Governor

The price of growth

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joe@sfbg.com

San Francisco is booming, but will its infrastructure be able to keep up with its population growth?

The problem is acutely illustrated in the southeast part of San Francisco, where long-stalled development plans were finally greenlit by the adoption of the Eastern Neighborhoods Community Plan a few years ago.

The Mission, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, and Mission Bay districts have attracted more attention from developers than any other sector of San Francisco, according to the Planning Department. Bayview and Hunters Point are also now attracting lots of investment and building by developers.

But when development projects don’t pay the full cost of the infrastructure needed to serve those new residents — which is often the case in San Francisco and throughout California, with its Prop. 13 cap on property tax increases — then that burden gets passed on the rest of us.

Mayor Ed Lee’s recent call to build 30,000 new housing units by 2020 and the dollar sign lures of waterfront development have pressed the gas pedal on construction, while giving short shrift to corresponding questions about how the serve that growth.

growthimage

Infrastructure needs — such as roads, public transit, parks, and the water and sewer systems — aren’t as sexy as other issues. But infrastructure is vital to creating a functional city.

That kind of planning (or lack thereof) impacts traffic congestion, public safety, and the overall livability of the city. And right now, the eastern neighborhoods alone face a funding gap as high as $274 million, according to city estimates highlighted by area Sup. Malia Cohen.

That’s why Cohen went looking for help, though that’s not exactly what she found.

 

MEETING DEMAND

Cohen has asked Mayor Lee about the lack of adequate investment in critical infrastructure again and again. She asked his staffers, she asked his aides. At the Feb. 11 Board of Supervisors meeting, during the mayor’s question time, she was determined to ask one more time.

Cohen asked the mayor about how to fund infrastructure needs in the eastern neighborhoods and whether the city should use a new, rarely used fundraising option called an Infrastructure Financing District, or IFD.

“When the city adopted the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, we were aware of a significant funding gap that existed for infrastructure improvement,” she said to the mayor. She asked if he would slow down development while the city caught up with infrastructure improvements, or commit more funding.

Cohen asked pointedly, “Would you support an IFD for the eastern neighborhoods?”

The mayor’s answer was in the foreign language known as bureaucratese, offering a firm “only if we have to.”

“Strategically planning for growth means making long-term investments in infrastructure,” he said. “And the most important thing that we can do right now is to work together to place and pass two new revenue generating bonds measures on the November 2014 ballot.”

But his proposed $500 million general obligation bond and $1 billion local vehicle license fee increase would just go to citywide transportation projects, where the city faces $6 billion in capital needs over the next 15 years, according to a task force formed by the mayor.

That’s small comfort for the people of the eastern neighborhoods, who are already ill-served by Muni and will have other needs as well. It’s a situation likely to get worse as the population there increases, unless the city finds a way to make serious new investments.

 

CITY VS. NEIGHBORHOOD

Development impact fees go to the city’s General Fund, paying for the planning work, building inspections, and a share of citywide infrastructure improvements. The problem with that strategy, opponents say, is that there are then no promises that the money will make its way back to the neighborhood that generated the funding in the first place.

Neighborhood advocates see a need to address the problems created by new development by capturing fees before they get to the General Fund. IFDs do just that. Though the nuts and bolts of how an IFD works are complex, the gist is this: Once implemented, an IFD sets up a special area in a neighborhood where a portion of developer impact fees are captured to exclusively fund infrastructure where the development is.

“So the idea that growth should pay for growth was the notion,” Tom Radulovich, executive director of the nonprofit group Livable City, told us. But with money flowing into the General Fund rather than being earmarked for specific neighborhoods, Radulovich said,the infrastructure is going to come much later than the development. (The city) delivers projects slowly, if at all.”

IFDs are largely untested in California, and have only one recent use in San Francisco, on Rincon Hill, where a deal with developers cut by then-Sup. Chris Daly has morphed into an IFD created by his successor, Sup. Jane Kim. The neighborhood will now see new funding, and a new park, as a result of development there.

“This is a HUGE step towards getting the public infrastructure improvements needed to correct livability deficiencies in Rincon Hill,” read a newsletter from the Rincon Hill Neighborhood Association in 2011. “What does this mean for those of us living (here)? It means the Caltrans property at 333 Harrison Street has a short future as a commuter parking lot, because the front portion will become our first neighborhood park.”

The benefits are tangible, but putting an IFD into action is onerous. California Senate documents describe the hurdles involved: The county (or city) needs an infrastructure plan, it must hold public hearings, every local agency that will contribute property tax revenue must approve the plan, and the IFD needs to go to ballot and obtain two-thirds voter approval, a high mountain to climb.

Gov. Jerry Brown has called for lowering the voter threshold for IFDs to 55 percent in his newest budget. The mayor used the governor’s rationale as reason to avoid an IFD for the eastern neighborhoods when speaking on the topic last week. But that may not be his only reason.

“Even if we get the changes that we seek, it’s important to point out that IFDs don’t create more money for our city, they fund specific capital improvements by earmarking money in the General Fund for a particular purpose,” Lee said.

In other words, IFDs take money from a city that is already wrestling with underfunded citywide infrastructure needs. “Earmarking general funds isn’t something that we do lightly,” Lee told Cohen.

But Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, put it this way to us: “Should the eastern neighborhoods be the cash cow for the General Fund?”

 

BOOMTOWN

With more than 10,000 housing entitlements, the eastern neighborhoods are where San Francisco will experience its biggest growing pangs.

“The eastern neighborhoods are ground zero for development in San Francisco,” Keith Goldstein, a long time member of the Eastern Neighborhoods Citizens Advisory Committee, told a Nov. 14 Board of Supervisors Government Oversight Committee hearing on the issue.

Sups. Cohen and David Campos spent the majority of the meeting trying to find solutions, but none were forthcoming. Instead they were met with presentations on the neighborhood’s myriad needs, but few on how they would be funded.

Muni is also starved for resources in the area, where the T-line is notorious for its “switchbacks” that leave riders stranded before completing its run.

“This is a topic I’ve advocated a lot,” Sup. Scott Wiener told us. “When you have a growing population, these folks absolutely have to have service.”

At the meeting, Planning Director John Rahaim put the problem simply: “There’s a lack of development fee funding.” The officials that day from the SFMTA, Planning Department, and the Department of Public Works presented plans that relied heavily on state and federal funding to meet the new construction and infrastructure needs, a funding gap of $274 million.

“We’re really struggling to maintain the infrastructure the city has,” Brian Strong, director of capital planning, said at the meeting. “For the General Fund itself, we’re deferring $3.9 billion in capital projects the city deemed high priority. We just don’t have the funds.”

The Mayor’s Office didn’t respond to our questions about how to solve the problem, but Sup. Cohen said she’s hopeful he’ll support an IFD in her district.

“When we introduced the plan five years ago, we knew there was a gap in terms of what we expected to collect. In terms of development impact fees, we’re still in that place,” she told us. “I just want to get shit done.”

One report seems to agree with Cohen on the importance of IFDs. In 2009, a major report on development in the eastern neighborhoods was filed to then-Mayor Gavin Newsom. It recommended the city “commission a consultant study to inform the formation of an IFD,” saying it was the best tool available to fund infrastructure in the eastern districts.

The top signature on the report belonged to then-City Administrator Ed Lee. Now that he’s mayor, a mayor calling for rapid growth, can he find a way to pay for the infrastructure to serve those new residents?

Drought

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steve@sfbg.com

I remember the dead lawns, 90-second timed showers, empty fountains and pools, and water cops issuing tickets for washing one’s dirty car. “If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down,” went the toilet edict they taught us in school. Water was too precious to just wantonly flush away.

I was 8 years old in 1976-77 during California’s last severe drought, but I retain vivid, visceral memories of that time. Water was an ever-present concern. I learned how dependent we are on the natural world and the role that individual responsibility plays in collective action, particularly in times of turmoil.

Everyone’s yards were brown; nobody’s cars were clean. We were in it together.

But even deeply implanted memories and learned behaviors fade. I may still feel subtle emotional pangs when I watch the water running down the drain when I shave or wash the dishes, yet I’d content myself with the knowledge that water is a renewable resource and we were no longer in a severe drought.

Or at least I was able to do that until this season. California experienced its driest year in recorded history in 2013, and it’s still not raining as we go to press. Yes, there are welcome predictions of finally getting some rain this week, but not the sustained precipitation we need to make a difference.

If current long-range weather forecasts hold true, this winter could be even drier than last winter, causing by far the most severe drought in state history, worse than ’76-’77, even worse than 1923-24, the driest winter ever and the beginning of a seven-year drought.

“We’re facing the worst drought California has ever seen,” Gov. Jerry Brown told reporters on Jan. 17 as he proclaimed a state of emergency, invoking powers to redirect water resources and asking Californians to reduce their consumption by 20 percent.

Yet as dire as this situation may be — and we’ll have a better idea by the end of March, when more stringent water restrictions will be enacted if we don’t get some serious rainfall by then — one of the scariest aspects to this drought is that it may be just a preview of things to come.

This could be the new normal by the end the century. Most reputable climate change models predict California’s average temperature will increase 3-8 degrees by 2100. That’s enough to radically change our climate, causing shorter winters with less precipitation, and more of it coming in the form of rain than snow, undermining the elegant system of storing water within the Sierra snowpack.

That also translates into more extreme conditions, from more flooding in the winter and spring to more dangerous heat waves and wildfires in the summer and fall — and more frequent and severe droughts.

“People should reflect on how dependent we are on rain, nature, and other another,” Brown said at the end of his news conference. “This is Mother Nature. At some point we have to decide to live with nature and get on nature’s side and not abuse the resources we have.”

That theme of interdependence was one he returned to several times during that 14-minute event. Brown was governor during that last big drought in ’76-’77, and when a reporter asked what lessons he took from that experience, he said, “We’re dependent on rain, we’re dependent on one another.”

He expressed confidence that Californians will find their way through even the most severe drought, although he acknowledged it will exacerbate existing conflicts between cities and rural areas, farmers and environmentalists, and Northern and Southern California as each fights for its interests.

“This takes a coming together of all the people of California to deal with this serious and prolonged event of nature,” Brown said. “This is going to take a lot of support and a lot of collaboration on the part of everybody.”

