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Tenderloin upstart Book & Job aims to level the art-gallery playing field

Sue Vaughan
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Carson Lancaster is tired of the bullshit. He’s tired of watching the same handful of mainstream galleries hang the same artists and shun a majority of San Francisco’s young, talented artists. “It’s like that scene in Scanners. You know, the one where the guy’s head explodes? That’s what it feels like every time I walk into one of those places,” he said.

Lancaster is the owner of Book & Job, an art gallery that seeks to do exactly the opposite: make San Francisco’s art market accessible to both artists and consumers. Located on Geary and Hyde Streets, Book & Job blends into the grit of the Tenderloin and in no way resembles the blue-chip megaliths huddled toward Union Square. The space is tiny. There’s no team of attractive sales people standing at the entrance, no bubbly event photographers milling around, no tuxedos, and no free champagne.

However, it isn’t uncommon to see a small throng of young people spilling from the entrance on a given Saturday night, or passers-by (likely coming from galleries down the street) stopping in their tracks to gander at the commotion — looking for something, anything, that slightly resembles uncharted territory: candid photographs from inside of a ramshackle San Francisco mosque, say, or a couple of naked male performers feeding each other wedding cake while dancing to Celine Dion. That, Lancaster feels, is an art scene.

Which is why Lancaster is all ears if an artist wants to show work at Book & Job. Though it began mainly for photographers, in the past couple of years the small gallery has broadened its horizons to include just about anything — paintings, zines, and performances. “People come in all the time and say, ‘I like this place because it’s pure, because it’s real, because it’s no bullshit,” he continued. “It’s known in the community as the no bullshit gallery.”

Sat/13, Lancaster’s walls will feature work from an analog photography club called Find Rangers, which sent out an open call to artists around the world. Lancaster and a group of colleagues started the club for many of the same reasons he opened his gallery. “It’s a grassroots affair,” he said. 

As a former photography student at Academy of Art University, Lancaster wondered why many of the best students would flee San Francisco after graduating, but he eventually came to a realization: “The San Francisco art scene sucks. It is very close-minded, unfriendly, not open to interpretation, set in the same ways. And for young artists at CCA [California College of the Arts], SFAI [San Francisco Art Institute], and Academy of Art, to go to an art gallery in the city [and inquire about showing their work], they’re going to be told to go fuck themselves in so many words.”

Lancaster spoke of a disconnect between San Francisco’s relatively insular gallery scene and the high number of art students in the area. From 2002 to 2012, San Francisco received more art funding per capita than any another city in the nation, according to a 2014 study released by the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago. And yet, the city’s abundance of talented artists cannot break in and are thus forced to seek greener pastures, usually in New York or Los Angeles.

Lancaster believes that this is largely because art galleries in San Francisco have tight business models, and that giving artists a chance just doesn’t allow them to stay afloat. These galleries, he said, would rather show artists they know can sell. “They have their roster of artists,” he explained. “December is Ferris Plock, or September is Jay Howell or Mike Giant, and it’s the same names over and over again. It’s more like a meat factory. It’s the meat aisle.”

This is especially prevalent nowadays, Lancaster explained, as many of the higher-end galleries are struggling themselves with out-of-control rents and the city’s shifting cultural values. In the past year, particularly downtown, a rash of galleries have either relocated or completely shuttered.

But Lancaster isn’t worried about Book & Job. His lease is written such that his rent stays fixed — and relatively low — until 2022. For next eight years, Book & Job cannot be priced out, even as the neighborhood continues to transform around it. “This is place is blowing up,” he said, pointing out the new cafés and restaurants that are now sprouting up around the Tenderloin. All the same, in the coming years Book & Job will serve as a small preservation of what remains of city’s DIY ethos, a channel through which local artists can be discovered without having to flee the city. 

“It’s a really nervy thing to do,” Sarah Barsness, one of Lancaster’s former Academy of Art teachers, says of the gallery. She explained that it’s extremely difficult to open a successful art gallery in the city, let alone one as “subversive” as Book & Job. “He’s doing the thing that you’re never supposed to do, which is having a lot of work that he sells for nothing, and spreading it out to a different, broader population — younger people and fellow students,” she explained. 

She even compared Lancaster to Andy Warhol and other pioneers of the pop art movement, who sought to strip art of its “preciousness” and “elitism” by selling prints for pennies on the dollar. Ultimately, Barsness explained, this made art more democratic. “It’s really important right now because we’re at a high point of elitists,” she said. “It’s over the top.”

By making art more democratic, she explained, galleries like Book & Job “bring artists back into the conversation,” making art more about art and less about business. But Barsness believes many San Francisco galleries have always operated this way. “San Francisco collectors are notorious for not buying San Francisco art,” she said, explaining that galleries have had to survive by bringing in work from other cities. 

While Barsness feels that the economic cards are not stacked in Lancaster’s favor, she feels that Book & Job embodies much of what art stands for. “Art is not supposed to preach. It’s supposed to show you an alternative way of thinking, so that questions emerge,” she said. “[Book & Job] is a little work of art, in that sense, making you ask: Do galleries have to operate this way? Is it wrong to have galleries operate this way? And why is it wrong?”

For Lancaster, however, Book & Job’s place in the art world isn’t so much subversive as it is deeply personal. In March, Lancaster found his close friend, renowned San Francisco artist Shawn Whisenant, dead from a health issue in the back room of the gallery, where he had been sleeping. Whisenant was a San Francisco street artist and photographer and one of the last “true” San Francisco artists, according to KQED’s Kristin Farr, who remembered him fondly after his passing.

And for Lancaster, Whisenant’s artistic ethos of “no B.S.” will always shape how Book & Job is run. A day doesn’t go by in which Lancaster doesn’t think about what Whisenant would have done. “He’s the angel and devil on my shoulder,” he said.

The room in which Whisenant died has been converted into a dark room, and for now Lancaster plans to share it with other like-minded photographers and use it to hone his own skills. “If someone is checking their phone and they see my open call [for a Find Rangers Camera Club exhibit], and they dust off their camera and buy a roll of film, I’m doing something right,” he said. “That’s not just me selling a booklet to help pay rent, that’s helping someone’s creativity … and that’s really cool.”

Find Rangers Camera Club exhibit

Sat/13, 7-11pm

Book & Job Gallery

838 Geary, SF

www.book-job.com

Schools not prisons

Sasha Cuttler
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Schools not prisons

OPINION Jay-Z doesn’t usually make political endorsements.

But at a recent concert in Los Angeles, he took the rare and unexpected step of endorsing a California ballot initiative. “California, build more schools, less prisons,” he rapped to the crowd, and then encouraged them to all vote yes on Proposition 47.

Jay-Z chose the right issue to speak out about. On an otherwise quiet state ballot, Californians have the opportunity to make history this fall with Prop. 47, also known as the “Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act.”

While California has long been known as an incarceration trailblazer for all the wrong reasons, Prop, 47 will give us an opportunity to reduce overcrowded prisons and bloated corrections budgets, roll back the failed drug war, and reinvest in public education.

Most importantly, Prop 47 will reduce the penalty for most nonviolent, non-serious crimes, such as drug possession, shoplifting, and bouncing a check, from a felony to a misdemeanor. These offenses are closely associated with drug addiction or poverty, and are not well addressed in prison.

This change will also be retroactive, allowing us to make amends for misguided policies. Approximately 10,000 inmates will be eligible for re-sentencing, helping to alleviate California’s notoriously overcrowded prisons. Hundreds of thousands of formerly incarcerated people with past felony convictions will have them reduced to misdemeanors, lifting existing barriers to employment and housing.

The estimated $150–<\d>$250 million in savings each year will be reinvested into K-12 education, victim compensation, and community-based rehabilitation and re-entry programs.

There are a number of reasons why Prop. 47 would be a huge step forward for California. First, we have to stop wasting money unnecessarily locking people up for long periods of time. California currently spends $10 billion on corrections, which has increased 1500 percent since 1981. Even as crime rates have fallen, corrections spending keeps going up.

The astronomical increase in prison spending has squeezed public education and services. We spend $62,000 to imprison someone for one year, while only about $9,000 per K-12 student. California built 22 prisons since 1980, but we built just one university. Imagine if both of those numbers were flipped. In light of all of our urgent priorities as a state, the cost of imprisonment for minor offenses simply isn’t worth it.

Second, prison time and felony convictions can have a devastating impact on individuals and communities. When a person is sent away to prison, they are separated from their family, community, and employment. Their time spent behind bars often leads to serious negative consequences for their physical health, mental health, and overall wellbeing. When they come out, they can face insurmountable barriers to employment, housing, and assistance.

Others feel the impact too: Hundreds of thousands of children in California have parents who are incarcerated. A recent study showed that for many kids, having a parent in prison is more detrimental to a child’s health and development than divorce or even the death of a parent.

Third, locking people up for drug crimes and petty theft is ineffective. Many California prisoners need drug or mental health treatment, not longer prison sentences. There are now three times as many people with mental illnesses in prisons and jails than there are in hospitals.

And instead of treating drug use as a health issue, we have criminalized it and enforced laws selectively, with communities of color bearing the brunt of this counterproductive war on ourselves.

California has long been one of the country’s pioneers in creative and expansive ways to lock people up. We were one of the first to pass a “Three Strikes” law, and have the unfortunate distinction of being the only prison system found by the US Supreme Court to be unconstitutionally overcrowded.

But just like our fellow citizens who made mistakes in the past, California too deserves a second chance. Prop. 47 gives us our own shot at redemption.

Prop. 47 can provide a mandate for a better California, one where we support each other and invest in our people, and put an end to misguided approaches that have been punitive and wasteful. Demanding “Schools Not Prisons,” a new California majority is emerging, one that will shape our state’s future this November and beyond.

Matt Haney is an elected member of San Francisco’s Board of Education and the co-founder of #Cut50, a new initiative to cut the prison population nationally by 50 percent in 10 years.

 

Taking a cue from SF, California Legislature bans plastic bags and offers paid sick leave

Sasha Cuttler
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Taking a cue from SF, California Legislature bans plastic bags and offers paid sick leave

California lawmakers took two big steps forward last week, passing a statewide plastic bag ban and a measure providing workers with three sick days a year, both issues borrowed from San Francisco. California is the second state to pass each bill, with Hawaii banning plastic bags in January of this year and Connecticut enacting a similar sick leave measure in 2012.

Gov. Jerry Brown pushed hard for the paid sick leave measure, which barely made it through both houses after losing steam following an amendment that excluded in-home health care workers. Passing the plastic bag ban was also uncertain near the end, but it passed the Assembly with a 44-29 vote and then made it through the Senate by a 22-15 count.

“It took six years of advocacy and the building of a grassroots movement to make this happen,” California Director of Clean Water Action Miriam Gordon said in a statement about the plastic bag ban. “But with 121 local ordinances already on the books across California, our Legislature finally followed the will of the people.”

Brown was similarly thrilled about the passing of the sick leave bill, calling the legislation a “historic action to help hardworking Californians…This bill guarantees that millions of workers – from Eureka to San Diego – won’t lose their jobs or pay just because they get sick.”

San Francisco voters passed a similar measure in 2006 called the Paid Sick Leave Ordinance. The law, which made it through with 61 percent of the vote in the November election, requires all employers to provide paid sick leave to employees (including part-timers) working in the city.

The state sick leave bill that passed on Saturday was a notable achievement for labor advocates, but some Democrats weren’t thrilled about the amendments that gave in-home health workers the short end of the stick. Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) called it “BS” and told The Sacramento Bee, “I resent the fact that we are picking between two sets of workers.”

Lawmakers passed a few other notable measures last week, including a bill regulating groundwater and a gun-restraining measure that would give judges the power to temporarily remove firearms from those deemed dangerous or mentally unstable. The shooting incident in Isla Vista at UC Santa Barbara in May prompted the bill, while California’s extreme drought pushed the groundwater measure forward. Many believe the state is long overdue in making progress on gun control.

The firearm measure is key in preventing many of the mass shootings that have plagued the country in recent years. Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) noted, via the Los Angeles Times, that “none of those individuals had a criminal record or a criminal background. So we need tools such as this.”

Though it also took an extreme event to stimulate the groundwater regulation bill, the new legislation figures to make serious inroads in the effort to stop a drought that is affecting more than 80 percent of the state. If Brown signs off on the bill, making California the last western state with such regulation, the state would have the ability to enforce restrictions, and local governments would be required to develop groundwater regulations.

“A critical element of addressing the water challenges facing California involves ensuring a sustainable supply of groundwater,” said Assemblyman Roger Dickinson (D-Sacramento) in a statement. “Overdrafting our groundwater leads to subsidence and contamination — consequences we cannot afford.”

 

He hates these cans! How helping Muni becomes hating nonprofits

Sasha Cuttler
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He hates these cans! How helping Muni becomes hating nonprofits

While I’m reluctant to give this self-serving poverty pimp any more attention or web traffic, it’s hard to ignore the latest misleading hit piece that Randy Shaw has written on behalf of Mayor Ed Lee, going after Sup. Scott Wiener and his Muni funding measure Prop. B.

As many local media outlets have reported, the Mayor’s Office has been fuming that Wiener dared to put the measure on the ballot in response to Lee reneging on his promise to put a local vehicle license fee increase on the fall ballot to help Muni serve a growing population of residents and workers — and threatening political retaliation.

So Shaw has been using his BeyondChron website to defend the financial interests of his city-supported Tenderloin Housing Clinic and other pet projects that this nascent Tenderloin power broker has been working on, in the process providing propaganda pieces for the Mayor’s Office, which supports Shaw with money from city taxpayers.

This cozy and symbiotic relationship is never disclosed by Shaw when he writes stories that he promotes as actual journalism, a practice that we’ve repeatedly taken issue with. We also contacted Shaw for comment, something he doesn’t do when attacking the Guardian, but we got no response.  

Wiener isn’t always the most progressive supervisor, but he’s been a solid and consistent supporter of Muni and modernizing the city’s transportation infrastructure, arguing correctly that San Francisco needs good public transit to function well, a point that civic groups ranging from SPUR to Livable City also regularly make.  

But the only reason Shaw can see for Prop. B is that Wiener hates nonprofits: “I understand why Wiener backs Prop B. Wiener is the Board member most opposed to nonprofits. He fought to eliminate the nonprofit exemption on Transit Impact Development Fees.  Wiener pushed for the proposed Vehicle License Fee to go 100 percent to transit, though it had originally been intended to be partially available for human services.”

The argument, of course, is ludicrous. In fact, it reminds me of the scene in The Jerk where a sniper aiming for Steve Martin misses and hits oil cans, causing Martin’s dim-witted character to conclude, “He hates these cans!.

No, Randy, Wiener doesn’t hate nonprofits. He supports Muni, which is also the common denominator in that list you cited. And no, Randy, the salaries of nonprofit workers aren’t the only place to find $20 million in the General Fund, as the Guardian showed during our city budget overview earlier this year.   

Shaw also claims Muni funding has kept pace with population growth — which, if true, would mean it wouldn’t get any more money under Prop. B — but Shaw uses misleading data that ignores the SFMTA reorganization measure Prop. A from 2007, the raid of SFMTA funding that followed using “work orders” from city departments, Muni’s deferred maintenance backlog of more than $2 billion, and the fact that SFMTA’s budget increases lag behind other major departments (such as the Department of Public Health and the Police Department) even with this week’s 25-cent Muni fare increase.

As former Guardian Editor/Publisher Tim Redmond used to say regularly: not everything gets better when you throw more money at it, but schools and public transit do. Money translates directly into more capacity to serve students or riders, including the growing number of local workers Muni is serving on top of the increasing local population.

This makes sense to most people, whether or not they support Prop. B and giving more General Fund money to Muni, a legitimate question about which well-meaning people can have good-faith differences of opinion over. But Shaw isn’t one of those people, and to him, Wiener just hates those cans. 

Alerts: September 3 – 9, 2014

Michael Redmond
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WEDNESDAY 3

 

Panel: Agriculture and Journalism

SF Commonwealth Club, 595 Market, SF. tinyurl.com/agriculturebeat. 6pm, $20 nonmembers, $8 members, $7 students. Cutbacks in reporting staff have decreased the amount of agriculture related journalism, yet in today’s foodie world, there is a growing demand for new information about where consumer’s food is coming from. Join Tara Duggan of the SF Chronicle, Naomi Starkman of Civil Eats, Andy Wright of Modern Farmer, and Sasha Khokha of KQED to discuss journalism’s changed and changing relationship with agriculture. Bi-Rite Catering will provide food for the event.

THURSDAY 4

 

Public Forum: Police Tasers in Berkeley

1939 Addison, Berk. coalitionfortaserfreeberkeley.org. 7-10pm, free. Is the militarization of the police force unnecessary? The Berkeley police force is asking for Tasers, but the City Council is hesitant. Discuss the issue with panelists such as Aram James, activist and former Palo Alto Public Defender; Barbara Ann White, Berkeley NAACP vice president and community mental health professional; James Chanin, founding member of the Police Review Commission and civil rights lawyer; and Jeremy Miller, program director of the Idriss Stelley Foundation and co-organizer of the successful campaign to stop San Francisco from getting Tasers. The Coalition for a Taser Free Berkeley is sponsoring the forum.

SATURDAY 6

 

Police Violence Teach-In

Starry Plough Pub, 3101 Shattuck, Berk. 510-465-9414. 2-4:30pm, free. In light of the recent Ferguson and St. Louis events, join speakers Anita Wills, Chris Kinder, and Carol Denney to learn about police violence and political protest in America, and how Ferguson relates to the Bay Area. The event is put on by the Alameda Peace and Freedom Party.

 

Film & Fundraiser: Connected By Coffee

2868 Mission, SF. tinyurl.com/connectedbycoffee. 4pm, $10 suggested donation. Coffee is important to a large percentage of the SF population. However, many coffee farms are threatened by leaf rust fungus. All donations will go to Cooperative Las Marias 93 in El Salvador — a cooperative farm that lost 80 percent of its crop to the fungus, and has been unable to export coffee since. There will be a Q&A with local coffee roasters from the Ubuntu Coffee Cooperative, and coffee samples at intermission. The documentary — Connected By Coffee — looks into the multibillion dollar industry of coffee.

Tom’s legacy

Michael Redmond
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Tom’s legacy

steve@sfbg.com

At a moment when San Francisco politics has slid toward the slippery center — when one-time progressives align with business elites, the political rhetoric seems hollow, and the vaunted value of “civility” in City Hall increasingly looks more like a deceptive power grab by the Mayor’s Office — it feels so refreshing to talk with Tom Ammiano.

For one thing, he’s hilarious, always quick with quips that are not only funny, but often funny in insightful ways that distill complex issues down to their essence, delivered with his distinctive nasally honk and lightning timing. Ammiano developed as a stand-up comedian and political leader simultaneously, and the two professional sides feed off each other, alternatively manifesting in disarming mirth or penetrating bite.

But his humor isn’t the main reason why Ammiano — a 72-year-old state legislator, two-time mayoral candidate, and former supervisor and school board member — has become such a beloved figure on the left of state and local politics, or why so many progressives are sad to see him leaving the California Assembly and elected office this year for the first time since 1990.

No, perhaps the biggest reason why public esteem for Ammiano has been strong and rising — particularly among progressives, but also among those of all ideological stripes who decry the closed-door dealmaking that dominates City Hall and the State Capitol these days — is his political integrity and courage. Everyone knows where Tom Ammiano will stand on almost any issue: with the powerless over the powerful.

