As a kid growing up in the East Bay, I always regarded San Francisco as a kind of magical place where people would go to find their true selves.
What I didn’t understand as a child is that magic comes at a price — a steep one. San Francisco rents are so out of control that they’ve received national attention for their absurdity. Despite HBO documentaries, dozens of articles in national media outlets and anti-gentrification protests across the city, things haven’t really changed.
Maybe we artists should come to terms with the fact that new money doesn’t want us there.Instead of holding onto what San Francisco was, we need to take the things that made San Francisco great and deprive the city of those things — the same way the tech companies deprive us of a fair cost of living.
The rich may have taken the city, but artists can take the culture and bring it with them anywhere. Instead of living with 10 roommates in a three-bedroom, one-bath Victorian that hasn’t been renovated since 1900, why not rent a Victorian in Vallejo with only two roommates? Instead of dealing with insane landlords who actively try to evict you, why not move to Concord or Hayward or Pittsburg or any of the other cities with a BART station that offers easy access to San Francisco?
The best way to bring the San Francisco bourgeoisie to their knees is to remove all thenovel, artsy things that attracted them to the city in the first place. Stop painting murals in San Francisco — San Francisco doesn’t deserve our creativity! Stop performing in the streets or playing music in the BART stations. Let the tech bros entertain themselves with the mundane coffee shops that their presence has filled the city with. Express yourself creatively elsewhere. Soon enough they’ll get bored of our hilly progressive paradise and be on their way to ruin someone else’s city.
