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Foreword

Hollow City was written and published in a rush, and it now depicts a crisis in amber, a portrait of the perils of a boom economy useful to recall even in a bust one. While nearly everyone expected the tech boom to subside, it did so sooner, faster, harder than anticipated, and the global economy followed. But the real estate boom is still with us—prices have slipped slightly, sale and rental real estate stays on the market longer, but prices are still so much higher than they were only a few years before that they have effectively gated San Francisco (and the same conditions are arising or expanding in other cities, from Dublin, Ireland to Chicago, Illinois). The majority of artists and activists survived the last boom, but the circumstances for generating future generations of such activists and artists here look bleak. There’s good news too, though. The boomtime crisis roused the rabble who are more than and more amorphous than “the progressive community,” and they elected the most radical Board of Supervisors in the city’s history. The new supervisors immediately set about implementing some of the best ideas for protecting the city’s economic and cultural diversity, reforming the corrupt planning commission, and otherwise cleaning house, and with that Mayor Willie Brown’s reign was finally challenged.

Sometimes I myself think I was too much of an alarmist when I wrote Hollow City, but it is an accurate picture of the time, when there seemed no end to the loss. And after all, the good news amounts to this: the amputation didn’t take the whole limb; the city limps on. Sometimes I remember how dramatic that loss was when I recall all the many nonprofits that folded for lack of affordable space or cracked under the strain of huge rents and all the people who left. Aaron Noble and Marisa Hernandez (pp. 156–59 and in the photochapter “The Last Barricades”) departed for, respectively, Los Angeles and New York. Eighteen months after his home was threatened, René Yañez (pp. 105, 153) and his family still live there, but their security has been undermined. Countless others are gone. How do you calculate the costs of such insecurity, of all the time and calm gnawed away by real estate speculation?

More than a portrait of a crisis, I hope Hollow City stands as a portrait of the complex social interconnections that make a city matter, interactions that include artists, activists, the poor, the middle class, public places and institutions, collective and individual memory and much, much more—in other words, of the interplay between imagination and urban space. The book’s readers were often positive but the reviewers, particularly those from the region traditionally known as the left, were often scathing. Over and over again we were chastised for defending artists—or I was, since almost without exception these hostile reviews neglected to note Susan herself and the many other artist-activists and artist-historians and community artists represented in this book’s 170 images and who would have undermined their assertions about art as a disengaged luxury good (and they ignored the book’s definition of art as including all media to excoriate visual artists alone). The ever-popular story goes that artists move into an area and gentrify it, by making it so attractive the affluent follow them, and there goes the neighborhood. As a Yale-based spokesman for the masses put it in a progressive magazine, “Solnit is reluctant to ‘blame’ artists for gentrification.”

Blaming artists for gentrification seemed to be easier than addressing the complex market forces that affect a neighborhood or recognizing the diverse roles artists play in their communities. But what bothers me most about this story is that, in the guise of deploring the white middle class, it secretly celebrates the white middle class by suggesting that only members of that group are artists. The story is more complicated, and thereby richer. The first artists we depicted in words and images were the musicians of the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, who were evicted from their inner-city storefront church after twenty-nine years and have yet, eighteen months later, to find another home. They were exemplary artists and activists: keeping alive the jazz tradition that had otherwise been uprooted by the 1960s urban renewal in the center of the neighborhood where they played and prayed, feeding the homeless, and making avant-garde music into an accessible spirituality.

I deplored the displacement of artists and activists even though not all artists were heroes of the revolution; and deplored the impact of the dotcom boom mostly without condemning dot-commers as a species (thus the contradictions addressed in “Skid Marks on the Social Contract” and commentary elsewhere on the multiple roles artists have played in gentrification—see pp. 99–105). Such ambivalence and such porous categories seemed incomprehensible to many reviewers, and I wonder if this is evidence of a wider crisis of binary thinking, one believing that every conflict exists between opposites and every category is an adequate description of reality. If nothing else, it makes a good case for the need for the expansion of imagination and understanding—for further intersections between art and politics. What I was arguing for in Hollow City is the value of a kind of urban free space in which ideas circulate, the young come to invent themselves as artists and activists, and new ways of thinking and new movements both political and cultural arise, and this is neither a middle class nor a working class phenomenon but something whose value consists in its openness and its indefinability. It is subversive precisely because there the categories melt down and new things emerge. San Francisco has been a significant place in American politics and culture precisely because the two are so inseparable here, or have been, and out of this mix have come some of the most potent insurrections of the past half-century or more. The late-breaking news in San Francisco and cities like it wasn’t that the poor were getting screwed (though chapter two is devoted to that history). It was that the subversive life that cities had always fostered was getting squeezed out by economics and homogenization, and that that squeeze was also going to affect the marginal and resistant communities here and around the world that artists—some artists—and activists have served.

The life of the imagination is now more critical than ever. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the great revolutionaries of recent times are artists with a sense of humor: playwright Vaclav Havel, who was heroic and often hilarious as the figurehead of the Velvet Revolution before he became prosaic president of a reborn Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic; and, more importantly, Subcomandante Marcos, who writes manifestos in the form of poetry and parables in the form of children’s books. Both of them were faced with situations that didn’t fit the old definitions of class or revolution or right and left. How do you face a time that, with new technology, new globalizations, new hybridizations of art, entertainment, race, politics, media, genes, new economic principles, can’t be described in old terms but demands a response before it’s too late? With imagination. That’s one reason art matters.

Rebecca Solnit2002

Wrecking-Ball Overture

Demolition of a housing project, Hayes Valley

Demolition of an office complex, Mission Street near First Street

Formerly Clear Café and May’s Cleaners, Polk and Turk Streets, 2000

This whole city is a construction zone.

I came from Phoenix. I can’t afford to live here,

so I’m sleeping on the floor at a friend’s house.

I came because there is so much work.

There are a lot of guys like me on the job.

– Construction worker

Moscone West Convention Center, Howard and Fourth Streets

These get built all over the

town, and most are sold

before they’re finished being

built. I just paint, day after

day—always white. Yeah, we

build them, but we won’t

ever make enough money to

buy one.

– Interior painter

Loft condo, Folsom and Seventh

There’s so much work right now and not enough qualified people to do it. Some days I feel like my head is about to explode—the intensity, the pace, the stress are just so great. It’s all market-driven and client-controlled. When I first came here I had any number of great offers and I’m someone who remembers the slow times only too well. Some people where I work routinely put in 40 to 50 percent in overtime hours. We’re professionals so we don’t get paid for it. Most of us probably can’t even afford to live in the buildings we’re designing.

– Architect

“Who are you photographing for?”

“Just me.”

“You’re not working

for an insurance

company are you?

I’m not getting

sued, am I?”

“No. Why would you

be getting sued?”

“I don’t know. You try

to build housing

in this city and they sue you.”

“What are you building here?”

“Condos—higher end.”

– Conversation with a developer

There are too many projects happening at the same time and none of them are managed in any sensible way. No one has time, or cares to pay attention to the details—we do, but we lose money because we care. It’s pure greed—everyone wants to develop as much as they can and make as much money as possible. It’s crazy.

– Landscape architect

Gas station at the edge of South Park and Fourth Street

Architect’s office

Condiment City, 2000.