Jane Kim

Why and how we endorsed what we did

Sasha Cuttler
-
0
Why and how we endorsed what we did

As I sort through the barrage of positive and negative feedback to the election endorsements that we published today — which included some tough calls that have surprised some of our progressive allies — I’d like to take a moment to explain how we at the Guardian approach our political endorsements and what they represent.

First of all, let me state clearly and categorically that our corporate owners had nothing to do with our decisions, which were made entirely by the Guardian’s editorial board, which includes me, News Editor Rebecca Bowe, and Staff Writer Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez. And the three of us found consensus on all of our choices, sometimes after long discussions, even when we had differing initial views on a particular race or measure.

The other important point to make is that it’s long been the Guardian’s philosophy to avoid choosing “no endorsement” whenever possible. If voters have to make a tough decisions among bad or equally attractive options, then we shouldn’t shrink from making that decision as well, even if that risks the scorn of a segment of our readership. This was the approach that I learned from former Guardian editors Bruce Brugmann and Tim Redmond, and it’s an approach that I’ve encouraged us to continue as editor.

Finally, there’s the philosophical question of what it means to endorse a candidate, a question that we’ve spent a lot of time pondering and discussing during this election cycle. There’s not a clear and simple answer to the question, so I’ll just discuss what I think it means.

At its most basic, our endorsement means that we think our readers should vote for this person or position in this election. That’s all. It isn’t a validation of everything a politician does or stands for, and our endorsements are often driven by a weak field of challengers more than the strength of an incumbent. Frankly, there’s only one challenger in the five supervisorial races this fall who is well-qualified for the board and running a strong campaign, Tony Kelly in District 10, and we endorsed him.

The endorsement that we’re catching the most shit for right now is Scott Wiener in District 8, which was a tough call that we spent a lot of time discussing. To many progressives, Wiener is the devil, someone who has taken strong and inflexible positions on housing and regulatory issues that have angered many on the left.

But I don’t think Wiener is the devil, even though I’ve helped blast him for his bad positions as strongly as anyone in town. I think he’s a complicated person and politician who, in addition to his bad stands, has shown important political leadership and integrity on issues we do support, including transportation, nightlife, and public health. I’ve also found him to be more honest and accessible than his more progressive colleague, Sup. Jane Kim, who we also endorsed with some reservations. If you want to understand why we endorsed them, read our endorsements, it’s all in there.

Personally, for me, the hardest endorsement in our package was going no on Prop. H, and I’m still not sure whether we made the right call — or how I’m going to vote on this measure. I’ve sympathetically covered the political battles over artificial turf and this Beach Chalet project for years, and I viscerally don’t like this project, feeling like it just doesn’t belong right there on the coast.

But I understand the need for more playing time on the city’s fields, we’ve visited the site and seen how tucked away from the surrounding area it really is, and I was persuaded that it’s time to let this project proceed after six-year-long fight. Our strong rejection of the companion measure Prop. I also gives me confidence that we’re not opening the door to a rapid conversion of city playing fields to artificial turf.

Did we get it right? That’s for readers and voters to decide based on their political perspectives, but I can tell you that we made a good faith effort and spent many hours trying. And if you have doubts about the calls we made, please listen to the audio recordings of our endorsement interviews and form your own opinions. Democracy is messy business, imperfect by design, and sometimes “least bad” is the best choice. 

In the end, I’m proud of our endorsements, which provide a valuable public service in helping voters sort through a long and complicated ballot, offering a more neutral and public-spirited perspective than that of the paid advocacy that is filling up voters’ mailboxes and billboards around town right now.

Good luck this election season, and don’t forget to vote by Nov. 4.  

SF supervisors vote to legalize and regulate Airbnb’s short-term rentals

Sasha Cuttler
-
0
SF supervisors vote to legalize and regulate Airbnb’s short-term rentals

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors today approved controversial legislation to legalize and regulate short-term housing rentals to tourists, voting 7-4 on the package after supervisors narrowly rejected a series of amendments to rein in an activity that has taken thousands of units off the market for local residents.

