Here’s how it went: Two square miles in the southern part of the city were home to the San Francisco Mission in the early days, the late 18th century. The Native American population was decimated by the measles and high stillbirth rates brought on by syphilis, carried from Mexico and Spain in the bodies of soldiers and missionaries. By 1842, there were only eight Ohlone Indians living at the Mission; eight of the original several thousand who were present at the Mission’s founding. Just a few years earlier, the Mexican government had decommissioned the whole project, and the area, sunny and temperate in a stronghold of fog, thrived. A few Franciscans stayed behind when the Mission project ended, but they mostly went back to Mexico or Spain. Wealthy families whose names still hang on our street signs—Valencia, Guerrero, Noé—built large ranches and a wooden-plank road to connect them. Irish and German settlers made the Mission District their home during waves of immigration at the turn of the century, but eventually left for the more family-friendly (and less expensive) neighborhoods of the Sunset and Richmond districts to the west.
In 1910, after the Mexican Revolution, a wave of immigrants moved northward to settle in Los Angeles, California’s Central Valley, and San Francisco. Job openings at shipyards in San Francisco during World War II brought an influx of Mexicans north again, and Guatemalans, Salvadoreans, and other Central Americans followed shortly after. The Mission District was an industrial hub, replete with garment shops, factories, and dockyards in constant need of labor. Hispanic culture, though displaced from its point of origin, flourished in the Mission District’s restaurants, music venues, and arts scene.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMission_Dolores_(Mission_District).JPG)
In the late 1990s, with the rise of the Internet and the birth of the dot-com industry, the Mission District became the hottest place in San Francisco for young, wealthy, mostly white tech workers. The area was close to the freeway—necessary for those who alternated between their company’s city offices and Peninsula headquarters—and real estate was cheap and plentiful enough that the area was ready for new tenants. They came from all over the world to code for IBM, to design for Apple, to inhale the electric air of Silicon Valley in the ‘90s. They settled the Mission District in droves, taking over its cafes and nightlife. Its daylife, too, for that matter, became more and more white and less and less Hispanic. When a real estate investor bought a building at 17th and Harrison in 1998, the city-commissioned mural that decorated one side of the building was whitewashed. Red and orange and green, the mural was one of the only abstract pieces in a city covered in representational art. “A mural is just a big painting. It can be nonrepresentational and still be meaningful,” said the artist, Jesus “Chuy” Campusano. It was whitewashed so the building’s new tenants, an online gaming company, could advertise.
Proposition 227, passed the same year, required all public school education in California to be conducted in English. Work-live loft spaces proliferated in the Mission—great news for recent college grads with funding for their start-ups; a sign of further adversity for people with traditional jobs that took them out of the house for work and didn’t pay enough for a brand-new condo.
The trend has continued. Dot-com bubble-burst notwithstanding, the Mission has only become less diverse since the late ‘90s. Rising rent and real estate prices have driven longtime residents out of their homes and neighborhoods and further south, to the Bayview, or east, to Oakland, or inland hundreds of miles to Modesto, Bakersfield, and Stockton. The culturally Hispanic Mission District remains, but it is being edged out by restaurants selling fifteen-dollar craft cocktails and yoga studios advertising inner peace in just 60 minutes a day.
The Mission District is San Francisco’s oldest neighborhood, founded in 1776 with the completion of La Misión de Nuestro Padre San Francisco de Así—The Mission of our Father Saint Francis of Assisi. The building is known now by its nickname, Mission Dolores, because the space for the mission was selected on the Friday of Sorrows, “sorrows” being “dolores” in Spanish, from the verb doler. To cause pain. I’m not sure how to inhabit this place, although I navigate its pain like a passenger on a gondola navigates Venice’s canals. I am part of the reason for its pain, and I don’t know what to do about it.
When we were first married, Zack and I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment near downtown Palo Alto, twenty-five miles south of San Francisco. The price was excellent for the neighborhood—at $1450 a month, far below the town’s average one-bedroom rental price—and when a Silicon Valley real estate investor bought the building from the retired woman in France who owned it, we knew we were in for a rent increase. Our neighbors moved out one by one, taking with them the cherry tomato planters and laundry racks we had come to think of as communal property. The bougainvillea crisped on the vine as fall came, and we had to concede that it was time to go.
