A few weeks ago, I moved to the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco — the bright-orange yolk at the center of our gentrification-eviction debate — for the second time. This time, instead of being a single artist in a collective house, I moved in with my boyfriend, who owns his apartment. As I walked from BART to my new house, I noticed a handmade poster with the Twitter logo fluttering on it that read, “Invasive Species.” And for the first time, I thought, “That means us.”
I first lived in the Mission 10 years ago. I had holes in all my clothes, a neon-pink studded belt I’d altered with silver rivets and an aimless existence loosely centered on rejecting authority and oppressive systems. With my index fingers, I bang-typed magical-realism stories on my manual typewriter, then Xeroxed them into zines alongside collages with lesbian-feminist messages. Over the next few years, my hair alternated between shaved, Mohawk’d and unevenly cut with children’s scissors.
My rotating housemates included a transgender woman from Iowa, a Goth-chick sex-addict catering server and a dreadlocked anarchist Internet hacker. We spent many Sundays hungover eating brunch at the Mexican restaurant on our corner, speaking in Spanish to the family who ran it. We weren’t Latin American like the families around us, but we tried to respect the neighborhood ecosystem. We felt safe, but two times I was walking with a housemate when someone assaulted her. Arriving home, we’d smell when the crack dealer had just come through. At some point, I couldn’t afford the $450 rent and shared a bed with a housemate. It was 2005. The social media tech boom was still in the womb of San Francisco’s fattening belly.
After a few years, I left San Francisco. When I returned, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $2,900, and people talked of gentrification incessantly. Everyone mourned the disappearance of small businesses and feared they’d have to move to Oakland. People printed stickers that read, “Fuck Mark Zuckerberg,” and spray-painted stencils in front of houses facing eviction. There was a palpable, stifling feeling that artists couldn’t survive here anymore. Or activists. Or immigrants. Or anyone interesting.
Then, within a month of being back, I fell hard. For a Google employee.
On an early date with Tom, we ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and lay in a hilly park, feeling mud seep into our clothes. While we looked up at the shadowy trees, he mentioned his job and asked me if I knew what I was doing. “You mean,” I said, “you want to make sure I’m OK sleeping with the oppressor?”
“Yeah, basically,” he said.
“Well, if I weren’t, I wouldn’t be dating men,” I said, and we laughed. I was sure I wanted to date him and didn’t think of anything else.
I’d never met someone with such a different life who was so similar to me at his core; we were both too sensitive to watch cinematic violence and cried on cloudy days when the world felt emotionally intensified. He texted me poetry on his lunch breaks at Google, and I left him notes scrawled in permanent marker stuck to his dining table. “We are so radically different,” I wrote, “and yet you feel so familiar.” Soon he quit his job at Google to work at a start-up helping diabetes patients.
As we dated, I shifted away from my Luddite attitudes. Tom and his peers were optimistic about the future and felt confident that technology would solve society’s pressing problems. They didn’t fear the social impact of the Twitter/Instagram/Snapchat generation. I adopted some of this optimism, no longer automatically suspicious of technological advances.
Ten years ago, I would have dismissed Tom and his lifestyle. At times, I talked with this old self about my new life: “So we don’t have to worry so much about future droughts because of desalination plants?” she asked. “Is this faith in technology, or have you given up?”
After a year, Tom and I moved in together. He owned a modern apartment in the Mission, 10 blocks from my old place. That family-run Mexican restaurant was gone. I never smelled crack in the neighborhood and didn’t know anyone who’d been assaulted recently, and a room in a collective house easily rented for $1,200/month.
Soon I learned that the rent was tripling at the children’s center where I worked. It would likely shut down, leaving me without a job. The landlords wanted someone in tech to move in. “That’s disgusting,” said one of the parents. “It is,” I said, but thought, “That could be my boyfriend’s company.” His start-up had just moved to an office several blocks away.
While walking along Market Street, Tom told me his ending salary at Google. The sum was so large that I felt nauseated. All of Tom’s close friends were in tech. Talking with them about money sometimes seemed surreal. One friend in tech, who was making upwards of $250,000 a year, announced to us that his friend’s start-up sold for millions. “How does that make you feel?” I’d asked. He said, “Like I’ve been wasting my time.”