“Don’t make it about yourself, make it about what you believe in,” Ammiano told us, describing his approach to politics and his advice to up-and-coming politicians.

Ammiano’s positions derive from his progressive political values, which were informed by his working class upbringing, first-hand observations of the limits of American militarism, publicly coming out as a gay teacher at time when that was a risky decision, standing with immigrants and women at important political moments, and steadily enduring well-funded attacks as he created some of San Francisco’s most defining and enduring political reforms, from domestic partner benefits and key political reforms to universal health care.

“He has been able to remain true to his values and principles of the progressive movement while making significant legislative accomplishments happen on a number of fronts,” Sup. David Campos, who replaced Ammiano on the Board of Supervisors and is now his chosen successor in the California Assembly, told the Guardian. “I don’t know that we’ve fully understood the scope of his influence. He has influenced the city more than most San Francisco mayors have.”

So, as we enter the traditional start of fall election season — with its strangely uncontested supervisorial races and only a few significant ballot measures, thanks to insider political manipulations — the Guardian spent some time with Ammiano in San Francisco and in Sacramento, talking about his life and legacy and what can be done to revive the city’s progressive spirit.

 

 

LIFE OF THE CAPITOL

Aug. 20 was a pretty typical day in the State Capitol, perhaps a bit more relaxed than usual given that most of the agenda was concurrence votes by the full Senate and Assembly on bills they had already approved once before being amended by the other house.

Still, lobbyists packed the hall outside the Assembly Chambers, hoping to exert some last minute influence before the legislative session ended (most don’t bother with Ammiano, whose name is on a short list, posted in the hall by the Assembly Sergeant-at-Arms, of legislators who don’t accept business cards from lobbyists).

One of the bills up for approval that day was Ammiano’s Assembly Bill 2344, the Modern Family Act, which in many ways signals how far California has come since the mid-’70s, when Ammiano was an openly gay schoolteacher and progressive political activist working with then-Sup. Harvey Milk to defeat the homophobic Briggs Initiative.

The Modern Family Act updates and clarifies the laws governing same-sex married couples and domestic partners who adopt children or use surrogates, standardizing the rights and responsibilities of all parties involved. “With a few simple changes, we can help families thrive without needless legal battles or expensive court actions,” Ammiano said in a press statement publicizing the bill.

Ammiano arrived in his office around 10am, an hour before the session began, carrying a large plaque commending him for his legislative service, given to outgoing legislators during a breakfast program. “Something else I don’t need,” Ammiano said, setting the plaque down on a table in his wood-paneled office. “I wonder if there’s a black market for this shit.”

Before going over the day’s legislative agenda, Ammiano chatted with his Press Secretary Carlos Alcala about an editorial in that morning’s San Francisco Chronicle, “Abuse of disabled-parking program demands legislators act,” which criticized Ammiano for seeking minor changes in a city plan to start charging for disabled placards before he would sponsor legislation to implement it. The editorial even snidely linked Ammiano to disgraced Sen. Leland Yee, who is suspended and has nothing to do with the issue.

“I’ve had these tussles with the Chronicle from day one. They just want people to be angry with me,” Ammiano told us. “You stand up for anything progressive and they treat you like a piñata.”

He thought the criticism was ridiculous — telling Alcala, “If we do a response letter, using the words puerile and immature would be good” — and that it has as much to do with denigrating Ammiano, and thus Campos and other progressives, as the issue at hand.

“Anything that gets people mad at me hurts him,” Ammiano told us.

But it’s awfully hard to be mad at Tom Ammiano. Even those on the opposite side of the political fence from him and who clash with him on the issues or who have been subjected to his caustic barbs grudgingly admit a respect and admiration for Ammiano, even Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who told the Guardian as much when we ran into him on the streets of Sacramento later that day.

Ammiano says he rarely gets rattled by his critics, or even the handful of death threats that he’s received over the years, including the one that led the San Francisco Police Department to place a protective detail on him during the 1999 mayor’s race.

“You are buoyed by what you do, and that compensates for other feelings you have,” Ammiano said of safety concerns.

Finally ready to prepare for the day’s business, he shouts for his aides in the other room (“the New York intercom,” he quips). The first question is whether he’s going to support a bill sponsored by PG&E’s union to increase incentives for geothermal projects in the state, a jobs bill that most environmental groups opposed.

“That is a terrible bill, it’s total shit, and I’m not going to support it,” Ammiano tells his aide. “It’s a scam.”

As Ammiano continued to prepare for the day’s session, we headed down to the Assembly floor to get ready to cover the action, escorted by Alcala. We asked what he planned to do after Ammiano leaves Sacramento, and Alcala told us that he’ll look at working for another legislator, “but there would probably be a lot more compromises.”

 

 

SPARKING CHANGE

Compromises are part of politics, but Ammiano has shown that the best legislative deals come without compromising one’s political principles. Indeed, some of his most significant accomplishments have involved sticking to his guns and quietly waiting out his critics.

For all the brassy charm of this big personality — who else could publicly confront then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at a Democratic Party fundraiser in 2009 and tell him to “kiss my gay ass!” — Ammiano has usually done the work in a way that wasn’t showy or self-centered.

By championing the reinstatement of district supervisorial elections and waging an improbable but electrifying write-in campaign for mayor in 1999 (finishing second before losing to incumbent Willie Brown in the runoff election), Ammiano set the stage for progressives to finally win control of the Board of Supervisors in 2000 and keep it for the next eight years, forming an effective counterbalance to Gavin Newsom’s pro-business mayoralty.

“I just did it through intuition,” Ammiano said of his 1999 mayoral run, when he jumped into the race just two weeks before election day. “There was a lot of electricity.”

After he made the runoff, Brown and his allies worked aggressively to keep power, leaning on potential Ammiano supporters, calling on then-President Bill Clinton to campaign for Brown, and even having Jesse Jackson call Ammiano late one night asking him to drop out.

“That’s when we realized Willie really felt threatened by us,” Ammiano said, a fear that was well-founded given that Ammiano’s loss in the runoff election led directly into a slate of progressives elected to the Board of Supervisors the next year. “It was a pyrrhic victory for him because then the board changed.”

But Ammiano didn’t seize the spotlight in those heady years that followed, which often shone on the younger political upstarts in the progressive movement — particularly Chris Daly, Matt Gonzalez, and Aaron Peskin — who were more willing to aggressively wage rhetorical war against Newsom and his downtown constituents.

By the time the 2003 mayor’s race came, Ammiano’s mayoral campaign became eclipsed by Gonzalez jumping into the race at the last minute, a Green Party candidate whose outsider credentials contrasted sharply with Newsom’s insider inevitability, coming within 5 percentage points of winning.

“I just bounced back and we did a lot of good shit after that,” Ammiano said, noting how district elections were conducive to his approach to politics. “It helped the way I wanted to govern, with the focus on the neighborhoods instead of the boys downtown.”

Perhaps Ammiano’s greatest legislative victory as a supervisor was his Health Care Security Ordinance, which required employers in San Francisco to provide health coverage for their employees and created the Healthy San Francisco program to help deliver affordable care to all San Franciscans.

The business community went ballistic when Ammiano proposed the measure in 2006, waging an aggressive lobbying and legal campaign to thwart the ordinance. But Ammiano just quietly took the heat, refused to compromise, and steadily lined up support from labor, public health officials, and other groups that were key to its passage.

“Maybe the early days of being a pinata inured me,” Ammiano said of his ability to withstand the onslaught from the business community for so long, recalling that in his 1999 school board race, “I really became a pinata. I got it in the morning from the Chronicle and in the afternoon from the Examiner.”

Ammiano kept Newsom apprised of his intentions and resolve, resisting entreaties to water down the legislation. “I kept talking to him and I told him I was going to do it,” Ammiano said. “Eventually, we got a 11 to zip vote and Newsom couldn’t do anything about it. That was a great journey.”

In the end, Newsom not only supported the measure, but he tried to claim Ammiano’s victory as his own, citing the vague promise he had made in his 2007 State of the City speech to try to provide universal health care in the city and his willingness to fund the program in his 2007-08 budget.

But Ammiano was happy with the policy victory and didn’t quibble publicly with Newsom about credit. “I picked my battles,” Ammiano said, contrasting his approach to Newsom with that of his more fiery progressive colleagues. “I tried to go after him on policy, not personality.”

Ammiano isn’t happy with the political turn that San Francisco has taken since he headed to Sacramento, with the pro-business, fiscally conservative faction of the city controlling the Mayor’s Office and exerting a big influence on the Board of Supervisors. But San Francisco’s elder statesman takes the long view. “Today, the board has a moderate trajectory that can be annoying, but I think it’s temporary,” Ammiano said. “These things are cyclical.”

He acknowledges that things can seem to a little bleak to progressives right now: “They’re feeling somewhat marginalized, but I don’t think it’s going to stay that way.”

 

FLOOR SHOW

Back on the Assembly floor, Ammiano was working the room, hamming it up with legislative colleagues and being the first of many legislators to rub elbows and get photos taken with visiting celebrities Carl Weathers, Daniel Stern, and Ron Perlman, who were there to support film-credit legislation

“Ron Perlman, wow, Sons of Anarchy,” Ammiano told us afterward, relating his conversation with Perlman. “I said, ‘They killed you, but you live on Netflix.’ I told him I was big fan. Even the progressives come here for the tax breaks.”

When Little Hoover Commission Chair Pedro Nava, who used to represent Santa Barbara in the Assembly, stopped to pose with Ammiano for the Guardian’s photographer, the famously liberal Ammiano quipped, “You’ll get him in trouble in Santa Barbara. Drill, baby, drill!”

Ammiano chairs the Assembly Public Safety Committee, where he has successfully pushed prison reform legislation and helped derail the worst tough-on-crime bills pushed by conservatives. “We have a lot of fun, and we get a chance to talk about all these bills that come before us,” Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, told the Guardian when asked about Ammiano. “You can see how these bad bills get less bad.”

Ammiano gave a short speech when his Modern Family Act came up for a vote, noting that it “simplifies the law around these procedures,” before the Assembly voted 57-2 to send it to the governor’s desk, where he has until Sept. 30 to act on it. “I think he’ll sign it,” Ammiano told the Guardian, “even though it’s about reproduction and naughty bits.”

“He’s a hoot,” Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles) said of Ammiano, whose desk is right behind his own. Jones-Sawyer said that he’d love to see Ammiano run for mayor of San Francisco, “but he’s waiting for a groundswell of support. Hopefully the progressives come together.”

Jones-Sawyer said Ammiano plays an important role as the conscience of a Legislature that too often caters to established interests.

“There’s liberal, progressive, socialist, communist, and then there’s Tom,” Jones said. “As far left as you can go, there’s Tom, and that’s what we’re going to miss.”

Yet despite that strong progressive reputation, Ammiano has also been an amazingly effective legislator (something that might surprise those supporting the campaign of David Chiu, which has repeatedly claimed that ideological progressives like Ammiano and Campos can’t “get things done” in Sacramento).

Last year, Ammiano got 13 bills through the Legislature — including three hugely controversial ones: the TRUST Act, which curbs local cooperation with federal immigration holds; the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights; and a bill protecting transgender student rights in schools, which was savaged by conservative religious groups — all of which were signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown.

“A lot of it is personal relationships, some is timing, and some is just sticking to it,” Ammiano said of effectiveness.

Some of his legislative accomplishments have required multiyear efforts, such as the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which was vetoed in 2012 before being signed into law last year with only a few significant changes (see “Do we care?” 3/26/13).

“Tom Ammiano was so incredible to work with,” Katie Joaquin, campaign coordinator for the California Domestic Workers Coalition, for whom the bill had long been a top priority, told the Guardian.

The large grassroots coalition backing the bill insisted on being a part of the decision-making as it evolved, which is not always easy to do in the fast-paced Capitol. But Joaquin said Ammiano’s history of working with grassroots activists made him the perfect fit for the consensus-based coalition.

“That’s difficult to do in the legislative process, and working with Tom and his office made that possible,” Joaquin told us. “He wanted to make sure we had active participation in the field from a variety of people who were affected by this.”

When the bill was vetoed by Gov. Brown, who cited paternalistic concerns that better pay and working conditions could translate into fewer jobs for immigrant women who serve as domestic workers, Joaquin said Ammiano was as disappointed as the activists, but he didn’t give up.

“It was really hard. I genuinely felt Tom’s frustration. He was going through the same emotions we were, and it was great that he wanted to go through that with us again,” Joaquin told us. “Sometimes, your allies can get fatigued with the long struggles, but Tom maintained his resolve and kept us going.”

And after it was over, Ammiano even organized the victory party for the coalition and celebrated the key role that activists and their organizing played in making California only the second state in the nation (after New York) to extend basic wage, hour, and working condition protections to nannies, maids, and other domestic workers excluded under federal law.

“He has a great sense of style,” Joaquin said of Ammiano, “and that emanates in how he carries himself.”

 

 

COMING OUT

Ammiano came to San Francisco in 1964, obtaining a master’s degree in special education from San Francisco State University and then going on to teach at Hawthorne Elementary (now known as Cesar Chavez Elementary). He quickly gained an appreciation for the complex array of issues facing the city, which would inform the evolution of his progressive worldview.

“In teaching itself, there were a lot of social justice issues,” Ammiano said. For example, most native Spanish-speakers at the time were simply dumped into special education classes because there wasn’t yet bilingual education in San Francisco schools. “So I turned to the community for help.”

The relationships that he developed in the immigrant community would later help as he worked on declaring San Francisco a sanctuary city as waves of Central American immigrants fled to California to escape US-sponsored proxy wars.

Growing up a Catholic working class kid in New Jersey, Ammiano was no hippie. But he was struck by the brewing war in Vietnam strongly enough that he volunteered to teach there through a Quaker program, International Volunteer Service, working in Saigon from 1966-68 and coming back with a strong aversion to US militarism.

“I came back from Vietnam a whole new person,” he told us. “I had a lot of political awakenings.”

He then worked with veterans injured during the war and began to gravitate toward leftist political groups in San Francisco, but he found that many still weren’t comfortable with his open homosexuality, an identity that he never sought to cover up or apologize for.

“I knew I was gay in utero,” Ammiano said. “I said you have to be comfortable with me being a gay, and it wasn’t easy for some. The left wasn’t that accepting.”

But that began to change in the early ’70s as labor and progressives started to find common cause with the LGBT community, mostly through organizations such as Bay Area Gay Liberation and the Gay Teachers Coalition, a group that Ammiano formed with Hank Wilson and Ron Lanza after Ammiano publicly came out as a gay teacher in 1975.

“He was the first public school teacher to acknowledge that he was a gay man, which was not as easy as it sounds in those days,” former Mayor Art Agnos told us, crediting Ammiano with helping make support for gay rights the default political position that it became in San Francisco.

San Francisco Unified School District still wasn’t supportive of gay teachers, Ammiano said, “So I ran for school board right after the assassinations [of Mayor George Moscone and Sup. Harvey Milk in 1978] and got my ass kicked.”

Shortly thereafter, Ammiano decided to get into stand-up comedy, encouraged by friends and allies who loved his sense of humor. Meanwhile, Ammiano was pushing for SFUSD to name a school after Milk, as it immediately did for Moscone, a quest that dragged on for seven years and which was a central plank in his unsuccessful 1988 run for the school board.

But Ammiano was developing as a public figure, buoyed by his stand-up performances (which he said Chronicle reporters would sometimes attend to gather off-color quotes to use against him in elections) and increased support from the maturing progressive and queer communities.

So when he ran again for school board in 1990, he finished in first place as part of the so-called “lavender sweep,” with LGBT candidates elected to judgeships and lesbians Carole Migden and Roberta Achtenberg elected to the Board of Supervisors.

On the school board, Ammiano helped bring SFUSD into the modern age, including spearheading programs dealing with AIDS education, support for gay students, distribution of condoms in the schools, and limiting recruiting in schools by the homophobic Boy Scouts of America.

“I found out we were paying them to recruit in the schools, but I can’t recruit?” Ammiano said, referencing the oft-raised concern at the time that gay teachers would recruit impressionable young people into homosexuality.

As his first term on the school board ended, a growing community of supporters urged Ammiano to run for the Board of Supervisors, then still a citywide election, and he was elected despite dealing with a devastating personal loss at the time.

“My partner died five days before the election,” Ammiano said as we talked at the bar in Soluna, tearing up at the memory and raising a toast with his gin-and-tonic to his late partner, Tim Curbo, who succumbed to a long struggle with AIDS.

Ammiano poured himself into his work as a supervisor, allied on the left at various points in the mid-late ’90s with Sups. Sue Bierman, Terrence Hallinan, Leland Yee, Mabel Teng, Angelo Alioto, and Carole Migden against the wily and all-powerful then-Mayor Brown, who Ammiano said “manipulated everything.”

But Ammiano gradually began to chip away at that power, often by turning directly to the people and using ballot measures to accomplish reforms such as laws regulating political consultants and campaign contributions and the reinstatement of district supervisorial elections, which decentralized power in the city.

“People frequently say about politicians, when they want to say something favorable, that they never forgot where they came from,” Agnos told us. “With Tom, he never forgot where he came from, and more importantly, he never forgot who he was…He was an authentic and a proud gay man, as proud as Harvey Milk ever was.”

And from that strong foundation of knowing himself, where he came from, and what he believed, Ammiano maintained the courage to stand on his convictions.

“It’s not just political integrity, it’s a reflection of the man himself,” Agnos said, praising Ammiano’s ability to always remain true to himself and let his politics flow from that. “A lot of politicians don’t have the courage, personal or political, to do that.”

 

 

WHAT’S NEXT

Ammiano’s legacy has been clearly established, even if it’s not always appreciated in a city enamored of the shiny and new, from recent arrivals who seem incurious about the city’s political history to the wave of neoliberal politicians who now hold sway in City Hall.

“Tom has carried on the legacy of Harvey Milk of being the movement progressive standard bearer. He has, more than anyone else, moved forward progressive politics in San Francisco in a way that goes beyond him as an individual,” Campos said, citing the return of district elections and his mentoring of young activists as examples. “He brought a number of people into politics that have been impactful in their own right.”

Campos is one of those individuals, endorsed by Ammiano to fill his District 9 seat on the Board of Supervisors from among a competitive field of established progressive candidates. Ammiano says he made the right choice.

“I have been supportive of him as a legislator and I think he’s doing the right things,” Ammiano said of Campos, adding an appreciation for the facts that he’s gay, an immigrant, and a solid progressive. “He’s a three-fer.”

Ammiano said that Campos has been a standout on the Board of Supervisors in recent years, diligently working to protect workers, tenants, and immigrants with successful efforts to increase tenant relocation fees after an eviction and an attempt to close the loophole that allows restaurants to pocket money they’re required to spend on employee health care, which was sabotaged by Chiu and Mayor Lee.

“I like his work ethic. He comes across as mild-mannered, but he’s a tiger,” Ammiano said of Campos. “If you like me, vote for David.”

But what about Ammiano’s own political future?

Ammiano said he’s been too busy lately to really think about what’s next for him (except romantically: Ammiano recently announced his wedding engagement to Carolis Deal, a longtime friend and lover). Ammiano is talking with universities and speakers bureaus about future gigs and he’s thinking about writing a book or doing a one-man show.

“Once I get that settled, I’ll look at the mayor’s race and [Sen. Mark] Leno’s seat,” Ammiano said, holding out hope that his political career will continue.