The new owner of our building had been in place for a month when I took Zack out to dinner at The Creamery. The Creamery is an upscale diner—they serve a fried chicken salad, breakfast all day, and, for $195, the Bubbly Burger. It’s a hamburger with a bottle of Dom Perignon. We walked there from our apartment in Palo Alto, the place we had lived for the last two years, just three blocks away from the action on University Avenue. On the way to the Creamery, we passed all my regular haunts: Coupa Cafe for writing, Be Yoga for yoga-ing, The Patio for cheap drinks. The Creamery wasn’t one of our regular restaurants, but they had catered our wedding and so we were fond of the people who worked there and their California comfort food and their intimate knowledge of they Bay Area clientele who would absolutely pay $195 for the sheer novelty of pairing a bottle of Dom with a hamburger.
Before we got married, Zack lived with two of his best friends in San Francisco. His mom grew up in San Francisco, and his grandparents still live there, so he spent plenty of spring breaks and summer vacations in the city as a child. He wanted us to live in San Francisco when we got married, but the rents were outrageous and, besides all that, I had never thought of myself as a city person.
But that night, I sat across from Zack in the booth at the Creamery and said, “Let’s move to San Francisco.” I had recently quit my job to do freelance work and attend graduate school. Zack’s company was opening a sales office in the city. It made sense to move then, if we were ever going to. Why not, I told myself, pretending I was game. Zack wanted to move so badly, and there were things about San Francisco I didn’t despise. We weren’t so tethered to Palo Alto by our jobs, then, but other things remained and gave me pause. Where would we make new friends in San Francisco? How would we park our cars? Could we fall asleep if we lived on a busy street, with cars and ambulances driving by? The answers came later, after we moved–we made new friends at our new church, and we saw the dozens of friends we had who already lived there. We got rid of one car and parked the other in front of our landlord’s garage, which guaranteed us a parking spot in front of our apartment most of the time. We sleep with a fan on. I wear earplugs and still wake up sometimes in the middle of the night. It works.
Initially, we said we would not pay more than $1900 for an apartment. That seemed beyond reasonable to me until, after hours of scouring Craigslist, we realized we would have to reach deeper into our pockets. A studio apartment in the furthest reaches of the city could run $2000 per month or more. We recalibrated. We could afford it because my husband happened to be working at a good job in a growing industry at the right time.
It was a warm afternoon in November—one of San Francisco’s two sunny months, the other one being October—that I came to 3667 24th Street, near the intersection with Dolores Street. I walked a ways uphill from my parked car to a gate and rang the doorbell marked #2-SOBELL. A man with Albert Einstein hair buzzed me in, and I followed him up two sets of stairs, past a dog with two matching head indentations like you see on a dropped soup can, and into the apartment on the right at the top of the landing.
“It’s small,” the landlord said. His name was Mark, and a perfunctory Google search later in the day revealed that his father, Morton Sobell, had been a Russian spy. Jailed with the Rosenbergs three years before the “queer, sultry summer” they were executed, he escaped a death sentence and spent thirteen years of the seventeen he served on Alcatraz. All of this information made me much more inclined toward moving into this small second-floor apartment in the hopes that Mark would tell long stories about his growing-up years or drop hints about the trauma he’d endured when his family was kidnapped by armed men and his father turned over to the FBI, as Morton’s Wikipedia page told me.
We moved on a rainy day in two weeks later, carrying what seemed like an endless number of boxes and suitcases up the two flights of stairs into our new home. Some friends came over to help us unpack and arrange the furniture. Our apartment, perched on the eastern edge of the Mission District, was small but had an expansive view of the city’s skyline. I wanted the couch arranged so that it faced the window.
“Wouldn’t it look better if we put the couch against the window?” Zack asked. “If we have it facing the window, we’ll walk into the back of the couch every time we leave the kitchen.”
