“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 compared Google buses to conquistador transportation—rolling through neighborhoods, stopping at public bus stops, picking up only young white tech workers. San Francisco had become a company town for the tech industry.
• The Market Will Never Solve This—And That’s the Point: All the housing built in the past fifteen years has been luxury housing. The market can’t produce deeply affordable units. 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. The real foil isn’t small landlords; it’s private equity firms making billions off rental housing.
• The Housing Crisis Is About Regulation, Not Just Supply: Fifteen million homes sit vacant in the United States. The Abundance argument for deregulation misdiagnoses the problem.
• Anti-Eviction Activism Offers a Model for This Moment: The movement grew out of Occupy. A small group of dedicated people built community, fought for each other, and some are still in their homes.
About the Guest
Manissa Maharawal is an assistant professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C., and author of Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco.
References
Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco by Manissa Maharawal: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Eviction-Gentrification-Francisco-California-Anthropology/dp/0520423356

About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction: The housing crisis in the Bay Area
00:01:46 Anti-Eviction and the colonization metaphor
00:04:16 "It's just the market" — is that a credible argument?
00:06:12 Things could be different: contesting gentrification
00:07:34 Has San Francisco’s government helped or hurt?
00:10:07 Rent control: the policy nobody will pass
00:12:20 The Abundance debate and the split on the left
00:15:08 Misdiagnosing the housing crisis: regulation, not just supply
00:16:47 Governor Newsom and the abundance doctrine
00:20:11 Private equity, Trump, and America’s real estate president
00:23:01 What makes tech-led gentrification different?
00:26:35 From Occupy to anti-eviction: a model for this moment