I'm the enemy!

At a meeting of San Franciscans trying to stop gentrification, I realize that I'm the Internet yuppie scum that's ruining my neighborhood!

By Carol Lloyd

Oct 29, 1999 | On a Sunday morning, at a cavernous performance space in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District, a group of social workers, artists and community activists sit around on flea-market furniture to plan a counterattack on the infiltrating enemy -- the hordes of well-heeled newcomers, many of them dot-com yuppies, gentrifying the neighborhood. Kevin, aka the anarchist Nestor Mahkno, alleged founder of the Yuppie Eradication Project, chivalrously pulls up a seat for me.

In the past two years, my neighborhood has become a battle zone in the gentrification wars transforming America's inner cities, and I have been trying to understand it from the trenches. Real-estate developers and the young cyber-professionals who buy homes in the Mission have become the enemy. White artists -- many no doubt graduates of the same tony, liberal arts colleges that the young cyber-professionals attended -- and old-time residents, mostly white and Latino community workers, have forged a precarious alliance against the moneyed intruders.

Some would consider me the Internet vermin that's ruining San Francisco. Sure, I moved here as a writer and artist, but now I work at Salon.com, and even own a home in the Mission. Am I now the enemy? Hanging around the anti-gentrification movement, and supporting at least some of its goals, has let me answer "no" -- until recently.

Like so many left-wing organizations, this one has been foundering with internecine strife from the beginning. There are too many good ideas -- and each one has ideological underpinnings that offend somebody. They all agree they want to preserve the "old neighborhood": ethnic diversity, working-class small businesses, affordable rents, art spaces, live-work studios for writers and artists. But how to achieve these goals is an ongoing source of contention.

Some would like to blow up buildings; others to draft planning legislation; others to lead whimsical anti-gentrification tours. The Yuppie Eradication Project, a radical anarcho-propagandist group, posts flyers urging vandalism against yuppie vehicles and elite restaurants in the neighborhood. Not everybody here supports that.

"We just need something simple to say who we are and what we want," says Jonathan, the boyish founder of Cell, the community art/performance space where we sit. "What makes sense as an overall slogan?"

"Resistance to Gentrification," offers Kevin, adjusting his black-rimmed librarian glasses.

"Too negative," complains a gray-bearded Latino man. "How about 'Mission Visions'?"

"Too obscure," a middle-aged, short-haired painter says. "Why not just say what we want? 'Save Our Neighborhood.'"

Deciding on a slogan was supposed to take only a minute; already it has dragged on for more than half an hour.

On my right, Kevin mutters something about tedium and shakes his head. As the presumed front man of the Yuppie Eradication Project, he maintains a certain precarious prestige within the group, even among those who disagree with his tactics. After all, gentrification happens every day in neighborhoods across the nation, but his antics put our little Mission Beanfield War on CNN and in the pages of the London Times. Yet, as a strident anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist, anti-democratic ideologue, he also represents a political fringe that few of these activists condone.

Deborah, the director of a local arts organization, perches quietly on the other side of the circle, her hands glimmering with silver rings. As the group continues to argue about the historical implications of the word "resistance," and then "gentrification," Deborah and I exchange uncomfortable, complicitous smiles. We both have been coming to these meetings for the past 18 months; we are both long-term residents of the neighborhood who have devoted years to the local arts community. But, like me, she is one of the enemies within: a young professional who bought a home in the 'hood two years ago.

But if she's an enemy, I've come to feel like a double agent, a traitorous spy who represents everything that these good souls despise. As a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, community-volunteering, social-working artist, I was once a member of the endangered species that these activists are so diligently trying to save from extinction. What happened? I got a job -- in the scurrilously libertarian Internet sector -- that allowed me to buy a home. That alone has transported me across the battle lines.

That's not all: I also bought a flat on a gang-infested corner, in a controversial arrangement known as a tenancy in common -- in which a group of people buy and share a set of flats. TICs are both the closest thing to low-income homeownership in the city and a buzz word for the evil that the new economy has wrought. Because owner-move-in evictions remain the only sure-fire way of ousting tenants from rent-controlled apartments, TICs have become the primary means by which once-affordable apartments have been transformed into pricey middle-class pads.

Then I bought a new couch. More than anything else, that pea-green, ultra-suede purchase sealed my initiation as a yuppie. For months I didn't sit on it, but just looked at it every day -- marveling at how high I'd risen and how low I'd sunk. I even had a recurring nightmare that Kevin discovered it and realized the depth of my iniquity.

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