How to Kill a City by Peter Moskowitz

Author:Peter Moskowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

I met Hugo Vargas, a sixteen-year-old who grew up in the Mission, when I was wandering around the neighborhood one day. Hugo was volunteering at a local community center and agreed to show me around. He grabbed his fixed-gear bike and walked me down Mission Street, past the dollar stores and fresh fruit stands and the smattering of hipster-filled coffee places and bars. Hugo told me about his parents: one’s a barista, the other’s a cook, and both work at Blue Bottle Coffee, one of the hippest and most expensive coffee chains in the city. They each make about $45,000 a year, yet Hugo and his family are constantly thinking about leaving the city, maybe for Richmond, about an hour north, maybe for somewhere else even farther afield. The idea that he might have to leave is constantly at the back of Hugo’s mind. As we walked, I wondered how two good salaries could equate to a life of precariousness—until Hugo showed me what $90,000 a year gets you in San Francisco.

We stopped in front of a four-story building and Hugo rang the bell. A security guard let us into what turned out to be SRO, or single-room occupancy, housing—buildings divided into rooms big enough to fit a bed, a dresser, and not much else. San Francisco’s SROs have been a backbone of the city’s housing stock since the gold rush. They’ve housed transient workers, new immigrants, the homeless, and, increasingly, working families. SROs were once much more common throughout the United States—they aren’t exactly ideal affordable housing, but they nonetheless were and are important sources of housing for low-income people. But since the 1970s, more than 1 million SRO units have been demolished across the country. They’ve been replaced mostly by market-rate housing. San Francisco still has some 30,000 SRO units. That’s enough to house about 5 percent of the city’s population. The city has a law requiring any SRO owner who converts a building to market-rate housing to pay a fee to the city to build new affordable housing, but that hasn’t stopped dozens of demolitions.

Hugo’s parents had rented two SRO rooms here, one for themselves and one for Hugo and his younger sister. Hugo showed me his room, which was about twelve by eight feet. His sister was there watching a small TV, holding their little Chihuahua, Novio. Clothes and books were piled everywhere, though the room was not messy—this is just what it looks like when you need to fit the lives of two teenagers into less than 100 square feet. His parents’ room, upstairs, was the same size. They pay $1,900 a month for the two rooms.

Hugo’s living situation was not ideal, but that wasn’t what made him the angriest about the city changing around him. That wasn’t what turned him into a young community activist. In the fall of 2014, Hugo and some friends were playing soccer at a local city-owned field when a group of white men came over and started explaining to

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