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.
