Mission Mission

My best guess here is that the rental market in San Francisco is so competitive that two desperate people from Baton Rouge are advertising their creative, nerdy and humorous approach to life in order to charm someone into contacting them to move into their apartment.

My question is, will this work? And if so, would it work again? Looking for apartments in the Mission on Craigslist is to be confronted with a harsh reality – rents are pretty much twice what you want them to be. Showing up at open houses and finding people clamoring over one another, offering hundreds more than the listed rent can be a major bummer. Is this actually a saner, more reasonable approach?

A 2 alarm fire is raging at Valencia and Duboce, at a multi-story apartment building across the street from Zeitgeist.

I can smell it from 22nd and hear the sirens. I hope everyone’s OK.

Update (1:35pm):

It was upped to a 4 alarm fire. Witnesses reported an explosion prior. The blaze is under control now. 37 people will be displaced and there were 5 injured including 3 firefighters who were victims of a collapsed staircase. Scary stuff. Read on at Mission Loc@l.

[photo by nancymancias]

Someone please make a single-serving web site for the status of the Valencia Street Swing.

SFGate posted some great then-and-now shots of Mission locations that you may know. Check out a 1962 Clarion Alley, lined with quaint bungalows:

And now, it’s the only street in the Mission that’s apparently immune to city graffiti citation!

Here’s everyone’s favorite intersection: 24th and Hampshire (AKA “Deuce-four Ham”).

Sadly, Bucket O’ Suds didn’t survive the British Invasion:

I personally think the closing of Bucket O’Suds marked the end of the golden age in Mission. After that, it was only high-tech artisanal laundry facilities. No soul. I long for the days where I’d pop a nickel in the laundry machine and get a shave from Chet while I waited. Maybe someone should start a kickstarter campaign to restore the Bucket O’Suds space to it’s full architectural glory.

Check out the rest of this amazing series at SFGate.

[photos SFGate Archives, Peter Hartlaub]

Talk about adding insult to injury. Or is it adding pointless fine to injury?

Oh SF City dept, citing us for graffiti on our boarded up windows is just poor taste.

— Weston Wear Store (@WestonWearStore) May 3, 2012

On the shitty meter, this just about ranks up there with getting your car stolen and having to pay for towing.

Bender’s has two amazing vegan tacos on its menu: the seitan taco and the grilled veggie taco, which, in addition to grilled veggies, also has smashed-up pieces of their homemade vegan burger in it. Both feature hunks of avocado, tangy pickled red cabbage, and, surprisingly, enough salt that I didn’t need to add any – remarkable since I have never in my life eaten anything and thought it was too salty.

You know what’s great about Bender’s? They don’t refer to the seitan taco as a “fake chicken” taco. I like this because seitan is real food, not fake chicken: it’s just real seitan, in all its chewy, crumbly, mouthfeely glory. Two omnivorous vegan-taco-enthusiast friends joined me for dinner and chose the vegan ones over the meaty ones on the menu. On purpose. Also, a friendly black dog named Mortimer wanted to steal them.

That’s right, friends: Seitan is real. And it’s saltier that the sweat of John Henry’s brow.

You knew it was only a matter of time before the whimsical fun squad struck back against both the city and the fun-hating grinches determined to keep Valencia Street free from pendulum tyranny.  And this time they’ve done it in grand festive style, with glorious streamers to accentuate the riders’ flight as they glide through the air (while respectfully watching out for pedestrians, of course).  Furthermore, eagle-eyed readers may notice that the cord on this new swing matches the orange and black braiding of the original swing before it was hacked down by misinformed neighborhood vigilante Carmen Castillo, suggesting that this may be the work of the originators!

We can only wonder how long this incarnation lasts before the anti-fun police have their way, but for now both the young and young-at-heart have a new toy with which to play.

Previously:

• Fun-hating grinch cuts down Valencia swing
• Valencia swing memorial eulogizes the death of fun
• Site of former Valencia swing commemorated by hanging dog toy
• Valencia swing is back, with steel cables this time
• Valencia swing cut down again, this time by a city official

Over the last month, an unusual amount of the food reporting in the Wall Street Journal has centered around the Mission’s most loved/hyped restaurants.

Today it was a feature on Wo Hing General Store, the new Charles Phan restaurant opened in the original Slanted Door space on Valencia. A couple weeks ago Bi-Rite and Humphry Slocombe were somewhat awkwardly portrayed as rivals in a cookbook review in the national lifestyle section.

The previous week, Mission Chinese Food’s ribs were one of four dishes featured in an article about lamb. A few days before that, the front page of the lifestyle section was devoted to an article on these newfangled “pop-ups” that led with a lengthy profile of Wise Sons, the brand new Jewish deli on 24^th.

