Update on Project Activities
Since we did not have a reflection due last week, the following update will touch upon the last 2 weeks. Last Monday, 10/15, we met as a group to work on our midterm presentation and the Project Scope of Work (which we continued to tweak throughout the week before submitting it to AEMP). We also started to think more deeply about the oral history component of the project, and who we would like to interview. We wanted more clarification about the purpose of our interview, and how we could ensure that the interview would be mutually beneficial for both us (AEMP) and the interviewee(s). We were initially concerned for ethical reasons that, without a guaranteed publication/dissemination plan for the interview content, we might cause the interviewee harm (by bringing up emotional topics) without creating any tangible “good” for that person. However, we emailed back and forth with Adrienne and Magie, who clarified the AEMP model for interviewing and its purpose as a tool of empowerment for the interviewee. We decided it makes sense to approach the interview in a more open-ended way, and to allow the interviewee(s) to choose how the interview might be shared more publicly, or at all. On that note, we have scheduled an Ethical Research Training with Magie and Adrienne for November 8th to begin to help us learn the skills necessary for an effective and compassionate interview. On Wednesday, 10/17, the day of the midterm presentation, we had a Zoom call with Erin and Mary to discuss the successful grant narratives we had read and to create a plan for drafting the NEH grant. This conference call was very useful for us to catch up and get back on the same page after not having spoken for a few days. On Wednesday, 10/24, we divided up the requirements for the “narrative” component of the NEH grant application amongst ourselves so that we can find language in AEMP’s past grant applications that could be used directly or adapted for the NEH application. We intend to have this language pulled by Monday, 10/29, and to check in with one another then to discuss what we found and what language we still need to write. We will then follow-up with Erin and Mary during a Zoom call on Wednesday, 10/31. We have also been having individual meetings with each of the chapter editors to discuss what feedback would be most useful for them. Erin met with Spencer and Tony to discuss the Evictions and Speculation chapters on Tuesday 10/23, Elise met with Deland to discuss Transportation/Infrastructure on Wednesday, 10/24, and Lexi and Christian met with Mary to discuss Migration/Relocation on Friday, 10/26. Lexi and Tony will meet with Magie about the Indigenous Geographies chapter on Thursday, 11/1, and Christian and Elise will meet with Adrienne to discuss the Public Health chapter on Saturday, 10/27. These chapters are all in various stages of production, but we will all be producing a 1-2 page memo with feedback about that chapter within two weeks of our initial meetings with the editors. Because we will all have different focus areas when editing, it will be an exciting chance to think about language in several different ways (i.e. some of us will look at “big picture” thematic elements, while others will look at vocabulary and word choice, while others will look at the relationship between the text and images). What We Observed and Learned These past two weeks, we learned a great deal by looking at the past successful NEH grant narratives. These will inform our approach and our work on this component of the project, and help us craft a compelling grant narrative for AEMP, as well as inform our future grant-writing efforts more broadly. This grant specifically will be used to offset publication costs, which will keep the atlas cheap so communities can afford it. This is critical, as the t mission of AEMP is to amplify the voices of low-income communities and support their objections to gentrification with credible research. We are also learning that we play a valuable role in consolidating, interpreting, and drawing connections across the atlas, and helping to clarify details like timelines, methodologies, and vocabulary words. We bring a fresh, critically-constructive set of eyes to material, and we frequently find ourselves asking how we can make the Atlas’s content as accessible as possible. These are valuable for the NEH narrative as well as for the broader collective itself in thinking about how their work can be the most effective. We are also learning to help clarify the collective’s expectations for our experience. For instance, we requested an updated budget break-down this week and provided an example AEMP had used for other grant narratives; the feedback we received is that the process of creating the budget break-down would be helpful for AEMP, and that upon consideration Erin and Mary were more in a place to know what kind of line items were needed than we were. One thing we saw very clearly in the grant narratives is that it is important to provide exigence for the project. Many of the grant narratives seem to be geared toward projects with a sense of urgency. Why is it important, and why now? We’ve had to think about the significance of the project among other crucially-important topics that our funding might compete with, and consider how this project might implicate other broader issues in the Bay Area and nationwide. This has caused us to think critically, thoroughly, and creatively about how to situate the work and impact of AEMP in the SF Bay Area in light of the housing crisis and transit struggles. This work is even more salient in the age of tech booms, with complex and sometimes paradoxical politics of technology companies. On face, these companies stand for free equitable access to information, convenience, and quality of life, while at the same time