San Francisco's Space Wars 2001

Historical Essay

by Tom Wetzel originally published in Processed World #2.001, Summer 2001

“Dot-coms’ demise could alleviate rent problems” read a recent Examiner headline, more promise than reality. In the Mission District, north of the outdoor narcotics zone along 16th Street, dozens of households received rent increases of 10 to 60 percent in March. These residents live in a group of buildings built after 1979, which exempts them from rent control. One tenant, Raul Garcia, a janitor, had his rent jacked from $900 to $1,200 a month. In response, the residents have begun to organize a tenants union.1

The Mission District has been ground zero in a class war as tenants resist the capitalist forces that are squeezing the working class out of the city. Since 1990 the proportion of employed residents who are not professionals or managers has declined by about 8 percent.

Poster: San Francisco Print Collective, Photo: Chris Carlsson

Dot-Com Invasion

Five years ago [apx. 1996] American capitalism discovered the Web. Sources of capital turned the spigots full on for all sorts of schemes to exploit the Internet. As NASDAQ stock prices lost all touch with reality venture capitalists poured funds into dot-com startups betting on eventual IPOs or buyouts by larger firms. Tech startups in the city received $1.6 billion during just one quarter last year.2 As dot-com CEOs scurried to find space for their newly crafted ventures, the office market tightened and rents for Class A office space shot up from $28 per square foot in 1996 to $77 in 2000, surpassing office rents in Manhattan.3 Downtown evenings reverberated to the sound of pilings being driven for new office buildings. The Mayor’s Planning Commission just couldn’t say “No” to more office space.Where would the people working in these buildings live? The Mayor and Board of Supervisors (the city council) weren’t losing any sleep worrying about that.

Multi-media and Internet-related businesses had grown virtually overnight to become the city’s second-largest industry, employing 47,000 people by last fall. The high-tech sector’s appetite for space was seemingly insatiable, enticing landlords to dump low-rent uses. Dance studios or social service agencies aren’t profit centers.As the dot-com boom threatened to destroy the city’s artistic subcultures and drive nonprofits out of existence, the ensuing struggle spawned a wide range of protests, from illegal occupations to a “Million Band March” of evicted musicians. The city has experienced two space wars over the past year—a fight over living space and a fight over “commercial” space. A common theme that linked these two was the threat that displacement poses to the city’s social and cultural diversity.

Who Can Afford to Live Here?

Even before the fin de siècle dot-com boom, high-tech growth in Silicon Valley was adding to stress on the city’s housing supply as increasing numbers of tech workers drove the freeways or rode commuter trains from the city to jobs in suburban office parks. Meanwhile, the city’s housing supply had been inching upward at the tepid rate of about 1,300 new units per year for the past two decades.4 The sudden surge of 130,000 new jobs during the last five years twisted a tight housing market into a savage bidding war for living space. From 1999 to 2000 the average rent for a vacant one-bedroom apartment rose 29 percent.5

A recent RentTech survey found that rent for a vacant one-bedroom apartment averaged $1,888. This is more than the entire take-home pay of a union janitor making $13 an hour. Food service workers in the city who average $9.50 an hour will be hard-pressed to find a place they can pay for. Twenty-somethings who grew up in the city are often forced to live at home with their parents. Of course, many tenants pay much less than the current market rate due to rent control.The median rent in the city in 1999 was $860, meaning that many people face the prospect of their rent doubling if they have to move for any reason. Buying isn’t an option either.At the end of last year the median price of condos and houses in the city was $475,000. In five years residential real estate prices have inflated 77.2 percent, 6 and only about one out ten households can afford to buy a house. The majority of people who are evicted are simply forced to leave San Francisco.

The Mission’s Working Class Roots

The Mission District has been a working class area for a long time. Union organizing was a strong presence in the Mission in the early 20th century. Two notorious Mission District labor activists in the ’10s were ex-Wobbly Tom Mooney and anarchist Warren Billings. In 1916 Mooney was trying to unionize the workers of the Market Street Railway streetcar system when he and Billings were framed for a bombing they didn’t do. In 1914 the city’s unions built their headquarters, the AFL Labor Temple, at 16th and Capp Streets, which became the center of strategizing and organizing during the city’s historic 1934 general strike.This was merely the most dramatic symptom of a heightened activism and solidarity among workers in San Francisco in that decade. The main center of this working class strength was among the longshore, shipyard and maritime workers—the heart of the city’s economy in the ’30s and ’40s.