On Market Street, I was pierced with the feeling that the city didn’t have room for the rest of us. When the nausea subsided, though, I felt lighter. Tom gave up money for a job he found more meaningful.
One night Tom and I headed to Oakland to see a storytelling show, and I grabbed one of his cloth bags with a tech logo on it. Tom said, “Stuff like that makes me feel like a moving target.” I laughed, but when we boarded BART, I hugged the silkscreened logo close to my belly so it remained hidden. I did the same at the show. The MC yelled, “Who here lives in San Francisco?” We raised our hands, along with a few others, and the MC said, “Fuck you. We’ll see you next year in Oakland.” My cheeks got hot, but as I told Tom, if we were to break up, I’d have to leave San Francisco. I gave up my rent control to be with him.
It’s hard, Tom told me, to be identified as a tech worker by sight. He’s a skinny, young white guy with glasses. He loathes being lumped in with the young, drunk tech bros who swagger around the Mission from bar to bar. Once a friend joked, “Your relationship legitimizes Tom’s existence in this city.”
She said we should start a nonprofit to match rich techies with starving artists. Sponsorship and dating: a tangible way to support the arts in San Francisco.
Cuddling in the living room one night, Tom lamented that I viewed his fancy apartment primarily as an obstacle. It was true. I didn’t want to live in an apartment where I was afraid to spill food on the furniture. All else being equal, I would rather date someone in my class. His voice wavered. “It’s just, I worked really hard to make my home nice, and I’m sad you don’t appreciate it.”
I processed that for a moment, then said, “Tom, I would live with you even if you lived in a dump.”
“I know you would. That’s the thing,” he said and sighed.
I didn’t identify with his fixation on having nice things, and he didn’t understand why I rejected them. My old self asked, “Can I sit on my boyfriend’s $4,000 couch and discuss the injustices of wage labor and social stratification? Can I claim to be an independent woman while on a vacation paid for by him? Can I still feel frustrated at artists being pushed out of the city, when we were complicit in the first wave of gentrification?”
A couple of weeks later, I ran into an old housemate — the woman from Iowa. She’d moved to a different corner of the Mission. After losing her job in arts administration, she learned software engineering. “I wish I’d done it so long ago,” she said, shaking her head. “I tripled my salary … I can’t believe I struggled in the arts for so long.”
I was making a similar wage as I had 10 years ago , teaching toddlers. The pay was meager. Walking home one day, I talked with Tom about ways to make more money. “I’ve been teaching myself some HTML and CSS,” I said, “combining it with graphic design. Maybe I could get paid for it.”
Tom unlocked the gate to our courtyard. “Totally,” he said as I laced my fingers through its steel bars. “It’s funny how tech creeps into everything.”
My life was nothing like when I’d lived in the Mission before. I was still an artist, but my tools had shifted from typewriter to laptop, from etched copper plates to design software. The changes were incremental. I let my hair grow out. My job required a smartphone. I started getting rid of my shirts before they became threadbare. My younger self questioned me about all of this. She resided, stubbornly, in the innermost kernel of my worldview.
But my younger self didn’t have a partner. She didn’t have stability or long-term creative projects. Instead, her ways were rigid, and she constantly rejected the world as it existed. She wasn’t listening, but on one of her CDs, Ani DiFranco sang, “All that steel and stone / are no match for the air, my friend. / What doesn’t bend breaks.” When I look at her now, I barely recognize her.
Tom isn’t how I’d imagined a life partner. We won’t renounce our belongings and move to Morocco and overthrow capitalism. But I’m not dating him for his politics, and I feel less and less the desire to renounce everything.I fell in love with Tom because when we strip away the superficial aspects of our lives down to our naked and writhing souls, they have a secret understanding, a twin shine and sadness.
My old self says, “Tom’s not an artist. He’s not part of your world.” I tell her that Tom and I are both creators. His creative pursuit just happens to be valued more by society and duly compensated. “That system is broken,” my old self says.
It’s true. The system is broken. But it feels far more revolutionary to acknowledge that although the system may shape my economic reality, may shape human oppressions and opportunities, I refuse to let it dictate whom I love.
