The San Francisco pro-yuppie prank that tricked the entire city

In June 1999, 200 protesters flocked to San Francisco’s Dolores Park to protest a “Stop the Hate” rally… but the rally in question never actually took place.

This may sound like an odd occurrence in a city as famed for tolerance as San Francisco. But the hated group in question was not any disadvantaged group, but the yuppies of the Mission District. According to the quarter-page ads for the rally, posted in print editions of SF Weekly, the Mission District’s newly arrived, moneyed transplants were the victims of hate crimes and vitriol. They needed to band together and take a stand.

They didn’t. Instead, Dolores Park filled with an anti-gentrification counterprotest which, in the absence of any yuppie advocates, turned into a plain old protest. Protesters gave speeches into a megaphone, while others held up cardboard signs with ironic slogans like “Poor People Suck” and “Make Lofts Not War.” Police arrived to watch over the rally, but no fights occurred.

Among the crowd were reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, who found themselves disappointed by the turnout. 

A reporter from the Chronicle observed that “the few supporters were heavily outnumbered.”

“A rally ostensibly organized to protect the civil rights of yuppie newcomers to the Mission District apparently attracted just about everybody in the neighborhood – except the yuppies,” another reporter for the Examiner noted.

“No yups, just nopes at rally in Mission: Was scheduled anti-hate gathering a complete put-on?” the headline for the Examiner story asked.

The reporter’s intuition was spot on. The pro-yuppie rally was a prank.

Some context is important here. By the 1990s, a new wave of San Francisco’s gentrification had (mostly) crested, and the city’s predominantly Latino Mission District stood as one of San Francisco’s last working-class havens. 

But the respite was only temporary. Near the end of the decade, a familiar pattern began to unfold in the Mission. Wealthy office workers, buoyed by the dot-com boom, began snatching up old Victorian homes and artist’s lofts, driving up rents and pushing out longtime residents. To quote one especially vocal resident, the “cell phone types” trickled into the neighborhood. 

In response, a group called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project emerged sometime around 1998. The anonymous group covered the neighborhood in anti-yuppie flyers, urging Mission residents to take action against the moneyed transplants. The suggested methods ranged from serious calls for property destruction to (presumably) facetious calls for violence.

“If you want your rent to go down, kill your landlord,” one flyer reportedly read. 

“The yuppie takeover can be stopped,” read another. “Vandalize yuppie cars … Break the glass. Slash their tires and upholstery. Trash them all!” (One of the sponsors for the pro-yuppie rally was the nonexistent “Safe Parking Utility Vehicles Working Group.”)

Another flyer listed upscale Mission District businesses as targets for destruction, including a Starbucks on Mariposa Street and the dance club Beauty Bar. While the sheet listed no methods, it urged readers to “use your imagination.”

One of the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project’s prime targets was the Cort family, commercial real estate developers with properties in the Mission, who drew controversy in 1998 when they painted over a mural on a building they spent $1.5 million renovating. One flyer included the addresses of two of the family’s homes. 

Robert Cort Jr. told the San Francisco Chronicle that people had thrown feces and balloons filled with paint at his family’s buildings.

From the newspaper records, it’s unclear whether YEP’s call for action resulted in any sort of widespread, direct action mobilization. But at one point, police suspected the group of breaking windows, slashing SUV tires and vandalizing buildings with graffiti.

Even if YEP’s bark was louder than its bite, the group’s messaging drew attention from newspapers from Sacramento to Barstow, including the Los Angeles Times. A story about the conflict ran in the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Texas’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

In May 1999, police arrested Kevin Keating, an 11-year Mission District resident, after catching him pasting Mission Yuppie Eradication Project flyers around the neighborhood. They later raided his home. According to the San Francisco Examiner, police initially charged Keating with “making terrorist threats,” but later dropped the charges.

In June, Keating was among the counterprotesters at the “Stop the Hate” rally. Just three days after the fake rally took place, he penned a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Examiner, which appeared in the paper: “While I deny claims by the San Francisco Police Department that I am the diabolical mastermind of the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project, I must point out that the anti-yuppie folks have never advocated ‘destruction of people’ as claimed in the headline of your editorial.”

A few days later, he published another letter in the Chronicle: “Editor — In response to the June 8 editorial, ‘A Bad Element in the Mission,’ I must point out that the SFPD has accused me of scratching the paint on only one automobile, not many automobiles.”

In the days after the rally, the pro-yuppie organizers unmasked themselves. As it turned out, they weren’t pro-yuppie at all. 

The editorial staff of SF Weekly, led by editor John Mecklin, designed the advertisements as a prank. The goal, Mecklin wrote in an editorial on SF Weekly’s website, was to bait local news outlets into covering an absurd protest.

“We have made up a political movement out of thin air, called a rally on its nonexistent behalf, called into being a significant counter-demonstration (complete with a significant police presence), and created a minor media uproar,” Mecklin wrote.

The prank drew the ire of local journalists. Some felt that it violated journalistic standards. A few suggested that it trivialized genuine problems facing the Mission. A cartoon by Don Asmussen, which appeared in the Sunday edition of the Examiner, found a way to mock both Mecklin for lying and the Examiner’s reporters for taking the bait.

Mecklin’s prank had a secondary target: the yuppies themselves. After SF Weekly sympathetically covered the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project, the paper received tons of complaints from the yups, Mecklin told the LA Times. The “Stop the Hate” ad, in its absurdity, was meant to mock their feelings of persecution. 

Maybe it was too believable.

In 2023, a short walk down the Mission’s Valencia Street confirms that some of the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project’s worst fears were realized. (A block away, on Mission Street, it’s a different story — at least for now.) Upscale businesses, once rare enough to look out of place, now line the corridor. If SUVs are gone, it’s only because Teslas have taken their place.