The northeast Mission is the neighborhood’s historic industrial district. It developed around the city’s original railroad link to San Jose, which encouraged factories, breweries and warehouses to locate nearby. The dense Mission neighborhood that grew up adjacent to the work sites provided a pool of workers for these industries.The industrial district thus helped to reinforce the Mission’s working class character.

Many of the larger plants had closed during the ’70s and ’80s. Best Foods moved its mayonnaise operation to Guatemala in 1990, adding to the myth of the city’s industrial zones as an abandoned wasteland of boarded up warehouses. In the late ’90s the developers and their allies exploited this myth to gain city approval to cannibalize the industrial land for luxury loft and dot-com office development. In reality, blue-collar production, distribution and repair industries had not declined in San Francisco during the decades of so-called de-industrialization. The proportion of manufacturing jobs remained constant in the city from 1970 to 1990 at nine percent of total jobs.While some larger operations did close, many smaller firms replaced them (e.g.Timbuk2, which makes custom courier bags for bike messengers). Auto repair and manufacturing have been a source of blue-collar jobs for Mission District residents— 18 percent of the employed residents worked in manufacturing in the ’90s.

Displacement of such industries creates an imbalance between available jobs and the backgrounds and skills of local residents. If a welder or sewing machine operator loses her job, it’s not likely she will be hired as a Java programmer or Web site designer the following week.

The Bulldozer as Agent of Class-Cleansing

In the decades after World War II direct government intervention to aid the capitalist economy was still in vogue in elite circles. An application of this idea was the use of the redevelopment bulldozer to forcibly remove working class people from valuable central city real estate.

Many of the young male workers of the ’30s strikes had lived in single room occupancy (SRO) hotels and lodging houses along 3rd Street in the South of Market area (SOMA). The 3rd Street worker’s district was eventually bulldozed in the ’60s, but not without a major fight, in which retired longshoremen and others from the ’30s era played a role. Today’s low-income senior housing in that area and nearby Yerba Buena Gardens exist only because of that struggle.

In the ’60s the city attempted to apply the bulldozer approach to the Mission District as well. Mission Street is the “Main Street” of furniture stores and produce and meat markets that runs through the district. In the ’60s Mission Street was being dug up for a BART subway and the city wanted to bulldoze the areas around the 24th Street and 16th Street subway stations for high-rise apartment towers. This sparked a broad-based effort at community organizing, based on the Saul Alinsky model from places like the Woodlawn neighborhood in Chicago.Thousands of people in the Mission became involved in scores of community groups, which were linked into the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO). As many as a thousand people attended MCO community congresses.7

The MCO proposed an alternative development strategy for the Mission based on funding of nonprofits from federal Model Cities grants. The city, under Mayor Joseph Alioto, eventually agreed to the MCO’s proposal.This led to the formation of nonprofits like the Mission Housing Development Corporation (MHDC), a builder of affordable housing, and Mission Economic Development Association (MEDA), which provides services for small businesses. The Mission was able to avoid demolition of the heart of the neighborhood only because of the intense community activism that was channeled through the MCO.

Diversity and Its Material Base

The ’60s was a period of rising real worker incomes and many people were leaving central city neighborhoods like the Mission for the new suburban tracts along the freeways. The demographics of the Mission were changing, with people of Central American and Mexican descent becoming a majority by the ’70s.

In Magical Urbanism Mike Davis has argued that the Latino migration into American cities has helped to reinvigorate city character and the democracy of public space. The Mission District illustrates his point, from the throngs of people on foot on Mission Street to the murals that add color to the streetscape.

In the ’90s, the Mission District was home to about a third of the city’s Latino population. Cultural venues like the Mission Cultural Center and Galeria de la Raza, and the numerous businesses and services along Mission and 24th Streets, make the Mission the cultural and commercial heart of the Latino community in San Francisco. For immigrants, stores and service providers that speak Spanish are part of a support network that includes friends and family members. This working class, predominantly low-income, community would not be sustainable without cheap rents. Affordability also drew a significant number of artists and political activists to the Mission District. By the early ‘90s the Mission had a dozen theaters, such as The Lab and the Theater Rhinoceros, which use the former union meeting spaces in the Redstone Building (the former AFL Labor Temple). Dance rehearsal and performance spaces (such as Dance Mission and Dancers Studio/Footwork), and other kinds of studio or rehearsal space were scattered about the area.

