They passed out fake bus passes. (The shuttle buses, which ferry tech workers to their cushy campuses, are resented by many locals because they stop at public transit stops but don’t serve the larger public). They formed human pyramids, shouted slogans, and tossed around exercise balls printed with parodic Google logos. They stopped the bus from moving until the police came to break up the action.>
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The phenomenon described in this article is an example of a vicious cycle that I think has plagued many artistic and independent communities all over America in the past few decades. A creative community comes together and helps art grow, but while the area becomes more gentrified and "hipsterized" the cost of living goes up until the area becomes unlivable for the very kind of people who built the community in the first place. When this happens, I believe the artists who made up that community have two choices. They can, as the article explored, fight to take back the artistic side of the area and continue creating art and helping the community grow. Sometimes they can garner support from the rest of the area, or describe how their efforts can benefit the city as a whole. The other option is to try to move their community into another location or continue creating on their own outside of their community. I don't think this would necessarily work with such a broad group as described in the article, but I do think that cultural hubs can shift as the cost of living changes, depending on the area.
Situations like this are always sort of depressing and sad. This reminds me of an incident that occurred a few years back in Long Island City, New York. There was a magnificent, one of a kind artistic building that was covered head to toe in graffiti done by legitimate artists (who were by the way, all paid and had permits). It was called 5Pointz and it was essentially a graffiti Mecca that required you to have a shooting permit if you wanted to take photographs or film. Unfortunately, the owners of the building decided that they wanted to knock down the entire place and renovate it into luxury condos. This sort of action baffles the hell out of me--- to sacrifice a breathing, living art space as sacred as 5Pointz to make room for *luxury condos*. Is making money and having luxury condos more important than protecting a widely respected and beloved legacy art space? It's incredibly depressing. :(
It sad to hear that the arts are having to go to war with the world of technology for space in a city. Why can't we have both? I think that the act that this new found economic status of San Francisco has led to mainly artist being evicted is pretty crazy. I would like to learn more about how other communities are being affected. Honestly I am not sure how to solve this problem without more support from the city. I am glad to hear that there are some organizations that are trying to help the artists out but I think that the city itself can be doing more than nothing. I think that the city should be concerned about the diversity it is loosing with all of the art. This article helped me to realize that many people don't see the growth in art as much as they see the growth in technology and while the growth of technology is good, I think that the growth in both areas are beneficial to any community. This article has opened my eyes to the vast community who don't really understand the true impact art can have on a community. I just hope they don't have to learn it the hard way.
Having spent my whole summer in the Bay Area working a great regional theater, I would definitely say that San Francisco is not losing their artists. This city has so much art in it that you can feel it’s presence where ever you go. In other words, the arts play a very big role in the community. People really like to express them selves and speak openly, and art has become the avenue of choice for them. Everywhere you look there are murals that are taking a very crowded city and making it feel so much more like home. Just walking to the nearest Trader Joe’s you got a sense of the community you were in that short ten minute walk, and you felt at home. What really interested me with all of this is that San Francisco is also the home for so many software designers and technicians and to see how much they were involved with art was amazing. I love the Bay Area and I can’t wait to go back!
San Francisco delights and saddens me. Where else do you find such a culture war, crammed into a city the size of a post stamp? L.A has 400 sprawling square miles, flecked with the permanently-tanned, the night dwellers, and everything in between. San Francisco and the Bay Area, however, are jammed with polar opposite and all sorts of crazy. The phenomenon this article talks about, the rapid hyper-gentrification of comfortable neighborhoods (that's when your 2 bed, one bath condo near a starbucks and a bus stop turns into a 7.5k/month moneymaker) is not new to me. This creates conflict, and in the case of San Francisco, incredibly polarized conflict. Local Bay Area media has been branding this not-so-quiet property war as a "art vs. technology" or "money vs. culture" situation since the first counterculture taco shop closed its doors to be replaced by a start-up. This isn't to say that I'm no longer interested, or have become jaded by the constant stream of news from back home singing the same song. While little has been done yet, and talks are seemingly always in progress, I have good faith, or rather, desperate hope- that tolerating just a few more months of the same crappy news will lead eventually to a ray of sunshine to pierce that fog of San Francisco gentrification.
I think one of the biggest problem with San Fransisco is that there are no art jobs there. Everything has moved to Los Angelos and so no one wants to go to San Fran anymore. I mean yes I would love to visit but I have no potential employment there. Or if I do, it’s not well advertised. LA and NYC are the theater art capitals of America right now. Once I graduate, those are the two real options of places to live. It kind of sucks that those are the two main places for me to live because I really don’t want to go to either of those cities. I’m sick of living in New York because it’s so expensive and commuting sucks, but the same problems exist in LA just in different ways. Driving is the only way around anywhere, and there is such a smog problem that apparently it’s very difficult to breathe if you have lung problems (that’s me!)
I think its sad that when technology starts gaining a foothold, starts bringing about economic prosperity or just advancing the arts are often forced out. Like Vanessa said in an earlier comment, why can’t they exist together? Especially since they can both benefit from the other. We use technology for art all the time, with Photoshop, AutoCAD, cameras, and other things like that. Technology and the companies that are associated with it benefit from art the same way, they rely on us for the design and marketing of their products among other things. But despite this symbiotic relationship the two groups are constantly put at odds and situations like what’s happening in San Francisco keep happening. If we need both groups why can’t we find a way to have them coexist? Or at least have them stop fighting each other the way they are now. There’s no reason we have to act like they’re mutually exclusive things.
It's a shame that the growth of tech startups led to this, because I feel like the entrepreneurial and DYI mindset of these companies is in no way mutually exclusive with a flourishing and diverse arts community -- the Community Arts Stabilization Trust is a great example of what the marriage of the two can create, and I wish that this was more widespread. In general, we have a hard time balancing all these fields and industries without one over-powering the other, and in a city like San Francisco this is exacerbated by urban growth and the rapidly rising cost of living. It's definitely disheartening, because San Francisco's identity had been so intimately tied to the arts and community organizations for so long, and it's sad to see that go. SF is a city with a rich artistic community that I would love to move to and work in, but it doesn't seem like an achievable goal right now mostly because living there while I'd be trying to establish myself would be a huge financial stress, and I think many young artists feel like me.
Gentrification can be confusing because we usually associate new businesses and refurbished districts with progress. This, however, isn’t always really the case. As this article reveals, the real estate market can do some serious damage when property owners want to sell their properties or change who they’re leasing them to. Gentrification is damaging primarily because of how it causes displacement. Small businesses are sometimes forced to close their doors because they cannot find a new storefront, or they’re forced to move away from an established customer base. It is a less commonly known problem in the case of artists, which the author is trying to bring light to. Artists need spaces to work to, and it can be a hard sell sometimes to district managers or property owners who think the spaces could be better used—whether that’s with larger/more commercial businesses or condos. The concept of “going condo” is actually another issue of the same vein. I learned last year about the practice of property owners turning low-cost apartments into new high-cost “condos” as neighborhoods turn-over in the process of gentrification. This often forces poorer residents into shelters or homelessness because their homes are being turned into something with an astronomically higher price tag. I met a woman last year who had been thrust into homelessness multiple times because her apartments kept “going condo”!
I think the author of this article is right: we need to pay more attention to these issues and come up with solutions to allow districts to continue making “progress” while not displacing people, businesses, and artists.
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