Another long break from blogging… my last post, on the absurdity of rising rents in San Francisco’s “affordable housing,” was written as part of an ongoing organizing effort behind the scenes at various buildings subject to the Mayor’s Office of Housing rules. More to come on that.
Meanwhile, since I wrote in December we watched the final flailing efforts of Trump to promote his imaginary idea of the world beyond his cult following, and fail for good after the surprising January 6 riots at the Capitol. Watching that (later) was weird, because it looked so familiar, but in a bizarro world version—they weren’t anarchists streaming through the halls of Congress, they were ultra-right racists and Trump cultists! A lot of ink has been spilled since the November election and especially since the January 6 riots and ensuing impeachment, most of which I find terribly boring. The endless handwringing by liberals about our sacred institutions being violated seems comical at best. The vitriolic focus on Trump as the cause of it all is also wildly off-base in my opinion… the guy is an inept, failed grifter who has used overt racism and assaults on objective reality to hone his message to his cult following, but that “following” was there all along, and has been seeking a “leader” long before Trump came along to fill the role. I recommend reading “The Trump Inheritance” by Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books for a surprising look at the America First movement (and the weird 2005 tale of Trump’s first planned presidential run as a centrist with Oprah Winfrey as Veep, and a message of unity and racial tolerance!!). In the article O’Toole nails the underlying truth of the “voter fraud” myth: “The concern is not, at heart, that there are bogus votes, but that there are bogus voters, that much of the US is inhabited by people who are, politically speaking, counterfeit citizens,” referring obviously to anyone who is not a white, “real” heartland American… Anyway, I’ll come back to this topic in a later post. I’ve already written quite a bit about racism and the ongoing legacy of slavery and genocide in posts over the past year and a half… and more to come!
A gorgeous old oak tree above the Calaveras reservoir in Alameda County.
The divergent realities we are living in today, with silo-ed bubbles of media and information creating largely unintelligible worlds living side by side, is just a spectacular version of a deeper reality that shapes our assumptions and worldviews. Most of us grow up learning some version of evolution that proposes that humans started as cavemen, eventually becoming skilled hunters (and wiping out all the prehistoric big game as proof of our growing intelligence), later domesticating various animals and developing agriculture which allowed humans to settle in permanent communities. Surpluses were created, monarchies and priesthoods arose with armies to protect them, cities developed, states emerged, and eventually wheels, wagons, trains, and cars came along, then we all got popsicles, pills, and smartphones and isn’t the modern world great?
This simplified timeline of history sounds silly on its face, and of course, it is. Especially when it comes to the received story about California, and the people who lived here for thousands of years and their relationship to nature. We have been propagandized by Franciscan missionaries, Gold Rush-era hucksters, and boosterish historians ever since the beginning of modern California. We’ll dig into that in a moment.
But there’s an even deeper issue to how our sense of the world has developed, how we have come to “know” things. Most of modern sensibility takes it for granted that the plant world, vegetal life, is unconscious, unaware, essentially inert and manipulable by humans. The logic of Christian Dominion comes to mind, where supposedly God gave humans dominion over all other forms of life, which by definition are inferior to and thus necessarily subordinate to humans. But what if that logic has blinded us to the dynamic, interactive, mutualistic forms of life all around us, not just the obvious intelligence we are increasingly aware of among animals, but also among plants?
On a trail above the Russian River in Sonoma County.
In the middle of the economic crisis resulting from the pandemic, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) continues to push up rents in the properties that it controls throughout the City. A mid-pandemic announcement from the MOHCD that the annual Area Median Income would be calibrated to rise by 4% for 2020 puts even more pressure on the many properties acquired in the past decade to preserve low-cost housing.
Zillow recently reported that there was a 31% decline in the asking rent for studios in the City over last year. Zumper reported a 20% drop in the past year for 1-bedroom apartments, and a quick perusal shows that there are now dozens of 2-bedroom apartments for rent in San Francisco below $2550/month.
Rather than prioritizing the stabilization of relatively lower rents in Small Sites properties (owned by the San Francisco Community Land Trust (SFCLT), Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), and other non-profit housing agencies in the City), MOHCD has provided millions of dollars in acquisition and rehabilitation support in exchange for agreements that exempt tenants of these places from the city’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance (commonly known as rent control). The City agency has imposed agreements on the tenants of these subsidized buildings that rents will go up every year a minimum of 2% and a maximum of 3.5%, and for 2019 and 2020, MOHCD has made it clear that they expect rents to rise the maximum of 3.5%. This is more than double what tenants in privately owned properties are experiencing this year, and many savvy residents are taking advantage of the plunging market to renegotiate their rents downward.
