The city, known for its eccentricities and uniquely crafted landscape, has become inhospitable for those who have helped notarized it as such.
The artists who have been responsible for San Francisco’s rich cultural history are being turned away from the city that once welcomed them in favor of high-tech gentrification.
Imagine the halls of San Francisco State’s Creative Arts building, lined with images of famous alumni like Danny Glover and Willie Brown. Accompanied with words of wisdom or snippets about keys to success in many arts-based industries, any student wandering through these halls can easily conclude that, by following their footsteps, walking the same halls that they did in their youth, and chasing a dream with determination and passion, they can potentially end up as successful as their “forefathers”. The dream is big yet attainable in the Creative Arts building, but outside of those double doors and out along 19th Street making their way back home, these same students and artists alike are faced with the crushing reality that the city that is harboring their passion will reject them.
A student takes the M-Muni line that runs all the way from Ingleside to the downtown Embarcadero district, and they get off just a few stops down the road. Just 20 years old and living away from their parents for the first time, they exit the bus to the usual calamity of their neighborhood: sirens blaring, transients loitering. Ingleside, a booming neighborhood that is extremely popular with students due to its proximity to the university and its unusually cheap rent, is home to a variety of residents; this includes life-long residents/natives, students, and those looking for temporary housing in the many sublets that the neighborhood offers.
What “Affordable” Rent Looks Like in SF:
However appealing Ingleside may be to the average San Franciscan from the inside, from the outside looking in, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is almost $2,000. [1] Comparatively, the city’s median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is nearly $4,000, which is more than four times the national average of $940 per month. [2]
What do you get for that price? Houses that were built nearly 100 years ago, rarely updated, and an array of other factors that make living comfortably nearly impossible. The student inhabitants, maxed out on student loans, are barely scraping by to afford their $1,500 shared space in this neighborhood, drops off their school supplies and swaps it out for work attire, preparing to work a full shift at their minimum wage job to subsidize the cost of living in San Francisco. Welcome to “Tech Land”.
The Cause and Effect of Rising Rent and its Effects on Artists
Even working as hard as they do, these students can’t and don’t expect much more leniency upon graduation. Ingleside is one of the last “affordable” niches in the city, but affordable is subjective. For students graduating with degrees in business or in the sciences, there’s much more potential for job security – especially in a climate that is home to some of the largest technology corporations in the world. There is little to no room for artists – and when there is, the niche is competitive.
While the center of the neighborhood is a mere 5 to 6 miles out from the epicenter of the downtown Market/Financial District, the commute between the two can be anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour depending on the time of day. Working full time, and commuting between the two districts in San Francisco will run the average BART rider $1,742 a year, according to the BART fare calculator. [3]
The city’s Mid-Market neighborhood, known for its once-booming artistic landscape, has been wiped clear of culture; most storefronts lie vacant, and businesses that have had a foundation in the city for years are being cleared to make way for either tech companies, businesses that cater to tech workers needs, and desires, and housing designed with these companies employees in mind.
Twitter, Uber, Dolby Laboratories and similarly massive tech conglomerates are able to sustain their businesses in the highly desirable and competitive Mid-Market neighborhood because of a tax incentive that was provided to them via the late Mayor Ed Lee. The tech-friendly mayor’s now infamous “Twitter Tax Break” waived a 1.5 percent payroll tax to encourage tech development in the neighborhood. [14,15]
The late Mayor Ed Lee was notoriously tech friendly. His last campaign for mayor was majority funded by tech investors. The infamous and exorbitant tax break provided to Twitter given their relocation to Mid-Market “spurred the area’s ‘hyper-gentrification,’” according to Progressive Planning by Manissa McCleave Maharawal. The further introduction of the Google busses in the same area increased the desirability of the neighborhood exponentially, with “the price of rental units within walking distance of shuttle bus stops [had] risen up to 20% higher then units beyond walking distance from the stops,” according to Alexandra Goldman, a UC Berkley City Planning graduate student. [7]
And how did tech and its resulting gentrification impact the artists? The San Francisco Arts Commission has launched an ongoing survey in 2018 to try and identify the cause and effect of the loss of artists and art in the city. In a nearly identical study that they produced in 2015, they found that approximately 70 percent of those artists surveyed had suffered some sort of displacement in light of the rising rents. [4]
If it’s not the astronomical rents that are making living in the city impossible for artists, it’s the availability and cost of workspaces, which are necessary for all kinds of artists. The SFAC survey results found, “the average size of workplaces utilized by the artists polled was 500 sq. ft. And though the average monthly cost of rent was reported at $1.75 per sq. ft., some artists were being charged as much as $17.33 per sq. ft.,” according to KQED, which analyzed the study’s findings. [4] When the expense of rent and a workspace when income is unstable or unpredictable is detrimental, and there’s no choice other than to turn away from San Francisco, or turn to the streets.