 

STATE OF DENIAL

California is on a collision course with reality. Whether or not it’s this drought that wakes us up, at some point we’ll awaken to the fact that a growing population can’t survive on dwindling water resources without a major shift in how we operate.

“California does not today live within its means. We want more water than nature is naturally providing, even in normal years,” said Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute and a world-renowned expert on water issues whose research has fueled United Nations studies as well as his own books. “Some of the most serious impacts of climate change are going to be on water.”

That’s particularly true for California, whose large population and huge agricultural and other water-dependent industries belie a Mediterranean climate that is actually quite fragile and susceptible to droughts and the impacts of climate change.

“You’ve got 30 million people perched on the edge of a physical impossibility, unless we act with huge speed,” said Bill McKibben, an author and researcher who founded 350.org, one of the leading advocacy organizations for addressing climate change.

Gleick and McKibben are leading voices on the related issues of water policy and climate change, respectively, and they both told the Guardian that this drought should finally get people serious about conservation, efficiency, reducing our carbon output, and generally living in greater harmony with the natural world.

“The current drought ought to be a wake-up call to tell us we have to start thinking about our water resources differently,” Gleick told us, calling for far greater efficiency in how we use water, particularly in cities and the agriculture industry. “California has made great progress over the last several decades, but we’re nowhere near where we could be or should be.”

From low-flow toilets and shower heads to smarter irrigation techniques and recycled wastewater, California has made tremendous advances in its water efficiency since the last big drought. But Gleick and McKibben both say California needs a seismic shift in its thinking to grapple how a growing population can function within a changing climate.

“The assumption has always been that as we get larger populations, we’ll figure out their resource needs,” Gleick said, pointing out that climate change challenges that assumption and calls for more proactive thinking. “We need to do a better job at planning for future resource needs.”

Times of crisis can trigger that kind of shift in thinking. Gleick said Australia’s “Millennium drought” from 1995 to 2009 began with basic conservation measures and eventually led to a complete overhaul of water rights, “policies that we haven’t even contemplated” in California.

But Californians may soon be forced into such contemplations.

“It’s physics in action. This is what happens when you start to change the way the world has worked throughout human history,” McKibben told us. “Some people will be empowered to act, and some will have to go into denial. A truly interesting test will be Jerry Brown — he ‘gets it’ on climate, but he’d love to frack as well apparently. He’s like a Rorschach for the state.”

Brown’s call to work with nature and one another is encouraging, but neither Gleick nor McKibben were willing to wager that Brown is ready to lead the big discussion Californians need to have about our long-term needs.

Yet Gleick says something will have to start that conversation before too long: “It’s either going to take a more severe drought or better political leadership.”

 

FIRES IN JANUARY

California is a tinderbox right now, with a high risk of wildfires that could get unimaginably worse by this summer.

“We’re experiencing conditions in California that we typically see in August,” CalFire spokesperson Daniel Berlant told us. “We never really moved out of fire season in Southern California.”

And that will only get worse as global warming changes California’s climate.

“As summers get longer, it extends the window for fires,” Berlant said. “It’s a clear sign that this generation is seeing more and bigger fires.”

Farmers are also worried, facing the prospect of fields going fallow.

“There is considerable anxiety on farms and ranches throughout California,” Dave Kranz, spokesperson for the California Farm Bureau, told the Guardian. “We know it’s going to be bad, we just don’t know how bad.”

He described ranchers selling their animals before they reach market weight and farmers considering whether to plant field crops and how to keep trees and vines alive if things get bad.

“You have people irrigating crops in January, which is a very unusual occurrence,” Kranz said. And if the rains don’t come this winter, “hundreds of thousands of acres of land would be left unplanted.”

Kranz said that “farmers have become significantly more efficient in their water use,” citing stats that crop production doubled in California between 1967 and 2005 while the water used by the industry dropped 13 percent. “We talk about more crop per drop.”

But Gleick also said the fact that agriculture accounts for 80 percent of water use in California must be addressed, something that Kranz acknowledges. For example, he said Central Valley fields that once grew cotton, which takes a lot of water, have mostly switched to almonds. Pistachios are also big now, partially because they can be grown with saltier water.

“Farmers adapt, that’s what they’ve done historically in response to weather trends and market demands,” he said.

“There’s only so much water and much of it is spoken for for the environment,” Kranz said, acknowledging species needs but also complaining about much of the last big rains, in November and December of 2012, were released to protect the Delta smelt. “We should have saved some of that water.”

While the 1927-28 winter was the driest on record in the state, dropping just 17.1 inches of rain, this winter already looks worse, with just 3.5 inches falling so far as of Jan. 27. That could change quickly — indeed, a chance of rain was finally in the forecast for Jan. 30 and Feb. 2 — but it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll get enough to end this drought.

“Right now, we are saying the odds do not indicate a Miracle March, which is not good,” a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center told the San Jose Mercury News on Jan. 16 following release of its three-month forecast.

The worse it gets, the more heated the political battles will become over how to address it.

“You’re going to hear a lot of talk about additional water storage,” Kranz said. “We’re paying now for not creating more storage 10-15 years ago. Droughts happen in California.”

But even Kranz and his generally conservative constituency is talking about tweaks to existing reservoirs — such as increasing Shasta Lake’s capacity and expanding the Sykes Reservoir in Colusa County — rather than big new dam projects.

Gleick agrees that the era of building big dams in California is over. “You can’t build a new dam in California, with their enormous political, economic, and environmental costs.”

And that makes the challenges this state faces all the more vexing.

 

PAST AND FUTURE

California has dealt with drought many times before, including several that lasted for a few years. The last sustained drought was in 1987-1992, but it wasn’t nearly as dry as earlier droughts, such the 1928-1934 drought, the worst one on record.

Officials try to learn from each drought, studying what happened and trying to develop long-term solutions, such as the water banking and distribution systems established during the 1976-77 drought. Yet a study by the Department of Water Resources in 1978 also concluded that we’re essentially at the mercy of nature.

“The 1976-77 drought has again shown that finite nature of our resources and our limited ability to control nature,” read the introduction to the report “The 1976-77 California Drought: A Review.”

DWR’s then-Director Ronald Robie warned at the time that there was no way to predict when or how severe the next drought might be. “We can be assured, however, that drought will return,” he wrote, “and, considering the greater needs of that future time, its impact, unless prepared for, will be much greater.”

Those words could carry a special resonance now, but it’s even scarier given long-range climate change forecasts that Robie wasn’t taking into account when he wrote those words. California estimates it will add more than 15 million people between 2010 and 2060, crossing the 50 million people mark in 2049.

“California could lead the nation into renewable energy. You’ve got the sun. But it would take a 21st century statesman. I guess we’ll find out whether Brown’s that guy — he could be, freed from the need for political popularity after this next election,” McKibben said, calling Brown “a true visionary in many ways, but also a politician. What a fascinating gut check!”

Gleick said that he sometimes gets asked whether climate change is causing the current California drought or other specific weather incidents, and he said that question misses the crucial point: “All of our weather today is influenced by climate change.”

As the climate changes and the world warms, that becomes the new normal for California and other regions, affecting all of its weather patterns. “As goes our climate,” Gleick said, “so goes our water, and we’re not ready.”

Double standard for the role of voters in SF waterfront development?

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As our article on San Francisco waterfront development was hitting the presses last week, California State Lands Commission Chief Counsel Mark Meier made public a letter questioning the legality of a local initiative in circulation that would submit waterfront projects that break height limits to a vote of the people.

Meier argued that such “public trust lands” are managed locally for statewide benefit, and therefore voters can’t meddle with the decisions made in City Hall or the Port of San Francisco offices: “The land use and management decisions that the City makes regarding these public trust land cannot be overriden by the local initiative process…”

State Lands Commission must sign off on most waterfront developments, along with the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, so this Jan. 13 letter to the City Attorney’s Office is significant. It’s unlikely to keep the measure off the June ballot if the campaign gets enough qualifying signatures by Feb. 3, but it could be used in later challenges. 

Campaign Manager Jon Golinger said he wasn’t surprised or worried by the threat, calling Meier’s argument flawed. “Our attorneys have already analyzed this and we feel pretty confident,” he told us, summarizing his side’s legal argument as, “Anything that the people’s representatives can do, the people are also allowed to do.”

Golinger also noted a perverse aspect to Meier’s arguments, noting that the initiative seeks to strengthen existing protections of the waterfront, which is exactly what the Burton Act encouraged when transfering authority to the city. And most of the caselaw that Meier relies on for his arguments involved judges ruling against initiatives that sought to weaken local authority and protections.

Golinger also noted the glaring contradiction between the position between taken now by the State Lands Commission, of which Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom is one of three elected members, and the Prop. C initiative campaign funded last year by the 8 Washington project developers that was overtly supported by Newsom.

“If this is of question legally, why didn’t Commissioner Newsom raise this last year?” Golinger asked.  

In fact, that initiative would have been a far more glaring violation of the sanctity of local government control considering it would have not only green-lighted the 8 Washington project and all of its variances from local codes, but it would have prohibited “discretionary review” of the project by professional city planners.

We called both Meier and Newsom’s office with questions about the letter, its arguments and contradictions, and the role that Newsom had in ordering, preparing, or reviewing the letter. We never heard back from either of them, but we’ll update this post if and when we do.   

 

California joins Oregon, Washington and British Columbia in climate action plan

Gov. Jerry Brown announced a regional agreement Oct. 28 with Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia to align policies for combating climate change.

“This is what is totally unique: We have a problem whose timescale is beyond anything we’ve ever dealt with,” Brown said as he gathered with Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber, Washington Governor Jay Inslee and British Columbia Premier Christy Clark (who joined remotely) to sign the agreement. “So, we have to take action before we see or experience all the problems we’re dealing with.”

In most political venues, “to actually utter the word ‘global warming’ is deviant and radical in 2013,” Brown said. “But you just watch … this will spread until we have a handle on the world’s greatest existential challenge.”

Called the Pacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy, the pact commits all the jurisdictions to take a leadership role in national and international climate change policy by agreeing to emissions reduction targets; to transition the West Coast to cleaner modes of transportation such as high-speed rail; and to invest in clean energy and infrastructure through actions like streamlining permitting of renewable energy infrastructure and supporting integration of the region’s electricity grids.

Apart from this accord, Brown noted that “California has already signed a memorandum of understanding with several provinces in China,” concerning the need to work together on climate change, “and in fact with the national government itself.”

