Robert L. Terrell

The homeless people on my block are being forced to compete with young professionals for midday squatting rites. The young professionals are attracted by a food service business that sells them gourmet coffee and lunch from a waist-high street-side window. Each working day, they pour onto the block and gather in front of the window from whence they acquire food.

After obtaining food, the young professionals spread out along the block in search of spots suitable for sitting in the sun to eat while talking with friends and associates.  Because there are so many of them, they dominate the scene all along the block. Preoccupied with themselves, they seldom interact with those who do not belong to their demographic. These days, there are thousands of them in the neighborhood during work hours.

They are drawn here by high tech jobs associated with the graphic design segments of the computer industries. Many of the firms they work for are relatively new startups. But the foundations of their emergent, critical mass in this South of market San Francisco neighborhood was provided by the printing, photography, engraving and advertising firms which proliferated in this area prior to the emergence of Silicon Valley.

Many of the old firms have gone out of business over the years. But a surprising number of them evolved with the technology such that during the dot com era this section of town was known as “Multimedia Gulch.”  Young professionals constitute the primary work force for the high tech firms that lease the large, red brick warehouses located throughout this neighborhood.

Most of the warehouses were built as storage facilities during the era when San Francisco was an important seaport. The sailing ships and steamers are long gone, including the longshoremen who worked on them. But the buildings they used remain, including the large warehouses formerly used to store cargo.

These days, the beautiful, old warehouses are being transformed into expensive lofts, chic offices, and conspicuously informal, work sites for young professionals with high tech skills. As indicated above, such employees dominate the neighborhood’s public spaces during working hours. I emphasize the fact that their dominance is largely restricted to working hours because few of them can afford to live here.

Nonetheless, they are clearly well paid. And the quiet confidence they uniformly exude confirms their hope–that they will eventually acquire sufficient financial assets to reside in neighborhoods much nicer than this one.  It is, of course, all a gamble. A similarly smart, hip, confident, demographic flowed in and out of the same restaurants, coffee shops, bars a decade or so or ago as members of the dot com phenomenon.

Within a quarter mile radius of this block, they earned and spent hundreds of millions of dollars. Many of those who cashed out smartly before the crash, have moved on to nicer neighborhoods. But many remain, and some of them are the employers of the current crop of young professionals. Those who completely missed the dot com gravy train, deserted this scene long ago.

At the end of the workday, and the young professionals have departed, homeless people reoccupy the few spots along the block where the sun is still shining. Some of them use the respite to organize their incredibly full shopping carts. They are much less chatty than the young professionals, and also less prone to congregate in groups.

Many of the homeless people who gather here use the hours after dark to collect cans and bottles from trash containers and dumpsters. Others cop squats in comfortable spots beside buildings to down a few beers, or smoke a bit of weed.

With the arrival of daylight, they crawl out of their ragged, sleeping bags, scramble from cardboard blankets, and move off in anticipation of the arrival of the young professionals. One wonders what will happen to them when the full force of the gentrification tsunami currently transforming neighborhoods such as this one makes it impossible for them to be here, day or night…