One
You grew up in one of these five counties: Marin, Santa Clara, Orange, Loudoun or Westchester. You went to a private high school that cost $40,000 a year to attend, yet when you mention it, you emphasize that it “almost bankrupted your parents,” one of whom is an engineer, and the other of whom is a clinical psychologist who has written two best-selling self-help books.
You attended an Ivy League school (or Stanford) and majored in either computer science or business with an emphasis in sustainability. You had no student debt — or if you did, you paid it off within 18 months of graduating. Your first post-college job had a salary of $85,000. You feel somewhat bitter about this fact because one of your acquaintances from your alma mater made $240,000 straight out of college working at Google, and you know you’re smarter than them.
When you first move to San Francisco, you rent a room in a contemporary condo complex across the street from the 4th and King Caltrain station to facilitate an easy commute to Silicon Valley. This room costs $2,200 a month — a steal. Your three housemates, who all have JD degrees, work 90 hours a week, eat only Blue Apron meals and Whole Foods hot-bar boxes, and always leave the granite kitchen counter dirty and covered in IPA empties. After several weeks of arguing over cleanliness, you agree to use an on-demand-maid app. After several years of arguing over cleanliness, you will get your own one-bedroom in Pacific Heights for $3,900/month at age 24. Shortly after your 29th birthday, you will buy a two-bedroom house in Potrero Hill for $1,090,000 and a purebred golden retriever for $3,200. You name her Luca.
You have thought seriously about med school, law school, an MBA or all three. However, you wouldn’t go unless you got into UCSF, Stanford, Haas or Boalt. Hastings would be embarrassing, but you would consider it.
You order your groceries via app. You make restaurant reservations via app. You have your laundry picked up via app. You manage your investments via app. You have casual sex via app. You refill your Xanax prescription via app.
You have thought seriously about med school, law school, an MBA or all three. However, you wouldn’t go unless you got into UCSF, Stanford, Haas or Boalt. Hastings would be embarrassing, but you would consider it.
All your friends are engineers, product managers or consultants. You think seriously and often about founding a start-up and feel a seething envy toward friends who have done so successfully. When you meet a new person, the first thing you ask is what they do for work.
You were an enthusiastic Hillary supporter and think all the world’s problems could be solved if people just listened to each other more and read the op-eds in the Atlantic. You support Black Lives Matter in theory but dislike their tactics. You are utterly certain that you are not racist, even though your friend circle is exclusively white, Asian or hapa.
Despite living in San Francisco for five years, you have never taken Muni — the idea grosses you out. You always Uber or Lyft, although after reading that article about the Uber CEO’s sexism, you try to use Lyft, at least when it’s cheaper. You use seasons as verbs; to that end, you “winter” in Tahoe and “summer” in Carmel. You have had a gym membership continuously since age 16. You have a subscription to Kinfolk, although you don’t really read it and just leave it on the glass coffee table for guests to flip through. In ten years’ time, your life will look virtually indistinguishable from those of the people in the magazine.
When you hear the word “gentrification,” you get upset and feel attacked.
Two
You went to a state school that wasn’t Cal, or a second-tier liberal-arts school — when you mention your alma mater’s name, people generally scratch their heads and ask, “Where’s that again?” Its most famous alumni include one of the foremost gender theorists, a screenwriter for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and an eccentric biologist who invented the green anti-bacterial coating on public-toilet handles.
You have $58,000 in student debt from a number of different loan companies. You have been paying it for eight years, but the principal is still the same. You think student loans are probably a financial ruse and believe that some day Anonymous will hack Sallie Mae and delete everyone’s debt.
At one point, you thought you would someday live in the city, but now you feel horrified at how it’s changed since your youth. You think people who still live in San Francisco are all rich techies, and after walking through the Marina, you feel the need to shower.
Your new housemates include a Hatha yoga teacher, a sociology PhD student, an abortion counselor and a freelance body worker. You are not sure you know what body work is, but you pretend like you do.
You have been living in a co-op in North Berkeley for the past two years, paying $950/month, which was just a little more than you could afford; you shopped at Grocery Outlet (which you call “Gross-Out” for short) instead of Berkeley Bowl to save money. When your house’s landlord — a white, 55-year-old libertarian intactivist—loses his IT job and has to move in with you, you feel irked that you can no longer walk around semi-nude. Everyone else in the house is between 25 and 34 and queer and/or vegan, and voted for Bernie Sanders. You decide it’s time to move.
Moving is a vicious process and takes three to six months. The last time you moved, you had to cycle through three sublets in Richmond, Oakland and Albany. You join every affordable-housing and queer-housing Facebook group you can find and scour them for several hours each day. Finally, you find a shared house in West Oakland with a room opening for $775/month. You beat out 27 other applicants to get it. Your new housemates include a Hatha yoga teacher, a sociology PhD student, an abortion counselor and a freelance body worker. You are not sure you know what body work is, but you pretend like you do.
When they call you to let you know you got the room, you are ecstatic. You suspect that the housemates were won over by your frank discussion of deep ecologist Derrick Jensen’s troubling transphobia and the gluten-free carrot cake you brought to the third interview.
