Socialism Thrives in San Francisco’s New Downtown Initiative
On a rare sunny morning on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, a red banner may as well have waved over a string of sleepy businesses waking up for the first time. Busy hands at Green Apple Books and Devil’s Teeth Bakery’s joint new operation doled out texts and egg sandwiches, York Street Cafe and Whack Donuts cracked out oat milk lattes and vegan treats. There were lines of customers outside doors that lay dormant for years. Vacant to Vibrant, San Francisco’s initiative to install local small businesses in shuttered downtown storefronts, is a hit. As Karl Marx once opined, quantum mutatus ab illo! Or, “how changed from what he once was.” The same can be said of the Embarcadero, and we can thank a democratic socialist project from the city for the rejuvenation.
But wait, selling things? And socialism? Indeed, they can co-exist, and do in various political economic moments throughout history. Socialized healthcare or Obamacare is a decent example of the state providing goods for purchase — owning the means of production — as is the country providing more than $30 billion in subsidies to the meat and dairy industries each year. As zeitgeist-arresting intellectual Yuval Harari writes, think of a national, capitalist system as decentralized buying and selling goods in competition versus a global, democratically socialist system as centralization — it doesn’t mean commercialism doesn’t exist, as the world is not ready for that kind of return to form. Unpacking capital-based market solutions versus general markets is tricky, but the Vacant to Vibrant program downtown is a terrific example of the latter: San Francisco promoting its own entrepreneurs and workers through over the interests of privatization and acquisition.
This is an important shift in downtown tenor. The office vacancies in the city’s civic corridor is no mere doom loop spiraling as the city hits a record high 33.9 percent in the third quarter of 2023. Renting retail spaces is impossible for anyone of working class means; the only businesses entering the fray are ultra well-funded and even those are struggling with Starbucks and Target as the latest mammoths to shy from the area, shuttering seven locations and the SoMa outpost respectively. Vacant to Vibrant itself sees tenants with just three month-long leases, but in that time the businesses in the program receive assistance from organizing nonprofit SF New Deal and the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development which collaborate “with the city and local property owners to secure storefronts, permits, and grants to fund your pop-up.”
Seeing an injection of capital — from the city, no less — is inspiring. Leaning into state-sponsored solutions is smart, and tapping a nonprofit to coordinate is wise, too. As President Biden put it in the omnipresent meme: this program is good for the economy, helps everyone, and hurts no one. That is obviously not the case for many major political and economic decisions, including the rightly-reviled policies of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, which no one is promoting in city hall or in this article.
But investing in local merchants and encouraging participation in the buying and selling of small, local goods is healthy, and is certainly better than the United States’ de facto political economic policies. For instance, one definition of neoliberalism — the spiritual antithesis of what’s going on downtown — provided by Vassar College geography professor Joseph Nevins is “policies of privatization, deregulation, liberalization of national economies, ones that typically involve a significant weakening of the social provision aspects of the states, aimed at facilitating economic growth.” Downtown’s new project is not quite the opposite, but damn near close as San Francisco opts to repurpose properties through regulation and investment in local social provisions.
As economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi predicted in The Great Transformation of Our Times, self-regulating markets can turn cancerous and “demand nothing less than the institutional separation of society into an economic and apolitical sphere. But, again, the scholar notes markets are not inherently evil; it’s just that in pre-industrial societies they were nothing “more than accessories of our economic life.” Programs such as these allow for trade and livelihood, novels and breakfast sandwiches alongside a thriving economic corridor that bears real life and operates as a real public, common space.
The future of Vacant to Vibrant is bright. According to executive director of SF New Deal Simon Bertrang over 1,000 pop-ups applied for the program, and some of the grantees have the option to extend their three-month leases. The second cohort next year will be available for grants up to $8,000, too. Whether it be Project Homekey and it’s restructuring of derelict buildings into permanent housing or this new initiative, it’s a good time to support socialist campaigns in the Bay Area.
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