Rents were low enough that a person could work part-time as a drywaller or audio tech and spend their free time doing experimental videos or writing political commentary or novels. Affordability also made the city a refuge for people fleeing Central American death squads or queer kids escaping Bible Belt prejudice.

“For decades,” writes Rebecca Solnit,“—college students, musicians, artists, writers—have been moving into the Mission, which some poor whites never left, but many of the artists and radicals who were raised there or arrived as adults are Latinos...” In fact the subcultures of artists and activists that Solnit describes in Hollow City can only thrive within the larger context of working class neighborhoods because they share the same requirement for cheap space.

Loft Boom Colonizes the Mission

Ironically, the city’s so-called “live/work” law derives from the struggle of a group of artists evicted from the Goodman Building in 1983. A law was passed modifying the building codes so they could erect a new building that would combine studio and residential space. With the onset of the dot-com boom in the mid-’90s, the anti-union Residential Builders Association began to exploit the “live/work” law to build hundreds of loft condos in SOMA and in the adjacent northeast Mission.The builders were able to increase their profits by using cheap industrial land.The law exempted them from many city fees and from providing affordable housing units. As the city bulked up on its population of dot-com managers and marketing gurus, flush with stock options and six-figure salaries, prices of the loft units soon soared to $400,000 and more.The ultra-modernist design of the live/work boxes presents a stark face to the surrounding community, reflecting their character as a fortified colony in a working class neighborhood—the garage door opens as the SUV approaches and then the fortress door clangs shut behind.

Dot-Com Contradiction

The rapid expansion of multimedia and Internet-related firms in the city in the late ’90s allowed graduates of local college multimedia programs to jump into entry-level jobs paying $30,000 to $50,000 a year.

Some writers and artists are able to find work in the dot-coms doing design or content work, though the work they do is driven by the commercial needs of their employers, not their own creative interests. Some work part time to retain more free time for doing their own thing, but the high-cost of housing makes it increasingly difficult to survive without long hours of work.

The large numbers of creative and technical people living in or near the city is a key reason the dot-coms wanted to locate in San Francisco. Displacement fueled by the dotcom boom led to angry rhetoric attacking “dot-commers.” The “dot-commer” tag obscures distinctions of income and power. The people who simply work in the industry weren’t calling the shots. The venture capitalists, dot-com CEOs, office developers, landlords of commercial buildings and top city leaders were making the relevant decisions. Some rank-and-file dot-commers were in a bind. Friends were being evicted, their favorite bands were losing practice space, the boom was destroying things they liked about the city. The New Economy was eating its own tail.

Eviction Epidemic

Throughout the ‘80s, the presence of working class people of color in the Mission had acted as a barrier to attracting the white professionals and managers who were moving to the city in increasing numbers. To the west of Valencia Street was an area of transition into Noe Valley and the Castro, where professional and managerial people already predominated. But east of Valencia Street only 15.8 percent of the employed residents had professional or managerial jobs in 1990. Despite its close proximity to downtown, the Mission District remained a neighborhood of comparatively cheap apartments.

A large proportion of the housing stock in the Mission District consists of duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. With large numbers of high-salaried people desperately looking for a place to live, owners of these properties were able to cash in. These buildings are ideal targets for Ellis Act conversions. The state Ellis Act permits a property owner to empty a building of its tenants.The owner can then sell off the units as a tenancy-in-common (TIC).

Ellis Act and owner-move-in evictions soared in the city in the late ‘90s.This trend was particularly strong as the NASDAQ bubble reached its peak last year, with high-tech employees cashing in on their stock options. Ellis Act evictions in the Mission District alone went from 14 in 1995 to over 660 last year. City wide, 2,761 households were evicted between June 30, 1999 and June 30, 2000.

Billboard on side of Galeria de la Raza, late 2000

Photo: Chris Carlsson

City Leaders Give the Finger to the Mission

At the corner of 17th and Valencia a two-story building with turn-of-the-century white terra cotta facade has just been demolished. A five-story luxury apartment building is slated to go in here, replacing Ed Arroyo and Sons, a body shop that employed journeymen painters and others. Most of the employees were Latino Mission residents. The business has temporarily relocated to far-off Bayview but its future is uncertain.

