Photo Credit: Robert Bruce Livingston
The Bay Area has always been a place defined by radical imagination and collective defiance. From the Black Panthers to the farmworker movement to the queer liberation struggles that reshaped culture worldwide. Make no mistake about it, working people built this place. And today, as the region endures overlapping crises of affordability, deportation, and state-sanctioned neglect, it’s once again everyday people, not billionaires, who are keeping San Francisco alive.
While grocery prices rise and public assistance shrinks, while ICE terrorizes families and legal defense budgets evaporate, media attention continues gravitating toward tech titans posing as saviors. Their charitable foundations donate fractions of fortunes amassed through exploitation and displacement. The narrative that billionaires will rescue San Francisco isn’t just misleading; it strategically erases the labor, bravery, and hope that working people bring to this city every day.
Because the real story is happening on courthouse steps, in the streets, and inside community organizations – places that couldn’t be more divorced from the boardroom culture San Francisco is trying to cultivate.
When ICE began abducting immigrant families outside San Francisco courthouses, it wasn’t political donors or major philanthropists who showed up. It was neighbors. Dozens of ordinary residents formed a community defense network, trained themselves to document federal agents, and stood watch at hearings daily. Their presence interrupted ICE’s campaign of fear so effectively that arrests at the SF Immigration Courthouse halted for six weeks.
Immigration attorneys have filed waves of habeas corpus petitions to challenge unconstitutional detentions. Former judges have joined them in demanding due process. These legal workers are not only changing outcomes; they are saving lives.
Faith in Action, a network of congregations organizing against displacement and deportation, continues to protect low-income Latino families from being uprooted. They are refusing the ongoing erasure of working-class communities of San Mateo County, asserting that culture and humanity matter more than profit margins.
Bay Resistance, a grassroots coalition created after Trump’s election, has mobilized thousands to defend immigrants, workers, and people experiencing homelessness from state violence and right-wing harassment. Their message is simple: none of us are safe unless all of us are.
This is what public safety really looks like. Yet a coordinated effort continues to credit oligarchs for every visible improvement in San Francisco, as if wealth accumulation were a form of leadership. As if the very individuals accelerating inequality should be thanked for tossing crumbs back to a public forced into permanent precarity.
It’s time to give flowers where they’re deserved: to the organizers, the legal advocates, the protestors, the faith-based leaders, and the everyday workers keeping the Bay Area alive.
Solidarity has always been how the cities survive. Not glazing Blackstone executives for jogging along the Embarcadero. You can’t automate everything. People will always be needed, and we shouldn’t forget that. Tech workers, no matter how sheltered they think they are, are still workers. Everyone needs to realize they’re in the same fight, just with different salaries.
