Robert L. Terrell

September 17, 2007

Having resided in the San Francisco neighborhood centered around South park for more than a decade, I am qualified to comment on the manner in which rapid, hyper-gentrification is transforming the troubled lives of the poorest residents. South Park itself is located in the South of market section of the city between Second and Third Streets on the East and West. The park’s North-South borders are Bryant and Brannan Streets, respectively.

The oval shaped oasis of grass and leafy trees is a beautiful little sliver of green in a neighborhood whose surface area is almost completely covered by concrete. As a result, for better or worse, it is an oasis around which much of the neighborhood’s day-to-day affairs revolve. South Park was San Francisco’s wealthiest neighborhood in the last 1800s, a period during which it was ringed by grand mansions and consulates. Neighborhood conditions took a turn for the worse in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake when the city’s wealthy decamped to the hills, where they congregate to this day in isolated splendor.

During the next century, South Park was the vibrant center of a working-class neighborhood dominated by warehouses, small businesses, cheap hotels and down market rooming houses. The city’s massive, “urban renewal” projects of the late 1960s kick started the process of deconstructing the area’s working-class culture. That process ultimately produced the Moscone Center, Yerba Buena Gardens, the Museum of Modern Art and other accoutrements of the so-called “smart set.

When I moved into the neighborhood in the mid 1990s, the process of gentrification was already underway and gaining momentum. The poorest residents in the neighborhood were being inexorably crowded out of the last remaining units of low-rent apartment buildings. Some of those buildings were being expensively renovated in order to accommodate the tastes of the young urban professionals associated with the burgeoning computer industry.

Others were being torn down and replaced by expensive live-work lofts outfitted with granite counters, cherry wood cabinets, 16-foot windows, 20-foot ceilings and rooftop gardens with panoramic views of the nearby downtown skyline. Change was also underway in the neighborhood’s small business sector. Many such businesses were being forced out because of rising rents. Others were leaving because of declining revenues, due primarily to dramatic changes underway in the composition of the area’s population. The cheap clothing stores, golf equipment stores, photo services businesses, computer repair firms, automobile repair shops, printing businesses and mom and pop restaurants were prominent among the early victims of the transition.

Many such businesses also failed because the composition of the neighborhood’s population shifted from dominance by working-class and poor people to dominance by elite earners who prefer as a matter of course the best that money can buy. Moreover, new businesses quickly moved in and replaced the neighborhood-based, inexpensive firms without which contemporary, urban dwelling people with low incomes cannot survive. During the mid 1990s, streets in the neighborhood were typically filled on Saturday mornings with scores of young women in search of cheap, second-hand wedding gowns. Walking desperately from store to store with fear of failure haunting their eyes and every step, the women symbolized the tenuous nature of the dreams on which the poor in our midst seek to build their structurally insecure lives.

Nonetheless, sometimes the women provided a measure of hope and encouragement for those who witnessed their desperate searches. This was because sometimes they emerged from the dingy, old buildings that housed the recycled gowns which drew them to the neighborhood with broad, happy smiles on their tired, innocent faces. They were smiling because they had found suitable dresses they could afford. They were happy, as were the relieved mothers and supportive bridesmaids-to-be accompanying them, because they were hopefully on their way to experiencing the so-called American Dream.

Chatting gaily as they strode to their precariously parked cars, they tightly clutched the old gowns sheathed in dust covered cellophane bags. Their enthusiasm conveyed their conviction that the right dress and marriage would help them make their individual versions of the dream come true. Those of us who witnessed the scene as it evolved over the years wished them well. But it was apparent even before the surge toward total gentrification of the neighborhood currently underway that brides who get married in second hand gowns are probably due to experience more than a little hardship as they struggle in an increasingly expensive environment to make their dreams real.

In any event, the used wedding gown stores are gone. The dot com boom, which transformed this particular neighborhood like a roiling, take-no-prisoners tsunami, sealed their fate. As was the case with other small business scattered throughout the neighborhood, owners of the used wedding gown shops received their death sentences via non-negotiable, quadruple increases in the costs of their leases. Lacking the financial clout needed to carry such leases, the storeowners held fire sales to get red of remaining merchandise, said their goodbyes and left forever.

A poignant reminder of times past takes place in South Park on the first Saturday of each June when hundreds of former residents return for a daylong party. Armed with huge, gleaming boom boxes and dangerously delicious slabs of barbeque ribs, they spend the day eating, reminiscing and casting wistful, sidelong glances at former residences. Many of those who participate in the affair are working-class blacks. South Park used to be their turf. But this is no longer the case. As a matter of fact, excepting homeless people, there are very few black residents in the neighborhood these days.

The same is true of working-class people of every race and ethnicity. The vast majority of the working-class and poor people who resided in the neighborhood for almost a century were run out of the neighborhood by rising rents, dwindling job prospects and, according to many of them, landlords who refused to rent to them any longer. South Park’s former residents are represented these days by the sad, downtrodden coterie of alcoholics and homeless people who congregate most days on benches at the far west end. They coexist precariously with the new residents, who tend to be upscale professionals.

The older buildings that used to house the neighborhood’s working-class residents are being renovated or torn down. They are being replaced with chic restaurants, art galleries, elegant boutiques, more expensive lofts and high rise buildings with top end units that routinely sell for more than a million dollars.

These days on Saturday mornings the neighborhood’s streets tend to be dominated by well-toned joggers, expensive women walking pedigreed dogs, and crowds of suburbanites on their way to participate in witnessing rituals at the baseball stadium, which is located approximately one and a half blocks from South park. As is the case in much of the rest of San Francisco, rich people have taken near total control of the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, many of them have brought class-oriented prejudices with them. Unused to living in close proximity with people unlike themselves, far too many of the wealthy, new residents are intent on driving out the last remnants of the neighborhood’s working-class and poor people. Planning and coordination for the gentrification regime is being accomplished via regular meetings with city officials, who are being urged to rid the neighborhood of people perceived to be unpleasant, destitute losers who undermine property values.

Here in the United States, mainstream spokespersons at the local and national levels typically support class-based cleansing of traditional neighborhoods inhabited by poor and homeless people. Fortunately, mainstream U.S. opinion is not the last word where human suffering of the sort underway in and around San Francisco’s South Park is concerned. For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights holds that housing is a basic human right. That being the case, the gentrification-on-steroids process currently underway in my neighborhood, and many others here in San Francisco, is a form of cruel abuse that may eventually be recognized as a prosecutable human rights crime.