Friday, June 14, 2013

Let's all get in on the Gentrification Article Pool

Articles/Think Pieces/Blog Posts/Scrawled Ravings about How Tech Shitheads Are Ruining San Francisco Forever are the new hotness, no doubt!


It's just a matter of time before the next one appears, makes everyone super angry, spawns a 100-comment stream, and then recedes into memory. I thought I'd crowdsource when and where it's going to go down!

PICK ONE FROM EACH CATEGORY

The Next Gentrification Piece is going to appear in:

[1] Bold Italic
[2] Mission Local
[3] Bay Guardian
[4] That hippie expo paper thing next to the Bay Guardian in the newsrack


The author used to live in

[1] an "apartment in the Mission that rented for $300"
[2] a "performance community in China Basin"
[3] an "artist's cottage on the slope of Telegraph Hill"
[4] Evanston, Illinois

Someone just Ellis Acted the author's neighbor, a

[1] Kindly grandmother and her parrots
[2] Hardworking immigrant and his four kids
[3] Radical queer arts collective
[4] Guy who rented his place for $250 a night on Airbnb

This neighborhood used to be a real community until it was ruined by

[1] $48 fried chicken
[2] $50 haircuts
[3] Google glass
[4] Apps
[5] Fleece vests

You can tell the new residents don't respect the community because they

[1] Work on computers
[2] Buy expensive produce
[3] Don't speak Spanish
[4] Moved in after the author did

We are losing the things that made San Francisco special, like

[1] Spoken word/bondage cafés
[2] Marginally employed recent college graduate potheads
[3] Abandoned warehouses
[4] The capacity to be free of rage

That's it; the author is giving up and moving

[1] To Oakland
[2] To Bozeman, Montana
[3] To LA
[4] Back to his/her parents' place in Evanston, Illinois

9 comments:

MoFoPlz said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
MoFoPlz said...

hahahaha! that's not funny. shuttup. #I'llkillyou. Is there a vegan, glutten free, half caf, huge bandwith cafe I can squat in for 5 hours while I write my blog and get a little work done for Spotify?

Stephen said...

Obligatory Stephen comment on gentrification-related article.

Your piece is now complete.

TK said...

MoFoPlz -

Right.

Stephen -

I totally forgot about comments. Thank you.

Lisa said...

Thank you for writing this. I was gonna write about how ragey all my law school friends being like, "Yeah! The REAL SF is disappearing!" when they've lived there for five minutes (exaggeration, literally 5 years though) was making me but...this is a much more reasoned approach. Gonna go sip my latte & roll my eyes and ponder that someday I inherit city property so screw 'em all.

Jon said...

lol as someone who moved from evanston to sf in 2000. :D

Stoney said...

Only one deleted comment? Amazing.

Tamagosan said...

Obligatory comment from amused native:

When I was growing up, we used to ride magic dragons from Dolores Park to Coit Tower, where they would feed like hummingbirds and then zip off to the daily raves at Mt Davidson.

YOU KIDS WILL NEVER EVEN KNOW.

Easy like Sunday morning said...

Love this, especially because I grew up in SF, lived the last 10 years in Oakland, and just moved two weeks ago to Bozeman, Montana. And guess what? Bozeman is getting gentrified too. There's a Pure Barre studio off of Main Street and a 'sushi bar' inside of the Smith's.