Mission Mission

This is a comment by reader Lyle Lanley, left on yesterday’s post about gentrification. Enjoy!

I’ve been here since 1993. Nope, doesn’t make me an OG, but it’s a bit of time. Flew in, sight unseen. Stayed in an acquaintance’s basement for a few days, then pored over the Bay Guardian looking for an apartment (there was not only no craigslist, there was barely an internet). I found a room in a Guerrero two-bedroom for $330 a month.

This was when New Dawn occupied the Tokyo Go Go space, Elixir was part of the Jack’s empire, Casanova was an old Vietnam vet daytime bar, and a rice and bean burrito at La Cumbre cost $1.25. Laughing Hyenas at Kilowatt!

You’re probably expecting some things-were-better-then nostalgia to follow, but let me disappoint you. Things are better now. There are better drinks now. There is better coffee. There are breakfast/brunch choices that I wish we had (Boogaloo’s, New Dawn, and crepes used to be the only game in the neighborhood). The food is unbelievable. The only downside to the Mission today is that everything’s a little pricier than I want it to be, but that’s always true, isn’t it? No one has ever thought, “I live in a Golden Age of Prices.”

Something that I have heard weekly, daily, hourly in the past 20 years is howls about the gentrification that has just *ruined* the place. Yes, the folks worried about the Google buses on Guerrero, are not the first to worry about “losing the character of the neighborhood.” People bemoaned gentrification in the mid-90’s, they *really* got up in arms during the dot-com boom soon thereafter, and now, during the app boom (or whatever is driving the current rent increases), we’re hearing the cries again. But I’m not worried about it. Why? Two reasons. First, I don’t consider displacement of *businesses* gentrification. I’ll take a nice restaurant over a grimy donut shop any day, and there’s nothing crucial to the character of the neighborhood about having an “envio dinero” bulletproof plexi kiosk in every single storefront – every third one will be fine. So the economic development of the Mission – from artisanal cheese, to handmade clothing, to custom bikes, to fancy restaurants – doesn’t count as gentrification in my eyes. If it is, well, it’s the good kind.

What counts to me as gentrification is displacement of *people*. And that happens far, far less than the town criers suggest it does. It turns out that Prop. 13 (which caps property taxes) and rent control have done a spectacular job of keeping people in place. The family to the right of my apartment, the woman to my left, two entire buildings across the street – all are full of people who have been there for decades. If they’re renting, they’re renting at a rate they’ve been paying for years, and they can’t be evicted (yes, there are owner move-ins and Ellis Acts, but they are the rare exception, not the rule). If they own, they’re paying a few hundred a year in property tax, as opposed to some folks down the street paying over $10,000.

We have serious structural incentives in place to keep people in place, and they are working. So the folks out back who slaughter a couple chickens on the landing on special occasions aren’t going anywhere. The neighbors with thirty people in the backyard shouting at every punch thrown on the pay-per-view boxing match are settled in. The guy across the street who comes out of his family’s house drunk at 9 a.m., accosting passersby with, “I been here 40 years, born and raised,” will probably do that for another 40, unless his liver gives.

Are there problems with rent increases? Absolutely. Vacancy decontrol lets the apartments that become available shoot up to crazy levels. It’s going to be very difficult for people to come *into* the neighborhood unless they’re rich. I think I saw a $2700 one-bedroom down the street, and no kid fresh from college can rent that out and start working an entry-level job. But that’s true on the Lower East Side, too. The most desirable places are always going to be the most expensive. So there are barriers to entry, but nobody is being “pushed out.”

Demographically, the Mission today looks an awful lot like what it looked like 20 years ago. Economically, Farina employs a lot more people than the dormant bakery there before it (what was that place called?). It may be better than ever here.

Thanks, Lyle!

Okay, I’m prepared for the idea that it might just be me. It usually is just me. Maybe I have an acute sensitivity towards pareidolia. But when I saw the picture of the Bay Area that the astronaut took from space today I immediately recognized what was actually happening: The East Bay, San Francisco and Marin are engaged in an eternal battle for the Golden Gate!

Three great beasts. Here’s the proof:

(Bigger version)

The original photo:

Or maybe they’re all just reaching out to gobble up the doggie biscuits that are Islands Yerba Buena, Treasure, Angel and Alcatraz.

Of course, this is not without precedent, in that I had previously revealed the East Bay Beast.

