The housing crisis is a burning question in San Francisco

San Francisco now has less than a 1% vacancy rate and there are rent increases of 30-50% for newly rented apartments. Owners are easily finding a way around rent control laws; owner move-in evictions have become all too common. Homelessness has exceeded epidemic proportions.

During the past year a group called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project has promoted Direct Action against this madness in one working class neighborhood (the Mission). This group has advocated attacking local yuppie businesses and cars in a poster campaign in an attempt to drive out those who cause our rents to skyrocket. Since then SUVs and other expensive cars have been vandalized, and anti-yuppie graffiti has decorated the neighborhood. But lately the opposition to the gentrification of the Mission and other neighborhoods has become much more incendiary.

A live-work loft construction site was torched at 11th and Harrison on October 1. There was an unsuccessful arson attempt at another loft construction site at 18th and Harrison 2 weeks earlier. There were also a few arson attempts along 3rd St. near 18th. No one has been arrested in connection with these attacks. These live-work spaces replace low-rent working class housing with expensive posh apartments leaving poor and low income people on the streets and banishing middle class and others to the suburbs. Therefore these attacks strike at one of the core causes of the housing crisis in the most direct way possible.