SFBG: There’s a great anecdote in the book where you start repeatedly sneaking into a dot-com office in the Mission to make yourself sandwiches and drink beer in their fully-stocked kitchen. You eventually stop going there, not because you got kicked out (since nobody noticed that you didn’t belong there), but simply because it was just weird being in that environment. You wrote: “After a while, being somewhere that could be anywhere with people who could be anybody was just too damn creepy.” That seems like an apt metaphor for the direction the city was headed at the time.
EL: Yeah, that was the spirit of that era, and to a certain extent, that continues on today — that era has never completely ended. We face the prospect of becoming the first entirely gentrified city in America. That situation at the dot com place, with all these hip, white kids, with their iPods on, staring at their computer screens eating organic food: that’s what the city is in danger of becoming. Kind of like Seattle. A city where everybody hates the war, but it’s illegal to sit on the sidewalk. Where everybody eats organic peaches, but they hate George Bush. It’s environmentally beautiful, but only the elite can afford to live there.

SFBG: So what do you think of the ongoing Manhattan-ization of downtown San Francisco? There are a lot of mixed feelings, even on the left, because development is now framed as being either “out or up,” tall or sprawl. What do you think?
EL: It’s not true. The “up” that they’re building is ALSO “out.” It’s still all about cars. All these massive condo complexes also have parking garages. If you still wanted to build up, you could be putting housing density along transit corridors, like Market St. or Geary. We could be building denser housing that takes public transportation into account and where there’s not going to be parking garages.
Also, the idea that these luxury condos are going to help solve San Francisco’s housing crisis is false. These condos aren’t built for the people already in this town who need housing. It’s bringing in new wealthier people. And it’s certainly not helping people living on the street. District 6 is really going to be gentrified from within.

SFBG: You’ve been following housing issues in the city for a long time. You’ve been homeless, you’ve lived in SROs. What would be a sensible policy for this city to adopt, regarding homelessness?
EL: The main thing is that housing should not be a commodity. It should not be a source of wealth or speculation or profit. It’s an essential need of life. You could take Market St., for example. You’ve got all these abandoned buildings and all these people sleeping in front of them, so that would suggest a solution right there.
Just to add this, though: Newsom and all these people always say, “It’s not that simple. These people have problems and you can’t just plug them into housing.” That’s true, there needs to be substance abuse programs, as well. We have a mayor who declared that he had an alcohol problem and instantly he received treatment – treatment on demand that simply does not exist in this city for people who live on the street. This is the same guy who demonized people for using welfare checks to allegedly purchase drugs or alcohol! We need more mental health services, too. But people don’t need to go all the way to the streets. There needs to be more affordable housing to keep people from becoming homeless.

SFBG: Or they could take Willie Brown’s famous advice that he told your newspaper The Turd-Filled Donut and just move somewhere else.
EL: Yeah, you could try to get some relocation money from your landlord, and take a subprime loan to buy a house in Stockton or Fresno or somewhere and then have it foreclose on you a few years later!

SFBG: What do you think are the biggest differences in the mayoral styles of Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom?
EL: I really miss Willie Brown sometimes. Willie was just more entertaining. Newsom is so petulant about criticism, like, “What? I’m a good guy; I’m trying to help everyone out here.” Now Newsom seems to have just disappeared from public life. When’s the last time you saw him around? You’d see Willie walking around on the streets and you’d be like “Hey, Willie, you’re a fucking scumbag!” and he’d be like, “No, you’re a scumbag.” He was a little more down to earth. I mean, he was an awful person, but I miss his flair.

SFBG: Much of the content of On the Lower Frequencies was taken from your long-running zine, Scam. What is the state of zines right now? It seems like a lot of people who might have been lured to the zine world previously might be drawn to the blogosphere now instead, since it’s so much easier to produce and distribute your content.
EL: Well, I don’t think people who were born to be zine editors are into doing things the easy way! I think they’re drawn to doing things the most difficult way possible: “Yeah, so I’ve got to steal all these copies and then walk around the country passing them out? Cool!” But, I still get a lot of good zines in the mail. There’s a lot more zine distro now, so in ways, it IS easier. The culture of it has a little bit less of the elusive, exciting, kind of pirate radio feel that it once did, but it’s definitely bigger, stronger and wider. You can still steal copies anywhere, too, so there’s no problem there, you know?

SFBG: There are times in the book when you have an almost gleeful or joyous tone in describing “squalor.” For example, in the story about how the City failed in its attempts to keep people off the grass at UN Plaza, you wrote: “Finally the City gave in and the two patches have returned to their rightful state: covered in trash and home to an army of shirtless men, swilling 40’s in the sun!” Many people would likely disagree with your view on “the rightful state of things.”
EL: In the specific situation you’re referring to, it was about people not being allowed to sit in the grass anymore at UN Plaza, and, yeah, I think people should be able to sit in the grass with their shirts off and drink beer in a public park! It’s a shame that people don’t still think that, because for a long time in America, that has been perfectly acceptable behavior. But now you’re not allowed to unless you have a certain amount of money — if you have nice clothes and a bottle of wine, then you can sit in the grass and drink. So it’s a class issue, you know?
But I do enjoy a little bit of “squalor.” I like to see spray-paint on the walls. I like to see people on the grass. I like to see people drinking beer and having fun. I like to see people making music on street corners. I like loud, vibrant life in the city and the alternative is the cynical, sterile place that we’re seeing the city become right now.
I recently saw a review of this book on the KQED web site. They really liked it, but they did say at the end of the review that it was sort of a problem that I glamorize being poor or homelessness, because people who are poor have a very difficult life. I anticipate that some people will say things like that, but that viewpoint is predicated on the assumption that I’m not one of those poor people myself! So I’m not allowed to talk about my own experience in a positive way?
I mean, let me make this clear, when we’re talking about taking over abandoned buildings and living in them, or when we’re talking about stealing food to survive, we’re talking the measures that many people have to take to live in this city. I’m one of the people that’s a couple bucks away from not being able to live here, every single month. And that’s why we organize these protests; that’s why we get together and do this. We’re to try to keep a foothold in this place, because we want to live here.
I’m not ashamed of the way I live. People think if I wrote a book, I must be slumming it, but I’ve been trying to find a dentist all year, because half my teeth are rotting out.

SFBG: So you’re not going home to your mansion after the book tour?
EL: Yeah, I’ll be living in a mansion made of boxes of unsold books!