Ammiano said the city is desperately in need of some strong political leadership right now, something that he isn’t seeing from Mayor Lee, who has mostly been carrying out the agenda of the business leaders, developers, and power brokers who engineered his mayoral appointment in 2011.

“Basically, he’s an administrator and I don’t think he’ll ever be anything but that,” Ammiano said. “We are so fucking ready for a progressive mayor.”

If Ammiano were to become mayor — which seems like a longshot at this point — he says that he would use that position to decentralize power in San Francisco, letting the people and their representatives on the Board of Supervisors have a greater say in the direction of the city and making governance decisions more transparent.

“I don’t believe in a strong mayor [form of government],” Ammiano said. “If I was mayor, all the commission appointments would be shared.”

But before he would decide to run for mayor, Ammiano says that he would need to see a strong groundswell of public support for the values and ideals that he’s represented over nearly a half-century of public life in San Francisco.

“I don’t want to run to be a challenger,” Ammiano said. “I’d want to run to be mayor.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A show a day: Your fall music calendar

Steven T. Jones
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What’s going on in Bay Area music these next three months? Glad you asked. 

Like a daily multivitamin wards off the sniffles, getting the SFBG’s official recommended dose of live shows is crucial to maintaining optimal mental health, fun levels, and skin tone, especially as the days get shorter and the weather turns ever-so-slightly cooler.

Here’s your musical agenda from Labor Day through Thanksgiving, with highlights from our favorite fall festivals (see this week’s issue for lots more).

Aug. 28 Black Cobra Vipers with French Cassettes The Chapel, SF. www.thechapelsf.com

Aug. 29 Blind Willies Viracocha, SF. www.viracochasf.com

Aug. 30 Mistah F.A.B. Slim’s, SF. www.slimspresents.com

Aug. 31 LIVE 105’s Punk Rock Picnic with The Offspring, Bad Religion, Pennywise, and more. Are you a late-thirties/early-forties punk rock guy or gal who can’t agree on much of anything with your 13-year-old these days? Doesn’t get much better than this lineup. Bonus points for screaming along to all the swearing on The Offspring’s “Bad Habit.” Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. www.theshorelineamphitheatre.com

Sept. 1 Hiero Day. Souls of Mischief, Del, and the rest of the guys have promised some pretty big guest stars at this week’s fest, but even without ’em — a free block party with beer from Linden Street Brewery and music from some of the Bay Area’s best underground rappers? Guests, schmests. Downtown Oakland, www.hieroday.com

Sept. 2 Ghost & Gale Brick and Mortar, SF. www.brickandmortarmusic.com

Sept. 3 Joey Cape Thee Parkside, SF. www.theeparkside.com

Sept. 4 Carletta Sue Kay Hemlock Tavern, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

Sept. 4-13 Mission Creek Oakland Music & Arts Festival. With a range of heavy hitters — from B. Hamilton and Bill Baird to Whiskerman — this is a showcase of the fertile ground that is Oakland’s indie rock scene right now, most with door prices you’re not likely to see from these bands again. Venues throughout Oakland,www.mcofest.org.

Sept. 5 Sam Chase with Rin Tin Tiger Uptown, Oakl. www.uptownnightclub.com

Sept. 6 Bart Davenport, Foxtails Brigade, more Block Party, downtown Oakland, www.mcofest.org

Sept. 7 Coheed and Cambria, Fox Theater, Oakl. www.thefoxoakland.com

Sept. 8 The Rentals Slim’s, SF. www.slimspresents.com

Sept. 9 Wild Eyes Knockout, SF. www.theknockoutsf.com

Sept. 10 Kyrsten Bean New Parish, Oakl., www.thenewparish.com

Sept. 11 Sonny & The Sunsets Eagle Tavern, SF. www.sf-eagle.com

Sept. 11-14 Downtown Berkeley MusicFest. A range of bluesy, folky, dancey bands from all over the Bay — especially recommended: the First Person Singular presentation of Beck’s Song Reader Sept. 11 and The Parmesans at Jupiter Sept. 14. Venues all over Berkeley, www.downtownberkeleymusicfest.org

Sept. 12-14, 15th Annual Electronic Music Festival Brava Theater Center, SF. www.sfemf.org

Sept. 13 The Breeders Fillmore, SF. www.thefillmore.com

Sept. 13-14 Forever Never Land, “California’s only 21+ music festival,” Avila Beach Golf Resort, www.foreverneverland.us

Sept. 15 Vulfpeck Brick and Mortar, SF. www.brickandmortar.com

Sept. 16 Lil Dicky Independent, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Sept. 17 Anais Mitchell The Chapel, SF. www.thechapelsf.com

Sept. 18 Silent Comedy and Strange Vine Bottom of the Hill, SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

Sept. 19 Blake Mills, The Chapel, SF. www.thechapelsf.com

Sept. 20 Old Crow Medicine Show The Masonic, SF. www.masonicauditorium.com

Sept. 20-21 Berkeley World Music Festival All over Berkeley, www.berkeleyworldmusic.org

Sept. 20-21 Russian River Jazz & Blues Festival, with Larry Graham & Graham Central Station, more. www.russianriverfestivals.com

Sept. 21 Oakland Music Festival with The Coup, Kev Choice, more Downtown Oakland, www.oaklandmusicfestival.com.

Sept. 22 La Roux Fox Theater, Oakl. www.thefoxoakland.com

Sept. 23 Cello Joe The Chapel Bar, SF. www.thechapelsf.com

Sept. 24 Skeletonwitch, Black Anvil DNA Lounge, SF. www.dnalounge.com

Sept. 25-28 Philip Glass’ Days and Nights Festival Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur; Sunset Cultural Center, Carmel-by-the-Sea, www.daysandnightsfestival.com

Sept. 26 Bob Mould Fillmore, SF. www.thefillmore.com

Sept. 27 Wu-Tang Clan Warfield, SF. www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

Sept. 27 Redwood City Sala Festival Courthouse Square, Redwood City, www.redwoodcity.org

Sept. 28 Sam Smith Fox Theater, Oakl. www.thefoxoakland.com

Sept. 29 Motown on Mondays Legionnaire Saloon, Oakl. www.legionnairesaloon.com

Sept. 30 Pixies The Masonic, SF. www.masonicauditorium.com

Oct. 1 Rhymesayers presents Brother Ali, Bambu Bottom of the Hill, SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

Oct. 2 Lorde Greek Theatre, Berk. www.thegreektheatreberkeley.com

Oct. 3-5 Berkeley Hawaiian Music Festival Freight and Salvage, Berkl. www.thefreight.org.

Oct. 3-5 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Golden Gate Park, SF. www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com

Oct 3-5 TBD Festival. Emerging Bay Area acts like 8th Grader mingle with the big kids (Blondie, Moby, Danny Brown, Kurt Vile) at this seventh annual celebration of “music, art, design, and food.” A low-key vibe and great chance to see some huge acts in a seemingly unlikely location. Riverfront, West Sacramento. www.tbdfest.com.

Oct. 4 Cibo Matto The Chapel, SF. www.thechapelsf.com

Oct. 5 Bombay Bicycle Club Warfield, SF. www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

Oct. 6 The War on Drugs with Cass McCombs Fillmore, SF. www.thefillmore.com

Oct. 7 Thurston Moore Great American Music Hall, SF. www.slimspresents.com

Oct. 8 The King Khan & BBQ Show Great American Music Hall, SF. www.slimspresents.com

Oct. 9 Imelda May Fillmore, SF. www.thefillmore.com

Oct. 10 Too Short Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. www.shorelineamphitheatre.com

Oct. 11 Pomplamoose Fillmore, SF. www.thefillmore.com

Oct. 12 Jack Beats Mezzanine, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

Oct. 13 Mutual Benefit Independent, www.theindependentsf.com

Oct. 14-15 Culture Collide. This new-to-the-Bay-Area party has been rocking LA for the past few years, but it seems to have taken on an appropriately Mission-esque flavor for its first Mission takeover: Local kids like Grmln alongside national acts like Cloud Nothings and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah alongside a whole host of buzzy Korean, Australian, and UK bands? Yeah, we’re there. Up and down Valencia in the Mission, with multiple stages including the Elbo Room. www.culturecollide.com

Oct. 15 Of Montreal Great American Music Hall, SF. www.slimspresents.com

Oct. 16 Russian Red Independent, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Oct. 17 Pup Brick and Mortar Music Hall, www.brickandmortarmusichall.com

Oct. 18-19 Treasure Island Music Festival, with Outkast, Massive Attack, more Treasure Island. www.treasureislandfestival.com

Oct. 20 Kimbra Independent, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Oct. 21 Melvins Great American Music Hall, SF. www.slimspresents.com

Oct. 22 Kat Edmonson Great American Music Hall, SF. www.slimspresents.com

Oct. 23 The Blank Tapes Brick and Mortar Music Hall, www.brickandmortarmusichall.com

Oct. 24 Foxygen Fillmore, SF. www.thefillmore.com

Oct. 25 Titan Ups and Carletta Sue Kay DNA Lounge, SF. www.dnalounge.com

Oct. 26 Bridget Everett Independent, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Oct. 27 Warpaint Regency Ballroom, SF. ww.theregencyballroom.com

Oct. 28 Broken Bells The Masonic, SF. www.masonicauditorium.com

Oct. 29 King Tuff Great American Music Hall, SF. www. slimspresents.com

Oct. 30 Tycho Fox Theater, Oakl. www.thefoxoakland.com

Oct. 31 LIVE 105’s Spookfest with Chromeo, Alesso, more Oracle Arena, Oakl., www.live105.cbslocal.com

Nov. 1 Stone Foxes with Strange Vine The Chapel, SF. www.thechapelsf.com

Nov. 2 Citizen Cope Catalyst, Santa Cruz. www.catalystclub.com

Nov. 3 The Black Keys Oracle Arena, Oakl., www.coliseum.com

Nov. 4 Frankie Rose with Cold Beat Bottom of the Hill, SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

Nov. 5 Finch, Maps & Atlases Slim’s, SF. www.slimspresents.com

Nov. 6 Bleachers Independent, SF. www.theindependent.sf.com

Nov. 7 Slowdive Warfield, SF. www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

Nov. 8 Shovels & Rope Fillmore, SF. www.thefillmore.com

Nov. 9 Mirah Independent, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Nov. 10 Psychedelic Furs, Lemonheads Fillmore, SF. www.thefillmore.com

Nov. 11 Mac DeMarco Fillmore, SF. www.thefillmore.com

Nov. 12 Shakey Graves Independent, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Nov. 13 Generationals The Chapel, SF. www.thechapelsf.com

Nov. 14 Deltron 3030 Catalyst, Santa Cruz. www.catalystclub.com

Nov. 15 J. Mascis Independent, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Nov. 16 Hot Water Music Slim’s, SF. www.slimspresents.com

Nov. 17 Culture Club Fox Theater, Oakl. www.thefoxoakland.com

Nov. 18 The 1975 The Masonic, SF. www.masonicauditorium.com

Nov. 19 Har Mar Superstar Bottom of the Hill, SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

Nov. 20 Minus the Bear Slim’s, SF. www.slimspresents.com

Nov. 21 Seu Jorge Bimbo’s 365 Club, SF. www.bimbos365club.com

Nov. 22 Peanut Butter Wolf Brick and Mortar Music Hall, www.brickandmortarmusichall.com

Nov. 23 Lucero Slim’s, SF. www.slimspresents.com

Fall fairs and festivals

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Fall fairs and festivals

Aug. 30

Pilgrim Soul Forge Harvest Fair Pilgrim Soul Forge, 101 West Tower, Alameda; www.grantsforge.com. Noon-6pm, free. Possibly the only fall fair in the Bay Area to offer blacksmithing demonstrations alongside the usual suspects: food trucks, craft vendors, and live music.

Savor Filipino Justin Herman Plaza, Embarcadero at Market, SF; www.savorfilipino.com. 10am-6pm, free (most workshops $15). Try the best in Filipino cuisine at this gathering of chefs and authors, with a huge menu of tasty eats (check it out online) and workshops on vegan Filipino cooking, modern Filipino desserts, and other tasty topics. Plus: live music and traditional dance performances, and a “Dance That Lumpia Off” audience-participation activity.

 

Aug. 30-31

Millbrae Art and Wine Festival 400 Broadway, Millbrae; www.miramarevents.com. 10am-5pm, free. Downtown Millbrae’s annual Mardi Gras-style celebration, with live music, a juried art show, a classic car show, carnival-style rides, and tons of specialty food and drink vendors.

San Francisco Zine Fest SF County Fair Building, 1199 Ninth Ave, SF; www.sfzinefest.org. Aug 30, 11am-5pm; Aug 31, 11am-4pm. Free. Support indie writers, artists, and creators at this annual event, with exhibitions, workshops, book signings, and more. Special guests include Ryan Sands (publishing company Youth in Decline), Tomas Moniz (RAD DAD zine), and illustrator and cartoonist Hellen Jo.

 

Aug. 30-31

SF Bay Brazilian Day and Lavagem Festival Casa de Cultura, 1901 San Pablo, Berk; www.brasarte.com. 11am-7pm, free. Celebrate Brazilian Independence Day with a lavagem (blessing) calling for world peace, plus Brazilian music, food, a “Caipirinha lounge,” and more.

 

Aug. 31

Oakland Pride Uptown Oakl; www.oaklandpride.org. Parade starts at 10:30am, Broadway and 14th St; festival, 11am-7pm, Broadway at 20th Sts. Parade free; festival $5-10. It’s the very first year for the Oakland Pride Parade, while Sheila E headlines the fifth annual festival, billed as the second-largest pride event in NorCal.

 

Sept. 6

SF Mountain Bike Festival McLaren Park, Jerry Garcia Amphitheater, 20 John F. Shelley, SF; sfurbanriders.org/wordpress/sf-mtb-festival. 9am-5pm, free. Register in advance to compete — or just show up to spectate or test your skills in any of the non-competitive categories. Events include a short-track challenge, a 10-mile urban adventure ride, a cargo bike hill climb, a bike skills challenge for youth and families, and more, plus a box jump demo and a bike raffle.

 

Sept. 6-7

Autumn Moon Festival Chinatown, SF; www.moonfestival.org. Grand opening ceremony and parade, Sept 6, 11am; festival, 11am-5pm (dog costume contest, Sept 7, 2:30pm). Free. Cultural performances, an open-air street bazaar, lion dancing, and (new this year!) a dog costume contest highlight this 24th annual celebration of the Asian holiday.

Mountain View Art and Wine Festival Castro between El Camino Real and Evelyn, Mtn View; www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. With works by over 600 professional craftspeople and artists, plus live music, home and garden exhibits, a young-performers stage, a climbing wall, food and wine, and more.

 

Sept. 7

Haight Street Music and Merchants Street Festival Haight between Masonic and Stanyan, SF; hsmmsf@gmail.com. Noon-6pm, free. Yep, it’s another street fair on Haight — but this brand-new event has a highly local focus, since it’s sponsored by local merchants. Expect three stages of music, kids’ activities, a skate ramp, and more.

 

Sept. 13

Sea Music Festival San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, Hyde Street Pier, SF; www.nps.gov/safr/planyourvisit/seamusicfestival2014.htm. 9am-5pm; evening chantey sing, 7:30-9:30pm. Outdoor performances free; admission to historic ships $5 (15 and under with adult supervision, free). Learn about maritime history through music at this all-day fest of traditional and contemporary songs, instrumentals, and dances. The Sea Music Concert Series continues aboard the Balclutha Sept 20, Oct 25, and Nov 25 ($12-14 or a season ticket, $36).

 

Sept. 13-14

Ghirardelli Chocolate Festival Ghirardelli Square, 900 North Point, SF; ghirardelli.com/chocolatefestival. Noon-5pm, $20-40. Help raise money for Project Open Hand and satisfy your sweet tooth at this 19th annual dessert and wine fiesta. In addition to offering samples of gourmet goodies from over 50 vendors , Ghirardelli hosts chef demos, a silent auction, a “Chocolate School” (learn about the chocolate-making process!), and the ever-popular hands-free sundae-eating contest.

 

Sept. 14

Comedy Day Sharon Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.comedyday.com. Noon-5pm, free. This year’s incarnation of the free, all-day comedy festival is dedicated to the memory of supporter (and frequent unannounced performer) Robin Williams.

Sunday Streets: Western Addition Fillmore between Geary and Fulton; Fulton between Fillmore and Baker, SF; www.sundaystreetssf.com. 11am-4pm, free. What traffic? Explore the neighborhood (including Alamo Square) on foot or bike.

 

Sept. 19-21

Eat Real Festival Jack London Square, Oakl; www.eatrealfest.com. Sept 19, 1-9pm; Sept 20, 10:30am-9pm; Sept 21, 10:30am-5pm. Free. Billed as a combo “state fair, street-food festival, and block party,” this fest offers sustainable, regionally-sourced eats (BBQ, ice cream, curry, and more) costing eight bucks or less.

Oktoberfest by the Bay Pier 48, SF; www.oktoberfestbythebay.com. Sept 19, 5pm-midnight; Sept 20, 11am-5pm and 6pm-midnight; Sept 21, 11am-6pm. $25-75 (Sept 20-21 day session, kids 13-18, $5; must be accompanied by parent). The Chico Bavarian Band returns to add oompah to your eating and, more importantly, drinking experience. Prost!

 

Sept. 20-21

Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival #58 Old Mill Park, 325 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; www.mvfaf.org. 10am-5pm, $5-10. Over 140 fine artists participate in this fair, which is held in a can’t-be-beat location (hi, majestic redwoods) and also features live music and children’s entertainment.

 

Sept. 21

Folsom Street Fair Folsom between Eighth and 13th Sts, SF; www.folsomstreetfair.com. 11am-6pm, $10 donation requested (donation sticker entitles wearer to $2 off drinks). The leather and fetish fantasia returns with over 200 exhibitor booths, two giant dance floors, public play stations, erotic art, and more.

 

Sept. 27

Bay Area Record Fair Thee Parkside, 1600 17th St, SF; www.theeparkside.com. 11am, $5 early entry (free after noon). Vinyl junkies, take note: over 30 Bay Area indie labels participate at this semi-regular event, which also boasts live music, DJs, raffles, and more.

San Mateo Bacon and Brew Festival Central Park, Fifth Ave and El Camino Real, San Mateo; www.sanmateochamber.org/bbf. 11am-5pm, $15. This fest breaks it down to the essentials. Admission gets you a free beer (or soft drink), while food vendors favor you-know-which crispy pork product.

SuperHero Street Fair 1700 Indiana, SF; www.superherosf.com. 1-11pm, $10. Seven stages and 13 “sound camps” provide the beats for this fifth annual festival celebrating heroes, villains, sidekicks, and everything in between. It goes without saying that costumes are highly encouraged.

 

Sept. 28

“A Day on the Water 2” Cesar Chavez Park, 11 Spinnaker, Berk; (510) 677-9425. Noon-7pm, free. Outdoor fair and music festival with Manzo Rally, Afrofunk Experience, Crosscut, and more.

Sunday Streets: Excelsior Mission between Theresa/Avalon and Geneva, SF; www.sundaystreetssf.com. 11am-4pm, free. Hit the street at this edition of Sunday Streets, which coincides with the sixth annual Tricycle Music Fest at the Excelsior Branch Library (sfpl.org/tricycle for more info).

