 His current book is Dispatches Against Displacement, Field Notes from San Francisco's Housing Wars. He is part of the Organizing Committee of the Upcoming Howard Zinn Book Fair. So please welcome James. So I'm here to talk just a little while about this book that just came out three and a half months ago. I've been doing a lot of canvassing for Prop G going up and down stairs in broken buildings. So if I'm a little off or tired or transpose words, please forgive me. Dispatches Against Displacement is not a comprehensive history of San Francisco's Displacement battles. It's not a guide to the political economy of cities, although those things, history and political economy is definitely in it. They're basically my notebooks from doing housing organizing for over 20 years in the Bay Area on both sides of the bay, mostly in San Francisco, but I've done some things in Oakland as well. And I've just felt like it was time to get some of these ideas down. You should ruthlessly interrogate everything that I say and anything you read in this book because if you might have noticed the groups that I've worked with and myself, we haven't exactly turned back the gentrification and displacement clock in the Bay Area in a lot of ways we failed because one bedroom apartment here is about $3,000. So we're not experts on how to fight displacement, but I would like to think that this book kind of collects some of the successes and the failures of organizations and movements that I've been a part of. So people have a starting point. People have something to debate, to consider, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel if you want to take part in the fight for the rights of the city. So that outlook was something that one of my mentors, Malik Rahim, taught me. We did a lot of organizing in public housing and residential hotels together as part of the Fiction Defense Network and Housing as a human right. He was a former Black Panther Party member who was just really always brought back the need when radicals do things. We actually need to document it. In the last book, I interviewed quite a few aging radicals, and I was like, you know, I'd like to get these things out while it's still clear. Cities simultaneously and effortlessly embrace both utopian and dystopian potentials. Most of them were born from human-caused ecological disasters, the clear-cutting of forests, the paving of rivers and creeks. Today, the solutions to climate change are in part urban. Density can prevent sprawl, and robust public transportation is the best way to cleave drivers and private automobiles. Through zoning and redlining, the political economy of cities has always been shaped by racism and white supremacy. It is in cities where oppressed people most often find each other, demand self-determination, and often forge coalitions. Dour-alienated architecture argues with vibrant design. Cities offer up the worst that popular culture can conjure and also give birth to rebel music such as hip-hop, jazz, and punk, which in turn become the mass culture of another decade. But displacement replaces all of this potential with simply spectacle. It is the change that kills off all positive changes. But it doesn't really matter if one likes or dislikes cities. In 2008, for the first time, the percentage of the world's population living in cities outpaced those living in rural and suburban areas, and that population is likely to grow for the next few decades. This makes questions about who governs, lives in, and is excluded from cities all the more crucial to those who wish to chart a course for a more egalitarian world. Throughout this book, I use the term displacement instead of gentrification in order to emphasize the result of uncontrolled property speculation and the impacts this process has on everyday people. The definition of gentrification in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is precise enough. It's the process of renewal and rebuilding, accompanying the influx of middle-class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces poorer residents. However, the way that the term is used often lacks the same precision. It is not uncommon to hear, as one liberal San Francisco supervisor opined Ross Mark Ramey, a little gentrification is a good thing. Worlds of contradictions live within this deceptively simple sentence. What is usually meant is that neighborhoods need certain things like grocery stores and basic infrastructure to be whole, and that the speaker can only imagine their rival of affluent newcomers as a catalyst for this. It assumes that gentrification is as natural as granola instead of deliberate real estate strategy. Let's assume then when at least some of the people who profess to want gentrification really simply want a thriving neighborhood without displacement. The final chapter toward an alternative urbanism offers some ideas about how to fight for development without displacement. What to do now that cities are not feared in the way that they were 50 years ago? Politicians impundence frame displacement as either an unfortunate side effect of urban progress, or in engarded moments a welcome cleansing, but it doesn't have to be this way. Cities can grow, change, and welcome new citizens without running roughshod over the existing population. It is a mistake to frame anti-displacement politics as anti-change. After all, change is one of the things that made cities interesting places to live in in the first place. Immigrants fleeing Latin American death squads and poverty represented change in the Mission District. The difference then was that the old school Irish and Italian and Jewish residents did not leave the neighborhood in the address of an eviction notice. Working class blacks who arrived in cities during the southern diaspora not only contributed their labor, but also helped