Meanwhile, a group of protesters gathered outside the Cisco-Meraki offices in Mission Bay, where the event was held, to oppose Brown’s unwillingness to support a statewide ban on fracking, an oil and gas extraction technique that environmentalists fear could contribute to groundwater contamination and increased greenhouse gas emissions.

“It’s starkly hypocritical for Governor Brown to be inking climate agreements while he’s at the same time green-lighting a massive expansion of fracking for dirty oil in California,” said protester Zack Malitz.

Asked to respond to the protesters’ concerns, Brown responded, “I signed legislation that will create the most comprehensive environmental analysis of fracking today,” referring to a bill that requires environmental review but has been criticized as flawed because it does not impose an outright ban.

“The big issue is the Monterey Shale,” he added, referring to an expansive underground oil reserve that environmentalists fear could be opened up to fracking, “and nobody is talking about doing anything there for an extended period of time, and not before the environmental document.”

Brown takes heat on fracking

On Thursday Oct. 17, more than fifty people gathered in front of the Parc 55 Wyndham Hotel in downtown San Francisco to protest Governor Jerry Brown’s reception of an environmental award. 

Every year, the BlueGreen Alliance hosts its Right Stuff Awards dinner to honor prominent individuals promoting a sustainable environment and economy. This year, they selected Governor Jerry Brown as a winner in the government category. The choice enraged environmentalists, who congregated where the awards dinner was being held to voice their indignation.

Brought together by several collaborating organizations, including Idle No More and Gathering Tribes, the protesters blocked the entrance to Parc 55 as they awaited the governor’s arrival. Bearing signs with messages such as “Jerry Brown is Not BLUE or GREEN,” they yelled to drivers who honked horns in support as they sailed past.

They were upset by Brown’s support for Senate Bill 4, which he signed into law in September. SB-4 is California’s first legislation regulating hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as fracking, which involves shooting massive amounts of water and toxic chemicals deep into the earth to crack rock formations and release otherwise trapped oil and natural gas deposits.

Widely viewed as flawed legislation that is far from what environmentalists had in mind when they called for the practice to be regulated in California, the bill allows fracking permits to be approved as long as oil and gas companies publicly disclose which chemicals are used in the process. The legislation also requires groundwater and air quality monitoring before operations begin. Environmentalists fear that SB-4 will lead to a dramatic expansion of fracking in California, by allowing access to the state’s vast Monterey Shale deposit, estimated to hold 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

“This award from BlueGreen is a travesty,” declared protester Steve Ongerth, after a flash mob of young people danced to the song “Toxic” by Brittney Spears, dressed in shirts spelling out TOXIC while donning surgical masks.

In the past several years, Governor Brown has accepted at least $2.49 million in financial donations from oil and natural gas interests. Environmentalists point to these donations as an explanation of Brown’s refusal to impose a moratorium or an outright ban on fracking, despite pressure from a statewide coalition of organizations calling for such protective measures.

They also blame him for the changes made to SB-4 in the final week before the bill was voted on, which followed intense lobbying by oil and gas interests. The amendments substantially weakened restrictions on fracking by removing some of the bill’s tougher regulations and diluting language intended to ensure that new wells go through adequate environmental review.

“Jerry Brown has sold out the California public for his own self-serving interests. He made a deal with the devil,” said protester Pamela Zuppo of 350 Bay Area. “This is a fracking bill gone wrong. It is referred to as a regulation bill, but it is not. It is an institutionalization of fracking bill and it’s the destruction of our democracy.”

When he signed SB-4, Brown said it “establishes strong environmental protections and transparency requirements,” but added that he plans to seek additional changes next year to clarify the new requirements. So far, details remain sketchy on what areas of the bill will actually be addressed.

At the last minute, activists learned that Brown would not be attending the event to accept his award in person. When this was announced, the crowd of protesters let out a cheer.

But environmentalists who remain concerned about fracking are keeping the pressure on. On Saturday, Oct. 19, activists from 350.org, Food & Water Watch and the Center for Biological Diversity held a march and rally in downtown Oakland to call on Brown to ban fracking.

“Over the past year, Governor Brown has gone against the wishes and best interests of Californians — the majority of which oppose fracking — and has clearly stated his support for the dangerous drilling process, said Food & Water Watch Northern California Organizer Tia Lebherz.

“By doing this he is embarrassing himself and putting his legacy and our state’s future at risk.”

Community not criminalization

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By María Poblet

OPINION San Francisco is poised to break ground in defense of immigrants, an important step towards turning the tide against the criminalization of communities of color.

In a unanimous vote on September 24, the Board of Supervisors supported a due process ordinance that, after final approval, will reduce deportations by setting strict limits on collaboration between federal immigration enforcement and local authorities. Our city will make history by refusing to implement the federal Secure Communities program, which allows US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to request an immigration hold detention without cause, regardless of immigration status, at local expense.

This victory didn’t trickle down like fog from the “progressive Bay Area bubble.” It was hard fought, from the bottom up. Immigrant and undocumented people most impacted by the problems led the fight, and they built a movement too strong to ignore. Causa Justa::Just Cause helped organize the groundswell, as part of the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Committee, a broad grassroots collaboration. We had support from progressive champions John Avalos, Eric Mar, David Campos, and five additional co-sponsors on the board.

This movement builds on the fights in the 1980s to make San Francisco a Sanctuary City, welcoming survivors of the wars in Central America. We build on the fights in the ’90s to re-commit to those values in the face of a new wave of migration, when economic refugees arrived, fleeing the hunger caused by US-imposed Free Trade Agreements. We build on the very personal fights of everyday people, like a woman we’ll call Silvia, a domestic violence survivor who met with the District Attorney repeatedly, demanded that he lead those meetings in Spanish so she could participate fully, advocated for herself and her community, and ultimately won his commitment of support for this ordinance. This victory belongs to the hundreds of community leaders who, like Silvia, overcame intimidation, organized their families and neighbors, and showed our elected officials the way forward.

In a national context, where states like Georgia, Alabama and Arizona hunt down immigrants, we in California, a majority immigrant, majority people of color state, have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to follow Silvia’s leadership. It’s time to reject criminalization, and build community.

Every time there’s a new way to label someone a “criminal,” more families and communities are torn apart. Millions of black and Latino people are behind bars already, thanks to criminalization policies like the war on drugs, structural unemployment, decades of divestment from working class communities, and racial discrimination. Creating new immigration violations only makes that problem worse, trapping whole new sectors of our society in the prison dragnet. This advance in San Francisco should inspire our state as a whole not only to reject S-Comm, but also to take bold action to address the profoundly problematic prison system, and challenge the racism and poverty it depends on.

But, for our state to stand up like that is going to take a serious transformation. Gov. Jerry Brown recently announced plans to expand the prison system with revenues from Prop. 30 — the grassroots progressive tax passed last year to support public schools and social services. Causa Justa::Just Cause, as part of California Calls, through SF Rising and Oakland Rising, was one of hundreds of community groups that helped pass this progressive tax. We are outraged to see the governor literally betting on the criminalization of the next generation, with money that was supposed to support their success.

Policies like S-Comm manufacture the need for more detention facilities, ultimately benefitting corporate interests like the GEO private prison group. Its lucrative business depends on criminalization, and a culture of fear. If politicians aren’t brave enough to survive the accusation that they are “soft on crime” in order to champion real change, then we the people will have to take it into our own hands. Immigrant communities, black communities, communities of color, and poor communities need to keep building the solidarity and the movement that will allow us to win, from San Francisco to Sacramento to DC. There is much more to be done, and we can only do it together.  

María Poblet is executive director of Causa Justa::Just Cause.

Bill on Brown’s desk to make two-tiered system of college tuition: for the rich, and the poor

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It seems that one California politician is adapting an old adage for a modern era: If at first students protest and get pepper sprayed, try, try that legislation again. 

AB 955 is a bill that would create a pilot program to raise community college tuition, allowing six allegedly overcrowded community colleges to charge the full cost of their classes during summer and winter sessions. A three-unit class would jump in cost from $138 to roughly $600, depending on the college involved. Authored by Assemblyman Das Williams (D- Santa Barbara), the bill now sits on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk awaiting his signature. 

The colleges in the pilot are College of the Canyons, Crafton Hills College, Long Beach City College, Oxnard College, Pasadena City College and Solano Community College.

Local community college advocates said the pilot program could crack open the door to a future where two-tiered access to community college is the norm: The rich will be able to get classes, and the poor will be crowded out. 

Those fears are prompting local San Francisco activists to join in the fray.

“AB 955 creates a system of haves and have nots,” said Shanell Williams, the student trustee of City College of San Francisco (no relation to Assemblyperson Williams). “Students that cannot afford to pay more will essentially be denied access,” she said.

Williams is a staunch advocate for education equality at City College, and led many of the rallies decrying the school’s loss of accreditation. She now plans to lead a rally against the bill here in San Francisco. But she’s not the only one who thinks this is a bad idea.

Santa Monica College tried to make a similar two-tiered system for tuition last year, offering classes that were previously closed due to lack of state funding by sticking the whole price of the class on students. Santa Monica College students were far from pleased.

Protests erupted, students were pepper sprayed, the incident became national news, and the idea was criticized across the board as class warfare. 

The students’ outrage doesn’t just stem from raised tuition, but from a broken promise. 

The idea of “open access” to classes is mandated by California’s educational master plan, which states that all students over the age of 18 should have access to community colleges and that tuition would be free. Part of the Donahoe Education Act of 1960, it was signed into law that year by Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown.

The Master Plan has eroded slowly since the 90s, and the once tuition-free UC and CSU systems now charge their students fees in excess of $3,000 a semester for full time enrollment — inflated prices which so far the community college system has resisted. Classes cost $46 per-unit at each of the 112 community colleges in California.

Assemblyman Williams  justified his bill in an op-ed for The Daily Californian, saying the idea of open access has failed as the California community college system has already shut over 500,000 students from its doors, according to data from the state community college chancellor’s office.

“Yes, $600 is more expensive than $138, but only in the short term,” Williams wrote. “What’s the cost to a student forced by the current lack of classes to have to face one to four more years of living expenses to complete his or her education? It’s a lot more than $600.”

But Jessica Jones, two-year student body president of Santa Rosa Junior College, fears that the pilot program may just be the beginning.