 

Oct. 4

“Oaktoberfest” Fruitvale at MacArthur, Oakl; www.oaktoberfest.org. 11am-6pm, free. Family-friendly craft beer festival, with over 30 participating local breweries, a Bavarian big band and dancers, German food vendors, and more.

 

Oct. 4-5

Alternative Press Expo Fort Mason Center, Festival Pavilion, 2 Marina, SF; comic-con.org/ape. Check website for updates regarding times and badge prices. APE is back to celebrate alternative and small-press comics in a new venue, with a guest list that includes Bob Fingerman, Faith Erin Hicks, Ed Piskor, Paul Pope, Jason Shiga, and many more.

 

Oct. 5

Castro Street Fair, Castro at Market, SF; www.castrostreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free (donate at the gate to get $1 off at fair beverage booths). Five different entertainment areas (including a main stage, a “legends” stage, and “Barnaby’s World of Wonderment”) highlight this annual event, which was founded by Harvey Milk in 1974. Performers were TBD at press time, so check the website closer to the event for updates.

 

Oct. 9

Union Street Wine Walk Union between Gough and Steiner, SF; www.sresproductions.com. 4-8pm, free (sampling tickets, $25). Restaurants and merchants offer wine tasting and small bites at this fifth annual neighborhood event.

 

Oct. 10-18

Litquake Various venues, SF; www.litquake.org. San Francisco’s annual literary festival turns 15 this year, with a week full of live readings, performances, panels, and multimedia events, including tributes to Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Barbary Coast Award will be presented to Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and their many projects, including 826 Valencia and McSweeney’s.

 

Oct. 11

Woodside Day of the Horse Woodside Town Hall, 2955 Woodside, Woodside; www.whoa94062.org. 10am-2:30pm, free (progressive trail ride, $40). The Woodside-area Horse Owners Association (WHOA) celebrates Year of the Horse with stagecoach rides, live music, a petting zoo, and more, plus an organized trail ride for experienced riders and their horses to raise money for the organization’s charitable community projects.

 

Oct. 11-12

World Vegetarian Festival SF County Fair Building, 1199 Ninth Ave, SF; www.worldvegfestival.com. 10:30am-8:45pm, free. The SF Vegetarian Society’s annual event features cooking demos, exhibitors, speakers, an eco-fashion show, entertainment, and samples galore.

 

Oct. 12

Italian Heritage Parade Begins at Jefferson and Stockton, proceeds on Columbus, and ends in Washington Square, SF; www.sfcolumbusday.org. 12:30pm, free. Established in 1868, this North Beach tradition features handmade floats, a costumed Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella, Italian music, a Ferrari display, and more.

 

Oct. 13

World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off IDES Grounds, 735 Main Street, Half Moon Bay; weighoff.miramarevents.com. 7-11am, free. Who will reign supreme at this 41st annual battle of the bulge, dubbed the “Superbowl of Weigh-Offs”? Last year’s champ tipped the scales at 1,985 pounds — that’s a lotta pie!

 

Oct. 18

Noe Valley Harvest Festival 24th St between Sanchez and Church, SF; www.noevalleyharvestfestival.com. 10am-5pm, free. This 10th annual shindig aims to help you get a jump on holiday shopping, with over 50 local artisans showing their creations. Also: two stages of music, costume contests for dogs and kids, a dunk tank, a pumpkin patch, and more.

Potrero Hill Festival 20th St between Wisconsin and Missouri, SF; www.potrerofestival.com. 11am-4pm, free. Now in its 25th year, this neighborhood block party features local food and entertainment — including a kick-off Cajun-style brunch ($5-12) with Dixieland jazz — plus pony rides and a bouncy house for kids.

 

Oct. 18-19

Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival Main between Mill and Spruce, Half Moon Bay; www.miramarevents.com. 9am-5pm, free. They don’t call Half Moon Bay the World Pumpkin Capital for nothing — the coastal town represents at its 44th annual gourd-tastic throwdown with three stages of music, the Great Pumpkin Parade (Oct 18 at noon), a haunted house attraction, expert Jack O’ Lantern carving, and food and drinks galore (pumpkin beer, anyone?)

 

Oct. 19

Sunday Streets: Mission 18th St between Guerrero and Harrison and Valencia between 25th and Duboce, SF; www.sundaystreetssf.com. 11am-4pm, free. Sunday Streets returns to the Mission! Check the website after Oct. 3 for updates on planned activities.

 

Oct. 25

San Francisco’s Wharf Fest Fisherman’s Wharf, SF; www.sresproductions.com. 11am-6pm, free. Celebrate SF’s waterfront history at this event, with a chowder competition, chef demos, ship tours, street performers, fireworks, and more.

 

Nov. 2

San Francisco Day of the Dead Procession and Festival of Altars Festival, Garfield Park, 26th St and Harrison, SF; www.dayofthedeadsf.org. 6-11pm, free. Procession begins at 22nd St and Bryant, SF; www.dayofthedeadsf.org. 7pm, free. Add a personal altar for a loved one who has passed away to the display at Garfield Park (candles must be in glass containers; no open flames allowed), and bring canned food to donate to St. Anthony’s Foundation, in honor of the altar memorializing the deaths of homeless people in SF. The procession, led by Rescue Culture Collective, circles the Mission accompanied by traditional Aztec dancers.

 

Nov. 14-16

Green Festival Fort Mason Center, 2 Marina, SF; www.greenfestivals.org/sf. Nov 14, noon-6pm; Nov 15-16, 10am-6pm. $15-30. Learn how to “work green, play green, and live green” at this expo, an ode to health and sustainability. Featured events include vegan and vegetarian cooking demos, inspirational speakers, and a marketplace with more than 250 eco-friendly businesses. *

 

Fall fairs and fests

Michael Redmond
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0

Listings are compiled by Guardian staff.

 

Aug. 30

Pilgrim Soul Forge Harvest Fair Pilgrim Soul Forge, 101 West Tower, Alameda; www.grantsforge.com. Noon-6pm, free. Possibly the only fall fair in the Bay Area to offer blacksmithing demonstrations alongside the usual suspects: food trucks, craft vendors, and live music.

Savor Filipino Justin Herman Plaza, Embarcadero at Market, SF; www.savorfilipino.com. 10am-6pm, free (most workshops $15). Try the best in Filipino cuisine at this gathering of chefs and authors, with a huge menu of tasty eats (check it out online) and workshops on vegan Filipino cooking, modern Filipino desserts, and other tasty topics. Plus: live music and traditional dance performances, and a “Dance That Lumpia Off” audience-participation activity.

 

Aug. 30-31

Millbrae Art and Wine Festival 400 Broadway, Millbrae; www.miramarevents.com. 10am-5pm, free. Downtown Millbrae’s annual Mardi Gras-style celebration, with live music, a juried art show, a classic car show, carnival-style rides, and tons of specialty food and drink vendors.

San Francisco Zine Fest SF County Fair Building, 1199 Ninth Ave, SF; www.sfzinefest.org. Aug 30, 11am-5pm; Aug 31, 11am-4pm. Free. Support indie writers, artists, and creators at this annual event, with exhibitions, workshops, book signings, and more. Special guests include Ryan Sands (publishing company Youth in Decline), Tomas Moniz (RAD DAD zine), and illustrator and cartoonist Hellen Jo.

 

Aug. 30-31

SF Bay Brazilian Day and Lavagem Festival Casa de Cultura, 1901 San Pablo, Berk; www.brasarte.com. 11am-7pm, free. Celebrate Brazilian Independence Day with a lavagem (blessing) calling for world peace, plus Brazilian music, food, a “Caipirinha lounge,” and more.

 

Aug. 31

Oakland Pride Uptown Oakl; www.oaklandpride.org. Parade starts at 10:30am, Broadway and 14th St; festival, 11am-7pm, Broadway at 20th Sts. Parade free; festival $5-10. It’s the very first year for the Oakland Pride Parade, while Sheila E headlines the fifth annual festival, billed as the second-largest pride event in NorCal.

 

Sept. 6

SF Mountain Bike Festival McLaren Park, Jerry Garcia Amphitheater, 20 John F. Shelley, SF; sfurbanriders.org/wordpress/sf-mtb-festival. 9am-5pm, free. Register in advance to compete — or just show up to spectate or test your skills in any of the non-competitive categories. Events include a short-track challenge, a 10-mile urban adventure ride, a cargo bike hill climb, a bike skills challenge for youth and families, and more, plus a box jump demo and a bike raffle.

 

Sept. 6-7

Autumn Moon Festival Chinatown, SF; www.moonfestival.org. Grand opening ceremony and parade, Sept 6, 11am; festival, 11am-5pm (dog costume contest, Sept 7, 2:30pm). Free. Cultural performances, an open-air street bazaar, lion dancing, and (new this year!) a dog costume contest highlight this 24th annual celebration of the Asian holiday.

Mountain View Art and Wine Festival Castro between El Camino Real and Evelyn, Mtn View; www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. With works by over 600 professional craftspeople and artists, plus live music, home and garden exhibits, a young-performers stage, a climbing wall, food and wine, and more.

 

Sept. 7

Haight Street Music and Merchants Street Festival Haight between Masonic and Stanyan, SF; hsmmsf@gmail.com. Noon-6pm, free. Yep, it’s another street fair on Haight — but this brand-new event has a highly local focus, since it’s sponsored by local merchants. Expect three stages of music, kids’ activities, a skate ramp, and more.

 

Sept. 13

Sea Music Festival San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, Hyde Street Pier, SF; www.nps.gov/safr/planyourvisit/seamusicfestival2014.htm. 9am-5pm; evening chantey sing, 7:30-9:30pm. Outdoor performances free; admission to historic ships $5 (15 and under with adult supervision, free). Learn about maritime history through music at this all-day fest of traditional and contemporary songs, instrumentals, and dances. The Sea Music Concert Series continues aboard the Balclutha Sept 20, Oct 25, and Nov 25 ($12-14 or a season ticket, $36).

 

Sept. 13-14

Ghirardelli Chocolate Festival Ghirardelli Square, 900 North Point, SF; ghirardelli.com/chocolatefestival. Noon-5pm, $20-40. Help raise money for Project Open Hand and satisfy your sweet tooth at this 19th annual dessert and wine fiesta. In addition to offering samples of gourmet goodies from over 50 vendors , Ghirardelli hosts chef demos, a silent auction, a “Chocolate School” (learn about the chocolate-making process!), and the ever-popular hands-free sundae-eating contest.

 

Sept. 14

Comedy Day Sharon Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.comedyday.com. Noon-5pm, free. This year’s incarnation of the free, all-day comedy festival is dedicated to the memory of supporter (and frequent unannounced performer) Robin Williams.

Sunday Streets: Western Addition Fillmore between Geary and Fulton; Fulton between Fillmore and Baker, SF; www.sundaystreetssf.com. 11am-4pm, free. What traffic? Explore the neighborhood (including Alamo Square) on foot or bike.

 

Sept. 19-21

Eat Real Festival Jack London Square, Oakl; www.eatrealfest.com. Sept 19, 1-9pm; Sept 20, 10:30am-9pm; Sept 21, 10:30am-5pm. Free. Billed as a combo “state fair, street-food festival, and block party,” this fest offers sustainable, regionally-sourced eats (BBQ, ice cream, curry, and more) costing eight bucks or less.

Oktoberfest by the Bay Pier 48, SF; www.oktoberfestbythebay.com. Sept 19, 5pm-midnight; Sept 20, 11am-5pm and 6pm-midnight; Sept 21, 11am-6pm. $25-75 (Sept 20-21 day session, kids 13-18, $5; must be accompanied by parent). The Chico Bavarian Band returns to add oompah to your eating and, more importantly, drinking experience. Prost!

 

Sept. 20-21

Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival #58 Old Mill Park, 325 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; www.mvfaf.org. 10am-5pm, $5-10. Over 140 fine artists participate in this fair, which is held in a can’t-be-beat location (hi, majestic redwoods) and also features live music and children’s entertainment.

 

Sept. 21

Folsom Street Fair Folsom between Eighth and 13th Sts, SF; www.folsomstreetfair.com. 11am-6pm, $10 donation requested (donation sticker entitles wearer to $2 off drinks). The leather and fetish fantasia returns with over 200 exhibitor booths, two giant dance floors, public play stations, erotic art, and more.

 

Sept. 27

Bay Area Record Fair Thee Parkside, 1600 17th St, SF; www.theeparkside.com. 11am, $5 early entry (free after noon). Vinyl junkies, take note: over 30 Bay Area indie labels participate at this semi-regular event, which also boasts live music, DJs, raffles, and more.

San Mateo Bacon and Brew Festival Central Park, Fifth Ave and El Camino Real, San Mateo; www.sanmateochamber.org/bbf. 11am-5pm, $15. This fest breaks it down to the essentials. Admission gets you a free beer (or soft drink), while food vendors favor you-know-which crispy pork product.

SuperHero Street Fair 1700 Indiana, SF; www.superherosf.com. 1-11pm, $10. Seven stages and 13 “sound camps” provide the beats for this fifth annual festival celebrating heroes, villains, sidekicks, and everything in between. It goes without saying that costumes are highly encouraged.

 

Sept. 28

“A Day on the Water 2” Cesar Chavez Park, 11 Spinnaker, Berk; (510) 677-9425. Noon-7pm, free. Outdoor fair and music festival with Manzo Rally, Afrofunk Experience, Crosscut, and more.

Sunday Streets: Excelsior Mission between Theresa/Avalon and Geneva, SF; www.sundaystreetssf.com. 11am-4pm, free. Hit the street at this edition of Sunday Streets, which coincides with the sixth annual Tricycle Music Fest at the Excelsior Branch Library (sfpl.org/tricycle for more info).

 

Oct. 4

“Oaktoberfest” Fruitvale at MacArthur, Oakl; www.oaktoberfest.org. 11am-6pm, free. Family-friendly craft beer festival, with over 30 participating local breweries, a Bavarian big band and dancers, German food vendors, and more.

 

Oct. 4-5

Alternative Press Expo Fort Mason Center, Festival Pavilion, 2 Marina, SF; comic-con.org/ape. Check website for updates regarding times and badge prices. APE is back to celebrate alternative and small-press comics in a new venue, with a guest list that includes Bob Fingerman, Faith Erin Hicks, Ed Piskor, Paul Pope, Jason Shiga, and many more.

 

Oct. 5

Castro Street Fair, Castro at Market, SF; www.castrostreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free (donate at the gate to get $1 off at fair beverage booths). Five different entertainment areas (including a main stage, a “legends” stage, and “Barnaby’s World of Wonderment”) highlight this annual event, which was founded by Harvey Milk in 1974. Performers were TBD at press time, so check the website closer to the event for updates.

 

Oct. 9

Union Street Wine Walk Union between Gough and Steiner, SF; www.sresproductions.com. 4-8pm, free (sampling tickets, $25). Restaurants and merchants offer wine tasting and small bites at this fifth annual neighborhood event.

 

Oct. 10-18

Litquake Various venues, SF; www.litquake.org. San Francisco’s annual literary festival turns 15 this year, with a week full of live readings, performances, panels, and multimedia events, including tributes to Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Barbary Coast Award will be presented to Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and their many projects, including 826 Valencia and McSweeney’s.

 

Oct. 11

Woodside Day of the Horse Woodside Town Hall, 2955 Woodside, Woodside; www.whoa94062.org. 10am-2:30pm, free (progressive trail ride, $40). The Woodside-area Horse Owners Association (WHOA) celebrates Year of the Horse with stagecoach rides, live music, a petting zoo, and more, plus an organized trail ride for experienced riders and their horses to raise money for the organization’s charitable community projects.

 

Oct. 11-12

World Vegetarian Festival SF County Fair Building, 1199 Ninth Ave, SF; www.worldvegfestival.com. 10:30am-8:45pm, free. The SF Vegetarian Society’s annual event features cooking demos, exhibitors, speakers, an eco-fashion show, entertainment, and samples galore.

 

Oct. 12

Italian Heritage Parade Begins at Jefferson and Stockton, proceeds on Columbus, and ends in Washington Square, SF; www.sfcolumbusday.org. 12:30pm, free. Established in 1868, this North Beach tradition features handmade floats, a costumed Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella, Italian music, a Ferrari display, and more.

 

Oct. 13

World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off IDES Grounds, 735 Main Street, Half Moon Bay; weighoff.miramarevents.com. 7-11am, free. Who will reign supreme at this 41st annual battle of the bulge, dubbed the “Superbowl of Weigh-Offs”? Last year’s champ tipped the scales at 1,985 pounds — that’s a lotta pie!

 

Oct. 18

Noe Valley Harvest Festival 24th St between Sanchez and Church, SF; www.noevalleyharvestfestival.com. 10am-5pm, free. This 10th annual shindig aims to help you get a jump on holiday shopping, with over 50 local artisans showing their creations. Also: two stages of music, costume contests for dogs and kids, a dunk tank, a pumpkin patch, and more.

Potrero Hill Festival 20th St between Wisconsin and Missouri, SF; www.potrerofestival.com. 11am-4pm, free. Now in its 25th year, this neighborhood block party features local food and entertainment — including a kick-off Cajun-style brunch ($5-12) with Dixieland jazz — plus pony rides and a bouncy house for kids.

 

Oct. 18-19

Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival Main between Mill and Spruce, Half Moon Bay; www.miramarevents.com. 9am-5pm, free. They don’t call Half Moon Bay the World Pumpkin Capital for nothing — the coastal town represents at its 44th annual gourd-tastic throwdown with three stages of music, the Great Pumpkin Parade (Oct 18 at noon), a haunted house attraction, expert Jack O’ Lantern carving, and food and drinks galore (pumpkin beer, anyone?)

 

Oct. 19

Sunday Streets: Mission 18th St between Guerrero and Harrison and Valencia between 25th and Duboce, SF; www.sundaystreetssf.com. 11am-4pm, free. Sunday Streets returns to the Mission! Check the website after Oct. 3 for updates on planned activities.

 

Oct. 25

San Francisco’s Wharf Fest Fisherman’s Wharf, SF; www.sresproductions.com. 11am-6pm, free. Celebrate SF’s waterfront history at this event, with a chowder competition, chef demos, ship tours, street performers, fireworks, and more.

 

Nov. 2

San Francisco Day of the Dead Procession and Festival of Altars Festival, Garfield Park, 26th St and Harrison, SF; www.dayofthedeadsf.org. 6-11pm, free. Procession begins at 22nd St and Bryant, SF; www.dayofthedeadsf.org. 7pm, free. Add a personal altar for a loved one who has passed away to the display at Garfield Park (candles must be in glass containers; no open flames allowed), and bring canned food to donate to St. Anthony’s Foundation, in honor of the altar memorializing the deaths of homeless people in SF. The procession, led by Rescue Culture Collective, circles the Mission accompanied by traditional Aztec dancers.

 

Nov. 14-16

Green Festival Fort Mason Center, 2 Marina, SF; www.greenfestivals.org/sf. Nov 14, noon-6pm; Nov 15-16, 10am-6pm. $15-30. Learn how to “work green, play green, and live green” at this expo, an ode to health and sustainability. Featured events include vegan and vegetarian cooking demos, inspirational speakers, and a marketplace with more than 250 eco-friendly businesses. *

 

Did Big Soda swing a key endorsement by a progressive democratic club?

Erica Hanna
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0
Did Big Soda swing a key endorsement by a progressive democratic club?