develop a strong urban cultural life. Those who come to a city fleeing homophobia wanting to start a band or go to school are exactly what a good city is built upon. How then have monocultural and commodity come to dominate? I'll do a little bit from the first chapter called Land Grabs and Lies. I think one thing that is often left out of the debates around displacement and gentrification is the fate of people in public housing and residential hotels. And just like James Baldwin said, if they come for you in the morning, they'll be back for me at night. When you're fighting against displacement and fighting for a better city, really nobody can be expendable. Absolutely not. And when Valencia Gardens first announced that it was going to come down and redeveloped, evictions in all the private apartments for many, many circles on the map all went up. The evictions went through the roof for about two years while this redevelopment. So our fates are actually truly intertwined. So this is an excerpt from a story that happens in 2003. Those of you who are old enough to remember the Seattle protests in 1999 might remember my friend Elizabeth Martinez who wrote an essay called Where Was the Color in Seattle where she very rightfully talked about social justice movements and who had access to an agency to express themselves. The reason why I talked about this takeover that happened at North Point Public Housing is that it was a broad coalition of white, black, punk rock moms going from welfare to work. And nobody actually had to ask that question because they did everything right and they built a really healthy coalition that was steeped in a lot of mutual trust because they built up for it over a year. They ironed out the differences that sometimes we don't give ourselves the chance to deal with because we're going from one campaign to another. It starts off with a quote from the great political prophet Tupac Shakur. Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete proving nature's law is wrong and learned to walk without having feet? Thanksgiving morning 2003 at the intersection of 30th and Mission Street's an odd assortment of humanity even by San Francisco standards gathered. Homeless families most with strollers in tow cautiously mingled with trade union activists, college students tried out their Spanish on Latino day laborers, street punks, checked out the nonprofit workers with a sneer that acknowledged I'll probably be you one day. The crowd of about 140 had diversity written over it. They were old and young with ethnicity to make even the most adjaded observers speak of rainbow coalitions. Picket signs read, let us in, the mood remain mellow, maybe strangely so for a crowd of people who in an hour's time would participate in a legal occupation of vacant housing. Just one vacant unit among thousands owned by the San Francisco Housing Authority, the troubled agency charged with providing homes for the city's most impoverished. The bus chartered to bring the protesters to the secret takeover site was late. The driver reached by cell phone reported a holiday hangover from which he had just woken up. He would be stopping for a strong cup of coffee. Even though it was Thanksgiving Day, there was more than one protest going on in San Francisco a couple hundred feet away. United Food and Commercial Worker members picketed Safeway in an ongoing battle over the company's attempt to decimate employee health care benefits. A delegation went over to wish the union as well as one nervous housing protestor tried to conceal the Safeway logo under a fresh cup of coffee. The press showed up to search for a spokesperson played today by Kerry Godspeed, a formerly homeless 24 year old organizer with family rights and dignity. She's nervous at first but then relaxes. The authority owns over 1,000 units of vacant housing that could be used to house families. We will risk at rest to make this point. Is this the right thing to do, blurted out one reporter? There is silence and the expression of someone having second thoughts crosses Godspeed's face. Suddenly that expression disappears. Definitely, it is the right thing to do. Takeover, the caravan consisting of five autos, some bikes, and the long awaited bus arrived at the tip of West Point Housing Development. Banners and windows proclaimed homes not jails for homeless families. These units sit vacant while homeless families sleep on the streets. The dwelling, 45 West Point, was opened up the night before by a covert team. The strategy was for one group to do the breaking and another group to do the entering so as to shrink potential criminal charges. Some were there to pressure the authority to rehabilitate the vacant units. Homeless people added another thoroughly practical perspective. If I get busted, I sleep inside. If I don't, I sleep inside. One person remarked. This chapter goes on to talk about what were the conditions that could actually lead a thousand units to be vacant in the first place in the middle of a housing crisis, which even though it was 2003 and the first dot com era had officially come to a close, we were certainly in the middle of the housing shortage. Talks a little about the valgan fights where residents in public housing fought about the hope six process that demolished their homes and rebuilt them, only with many, many less human beings there. Go on to talk a little bit about residential hotel organizing and the need to be able to address in a political way trauma and organizing. And of course, the history of the mission anti displacement coalition in the 1990s and go on to make a few modest proposals, not a big checklist or anything on how we can fight back. So it's such an honor to be with these guys to be with you. I have a few cool little anti eviction stickers. If you ask a really good question, I'll give you one. Thank you.