“Who’s to say it won’t go like wildfire across the state?” she said in comments to the Guardian. Unlike the UC and CSU students, she fears the community college students she sees everyday would have more to lose when the fees are hiked.  More often, she said, those students are “working many jobs, many have families, you’ll see less and less students able to take courses.”

It isn’t just activists who fear this will go statewide. The state chancellor of all 112 California Community Colleges, Brice Harris, has also publicly denounced the bill.

“The next time the budget goes in the tank they’ll tell (us), we can’t give it to you, tell your colleges to raise fees,” he said at a recent state meeting. “All of us who believe this is bad public policy for California are going to have to speak out forcefully with the (Brown) administration to make them understand what a huge policy change this is for the state of California,” he said. 

Jessica Jones works with the Student Senate of California Community Colleges, and though their opinion is not uniform, many student leaders statewide are organizing actions against the fee hike pilot program. Crafton Hills College, Modesto Junior College, Pasadena City College, Long Beach City College, Santa Rosa Junior College and De Anza College will all have demonstrations or engage in write-in campaigns by the end of next week.

Williams, the City College Student Trustee is organizing a demonstration in San Francisco as well. The protest will be at Powell Street BART station on Tuesday, Sept. 24, at 6pm. 

Domestic workers may get labor rights

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The California Legislature gave final approval to the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights on Sept. 12, legislation sponsored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-SF) to finally extend some labor rights to this largely female and immigrant workforce. Advocates are hopeful that Gov. Jerry Brown will sign it this time.

As we reported in a Guardian cover story, “Do we care?” (March 28), domestic and farm workers are the only two categories of employees exempted from federal labor law, and the caregiving professions are consistently undervalued in our economic and political systems. Last year, Brown vetoed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, expressing the concern that it might hurt the economy and cost jobs.

But advocates for the measure came back even stronger this year than last, and they recently accepted a set of amendments in the Senate that weaken the bill but may make it more palatable to Gov. Brown, including eliminating the requirement for rest and meal breaks and giving the measure a three-year sunset and commission to review its impacts.

“We’ve had discussions with the administration and we think we’re on the right track to get it signed,” Ammiano’s Press Secretary Carlos Alcala told the Guardian.

He emphasized that the bill still retains the requirement that domestic workers, who routinely work more than 40 hours per week, are entitled to overtime pay, something that Ammiano also emphasized in a prepared statement.

“This is a historic moment,” Ammiano said. “This now goes to the governor for his signature. That will give these workers, mostly women, the right to be paid fairly for overtime worked.”

Katie Joaquin, campaign coordinator the California Domestic Workers Coalition, said she’s excited to see the bill pass and hopeful that Brown will sign it this time.

“If he signs this bill, California would be the first state to give daily overtime rights to all domestic workers,” she said.

Gov. Brown has until Oct. 13 to sign it. 

How far will $10 an hour stretch in 2016?

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Earlier this week, just as media reports pointed out that America’s wealthiest 1 percent did better in 2012 than almost any other year in history, Gov. Jerry Brown came out in favor of a bill that would raise the state minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2016.

Last night, the Assembly approved the bill on a 51-25 vote, sending it onto the governor’s office. The development is almost certain to provoke howls from pro-business interests claiming it will wreak havoc on the economy. But what will it mean for minimum wage earners, whose take-home pay currently totals less than $300 a week for a full-time job?

Here are some statistics to put into perspective what it means to be a minimum wage earner in a world of rising costs and a widening gulf between top income earners and the rest.

  • The National Low Income Housing Coalition notes that a household must earn $25.78 per hour to afford fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment without spending 30 percent of their income. Couples earning California’s current $8 minimum wage can muster only a combined $16 an hour before taxes.
  • Based on this map illustrating San Francisco’s gaping rent affordability gap, a minimum-wage earner (making the 2012 minimum wage of $10.24 an hour) would have to hold down at least 3.4 full-time jobs to rent a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rate – even in the city’s less expensive areas like the Bayview or the Excelsior.
  • Fast food workers around the country are aiming higher than the $10 per hour Californians may have to look forward to by 2016 – organized food service employees have been rallying to be paid $15 an hour, a rate they see as an actual livable wage. According to this nifty calculator created by the Daily Beast, using data from University of Massachusetts economists Jeanette Wicks-Lim and Robert Pollin, the cost of paying McDonald’s workers this much could be recovered by charging 22 cents more for a Big Mac.
  • Finally, it’s worth considering the growing wealth gap between the wealthiest one percent and the rest. From 2007 to 2009, average real income for the bottom 99 percent fell by 11.6 percent, the largest two-year decline since the Great Depression, according to to an analysis by UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent lost an even higher percentage in that time. But then, during the economic recovery from 2009 to 2011, the one percent saw their incomes increase by 11.2 percent, while incomes of the bottom 99 percent shrunk slightly. Then, in 2012, the top one percent scored a 19 percent increase, their collective earnings accounting for 22.5 percent of total U.S. income. As Matthew O’Brien writes in The Atlantic, “it’s the one percent’s economy, and we’re just living in it.”

Legislature approves Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, but will Brown sign it this time?

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The California Legislature today gave final approval to the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, legislation sponsored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-SF) to finally extend some labor rights to this largely female and immigrant workforce. Advocates are hopeful that Gov. Jerry Brown will sign it this time.

As we reported in a Guardian cover story in March, “Do we care?,” domestic and farm workers are the only two categories of employees exempted from federal labor law, and the caregiving professions are consistently undervalued in our economic and political systems. Last year, Brown vetoed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, expressing the concern that it might hurt the economy and cost jobs.

But advocates for the measure came back even stronger this year than last, and they recently accepted a set of amendments in the Senate that weaken the bill but may make it more palatable to Gov. Brown, including eliminating the requirement for rest and meal breaks and giving the measure a three-year sunset and commission to review its impacts.

“We’ve had discussions with the administration and we think we’re on the right track to get it signed,” Ammiano’s Press Secretary Carlos Alcala told the Guardian.

He emphasized that the bill still retains the requirement that domestic workers, who routinely work more than 40 hours per week, are entitled to overtime pay, something that Ammiano also emphasized in a prepared statement.

“This is a historic moment,” Ammiano said. “This now goes to the governor for his signature. That will give these workers, mostly women, the right to be paid fairly for overtime worked.”

Katie Joaquin, campaign coordinator the California Domestic Workers Coalition, said she’s excited to see the bill pass and hopeful that Brown will sign it this time.

“If he signs this bill, California would be the first state to give daily overtime rights to all domestic workers,” she said, referring to its requirement that domestic workers get overtime pay after working nine hours in a day, the same standard as now applies to live-in caregivers. 

While she said it was hard to accept some of the amendments, such as removing the requirement that domestic workers get uninterrupted time for a full night’s sleep, she said they were acceptable conditions for this initial reform measure. And she said the sunset provision could actual work in their favor: “We plan to take that as an opportunity to fight for even more.”

The bill, AB241, was approved by the Assembly today on a 48-25 vote to concur with the amendment made in the Senate. Gov. Brown has until Oct. 13 to sign it. 

Petition to name Bay Bridge after Emperor Norton gains 1,000 signatures

San Francisco freelance writer John Lumea disagrees with California state legislators who want to name the western span of the Bay Bridge after former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

Nothing personal against Brown, says Lumea. He just believes that honor belongs instead to 19th century San Francisco eccentric Joshua Abraham Norton (1819-1880), the Scotsman who proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States in 1859 and printed his own currency.

Lumea has drafted and launched a Change.org petition asking the California Legislature to rename the iconic thoroughfare “The Emperor Norton Bay Bridge.” The petition cleared its initial goal of 1,000 signatures on Aug. 12. The Bay Bridge, the petition argues, fulfills Emperor Norton’s “140-year-old vision” of a bridge from San Francisco to Oakland “that has shaped the lives of generations.”

In 1872 Emperor Norton famously proclaimed the need for a suspension bridge between San Francisco, Goat Island (now Yerba Buena), and Oakland. While the Bay Bridge matches the literal proclamation, it also matches Emperor Norton’s social vision for the area, according to Lumea. 

“Emperor Norton was an early visionary of a regional economy,” said Lumea, “and a herald of the whole idea of a Bay Area as a region that shares ideas and relationships beyond economics.” A harbinger of Bay Area progressivism, Emperor Norton also used his local notoriety to advocate on behalf of women’s suffrage and the rights of marginalized populations. 

Past attempts to commemorate Emperor Norton’s special relationship to the Bay Bridge never got off the ground. In 2004, former San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin introduced a resolution to name the entire Bay Bridge after Emperor Norton, but the Board of Supervisors passed a modified version to dedicate just the new additions to the bridge. To date, Oakland and Alameda haven’t obliged.

This June, California State Assembly members had a completely different public figure in mind for the bridge’s name, and introduced a resolution to name the western span of the Bay Bridge after the former Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. In answer to that proposal, an online petition surfaced in July calling for state legislators to name that span of the Bay Bridge after Emperor Norton instead.

Less than two weeks ago, Lumea’s petition took things a step further, calling on the Legislature and the Governor to name the entire bridge after Emperor Norton.

“As for Willie Brown,” said Lumea, “surely any number of buildings in California could be used for his honor.”

Activists urge Gov. Brown not to veto the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights again

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Supporters of the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights are gathering outside the State Capitol Building this afternoon (Tues/13), culminating caravans that began with rallies in a half-dozen cities (including San Francisco this morning), hoping to extend basic labor protections to the people who care for our children and grandparents and clean our homes.

Although activists want to reach members of the California Senate, where Assembly Bill 241 awaits approval after clearing the Assembly (it now awaits action by the Senate Appropriations Committee), their main target is Gov. Jerry Brown, who vetoed a similar bill last year.

As we wrote in an April cover story on the issue, “Do We Care?,” Brown cited concerns that extending overtime, minimum wage, and other basic labor standards to domestic workers — who, along with farm workers, are the only workers exempt from federal labor laws — could cause employers to lay off or reduce the hours of domestic workers.

Activists said they were insulted by that paternalistic approach. Nonetheless, the bill was modified to address some of those concerns, said Carlos Alcala, spokesperson for Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, who sponsored the bill last year and again this year. For example, he said it eliminated the need for state agencies to write new regulations to enforcement the measure.

