Protesters in San Francisco stopped an Apple employee shuttle bus on Friday. The group—San Francisco Displacement and Neighborhood Impact Agency—is demanding an end of evictions in the city, evictions they blame on wealthy employees from Apple, Google, and the other Bay Area tech giants for driving up rent.
Yes, the group does have a website: HeartOfTheCity.org.
Many of these companies provide private busses that bring employees from San Francisco to Silicon Valley offices in San Jose, Cupertino, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and other cities south of the city. The Apple bus was the second such shuttle targeted by protesters, as a Google bus was stopped by the same group two weeks ago in Oakland.
Here's a video of Friday's Apple bus protest posted by Joe Fitz Rodriguez:
In addition to the issue of rising rents, the protesters accuse the busses of using city bus stops without permission. According to a flier handed out at the Google bus protest, tech giants use 200 San Francisco Muni stops 7,100 times every day without paying and without permission.
They're demanding an end of evictions in the city, and they want the tech giants to pony up a combined US$1 billion, a figure based on charging them for two years of using the bus stops. That's $192.94 per stop, though it's unclear how that figure was derived.
The SFDNIA wants that money to be used for funding affordable housing, defending against evictions, public transit improvements, and legislation to prevent real estate speculators from using California law to evict tenants.