I attend a talk about housing in the Bay Area. I slip in 25 minutes late because of tech worker traffic and take the last seat in the back. I can’t see because of a pillar in the way, but it doesn’t matter much, there is plenty to look at: the hanging house plants, the exposed pipes on the ceiling, the floor lamps, the red couches, and the rugs. I think the vibe they are going for is chill living room. The man sitting next to me hugs a throw pillow.
The speaker is Kate Hartley, Director of the SF Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development and the moderator is a millennial named Manny. We are in a community space run by Manny. It is called Manny’s. In front of a mostly millennial crowd, they speak about affordability and how outdated policy stands in the way to building market rate and below market rate units. They say things like: it’s a broken system, HUD has failed us, the African American community has dwindled, middle income families have it hard too, homelessness is up 30%. Manny asks how Kate Hartley holds up personally in such a damning field. She says, I don’t sleep, I am worried all the time.
I live 100 paces from a tent encampment but I don’t know anything at all about homelessness. I don’t know how you keep mice and rats and cockroaches out of your tent; I don’t know how you insulate in the winter against the cold; I don’t know how you waterproof for the rain; I don’t know the politics and hierarchies at play within an encampment; I don’t know how to charge a cell phone; I don’t know where you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night or how often you see yourself in the mirror; I don’t know how you wind up living in a tent in the first place and I don’t know how you proceed to stop living in one.
Upon these mysteries, the speakers do not illuminate. To be fair the talk is not about homelessness. It is about affordability. And the people in the room are not homeless. They are equally not tech workers. They are like myself, young and I assume low-paid non-profit types. It is a room of renters in a city where they will never be owners. They are here to learn about why their rent is going up, why do their neighborhoods look so different than when they moved in, why can they not achieve what their parents had?
The Q&A bore out the room’s anxieties: I live in such and such building at the intersection of such and such streets, my landlord is up to this, this, and this, is he pushing me out? A developer started construction next door to me on a 20 unit for recently homeless, how do I make sure I don’t have to step over drug addicts on my walk to the muni? What about the recently incarcerated? What about people who look like me?
This is not a cultural or sociological indictment, it is just a lecture review. 1000 words is 1000 words. In them I posit no historical teleology, no thesis, and no solutions. But neither did this talk. We listen earnestly to a well-meaning and passionate advocate tell us about where we are and a little about how we got here. We position our own stories inside the larger story of an entire city. We wonder how do we make it stop, how do we pause our neighborhoods and our own stories in time, how do we not let what happened in The Mission—where we sit right now—happen to us.
At Manny’s closing question: what can we all do, right here right now, Kate Hartley says to call your representatives, to advocate for more legislation that protects renters, to vote what’s-his-name out of office, and/or otherwise give her office a billion dollars. That elicits laughs if not hope and the audience applauds and heads for the doors.
I follow the exodus outside and watch a pair of millennials with yoga mats running to catch the start of class at the studio next door. I pass a man sleeping on the sidewalk and a young mother cajoling her small daughter to walk and not look in the shop windows. I hunt about for a burrito and then drive over a bridge to my apartment across the street from 100 people living in tents. I walk inside registering that housing is as big and complex an issue as exists in America right now and writing fewer than 1000 words on it is possibly worse than writing nothing at all. But I write not to persuade you of anything, only to understand my own thoughts. And what I came to understand in listening to a talk attended by people who are neither homeowners nor homeless, is that are we to get any closer to keeping people in their homes for as long as they want to live in them, we need more lectures that put the homeless on stage and more coalition building between those at risk of displacement and those already displaced.
But tonight at least I am grateful for a bed and four walls, for a kitchen and a doorbell that doesn’t work, I am grateful for a place to charge my phone and go to the bathroom at night (4 times some nights), and most of all I am grateful that I have no idea what it is like to live in a tent in a city that receives on average 24 inches of rain a year.
July 10, 2019