He was right. The couch made no sense where I had it, and the back of the couch was totally exposed to the kitchen, and it looked weird and naked, and if we moved the couch against the window and you sat on it just right, you could still see the skyline, which by now was turning dark and dotted with lights. The Bay Bridge stretched out like a necklace on the water toward Oakland, and cars thunked down the hill outside.
I sighed. We moved the couch, our friends popped champagne, and I smiled. We were home. Zack pulled me close, kissed the top of my head. It felt good.
The location was perfect: on the sunny side of town, near restaurants and coffee shops, and three blocks from the BART and bus stations at 24th and Mission. It is maybe 500 square feet, which feels like just enough space for two people and a small dog. The rent is $2500 a month. The north-facing walls both have giant bay windows that look onto the San Francisco skyline where the buildings crowd so close together it looks like they are telling secrets, and the church spires a few blocks away find an echo in the pyramid-shaped top of the Transamerica building.
The Mission district is on the far eastern side of San Francisco, tucked in from the Bay just enough to avoid offshore breezes. Its position east of Twin Peaks in the central part of town means that it is sunny and warm, one of the best of San Francisco’s microclimates. Mission and Valencia Streets hold block after block of dive bars, coffee shops, restaurants, and closet-sized music venues. Dolores Park, two blocks south of the Mission, offers unparalleled views of the city and an easy place to smoke pot in peace at any hour of the day. It is an idyll for a certain kind of twenty-something.
The sun leaves the city’s skyline around 5:30pm in the winter, and this day I had spent writing in the apartment. Artie, too, had been cooped up in his kennel for the last few hours so that I could write without him jumping into my lap, licking my face, or barking when the landlord walked up the stairs. I put his leash on and we walked out the gate, past the spot on Fair Oaks where we usually turn and down 24th Street toward Mission, where we would wait for Zack to get off BART. When I walk to BART, this is what I pass, in order:
- Fiore, an Italian restaurant with a great happy hour and heavy wooden tables. They take reservations.
- A tall house painted purple, with pink, gold, and teal trim.
- Papalote, a Mexican-ish restaurant that boasts a burrito featured on Bobby Flay’s TV show on The Food Network
- Bethel Christian Church, a squat glass building with several peaks for a ceiling and a big poster that says “GOD Questions?” and “It’s about relationship, NOT religion.”
- The San Francisco Public Library, Mission Branch, with its flower garden and children’s reading room at street level
- Bartlett Market & Liquors, whose sandwich board boasts a selection of fine wines and calling cards to Guatemala, with a small Guatemalan flag above
- A new pizza place, Rustic, that sells twenty-dollar artisanal pizzas and is in the process of obtaining a permit from the city that would let them build a bocce ball court
- In quick succession, La Mejor Panaderia, a Mexican bakery with the most heavenly smells; Herrera Escobar Service, a storefront that advertises “Bodas Civiles, Migracion, Traducciones, Income Taxes, Divorcios,”; and the now-shuttered Café Venice, offering Coffee Espresso Sandwiches and More! on its green awning.
- The southwestern entrance to the 24th Street BART station, shrouded in construction dust
- A Chinese food and donut emporium
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, which is how I explain my aversion to public transportation to anyone who asks. Unless you live in downtown L.A., which is really just a mess of commercial buildings and the Disneyland version of an old Mexican town, Olvera Street, you drive everywhere you go. Walking is impossible because it would require that things be in walking distance of each other. Freeways are plentiful in Los Angeles, and the veins of the city are the 60, the 5, the 210, the 101, crisscrossing endless surface streets and dried-up riverbeds until the L.A. Metro system is a crumbling afterthought. Where parking and flat surfaces for new streets abound, who needs public transportation? That’s not a rhetorical question. There are people in Los Angeles who need public transportation. I wasn’t one of them. My earliest childhood memories are of falling asleep after church on Sunday evenings in the backseat of the car, feigning sleep even after we had pulled into the driveway as my dad scooped me out of my car seat and tucked me into bed.
