Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco’s Housing Wars

by James Tracy

San Francisco is being eroded by waves of cash flowing north from Silicon Valley. Recent evictions of long-time San Francisco residents, outrageous rents and home prices, and blockaded "Google buses" are only the tip of the iceberg. James Tracy's book focuses on the long arc of displacement over almost two decades of "dot com" boom and bust, offering the necessary perspective to analyze the latest urban horrors.

A housing activist in the Bay Area since before Google existed, Tracy puts the hardships of the working poor and middle class front and center. These essays explore the battle for urban space--public housing residents fighting austerity, militant housing takeovers, the vagaries of federal and state housing policy, as well as showdowns against gentrification in the Mission District. From these experiences, "Dispatches Against Displacement" draws out a vision of what alternative urbanism might look like if our cities were developed by and for the people who bring them to life.

James Tracy is a Bay Area native and a well-respected community organizer. He is co-founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust (which uses public and private money to buy up housing stock and take it out of the real estate market), as well as a poet and co-author of "Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power."

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

197 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 22, 2014

About the author

James Tracy is the co-author (with Amy Sonnie) of "Hillbilly Nationalists: Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times," and Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco's Housing Wars.

Tracy has edited two activist handbooks, the Civil Disobedience Handbook and the Military Draft Handbook, both on Manic D Press. Works of Poetry include co-editing "Avanti Popolo: Italian-Americans Sail Beyond Columbus," and Sparks and Codes.

Reviews

[Nick Doty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot about the history of housing debates in San Francisco and the operation of activist organizations. Probably most valuable was the very candid accounting of mistakes made and disagreements within various anti-displacement coalitions. (Indeed, even reading the other GoodReads reviews here is instructive in seeing those who despise the author for not being radical enough.)

It was frustrating to not see more of the alternative vision, where I had been hoping for inspiration. I think the community land trust concept is especially interesting and would have liked to learn more. But it also seemed confusing to hear about this post-scarcity vision and have there be almost nothing about building more housing? (NIMBY homeowners are mentioned just once, not as antagonists, but as short-term allies in trying to block BART planning and development.) I want to hear a vision of community-led development, with community land trusts, dense housing development everywhere, public transit for all. I'll keep looking for it, with this history as informative guidance.

[Nato · Rating 5 out of 5]

I may not be a good judge of this book because James is a friend, and I know the people involved and lived through and was in and around the events described. But it was great to read it all laid out in this way, and especially great how James put these local campaigns in a bigger analytical and historical context and drew out lessons learned. The book is critical yet fair towards the work that's been done. Gentrification is such a knot of issues, the focus on SRO organizing, public housing, the Mission Anti-displacement Coalition, and land trusts, gives us good tools to figure out strategies for our current challenges.

[Yuan]

I just finished reading "Dispatches Against Displacement" by James Tracy, who is a housing activist in San Francisco. It was an interesting read: both inspiring and disheartening. I don't think it necessarily taught me anything I didn't already know, but it did outline a lot of history in San Francisco - history that Seattle has and will repeat.

Some quotes that caught my eye:

[Joe Wilson] defines trauma as the "impairment of the body's natural physical and emotional capacity to heal itself." Collective trauma by extension is the destruction of a community's ability to find solutions to the problems it faces due to the aggregated injuries of inequality and discrimination."

When I think of community control, I think if a community that is able to plan its own future because they are not having to struggle so much just to stay.

Anyway, the above quotes strike me as important when I'm thinking about fights around displacement in the CID, the CD, and Southeast Seattle in general. The fact that so much energy goes just to anxiety around displacement means that there's little opportunity to think about a positive vision for one's own community.

The book advocates a great deal for Community Land Trusts and warns against promises to build affordable housing that in reality ends up decreasing the actual housing stock.

Rising property taxes isn't really touched upon in the book, probably because it's a very WA-specific issue, given our inability to tax much else. I think it gives our political climate a differing flavor, because so much of Seattle is single-family housing. Designing a housing solution that prevents displacement from rising land value while also building new affordable housing stock is, imo, challenging. I think we need to be converting detached single family housing to missing middle housing, but it often happens with displacement.

[Nikhil · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is long on name-dropping activists and activist organizations, and short on analysis and policy prescriptions. The phenomenon of displacement seems to combine two things: the economic hardship and unwanted risk embodied in evictions and uncertain future housing, and the cultural loss associated with communities being fractured and moved.

The first can be addressed by a variety of known public policies that are currently viewed as politically unpalatable and infeasible. These policies do not require communal land ownership, which seems doomed to fail the moment the communal owners want to sell/move or want to themselves become landlords. They do involve things like cash transfers to the poor, housing vouchers, changes to zoning laws, expanded funding to public housing, improved public transit that expands the functional area to the city. Barriers to implementing these policies are rooted in fractured local politics and a system of representation that disproportionately weights white suburban and rural voters.

It is entirely unclear to me that there are ways to address the second issue without guaranteeing communities the right to live wherever they end up, an unpalatable and impossible to create goal. What if a community wants to live in an economically unviable location? Creative destruction necessitates displacement, which should be ameliorated by appropriate transfers. While mourning lost community is valuable, and state-sanctioned private land grabs are a mistake, requiring the preservation of all communities is simply bizarre.

