Bayview Hunters Point

Racing for solutions

Michael Redmond
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Racing for solutions

rebecca@sfbg.com

Although there are five seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors up for reelection this fall, incumbents face few contenders with the requisite cash and political juice needed to mount a serious challenge. The one race that has stirred interest among local politicos is the bid to represent District 10, the rapidly changing southeastern corner of San Francisco that spans the Bayview, Hunters Point, Visitacion Valley, Dogpatch, and Potrero Hill neighborhoods.

Sup. Malia Cohen, who narrowly beat an array of more than a dozen candidates in 2010, has raised way more money than her best-funded opponent, progressive neighborhood activist Tony Kelly, who garnered 2,095 first-place votes in the last D10 race, slightly more than Cohen’s, before the final outcome was determined by ranked-choice voting tallies.

For the upcoming Nov. 4 election, Cohen has received $242,225 in contributions, compared with Kelly’s $42,135, campaign finance records show. But Kelly, who collected the 1,000 signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot and qualified for public financing, has secured key progressive endorsements, including former Mayor Art Agnos, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, Sups. David Campos and John Avalos, and the Potrero Hill Democratic Club.

Others who’ve filed to run for this office include Marlene Tran, a retired educator who has strong ties to families in the district, especially in Visitacion Valley, through her teaching and language-access programs (she’s known by kids as “Teacher Tran”); Shawn Richard, the founder of a nonprofit organization that offers workshops for youth to prevent gun violence; and Ed Donaldson, who was born and raised in Bayview Hunters Point and works on economic development issues. DeBray Carptenter, an activist who has weighed in on police violence, is running as a write-in candidate.

But the outcome in this dynamic district could be determined by more than campaign cash or political endorsements. That’s because the D10 supervisor faces the unique, unenviable challenge of taking on some of the city’s most intractable problems, which have disproportionately plagued this rapidly changing district.

Longstanding challenges, such as a high unemployment and crime rates, public health concerns, social displacement, and poor air quality, have plagued D10 for years. But now, fast-growing D10 is becoming a microcosm for how San Francisco resolves its growing pains and balances the interests of capital and community.

 

MIX OF CHALLENGES

While candidate forums and questionnaires tend to gauge political hopefuls on where they draw the line on citywide policy debates, such as Google bus stops or fees for Sunday parking meters, neighborhood issues facing D10 have particularly high stakes for area residents.

While other supervisors represent neighborhoods where multiple transit lines crisscross through in a rainbow of route markers on Muni maps, D10 is notoriously underserved by public transit. The high concentration of industrial land uses created major public health concerns. A Department of Public Health study from 2006 determined that Bayview Hunters Point residents were making more hospital visits on average than people residing in other San Francisco neighborhoods, especially for asthma and congestive heart failure.

Unemployment in D-10 hovers near 12 percent, triple the citywide average of 4 percent. Cohen told us efforts are being made on this front, noting that $3 million had been invested in the Third Street corridor to assist merchants with loans and façade improvements, and that programs were underway to connect residents with health care and hospitality jobs, as well as service industry jobs.

“The mantra is that the needle hasn’t moved at all,” Cohen noted, but she said things are getting better. “We are moving in the same downward trend with regard to unemployment.”

Nevertheless, the high unemployment is also linked with health problems, food insecurity — and violence. In recent months, D10 has come into the spotlight due to tragic incidents of gun violence. From the start of this year to Sept. 8, there were 13 homicides in D10.

Fourth of July weekend was particularly deadly in the Bayview and D10 public housing complexes, with four fatal shootings. Cohen responded with a press conference to announce her plan to convene a task force addressing the problem, telling us it will be “focused on preventing gun violence rather than reacting to it.”

The idea, she said, is to bring in expert stakeholders who hadn’t met about this topic before, including mental-health experts and those working with at-risk youth.

“I think we need to go deeper” than in previous efforts, Cohen said, dismissing past attempts as superficial fixes.

But Cohen’s task force plan quickly drew criticism from political opponents and other critics, including Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who dismissed it as empty rhetoric.

“How many people are cool with yet another task force?” Kelly said in a press statement challenging the move. “We can’t wait any longer to stem the deadly tide of violence in District 10. Supervisor Cohen’s task force won’t even propose solutions till 2017. We can’t wait that long.”

Kelly told us he’s formulated a five-point plan to tackle gun violence, explaining that it involved calling for a $10 million budget supplemental to bolster family services, reentry programs, job placement, and summer activities aimed at addressing poverty and service gaps. Kelly also said he’d push for a greater emphasis on community policing, with officers walking a beat instead of remaining inside a vehicle.

“How do you know $10 million is enough?” Cohen responded. “When you hear critics say $10 million, there is no way to indicate whether we’d need more or less.” She also took issue with the contention that her task force wouldn’t reach a solution soon enough, saying, “I never put a timeline on the task force.”

Cohen also said she wanted to get a better sense of where all of the past funding had gone that was supposed to have alleviated gun violence. “We’ve spent a lot of money — millions — and one of the things I am interested in doing is to do an audit about the finances,” she said.

She also wants to explore a partnership with the Guardian Angels, community volunteers who conduct safety patrols, to supplement policing. Cohen was dismissive of her critics. “Tony was not talking about black issues before this,” she said. “He hasn’t done one [gun] buyback. There’s no depth to what any of these critics are saying.”

Tran, who spoke with the Guardian at length, said she’d started trying to address rampant crime in Visitacion Valley 25 years ago and said more needs to be done to respond to recent shootings.

“There was no real method for the sizable non-English speaking victims to make reports then,” Tran wrote in a blog post, going on to say that she’d ensured materials were translated to Chinese languages to facilitate communication with the Police Department. “When more and more residents became ‘eyes and ears’ of law enforcement, community safety improved,” she said.

Richard, whose Brothers Against Guns has been working with youth for 20 years and organizing events such as midnight basketball games, said he opposed Cohen’s task force because it won’t arrive at a solution quickly enough. He said he thought a plan should be crafted along with youth advocates, law enforcement, juvenile and adult probation officers, and clergy members to come up with a solution that would bolster youth employment opportunities.

“I’ve talked with all 13 families” that lost young people to shootings this year, Richard said, and that he attended each of the funerals.

 

CHANGING NEIGHBORHOOD

Standing outside the Potrero Terrace public housing complex at 25th and Connecticut streets on a recent sunny afternoon, Kelly was flanked by affordable housing advocates clutching red-and-yellow “Tony Kelly for District Supervisor” campaign signs. The press conference had been called to unveil his campaign plan to bolster affordable housing in D10.

Pointing out that Cohen had voted “no endorsement” at the Democratic County Central Committee on Proposition G — the measure that would tax property-flipping to discourage real estate speculation and evictions — Kelly said, “This is not a time to be silent.”

While Cohen had accepted checks from landlords who appeared on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s list of worst offenders for carrying out Ellis Act evictions, Kelly said he’s pledged not to accept any funding from developers or Ellis Act evictors. Asked if any had offered, Kelly responded, “Some. They’re not knocking down my door.”

Cohen told us that she hadn’t supported Prop. G, a top priority for affordable housing advocates, because she objected to certain technical provisions that could harm small property owners in her district. As for the contributions from Ellis Act evictors, she said the checks had been returned once the error was discovered. Her formal policy, she said, is not to intentionally take money from anyone involved in an Ellis Act eviction.

Speaking outside Potrero Terrace, Kelly said he thought all housing projects built on public land should make at least one-third of their units affordable to most San Franciscans. He also said renovation of public housing projects could be accelerated if the city loaned out money from its $19 billion employee retirement fund. Under the current system, funding for those improvements is leveraged by private capital.

Mold, pests, and even leaking sewage are well-documented problems in public housing. Dorothy Minkins, a public housing resident who joined Kelly and the others, told us that she’s been waiting for years for rotting sheetrock to be replaced by the Housing Authority, adding that water damage from her second-floor bathroom has left a hole in the ceiling of her living room. She related a joke she’d heard from a neighbor awaiting similar repairs: “He said, Christ will come before they come to fix my place.”

Lack of affordable housing is a sweeping trend throughout San Francisco, but it presents a unique challenge in D10, where incomes are lower on average (the notable exceptions are in Potrero Hill, dotted with fine residential properties overlooking the city that would easily fetch millions, and Dogpatch, where sleek new condominium dwellings often house commuters working at tech and biotech firms in the South Bay).

Home sale prices in the Bayview shot up 59 percent in two years, prompting the San Francisco Business Times to deem it “a hot real estate market adorned with bidding wars and offers way above asking prices.”

One single-family home even sold for $1.3 million. Historically, the Bayview has been an economically depressed, working-class area with a high rate of home ownership due to the affordability of housing — but that’s been impacted by foreclosures in recent years, fueling displacement.

Although statistics from the Eviction Defense Collaborative show that evictions did occur in the Bayview in 2013, particularly impacting African Americans and single-parent households, Cohen noted that evictions aren’t happening in D10 with the same frequency as in the Tenderloin or the Mission.

“When it comes to communities of color in the southeast, it’s about foreclosure or mismanagement of funds,” explained Cohen.

She said that a financial counseling services center had opened on Evans Street to assist people who are facing foreclosure, and added that she thought more should be done to market newly constructed affordable units to communities in need.

“There’s an error in how they’re marketing,” she said, because the opportunities are too often missed.

But critics say more is needed to prevent the neighborhood from undergoing a major transformation without input from residents.

“This district is being transformed,” Richard said. “A lot of folks are moving out — they’re moving to Vallejo, Antioch, Pittsburg. They don’t want to deal with the issues, and the violence, and the cost.”

At the same time, he noted, developers are flocking to the area, which has a great deal more undeveloped land than in other parts of the city.

“The community has no one they can turn to who will hold these developers accountable,” he said. “If the community doesn’t have a stake in it, then who’s winning?”

 

Standing Up for Children Exposed to Trauma

Michael Redmond
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Standing Up for Children Exposed to Trauma

By Suzy Loftus

OPINION Sasha’s only 9 years old, but she has already experienced significant trauma and adversity. Whenever her father drank too much, he would hit and verbally abuse Sasha and her mother. After her father went to jail, Sasha’s mother lost her job, the family became homeless and eventually moved into subsidized housing. Sasha had also witnessed high levels of community violence. Exposure to trauma has taken its toll on Sasha; she has a hard time focusing on assignments in class and struggles with reading and math. She gets frustrated and acts out at home and in class. Her teacher thinks Sasha has learning problems, and has recommended her for special education.

We have often looked at childhood trauma such as Sasha’s as a social problem or a mental health problem — but emerging data provides a more complete picture. At the Center for Youth Wellness, in Bayview Hunters Point, we are part of a growing national movement that is looking at childhood exposure to chronic adversity through a different lens: as a public health threat.

Children, like Sasha, are screened for exposure to chronic adversity and toxic stress during their pediatric visits, through a partnership between the Bayview Child Health Center and the Center for Youth Wellness.

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris discusses ACEs and toxic stress as the next massive public health threat.

In the Bayview and across California, chronic adversity and toxic stress stand in the way of the health and success of many children. Now more than ever, we are beginning to understand the impact of early adversity — known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) — on the developing brains and bodies of children like Sasha.

ACEs are traumatic experiences over which a child has no control. Examples include abuse, neglect, household dysfunction, exposure to community violence, homelessness, discrimination, involvement in foster care, and others.

A study conducted by Dr. Burke Harris, founder of the Center for Youth Wellness, found that a majority of the 700 participants, all patients from Bayview with a median age of 8 — 67 percent —were exposed to one or more ACEs.

Beyond the Bayview, exposure to childhood trauma is surprisingly common among Californians. In fact, a San Diego study found that two-thirds of 17,000 participants reported at least one adverse childhood experience, and 20 percent of participants reported three or more ACEs.

ACEs can result in toxic stress, which can affect the fundamental biological functioning of the body and, in many children, the healthy development of their brain architecture. Without support and protection from adults, children who experience toxic stress are at higher risk for health problems, like asthma, diabetes, and obesity. Toxic stress also may make it difficult to sit still in school or to control emotions in challenging situations. If left untreated, toxic stress can lead to increased risk of adult diseases including heart disease and cancer as well as behavior problems such as depression, substance use, and suicide.

That’s why exposure to Adverse Childhood Experiences has been called the greatest unaddressed public health threat of our time. This is a public health crisis with clear implications beyond health — from education to public safety to our economy.

Our approach: screen every child for toxic stress and pilot and evaluate interventions that heal the impact of ACEs. Our goal is to share best practices in ACEs treatment with others around the country. We believe that the pediatric home offers an important entry point into addressing ACEs and toxic stress with families.

Even before a child goes to school or interacts with other systems, he or she usually visits a pediatrician for a routine well-child check. With the ability to touch countless numbers of children exposed to ACEs, pediatricians can be on the frontlines of preventing, screening, and healing toxic stress. Other healthcare professionals who work with children, such as school nurses, also are in a unique position to screen for toxic stress and help families access the services they need.

The science is clear — we must do more to prevent, screen, and heal the impacts of ACEs and toxic stress. A crucial first step in addressing this crisis is raising awareness among parents, pediatricians, educators, and policymakers that ACEs are a public health threat that we cannot afford to ignore. We must do more to identify toxic stress in our kids before it leads to a lifetime of challenges for children, families and our communities.

Suzy Loftus is chief operating officer of the Center for Youth Wellness and a member of the San Francisco Police Commission.

Fresh out

Michael Redmond
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21
Fresh out

Rebecca@sfbg.com

Food stirs strong passions in San Francisco. Protests have been mounted against foie gras and live chicken sales, and epic battles have been fought over chain grocery stores’ proposals to open up shop in certain neighborhoods.

When Whole Foods opened in the Upper Haight in 2011 amid no shortage of neighborhood controversy, Rachel Levin wrote in The Bold Italic that her glee at beholding offerings such as Kombucha on tap belied her nagging conscience about patronizing a chain retailer in an area dotted with local businesses. Internal conflict ensued; the writer confessed feeling “totally conflicted.”

But a very different food-related dilemma is currently plaguing residents in Bayview Hunters Point, a racially diverse, low-income area in the city’s southeast sector.

Six months after the Upper Haight Whole Foods flung open its doors to guilt-ridden and guilt-free patrons alike, a different grocery store was welcomed with much fanfare.

Five years had passed from the time when Fresh & Easy Market had agreed to do business in the Bayview to the day it finally opened for business. The store launch, held in late August of 2011, was treated as a celebratory affair — after much involvement by city officials, it marked the first time in 20 years that the low-income community would have a grocery store.

