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HOLLOW CITY
HOLLOW CITY
The Siege of San Francisco and theCrisis of American Urbanism
REBECCA SOLNIT
Text
SUSAN SCHWARTZENBERG
Photographs
The artworks on the following pages are copyright by the artists as indicated: Estate of Wallace Berman, 101; Sam Cherry, 96; Bruce Conner, 95; Jaime Cortez, René Garcia, John Leanos, Gerardo Perez, Monica Praba Pilar, 63; Janet Delaney, 50, 69, 70; Eric Drooker, 19; Connie Hatch, 71, 72, 73; David Johnson, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48; Kate Joyce, 137–39; Ira Nowinski, 56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68; Rigo, 110; San Francisco Print Collective, v, 134, 146; C. J. Snyder, 109; Together We Can Defeat Capitalism, 122, 123, 130.
This paperback edition published by Verso 2018
Paperback edition first published by Verso 2002
First published by Verso 2000
Text © Rebecca Solnit, 2000, 2002, 2018
Images © Susan Schwartzenberg and the individual artists, 2000, 2002, 2018
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
USA: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-134-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-135-5 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-136-2 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress Has Catalogued the Hardback Edition as Follows:
Solnit, Rebecca.
Hollow city : the siege of San Francisco and the crisis of American urbanism / Rebecca Solnit, text;
Susan Schwartzenberg, photographs
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
ISBN 1 85984 363 8 (paper)
1. Gentrification–California–San Francisco. 2. Urban poor–California–San Francisco–Social conditions. 3. Working class–California–San Francisco–Social conditions. 4. San Francisco (Calif.)–Social conditions. 5. San Francisco (Calif.)–Economic conditions. I. Schwartzenberg, Susan. II. Title.
HT177.S38 S65 2001
307.76’09794’61—dc2100-054982
Designed by Steven Hiatt and Susan Schwartzenberg
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Contents
San Francisco, Capital of the Twenty-First Century
The Shopping Cart and the Lexus
Three Photographers and the Transformation of Yerba Buena
A Real Estate History of the Avant-Garde
The Last Barricades
Skid Marks on the Social Contract
Amnesia Is a Club
San Francisco in Chains
Delivered Vacant
Notes
Acknowledgements
dedicated to the artists and activists born in 2000
and
in memory of Frances Solnit Gallegos
East Los Angeles, July 31, 1937–Sonoma County, March 24, 2000
bohemian, saboteur of bulldozers, supplier of books,
excellent aunt
Hollow City was written and published in a rush, and it now depicts a crisis in amber, a portrait of the perils of a boom economy useful to recall even in a bust one. While nearly everyone expected the tech boom to subside, it did so sooner, faster, harder than anticipated, and the global economy followed. But the real estate boom is still with us—prices have slipped slightly, sale and rental real estate stays on the market longer, but prices are still so much higher than they were only a few years before that they have effectively gated San Francisco (and the same conditions are arising or expanding in other cities, from Dublin, Ireland to Chicago, Illinois). The majority of artists and activists survived the last boom, but the circumstances for generating future generations of such activists and artists here look bleak. There’s good news too, though. The boomtime crisis roused the rabble who are more than and more amorphous than “the progressive community,” and they elected the most radical Board of Supervisors in the city’s history. The new supervisors immediately set about implementing some of the best ideas for protecting the city’s economic and cultural diversity, reforming the corrupt planning commission, and otherwise cleaning house, and with that Mayor Willie Brown’s reign was finally challenged.
Sometimes I myself think I was too much of an alarmist when I wrote Hollow City, but it is an accurate picture of the time, when there seemed no end to the loss. And after all, the good news amounts to this: the amputation didn’t take the whole limb; the city limps on. Sometimes I remember how dramatic that loss was when I recall all the many nonprofits that folded for lack of affordable space or cracked under the strain of huge rents and all the people who left. Aaron Noble and Marisa Hernandez (pp. 156–59 and in the photochapter “The Last Barricades”) departed for, respectively, Los Angeles and New York. Eighteen months after his home was threatened, René Yañez (pp. 105,