[Originally via SFist]

Hey all you 4/20 stoners with minimal wave boners, guess what happens tonight? Before Grace Jones butchered it, there was the original Warm Leatherette version by The Normal. Now you can relive the golden age of lo fidelity darkwave jams spanning genres from minimal wave, cold wave, synth punk, post punk, etc. Expect goths-with-good-taste and their friends at the lovely Submission space on Mission & 19th.  Tunes provided by resident wave-ologists Nihar, Justin, Jason P, Dreamweapon, and Riegler. Visuals provided by Subset. Event link here.

If you grow tired of the mix of grease-burned carne asada, urine, exhaust and rotting garbage that hovers in the air under your nostrils as you walk through our fair neighborhood, take a chance on Pearl Street and enjoy a whiff of these big yellow suckers. These things are so smelly! And it’s completely intoxicating. To smell, perchance to dream.

UPDATE: Lizzy tells us they’re also hallucinogenic! Bonus! But! Please don’t cut off your penis!

Turns out The Mission ain’t what it used to be:

San Francisco is a place that offers at least a semblance of social life in the streets and has a mass-transit system that, being at least semi-functional, can get you home even after chasing large doses of MDMA with multiple Irish carbombs, resulting in an uncontrollable throwing up of copious amounts of last nights frozen pizza onto strangers who you had drunkenly mistook for childhood friends. Who doesn’t want to live in a place where you can simply exit your apartment, walk a few blocks, and end up at a bar filled to the brim with a battalion of apparently creative, interesting patrons? Or, at least, so went my daydreams.

As it stands, the reality is much different. Upon exiting BART and walking down the streets of the Mission, it becomes apparent that San Francisco has transformed in ways that I cannot appreciate. Newly Ipe-planked luxury condominiums with fancy, all glass, automatic underground garage doors, and heated post-industrial concrete polished floors, sit adjacent to coffee shops whose patrons sip on $6-7 dollar coffee while they guiltily donate some small, insignificant pittance towards “saving the third world” on their new high-end Mac gadgets.

Read on at Oakland Local. Also here’s what ipe is.

[photo]

At least according to every Facebook and Twitter newsfeed I happened to lay eyes on last night.  Everyone had something to say about the thunder, either regarding how awesome or terrifying it was, but the most striking sentiment came from a friend’s FB post:

It made me realize that in the 6 or 7 years I’ve lived in SF myself as well, I can’t exactly remember experiencing a thunderstorm either.  I guess they just don’t happen here ever?  I could have sworn that they were commonplace when living in Berkeley before that, but perhaps that’s an invented memory too.  At the very least, nature’s sonic performance last night finally gave all the East Coasters and Midwesterners something to be smug about!

[Photo by trophygeek]

Previously:

• It did NOT rain today
• But damn, did it EVER rain last night!

Ariel was pretty happy that it did NOT rain yesterday, as was I since I did not get absolutely soaked on my bike ride home from work like I did the previous evening.  However, is it just me or were any of you woken up at around 4am this morning by the LOUDEST rain storm (sans thunder) that you’ve ever heard?  Seriously, it was a deluge out there–it sounded like there was a waterfall outside of my window!

Please tell me that I’m not crazy.

[Photo by land of entrapment]

At least not where I was. It was mostly supposed to. Nobody’s complaining though. Except dehydrated people/things.

Supposed to rain tomorrow, we may even get a thunderstorm, they say.

Does anyone know any site or app that accurately tracks/predicts the weather in San Francisco’s microclimates? Hyperlocal weather blogs? Neighborhood soothsayers? (weather specific)

As I walked around this evening the sky had a really nice glow to it.

Sally snapped this shot of the view from the 299 Valencia condo development. Get yourself a telescope and you can go ahead and cancel your subscription to Kink.com.

[photo by Sally Kuchar/Curbed SF]

Well, the first major Dolores Park renovation is done, and it just so happens to be the section of the park you’re probably too old to hang out in. This Saturday, check out the ribbon cutting event from 2-4pm.

True to Dolores Park form, there will be a performance with Shredder Hoops, a troupe of scantly-clad women demonstrating their flexibility with flaming hula hoops:

Live music will be provided courtesy of Orange Sherbert, a family-friendly band that writes rap songs about the benefits of eating locally-sourced sustainable seasonal vegetables (no I didn’t just make that up):

Oh, and there’s face painting, if you’re into that. I personally don’t care for it, after the unicorn-whose-head-looked-a-lot-like-a-dick incident of 1986.

[via Dolores Park Works]