“The opening of Fresh & Easy on Third Street creates jobs for the community and will help make the neighborhood a place where families will want to stay and thrive,” Mayor Ed Lee said at the time.

But just over two years later, Fresh & Easy was closed. Tesco, the British parent company that owned the grocery chain, fell into financial trouble and unloaded its West Coast stores onto an affiliate of Yucaipa companies, headed by Los Angeles billionaire Ronald Burkle. Other San Francisco Fresh & Easy locations survived the transition, but the Bayview store didn’t make the cut.

Now it’s back to square one, and the neighborhood is once again without a grocery store where one can purchase fresh food. That’s especially problematic considering that Bayview residents suffer from diet-related illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes at much higher rates than other city residents.

And ever since Fresh & Easy closed, Sup. Malia Cohen, who represents District 10 where Bayview is located, has discovered that attracting a new grocery retailer to that neighborhood is like pulling teeth.

“Safeway was absolutely closed to the idea,” Cohen reports. “They cited safety concerns.”

When she first contacted Safeway representatives to pitch the idea of having the grocery retailer move into the vacant Fresh & Easy location, their response was to ask her office to track down emergency service call data in the surrounding neighborhood. “They said they couldn’t get the information,” Cohen said. “I said, that’s interesting, it’s public information.”

Safeway also cited concerns about the configuration of the vacant space and the size of the parking lot, Cohen said. She noted that the grocer has shown generosity in the past by making Safeway gift card donations to needy Bayview residents, but “that also presents a challenge. It’s a hike to get to the grocery store.”

Safeway spokesperson Wendy Gutshall did not answer questions about why the retailer was unwilling to consider moving to the area, and wrote in an email to Bay Guardian, “There are no plans at this time with respect to a new location in the Bayview.”

Cohen was frustrated, but undeterred. “I think there’s a certain level of racism and classism that blinds retailers from even exploring these communities,” she said. “I really want the community to be able to have healthy food options — not discounted toss-aways.”

Next on Cohen’s list was Trader Joe’s. “The conversation went well,” she noted, adding that she’s targeting the chain because numerous residents have told her they would shop there. “I’m optimistic — although they did express a desire to be in Noe Valley. Or the Castro.”

Asked whether the company would consider opening a store in the Bayview, Trader Joe’s spokesperson Alison Mochizuki would only say, “At this time, it’s not in our two-year plan to open a location in that area.”

Cohen said she’d also reached out to Kroger, Sterling Farms, and 99 Ranch Market to gauge interest. Meanwhile, nearby Visitation Valley will be getting its own grocery store, with an anticipated opening in June: discount retailer Grocery Outlet.

The closure of Fresh & Easy left some Bayview residents without jobs. Gloria Chan, spokesperson of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, a city agency that works closely with Mayor Ed Lee, noted that OEWD had “deployed its rapid response team to assist [displaced Fresh & Easy] employees during the transition, and provided information on workforce services including unemployment assistance.”

Investment firm Fortress Investment Group acquired the vacant Fresh & Easy site in December, Chan added. “OEWD reached out to the Fortress Investment Group and expressed interest and the need for ensuring a grocery retail outlet continues to remain in the now vacant location,” she wrote. “OEWD remains diligent in pursuing a grocery retail outlet in the Bayview and have also spoken to various food operators.”

But so far, nothing has fallen into place, and Cohen says the mayor’s office could be offering more support. “We have the density needed to support a store — households, age range, all the qualifying data points,” Cohen said. “I do have my fingers crossed.”

 

Homeless for the holidays

Erica Hanna
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0
Homeless for the holidays

news@sfbg.com

As temperatures dropped in recent weeks, those who care for San Francisco’s homeless snapped into action.

Shelters stopped requiring reservations, making any beds still open after 8pm available to anyone who needed them. General Hospital’s Emergency Room treated the annual uptick of hypothermia cases, working closely with the city’s Homeless Outreach Team. Seven people in the Bay Area died as a result of cold weather in the last month — mercifully, none in San Francisco.

“Just one homeless person passing from being cold is way too many,” Carol Domino, program director at Mother Brown’s Drop-In Center, told the Guardian.

When the cold hit, Mother Brown’s staff could be found scouting encampments near its location in Bayview. Besides a respite from the weather, it offers bathrooms, showers, access to case management services, and other resources, as well as two hot meals a day in its dining room. But there’s one thing it can’t offer: a warm bed.

But that may change. A proposal for a 100-bed homeless shelter next door to Mother Brown’s gained political footing this year, despite controversy and a divided neighborhood.

 

SHELTER IN BAYVIEW

Behind the shelter effort is Gwendolyn Westbrook, director of the United Council of Human Services. Westbrook says the idea didn’t come from her, but from Barbara J. “Mother” Brown, the local legend who served hot meals out of the back of a Cadillac Seville before founding Bayview Hope Homeless Resource Center and Mother Brown’s Dining Room in 2001.

“People have come in here needing a place to sleep for as long as it’s been open,” Westbrook said. Brown’s solution was to set out folding chairs where people could sleep. Nowadays, 80 people rest in the chairs on a typical night.

Before Brown died in 2005, Westbrook remembers, she made it clear to her successor how much she wanted shelter beds where clients could lie down.

Of her clients, Westbrook says, “it’s a lot of people who are from this area, grew up in this area. Some people never leave this district. Their homes might have gone into foreclosure, or somebody died that set them back and triggered something mentally, and now they’re on the street. So this is a safe haven for them. This is a place where they can come and just relax.”

Even as the cost of living soars and the neighborhood changes, Westbrook says, her clients hold on.

“Most of our clients won’t leave the Bayview,” she said. “Some of them have told me, ‘well if I die, just cremate me and put my ashes up on Third Street. Spread them on Third Street.’ That’s how much they love this neighborhood.”

Human Services Agency (HSA) director Trent Rhorer witnessed the chair arrangement during an August 2011 visit to Mother Brown’s. He called the sight “simply not acceptable from a view of humanity.”

When Rhorer learned that a warehouse next door had recently been put up for rent, the shelter idea was born. The HSA applied for a forgivable loan from the state’s Emergency Housing and Assistance Program (EHAP). In January 2012, the project was approved for $978,000.

On Nov. 19, the Board of Supervisors voted to accept the grant, and on Dec. 10, it assigned the next two steps: city adoption of the lease for the property and creation of a special use district. The rezoning process could take six months to a year at the Planning Commission, and if the shelter ultimately goes through, construction is not likely to begin before 2015.

Until then, shelter options in Bayview-Hunters Point will stay slim. There is no single adult shelter with beds in the neighborhood. The closest thing is Providence Baptist Church at 1601 McKinnon. There, staff lay out mats on the gym floor each night.

“In Bayview-Hunters Point, that’s it. Providence is the shelter,” said Nick Kimura, shelter client advocate with the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness.

In Mayor Ed Lee’s 2013 State of the City address, he said he was “proud to support” efforts to expand services for the homeless in Bayview—specifically “Sup. Cohen’s effort, aided by a federal grant — to build a new 100-bed shelter”

The only problem: that was the first Cohen said she had heard of it.

“My first concern was how the proposal came about,” Cohen told us. “I wasn’t made aware of it until it was announced.”

 

SHIFTING POLITICS

After Lee’s announcement, there were two community meetings, one in March at the police station and one in April at the YMCA. The idea gained support from the Southeast Community Facility Commission and the San Francisco branch of the NAACP.

A wave of opposition also grew, including the neighborhood organization Bayview Residents Improving Their Environment (BRITE), and a handful of businesses led by David Eisenberg, president of Micro-Tracers, a food testing company next door to Mother Brown’s.

On July 16, Cohen herself came out against the shelter. Cohen said her decision came after “meeting with residents about their concerns and fears.”

Neighborhood residents are a shifting demographic. The African American population has declined by 10 percent since Mother Brown’s was founded in 2001. The Asian population increased slightly in the same time period, and the white population has more than doubled.

Homelessness in the neighborhood has also increased. According to the city’s biannual homeless count, the number hovered around 400 until January 2011, when the number jumped to 1,151. It had 1,278 homeless people in 2013.

After Cohen declared her opposition, the meetings went back behind closed doors. In September, David Curto, director of contracts at the HSA, said that “[city homeless czar] Bevan Dufty and other folks in the Mayor’s Office are trying to revive it.” On Oct. 9, Lee met with a group of neighbors. And on Oct 30, the shelter proposal made its public reappearance.

Sups. John Avalos, Eric Mar, and Mark Farrell of the city’s Budget and Finance Committee heard the issue. They were tasked with voting on whether to accept the EHAP loan, a question that would be put to the Board of Supervisors if it passed.

Out in the gallery, the two sides sat divided down the aisle like squabbling families at a wedding. House left were the shelter’s supporters, a mix of residents and community leaders and staff of Mother Brown’s and their clients, some with their shoes pulled on only half way over feet swollen from sleeping in their chairs. On the right, BRITE members, an ad hoc group called Protect MLK Pool and Playground, Eisenberg, and other community members in opposition.

The shelter became a vehicle for a debate about larger changes in Bayview. BRITE member David Armagnac saw no need for shelter beds in the neighborhood that he has “seen transform and emerge into an ever-increasing vibrant area.” Bayview business owner Carla Eagleton wanted economic and quality of life impact reports on the proposed shelters “as it relates to the city’s only remaining blue collar industrial area, MLK Park, surrounding neighborhoods and the Third Street corridor, which the city of San Francisco has spent billions of dollars to revitalize.”

Meanwhile, resident Sandy Thompson testified that “for you guys to move in and make yourself comfortable,” many of her neighbors have been displaced. “Make the homeless comfortable, just like you guys are making yourself comfortable, because they need a place too,” Thompson said.

A client of Mother Brown’s talked about being homeless in the neighborhood her family had been in for generations. “My grandparents are the ones that migrated from the south, that came up here to work on those shipyards,” she said. “Think about that parent who is working at McDonalds, or working a low, minimum-wage job. They can’t afford the new housing that’s coming in, that’s being developed. Yes, we love it. We love to look at the property that we cannot live in.”

Both sides made passionate pleas, but shelter supporters won over the Budget and Finance Committee.

“It’s very rare that I get moved from hearing public comment. I hear a lot of public comment, and sometimes I feel like my heart is hardened to everything. But not today,” Avalos said.

Farrell agreed: “It’s rare that you get touched here, because we do hear so much public comment all the time. And the personal stories are pretty incredible.”

 

INSIDE MOTHER BROWN’S

Inside Mother Brown’s cool blue walls, there’s no shortage of incredible personal stories. Lonnel McCall took a break from helping to cook dinner at Mother Brown’s kitchen to describe what the place has meant for him.

“I didn’t have nothing, not even ambitions. I felt I was a loser. I had no self-esteem,” he remembers. “I was smoking crack under the bridge and all that stuff.”

He now has a job as a hotel chef and lives in a HOPE House home. He rolled up his sleeves to reveal cuts and burns, the battle scars of a chef.

“These are my cook wounds,” he said, “instead of dope wounds.”

But for a period, McCall slept in the chairs. “It’s hard. Your ankles swell up,” he said.

Wade Verdun also slept in the chairs and went through HOPE House.

“I’ve got my own place now, got my own car. I’m no longer on drugs. And I’ve got a two-year-old son,” Verdun said. “This place saved my life, to tell you the truth.” Smiling, he patted his belly. “I’ve never been this fat. Trust me.”

If the shelter does get built, Westbrook hopes, it can lead to more happy endings like McCall’s and Verdun’s.There are already too many sad stories.

On Dec. 19, candles lit the dusk on the steps of City Hall in a vigil for the homeless people who have died in San Francisco. The vigil was organized by Night Ministry, a crisis intervention and counseling service that operates in the Tenderloin from 10pm to 4am. Reverend Lyle Beckman, director of Night Ministry, said that he got the names of 22 deceased homeless people from the Department of Public Health, but knew it was low. During the vigil, attendants came forward with the names of more dead, until the number reached 100.

Beckman said the crisis line gets busy this time of year. “We always see more conversations around holiday time,” he said. “When people have memories of it being a family time and then they’re not connected with their family in some way, it can bring isolation and loneliness.”

In a city of chosen families, Mother Brown’s “children” have found a way to heal that kind of loneliness. Perhaps McCall put it best when he described the first time he came back to his native Bayview and found Mother Brown’s after decades of isolation.

“When I came in through the door — this is God’s truth — I felt like I was at home,” he said. Soon, people like McCall may find a bed, too, when they walk through that door. Maybe for Christmas 2015.

BEST OF THE BAY 2013: LOCAL HEROES

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

Bruce Brugmann, Jean Dibble, and Tim Redmond

The San Francisco Bay Guardian — which has had a significant impact on the Bay Area’s cultural and political dynamics and dialogue over the last 47 years — was largely the creation of three people with complementary skills and perspectives, an amalgam that gave the Guardian its voice and longevity.

Although they are no longer involved with running the paper, we’re honoring their contribution and legacy with a form of recognition they created: a Local Hero Award in our Best of the Bay issue, an annual edition that has been adopted by almost every alt-weekly in the country.

Bruce Brugmann and Jean Dibble launched the Guardian in October 1966 after years of planning by the married couple, and they ran it as co-publishers until the paper’s sale to the San Francisco Newspaper Co. last year, with Dibble running the business side and Brugmann in charge of editorial and serving as its most public face.

“We were one of the few husband and wife newspaper teams, a real mom and pop operation,” Brugmann told us. “We couldn’t have done it without the two of us, we needed both of our skill sets.”

They met in 1956 at the University of Nebraska, where Brugmann studied journalism and served as editor of the Daily Nebraskan, starting his long career as journalistic rabble-rouser. Dibble studied business, which she would continue in graduate school at Harvard University’s Radcliffe College while Brugmann got a master’s in journalism at Columbia University.

As graduation neared, they started talking about forming a newspaper together, an idea that percolated while Brugmann served in the US Army, where he wrote for Stars and Stripes, and Dibble moved to San Francisco with their two kids to work in personnel and administrative positions.

After the Army, they settled in Wisconsin, where Brugmann worked as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal before moving to the Bay Area to work on launching the Guardian while Brugmann supported the family working for the Redwood City Tribune.

“We came out here with the idea of doing it and we immediately started planning. Jean did the prospectus, a damn good prospectus,” Brugmann said.

