Following a year of roaring criticism of tech buses, ranging from Rebecca Solnit's “alien overlord” essay to December's blockades, Mayor Lee and SFMTA today laid out a proposal to legitimize the shuttles that have been accused of illegally using Muni stops and enabling exorbitant rent increases.

“These shuttles provide more than 35,000 boardings per day in San Francisco, eliminating at least 45 million vehicle miles traveled and 761,000 metric tons of carbon every year from the region’s roads and air,” SFMTA wrote in a press release.

The release went on to detail the agency's 18-month pilot program for the shuttles, which will be voted on by the MTA Board on January 21st:

• Charging a daily fee based on the number of stops that a shuttle provider or employer makes in order to fully cover the SFMTA’s cost of administering and enforcing the program and includes private investment to improve select stops. Fees are estimated to raise tens of thousands of dollars monthly to the largest transportation providers.
• Approval of 200 bus stops (out of more than 2,500 total in the Muni system) to be used by providers;
• Private shuttle providers will pay to use Muni bus zones, based on a per stop, per day, cost recovery schedule. Due to Proposition 218, the SFMTA cannot create a fee structure that goes beyond the cost to provide such a service or policy;
• Providers would operate in accordance to agreed-upon guidelines, such as yielding to Muni and pulling to the front of the zone making more room for other vehicles, and avoiding steep and narrow streets;
• The Agency would enforce these rules to ensure only participating companies are using shared zones. It will be illegal to use all other bus zones;
• Each commuter shuttle will be issued a unique identification placard so enforcement personnel can easily identify vehicles; and
• Providers would share data with SFMTA to ensure that location information is available for complaint follow-up, enforcement and to support the agency’s transportation system management.

SFMTA didn't detail how much the shuttles will be charged, but reporter Sarah G McBride tweeted it would be “around $100k a year”—far shorter than the $1 billion protesters were demanding last month.

However, the agency promised some community input into the routing of buses, writing “[we] will ask shuttle providers to propose stops for inclusion into the bus zone network and will ask San Francisco residents for their input to determine specific bus zones that can be used.”

The Housing Rights Committee issued a press release in anticipation of the Mayor's announcement, in which the group reiterated their demands that “the [tech] industry must contribute significantly for its impacts on local infrastructure and neighborhoods.”

“We are prepared to be demand more of City Hall if it appears that Mayor Lee's plan is not realistically aggressive enough to address the concerns of poor, working, and middle-class San Franciscans,” wrote Eviction Free San Francisco organizer Jennifer Cust. “The tech industry has fueled soaring rents and accompanying evictions that have uprooted longtime residents, families, artists, teachers, and many others. The industry must step up and contribute to help San Francisco retain its diversity, culture, and affordability.”

We'll update as this story develops.

UPDATE 4:15pm: Reuter's reporter Sarah G McBride further clarified the $100k/year amount, tweeting that companies with shuttles will pay “around $100k each for a total of about $1.5 million over 18 month pilot program.”

[Illustration by Lincoln Smith]

Certainly you've heard Thee Oh Sees' frontman and Castle Face Records' co-owner John Dwyer has moved to Los Angeles.  How could you not?  On December 18th, on stage at the Great American Music Hall, he announced the band was going on hiatus “for a long while,” and he hasn't let up since.

“He's been living in the Mission on 17th and Valencia, and watching that neighborhood as well as the city transform has been enough for him,” Oh Sees' booking agent Annie Southworth told SF Weekly after the Great American show. “He's over it.”

Over it. Yes, lots of people are “over it,” but they don't necessarily pack up all their toys and run away either, especially not by announcing it through their 'representation team'.

Dwyer himself must have realized he let his fuming furor get the better of himself, and quickly dialed back the “long while” hiatus as a “well deserved transitional period” for the band.  And the “over it” was a stray remark by a representative, so we let that slide, too.

But then yesterday, safely distanced from San Francisco's woes in LA, Dwyer puked up a blathering screed about the city's cultural decay. It took the form of a Castle Face press release for POW!'s forthcoming album (edited down for length):

San Francisco has long been filling up with noobs…but now we face the most dangerous, the most egregious and blandest of them all… people with lots of money.
NOBODY can square-up a joint like rich people.

POW! have written a punk eulogy to our fair city.

Evictions!
Pop up shops!
Parklets!
Specialty shops!
What the fuck is happening???

There goes the taqueria that used to kick ass, replaced by a deli with a line of assholes a mile long. “I wonder what the sandwiches are like and do they make their own salsa?”
It's enough to be the catalyst for a bad day or a great fucking song. […]

Heed the warning bell about the streets of our home being clogged with the cholesterol of normals…next they could be knocking on your door…

The whole media campaign is starting to look like a desperate attempt for his move to be seen as a watershed moment in gentrification.

However, John Dwyer made a choice.  He wasn't evicted.  He wasn't priced out.  He's in a famous band; no one was making him go anywhere.  One day he said “fuck this noise,” loaded up a U-Haul, and drove to Los Angeles—which is fine, because people do similar things all the time.  But then, from hundreds of miles away, he waved his middle finger at the city he just gave up on and lashed out at it.

Instead of admitting he had a great run in SF but he felt was time to move on, he voluntarily left kicking and screaming.  His resulting tirade was worse than pointless and petulant, it was snot-filled loogie spit in the face of community that nurtured his storied career.  And what for?  Did any of this help?

