ABSTRACT
The collective Eviction Free San Francisco (EFSF) emerged in 2013 in the height of San Francisco’s eviction epidemic correlative with the ‘Tech Boom 2.0’, an era beginning in 2011, following the Dot Com Boom of the late 1990s. This chapter draws upon Anti-Eviction Mapping Project analyses, EFSF participant observation, and Limited Liability Company (LLC) research in order to theorize the role of speculation and shell companies in San Francisco's eviction crisis. It looks at how speculation is constitutive of Ellis Act evictions in California. The chapter offers a brief history of shell companies and LLCs, particularly as they rest upon ongoing colonial speculation. In A. Bahng’s words, ‘It is indeed a god trick to get people to mistake prophecy for truth, notional figure for value, or futurity for the future’. The chapter concludes by placing real estate speculation within a deeper genealogy of settler colonialism, gesturing to the possibility of decolonizing speculation.
