Neighborhoods and Gentrification

You Can't Please Everyone

In San Francisco's famously downtrodden Tenderloin district, the Wall Street Journal reports [subscribers only link] that some longtime area activists have responded to a plan for planting 400 trees with a wanted poster aimed at the "brutal gentrification squad" and its "sanitized vision for the future."

These and other equally out-there quotes from the group Gay Shame—

Lower Polk Neighbors is allegedly an organization striving for neighborhood “beautification” and “cleanliness”, but is actually a pro-gentrification attack squad that works with the police to rid neighborhood streets and businesses of “undesirables,” i.e. hookers, hustlers, drug addicts, homeless people, trannies, needle exchange services, working class queers and other social deviants. Lower Polk Neighbors claims to be open to all, but primarily consists of wealthy property and business owners, slumlords, developers, bureaucrats, robber barons, police officers and vigilante social purists.

—would just be filed away under theater of the absurd, if not for Chris Daly, the district's representative on the city's Board of Supervisors, backing up the play: "Yes, people are addicted to drugs and, yes, there's homelessness [but] why shouldn't these people have a place of their own?"