“It now puts the rules into the code. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. If we write the rules, then the rules say what we want,” Alcala told us. Still, he said they’ve gotten no indications from the Governor’s Office that Brown would sign this version: “It’s really hard to read where he is, but the good thing is we’ve already been through this.”

Activists with the California Domestic Workers Coalition — which brings together domestic workers, their employers, labor unions, and progressive groups — say they’ve been lobbying the Governor’s Office but they don’t know where he stands.    

“Gov. Brown has not given any indication he’s going to sign the bill,” said Katie Joaquin, who is coordinating the campaign. “This caravan has involved numerous leaders from various communities urging Gov. Brown to work with us.”

Last tango: Investigators sort through BART’s labor impasse

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Much of BART’s dirty laundry was aired at the first hearing on the negotiations in Oakland today, part of a seven-day investigation called by Gov. Jerry Brown after Sunday night’s talks between unions and management threatened the Bay Area with another strike.

The particulars of each side’s bargaining offers are normally hush-hush, but the hearing was a chance for the public to get a peek into what each side has been asking for. As the three-person panel on the governor’s fact-finding board sat at a long table facing the audience, management and unions sat on separate tables, much like that in a courtroom. 

Amid all the particulars of wages and economics, the unions levied  major allegations over safety concerns, saying that BART management hasn’t incorporated safety changes after the deaths of workers.

Saul Almanza, a BART representative from SEIU Local 1021 and a 17-year railroader, showed the board a set of photos of the places where BART workers had been killed on the job. 

“I’d like to start out with the picture with the part where Robert [Rhodes] was killed,” he said. “The area where Mr. Rhodes was killed was very dark, and remains that way today. Look at the picture to the left, and that’s where Mr. Rhodes was standing as the southbound train proceeded through the interlock. It was dark and loud, and that’s where he was struck as he stood there with no place to go.”

Almanza said that he brought up lighting improvements to his management at many levels, many times. When no improvements were made, that’s when the safety issues became a major point in bargaining, one sticking point that led to the four-day strike in early July. 

Paul Oversier, BART’s general manager of operations, made it a point to hammer home how pained the Bay Area was during the strikes, alleging that “people who depend on BART, who want to fill their prescriptions” may have been delayed, among others. 

He also touted some drastic numbers, saying the direct cost of the BART strike to the Bay Area was estimated at about $73 million per a weekday. 

“That doesn’t include empty tables at Bay Area restaurants, higher day care payments for working parents, or the  overall increase in personal stress throughout the region,” Oversier said. “None of these are counted in the economic model used for the BART strike.” 

But the union said that management did everything short of inviting them to strike, repeatedly used stalling tactics, making counter-offers that had changes of “point five percent” from their previous offers, and avoiding bargaining for as long as 33 hours at a time. 

Vincent Harrington has represented BART unions in contract negotiations since 1978, but he said this negotiation has had more hardball tactics than he’s seen in any negotiation. “This time around, we couldn’t even reach an agreement on ground rules,” he told the board. 

He also said that management used the media as a way to spread inaccurate information. He wanted to use the hearing as a chance to air the “facts versus myths.”

One commonly misreported figure is that BART workers pay only $92 per month into their healthcare, he said. “That doesn’t tell the full story. These workers contributed 1.627 percent of their wages into a fund to cover not only the ongoing health care of active employees, but also the retirees. There are 3,000 employees in the plans,” he said.

That brings the total to about $180 per person, he said, with a caveat. Some time ago, employer-provided healthcare was capped. “Additional costs beyond that cap would be on the workers and their families, not on BART,” he said.

Harrington also brought up a point of contention in negotiations that is familiar to regular BART riders: how bathrooms in the station are routinely locked and unavailable for use.
“We want BART to reopen bathrooms for patrons. We are not aware of a single transit station today that keeps the bathrooms locked. What does that mean for workers and our patrons? Where do they go? That means they relieve themselves in the stations,” he said. The bathrooms were locked since the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks at nearly every station. “We asked them to open them up. BART has said no.”

Management and the unions both presented their idealized BART systems, with management reiterating their need to invest in new trains and to control pension costs, and unions saying their workers deserve a living wage.

This will be the only public hearing day, and afterward the panel of Jacob Applesmith, Micki Callahan, and Robert L. Balgenort will put together a draft report for Brown, which is due Sunday. 

This could lead to a 60-day cooling off period where no strikes could take place, or Monday morning we could find ourselves with no BART trains and negotiations again at a standstill.

BART union negotiators said that they were willing to talk, and that they could even hammer out a deal with management by Sunday — if management is willing to bargain in good faith.

“It’s like a textbook on how to bargain but not actually be bargaining,” Harrington said. “It’s like a tango: you can’t do it by yourself very effectively.”

Any member of the public that wishes to send a comment about the BART negotiations may do so to communications@dir.ca.gov until 9am tomorrow [Thu/8]. The board said its report, once sent to the governor, would also be made public and likely available on the governor’s website.

 

 

 

Inmates on hunger strike win support from California legislators

The largest prison hunger strike in California history officially began on July 8, and though some California legislators have voiced support for state prison inmates, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) won’t cede an inch. Prisoners are in for a long battle.

Estimates indicate that over 29,000 inmates have joined ranks to refuse meals in 24 of the state’s 33 prisons and all four of the private, out-of-state facilities where California sends offenders. Additionally, thousands of inmates have declined to attend work and educational assignments since the strike commenced a week ago.

The CDCR released its own tally July 11, stating that there were only 12,421 participants. Asked about the discrepancy between numbers, CDCR Deputy Press Secretary Terry Thornton said, “we have inmates who skip a meal here and skip a meal there,” and clarifying that the estimate included only inmates who had met the CDCR’s official metric of nine consecutive missed meals up to that point. 

State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who authored a 2012 senate bill aimed at increasing media access in prisons which was vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown, issued a statement last week “join[ing] the protesters in urging prison officials to make more progress in establishing fair and humane policies in the prisons paid for by California taxpayers. We should not be the focus of international human rights concerns.”

This hunger strike, and an earlier pair that took place in 2011, was orchestrated by the Short Corridor Collective, a group of four inmates confined to security housing units (SHUs) at Pelican Bay State Prison, a supermax facility 15 minutes south of the Oregon border.

A network of legal advisers and prisoners’ rights advocates facilitated communication between participating inmates, and the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition is serving as the main conduit for information traveling from prisons to the public. The Coalition has summarized the goals of the strike in this video and mobilized support across the state. This past Saturday, July 13, several hundred activists participated in a rally at Corcoran, a California State Prison in the Central Valley.

In the Guardian last week, Toshio Meronek reported on the motivations behind the strike. The Short Corridor Collective’s five core demands include ending group punishment and long-term solitary confinement, abolishing a “debriefing policy” that encourages prisoners to exchange information about other inmates in return for favorable treatment, providing more nutritious food, and allowing for weekly phone calls and annual photographs. Inmate groups outside of Pelican Bay have documented separate sets of grievances, also published on the Solidarity Coalition’s website.

The 2011 strikes ended when the CDCR promised to create a formal “step down” process, through which SHU inmates could be vetted and prepared for reintroduction into general prison populations.

That program got underway last fall and, by all accounts, progressed slowly with limited success. In a press release issued Thursday, the CDCR disclosed that “since last October, [it] has conducted 382 case-by-case reviews of [gang] validated inmates housed indefinitely in SHUs. As of June 28, 208 inmates housed in SHUs have either been transferred or are approved for transfer to a general population facility and 115 inmates were placed in various phases of the Step-Down Program.”

At this rate, it would take nearly 20 years to conduct reviews of the over 10,000 inmates presently held in solitary confinement in California. Completion of the step down process, meanwhile, could take an additional four years for inmates enrolled in the first phase.

In a statement circulated shortly after the CDCR’s on Thursday, State Senator Mark Leno wrote, “I have concerns that this review process is moving too slowly and I would like to see it accelerated.” 

Leno stated “grave concerns about the Department’s over-reliance on the use of solitary confinement and in particular on a policy in which suspicion of gang affiliation is sufficient grounds for keeping an inmate in solitary confinement indefinitely.”

In a KALW radio interview Thursday morning, Thornton asserted that the CDCR doesn’t “negotiate with people who are trying to hold the prison system hostage. We don’t condone these types of disturbances. We will keep the lines of communication open. And we will manage the prisons as safely as possible with as little interruption to normal programming as possible.”

Also on Thursday, Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard’s confirmation was pushed through after being in limbo since Governor Brown appointed him in December 2012. Almost immediately, Beard declared all step-down reviews suspended, in what may well be the first official retaliatory action by the state against the hunger strikers.

Beard inherits not only the hunger strike, but a prison system long plagued by severe overcrowding, high recidivism rates, gross mismanagement of inmate health services, and a Supreme Court order to release close to 46,000 low-risk offenders.

“The prisoners are complaining about indeterminate solitary sentences not based on findings of misbehavior, but on alleged gang associations,” explained Rachel Meeropol, a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which filed a class action lawsuit against the state and CDCR last May alleging inhumane treatment of Pelican Bay prisoners through the use of security housing units. “California is an outlier in the number of prisoners that it holds in indeterminate solitary confinement.” In the CDCR system, inmates can spend decades in SHUs, sometimes without ever understanding what landed them there in the first place.

The hunger strikers seek a binding, written agreement from the CDCR that commits to a maximum sentence of five years in solitary confinement. Given the UN Human Rights Council’s recent judgment that “any imposition of solitary confinement beyond 15 days constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” and “should be subject to an absolute prohibition,” the Short Corridor representatives think their demand is reasonable.

In his statement last week, Ammiano indicated that he “continue[s] to be concerned about the policies being used to segregate prisoners who are deemed – often on weak public grounds – to be gang leaders.”

Donna Willmott, a member of the media committee for the Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition, said the vast majority of inmates in SHUs are there because they have received validation of gang affiliation from the CDCR. She described a “fundamentally flawed and corrupt” process, in which validating evidence is often scant.

“People have been sent to the SHU for indefinite terms for having Aztec art on their walls or a George Jackson book in their cells. And there’s no appeal process,” Willmott explained. “The way you get out of the SHU is parole, snitch, or die.”

Hungry for reform

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news@sfbg.com

Sitawa Jamaa is among the thousands of California inmates who, two years ago this summer, took part in the largest prison hunger strike in US history to protest harsh conditions and their invisibility to those outside prison walls.