In the ’80s, young people in the Mission District would sometimes refer to the ’hood jokingly as the “transmission” because of the many body shops, brake shops, and other vehicle repair places. In fact the vehicle repair industry provides skilled blue-collar jobs and employs a significant number of Latino workers. This industry is being forcibly downsized as loft or dot-com office developers buy properties out from under businesses.

Displacement thus works along several dimensions. People cannot find apartments they can afford to rent and their employers are displaced. For artists, affordable studio or rehearsal space disappears.

The luxury loft boom, followed by an explosion of multimedia office development, were left and right punches that drove up real estate prices and rents in the northeast Mission. By last year the city had allowed 1.75 million square feet of high-tech office space to emerge in the area, as the Mission was laced with 200 dot-coms.

The loft boom didn’t happen without opposition. The Coalition for Jobs,Arts, and Housing (CJAH) was formed in reaction, lobbying for changes in the live/work law. But CJAH’s efforts were thwarted by the pro-developer bias of the Board of Supervisors (the city council) and the intimidation tactics of the Residential Builders Association, headed by the thuggish Joe O’Donoghue (a former union organizer). A more blunt form of protest was proposed by the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project, advocating sabotage of loft dweller’s cars and squatting in newly built units. During the past year anger escalated to acts of arson, with the torching of two live/work buildings under construction. The stealth invasion of dot-com offices was punctuated last April by two massive projects. Eikon Investments proposed converting the former National Guard Armory—a fortress-like presence on Mission Street—into 300,000 square feet of dot-com office space. Another developer, SKS (financed in part by the late William Simon, Reagan’s Treasury secretary), proposed 160,000 square feet of high rent multimedia and high-tech office space on an industrial site at 20th and Bryant, named “Bryant Square.” SKS first had to evict the existing tenants, which included a small furniture factory, a sex-toy factory, a non-profit publisher and a sweater factory employing about 30 people (mostly Mission residents). A shed with cheap artist studio space was to be torn down. More than four dozen artists would be displaced— photographers, animators, videographers and designers. A young artist, one of the evictees, told me that people were “devastated” and having difficulty finding other space.

The Bryant Square project provoked widespread opposition in the Mission District, prompting a number of Mission District groups to form the Mission Anti- Displacement Coalition (MAC). This initiative brought together the staffs of MEDA and MHDC and tenant-organizing groups such as Mission Agenda and St. Peter’s Housing Committee, plus the Day Laborers’ Program and PODER, a Latino environmental justice group. The primary aim of MAC has been to prevent the displacement of the working class, predominantly Latino, tenant population of the Mission District.

On June 26th more than a hundred people spoke before the Board of Supervisors in opposition to the Bryant Square project. Guys in suits predominated among those speaking for the project—mainly people with ties to dotcom office development in one way or another.

A handful of union leaders who had contracts with SKS or its subcontractors praised the developer, ignoring the displacement of blue collar jobs from the industrial zones and the effects of the dot-com boom on the ability of workers to find affordable housing.

Ignoring the Mission district’s concerns, the Board of Supes gave the finger to the Mission by approving the Bryant Square project by a vote of 8 to 3.

Protest Grows, Evictions Continue

Two days later a boisterous crowd of 500 people filled a local school auditorium in the largest Mission District community meeting in years. The meeting had been called by MAC to confront city planning commissioners and the head of the planning department. The crowd chanted their support for a moratorium on office and live/work development in the Mission District.

As the movement grew during the summer, MAC’s weekly meetings were drawing 70 to 80 activists.A de facto alliance had developed between progressive artists, on the one hand, and activist groups organizing amongst the segments of the Mission community most at risk of displacement— Latino working class families and low-income tenants. The posters of the San Francisco Print Collective and video shorts produced by activist videographers were some of the ways artists were able to use their skills for the defense of the larger community. On August 12th MAC led a thousand people on a caminata— billed as a walk “to defend the right to live in the Mission,” touring sites of evictions or threatened evictions. Three days later about two thousand people attended an eviction party for Dancers Group/Footwork on 22nd Street, which was being forced out by a 500 percent rent increase. This space had been an Arthur Murray dance studio in the ’50s and had been in continuous use for dance rehearsal since then. Three days later the police removed a group of people who had occupied the space in protest of the eviction. Dancers Group was only one of a series of high-profile evictions, or impending evictions, of arts groups throughout the year which kept the issue of displacement on the front pages. Down the street at 24th and Mission another dance studio, Dance Mission, was facing eviction as the landlord sought to cash in on the dot-com boom.