Before moving to San Francisco, I had extensive experience with its public transportation. I worked for a time for a publishing company in the Financial District, and every day I drove from Menlo Park, thirty miles south of the city, up the 280 freeway and into the Mission District. Zack, who was living in the city, worked at the corner of 18th and Folsom, and I would meet him near his office so that he could park the car there, where street parking was plentiful. Then I would walk down the stairs at the 16th-street BART station.
The 16th-street BART station would disenchant even the most ardent fan of public transportation. It smells strongly of piss and marijuana, an unlovely one-two punch at any hour of the day but all the worse for being drawn out by the bright morning sun. There is a website that tracks criminal activity in San Francisco, and marks its searchable map with images that correspond to specific crimes—a clenched fist for assault; a masked man in a black hat for burglary; four-headed flames for arson. The intersection of 16th and Mission, where the BART station is located, is covered in fists and red targets. The targets indicate shootings. There are some blue question marks, too, for “other.”
It didn’t take long to notice that most people who looked like me—young and white—had ways of being present on BART that involved being mentally present elsewhere. Our white headphones attached to our iPhones gave us access to worlds of music and audiobooks, worlds away from the scratchy fabric seats and quiet Spanish conversations.
When I walked down those stairs to the 16th Street BART station, passing women selling flowers and stepping over shards of McDonald’s french fries, I noticed how white I was in a sea of people who were much more brown. My family is Swedish, although for all anyone knows I could be Irish or Dutch or Scottish, could be from anywhere whose provenance allows pale skin and copper hair. I knew I didn’t fit in at the 16th Street BART, but I did fit in when I exited at the Embarcadero station to walk the three blocks to my publishing job. I fit in with the hordes of young women adjusting the Ann Taylor blouses and Anthropologie skirts we had splurged on over the weekend. I fit in with the people who took their lunch breaks at Focaccia, a gourmet sandwich store with lines out the door, or snuck out to Peet’s coffee for an afternoon pick-me-up. Those people, the people who look like me and spend their disposable income like me and work in tall buildings like me—those were my people. The Mission District in those days was nothing more than a parking spot to me; the whole neighborhood reduced to where I met Zack to hand off my car and how quickly I could descend the stairs to the underground station.
We live here now, of course, a fact I have to remind myself of periodically. Even our church is part of this old-new Mission tension. We meet at the Iglesia Presbiteriana De La Misión on 23rd Street, in between Mission and Capp Streets. It’s a ten-minute walk from our house on the Sunday mornings we are in town—down 24th, left on Fair Oaks, right on 23rd, cross Mission, and there you are. It was built in 1892, a gray shingled building in the Romanesque style, an architectural aesthetic as different from that of the Mission as the East Coast is from the West. The building looks like it belongs in Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard.
Inside the building, the sanctuary is feels too formal for us, filling heavy wooden pews only to half their capacity, guitar music echoing across the arched ceiling. The carpet is the color of communion wine, and the wall behind the stage is trimmed in blue and pink paint, as if someone told them to decorate for Jesus’s return and they weren’t sure whether he would return as a boy or a girl. The denomination came close to having to sell that property. The monthly rent our church pays closed their financial gap enough to keep it. It’s a great arrangement in many ways, and it benefits both parties. Our pastors are friends. They pray together and walk the neighborhood together. I wonder if that means I should just stop worrying about whether we belong in this neighborhood; this white and Asian church in the Latino Mission. When the pastors walk the streets together to pray for peace, I understand that maybe my worries about who belongs where don’t matter so much.
The 49 bus runs up and down Mission Street in San Francisco until it curves at Van Ness, an elbow of an intersection that marks the end of the Mission District and the beginning of a neighborhood known as the Civic Center. Some of the city’s fleet has recently been upgraded—these buses are marked by big red letters above the windows that pronounce this bus HYBRID & ENERGY-EFFICIENT—but the 49 still sends decades-old buses barreling down its thoroughfare.
