LOS ANGELES — San Francisco has long been a venue for colorful protests but a demonstration earlier this month in the city’s Mission District may have set a new standard for creativity.
At the intersection of 24th and Valencia streets, protesters dressed in one-piece clown suits and bouncing exercise balls joined arms and danced a conga line in front of a private shuttle bus carrying Google workers to their jobs some 40 miles south in Mountain View. Another activist disguised as a surveillance camera tottered around on stilts.
The driver refused to let a protester on the bus and, after police cleared the way, the Google workers continued their commute. But by sending in the clowns, a group called Heart of the City scored another publicity coup in a high-stakes conflict that has pitted the tech giants of Silicon Valley against activists for housing rights and other issues in San Francisco.
At least nine employers, including Google, Yahoo!, Genentech, Apple and Facebook, have been offering shuttles between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, with at least 7,000 people riding the buses — which offer Wi-Fi and other amenities — every day. The buses, which can use carpool lanes, cut as much as an hour off the riders’ daily commute.
According to activists, though, the shuttles have not only caused traffic congestion and hazards by using the same stops in San Francisco as public transit, but they are also fueling the city’s housing crisis as high-earning tech workers displace low-income residents of gentrifying neighborhoods such as the Mission District.
“[S]huttles exacerbate the jobs-housing imbalance by enabling individuals to live farther from work,” researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, said in a recent study, citing anecdotal evidence that “some tech employees choose to live close to shuttle stops, causing real estate prices to rise further and gentrify portions of San Francisco.”
The city already has the most expensive rental housing in the country, with the median price for a one-bedroom apartment having increased 27 percent to $2,795 between June 2011 and June 2013.
Residents expressing concern over the effects of the “Google buses” include famed environmental writer Rebecca Solnit, who, in a column last year for the London Review of Books, likened them to “spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us” and lamented that they were helping to turn San Francisco into “a bedroom community for the tech capital of the world at the other end of the peninsula.”
“We have never seen one issue that has brought together issues of housing, wage inequality, social justice and environmental impact into one issue,” Cynthia Crews, spokesperson for the San Francisco League of Pissed-Off Voters, told MintPress News in an interview.
A few hours after the April 1 clown protest in the Mission District, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved an 18-month pilot program that requires the bus operators to pay a fee of $1 per stop. But a coalition of groups including the League of Pissed-Off Voters, the Housing Rights Committee and the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club wants the city to conduct a full environmental review that would cover the buses’ impact on housing.
“Our main concern is the displacement” of seniors, longtime residents and families in favor of wealthy, mostly single people, said Richard Drury, the coalition’s attorney.
Anti-bus backlash
Mountain View and neighboring communities such as Sunnyvale and Cupertino are home to some of the country’s largest companies but they have not generally been considered desirable places to live by their mostly youthful workers.
“I lived in Sunnyvale my first year at my current job and hated it so much,” one shuttle rider told the UC-Berkeley researchers. “I don’t think I would ever live in the South Bay again. I felt very isolated there as a single, gay man.”
San Francisco, with its nightclubs, gourmet restaurants, permissive atmosphere and quaint neighborhoods, is altogether more appealing to the tech workforce. The average age of the shuttle riders in Berkeley’s sample was 31.6 years old, while 67 percent reported an income of $100,000 or more. The vast majority rent their homes.
In Silicon Valley, the average tech-professional salary in 2013 was $108,603, a 7.2 percent increase on the previous year, making even upscale San Francisco neighborhoods such as Pacific Heights (median rent: $3,100) and the Marina (median rent: $2,900) affordable. The Mission District, with a median rent of only $2,675, is a relative bargain.
Commuting to tech jobs from San Francisco, though, can be a major headache. In 2012, the San Francisco-Oakland area ranked second in the U.S. for yearly hours of delay per auto commuter due to congestion. With the shuttle buses, tech employers provide a benefit that is free for their workers and does not need to operate at a profit.
“It gives me a calm, clean, quiet place to work with Wi-Fi,” a participant in the Berkeley study enthused.
Google introduced the first shuttle in 2004, upgrading its vanpool program and carrying 155 passengers on a route that made two stops in San Francisco. It now operates about 100 buses at 80 shuttle stops across the entire Bay Area with 380 daily departures and approximately 10,000 daily one-way trips.
All this, of course, means fewer solo drivers on the cluttered Bay Area highways. The shuttles have become so important to riders that, according to UC-Berkeley, more than half of them live within a 10-minute walk of their stop. And even though it is illegal in San Francisco for private vehicles to use public bus stops, the city didn’t seem to mind the Google buses clogging up “red zones.”
“If any other companies wanted to start a similar program … the city would require them to do an environmental review,” Drury told MintPress. “Because it’s Google, they don’t have to do anything.”
But around the Bay Area, an anti-bus backlash has been building, reflecting, in part, a class-based disenchantment with what some have called the “Googleopoly.”
“Wealthy corporations like Google” use “public infrastructure for virtually no cost, while the public pays more than ever,” Heart of the City complains on its website, noting that San Francisco is the city with “the fastest-growing inequality gap in the country.”
Environmental review
In one of the first protests, members of a group called the San Francisco Displacement and Neighborhood Impact Agency blocked a Google bus in the Mission District in December, brandishing signs reading, “Public $$$$, Private Gains” and “Stop Displacement Now.”
The location of the protest was not coincidental. Displacement is “really changing the face of the Mission District,” which had been a mostly low-income Latino community, Drury said. “Families who have been there for generations are being pushed out by people earning six figures.”
Later the same month, a window was shattered and tires were slashed on a bus that was picking up Google employees in West Oakland. On April 2, hoodie-wearing protesters climbed on top of a Yahoo! bus in Oakland and at least one of them vomited onto the windshield.
“There are activists who would like to ban the buses entirely,” Drury said. Such a ban would reduce displacement, he added, “But people are going to live where they want to live.”
At the Board of Supervisors meeting on April 1, activists urged the board to submit the pilot shuttle program for review under the California Environmental Quality Act. But Supervisor Scott Wiener, who represents part of the Mission District, suggested they were abusing environmental law to halt or slow the process of gentrification.
“This has to do with a political current that [assumes] technology workers aren’t real San Franciscans,” he said. “But … quite a few of them have lived here for a very long time. Many of them used to drive and now take the shuttles.”
The board voted 8-2 against a CEQA review. Since then, anti-tech activists have been finding other outlets for their frustration, picketing the San Francisco home of Digg founder and Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose and targeting a Google lawyer who owns a building where tenants have been evicted.
The pilot program will launch July 1, but Drury said his clients are considering whether to seek a court order that would force an environmental review. “Under CEQA, displacement of people is considered an environmental impact,” he said.
“If you charge Google passengers the same $2 fare [as public transit riders], that would pay for a whole lot of low-income housing,” he suggested.
For her part, Crews of the League of Pissed-Off Voters anticipates more protests but hopes that there is a way to “create harmony,” citing a group called Engage SF that has been “trying to bring together housing rights activists and people from the tech community.”
She also thinks that tech workers who are lucky enough to move to San Francisco need “to step up a little bit more,” perhaps by signing a pledge to not contribute to displacement.
After all, Crews said, “It’s an amazing privilege to be able to live here.”