The Center for Sex & Culture, a San Francisco-based community center that provides “judgment-free education, cultural events, a library/media archives, to audiences across the sexual and gender spectrum,” is shuttering its physical space on Mission Street at the end of January 2019.
Closure of the Center’s physical space appears to be yet another artifact of the Bay Area’s seemingly endless rent hikes.
The Center stated on its Patreon page that, on February 1, 2018, their rent went up from $7500 per month to nearly $10,000. They also wrote that over the past two years their rent has tripled. Further, Hoodline.com reported in February, 2016 that the Center’s physical location was in a precarious spot due to rental increases.
According to Hoodline, the Center had been based in the city’s “SoMa” (South of Market) neighborhood since 2004. Then, after twelve years, the Center’s lease came up for renewal, and the landlord opted to triple the rent. Ultimately, the rent was increased but by a smaller amount than was originally planned, which enabled the Center to stay put for another three years.
January 2019 seems to mark the end of this contract period. One can assume the rent has been increased once more and/or that the Center’s funding cannot sustain the fees in general.
We recently received the following email correspondence from the Center’s director and co-founder Carol Queen on December 28. It read:
Lovely people!
You know already, I think, that this is a time of enormous change for us. Multiple times a week I have a version of the same “What’s happening?” convo, and here’s the short answer:
Plan A, we morph from the space you have known and visited into an online and pop-up entity. (Do you know about places we should have in our Pop-Up User Database? Ping me!). Our last day in the Mission Street space is 1/31. [emphasis added]
Plan B, a handful of new key volunteers step up: folks who want to help with grantwriting and other fundraising, website rebuilding and maintenance (we were on a Tumblr platform, eek!), and PR/social media management, and more. With a full team, *maybe* we could look at seeking a new space. But we are not currently equipped to do that.
The Center’s closure seems par for the course in today’s Bay Area.
According to Curbed.com, “although San Francisco’s housing market seems just on the brink of turning downward year in and year out… the price of renting keeps trekking ever upward.” They provided several residential rental rate examples, each of which were just bananas. For instance, as of November 2018, a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco rents for a median of $3,560/month — the highest rent in the country. This was down 1.7 percent from the previous month but still up five percent year over year. For comparison, the nationwide median is $1,212/month, down 1.4 percent from last year.
A one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is almost three times as much as the national average. One can only imagine that non-residential space is experiencing similar (perhaps even greater) increases, which is certainly impacting non-profits – including the Center for Sex & Culture.
The Center for Sex & Culture has been around for a very long time. According to Hoodline, since 1994. Though the closure of its physical space on Mission Street does not mark the closure of the Center itself, this does present a very real change.
One could argue that the city of San Francisco is no longer a viable space for the non-profit. The city is known (ironically?) for its liberal, progressive ways. As such, perhaps a new location — perhaps in a less progressive and less expensive part of the country — would actually have a greater impact on a greater number of people needing services within the Center’s areas of expertise?
This may be the case, but it’s also troubling to consider the slow removal of less “high dollar” cultural spaces from the city itself. The Center for Sex & Culture may not be, for instance, a luxe new home designed by Troon Pacific (listed for $45 million San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood just this past October), but it has been an important part of the city’s culture for a very long time.
