Mission Bay fire will cause a cascade of displacement

Mission Bay fire will cause a cascade of displacement

By Shawn Gaynor

Though no official cause has been announced for yesterday's raging fire that destroyed a San Francisco luxury apartment complex under construction at 4th Street and Mission Bay, speculation among construction workers this morning in the still smoldering area was that welding work in the building yesterday must have ignited the blaze after workers left for the day.

The 172 empty units of the “MB360” project undertaken by real estate giant BRE Properties represented $227 million of new construction. To put the project in perspective, that is over $1.3 million per unit. The site has been declared a total loss and what remains of the building will be demolished.

BRE knows their market and the company's connection with the tech boom is mirrored in its heavy investment tech rich Seattle. The MB360 project's proximity to the Mid-Market neighborhood's tax-free tech zone and its prohibitive pricing are indications of who the Mission Bay neighborhood is being constructed for. Perhaps most telling is that these units sat just three blocks from the downtown Cal-train station -- the regions fastest and most comfortable public transit, known for shifting thousands of tech workers each day from emerging bedroom communities in San Francisco in a reverse commute to high paying jobs on the peninsula.

But this fire did not just burn 172 units in Mission Bay. The smoke was filling a duplex in the Excelsior. It forced out a family in Bernal Heights. This fire burnt in the Mission District, the Dog Patch, and the Bayview. This fire burnt everywhere that San Francisco renters will be displaced by 172 desperate and affluent home seekers toting around $1.3 million to solve their smoldering housing woes. But there will be no benefit event, no community relief, for the all the households forced out to shelter the would be new urbanites of Mission Bay as they seek new digs.

But this story has another connection to the tech boom and that is taxes. The San Francisco Fire Department has been under financial strains. A long standing hiring freeze has forced fire fighters into long overtime hours. While that overtime may sound good to individual firefighters looking at their paycheck, their faces this morning showed a department stretched thin. 150 fire fighters battled the Mission Bay blaze – literally everything the city could muster. One was injured with second degree burns. They battled the blaze for over 12 hours without relief.

Everyone living in San Francisco is aware that yesterday's fire, limited to roughly a square block of unoccupied structure, is not the worst disaster the SFFD could be called on to face. Let's not wait for a tech company to offer an altruistic donation to the SFFD before addressing the needs of city departments that San Francisco relies on. In a time of historic economic growth, of a second gold rush, it is fair to tax the tech companies who have made San Francisco their chosen home. Yesterday's fire was a prime example that the services of the city government are not simply charity and should not be funded by the piecemeal largesse of the tech sector giants, like Google's recent donation of free MUNI passes for youth. Paying your fair share to fund city services should not be an ethical choice or a charitable act for corporations, it should be an obligation. It's the job of our civic leaders to make this obligation clear to the gilded tech sector through action on taxes.