Amendments to limit hosted rentals to 90 nights per year, to require that Airbnb pay about $25 million in back transient occupancy taxes it owes the city before the legislation would go into effect, to exclude in-law units from eligibility for short-term rentals, and to limit rentals in single-family home neighborhoods failed on a series of 5-6 votes.

Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, Norman Yee, and Jane Kim voted as a block on the amendments to limit the scope of short-term rentals facilitated by Airbnb and other companies, as a broad coalition that includes tenant, landlord, labor, neighborhood, and affordable housing groups had sought. Kim parted from that block to vote yes on the final legislation, which the others opposed.

Amendments proposed by Kim to give housing nonprofits the right to file injunctive lawsuits to help enforce the legislation and by Campos to ban short-term rentals in units that have been cleared of tenants by Ellis Act evictions were approved 8-3. But because those changes were substantial, they were turned into trailing legislation that must go back to the Planning Commission.

Despite a series of amendments since Board President David Chiu proposed the legislation over the summer, its basic tenets have changed little. It requires short-term rental hosts to register with the city and rent out only their primary residence, which they must live in for at least 275 days out of the year, with the Planning Department enforcing the regulation on a complaint basis.

That effectively limits the rental of entire homes to 90 days per year, but Chiu, Airbnb, and its hosts strenuously rejected calls to extend that cap to hosted rentals, such as spare bedrooms that might otherwise be available to permanent city residents. Chiu said his legislation was “framed through the lens of our housing affordability crisis,” arguing that many San Franciscans rely on Airbnb income to make their rent.

Avalos said he understands that position, but he said tourists shouldn’t be displacing San Franciscans, proposing the 90-day limit on all short-term rentals. “I think it’s important to maximize our residential housing stock to the utmost,” he said. Mar also voiced strong support for extended the cap, criticizing the “cult-like” beliefs by some home-sharing advocates.

As I’ve been reporting in the Guardian over the last two and a half years, Airbnb and its hosts have been openly defying city laws against short-term rentals, as well as ruling by the Tax Collector’s Office that the city’s transient occupancy tax (aka hotel tax) of about 15 percent applies to short-term rentals.

Airbnb just began to collect that tax for its guests last week, but Campos argued that it should pay those back taxes going back to the city ruling in the spring of 2012 before the city legalizes and validates its activities. Company representatives have said its TOT collection would total about $11 million per year.

“I believe it’s only right that Airbnb make good on its back taxes before this legislation becomes law,” Campos said, arguing this $10 billion company is being rewarded for defying city regulators. “Do we give special treatment to a multi-billion-dollar company?”

But supporters of the legislation were anxious to move it forward, despite the dizzying series of complicated amendments, something Avalos said was unusual. “I’m surprised it was given the green light to leave today,” Avalos told reporters after the vote. “There was a lot of pressure to move it forward.”

Now the question will be whether the Planning Department can effectively enforce the regulations, particularly given that Airbnb has been unwilling to share data that might help in that effort. City officials have seemed powerless to enforce laws against short-term rentals that have been on the books for decades, even with rising public concern about the issue over the last year.

“I’m concerned that the legislation simply isn’t enforceable,” Kim said, arguing for the private right of action component that will be returning for board consideration in the coming months.

The other question is whether we’ve heard the end of an issue that has polarized city residents, or whether the coalition of opponents will succeed in a threatened initiative campaign to put more stringent new short-term rental regulations before voters next year.

Sup. Mark Farrell thanked Chiu for taking on the issue despite the intractable positions on both sides, saying, “I think everyone recognizes this to be a no-win situation.” Wiener are referenced the wide emotional divide on the issue: “The views around it are so intensely divergent.”

