New Money Driving Out Working-Class San Franciscans

They are young, successful, fun-loving professionals who like to live in lofts, wear baseball caps and drive sport utility vehicles--and they are scaring the hell out of old-time San Franciscans.

Buoyed by the bullish stock market and the ongoing Silicon Valley boom, yuppies are moving here in droves, looking for the good life. Across the city, the onslaught is raising fears that San Francisco’s last working-class neighborhoods are about to disappear beneath a tidal wave of martini bars and bistros.

The final battleground, some say, is the Mission district, a gritty, heavily Latino neighborhood on the east side of town that until a few years ago made headlines mostly for the drug deals and gang wars going down on its streets.

For all its problems, the Mission, as it is called here, has long been regarded as a vibrant, colorful neighborhood that helped San Francisco preserve its credentials as a multicultural, socioeconomically diverse community.

But three years ago, yuppies discovered the neighborhood--first as a place where a handful of trendy bars and restaurants had opened, then as a spot to buy crumbling Victorians and new lofts at bargain prices.

“It began to get especially cute around 1997,” said Kevin Keating, a Mission resident for 11 years.

“I was sitting in a cafe right in the heart of the Mission and I saw these cell phone types around me wearing those kind of stockbroker shirts like Michael Douglas in ‘Wall Street’--you know, with the white collar and the blue and white stripes? I’m thinking: ‘This is the Mission. It is supposed to be a tough, working-class neighborhood.’ I was appalled.”

The trouble with yuppies, Keating said, “is that they come in and displace working-class and poor people by offering landlords more money.” Since more affluent people have discovered the Mission, he said, “there has been a massive wave of owner move-in evictions.”

In May, police arrested Keating and raided his home, saying they believe he is the founder of the Yuppie Eradication Project, a tiny group of anarchists who began plastering the Mission with posters six months ago, calling on residents to fight the yuppie influx.

Keating was quickly released, and no charges have been filed against him. But police say their investigation continues.

Keating will not say whether he founded the Yuppie Eradication Project or had anything to do with the posters. But he does describe himself as an anarchist dedicated to “eliminating state governments and wage labor.”

Anti-Yuppie Fliers Posted

Depending on whom you talk to, the Yuppie Eradication Project has given either a violent cast or a humorous one to the increasingly urgent, citywide debate over gentrification.

The anti-yuppie fliers named four local bars and restaurants that should be bombed, and urged residents to spray-paint graffiti on lofts and scratch the paint of cars they suspected belonged to yuppies. The fliers were signed: Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist who fought czarism and Bolshevism and killed Russian landlords during the Russian civil war.

No businesses have been blown up in the Mission district, and no landlords have been killed. But police said they do have reports of cars being scratched with keys and loft buildings being spray-painted with slogans such as “Yuppies Go Home.”

Colleen Meharry, owner of commercial property in the district, said she found the fliers “disgusting. They said things like ‘If you want your rent to go down, kill your landlord,’ and ‘Yuppie scum!’ ”

SF Weekly Editor John Mecklin said yuppies flooded his newspaper with complaints about what they saw as its sympathetic coverage of the Yuppie Eradication Project, saying they feel like victims of hate crimes. Two weeks ago, Mecklin retaliated by staging a fake “yuppie support” rally in the Mission district.

It drew 200 people and was covered as an actual event by several local newspapers and television stations. But most of those who turned out for the “rally” were demonstrating against yuppies, shouting slogans such as “Quality In! Yuppies Out!”

Robert Cort Jr. was a specific target of some of the fliers. His parents, who own several San Francisco properties, bought a house in the Mission district in 1996 and transferred ownership to him. After a court fight, he evicted the tenants in 1997 under a city law that allows owners to evict tenants and replace them with family members. Cort has yet to move in, but found his name and address listed in the Yuppie Eradication Project fliers.

“I get graffiti on my house,” Cort said. “If they were saying: ‘Go home gays, blacks or Jews,’ it wouldn’t be tolerated in this city.”