buying up affordable homes of long-time residents to build housing and workspace for high-paid employees and driving an increase in property values. They thereby contributing to displacement and inequity in their own backyards which they claim to support and advocate for. One of the strengths we believe is important to mention is how bottom-up the project is. Fields of infrastructure and planning (as well as maps in general) often run the risk of being a top-down approach both literally and figuratively, with crisp, idealized images that lack the complexity of lived human experience. The anti-eviction mapping project is an active effort to reclaim the genre and the practice to not only incorporate, but to represent the erased experiences of Bay Area residents. It is a powerful part of the narrative that the map not only depicts the end result of evictions: gentrified neighborhoods, but also the experiences of health, acts of resistance, and intersecting testimonies of residents. This helps put the area on an upward path on the citizen participation ladder -- the testimonies in the atlas frame knowledge as coming from the citizens, with verified data as support. Knowledge belonging to citizens is the first step in facilitating at least a consultation model, if not partnership or even citizen control, with regard to housing and displacement in the Bay Area. This project uplifts that knowledge through community storytelling and map-making -- two critically underutilized tools -- and empower others. We are also understanding that because diversity and social cohesion are part of social sustainability, multiple perspectives are required to understand and address these issues. These collaborations may be broad and intersect policy, economics, business strategies, urban planning, community organizing, education, public health, and human rights. It must integrate a vary of perspectives, methodologies, backgrounds, and areas of expertise, and collaboration requires empathy, trust, and understanding. We’ve already begun to see the benefits of this process In terms of writing the grant narrative. Its collaborators come from diverse fields and backgrounds, and are organized in a horizontal structure, meaning that everyone contributes a unique and crucial component to the project. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward A major thought on our minds as we continue to work to provide finalized chapter feedback and prepare the NEH grant is the relationship of the Atlas project to the current sustainability discourse in the Bay Area. As we saw in “Plan Bay Area” published in 2013, most people emphasize environmental sustainability first before thinking about people. For example, Plan Bay Area listed and prioritized Climate protection as their first goal while discussion of addressing the housing crisis seemed to be secondary considerations. Similarly Section 15382 of CEQA, clarifies that it does not even consider a social or economic change in itself significant enough to necessitate an Environmental Impact Report. These documents provide clear examples of how often environmentalists place conservation of ecosystems and natural systems over socioeconomic disparities and needs of disadvantaged communities when thinking about sustainability. On that note, we believe that the publication of the Atlas should help reassert the presence and the importance of cultural continuity. Many of the chapters we’ve been reading comment extensively on the how strong culture, history and way of life of communities have been threatened by displacement and how communities have resisted this disruption of neighborhood culture. Cultural continuity is one of the four pillars of sustainability we’ve defined in our class, and documenting gentrification and evictions are a testament to how allowing people to stay in their homes and stay in their communities. Speculators buying up properties and reselling them to the recent wave of tech workers, threaten and undermine cultural continuity and contribute to values/priorities that are born out of colonial, capitalist histories. Preserving uniquenesses and identities is critical to sustaining healthy communities, relationships, moving toward equity of people and communities and identities. But there are complex dimensions to this idea of cultural continuity. Why for example should ethnic enclaves like Chinatown, with origins to an era of intense anti-Chinese sentiment be preserved? Chinatown was formed because Chinese workers were not sold property anywhere else in the city and many buildings were men’s dormitories for an ageing male population due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. However, the beautiful culture, the unique shops and local businesses, and strong Chinese-American community that emerged over time provide strong reasons for how gentrification and change with community input should be opposed. Similarly, Oakland, with its history strongly tied to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was the site of state-sponsored violence against black community leaders. Yet, for decades before and during this era of violence against the black community, the city developed strong resources for art, education, community programs and more. Currently the black population has been decreasing due to gentrification. The history of both these neighborhood examples have taught us the importance of cultural context and history in discussions of evictions, displacement and neighborhood change. In chapter-editing and looking over maps, we’ve found instances of similar displacement over time, and been able to see patterns form throughout history. We’ve begun to consider the similarities between racial redlining policies in 1930’s Oakland and the racialized impacts of technology like AirBnB. This has given us a critical eye when thinking