On
Wisconsin Letters
Occasionally On Wisconsin receives letters that
are too long to publish in full. Sarah Town's response
to "Dot-com Survivors" was one such letter. Her full
text, and the other responses to that article, are
included here.
Sarah
Town '96
Brian
Hale '81, MBA'87
Darren Bush '88
The
other night I had this crazy dream. In the background
there were police in riot gear cordoning off the surging
masses; you couldn't really hear what they were saying.
Right smack dab in center foreground was a roller
coaster. It was kind of a generic-looking roller coaster;
maybe its hills were a little taller and steeper than
usual. So like all these people in suits and nice
clothes would get on the roller coaster holding scotches
and martinis, chatting and making business plans.
A minute or so later, they would get off at the other
end, hair windblown and clothes slightly sweaty and
wrinkled. But the weirdest thing was the scene at
the end of the ride, which was swarming with press
and official-looking people flashing photos, patting
everyone on the back, and handing out shiny little
trophies that read, "SURVIVOR."
According
to the mainstream media, the story goes: First came
the boom, then came the bust, then came the "survivors":
the rugged individualists of entrepreneurial spirit
who put their college degrees, personal connections,
and millions of dollars in venture capital to good
use, creating an industry that boomed and busted in
the space of a few years.
But
there is another side to this story: the dot-com boom
trashed San Francisco. Throughout the city, long-term
residents, community-serving local businesses, arts
and cultural organizations, and even charter schools
were displaced by skyrocketing rents and replaced
by dot-coms with inflated budgets. San Francisco's
Mission District, long an important Latino, immigrant,
working class, and artists' community, was particularly
hard-hit.
According
to the San Francisco Rent Board, 1000 Mission District
households were evicted from 1990 to 2000. The Rent
Board's numbers do not include evictions that went
unreported, such as legal or illegal evictions that
went unchallenged; false owner-move-in evictions (OMIs),
where the owners later changed their minds about occupying
the units; and effective evictions through unchallenged
legal or illegal rent increases. The drastic and permanent
increase in market-rate rents made possible by these
evictions has contributed to a severe loss in affordable
housing in the neighborhood and the city.
The
fact that 84 percent of neighborhood residents are
renters contributed to the severe level of displacement
of long-time residents by newly arrived owners. About
half of the 1,000 registered evictions in the Mission
District were through OMIs. Ellis Act evictions -
where property owners remove their units from the
rental market for ten years - increased dramatically
in the late 1990s, from 61 to 881 units per year throughout
the city of San Francisco. Many Ellis Act evictions
were for conversions to condominiums - single housing
units free from rent control. San Francisco's Planning
Department reported that in 1999, while 854 units
of affordable housing were lost under the Ellis Act
alone, only 240 affordable units were built.
Community-serving
non-profits, small businesses, and industrial jobs
were also displaced by a disproportionate increase
in commercial rents and conversions to office and
live/work spaces or lofts in the city's Industrial
Protection Zones (IPZs) - designated to protect lower-priced
industrial land and local blue collar jobs. In a massive
eviction in the heart of the Mission District, Bigstep.com
displaced twenty-six non-profit tenants in the Bayview
Bank building. The San Francisco Planning Commission
allowed thousands of square feet of office space to
be developed in the city's IPZs. Developers and realtors
took advantage of city agencies' lax enforcement of
zoning guidelines, using the live/work loophole to
dodge affordable housing and childcare fees. Companies
like Zephyr Realty then illegally converted live/work
units to house cyber-businesses such as Zing.com and
Sony ImageStation.com.
The
real survival story can be told by any low- to moderate-income
tenant or community organization - the people who
were here before the boom and who remain after the
bust, who held on and fought for what they could and
are now pulling together the scraps - vacant commercial
spaces and luxury lofts where landlords are slowly,
slowly letting go of exorbitant rent expectations
- and rebuilding their community. The dot-com roller
coaster for communities across the San Francisco Bay
area and the country was not an entrepreneurial thrill,
but only the latest crisis to real social and economic
stability, growth, and sustainability.
In
San Francisco's Mission District, community organizations
pulled together and ran a campaign denouncing the
mass displacement of community members and institutions
in the name of free-ranging development and this latest
economic craze. The San Francisco Day Laborer program,
for example, compared their ten-year struggle for
a building to house their program to the ease with
which cyber-serving developers rolled right through
zoning controls to slap up more and more unaffordable
housing and now-empty office space. This work recently
resulted in passing important interim zoning controls
for the neighborhood that will limit any live/work,
office and business services development and promote
affordable housing and community spaces for the next
twelve months. In the meantime, members of the Mission
community will use this hard-won breathing room to
implement a community planning process, establishing
community priorities and long-term controls for development
in the neighborhood - a direct and permanent counter
to the capital-driven development that has trashed
this neighborhood and others across the country.
With
all the media's current fascination with "survivors,"
where are the real survivors? How about just a tiny
corner of the public consciousness, a moment of reflection
devoted to the entire communities that continue to
struggle with the displacement of thousands of long-term
residents - disproportionately elderly, disabled,
and families with children - community-serving businesses,
and community-based organizations in exchange for
the latest ephemeral thrill of the moneyed, entrepreneurial,
and now survivor class? In my book, they are the real
survivors and the heroes of this story. If there is
any stability and sustainability in our communities
and our economy, we have them to thank.
Sarah
Town '96
San Francisco, California
Sarah
Town '96
Brian
Hale '81, MBA'87
Darren Bush '88
On Wisconsin
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