October 9, 2002

In this issue

JUST ABOUT EVERYONE I know in San Francisco came here from somewhere else, sometimes for jobs, but mostly because they were fleeing something and seeking something, and San Francisco was the place to end up. When we arrived, we crashed on a friend's couch, or slept in the park, or (in a few cases) got a room in a cheap hotel. Then we looked for shared rentals.

San Francisco was, and is, full of flats and apartments and even houses that three or four or five or six people rent together. People move in; people move out. The original tenants are sometimes long gone, and as new roommates arrive, they barely know the other folks, but eventually it tends to work out, and friendships and communities are built up.

Not all of this is entirely legal (that is, not every landlord knows exactly who is living where and how many there are), but for the most part, it works – and it's one of the only real forms of affordable housing available in one of the world's most expensive cities.

And if Proposition R passes in November, a lot of that housing is going to vanish. Prop. R would allow landlords to turn a lot of those flats (as much as a third of the city's housing stock) into condos, making them available to a few existing tenants wealthy enough to buy them, a lot of speculators looking to make a killing on them, and newcomers who already have enough money to buy property in town.

A lot of current tenants will be displaced – and the next generation of immigrants will be SOL.

Which is exactly what the Committee on Jobs, which is funding Prop. R, wants. This downtown group has been trying since it was formed in 1991 to overturn progressive politics in San Francisco. For a while downtown money did the job, but with district elections of supervisors, money isn't everything in local politics. So now , as Cassi Feldman reports on page 24, the powers that be want to change the demographics of the city – to get rid of all the tenants who tend to vote on the left (and then drive poor people out of town with Proposition N) and then bring in a lot more homeowners, who tend to vote more to the right. Scary.