There’s the Financial District and industrial SoMa to the east. To the north, up Russian Hill, through Pacific Heights (or “Pac Heights”), to the Marina, wider streets, larger houses, traditionally wealthier areas. In between, there’s Chinatown and North Beach, full of cafés and old Italian restaurants. To the south, the Castro, the Mission, Bernal Heights. To the west, the Western Addition, the Richmond, the Sunset. In the middle, the Fillmore and the Tenderloin. The names of many of these neighborhoods have been shaped by the early history of the city. The Mission was the site of the early Spanish mission; Bernal Heights and Noe Valley were named after family farmsteads and early land grants ceded to the city; Russian Hill was named after a small Russian cemetery discovered there by Gold Rush settlers.
And the great upheavals of the twentieth century that gave the neighborhoods their modern character. North Beach became the home of the Beats, the City Lights bookstore their shrine. The Castro and the Mission, once predominantly Irish neighborhoods, received wave after wave of Latin American immigrants escaping revolution and unrest to the south; these areas later became home to gay and lesbian communities. The western neighborhoods drew an eclectic mix of hippies, Asian, Russian, and African communities, each carving space while integrating into what came before. A black middle class, one of the few in America, drawn after World War II by jobs in shipping and the factories lining the bay, made its home in the Fillmore. Then, when the ports slowed and shipyards like Hunters Point were decommissioned, housing projects like the Bayview grew in their place.
This historical archaeology was preserved for decades, giving many the hope that the cultural map of San Francisco might be carved in its bones. The city grew richer, the city grew poorer, neighborhoods grew more colorful; the city made space for those who arrived. It had a way of absorbing the friction. Recent years have tested that tradition. The tech boom drew a new wave of settlers seeking gold and the chance to be part of building the future. As many as ten thousand new residents arrived in some years, many of them well credentialed, well paid, and far too young to settle down in the suburbs nearby.
And San Francisco ran out of space. In the battle for housing, new won over old. Evictions spiked—leases broken, nuisance claims issued, illegal roommates, obscure legal provisions invoked. More than five thousand evictions since 2010 clustered in working-class neighborhoods like the Mission, the Tenderloin, and the Western Addition. Longtime residents moved as far as Antioch, to Gilroy, to Stockton, commuting sometimes two hours to hold on to the job they had worked their whole lives in San Francisco.
New residents came in such numbers that they spread across the city, terraforming the ecosystem to suit their appetites and threatening to trample the relics of lives that once inhabited the same space. The comforts of life as a hipster techie slowly replaced the individual character of the communities that once defined the city.
SAMI RAHUL
We drive through the Marina in his truck. He points out his favorite buildings as we pass. He grew up in Sacramento and moved here as soon as he could afford it: “San Francisco opens you up. It puts you on the front lines of innovation. I felt that energy here. I felt like I can be a part of something bigger, that connection to the possibilities.” He got a job selling cable door-to-door.
Mind you, I’m still learning the city, the neighborhoods. They give you a lead sheet with a bunch of addresses. People who have cable or people who don’t.
My first territory was Pac Heights. And I didn’t know shit about Pac Heights. I drove out, parked my truck, and started knocking on doors. I quickly noticed, These homes are freaking amazing. These are mansions, mini mansions. But that didn’t deter me. I started knocking on these doors, and I quickly noticed a lot of help was answering—butlers and maids—and I was tripping out. Every once in a while, I stopped and looked at these beautiful views.
One of the names on the list was Jessica McClintock, and that name stuck out to me. I’m like, Jessica McClintock? Where have I heard that name? She’s a wedding-dress designer, a famous wedding dress designer. My wife wanted a Jessica McClintock dress for our wedding.
They have all these little pitches that they teach you—like how you can save money if you add phone service with us. I’m trying to pitch this to Jessica McClintock’s butler, but I’m like, What the hell am I doing? I’m trying to save these billionaires sixteen bucks a month by adding phone service. I got no sales out of Pac Heights. None.