Maybe 2012 is the year of the WSJ discovering the Mission, like how the NYT discovered Brooklyn in 2010:

[photo by Sexpigeon]

There’s always a lot of talk around these parts about what constitutes “the REAL San Francisco,” right? Well, anadromy, one of our new favorite bloggers, has a humdinger of an answer:

Last year, I met a girl online. Turned out she had just moved here from Beijing. She kept saying she wanted to see, “Authentic San Francisco.” It would be impossible for me to phonetically spell out the bizarre and borderline incomprehensible grandeur of her accent, but suffice it to say that it took several, “Excuse me’s?” before I understood her meaning.  When I got it, I decided to try to give her what she wanted. We climbed into the beater pickup truck I was driving then and I just started driving. I didn’t know where the hell to go to find “Authentic San Francisco.” But I gave it my best shot. We went up Portola so she could see the view, then cruised down through the Castro and into the Mission. To my shock, there was a parking space right outside of the Latin American Club. Then, to my even greater shock, there was an open booth in the window. So I sat the girl from Beijing down in the booth and went to get us some drinks. When I came back, there were two young Mission kids sitting in the booth with her. I sat down and they said they had been sitting there originally, but that we were more than welcome to join them. About 30 seconds later, they more or less started having sex. I’m only exaggerating a little bit. Zippers were unzipped. Hands were down pants and up shirts. The guy’s knees kept banging into mine, too.

Read on.

[Photo by LLL]

This is a comment by reader Lyle Lanley, left on yesterday’s post about gentrification. Enjoy!

I’ve been here since 1993. Nope, doesn’t make me an OG, but it’s a bit of time. Flew in, sight unseen. Stayed in an acquaintance’s basement for a few days, then pored over the Bay Guardian looking for an apartment (there was not only no craigslist, there was barely an internet). I found a room in a Guerrero two-bedroom for $330 a month.

This was when New Dawn occupied the Tokyo Go Go space, Elixir was part of the Jack’s empire, Casanova was an old Vietnam vet daytime bar, and a rice and bean burrito at La Cumbre cost $1.25. Laughing Hyenas at Kilowatt!

You’re probably expecting some things-were-better-then nostalgia to follow, but let me disappoint you. Things are better now. There are better drinks now. There is better coffee. There are breakfast/brunch choices that I wish we had (Boogaloo’s, New Dawn, and crepes used to be the only game in the neighborhood). The food is unbelievable. The only downside to the Mission today is that everything’s a little pricier than I want it to be, but that’s always true, isn’t it? No one has ever thought, “I live in a Golden Age of Prices.”

Something that I have heard weekly, daily, hourly in the past 20 years is howls about the gentrification that has just *ruined* the place. Yes, the folks worried about the Google buses on Guerrero, are not the first to worry about “losing the character of the neighborhood.” People bemoaned gentrification in the mid-90’s, they *really* got up in arms during the dot-com boom soon thereafter, and now, during the app boom (or whatever is driving the current rent increases), we’re hearing the cries again. But I’m not worried about it. Why? Two reasons. First, I don’t consider displacement of *businesses* gentrification. I’ll take a nice restaurant over a grimy donut shop any day, and there’s nothing crucial to the character of the neighborhood about having an “envio dinero” bulletproof plexi kiosk in every single storefront – every third one will be fine. So the economic development of the Mission – from artisanal cheese, to handmade clothing, to custom bikes, to fancy restaurants – doesn’t count as gentrification in my eyes. If it is, well, it’s the good kind.

What counts to me as gentrification is displacement of *people*. And that happens far, far less than the town criers suggest it does. It turns out that Prop. 13 (which caps property taxes) and rent control have done a spectacular job of keeping people in place. The family to the right of my apartment, the woman to my left, two entire buildings across the street – all are full of people who have been there for decades. If they’re renting, they’re renting at a rate they’ve been paying for years, and they can’t be evicted (yes, there are owner move-ins and Ellis Acts, but they are the rare exception, not the rule). If they own, they’re paying a few hundred a year in property tax, as opposed to some folks down the street paying over $10,000.

We have serious structural incentives in place to keep people in place, and they are working. So the folks out back who slaughter a couple chickens on the landing on special occasions aren’t going anywhere. The neighbors with thirty people in the backyard shouting at every punch thrown on the pay-per-view boxing match are settled in. The guy across the street who comes out of his family’s house drunk at 9 a.m., accosting passersby with, “I been here 40 years, born and raised,” will probably do that for another 40, unless his liver gives.

Are there problems with rent increases? Absolutely. Vacancy decontrol lets the apartments that become available shoot up to crazy levels. It’s going to be very difficult for people to come *into* the neighborhood unless they’re rich. I think I saw a $2700 one-bedroom down the street, and no kid fresh from college can rent that out and start working an entry-level job. But that’s true on the Lower East Side, too. The most desirable places are always going to be the most expensive. So there are barriers to entry, but nobody is being “pushed out.”

Demographically, the Mission today looks an awful lot like what it looked like 20 years ago. Economically, Farina employs a lot more people than the dormant bakery there before it (what was that place called?). It may be better than ever here.

Thanks, Lyle!