The Guardian published sporadically in the beginning, but it tapped into a vibrant counterculture that was clashing with the establishment and began publishing important articles highlighting inequities in the Vietnam War draft and exposing local political scandals, including how Pacific Gas & Electric illegally acquired its energy monopoly.

“A lot of it was just keep your head down and keep going,” Dibble said. “We never talked about alternatives, it was just what we were going to do.” The Guardian covered the successful revolts against new freeways in the city and plans to build Manhattan-style skyscrapers, publishing the book The Ultimate Highrise in 1971. In the mid-’70s, the Guardian won a successful unfair competition lawsuit against the Chronicle and the Examiner over their joint operating agreement, allowing the paper to become a free newsweekly. “Eventually, things got better, and we got some large advertisers in the ’80s and they really helped kick us off,” Dibble said. That was also when Tim Redmond, a journalist and activist steeped in radical politics, started writing for the Guardian, going on to serve as the paper’s executive editor and guiding voice for more than 30 years. “Tim was always more radical than I was,” Brugmann said, giving Redmond credit for the Guardian’s groundbreaking coverage of tenant, environmental, and economic justice issues. “Every publisher needs an editor who was more radical than they are to push them.” The two journalists had a prolific partnership, mentoring a string of journalists who would go on to national acclaim, turning the Guardian into a model for alt-weeklies across the country, exposing myriad scandals and emerging arts and cultural trends, and helping to write and pass the nation’s strongest local Sunshine Ordinance. “We always wanted to make things better,” Brugmann said of what drove the Guardian. “Even the battles that we lost, we got major concessions. Yerba Buena is much better because of the stories we did at the time, same thing with Mission Bay…San Francisco is much better that we were here. And we’re really proud and we appreciate the work of the current Guardian staff in keeping the Guardian flame alive.”

 

LOCAL HEROES: Kate Kendell

The night Proposition 8 passed was one of the hardest of Kate Kendell’s life. She remembers it with startling detail — and she should, because she was one of the most prominent opponents of the measure to overturn marriage equality in California.

“I was hopeful right up until the end that Prop. 8 would be defeated,” she said, speaking slowly as she pulled her thoughts from what sounded like a dark place. “Our initial polling numbers said we’d probably lose, but I really hoped in the deepest heart of my heart that when people got in there that they’d punch their vote in favor of the person they knew.”

But as the voters of California showed in that 2008 election, sometimes the good guys lose.

Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, fought the good fight since she started there in 1994. The NCLR litigates, creates policy, and performs outreach for LGBT civil rights on a national level, with headquarters in San Francisco. After years of anticipation, she poured herself into the campaign against the proposition that would make her marriage illegal, and then the measure passed.

That night she hung her head in disbelief. She felt physically ill, and her mind roiled in grief equaled only by the death of one of her parents. “It felt like that,” she said.

Kendell and her wife, Sandy, went home without speaking a word, and when she got in the door she tried to pull it together. Steeling herself to face her family, Kendell walked out of the bathroom and burst into tears. Her son said simply “this just means we have to fight more.”

So she did, and we all won.

That led to the moment for which Kendell may be remembered for a long time to come. When Prop. 8 was overturned by the US Supreme Court this year, a flock of San Francisco politicians descended the steps inside the rotunda at City Hall. Kendell took to the podium and spoke to the nation.

“My name is Kate Kendell with the National Center for Lesbian Rights,” she said, “and fuck you, Prop. 8!” The crowd erupted into cheers.

She regrets saying it now, but history will likely forgive her for being human. For someone whose own marriage’s validity was threatened and who spent two decades fighting for equality, she earned a moment of embarrassing honesty.

Kendell’s infamous declaration may be how she’s known, but one of her key decisions behind the scenes shaped the LGBT equality movement as well. When then-Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration wanted a couple to be the first in his round of renegade gay marriages in 2004, it was Kendell who suggested Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.

The two were in a relationship since 1953, pioneers of LGBT activism in San Francisco. Kendell said it was only right that they were first to read their vows in the city they helped shape. “Were it not for their contributions, visibility, and courage in the ’50s and ’60s, we wouldn’t be in that room with Newsom contemplating marriage licenses,” she said. “I’m just happy they said yes. It was absolutely appropriate.” And it’s with that sense of history that she herself pioneers forward, pushing in states across the US what Harvey Milk fought for in California — workplace protections for the LGBT community. “In 38 states, you can be fired from your job or being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That has to change,” she said. “When the next chapter of history is written, it will be about a nation that treats the LGBT community as equals.”

 

Theo Ellington

Last year, when San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee floated the idea of implementing stop-and-frisk, a practice that many civil rights advocates say amounts to racial profiling, Theo Ellington stepped up to create a Change.org petition to oppose the idea — and won.

The policy would have given San Francisco police officers the authority to stop and search any individual who “looks suspicious,” in an effort to get guns off the streets.

“I found it was basically a predatory policing practice that didn’t belong in a city like San Francisco,” Ellington told us. His petition garnered a little more than 2,300 signatures, “enough to show policymakers we were paying attention,” he guesses. Faced with mounting pressure and a community outcry, Lee ultimately abandoned the idea.

“That was a win, I think, for everyone fighting for what’s really a civil right,” the 25-year-old, native San Franciscan told us in a recent phone interview. “It’s not a black issue or a white issue,” but it did strike a nerve and provide Ellington with some momentum for coalition building.

Ellington was born and raised in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood, home to a significant portion of the city’s dwindling black population. The campaign against stop-and-frisk helped catalyze his still-evolving political organization, the Black Young Democrats of San Francisco, of which he is president.

Go to BYDSF’s website and you’re confronted with some startling statistics about the experience of black San Franciscans: In the last 20 years, the African American community has dwindled to only 6 percent of the city’s population; meanwhile, the high school dropout rate stands at 38 percent, the unemployment rate is 18 percent, and the level of poverty stands at a disheartening 20 percent.

To tackle these looming challenges, BYDSF now faces the hurdle of getting local elected officials to care. “Since then, we have been trying to build our membership and figure out where we fit in the political climate of SF,” Ellington says.

His group’s chief concerns include closing the achievement gap in San Francisco public schools, doing something about the escalating cost of housing, and finding better solutions for public transit. “There’s the housing need, obviously. It’s a need that working class folks in general are facing,” he said.

He’s pursing a master’s degree in urban affairs at the University of San Francisco, and says he’s taken it upon himself to learn everything he can about how cities operate. To that end, he often ponders vexing questions: “How do you figure out a way to give those same opportunities to everyone? How do you provide opportunities for all income levels?”

His successful opposition campaign to stop-and-frisk didn’t stop Mayor Lee from appointing him to the Commission on Community Investment and Infrastructure, which oversees the successor to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. A major project under that body’s purview is the Hunters Point Shipyard development, a massive undertaking led by construction firm Lennar Urban, practically in Ellington’s backyard. Having grown up in the neighborhood, he sees himself as being in a unique position to ensure that the developers are providing jobs for local residents as required under the agreement. “It allows me to speak to both sides — on the community level, and in City Hall,” he said. “There are certain social dynamics you won’t understand unless you have lived in the community.” Ultimately, Ellington says, his goal is to push local politicians to find ways of making San Francisco a place where people of all income levels can find their way. “There’s a lot more work to do,” he said. “I think San Francisco is at a real pivotal point, where we can choose to go in the right direction … or we can choose the opposite.”

 

LOCAL HEROES: Shanell Williams

Shanell Williams is a chameleon activist, spearheading the effort to save City College of San Francisco from many fronts.

When City College fought off a statewide initiative to save money by stigmatizing struggling students, she defended the school as an Occupy activist. With a banner raised high, she faced down the California Community College Board of Governors, shouting their wrongs aloud at a meeting attended by hundreds. The board was stunned but her fellow activists were not, because that’s who Williams is: an uncompromising defender of San Francisco.

Now, as City College faces a fight for its existence, Williams is defending it again, this time as a duly elected CCSF student trustee.

Williams is at the forefront of Save CCSF, an Occupy-inspired group publicly protesting the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges, the body trying to shut down City College. San Francisco is holding its breath until next July to hear if the accrediting commission will close the city’s only community college — and Williams was one of the key organizers helping students’ voices rise up to decry the decision to close the school.

She has reason to fight hard, growing up watching her community ravaged by those in power who purported to do good. She is a black woman and San Francisco native raised in the Fillmore and the long history of redevelopment and its role in the flight of The City’s African American population shaped her ethos. To Williams, there are forces that care about money at the expense of communities and those forces need to be fought.

“How are we supporting people to have a decent quality of life?” she said, and that’s the way she’s approached saving her community since a young age.

In 2003, while in high school, Williams got a taste of politicking as a member of San Francisco’s Youth Commission, appointed by then-Mayor Willie Brown. “I think he’s a very interesting character with a lot of influence over the city,” she said, with just an edge of steel to her voice.

As a teenaged politician, she discovered the work of the Human Rights Commission and was inspired. While a student of Washington High School and then Wallenberg High, she had a tough home life and entered the foster care system, getting a firsthand look at how the state takes care of its youth.

It galvanized her, honed her, and made her yearn for change. “I just innately had a sense of wanting to see justice and fairness,” she said.

Energized, she joined the Center for Young Women’s Development, the Youth Treatment Education Court, Urban Services YMCA, the Youth Leadership Institute, and more. She joined so many organizations and taught so many youth and government officials that even she can’t remember all of them off the top of her head.

At one point, she even taught judges across the country about cultural competency. “We had this whole spoken word performance thing we did,” she said, laughing.

In 2010, as Williams took classes at City College, she waved the banner defending San Francisco’s community college students. She pushed for city-level minimum wage requirements for City College workers, who earned dollars less. She also pushed back against state requirements to cut off priority registrations to those who took too long in the community college system — because she’s been there herself.

“They need a few chances to get it right and become a good student,” she said. When the struggle to save City College is done, win or lose, Williams sees herself remaining an advocate for students for years to come. At 29 years old, she’s still a student herself, and she eagerly awaits the day she’ll transfer to Cal or Stanford as an Urban Studies major. It all comes back to defending her city. “We have to broaden the movement,” she said. “The enemy is not about color, it’s about wealth inequality. It’s not just about City College either. It’s about the austerity regime that doesn’t care about working class people and poor folks.”

 

San Franciscans for Healthcare, Jobs, and Justice

When the San Francisco Mayor’s Office cut a deal with Sutter Health and its California Pacific Medical Center affiliate for an ambitious rebuild of hospital facilities — which would shape healthcare services in San Francisco for years to come — community activists began to find serious flaws in the proposal.

So they organized and banded together into a coalition to challenge the powerful players pushing the plan, eventually helping to hash out a better agreement that would benefit all San Franciscans. Representing an alliance between labor and community advocates, the coalition was called San Franciscans for Healthcare, Jobs, and Justice.

When the whole affair began, it seemed as if the CPMC rebuild would incorporate a host of community benefits — but those promises evaporated after the healthcare provider walked away from the negotiating table, unhappy with the terms.

Then a second agreement, with much weaker public benefits, came out of a second round of talks between CPMC and the Mayor’s Office. But by then, so much had been given up that “we were stunned,” said Calvin Welch, who joined the coalition on behalf of the Council of Community Housing Organizations. “We met with [Mayor Ed Lee] and told him, this is absolutely unacceptable.”

But the mayor wasn’t willing to address their concerns at that time. When the deal failed to win approval after a series of hearings at the Board of Supervisors, however, “the unacceptable deal that the mayor created melted in the sun of full disclosure,” Welch said.

That plan would have allowed St. Luke’s Hospital, a critically important facility for low-income patients, to shrink to just 80 beds with no guarantee that it would stay open in the long run. CPMC’s commitment to providing charitable care to the uninsured was disappointingly low. And while the project was expected to create 1,500 permanent jobs in San Francisco, the deal only guaranteed that 5 percent of those positions would go to existing San Francisco residents.

Enter the movers and shakers with San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs, and Justice. The coalition took its place at the negotiating table, along with CPMC, a mediator, and an unlikely trio of supervisors that included Board President David Chiu and Sups. David Campos and Mark Farrell. Over several months, the coalition put in some serious time and energy to push for a more equitable outcome.

“We pushed so hard for a smaller Cathedral Hill [Hospital] and a larger St. Luke’s,” Welch said, describing their strategy to safeguard against the closure of St. Luke’s. They also pushed for CPMC to make a better funding contribution toward affordable housing, a stronger guarantee for hiring San Franciscans at the new medical center, and improvements to transit and pedestrian safety measures as conditions of the deal.

Under the terms that were ultimately approved, St. Luke’s will remain a full-service hospital, and CPMC will commit to providing services to 30,000 “charity care” patients and 5,400 Medi-Cal patients per year.

CPMC also agreed to contribute $36.5 million to the city’s affordable housing fund, and promised to pay $4.1 million to replace homes it displaces on Cathedral Hill. Under the revised deal, 30 percent of construction jobs and 40 percent of permanent entry-level positions in the new facilities would be promised to San Francisco residents.

One of the greatest victories of all, Welch said, was how well coalition members worked together. “This was the most straight-up equal collaboration with labor and community people, equally supporting one another, that I’ve ever been involved with,” Welch said. Even though they were motivated to participate by different sets of concerns, the two sides remained mutually supportive, Welch said. During the long, grueling hearings, “The nurses never left,” he noted in amazement. “The nurses stuck around for all the community stuff.”

 

Photos by Evan Ducharme

Call to action issued at San Francisco vigil for Trayvon Martin

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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A group of African American community leaders gathered outside San Francisco City Hall July 16 for a rally and candlelight vigil in memory of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old black youth who was gunned down in Sanford, Florida by George Zimmerman. Protests have flared up throughout the nation since Zimmerman was acquitted on a second-degree murder charge this past weekend, spurring renewed dialogue about race.

Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco NAACP, introduced a host of speakers including pastors from black churches, the San Francisco Interfaith Council, members of the Bayview Hunters Point Community, and others. While speakers touched on a variety of topics including San Francisco’s dwindling black population and the economic pressures facing those unable to find work in an increasingly unaffordable city, much of the discussion revolved around a need to mount a significant challenge against racial profiling and to seek a different outcome in Zimmerman’s case.

The NAACP “will use all of our legal and moral resources at the national level, and will push for a civil suit to bring this Zimmerman gentlemen to justice,” said Brown. The national NAACP has created a petition urging U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to open a civil rights case against Zimmerman.

Sups. London Breed, Malia Cohen, Jane Kim, and David Campos also delivered speeches at the rally.