But an old salesman—he was from New York, a classic, strong Brooklyn personality—he schooled me in the game. He took me out to a couple of housing projects. As a child, I had grown up in public housing, but I didn’t think that’s where you got sales. Go where the money’s at, right? But these housing projects—near the Fillmore area, even some down in Sunnydale—if you knocked on doors, people were home. Some of them had $500 cable bills a month. Those were the gold mines. The first day, I got ten sales.
I’m still not a good salesman. I get lost in conversations, and I don’t see the end of the deal. But I’ve learned a lot: in my truck, driving around, knocking on doors, seeing the beautiful architecture and learning those neighborhoods. Or, on foot, seeing different, almost hidden gems. Meeting different people. Understanding the city.
Understanding that in some respects, you turn a block here in San Francisco, you’re in a different little world.
PAUL GILLESPIE
In his rent-controlled apartment looking over Dolores Park, he has a mattress, sheets, a table, some chairs, and a small shelf with books and records, analog only. Outside, through a broken windowpane, San Francisco’s young bask shoulder to shoulder in the early spring sun. Through all the bodies, you can barely see the green of the lawn. He has driven a cab in San Francisco for nearly forty years.
California has always attracted get-rich-quick artists. Starting from the Gold Rush, people come to make a lot of money and leave. Gary Snyder, the poet, once said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home.” Find somewhere to stay put, and really get to be a part of a place, to understand it. Not flit around, exploiting as you go.
I hear kids talking about how they are going to “solve the money problem.” They are going to make a lot, a whole lifetime’s worth of money, and then just kick back. Like Napster and Facebook and everyone that got very, very wealthy, very, very young.
San Francisco used to attract the offbeat, the bohemian, the one who is different, the one who didn’t come here to make money. If you want to make money, you went to New York. If you wanted to become famous, you went to Los Angeles. The people who came to San Francisco were just as smart, maybe smarter, but they didn’t really care that much about money. They cared about being themselves and finding people who were a little offbeat too.
I hitchhiked out here from Michigan, through Montana, down Washington state, down the coast. I woke up one morning next to a hippie girl in a VW bus and came into San Francisco on the back of a pickup truck at four in the morning across the Golden Gate Bridge. That was my first day in California. I’d never had a day like that. And I just fell in love with this city. I fell in love with the diversity.
There was a real community, people who struggled. A lot of people were driving a cab and making films—they had all this free time, they could make art when they wanted. I said to myself, Oh, I want to do that.
At that time, living at Haight and Divisadero, depending on which direction I walked out of my house, there was a different neighborhood. The Castro was in full bloom, the Western Addition was a black neighborhood, the Upper Haight was the old hippie Haight. My little brother came out one time, and he sat in the window looking out at the intersection for like three hours. He was just like, “I can’t believe the kind of people that are just walking around in this street out here.”
The other night, I’m sitting in front of the Kabuki Theater in my hybrid taxi, not spewing. I see these two young women coming out of the theater, and I know what they are doing. They pull out their cell phone, and th
ey call either Uber or Lyft, and they are kind of looking at me. I am sitting there, waiting. They kind of chat amongst themselves thinking, Well, maybe we should . . . But if you cancel an order with Uber or Lyft, they charge you.
So, sure enough, two or three minutes later, up drives this big Chevy Tahoe, Cadillac Escalade, or whatever it was—some enormous vehicle—and these two girls go scurrying off across the street and hop inside.
If you were to interview those girls, sure as shit they’d be, “Global warming! Let’s reduce! Green! We really have to do something! This is our future!” And yet here they are, doing something stupid.
I started to get really interested in clean vehicles after the Kyoto Accords. At that time, I was on the Taxi Commission and thought, Well, okay. I know I’m in this industry that’s burning a lot of gasoline and releasing a lot of carbon. What would it actually mean if I did something in the realm that I was responsible for? What would that actually look like?