The Shipyard at Hunters Point, “affordable” housing?
In 2020 the Covid crisis has led many renters to fall behind in monthly payments, and tenants of SFCLT and MEDA are no exception. In one Mission District SFCLT building, where there is already a deficit of $15,000 in unpaid rent from 2020 due to Covid, the City is insisting that rents be raised by a whopping 5% (insisting that last year’s 2% raise “should have been 3.5%” and thus the “missing” 1.5% is being added to this year’s maximum 3.5% to equal 5%). A 3-unit SFCLT building north of the Panhandle is being hit with the maximum 3.5% after struggling to keep the rent paid this year. A 20-unit Tenderloin SFCLT building where more than 50% of the predominantly Latinx tenants have been unable to pay rent due to Covid, many of them already months in arrears, is having the rents raised by 3.5%.
What is the agenda of the Mayor’s Office of Housing?
Isn’t it the goal of MOHCD to help nonprofit housing groups like the SFCLT and MEDA to remove buildings from the predatory private marketplace forever? Why then, would they pursue a policy of relentless rent increases on the very properties that have been successfully removed from the arbitrary and capricious pressure of the speculative market?
Properties acquired with Small Sites Funding from MOHCD should have their rents set by the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, not an automatic annual increase that only contributes to the inexorable inflation of housing costs. Tenants in these buildings should be able to count on their rents not spiraling upwards, since many are pushing the boundaries of reasonable rent burden already, and further increases will only push them into financial hardship.
San Francisco should use the monies from Proposition I to cover the unpaid rents of all the nonprofit housing agencies in town. After multiple housing initiatives have been passed during the last few years, there are millions of dollars available to preserve and expand existing low-cost housing, and the priority should be to halt the annual rise in rents since by all accounts, San Francisco’s housing costs more than any other city in the country.
The Board of Supervisors should legislate new policies that MOHCD, an executive branch agency answerable only to the Mayor, will have to follow, regarding the permanent stabilization of housing costs in the nonprofit sector. Under the current and recent mayors, MOHCD has pursued a neoliberal housing agenda, that gives support for nonprofit housing while imposing rules that ensure that “affordable” is an increasingly meaningless term. Whether new senior housing that few seniors can afford, or the many new affordable apartments that thousands of potential tenants can no longer qualify for because of Covid-related job losses, the Mayor’s Office has an obligation to arrest and reverse the cost of housing.
Stopping the transfer of wealth from poor to rich through the housing market, whether owned by private interests or publicly supported nonprofits, should be the explicit goal of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. It currently has other priorities, much more in line with the larger dynamics of the market in which it operates. Tenants who thought they were protected from rent increases and evictions thanks to the Small Sites Program are now urgently counting on political action to change the policies, values, and behavior of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, an agency that seems to be more interested in adapting to the dynamics and values of the real estate market than they are in the mission of decommodified housing which should be their primary focus.
Firstly, I’m feeling fine (thanks for asking!). I just started a round of prophylactic immunotherapy infusions to be sure we have killed off all the microscopic cancer cells that may be floating around in me… but the cancer-free diagnosis I got after my October 14 surgery has held up so far, and I’m happy to say my voice is back (28 days later!). I have resumed all my usual activities, including hiking and biking around San Francisco, playing pétanque, and schlepping home 50-70 lbs of groceries every week on my bike. Basically I feel just as normal as I did before surgery, and before diagnosis, except for a very numb half of my left face (from mid-ear to the bottom of my neck) which may last a year or more…
Anyway, my personal history is unfolding in surprising ways this year. All of us are having a weird Covid-warped year, but some are having harder or easier ones than others. All in all, I can’t complain since I have really not been suffering since neither my cancerous tumors nor their treatment have been that bad, and life during Covid is not so different for me than what it was before Covid. Between the loving care I get from Adriana, and the sweet joy of seeing my father, my daughter and my grandkids all the time, I have it easy. Plus, we eat incredibly well!
I read a lot. I’ve probably plowed through at least 30 books this year, mostly nonfiction but some great novels too. In fact, I finally read the original Frankenstein after getting inspired by reading Dave McNally’s Monsters of the Market(Haymarket Books: 2012). I also recently read Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest, Ministry for the Future—I always enjoy his work more than most, and I liked this novel too, but it was less of a novel than a strong demonstration of thinking creatively about our fraught future. It has plot and characters and a variety of compelling events, but more than anything it shows one man’s ideas, at one point in time, of how we actually could grapple with climate chaos on a global basis, even while realistically understanding how much inertia blocks us, not to mention so many people with the worst of intentions.
Outdoor dining in Covid times, North Beach, November 2020.
