Activists in San The Francis Mission District did not give up easily. David Campos took the baton from Chris Daly as city supervisor leading anti-gentrification advocates who were anchored in several nonprofit community groups. During the 2015 spring Cinco de Mayo festivities, Campos called for a moratorium on all novel housing construction in the Mission, saying it was the only way to give the neighborhood “a fighting chance.”
The idea that novel apartment buildings would cause rents to rise was – and is – a source of endless irritation for housing advocates. Scott Wiener, who had taken a more centrist path than Campos, was now a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and led the charge against the mission moratorium, which was twice voted down. This was too drastic a step even for the progressive-minded Council. However, the district’s development slowed dramatically in the face of all the political resistance: a proposed 10-story apartment building, dubbed “The Monster on a Mission” by activists, became a symbol of the struggle and was ultimately abandoned. (At the time of writing, it has been revived as an affordable housing project, although opposition still exists and has received little attention.)
But gentrification arguments weren’t just, or even primarily, about rent. Nothing would demonstrate this better than theatrical protests targeting so-called Google Buses – or, more commonly in many circles, “Google fucking buses.”
Cari Spivack, the mid-level Google employee who first created the company’s shuttle program, never imagined she would ignite a years-long political dispute over whether technology was destroying the soul of San Francisco. Her motivation was elementary and personal: she was fed up with sitting in traffic.
A designer by profession. Spivack was working at networking company 3Com in the early 2000s when she saw the elementary elegance of Google’s website, then a white screen with the Google logo, a query box and a button that said “I’m lucky.” Spivack found the software’s functionality itself inspiring, and a friend of a friend put her in touch with the company’s hiring manager. She was hired as a product manager and joined Google at a magical time when the company had only a few hundred employees. It was a dream job – except for the 45-minute commute from my home in Bernal Heights to the Google building in Mountain View.
She tried to take the Caltrain, the creaky, then diesel-powered commuter line that connected Silicon Valley to the city, but it took forever due to awkward stations and leisurely and infrequent trains. She tried carpooling and that worked better, but coordination was a constant problem. “We all leave at the same time, going to the same place on the same road. I thought there must be a better way,” she later recalled. A friend who worked at Genentech, a biotechnology pioneer based in the industrial city of South San Francisco, mentioned that the company had a bus that picked people up at the Glen Park BART station and dropped them off outside the office. Maybe Google would do it?
“Google is a place where you can see patterns of problems and just find solutions,” he says. In fact, the company hired her because of this attitude. She was a product manager on a team of engineers with no engineering experience. But no one knew what product management was, and she could learn programming on her own. She had what was known as a “Googley” quality, as she was known at the company, and while a computer science degree from a prestigious university would later be almost a requirement for many jobs, it wasn’t so at the time. Employees were encouraged to think creatively and exploit 20 percent of their time on their own projects, which could include almost anything – even commuter buses.
“I was talking to people about it at lunch, and they said, ‘Larry will love that idea,’” she recalled, referring to co-founder Larry Page. A few days later, she mentioned it to him in the cafeteria line – the company still operated that way in 2004 – and he said, Sure, figure it out. That’s what she did, checking the cost of the bus, where it stopped, and trying to answer the key question of whether anyone would actually ride it. Page liked the idea of reducing the company’s carbon footprint, Spivack says, although Sergey Brin had doubts whether people would be willing to leave their cars in the city.