Saturday, June 25, 2016

The Mission, San Francisco

I went to the Mission today. I rode my bike down to the BART Fruitvale Station, left my bike at the free bike valet service and rode the BART in to the City. Even at 9am the BART is crowded, no seats left, the cars are old and tired and it's expensive. The BART was good 50 years ago, but it badly needs updating today.

The Mission is an amazing place. I first visited the Mission 21 years ago, a barrio in the heart of San Francisco, a dense hub of all things latin. It was a cool place to live even then, teeming with vitality and history. Friends there were cool people living in old Victorians. A few years later I first noticed gentrification starting on Valencia Street, fancy restaurants, bars and cafes that were cool and expensive. Since I retired and moved to the East Bay I haven't been to the City much and hardly at all to the Mission. In the time I've been gone gentrification has attacked the Mission with a vengeance. Gentrification is pushing east from Valencia which is now full of boutiques, cafes, bookstores, galleries and clothing stores. Apparently gentry shop for clothes a lot.

Now the gentrification is striking at the heart of the Mission itself, taking over Mission Avenue and gobbling homes and lots on the backstreets, renovating some, new construction on others. The local color, the shops, the restaurants are still there but the rents are going up and what's there and been there is being squeezed out.

I'm not opposed to gentrification outright. Everyone needs a place to live. Subsidized housing and set asides are bromides for the lucky few who get it, while the rest of the poor are just pushed out and people with ordinary jobs can't even think about living in the City. In my opinion the whole system needs revamping, how people earn a living, how we pay people, how housing is built and how it's financed. In the meantime we let the market make all these decisions for us and claim there's little that can be done to stop it and then we do even less.

Even East Oakland is feeling the pressures of the market, the poor are being pushed further out and ordinary working people can barely afford to live here. Suzette and I have a comfortable house we squeezed into last year and we look forward to the improvements that gentrification will slowly make in our neighborhood. All things remaining equal, – let's not think or do anything about global warming or solve our social problems with real changes, – and after 10, 15, 20 years we'll be able to sell our house for an outrageous sum and move out of the city.

I had lunch with my friend John who has non-Hodgkin lymphoma in his lungs. He had radiation and just this week learned that the treatment got most of it, that there is something still there, it may just be scar tissue or it may be cancer. The type of cancer is very slow moving and in six months they'll check again, scar tissue and things are good, cancer, more treatment.

John is an amazingly strong person. He's a philosopher and a songwriter and incredibly well read. He looks almost down and out, never has taken much interest in his own appearance, but he reads the classics and knows writers some but not all of whom I have heard of. A few I've read excerpts or paragraphs from. He claims to have read Tacitus in the original Latin and understood it. I'm skeptical of anyone reading Latin but in John's case it could be true. After all he's Italian.

John and I used to smoke cigars together. With John I'd smoke Parodis, those little stumpy Italian cigars that look like something you might find on a city sidewalk. If I had a fatal prognosis I'd start smoking cigars again. John agrees. We didn't smoke any cigars today.