• James Tracy is a Bay Area native and is well respected as a community organizer, author, and poet.• The changes facing San Francisco, wrought by the waves of cash flowing up from Silicon Valley, are a hot national story. Evictions of long time SF residents, outrageous rents and home prices, and public demonstrations against the «Google buses» have been national and international news for the last year.• Tracy's book focuses on the long arc of displacement over the last eighteen years of «dot com» boom and bust in San Francisco, offering the necessary perspective to contemplate and analyze today's latest urban horrors. As well, patterns in federal and state housing going back decades are highlighted.• Dispatches puts the hardships of the working poor and middle class front and center, while highlighting the particular hurdles faced by women and minorities in housing struggles. • James is a cofounder the San Francisco Community Land Trust, which uses public and private money to buy up housing stock, taking it out of the real estate market, and providing affordable housing for generations to come. • James has been on the forefront of housing solutions in SF since before Google existed!
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James Tracy. Dispatches Against Displacement
Praise for Dispatches Against Displacement:
Table of Contents
Foreword. by Willie Baptist
Introduction: Of Delivery Trucks & Landlord Pickets
Chapter One. Landgrabs & Lies: Public Housing at the Crossroads
Chapter Two. Slow Burn: San Francisco’s Hotel Residents Walk. through the Fire
Chapter Three. They Plan for Profits, We Plan for People: Local Politics and International Conversations in the Mission District
Chapter Four. A Shift toward Stewardship: Is the Displacement War Over, If We Want It to Be?
Chapter Five. Toward an Alternative Urbanism
Acknowledgments and Gratitude
Recommended Reading:
Endnotes
Index
Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco’s Housing Wars
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“James Tracy knows that our dysfunctional housing machine is working as it should: working for the rich. This important history throws sand into the gears of that machine. It is a vision of a better housing system. And it is a defiant story, told from the frontlines of citizens fighting for the right to their city, with lessons that matter for any community aspiring to control its own destiny.” —Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved
“With the insight of a poet and the long-term vision of a seasoned organizer, Dispatches Against Displacement weaves together a powerful, instructive, hilarious, and poignant description of how the working class fights back in the City by the Bay.” —Alicia Garza, National Domestic Workers Alliance
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Beyond the presence of the tattooed and the restless, there was something else going on: it was neoliberalism, something that my generation of activists associated with Chiapas or Bolivia but rarely connected to the home front.
In 1999, the American Friends Service Committee asked me to travel to Seattle to cover the WTO protests for their magazine Street Spirit. Thanks in part to the Zapatistas, the term “neoliberalism” was on everyone’s tongue. I struggled with this; I thought it was strange that so many people who wanted to change the world ignored what was going on in their own backyards. After all, if neoliberalism was simply capitalism with the happy face torn off, weren’t there plenty of signs of it in San Francisco?