Muni’s buses are gray and red, jointed in the middle by a bellows that separates front from back. The bus’s front doors lead straight into the driver’s cubicle; some open, some guarded by a sheet of Plexiglass. My first time on the 49, I entered through the front doors, conscientious and holding two smooth dollar bills in my hand to give the driver. No one else paid with cash. Passengers tapped their Clipper cards to the scanner next to the coin slot or, more often, entered through the middle doors where payment went unrecorded and unchecked. I got wise and started entering halfway back, noting with a wise smile all the eager young folks who clamored to the front on a Monday morning. I was entering with the regulars.
There were a mother and daughter who often rode the 49. They sat in the back of the bus. Mostly, we are on different timetables, but three times now I have ridden the bus with them, at least in seats near enough to notice. The daughter, in her early twenties, was always on her phone, always with someone from Medicare, always disputing the timeliness of the bills she has or has not paid. Torn between fascination with her conversations and guilt at being fascinated, curiosity won out as I perked up my ears to eavesdrop.
“You didn’t say, on the…uh, on the thing, the sheet, that if the bill was paid late it would result in the funds being late. Seven to ten days! I needed the funds at the beginning of the month.”
“Yes, but I took it to the post office and asked them if it would arrive on time and the woman at the post office assured me that it would. She said there was no way it would be late, because even if it didn’t get there on Saturday it would get there on Monday, and the month started on a Tuesday this month.”
The daughter doesn’t call her mother any variation on “Mom,” but I know they belong together because she occasionally lay her head on her mother’s shoulder while her mother stroked her head and whispered “Hija, hija, hijita,” after the daughter is done with her phone call. I remembered how my dad would scoop me out of the backseat of the car when I was young, and I would ask him to “Stroke your little head, daddy?” I still ask, and he still obliges.
When Zack and I moved to San Francisco and chose the Mission District for our home, we knew we were entering contested territory. An article about the Mission, written for the Los Angeles Times a year before we moved, blared that “Upscale culture and gang violence share a small place.” The gang violence—the Sureños and the Norteños were the two players in the Mission—wasn’t anything new, but the residents were. Between 2001 and 2011, the Latino population in the Mission declined by 20%. We moved from a place where I felt we really belonged—we had a church, had good friends, had a lay of the land—to a place where belonging wasn’t so easy. And I wondered whether we even should belong. I knew the problem didn’t lie solely with us, that there was a larger wave of gentrification and that displacement was a systemic issue. But how much did we really deserve to be there, on 24th Street? Whose family used to live there, even if it was decades ago, that couldn’t afford to stay any longer?
My most recent ride with the mother and daughter was on a gloomy Tuesday morning. I dread walking to the bus station those days, wishing for the convenient protection a car affords from the frizz-inducing humidity and the eight o’clock chill in the air and the smells of other people. I wore a black puffy jacket, jeans and boots, and a hat. It was August, which is another way of saying it was winter in San Francisco.
It was quiet at first, and from 24th Street to 15th I wondered if there would be no phone calls today. But just past the Mission Beach Café, she picked up the phone.
“Hello! I am calling about the late fees I was charged for the bill I paid on the third of the month.”
“No, I paid it on paper. It was a paper bill, with a check, not on the Internet. I don’t even have a computer, so how could I have paid it on the computer?”
“Well, I haven’t been able to pay the bill on time because I have been in the hospital. I have been in and out of the hospital with”—here she paused to slowly enunciate each letter—“MRSA. No one could visit me, my mom had to work, so I couldn’t give my check to anyone because I didn’t have any visitors, you know, to bring my checkbook to me…”
She kept talking, but my mind wandered down another trail. What happens to someone with MRSA—a serious strain of staph infection—when they can’t pay their medical bills? What happens to the people they live with? It is a communicable disease, transmitted when the bacteria contaminate open wounds or other abrasions and resistant to traditional antibiotics. Newer and more expensive antibiotics are required to treat the infection.
“The bill did not state that the payment would take seven to ten business days to process. It’s not—there was nothing on the bill that said how it would take longer to disburse my funds. Is there a manager I can talk to?” The desperation in her voice edged up.
