Kevin Dublin, a San Francisco-based poet and writer, is doing everything he can to keep the city’s literary culture alive. He leads a number of writing programs, including the Elder Writing Project, which brings creative writing classes to retirement communities across the Bay Area. He also hosts a community-building reading series, mentors under-resourced kids, spends his summers teaching writing at various youth camps and dreams of founding his own writing youth camp in San Francisco. He is exactly the kind of guy you would want as your neighbor. He’s also exactly the kind of guy the city of San Francisco is least hospitable to. 

“There’s so much opportunity here, but a lot of people are holding on by a shoestring,” says Dublin.

The community of artists and writers to which Dublin belongs is fighting to hold on to their place in the most expensive city in America. In 2015, the same year Dublin moved to the Bay Area, the San Francisco Arts Commission surveyed nearly 600 local artists and found that more than 70% of them had either already left San Francisco or were about to be displaced from their work, home or both. The pandemic has only intensified these problems. A report by Americans for the Arts found that 53% of artists have no savings whatsoever as a result of the pandemic.

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