The effect of high-tech conversions in the industrial zones was highlighted by the announcement that the owner of Downtown Rehearsal, a warehouse in a Bayview industrial area used for music rehearsal, was converting the building to a telecom switching station or server farm. The eviction, slated for September 25th, was a stunning blow to the city’s music subculture, affecting 2,000 musicians. The proposed Armory office conversion project came before the Planning Commission on September 7th. A large crowd of Mission activists and residents were present to speak against the project. During the hearing, Jonathan Youtt, the executive director of Cellspace (an arts center in a former machine shop in the northeast Mission) and a member of MAC, spoke a few seconds past the beep announcing the end of his allotted speaking time, as people often do. In this case the chair of the Commission summoned a sheriff who slammed Jonathan to the floor. This action provoked a near riot, with activists chanting “Shut it down!” A week later the project sponsor withdrew the office development proposal in response to the intense conflict their proposal had generated. This and other protests at the Planning Commission had brought the actions of this obscure body to the front pages. The effect of this bad publicity was to weaken the credibility of the city government’s handling of development issues.

Developers’ Candidates Defeated

In an atmosphere of increasing polarization, leaders of CJAH and the Coalition of Community Housing Organizations (COCHO)—a consortium of non-profit housing developers—entered into behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Chamber of Commerce to work out some sort of compromise. With the backing of the city’s elected officials, the for-profit developers judged that they had no reason to compromise. Ever responsive to this constituency, Mayor Willie Brown vetoed a compromise.

The CJAH and COCHO activists then wrote a citizens initiative, Proposition L. Prop L would end the “live/work” loophole by making lofts subject to the same rules as other housing construction. Office projects larger than 6,000 square feet would be banned in the Mission District and some adjacent industrial zones. Office developers would be required to provide some below-market-rate space for nonprofits. MAC, CJAH and other groups collected 30,000 signatures in two-weeks to get L on the November ballot.

The framers of Proposition L were some of the same activists who had crafted the “growth-control” Proposition M, which passed in the mid-’80s. Proposition M limited the amount of office space built in the city to 950,000 square feet per year in order to prevent job growth from driving up housing prices. These framers of L hoped to build the same cross-class coalition of working class tenants and professional/ managerial class environmentalists that had backed Proposition M. As the November election approached, MAC and the city’s dozens of grassroots political clubs, tenant, environmental and other groups networked and progressive support solidified for L and converged on a common slate of candidates for the Board of Supervisors. These were grassroots campaigns, based on volunteers passing out literature, making phone calls, postering. MAC was providing about 75 volunteers every weekend to help with the endorsed candidates.

Meanwhile, a powerful network of development interests and their political allies poured more than $5 million in “soft-money” into campaigns against L and against the pro- L candidates, paying for phone banks, and stuffing mailboxes throughout the city with glossy four-color propaganda. The campaign against L was the most expensive initiative fight in city history.

L was a complicated land-use measure. The anti-L propaganda had only to obfuscate and generate doubt. It was successful, with L narrowly defeated by about 1,300 votes. L lost heavily in the predominantly African-American Bayview district. The perception of L as a “slow growth” measure worked against L in Bayview, where opponents framed the issue in terms of economic opportunities.

But the housing crisis, rising evictions and the development fights of the past year did affect the election of city supervisors. The activists’ work paid off in the December 12th victories of all but one of the eight candidates supported by MAC and a liberal/radical alliance of grassroots activists. The polarization around L helped to make clear who was willing to say “No” to the developers, speculators and their allies. Even more important was the direct militancy of hundreds of people—the occupations and blockades of buildings, people speaking out at Planning Commission hearings, marches, postering and graffiti and agitprop of all kinds. These actions kept the issue of displacement on the front pages and drove the debate in the city.

Dot-Com Bust

Since December, dozens of dot-coms in the city have crashed and burned. Venture capital is flowing elsewhere. The www.sfGirl.com website has moved from prowling the champagne-slated dot-com launch parties last summer to pink-slip parties for laid-off dot-commers. In SOMA, where dot-coms were forking over stock to landlords to get space last year, the vacancy rate has risen to 20 percent. Office rents have fallen from $72 a year per square foot in December to about $50.

