May 8, 2014 (Updated April 2015)
Google Bus Blockades for a Right to the City
by Leslie Dreyer
When activists with Heart of the City affinity group, housing advocates, and tenants blocked the Google buses in San Francisco to draw attention to broader issues of gentrification and displacement, they struck a nerve that was felt throughout the world. These private coaches used by many tech companies, though all deemed “Google buses”, utilize public bus stops to reverse-commute their high-paid workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley. Stopping the white, unmarked, double-decker behemoth in its tracks became the symbolic spike in many of late capitalism gears. Hundreds of journalists from all over the world scrambled to cover the actions, and through such efforts, they began to cover the eviction and income disparity crises. This article analyzes: how it unfolded; how we were able to get corporate media to tell unglamorous but essential stories of the dispossessed; and how it fed a larger movement fighting for social and structural change prioritizing those with less access to wealth. By sifting through the actions, I seek ways to envision the next “Google bus,” the next symbol that penetrates mainstream media, ignites debates, and forces people of different backgrounds to have conversations around income inequality, privilege, rights to the city and a roof.
With evictions increasing 115% from 2012 to 2013 in San Francisco, the crisis started to mirror that of the first tech boom (1997-2000). Thus, the tenor of folks trying to fight it grew louder. Rents had been on a continuous uptick, and in 2012 they started skyrocketing at rates we hadn’t seen since the height of the real-estate bubble in 2006 (Anti-Eviction Mapping Project 2014). San Francisco rivaled Manhattan for the highest rents in the country. The tenant case that garnered the most press at the time was the Lee family’s fight for their home of 34 years (Fagan 2013). In October 2013 hundreds of people including two supervisors came out and risked arrest on the day the cops were supposed to oust the family. The public pressure forced Mayor Ed Lee to negotiate a 10-day stay of their eviction order, and his office attempted to find the family a home (Ho 2013). The outcry raised the political stakes, and in this case, it seemed to temporarily work, though in the end the city couldn’t find the family a comparable, affordable home, and the Lees were forced to settle for a smaller, more dilapidated apartment. This wasn’t a ‘win’ for activists, though major publicity showing that even the mayor couldn’t find residents housing when he intervened was a wake up call for everyone in the city.
Around this time, one couldn’t go a day without people talking about their friends getting evicted, moving to the East Bay or the lack of affordable housing in the greater Bay Area. Another thing on people’s minds and tongues was the ‘Google bus’, or ‘Gbus’ for short. These luxury coaches, used by all major tech firms to shuttle tech workers from SF to Silicon Valley, have been around since 2007, but they started multiplying in the last few years. In February 2013, local writer and historian Rebecca Solnit finally put these sentiments in print, which became the most cited and shared article regarding the Google bus phenomenon.
The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public....
Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us....
Sometimes the Google Bus just seems like one face of Janus-headed capitalism; it contains the people too valuable even to use public transport or drive themselves (Solnit 2014).
May 6th 2013 was the first public event using the Gbus as a symbol of gentrification. Several activists had made tech bus piñatas that people smashed at the 16th street BART plaza, which was surrounded by as many cops as there were protesters. Some news outlets dismissed this “anti-gentrification block party” as anti-climactic. Perhaps they were hoping for a riot. Thankfully, one journalist who happened to live in the Mission took a moment to reflect on the surrounding situation. He writes, “As a three-year resident of the Mission, I’ve seen the influx of money from the rise of Apple and Google’s stock plus the Facebook IPO change its character... Unfortunately, I haven’t seen the tech giants who’ve colonized the neighborhood do much to give back. Funding some local education or beautification initiatives could go a long way to reducing the gentrification backlash” (Constine 2013). It was around this time that I started raising funds to put a fake Google bus in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade.
In the spring of 2013, Brian Whitty released the first map visualizing SF’s Ellis Act Evictions from 1997-2013, which detailed the state law landlords were using as a loophole around rent control in order to evict tenants (Keeling 2013). At the same time the SF Pride Parade president rescinded the nomination of whistleblower Private Manning, who leaked details of US war crimes, as a parade Grand Marshal. San Francisco’s cultural institutions were becoming as gentrified as the city itself, and working class folks, radicals and queers were being displaced from both. To many low-income LGBTQ folks, Pride began to feel more like a parade for corporate advertising instead of a protest for liberation from police and administrative violence. Thus, a group of artists, queers and housing advocates and marched as the contingent G.E.T. OUT with PRIDE. By presenting our group to Pride management as “queer techies for open source technology” who wanted to be placed next to Google and other tech companies because “some of us worked for them and wanted to be near our coworkers,” we fooled a coordinator in charge. We were indeed placed among Twitter and Google. Confused tech workers watched as we stuck our vinyl banner on the side of the rented luxury coach, which read: “Gentrification and Eviction Technologies OUT” in Google font.
Our goal was to publicly and spectacularly link the tech boom to the displacement crisis by using the arena of a huge event that draws thousands of onlookers. We made a giant banner of Whitty’s Ellis Act Eviction map that trailed behind our faux Google bus, and participants wore giant cardboard cutouts that mimicked Google map location markers to mirror the eviction spots on the map. Our tactic was to disrupt from within – to jump through the bureaucratic hoops and pay the fees in order to gain the built-in press that comes with the package. What we didn’t expect was to be one of the only two groups to be censored. Evidently someone calling the shots at Pride decided to divert the cameras (a benefit usually covered by entry fees) as the Private Manning and GET OUT with Pride contingents passed the press. Luckily the Bay Guardian was there to report on the spectacle, which became the most read story on their site that week sparking debates like:
Cash-rich corps. like Google need to build company housing for their workers NEAR their workplace. Not very SUSTAINABLE to bus people in any direction when they can live in the affluent cities of the Peninsula and bike or walk to work. – Anonymous Commenter 1
Did it ever occur to you that I do not want to live next door to the people I work with? – Anonymous Commenter 2
So why did you come to SF? So you can all rent the new 2/2 apts that just went up on Valencia for $5,000/mo? Soon you're going to all live here because it's just so "interesting," plague the Mission with your button-downs and your Uber cars and your guffawing at the gay nightclub posters, and wake up one day and see that your neighbors are your coworkers. All the "interesting" will be gone, because you used your power to destroy it. Why not stay in San Jo and try to make it exciting? Write some graffiti on the walls in C++ or something.