Say what you will about the Mission's current state of affairs (we certainly have), but it's not irreparably fucked.  The neighborhood has grown to have three flourishing independent radio stations, venues like The Chapel (where Thee Oh Sees recently had a residency) are opening, not closing, and worthy bands are still springing up.  Never mind all the people sticking around, fighting to reverse the vile trends Dwyer called out.

GUYS, SAN FRANCISCO HAS LOST ALL ITS SOUL. SO I'M MOVING TO…. LOS ANGELES

— Different Fur (@differentfur) January 3, 2014

This isn't to say that I don't love Thee Oh Sees—I've trashed my ear drums to Help more times than I can count, and blared their other albums almost as much.  And their live show was always among my favorites around.

But if you decide you can't take it anymore, at least push off with some dignity. Because there's nothing punk rock about being smug.

[Photo via SF Weekly]

Despite its faults, I think we all agree that tech bus shutdowns are a pretty effective way to protest gentrification.  No matter.  Some off-message neighborhood activists are gathering at 24th and Mission at 3pm New Year's Day to “Evict The Cops,” as posters plastered up-and-down Mission Street say.

Here's the spice:

Mission residents and agitators want to ring in the New Year with a big “fuck you!” to the San Francisco Police Department. The elevated pig presence in the neighborhood is unavoidable and many have already felt its effects. In November, four Valencia Gardens residents were attacked and then arrested by SFPD officers. And the expansion of police surveillance at the 16th street BART plaza has lead to increased harassment of young people of color, homeless folks, and sex workers.

These efforts only aid in the gentrification of the Mission District as policing and surveillance are integral to the process of sterilizing a neighborhood for new, well-to-do, bougie assholes. Time and again the police have proven their loyalties to new developers and shitty landlords.

It's the cops who are there to make sure we leave on the day of our evictions, who throw us out of our squats when we have no place to go, and who continually harass us because we're not white yuppies. We're fucking sick of it and so our resolution for 2014 is to make the SFPD's life hell at any opportunity that presents itself.

I like a good pre-Law & Order Ice-T track as much as the next guy, and certainly SFPD has done some objectionable things this year.  But considering teachers and other city employees are already being pushed out of the city, I'm sure police officers will soon too be finding themselves outside city limits.

Whatever.  Happy New Year!

If you read the criticisms, the protests over tech shuttles and the industry's impact on housing costs are pointless and misdirected, if not worse.

“The protests are xenophobic and illogical,” wrote Rodrigo Guzman, CTO of iDoneThis, in an essay that was passed around Reddit and other like-minded echo chambers. “They do serve a useful purpose in sparking discussion about important issues (e.g. the Ellis Act, housing, cultural change in SF, etc), but the impact of that is very limited when there isn't coherence about the issues and the desired changes. The protests may even be counter-productive to their cause.”

On Twitter, the peanut gallery of peanut galleries, the backlash is even more pointed.

“The tech bus protests are targeting the wrong people,” tweeted urban housing specialist Mark Hogan. “Buses are not the cause of prices going up, local government policies are.”

“Tech workers taking a bus to get to work aren’t The Man,” chided Lisa McIntire, Gavin Newsom's former Deputy Communications Director. “HAVE YOU CONSIDERED CITY HALL, GUYS?”

But if City Hall hears the protesters and reacts, doesn't it mean they are successful?

Scott Lucas of SF Magazine recently opined that the protesters are winning, and his case is damn convincing:

Though we doubt that Google is going to “Fuck Off” any time soon, the protests already have had a pretty substantial impact.  Since the first Google bus blockade on December 9th, there's been a noticeable uptick in both talk and action from city and industry leaders. While there may not be a direct correlation between the demonstrations and the responses below, it's hard to deny that the protestors have been driving the city's conversation.

His proof? Ed Lee coming out in favor of a $15/hour minimum wage, activists “shaming the [tech] billionaires into philanthropy,” new ideas for spurring middle-income housing development, Ron Conway's lobbying group sf.citi going on a public relations campaign, and three new pro-tenant measures getting passed by the Board of Supervisors.

And it doesn't just end there.

Tech companies themselves are scrambling to look good, with companies like Airbnb and Zendesk pledging community classes for children, donating unused office space as free community spaces, and even hosting lectures on the industry's impact on the city.

Even former Mayor Willie Brown, arguably patient zero in the artisocratization of San Francisco, has come out slamming the industry, writing, “What the tech world needs to do is nip this thorny plant in the bud. They need to come off their high cloud efforts to save Africa or wherever they take adventure vacations and start making things better for folks right here.”

Photo by Steve Rhodes

One must consider the goals of the protesters before attacking their effectiveness.  No one is naive enough to think that sporadically blocking a few commuter shuttles for 30 minutes a pop is going to create systemic change.  But when it comes to raising awareness—and making sure City Hall gets the message loud and clear—taking on tech has been the most effective strategy yet, despite the divisiveness.

Like Occupy Wall Street targeting the financial sector to highlight America's inequality crisis, San Francisco's housing activists have made the tech industry represent our skyrocketing cost of living.  So it's little surprise that shuttle commuters, many having just come from ramen dinners at Stanford and Berkeley, are now uncomfortable with being the new face of economic ruthlessness—a characterization that is often grossly inaccurate.  And, of course, the targets are pointing fingers elsewhere, and dismissing the movement as scattered and confused.

But protesting greedy landlords didn't work.  Howling at the Mayor did little good.  Complaining about tax breaks and America's Cup never got traction.

It wasn't until activists put up roadblocks in front of the those gleaming white economic engines, squeezing the pockets of City Hall's primary backers, did anyone listen.

Those roadblocks might just make San Francisco a better city for everyone… even the tech community.