No Love for Cops or Condos Procession

No Love for the Cops and Condos
Hella Love for the Mission

This Valentine's Day, we demonstrate our love for San Francisco and the Mission District, and our disdain for all that is destroying our beloved home.

We want to address some issues specifically. As a community, we are on the shitty end of an abusive relationship that politicians, developers, and property owners call "progress." In reality we are being exploited for our cultures, while barely able to scrap together our ever increasing rent. Often our only violent "choices" are between measly buyout money or staying to fight a costly eviction in courts that are created to defend property owners' "rights."

Gentrification is degrading our life.

Then to make matters worse, cops are menacing over our kids, shooting our neighbors, and doing so with the same audacious attitude of the rest of capitalism's machinery, insisting, "This is good for you." In the last year SFPD has murdered Alex Nieto, O'Shane Evans, and Mathew Hoffman. It is no coincidence that these three people represent the exact demographics (either black, brown, poor, homeless, and/or struggling with mental health) of those forced out of the city. It's also no coincidence that in the midst of the housing crisis, the county of San Francisco is moving toward building a new jail with more beds.

This procession is about calling out some of our worst abusers while illuminating this parasitic relationship. We don't buy these lies that the cops protect us or [that] the neighborhood is being "improved." We know that we have to support one another in fighting the many assaults aimed at erasing poor people from this neighborhood. Together we can strategize against this many-headed monster that wishes to displace and dispossess us, jail us, or see us dead.

But we also come together to profess our love for this neighborhood and shine a light on all the things still here, including us, that we have to fight for. Let's celebrate how the Mission has long been a refuge for immigrants and queers, people of color and poor folks, street artists and families. We will always celebrate the resiliency of the Mission despite decades of attempts to kick us all out.

Here's the flyer in spanish too