– Anonymous Commenter 3 (Bowe 2013)
Making a complex argument within a form of protest is never easy, especially in the U.S. where people have fading memories of radical uprisings and people’s movements. Occupy Wall St. was the most recent one, perhaps the only one in millennials’ lifetimes, and, unfortunately, mainstream media was quick to condemn it for “not having clear demands.” This argument neglected the interconnectedness of our global capitalist problems by insisting that every problem has one cause and, thus, one clear way to rectify it. Our intervention was met with a similar reaction: media questioned what tech had to do with evictions and some journalists urged us to focus on landlords and politicians. They conveniently left out that our Pride spectacle publicized Eviction Free San Francisco, a direct action mutual aid group directly targeting greedy landlords. It became clear that tying the tech boom to real estate speculation and a broadening inequality gap was going to take a different and more direct approach.
December 9th 2013, a similar affinity group of friends and housing organizers, now going by the name Heart of the City Collective (the title of the website we used to publicize the Pride action), decided to take our message to the next level: we blocked a double-decker Google bus on 24th and Valencia Street in the Mission District. We surrounded the bus dressed in fluorescent vests and holding streets signs reading: “Warning: Two-Tier System” and “Stop Displacement Now.” Performing a faux city agency, the San Francisco Displacement and Neighborhood Impact Agency, we issued an ordinance that the city should have been enforcing for years. I dug up the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) law that the private shuttles were breaking: The Curb Priority Law, which basically states that no vehicle other than Muni buses can park in Muni zones; if they do so, they’ll receive a $271 fine. Our ordinance took this infringement and applied it to SFMTA’s estimates of how many times private shuttles stop per work day, which was approximately 7100 times in over 200 Muni stops. I calculated that 7100 stops times $271 fines each time, times 265 workdays a year, times two years since we’ve seen the shuttles increasing, equaled $1 billion in fines. Thus, our ordinance suggested that this amount should be collected and used to improve public transit, eviction defense and affordable housing initiatives.
Major news outlets and local TV stations were clamoring to cover the story before it even happened based on one line our press liaison gave them: “we will be blocking the Google bus.” Their massive cameras spoiled the surprise and made our theatrics much less believable. Regardless, we were able to stall the bus for 45 minutes and became a top new story for weeks. This first action garnered over 100 articles from around the world, was featured on Reuters, BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, Al Jazeera, the Daily Show, Rush Limbaugh, even Google News blasted it on Twitter. Emails flooded in from head news outlets in Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Japan, France, England, Germany, … all asking for interviews and if we were going to do it again, so that they could fly in and film another one with their cameras. The Bay Guardian posted a video of a union organizer doing a bit of improv impersonating an outraged Google employee. They didn’t fact check, uploaded it as a real Google employee and then had to scramble to deal with the internet traffic, which was so great that it shut down their servers for the first time in history. People all over the world wanted this story. The Google Bus Protest became a meme.
Our group was initially worried that our intentions of highlighting the eviction epidemic would be derailed by the side theatrics. However, Max Alper, deemed “Google Bus Boy,” became an additional meme and sent the story even further. The Guardian UK article stated, “Tensions between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is fertile ground for political theater. A hoax isn’t a hoax without some truth” (Wiltz 2013). Coincidentally, the very next day AngelHack CEO Greg Gopman publicly spouted this toxic vitriol on his facebook page:
Just got back to SF. I've traveled around the world and I gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down market st in San Francisco. Why the heart of our city has to be overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash I have no clue… You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us (Dickey 2013).
The timing couldn’t have been better for our growing movement. Gopman’s reality made Alper’s theater look downright saintly.
Even Mayor Ed Lee felt he had to publicly address the Google bus controversy by toeing the line, “People, stop blaming tech, … tech companies. They want to work on a solution. I think it's unfortunate that some voices want to pit one economic sector they view as successful against the rest of our challenge” (CBS 2013). Google released a benign statement, "We certainly don't want to cause any inconvenience to SF residents and we and others in our industry are working with SFMTA to agree on a policy on shuttles in the city" (Thompson 2013). In summary, two-dozen activists were able to make hundreds of headlines and force the head politician of our city and a giant corporation known for not responding to media to issue press statements. We knew we were onto something, so… we did it again.