about the future, as we are careful to think about our projects amongst the broader historical context of urban planning and of grassroots organizing. Additionally, many of the chapters also highlight how social sustainability is also under threat due to the housing crisis. The tech industry accumulates wealth and capital which perpetuates income inequalities and gaps in resource provision. People are forced to live far away from their works and are subject to long commutes, expensive housing, and often the worst environmental conditions. This in turn reduces quality of life, with people in poverty bearing the physical and mental health consequences of a sedentary lifestyle associated with long commutes. Though reading through the wealth of historical accounts of neighborhood character, modern examples of resistance, data-rich maps and oral histories contained in the Atlas Chapters has been informative, our group has battled with a question about our experiences of these issues. Though we all live in the Bay Area and some of us have spent time in San Francisco and Oakland, we still are largely developing thoughts and opinions about the crisis through the recorded experiences of others in the Atlas. We all feel quite strongly about housing as a human right and not something that should be stripped from people, but we feel that there is a missing lived experience aspect of the project. Though it is easy to oppose the actions of speculators and real estate developers catering to tech-industry elites at the cost of the livelihoods of people of color, I think we would have a different perspective on these issues if it was our own door with an eviction notice taped on the front. We’re particularly excited to work more on the public health chapter, which we expect to be informative on the disparate classed and racialized impacts of housing, gentrification, and environmental damage. It will provide an entirely new area of inquiry for the project, as it examines an issue with national significance, from Flint, Michigan to Oakland and Los Angeles, and is an exciting and important new lens to view to project with. Another experience that will inform our approach to our future contribution to the Atlas is the town hall role-play that we did in class on Wednesday. In the activity, the success of the Department of Transportation relied on their ability to placate and address the needs of different stakeholders while convincing everyone of the common goal: a less congested, safer, more enjoyable, people-friendly road good for cyclists, shopkeepers, and drivers. However, what quickly became evident is that different stakeholders wanted different things and had contrasting goals, which made achieving this vision difficult. Similarly, the Atlas incorporates many different perspectives; the perspectives of planners, community members, evictees, activists, youth, retirees and more. The atlas incorporates these strengths and allows different people’s stories to interact. The Atlas helps people to speak for themselves, without a central narrator speaking for them. The stories are united by a common aspiration for more affordable housing, better transportation and a better quality of life, but the chapters sometimes address very different content. However, this means, it may be a challenge to unite the chapters, thread common themes throughout the Atlas and tell a cohesive narrative with so many different aspects. The goal is to respect individual perspectives and stories, preserving the voices and independence while also linking them and moving toward a broader narrative that is applicable beyond itself. Update on Project Activities
This past week has been focused on our first Zoom call with Erin and Mary, some of our community partners at AEMP. This was particularly important for our group because we had not yet met either of them as Adrienne and Magie attended the in-person meeting last week. We started off the week in an email conversation with Deland, Erin, and Mary to schedule our Zoom call (which ended up occuring on Wednesday, October 10th at 8:30am). Erin and Mary provided us with several of their past grant materials for us to review, as well as the website for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant. We individually read these materials and thought about questions/comments we’d like to pose to Erin and Mary. During the call itself, we spent some time introducing ourselves and talking about our personal interests and on-campus connections, with the hope that we could help AEMP through multiple channels (for example, two of our group members are broadcasters and leadership at KZSU, Stanford’s FM radio station, and another is leadership for Students for a Sustainable Stanford). We then discussed our group strategy for approaching the grant-writing, which is our main focus at the moment (see “Moving Forward” for more details). We wrapped up by outlining the scope of our project and what other tasks/deliverables we should expect to complete by the end of the quarter. The call lasted approximately one hour. Since then, we have divided up a list of past winning grant narratives for NEH amongst ourselves and begun to read them. We hope to glean some successful strategies for responding to each individual aspect of the grant prompt. What We Observed and Learned This week, while focusing on reading AEMP’s previous grant applications and the guidelines for NEH grant applications, we started to build an intuition for what qualities or angles each grant-offering institution values. The NEH grant is a humanities grant, so AEMP wants to frame the atlas as an interdisciplinary, digital humanities project, as opposed to a quantitative, cartography project. This frame means that we should focus on the collaborative, analytical work, revealing processes and experiences of the human environment of the Bay Area and looking to the past, present, and future. On Sunday, we will observe the operations and interactions of the entire collective and look forward to seeing more of how our efforts will play a role in the team. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward The Zoom meeting this week was successful because everyone came prepared, having read the NEH application requirements and previous grant proposals shared with us by the AEMP project. This allowed us to jump straight in to more in-depth, critical questions about how we should tackle this task, instead of familiarizing ourselves with the task itself. Because there are so many moving pieces, it is already challenging to juggle responsibilities and will continue to be this way. However, outlining the project’s scope with Mary and Erin helped us to begin formulating a manageable timeline for this quarter, and discussing daily to-dos over our group chat has helped us keep track of deadlines and tasks. Moving forward, we have the following list of tasks:
This week, our group had the pleasure of meeting our project partners at the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project! Adrienne and Maggie introduced themselves and the project to us, and gave us a little bit of their own backstories of what led them to the project in the first place. They told us about their interests and areas of expertise, and told us how they were incorporating them into their work for the Atlas. After receiving a full-planning document including a chapter table of contents from Maggie, we’ve divvied up the available chapters and plan to work one-on-one with chapter editors. We plan on then reuniting as a group, and we will discuss together the overall theme and narrative arc of the Atlas, as well as how well it is communicated to the intended audience.
Moving forward, we’re excited about the prospect of preparing educational materials once working text drafts are available and shared with us, as well as for the grant-writing process which will take place during November. We also have an upcoming virtual meeting to discuss the Atlas and its progress this Sunday, and an ethical service workshop sometime in mid-to-late October! Even from these brief interactions with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project Staff, it’s clear that the collective of artists, scholars, and activists working on the project have poured their heart and soul into it. There is a strong sense of horizontalism among the different members, and there does not seem to be a set hierarchy in terms of importance or amount of work completed. This model makes sense given the decentralized nature of the project, and what seems to be a very individual and non-linear style of work. It sounds like a lot of our work will be “creative vision” for the project, and ensuring that there is continuity amongst and between chapters, and that overall, the atlas has a coherent and intelligible message. Given our eagerness to collaborate with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project researchers, our initial plans to move forward center on: i) streamlining communication avenues with our partners; ii) getting to know our partners personally; iii) spending good time reading up on chapter drafts and iv) brainstorming ways of teaching this content to young audiences. i) Digital Communication - Adrienne and Maggie made it very clear to us that the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project was a horizontally structured project. This meant that decisions on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project Atlas were to be made by the consensus of a large and diverse group of researchers rather than a single project lead. One strength of this structure is that it makes space for specialists in many different interconnected disciplines and allows for the discussion of diverse issues, spanning from incarceration and police brutality to housing prices and transport access, in a single issue. Notwithstanding this strength, currently Maggie and Deland are our only contacts to the large group and so we plan to make direct contact with each of the chapter editors to relieve the burden of two people managing the connections between a large number of people. Once we have everyone’s emails we plan for members of our team who are analyzing particular chapters in detail to connect with those chapter editors. For all our communications we want to be clear on general practices such as frequency and timing of check ins. On the whole, recognizing that all the authors have their own community based research projects, and likely classes and other priorities, we concede that we must be flexible and understanding of people’s schedules. ii) Getting acquainted with the chapter editors - This step is not just a nicety but will influence how we interact with the chapter editors and how we can best collaborate with them. By hearing about how the chapter editor’s own history is tied to the issues they are studying we can learn about the things that motivate them and do our best to respect and imitate these motivations as we provide advice. For example, Maggie told us that for her Postdoc she is working on the link between social organizing and art as well as the role of indigenous communities in today’s Bay Area. Awareness of her knowledge of art and organizing may come in handy should we want help in offering advice on the documentation of art in other chapters. Similarly, Deland told us about her experience of learning to communicate complex urban planning jargon into everyday language for community members. We should try to make use of this strategy in looking to bring Atlas content into educational materials for high schoolers. iii) Understanding the project - This step will involve a lot of reading of the chapter drafts, oral