“The injustice in Florida is a threat to all of us,” Breed said. “The injustice in Florida is a threat to African American boys. The fact that we have to look our children in the eye and explain why somebody can kill a kid and get away with it and not be charged and walk out of the courtroom a free man, how do you explain that?”

Rev. Malcolm Byrd, pastor of First A.M.E. Zion Church in San Francisco, illustrated his point about racial profiling by wearing a hoodie, jeans, and sneakers to the rally. He opened with comments referencing how Martin was deemed “suspicious” due to his appearance. His comments also alluded to the idea that Zimmerman was allowed to walk free in Florida, the same state where a woman was sentenced to three years in prison for shooting and killing a pit bull.

Despite the very real sense of outrage that many people expressed, some spoke about using the Zimmerman verdict as an opportunity to push for broader social change.

“In San Francisco, we know how to lead the way,” said LGBT activist Andrea Shorter. “On Sunday, every black church in this nation was talking about what? Trayvon Martin.” Shorter added that community members had succeeded in halting a proposal to introduce a stop-and-frisk policing policy that had the potential to increase racial profiling, and that there was momentum in place for a national effort to “dismantle racist profiling policies” and repeal stand-your-ground laws.

“For the first time in my life, after growing up and going to funeral after funeral after funeral after funeral, of all boys and black men throughout my life, I see people in this audience who are not African American, who are just as hurt as I am, who are just as sick of this as I am,” Breed noted. “And we are all in this together. We have got to work together if we want to change it.”

Cohen sounded a similar note. “I think one of the things that have transpired now that the verdict has come out is that there has been a serious call to action,” she said.

“Being black in America is to be the beneficiary of great inheritance,” said Obai Rambo of the San Francisco Black Young Democrats. “History will mark this day as one of the greatest opportunities for building equality and justice.”

Photographs by Justin Benttinen. Audio slideshow by Rebecca Bowe.

Community awaits benefits as Lennar finally breaks ground in Hunters Point

Sasha Cuttler
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More than five years after San Francisco voters approved a massive redevelopment plan for the Hunters Point Shipyard and much the southeast part of the city — giving Lennar Corp., the country’s biggest home builder, the largest tracts of open land in the city — that project is now finally, slowly, getting underway.

But activists who have been following the project say the city is getting played by Lennar because of an agreement that lacks performance standards and has allowed the company to drag its feet to maximize its profits despite an affordable housing crisis in the city. And some community members say Lennar hasn’t lived up to promises of jobs and other benefits.

“The modus operandi of Lennar is bait and switch and delay,” Saul Bloom of Arc Ecology, who consulted on this development deal for the Redevelopment Agency before his contract was dropped in 2010 after publicly raising concerns, told us. Bloom and his firm have decades of experience analyzing complex development deals, and he has been tracking Lennar’s pattern of behavior around the country. 

Bloom said that when Lennar cut its initial deals with then-Mayor Willie Brown and other local officials in 1997, the company said it needed no external financing and that it would build housing affordable to Hunters Point residents, including rentals. Since then, the deal has gotten steadily better for the company and worse for San Francisco, and the groundbreaking date has been repeatedly pushed back.

“The city was not smart enough to build in liquidated damage and a performance schedule and that kind of thing,” Bloom said. “Lennar tells them what they want and the city tends to roll over, and there’s been no pushback.”

When Lennar ended up needing financing after all, the project stood by while a $1.7 billion deal with the China Development Bank Corp. was structured in 2012. Despite Mayor Lee personally participating in the quest for capital in China alongside the developer, the deal quickly collapsed. It is yet to be seen how Lennar will satisfy its commitments in the Bayview and at its separate Treasure Island site since the plug was pulled on the loan deal.

Lennar Urban Director of Community Affairs Cheryl Smith referred our questions to communications consultant David Satterfield of G.F. Bunting, who said that he passed them on to Lennar officials and, “They don’t have anything to say.” The Mayor’s Office also has not responded to our request for comment on the issues that Bloom is raising.

With a weak agreement and a lack of political will to push the company to expedite construction of affordable housing, Bloom said Lennar has simply waited for housing prices to increase and for other developers to lead the way in gentrifying Bayview Hunters Point before moving forward on the nearly 1,400 acres of land it controls in San Francisco — an area equivalent in size to the Presidio.

“Their incentive is to wait for the property values to rise…Lennar understands how much this land is worth,” Bloom said. “What Lennar has done is crafted a strategically smart box that the city is in.”

Yet after years of delays, the project did officially get underway last week (Wed/27), with a well-attended hilltop ceremony.  Mayor Ed Lee, former Mayor Willie Brown, District 10 Sup. Malia Cohen, and Cohen’s predecessor, Sophie Maxwell, joined Lennar Urban President Kofi Bonner to speak at the long-anticipated event.

Lennar’s local subsidiary, Lennar Urban, unveiled a master plan to convert the land to a brand new mixed-use community. At the ceremony, Brown remarked that “there is no other piece of soil that is as lucrative” as the Bayview Hunters Point peninsula and that it promises to be the “ideal place to live.”

The Hunters Point Shipyard, occupies roughly 500 acres of southeastern San Francisco and when taken together with neighboring Candlestick Point and parts of Bayview, it is the largest single tract of land in San Francisco designated for redevelopment. The other big redevelopment site in the city, Treasure Island, is also controlled by Lennar and its partners.

A former naval base, the shipyard was transferred to the city in 2004. Most naval operations there had ceased in 1974 and commercial uses declined in the 20 years that followed, steadily displacing black workers employed on the premises.

Affordable housing and job creation for neighborhood locals were two major stipulations in the ballot measure San Francisco voters approved in 2008. The “Bayview Jobs, Parks, and Housing Initiative,” however, entrusted that goal fulfillment almost wholly to Lennar and Bloom now questions whether that trust was well placed.

Phase 1 of the project will consist of construction of 1,400 new residential units in the shipyard, approximately 30 percent of which will one day be affordable housing. But Bloom said that Lennar has delayed construction of the affordable units until after much of the more lucrative market rate housing is done.

At the event, Bonner enthusiastically outlined the goal of having 800 of 1,100 market rate homes in this first phase constructed and occupied within 36 months time and Mayor Lee opened his remarks with the celebratory chant “Welcome to The Bayview! We need housing for everybody!”

But Bloom said that the city is rapidly gentrifying as Lennar waits to meet its affordable housing obligations, noting that the city was 11 percent African-American when Lennar cuts its first deal to develop Hunters Point in 1997, and that population is now 4 percent and falling.

Reconstruction of the Alice Griffith Public Housing Project will help Lennar to satisfy its affordable housing quota. Announcements of these plans garnered large applause from community activists in attendance, though they are slated for the project’s second phase, which likely won’t begin for years.

“They could build all of Alice Griffith on Parcel A, but they’re not going to do it,” Bloom said. “When is this community going to get what was promised to them?”

A group of picketers from Aboriginal Blackman United (ABU) was contained by SFPD at the bottom of the hill during the afternoon’s proceedings. As black town cars chauffeured officials to the event site, the protesters’ cries were drowned out by the music of Miles Davis playing from stage speakers.

ABU was protesting non-inclusive hiring practices at the shipyard site. Members, who were outnumbered by police 2-to-1, argued that they were being wrongfully barred access to the ceremony above and by the event’s conclusion, they had been relocated from the main intersection at Innes Avenue and Donahue Street to a side access road.

Job creation was trumpeted generally in the afternoon’s speeches, with Sup. Cohen applauding the public-private partnership between Lennar and Bayview organizations and Mayor Lee praising the project for “honoring labor and honoring local residents.” However, ABU’s founder and president, James Richards, said “we’re not getting the jobs or the contracts that the community people are supposed to get and that’s why we’re out here.”

Though ABU wants to see local residents of color placed in many of the new positions opening up, workers in the community have only been promised good faith consideration rather than actual job guarantees by the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, which is in charge of staffing the project. Attempts to reach Michael Theriault, Secretary-General of the Council, were unsuccessful.

Bloom said Lennar has insulated itself from community criticism with an agreement that promises money to community groups that refrain from publicly criticizing Lennar or the project. He said Lennar has followed a similar pattern here as it has elsewhere, using its clout and political contacts to get lucrative redevelopment deals, then using delay and bait-and-switch tactics to make those projects more lucrative. He cited Lennar’s Mare Island project, which is now in bankruptcy, and its massive Newhall Ranch project north of Los Angeles.

In that latter deal, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System lost the $970 million it paid Lennar in 2007 for part of its stake in Newhall Land Development Co., which went bankrupt when the housing market crashed the next year. But Lennar built in an option to reclaim the shares, which a bankruptcy judge allowed Lennar to do in 2009 for just $138 million.

Bloom said that deal is typical behavior for a manipulative company that has a history of acting contrary to the public interest, but in which local political officials have given tremendous control over the city’s future.

“We remain skeptical about their commitment to getting it done,” Bloom said of the affordable housing that Lennar has promised. “What we’d like to see is some real action on the promises that were made to the public.”

Planning for displacement

Andrew Lam
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Planning for displacement

tredmond@sfbg.com

The intersection of Cesar Chavez and Evans Avenue is a good enough place to start. Face south.

Behind you is Potrero Hill, once a working-class neighborhood (and still home to a public housing project) where homes now sell for way more than a million dollars and rents are out of control. In front, down the hill, is one of the last remaining industrial areas in San Francisco.

Go straight along Evans and you find printing plants, an auto-wrecking yard, and light manufacturing, including a shop that makes flagpoles. Take a right instead on Toland, past the Bonanza restaurant, and you wander through auto-glass repair, lumber yards, plumbing suppliers, warehouses, the city’s produce market — places that the city Planning Department refers to at Production, Distribution, and Repair facilities. Places that still offer blue-collar employment. There aren’t many left anywhere in San Francisco, and it’s amazing that this district has survived.

Cruise around for a while and you’ll see a neighborhood with high home-ownership rates — and high levels of foreclosures. Bayview Hunters Point is home to much of the city’s dwindling African American population, a growing number of Asians, and much higher unemployment rates than the rest of the city.

Now pull up the website of the Association of Bay Area Governments, a well-funded regional planning agency that is working on a state-mandated blueprint for future growth. There’s a map on the site that identifies “priority development area” — in planning lingo, PDAs — places that ABAG, and many believers in so-called smart growth, see as the center of a much-more dense San Francisco, filled with nearly 100,000 more homes and 190,000 new jobs.

Guess what? You’re right in the middle of it.

The southeastern part of the city — along with many of the eastern neighborhoods — is ground zero for massive, radical changes. And it’s not just Bayview Hunters Point; in fact, there’s a great swath of the city, from Chinatown/North Beach to Candlestick Park, where regional planners say there’s space for new apartments and condos, new offices, new communities.

It’s a bold vision, laid out in an airy document called the Plan Bay Area — and it’s about to clash with the facts on the ground. Namely, that there are already people living and working in the path of the new development.

And there’s a high risk that many of them will be displaced; collateral damage in the latest transformation of San Francisco.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND “SMART GROWTH”

The threat of global climate change hasn’t convinced the governor or the state Legislature to raise gas taxes, impose an oil-severance tax, or redirect money from highways to transit. But it’s driven Sacramento to mandate that regional planners find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California cities.

The bill that lays this out, SB375, mandates that ABAG, and its equivalents in the Los Angeles Basin, the Central Coast, the Central Valley and other areas, set up “Sustainable Communities Strategies” — land-use plans for now through 2040 intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent.

The main path to that goal: Make sure that most of the 1.1 million people projected to live in the Bay Area by 2040 be housed in already developed areas, near transit and jobs, to avoid the suburban sprawl that leads to long commutes and vast amounts of car exhaust.

The notion of smart growth — also referred to as urban infill — has been around for years, embraced by a certain type of environmentalist, particularly those concerned with protecting open space. But now, it has the force of law.

And while ABAG is not a secret government with black helicopters that can force cities to do its will — land-use planning is still under local jurisdiction in this state — the agency is partnering with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which controls hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal transportation money. And together, they can offer strong incentives for cities to get in line.

Over in Contra Costa and Marin counties, at hearings on the plan, Tea Party types (yes, they appear to exist in Marin) railed against the notion of elite bureaucrats forcing the wealthy enclaves of single-family homes to accept more density (and, gasp, possibly some affordable housing). In San Francisco, it’s the progressives, the transit activists, and the affordable housing people who are starting to get worried. Because there’s been almost zero media attention to the plan, and what it prescribes for San Francisco is alarming — and strangely nonsensical.

Under the ABAG plan, San Francisco would approve 92,400 more housing units for 280,000 more people. The city would host 190,000 more jobs, many of them in what’s called the “knowledge economy,” which mostly means high tech. Second and third on the list: Health and education, and tourism.

The city currently allows around eight cars for every 10 housing units; as few as five in a few neighborhoods, at least 10 in many others. And there’s nothing in any city or regional plan right now that seeks to change that level of car dependency. In fact, the regional planners think that single-occupancy car travel will be the mode of choice for 48 percent of all trips by 2040 — almost the same as it is today.

And since most of the new housing will be aimed at wealthier people, who are more likely to own cars and avoid catching buses, San Francisco could be looking for ways to fit 73,000 more cars onto streets that are already, in many cases, maxed out. There will be, quite literally, no place to park. And congestion in the region, the planners agree, will get a whole lot worse.

That seems to undermine the main intent of the plan: Transit-oriented development only works if you discourage cars. In a sense, the car-use projections are an admission of failure, undermining the intent of the entire project.

The vast majority of the housing that will be built will be too expensive for much of the existing (and even future) workforce and will do little to relieve the pressure on lower income people. But there is nothing whatsoever in the plan to ensure that there’s money available to build housing that meets the needs of most San Franciscans.

Instead, the planners acknowledge that 36 percent of existing low-income people will be at risk for displacement. That would be a profound change in the demographics of San Francisco.

Of course, adding all those people and jobs will put immense pressure on city services, from Muni to police, fire, and schools — not to mention the sewer system, which already floods and dumps untreated waste into the Bay when there’s heavy rain. Everyone involved acknowledged those costs, which could run into the billions of dollars. There is nothing anywhere in any of the planning documents addressing the question of who will pay for it.

THE NUMBERS GAME

Projecting the future of a region isn’t easy. Job and population growth isn’t a straight line, at best — and when you’re looking at a 25-year window in a boom-and-bust area with everything from earthquakes to sea-level rise factoring in, it’s easy to say that anyone who claims to know what’s going to happen in 2040 is guessing.