On December 20, we teamed up with community groups Our Mission No Eviction and Eviction Free San Francisco, which had become a well-established direct action group since its announcement at our Pride Parade spectacle, and together we blocked Apple’s private shuttle bus on Valencia Street, across the street from our first blockade. Using the momentum of the media’s fascination with these actions, we were able to get the unglamorous stories of evictions into the headlines. Luckily the syndicated Reuters article about our December 9th action gave a neutral account of our intentions rather than the slanted “us vs. them”, “protesters vs. techies” angles that many other outlets were pitching (McBride 2013). This time we were able to represent our anti-gentrification and displacement message instead of the ‘anti-techie’ message created by the media by organizing several tenants facing evictions as our main speakers. This allowed us to tell a more complicated story:
Big tech (much of it based over 40 mi. away in Silicon Valley) exploits San Francisco’s cultural diversity and public infrastructure to lure workers to the area. Real estate speculators capitalize on the influx of high-wage earners by evicting long-time residents to rent units at inflated rates, commanding up to twenty percent more around tech shuttle stops. Speculative real estate takes advantage of the new tech class, using the Ellis Act, buy-buts, rent increases, and harassment to replace poor and working-class tenants with the new upwardly mobile tech workers. Since the emergence of the Tech Boom 2.0, we have seen no-fault evictions up eighty-three percent. … We will fight to save our city refuge and neighborhoods! We will not be washed away by this green-washing campaign, by big business, by corporate greed, or by corrupt politics. (Heart of the City 2013)
Though again, there were extraneous factors that hooked the media. Oakland protestors blocked two tech shuttle buses on the same day, breaking the window of one of them. News outlets were quick to lump the groups together and call us all “violent protestors” even though no person was hurt. Journalists tried to bait our group with questions like, “Don’t you think they’re appropriating your actions and making you look bad?” Luckily we were able to sidestep such questions, which could splinter a movement, and reiterated that we were not responsible for another group’s actions but support a diversity of tactics in the growing fight against displacement and inequality.
One argument repeatedly issued by tech and big business advocates was that the private shuttles take cars off the road and are, thus, environmentally friendly. Google even issued a memo regarding an SFMTA hearing, which was covering a pilot program that would essentially legalize their use of public bus stops for a mere $1 per stop, and told their employees to show up to the say things like this:
*I support local and small businesses in my neighborhood on a regular basis
*My shuttle empowers my colleagues and I to reduce our carbon emissions by
removing cars from the road
*If the shuttle program didn’t exist, I would continue to live in San Francisco and
drive to work on the peninsula
*I am a shuttle rider, SF resident, and I volunteer at… (Tsotsis 2014)
A Google employee leaked the memo to our group who then gave it to Tech Crunch, the biggest online tech publication in the country. Our strategy: hit ‘em where it hurts – within their own industry – on the day before the hearing (January 20, 2014). We also gave the outlet details of a survey showing that almost 50% of tech workers wouldn’t drive alone and many would choose to live closer to work if the shuttles weren’t an option, which contradicted what Google was urging their employees to say.
On the morning of January 21, 2014, the date of the SFMTA hearing on the proposed Commuter Shuttle Program, we blocked a Facebook and a Google bus on 8th and Market Streets, marched to the SF Realtors Association and then to City Hall in an effort to physically tie the story of tech money, interests and tax avoidance to real estate speculation and corrupt city politics. Once again, all the news cameras were out and followed us from our actions to one of the most packed SFMTA hearings in history – big business vs. long-time San Franciscans and anti-displacement activists. Goliath won that round, but that didn’t stop us.
Loud-mouthed tech folks continued to unwittingly help our movement. On January 24, venture capitalist/tech investor Tom Perkins invoked Godwin’s law and compared us to Nazis:
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay… This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now (Perkins 2014)?
And in March, Sarah Slocum claimed she was assaulted for wearing Google Glass at a bar in the Haight District. However, it was later revealed, via the raw footage captured on her wearable, that she was the person instigating the kerfuffle and surveilling the bar patrons.
The press was finally telling the stories we’d been urging them to tell. They were writing into our website heart-of-the-city.org and asking to interview tenants facing evictions. This was a major win in our eyes. Our actions had become a megaphone for a much larger populace facing the loss of their homes, communities, safety net, and culture. Through our repeated actions, we demonstrated solidarity with residents who were tired of being seen and treated as mere consumers. It was as if we threw a ball against the invisible force field of neoliberal global capital to see its contours and exploit the underbelly of its narrative (De Kosnik 2014). Alongside Edward Snowden’s revelations of the tech industry working with the NSA, the Gopmans, Perkins and Slocums of the world were starting to prove to the general public that the industry would not solve the world’s problems; in fact, tech giants’ ongoing “disruption” and deregulation of other industries and centralization of wealth was indeed exacerbating them. As the U.S. moved from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy, the wealth gap between the country’s top 20 percent of earners and the rest of America had stretched to its widest point in the least three decades (Fry 2014). Meanwhile, our region’s three largest cities, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, became the “three worst cities for renters” with long-time tenants being evicted to make room for high-wage tech workers, while non-profits and small businesses were displaced by startups offering well above the previous rental prices (Hapsis 2015).
On February 21, Tim Redmond uncovered emails showing that SFMTA had given Google and other shuttle companies a “handshake” pass for years (Redmond 2014). They also showed SFMTA had started giving Google more tickets after our actions, and that Google had hired a the public relations firm Barbary Coast Consulting to get the few tickets they had received dismissed. The Examiner reissued the same story on February 25, though without crediting Redmond. Two days later there was a surprise announcement from the Mayor after his closed-door meeting with a senior Google executive: Google decided to give a $6.8 million “gift” to fund two years of free Muni transit for poor and working class youth in San Francisco. The Chronicle noted the much-needed PR gesture, “[Google’s donation] is just the first in what Mayor Ed Lee expects will be a series of donations from the tech giant as the industry increasingly looks to improve its local image and ease the city's affordability crisis” (Coté and Lagos 2014). They didn’t, however, mention that People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) had been working on this campaign for years, and it already had a good chance of passing with or without Google’s gesture. The press also failed to note that had SFMTA collected fines for Google’s 150 illegal stops per day, the tech giant would actually owe $10.6 million per year to the city. This revenue wouldn’t be an optional gift that could go on a corporate philanthropy portfolio; it would be in the form of taxes and fees that our city representatives should be taking from wealthy corporations. Instead, politicians are giving them tax breaks and letting them avoid paying fines and fees for public infrastructure (Levy and Vekshin 2014).