“The status quo is not working. This system of home sharing is happening in the shadows with little or no oversight,” Wiener said. “It’s time to bring it out of the shadows.”  

Even supporters of the legislation, such as Breed, said they would continue closely monitoring the situation to ensure the legislation helps curbs widespread abuses of lucrative short-term rentals, including landlords evicting rent-controlled tenants to use Airbnb and entrepreneurial tenants renting out multiple apartments through Airbnb, practices Chiu sought to curb.

“The one thing that I think everyone can agree upon is the status quo is not working,” Chiu said early in the hearing.

After the legislation — which comes back to the board for a perfunctory final vote next week and goes into effect in February barring legal challenges — Airbnb’s Public Policy Director David Owen told the Guardian, “It’s a tremendous step forward and we have a lot of work to do.”

Alerts: Sept 17-23, 2014

-
0

 

Leather and Feathers: AIDS Emergency Fund’s Annual Gala

Temple Nightclub, 540 Howard, SF. 7pm, $125. For the second year, the San Francisco AIDS Emergency Fund is hosting its annual gala, Leather and Feathers, to raise money for clients. This year, the organization is proud to debut Fantasy Runway, where community members will strut their finest leather, fetish gear, and drag.

FRIDAY 19

 

League of Women Voters’ District 6 Candidate Forum

Golden Gate University, Room 2201, 536 Mission, SF. 6-8pm, free. Incumbent Jane Kim, and challengers Michael Nulty, David Carlos Salaverry, and Jamie Whitaker are invited to take questions from the San Francisco League of Women Voters and audience members regarding the race for the District 6 supervisor position. The forum is free and open to the public, with seating on a first-come, first-serve basis.

 

Dan Choi: Fight for City College

Barry’s Bootcamp, 236 King Street, SF. pro-choi.com. 9:00pm-midnight, $25 pre-sale, $50 at door. Dan Choi, a candidate for the City College Board and a key player in the “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell” repeal movement, will host this event and fundraiser for Fight for City College. That organization is fighting to save the threatened LGBT studies program at City College of San Francisco. Enjoy cocktails and hors d’oeuvres by Skyy Cocktails, as well as musical entertainment, during the event.

SUNDAY 21

 

Transit History Bicycle Tour

Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics, 518 Valencia, SF. noon-3pm, $15–$50 suggested donation. Chris Carlsson, of Shaping San Francisco, will lead this bicycle tour of San Francisco’s transit history. He’ll highlight locations linked to San Francisco transit history, such as the Freeway Revolt in Hayes Valley, the creation of The Wiggle, Critical Mass and bicycle activism in San Francisco, the United Railroads Strike, and nostalgic F-line cars. The tour will wrap up at Pier 36 with a look at San Francisco’s first Clipper ships. NorCal People’s Climate Rally Lake Merritt Amphitheater, Lake Merritt Blvd and 12th St., Oakl. peoplesclimatemarch.org. 2-5pm, free. Join activists and community members in a family-friendly settling for a rally in solidarity with the People’s Climate Rally in NYC, which will bring together environmental organizations, trade unions, and social justice groups nationwide for a gathering just before the Sept. 24th UN Climate Summit of world leaders. The Oakland demonstration, in support of the larger movement in NYC, will feature “Climate Fair” with a host of Bay Area environmental organizations that are focused on climate change.

Still not sharing

Erica Hanna
-
0
Still not sharing

news@sfbg.com

As controversial legislation to legalize and regulate Airbnb and other short-term housing rental services operating in San Francisco headed for another contentious City Hall hearing on Sept. 15, the San Francisco Treasurer & Tax Collector’s Office quietly unveiled new policies and mechanisms for hosts to finally start paying long-overdue local taxes on their rentals.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu’s legislation attempts to strike a balance between protecting housing for permanent city residents — including tenants in rent-controlled units who are being displaced in favor of visiting tourists — and allowing San Franciscans to sometimes rent out rooms through companies such as Airbnb. That practice has mushroomed during the Great Recession even though such short-term rentals of residential units have long been illegal in San Francisco (see “Into thin air,” 8/20/13).

