The group-cheerful, mostly young-stands out among some of the tougher clients Williams, his wife and the founding president of Glide, Janice Mirikitani, and their staff welcome as one of the city’s largest providers of social services. The Zendesk team proceeds past the food line, into an elevator to a spartan conference room four floors up.Īs emissaries of the tech world, the Zendesk employees represent the forces that have exacerbated the city’s ever-widening economic disparity. For nearly a half century, Williams’ church has served three squares a day to the city’s most down-and-out-roughly 800,000 meals a year of late-making it one of the most ambitious soup-kitchen programs in the nation. The line snakes down Ellis Street, past a boarded-up lot and a single-room apartment building for the poor, then winds up Leavenworth. Maybe the Zendeskers mapped their walk before they came, or maybe they just looked for the line of hungry people. It is a bright and cold day in San Francisco, and from their glassy Market Street headquarters the crew walks toward Williams and his Glide Memorial Church, a beautiful but weathered building three grimy blocks and several galaxies away. Reverend Cecil Williams is large and peaceful-looking, with a bushy beard and the vaguely cosmic power to lure a dozen Zendesk employees from a perfectly nice office building.
That job belongs to an 87-year-old man three blocks over. “It’s not my job to hold their hand while they get to know their own neighborhood.” “If they can read code, they can understand why gentrification is a problem in the TL,” he says. But he also feels that bridging San Francisco’s two most polarized and symbolic monoliths-its growing tech community and its impoverished Tenderloin-isn’t his responsibility. Indeed, Bhakta sometimes fantasizes about conducting a more substantive conversation. Or maybe, at some subconscious level, everyone knew things were more complex than they were letting on. The insults escalated-but ultimately both sides walked on. “If you can’t afford it, get out!” one shouted.Īs Tenderloin conflicts go, this one was relatively demure. “Fucking tech bros ruining the neighborhood,” he spat. When he was growing up, his parents, immigrants from India, had washed dishes and worked a cash register just blocks away. A tenant-rights-nonprofit worker by day, he watched the influx of tech companies lead to higher rents, more evictions, and a general sense of displacement in an already marginal community.
“I was like, fuck it, I’m going to do away with my filter,” Bhakta, 29, recalls. San Francisco Is Ground Zero for an AirBnB Freakout Hack, Hustle, Nap, Repeat: Life as a Young Techie in San Francisco Google Cash Helps Turn SF’s Buses Into Showers for the Homeless
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This level of misery is one of the most striking things a person can see in San Francisco, topped only by a relatively newer sight-that of well-to-do 23-year-olds gliding blithely through this scene while playing Twilight: The Movie Game on their phones. People shoot up openly, stagger about in various stages of undress and untreated illness nowhere else in town is such an intricate, root-bound extremeness of poverty on display. Wedged improbably between the city’s gleaming high-rises, tony Union Square shopping zone, and affluent Nob Hill district, the Tenderloin is a sprawl of code-red despair. One day last summer Chirag Bhakta and a friend were walking through the Tenderloin, the San Francisco neighborhood Bhakta has called home all his life. Healing the Tension Between Wealthy Tech Workers and Their Impoverished Neighborsīy Chris Colin | photographs by Darcy Padilla 2.7.17