American Yellow Vests? Manissa Maharawal on the Fight Against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco

“We keep telling you there’s an eviction crisis, so organize with us. Feel free to come into our meetings. Feel free to learn about the lives of people who have been here for a long time.” — Manissa Maharawal

Yesterday we spoke with anthropologist Ida Susser about France’s Yellow Vests—provincial truck drivers, nurses, and teachers who drove hours to Paris, furious about decades of disinvestment in their economy. So does America have its own Yellow Vests? You might find them in (of all places) the San Francisco Bay Area, the setting of a new book by a former student of Susser’s about what happens when the same disruptive economic forces hit an American city.

Anthropologist Manissa Maharawal’s new book, Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco, chronicles the grassroots movement that rose up against big tech during the boom of the 2010s. Like the French Yellow Vests, these were ordinary people from the San Francisco Bay Area—teachers, bartenders, nurses, copy editors—who refused to accept their displacement as inevitable. Like the Yellow Vests, they grew out of no political party or even ideology. The anti-eviction movement emerged from Occupy, just as the gilets jaunes emerged from the roundabouts outside Paris.

Anti-tech activists in San Francisco’s Mission District watched Google buses roll through their neighborhoods and decided to blockade them. But where the Yellow Vests defied the left-right spectrum, Maharawal’s activists have a clear target: the neoliberal market logic that justifies gentrification as the result of “inevitable” market forces. She is sharply critical of the abundance argument advanced by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, arguing this supposedly free market has given the Bay Area a glut of luxury housing and almost no affordable units. The real crisis, she says, isn’t too few homes—it’s too little regulation on the homes we already have.

Fifteen million sit vacant in the United States, Maharawal reminds us. Private equity firms are buying up a quarter of the housing on the market. Even Trump has woken up to this. In a moment of political pessimism on both sides of the Atlantic, both Susser and Maharawal offer evidence that ordinary people can both organize and, at least, shape the political conversation.

Five Takeaways

•       Tech Gentrification Is Modern Colonization: Activists in San Francisco’s Mission District compared Google buses to conquistador transportation—rolling through their neighborhoods, stopping at their bus stops, letting in only young white tech workers while longtime residents stood by with their children. San Francisco had become a company town for the tech industry, with the city rolling out a red carpet—including massive tax breaks—while people in surrounding neighborhoods were evicted.

•       The Market Will Never Solve This—And That’s the Point: It’s never going to be profitable enough to build the deeply affordable low-income housing we actually need. That’s why all the housing built in the past fifteen years has been luxury housing. New York City has entire half-empty skyscrapers. San Francisco consistently meets its targets for luxury construction but fails on low-income housing. Market-based solutions alone are insufficient.

•       Rent Control Stabilizes Lives, Not Just Rents: Maharawal grew up in a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City—it’s the reason her family could stay. Rent stabilization gives people a chance to imagine a future somewhere. The real foil isn’t small landlords; it’s private equity firms making billions off rental housing. A statewide rent cap proposal in California didn’t even