Among other provisions, Chiu’s legislation would require hosts to register with the city and live in their units for at least 275 days per year (thus limiting rental nights to 90), create enforcement procedures for city agencies, and protect below-market-rate and single-room occupancy units from being used as short-term rentals.

But Airbnb has also been snubbing the city for more than two years since the Tax Collector’s Office held public hearings and concluded that short-term rental companies and their hosts are required to collect and pay the city’s Transient Occupancy Tax (aka, the hotel tax), a surcharge of about 15 percent on room rentals usually paid by visiting guests (see “Airbnb isn’t sharing,” 3/19/13).

After other media outlets finally joined the Bay Guardian in raising questions about the impact that Airbnb and other companies was having on San Francisco — and with cities New York City, Berlin, and other cities taking steps to ban short-term rentals — Airbnb announced in March that it would begin collecting and paying the TOT in San Francisco sometime this summer.

But that still hasn’t happened, even though Tax Collector Jose Cisneros recently unveiled a new website clarifying that Airbnb hosts must register as businesses and pay taxes and created a streamlined system for doing so. The office is even allowing Airbnb and other companies to register as “qualified website companies” that collect and pay these taxes on behalf of hosts.

“The law does apply to these transactions,” Cisneros told us. “And the set of requirements are the same for the hosts and the website companies.”

Airbnb didn’t respond to Guardian inquiries for this story.

Meanwhile, an unusually diverse coalition of critics continues to raise concerns about Airbnb and the regulatory legislation, including renter and landlord groups, neighborhood and affordable housing activists, labor leaders, and former members of the Board of Supervisors (including Chiu predecessor, Aaron Peskin) and Planning Commission. They penned a Sept. 15 to Chiu calling for him to delay the legislation.

“Individually and collectively, we have advanced nearly two dozen additional amendments that address the issues raised by short-term residential rentals. While we are not of one mind on every issue or every suggested amendment, we are unanimous in our belief that the process you are pursuing is rushed,” they wrote. “The City will live with the intended (and unintended) consequences of your legislation for many, many years.”

Sources in Chiu’s office had already told the Guardian that he planned to keep the legislation in committee for at least one more hearing so the myriad details can be worked out, as Chiu said at the hearing as well.

“We want to have the time to continue to vet and hear all of the perspectives, and at the end of the day what I hope to do is to be able to move forward and build incentives around something that is far better than our current status quo,” Chiu said at the hearing. “This is a very complicated issue, and we all know that we need to get this policy as right as we can.”

Planning Director John Rahaim conveyed concerns from the Planning Commission that the legislation beef up the city’s ability to regulate short-term rentals.

“The commission does believe that the law should be updated to create a legal avenue for those who do want to host,” Rahaim said. “However, currently there are about 5,000 units in the city engaging in short-term rentals. It’s very difficult to know if there are units not being lived in by a full-time resident.”

A long line of speakers wound completely around the packed chamber in City Hall, awaiting their turn to speak publicly to supervisors and city residents, from 20-somethings making a lives renting out their homes to longtime tenants fearing that home-sharing will hurt city’s character.

Airbnb was represented at the hearing by David Owen, a former City Hall staffer who is now director of public policy for the company, and he was publicly confronted by Chiu on the tax issue. Chiu criticized Airbnb for failing to start collecting those taxes as promised.

“As of now, we are extremely close and you will be hearing from us about that in the near future,” Owen said, provoking audible disbelief from many in the crowd. “We have been working diligently alongside the city. This is a complicated set of issues and those involved have all worked in earnest to facilitate this request.”