Thanks to readings this year, I also enjoy a widening perspective on history. Not only am I constantly confronted with how little I actually know (while at the same time, my endless filling in of blanks does create thickening webs of understanding), but a lot of what I’m reading is actually breaking new ground historically. Whether its about how other people are doing history, or histories covering lost and forgotten chapters, or stories of populations that have been left out of the historic record until now, we are living through a remarkable explosion of paradigm-shifting historical work.
A good friend, Peter Linebaugh, has certainly been one of the historians who shaped this epoch of rethinking basic assumptions. He was a student of famous British historian of the working-class, E.P. Thompson, and steeped in a “history from below” perspective, he has opened that up to reveal lost histories of the Commons, of commoners and commoning. Our pals at PM Press published his collected essays Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance back in 2014, but as is the case with anthologies, I find myself going back to find things rather than reading it from front to back. I revisited Linebaugh’s essay “Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-1822,” realizing as I did that it was a precursor to his more recent book on Ned Despard, the Anthropocene, and Global Warming Red Round Globe Hot Burning. Peter’s style is unique. He always manages to knit together seemingly disparate and far-removed items that individually seem small and isolated, but once he does his magic, they make a coherent analytical tapestry:
Rocketry was the advanced military technology of the day, originating in India at the battle of Seringapatam in 1799 and carefully studied by Robert Emmet in the insurrection of 1803. During this total war hundreds of thousands of soldiers put boots on the ground, boots made of hides from cattle fed in the pastures of Ireland or the pampas of Argentina. Pick any thread of this tapestry, pull it, and yes, the historian unravels the cruelties and crimes of the era, but look more carefully and there is another story which sticks to the hand. It is the story of preservation, resistance, kindness to strangers, a seat at the table. This was the commons, and so it was with the Luddites. (p. 81-82)
Part of my rooting around in history has led me to the surprising perception that our world in 2020 is still heavily shaped by events that took place decades and centuries ago. The new histories that I’ve found so exhilarating embody these connections, revealing as they do new ways of understanding received stories that have ossified into condescending clichés if we remember anything at all. In Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War(The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: 2020), Vincent Brown digs deep into the uprisings that rocked Jamaica in the late 18th century when it was the heart of British imperial wealth, analogous to the wealth France was deriving from Haiti before its successful and all-important revolution within a generation of Jamaica’s revolts. Brown emphasizes that the military conflicts that emerged on the island of Jamaica in the 1760s were not only a part of a global war being fought by Britain against France and a variety of indigenous nations in the Americas and Africa, but also reflected internal African conflicts that began in the west African territories that became the center of the slave trade. The individuals who became enslaved were often men with considerably military skills but had been defeated in battle. The image that late-eighteenth century abolitionists developed to rally anti-slavery sentiment, “of a kneeling supplicant begging to be recognized as a man and a brother,” invoked a false meek innocence. “That icon of abjection has shaped the prevailing understanding of bondage and race to this day. But the caricature bore no resemblance to the black fighters who stood toe-to-toe with whites in encounters all across the war-torn world of Atlantic slavery, from West Africa to the Americas.” (p. 18)
Jamaican slave revolt, 1761.
Tacky’s Revolt specifically refers to an uprising in one part of Jamaica that took place prior to a series of even more dramatic revolts that unfolded over the following years. Brown’s fantastic book unpacks the oversimplified reduction of a series of complicated insurrectionary uprisings to one event led by one person. From the British imperial angle, it’s worth noting that their prime Caribbean colony was hanging in the balance just as their North American colonies were uniting in a Revolutionary War, adding military and political pressure to both war zones.
Certainly the confederacy of Coromantees, Eboes, and creoles that plotted the 1776 uprising exposed as fantasy the belief that only enslaved Africans posed a threat to slavery—and there would be many more creole revolts in the future. Yet contemporary chroniclers and subsequent historians have generally overlooked the way that Jamaica’s landscape channeled slave revolt across generations. The emphasis on the changing nature of rebel participants obscures an important continuity—the reproduction of local political memory that shaped the geography of black militancy over time. (p. 238)
This theme of local political memory and its role in shaping historic agency is fundamental. The role of memory and invisible channels of communication makes up the heart of The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (Verso: 2020) by Julius S. Scott. In it he navigates the very sketchy documentary record to bring to light the numerous ways that information and tactics moved from island to island, and throughout the African diaspora in the Americas to spread news, to shape revolts, and to maintain paths of exodus. Sailors and dockworkers were key transmitters in this extensive oral culture, and it was among those same sailors that some of the greatest revolts of the late 18th and early 19th centuries took place. Linebaugh sets the stage:
