Author: Gary Chen

“You have access to the world.”

“I expected a cosmopolitan society. I didn’t know there were homeless here and no place for them or me to stay. I had visited California over the years three times but that’s as a tourist and you don’t really see the reality.”

“This area was almost unrecognizable when Twitter came in.”

“Any kind of job is better than no job, so I do the best I can.”

“There was a real opportunity in San Francisco to do radical design rather than radical displacement. That’s the opportunity that’s lost.”

“That essence of being a human is gone.”

“Families used to come, now you find those people with drugs. They used to come from San Jose and pick up a box and share with the neighbor. They used to [say], ‘Ok, I go to the market this week and I buy…what do we need? We need peach, we need nectarine. Ok, I’ll buy a box each. When I come home, we’ll share with this one, with that one,’ and the whole box it was shared. Not anymore…not anymore.”

“It’s a big deal! So having it here—it’s not going away—we should try to make something of it in the spirit of the past but make it useful for the present and the future.”

“You don’t want a band-aid. You want an actual fix.”