But as economist Stephen Levy, who did the regional projections for ABAG, pointed out to us, “You have to be able to plan.” And you can’t plan if you don’t at least think about what you’re planning for.

Levy runs the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy, and he’s been watching trends in this state for years. He agrees that some of his science is, by nature, dismal: “Nobody projects deep recessions,” much less natural disasters. But overall, he told me, it’s possible to get a grip on what planners need to prepare for as they write the next chapter of the Bay Area’s future.

And what they have to plan for is a lot more people.

Levy said he started with the federal government’s projections for population growth in the United States, which include births and deaths, immigration, and out-migration, using historic trends to allocate some of that growth to the Bay Area. There’s what appears at first to be circular logic involved: The feds (and most economists) project that job growth nationally will be driven by population — that is, the more people live in the US, the more jobs there will be.

Population growth in a specific region, on the other hand, is driven by jobs — that is, the more jobs you have in the Bay Area, the more people will move here.

“Jobs in the US depend on how many people are in the labor force,” he said. “Jobs in the Bay Area depend on our share of US jobs and population depends on relative job growth.”

Make sense? No matter — over the years it’s generally worked. And once you project the number of people and jobs expected in the Bay Area, you can start looking at how much housing it’s going to take to keep them all under a roof.

Levy projects that the Bay Area’s share of jobs will be higher than most of the rest of the country. “This is the home of the knowledge industry,” he told me. So he’s concluded that population in the Bay Area will grow from 7.1 million to 9.2 million — an additional 2.14 million people. They’ll be chasing some 1.1 million new jobs, and will need 660,000 new housing units.

Levy stopped there, and left it to the planners at ABAG to allocate that growth to individual cities — and that’s where smart growth comes in.

For decades in the Bay Area, particularly in San Francisco, activists have waged wars against developers, trying to slow down the growth of office buildings, and later, luxury housing units. At the same time, environmentalists argued that spreading the growth around creates serious problems, including sprawl and the destruction of farmland and open space.

Smart growth is supposed to be an alternative: the idea is to direct new growth to already-established urban areas, not by bulldozing over communities (as redevelopment agencies once did) but by the use of “infill” — directing development to areas where there’s usable space, or by building up and not out.

ABAG “focused housing and jobs growth around transit areas, particularly within locally identified Priority Development Areas,” the draft environmental impact report on the plan notes.

The draft EIR is more than 1,300 pages long, and it looks at the ABAG plan and several alternatives. One alternative, proposed by business groups, would lead to more development and higher population gains. Another, proposed by community activist groups including Public Advocates, Urban Habitat, and TransForm, is aimed at reducing displacement and creating affordable housing; that one, it turns out, is the “environmentally preferred alternative.” (See sidebar).

But no matter which alternative you look at, two things leap out: There is nothing effective that ABAG has put forward to prevent large-scale displacement of vulnerable communities. And despite directing growth to transit corridors, the DEIR still envisions a disaster of traffic congestion, parking problems, and car-driven environmental wreckage.

THE DISPLACEMENT PROBLEM

ABAG has gone to some lengths to identify what it calls “communities of concern.” Those are areas, like Bayview Hunters Point, Chinatown, and the Mission, where existing low-income residents and small businesses face potential displacement. In San Francisco, those communities are, to a great extent, the same geographic areas that have been identified as PDAs.

And, the DEIR, notes, some degree of displacement is a significant impact that cannot be mitigated. In other words, the gentrification of San Francisco is just part of the plan.

In fact, the study notes, 36 percent of the communities of concern in high-growth areas will face displacement pressure because of the cost of housing. And that’s region wide; the number in San Francisco will almost certainly be much, much higher.

Miriam Chion, ABAG’s planning and research director, told me that displacement “is the core issue in this whole process.” The agency, she said, is working with other stakeholders to try to address the concern that new development will drive out longtime residents. But she also agreed that there are limited tools available to local government.

The DEIR notes that ABAG and the MTC will seek to “bolster the plan’s investment in the Transit Oriented Affordable Housing Fund and will seek to do a study of displacement. It also states: “In addition, this displacement risk could be mitigated in cities such as San Francisco with rent control and other tenant protections in place.”

There isn’t a tenant activist in this town who can read that sentence with a straight face.

The problem, as affordable housing advocate Peter Cohen puts it, is that “the state has mandated all this growth, but has taken away the tools we could use to mitigate it.”

That’s exactly what’s happened in the past few decades. The state Legislature has outlawed the only effective anti-displacement laws local governments can enact — rent controls on vacant apartments, commercial rent control, and eviction protections that prevent landlords from taking rental units off the market to sell as condos. Oh, and the governor has also shut down redevelopment agencies, which were the only reliable source of affordable housing money in many cities.

Chion told me that the ABAG planners were discussing a list of anti-displacement options, and that changes in state legislation could be on that list. Given the power of the real-estate lobby in the state Capitol, ABAG will have to do more than suggest; there’s no way this plan can work without changing state law.

Otherwise, eastern San Francisco is going to be devastated — particularly since the vast majority of all housing that gets built in the city, and that’s likely to get built in the city, is too expensive for almost anyone in the communities of concern.

“This plan doesn’t require affordable housing,” Cindy Wu, vice-chair of the San Francisco Planning Commission, told me. “It’s left to the private market, which doesn’t build affordable housing or middle-class housing.”

In fact, while there’s plenty of discussion in the plan about where money can come from for transit projects, there’s virtually no discussion of the billions and billions that will be needed to produce the level of affordable housing that everyone agrees will be needed.

Does anyone seriously think that developers can cram 90,000 new units — at least 85 percent of them, under current rules, high-cost apartments and condos that are well beyond the range of most current San Franciscans — into eastern neighborhoods without a real-estate boom that will displace thousands of existing residents?

Let’s remember: Building more housing, even a lot more housing, won’t necessarily bring down prices. The report makes clear that the job growth, and population boom that accompanies it, will fuel plenty of demand for all those new units.

Steve Woo, senior planner with the Chinatown Community Development Center, sees the problem. In a letter to ABAG, he notes: “Plan Bay Area and its DEIR has analyzed the displacement of low-income people and explicitly acknowledges that it will occur. This is unacceptable for San Francisco and for Chinatown, where the pressures of displacement have been a constant over the past 20 years.”

Adds the Council of Community Housing Organizations: “It would be irresponsible for the regional agencies to advance a plan that purports to ‘improve’ the region’s communities as population grows while the plan simultaneously presents great risk and uncertainty for many vulnerable communities.”

Jobs are at stake, too — not tech jobs or office jobs, which ABAG projects will expand, but the kind of industrial jobs that currently exist in the priority development areas.

Calvin Welch, who has been watching urban planning and displacement issues in San Francisco for more than 40 years, puts it bluntly: “It is axiomatic that market-rate housing drives out blue-collar jobs,” he said.

Of course, there’s another potential problem: Nobody really knows where jobs will come from in the next 25 years, whether tech will continue to be the driver or whether the city’s headed for a second dot-com bust. San Francisco doesn’t have a good record of building for projected jobs: In the mid-1980s, for example, the entire South of Market area (then home to printing, light manufacturing, and other blue-collar jobs) was rezoned for open-floor office space because city officials projected a huge need for “back-office” functions like customer service.

“Where are all those jobs today?” Welch asked. “They’re in India.”

TOO MANY CARS

For a plan that’s designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by moving residential development closer to work areas, Plan Bay Area is awfully pessimistic about transportation.

According to the projections, there will be more cars on the roads in 2040, with more — and much worse — traffic. The DEIR predicts that a full 48 percent of all trips in 2040 will be made by single-occupant vehicles — just slightly down from current rates. The percentage of trips on transit will only be a little bit higher — and there’s no significant increase in projected bicycle trips.

That alone is pretty crazy, since the number of people commuting to work by bike in San Francisco has risen dramatically in the past 10 years, and the city’s official goal is that 20 percent of all vehicle trips will be by bike in the next decade.

Part of the problem is structural. Not everyone in San Francisco 2040 is going to be a high-paid tech worker. In fact, the most stable areas of employment are health services and government — and hospital workers and Muni drivers can’t possibly afford the housing that’s being built. So those people will — the DEIR acknowledges — be displaced from San Francisco and forced to live elsewhere in the region (if that’s even possible). Which means, of course, they’ll be commuting further to work. Meanwhile, if current trends continue, many of the people moving into the city will work in Silicon Valley.

Chion and Levy both told me that the transit mode projections were based on historical trends for car use, and that it’s really hard to get people to give up their cars. Even higher gas prices and abominable traffic delays won’t drive people off the roads, they said.

If that’s the case — if auto culture, which is a top source of global climate change, doesn’t shift at all — it would seem that all this planning is pointless: the seas will rise dramatically, and San Franciscans ought to be buying boats.

“The projections don’t take into account social change,” Jason Henderson, a geography professor at San Francisco State University and a local transportation expert, told me. “And social change does happen.”

Brad Paul, a longtime housing activist who now works for ABAG, said these projections are just a start, and that the plan will be updated every four years. “I think we’re finding that the number of people who want to drive cars will go down,” he said.

Henderson argues that the land-use policy is flawed. He suggests that it would make more sense to increase density in the Bay Area suburbs along the BART lines. “Elegant development in those areas would work better,” he said. You don’t need expensive high-rises: “Four and five stories is the sweet spot,” he explained.

Most of the transportation projects in the plan are already in the pipeline; there’s no suggestion of any major new public transit programs. There is, however, a suggestion that San Francisco adopt a congestion management fee for downtown driving — something that city officials say is the only way to avoid utter gridlock in the future.

SIDELINING CEQA

ABAG and the MTC have a fair amount of leverage to implement their plans. MTC controls hundreds of millions of dollars in transit money; ABAG will be handing out millions in grants to communities that adopt its plan. And under state law, cities that allow development in PDAs near transit corridors can gain an exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act.

CEQA is a powerful tool to slow or halt development, and developers (and some public officials) drool at the prospect of getting a fast-track pass to avoid some of the more cumbersome parts of the environmental review process.

Under SB 375 and Plan Bay Area, CEQA exemptions are available to projects that meet the Sustainable Community Strategy standards and are close to transit corridors. And when you look at the map of those areas, it’s pretty striking: All of San Francisco, pretty much every square inch, qualifies.

That means that almost any project almost anywhere in town can make a case that it doesn’t need to accept full CEQA review.

The most profound missing element in this entire discussion is the cost of all this growth.

You can’t cram 210,000 more residents into San Francisco without new schools, parks, and child-care centers. You can’t protect those residents without more police officers and firefighters. You can’t take care of their water and sewer needs without substantial infrastructure upgrades. And even if there’s state and federal money available for new buses and trains, you can’t operate those systems without paying drivers, mechanics, and support workers.

There’s no question that the new development will bring in more tax money. But the type of infrastructure improvements that will be needed to add 25 percent more residents to the city are really expensive — and every study that’s ever been done in San Francisco shows that the tax benefits of new development don’t cover the costs of public services it requires.

When World War II and the post-war boom in the Bay Area brought huge growth to the region, property taxes and federal and state money were adequate to build things like BART, the freeways, and hundreds of new schools, and to staff the public services that the emerging communities needed. But that all changed in 1978, with the passage of Prop. 13, and two years later, with the election of Ronald Reagan as president.

Now, federal money for cities is down to a trickle. Local government has an almost impossible time raising taxes. And instead of hiking fees for new residential and commercial projects, many communities (including San Francisco) are offering tax breaks to encourage job growth.

Put all that in the mix and you have a recipe for overcrowded buses, inadequate schools, overstressed open space (imagine 10,000 new Mission residents heading for Dolores Park on a nice day), and a very unattractive urban experience.

That flies directly in the face of what Plan Bay Area is supposed to be about. If the goal is to cut down on commutes by bringing new residents into developed urban areas, those cities have to be decent places to live. What would it cost to accommodate this level of new development? Five billion dollars? Ten billion? Nobody knows — because nobody has run those numbers. But they’re going to be big.

Because just as tax dollars have been vanishing, the costs of infrastructure keep going up. It costs a billion dollars a mile to build BART track. It’s costing more than a billion to build a short subway to Chinatown. Just upgrading the sewer system to handle current demands is a $4 billion project.

And if the developers and property owners who stand to make vast sums of money off all of this growth aren’t going to pay, who’s left?

The ABAG planners point out, correctly, that there’s a price for doing nothing. If there’s no regional plan, no proposal for smart growth, the population will still increase, and displacement will still happen — but the greenhouse gas emissions will be even worse, the development more haphazard.

But if the region is going to spend all this money and all this time on a plan to make the Bay Area more sustainable, more livable, and more affordable in 25 years, we might as well push all the limits and get it right.

Instead of looking at displacement as inevitable, and traffic as a price of growth, the planners could tell the state Legislature and the governor that it’s not possible to comply with SB375 — not until somebody identifies the big sums of money, multiples of billions of dollars, needed to build affordable housing; not until there are transit options, taxes, and restrictions on driving.

Because continued car use and massive displacement — the package that’s now facing us — just isn’t an acceptable option.

Small Business Awards 2013: Universal Martial Arts

Andrew Lam
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Small Business Awards 2013: Universal Martial Arts

Police officers and security guards get trained in the use of firearms and batons; they know how to hurt and sometimes kill people. But most of them don’t get the sort of basic unarmed self-defense training that would allow them to subdue an assailant without dangerous or lethal force.

That’s where Universal Martial Arts Academy comes in. The only martial arts school with a full-time facility in the Bayview, Universal specializes in self-defense classes for security professionals and also offers classes for the general public.

Jim Hundon, the founder and head instructor, is an expert in small-circle jujitsu and holds multiple black belts in other disciplines. He’s been in martial arts since high school, and trained with two instructors of Chinese kenpo who were students of Bruce Lee. He’s worked with the legendary Grandmaster Wally Jay, and has since developed his own style, ju trap boxing. He’s in the US Martial Arts Hall of Fame.

In other words, he’s a total badass.

In person, though, Hundon is soft-spoken, polite, and humble. His modest-sized studio on Third Street, built from a trashed empty storefront, is clean and well-designed with immaculate hardwood floors. He has regular students as well as contracts with companies like California Pacific Medical Center and Paramount Studios, where he teaches security guards how to keep themselves — and others — safe.

“The piece always missing in law-enforcement training is the empty hand,” Hundon tells me. “You’re in a verbal confrontation and a person takes a swing at you; what are you going to do, shoot him?”