Did the soda industry buy a prominent progressive political endorsement? Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle raised the question in a story by Heather Knight, who goes on to air a number of rumors propagated by the soda tax supporters against the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club.

First things first: the sugary beverage tax already has a lot of progressive support. Unions, health groups, and loads of other San Franciscans have backed the two cents per ounce tax on sugary beverages, Proposition E, which is slated to appear on this November’s ballot. The endorsement of “No on E” by the Milk Club is certainly a bit out of left field, and rightfully raised eyebrows in political circles.

That’s the argument Knight uses in her Sunday article, using a few quotes from the soda tax’s paid public relations’ people to take a big swing at Sup. David Campos, alleging this is a big ole scheme he’s orchestrated in order to get Coca Cola’s money to fund the Milk Club’s slate card, which would also feature Campos, giving him a boost in his Assembly race against Sup. David Chiu.

It’s a seemingly convincing scenario, and we’re not soothsayers. Maybe it’s true. But there are a number of reasons to not believe the hype.

First, we at the Guardian heard those same rumors and whispers too, but that wasn’t all we heard. One politico told us the beverage industry might be funding the Milk Club with $300,000 in campaign funds for their November ballot fliers. Our reaction was “um, what?!”

That’s more money than techie-billionaire Ron Conway spent backing Mayor Ed Lee’s major pet projects on the June ballot. Hell, it’s more money than some candidates raise in their entire races. That should’ve been the first red flag for the “soda milking the Milk Club” theory, but it wasn’t the last.

Second, though the club did accept money from the American Beverage Association, it wasn’t anywhere within spitting distance of $300,000. Tom Temprano, co-president of the Milk Club, told us they accepted $5,000 from the beverage industry to put on their annual gala. For context, SEIU Local 1021 donated $4,000 to the dinner. This is all data that would come out publicly in a few months through ethics filings anyhow, but long after the rumor of big beverage industry money would’ve caused its damage.

“All you get for sponsoring our dinner is a mention in the program and a plug on the stage,” Temprano told us. “If the [beverage industry] paid us anywhere near what the rumors are, I would’ve flown out Elton John to serenade [Assemblymember] Tom Ammiano in person.”

Though the $5,000 is not chump change to the Milk Club, its leadership doesn’t make endorsement decisions, which are enacted by a vote of the club’s members. In a heated exchange last week, Milk Club political wonks batted soda tax points back and forth like a beach ball. There was hardly a consensus on the matter.

“They didn’t vote the way I wanted but the process was very democratic,” Sup. Eric Mar told us. Mar was one of the authors of the soda tax, and even he doesn’t believe the Milk Club’s palms were greased by big soda’s big money.

“I feel that there are rumors being spread to undercut the integrity of the Harvey Milk Club, the strongest progressive voice and political leadership in the city right now,” he said. “I stand behind them even though they voted no on [the soda tax].”

Laura Thomas, co-president of the Milk Club, told us she is actually in favor of the soda tax. It’s easy to see why. As Deputy State Director of the Drug Policy Alliance, she has day-to-day experience with public health, and she sees the far reaching affect of soda’s loads of sugar on San Francisco’s kids.

“I do support [the tax], and I’ve spoken passionately for it in our meetings,” Thomas told the Guardian. “I’d say it’s something we’re passionate on all sides about.”

The last stickler in the money-influence theory is a bit trickier. Many we talked to traced some of these rumors back to Chiu’s campaign spokesperson, Nicole Derse. When we spoke to her, she pounced on the subject like a hyena on carrion.

“The Harvey Milk Club has sold out to the soda industry,” she told us. “What would Harvey Milk think of this gross display of hypocrisy? David Campos needs to answer some serious questions on his position on the soda tax and his campaign.”

Notice how she shifted the Milk Club assertion, which we asked her about, straight into a Campos critique. She’s affable, she’s smart, but in that moment, Derse also sounded gleeful.

We then asked Derse if the rumor about the Milk Club and Campos came from her.

“I am not the person that started this rumor. But do you really think it’s a coincidence David Campos is broke and needs a vehicle to fund his campaign? I think it speaks for itself, if it happens,” she said. “If the Milk Club does not take hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American Beverage Association, I will happily be wrong.”

Actually, when it comes to spreading rumors through news outlets, being right or wrong doesn’t really matter. All you need to do is raise the question of impropriety, proof or no. It’s grandma’s classic recipe for a good political smear, as old as the hills, and very, very easy to do.

Update [8/26]: This story stirred up quite a bit of controversy, and folks called, emailed, Facebooked and Tweeted at us with one point: sure the Milk Club didn’t take all that much money from the American Beverage Association for the gala, but what about the future? Would they take a large sum from the ABA? Tom Temprano answered: “I find that completely unlikely. I’m going to say that’s not a situation we’re going to be in. But I haven’t had a conversation with anyone with anybody about money yet. Our entire board and PAC chair make decisions on fundraising.”

So there you are. If a donation in the tens of thousands of dollars should land on the Milk Club’s doorstep, Temprano is now on the record.

More time, same crime

Michael Redmond
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0
More time, same crime

joe@sfbg.com

Roll up a dollar bill, snort a line of coke, sit back and smile: If your cocaine use leads to a conviction, your drug of choice will be spared from the harsher penalties associated with inhaling the substance through a glass pipe. When it comes to busts for cocaine possession and dealing, those caught with a rock instead of the powdered stuff are kept behind bars longer. But that could soon change.

The drug is the same, the punishment is not — and a new bill may soon end that decades-long disparity, one that critics have called racist. But crack cocaine use is now at a historic low in San Francisco, raising a question: What took so long?

The California Assembly voted 50-19 Friday [8/16] to pass the Fair Sentencing Act, which aims to lower the sentence for possession with intent to sell crack cocaine to be on par with that of powder cocaine.

The bill, authored by Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), is seen as championing racial justice.

“The Fair Sentencing Act will take a brick out of the wall of the failed 1980s drug-war era laws that have devastated communities of color, especially black and Latino men,” Lynne Lyman of the Drug Policy Alliance said in a prepared statement.

Crack cocaine rocks have tended to be more heavily used by African Americans, while powdered cocaine tends to be the province of rich white folks. The bill would lessen the maximum sentence for crack cocaine possession with intent to sell to four years, down from five. It would still constitute a felony.

In California, having a drug-related felony on record can prevent the formerly incarcerated from accessing housing assistance and food stamps, further feeding a cycle of poverty. The Fair Sentencing Act now awaits Gov. Jerry Brown’s pen. But some say this disparity should have been addressed some 30 years ago.

The 1980s gave rise to the “crack epidemic” narrative, a supposedly sweeping addiction promulgated by media reports on crack’s outsized harm to pregnant women and newborn babies. But those health impacts are now understood to be on par with tobacco use during pregnancy, rather than the terrifying danger it was presented to be.

Still, the images and narratives from that era were powerful.

In a television news report that aired in the 1980s, an unnaturally tiny baby quivers and shakes on the screen. Then-First Lady Nancy Reagan appears and hammers the point home: “Drugs take away the dream from every child’s heart, and replace it with a nightmare.” Flash forward to the future, and university researchers have produced studies showing that the babies born to crack-using mothers that so frightened the country were simply prematurely born, and went on to lead healthy lives.

True or not, people were outraged. The change in laws happened “virtually overnight,” Public Defender Jeff Adachi told us. Crack cocaine hit San Francisco hard.

Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, remembers it well. He had just come out of homelessness in the Tenderloin in the ’80s. Just prior to starting as a staffer at Hospitality House, he saw the worst of it.

“People were killing each other over the stupidest shit. It got really violent,” he said. “What crack cocaine did is it divided a community against itself. I never thought I’d get to a point where I missed heroin.”

But, he added, “I do think the advent of crack and the assumption that every black male was doing crack gave the cops carte blanche for all of their racist patterns.”

According to the Drug Policy Alliance, people of color accounted for over 98 percent of men sent to California prisons for possession of crack cocaine for sale. Two-thirds were black, and the rest were Latino.

Long since the days when cops regularly raided the Tenderloin on a hunt for every glass crack pipe, the SFPD is now a somewhat more lenient beast in the drug realm. Drug arrests in the city dropped by 85 percent in the last five years, according to California Department of Justice data. Police Chief Greg Suhr downsized his narcotics unit, shifting to focus on violent crime.

“People that sell drugs belong in jail because they’re preying upon sick people,” Suhr told the Guardian, although he added, “People with a drug problem need to be treated, as it’s a public health issue.”

Suhr said he supports the lower sentencing for crack cocaine to make it on par with powder.

“Cocaine,” he said, “is cocaine.”

District Attorney George Gascon’s office also prosecutes mostly violent and property crimes as opposed to drug possession, reflecting a rare show of agreement between the Public Defender’s Office, the SFPD, and the DA. San Franciscans battling drug problems are often diverted to drug courts and rehabilitation programs.

Crack cocaine has largely moved on from San Francisco, leaving its ugly legacy. Meanwhile, heroin use is on the rise, but nevertheless carries the same harsh sentence as crack cocaine for possession with intent to sell.

“It’s the pathetic state of politics today that it took this long for this to happen,” Boden told us, on sentencing reform. “Now it won’t cost me anything, I’ll show what a great liberal I am.”

 

Film festival organizers call for safer San Francisco streets

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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8
Film festival organizers call for safer San Francisco streets

Editor’s Note: Aug. 19 marks the Bay Area Global Health Film Festival, hosted by the Institute for Global Orthopaedics and Traumatology. The theme of this year’s festival is “Road Traffic Safety Locally … and Globally,” and is geared toward raising awareness about the need for road traffic safety improvements. In this opinion piece, representatives from the University of California at San Francisco Orthopaedic Trauma Institute, at San Francisco General Hospital, describe how all-too-common accidents can permanently injure pedestrians and bicyclists. And they voice support for Proposition A, the San Francisco Transportation and Road Improvement Bond.

By Amber Caldwell and Nick Arlas

San Francisco is a transit-first city. Everyone shares the need to get safely from point A to point B, preferably quickly. And the various options for doing so span the full spectrum from driving, biking, and walking, to public transit like MUNI and Bart, rideshare programs, taxis, and companies like Uber and Lyft.

As we go about our daily lives, transportation is one of the most important public infrastructure systems that San Francisco relies upon. It encompasses many controversial issues and is linked to other social equity campaigns including housing advocacy and urban gentrification.

Yet the issue of pedestrian and bike safety in San Francisco has made disheartening headlines as of late. 2013 was an especially deadly year, with 21 pedestrian and four bicyclist fatalities. San Francisco General Hospital alone cared for over 1,000 road traffic injuries, with an estimated $60 million annual cost. Organizations like the SF Bicycle Coalition and WalkSF have made biking and walking leading issues in debates over transportation policy and traffic safety. Mayor Ed Lee and our city government have responded by introducing a $500 million transportation bond measure for the Nov. 4th ballot. If it passes, a portion of the funding will be allocated for improving pedestrian and cyclist safety.

Less often discussed, however, is what happens to the pedestrians and bicyclists who are hit while going about their daily routines and permanently affected by all-too-common accidents. At the UCSF SFGH Orthopaedic Trauma Institute (OTI), these patients fill our wards, the operating room schedule and our hearts as we help to heal them from these injuries. We struggle with the balance between doing what we can and what should be done to curb the growing volume of patients we see annually due to preventable accidents.

What is alarming is the socio-economic impact these accidents have, not only on the person affected, but on the hospital and our city as a whole. Even in cases where the driver is at fault, it is rare for them to even be cited for a traffic violation in most cases. More importantly, personal injury insurance and health coverage barely cover the emergency services needed for these accidents, and most services offered at the hospital are subsidized by taxpayer dollars, which means we are paying for this on all sides. This is unacceptable.

There is currently a wave of momentum to address these complex issues and attempt to tease through how we as a city can rebuild, redefine and reinforce the safety in our city. This movement is supported by a global platform addressing road traffic safety as a public health campaign, through the World Health Organization’s Decade of Road Traffic Safety. This campaign tackles the myriad polices and resource investments needed to address the enormous impact road traffic accidents have on the world. 

Injuries, mainly those resulting from road traffic accidents, account for greater disability and death than HIV, TB and Malaria combined.  An average 5.8 million die annually, and for every death caused by these accidents, eight to 10 more are permanently injured.

To bring collective awareness around this issue and to change the landscape, the community needs to stand together not only in San Francisco but also around the world, to demand safer streets. The city is doing its part to outline a roadmap to curbing these alarming statistics, and a greater global campaign is underway to promote awareness and inspire activism.

We must stand up for the injured and for ourselves as local citizens to demand safer streets and protection from when accidents occur.  We may not be able to prevent every accident, but we can improve the choreography of their outcome if we work together.    

Amber Caldwell and Nick Arlas are Director of Development and Community Outreach Coordiator, respectively, at the Institute for Global Orthopaedics and Traumatology, UCSF Orthopaedic Trauma Institute, San Francisco General Hospital.

The Bay Area Global Health Film Festival begins Tue/19 at 6 p.m. at Public Works, 161 Erie, in San Francisco.

SF school board votes to aid Central American child refugees, hopes to spark national movement

Erica Hanna
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14
SF school board votes to aid Central American child refugees, hopes to spark national movement

Waves of Central American child refugees are landing in San Francisco, fleeing violence in their home countries. A growing number of supporters are lending aid, and now the San Francisco Unified School District is the newest group to join the cause. 

Last night [Tues/12], the SFUSD Board of Education unanimously approved a resolution to bolster services in city public schools for child refugees fleeing Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

“We are a nation of immigrants, which is often forgotten when we talk about ‘those kids,'” SFUSD Superintendent Richard Carranza said to the board. “These are our children.”

To help them, he said, “we will move heaven and earth.” Carranza then pledged to forward the text of the resolution far and wide, saying he hoped the SFUSD’s efforts would cross the desk of President Barack Obama, and set an example for the rest of the country.

Child refugees coming to San Francisco face language barriers, inadequate city services, and major gaps in their education. The resolution, authored by board member Matt Haney, will beef up teaching resources for child refuegees, connect these children with counseling services, and enroll them in specific classes geared towards new English learners. The district will also soon hire an administrator to coordinate these new and existing services for refugees. This new administrator will need the qualifications of a social worker, the district said, and it’s easy to see why. 

One counselor put the kids’ needs this way: normal teenagers have it hard enough, but adjusting to school with the trauma of near-death behind you can be almost impossible.

“These kids have a set of needs which are at a higher level than any set of kids we deal with,” Haney said. 

Most of these new services will wrap into SFUSD’s Newcomer Pathways program, an already existing framework which bolsters the success of new immigrant children in San Francisco, who often face steep language and cultural barriers.The effort joins a rising tide of SF officials pledging to aid these refugees, including Supervisor David Campos, Mayor Ed Lee, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, and USF School of Law Dean John Trasvina.

The US Department of Health and Human Services reported 175 unaccompanied minors were released into custody of San Franciscans, though federal data shows many hundreds more wait in the wings for aid. Some of these refugee children will join school in the new year, which starts Monday, but many are already in attendance.

Dawn Woehl, a counselor with the Newcomer Pathways program at Mission High School, told the board during public comment she started noticing more child immigrants who spent time in detention centers in New York and Texas. 

“We may not know much about each individual family, but we know enough about the trauma they’re facing,” she said. After she spoke to the board, she told the Guardian that wraparound services for mental health are most needed. 

“We take care of the basic needs first,” she said, “but counseling is where we get stretched.”

These children and teenagers often come from towns where gangs recruit new members through high schools. Those that refuse to join up meet violent fates: rape, dismemberment, and death. With those challenges, it’s no wonder that many of these kids show up in San Francisco with gaps in their learning, and significant need of counseling.

“The need for Spanish-speaking therapists is high,” Woehl told us. 

The Newcomer Pathways program is a successful one, and alumni of the program came to the board to laud the proposal to aid the refugees.

“I was born and raised in Guatemala, I emigrated here when I was 14 years old,” Anna Avalos Tizol, now 21, told the Board of Education. “I had to learn the language, the culture, and work to help my family back in Guatemala. It was a culture shock.”

But in the end, the young student found success at Mission High School. She’s now a senior at UC Santa Cruz, and interned in Washington DC, where she witnessed child refugees testifying before Congress, telling them of the cold hard floors and thin sheets of their detention centers.

“When we come here, we give up everything. Our home and our loved ones,” she said. “Remember: all children are sacred.”

Touch of class

Michael Redmond
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0
Touch of class

culture@sfbg.com

 

INPUT AS NOISE MUSIC WORKSHOP

Bask in the simplest element of electronic music — noise — and tickle your tech fancies simultaneously. This workshop is described as “not so much, or not only, a software workshop, but rather a composition course in electronic music which takes as its starting point the use of noise.” So treat your ears to the basics of sound and your imagination to the endless possibilities of music, without having to take your fingers off your precious electronics.

Aug. 23, noon, $10 suggested donation. NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, www.tinyurl.com/noiseworkshop

 

HOMEMADE FETA

Have you stood in the cheese aisle at your favorite market, marveling at the choices, but feeling a little guilty for buying something you could make? 18 Reasons is offering a class that will give you the skills to finally create homemade creamy deliciousness. Cheese veteran Louella Hill, aka the San Francisco Milk Maid, will teach you everything you need — and want — to know about cheese and making feta.

Aug. 25, 6pm-9pm, $65 for non-members/$55 for members. 18 Reasons, 3674 18th St, www.tinyurl.com/homemadefeta.

 

LEATHERWORKING

Up your street cred by having your nice leather belt — and making it, too. The class, taught by SF crafter and owner of leather shop Tilt Adornments, will teach you to make a custom leather belt, totally personalized, with perfectly placed holes. All supplies for dyeing and assembling your belt are provided. Bonus points: There will be alphabet stamps and beer.

Sept. 4, 7pm-10:30pm, $68. Workshop SF, 1798 McAllister, www.tinyurl.com/makeabelt.

 

ACID TEST

Acid isn’t just for hippies. Editor, journalist, and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Tom Schroder will discuss psychedelic drugs’ ability to heal and help those with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, and addiction. Recent trials show that drugs now associated with trippy artwork, the 60s, and Ken Kesey may be the secret to mental health. This lecture will cover the past, present, and future of psychedelic therapy. Far out.

Sept. 25, 7pm-9pm, $20 for non-members, $15 for members at door. CIIS, 1453 Mission, www.tinyurl.com/acidlecture

 

NINJA ROLLING AND FALLING WORKSHOP FOR CYCLISTS

Cycling past backed-up car traffic in SF feels badass enough, but the danger adds an extra edge. Prepare mentally and physically for accidents, whether they’re car- or pebble-induced, in a padded environment. This workshop is designed to help cyclists save face (and limbs) in the event of a collision. Plus, what motorist would want to mess with a cyclist who has ninja skills?

Sept. 9/Oct. 5, 1pm-3pm, Free. Mission Yoga, 2390 Mission, www.tinyurl.com/ninjacyclist

 

WINE TASTING FUNDAMENTALS

Award-winning sommelier Eugenio Jardim will lead you through the wafting and sipping and lip smacking of wine tasting. This class promises to provide the necessary skills for enjoying great wines and being able to talk about them. Six wines will be tasted during the class. And after you’ve mastered the fundamentals, you can pour your skills into the SF Cooking School’s region-themed tastings, including New Zealand, France, and Italy.

