," he said. "The
old neighborhood we knew doesn't
belong to us anymore."
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company