I remember once visiting the doctor on the day I started a new insurance plan. There hadn’t been a moment of gap between the two plans, but because the doctor’s office didn’t have my new information, I received a bill in the mail a few weeks later for $500. It shocked me—not only that I should have to pay so much money for a twenty-minute checkup, but that I had gotten the bill at all. It had always been someone else’s job to intercept this information, someone else’s job to see that it cost $117 to get my blood drawn to test for iron deficiency and $2.50 for two tablets of ibuprofen. It took over an hour on the phone, hold time notwithstanding, to get the bill resolved and back in the hands of the people at Blue Cross.
I didn’t hear how her conversation ended. She was asking for a manager and then she and her mother were talking in rapid-fire Spanish. I recognized a few words—cuenta, the bill; pagar, to pay; yo no sé, I don’t know. The bus gasped to a stop and she walked out behind her mother, the two of them twenty years apart but in the same bodies. A tall balding man waited outside for them, two Styrofoam coffee cups stacked one top of the other in his hand. He joined them as they crossed the street behind the bus, then walked away down O’Farrell.
Zack’s out of town on business. He’s in Seattle. Today is Wednesday, and he’s gone, and our friends who were in town from Boston left at 2 this afternoon to go camping in the redwood trees north of the Golden Gate Bridge. I had my night all planned out, planner that I am: Call Papalote, the Mexican place two blocks east and order my usual, pick it up, take it home, eat, shower, read, watch a documentary in bed and fall asleep on the crest in the middle of the mattress, the place where neither Zack nor I sleep, the place that has not been worn down.
But I took the dog for a walk around 5 and it was so pleasant to be outside, around people, and I had spent the last three hours working on my computer alone at home, on the desk that I painted peacock blue on a whim when we lived in Palo Alto. So I decided to take myself to dinner. I dropped the dog off at home, did some more work on my computer, and then left the house. I was wearing the jeans I wear when I feel like I’ve eaten too much to fit into my normal jeans, a gray T-shirt, a gray sweatshirt from Target, and a black Patagonia vest. My hair was back in a bun, which, despite magazine imperatives to the contrary, will never look “smooth!” or “frizz-free!” because I have thin hair prone to fly away from my skull right around the hairline. The thought of showering and then going to dinner crossed my mind, but it seemed like too much work.
The two blocks down to Papalote are downhill from our house. Sometimes, I wonder if I could lay down on the ground, horizontal, like a sausage, and have someone push me and then I might just roll, roll, down 24th Street, until I neared my destination and put my hands out and picked myself off the ground. This was on my mind as I walked past couples, past schoolgirls out of volleyball practice, past one loud homeless man yelling “THANK YOU!” It took about five minutes to walk to Paplote; I imagine it would take two minutes at most to roll. I may never know.
I chose a table in the back corner of the restaurant, and I took my plastic number “66” to sit with me. The table had three chairs, and I was only one person, but it wasn’t so crowded that I felt bad about sitting there instead of one of the communal tables in the middle. I had ordered a Negra Modelo, which was a stupid decision when there were Modelo Especials in the same fridge, but that thought came too late. Dinner cost $9.77. I had gotten two books in the mail the day before—Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and Witold Rybczynski’s Home: A Short History of an Idea. I brought Jamison with me to dinner, cracked it open, dipped a chip into creamy salsa, sipped from the aluminum-necked bottle. “My job title is medical actor, which means I play sick. I get paid by the hour.” I underlined the second sentence. I checked Facebook on my phone.
The molé tacos are out of this world. I tried to make them once at home, but they were not as delicious by half, so I haven’t tried again. The chicken is so tender, and it is hidden by a small mountain of lettuce and fresh tomatoes and, in my case, avocado. I eat the tacos with a fork and knife, and this time they come with a bunch of jicama at the top, which I think is strange. Jicama reminds me of high school, of my friend Steve’s mom, the only person I can ever remember saying “jicama” in our small corridor of suburban Illinois. I said “shit” in front of Steve’s mom once, when I burned my hand on a pan of brownies, and she never really liked me after that.