Since the press finally ‘got’ our anti-displacement message and public opinion was starting to turn a critical eye on big tech taking more from the community than it returns, Heart of the City Collective had more liberty to boost our level of theatrics and layers of parody. Our April Fools Day action purposefully preceded the appeal of the SFMTA’s Commuter Shuttle Program at the Board of Supervisors meeting. We created Gmuni, a faux Google pilot program that would allow the public to use Google buses, which illegally utilize public bus stops, for free. We handed out Gmuni passes, and acrobats dressed in Google-colored spandex effectively blocked the bus at 24th Street and Valencia while participants tried to board. Alongside these spectacles, we had a stilt-walking Google/DARPA surveillance robot looming over the crowd. Once again, we captured the media’s attention. Though, this time we added a little levity to a dire situation, as seen in some of the headlines: Google Bus Protest the Most San Francisco Thing Ever and Google Bus Protests get Colorful Ahead of Hearing on City Shuttle Program (Wuestewald 2014; Cutler 2014a).
Those pushing the April 1st appeal of the Commuter Shuttle Program lost the Board of Supervisors vote but are taking it to court and have a good case. Evidently, SFMTA approved the new pilot program without subjecting it to environmental review, which should be required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Even adding bike lanes has been subject to such reviews in the past. According to the written appeal:
… there is no CEQA exemption that can reasonably apply to the Commuter Shuttle Project, because there is a fair argument that the Project will result in significant environmental impacts, including air pollution, the displacement of people and housing, and the displacement of low income communities and communities of color that live, work, and commute in the areas proposed for Commuter Shuttle activities. CEQA requires the lead agency to determine whether the “environmental effects of a project will cause substantial adverse effects on human beings, either directly or indirectly, … (Drury 2014)
Even if they don’t win the appeal, these exercises are necessary. Successes may not come in the form of policy change from our broken ‘representative democracy’ but instead in the form of a growing social movement demanding justice and accountability, especially from the wealthiest corporations in the world that present themselves as environmentally friendly, innovative, even democratic.
In the eleven months since Heart of the City Collective staged the faux Google bus in the Pride Parade, San Francisco’s eviction epidemic, hyper-gentrification and inequality gap have made hundreds of headlines all over the world. We were not alone in action and outrage, but our blockades opened the floodgates to a reserve of sentiment against the obvious atrocities and unfairness the ‘free market’ is unleashing on the majority, especially those living in urban centers right next to the richest people in the world. Theatre artist and tactical performance practitioner Larry Bogad says, “Being right is not good enough. You need to grab people’s attention by breaking the rules or defying expectations, and you have to win in a war of symbols and symbolic action and storytelling” (Bogad 2013). With the Google bus blockades and our unexpected theatrics, we achieved all of his above requirements. Even Tech Crunch’s latest article on the issue seemed to agree:
Tenants-rights activists had struggled to generate momentum for protections against Ellis Act evictions, but villains like real-estate speculators are too nebulous. Indeed, many of the landlords responsible for the bulk of Ellis Act evictions hide behind strangely-named entities like ‘Pineapple Boy LLC.’ But the Google Bus protests worked. They were a media sensation. They tapped into this inchoate sense of frustration around everything from rising income inequality to privacy to surveillance to the environmental impact of the hardware we buy to a dubious sense that today’s leading technology companies aren’t living up to their missions of not being evil. (Cutler 2014b)
Ron Conway, the biggest tech lobbyist in the area, acknowledged our actions and is now pushing for Ellis Act reform, which could be seen as a success of the anti-displacement movement. However, this is the same powerhouse that got Mayor Ed Lee elected, funded the No Sit/Lie bill, which effectively criminalized homelessness, and helped broker tech sector tax breaks. What tactics can we use to push those in power to change policies that harm tenants and disenfranchised populations while taking back power for the majority of voters without millions of dollars in lobbying potential? How can we make sure those that accelerated the inequality crisis don’t use these opportunities to appear as saviors and reclaim seats during the next election cycle? And a final question, one I raised in the beginning: what is the next “Google bus”? What symbol and point of intervention will capture the imaginations of a wide demographic and keep the momentum moving towards transformative, liberatory models of living together? I want to believe artist Megan Wilson’s painted statement “Capitalism is Over if You Want It” (2011) appropriating John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “War is Over If You Want It” (1969). I want it, and I know the Bay Area’s problems are bigger than housing alone; they’re bigger than the Bay Area alone. David Harvey addresses similar sentiments in The Right to the City:
At this point in history, this has to be a global struggle, predominantly with finance capital, for that is the scale at which urbanization processes now work…
One step towards unifying [global] struggles is to adopt the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all (Harvey 2008).
I’m all for adopting the Right to the City as a slogan and ideal. Now we just have to find the symbols to amplify it in conjunction with ongoing efforts to transform the emblematic spikes in late capitalism’s gears into physical and lived realities.
REFERENCES
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (2014), ‘No Fault Evictions 1997-2013’, www.antievictionmappingproject.net , accessed 4 May 2014.
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Bowe, Rebecca (2013), ‘Anti-gentrification activists “GET OUT” with Pride’, San Francisco Bay Guardian, 30 June, Web, accessed 4 April 2014.
CBS (2013), ‘SF Mayor Disputes Link Between Soaring Tech Sector, Rising Rents’, San Francisco CBS. 19 December, Web, accessed 12 January 2013.
Constine, Josh (2013), ‘Protesters Smash Google Shuttle Bus Piñata In Fight Against Rent Increases’, TechCrunch. 6 May, Web, accessed 3 April 2014.
Coté, John and Marisa Lagos (2014) ‘Google says $6.8 million for youth Muni passes just a start’, SFGate, 28 February, www.sfgate.com/news/article/Google-says-6-8-million-for-youth-Muni-passes-5273937.php, accessed 21 April 2014.
