Protesters vandalize Google bus, block Apple shuttle
SAN FRANCISCO -- As tech-driven housing costs and evictions soar, anti-gentrification protesters in San Francisco and Oakland on Friday again blocked private shuttle buses filled with tech workers commuting to Silicon Valley.
One Google bus had its tires slashed and a window broken while picking up employees at a West Oakland train station, according to police and local news reports. Another bus was briefly blocked at another Bay Area Rapid Transit station.
In San Francisco's Mission District, the epicenter of the housing crisis, protesters surrounded a bus full of Apple workers at about 9 a.m. and held it up for about 30 minutes, according to local news reports and witnesses. Demonstrators chanted and carried banners reading "Eviction Free San Francisco" and "Get Off The Bus." Some urged Apple workers to join them; one did.
The Mission Local blog estimated the protest at 100 people, while the SF Examiner counted 40 to 50.
"The vandalism and violence against employee shuttles and the workers who ride them is unfortunate and unacceptable," the Bay Area Council, a business group representing many of the shuttle bus operators, said in a statement.
Craig Frost, a Google employee who works for the company's Play and YouTube businesses, posted photos of the incident on Twitter, showing the broken window and protesters standing in front of the bus holding a banner that read "F--k Off Google."
He also posted a photo of a flyer handed out by the West Oakland protesters that blamed the rising cost of living in the area on Google employees.
"The people outside your Google bus serve you coffee, watch your kids, have sex with you for money, make you food, and are being driven out of their neighborhoods," the flyer read. "While you guys live fat as hogs with your free 24/7 buffet, everyone else is scraping the bottom of their wallets, barely existing in this expensive world that you and your chums helped create."
It was the second time in two weeks that protesters have targeted the fleets of corporate limousine buses ferrying thousands of high-paid tech and biotech workers from popular urban areas to the suburban campuses of Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, eBay, Intuit, Genentech and other companies.
"We certainly don't want to cause any inconvenience to Bay Area residents and we and others in our industry are working with San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to agree on a policy on shuttles in the city," a Google spokeswoman said. She declined to comment further.
Tech workers, and the buses they ride, have become unwitting symbols of the latest tsunami of gentrification that has pushed seniors, middle-income workers and other longtime residents from affordable, rent-controlled apartments.
The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is just under $2,800 per month, a 27% jump in the past two years. Realtors say being near a corporate bus stop can add 20% to rents or selling prices.
Nearly 40 companies operate the cushy, mostly unregulated coaches that make more 200 stops a day --mainly in public bus zones -- across the city. Google runs more than 100 buses that make 380 trips daily around the Bay Area. The local transit agency was deluged with complaints about private coaches hogging city bus zone and forcing passengers to get off in the middle of crowded, busy streets. In July, the agency proposed that the tech companies pay the city to share about 200 stops with the public buses.
The San Francisco protest leaders said they weren't singling out Google or tech workers.
"We want to make it clear that we're not just targeting Google, we're targeting the systematic use of these shuttles and their impact on this city," said Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, who leads the housing-rights coalition Heart of the City.
"This protest is about gentrification and people being displaced," organizer Erin McElroy told the crowd. "We're not necessarily against tech. We're against tech's effect on speculation and evictions."
The story across the bay was different, public radio station KQED said.
The character of the West Oakland incident seems much more aggressive and hostile toward Google and its employees than bus-related protests in San Francisco, which have been nonviolent and focused specifically on the displacement of residents from the Mission District as employees of technology firms bid up rents and home prices.
During this morning's San Francisco action, demonstrators went through the motions, at least, of reaching out to Apple employees inside the bus, urging them to join the protest. (None did, so far as we've heard.)
On Dec. 9, about two dozen protesters briefly blocked a Google bus in the Mission District, the epicenter of the battle. In a spoof that fooled news outlets and spectators, one union activist pretended to be an outraged Google employee, berating demonstrators to leave the city if they couldn't afford to stay.
Read more about "The Google Bus" phenomenon and its effect on San Francisco real estate.