Now, Jamaa and other prisoners are about to launch another hunger strike to highlight the system’s unfulfilled promises and the persistence of inhumane conditions.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) counted 6,000 prisoners throughout the state who refused food over several weeks in July 2011. During a follow-up strike that September, the number of prisoners missing meals swelled to 12,000, according to the federal receiver who was appointed by the courts to oversee reforms in the system. At least one inmate starved to death.

As one of four inmates who call themselves the Short Corridor Collective, Jamaa was a key organizer of the hunger strike. The group of inmates drafted a list of core demands calling for the strike when they weren’t met.

That was no easy task for Jamaa, who has spent most of the last 28 years alone in a windowless, 8-by-10 foot concrete cell in Pelican Bay State Prison, a supermax facility not far from the Oregon border, where some 1,200 men are held in similar conditions.

Inmates held in solitary confinement (in government lingo: “Segregated Housing Units”, or “SHU” for short) aren’t supposed to communicate with each other, verbally or through the mail. But they were able to organize with the help of their lawyers, who they are allowed to communicate with, and prison reform advocates outside.

Jamaa and other inmates are planning to launch a second hunger strike on July 8. The Short Corridor Collective has drafted a list of 45 demands, reflecting concerns ranging from inadequate health care to extreme solitary confinement—conditions that prison advocates characterize as cruel and unusual punishment.

The list is an extension of the five initial demands that Pelican Bay inmates presented in 2011 before initiating a hunger strike. Most of those demands were never met, or they were met only with lip service, leading prisoners back to where they started.

 

 

CONFINEMENT AS TORTURE

High on the list are concerns about conditions in the SHU, the amount of time prisoners can be made to spend in isolation, and the public’s inability to monitor the situation.

“I feel dead. It’s been 13 years since I have shaken someone’s hand and I fear I’ll forget the feel of human contact,” Pelican Bay prisoner Luis Esquivel told attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights in an interview.

Along with Jamaa and others, Esquivel is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the state of California that would effectively cap the time someone can spend in solitary confinement to 10 years.

“The hunger strike is an extreme act,” says Terry Kupers, a Piedmont-based psychology professor and clinical psychiatrist who has testified before the California State Assembly on long-term solitary confinement. “It’s very dangerous, and you can die. So when a group of prisoners go on hunger strike, it means they’ve exhausted all ways of expressing themselves and having their demands considered. And that’s very much the case here—some of these guys have been in SHU for 30 or 40 years.”

Kupers believes solitary confinement in California prisons violates the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, a view echoed by activists who’ve launched a statewide effort called the Stop the Torture Campaign.

United Nations Special Rapporteur Juan Méndez, an expert on torture, has called for a ban on solitary confinement where inmates are kept in isolation for 22 hours a day or more, saying the practice should only be used in very exceptional circumstances and for short time periods.

The CDCR has made some concessions and reforms since the 2011 hunger strikes, but critical issues have gone unaddressed. In Pelican Bay’s SHU, the men are now allowed beanie caps for when it gets cold. They can now have wall calendars to track time and bring a human touch to their surroundings.

Some prisoners have received exercise equipment, such as a handball or pull-up bar. Each year, they now have permission to have one photograph of themselves taken to send to family members, and prison administrators have signaled that they are looking into extending Pelican Bay’s visitation hours.

But more pressing issues have yet to be resolved, so the prisoners who drafted the 45 demands are resorting to starvation once again, despite official statements that it will do little to improve their conditions.

“Negotiation is something the department does not do,” says Terry Thornton, a spokesperson for CDCR. But the department has met periodically with a mediation team, consisting of lawyers and prison activists, who have communicated the inmates’ concerns and gone over their demands with prison authorities.

 

 

RESISTING REFORM

In 2002, the state of California was sued, and lost, in an 8th Amendment class-action lawsuit: Plata v. Davis. The federal judge overseeing the case called the medical treatment in California prisons “horrifying,” sinking “below gross negligence to outright cruelty,” ordering improved treatment and reductions in severe prison overcrowding.

A court-appointed doctor found that out of 193 deaths over the course of one year, 34 were “probably preventable,” but medical staff gave “well below even minimal standards of care.” Eleven years later, the state is still under federal receivership, until it can show that conditions have actually improved.

Court-appointed consultant Dr. Raymond Patterson wrote his 14th annual assessment report last April, blaming high suicide rates behind bars on a lack of “adequate assessment, treatment or intervention.” After it was released, he quit the post in frustration, writing: “It has become apparent that continued repetition of these recommendations would be a further waste of time and effort.”

So inmates are taking in upon themselves to accomplish what the courts and consultants have failed to do: reform conditions in the prisons.

As happened in 2011, in spite of what is planned to be a peaceful protest, prisons housing strikers will be, according to Thornton, on “modified program” (or “lockdown,” as prisoners call it). Generally, that means inmates aren’t allowed to leave their cells, even to shower.

New regulations created after the 2011 strikes call for no visits for striking prisoners, and for their canteen food to be confiscated. In addition, “inmate(s) identified as strike leaders, instrumental in organizing, planning, and perpetuating a hunger strike, shall be isolated from non-participating inmates.”

Since March of this year, the Guantanamo Bay prisoner hunger strike has made news around the world for highlighting alleged violations of international law. There, when a striker goes below 85 percent Ideal Body Weight, regulations dictate that he or she be shackled to a chair, fitted with a mask, and have tubes inserted through their nostrils into their stomachs for up to two hours at a time.

That didn’t happen in California back during the 2011 strikes, but the Division of Correctional Health Care Services devotes five pages of its policy handbook to outlining specific instructions for dealing with hunger strikers, including transfers to prison medical facilities where they could potentially be force-fed, another practice the UN regards as torture.

Prisoners and activists believe the policy was instituted as preemptive attack on the upcoming hunger strike. “We are concerned that, under the pretext of ‘welfare’ checks, prisoners are being harassed, targeted, and deprived of sleep as the date of planned hunger strikes and work stoppages approaches,” said Isaac Ontiveros of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity group. “Whatever the case, new CDCR Secretary Jeffery Beard has an opportunity to avoid the strike and begin to undo the indescribable harm that the California prison system has caused.”

 

 

DANGEROUS ASSOCIATIONS

Problems associated with solitary confinement are closely connected to CDCR’s most commonly used tool for sending prisoners like Jamaa into the SHU: the controversial “gang validation” process.

Once an inmate is listed in prison records as a gang member, he or she loses multiple rights on the assumption that they’re a threat to the order of the prison. With no disciplinary write-ups since 1995, Jamaa would have been eligible for parole in 2004, except for the gang validation that led to his indefinite SHU sentence.

Getting pegged as a member of a gang can happen easily. Guards can write prisoners up for anything from the possession of artwork deemed to be gang-related, to information obtained from confidential informants whose claims prisoners often aren’t allowed to refute and whose identities remain unknown to the targeted prisoners.

Last year, in the wake of hunger strikes, CDCR announced a “complex retooling” of the gang validation practices. The so-called Step Down process, created in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security, is meant to transition inmates out of gangs over the course of four years, with privileges gained over that time.

It might be the most significant of the reforms that followed the last hunger strike, but prisoners and their advocates criticize it as too lengthy of a process, subject to the arbitrary whims of the correctional officers overseeing a given prisoner. In fact, they say it may widen the definition of who counts as a gang member.

Manuel Sanchez, who is participating in the Step Down program at Corcoran State Prison, wrote in a letter that he is “seriously considering returning to SHU, where I’d be less harassed and I’d get more yard access more consistently.”

Compounding the problems in the prisons is a lack of transparency and public accountability.

“It’s like mentioning July 8 is anathema,” says San Francisco Bay View Editor Mary Ratcliff, whose African American-focused newspaper has been a CDCR censorship target.

From January to April of this year, Ratcliff said papers were being returned from Pelican Bay undelivered because they included articles about the hunger strikes, representing “material inciting participation in a mass disturbance,” and “a serious threat to the safety and security” of the prison, according to CDCR Administrator R.K. Swift.

“I think it’s remarkable that hunger strikes are considered a ‘disturbance,'” says Ratcliff. “A disturbance is supposed to mean a fight—something that threatens people. A hunger strike is a threat to no one except the people who are participating in it.”

Just as inmates can’t get news from the outside, they are also walled off from journalists who might cover them and the conditions they live in.

Since 1996, the CDCR has limited reporters to only interviewing prisoners they’ve selected. Last September, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed legislation that would have opened up media access to the prisons. “Giving criminals celebrity status through repeated appearances on television will glorify their crimes and hurt victims and their families,” he wrote, citing the media spectacle around Charles Manson.

But activists say the nearly $2 million Brown received from the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) during his successful bid for governor in 2010 had more to do with it than infamous serial killers.

Assembly member Tom Ammiano, who authored the most recent bill, stressed that “Press access isn’t just to sell newspapers. It’s a way for the public to know that the prisons it pays for are well-run. I invite the governor to visit the SHU to see for himself why media access is so important.”

 

 

DRASTIC MEASURES

Last time around, Jamaa lost 19 pounds. Deprived of sunlight, the Oakland-born man has developed melanin and vitamin D deficiencies that have lightened his normally dark brown skin. He suffers stomach problems and swollen thyroid glands that he didn’t have before prison. Starvation is a possibly lethal proposition. “Make no mistake, none of us wants to die. But we are prepared to, if that’s what it takes to force a real reform,” he and other strike leaders wrote in a statement last December. Jamaa’s sister, Marie Levin, who has organized monthly vigils for the strikers at Oakland’s monthly First Fridays/Art Murmur event, is worried about how her brother’s body will cope this time around. “It’s something that we as family members don’t want them to have to experience again,” she notes with anxiety. Yet both the prisoners and their advocates on the outside say they can’t simply let dehumanizing conditions in California’s prison system continue indefinitely. “I think things have changed, but not substantially in terms of actual conditions,” Kupers argues. “What is changed is the CDCR had to recognize the strikers, and conceded some of the things. And subsequently, the various prisoner groups have come together and made a commitment not to have violence between groups inside the prisons. This is huge advancement.” But unless all 45 demands are met, they say the strike will commence July 8. For now, Jamaa and others are readying their bodies for hunger, for a cause they believe goes far beyond prison walls. “Know this,” he wrote from SHU, words that needed to be smuggled out through unconventional means to get around an official wall of silence. “I am a … Prisoner of War, and I serve the interest of all people.”