Oct. 2, 5:30pm-7:30pm, $85. San Francisco Cooking School, 690 Van Ness,

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Science of inclusion

Michael Redmond
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1
Science of inclusion

news@sfbg.com

Tammie Jean Bellinger had been unemployed for 14 years, and when she was 48, she decided to enter the tech industry. “My son told me that if I wanted to start my life over, I should do it in San Francisco,” Bellinger said. “He said no one would notice my age, or anything about me.”

She’s Hispanic, Native American, a little bit Ashkenazi, and female. That doesn’t sound like the tech industry, where data illustrates the lack of workforce diversity. Between 60 and 70 percent of employees at Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yahoo are men, while 91 percent of U.S. employees at Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn are white and Asian.

Bellinger, however, wasn’t setting her sights on the software or programming sectors but rather biotech, where female representation in major companies like Genentech is now over 50 percent, according to Fortune. In 2010, women held 46 percent of all positions in the biological and life sciences. A far cry from the frat boy image often associated with tech, things are different in the science-based field that tinkers with the building blocks of life.

First, though, Bellinger needed a way in. She found it at City College of San Francisco’s Bridge to Bio program, which accepts students who have no prior background in science. And it’s affordable. In-state students pay $46 per unit at City College, far below the $3,000 price tag for a full semester at San Francisco State University. Bellinger found herself learning alongside an eclectic mix of former school bus drivers, cooks, ballerinas, and bartenders. Many were female, people of color, and over 30.

Before long, Bellinger found herself completing internships in science labs where she cataloged human tissue, urine, and blood samples for cancer research.

“I know it sounds stupid, but a light bulb went off. My whole family has been affected by cancer,” Bellinger said. “I’ve been that family member. The doctor is on the other side, and there’s nothing you can do. I just hope that the person reading the tissue has as much passion as I do. That’s all I want.”

 

FUTURE SCIENTISTS

When Bellinger went to look for jobs, she was concerned about her age, but her worries vanished when she was offered a lab tech position at Genomic Health. “Biotech is different. Pretty much all … the recruiters are all women,” she said. “My knowledge is all new. If I talk the talk, and walk the walk, and it’s all updated, they’ll take me in.”

But even now, she has trouble seeing herself as a scientist. “I feel like an artist,” she said. “If you can stain a perfect nuclei and bring that cell to life when they’re performing cancer treatment, that’s kind of an art. The tissues come alive. They tell a story.”

Bellinger wants all young girls to see themselves as future scientists. This September, she’s going to start a program called Tech Bridge for those in the Livermore area. With a coral reef she built with her son, she’ll teach the Livermore Girl Scouts how to test water and play around with nitrates.

Tech Bridge is mirrored after Nexgene Girls, launched by Bridge to Bio graduates Jeanette Wright and Marlena Jackson. Through Nexgene Girls, young girls in Bayview-Hunters Point complete internships where they work alongside professional scientists and conduct their own experiments, like extracting DNA from bacteria in the salt marshes of Heron’s Head Park. By 2015, Nexgene Girls is looking to take a science field trip to Botswana.

Before Jackson became a scientist, she drove a school bus. In Hunters Point, where she grew up, breast cancer rates among women under age 50 are twice above average.

“I looked around and I thought, ‘I’ve got to do more’,” Jackson said. “You look around at the divisions in Bayview Hunters Point, and science seems like a way you can really change the community. My mother survived breast and cervical cancer. I know the power of medicine.”

After graduating from Bridge to Bio, Jackson got a job at Genentech in 2006. At that time, there weren’t many African Americans employed by the company. “I looked around, and I realized there weren’t many women that even looked like me,” she said. “That was how I started thinking about how I could go and give back to my community. I wanted to inspire young women to see themselves differently.”

Now, when young girls complete NexGene Girls programs, Jackson said, they have a different perception of what a scientist looks like. “They come in with the perception that a scientist is a guy, and he’s white,” Jackson said. “But when they’re done, and they’re asked to draw a scientist, they draw a girl. They’re not even drawing a woman. They’re drawing themselves.”

While Nexgene Girls focuses on inspiring young girls, another women-led biotech organization in the Bay Area — part of a larger, national network — is Women in Bio. For them, the mission is not to introduce more women to biology-related fields, where women already make up a substantial percentage of the workforce, but to bring females to leadership positions. Of the 18 Bay Area life sciences companies that had gone public since the start of 2012, women made up only 12 of the 129 board posts. Ten of the companies have no women on their boards.

Chris Meda, now CEO of medicine consulting firm RxDxLink and the chair of the San Francisco Chapter of Women in Bio, found herself struggling to find female mentors when she entered the industry 30 years ago. “If you look at my resume, you can see how many companies I’ve worked for. I wasn’t willing to wait around. If they didn’t want to give me the opportunity, I would find someone that would,” she said.

Now, her mission is to mentor young women through Women in Bio, which also runs monthly programs including workshops to help women network, start their own companies, and gain technical skills.

 

CURIOSITY AND GLOWING PLANTS

Others, like Sunny Allen, have found their bridge to biology outside of the industry and within DIY bio hackerspaces, like BioCurious in Sunnyvale. That’s where Allen learned how to make algae glow in the dark.

“I’m the poster child for the kind of girl all these STEM programs are trying to reach,” said Allen, who grew up in Kentucky. “In the seventh grade, I fell in love with the micro-science world. I wanted to be a marine biologist. I applied for this magnet school for high school. I got in. But then I hit a wall. I got kicked out of the program, and I thought, ‘This is too hard for me. I can’t do it.'”

Later, she fell for a programmer and followed him to the Bay Area, where she felt alienated by the male “brogrammer” culture. “You have guys making six figures and taking Adderall to see who can code the most,” Allen said. “And they have these girlfriends who aren’t programmers, because most girls aren’t programmers. Suddenly there’s this imbalance of power. Women take care of them like infants. They’re like coding monkeys.”

But at BioCurious, she said, it was different. “Out there, I finally felt like I could do something. Biology is accessible tech for women,” she said. “For me, what really happened was that a lot of succeeding in biology is not dependent on being able to do the problem sets, like the physics and the math, but a lot of it is reading comprehension. I could get in.”

She soon launched Biomonstaaar, an open source bioreactor project (a bioreactor is an engineered system that supports a biological environment). She now lives in a hacker house in Sunnyvale and has big dreams of escaping the service industry through the world of robotic sex toys. Indeed, she’s now the creative director of a yet-to-be-named robotic sex toy company with a launch date three weeks away and a crowdsourcing campaign on the horizon. She’s in charge of testing the sex toy, and critiquing it. The other two scientists involved are men.

“They needed a woman’s touch,” she said.

This robotic sex toy is like a vibrator that knows exactly what the user wants: It senses pressure and motion, and then reacts to it. After trying out the prototype, Allen wrote to other scientists involved, “Congratulations, we’ve invented a new kind of sex.”

Jihyun Moon is another female scientist who found her place in biology through DIY bio roots. When Moon saw an advertisement calling for scientists who might like to help make a glowing plant, she signed up.

Now, she works at the Glowing Plant Project, a controversial endeavor that uses synthetic biology with DNA laser printing to create plants that glow in the dark. The project raised more than $450,000 on Kickstarter and drew national media coverage, becoming the focal point of a debate over DNA modification. The bioengineered plants are expected to ship later this year. “I’m the scientist here,” Moon proclaimed from her lab in SoMa. “I make DNA.” Her job is to take the enzyme genes from fireflies and marine bacteria, and put those pieces of DNA into plants.

Moon says that as far as she’s concerned, DIY bio is the gateway to biology. For other women, biology is the door to biotech. And that’s the door to a whole lot else.

Public hospitals are too Lean

Michael Redmond
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5

OPINION

The San Francisco Department of Public Health is paying Rona Consulting Group, an out-of-state consulting firm, $1.3 million of taxpayer dollars to implement a program called “Lean,” allegedly to improve patient services. The “Lean” program is based on the Japanese Toyota automobile production model.

Hospital quality improvement schemes such as the Lean promise decreased waiting times, improved communication, more satisfied patients, and safer care. Quality care should also decrease the incidence of hospital-acquired conditions so that patients leave the hospital without getting new infections, falling, or getting pressure ulcers such as “bed sores.”

Hospital administrators are telling health care workers and patients that Lean will achieve these widely shared goals. Yet despite years of efforts, there is no evidence that it works, and growing concern that resources must be increased rather than prescribing the Lean diet to an already starving public health infrastructure.

Health care should be based on the best available science — not corporate sales. The Lean program encourages the hospital staff to consider its workplace as a factory shop floor, and to consider their patients and work as a product. The competition for well-insured patients and improved satisfaction for reimbursement has caused hospital administrators and Lean consultants to propose surgical clinics that resemble Nordstrom or the Hyatt Regency.

Lean’s management methodology, based on Toyota’s selected Japanese words, is used to mystify and dazzle. Instead of the pharmacy window, we are told that all staff must go to the “gemba,” which the consultants (not the dictionary) say is Japanese for “where the work happens.” Many highly paid hospital administrators and even clinical staff have been re-named as “kaizen promotion office” leaders. Those who have completed advanced training are awarded a “black belt.” The use of Japanese terms is clearly meant to add a sense of authority.

Evidence-based medicine and nursing have been examining high-quality studies of the effectiveness of improvement schemes such as Lean. According to “Guiding Inpatient Quality Improvement: A Systematic Review of Lean” (The Joint Commission, 2012), “the true impact of these approaches is difficult to judge, given that the lack of rigorous evaluation or clearly sustained improvements provides little evidence supporting broad adoption.” This leads to very expensive, wishful thinking. When consultants are paid from $4,700 to $25,000 a day from public funds intended to construct a seismically sound hospital (see “Toyota work methods applied at General Hospital” San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 7, 2014) it seems important to consider what randomized controlled trials tell us. The taxpayers have a right to know what to expect from this scheme, but there are no controlled scientific studies to tell us.

Despite more than 10 years of multiple published studies, very few consulting firms even report statistics. Those that do show weak evidence of effectiveness, and none show sustained improvement. If Lean were a medication, it would never receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration, as we don’t know if it helps or hurts the care of patients. As it is, hospitals are performing a single-group intervention study without ethical approval or consent from the workers and the patients.

Hospitals should be providing their patients with the best care, not the cheapest. Even if Lean didn’t come with a price tag to taxpayers ranging in millions of dollars for consultants to do the work that administrators should be doing, the underlying notion of speed is dangerous in health care. Public health patients are even more vulnerable with increased prevalence of poverty-related co-morbidities, from diabetes to tuberculosis. If there were a way to more quickly cure our population of its many ills, we would embrace Lean.

Nobody likes to wait around, but the human connection between caregiver and patient takes time. Efficiency should not be valued over safety. Furthermore, many patients would be unhappy to learn that they are being viewed as inanimate products on an assembly line. Nor does it please health workers to think of themselves as robots.

Hospital safety under Lean is being modeled after the same automobile corporation that was just forced to pay $1.2 billion for concealing safety defects (“Toyota Is Fined $1.2 Billion for Concealing Safety Defects” New York Times, March 19, 2014). The safety defects were implicated in unintended acceleration of some Toyota vehicles that led to injury and death. Speed was certainly not helpful in that situation. Perhaps DPH should critically examine Lean before prescribing a diet to our vulnerable safety-net patients. Maybe we need more, not faster, health care workers.

Ed Kinchley has worked for DPH for 30 years, after spending nine years in Japan.

Until we legalize marijuana, reduce arrests

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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38
Until we legalize marijuana, reduce arrests

By Endria Richardson

Last week, the Editorial Board of the New York Times called for the federal government to repeal its ban on marijuana. Marijuana legalization would be a strong step towards reducing the impact of the drug war, especially on communities of color. But, as coverage by the New York Times may be missing, legalization is a small – and slowly moving – step towards ending mass incarceration. Reducing arrests in California can do more to impact mass incarceration now.

Federal legalization of marijuana will be a slow, perhaps decades-long, process. In the meantime, we should not get caught up in the excitement of what might be, and forget about the casualties of continuing criminal penalties for illegal drug use and possession. In 2012, there were 79,270 misdemeanor drug arrests in California, and 120,995 felony drug offense arrests. Of the individuals arrested for misdemeanor drug offenses, 30,067 were Hispanic, and 8,433 were Black.

It has long been acknowledged that who is arrested often depends less on who is actually committing a crime, than on deeply entrenched beliefs about who commits crimes and who deserves punishment. Nowhere is this more apparent than with drug offenses. And yet, perhaps more than any other tool in the criminal system, arrests disregard the social context in which they occur. There is no time to consider complex sociological questions about why crimes are committed, or what the impact of arrest will be on a person’s community.

An interim strategy of challenging arrest practices can reduce these numbers. This could start with asking state legislatures to take arrest or incarceration off the table for all misdemeanor drug offenses, and replacing criminal penalties with infractions. Police officers could be trained on alternative responses to offenses that we, as a society, have decided should not be paid for in arrest, incarceration, or a criminal record.

In California, this has already made a difference in the number of arrests for misdemeanor marijuana possession. In 2010, there were 54,849 misdemeanor marijuana arrests. After the state made possession of under an ounce of marijuana an infraction, that number plummeted – to 7,768 in 2011. Felony marijuana arrests remained high – at 13,434 in 2012.

Other states are also taking an aggressive approach to reducing incarceration and arrests for drug crimes. Washington state’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (“LEAD”) program, launched in 2011 and designed by a coalition of law enforcement, district attorneys, public defenders, and community members, diverts people with low-level drug and prostitution offenses into community-based services after arrest, but before booking. The Vera Institute of Justice recently found that, in 2013, six states enacted or strengthened pretrial drug treatment diversion programs, 11 instituted or expanded access to “problem-solving” courts that rely less heavily on incarceration, and three codified graduated responses to violations of supervision conditions, including issuing written reprimands instead of immediate arrest or incarceration in one state.

California should reduce the impact of the War on Drugs, safely and quickly, by relying less on arrests and incarceration. Misdemeanor drug offenses are a good place to start. Eventually, we can shift more completely towards a public health approach to drug use and misuse, one that eschews entirely the criminal system. In the interim, treating simple drug use or possession as infractions would save the state millions of dollars in booking, court, and jail fees – money that could more profitably be invested in treatment, education, employment, and housing opportunities.

(Sources: Crime in California 2012 and Vera Institute of Justice Report)

Endria Richardson is a graduate of Stanford Law School and is currently a fellow at Legal Services for Prisoners With Children. She can be reached at endria@prisonerswithchildren.org.

Rise up singing

Michael Redmond
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0
Rise up singing

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM A remarkably effective — and remarkably simple — form of music therapy pioneered by New York social worker Dan Cohen finds a strong advocate in filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett, whose documentary Alive Inside benefits greatly from its awesomely cinematic results. The doc sprang from a 2011 YouTube video, “Man In Nursing Home Reacts to Hearing Music from His Era,” a six-minute clip that went viral after a Reddit post. (It’s since garnered nearly 1.5 million views.)

The scene is a typically depressing nursing home, where an elderly man named Henry sits hunched over in a wheelchair. But once he’s given a pair of headphones and an iPod loaded with the gospel songs he used to love, he lights up. His eyes open wide. He boogies in his chair. He croons along at the top of his lungs. Even more incredibly, after the headphones are lifted, he’s able to converse with Rossato-Bennett, enthusing about Cab Calloway and his long-ago job as a “grocery boy.” In just seconds, the music he’d long forgotten seemingly zapped Henry with fresh life, enabling him to connect with his memories and express himself with surprising energy.

No wonder Rossato-Bennett, who filmed numerous examples of this phenomenon over the three years he followed Cohen, chose to make Alive Inside his first feature-length doc. Even though we know what to expect after seeing Henry’s reaction, the before-and-afters are intensely moving with every patient: the bipolar schizophrenic whose constant distress is alleviated, however briefly, by a spontaneous encounter with a funky tune; the man with dementia who sparks with his healthy wife, to her teary-eyed delight, as they listen to the Shirelles; the middle-aged woman whose frustration with her forgetfulness is soothed by a much-needed dose of the Beach Boys. And it’s not just the pleasure of hearing the music, Alive Inside suggests; it’s the regained sense of identity and emotion that music triggers in people whose memories have been essentially wiped clean.

Though the film could’ve probably sustained interest just based on these small yet monumental moments, Rossato-Bennett widens his focus to include neurology — Dr. Oliver Sacks explains how music is “a back door into the mind” for patients with Alzheimer’s and related diseases — and the history of American elder care, expanded upon by physicians and others who think the current system favors efficiency over nurturing. (It also struggles against a culture where youth is prized, and aging people are seen as something to be hidden away.) Care facilities emphasize regimented schedules, and most patients are overly medicated. As activist and geriatric medicine specialist Dr. Bill Thomas points out, the big bucks in health care are in pharmaceuticals. One social worker’s dream of distributing iPods filled with big band jams and other music tailored specifically to each patient is a fringe idea at best, no matter how effective it’s proven to be.

Alive Inside also investigates music’s primal powers, with Bobby “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” McFerrin and Musicians for World Harmony co-founder Samite Mulondo offering their expertise. More of an enigma is Cohen (Rossato-Bennett handles the occasionally over-sentimental narration), a lanky, soft-spoken man who cares deeply about the people he’s trying to help, even doing an awkward shuffle with a patient enjoying her first iPod experience. Cohen’s nonprofit, Music & Memory, came about as a result of his volunteer work in nursing homes, which he describes as a “life-changing experience.” Unfortunately, not everyone shares his point of view. We see him networking at a long-term care conference with some success, but he’s also shown pleading his case to facilities that refuse to accommodate him, and prodding deep-pocketed corporations that decline to donate.

Alive Inside‘s delighted chronicling of its own viral origins — Henry and his gospel awakening — caps the movie with a sense of hope that maybe The Kids can be bothered to care about The Olds, after all. One way to start: At screenings across America, including at San Francisco’s Opera Plaza, Cohen’s Music & Memory will have donation boxes to scoop up working iPods for its cause. *

 

ALIVE INSIDE opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters.

The last Republican

Michael Redmond
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34
The last Republican

steve@sfbg.com

BART Director James Fang is San Francisco’s only elected official who is a registered Republican, yet over the last 24 years, he has somehow managed to easily win election after election in a city dominated by the Democratic Party, often with the endorsements of top Democrats.

But this year, Fang is facing a strong and well-funded challenge from investor and former solar company entrepreneur Nicholas Josefowitz, a Harvard graduate in his early 30s. Thanks in part to support from the tech community — Lyft cofounder Logan Green is one of several prominent figures in tech to host fundraisers for him, according to Re/Code — Josefowitz has managed to amass a campaign war chest of about $150,000.

Josefowitz has also secured some key political endorsements, including from Sups. John Avalos, Eric Mar, and Scott Wiener, BART Director Tom Radulovich, former SF Mayor Art Agnos, and the Sierra Club.

After Josefowitz sold his solar company, RenGen, almost two years ago, “I got more and more involved in sustainable community advocacy,” he told us. “Then the BART strike happened and I was like, wow, this shouldn’t be happening.”

Josefowitz cited BART’s history of worker safety violations, last year’s unnecessarily divisive labor contract negotiations, the district’s massive deferred maintenance budget, property devoted to parking lots that could be put to better uses (he sees potential there for real-estate development), corrupt cronyism in its contracting, and lack of cooperation with other transit agencies as problems that urgently need correcting.

Fang is being challenged by well-funded Democratic newcomer Nicholas Josefowitz.

