They are young, successful, fun-loving professionals who like tolive in lofts, wear baseball caps and drive sport utility vehicles -and they are scaring the hell out of old-time San Franciscans.
Buoyed by the bullish stock market and the ongoing Silicon Valleyboom, yuppies are moving to the Bay Area in droves, looking for thegood life. The onslaught is raising fears that San Francisco's lastworking-class neighbourhoods are about to disappear beneath a tidalwave of trendy bars and bistros.
The final battleground, some say, is the Mission district, agritty, heavily Latino neighbourhood on the east side of town thatuntil a few years ago made headlines mostly for the drug deals andgang wars going down on its streets.
For all its problems, the Mission, as it is called here, has longbeen regarded as a vibrant, colorful neighborhood that helped SanFrancisco preserve its credentials as a multicultural,socioeconomically diverse community.
But three years ago, yuppies discovered it - first as a placewhere a handful of hip bars and restaurants had opened, then as aspot to buy crumbling Victorian dwellings and new lofts at bargainprices.
'It began to get especially cute around 1997,' said Kevin Keating,a Mission resident for 11 years. 'I was sitting in a cafe right inthe heart of the Mission and I saw these cell phone types around mewearing those kind of stockbroker shirts like Michael Douglas in WallStreet - you know, with the white collar and the blue and whitestripes? I'm thinking: 'This is the Mission. It is supposed to be atough, working-class neighborhood.' I was appalled.'
The trouble with yuppies, Keating said, 'is that they come in anddisplace working-class and poor people by offering landlords moremoney'. Since more affluent people have discovered the Mission, hesaid, 'there has been a massive wave of owner move-in evictions'.
In May, police arrested Keating and raided his home, saying theybelieve he is the founder of the Yuppie Eradication Project, a tinygroup of anarchists who began plastering the Mission with posters sixmonths ago, calling on residents to fight the yuppie influx.
Keating was quickly released, and no charges have been filedagainst him. But police say their investigation continues.
Keating will not say whether he founded the Yuppie EradicationProject or had anything to do with the posters. But he does describehimself as an anarchist dedicated to 'eliminating state governmentsand wage labour'.
Depending on whom you talk to, the Yuppie Eradication Project haseither given a violent cast or a humorous one to the increasinglyurgent, citywide debate over gentrification.
The anti-yuppie fliers named four local bars and restaurants thatshould be bombed, and urged residents to spray-paint graffiti onlofts and scratch the paint of cars they suspected belonged toyuppies. The fliers were signed: Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainiananarchist who fought czarism and Bolshevism and killed Russianlandlords during the Russian civil war.
No businesses have been blown up in the Mission district, and nolandlords have been killed. But police said they do have reports ofcars being scratched with keys and loft buildings being spray-paintedwith slogans such as Yuppies Go Home.
Robert Cort Jr was a specific target of some of the fliers. Hisparents, who own several San Francisco properties, bought a house inthe Mission district in 1996 and transferred ownership to him. Aftera court fight, he evicted the tenants in 1997 under a city law thatallows owners to evict tenants and replace them with family members.Cort has yet to move in, but found his name and address listed in theYuppie Eradication Project fliers.
'I get graffiti on my house,' Cort said. 'If they were saying:'Go home gays, blacks or Jews,' it wouldn't be tolerated in thiscity.'
Still, some say the Yuppie Eradication Project has trained aspotlight on a serious problem.
'The project is the far, extreme end of a definite fear about thede-Latinisation of the neighbourhood,' said Oscar Wolters-Duran,program director of St John's Urban Institute in the Missiondistrict. 'You have a neighbourhood here that is vibrant,affordable, with a very definite cultural identity. Yuppies andgentrification can definitely destroy the cultural cohesion of theneighbourhood.'
City officials confirm that San Francisco is in the midst of ahousing crisis, created by a population explosion fueled by theSilicon Valley boom and the emergence of the high-paying multimediaindustry here. What is happening in the Mission district, they say,is just a dramatic manifestation of the pressures felt all over town.
Between 1991 and 1998, said Amit Ghosh, chief of comprehensiveplanning for the city, 70,000 people moved into the city, swellingits population to nearly 800,000.
'We never expected this kind of growth,' Ghosh said. ''Ourvacancy rate is less than 1%.'
For years, San Francisco has had some of the priciest real estateof any major US city. Between 1997 and 1998, the median price for athree-bedroom house rose 16%, from $311,240 (#200,800) to $361,410.It is expected to increase by more than that this year, and there aredramatic accounts in the local press of bidding wars over houses.Rents have also increased dramatically, as has the pace of evictionsby owners who say they are moving in.
With most residential neighbourhoods built up, developers haveturned to areas like the Mission district, with mixed residential-industrial zoning, to build housing.
Lofts that will cost $300,000 to $500,000 are going up just ablock away from the corner of Mission and 16th streets, a favoritespot for addicts to hang out and score heroin.
Voters are so spooked by the threat of gentrification that lastNovember they approved a tightening of city restrictions on ownermove-in evictions, prohibiting owners from removing the elderly,disabled or terminally ill. More recently, the city's planningcommission imposed a moratorium on the building of lofts inindustrial zones.
Low-income housing activists would like to see lofts permanentlybanned, arguing that they cater for the affluent and are pushing outindustry and blue-collar jobs.
Intended to provide low-cost housing alternatives for artists whowant to live in their studios, lofts have become the symbol of howyuppies are moving into every corner of San Francisco.
Loft developers 'are bottom feeders', said Sue Hestor, a low-income housing activist. 'They build in some of the strangest places- right up against a scrap metal farm, for instance.'
Once young professionals move in, Hestor said, they do two things- drive up the price of surrounding property and complain about theirnoisy, smelly neighbours.
Los Angeles Times
