July 21, 2016

I met a 66 year-old African American man at the bus stop this morning while going to the Legion of Honor. He moved to San Francisco 44 years ago because his sister lived here and on the first day he arrived he walked about five miles downtown and got a job driving the Gray Hound bus all over the country. He left for the Vietnam War, lived in Alaska for a time and moved back to the city recently. We were sitting on the corner of Geary and 33^rd Street in the Richmond District (or the Avenues as many call it based on the street numbering), and he started telling me that he wanting to watch the GOP convention tonight because Mike Pence was accepting the nomination for Vice President. I assumed that since he is an African American man and the recipient, like so many other’s, of Trump’s racist and hateful remarks, he was going to express outrage at the idea of a Trump Presidency and an ultra conservative and right wing Vice President. Not wanting to verbally express my assumptions, I asked, “How do you feel about the presidential race?” His response, “We have to do something, this country is falling apart.” I took that to be he was a Trump supporter, especially when he exuberantly began to explain all the negative ways San Francisco was changing. He expressed many of the same arguments that white men are expressing as their reasons for supporting Trump, yet I found it ironic and sad that he lumped himself with those exposing hatred especially hatred against non-white people.

 

He went on to explain that the rents in the neighborhood where we were sitting used to be about $600 a month and were now between $3500 and $7000 a month and that long-time residents were being forced out and that average people could no longer afford to live in the city. This man asked the bus driver, “Hey, what do rents go for around here,” to which the bus driver replied in a kind and joking manner, “If you have to ask, you cannot afford them!”   The man I was talking to said he purchased a large van when he arrived in San Francisco this time around and was living in it while moving it from place to place so as to not be squatting anywhere in particular. He went on to explain that the young workers from Silicon Valley moved into the San Francisco neighborhoods, drove up rents, then moved across the Bay to Berkeley and Oakland where the weather is sunnier, leaving the rents in San Francisco unaffordable to the average worker.

 

As I ride the bus through the city, there is evidence of closed shops and run-down neighborhoods where people have fled to cheaper rents farther down the Bay. Paul, Rector at St. Gregory, told me that restaurants cannot afford to pay their workers a living wage so they are closing down and moving elsewhere as the service workers flee also to cheaper rents outside the immediate vicinity of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. The people that make the city function—the street sweepers, the toilet cleaners, the servers, the clerks, the janitors—can no longer afford to live in the place where they work.

 

Potrero Hill is home to what are called earthquake shacks, slapped together after the 1906 earthquake to temporarily house families and workers that rebuilt the city (see Instagram or Facebook for photos). Temporary in San Francisco lasts a long, long time because these earthquake shacks are still here and were one of the last bastions of places for tech workers to move in and gentrify, which they have done with great gusto. There is still the occasional house that looks like a shack but many of the houses have been renovated and are beautiful examples of the lasting architecture of a temporary time in San Francisco’s history. The Google bus stops frequently in this neighborhood to transport workers to and from their place of employment, and on the surface, this seems like a brilliant ecological brainchild to get cars off the road and people on buses to reduce traffic and pollution. And, ironically, the Google workers have settled in this particular neighborhood because it is affordable compared to the real estate in Mountain View where Google is located, and a starter home (aka a fixer upper) starts at $1,000,000 dollars. Despite the frugality of Google employees in choosing “affordable” housing and public transportation they are resented in the Potrero Hill neighborhood and especially in the nearby Mission neighborhood where they have driven up rents and driven out long-time residents. The Mission neighborhood has traditionally been home to immigrants from Central and South American and these are typically many of the workers that keep San Francisco going—the workers I described above.

