Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit

Author:Rebecca Solnit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Wallace Berman, poster for George Herms’ show at the Batman Gallery, 2222 Fillmore Street, San Francisco, 1961. © Estate of Wallace Berman. Courtesy L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, Calif.

Joan Holden of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Coalition on Jobs, Art and Housing told me, “The affordable housing people said, ‘Watch out—you’re creating a bonanza for developers.’”26 Debra Walker, an artist who has lived in a nonprofit-owned artists’ building for fifteen years and participated in housing politics nearly as long, had harsher things to say about the 1988 live/work ordinance: “Artists in City Hall were adamant that they did not want to be defined, so not only did we ask for special housing or special zoning, we refused to be part of any solution for enforcement. It really was the artists who screwed themselves on this, because artists didn’t want to be defined. I don’t think the answer is to take a group of people and make special housing for them. If live/work had to be affordable housing, it would’ve been a lot more successful and it [the regulations] would have been harder to get around. You have got to take speculation out of things like this or you lose. In the mid-1990s, I noticed a lot more lofts going up and I went to look at them and said, these are not for artists…. Shortly thereafter there was this proliferation of lofts and the prices were starting going up and businesses were started to get dislocated, and all of a sudden it was like this wild thing. Mortgage companies started giving residential loans for lofts. Anybody could buy one, so that was really what created the whole building boom, plus there was a need. Multimedia was just starting to come in.” Walker first noticed the loft problem because she paints cityscapes: looking at the city closely led her to recognize its transformation early and take political action.

Live/work spaces have become infamous as cheaply built condominiums at sky-high prices almost no artist can afford. From near downtown to the city’s poorest southern reaches, these angular modernist structures with glaring walls of glass pop up between industrial buildings, old Victorians and other older buildings, directly displacing numerous small businesses. According to the Coalition on Jobs, Art and Housing, “The Planning Department’s own studies show that not protecting industrial areas will cost the City 13,000–27,000 jobs in: production, distribution, auto repair, garment manufacturing, delivery services, printing and moving companies. These jobs must stay in the City to support industries like finance, multimedia, real estate, and tourism. The jobs at stake are stable, low-skill, high-wage jobs essential to a thriving economy.”28 Several hundred jobs already lost can be traced directly to the replacement of workplaces by live/work condos; many other small businesses have been forced to relocate or close because the new neighbors just wanted their neighborhood to look industrial, not be industrial. The newcomer neighbors have objected to longstanding activities ranging from meatpacking plants to a school that funds teaching English to immigrants by holding big dances on weekends.

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