What do you love about living in the Bay Area? Our proximity to stunning natural beauty and near-perfect year-round weather? Absolutely. Our well-deserved reputation for innovation? Yes. Our open-mindedness? For sure.

But if you think about what makes your day-to-day experience of the Bay Area great, you’ll probably come up with something like: I can get vegan soul food, Nepalese momos, and Peruvian aji de gallina, all at the touch of an app. The owner of the corner store on my block always asks after my kid (or my dog). There are more performances, pop-up galleries, and street festivals than I could ever hope to attend. Every neighborhood has its own vibe.

If you had to sum it up, you might say: the people and the culture.

Credits: Haleigh Hoff in East Bay Express

Unfortunately, the Bay Area is becoming increasingly inhospitable for many people. For some of us it’s increases in break ins or tent encampments along sidewalks. But for others it’s the inability to meet basic needs – and many of those people are the ones who make our region the distinctive, diverse, and creative home we love. Long before COVID-19 hit, they were facing compounding challenges, residents of color and lower-income residents most of all.

High home prices made buying a home out of reach for many. Rents, especially in the urban centers of San Francisco, Oakland, and San José, were likewise skyrocketing, pushing Bay Area residents into less expensive regions and contributing to deepening racial segregation and a persistenly high population of unhoused residents. Childcare was a huge household expense for families – in some counties even slightly overtaking housing. The gap between rich and poor was wide and growing: in 2018, Bay Area families at the top of income distribution had 12.2 times the income of families at the bottom, with Black and Latino families overrepresented at lower income levels.

“When you think about an equitable region, we’re in pursuit of a destination none of us has been to before. it’s not going to be linear. It requireS us to take risk, to sometimes fail … but the most important thing it takeS is a radical imagination."

FRED BLACKWELL, ceo, SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION

Then came the pandemic… and for many Bay Area residents, things got worse. Today, home prices are at a record high. Rents have dropped below pre-pandemic levels but remain among the highest in the state and the country. Employer-sponsored healthcare costs have risen substantially since 2018, just as the need for healthcare has become in some cases a matter of life or death. And wages at the low end of the pay scale simply have not kept up: despite the highest state minimum wage in the nation, it is estimated that a single adult in San Francisco County would need to work 72 hours per week to make ends meet, while a single adult with two children would need to work an impossible 183 hours per week.

Source: Insight Center for Community Economic Development

In short, many Bay Area households are struggling to meet their basic needs. The heads of those households are the people who prepare and deliver that vegan soul food, who keep the corner store open until midnight, and who delight with their inventive performances. And the struggle is hardest for Black, Latinx, and Native households.

We face the prospect that, if we continue with business as usual, the Bay Area will become a place where only the wealthy can thrive, and where others – some new to our region, some who have been here for generations – will be forced beyond the Bay. And we will all be poorer for it.

We believe that the people of the Bay Area can choose a different future. Now, as we begin to emerge from the pandemic, Battery Powered will explore:

How can we make the Bay Area a place of beauty, belonging, and opportunity for all?

Our Focus

In addition to the high cost of living, the issues that we as a region need to tackle are as familiar as they are massive: Homelessness. Environmental sustainability. Transportation. As the Battery Powered team contemplated where to focus, we kept three questions in mind: Where can our limited but meaningful funds make a difference? What sectors were particularly hard hit by the pandemic? And where are opportunities to invest in people, as well as in the systemic changes needed to create the Bay Area’s Future that we want?

Battery Powered will focus on three areas with people at the center:

	Artists & Cultural Practitioners. The Bay Area is home to a brilliant array of artists, culture keepers, and arts and cultural institutions that exhilarate us, create community, and contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to our economy. Post-pandemic, they need bridge funding while they bring audiences back. Business models must be reimagined, support for self-employed creatives examined, and space for creative expression sustained.
	Entrepreneurs & Small Business. Small businesses are the lifeblood of socially and economically dynamic regions, driving employment, community reinvestment, and economic mobility. They make our neighborhoods vibrant, not generic. The Bay Area had one of the worst rates of small business closure during the pandemic, but there are many working to bring small business back better and more inclusive than before.
	Activists & Organizers. With billions in recovery funding coming available, and political will and public demand for an equitable recovery growing, the next few years represent an unprecedented opportunity to build back better. An impactful use of our funds is to invest in advocacy by communities that are disproportionately impacted by realities like lack of affordable housing, income inequality, and holes in the safety net.

This theme will have an explicit equity lens: artists, entrepreneurs, and activists of color will be a focus. We will look both at short-term relief to keep people and institutions afloat, and efforts that focus on creating the conditions that will allow them to thrive in the Bay Area into the future.

We gratefully acknowledge SPUR, which first formulated our guiding question in its Regional Strategy.

RESOURCES

San Francisco Police Crime Dashboard. Accessed July 1,2021.
Kendall, Marissa. "Old methods failing, California cities take new steps to eradicate homeless camps." The Mercury News, 12 July 2021.
Romem, Issi and Elizabeth Kneebone. Disparity in Departure: Who Leaves the Bay Area and Where Do They Go?. Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, 2018.
Othering & Belonging Institute. U.S. Segregation Map. Accessed July 3, 2021.
Price, Anne and Aisa Villarosa. The Cost of Being Californian 2021. The Insight Center, 2021.
Public Policy Institute of California. Income Inequality In California. January 2020.
Hepler, Lauren. “Bay Area home prices just hit a record high. Will the buying spree last?” San Francisco Chronicle, 20 May 2021.
Hwang, Kellie. “Rents in these 3 big Bay Area cities are all up for the first time in the pandemic.” San Francisco Chronicle, 26 May 2021.
Castañeda, Leonardo. “The Bay Area’s small business closure crisis is already here.” The Mercury News, 23 September, 2020.