 

As I wander through the Mission District gentrification is not noticeable on the surface but an increase in homelessness certainly is. Along 16^th Street, a major thoroughfare in the Mission and home to the 16^th Street BART Station, there are tents lining the sidewalks where people have created their own neighborhoods. Max, a member at St. Gregory’s told me that an organization wanting to help the homeless provided the tents as temporary housing but temporary has turned into long term. There were also tent villages in Berkeley, a particularly large one under the freeway on the Gilman Street exit of the 580 West, a major Bay Area commuter freeway. A man we met at the park who was walking his dog told us the rents in Berkeley have skyrocketed and that with the recent past economic downturn many people turned to the streets to survive.

 

In 2013 protesters in San Francisco and Oakland held public protests against the use of Google buses, and the occupant’s gentrification of their neighborhoods, to ferry people from those locales to the South Bay Google offices about 35 miles away. In Oakland the protesters were more aggressive and broke the window and slashed the tires of one Google bus. The protesters primary complaint was that rents were driven up in the neighborhoods surrounding Google bus stops and one research study conducted by the University of California Berkeley City Planning Department found that rents increased by 20% near a Google bus stop. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bus_protests and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff)

 

St. Gregory’s is not immune to these changes in the neighborhood. The neighborhood is rapidly changing and becoming more unaffordable and more fancy, yet at the same time there are several RVs parked within a few blocks of St. Gregory’s where people live. This morning when I walked to the church several men exited one of these homes; they were well-dressed and looked like they were walking to work. In a recent staff meeting, Paul announced that another church in San Francisco sent him a great questionnaire that they used to assess the needs of their neighborhood and then Paul expressed that they hadn’t done this in a while and maybe it was time to do it in the neighborhood of the church. A lively discussion, with a plan to table the issue temporarily, ensued with some interesting comments:

We are no longer a neighborhood church

We don’t know our neighbors

I am not knocking on the doors of our neighbors

We can ask some of the members that live in the neighborhood to talk to neighbors

I’m not sure what we did before was useful

What would we do with this information?

 

My sense is that we aren’t asking the right questions or approaching the phenomena from the right perspective. Instead of asking, “What can I do for my neighbor or who is my neighbor?” Perhaps we need to start with the questions, “How do I live as a faith-filled person in a secular age? How do I model living a faith-filled life in a secular age? How do our church communities maintain a faith-filled presence in our secular neighborhoods?” I can’t say for certain, but I’m guessing that many of the tech workers living in Potrero Hill are not attending church. Perhaps it is not about helping our neighbors, but about us helping ourselves to be faithful people in a secular age. That is not to say that we get to shirk off our responsibilities of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, taking care of the orphans and widows, working for justice, and advocating for non-violence, but maybe, just maybe if we approach our faith lives differently by focusing on what we can do rather than getting people in our doors, we can have stronger communities.

 

James K. Smith, in his book How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, interprets Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age. Charles Taylor describes three kinds of secular, which I won’t go into (read the book if you are interested), but we are living in a secular3 age where the predominate cultural ethic is secularism, thus we are religious people living in a secular world trying to maintain a cultural identity as faith-filled people as a minority in the majority secular world. This is a shift from our church of just 50 or 60 years ago when it was expected that everyone would go to church and people relied on the church to meet basic needs when a family needed help. Generally, we no longer supply this help to church members and expect them to go to a government agency or a non-profit, which have become very good at meeting the needs of the hungry, homeless, and naked.   We live in a world that Taylor would call extreme humanism—meeting basic needs of the disenfranchised by non-religious organizations. Thus, the church has become obsolete at the very thing that Jesus asked us to do—care for the sick, children, orphans, widows, hungry, naked—because non-religious organizations have mastered the art of doing this. Ironic, huh?

 

I don’t have answers, just more questions: Where does this leave the church? What is the role of the church in a secular age? How do we live Christ’s message today? I believe this is an exciting time to explore our role as church and community, but first we need to focus on these questions and clarify what needs we have before we can ask ourselves what our neighbors need. Again, this is not to say that we can shirk our responsibilities to Christ’s message and expectations of our work, but hopefully exploring these questions can lead us back to how Christ wants us to be in the world and lead us to our role as faithful people in a secular world. Amen!