Cutler, Kim-Mai (2014a), ‘Google Bus Protests get Colorful Ahead of Hearing on City Shuttle Program’, TechCrunch, 1 April, Web, accessed 3 April 2014.
Cutler, Kim-Mai (2014b) ‘How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)’, TechCrunch. 14 April, Web, accessed 1 May 2014.
De Kosnik, Gail (2014), Summary of her description of Google bus protests’ effects on public sentiment, In-person conversation, 22 April 2014.
Dickey, Megan Rose (2013), ‘Startup CEO Who Said San Francisco Is Overrun By ‘Homeless, Drug Dealers, Dropouts, and Trash’ Says He’s Sorry’, Business Insider, 11 December, Web, accessed 3 April, 2014.
Drury, Richard (2014), ‘Coalition for Fair, Legal and Environmental Transit vs The City and County of San Francisco’, Superior Court of the State of California County of San Francisco. 1 May, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2515281/illegal-shuttles-suit.pdf, accessed 4 May 2014.
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Google Bus Blockades for a Right to the City
by Leslie Dreyer
When activists with Heart of the City affinity group, housing advocates, and tenants blocked the Google buses in San Francisco to draw attention to broader issues of gentrification and displacement, they struck a nerve that was felt throughout the world. These private coaches used by many tech companies, though all deemed “Google buses”, utilize public bus stops to reverse-commute their high-paid workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley. Stopping the white, unmarked, double-decker behemoth in its tracks became the symbolic spike in many of late capitalism gears. Hundreds of journalists from all over the world scrambled to cover the actions, and through such efforts, they began to cover the eviction and income disparity crises. This article analyzes: how it unfolded; how we were able to get corporate media to tell unglamorous but essential stories of the dispossessed; and how it fed a larger movement fighting for social and structural change prioritizing those with less access to wealth. By sifting through the actions, I seek ways to envision the next “Google bus,” the next symbol that penetrates mainstream media, ignites debates, and forces people of different backgrounds to have conversations around income inequality, privilege, rights to the city and a roof.
With evictions increasing 115% from 2012 to 2013 in San Francisco, the crisis started to mirror that of the first tech boom (1997-2000). Thus, the tenor of folks trying to fight it grew louder. Rents had been on a continuous uptick, and in 2012 they started skyrocketing at rates we hadn’t seen since the height of the real-estate bubble in 2006 (Anti-Eviction Mapping Project 2014). San Francisco rivaled Manhattan for the highest rents in the country. The tenant case that garnered the most press at the time was the Lee family’s fight for their home of 34 years (Fagan 2013). In October 2013 hundreds of people including two supervisors came out and risked arrest on the day the cops were supposed to oust the family. The public pressure forced Mayor Ed Lee to negotiate a 10-day stay of their eviction order, and his office attempted to find the family a home (Ho 2013). The outcry raised the political stakes, and in this case, it seemed to temporarily work, though in the end the city couldn’t find the family a comparable, affordable home, and the Lees were forced to settle for a smaller, more dilapidated apartment. This wasn’t a ‘win’ for activists, though major publicity showing that even the mayor couldn’t find residents housing when he intervened was a wake up call for everyone in the city.
Around this time, one couldn’t go a day without people talking about their friends getting evicted, moving to the East Bay or the lack of affordable housing in the greater Bay Area. Another thing on people’s minds and tongues was the ‘Google bus’, or ‘Gbus’ for short. These luxury coaches, used by all major tech firms to shuttle tech workers from SF to Silicon Valley, have been around since 2007, but they started multiplying in the last few years. In February 2013, local writer and historian Rebecca Solnit finally put these sentiments in print, which became the most cited and shared article regarding the Google bus phenomenon.
The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public....
Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us....
Sometimes the Google Bus just seems like one face of Janus-headed capitalism; it contains the people too valuable even to use public transport or drive themselves (Solnit 2014).
May 6th 2013 was the first public event using the Gbus as a symbol of gentrification. Several activists had made tech bus piñatas that people smashed at the 16th street BART plaza, which was surrounded by as many cops as there were protesters. Some news outlets dismissed this “anti-gentrification block party” as anti-climactic. Perhaps they were hoping for a riot. Thankfully, one journalist who happened to live in the Mission took a moment to reflect on the surrounding situation. He writes, “As a three-year resident of the Mission, I’ve seen the influx of money from the rise of Apple and Google’s stock plus the Facebook IPO change its character... Unfortunately, I haven’t seen the tech giants who’ve colonized the neighborhood do much to give back. Funding some local education or beautification initiatives could go a long way to reducing the gentrification backlash” (Constine 2013). It was around this time that I started raising funds to put a fake Google bus in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade.
In the spring of 2013, Brian Whitty released the first map visualizing SF’s Ellis Act Evictions from 1997-2013, which detailed the state law landlords were using as a loophole around rent control in order to evict tenants (Keeling 2013). At the same time the SF Pride Parade president rescinded the nomination of whistleblower Private Manning, who leaked details of US war crimes, as a parade Grand Marshal. San Francisco’s cultural institutions were becoming as gentrified as the city itself, and working class folks, radicals and queers were being displaced from both. To many low-income LGBTQ folks, Pride began to feel more like a parade for corporate advertising instead of a protest for liberation from police and administrative violence. Thus, a group of artists, queers and housing advocates and marched as the contingent G.E.T. OUT with PRIDE. By presenting our group to Pride management as “queer techies for open source technology” who wanted to be placed next to Google and other tech companies because “some of us worked for them and wanted to be near our coworkers,” we fooled a coordinator in charge. We were indeed placed among Twitter and Google. Confused tech workers watched as we stuck our vinyl banner on the side of the rented luxury coach, which read: “Gentrification and Eviction Technologies OUT” in Google font.
