Thursday, October 13, 2016

At home in the Mission ...

... where homes are wrenched from their occupants.

Tenants organized by Causa Justa spoke out against a landlord who changed the locks on their long-term home in front of a property management company on Valencia Street yesterday.

Displacement goes on; people fight back.

3 comments:

Hattie said...

Wow. That is so crass! Unbelievable!

Brandon said...

Housing in San Francisco is expensive and getting more so. There are many factors for this. What book or article would give a good overview of this?

janinsanfran said...

Hi Brandon: on one level the problem of SF housing is simple -- too many people with too much money wanting to live in too few units which drives up prices. We are, after all, a peninsula. But in other ways, it is nowhere near that simple.

We ask ourselves, do we want to be a place where ONLY the very well off can live? How about middle class people who keep the city going, like teachers? And who is going to clean the houses and serve the food to all these affluent people who have found their city of dreams here? So all sorts of public policy has accumulated over the years to try to keep a mix of people able to live here.

And then, necessarily, we fight over how to implement it. This is a good article. Not simple, but we don't want to go through what the city did in the 1960s when "redevelopment" amounted to just Black people removal.