Larry and Tom, a gay couple who bought in the north end of the Mission district in 1996 because it was affordable, said they think the attack on yuppies is ludicrous.

“The people who don’t want the Mission to change don’t want to change their crappy way of life,” said Larry, who declined to give his last name. “They don’t want anyone to upgrade the neighborhood so that they won’t have to upgrade themselves.”

The couple insisted that their neighbors have thanked them for getting the city to put garbage cans on the street, for planting sidewalk trees and telling gangs to move on.

Still, some say the Yuppie Eradication Project has trained a spotlight on a serious problem.

“The project is the far, extreme end of a definite fear about the de-Latinization of the neighborhood,” said Oscar Wolters-Duran, program director of St. John’s Urban Institute in the Mission district. “You have a neighborhood here that is vibrant, affordable, with a very definite cultural identity. Yuppies and gentrification can definitely destroy the cultural cohesion of the neighborhood.”

Silicon Valley Fueling Boom

City officials confirm that San Francisco is in the midst of a housing crisis, created by a population explosion fueled by the Silicon Valley boom and the emergence of the high-paying multimedia industry here. What is happening in the Mission district, they say, is just a dramatic manifestation of the pressures felt all over town.

Between 1991 and 1998, said Amit Ghosh, chief of comprehensive planning for the city, 70,000 people moved into the city, swelling its population to nearly 800,000.

“We never expected this kind of growth,” Ghosh said. “Our vacancy rate is less than 1%.”

For years, San Francisco has had some of the priciest real estate of any major U.S. city. But between 1997 and 1998, the median price for a three-bedroom house rose 16%, from $311,240 to $361,410. It is expected to increase by more than that this year, and there are dramatic accounts in the local press of bidding wars over houses. Rents have also increased dramatically, as has the pace of evictions by owners who say they are moving in.

With most residential neighborhoods built up, developers have turned to areas like the Mission district, with mixed residential-industrial zoning, to build housing.

Lofts that will cost $300,000 to $500,000 are going up just a block away from the corner of Mission and 16th streets, a favorite spot for addicts to hang out and score heroin.

Pablo Zubicaray just opened his upscale Spanish restaurant, Pintxos, on Valencia between 16th and 17th streets, in the north Mission district. Next door is a low-rent residential hotel for the down and out, but across the street is the Slanted Door, an Asian-influenced restaurant where Mick Jagger recently dined.

“I like the ambience,” Zubicaray said. “It is a very cosmopolitan area with people from all different levels of society.”

Voters are so spooked by the threat of gentrification that last November they approved a tightening of city restrictions on owner move-in evictions, prohibiting owners from removing the elderly, disabled or terminally ill. More recently, the Planning Commission imposed a moratorium on the building of lofts in industrial zones.

Low-income housing activists would like to see lofts permanently banned, arguing that they cater to the affluent and are pushing out industry and blue-collar jobs.

Intended to provide low-cost housing alternatives for artists who want to live in their studios, lofts--which can be built only in industrial zones--have become the symbol of how yuppies are moving into every corner of San Francisco.

Loft developers “are bottom feeders,” said Sue Hestor, a low-income housing activist. “They build in some of the strangest places--right up against a scrap metal farm, for instance.”

Once young professionals move in, Hestor said, they do two things--drive up the price of surrounding property and complain about their noisy, smelly neighbors.

Tenant activist Richard Marquez counts himself as one of the victims of gentrification in the Mission district. Having lived in the neighborhood much of his life, Marquez hates how it is changing.

Three years ago, he said, the influx of young professionals became intensely personal for him, when a couple from Silicon Valley bought the house where he and a roommate lived for $900 a month. Marquez and his roommate fought eviction for a year and lost. He has since moved to a studio apartment in a rough building on Mission Street. People have “such a hatred” for the upscale newcomers, Marquez said, “because their philosophy is to look out for themselves. These people stumble over panhandlers and see a sea of color around them. But they are here to party and they could care less.”