All your friends are teachers, social workers or some kind of nonprofit employee. The younger ones are bike messengers or baristas. The older ones are art therapists.
You feel vaguely uncomfortable about being a gentrifier, but this place in West Oakland is all you can afford. To make up for your guilt, you join several housing-activist groups on Facebook. Two weeks after moving into your new home, your car window gets smashed, though nothing is stolen. You find a guy in East Oakland who can fix it for $175, which is a lot of money but not devastating.
All your friends are teachers, social workers or some kind of nonprofit employee. The younger ones are bike messengers or baristas. The older ones are art therapists. You have acquaintances who work in tech, but you don’t really ever see them and can’t relate to their lives. You are not in a labor union, but you have strong, positive feelings about them. Everyone you know is an artist of some sort. When you meet someone new, the first thing you ask them is what they’d ideally like to be doing.
You don’t have any magazine subscriptions, but you read a lot of Jezebel, ThinkProgress and McSweeney’s. You leech off your parents’ Netflix, HBO GO and New York Times subscriptions.
You had a savings account, but when you moved, you depleted most of it. You take solace in the fact that you could always sell your car — a 2003 Honda Civic — in the event of an emergency. Despite worrying about money constantly, you’ve never actually gone bankrupt, and you know you could always crash with your parents if you had to.
And speaking of parents: Your parents are middle-income, one a public servant and the other a lactation consultant. They inherited $20,000 from a deceased relative when you were three, which enabled them to buy a house in Sacramento, where you grew up. Your parents specifically picked that neighborhood for its good public schools and because they were charmed by the feral chickens that roamed the streets freely.
You will live with housemates until you are 37, at which point you will move, with your partner and your rescue pitbull, to Seattle, Portland or Pittsburgh.
When you hear the word “gentrification,” you feel guilt and anger at once.
Three
You grew up in Oakland, Concord, East San Jose or Bayview—but “back in the day,” you like to emphasize, so no one confuses you for some transplant. You speak two languages. Your mother’s side of the family immigrated here; despite that, her brother still voted for Trump. Everyone else in your family is a socialist.
You went to CSU East Bay or CCSF, but you had to take breaks from school to work and take care of your grandma. Also, your sister got pregnant at 17, so you’ve helped her with childcare periodically.
You think people who pay someone to change their oil are foolish.
You don’t like throwing things out, and you are very good at fixing things, even things that are designed to break or become obsolete. Breaking down a wall or looking under a car’s hood does not scare you. You think people who pay someone to change their oil are foolish.
You love Mac Dre and think Mistah F.A.B. is cool but a bit derivative. You have a burned copy of a Souls of Mischief CD in your dad’s 1995 Mitsubishi, but you really listen to only one song, “93 ’til Infinity.” The song reminds you of cruising around during your teenage years.
When you read an article entitled “The Best Pho in San Jose” or “The Best Burrito in San Francisco,” you feel inexplicably angry. Burritos and pho are not fetish objects for white transplants to Columbus, you think. Besides, you and all of your friends know that it’s all about tacos, and the best ones come from a truck that chills in the parking lot of a King and Story liquor store, whose sole employee will machete a coconut right in front of you and mix the coconut flesh with cayenne and lime in a little sandwich bag and serve it up for $2.50. You know the family that owns the truck, and they frequently hook you up with free quesadillas.
Housing rights are very important to you. Three of your great-aunts were evicted from their Bay Area homes during the past 10 years. You were pretty sure that at least one of these evictions was illegal, but you couldn’t convince your aunt to fight back — she seemed resigned to her fate and moved to Pinole.
You fret over the Bay Area changing sometimes, but you are comforted by the fact that there are still so many O.G.s amidst the transplants. Being a fourth-generation Bay Area resident means something.
When you were going to school, taking care of your grandma and working as a server at the same time, you racked up $5,800 in credit card debt. After months of angry letters, the bill collectors settled with you for $3,638, which you pay in installments. Debt doesn’t bother you much — everyone has it, and besides, it’s just made-up bullshit anyway.
When you meet someone new, you don’t ask where they work, because it’s not important and doesn’t define a person. Work is just what you do to survive.
You live paycheck to paycheck. You dream of moving to Sacramento, where it’s still affordable, as many of your friends have already moved there. Sure, some of your friends have moved to Stockton, but you think Stockton is kinda a shit-hole and just couldn’t do it.
Most of your high school friends either work service jobs or government jobs, or are in the military. Your older friends are nurses, teachers or craftsmen. Your younger friends are clerks, in sales or cadets. When you meet someone new, you don’t ask where they work, because it’s not important and doesn’t define a person. Work is just what you do to survive.
Most of your family and friends are in unions, mostly UAW or SEIU. Your dad worked in sales when you were young, and when you were 22, he took the US Postal Service exam and passed. He was so excited that he bought you a Nintendo Wii with an advance from a Payday Loan store. You chastise him for using Payday Loans — you think they’re hella predatory — but also you fucking love that Wii, so you don’t push him on it.
President Trump terrifies you and everyone in your family (besides your mom’s brother.)
When you hear the word “gentrification,” you feel like you’ve just been shoved.
Though fictionalized, the stories in this article are based on real accounts from Bay Area residents of different socioeconomic classes.
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