Our goal was to publicly and spectacularly link the tech boom to the displacement crisis by using the arena of a huge event that draws thousands of onlookers. We made a giant banner of Whitty’s Ellis Act Eviction map that trailed behind our faux Google bus, and participants wore giant cardboard cutouts that mimicked Google map location markers to mirror the eviction spots on the map. Our tactic was to disrupt from within – to jump through the bureaucratic hoops and pay the fees in order to gain the built-in press that comes with the package. What we didn’t expect was to be one of the only two groups to be censored. Evidently someone calling the shots at Pride decided to divert the cameras (a benefit usually covered by entry fees) as the Private Manning and GET OUT with Pride contingents passed the press. Luckily the Bay Guardian was there to report on the spectacle, which became the most read story on their site that week sparking debates like:
Cash-rich corps. like Google need to build company housing for their workers NEAR their workplace. Not very SUSTAINABLE to bus people in any direction when they can live in the affluent cities of the Peninsula and bike or walk to work. – Anonymous Commenter 1
Did it ever occur to you that I do not want to live next door to the people I work with? – Anonymous Commenter 2
So why did you come to SF? So you can all rent the new 2/2 apts that just went up on Valencia for $5,000/mo? Soon you're going to all live here because it's just so "interesting," plague the Mission with your button-downs and your Uber cars and your guffawing at the gay nightclub posters, and wake up one day and see that your neighbors are your coworkers. All the "interesting" will be gone, because you used your power to destroy it. Why not stay in San Jo and try to make it exciting? Write some graffiti on the walls in C++ or something.
– Anonymous Commenter 3 (Bowe 2013)
Making a complex argument within a form of protest is never easy, especially in the U.S. where people have fading memories of radical uprisings and people’s movements. Occupy Wall St. was the most recent one, perhaps the only one in millennials’ lifetimes, and, unfortunately, mainstream media was quick to condemn it for “not having clear demands.” This argument neglected the interconnectedness of our global capitalist problems by insisting that every problem has one cause and, thus, one clear way to rectify it. Our intervention was met with a similar reaction: media questioned what tech had to do with evictions and some journalists urged us to focus on landlords and politicians. They conveniently left out that our Pride spectacle publicized Eviction Free San Francisco, a direct action mutual aid group directly targeting greedy landlords. It became clear that tying the tech boom to real estate speculation and a broadening inequality gap was going to take a different and more direct approach.
December 9th 2013, a similar affinity group of friends and housing organizers, now going by the name Heart of the City Collective (the title of the website we used to publicize the Pride action), decided to take our message to the next level: we blocked a double-decker Google bus on 24th and Valencia Street in the Mission District. We surrounded the bus dressed in fluorescent vests and holding streets signs reading: “Warning: Two-Tier System” and “Stop Displacement Now.” Performing a faux city agency, the San Francisco Displacement and Neighborhood Impact Agency, we issued an ordinance that the city should have been enforcing for years. I dug up the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) law that the private shuttles were breaking: The Curb Priority Law, which basically states that no vehicle other than Muni buses can park in Muni zones; if they do so, they’ll receive a $271 fine. Our ordinance took this infringement and applied it to SFMTA’s estimates of how many times private shuttles stop per work day, which was approximately 7100 times in over 200 Muni stops. I calculated that 7100 stops times $271 fines each time, times 265 workdays a year, times two years since we’ve seen the shuttles increasing, equaled $1 billion in fines. Thus, our ordinance suggested that this amount should be collected and used to improve public transit, eviction defense and affordable housing initiatives.
Major news outlets and local TV stations were clamoring to cover the story before it even happened based on one line our press liaison gave them: “we will be blocking the Google bus.” Their massive cameras spoiled the surprise and made our theatrics much less believable. Regardless, we were able to stall the bus for 45 minutes and became a top new story for weeks. This first action garnered over 100 articles from around the world, was featured on Reuters, BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, Al Jazeera, the Daily Show, Rush Limbaugh, even Google News blasted it on Twitter. Emails flooded in from head news outlets in Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Japan, France, England, Germany, … all asking for interviews and if we were going to do it again, so that they could fly in and film another one with their cameras. The Bay Guardian posted a video of a union organizer doing a bit of improv impersonating an outraged Google employee. They didn’t fact check, uploaded it as a real Google employee and then had to scramble to deal with the internet traffic, which was so great that it shut down their servers for the first time in history. People all over the world wanted this story. The Google Bus Protest became a meme.
Our group was initially worried that our intentions of highlighting the eviction epidemic would be derailed by the side theatrics. However, Max Alper, deemed “Google Bus Boy,” became an additional meme and sent the story even further. The Guardian UK article stated, “Tensions between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is fertile ground for political theater. A hoax isn’t a hoax without some truth” (Wiltz 2013). Coincidentally, the very next day AngelHack CEO Greg Gopman publicly spouted this toxic vitriol on his facebook page:
Just got back to SF. I've traveled around the world and I gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down market st in San Francisco. Why the heart of our city has to be overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash I have no clue… You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us (Dickey 2013).
The timing couldn’t have been better for our growing movement. Gopman’s reality made Alper’s theater look downright saintly.
Even Mayor Ed Lee felt he had to publicly address the Google bus controversy by toeing the line, “People, stop blaming tech, … tech companies. They want to work on a solution. I think it's unfortunate that some voices want to pit one economic sector they view as successful against the rest of our challenge” (CBS 2013). Google released a benign statement, "We certainly don't want to cause any inconvenience to SF residents and we and others in our industry are working with SFMTA to agree on a policy on shuttles in the city" (Thompson 2013). In summary, two-dozen activists were able to make hundreds of headlines and force the head politician of our city and a giant corporation known for not responding to media to issue press statements. We knew we were onto something, so… we did it again.
