Remember when people used to move to cities to escape small-town persecution, religion, to be free, to have sex, to make art?
“Now people come here to be rich and powerful,” Erick Lyle said.
We were talking on the phone about his new book Streetopia. Tomorrow night, Lyle will read from it and talk about artists, housing and displacement, and direct action at Left Bank Books here in Seattle, where displacement is approaching San Francisco levels. That’s part of why every other art show in Seattle this year seems to be about housing, led by The New Foundation’s Martha Rosler project Housing Is a Human Right. It’s not just some kind of art trend. It is a goddamn crisis. (Read this.)
San Francisco is where Streetopia happened, in 2012. It was a five-week series of free events, performances, exhibitions, and a Free Cafe, serving two free meals a day in the Tenderloin, where rents began skyrocketing after the mayor announced the redevelopment of nearby Market Street, and Twitter moved in.
The book includes interviews and essays with and by the artists and activists, including Rebecca Solnit, Sarah Schulman, Lyle, Chris Johanson, Kal Spelletich, Sy Wagon, and many others. Schulman gives practical advice. It begins, “Educate yourself thoroughly so that you are the expert on both the problem and the solution.” One chapter is “Basic tips for investigating businesses.” Others: “Applying Successful Tactics of the Food Movement to Other Movements” and “How to Raise Money for an Independent, Progressive, Fairly Anarchistic Art and Culture Fair by Publishing an Assembling Book.”
During Streetopia, the Luggage Story Gallery provided a central hub with its Tenderloin National Forest, an alley where redwoods grow, koi swim in a pond, hummingbirds hover, and artists paint murals and perform. (It was created by Luggage Store co-directors/artists Darryl Smith and Laurie Lazer, in an effort going back to 1989.)
Places like the Tenderloin National Forest, which is ongoing, and massive efforts like Streetopia are powerful forces for encouragement, Lyle said.
If you think they’re failures because San Francisco is gentrifying despite them, then what would ever be the point of anything?
They’re proof, instead, that you can do something small, wherever you are. They also power the engines of connection needed to organize more broadly. As Schulman writes, “It’s not a numbers game; it’s about focus.”
“You don’t have to go live in a park downtown and call it an occupation to feed each other and take care of each other and talk about equality,” Lyle said. “You can put a little more time into doing it every day, instead of waiting for the next march downtown.”
Those marches matter, too, though. Anything does that brings bodies together, out of virtual space and into face-to-face contact.
“I think it’s going to take an ACT UP-style protest movement with ACT UP tactics to drag this issue out into the light,” Lyle said, referring to the 1980s movement to raise awareness about HIV and AIDS. “Displacement shortens human life spans. We’re talking about a public health issue.”
On a cold day in December 1989, ACT UP protesters surrounded St. Patrick’s Church in New York during Mass. There were thousands of them, but only about a hundred went inside. “Stop killing us!” one man chanted, over and over and over. It still needs saying.
