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by tommi avicolli mecca

Newsom the gentrifier

MAYOR-ELECT Gavin Newsom and his downtown buddies have a message for poor and working folks: start packing, your days are numbered.

It's a message that's emanated from Newsom and his rich supporters ever since he announced he was running for mayor. First was the attempt to drastically cut down General Assistance checks to homeless people, Care Not Cash, then the anti-panhandling Proposition M, which punishes people for imitating the city's namesake, St. Francis of Assisi.

Now Newsom and company are proposing a bogus solution to the city's housing crisis: the Workforce Housing Initiative on the March 2004 ballot, intended to provide housing for those making 120 percent or more of the area's median income. In other words, according to the San Francisco Business Times (6/30/03), the houses will be for buyers who make upward of $110,000 a year.

That the people who desperately need housing, those making way under this amount, are not included in such a proposal shows Newsom and his cronies don't give a damn about poor or working-class people. This contempt for the have-nots is obvious in everything Newsom does. Even his transition team is devoid of the community activists and the advocates for poor and working people who maintain many of the city's social services. So much for "Together we can."

The Workforce Housing Initiative is not the only way Newsom is going to gentrify the city. He will no doubt continue the Mayor Willie Brown tradition of backing gentrification and displacement, starting with the old shipyard in Bayview-Hunters Point. According to reports in the San Francisco Bay View, not only will the shipyard be developed with new housing but so will many acres of the surrounding area. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Dec. 3 unanimously approved plans to develop 93 acres of the shipyard, along with giving the nod to Lennar Corp. to build housing there.

If this invokes déjà vu, remember it's similar to what the Redevelopment Agency did in the late 1960s in the Fillmore. That redevelopment project resulted in the eviction of thousands of African Americans from what was then a predominantly black neighborhood. When the agency is done with the Bayview, "magnificent structures" will indeed rise out of the ground, as Brown predicted at the Dec. 3 meeting, but they won't be occupied by African Americans. As Bayview activist-writer Marie Harrison wrote Nov. 26, "Once again, neighborhoods are on the chopping block in the name of progress, and low-income Black families are threatened with displacement in the name of profit."

Will Newsom speak out against a plan that could displace more of the city's African American population (down from 14 percent of the city's total population to 6 percent since 1990)? Doubtful – considering that Newsom's already given the nod to the gentrification plans of big landlord Angelo Sangiacomo, long credited with being the inspiration for our rent control laws. It was Sangiacomo's outrageous rent increases in the late 1970s that led the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to put limits on how much rents can be raised. Sangiacomo is demolishing the Trinity Plaza Hotel at Eighth Street and Market in an area eyeballed for redevelopment. He plans to build market-rate housing there, all in an attempt to "revitalize" the area.

But there won't be much left for the low-income tenants who already live there, many of them people of color. Newsom will wave bye-bye as these tenants leave San Francisco and wealthier occupants move into the new luxury apartments.

All of this is set to accomplish the dream of the Chamber of Commerce and downtown San Francisco: change the demographics of San Francisco to create a richer and more politically moderate population, a population that won't question the Democratic machine or the Chamber of Commerce. San Francisco will no longer be as racially diverse or on the cutting edge of arts and social movements, but Newsom's buddies won't care.

They'll be laughing all the way to the bank.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a longtime queer social-justice advocate and writer.