When Owen was asked about enforcement of the maximum number of nights a tenant has rented out his unit, he said Airbnb’s cooperation is “akin to the city asking Home Depot.com for a list of home care purchases to see if anyone had illegally renovated their bathroom.” But city officials say they need the company’s cooperation to address its impacts. “We don’t want data, just the number of nights per permanent resident so that we can ensure that the bad outcomes of this setup aren’t occurring,” Sup. Jane Kim said. “Airbnb profits from this industry, and therefore [is] accountable to the city.”

Grassroots campaigns work to counter the influence of big donors

Sasha Cuttler
-
0
Grassroots campaigns work to counter the influence of big donors

Big money is pouring into a few campaign committees for the fall election, with Big Soda targeting the soda tax, Realtors gunning for the anti-speculation tax, and the Fisher family last week giving $500,000 to promote artificial turf playing fields in SF (Yes on I, No on H), according to campaign filings. But low-budget grassroots campaigns are still having a strong presence at public events like the Sept. 14 Sunday Streets in Western Addition.

San Franciscans Against Real Estate Speculation, Yes on G, had activists out in force even though it has only raised a few thousand dollars. Its biggest contribution so far is $5,000 from attorney Dean Preston of Tenants Together, who was out there spreading the word near Alamo Square Park, along with campaign consultant Quintin Mecke, the runner-up in the 2007 mayor’s race.

One of the more surprising grassroots campaign of the season is No on L, San Franciscans Against Gridlock, which is campaigning against the pro-motorist Restore Transportation Balance initiative, a measure aimed at undermining the city’s transit-first policy and promoting more free parking.

The Yes on L campaign hasn’t shown much sign of life since the summer when it spent nearly $50,000 on its signature-gathering effort out of about $83,000 raised (including $49,000 from tech titan Sean Parker), but it was sitting on nearly $35,000 in the bank as of July 16.

But the No on L crowd is taking this attack on sustainable transportation policies seriously, and it’s hoping to fill its fairly meager coffers ($5,000 from Daniel Murphy on Sept. 6 is its biggest donation) this evening [Tues/16] from 6-8pm with a fundraiser at Public Bikes, 549 Hayes Street.

That event is hosted by a bevy of transportation activists and Sup. Scott Wiener, David Chiu, and Jane Kim. As the campaign says, “If you care about helping to build a better transit system, a more walkable and bicycle-friendly city, and reducing car congestion in San Francisco, the No on Gridlock, No on L campaign needs your support to raise money to educate voters.”  

Deal reached in Transbay Tower tax district showdown

Erica Hanna
-
0
Deal reached in Transbay Tower tax district showdown

The deal almost sounds too good to be true. After threats of lawsuits, frantic backdoor dealmaking and a very harried week for the Board of Supervisors, a deal was finally reached yesterday on a dispute over taxes in the area around the new Transbay Terminal and the Salesforce Tower. 

The initial dispute started over the amount of taxes devlelopers around the new Transbay Terminal were required to pay for the project. A special tax district established in the area would require the developers to pay up to $1.4 billion for public infrastructure in the area, including San Francisco’s high-speed rail connection, in exchange for upzonings that allow them to exceed city building height limits.

This was a critical deal. That $1.4 billion sticker-shock is based on recent property values, which as any San Franciscan not living under a rock knows, have shot up with our housing boom. But the developers balked at the numbers, saying the higher taxes were not part of the original deal. The city, the supervisors, and the mayor disagreed, saying the original agreement was clear. At yesterday’s hearing, Sup. Jane Kim repeatedly hinted at a deal they had reached, saying “I’m excited for what we’ll be able to announce after the closed session.”

The stakes were high. If the developers managed to stall the deal, they may have managed to not pay any of these taxes at all.

“When I woke up this morning, I said there’s no way I’d let this stall,” Sup. Scott Wiener, who has taken the lead on trying to hold the developers to the original deal, told us.

But the deal actually turned out to be pretty rosy for the city, he said, at least at first blush.

