PHOTO/ GWYNND MAESTRE
SAN FRANCISCO — A wave of gentrification is hitting San Francisco, with real estate speculators “flipping the rents” by evicting entire buildings. Average rent in the San Francisco is now $3500/month and rising. Tech corporations in the city now receive tens of millions of dollars of tax breaks. Tech workers roll in on ever-present Google busses, making huge salaries and often working 75 hours a week. Meanwhile residents are often reduced to temp workers who cannot afford the new rents.
The changes in the San Francisco reflect the transformation of the economy in the US and across the globe. Capitalism is reorganizing urban space to “flip the city.” Foreclosures and high rents pushed a majority of the Black community into the outer suburbs, and put tremendous pressure on the majority Latino Mission district. The largest working class institution in the City—City College of San Francisco (CCSF)—is under intense pressure to downsize radically, and convert to a precariously employed all-part-time faculty.
Two years ago the Accreditation Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC)—a private corporation—suddenly charged that the school was failing and announced their intention to disaccredit the school in July 2014, even though CCSF consistently receives the highest ratings for its educational programs. Withdrawing accreditation is a death sentence for any school.
The school’s “crime” was that it resisted the corporate redesign. CCSF guaranteed life-long education for everyone. It refused to allow super-sized CEO salaries. Governance was in the hands of the faculty. It stood squarely in the way of changing the mission of higher education in California.
Now the state has appointed an emergency manager, who has the unilateral power to cut anything and everything. The Special Trustee with Extraordinary Power gave out generous raises to new administrators, while faculty and staff were handed deep pay cuts.
Now students lose their class registration if they cannot pay up front, or if they are unable to get access to a counselor to help them draw up an educational plan. Classes in arts and languages are being cut back severely, putting a priority on narrow career education. Nine diversity departments won by previous movements—ethnic studies, women’s studies, LGBTQ studies and labor studies—are now being stripped of their coordinators.
The community, faculty and students have not sat by passively to watch the school be destroyed. They have exposed numerous conflicts of interest on the part of the ACCJC and revealed that it is funded in part by the Lumina Foundation, a creation of the largest student-loan corporation in the country. Pressure from a broad Save City College movement and the faculty union has resulted in six bills to rescue the college, and four lawsuits. Activists have written an Education Justice statement based on the principle of “everybody in, nobody out” and are building close ties with a movement to stop evictions.
The fate of CCSF waits on the progress of the movement and the resolution of the lawsuits in October 2014. But the larger economic forces at play cannot be avoided. We must fight forward, rather than backwards. The question arises: how do the people of San Francisco want to “flip the city?”