Poor Scott Walker–the sun ain’t gonna shine anymore

18

Anyone that believes that merit and achievement in governing mean anything at all should stay away from Wisconsin.

The Badger state, cheesehead central, home to the Packers, Brewers, Bucks and Violent Femmes. Also home to perhaps the most dismal head of state in the US, Scott Walker.

(To any music fan, the image conjured up by “Scott Walker” is that of the legendarily reclusive, Jaques Brel-like vocalist. But I digress).

Having won the governor’s seat in that state without having said anything about busting up public employee unions, that’s what Mr. Walker aimed to do. And set off massive protests in Madison and escaped recall by the hair of his chinny chin chin. Walker’s claim is that unburdening the state of the pensions and bloated salaries would set off an economic wave of growth–and did it?

No. The state plummeted in job growth and real wages declined at twice the national level. 87,000 Wisconsins have been heaved off the state’s massively successful BadgerCare program, presumably to join all the other unemployed Wisconsins that were gainfully employed before Walker took office. 

One would think that given the state’s atrocious fiscal performance that Walker’s ambition to ascend would be over. Wrong again–he is considered a viable presidential candidate in 2016. How can this be?

It’s simple: To win over the Republican base, the most important quality a candidate can have is a gleeful sadism when it comes to people of modest means plus a directly proportionate propensity to salad toss the very wealthy (Walker was pranked figuratively doing same to the nation’s big bankroller of lunacy). Even though the vast majority of said base are people of modest means themselves. 

A few weeks ago, I noted polling that showed the Republican party at 59% disapproval, a record high. Recent polls have shown the GOP getting annihilated in 2016 by the AntiChrist herself, the only Republican that polls decently is perhaps their last sane figurehead. Which makes sense–if what turns your base on is pointless cruelty, then you really have become a “crazy clown cult”. Venerating a complete failure is exhibit A, case closed. 

 

Light bulbs, birth defects and sin

21

Try though I may, I cannot understand the American right in 2013.

Thumbing through the news this morning, I came across two stories that are absolutely mind-boggling. The first is a sad commentary on the kind of mindset that is damaging and pervasive to and among the people that have it. The second is simply incredible.

The first was a study done on the benefits of CFL bulbs–those are the ones that last longer and are cheaper than incandescent ones. When not labeled as per “good for the environment”, conservatives and liberals alike preferred these, but when labeled “green” or environmentally friendly, right wingers were far less likely to want them.

Roll that over in your mind. A cheaper alternative that lasts longer is less desirable because as an added feature, it’s better for the only planet we now inhabit. What next? Right wingers declining cancer meds that are biodegradable? What this says to me is that they’re so vested in their ridiculous ideology, they’re willing to pay more and suffer more to prove a point that even they can’t articulate.

The second is even more astounding. E.W. Jackson is running for Lt. Governor in Virginia (Republican) and even though he has unleashed some whoppers before (yoga is satanic, Planned Parenthood is worse for African Americans than the KKK), apparently in 2008, this minister wrote that birth defects are caused by sin.

Organic and genetic causes, nah. You were nice to a gay guy once. You rubbed one out to nudies. You and your partner rooted around unmarried and on contraceptives–that’s why your baby has Down’s. As even line-toeing hardcore rightists have children with birth defects, this is not a winning electoral strategy.

Virginia is a large state. It is in the US in 2013. That anyone anywhere would espouse these ludicrous ideas and be anywhere near the levers of any power is mind boggling. And yet, the GOP’s candidate for governor hasn’t disavowed Jackson–and why?

Because when you’re marketed to shut in cable and radio junkies, you end up with them. The GOP’s base is now the dregs, the pits, the most pathetic of pathetic–what used to be fringe and laughed off is now what shows up at conventions and nominates idiots.

Until such time as their moneyed elite swallow their pride and heave these half-wits out, this will continue. This is the bed they’ve made, lie in it. 

The adulation of the technoriche

31

It’s hardly news at this point that billionaire tech mogul Sean Parker tore up a public campground to build the sets for his $10 million fantasy wedding in Big Sur. And it’s been widely reported that Parker paid a $2.5 million fine to the Coastal Commission, which he tried to spin as a wonderful environmental gift to improve the state park system.

But I read with interest in the Chron that both Lite Guv Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris were reportedly at the wedding. Both are very smart people; both have the ability to observe the world around them. So I have to wonder:

Didn’t either Newsom or Harris think it was a little bit odd to see all this new development in a protected area? Did it occur to either of them that their richy-rich-rich pal, who has a history of snubbing laws he doesn’t like, might have done the same thing here?

Could the state’s top law-enforcement official and a member of the state Lands Commission really look at artificial ponds and large new structures, which involved bulldozers to create, and not say:

Huh? Aren’t there rules against this sort of thing?

Okay, it was a wedding, and nobody wants to be the one to throw the turd in the punchbowl. The politician guests were there to celebrate with a person who is capable of helping to fund future campaigns (and since both Harris and Newsom are considered possible candidates for governor when Jerry steps down, I bet they had a great time together).

But didn’t either of them feel at least a little weird about it?

I called Newsom’s office and left a message for Dierdre Hussey, his press person. She hasn’t called back. Nick Pacilio in Harris’s office told me someone would get right back to me; hasn’t happened yet. So we don’t know what the two were thinking.
But I do know this: The level of adulation of the technoriche has reached levels we haven’t seen since the Gilded Age.

Technology columnist James Temple puts it this way:

To the outside observer, Parker’s actions look like contempt for the piddling rules that we non-billionaires can’t buy our way around. And they certainly do nothing to alter the increasingly popular local view of the tech class as selfish and aloof, conspicuously relishing their venture capital rounds and IPO winnings, as a growing portion of the Bay Area population struggles to make the skyrocketing rents.

And politicians seem to adore the most selfish and aloof (and clueless) among them.

Take Mayor Ed Lee’s comments about Airbnb. The company is clearly cheating on its taxes. The city treasurer investigated the situation and ruled unequivocally that airbnb needs to collect and remit the Transit Occupancy Tax money that should be charged on its rooms.
When Michael Krasny asked the mayor on Forum about the issue, Lee defended airbnb (which is funded by his buddy Ron Conway), saying that the company is just “making arguments” about whether it owes the tax.

But that’s just false: The arguments are over. The company argued with the tax collector and lost. And it isn’t arguing anywhere anymore — not in court, not in the political sector. It’s just …. not paying. And because it’s a tech company, and Conway is nurturing it, the mayor seems just fine with that.

It appears that big corporations are big corporations. They may claim that they won’t be evil, and they may be headed by people in their 20s who dress like hipsters, and they may make really cool products — but their operating just like the robber barons of old. And the great wealth they’ve created has, to a great extent, also created great arrogance.

Before the trolls accuse me of fomenting class warfare, let me repeat: I didn’t start this war. I didn’t rig the political and tax systems so that the middle class would be wiped out as all of the net new wealth in a generation goes to the top 1 percent. I’d much prefer we all share in the bounty, as the middle class and working class did in the post-War era.

Meanwhile: Does anyone really need a $10 million wedding in a state park?

Nothing without daddy

13

Reading Rand Paul’s prescription for a bigger and better GOP, I was struck by an interesting thought–since 1988, only one Republican nominee (coincidentally the only one I thought of voting for, Bob Dole), owed virtually none of his success in life to his dad. ( Rand Paul to say the least, owes everything to his dad). The rest–wow!

George HW Bush’s dad was a US senator. Bush’s son’s dad was the POTUSA. McCain’s dad was an admiral and Romney’s the governor of Michigan/CEO of American Motors. (In McCain’s case, his second wife’s dad bankrolled him–double nepotism!).

In contrast, for the Democrats in this time frame, only Al Gore was a “daddy’s boy”.

For a party that believes in “pulling yourselves up by the bootstraps” to become a “self made man” that’s a “maker and not a taker”, their role models are more or less the opposite in real life, ain’t they?

 

Activists to governor: Please un-frack California

A statewide coalition of more than 100 environmental organizations has formed to pressure California Gov. Jerry Brown to ban fracking – an environmentally harmful oil extraction method technically known as hydraulic fracturing.

On May 30, environmental activists from the Center for Biological Diversity, Credo Action, Food and Water Watch, Environment California and other nonprofits rallied outside the state building on Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco to launch the campaign and hand-deliver stacks of petitions calling on Brown to put an end to the practice. The action coincided with a similar show of opposition to fracking at the state building in Los Angeles.

Fracking has already taken off in Pennsylvania and North Dakota, and has the potential to transform vast swaths of landscape in California, where a geologic formation known as the Monterey Shale is estimated to contain some 15 billion barrels of oil.

With chants of “Jerry Brown, take a stand, don’t let frackers ruin our land,” the activists waved signs proclaiming, “Don’t frack California.”

“In California, water is more precious than oil,” said Becky Bond, political director at Credo Action. “It’s not just a question of will this produce some jobs.”

Bond added that the activists were targeting Brown because “we know that special interests have so much more influence in the Legislature than they do in the governor’s mansion.” And besides, she added, “even if good legislation passes, it ends up on the governor’s desk.”

Earlier in the week in Sacramento, legislation that would have imposed an indefinite moratorium on fracking was scaled back, much to the dismay of environmentalists. AB 1323 was introduced by Assemblymember Holly Mitchell, and would have imposed a statewide moratorium on fracking until an independent evaluation of the health and environmental impacts of the practice could be completed.

However, changes to the language of the proposed bill did away with the independent evaluation process and called for a moratorium only until the California Department of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources finished hammering out a set of regulations around the practice. A similar piece of legislation to impose a fracking moratorium, AB 1301, was kept on suspense file and won’t move forward this year.

“It renders the moratorium essentially meaningless,” Food and Water Watch political director Adam Scow told the Bay Guardian shortly after the changes were made. “We have a bill that is inadequate for protecting Californians from fracking.”

And that’s partly why Brown is the new target for anti-fracking activists. Elijah Zarlin, a campaign manager at Credo, jumped on the megaphone during the rally. “We’ve seen what fracking has done in Pennsylvania,” he said. “Governor Brown has the power to not let that happen in California.”

Short cuts

2

Lots of stuff in news worth looking at today.

