New York Times 14 December 2000 Artists vs. Dot-Coms: Fighting San Francisco's Gold Rush By BILL HAYES SAN FRANCISCO -- ON the evening of Dec. 2, AK Press, an anarchist book publisher, held an eviction party, an increasingly common occasion here. Four years after moving into an unheated warehouse in the Mission District, it had fallen victim to spiraling rents. "Dress warm," the invitation warned. A few blocks away, on newly fashionable Valencia Street, restaurants offered valet parking. But AK Press's guests -- a mix of graying bohemians and magenta-haired young activists -- arrived mostly by bike or by bus. "We need to live in a neighborhood of political writers, activists and artists," said Craig Gilmore, 50, an AK editor in a waist-length braid and a "Class War!" T-shirt. "Until now, that's been the Mission District. But when our lease is up, our rent will triple, which makes it impossible to stay." When AK Press moved into the warehouse in 1996, the Mission was still a predominantly Latino and working-class neighborhood, dotted with tacquerias and auto- body shops. Today, more than 400 Internet firms are based there and in the adjacent South of Market district, an area which, along with nearby Potrero Hill, has come to be known as Multimedia Gulch. The dot-com gold rush is blamed for introducing Manhattan-style traffic jams and unwanted development into San Francisco's famously picturesque neighborhoods, while skyrocketing rents drive out artists, cultural groups and working-class families. According to the California Association of Realtors, the median price of a single-family home in San Francisco is now $463,990, a 25.9 percent increase since October 1999. Meanwhile, there are 7.5 evictions a day, according to the San Francisco Tenants Union, an advocacy group. During the summer, a citywide coalition of artists, activists and nonprofit groups collected 30,000 signatures, 10,000 more than was required, to place an antidevelopment referendum called Proposition L on the November ballot. While the measure would have actually increased the amount of new office space that could be built in the city, it would have banned such development from the Mission and other largely residential neighborhoods. It would also have closed a loophole that allows Internet companies to occupy and construct "live/work lofts," meant for artists, that are exempt from certain development taxes. Proposition L was defeated by a paper- thin margin of 0.4 percent. A less restrictive slow-growth measure backed by Mayor Willie Brown also failed, leaving San Francisco's current regulations unchanged. Antidevelopment activists staged more than three dozen rallies in the days leading up to the Nov. 7 election. In one of the campaign's more enduring images, a group of demonstrators calling themselves Art Strikes Back smashed a computer with a baseball bat outside city hall. Oddly enough, many supporters of Proposition L work for dot-coms, and their campaign relied heavily on the Internet to organize meetings and reach voters and the news media. Mara Brazer, the president of the San Francisco Partnership, a pro-business nonprofit group, defended the dot-com industry, saying that the slow-growth advocates unfairly vilify an industry that helped pull San Francisco out of a punishing recession in the 1990's and created some 40,000 local jobs. "The Internet industry has become a scapegoat," she said, "partly due to a mythology that's built up about young, latte-swilling, S.U.V.-driving dot-com millionaires." Ms. Brazer predicted that the slowdown in the nation's economy and deflation of the dot-com boom that appear already to be under way will curb city growth. Across the country, dot-com layoffs in November were up 55 percent from October, according to a survey conducted by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a national employment service. The slow-growth movement is particularly ardent in San Francisco, Ms. Brazer said, because of its geography. The city is just 47 square miles, and it is bordered on three sides by water, so there is limited room for growth. "Everybody wants to see the city preserved just as it was when they fell in love with it," she said. Proposition L's defeat does not appear to have ended the movement. Organizers of the measure have been working with sympathetic members of the Board of Supervisors to draft legislation that would accomplish what Proposition L had proposed. "And if that all fails," said Debra Walker, a Mission District painter and co-chairwoman of the "Yes on L" committee, "we're ready to get new signatures and go back as soon as we can on a special election." On the night of AK Press's eviction party, Susan Schwartzenberg, 49, a photographer, stood on its warehouse's back patio, projecting her photographs of demolished neighborhood landmarks and artists' studios on a cement wall. The images illustrated the book "Hollow City" (Verso), written by Rebecca Solnit. Ms. Schwartzenberg has been evicted twice in the last two years. In 1998, she lost her work studio when an Internet firm leased the entire building. Next month, she will vacate her studio at Market and Seventh Streets � "the last vestige of skid row," she calls it. The eight- story building was bought by a Michigan- based real-estate development firm. "The whole flavor of San Francisco is changing so drastically," Ms. Schwartzenberg said. "New condominiums spring up overnight. I remember old bookstores or some curmudgeonly writer who used to live up there and I think: What happened to him? What happened to that bookstore?"