“BART does a terrible job at coordinating with other transit agencies,” Josefowitz told us, arguing the transit connections should be timed and seamless. “James has been there for 24 years, and if he was going to be the right guy to fix it, then he would have done it by now.”

But perhaps Josefowitz’s strongest argument is that as a Republican in liberal San Francisco, Fang’s values are out-of-step with those of voters. “Why is someone still a Republican today? … He’s a Republican and he’s a Republican in 2014, with everything that means,” Josefowitz told us. “He hasn’t been looking out for San Francisco and he’s out of touch with San Francisco values.”

We asked Fang why he’s a Republican. After saying it shouldn’t matter as far as the nonpartisan BART board race is concerned, he told us that when he was in college, he and his friends registered Republican so they could vote for John Anderson in the primary election.

“Some people feel the expedient thing for me to is switch parties,” Fang said, but “I think it’s a loyalty thing. If you keep changing … what kind of message does that send to people?”

Fang said he thought the focus ought to be on his track record, not his political affiliation. It shouldn’t matter “if it’s a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches mice,” he said. He pointed to programs such as seismic upgrades, completing the BART to the airport project, and instituting a small-business preference for BART contractors as evidence of his strong track record. “I’m a native San Franciscan — I’ve gone through all the public schools,” Fang added. “It’s very important to get people from a San Francisco perspective and San Francisco values.”

Josefowitz supporters say he has perhaps the best shot ever at defeating Fang, largely because of his prodigious fundraising and aggressive outreach efforts on the campaign trail. “He is doing all the things that someone should do to win the race,” Radulovich, San Francisco’s other longtime elected representative on the BART board, told us. “There’s a lot of unhappiness with BART these days.”

But in an interesting political twist, Fang has the endorsement of Service Employees International Union Local 1021, a champion of many progressive causes in San Francisco, after he walked the picket line with striking BART employees last year and opposed the district’s decision to hire a high-priced, union-busting labor consultant.

“It’s a priority for us to elect Fang,” SEIU 1021 organizer Gabriel Haaland told us. “When we needed him on the strike, he walked our picket line.”

SEIU Political Chair Alysabeth Alexander sounded a similar note. “In the middle of one of the most important and highest-profile labor fights in the nation, when two workers had to die to prove that safety issues were the heart of the struggle, Fang was the only board member who took a position for safety,” she said. “Every other member shut out the workers and refused to acknowledge that serious safety issues put workers lives at risk every day. If more BART Board members has the courage of Fang, two workers would be alive today.”

BART got a series of public black eyes last year when its contract standoff with its employees resulted in two labor strikes that snarled traffic and angered the public. Then two BART employees were killed by a train operated by an unqualified manager being trained to deliver limited service to break the strike, a tragedy that highlighted longstanding safety deficiencies that the district had long fought with state regulators to avoid correcting. Finally, after that fatal accident helped force an end to the labor standoff, BART officials admitted making an administrative error in the contract that reopened the whole ugly incident.

“One of the things that really opened my eyes in this labor negotiation is that often we get told things by management, and we just assume them to be true,” Fang said, noting that he’d questioned the agency’s plan to run train service during last year’s strike.

Yet Josefowitz said the BART board should be held accountable for the agency’s shortcomings in dealing with its workers. “It starts with having a genuine concern over worker safety issues, and not just at bargaining time,” he said. “If the board had acted early enough, that strike was totally avoidable.”

Indeed, BART’s decisions that led to the tragedy have been heavily criticized by the National Transportation Safety Board, California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, and the California Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment.

Fang also has the support of many top Democrats, including Attorney General Kamala Harris, US Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and former state legislator and current Board of Equalization candidate Fiona Ma, who told us: “I have endorsed one Republican in my political history, and that is James Fang for BART Board.” Noting that Josefowitz “just moved here,” Ma said, “The BART system is one of our jewels, and I don’t think we should elect first-time newcomers in San Francisco to manage it.”

Radulovich said he was mystified by prominent San Francisco politicians’ support for Fang, saying, “In this solidly Democratic town, this elected Republican has the support of these big Democrats — it’s a mystery to me.”

One reason could be Fang’s willingness to use newspapers under his control to support politicians he favors, sometimes in less than ethical ways. Fang is the president of Asian Week and former owner of the San Francisco Examiner, where sources say he shielded from media scrutiny politicians who helped him gain control of the paper, including Willie Brown and Pelosi (see “The untouchables,” 4/30/03).

But political consultant Nicole Derse, who is working on the Josefowitz campaign, told us that she thinks support for Fang among top Democrats is softening this year, noting that US Sen. Dianne Feinstein and state Sen. Mark Leno haven’t endorsed Fang after doing so in previous races.

“[Fang] has longstanding relationships with folks, but Nick is challenging people in this race to stop supporting the Republican,” Derse told us. “It’s now up to the Democratic Party and it’ll be interesting to see what they do.”

She was referring to the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, which plans to vote on its endorsements on Aug. 13. While DCCC bylaws prevent the body from endorsing a Republican, Ma and other Fang allies have been lobbying for no endorsement in the race, which would deny Josefowitz a key avenue for getting his name and message out there.

“This is going to be one of the most expensive races in BART’s history. He will kill me on money,” Fang said of Josefowitz. He suggested that his opponent’s candidacy underscores tech’s growing influence in local politics, and urged voters to take a closer look. “People are saying oh, it’s all about Fang. What about this gentleman?” Fang asked. “Nobody’s questioning him at all.”

Derse, for her part, noted the importance of having a well-funded challenge in this nonpartisan race. “It allows him the resources to get his message out there,” she said of Josefowitz. “Most San Franciscans wouldn’t knowingly vote for a Republican.”

 

Everyone’s hospital

Michael Redmond
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15
Everyone’s hospital

rebecca@sfbg.com

“I am a survivor of the AIDS epidemic,” Daniel volunteered, beginning to tell us his very San Francisco story.

He was diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s. Working in fine dining rooms of San Francisco hotels at the time, he had health insurance, and had gone to Kaiser for an unrelated procedure. That led to a blood test — and then wham.

“They just bluntly, without any compassion, just told me: You have it,” Daniel said. “Like telling you that you have a pimple on your nose or something.”

All around him, friends were dying from the disease. “I didn’t freak out, because that’s just my personality,” he recalled. “I know a lot of people who have been diagnosed, and they want to take their lives or whatever.”

Today, he’s unemployed and living on a fixed income. He lost his left eye years ago to an infection linked to HIV; he now has a prosthetic eye.

“I’m single, disabled, and low-income,” reflected Daniel, who didn’t want his last name printed due to privacy concerns. Originally from El Salvador, his family came to the U.S. when he was 10 and Daniel has permanent resident status. But despite the disadvantages he faces, Daniel still isn’t freaking out. His medical needs are met.

He got on MediCal after having to drop Kaiser. “And then I ended up at SF General,” he said, “with some of the most professional staff, doctors rated worldwide. It has some of the most professional health care providers for HIV, all in one place.”

Daniel is one satisfied San Francisco General Hospital patient, and he might as well be a poster child for how public health is supposed to work in big cities. Rather than being deprived of primary care and then showing up at the emergency room with preventable complications stemming from his disease, he’s keeping everything in check with regular doctor’s visits — and he can access this high level of care even though he’s on a very tight budget.

There’s a concerted effort underway in the San Francisco Department of Public Health to give more patients precisely the kind of experience Daniel has had, while also expanding its role as the region’s go-to trauma center.

But a difficult and uncertain road lies ahead of that destination, shaped in part by federal health care reform. The new course is being charted amid looming financial uncertainty and with more patients expected to enter the system and the doors of SF General.

Not every General Hospital patient is as lucky as Daniel. For scores of others, SF General is the last stop after a long, rough ride.

 

EMERGENCY CARE

Craig Gordon and Dan Goepel drive an ambulance for the San Francisco Fire Department, regularly charging through congested city streets with sirens blaring as they rush patients to SF General and other care facilities. They see it all: Patients who are violent and psychotic and need to be restrained in the back of the ambulance, folks who’ve just suffered burns or gunshot wounds.

Sometimes, in the thick of all of this, SF General’s Emergency Department is closed to ambulances — in public safety lingo, it’s called being “on diversion” — so the medics will have to reroute to different hospitals.

SF General might go on diversion because the Emergency Department is too slammed to take on anyone new, or because it’s too short-staffed to take on new patients without pushing nurse-to-patient ratios to unsafe levels.

For serious trauma cases, strokes, heart attacks, or traumatic brain injuries, however, the doors are always open. Patients with less-serious cases are the ones to be turned away when the hospital is on diversion.

Patients who wind up en route to SF General in Gordon and Goepel’s ambulance might be living on the margins. “If you’re kind of living on the cusp … you’re not likely going to pursue getting a primary care physician,” Goepel pointed out. “When something comes up, then you find yourself in the emergency room.”

Or their patients might be getting rescued from a spectacularly awful situation, like a plane crash. In this densely populated, earthquake-prone region, there is only one top-level trauma center between Highway 92 and the Golden Gate Bridge: SF General. Anyone in the city or northern San Mateo County unfortunate enough to experience a life-threatening incident — a car wreck, shooting, nasty fall, boating accident — winds up there, regardless of whether they’re rich or poor, indigent or insured. Ranked as a Level 1 trauma center, SF General is equipped to provide the highest level of care.

“In the summer, when school is out, we have a high season of gunshot wounds and stab wounds,” explained Chief Nursing Officer Terri Dentoni, who recently led the Guardian on a tour of the Emergency Department. “When it’s really nice outside, you have a lot of people who get into bike accidents, car accidents. … Last week, we were just inundated with critical care patients.”

Around 100,000 patients flow through SF General’s doors each year, and more than 3,900 need trauma care. On July 6, 2013, when Asiana Airlines’ Flight 214 crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport, more than 60 crash victims were rushed to SF General with critical issues ranging from organ damage to spinal injuries.

“It was a very big tragedy,” Dentoni said. “But it was amazing how many people we took care of, and how well we took care of them.”

Aside from being the sole trauma center, SF General is also designated as the county’s safety-net hospital, making it the only healthcare option for thousands who are uninsured, poor, undocumented, homeless, or some combination thereof. This makes for complex cases. Patients might require translators, be locked in psychiatric episodes, or need a social worker to help them get to a medical respite facility after being discharged if they’re too weak to fend for themselves and don’t have anyplace to go. There isn’t always a place to send them off to.

“We’re seeing people who are dealing with poverty, and often homelessness, in addition to mental health issues,” explained Jason Negron, a registered nurse in the Emergency Department. “You’re seeing patients who often have a number of things going on. Someone who has multiple illnesses — HIV, heart failure, Hepatitis C — even under the best of circumstances, they would be juggling medications. So what happens when they’re out on the streets?”

San Francisco ranks high on the list of health-conscious cities, a haven for organic food aficionados, yoga addicts, and marathon runners. It’s also a world of high stakes struggles and mounting economic pressures. With the city’s skyrocketing cost of living, sudden job loss can spell disaster for someone without a financial cushion. SF General is the catchall medical care facility for anyone who’s slipped through the cracks.

But while rank-and-file hospital staff must tackle grueling day-to-day problems, like how to juggle multiple patients with complex health issues when all the beds are full and the hospital is understaffed, hospital administrators face an altogether different challenge.

For the past several years, the city’s Department of Public Health has been preparing for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, the federal policy that is reshaping the health care landscape. Since public hospitals are mandated to provide safety-net care, they are uniquely impacted by the ACA.

Even with a sweeping new rule mandating health insurance for all, some segment of the population will nevertheless remain uninsured. But they’ll still need medical care — and when health crises come up, they’ll turn to SF General. Trouble is, no one knows exactly how much funding will be available to meet that need as the financial picture shifts.

 

FUNDING CUTS LOOM

Even as ACA aims to increase access to medical care, it’s also going to trigger major funding cuts at the local level. With both state and federal funding being slashed, San Francisco’s county health system stands to lose $131 million in financial support over the next five years, a budgetary hit totaling around 16 percent.

That’s a significant shortfall that will directly impact SF General — but the cuts are being made with the expectation that these gaps will be filled by reimbursements riding in on the waves of newly insured patients enrolled in ACA. Before federal health care reform took effect, around 84,000 San Franciscans lacked health insurance. At the start of this year, 56,000 became eligible to enroll in a health insurance plan.

SF General serves most of the area’s MediCal patients, the subsidized plan for people living on less than $16,000 a year. And since the county gets reimbursed a flat rate for each patient, the expansion of MediCal under federal health care reform will presumably help San Francisco absorb the state and federal funding losses.

“There’s a certain set of patients who previously were not paid for, who now will have MediCal,” explained Ken Jacobs, an expert in health care policy and professor at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

But there’s a catch. Since MediCal and insured patients will be able to choose between San Francisco’s public system (called the San Francisco Health Plan) and a private medical provider, SF General also runs the risk of losing patients. If too many decide to go with Anthem Blue Cross instead, the system could veer into the red.

“There’s some question of what share of those we’ll keep,” Jacobs noted.

Asked about this, hospital CEO Sue Currin sounded a note of confidence. “Because our outcomes and our quality of care has been so high…75 percent of everyone who’s enrolled in MediCal managed care default to the Department of Public Health,” she told us.

But the journey toward ACA has only just begun, and things are still falling into place. Costs are projected to rise if nothing is done to improve efficiency, while at the same time, the pending state and federal funding shortfalls could take a toll.

Retaining and attracting insured patients is the only way to avoid a resource crunch — but patients could always walk away if they’re dissatisfied. This uncertainty “makes financial planning and management of risk even more challenging,” according to a report issued by the City Controller.

“We don’t know yet today how the Affordable Care Act will impact the safety net,” acknowledged Erica Murray, CEO of the California Association of Public Hospitals, which represents 21 public safety-net institutions throughout the state. “How are these health care systems evolving to be competitive? How do we continue to fulfill our core mission of being the safety net? That is the fundamental challenge. And we don’t know today, and we can’t be certain, that these public health systems will have sufficient funding.”

It’s all “very dynamic,” Murray said. “We don’t have sufficient data to be able to draw any definitive conclusions. It’s just too short of a time to be able to make any predictions. It will take several years.”

For all the newly insured patients under ACA, a certain segment will continue to rely on the safety net. Undocumented immigrants who don’t qualify will be left outside the system. Some individuals can be expected to outright refuse ACA enrollment, or be too incapacitated to do so. Others will opt out of Covered California, the ACA plan for people who make more than about $29,000 a year, because their budgets won’t stretch far enough to afford monthly payments even though they technically qualify. They’ll need safety-net care, too.

Yet under the new regime, “We can’t, as a safety net, go forward only with uninsured patients — because there won’t be funding to sustain the whole organization,” explained hospital spokesperson Rachael Kagan. “We will still have uninsured patients, always. But it won’t be sufficient to serve only them.”

Mike Wylie, a project manager in the Controller’s Office, worked on the city’s Health Reform Readiness project, an in-depth assessment performed in tandem with DPH and consultants. “The million dollar question is: Are we going to be on target with the projections?” Wylie asked.

Instead of standing still, San Francisco’s health system must transform itself, the Health Reform Readiness study determined. Ask anyone who works in health care management in the city, and they’ll tell you that DPH has been working on just that. The idea is to focus on network-wide, integrated care that runs more efficiently.

“We need to switch from being the provider of last resort, to the provider of choice,” Wylie noted, voicing an oft-repeated mantra.

This could mean fielding more patient calls with nursing hotlines, or using integrated databases to improve communication. There’s also emphasis on increasing the number of patients seen by a care provider in a given day. The report urged the department to ramp up its productivity level from 1.5 patient visits per hour, where it currently stands, to 2.25 patient visits per hour. Currin noted that the hospital has also been looking into group patient visits.

“Part of getting ready for health care reform was creating more medical home capacity,” Currin said, referring to a system where multiple forms of care are integrated into a single visit, “so we knew we needed to have better access to primary care.”

If no changes are made, the Health Reform Readiness study found, the city’s General Fund contribution to DPH is projected to rise substantially — to $831 million by 2019, up from $554 million in 2014-15.

“We’re a little concerned about this rising General Fund support,” Wylie noted. And even though staffing represents a major expenditure, “They didn’t assume cuts in staff,” while performing the assessment, he said. “What they’re trying to get is more outputs, more efficiency. The managers went over this and said: in order for us to survive, we’ve got to get more out of our system. We may have to cut money — we may have to cut later, if city leaders don’t commit to this rising General Fund. We’ve got to do all these best practices.”

Throughout crafting this road map, he added, “There were some uncomfortable meetings and uncomfortable moments. But I think [DPH Director] Barbara Garcia got everyone to agree to these strategies.”

Talk to rank-and-file hospital staff, however, and some will tell you that getting more out of the system is a tall order — especially when the system already feels like it’s busting at the seams.

 

SPACE CRUNCH, STRESSED STAFF

“We hit capacity every single day,” said Negron, the RN in the Emergency Department. Patients are regularly placed on beds in the hallways, he said. Wait times for the Emergency Department can last four to six hours, or even longer. The hospital is working on limiting those waits, not just because it’s better in practice, but because timely patient care is mandated under ACA.

“Now, we have 26 or 27 licensed beds in our Emergency Department,” Negron said. But in reality, on a regular basis, “We function with 45 to 50 patients.”

A nurse who works in the Psychiatric Emergency Services unit described her work environment as “a traffic jam with all lanes blocked. This is totally business as usual.”

The workload is on the rise, she added. “The psych emergency room used to see 500 patients a month,” she said. “Now we see 600 patients a month, sometimes more. People are moving faster and faster through the system.”

Her unit is the receiving facility for anyone who is placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold, known as a 5150, for individuals who are a danger to themselves or others or gravely disabled.

“It doesn’t matter who they are,” she said. “We get homeless and destitute. We get CEOs. And we have had CEOs — it’s an experience for everyone involved.” Some patients have been involved in criminal activity. “I’ve had high profile people in my unit; people who have done things that, if I tell you what they did, you would easily be able to Google them.”

Patients who come to her wing need to be evaluated, because someone has determined that they are dangerous. It could be that they are “eating rotten food, or running naked in the street, or suicidal, or want to jump off Golden Gate Bridge, or their family thinks they’re out of control.” Sometimes, patients have to be let go once they’re no longer deemed to be a threat, but they still aren’t altogether recovered, she said.

In the psychiatric inpatient unit, meanwhile, the total number of beds has declined from 87 to 44 in the past five years — leading some staff members to voice concerns.

“There is more to do, and there’s less time to do it,” said another staff member who did not want to be named. This person said one psych unit was essentially shut down and another left open — “but then … a patient climbed up into the ceiling, broke some pipes, and flooded the room” in the open unit, so everything was shifted back to the closed unit.

In part, the daily patient crunch is due to a vacancy rate in the hospital nursing staff that hovers around 18 percent — but steps are being taken to address this problem, caused in part by the city’s Byzantine hiring process.

“The nurses are concerned about how, on a day-to-day basis, they don’t feel they have the support and resources they need,” said Nato Green, who represented the nurses’ union, SEIU Local 1021, in recent contract negotiations. “Staff was expected to do more with less. SF General chronically operates at a higher capacity than what it is budgeted for.”

Currin, the hospital CEO — who started out as a nurse herself — rejected this assertion, saying it is not the norm for the hospital to operate over budget. She added that she would like to reduce the nursing staff vacancy rate down to just 5 percent.

