San Francisco Eviction Protests

He's looking at citywide data rather than "what is happening to the Spanish Mission down around 24th Street," which is where the "uptick of evictions" comes from and also where the protests are. There was a wave of evictions before around "Mission/Dolores" which is immediately west of Mission Street, but the new ones are east of that street. This is a somewhat run-down neighborhood (compared to Dolores) where everyone speaks spanish and all business is (or was) conducted in spanish. The evictions amount to an attack on one of the last really cheap places to live in SF.

I've only been living here since 2011 but even since then a lot of businesses have been replaced with hipster coffee houses and bars, and a lot of triple deckers have changed hands and then mysteriously burned down. If you lose your apartment in this part of the city you will pay thousands more to get another one just like it, or you won't make that kind of money and literally no longer be able to afford to live anywhere in the city you probably work in. As an example I took the cheapest place I could in 2011 at $1200/month for something about the size of the cube you work in, and I'm sure I am paying more than twice as much as my neighbor. The next cheapest place was $1650, and over by Dolores was about $2k. I look at apartment listings and there's nothing studio sized in the area for less than $2500 now. If our place changed hands and burned I'd be inconvenienced and maybe have to cut back on comic books, but my neighbors would literally have to leave the city. It seems to me they have a legitimate gripe over having their neighborhood ripped out from underneath them, though I don't know what they should do about it. They might start demanding the city intervene or build public housing, but the existing new apartment fees that go into a pool to build public housing either don't get paid or just don't get built.