The developers will still end up paying up to $1.4 billion (officials say the actual figure will be closer to $1 billion) in the special tax district, but now will pay over 37 years instead of 30, allowing them to make smaller payments. The developers would also be bound to a later vote, further cementing the tax deal. The developers may also forefit their right to sue the city over the negotiations. 

Pressure on the supervisors was strong. At yesterday’s hearing on the tax deal, advocates and developers alike showed up in force. Patrick Valentino, a staunch advocate of market-rate housing development in the city, reminded the supervisors that the initial agreement wasn’t exactly mystifying.

“It was made very clear in (the initial contract) that the fees could go up and down based on the market,” he said. “We certainly aren’t spending millions of dollars for just a bus station.”

Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, threw some barbs the supervisors’ way as well. “There’s no time for waffling,” he told them, in public comment. He then made an argument for the high developer fees. “Why don’t people make 1,000-foot skyscrapers in the Nevada desert? There’s no society there, no infrastructure, no water. The value for the land is created by the infrastructure from the Bay Area’s pockets, which added billions of dollars to downtown land. We need more capacity.”

But supervisors didn’t waffle, and a deal was reached.  But to be clear, it is still preliminary, with the devil in the myriad details.

The Board of Supervisors issued a continuance on the final vote for the deal for two weeks, in order to give Mayor Ed Lee and the developers time to cement all the details. 

So far, the deal looks great, Wiener said. “It’s not even a compromise,” he told us. “The phrase I used was, ‘this is too good to be true.'”

But, he said, “We’ll learn new details in two weeks.”

Developers lobby hard to slash payments promised to Transbay Terminal and high-speed rail

Sasha Cuttler
-
0
Developers lobby hard to slash payments promised to Transbay Terminal and high-speed rail

Will the San Francisco Board of Supervisors let developers of the biggest office towers proposed for San Francisco renege on promises to help pay for the Transbay Terminal reconstruction, extension of rail service to that site, and other public amenities? Or will Willie Brown successfully use politicians that he helped get into office — most notably Mayor Ed Lee and Sup. Jane Kim — to let the developers keep hundreds of millions of dollars in excess profits?

The answers to those questions will become clearer tomorrow [Tues/9] as the board considers a complex yet crucially important agenda item. It involves creation of a special tax district around the Transbay Terminal, where office tower developers have been awarded huge upzonings — including the Transbay Tower, which would be the tallest building on West Coast at more than 1,000 feet — in exchange for paying for public works projects to serve the area.

But those developers, including Hines, Boston Properties, TMG, and others (it’s not clear whether all six upzoned parcels are participating in the current lobbying effort and threatened lawsuit), are now objecting to paying about $1 billion in special taxes and seeking to get that amount lowered to about $400 million. And to do so, they’ve already paid Brown at least $100,000 just this quarter, kicking off a lobbying effort so intense that Brown has finally registered as a lobbyist after questionably resisting it for many years.

Leading the charge against that effort is Sup. Scott Wiener, who said the promised payments are crucial to paying for about $200 million in work on the Transbay Terminal and paying for the first $450 million of the $2.5 billion project of bringing high-speed rail and electrified Caltrain trains into the facility, as well as a promised public park on top of the terminal.

“The downtown extension is one of the most important transportation projects we will deliver in the foreseeable future. It’s a legacy project with huge benefits for San Francisco and the entire state,” Wiener told us. “We have to go to the mat to get it built, and a reduction in this assessment will significantly undermine our ability to deliver the project and get the train downtown. The last thing we need is a very expensive bus station with no train service.”

The developers and their spokespeople (including the San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier & Ross, who announced Brown’s involvement in the project this summer) argue that their fees have gone up substantially since the plan was first hatched in 2007 and fleshed out in the 2012 Implementation Document (which relied on 2007 land values).

