Notes from the Epicenter: Capitalism in the Open Air Asylum

Andrea Dudrow

Those of us living in the Bay Area knew it was bound to happen. As long as there’s been a neighborhood called Multimedia Gulch, we’ve been waiting for it. As long as we’ve been unable to dislodge ourselves from the relative affordability of our rent-controlled apartments, we’ve known it was coming. And when perfectly sane people started fighting over whether it was a good or a bad thing to work for a dot-com, we knew it was almost here. Well, it’s officially happened: San Francisco (along with two other Bay Area counties — Marin and San Mateo) has become the most expensive place to live in the nation.

That’s right, Manhattanites can no longer boast of this particular claim to fame (though they can still gloat over New York’s culturally diverse population and functioning transit system). According to a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, workers in our fair town now have to rake in a whopping $28.06 an hour to afford a standard two-bedroom apartment. This in a state where the minimum wage is $5.75.

Survival of the Geekiest
There’s no doubt about it: San Francisco is a city in crisis, and the crisis is centered around those latest paragons of capitalism, the dot-com’s. Depending on whom you ask, the dot-com’s are either a boon or a bane to San Francisco’s economy. On the plus side, they will have created upwards of 50,000 new jobs in the city by year’s end (according to the nonprofit San Francisco Partnership), many of them high-paying; on the minus side, these venture-capital-backed companies’ ability to pay as much as $65 a square foot for office space (the highest rate in the nation) is pushing artists, musicians, and the urban poor out of town.

It would be easy enough if we could all be divided around whether or not we work for an Internet company. The dot-commers could rally around the promise of the new economy, and the anti-dot-commers could point to the damage done to San Francisco’s diversity. Naturally, it’s not that easy. The dot-com issue is compounded by the huge contingent of digital artists, designers, and musicians who make San Francisco their home — folks who can’t pay the high rents that are now the norm in the city, but who embrace the Internet and Web technology as part of their craft. And, on the other side of the funny-money coin, there are businesses like Bigstep.com, a Web development firm that is renting out space in it’s new Mission District digs to nonprofit organizations at prices lower than the market rate.

Straddling the Fault Line
In fact the lines between what’s good for San Francisco and what’s bad for San Francisco are getting so fuzzy, it’s harder and harder to know which side you’re standing on. In a city that’s built around progressive politics (and is often referred to as an “open air asylum”), it’s hard to abide the pure capitalism of the dot-economy. But it’s also hard to disparage those who want to be pioneers of the digital age — who want to plumb the depths of cyberspace for pleasure, for art, and also for profit. In a historically diverse and bohemian city, art, music, and the great unknown of a new medium should be revered. And in a city at the center of the new economy, that young people can make a comfortable living should be celebrated.

This argument is taking place every day, all over the city. Recently a friend e-mailed me, along with a bunch of other folk, to let us know that his band (along with a host of others recently displaced from their rehearsal studios to make room for, you guessed it, more dot-com office space) would be playing on a neighborhood rooftop to protest the “dot-com invasion.” But wait, replied one of the message recipients, I work for a dot-com. Are you saying I’m the bad guy? The thread continued throughout the day, finally ending in a heartfelt plea for San Franciscans to put their quality of life before the quality of their stock portfolios. You can’t put progress and personal gain before culture, the message admonished.

Pick Your Poison
The same argument is playing itself out in the political arena in the form of two competing propositions on the November ballot meant to limit the amount of office space developed per year in San Francisco. Both propositions, K and L, would reign in the amount of space dot-com businesses could occupy, and both would require new companies to contribute to transit organizations, childcare services, and local charities. Prop L, the stronger of the two, would essentially limit office growth anywhere but the city’s Mission Bay warehouse district. Prop K would substantially slow growth in other parts of the city, but not curtail it altogether. As with other aspects of the dot-com boom, San Francisco residents are divided as to which is the best path for the city to take.

A recent art exhibit entitled “Consumer to Capitalism” at San Francisco’s New Langton Arts Gallery greeted visitors with a sign that exclaimed, “We can defeat capitalism together!” Thank goodness we’re not still in the McCarthy era. But this brings up another point: Is it the responsibility of art to defeat capitalism? Is defeating capitalism the answer? After all, we still have to pay our skyrocketing rents. Would San Francisco really be better off without the dot-economy? Is there a way San Francisco can grow without self-destructing? And, most importantly, will there ever come a time when artists and dot-comers and everyone in between will just get along?

Read more by Andrea Dudrow.