This week, I had to come up with a new research project on the fly and have spent most of my time writing a new abstract along with figuring out data and methods.
So far, I have scrolled through Jstor looking up San Francisco and a variety of terms such as gentrification, policing, segregation, etc. I have found at least twenty journal articles so far that contain some form of relevant/ useful information including titles such as “Our Lives Matter: The Racialized Violence of Poverty Among Homeless Mothers of Color,” “Who You Calling a Techie?: Fear and loathing in boomtown,” “BART, GM and Bechtel: Protecting Property Values in the San Francisco Financial District,” “What’s the Matter with San Francisco?: We’re not arguing about what really matters,” and “Reproducing Disorder: The Effects of Broken Windows Policing on Homeless People with Mental Illness in San Francisco.”
I read “What’s the Matter with San Francisco?: We’re not arguing about what really matters” first because it was short and knew it could give me some general information that would help name some of the unknown factors I was seeking to identify. The article acknowledges the difficulty among scholars in making formulating a legible response to the question “what’s the matter with San Francisco?” On the day-to-day level, problems for residents include searching for affordable housing, and problems with traffic. In 2014, the city was characterized by change and growth. The city was becoming the most expensive city in the country while having its lowest ever unemployment rate, and new tech industry and culture. While inequality and marginalization are rampant, those at the powerful end of the spectrum would argue that there is nothing wrong with the city and that it is great. Since the mid-1990s, an increase in high-paid workers and a drop in middle-class jobs meant that inequality increased. Evictions are increasing, rents are increasing, and houses sell fast above market rate.
I also read “BART, GM and Bechtel: Protecting Property Values in the San Francisco Financial District.” The author John Gibler makes a distinction between the public presentation and the ‘unadvertised’ purpose of the Bay Area Transit System. The BART was created in 1962 financed by a $792 million bond to cure pollution and traffic congestion. Despite the real issue of pollution and traffic, the engineering reports of the time openly discussed the need of a transit system for the protection of San Francisco property values and urban development. The article claims “The system was created by and for the San Francisco Bay Area’s urban elite class- engineering firms, oil companies, and banks that all profited enormously from BART’s unusual design.”
The articles I’ve found so far have started to identify and articulate some of the interests I have for my research project but are obviously incomplete. Next week, I want to find broader and more general articles that discuss the problems I’m seeking to explore in my paper to provide me with greater context and more direction. I’ll look for more journal articles using other databases and might make a meeting with a research librarian to find books on the subject. Additionally, I can start to see that I will definitely need more personal narratives and first-hand accounts that seem to be missing from many journal articles/ secondary sources.