The cab companies were buying old, used police cars and then running them into the ground. Willie Brown, the mayor at the time, the one directive that he ever gave me was, “I want these nasty-ass taxis with the springs coming out of the seat replaced.”
So I started to do the calculations: What would it take to beat Kyoto? The goal was a 20 percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2012. I sat down, crunched numbers, looked at some of the new vehicles that were out there, the hybrids, did all the carbon numbers. I realized, If the entire taxi fleet converts to hybrid vehicles, we can pull it off.
That was the moment. I started to ambulate around Dolores Park, thinking, How do I write this law? If I wanted to convert the whole fleet, I had to cover the cost difference between an old used Crown Vic from the SFPD and a new hybrid—about $16,000. So I said, Okay, drivers are going to be paying, like, $20 or $30 less per night on gas with a hybrid, so we let the companies charge the drivers a surcharge each night. Let’s call it $7.50—over the course of three years, that is just about sixteen grand, the cost of the conversion.
The law passed in 2011, and the mandate kicked in in 2012. We reduced our greenhouse gas emission from about one hundred ten thousand tons to about forty thousand tons in three years by converting the whole fleet to hybrid vehicles. And put four or five thousand in each cabdriver’s pockets. So it was a total win, win, win.
I was never really recognized for this except for a handful of articles. The city got awards for it, but by this time, the Taxi Commission was disbanded. I got calls like, “Yeah, Paul, we got this award. You really should have been there.”
I was at one ceremony inaugurating the clean taxi program. In the middle of it, the speaker says, “No, no, no. Wait a minute. I see in the audience Paul Gillespie is here. This group of folks, they might be wonderful, but the program came out of the mind of the man sitting in the back row there, Paul Gillespie, former president of the Taxi Commission.”
It started a revolution around the country. If you go to Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, they are all trying to do what we did.
A cab is an environmental solution—I’ve been saying it since I started driving. It allows people to live without a car, without parking. That’s why I sold my car. I couldn’t find a place to park it in my neighborhood. It was too frustrating.
And the younger generation seems not quite so interested in owning a car—and this is the good part of Uber and Lyft. Young kids don’t want a car, they just want mobility. I want the taxi market to capture that, and it’s kind of frustrating to see these other companies come in and sort of steal it.
People talk about Uber being so high tech and so progressive, and I’m like, “Man, I have been doing this shit for fifteen years.” We were the first to accept credit cards, GPS-based dispatch, workers’ comp insurance for drivers. Then, the things I advocate for—clean vehicles, the greenhouse gas reduction mandate—they are all being undermined by Uber and Lyft, which don’t do any of those things. They don’t have any mandate for clean vehicles, they don’t serve wheelchair people or paratransit. Their drivers obviously don’t have workers’ comp. In fact, it’s a nightmare for their drivers. I mean, what if some drunk smashes into you?
I had a woman tell me, “It’s just my generation. We’re just so used to pulling out our phone and using it for everything. Uber and Lyft just made it so easy.” But the taxi apps do the same thing. We just don’t store your credit card information and sell it to third parties, telling them where you are going, where you live, where you’re going to eat dinner.
The past five years have been hyper in terms of change. And this is ground zero. Now when I go down the street in the Mission here, pretty much everybody looks about the same now. Everybody is young, everybody is white, everybody is in their twenties, everybody is looking at their cell phone. There used to be lesbian bars and weird Indian spice shops and stuff like that. Now, it’s like $15 oysters. The clubs are closing, Café du Nord closed, Yoshi’s closed. People don’t go see live music anymore—that’s kind of depressing.
I don’t want to go back to the time when there were gangs roaming up and down Nineteenth Street and fifteen different guys selling weed in the park. That was really about all there was in the ’90s, but we have to find some kind of balance.
I moved in here, it was $400 a month in ’83. Now, I pay $750 and God knows what my guy next door, who just moved in, pays. He is probably paying $2,000 at least for a studio in this neighborhood with a view of the park—maybe more.
