Jeanie Poling has a master's degree, twenty years of classical training, and a landlord who accepts money. This puts her in the running for San Francisco's least surprising eviction statistic.
Poling, a violinist who has gigged around the Bay Area for over a decade, went viral this week after a passerby filmed her playing Bach's Partita No. 2 outside the Powell Street BART station while a man in a Warriors jersey aggressively air-drummed two feet from her face. The clip has 4.1 million views. The comments are exactly what you'd expect: half of them are people saying "this is why I left San Francisco," and the other half are people who have never left Ohio explaining that she should simply get a job.
She has a job. Several, actually. Poling teaches private lessons, plays weddings, does the occasional session gig, and yes, busks. She told a local reporter she pulls in roughly $2,800 a month combining all four, which in San Francisco qualifies her for a studio apartment with a hot plate and a neighbor who practices throat singing at 3 a.m.
Here's the part that made the internet lose its mind: Poling said she once made $400 in one afternoon playing outside a tech campus, because engineers apparently tip like they're being watched by a performance review. Then a security guard made her leave for "obstructing the vibe." The vibe, it should be noted, was a sidewalk.
The discourse has split neatly along predictable lines. Team "just move" is arguing that no one is forcing her to live in a city where a parking spot costs more than a Corolla. Team "this is a civilization problem" is pointing out that a classically trained musician with a master's degree is one bad month away from living in her Honda, and that maybe, just maybe, we should examine that. Both sides are yelling past each other, which is basically San Francisco's official sport.
Poling, for her part, seems less interested in being a symbol than in paying November's rent. She told followers she's not trying to make a statement, she just wants to play. Which is, of course, the most San Francisco sentence ever uttered. In any other city, "I want to play the violin for a living" is a career. Here, it's a GoFundMe.
Her video has since spawned a wave of copycats—cellists in the Mission, a guy with a saxophone in North Beach, one brave soul playing the bagpipes near Fisherman's Wharf who should probably be arrested on general principle. The city has responded by doing what it always does when confronted with a visible problem: forming a task force and scheduling a meeting for next quarter.
Meanwhile, Poling keeps showing up, keeps playing, keeps hauling a violin case that weighs about as much as her hopes. If you're in the city and you see her, throw a few bucks in the case. Or don't. She'll survive either way, probably. That's the thing about San Francisco—it grinds you down, but it does keep the interesting ones around a little longer than it should.
**The Take:** San Francisco spent a decade pricing out everyone who made it worth living in, and now it's shocked—shocked—that the last violinist is busking for rent money. The city doesn't have a housing crisis anymore; it has a "who's going to play the music" crisis, and the answer is nobody, because nobody can afford the audition.