Hollow City

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I skip out on Bible class to bicycle through Golden Gate Park, which begins a few blocks west of the church, and pedal past a group of children and dogs bounding across the lawn, elderly Chinese doing tai chi, slack-faced men in cars waiting to be solicited for adventures in the shrubbery, skaters dancing to a boom box, homeless people sunning themselves, and what looks to be a matador class, with three students and an instructor (but no bull) waving hot pink capes.

I come home to a phone message from the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. When I call him back, he tells me of several incidents in which Latinos were attacked or thrown out of bars in the Mission District. "It is horrible, horrible, horrible," he says, repeating what several others have told me, that the San Francisco police are busting the neighborhood’s Latino bars for every possible code infraction, thereby accelerating their turnover into enterprises catering to the wealthier and whiter new arrivals.

The Mission is named after Mission Dolores, the church built by Franciscan missionaries in the 18th century, and it has had a Latino presence virtually ever since, especially since the 1930s, but that population is now under siege—mostly by money. Guillermo tells me that 20 of his friends in the Mission have already left, and the community that drew him to San Francisco five years ago may not exist much longer.

A sampling of newspaper stories over the next few days reveals the nature of the situation all too clearly. In the San Francisco Independent there is a story, "Popular Richmond [District] Dance Studio Faces Eviction," with an aside that dance studios all over the city are losing their spaces. A week later, the San Francisco Chronicle runs a gossip item on "start-up zillionaire Marc Greenberg," his $20 million house, his half-million dollar bachelor party, and the million he paid Elton John to play at his wedding, followed a few pages later by passionate letters about what untaxed Internet commerce will do to independent bookstores and to the community they encourage.

San Francisco institutions such as Finoccio’s—probably the nation’s longest-running drag-queen revue—have lost their leases. Fear and eviction come up every day. My favorite example is a letter to "Ask Isadora," the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s sex-advice column, by a masochist who wanted to know whether he really had to obey his dominatrix by sexually servicing her elderly landlord. Though the issue for him was about the extent to which submissiveness must go, the issue for her was preserving the lease by any means necessary.

"Where will you go?" is the question tenants ask each other, and the answer is always another city, another state. A woman who works at a domestic violence shelter tells me that the entire premise of domestic violence counseling—that the spouse should leave the batterer—is being undermined by the lack of places for victims to go after their time in temporary shelters.

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