One of the more noted San Francisco ordinances deterring artists involves overnight parking. The ordinance, passed in 2013 during late Mayor Ed Lee’s term, prohibits overnight parking in designated areas of the city, and specifically targets oversized vehicles that turn out to be mostly RV’s and trailers. While the ordinance pilot papers published by the SFMTA address concerns over those who are “vehicularly housed”, there included no solutions to address these concerns that these individuals would be displaced, or simply relocate and subsequently, overpopulate, other areas of the city. According to the “Oversize Vehicle Overnight Parking Restriction Pilot Evaluation and Recommendations” paper, “the most recent San Francisco Homeless Count and Survey (2013) reported that 13 percent of survey respondents said their “usual place to sleep at night” was a vehicle of some kind, up from 3 percent in the 2011 survey.” [6]
Artist Profiles. Who are the artists of San Francisco?
Taylor Wuthrich
Taylor Wuthrich was that kid roaming the halls of endless possibilities, but two years ago, he was thrust into the San Francisco real-world-art-world. Taylor is a busy man, working a catering job during the day and at a golf course during the weekends. But during the evening, Wuthrich is an artist. He and a few of his fellow class of 2016 alumni ultimately transformed what was a rewarding cabaret, that would perform at the famous Piano Fight in the Tenderloin district, into a theatre troupe. “[My professor] mentioned the importance of finding an ensemble of ‘like minded artists’ – [the] ultimate goal that artists in our field should strive for,” Wuthrich describes. Thus, Troupe Theatre was created. [10]
“The whole thing kind of developed organically,” Wuthrich said. “I wanted to harness the momentum we had found while working together at State, and to create a platform after graduation for my community of young artists.” While the troupe has found some success recently producing “traditional black box theatre”, Wuthrich concedes that producing plays in Troupe Theatre’s infancy has been a challenge. It’s difficult to secure the funding to produce their ventures, but equally as hard just to find rehearsal and performance spaces. These spaces are costly, and especially considering the abundance of competition for them, venues can easily market less than desirable spaces for outrageous prices. [10]
Troupe Theatre most recently partnered with Soundplay Media to produce traditional black box theatre, and hosted the show at the Exit Theatre in the Tenderloin district. The show ran for 2 nights, and put on a total of 3 shows; the cast rehearsed on location for 4 additional days. The “Exit Stage Left”, a 49 seat black box theater, cost the troupe $275 per night, bringing their total cost for performance to $1,650, at the minimum. The production team started a “GoFund Me” crowd fund to support these costs, but came up short by nearly half of their goal. Ticket sales helped to subsidize the cost of renting the performance and rehearsal space, but at $20 per ticket, none of the actors walked away with any monetary compensation for their work. [8]
While the competition is fierce and plentiful, the niche for independent theatre companies within San Francisco is still small comparatively. “The market is very small, which is great for networking but bad for finding work. There are very few who can make a living just doing theatre in the bay, the industry here is so small that it really can’t sustain anyone,” Wuthrich said. [10]
Regina Leon
Regina Leon, a company and staff member of Troupe Theatre, is a native of San Francisco unlike Wuthrich. She has been a resident of the Mission district her entire life, and studying acting by working with various companies since she was 14 years old. She has had both the fortune and misfortune of witnessing the changing landscape and the city’s relationship with art and artists from her backyard.
Artists are drawn to the more “bohemian” areas of the city – or ones whose history supports that lifestyle – but the growing tech presence in these areas leaves these artists forsaken, forcing their further migration to East Bay cities like Berkeley or Oakland. “There’s no way to be just purely an artist here, you have to work as well,” she said. [11]
With regard to her medium, Leon is concerned that theatre is going to have to change drastically to accommodate the “techie” influx. “Tech people are going to want a different way to see theater. That traditional black box theater with just sound, bodies, and light – that might not be as alluring to tech people,” says Leon. [11]
In the current climate of San Francisco, not just in the theatre but in the atmosphere that bred the movement of “woke” individuals (those aware on a hyperconscious level of race issues and relations), Leon isn’t too concerned about her own personal place within the world of San Francisco theatre. Leon is a woman of color – a hot commodity in today’s art world, a world that is typically flooded with trust fund Caucasian youth. “They’re [the industry] not as hungry for a white man or a white woman. In San Francisco, I might have a better chance. But in New York or all these other places, it’s different,” Leon explains. [11]
Leon feels the hostility towards artists everywhere that she goes, even in Ubers. However, as a San Francisco native, she has developed an array of defense mechanisms to ward off these critics. “I tell them what I do, and the first thing they ask is ‘how do you make money?’ That has happened many times to me, so I have to lie and say ‘I’m also thinking about teaching!’ And they’re like ‘oh, okay, that sounds more sustainable’,” Leon said. [11] It’s ironic, considering San Francisco teachers have hardly any more financial stability than artists – teachers for the San Francisco Unified School District make roughly between $50,000 and $60,000 annually – hardly a living wage in the city with the highest cost of living in the country. [9]
Daniela Quintanar
All of the conveniences and incentives provided to tech companies make their overwhelming presence intrusive and unwelcome (to put it lightly) to artists like Daniela Quintanar, a San Francisco native and an artist who works with metal and jewelry, as well as actively pursuing cosmetology. Quintanar holds these tech companies responsible for the rising rents that are displacing many of the artists that just can’t compete for the astronomical rents in the city, and she’s not wrong.
“When I was in beauty school, it wasn’t that bad, which was 2013. Then, I was here for a year, and then I left to go to LA, and then when I came back, it felt like a completely different city. I saw changes being made already when I was visiting back and forth at that time,” said Quintanar, “It’s hard to see that and think there’s going to be a positive change, a change where it’s going to be possible to live here again. I see this city turning into a little happy tech land, and I hate saying that, because that’s not the city that I am proud to be a part of…it’s very hard to be open to the tech industry coming in because we know that the reason rent is so high is because of them.” [12]
Does Quintanar predict a brighter future for her art in San Francisco? That’s one thing she’s very confident about, it’s that San Francisco will continue in this trajectory of hostility towards artists without drastic interference.
“I personally don’t see a change happening for the better, I see it happening for the worse. I think it’s either going to get more expensive. The only way I see it working in artists’ favor once again is if there’s an earthquake. I think everyone’s going to be scared, and they’re going to want to leave. I understand why people want to be here, because it is San Francisco,” said Quintanar.
“Being a San Francisco native, I get why you guys [tech] are here, but at the same time, it’s hard to see that and think there’s going to be a positive change, a change where it’s going to be possible to live here again,” Quintanar said. [12]
Quintanar is holding tech companies accountable for their role in displacing natives, as well as artists, and is actively fighting the apathy that comes with just accepting things for how they are.