Hundon notes that most cops spend far more time on the shooting range than they do with unarmed self-defense. “Everyone has a right to defend themselves,” he says. “But you don’t always have to strike back. You can protect yourself so everyone goes home alive.”

In 2010, Hundon (who is 64 but looks about 35) received the Bayview Hunters Point Community Leadership Award for his work with at-risk youth. “I love giving back to the community,” he says. “We’re so proud to be the first martial arts school in the neighborhood.”

4348 Third St., SF. (415) 671-2055, www.umaacademy.info

T-Third passengers unhappy about train service disruptions

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Around 20 residents from San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood lined up at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board meeting May 7 to voice complaints that all too often, the T-Third light rail transit vehicles leave passengers stranded on train platforms, taking rail cars out of service before the end of the line and leaving riders to wait for the next arrival.

Organized by People Organized to Win Employment Rights, an organization better known as POWER that has campaigned around Muni issues before, the riders asked the SFMTA board to address the T train turnarounds, and called on the transit agency to run all trains through to the end of the line in the city’s Southeast neighborhoods.

Muni service disruptions along the T-Third occur most frequently at 23rd and Third, Armstrong and Third, and Williams and Third, based on SFMTA data. The passengers expressed frustration that even though the T-Third technically runs all the way to Sunnydale, a Visitation Valley housing complex, it often stops short of the final destination and causes delays on an already lengthy commute. The topic of Muni “switchbacks” picked up momentum earlier this year after District 4 Sup. Katy Tang vowed to take up the issue of train turnarounds, which also impact transit passengers in the Sunset. 

Jackie Wysinger, who walks with a cane and resides at a senior center nearby Armstrong and Third streets, told SFMTA board members that she’s no longer able to drive and depends upon the T train to get around.

“We need better transportation,” Wysinger said. “The T train turns around right there, and they do it regularly,” leaving passengers with no choice but to walk or wait in discomfort. “It’s just bad on the senior citizens.”

Claudia Bustamante, a member of POWER who spoke in Spanish through a translator, related a story of traveling back to the Bayview on the T-third on Monday night. “We were on the T-train and there was a person in a wheelchair, and another woman crying,” she said. “But the driver said, ‘sorry, this is the last stop. Everybody has to get off.’ … They kicked us off. This happens not just to me, but to the members of the African American community in Bayview. And this needs to stop.”

Jim Hill, who told SFMTA board members that he’s lived in the Bayview for 51 years, said he’s experienced train service disruption at 23rd Street on a regular basis. “I don’t understand why a man would turn a train around that’s full of people,” he said. “I have experienced 45 minutes to an hour before another train comes.”

Hill added, “I don’t think a person should have to work all day, and have to stand up from the time they get off work, until they get home.”

Gloria Dean, a Bayview resident who penned an editorial in the San Francisco BayView newspaper in March, characterized the frequent disruptions to service in Bayview Hunters Point as “shameful racism” in her opinion piece. She recounted one evening when her commute from Oakland to Third and LaSalle took from 6:45pm until 9:08pm. Since her husband is battling health problems, “it’s important for me to get home” following her evening classes at Mills College in Oakland, Dean wrote.

Juana Teresa Tello, an organizer with POWER, stressed that while switchbacks are known to occur on other lines, Bayview residents tend to have fewer transportation options. “It’s the highest concentration of people in public housing,” Tello pointed out. “It’s people who need the transit system the most.”

There was no SFMTA agenda item on the topic of turnarounds on the T-Third line, so residents aired their grievances about the issue during public comment. Once they had all finished speaking, SFMTA board chair Tom Nolan indicated that the item should be added to the board meeting agenda “sometime in the near future.”

In response to a query submitted several weeks ago, SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose sent the Bay Guardian a detailed response to questions about train turnarounds at the 23rd and Third stop.

“Trains going to 23rd Street on the T-Third are typically going to our maintenance yard located near 25th Street and Illinois at the end of their shift,” Rose explained in an email. “These trains are J, K, L, M, and N trains that travel in service as T-Third trains to the yard and accept passengers all the way to the last stop before the yard – 23rd Street. The alternative is to have the trains travel ‘not in service’ to the yard from the subway and accept no passengers.

“The vehicles returning to the yard and traveling from the subway only to 23rd Street add additional frequency between the subway and 23rd Street but are not scheduled full trips to Sunnydale,” Rose acknowledged.

The 23rd Street stop marks the end of a stretch of recently installed condominium complexes in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, an increasingly popular residential area for Silicon Valley commuters who have easy access to the highway to travel south to tech campuses.

Finally, Rose stressed that “We minimize unscheduled train turnarounds as much as possible … Supervision is also told to only perform these turnarounds when there is another train within five minutes or less,” he added, “to minimize passenger inconvenience.”

Hectic days in SFPD’s officer-involved shooting unit

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Hectic days in SFPD’s officer-involved shooting unit

Apparently, the one San Francisco Police Department sergeant tasked with investigating officer-involved shootings has been busy. Yesterday morning, the Guardian received an email from SFPD Media Relations officer Albie Esparza, who apologized for taking almost a month to respond to a Guardian request for information.

“It’s simply been very busy with the multiple officer involved shootings we’ve been having in SF recently,” Esparza explained. “The ONE Sergeant who works in the Internal Affairs Officer Involved Shooting unit is aware of your questions and is trying to research that, as well as investigate the three OIS incidents we’ve had recently.” 

Reached by phone, Esparza said he actually meant to say there were four officer-involved shooting investigations; one involves a Daly City officer who fired upon a person in San Francisco city limits in early March. And whoops, as of yesterday, make that five – an officer shot and killed a pit-bull yesterday in Golden Gate Park.

The three shootings Esparza initally referred to include a March 15 officer-involved shooting in the Richmond District; another one on March 5 in Bayview Hunters Point, and a third one on Feb. 15 in the Tenderloin. Only the March 5 shooting resulted in an individual being struck; he wasn’t killed. Police later held a town hall meeting about that incident, which transpired after a high-speed chase that ended in a cul-de-sac. The suspect drove into two police cars and hit an officer, according to the police department’s account, before officers shot at him. Esparza said he did not have information about whether the incident involving the Daly City officer resulted in a fatal gunshot wound.

The Guardian’s original questions, meanwhile, remain unanswered. We submitted a query regarding a fatal officer-involved shooting that killed Pralith Pralourng last July. The 32-year-old Oakland resident had a history of mental illness, and was killed outside a chocolate factory in San Francisco after brandishing a box cutter. Police Chief Greg Suhr has pointed to this case as a prime example for why police ought to be equipped with Tasers. But the SFPD launched a specialized crisis intervention training (CIT) program over the last several years specifically to help officers better respond to calls involving mentally ill individuals. Local advocates weighing in at recent public hearings convened by SFPD said they feared the department could lose sight of CIT de-escalation tactics if the Tasers plan moves forward. 

The Guardian submitted questions to SFPD in late February asking whether the officer who shot and killed Pralourng had been trained under CIT; if any CIT officers were dispatched to the scene, since the call involved a mentally ill individual; and whether CIT de-escalation techniques were attempted prior to the shooting.

After nearly a month, Esparza finally sent a response from SFPD internal affairs. “We were told that because it’s open and active, the file is exempt from disclosure,” he said. Basically, we hit a dead end and were told to try again later. When things aren’t so busy.

On 67th anniversary of bombs in Japan, nuclear energy challenged

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An hour before the Chevron refinery in Richmond started to burn, Bay Area residents were demonstrating against a different type of energy that posed different environmental and health risks. It was August 6, the 67th anniversary of the day Hiroshima was devastated by a nuclear bomb. August 9 will be the anniversary of the bomb in Nagasaki.

To mark the day, about 50 met in front of the Japanese consulate in San Francisco. They then marched a few blocks to PG&E, bells chiming in beat with chants of “Radiation has no border,” “No nukes, shut the plants down” and “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima. Never again, never again, never again.” 

The protest also commemorated the nuclear disaster at Fukushima on March 11, 2011, On Monday, the Japanese government released videos from the day of the disaster.

Speakers emphasized the ill-health effects still felt in the regions where the bombs were dropped.  Between 150,000 and 240,000 people were killed by the bombs, and survivors often suffer cancer and other radiation–related problems due to their exposure. 

“People are still suffering. Children still have deformities. This is not over,” said Steve Zeltzer, KPFA radio host and member of No Nukes Action Committee 

Long-term reprecussions of military use of nuclear technology are felt strongly Hunter’s Point as well. That was where the US navy docked 79 ships that had been exposed to radiation following a bomb test in Bikini Attol. They docked in San Francisco to be decontaminated and, in the process, released radioactive material. Stationed in Hunter’s Point, and tasked with testing the material on the ships along with other research, was the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, which continued testing involving radioactive material in the area for decades. 

“We’re struggling very hard to force them to clean up the nuclear waste that’s buried in BVHP,” said Marie Harrison of Greenaction for Health and Environment. 

“As a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother who happens to live in Bayview-Hunters Point,” said Harrison, “this madness needs to stop. And if we don’t say it, no one else will.”

At the demonstration, protesters passed around a petition calling on the Japanese government. The petition calls for an end to nuclear power in Japan and government funds to evacuate people who remain in Fukushima because they can’t afford to leave.

Protesters also expressed concern about the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which was taken offline in January following a radioactive gas leak. The plant is of concern to San Diego Gas & Electric as well, who say that meeting energy needs for the area will be difficult this summer following the leak.

Morning Muni shutdown commemorates death of Kenneth Harding, Jr.

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More than 50 protesters disrupted Muni service for about an hour this morning before peacefully leaving to march down Market, in commemoration of the death of Kenneth Harding, Jr., on July 16, 2011.

After gathering at 14th and Market, the group marched to the intersection of Duboce and Church, where Muni trains headed outbound exit the tunnel. Soon, at least four outbound trains and two inbound trains were backed up.

Buses replaced their service.

Some passengers were angered, while most took literature from protesters on their way to catch another train. A few joined in the picket line. Drivers, meanwhile, were mostly nonchalant. “I’m just enjoying the show,” said one driver.

“They shoot us down, we shut it down,” protesters chanted. They also mentioned the names of Raheim Brown Jr., Derrick Gaines, Oscar Grant, and other young African American Bay Area men killed by police.

As a police line closed in, one protester shouted at cops, “you are all complicit!” The group left the intersection around 7:30 without much confrontation with police.

Denika Chatman, Harding’s mother, has been organizing a movement demanding that the police who shot him be charged with murder since his death.

Harding, 19, was stopped by police last year as part of a ticket check while exiting the T train at third and Palou. He ran, and police shot at him. He fell and bled for about thirty minutes, while police surrounded him, before he was taken to a hospital.

Police say Harding pulled a gun out as he ran and shot at them, and that the fatal bullet in his neck was his own. They say that, since the bullet that killed him was from a .380-caliber handgun and police carry .40 caliber guns, Harding shot himself. No gun was found on Harding, but police acquired a gun a week after the shooting that they believe Harding used.

Police have pointed to a video which they say shows a man picking up the gun at the scene, while Harding’s family members and supporters say the object is a cell phone.

By no accounts did police know Harding’s identity before shooting.

Officers Richard Hastings and Matthew Lopez have recieved medals of valor for their handling of the incident.

Dorian Maxwell, a whistleblower former Muni driver who refused to operate his bus and made noise about unsafe conditions on Muni, attended the protest as well. He said Labor Black and Brown, one of the organizations who planned the protest, supported him after he risked his job.

“Your life is in danger if you’re riding the Muni,” Maxwell told the crowd, pointing out what he identified as partially flat tires on a nearby 22 Fillmore.

“We wanted to combine the brutality of the police with the workers getting victimized,” said protest organizer Charles Du Bois.

Chatman has also connected her demonstrations to the movement for free Muni tickets for youth.

“I wanted to organize a Muni shutdown, and it just started growing from there,” Chatman said. It was in honor of Kenny, and to unite the community as well. Because a lot of them witness these horrible murders and I wanted to do something to give back to a community that has supported me since this happened.”

After marching down Market stopping traffic every few blocks, the group ended with a speak-out in front of SFMTA headquarters. There were no arrests. A vigil is planned for 5pm at Third and Palou, in Mendell Plaza, the spot when Harding died. Supporters call the plaza Kenny’s Plaza in Harding’s honor.

Thick petition against a big project

Zelda Bronstein
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Thick petition against a big project

My old friend Sue Hestor stopped by my house June 24 to ask if any of my neighbors might want to sign the referendum petition on 8 Washington. She was carrying a clipboard with a document the size of a phone book attached to it. Almost 600 pages, neatly bound.

I flipped through it. Lots and lots of background documents on the project, nothing anyone’s ever going to read. But thanks to some slick moves by the developer, Simon Snellgrove, supported by his allies on the Board of Supervisors, the referendum petition has to have all of that material attached.

See, the petition seeks an election to overturn a piece of legislation. Doesn’t happen often in San Francisco, and as far as I know, it’s never been successful. State law, of course, says that you have to show people the bill you want to overturn.

But when activists in Bayview Hunters Point tried to run a referendum campaign on the area’s redevelopment plan, they lost before they even had a chance. The City Attorney’s Office ruled that each petition had to include the entire redevelopment plan, all 62 pages. Since the petitions didn’t include every single page of that plan, the signatures were rejected.

In this case, Snellgrove’s crew made sure that the final legislation approved by the supes included numerous mentions of other documents that were, in legal terms, “included by reference.” Lots of documents. And all of them had to be copied, bound and attached to every set of petitions that every circulator carries.

It’s a bear: You can’t send petitions around by mail, you can’t carry a whole stack to a big event … and it costs $18 to print and bind a set. The foes of 8 Washington will need at least 1,000 sets to get the required 28,000 signatures. That’s $18,000, just to get started.

Which would clearly appear to be a chill on the rights of the people to force a ballot referendum.

Still, they soldier on. Hestor told me she’s “fundraising like crazy” to get enough money not to pay signature-gatherers but just to print the petitions. Jon Golinger, who’s helping run the campaign, says he confident there will be more than enough copies to do the job.

So if you want to get a little exercise for your arms (don’t laugh –one petitioner is already having arm problems lugging this stuff around) and you’re interested in helping out, check out the campaign HQ at 15 Columbus or call 415-894-7008. There’s a rally Saturday/30 at 10am.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does Malia Cohen want to dump Potrero Hill?

