Mistress Midori
2022-09-30 18:31:28.606041+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
I've been doing a bunch of thinking recently about gentrification. Charlene and I settled in Petaluma, a town with pretensions of agricultural roots, nearly 15 years ago, and as we get deeper into community involvement we definitely feel like newcomers. The cries of "I only want opinions from old established Petalumans who agree with me" (even though I live in a new subdivision on the east side, or out in Sonoma County) are strong, especially among the fairgrounds "preservationists" (even as the management of that property has let it slide into $13M of maintenance debt).
In discussions about development, municipal finance, active transportation, and affordable housing, I hear about the town being ruined by tech people bringing money, even as these immigrants buy land and houses at tremendous prices. I always wanted to live in a neighborhood with million dollar fixer-uppers, and as the house across the street goes on the market I realized that all I had to do was sit still. So we are clearly part of a wave of gentrification.
The identity of "butter & eggs" is strong, as dairy farming encroaches on salmon habitat, and despite the town having a name that apparently derives from what the indigenous peoples called it, there's not a whole lot of focus on the involuntarily displaced, or enslaved, Coast Miwok heritage.
So, yeah, we are gentrifiers over colonizers, and some of those colonizers were a Jewish culture that pitted Stalinist Communists against Zionists.
It's a complex place.
And, of course, the San Francisco Bay Area has changed immensely in the time I've lived here.
So I found this Broke Ass Stuart profile/interview with Mistress Midori thought provoking, and it references a Midori Patreon post that further explores her experience of the Bay Area over the past three decades or so.
I want to say that it was better when I was new in town. But I think that may be the case for any one who comes to San Francisco. The reality is that San Francisco, since the colonizers arrived, have been a boom town and constantly changing – a living organism and we’re just living on it.