histories and visuals to be included in the chapters. As we do extensive reading we want to ask the project editors about things such as key elements to remain consistent throughout the atlas such as layout, themes or vocabulary so that we can perhaps contribute by adding consistency. We also want to check on the status of languages of the atlas and website since, given the experience of some of our members living in the Bay Area, we could maximize the spread of information about the Atlas if it was in Spanish and other languages, such as Chinese. iv) Brainstorming educational modules - We do not yet know what audience we would present this information to but will keep track of basic teachable social-justice related content that we think younger audiences would understand. It would be good to talk to programs that run on campus for low-income youth to get their perspective on what aged children and what content they think would be beneficial to teach. Descriptive
In the past week our project transitioned from the gathering datastage into transforming our data into a concrete deliverable. Natasha and Caroline conducted one last interview on Wednesday in San Francisco, but other than that we have spent our time editing our audio files and photos so that they could be inserted attractively into our map. Natasha and Caroline have been selecting the most informative and important sound bytes from our interviews and uploading them to the audio sharing site SoundCloud so that they could be accessed by Jordan to plug into the ArcGIS map. We have been trying to select the most important parts of the interviews and are trying to keep the clips no more than three minutes so that the map can be meaningful to people no matter how long their attention span is. Jordan has been working on the mapping portion and has encountered numerous problems along the way. The ArcGIS online software is deceptively complicated to use as it requires a substantial knowledge of JavaScript and HTML. With only a basic knowledge in Java, Jordan had trouble adjusting the templates provided by ArcGIS to be able to incorporate our audio component. We met with Patricia on Tuesday to receive help, but she also didn’t know how to incorporate an audio component in a way that did not require coding knowledge. However, after several hours of trial and error, we found a way to embed audio into an existing template. While this method is not ideal and not exactly what we had envisioned, it is a serviceable method that will work for us. We are committed to finishing with a deliverable that will effectively tell the stories of the people we have interviewed, and we are well on our way to doing so. Interpretive Now in the midst of the more technical phase of our project, we have run into some compelling ideological quandaries. In the map-making process, we have looked into using a number of media-sharing websites such as Vimeo, SoundCloud, and Flickr, and in doing so, had to confront the paradoxical nature of this project. Many of our interviewees have expressed a great deal of resentment towards the tech population inundating the Bay Area, and the gentrification of the area is most commonly attributed to this phenomenon. In trying to spread awareness about this issue using mapping, the reality is that these tech companies offer accessible and sophisticated tools for social media sharing. This is an irony we noticed immediately when Erin and Julia asked us if we had any programming skills, and it is certainly one that is apparent to others; Melanie from KALW is focusing on this very paradox for her story about the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Is it really a paradox though? While in some ways, it could be perceived as hypocritical to bemoan tech people’s presence while benefitting from the tools they share with us, there are certainly other ways to think of it. For one, the people we have interviewed do not take issue with the tech industry itself--they take issue with the elitist and classist character of this particular industry. It is not the work that these companies do that is the issue, but the way they situate themselves within the Bay Area community. Social media is now an integral part of our society, and if it is a powerful tool for spreading awareness, it should be used. Another way to think of the paradox is within the framework of “reclaiming.” If the tech industry is one that has inflicted hardship and loss on many already disenfranchised people, then why shouldn’t those people use technology themselves, to make their stories and frustrations heard? Applicative: On Wednesday morning before class, we interviewed Michael in North Beach. He had much to say on his eviction. Needless to say, he was not going to be displaced without a fight. He fought his eviction with attorneys and the battle lasted for years. The stress and heartbreak of the entire situation also contributed to the separation from his partner of over a decade. He was fortunate enough to find another apartment in North Beach, however he now lives with neighbors and is in close quarters. He says there is nothing quite like his previous home. His thoughts on San Francisco are now changed. He says he feels as if there is a more inconsiderate undertone to people’s actions within the city. Michael was very welcoming and eager to share his story and we think he will add to the depth and personal detail in our map. Additionally, we had another phone interview scheduled with a person that was displaced from San Francisco and actually had to move to Los Angeles. Unfortunately, we were unable to get ahold of her and she did not answer any of our calls when the week of the interview had come. This has happened multiple times throughout our project and scheduling problems have contributed to our small number of interviewees. This past week