Zelda Bronstein
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Does Malia Cohen want to dump Potrero Hill?

Since the dawn of district elections in the 1970s, Potrero Hill and Bayview have been part of the same district. Of the four supervisors elected to represent that district — Bob Gonzalez and Doris Ward the first time around, Sophie Maxwell and Malia Cohen after the return of district elections — three have come from Potrero Hill. All three also won substantial votes from Bayview Hunters Point.

But now Sup. Cohen apparently wants to kick Potrero Hill out of District 10.

At the Redistricting Task Force meeting March 29, Cohen appeared in person, and during public comment said that she wanted to see the Portola district added to D10. That’s a huge change — under most of the proposals floating around, Portola would go into D9. Cohen did not directly address the obvious, inevitable impact of her suggestion, but it’s clear that if Portola goes into D10, Potrero Hill will have to go somewhere else. That’s simple math.

The immediate political impact would be to make D10 more conservative — and stick more of the progressive Potrero voters into either D6 (which would then have to sluff off what — more of the Mission into D9? The Tenderloin into D3? What a mess.)

The folks on Potrero Hill don’t seem happy about this at all. Tony Kelly, a longtime hill activist (who ran against Cohen for supe last year) sent out the following:

With her comments last night, Supervisor Cohen took the side of the real estate industry, and against her constituents on Potrero Hill. The real estate industry has demanded this exact exchange of Portola for Potrero at every Task Force meeting since early January, as part of their plan to re-shape the Board of Supervisors. Neighborhood residents and organizations from Potrero Hill, Bayview, Portola, and elsewhere have been speaking against it at the same meetings.

The real-estate industry wants, of course, to force as many progressives as possible into as few districts as possible, to try to make it easier to elect conservatives from D10, D11 and D1, to go with the moderate/conservative bloc already in D2, D4, and D8 — and guess what? Six vote majority.

I’ve been trying all day to reach Cohen in her office and by cell. So far no response. I’ll let you know if she calls me.

Four hours in Mendell Plaza

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Everyone stops what they were doing and ducks behind the plastic tables set up on the sidewalk. Flyers and  packaging rustle in the wind. There’s no yelling or chaos, but three police cars speed onto the scene from three different directions. 

I had been at Feed the People Day all of thirty seconds before gunshots were fired.

Feed the People Day, an international effort in which people get together to share food in black and poor communities from Australia to South Africa, was on its fourth year, and organizers from Bayview were joining in. 

A few minutes after the gunshots, we all get up from behind the table. “God is good,” one volunteer says. “That could have been us.”

The volunteers get back to serving food.

“It’s a typical day in the life,” says Jameel Patterson, one of the volunteers serving food. “Not every day. But every so often.”

They chose to set up at Mendell Plaza. It’s full of people, a common place to spend free time. It’s next to the Bayview Opera House, which holds frequent events, as well as a complex that includes a gym, elementary schools, a playground, and a 300-person auditorium. Those buildings don’t hold many events, though—they’re mainly used for storage by the school district.

Mendell Plaza is directly off the T train, whose installation was supposed to bring prosperity and foot traffic to Bayview. But most of the businesses on the few blocks surrounding the plaza are still boarded up. And this T stop has become well known for a different reason: it was here that Kenneth Harding, Jr, exited the train July 16, ran away after police asked for his transfer, got shot in the back and died.

And it was in Mendell Plaza that police stood around the bleeding Harding for 30 minutes, allegedly denying him medical care, before he died.

Tracey Bell-Borden, one of the organizers of Bayview’s Feed the People Day, wants to rename the spot Kenneth Harding Jr. Plaza. 

Fly Benzo, a musician and college student who has become well known after speaking out for Harding and a subsequent arrest–again at Mendell Plaza– while filming police, was a block away when the shots were fired. He was trying to take a young girl that he was looking after inside the gym to play. It was, inexplicably for a Sunday afternoon, locked.

“It’s never open,” said Benzo. “Where are we supposed to take our kids so they can be inside?”

The police, whose lightning-quick response time implies that they had a tip—according Patterson, it generally takes them 15 to 17 minutes to respond to gunshots– haven’t found a gun yet. Most of them are standing around three teenagers who, bystanders insist, were on the sidewalk doing nothing when the gunshots went off. The police run their IDs and take them to jail; probably on a gang injunction. 

20 minutes have gone by before a cop drives up to the tables. “What organization are you with?” he asks.

Bell-Borden replies, “the Kenneth Harding Foundation.” Denika Chatman, Harding’s mother who moved to San Francisco after his death to try and find out more details surrounding its circumstances, asks “do you have a contribution?” the cop gets back in his car and speeds off. 

“They didn’t want to know, is anyone here hurt? Are you guys OK?” says Patterson.

One man says he saw the smoke when the shots went off, directly behind him. The police rolled right past.

Patterson tells a story of the past Friday night, when lots of people had been out in Mendell Plaza. When one teenager who was playing with a remote control car accidentally steered it onto the street, a police officer pulled up and ran his ID.

Despite some dangers, neighbors continue to congregate in Mendell Plaza, and Bell-Borden says she is planning on turning Feed the People Day into a monthly event; the next date will be April 15.

Dewayne Isaacs, a community organizer who grew up in the Fillmore and Haight-Ashbury and had several Black Panther relatives killed in the 70s, says he, for one, will keep coming back for it.

“It’s us Bay Area natives,” says Isaacs. “We always fight back.”

Following court ruling, SF Redevelopment seeks a “legislative fix”

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Redevelopment agencies were dealt a statewide hit after a unanimous ruling Dec. 29 by the California Supreme Court decided not only that lawmakers had the ability to terminate the agencies, but that those agencies could not continue forward with redevelopment projects as smaller entities.


Assembly Bills 1X 26, which eliminates redevelopment agencies but makes existing redevelopment housing projects an “enforceable obligation,” and 1X 27, which would have required agencies to make payments to the state of California in exchange for continuing to exist in smaller form, both came under scrutiny by the state Supreme Court. AB26 was upheld, but AB27 was considered illegal.

While large-scale redevelopment projects in San Francisco have generated no shortage of criticism and controversy, Mayor Ed Lee described the decision as disappointing and harmful for the city’s future.

“Redevelopment has not only played a critical role in creating jobs, transforming disadvantaged communities and delivering affordable housing, but it has spurred economic growth for our entire City at a time when we needed it most,” Lee said in a statement issued earlier today.

Gov. Jerry Brown introduced the idea of eliminating redevelopment agencies about a year ago as part of budget cuts designed to revitalize the state economy, as the Guardian reported last January. Today’s decision, which leaves the state with $1.7 billion more to work with in the first year of implementation of this plan, may help cushion the blow as state legislators seek to balance the budget.

However, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency isn’t giving up.

“We are aggressively looking at solutions, most likely a legislative fix, to provide for redevelopment to continue,” S.F. Redevelopment Agency executive director, Tiffany Bohee, told the Guardian. “The state will do what it needs to do to fill the hole [in the state budget] but there are unintended consequences.”

Private funding from companies like Lennar Homes supplementing state funding has made the continuation of redevelopment projects in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, Bayview Hunters Point Shipyard, and Treasure Island possible. Lee maintains that these areas will remain unaffected.

The legislation does, however, affect future projects. “We call on the state to find a legislative solution to this problem” Lee’s statement noted. “And while we are committed to working with the state, we have already started to look at local solutions and alternatives.”

Bohee echoed the mayor’s resolve. “We are committed to the long haul and focused on what the next steps are,” she said.

On the Cheap Listings

Andrew Lam
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0

Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 28

Glen Canyon habitat restoration Elk and Chenery Sts., SF. www.sfrecpark.org. 9 a.m.-noon, free. Glen Canyon Park has been to quite a few things over the years, from Alfred Nobel’s Giant Powder Factory to today’s multitudinous flora and fauna. Volunteers work tirelessly towards the urban oasis’s restoration and maintenance.

Chanukah Night 8: Jeremiah Lockwood concert The Tivka Store, 3191 Mission, SF. www.idelsohnsociety.com. 7 p.m., free with RSVP (see website). The Idelsohn Society, dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of classic Jewish music, hosts a psych rock folk jam by Jeremiah Lockwood, Luther Dickinson (The Black Crowes, North Mississippi Allstars), and Ethan Miller (Comets on Fire, Howlin Rain).

THURSDAY 29

Kwanzaa celebration Bayview Hunters Point YMCA, 1601 Lane, SF. www.sfpl.org. 3-6 p.m., free. Ujima, the third day of Kwanzaa, honors communal work and responsibility; fittingly, the SFPL and YMCA team up to put on a veritable blow-out of a holiday. The celebration is part of a seven-night series celebrating the guiding principles of Kwanzaa.

FRIDAY 30

I Like Ludwig concert Herbst Theater, 401 Van Ness, SF. www.sfchamberorchestra.org. 8 p.m., free with RSVP online or to (415) 692-5258. Nothing like some Beethoven to violently, excitably ring in the New Year. L.V.B.’s Second Symphony and Violin Concerto get the royal treatment by soloist Robin Sharp.

SATURDAY 31

Last Vampire Tour California and Taylor Streets, SF. www.vampiretoursf.com. 8 p.m., $20. Vampiress Mina Harker has been alive for 100 years and leading Gothic tours of Nob Hill for 10. Tonight marks her last gory and guided gallivant.

All Day Punk Rock New Year’s Eli’s Mile High Club, 3629 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Oakl. www.elismilehigh.com, 2 p.m. – 12:30 a.m., $10. Considering we’re about to embark upon another year full of economic gloom and doom, the band names from Eli’s lineup aren’t too uplifting. But at least they’re angry. World of Shit, Short Changed, Society Dog, and others perform in deliciously spirited form all day and all night.

1984 New Year’s Eve Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com. 9 p.m.-2 a.m., free. Light on the Orwellian totalitarianism and heavy on ceaselessly pumping ’80s music, Mighty throws a period-themed New Year’s Eve soiree complete with champagne toast.

New Year’s fireworks show Pier 14, Embarcadero, SF. 12 a.m., free. The damp, strength-sapping chill of midnight on the Embarcadero is still worth the 15 minutes of promised pyrotechnic glory. Ring in the New Year with thousands of San Franciscans huddled together under the sky.

SUNDAY 1

Opulent Temple New Year’s Day party Mission Rock, 817 Terry Francois, SF. www.missionrockcafe.com. 6 a.m.-4:20 p.m., $5 with RSVP. Dedicated to maintaining their sacred space in Black Rock City for top-notch electronic music, OT holds an all-day fundraiser commemorating its 10th year of existence. Music, food, bathrooms, and familiar faces grace Mission Rock.

All backed up

Andrew Lam
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All backed up

news@sfbg.com

In February 2004, San Francisco saw an usually strong winter storm. More than an inch and a half of rain fell within 30 minutes, too much to handle for the wastewater system, which in parts of the city is more than 100 years old. In the Mission and Bayview, some homes were flooded with rainwater and raw sewage.

Before adjourning for the year, the Board of Supervisors on Dec. 13 approved payments settling a lawsuit filed in January 2005 by some of the residents affected by the storm. The main plaintiffs in the case were Jane Martin and David Baker, whose home in the Mission district were flooded.

More than 40 individuals and businesses joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs, with San Francisco and its San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC) as the sole defendant in the case. The plaintiffs sued for dangerous conditions of public property, failure to maintain public property, negligence, nuisance, and the trespass of water and sewage onto the plaintiff’s properties.

The settlement totaled $624,930 in compensation for property damage, including $50,000 for Martin and Baker, and many of the other plaintiffs getting around $25,000 each.

“Simply put, the city wasn’t doing proactive maintenance,” Baker told us.

Representatives of the SFPUC are trying to change that. There are currently several projects in the works to address issues with the city’s sewers, including flooding. These include Model Block improvement programs, such as green streetscaping meant to soak up rainfall, and a Sewer System Improvement Program that is in its early stages.

According to SFPUC spokesperson Jean Walsh, the SSIP is meant to tackle a number of issues with the sewer system, including flooding. She listed “seismic reliability issues” and a projected increase in major storms due to climate change as pressing reasons for the plan.

Besides the ancient pipes, the city’s network of storage transport boxes is routinely overloaded. These boxes are underground containers that catch water and hold it until it can be processed through the system and through to water treatment plants. Walsh says that they “surround the city like a moat… When those boxes fill up and all our capacity is full, the system overflows.”

This can cause flooding, especially in low-lying areas of the city and natural creek beds. Precita Creek, which once flowed freely along what is now Cesar Chavez Street, has been a site of overflows and flooding since it was first incorporated into the city’s sewer system in 1878. Nearby Islais Creek has also been diverted into sewers in the flooding-prone area.

The SSIP will have a particular focus on green technology. “One way that we’re going to address the flooding issue is by using low-impact design,” Walsh said. “We’re looking at permeable paving, bio-retention swales, and rainwater harvesting as ways to reuse the rainwater.”

Walsh says that the Model Block program has been a pilot for the SSIP. In May, the city and the Environmental Protective Agency unveiled a new green “streetscape,” part of the Model Block program, on the 1700 block of Newcomb Avenue. Areas of the sidewalk were replaced with permeable pavement, trees and gardens, meant to improve beauty and calm traffic as well as soak up rainwater so that it does not flow directly into the sewer system. In 2010, a similar project was completed on Leland Avenue between Bayshore Boulevard and Cora Street.

Neighborhoods in San Francisco’s southeast, particularly the Mission and Bayview, have been disproportionately affected by problems with the sewer system. Olin Webb, a lifelong Bayview resident and member of the group Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates, says that sewer improvements are long overdue.

“Whenever it storms, there’s an overflow here,” Webb said. “Every time it rains, you can smell the raw sewage.”

Bayview community organizations have been campaigning for improvement to the sewer system for decades. Webb said some progress has been made in the past few years, including the installation of a pathway at Yosemite Slough Park, part of an effort to restore the wetlands in the area and turn it into a pleasant community space.

Webb was ambivalent about recent improvements. Bayview Hunters Point, like most of San Francisco, has lost much of its African American population during a recent surge in out-migration. According to a 2010 census, San Francisco’s black population has declined by 22.6 percent in the last decade.

“This took too long,” Webb said of the sewer improvement. “I’ve been here 60-something years, my mother worked on this before me. It’s like a joke to me that now everything’s getting fixed up and most of the people can’t enjoy it.”