“We have had a fairly significant vacancy rate,” she acknowledged. “But just like any other hospital in the city and the country, you have countermeasures that you put in place to address staffing shortages. And so we use nurse travelers. We use as-needed staff, who work here part-time. We’ve been able to fill those gaps with these other staffing measures. We do want to have a more permanent workforce. We’re working with the city and [DPH] to bring in new hires.”

Roland Pickens, director of the San Francisco Health Network (the patient-care division of the Department of Public Health), said he was working with the city’s Human Resources Department to further streamline operations and get a jump on filling vacancies.

“[Chief Financial Officer] Greg Wagner is working with City Controller’s office and the Mayor’s Office, so everyone is addressing the issue of having a more expedited hiring process,” he said.

Negron, the RN, seemed to think it couldn’t happen soon enough. “For us, at the end of the day, who do we actually have that’s on the schedule, that’s on the floor?” he said. Being fully staffed is important, he added, “so we don’t have any more shortages. So we don’t close beds, or go on divert unnecessarily.”

Staff members, who deal hands-on with a vulnerable patient population, lament that there doesn’t seem to be enough resources flowing into the system to care for people who are at the mercy of the public safety net. After all, San Francisco is a city of incredible wealth — shouldn’t there be adequate funding to care for the people who are the most in need?

“Poor people are not profitable,” Green said. “Without regulatory intervention, poor people would not have adequate health care.”

 

EVOLVING INTO THE FUTURE

For all the concerns about staffing and the financial uncertainty caused by ACA, SF General still has plenty to brag about. For one, it’s moving into a brand new, nine-story facility in December 2015, which will be equipped with a seventh-floor disaster preparedness center and nearly twice as much space in the Emergency Department.

It will have 283 acute care beds, 31 more than there are now. Most of the patient rooms will be private, and the new hospital will be seismically sound — a critical upgrade in a city prone to earthquakes. The hospital construction was funded with an $887.4 million bond approved by voters in 2008.

“In a new care environment, it will be more comfortable for the patients and the staff,” Currin said. “It’s just a much better environment. We’re hoping with the expansion … the wait times [in the Emergency Department], instead of taking four to six hours, we’re hoping to decrease that by 50 percent,” she said. “There will be more nurses, physicians, housekeepers.”

Pickens, the Health Network director, said he felt that “the stars had aligned” to have the hospital rebuild nearing completion just as ACA gets into full swing, since the new facility can help attract the patients needed to make sure the health system is fully funded.

The hospital has also launched an initiative to reduce patient mortality linked to a deadly infection. “Sepsis is a reaction the body has to a severe infection,” explained Joe Clement, a medical surgical unit clinical nurse specialist. “It causes organ dysfunction, and in some cases death. It’s very common, it’s growing, there’s more and more of it every year, and about a third of hospital deaths have been associated with sepsis in some way.”

In 2011, SF General began implementing new practices — and successfully reduced the hospital mortality rate from 20 percent in 2010 to 8.8 percent in 2014.

SF General was also recently lauded in The New York Times for being a top performer in quality and safety scores for childbirth. In San Francisco, low-income women who may be uninsured and dealing with harsh life circumstances can nevertheless get full access to multilingual doctors, midwives, lactation consultants, and doulas. The World Health Organization has even designated it as “Baby Friendly,” because of practices that support breastfeeding.

As things move ahead, management is projecting a sense of confidence that SF General’s high-quality care will allow the hospital to attract patients and maintain a healthy system that can continue to support the insured and uninsured alike.

“Value, we usually define as improving health outcomes, and optimizing the resources we have, for as many people as we can,” said William Huen, associate chief medical officer.

Speaking about the sepsis initiative, he said, “This is kind of our model program of, how do you focus on one area where you know you can improve health outcomes, with integration throughout the system, education at every level … and then having the data and perfecting the care. That can be applied to anything. So as a system, I think we’ve developed infrastructure to support that type of work.”

But for the staff members who are actively involved in the union, it continues to be a waiting game to see if the promises of new staffing levels are realized. Until then, many have said that the low staffing levels are a threat to patient safety. “They are waiting to see if DPH lives up to its commitment to hire the people they said they were going to hire, and staff it at the level they were going to staff at,” Green said.

It all comes down to providing care for people who really have nowhere else to turn, Negron told us in the Emergency Department. “I’m sure we see the highest portion of uninsured patients in the city,” he said. “We’re doing that in many different languages, with people from all over the world. I feel like it’s a real honor to be able to work there in that context. I feel honored to meet a need — that’s not always able to be met.”

Refugee crisis hits home

Michael Redmond
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8

joe@sfbg.com

In the small, colorful Precita Valley Community Center, a woman clutches a black ceramic goblet, circling a teenage girl with wisps of incense, and repeats the act with the 60 or so attendees. The spiritual cleansing ritual is much needed. Afterward, the San Franciscans will set their minds to saving the lives of children.

Nearly 50,000 Central American children crossed the Mexican border since October, according to federal data, fleeing targeted violence in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. This recent surge has hit home, as hundreds of those young refugees, often unaccompanied, seek asylum through immigration courts in San Francisco.

The courts often decide between life and death: Do the children stay in the safety of our sanctuary city, or return to countries from which they fled violence and chaos?

Jose Artiga, executive director of the Salvadoran Humanitarian Aid, Research and Education Foundation, told the crowd a story of life in El Salvador.

“A boy of only 11 years old waited for his grandfather one day,” he said, in Spanish. “A gang captured him, and the community organized to search for the boy. They found the child, but in six parts. The grandfather said, ‘How can I bring my grandchild back to his mother in six parts?’ This was a child. The gang showed up at the funeral, and would not let the community bury him.”

Some say the rising power of gangs sparked this surge in immigration. As President Barack Obama struggles with a bitterly partisan and gridlocked Congress to find a solution, US cities are dealing with the impacts of the overburdened immigration court system.

Now politicians of all partisan stripes, activists, and families are coming together to help the child refugees. Just last week, Sup. David Campos’ resolution to find additional aid for overburdened immigration services unanimously passed the Board of Supervisors. The next step, he told the Guardian, is to determine how best to use funds to help these children.

At the Precita Valley Community Center and beyond, activists call for that funding to reach attorneys, without which these kids will almost certainly be sent home into harm’s way.

 

OVERBURDENED

The refugees travel far. Children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala trek through Mexico to cross the US border, and some die in the attempt. Those who live and are discovered by Border Patrol officers along the Southwest border are held temporarily in crowded, cold detention centers in McAllen, Texas, or Nogales, Ariz.

Images of these detention centers show groups of children lying on hard floors in thin blankets, and some advocates for the refugees reported feces and urine soaking the floors. The young refugees tell officials where they have family connections, and are flown to immigration courts across the country.

One such court is in San Francisco.

In 2005, San Francisco had 227 new active deportation proceedings for unaccompanied children, according to federal data obtained by Syracuse University’s TRAC Immigration project. That number was stable until 2012 when it jumped to 450 new cases. In 2013, the number jumped again, to 820.

San Francisco now has over 1,900 pending juvenile immigration cases, according to TRAC. Most of those children are Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan. The surge is pushing organizations that help these children to the breaking point.

Lariza Dugan-Cuadra, executive director of the Central American Resource Center, knows one thing for sure: “Things have been crazy.”

CARECEN is one of many organizations providing legal representation to Central American child refugees in San Francisco. Two attorneys and two paralegals handle the bulk of cases, which jumped from 20 children a month to 60.

“All a child is given is a court date,” Dugan-Cuadra told the Guardian. “While the US guarantees the right to court, it does not guarantee the right to representation.”

While US citizens have a constitutional right to representation by an attorney, noncitizens in Immigration Court do not. And when organizations like CARECEN can’t provide an attorney, the child loses.

“We’ve heard cases where a 6-year-old will go before a judge having to represent themselves,” she said. “The judges are throwing their hands up saying ‘Are you serious!?'”

Data obtained by TRAC Immigration backs up her claim.

Nationwide, only 52 percent of unaccompanied children are represented by an attorney in deportation court proceedings.

With an attorney, judges rule in a juvenile’s favor to stay about half the time, TRAC’s research found. Without an attorney? Only one in 10 children are granted asylum.

No legal representation means no hope. The ACLU filed a class-action suit against the United States earlier this month on behalf of unrepresented child immigrants, alleging just that.

“The onus has been hard on nonprofit providers and pro-bono attorneys,” Dugan-Cuadra said, because they know the stakes. Legal Services for Children, Catholic Charities, and the Asian Law Caucus are among the organizations calling for more aid.

Many of the attorneys are experiencing burnout. One we talked to was on a vacation for her mental health. Studies by the American Bar Association show judges are burning out too, and things are only getting worse: California has 77,000 pending immigration cases backlogged in its courts.

But locally, the children bear the worst of this: TRAC Immigration’s data shows only 71 of the new 830 unaccompanied children in San Francisco were represented by an attorney as of June 2014.

And without representation, many will be sent home to violence.

 

REFUGEES OR IMMIGRANTS?

The United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, said the children fleeing Central American countries should officially be considered refugees in need of asylum, a claim with legal ramifications President Obama so far has hesitated to make.

“We’re witnessing a complex situation in which children are leaving home for a variety of reasons, including poverty, the desire to join family, and the growing influence of trafficking networks,” Shelly Pitterman, UNHCR’s regional representative in the United States, said in a press statement. “Within this movement there are also children who are fleeing situations of violence at the hands of transnational organized criminal groups and powerful local gangs.”

Those fleeing violence and persecution, said Pitterman, will require access to asylum determination procedures and will need long-term protection. Others should be sent home, she said, and assisted with reintegration.

But some can’t find refuge anywhere at home, no matter where they go.

“My brother’s son was kidnapped eight years ago by extortionists,” one Salvadoran woman at the Precita center told the Guardian, declining to give her name out of fear for her family’s safety. Her brother moved to other cities, but the gangs continued to harass him and his family in provinces throughout El Salvador.

“He got letters threatening to kidnap his child. ‘We know where you live, we know where your child goes to school,'” she said. Her nephew is now 14. The last time she visited him she saw something that chilled her.

“He was approached by gangs to be recruited. I witnessed that. One day after when we were in the car, my nephew saw the gangs in another car. He hid on the floor and started to shake.”

The woman turned her head away and held back tears.

“My brother said ‘I have to take you out of here.'”

Now her nephew is somewhere safe in the United States, she said, though she would not say where. But the reason he left is clear.

“These kids don’t want to be the next dead body on the street,” Clarisa Sanchez, a Board of Immigration’s representative from Catholic Charities CYO told the Guardian.

Nationally, Republicans are calling for the mass deportation of these children. “I won’t stand idly by while our citizens are under assault and little children from Central America are detained in squalor,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said this week, as he announced deployment of 1,000 National Guard troops along the Texas border.

But many pin the origins of the crisis squarely on the United States.

 

DRUG LEGACY

Salvadorans are familiar with violence and cruelty. In 1932, more than 30,000 Salvadorans were slaughtered in a peasant revolt called la matanza: the slaughter. Nearly 75,000 civilians died in El Salvador’s bloody civil war, from 1980-1992.

The US government intervened in that war, sending government aid to the Salvadoran government. Now the US has a hand in today’s violence in Central America, some say, as our country’s drug habits fuel cartels throughout the region. Those cartels are arming Central American gangs, whichObama admitted in a press conference last year.

“The United States recognizes that we’ve got responsibilities; that much of the violence in the region is fueled by demand for illegal drugs, including in the United States,” the president said.

Obama requested $3.7 billion emergency funding that would bring at least $64 million to immigration courts, but also at least $1.5 billion to border security and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a troubling addition to needed funding.

Back at the Precita Valley Community Center, Jose Cartagena pled for legal aid at the border. Cartagena is intimately familiar with the need: He fled El Salvador’s civil war over 30 years ago. As he crossed the Tucson desert, 13 of his fellow border-crossers died in the blazing southwestern heat. Only Cartagena survived. Now he’s a representative for the National Network of Salvadorans in the Exterior in San Francisco.

He called for justice.

“We have to help these kids find their families or sponsors,” he said. “If we don’t provide legal support now, the Obama administration may deport all of them. We can’t wait until it’s too late.”

If you’d like to help the efforts around the Central American child refugees, you can contact CARECEN, Catholic Charities, or Superivsor David Campos’ office.

King of the commons

Michael Redmond
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9
King of the commons

steve@sfbg.com

When Susan King attends the Aug. 24 Sunday Streets in the Mission District — the 50th incarnation of this car-free community gathering, coming the week before her 50th birthday — it will be her last as director of an event she started in 2008.

That successful run was made possible by King’s history as a progressive community organizer who also knew how to do fundraising, a rare combination that has made Sunday Streets more than just a bicycle event, a street faire, or a closure of streets to cars that the city imposes on its neighborhoods on a rotating basis.

Instead, King took the ciclovia concept that started in Bogota, Colombia in the late ’70s — the idea was creating temporary open space on streets usually dominated by cars (See “Towards Carfree Cities: Everybody into the streets,” SFBG Politics blog, 6/23/08) — and used it as a tool for building community and letting neighborhoods decide what they wanted from the event.

“I regard the organizing as community organizing work rather than event organizing, and that’s significant,” King told the Guardian. “We’re creating the canvas that community organizations can use.”

San Francisco was the third US city to borrow the ciclovia concept to create open streets events — Portland, Ore, was the first in June 2008, followed quickly by New York City — but the first to do one that didn’t include food trucks and commercial vending, which Sunday Streets doesn’t allow.

“It’s not a street fair, it’s about meeting your neighbors and trying new things,” King said, referring to free activities that include dance, yoga, and youth cycling classes and performances. “It’s a really different way of seeing your city. A street without cars looks and feels different.”

Now, after seeing how Sunday Streets can activate neighborhoods and build community, and watching the concept she helped pioneer be adopted in dozens of other cities, King says she’s ready for the next level.

“I want to apply what I know on a larger scale, ideally statewide,” King said of her future plans. “This really opened my eyes up to the possibilities.”

 

WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES

After a lifetime of progressive activism — from grassroots political campaigns to city advisory committees to working with the Green Party — King knew the value of listening to various community stakeholders and earning their trust.

“We try to be culturally competent and work with each neighborhood,” King said. “We want to work with the neighborhood instead of dropping something on the neighborhood.”

That distinction has been an important one, particularly in neighborhoods such as Bayview and the Western Addition, where there is a long history of City Hall officials and political do-gooders trying to impose plans on neighborhoods without their input and consent.

“We worked really closely together and she gave me a lot of leeway to do Sunday Streets in a way that it worked for the community,” said Rebecca Gallegos, who managed public relations for the Bayview Opera House 2010-2013. “I can’t say enough great words about Susan. She was a truly a mentor to me. They’re losing someone really great.”

The first Sunday Streets on Aug. 31, 2008, extended from the Embarcadero into Bayview, opening up that neighborhood to many new visitors. King cited a survey conducted at the event showing 54 percent of respondents had never been to Bayview before.

“Susan wore a lot of hats. Not only did she create community in all the neighborhoods in San Francisco, but she knew how to go after the money,” Gallegos told us. “She walks the walk and doesn’t just talk the talk.”

Meaghan Mitchell, who worked with the Fillmore Community Benefits District, also said King’s skills and perspective helped overcome the neighborhood’s skepticism about City Hall initiatives.

“Susan came in and was very warm and open to our concerns. She was a joy to work with,” said Mitchell, who went on to work with King on creating Play Streets 2013, an offshoot of Sunday Streets focused on children.

The neighborhood was still reeling from a massive redevelopment effort by the city that forced out much of its traditional African American population and left a trail of broken promises and mistrust. Mitchell said King had to spend a lot of time in community meetings and working with stakeholders to convince them Sunday Streets could be good for the neighborhood — efforts that paid off as the community embraced and helped shape the event.

“It was nice to know the Fillmore corridor could be included in something like this because we were used to not being included,” Mitchell told us. “Community organizing is not an easy job at all because you’re dealing with lots different personalities, but Susan is a pro.”

 

ROUGH START

It wasn’t community organizing that got King the job as much as her history with fundraising and business development for campaigns and organizations, ranging from the San Francisco Symphony to the San Francisco Women’s Building.

At the time, when city officials and nonprofit activists with the Mode Shift Working Group were talking about doing a ciclovia, King was worried that it would get caught up in the “bike-lash” against cyclists at a time when a lawsuit halted work on all bike projects in the city.

“I thought that would never fly,” King said. “We started Sunday Streets at the height of the anti-bike hysteria.”

But her contract with WalkSF to work on Masonic Avenue pedestrian improvements was coming to an end, she needed a job, and Sunday Streets needed a leader who could raise money to launch the event without city funds.

“I know how to raise money because I had a background in development,” said King, who raised the seed money for the first event with donations from the big health care organizations: Kaiser, Sutter Health/CPMC, and Catholic Healthcare West. And as a fiscal sponsor, she chose a nonprofit organization she loved, Livable City, for which Sunday Streets is now a $400,000 annual program.

King had a vision for Sunday Streets as an exercise in community-building that opens new avenues for people to work and play together.

Immediately, even before the first event, King and Sunday Streets ran into political opposition from the Fisherman’s Wharf Merchants Association, which was concerned that closing streets to cars would hurt business, and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors who were looking to tweak then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose office helped start the event.

City agencies ranging from the Police Department to Municipal Transportation Agency required Sunday Streets to pay the full costs for city services, something that even aggressive fundraising couldn’t overcome.

“We were in debt to every city department at the end of the second year. It was the elephant in the room going into that third year,” King said.

But the Mayor’s Office and SFMTA then-Director Nat Ford decided to make Sunday Streets an official city event, covering the city costs. “It was the key to success,” King said. “There’s no way to cover all the costs. The city really has to meet you halfway.”

King said that between the intensive community organizing work and dealing with the multitude of personalities and interests at City Hall, this was the toughest job she’s had.

“If I would have known what it would be like,” King said, “I would never have taken the job.”

 

SUNDAY STREETS SOARS

But King had just the right combination of skills and tenacity to make it work, elevating Sunday Streets into a successful and sustainable event that has served as a model for similar events around the country (including at least eight others also named Sunday Streets).

“The Mission one just blew up. It was instantly popular,” said King, who eventually dropped 24th Street from the route because it got just too congested. “But it’s the least supportive of our physical activity goals because it’s so crowded. It was really threatening to be more of a block party.”

That was antithetical to the ethos established by King, who has cracked down on drinking alcohol and unpermitted musical acts at Sunday Streets in order to keep the focus on being a family-friendly event based on fitness and community interaction.

Even the live performances that Sunday Streets hosts are required to have an interactive component. That encouragement of participation by attendees in a noncommercial setting drew from her history attending Burning Man, as well as fighting political battles against the commercialization of Golden Gate Park and other public spaces.

“It was my idea of what a community space should look like, although I didn’t invent it…We really want to support sustainability,” King said. “We’re not commodifying the public space. Everything at Sunday Streets is free, including bike rentals and repairs.”

As a bike event, the cycling community has lent strong support to Sunday Streets, with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition strongly promoting it along the way.

“The success of Sunday Streets has been a game changer in showcasing how street space can be used so gloriously for purposes other than just moving and storing automobiles. At every Sunday Streets happening we are reminded that streets are for people too,” SFBC Director Leah Shahum told us. “Susan’s leadership has been such an important part of this success.”

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