Polk Street's Moral Economies

Chapter 5 draws on ethnographic and archival research to explore the transformation of Polk Street from a working-class queer commercial corridor to a gentrified entertainment destination serving the new economy’s tech elite in the late 2000s. The chapter shows that the economic and social transformations associated with urban neoliberalism radically undermined the preexisting social patterns—the reciprocities, obligations, and moral codes kids developed to limit competition and control pricing—that constituted the performative economy, leading to a more competitive marketplace in which kids and those who made up the larger vice economy no longer “had each other’s backs.” While feelings of anger were triggered by the razing and closing of spaces in which queer working-class people lived, socialized, and worked, these grievances were grounded in a set of shared moral values, social norms, obligations, performance practices, and conceptions of justice—a shared performative economy.