Tag, They're It

The writing’s on the wall for graffiti artists, as liberal tolerance gives way to a crackdown.

Lauren Murrow

Last November, Quality of Life, an independent film highlighting the lives of graffiti artists in the Mission, played at the Film Arts Festival. At the time, director Benjamin Morgan said he hoped to open up a dialogue about the merits of graffiti in a city like San Francisco.

Only thing is, the dialogue was already happening, but one side was too furious to converse politely. City residents have gotten increasingly fed up with the growing urban scrawl, both from professional taggers equipped to scale buildings and from marketing-happy multinationals such as NBC, which was fined for stenciling ads on sidewalks last year. In recent months, a slew of community groups and patrols have cropped up, and the government named a graffiti czar, Paul Henderson, in the D.A.'s office. Taking things one step further, the city in November passed a law holding property owners accountable for removing graffiti within 30 days of being notified by the Department of Public Works. "We've reached a critical mass of people who have really become outraged," says Gideon Kramer, a 27-year Mission resident who logged over 700 miles patrolling his neighborhood last year.

The times, they are a-changin'. For decades, public art displays and murals have been a welcome presence in the city; graffiti used to be tolerated, too. Scrawl was what gave the city an anarchic urban edge (that would be urban decay to critics). But with average home prices reaching the $650K mark and hippies having gone bourgeois, there simply isn't room for graffiti in today's civic scape. "Graffiti is a scapegoat for society's ills," says John Doffing, Quality of Life's executive producer and founder of Start SoMa gallery, which exhibits graffiti art from around the world. "But I'd rather see a beautiful graffiti piece than yet another corporate advertisement." Property owners under deadline to remove such works might beg to differ.