On December 20, we teamed up with community groups Our Mission No Eviction and Eviction Free San Francisco, which had become a well-established direct action group since its announcement at our Pride Parade spectacle, and together we blocked Apple’s private shuttle bus on Valencia Street, across the street from our first blockade. Using the momentum of the media’s fascination with these actions, we were able to get the unglamorous stories of evictions into the headlines. Luckily the syndicated Reuters article about our December 9th action gave a neutral account of our intentions rather than the slanted “us vs. them”, “protesters vs. techies” angles that many other outlets were pitching (McBride 2013). This time we were able to represent our anti-gentrification and displacement message instead of the ‘anti-techie’ message created by the media by organizing several tenants facing evictions as our main speakers. This allowed us to tell a more complicated story:
Big tech (much of it based over 40 mi. away in Silicon Valley) exploits San Francisco’s cultural diversity and public infrastructure to lure workers to the area. Real estate speculators capitalize on the influx of high-wage earners by evicting long-time residents to rent units at inflated rates, commanding up to twenty percent more around tech shuttle stops. Speculative real estate takes advantage of the new tech class, using the Ellis Act, buy-buts, rent increases, and harassment to replace poor and working-class tenants with the new upwardly mobile tech workers. Since the emergence of the Tech Boom 2.0, we have seen no-fault evictions up eighty-three percent. … We will fight to save our city refuge and neighborhoods! We will not be washed away by this green-washing campaign, by big business, by corporate greed, or by corrupt politics. (Heart of the City 2013)
Though again, there were extraneous factors that hooked the media. Oakland protestors blocked two tech shuttle buses on the same day, breaking the window of one of them. News outlets were quick to lump the groups together and call us all “violent protestors” even though no person was hurt. Journalists tried to bait our group with questions like, “Don’t you think they’re appropriating your actions and making you look bad?” Luckily we were able to sidestep such questions, which could splinter a movement, and reiterated that we were not responsible for another group’s actions but support a diversity of tactics in the growing fight against displacement and inequality.
One argument repeatedly issued by tech and big business advocates was that the private shuttles take cars off the road and are, thus, environmentally friendly. Google even issued a memo regarding an SFMTA hearing, which was covering a pilot program that would essentially legalize their use of public bus stops for a mere $1 per stop, and told their employees to show up to the say things like this:
*I support local and small businesses in my neighborhood on a regular basis
*My shuttle empowers my colleagues and I to reduce our carbon emissions by
removing cars from the road
*If the shuttle program didn’t exist, I would continue to live in San Francisco and
drive to work on the peninsula
*I am a shuttle rider, SF resident, and I volunteer at… (Tsotsis 2014)
A Google employee leaked the memo to our group who then gave it to Tech Crunch, the biggest online tech publication in the country. Our strategy: hit ‘em where it hurts – within their own industry – on the day before the hearing (January 20, 2014). We also gave the outlet details of a survey showing that almost 50% of tech workers wouldn’t drive alone and many would choose to live closer to work if the shuttles weren’t an option, which contradicted what Google was urging their employees to say.
On the morning of January 21, 2014, the date of the SFMTA hearing on the proposed Commuter Shuttle Program, we blocked a Facebook and a Google bus on 8th and Market Streets, marched to the SF Realtors Association and then to City Hall in an effort to physically tie the story of tech money, interests and tax avoidance to real estate speculation and corrupt city politics. Once again, all the news cameras were out and followed us from our actions to one of the most packed SFMTA hearings in history – big business vs. long-time San Franciscans and anti-displacement activists. Goliath won that round, but that didn’t stop us.
Loud-mouthed tech folks continued to unwittingly help our movement. On January 24, venture capitalist/tech investor Tom Perkins invoked Godwin’s law and compared us to Nazis:
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay… This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now (Perkins 2014)?
And in March, Sarah Slocum claimed she was assaulted for wearing Google Glass at a bar in the Haight District. However, it was later revealed, via the raw footage captured on her wearable, that she was the person instigating the kerfuffle and surveilling the bar patrons.
The press was finally telling the stories we’d been urging them to tell. They were writing into our website heart-of-the-city.org and asking to interview tenants facing evictions. This was a major win in our eyes. Our actions had become a megaphone for a much larger populace facing the loss of their homes, communities, safety net, and culture. Through our repeated actions, we demonstrated solidarity with residents who were tired of being seen and treated as mere consumers. It was as if we threw a ball against the invisible force field of neoliberal global capital to see its contours and exploit the underbelly of its narrative (De Kosnik 2014). Alongside Edward Snowden’s revelations of the tech industry working with the NSA, the Gopmans, Perkins and Slocums of the world were starting to prove to the general public that the industry would not solve the world’s problems; in fact, tech giants’ ongoing “disruption” and deregulation of other industries and centralization of wealth was indeed exacerbating them. As the U.S. moved from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy, the wealth gap between the country’s top 20 percent of earners and the rest of America had stretched to its widest point in the least three decades (Fry 2014). Meanwhile, our region’s three largest cities, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, became the “three worst cities for renters” with long-time tenants being evicted to make room for high-wage tech workers, while non-profits and small businesses were displaced by startups offering well above the previous rental prices (Hapsis 2015).
