Scatter Piece — Responding to Future Displacement in a Small, Quiet Way
Documentation of Scatter Piece, a site-specific performance at 65 Ocean Avenue, Excelsior District—Yelamu. This performance work is part of A Hxstory of Renting, a long-term multi-platform project. Taken on December 22, 2019.
Scatter Piece — Responding to Future Displacement in a Small, Quiet Way
By Erina Alejo
[10-minute read] *disclaimer: I am not a journalist, a city planner, nor an expert of any field. I’m an artist, Excelsior resident, and a third-generation renter in SF working to make sense and center the context of my art work in response to an under-heard + under-documented issue in my neighborhood from my community’s lens. This document is malleable and open to edits from community input.
Small gestures build up to collective action
FRISCO / YELAMU of RAMAYTUSH OHLONE TERRITORY—
“Scatter Piece” is a site-specific performance piece in which I routinely scatter multilingual-translated printed copies of a poem to address ongoing displacement of families, housing, and local businesses in light of gentrification. The work is part of my examination of the visual culture of displacement through my multi-platform project, A Hxstory of Renting. For this first iteration, I focused on 65 Ocean Avenue, a site of anticipated redevelopment into predominantly market-rate luxury housing in my working and middle-class neighborhood, Excelsior, San Francisco. I performed this small gesture of resistance and awareness for 15 days, starting on November 27, 2019.
This gesture takes place after my 16 years of having grown up and lived in the E, and slowly noticing 65 Ocean Avenue as an entity. [1] The lot was always in sight of the trash can I’ve grown fond photographing of over the years, while I wait for the westbound 29 Sunset and 49 Mission.[2]
Before I delve into talking about the performance work, I’ll share what I’m learning about 65 Ocean’s role in racial and economic equity for the E. Local community organizations help residents like me learn about this lot’s past, present, and future, and to envision ways to ensure we can continue living in our neighborhood for many more years and generations.
Image description: Community waiting for the 29 and 49 MUNI lines across 65 Ocean in Excelsior, San Francisco. Next to the trash can are an abandoned futon and a discarded, upside-down Direct TV satellite dish. Taken on 9/10/19
Let’s visually frame 65 Ocean Avenue in the way Sarah Broom introduces her family home in east New Orleans in her first book, The Yellow House. [3] Can you pin 65 Ocean on a map? Great. Next, can you zoom out to see the boundaries of the Excelsior District? Cool. Now, how about continue scaling back, until you see 65 Ocean Ave as a teeny, tiny dot in the whole San Francisco Bay Area, and then in the country? Yeeee. Now, zoom back in again to 65 Ocean.
Thinking in this small and large scale is important because it provides us ways to think of the lifespan of an address and property lot like 65 Ocean across generations and geographies.
Thinking in this small-to-large-to-small scale is important because it provides us ways to think of an address and property lot like 65 Ocean across generations and geographies. City planners and community organizers alike think about the trajectory and future potential of a commercial lot like 65 Ocean, across decades. [4] The property has served the E community as a 1950s grocery store, most recently, the Little Bear School preschool, and in the future, a primarily market-rate residential building.
It is important to envision our futures in our neighborhoods, whether we just moved here or our families are four generations-deep in our homes. It starts with imagining ourselves having a home at the proposed 65 Ocean residential building and asking difficult questions like these: How do we attain our vision of staying in the E? What must be remembered? Who is included, and who is left out?
Image descriptions: Screenshot from my Instagram account, @AHxstoryofRenting
1) A photo of the flatscreen TV in Room 400 at City Hall for a Planning Commission meeting on August 22, 2019.
2) A compilation of images and maps locating where the iconic trash can of Trash Can Happening sits and witnesses what is developing across the street at 65 Ocean. Posted 11/15/18
Let’s remember the discriminatory legacy of redlining, visually narrated in the short film Segregated by Design, through which banks, insurance companies, and other financial services refuse or limit loans, mortgages, insurance, etc., within specific geographic areas, especially inner-city Black neighborhoods. [5]
In reflection, we connect this residual, racist legacy of redlining to current housing policies and the housing affordability crisis, which, disproportionately affects BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) and Queer communities. If this current COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that this housing hardship is further compounded—our cousin freelancers and artist aunties struggle with making rent, our Trans sisters and brothers seek safe and stable housing, and our grandparents, and that kind, new family next door face evictions from both private and corporate landlords.
Local Excelsior grassroots community organizations, including: PODER SF, Coleman Advocates, and CUHJ (Communities United for Health and Justice) continue to express concerns about the proposed 65 Ocean housing development and its long-term viability in meeting the needs of our Excelsior working and middle class community. (In another post, I’ll detail these community advocates’ process in bringing residents and other Excelsior community members together to speak up.)