[Sterling Hardaway · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know more about the driver's of displacement in SF and cities like it from an organizers perspective, this is fantastic read.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really wish more ppl involved in movements would write books and share their thinking on what went well and what didn't. It is so incredibly valuable.

[Vincent Vertuccio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good analysis of years of San Francisco housing fights. I learned a lot, but I do think it could use a little more storytelling and direct portrayals of tenants and conditions.

[Kevin Keating · Rating 1 out of 5]

For most of the twenty years that I have known him, San Francisco housing activist James Tracy has received a steady paycheck to pedal illusions to hard-pressed poor people about the character of their powerlessness under capitalism in America. As can be amply seen in "Dispatches Against Displacement," City Hall, elected officials, and electoral politics are the star around which James Tracy's very small planet orbits. What is the legacy of this unrelentingly pro-electoral politics, work-within-the-system approach to the market-generated housing crisis in 21st century San Francisco? Today San Francisco is well on the way to becoming the world's nicest looking office park. This is happening without the faintest hint of any kind of credible, real world resistance -- resistance that doesn't play the capitalist election game, does an end-run around the bourgeois political apparatus altogether and inflicts real damage on the economic interests of the private sector elite. Regardless of subjective intentions the activities of work-within-the-system housing activists like James Tracy have helped pave the way to a contemporary situation of total demobilization and defeat for working class renters and poor people in San Francisco.

In "Dispatches Against Displacement," what is James Tracy's most far-going and visionary response to what capitalism does to housing in America? A "Community Land Trust." While this might not be a terrible thing in and of itself it tends to suggest our ultimate options is to try to shop our way out of the grief we get under the dictatorship of the market. For "radicals" of the James Tracy stripe, the capitalist system -- wage labor, money, the market -- and its political racket are eternal; they will always be with us, we must always work with them, and there is no possibility for another kind of society, let alone of fighting for it now. Opposition to market relations themselves and to the capitalist political apparatus are beyond the cognitive reach of remember everything and learn nothing salaried housing activists. Their abysmal perspectives, the consistently abysmal results they have produced, and the endless bogus rationalizations they make for their failures also serve as proof that there is no such thing as a paying gig fighting against capitalism in America.

Reading between the lines of "Dispatches Against Displacement" it can be seen that in San Francisco, James Tracy's approach of getting politicians elected and complaining about them afterward has been a catastrophic failure. It's time to retool and engage in actions that can will establish a dynamic that cuts elected officials out of the picture altogether, and consigns professional housing hustlers to time in front of a computer monitor in the unemployment office.

Kevin Keating

[Ravi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning achievement that lays bare the politics of the homeless in San Francisco. Engaging, thoughtful and erudite all at once, Tracy is well on the way to becoming a first class public intellectual. Building on his earlier book with Amy Sonnie on movements of the 60s, Hillbilly Nationalists, Tracy lovingly portrays the complex social movements at play in the housing movement in San Francisco. He effectively illustrates the pitfalls of a purely electoral approach in a thoughtful and engaging manner without ever seeming dismissive of those wedded to a different approach. The centrality of racism is ever present in this book and each page is like a clarion call for action, told with passion and verve. One feels liberated simply by reading it. Most of all, the individuals who normally occupy the margins come to the centre stage as he retells lost stories of resistance to neoliberalism. When Tracy describes a confrontation by housing activists using a bullhorn, you feel transported to San Francisco as if you are a witness to the struggle, as his prose grips and entices you. As housing becomes unaffordable to huge numbers of people in San Francisco and elsewhere, this issue warrants attention. Tracy has penned an absolute must read book that deserves to be widely studied..

[Kayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

The other reviews speak well to this book. The only thing I want to add is a complaint I've had about most urban planning politics/gentrification analyses. Tracy gives great examples of explicit practices that have done x or y in Seattle or Vallejo or Brazil, laying out action and then proceeding to talk about how it "put pressure on" or "forced the city to" without explaining what that actually means. Living and existing in this struggle in Chicago, I think a lot of people are frustrated with planning action after action under democratic non-hierarchical, often revolutionary models, to the result of an article in the paper, forcing the mayor or an alderman to comment on it once, or making a few people angry. What we need is explanation of what needs to be done to actually create tangible change, and which is what I hoped to get out of this book that ended up leaving me more frustrated than enlightened.

[Francesca Rosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Tracy's Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco's Housing Wars, is a must read for anyone who is interested in the history and reasons for gentrification and displacement of long time residents, especially poor and working class residents of color in San Francisco. The book manages to be engagingly anecdotal, filled with rigorous historical detail and thoughtful analysis at the same time. Not an easy thing to pull off. Tracy also proposes alternatives to the dominant narrative that such displacement by the wealthy is inevitable, and writes about his work with the Community Land Trust, which provides an alternative the dominant model of private property as a for profit venture.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I enjoyed most of this book and thought that it had a clear and useful overall message, there was a period of almost an entire chapter where I had no idea whether the author was describing actual events or a hypothetical future. I think the book is still worth reading, but the lack of clear transition in that one case does reduce the rating by a star.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review of this book on CounterPunch:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/2...

[Beau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tracy's book starts out at a lumbering pace but it quickly gains speed/organizational cohesion. What follows is diary on the history of affordable housing in the Bay Area.

[Mills College Library]

363.583 T761 2014