Listen To This Story

The best way to navigate the insanity of our world: Talk to strangers! I love doing that. 

Recently, I was sitting outside in front of a café in San Francisco’s historic North Beach neighborhood — home to the poets of the beat generation — and I said hello to a man sitting at the next table. 

He began speaking to me and I noticed what a strong accent he had. I asked him how long he had been in the United States and he said more than 70 years! He came here from Italy when he was 17 and is now 91, I believe. 

He was personable, even charming, and seemed much, much younger than his years. And he was appreciative that I’d spoken to him. 

He told me a little bit of his story. I looked him up and learned more. 

For 30 years, Diego lived in the same cottage, paying the same amount of rent. When his original landlords sold the complex, they stipulated that Diego must never pay more than $800 a month. (In those days, North Beach was one big extended Italian family where folks (including landlords!) looked after each other.)   

As rents went up everywhere, in 2014, his new landlord tried to evict him, based on something called the “Ellis Act,” which allows landlords in California to evict all their tenants if they “go out of the rental business.” But his landlord tried to scam the system by giving another tenant — an employee of the landlord — a sham ownership deal. 

Diego fought back, and eventually won his appeal, but for years lived in limbo. He said, 

It is like a death sentence. For one to be faced with eviction, at 81 years old, in a city where the rent could be in excess of $4,000. It is such a travesty that elders are expelled from San Francisco, just so wealthy landlords can make a few dollars more.

America’s most controversial mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was elected in good part because he advocated protecting longtime tenants from the ravages of the market. I think this man epitomizes exactly the kind of person we don’t want to lose from our communities. 

Yes, we need finance and tech people too, but they’re increasingly snapping up the apartments in North Beach, and, if we’re not careful, we’ll kill the golden goose — having lost the eccentrics, the artists, the musicians, the poets, who make the neighborhood alluring in the first place. 

Anyway, after we’d spoken briefly, Diego reached into a bag and pulled out a few poems he had written. 

Enjoy Diego’s poems below— and talk to strangers! As the late singer-songwriter John Prine urges us in his classic plea for cross-generational understanding, Say, “Hello in there!”