Remembrance of things past: Part 1

When I lived in Potrero Hill in the 1980s, my landlord was my next-door neighbor, the kind of kindly, eccentric bohemian this historically most-lefty-in-the-city nabe had always attracted. The Slovenian union hall is situated here. Traditionally, journalists and low-rent architects and artists were drawn here, in part because of the cheap rents and good light. Joe's grandparents had owned a cattle ranch on what is now part of the greenbelt surrounding Stanford University; Joe got a degree in theater arts from San Francisco State, had lived in Paris and North Beach in the '50s, in a loft in the Haight in the '60s, and for years made his living making architectural models. He also owns a 1949 Ford truck, which he always kept parked near the intersection we lived on -- not an issue in a neighborhood where there is lots of on-street parking.

Joe isn't running a meth lab, nor routinely scheduling raves, nor kenneling yappy dogs, nor, unlike my next-door neighbors in Santa Cruz, running an illegal car repair and refinishing business out of his house. He rides his bike far more than he drives. He's lived in that sun-drenched flat for close to 20 years, and been a good neighbor to all. Yet someone, starting about three years ago, began phoning into the Department of Parking and Traffic, complaining about his abandoned eyesore truck -- and they succeeded in getting it towed if he didn't move it often. Why live in Potrero Hill -- a neighborhood that abuts a light-industrial area, where Anchor Steam beer is still made and until only a few years ago you could smell the Hills Brothers' coffee roasting that always made the entrance to the Bay Bridge smell like toast -- unless you can appreciate the beauty of a museum-quality mid-century truck? We both suspect that if it were an SUV parked in front of his house, and not his trusty steed of 40-plus years, the anonymous informer would never have acted. Joe, whose duplex with smashing views is long paid off, tells me he feels like he's being forced out by the dot-com people.

Artists and arts organizations have been and continue to be economically harassed out of the city -- a trend exacerbated by the new gold rush. With no rent control on commercial property (modest 1,200-square-foot spaces now routinely rent for $3,000 a month), all kinds of rehearsal spaces and performance spaces and exhibition spaces and true live/work spaces (not the slapdash gimcrack monstrosities being thrown up by powerful contractor Joe O'Donoghue's Residential Builders Association, where chief technology officers live for their work) are in jeopardy. To take just one example: Artists' Television Access, a Mission District exhibition space where the best and worst of non-commercial films have been shown for years, is in jeopardy.

As Carren Shagley, a San Francisco realtor, asks, "What artist can pay $650,000 for a live-work space?" Still, these tenements of tomorrow would make a techno-libertarian proud: They don't pay into the city's public-school taxes, and their developers are not required, as they would be with other kinds of developments, to make any of them affordable housing. Ah, the beauties of the free market and the freedom from despised regulation.

Creating work that you hope might have value beyond a Webweek, or not intended to be monetized on the Web, requires time and space enough to be able to live at least at subsistence level while you rehearse or paint or go against City Hall as a skateboard activist.

But the Internet culture that celebrates all work all the time doesn't accord value to anything that isn't easily monetized -- or corporatized. The importance of leisure time, of being able to support yourself with a day job to pursue other ends, to rehearse and canvass and organize and noodle and reflect, is totally at odds with the all-connected-all-the-time upside-potential lifestyle of the dot-com people.

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