Tech Induced Gentrification: Policing the Right to the City

- by Simon Chen



Gentrification is something we've associated happening to low-income neighborhoods when the markets attract a wave of affluent investors and workers and drive rents to levels unaffordable to the previous tenants. It is explored in the El Dorado reading when a new light rail drew a new group of young professionals from Emerald City to work in the financial district and the establishment of mega-corporations edging out Mom and Pop stores. In the context of Policing and Surveillance, gentrification is a process of policing who has the right to live in this area based on their characteristics extracted by public and private forms of surveillance. What I want to discuss with you all in this blog post is the ongoing debate and situation of gentrification happening right in our backyards in the city of San Francisco, in particular the South Market district. More closely, I will focus on how the rise of tech companies like Twitter are influencing the social heirarchies of San Francisco and the reactions against this tech induced gentrification.

David Talbot, the found of Salon.com, wrote extensively against the mayor Ed Lee's stance promoting policies that would grant tech companies like Twitter greater benefits in order to attract more tech companies to develop their headquarters in San Francisco and not relocate to the South Bay in Silicon Valley. He fears that this new generation of techies will dillute the progressive spirit and culture of San Francisco and compared their cultural awareness to the flatness of a computer screen. At companies like Twitter, employees rarely have to leave the building because of all the services provided like free dining halls, exercise rooms, etc. Talbot compares this company consumerism to a cocooning of the employees from the outside local culture on the streets. While he does acknowledge the economic stimulus these tech companies are providing for city, he still stands firmly on his position to preserve the norms of the community, ironically, as a hub for innovation. The risks of promoting such a tech friendly city, he argues, disconnects and disenfranchises the working class people who make San Francisco the way it is today and who run the city as nurses, teachers, and fire-fighters. Who will take care of the city if they are pushed out to the peripheries?

Ilan Greenburg, a contributor for various news outlets like the New York Times, recognizes that based on actual statistics, San Francisco is not becoming any less liberal and progressive of a city than it was before. The idea of fighting to protect some kind of San Francisco exceptionalism from this new generation with different tastes and values is hypocritical to the progressive nature Talbot is trying to protect. Rather, Greenburg realizes that this anti-gentrification protest is largely coming from middle class families who have already been living in gentrified neighborhoods are now are being bought out by more affluent individuals. One quote from his article that resonated with me was how "'[t]he people who get hurt the most by an ignorance of the way development happens are not the ones who write articles.'" The debate against preserving SF from these cultureless tech invaders is detracting from the real people who get hurt by gentrification and have to deal with being cut off from all the resources San Francisco has to offer such as public transportation, hospitals, schools and other valuable cultural goods. There is no solid answer to solving the gentrification problem, but he doesn't believe anti-gentrification advocates do either because they aren't raising the right questions. Another question to raise is if you can even call middle-class migrations a result of gentrification.

What I have learned from these two perspectives on tech-induced gentrification is that:

1) The public generally does not have a good idea or trust behind the people who are developing the technologies that change the way they live. Articles like Talbot's strive to evoke images of completely one dimensional robots rather than actual living breathing human beings who not surprisingly can have social awareness and civic responsibility. The poor surveillance done to capture a portrait of a techie has far undershot their actual capabilities and formed this unappealing stereotype that all tech engineers are blind to the world around them. But understandably, the surveillance is being used to try and control and marginalize the perceptions of other people to think that this is how reality is to justify their argument of cultural dilution.

2) The tech industry is the place to be right now and it alongside the partnership of mayors like Ed Lee, will ride the market pony for all its worth. And without proper policing and surveillance of market forces and corporate regulations, real people will get displaced and hurt by the gentrification. Corporations should at least be obligated to give back to the shared economy of San Francisco that allowed their corporation to grow at such speeds with security and amply opportunity. However, this blurs the line as we have discussed in lecture between public-private partnerships and how authorities handle such relations. Presently, there is such a lack of market regulation for tech companies because city authorities do not want to deincentivize them to relocate and continue doing business and draw more business in.

There are many further implications of gentrification in San Francisco that I am not entirely familiar with, but I highly encourage you all to do further reading and research on the matter if this is something that interests you! Thanks for reading.

Greenburg article: The rise of the white, middle-class anti-gentrifiers

Talbot article: How Much Tech Can One City Take?