we have been editing the audio from the interviews. In order to do this, we upload the audio tracks onto iTunes, convert them to podcasts, and then edit the clips in garage band. We have sectioned off each of the clips into categories unique to each individual and are going to input these sound clips that last about a minute long into the map. Each interview was about 35 minutes long, but we have selected about 8 minutes from each interview to highlight and feature on our map (along with the ability to listen to the entire interview). We feel that these short clips will be most user-friendly and their length will not be off putting as they are short enough for an audience to feel that they have the time to listen. The progress on the mapping project was slow but steady. We continued to work on the map using ArcGIS online software, and found it to be deceptively complicated to use. While it is advertised as six easy steps and has a very intuitive interface and website, it required knowledge of JavaScript in order to render the template they provide into what we wanted. I worked for a long time to modify the existing templated provided by ArcGIS online so that it would incorporate our audio component. I found an example story map provided by the Smithsonian that gave an audio tour of christmas music around the world. I tried to copy the element’s of the Smithsonian’s map into the template I had, but we could not figure out where the code differentiated and it appeared to be exactly the same. My small knowledge of coding and JavaScript was limiting, and the ArcGIS software was starting to appear more and more out of the scope of our project. Through trial and error, I was able to find a serviceable method that will help us make the map, although it is not in the ideal format that we would prefer. Everything we have done so far in this project has been a learning process, including the mapping experience. The ArcGIS software required more coding knowledge than was advertised, and perhaps we should have explored our options further before becoming settling on software that we thought was within our scope of knowledge. Our project is coming together and it is extremely rewarding to see our hard work and the openness and willingness of our interviewees on a platform that will be accessible to the public. The multimedia aspect of our map really adds an interactive touch that will attract audiences to learn more about the real issues of eviction. In the end, we hope to be steps closer in the aid of spreading awareness of no fault evictions and eventually reconstructing the Ellis Act so these don’t happen again. Descriptive
Last Saturday was a busy, productive, and exhausting day for our group. We had three interviews arranged for the day a various locations in San Francisco. We began the day at Stuart house in the Mission. He was very excited to share his stories with us, and went into great detail about his experience with being bought out of his old apartment in the Mission. He told us about his struggles with the AIDS virus and how that has impacted his experience, and provided us with a unique perspective as he was a tech worker himself that had moved to San Francisco to work for Apple in the 80’s being displaced by a new generation of tech workers. He admitted to being a part of the Mission’s first wave of gentrification, but noted how he had spent many years investing himself in the community that existed there. He was extroverted, excited about our project, and it was an overall great interview. After our interview in Stuart’s house, we made the short drive to our second interview location on 16th street in the Mission. We met with Rick in his office building which was the old Worker’s Temple. He was a photographer who rented out an office space in the building. Melanie from KALW met us there to record us for the project that she is working on. For our final interview of the day we headed to the San Francisco Public Library to meet with Yazmin. After searching for almost half an hour, we were able to secure a quiet study room in the Library to conduct the interview in. Yazmin currently lives in East Oakland and it was incredibly generous of her to be willing to make the trip to San Francisco to meet with us. Yazmin was also very supportive of our project and excited to tell her story. She elaborated on the community she had developed in the Mission since she had moved there in the early 90’s. She was a part of the queer community in the Mission which she referred to as her “chosen family.” She enjoyed being able to run into people she knew throughout the Mission, and mentioned that it felt like a true home. She enjoyed living in a place where people could work jobs that would be enough to pay the rent while being able to pursue poetry, art, and her true passions. Yazmin talked about how she now has to commute to San Francisco for her job, as many people who live in East Oakland do, and talked about how that has limited the community development in East Oakland as people spend so much of their time commuting. We have completed four interviews thus far, and have one scheduled for tomorrow. We originally had a goal of completing ten interviews for the project, but we have begun to realize that ten interviews is a great amount of work to complete in a quarter and have recalibrated our goals. We will complete our fifth interview tomorrow, and view that as a sufficient number for the scope of our project and if we are able to secure any additional interviews we will view that as a bonus. We only have a limited pool of people that provided contact information in the initial survey, and of those people few have gotten back to us. Additionally, we have had several people cancel their scheduled interviews after having second thoughts about the project. We do not view this as a failure on