Residents may still have a to wait for SSIP projects to begin construction. The program will likely span 15-20 years, and is currently in its early stages. “The project is still in design and planning stages,” Walsh said. “It needs to be validated and budgeted. We know it’s going to cost multiple billions of dollars”

Yet Walsh is optimistic that the project will make real change in a sewer system that’s been inadequate for decades. “It’s going to be an impactful project,” she said. “People are going to notice it happening.”

Dickens and drag queens and dreidels (oh my!)

Andrew Lam
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0
Dickens and drag queens and dreidels (oh my!)

culture@sfbg.com

HOLIDAY GUIDE 2011 You know what would be a good present to yourself this holiday season? Some ankle weights. Imagine all the almond cake and vegan eggnog you’ll have shoved into your belly by this time next month, you soon-to-be-less-svelte snowy sexpot. Not into approximating a house arrest prisoner? How about pledging to run about to as many as the Bay’s holiday hotspots as possible this year — you’ll be a Kwanzaa cutie in no time a’tall. And with such jingling gems — from costume fairs to drag queens in Union Square and free chamber orchestra performances — you’ll come out on the other side (2012) cut and cultured. 

 

Union Square iceskating rink Good news for nervous wall-grabbers and double axel spinners alike: the holiday ice rink is back at Union Square. Cue icicle lights, grand romantic gestures, and seizing onto strangers for suddenly-needed support.

Through Jan. 16. 10 a.m.-11:30 p.m. except for when closed for private parties, $10 for 90-minute session. Union Square, SF. www.unionsquareicerink.com

 

Great Dickens Fair Before Harry Potter and Kate Middleton transformed young Americans into full-blown Anglophiles, a whole different conception of Britain flourished stateside: the Dickensian version, replete with scones and hot toddies. Walk off your burgeoning middle with a jaunt through the Cow Palace’s temporary lamp-lit alleys.

Saturdays and Sundays through Dec. 18, 11 a.m.-7 p.m., $25. Cow Palace, 2600 Geneva, SF. www.dickensfair.com

 

“The Best Time of Year” SF Symphony Christmas special concert The San Francisco Symphony and Chorus exhale classical Christmas picks and carols to a fully-bedecked Davies Symphony Hall.

Nov.30-Dec.1, 8 p.m., $25–$68. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness, SF. (451) 864-6000, www.sfsymphony.org

 

Working Solutions holiday gift fair Showcasing San Francisco businesses assisted by Working Solutions’ micro loan programs, this fair lets shoppers pick up everything from Bernal Heights-wrought knives to chunks of Mission-crafted chocolate.

Dec. 1, 5-8 p.m., free. 101 Second St., SF. (415) 655-5433, www.tmcworkingsolutions.org

 

The Golden Girls: The Christmas Episodes Trannyshack takes on the blue-haired wonder that was The Golden Girls in a glitzy, raucous yearly San Francisco tradition.

Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays Dec. 1-23, 8 p.m., $25–$30. Victoria Theater, 2961 16th St., SF. www.trannyshack.com

 

A Christmas Carol There’s no better way to get in the mistletoe mood than to watch old Ebenezer slowly thaw out his icy, pinched heart in the Deco glory of the ACT Theatre.

Dec. 1-24, 7 p.m., $20–$75. American Conservatory Theatre, 415 Geary, SF. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org

 

Holiday tree-lighting ceremony Jack London Square becomes a Bay-side holiday crèche two hours with live reindeer, snow, wintry tunes, and a tree-lighting to launch the flurry of the holidays.

Dec. 2, 5-7 p.m., free. Jack London Square, Oakl. www.jacklondonsquare.com


Oakland-Alameda Estuary lighted yacht parade How can yachts parade, you ask? With style, we answer — East Bay boat owners trick out their vessels with festive lights visible from the shore.

Dec. 3, 5:30 p.m., free. Visible from Jack London Square, Oakl. www.lightedyachtparade.com

 

Fantasy of Lights celebration ‘Tis the season for brilliant night-time lights, and Union Street will not be an exception. Stately Victorians provide the glowing background for a holiday gathering featuring everything from a monkey to Santa and his elves.

Dec. 3, 3-7 p.m., free. Union between Van Ness and Steiner, Fillmore between Union and Lombard, SF. www.sresproductions.com

 

San Francisco Forest Choir Imagine yourself in a snowy Narnia glen, the Forbidden Forest, or roaming through the woods with Hansel and Gretel to the music of the San Francisco Forest Choir, an all-female group who sing in Japanese and English at the Western Addition library.

Dec. 3, 3-4 p.m., free. Western Addition branch library, 1550 Scott, SF. (415) 355-5727, www.sfpl.org.

 

Sharon Art Studio winter pottery and craft sale Thousands of gleaming pieces are up for sale by this staple of the Bay Area craft scene; lug your loot home and get your bicep curls out of the way for a week.

Dec. 4, 11 a.m., free. Sharon Art Studio, Children’s Playground, Golden Gate Park, SF. (415) 753-7005, www.sharonartstudio.org

 

SF Chamber Orchestra holiday family concert Circus Bella and the SF Chamber Orchestra team up for a strangely compelling holiday pairing: clownish acrobatics set to the strains of classical music.

Dec. 4, 3-4 p.m., free with RSVP. Bayview Opera House, 4705 Third St., SF. (415) 824-0386, www.bayviewoperahouse.org

 

Gourmet Ghetto’s snow day For those Bay citizens unfamiliar with the bliss of a true snow day, the Gourmet Ghetto’s version provides a superior version to the rest of the country’s admittedly frigid ones: real snow, yes, but also crafting, hot cocoa and cookies, a Snow Queen, and the warmth of community.

Dec. 5 10 a.m.-3 p.m., free. Andronico’s parking lot, 1550 Shattuck, Berk.; 1-4 p.m., free. M. Lowe and Co., 1519 Shattuck, Berk.; Noon-4 p.m., free. Twig and Fig, 2110 Vine, Berk. www.gourmetghetto.org

 

“Winter in the Wineries” Sixteen wineries will stamp your passport for a two-month period starting December 2, enabling you to enjoy unlimited tastings, tours, and meet-and-greets throughout Napa Valley.

Various locations and times, Calistoga. www.calistogavisitors.com. $50 for one passport ticket

 

Palestinian Craft Fair Straight from the hands of Palestinian artists and craftspeople: olive oil-based soap, embroidery, glassware, ceramics, books, honey, and Dead Sea products sold to benefit their makers an ocean away.

Dec. 4, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., free. Live Oak Park, 1301 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 548-0542, www.mecaforpeace.org

 

“Songs and Harps to Celebrate the Holiday Season” Harpists of the Bay, unite! The young pluckers of the Bay Area Youth Harp Ensemble join the Triskela Celtic Harp Trio to perform holiday pieces from around the world. Singing along is not only encouraged but expected.

Dec. 6, 6 p.m., free. Main Library, 100 Larkin, SF. (415) 557-4400, www.sfpl.org

 

“Drag Queens on Ice” Break out your very best glitz for a night spent skating next to legions of SF’s drag personalities. A 9:30 p.m. performance by the queens in question ends the evening.

Dec. 8, 8 p.m., $10 for 90-minute session. Union Square, SF. www.unionsquareicerink.com

 

“A Very Shut-Ins Xmas” The vanguard leaders of the “hulabilly” sound, the Shut-Ins return with a Christmas show to benefit San Francisco’s Legal Assistance to the Elderly.

Dec. 8, 5:30-8 p.m., $20. 50 Mason Social House, 50 Mason, SF. (415) 538-3333, www.laesf.org

 

Golden Gate Park tree lighting Golden Gate Park’s hundred-foot Monterey cypress (shouldn’t it have a name by now?) transforms into a light-bedecked behemoth for the 82 year.

Dec. 8, 5 p.m., free. McLaren Lodge, 501 Stanyan, SF.

 

La Cocina gift fair Its cryptic but tasty-sounding “tamale alley” should provide enough of a draw, but La Cocina’s gift fair also promises local vendors selling organic olive oils, handmade pasta, and mushrooms nourished by recycled coffee grounds. Pretty easy to stomach.

Dec. 9, 5-9 p.m., free. Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF. www.lacocinasf.org

 

Winter Wunderkammer holiday art sale The most you can spend here on one item is 50 bucks, the least a dollar. Accompanied by spiced wine and tunes, small-format works from local artists are on sale. Proceeds from this walk-in curio cabinet benefit The Lab and participating artists.

Opening party Dec. 9, 6-11 p.m., free. Also Dec. 10, 11 a.m.-4 p.m., free. The Lab, 2948 16th St., SF. (415) 864-885, www.thelab.org

 

California Revels Ah, the revels. This year, the interactive period presentation will sit you smack down at the Round Table. Dance and sing, young knight — no one’s mocking you at this costume-heavy conclave.

Dec. 9-11, 16-18; Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. and Sun. 1 p.m. and 5 p.m., $19-52. Scottish Rite Theater, 2850 19th Ave., SF. (510) 452-8800, www.californiarevels.org

 

SF Ballet’s Nutcracker Even with its lampoonable name, the Nutcracker remains a incomparable date choice for its lush costumes, fantastical storyline, and ability to trigger childhood flashbacks.

Dec. 9-25, various times, $25–$285. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF. (415) 865-2000, www.sfballet.org

 

Misfit Toy Factory For one evening, artists cobble together sculptures, toys, and gifts under one roof to the beat of DJ Yukon Cornelius. Items are sold at the end of the evening for a fixed price of forty dollars.

Dec. 10, 7-10 p.m., free. Root Division, 3175 17th St., SF. (415) 863-7668, www.rootdivision.org

 

The Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie A radical alternative to the holiday classic, Dance Brigade’s version features Clara, an undocumented worker, a homeless Sugar Plum Fairy, and an angel of resistance.

Dec. 10, 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.; Dec. 11, 1 p.m. and 5 p.m., $15–$17. Brava Theater, 2781 24th St., SF. www.dancemission.com

 

Hanukah festival of light Geared towards the younger set and their handlers, the JCC East Bay’s festival of light features storytelling, menorah making, dreidel games, and a concert by Isaac Zones, a mainstay in the Bay’s Jewish music scene.

Dec. 11, 10 a.m-2 p.m., $5. JCC East Bay, 1414 Walnut, Berk. www.jcceastbay.org.

 

“Holidays: Christmas, Chanukah, and Other Festive Celebrations” lecture Library docents present an examination of paintings from around the world dealing with everyone’s favorite subject: the giving, feasting, and receiving endemic to the holiday season.

Dec. 14, 6:30-7:30 p.m., free. Glen Park branch library, 2825 Diamond, SF. (415) 355-2858, www.sfpl.org

 

Mechanics’ Institute holiday gift and poster sale The staggeringly lovely Mechanics’ Institute hosts a large sale of hard-cover and paperback books, gifts, and posters straight from its library.

Dec. 15, 4:30-6:30 p.m., free. Mechanics’ Institute, 57 Post, SF. (415) 393-0100, www.milibrary.org

 

Holiday youth mariachi concert Three zestful youth mariachi bands perform traditional Mexican holiday music, providing an energizing segue into a sometimes exhausting season.

Dec. 16, 7:30 p.m., $10. Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF. (415) 643-2785, www.missionculturalcenter.org

 

Holiday Memories double feature Head back to the times of toboggans and candle-lit windows with two short films recounting rural winters of yesteryear. A Child’s Christmas in Wales visualizes Dylan Thomas’ Welsh childhood; The Sweater animatedly recounts Roch Carrier’s Quebecois, hockey-centered upbringing.

Dec. 17, 2 p.m., free with $15 museum admission. The Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, SF. (415) 561-0360, www.exploratorium.edu

 

Renegade Craft Fair holiday market For the third year and showcasing more than 250 makers and craftspeople, the Renegade Craft Fair’s holiday happening can be a bit overwhelming. But it’s an undeniably great answer to gifting woes: pick up jewelry, body products, paper goods, clothing, and way, way more, all DIY enough to satisfy your most loca-ttired friend.

Dec. 17-18, 11 a.m.-6 p.m., free. Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St., SF. www.renegadecraft.com

 

Reclaiming Yule ritual It may be chilly outside, but Sebastapol’s midwinter celebration (led by Starhawk, a leader in Bay Area earth-based spirituality) is indoors and full of warmth-inducing activities, namely dancing in honor of the Earth and Sun.

Dec. 18, 6:30 p.m., $7. Sebastopol Community Center, 390 Morris, Sebastapol. www.reclaiming.org

 

Solstice Eve celebration With a bonfire and roles doled out to participants (rocks, trees and mists), celebrating the longest night of the year on Ocean Beach is actually rather toasty. Bring items to release into the transformative fire — love letters are just the starting point.

Dec. 20, 3:30 p.m., free. Ocean Beach at Taraval, SF. www.reclaiming.org

 

Bill Graham menorah lighting The lighting itself takes place at 5 p.m., but the hours-long run-up is by no means lacking: traditional Jewish music, arts and crafts, and menorahs for every child fill Union Square starting at 3 p.m.

Dec. 20, 5 p.m., free. Union Square, SF. www.chabadsf.org

 

Kujichagulia celebration Kwanzaa’s day of personal definition and expression comes to City Hall, followed by a candle-lighting ceremony and dinner at Gussie’s, known for its fried tasties, red velvet cake, and Southern sweet tea.

Dec. 27, noon, City Hall, SF., 6 p.m., Gussies Chicken and Waffles, 1521 Eddy, SF. www.kwanzaasanfrancisco.com

 

Ujima celebration On Ujima, the third day of the week-long Kwanzaa holiday, community members gather to celebrate a collective spirit of responsibility and work.

Dec. 28, 3-6 p.m., free. Bayview Hunters Point YMCA, 1601 Lane, SF. www.sfpl.org

 

Keeping Score: Ives Holiday Symphony screening Unrecognized at the time of his death, experimentalist composer Charles Ives labored over his Holiday Symphony, which now gets fitting recognition by the San Francisco Symphony in a library concert that follows an hour-long documentary on the man.

Dec. 29, noon, free. Main Library, 100 Larkin, SF. (415) 557-4400, www.sfpl.org

 

Kuumba celebration Fittingly, the main San Francisco celebration of Kwanzaa’s Kuumba (day of creativity) occurs in the Jazz Heritage Center, a space shared by musical hotspot Yoshi’s. Celebrate the Fillmore’s manifold musical virtuosos on the last day of the year.

Dec. 31, 1-5 p.m., free. Jazz Heritage Center, 1330 Fillmore, SF. www.jazzheritagecenter.org

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