Barring some global capitalist meltdown, the residential market is not likely to see the same decline that we have seen with office space rents. The unregulated commercial market is far more volatile, as businesses expand into space during upswings in the business cycle and then contract to reduce expenses in downturns.

People need a place to live even if they’re currently unemployed. “I don’t think we’ll see prices go down,” says Walter Ellingwood, executive vice-president of Rent Tech (an online rental agency). “Landlords are now more reluctant to raise rents, but they would still rather keep their units vacant than to rent it for less than what they were renting it for before.”8

In some cases landlords’ expectations have outrun the market, and they may lower their asking price to keep apartments from being vacant too long.With the dotcom collapse the vacancy rate in the city has risen from one percent to five percent. Despite this, a recent RentTech survey found that average rents for one-bedroom units had dropped a minuscule 1.3 percent since fall. In February the city Rent Board reported 166 evictions in the city, down only slightly from the previous year.

Future Direction?

As expected, the new Board of Supervisors has moved quickly to implement at least some of Prop L. A temporary ban was enacted against “live/work” lofts. MAC has proposed a shortterm ban on high-tech office development in the Mission District, and a requirement of 25 percent affordable units for all new market-rate housing developments. The board is likely to approve this proposal when it comes up for a vote.

The intent of the proposed ban is to channel office development downtown. But this will not end the pressure on the Mission District housing supply. The Mission is only an eight-minute subway ride from the financial district. Despite the dot-com shakeout, the Bay Area remains a powerful center of computer, bio-tech and Internet-related industries. The dot-com bust may herald a recession this year, but more growth is likely in the next expansion.

Market forces are working to change the demographics of the Mission, apartment by apartment, building by building. Private ownership of the neighborhood’s buildings by people other than those people living in them enables the owners to evict tenants under the Ellis Act and raise rents of vacant units to whatever they can get. This displacement is not inevitable but an effective solution requires that we get to the root of the problem.

The problem is not a lack of sites in the city for new housing. A city Planning Department report notes that there are under-utilized parcels with space for 60,000 dwelling units under current zoning.9

Getting to the root of the problem means attacking the ownership structure of real estate. Some local activists are proposing community land trusts as a new model for affordable housing10. A community land trust is a democratic community membership organization that would enable tenants to convert their buildings into cooperatives, or develop new coop buildings. The land trust would retain ownership of the land under the buildings, to take it permanently off the market. The land trust model poses the possibility of community self-management of real estate development. A weakness of public housing programs in the U.S. has been the absence of control by residents over the buildings where they live.

Cooperatives empower residents and give them a stake in the community. A satisfactory solution requires an expansion of housing supply at moderate prices. Building more dwelling units means making the city a denser place. This will require organizing to get around neighborhood NIMBYs who often use environmental arguments to try to block or downsize multi-unit housing developments.

A program that is far-reaching enough to make a dent in the housing crisis won’t be cheap—hundreds of millions of dollars in funding will be needed. New tax streams will be required. The city has the powers to borrow and tax that can finance this sort of program. But it is not likely to use those powers for the benefit of the ordinary people of the city without a major movement from below. Those who are at risk of being displaced, who want to stay, and all those who want to preserve the city’s social and cultural diversity, need to take the initiative, to craft solutions that address the real roots of the crisis.

Notes

1. Cassi Feldman, “Landlords don’t let up”, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Apr. 4, 2001, and Victor Miller, “Rent hikes may oust 100 tenants”, New Mission News, Apr., 2001
2. “Venture Capital Epicenter,” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 3, 2000
3. ”Demand High for Offices in S.F.”, San Francisco Chronicle, October 10, 2000
4. “San Francisco Housing Inventory,” S.F. Planning Dept., 1999
5. “Apartment rents soar”, San Jose Mercury News, August 26, 2000
6. “No Sign Housing Market Is Slowing,” S.F. Chronicle, Mar. 4, 2001
7. M.Toby Levine, “Planning our history and the history of planning in the Mission”, New Mission News, Oct. 2000
8. Quoted in “Dot-coms’ demise could alleviate rent problems,” San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 29, 2000
9. San Francisco City Planning Commission, Resolution No. 14861, 1999
10. See San Francisco Community Land Trust.