Javan Jiles
Like Quintanar, Javan Jiles is a San Francisco native, and an artist pursuing directing and film making currently at San Francisco State University. While Jiles feels equally as jilted as Quintanar, he views things from a business perspective. “There’s such an overwhelming favoritism to fund technology because technology is profitable business. And there’s not a lot of “profit” in art, but that’s the way our city’s [run],” Jiles said. [13]
Technology is a guaranteed profit, whereas art is subjective and its value is subjective depending on the viewer and the artist. Therefore, that lack of a guarantee is driving funding and resources in a different direction. Even big budget films (Jiles mentions Transformers and Marvel movies as examples) are not showcasing an art, but they’re showcasing technology and how far we can go with technology, like editing and special effects, rather than low budget films that are more about the art and the telling of a story. And in that sense, we’re still more geared to fund tech even when we are funding the arts.
These disturbing trends leave the local artists deflated. “It’s [kind of] like a vampire, the whole technology in San Francisco is kind of like a vampire just sucking the purpose out of you that just leaves your body drained,” says Jiles. [13]
Looking into the future…
So what’s next for these artists? For Quintanar, whose struggle with the rising cost in living is something she grapples with everyday? Leon, who’s living comfortably, but knows it’s only a temporary state of being? How about for Wuthrich? How long can he continue to pursue his passions part time only under the cloak of nighttime? What’s left for Jiles here – the scattered remnants of an industry that is ultimately more prone to give his Computer Science-counterpart a position over himself?
Give it five years, and none of these people will exist anymore – at least, not when it comes to their art. They’ll be in New York, or in Los Angeles becoming somebody and showcasing their talents – there won’t even be people like them left in the city. “I wish it was livable, because I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to leave the city I grew up in. I don’t want to be kicked out, but the tech industry is just making it harder and harder for people to stay here. There [is] no other choice but to leave…no choice,” says Quintanar.
“I don’t see a future for me in San Francisco and my art” [12]
“The only way that I can move to a different place, as an artist, is to go to school” [11]
“I cannot pursue what I want to pursue here in San Francisco. If I could, I would…I love this place so much” [13]
“If I really want to make theatre, I should probably move somewhere else” [10]
These sentiments voiced by our artists are painful, but an accurate portrayal of San Francisco’s current hospitability towards artists. Current trends point to the arts scene dying out complete in a city that built its unique reputation on its embrace of the arts. The only sure thing, however, is that nothing is a sure thing and that trends can change. With that being said, these artists will continue to work the day jobs that continue to fuel “Tech Land.”
Annotation:
[1] Average Rents, Rentometer (https://www.rentometer.com/analysis/1-bed/240-orizaba-avenue-san-francisco-california-94112/kSctWnOI5ug)
[2] Average Rents, National and San Francisco (https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rental-data/)
[3] BART Fare Calculator (https://www.bart.gov/tickets/calculator)
Calculations: $6.70 round trip between Ingleside and Civic Center x 5 days a week x 52 weeks in one year.
[4] KQED article re: San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artists Space Need Analysis (http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/Individual-Artists-Space-Need-Analysis_FINAL.pdf)
[5] Salary Finder, for comparison (note: no salaries are available for any of the art careers that were searched) (http://www.careeronestop.org/toolkit/wages/find-salary.aspx?frd=true)
[6] SFMTA Oversize Vehicle Parking Restriction Pilot Evaluation and Recommendations, 2013 (https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2017/12/ov_pilot_evaluation_fall_2013_0.pdf)
[7] Protest of Gentrification and Eviction Technologies in San Francisco by Manissa McCleave Maharawal (http://www.plannersnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/PPM_Sp2014_-Mahawaral.pdf)
[8] The Exit Theatre Rental Information (http://www.theexit.org/rental-info/)
[9] Salary Schedules via SFUSD (http://www.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-staff/contract%20and%20salary%20schedules/2017-18%20Teachers%20Salary%20Schedules.pdf)
[10] Interview with Taylor Wuthrich
[11] Interview with Regina Leon
[12] Interview with Daniela Quintanar
[13] Interview with Javan Jiles
[14] Twitter Tax Break papers (https://www.sfbos.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/bdsupvrs/bosagendas/materials/bag051711_110337.pdf)
[15] Time article for tax break analysis (https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/san-francisco-tech-companies-get-a-tax-break/)