our part, but rather a success in that we were able to accomplish five successful, informative, and powerful interviews. We are looking forward to the next phase of the project in which we will begin mapping our data and displaying the audio and visual component in an attractive way. Interpretive The pervasiveness and immensity of the housing crisis in the Bay Area has become even more clear to us this week. Now that we have begun making regular trips into San Francisco and engaging with residents, the issues we have been learning about through class readings, newspaper articles and lectures are suddenly all around us. One striking experience that epitomizes the ubiquity of this issue occurred last Saturday, after completing our interview with Rick. We were standing outside of his apartment in the Mission in front of a small empanada shop, and overheard a customer saying to the shop owner, “I’m sorry to hear about your eviction.” Curious to know more and wondering if she would be interested in interviewing with us, we inquired further about the woman’s eviction. She told us that she was already in touch with Erin from the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, but that she had many friends who also had eviction experiences. She gave us her card and told us that she would be happy to put us in contact with them for the purposes of our project. It was such a striking moment for us to simply walk down the street and encounter an entire collection of eviction experiences. It seems that this issue is becoming so pervasive that local politicians have no choice but to acknowledge it. An article published this week in the SF Chronicle reported that State Senator Mark Leno, at the request of SF Mayor Lee, is proposing a bill that would amend the Ellis Act which requires that buyers own a building for five years before evicting tenants using the Ellis Act. Leno stated, "In recent years, speculators have been…[using] a loophole in the Ellis Act to evict longtime residents just to turn a profit...Many of these renters are seniors, disabled people and low-income families with deep roots in their communities and no other local affordable housing options available to them. Our bill gives San Francisco an opportunity to stop the bleeding and save the unique fabric of our city." (http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/2-S-F-lawmakers-push-bills-to-slow-Ellis-Act-5261383.php) While this bill is just a small step towards major reform, the fact that this issue is being recognized by lawmakers and major newspapers is heartening. It makes us hopeful that the work we are engaged in of spreading awareness does have an impact, and does have the potential to reach the people who have power to change legislation in our cities. Applicative Our interviews last weekend have brought about many thoughts and emotions. Hearing Stewart, Rick, and Yasmin’s stories about their connections to their previous homes was telling to how they saw themselves fit into their own communities within San Francisco. What was most eye-opening was the fact that Yasmin no longer felt positive feelings towards San Francisco. She felt rejected and pushed out of a place that she once felt was home. To Yasmin, living in the mission in San Francisco meant living among people she looked up to and admired. When her queer community was displaced from the city, she lost what she loved about the environment the most. No longer would she recognize people walking along the street. She now lives in Oakland, and has no intention of ever moving back to San Francisco. Because of her own displacement in SF, she has become aware of her own actions in Oakland, sensitive to the fact that she may be displacing others. Her mindset has evolved into one that pays close attention to her living situation and its impact on others. Yasmin mentioned that she overheard some people talking about opening a cheese shop in a neighborhood in East Oakland. She said that this disturbed her because she does not want to change the neighborhoods of Oakland the way that people changed her neighborhoods of San Francisco. She made the point that a cheese shop may not be culturally relevant to the population of East Oakland. People should focus on becoming acquainted with and celebrating the unique cultures that are present in East Oakland. Yasmin believes that people should immerse themselves into the heritage of a neighborhood they move to rather than look to reshape the neighborhood in a way they like. These interviews have surfaced thoughts on the eviction process in general. How does a city evolve? Is eviction just one of the many ways a city transforms and, even in extreme cases, overturns? How does culture come about in a city? What factors truly come together to create a neighborhood? Throughout our interviews, a general trend of belonging has been a significant characteristic of a neighborhood. Stewart, Rick, and Yasmin all live/lived in San Francisco for a reason. They all moved to the city for different intentions, but all in all were looking for a place that they belonged. To some, their evictions were seen as a rejection. It is interesting to think that a home is more than just a physical structure, it is what that home represents that is lost when one is evicted. In our group meeting on Wednesday during class, our group discussed that our biggest weakness and area to improve is communication. We have now made it imperative that we respond to each other’s texts and emails promptly, and provide feedback when needed. We also discussed our goals in depth and recognized where the differences were, and where there was a need for re-alignment. Our improvements have been successful! We have implemented more group meetings and predict stronger group communication going forward. |
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