He works at a tech company, takes the Google bus on the corner. He sets out his laundry, somebody comes and does his laundry for him. You look down the corner and see the brown people and the poor people waiting for the community bus, and you see this kid waiting for the Google bus. Funny, it is environmentally sound, but it is just the symbolism. That is where we are headed: a whole class of people living a seamless or frictionless life, and they have a series of people working for them.
So my landlord doesn’t fix my windows. He doesn’t do too much work for me because I am paying $750 a month. But it keeps me in the city. If you are not really focused on making money, there is no place for you in San Francisco—unless you have a rent-controlled apartment or if you have a wealthy boyfriend or girlfriend. Let’s face it, my girlfriend is as poor as I am.
I worry about the soul of the city. And I am really conflicted, because everybody wants a dynamic city and a city where bright young people from around the world want to come. We are the envy of other cities in that sense, but are we big enough? Is the city big enough? Is the Bay Area big enough to accommodate all that energy and all that desire and still keep the regular folks, the teachers, the cops, the firemen, the cabdrivers, the restaurant workers? If they have to live in Hercules or Pinole or some of these far-flung places, what happens to the soul of the city?
Nobody wants to have the economy crash, but on the other hand, what are some of these companies? What is Uber really? Why is this company worth $40 billion? People must be thinking they are going to take over the worldwide taxi industry, plus a healthy chunk of UPS and DHL and the local pizza delivery guy, too. And are they really? Now they are trying to align themselves with Google and the driverless cars, saying, This is going to be our future.
I love reading, I love making love to my girlfriend, I love traveling. I’m single, and I don’t have children or anything like that. I buy books and records and that’s about it. I don’t have a car. I walk three miles to work every day. I take the Muni. I can afford my lifestyle, which is not real highfalutin.
I still go down every morning and plunk my four quarters in the Chronicle box on the corner. If I see a young person reading the newspaper now, on the train, I take a picture. Where is the shared knowledge? What is our common culture? If you are riding the Google bus, and you are looking on your cell phone for stories that are tailored just for you, and at night you are taking an Uber to a nightclub or a restaurant with a lot of other people just like you, where is the interaction with everybody else? Where is the kn
owledge of what other people are thinking or what’s going on in the world?
ELAINE KATZENBERGER
She was working at Bar Vesuvio, before it became “historicized” and the muraled alley outside was renamed as a tribute to Kerouac. She worked there alone in the early mornings, and because there was almost no place else in North Beach open at that hour, she met the neighborhood: poets, old merchant seamen, flamenco dancers, alcoholics on their way to work downtown, taxi drivers having a drink after their shift, and regular folks looking for a good cup of coffee and a little bit of company in those hours before the local cafés opened. And one day a regular offered her a job at a little bookshop across the alley called City Lights. Founded in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet in his own right, the store had become a home to literary souls worldwide. Of her first day at work, she says, “It was like stepping into just the right temperature bath water. A stroke of lightning. It’s been thirty years.”
Today she runs City Lights and oversees its publishing wing, the imprint that first published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl & Other Poems. In the basement of the bookstore, there are shelves upon shelves of books on progressive politics, labor movements, world history, even a graphic-novel treatment of the Communist Manifesto. Above the main floor, up a set of stairs lined with photographs of poets and writers, is an odd-shaped room labeled POETRY. Her office sits behind an unmarked door.
Back in 2013, when we were all being told that books were going to die out and all the bookstores were going to close, we had our sixtieth anniversary. We’d decided to make the celebration an open house, and the place was just roaring packed. I don’t know how many thousands of people came through here that day over the course of four or five hours. We had a few special readings and some party favors on offer, but really it was just about being here. It was amazing, very celebratory. Like you feel when you go to a protest and you’re surrounded by thousands of people and you think, Well, thank God. At least for today, right now, I can feel okay.
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