On February 21, Tim Redmond uncovered emails showing that SFMTA had given Google and other shuttle companies a “handshake” pass for years (Redmond 2014). They also showed SFMTA had started giving Google more tickets after our actions, and that Google had hired a the public relations firm Barbary Coast Consulting to get the few tickets they had received dismissed. The Examiner reissued the same story on February 25, though without crediting Redmond. Two days later there was a surprise announcement from the Mayor after his closed-door meeting with a senior Google executive: Google decided to give a $6.8 million “gift” to fund two years of free Muni transit for poor and working class youth in San Francisco. The Chronicle noted the much-needed PR gesture, “[Google’s donation] is just the first in what Mayor Ed Lee expects will be a series of donations from the tech giant as the industry increasingly looks to improve its local image and ease the city's affordability crisis” (Coté and Lagos 2014). They didn’t, however, mention that People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) had been working on this campaign for years, and it already had a good chance of passing with or without Google’s gesture. The press also failed to note that had SFMTA collected fines for Google’s 150 illegal stops per day, the tech giant would actually owe $10.6 million per year to the city. This revenue wouldn’t be an optional gift that could go on a corporate philanthropy portfolio; it would be in the form of taxes and fees that our city representatives should be taking from wealthy corporations. Instead, politicians are giving them tax breaks and letting them avoid paying fines and fees for public infrastructure (Levy and Vekshin 2014).
Since the press finally ‘got’ our anti-displacement message and public opinion was starting to turn a critical eye on big tech taking more from the community than it returns, Heart of the City Collective had more liberty to boost our level of theatrics and layers of parody. Our April Fools Day action purposefully preceded the appeal of the SFMTA’s Commuter Shuttle Program at the Board of Supervisors meeting. We created Gmuni, a faux Google pilot program that would allow the public to use Google buses, which illegally utilize public bus stops, for free. We handed out Gmuni passes, and acrobats dressed in Google-colored spandex effectively blocked the bus at 24th Street and Valencia while participants tried to board. Alongside these spectacles, we had a stilt-walking Google/DARPA surveillance robot looming over the crowd. Once again, we captured the media’s attention. Though, this time we added a little levity to a dire situation, as seen in some of the headlines: Google Bus Protest the Most San Francisco Thing Ever and Google Bus Protests get Colorful Ahead of Hearing on City Shuttle Program (Wuestewald 2014; Cutler 2014a).
Those pushing the April 1st appeal of the Commuter Shuttle Program lost the Board of Supervisors vote but are taking it to court and have a good case. Evidently, SFMTA approved the new pilot program without subjecting it to environmental review, which should be required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Even adding bike lanes has been subject to such reviews in the past. According to the written appeal:
… there is no CEQA exemption that can reasonably apply to the Commuter Shuttle Project, because there is a fair argument that the Project will result in significant environmental impacts, including air pollution, the displacement of people and housing, and the displacement of low income communities and communities of color that live, work, and commute in the areas proposed for Commuter Shuttle activities. CEQA requires the lead agency to determine whether the “environmental effects of a project will cause substantial adverse effects on human beings, either directly or indirectly, … (Drury 2014)
Even if they don’t win the appeal, these exercises are necessary. Successes may not come in the form of policy change from our broken ‘representative democracy’ but instead in the form of a growing social movement demanding justice and accountability, especially from the wealthiest corporations in the world that present themselves as environmentally friendly, innovative, even democratic.
In the eleven months since Heart of the City Collective staged the faux Google bus in the Pride Parade, San Francisco’s eviction epidemic, hyper-gentrification and inequality gap have made hundreds of headlines all over the world. We were not alone in action and outrage, but our blockades opened the floodgates to a reserve of sentiment against the obvious atrocities and unfairness the ‘free market’ is unleashing on the majority, especially those living in urban centers right next to the richest people in the world. Theatre artist and tactical performance practitioner Larry Bogad says, “Being right is not good enough. You need to grab people’s attention by breaking the rules or defying expectations, and you have to win in a war of symbols and symbolic action and storytelling” (Bogad 2013). With the Google bus blockades and our unexpected theatrics, we achieved all of his above requirements. Even Tech Crunch’s latest article on the issue seemed to agree:
Tenants-rights activists had struggled to generate momentum for protections against Ellis Act evictions, but villains like real-estate speculators are too nebulous. Indeed, many of the landlords responsible for the bulk of Ellis Act evictions hide behind strangely-named entities like ‘Pineapple Boy LLC.’ But the Google Bus protests worked. They were a media sensation. They tapped into this inchoate sense of frustration around everything from rising income inequality to privacy to surveillance to the environmental impact of the hardware we buy to a dubious sense that today’s leading technology companies aren’t living up to their missions of not being evil. (Cutler 2014b)
Ron Conway, the biggest tech lobbyist in the area, acknowledged our actions and is now pushing for Ellis Act reform, which could be seen as a success of the anti-displacement movement. However, this is the same powerhouse that got Mayor Ed Lee elected, funded the No Sit/Lie bill, which effectively criminalized homelessness, and helped broker tech sector tax breaks. What tactics can we use to push those in power to change policies that harm tenants and disenfranchised populations while taking back power for the majority of voters without millions of dollars in lobbying potential? How can we make sure those that accelerated the inequality crisis don’t use these opportunities to appear as saviors and reclaim seats during the next election cycle? And a final question, one I raised in the beginning: what is the next “Google bus”? What symbol and point of intervention will capture the imaginations of a wide demographic and keep the momentum moving towards transformative, liberatory models of living together? I want to believe artist Megan Wilson’s painted statement “Capitalism is Over if You Want It” (2011) appropriating John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “War is Over If You Want It” (1969). I want it, and I know the Bay Area’s problems are bigger than housing alone; they’re bigger than the Bay Area alone. David Harvey addresses similar sentiments in The Right to the City:
At this point in history, this has to be a global struggle, predominantly with finance capital, for that is the scale at which urbanization processes now work…
One step towards unifying [global] struggles is to adopt the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all (Harvey 2008).
I’m all for adopting the Right to the City as a slogan and ideal. Now we just have to find the symbols to amplify it in conjunction with ongoing efforts to transform the emblematic spikes in late capitalism’s gears into physical and lived realities.
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