"THE SHORT ANSWER IS: Mike Davis made me do it," laughed writer Rebecca Solnit when asked how she came to write Hollow City: Gentrification and the Eviction of Urban Culture, a collaboration with fellow San Franciscan artist Susan Schwartzenberg. Davis had admired Solnit's 1999 book Savage Dreams, which juxtaposed Yosemite and the Nevada nuclear test site as two crucial landscapes of the American West, and the two had struck up a correspondence. "Theoretically, I'm an environmental writer, and I used to send him field reports from all over the West," Solnit said. "But around 1999, I started to write him more and more about what was happening in San Francisco." Davis encouraged her to do a book about the transformations in the city, which Solnit likened to "a fifties science-fiction movie where the aliens of capitalism had invaded and taken over."

What Solnit saw was a staggering influx of white-collar immigrants drawn by jobs (seventy thousand or so created annually every year since 1997) and venture capital (thirty-five percent of the VC money in the country is in the Bay Area). This forced housing prices up astronomically: homes routinely sell for $100,000 over the asking price, and rents have gone up twenty percent in a six-month period in some neighborhoods. All of these newly rich residents spawned a slew of flashy new restaurants, boutiques, and bars that displaced old-economy businesses, especially nonprofits, and the distinct way of urban life that San Francisco once provided. Though the dot-com bubble has deflated, if not burst, in the past month or so, longtime residents are still bristling from the effects of this unprecedented, rapid redevelopment.

Solnit wrote the text quickly last spring, and asked Schwartzenberg, a photographer who had been planning a show called Urban Narratives for the San Francisco Arts Commission gallery, to work with her. The book is kind of a boho, beautifully illustrated Silent Spring, an environmental study in shades of gray about a city ravaged by capital and callousness. Both authors spoke to FEED by phone from their respective headquarters (read: affordable apartments) on the front lines of the gentrification struggle. Schwartzenberg, on the verge of being evicted from her art studio, was anxious but undaunted, describing how the sights and sounds of the city still inspire her as an artist. Solnit's depth of local historical knowledge gives her a remarkably long view on this short boom; resisting a too-easy cynicism, she spoke with guarded optimism and a complicated civic pride familiar to San Franciscans present and former.