SF privatizes sacred space once again

Two times in one week. Ed Lee et al on Monday, June 13, once again saw fit to rent Civic Center to private interests for the relative price of a vapor drag recharge for high-flying technoville. Meanwhile, the city's land owners pass the buck of housing access and decent wages over to the leftovers class of San Franciscans.

Last week it was a smarmy tribute to 1960's counter-culture San Francisco party laid out by the biotech world that displaced city residents from Civic Center. On Monday of this week it was Apple that bought the rights to freedom of movement in the heart of the city. Make no mistake, neither biotech nor hitech are the high villains here. The canker is less specific than a passel of corporations or a platoon of personalities. The toxin is nothing less than the collective belief that land values belong, at least to some degree, to the nominal owners of land.

For those who believe that there is such a thing as community, consent in the privatization of the value of location obliterates the meaning of community. Community occurs only in the circumstance of geography. An aspect of geography is facilitated by cyberspace, but the great, preponderant piece of geography is literal space. Community occurs on the land beneath where we live, work, rest, love, and otherwise engage in human relations. The value of that land is a product of community as it vies for preferred locations.

Too few of us are mindful latter-day Robin Hoods willing to challenge the notion of private ownership of the whole land. Too many of us concede to private interests the land we are on the brink of being displaced from. And sadly, too few of us take time from tech-addiction to master the subtle but commonsensical proposition that it is not land we need divvy up to make things right, it is the value of land that when in whole applied to commonwealth purposes is capable of restoring community health.

The Apple party at Civic Center luridly illustrated the essential division within society. The control of geography is political power. When land is ceded to private interests, even when sweetened with a little rent dropped in city coffers, political power moves to those private interests. Socializing land values in full returns political power to democratic republican institutions by removing land rents from private interests. Socializing land values also establishes reciprocal economic relationships where goods and services are exchanged for goods and services. This rather than, as at present, where private ownership of land values commands the surrender of goods and services in exchange for mere access to the geography of community.

At the current rate of privatization of public land, albeit on a rental basis, is it too much to anticipate the day when the elite rent out the entire 48 square miles to Technogloria for a day, banishing you and the next schlub to the East Bay for the duration. Ah, the dark days of Bad King John are fast upon us should-be Merry Men.