After dinner, I go to the convenience store next store. I take $100 out of the ATM, plus a $2.25 fee. I need $85 to pay the cleaning lady tomorrow morning, and I don’t have five dollars, so I go inside the store and buy one bottle of Racer 5 IPA. The top of the bottle says it’s 229 cents, but when I get rung up the man quotes me two dollars and twenty-five cents. I’m buying a beer to make change for my cleaning lady, I think to myself. I am a woman who employs another woman to clean my house when I could really do it if I wanted to, and I am angry at myself about that, and also for not being Leslie Jamison and writing award-winning novels when I’m 26, which was two years ago.
On my walk home, I follow a couple walking a dog. The dog looks like a small goat—black, coarse hair, agile legs. It is not a goat, but for a moment I convince myself that it is, and I want to call my husband and say, Zack! I am walking home behind a goat and I am not a great writer but I am trying! I am not sure who I am, but I am walking behind a goat and isn’t that funny! But it’s just a dog.
The question I am trying to answer for myself is this: Where do I belong?
No, the more immediate question is this: Do I belong here? It’s been a year or so since I started reading more and more about ally-ism, about gentrification and city living and really thinking about what it means to be a good neighbor, to belong. In her book belonging, bell hooks wrote about moving to the city as a child, away from her home in the mountains: “Our move away from that culture into the mainstream world and its values meant that it was white supremacy which shaped and informed the nature of our lives once we were no longer living in the hills.”
We are in the hills now, the city of hills, and it isn’t gentrifying only because of well-off tech-rich people like us, but we’re the main drivers. (That doesn’t even begin to ask the gendered questions I don’t want to ask, questions about Zack being the breadwinner and I the writer, cushioned against any potential blow by his salary, his job security, his stock options.) This is our home now, these 500 square feet of second-story apartment living with hardwood floors and a half-dishwasher. But it is our home only because someone else couldn’t afford it. I suppose that’s the case with a lot of places, but the conversation around real estate in San Francisco is so pervasively heated, so sharply divisive, that I can’t help but think it applies most of all to us.
We live in the heady times before the second technology bubble bursts, or at least plateaus. Three blocks away, I board a bus with a mother and daughter whose life is so different from mine, but our geographies are so similar. The average home price in Noe Valley is $1.2 million, but the average in the Mission is still $942,000. There are very few homes for sale in San Francisco without a “point” in their valuation. The upcoming Twitter IPO—Initial Public Offering—is occasion for a new term: “hyper gentrification.” So many people will become millionaires, at least on paper, with the Twitter IPO that they had to invent a term to describe the effect it will have on the housing market.
Image via Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMission_dolores_sf_1887.jpg)
The California missions were secularized in 1834. Mexico had recently gained independence from Spain, and the missions and presidios had fallen, by and large, into states of disrepair. Since the missions were a Spanish undertaking, the Mexican government was eager to get these dilapidated properties off their ledgers, so they broke up the land the missions were on and sold it or gave it to Franciscan priests. The land around Mission Dolores went mostly to wealthy families, although during his presidency Abraham Lincoln signed an order directing that the mission buildings be returned to the Catholic Church. So Mission Dolores is a church now—there is Mass on Sundays. There is an onsite elementary school.
The mission is at the corner of 16th and Dolores, three blocks west of the BART stop I used to frequent and eight blocks north of our current apartment. It’s not as simple as saying that Zack and I and all the other wealthy tech workers are like the missionaries and the people being displaced are like the Indians. But the outline of the story remains: Someone new moved in; someone the native people didn’t ask for. The native people protested. The native people couldn’t afford, in one way or another, to remain.
It’s a short, squat building with thick walls built of mud from the banks of the Dolores Creek. The Creek dried up a century ago, but the building is still standing. The last time I visited, I was the only person in the museum for ten minutes or so, until a group of school children came in behind me for a tour. I moved out to the cemetery where some of the familiar names from our street signs were etched into plaques and tombstones: Noé, Guerrerro, Valencia. I paused near a mausoleum and listened to the sounds: wind rustling the date palms, kids shushing each other, cars driving just a few feet from where I stood. I still didn’t know where I belonged, but in that moment, that place was as good as any.
 Romney, Lee, “Upscale culture and gang violence share a small space,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), September 21, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/21/local/la-me-mission-district-slayings-20110921.