We bag on Texas and their generally idiotic governor a lot but recently, he and they did the right thing–under pressure from Texas’ parents, the state is going to slash the number of “No Child Left Behind” tests imposed on school children. NCLB is one of the worst educational ideas ever implemented. Teaching to the test teaches nothing and when its been shown in considerably poorer and smaller nations that drilling and rote are worthless, America should take stock. Good for Rick. That he sort of reversed Bush’s policy (whose actual aim was to enrich a family member, of course) showed some stones.

John McCain snuck over Syria’s border recently to meet with anti-Assad rebels. As the embargo on sending said rebels military aid is ending anyway, it’s hard to say what the purpose of the trip was. As usual, the military’s “worst pilot in history” was advocating more arms, more involvement and naturally, more bloodshed. One would think that after the particularly disasterous embrace of arming an enemy’s opposition in the 80’s and 90’s, the US would have learned, but as Senator McCain has never met a conflict he didn’t like (or that didn’t enrich his friends). no surprise.

Newsweek is for sale again. Its purchase in the first place, says money heavyweight Barry Diller “was a mistake”. It is operating at a loss, even online. Fact is, online content in a “general news” format is very hard to monetize. It’s even hard to monetize in specialty and local forms, but easier. This magazine’s day is over. C’est la vie.

More later!

 

Selector: May 29-June 4, 2013

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WEDNESDAY 29

John Hodgman

John Hodgman has parlayed his starring role as the awkward PC in Apple Computer commercials into a multifaceted comedy career. The humorist typically portrays the authoritative know-it-all, dispensing faux expertise on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and through his trilogy of satirical almanacs titled Complete World Knowledge. Unsatisfied with conveying pseudo-information to the masses, quasi-legal expert (fake) Judge John Hodgman also adjudicates over everyday silly disputes on a weekly Internet podcast. His thoughtful, goofy, non-legally binding rulings are a regular feature in the New York Times Magazine. Adam Savage of Mythbusters‘ fame provides a clever and fitting foil. (Kevin Lee)

In conversation with Adam Savage

7:30pm, $27

Nourse Theatre

275 Hayes, SF

(415) 392-4400

www.cityarts.net

 

“Drinking/Songs: A Night of Beer and the Music That Goes With It”

I feel a beer coming on! Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and public radio’s VoiceBox have joined forces for an “inter-active beer-tasting and live music event,” i.e., a night of singing and musical revelry the way nature intended — with frothy steins of that beloved thirst quencher known to barstool Pavarottis everywhere as a brewski. With musical entertainment from the Fill A Steins a cappella vocal music ensemble and a live discussion on the cultural history of this love affair between pipes and pints with cicerone Sayre Piotrkowski, the Fill A Steins, and VoiceBox‘s Chloe Veltman, there’s even an added touch of class with your glass. (Robert Avila)

8pm, $20

50 Mason Social House, SF

(415) 608-0133

drinkingsongs2.eventbrite.com


THURSDAY 30

Skull and Bones NightLife

Like Halloween in springtime, the Cal Academy’s popular Thursday evening nightlife event this time explores the creepier side of life — animal insides. At Skull and Bones, you can play like Indiana Jones — or at least, an amateur archaeologist — and watch volunteers assemble the bones of a skeleton, those of a juvenile offshore orca whale. Plus, Lee Post and Academy field associate/bone collector Ray “Bones” Bander will be on hand to answer the thorny questions, Icee Hot DJs Rollie Fingers and Ghosts on Tape will be spinning spooky tracks, and Paxton’s Gate will have a station of treasures; if you’ve ever visited the Mission curiosities-flora-and-fauna shop, you know they’ll have some good stuff on hand. This time, they’ll show Jason Borders’ skull art, and conduct a hands-on owl pellet dissection. SCRAP will have crafts at the ready, EndGames Improv will tickle your funny bone (ha! laughing already), and the planetarium will have a presentation on the “bones’ of the Milky Way. It’ll be a great way to bone up on the galaxy (sorry). (Emily Savage)

6pm, $10–<\d>$12

California Academy of Sciences

55 Music Concourse Dr., SF

(415) 379.8000

www.calacademy.org

 

San Francisco Green Film Festival

The third San Francisco Green Film Festival opens tonight with a tale of true Bay Area environmental heroes. Nancy Kelly’s doc Rebels With a Cause — first seen locally at the 2012 Mill Valley Film Festival and opening at the Roxie Fri/31 — offers an inspiring look at the Marin County activists who fought to preserve the NorCal coastline at a time when “conservation” was a dirty word. The rest of the Green fest’s over 50 films include Bidder 70, about climate activist Tim DeChristopher; Jon Bowermaster’s “fracktivist” tale Dear Governor Cuomo; and Kalyanee Mam’s Cambodia-set doc A River Changes Course, which just picked up a much-deserved Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. (Cheryl Eddy)

Through June 5, $12 per film (passes, $100–<\d>$200)

Various venues, SF and Berk.

www.sfgreenfilmfest.org

 

Cheap Girls

Call them loud, reckless, naïve — but don’t call them cheap. Though cranking out a big garage rock is something Cheap Girls could do in their sleep — and well — they’ve been known to slow it down on the few tracks that showcase their pop side and tight vocals. Like on earworm “Her and Cigarettes,” for example, it’s hard to believe this self-ascribed power pop rock group from Lansing, Mich. is not a small acoustic trio. “I love her and cigarettes/we took the long way, so we could have another,” whimpers vocalist Ian Graham in the song, embodying the wayward insecurities and heightened drama of adolescence itself. The group doesn’t present its songs; it relives every single one right there on stage. (Hillary Smith)

With Make Do and Mend, Diamond Youth

9pm, $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 626-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com


FRIDAY 31

Walking Distance Dance Festival

Building on last year’s Walking Distance Dance Festival, featuring local dance, ODC Theater Director Christy Bolingbroke has changed the formula. With a sure touch for vision leavened with reality, she has assembled a line-up that, with the exception of opening night, pairs locals with visitors. First up, however, will be Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters, and Kate Weare and Company — once they were local, now they are visitors. Other fab choices are Nicole Klaymoon’s House of Matter and ODC/Dance’s Cut-Out Guy. New in town will be Brian Brooks (NY), and casebolt and smith (LA). You see each program in Studio B at ODC Commons and the B’way Theater across the Street. Amazing how much fun last year the simple act of walking from one venue to the other was. (Rita Felciano)

Fri/31, 7pm; Sat/1, 4pm, $20

ODC/Commons and B’way/ODC Theater, SF.

(415) 863-9834

www.odcdance.org/walkingdistance

 

Hi Ho Silver Oh

The LA-based band Hi Ho Silver Oh converts even the toughest of listeners with its harmonies. Frontperson Casey Trela’s vocals communicate a yearning I’m not sure I’ve felt before. The group’s humor will lure you in almost as much as its sometimes giddy, occasionally melancholic sound. The band’s affinity for good times shines through while performing great tracks, which makes for a set worth checking out. The video for the band’s “My Confessor” displays just this. It profiles a spelling bee gone wrong, starring a washed out principal, juxtaposed with clean vocals, attractive guitar rhythms, and evocative lyrics — it’s an encompassing reflection of the group. Hi Ho Silver Oh opens tonight for Mice Parade. (Smith)

9pm, $12

Brick and Mortar

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 800-8782

www.brickandmortarmusic.com

 

Jazzanova’s Jurgen von Knoblauch

“This is one of Jazzanova’s major talents: to combine pieces from very different musical genres. And the linchpin holding them together is generally soul.” That’s how Jurgen von Knoblauch describes his German supergroup Jazzanova, now approaching two decades of producing and performing a blend of jazz, boss nova, soul, Latin, deep house, and electronica. The collective’s versatility means it can shift from individual DJs like founding member von Knoblauch spinning at nightclubs across Europe to a nine-person live performance band performing around the world. Von Knoblauch also maintains a music show on German radio with two of his fellow Jazzanova DJs and helps select new talent for the group’s record label Sonar Kollektiv. (Lee)

With Fred Everything, Joey Alaniz

9pm, $10–<\d>$15

Monarch

101 Sixth St, SF

(415) 284-9774

www.monarchsf.com


SATURDAY 1

Ludovico Einaudi

Ludovico Einaudi avoids describing his music any one way; he likely wouldn’t call it classical or modernist, because he feels a plethora of influences inform his pieces. It’s likely if you attend one of his performances you too will have a tough time describing it in one phrase anyway. He offers viewers a cathartic experience — one that is felt on many levels — and takes them through the big emotions of ecstasy and doom, the same emotions Rothko was interested in conveying in his paintings. Like the famous painter, Einaudi’s work is presented on a grand scale. He plays with a raw emotion seldom seen in similar pianists. The intrinsically deep, emotional tones presented in his performances are emphasized by his 11-piece band that includes a string section.(Smith)

7:30 p.m., $40–<\d>$85

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 345-0900

www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

 

No Regular Play

If you haven’t heard of ‘Play,’ a monthly party put on by Listed Productions and the End Up, all you really know is that it’s described as “recess for adults.” Which is perfect if you, like me, have the Peter Pan syndrome that’s particular to the Bay Area, holding down jobs but still holding onto acting like a kid the rest of the time. When I’ve been hula-hooping recently — on breaks, in the handicapped bathroom stall at work — I’ve been listening to Endangered Species by Wolf + Lamb compatriots No Regular Play, whose playful shows mix funky house with live vocals and fresh trumpet blasts. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Butane (Crosstown Rebels), Bells & Whistles (AYLI), Alex Blackstock (Less is More)

10pm-6am, $15 advance

End Up

401 Sixth St., SF

(415) 357-0827

www.theendup.com


SUNDAY 2

“The Globalization Trilogy”

For the last 12 years, local filmmaker Micha X. Peled’s documentaries have exposed the human toll of corporate greed around the world.

The Rafael is showing the completed trilogy over the next week, with the filmmaker present at each screening. 2001’s Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town chronicles the decimating impact America’s favorite retailer (and arguably worst employer) has on local businesses. 2005’s China Blue provides a rare, clandestine peek inside a Chinese garment sweatshop-factory. His latest Bitter Seeds ponders the epidemic of small-farmer suicides in India — over a quarter-million in 16 years — due to the impoverishing effect of genetically modified seeds from US agri-giant/villain Monsanto. (Dennis Harvey)

Through June 9, $6.50-10.75

Rafael Film Center

1118 Fourth St., San Rafael


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Planning for displacement

70

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.