DEFENDING AGAINST GENTRIFICATION OR NIMBYISM?

Regardless of how you feel about American Apparel, is it just me or does the effort to keep them out of their Valencia St location in San Francisco's Mission District seem misguided? After 2500 local people signed a petition to keep the store from opening and local politicians and business owners spoke out against the shop, the company decided to stop pursuing the necessary conditional use permit that any chain store seeking a location in the Mission District must obtain was denied to them. I think the Mission community is talking about two separate issues here: community identity and gentrification. Chain stores, which divert money from local economies and have the genericizing potential to make any city look like every city, are a serious issue for communities. However, cries of gentrification seem brazenly disingenuine, especially when raised by owners of recently-added boutiques and pricey cafes. Gentrification is a far more serious community issue that has lead to the hostile take-over and disposession of land from low-income communities, often just as those communities begin to organize, invest, and improve.

In Julie Johnson's coverage of the issue for the Mission Local blog the opposition at the planning commission argued the chain store would alter the image of the neighborhood the neighborhood and local businesses - including the trendy cafe, Ritual Coffee, spoke out against it. Personally, I don't care for chain stores either, and I am reminded of how unfortunate I think it is that upper Haight St. has transformed itself from a cultural center to something more like a mall. Nonetheless, organizing to keep AA out under the guise of defending a neighborhood against gentrification while there are a high number of vacancies already on the street and far more expensive independent designer clothing boutiques and high-end cafes and restautrants popping up all over the neighborhood rings of the kind of NIMBYism I am used to seeing in long-since gentrified Berkeley. I'm not sad to see that AA isn't occupying the space on Valencia St., but I think those that organized to prevent it are missing an important irony: that keeping a chain store out is not the same as fighting gentrification, if anything it is a sign that the neighborhood is already gentrified enough that a chain store would ruin it's oh-so precious indie-boutique marketing identity. The fact that AA transformed the highly exploitative garmet industry by building itself around an anti-sweatshop, fair labor ethos only adds to this irony. Community leaders and politicians would be more effective protectors of their neighborhood's heritage if they focused their efforts on the far more important battle for affordable housing development and ways to support exisiting local businesses. In the meantime, there's just one more vacant storefront in the mission where no one works.