UC Press Blog

By Manissa Maharawal, author of Anti-Eviction: The Fight against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco

The United States is in the midst of a massive housing crisis—one that has worsened over the past decade. Today, whether one rents or owns, everyone is spending more of their income on housing then almost ever before. 

But the burden is unevenly distributed: seventy percent of low-income people are “severely rent burdened,” meaning they spend more than half of their income on rent. There is no state or county in the US where working full time in a minimum wage job will allow you to afford a two-bedroom apartment. Home prices have increased 88% in the past decade, making homeownership increasingly out of reach. Meanwhile, the high cost of housing is a main cause of inflation, driving up the cost of living and the cost of goods across the county.

Coupled with this housing crisis, the political crisis we face today is one indelibly shaped by the tech industry and emerging forms of techno-fascism. It is not only that the new  tech oligarchy has become deeply embedded in the present authoritarian US government, but that explicitly techno-fascist ideas are increasingly popular amongst them. As tech companies and AI cause environmental degradation, automate warfare and genocide,  profit from the youth mental health crises, and promulgate new forms of colonialism (digital, urban, imperialist), they are complicit in the degradation of the democratic process. Through all of this, tech oligarchs continue to evade regulation, be immune to critique even from within their own companies, and continue to massively  profit from these destructive processes. The present AI bubble is fueled in large part by the promise that AI will replace many human workers, thereby cutting costs and generating huge profits for investors—never mind the social costs of mass layoffs and mass unemployment. 

These twin crises—of housing and the destructive tech industry—are at the center of my book, Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech-led Gentrification in San Francisco. The focus of the book is San Francisco in the 2010s, during the tech boom 2.0. This was the time of angel investors, unicorn start-ups and overnight Twitter millionaires. It brought untold wealth and capital investment to the city, as well as massive social disruption. I look at the other side of the tech boom—the eviction crisis, gentrification, the crisis of affordable housing, and the consequent displacement of tens of thousands of residents from the city. As tech money flooded in San Francisco, many long-term tenants faced eviction, but they also fought back and built an impressive housing justice movement in the city. The activists and tenants I worked with organized not only against landlords, speculators and developers, but also against the tech industry itself, protesting against what I call, “tech-led gentrification.”

Anti-Eviction chronicles these protests, telling the stories of the tenants and the politics that motivated them, how they kept people in their homes, and the lessons and tactics we can learn from their work. In San Francisco in the 2010s, resistance was everywhere and protests occurred weekly. Sometimes this took the form of direct actions, with tenants using disruptive protest tactics at the homes and offices of the landlords who were evicting them. Sometimes it was eviction defenses. Often hundreds of people would march through the streets to fight for local teachers, or elders being evicted. Sometimes it took the form of bus blockades targeting the so-called “Google buses” that tech employees took from San Francisco to Silicon Valley. It also took the form of activist research collectives, counter-mapping, community oral history and everyday forms of building political community.

My book is based on my own long-term involvement in this housing movement as well as my work with the activist research collective, The Anti Eviction Mapping Project. It asks how scholars can support and work in solidarity with social movement and use “activist ethnography,” counter-mapping and community oral history to build campaigns against displacement and eviction. 

To give just a few examples of this, through our work with The Anti Eviction Mapping Project, we documented how state-level policies were being used as  “speculator loopholes”  enabling whole buildings full of rent-controlled tenants to be evicted. This then became the basis for particular campaigns. We collected and cleaned eviction data to identify particularly predatory landlords and build campaigns across buildings owned by the same person. And we supported tenant-led individual campaigns to keep people in their homes, employing a diversity of tactics (direct action, public pressure, storytelling, coalition building, and counter-mapping). 

At our present crisis-ridden conjuncture, the mainstream solutions on offer seem woefully inadequate: on the one hand, centrist technocratic solutions to the housing crisis seem to think that zoning reform and deregulation will save us by indiscriminately building more housing. Never mind that there are already 16 million vacant homes in the US. What is needed is not more housing, but rather more housing that is affordable to more people. This takes political will, political vision, and political organizing to develop.[TI1]  It takes rent control, the de-commodification of housing, state investment in social housing, the expansion of community land trusts, and curtailing the power of landlords and real estate capital. On the other hand, while tech oligarchs seem only to want to “move fast and break things,” we need a widespread movement against the environmental, social and warmaking consequences of AI and the data centers they rely on. And we need to push for government regulation of these tools, redistributing the wealth of tech companies, taking back control of our data. 

These may seem like impossible goals. But I offer Anti-Eviction as a rejoinder to the political pessimism of our moment. It shows how everyday people working in (often) small groups, with dedication, vision and a sense of shared commitment to one another can fight and win.