Image description: My neighbors and fellow Excelsior residents taking a seat before participating in public comment at a city hall meeting. We were invited by PODER SF, Coleman Advocates, CUHJ (Communities United for Housing and Justice) to come together at the Board of Appeals at City Hall, Room 416, to appeal the current proposed plan for 65 Ocean Ave that does not equitably represents our working and middle class community’s needs. Taken 1/15/20
How do we attain our vision of staying in the E? What must be remembered? Who is included, and who is left out?
Between 2019-2020, the San Francisco Planning Commission tried to quietly approve the development, in time for the developer, Presidio Ventures, to qualify for the federally-approved Opportunity Zone across all states, under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. [6] We made community noise by demonstrating, making public comments at the SF Planning Commission, and down to filing an appeal to contest the current plans for primarily market-rate housing (only 25% is below market rate and accommodates larger families) at the Board of Appeals. While the city has ultimately approved the project, our work is not done—we remain vigilant in holding the developers accountable in investing in and listening to our community concerns about equitable access to the proposed residential building.
In CUHJ’s kid and family-friendly zine (publishing date unknown), A Fight for Our Home: Neighbors Coming Together to Create Community Solutions, they share a resident—Nomi’s— heartache about the proposed development.
Nomi is drawn by local artist Metzali Andrade, holding his young son, with his quote:
My name is Nomi. 65 Ocean Avenue has been home to two preschools, including one Spanish immersion preschool. Can you believe they will tear down these preschools in order to build luxury housing that is unaffordable to the majority of our families?
CUHJ follows up and contextualizes Nomi’s statement:
Development and Displacement: How do you think the changes in our neighborhoods are going to affect our families and our future? [Draw It!] [Write It!]
Did you know? Our city already has overbuilt housing that wealthy people can afford, but not enough homes that are affordable to our own families.
Image description: Page 8 from CUHJ’s zine contextualizing community concerns about 65 Ocean, from A Fight for Our Home: Neighbors Coming Together to Create Community Solutions, illustrated by local artist Metzali Andrade. Below is the scanned cover page and table of contents for the informative zine. Please contact CUHJ if you’d like a copy, or contact me as it’s an awesome zine!
Like Kuya Nomi, I’m also concerned about the future of my family, my neighbors, and my private landlord who has been advocating for families of color to affordably access our rental units in our building. It got me thinking: what can I do NOW as an artist, and LATER ON? Documenting this development now, and reflecting on and sharing this story later on is invaluable to the history and archive of grassroots organizing in the E, and beyond.
Despite documenting community organizing events with CUHJ through photographs, discussing 65 Ocean and the housing crisis with my family and friends, and even auditing an urban studies seminar on the housing affordability crisis in California at Stanford— my grief remained inconsolable. This period was also towards the January 2020 Board of Appeals hearing CHUJ had, which kept getting pushed back.
I needed a way to act on my grief through mourning, no matter how small of a gesture. The best way was through movement embodying the collective, painful process community residents in the E have taken this fight. Moreover, that winter, I was inspired by movement work through my participation in embodied movement workshops by fellow sister and artist Sammay Dizon. In the process, I developed my performance work “Scatter Piece”, based on a poem I wrote back in 2016, and a screen-printed installation I contributed at Kearny Street Workshop’s APAture 2019: Declare (thanks to the help of sister artist Niki Waters!).
A Spanish-translated version of the original English-language poem for Scatter Piece, printed on paper next to blight in the form of a wet paper bag and two uneaten combo pizza slices. Taken on 12/12/19 at the 49 Mission and 29 Sunset MUNI bus stop across 65 Ocean.
I scattered the following poem on a bi-weekly basis:
there was no time to memorize everything
all else discarded in a rush to vacate
no sooner did the landlord raise rent to market rate
no traces left
of a hxstory of renting
The poem is translated into languages spoken in my neighborhood, including: Tagalog, Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Ilocano, and more. My translators are fellow artists and community organizers who are renters in the city and across the globe, from Excelsior, to San Jose, to Vietnam (these translators wish to remain anonymous). I was not able to print and scatter the Ilocano translation in time, translated by Mish and their mom, so I share it here:
naibos ti panawen nga ikabisado
amin gapu ti panagdardaras a pumanaw
saan a nagbayag ket ingato diay
akinbagi ti nakanginngina diay abang
awan naibati a paglasinan dyiay
panawen a panagababang
Image description: Documentation of individual “Scatter Piece” poetry translated into Hindi, Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, French, Tagalog, and Chinese. All are translated by loved ones who are / have been renters across the country.
“Scatter Piece” bears the multilayered physicality and cycle of displacement:
1) through the bounds of copy paper replenished with the multilingual poem;
2) I, as the performer, laboriously scattering the poems;
3) the poems taking weight on the proposed luxury development perimeter;
4) passersby witnessing the foreboding message, and
5) the poem as ephemeral litter cleaned up within that week
—the ritual is perpetually repeated. At this time, the performance piece is intended to be performed indefinitely across various, contested spaces, for long as the city approves permits for luxury housing to be built as bandaid solutions to community concerns of these residences’ lack of affordability for local residents.
- to be continued -
Signed,