That’s true, but that’s mostly because the value of the properties have shot up in recent years (incidentally, so have the costs of bringing the trains downtown), which also makes the projects far more lucrative for the developers. And Adam Alberti, who represents the Transbay Joint Powers Agency, notes that the tax rate hasn’t changed: it’s still the same 0.55 percent of assessed value that it’s always been.

“The rate is exactly the same, 0.55 percent, but the difference is the land valuations,” Alberti told us.

When the rates were formally set this year by the Rate and Method of Appointment (RMA) document, based on detailed studies of the properties and the district, it did charge the tallest buildings a little more than the shorter ones, under the logic that penthouses are more profitable (for example, the Saleforce lease of most of the Transbay Tower is rumored to be the largest commercial office deal in city history).

But the paper trail of documents and conditions for the four projects that have so far been awarded their entitlements always indicated such details would be hashed out by RMA. Indeed, when the city responded to the developers’ legal threats with a 14-page letter on July 14, it meticulously dismantled the convoluted claims by the developers that there’s been some kind of bait-and-switch here.

Still, the developers have been aggressively working the corridors of power in City Hall trying to get their fees reduced.

“Having not received any of the relief that the the Land Owner sought, the Land Owner is now forced to formally protest the formation of the CFD [Community Financing District], the levying of special taxes pursuant to the RMA, and the incurrence of bonded indebtedness in the CFD,” Boston Properties (which has not returned our calls for comment) wrote in a Sept. 2 letter to the city, which prompted Kim, the district supervisor, to continue the item for one week.

The decision to employ Brown upped the ante on this power struggle, given that Brown (who also didn’t return our calls) helped engineer Mayor Lee’s appointment to office in 2011 and worked behind-the-scenes to help Jane Kim beat progressive challenger Debra Walker the year before. Since then, Kim (who didn’t return our calls for comment) has helped do Brown’s bidding a couple of times and made misleading statements about their relationship.

Kim will be a central figure in this unfolding drama, given that it’s taking place in her supervisorial district. Her predecessor, Chris Daly — who says that he’s already been burned once by Hines (which also wouldn’t comment), which he said broke a promise for another $100 million in fees to the TJPA — said the current lobbying effort is essentially a raid on the public coffers that endangers an important project.

“The last redeeming thing about Willie Brown was his unwavering support for Transbay Terminal,” Daly told us, “and now that’s gone too.”

Unfortunately, the complexities of this deal might make it difficult for the general public to digest just how it changes, particularly as they are engineered by Brown, a legendary political dealmaker who spent decades as speaker of the California Assembly before becoming mayor of San Francisco.

But Daly said this project is crucially important for Kim’s district, and it’ll be intriguing to see what happens: “I don’t think she can make a bad vote, but behind the scenes, I’m not sure how much she can stand up to Willie Brown.”  

If the board approves the special tax district and the RMA tomorrow, then the affected property owners will vote on whether to create this Mello-Roos District in December, with a two-thirds vote required for passage. The projects can’t proceed with their current entitlements unless such a district is created, so the effort now is to slash the payments that such a district would require.

“Smart development means, among other things, making sure that development pays for supporting infrastructure,” Wiener told us. “The creation and upzoning of this district were explicitly linked to to funding the transit center and the downtown train extension. By upzoning these properties, we provided the developers with massive additional value and, in fact, the properties have exploded in value. The transit assessment needs to reflect those current property values, not values from the bottom of the recession.” 

[UPDATE: Sup. Kim returned our calls this evening and said this was a difficult issue, but that she wants to defend the city’s stance. “At this point we’re in a legal dispute, an impasse,” Kim told us, noting that she supports the fee structure from the RMA rather than earlier estimates. “The city was very clear those rates were illustrative.”

She said this isn’t simply about getting more money for the Transbay Terminal projects, but holding developers accountable for the upzoning they received. “The question isn’t what is the most money we can extract from the developer,” she said. “The question is: What did we agree to?”

Kim said she has met with Willie Brown about the issue, but she isn’t feeled pressured by him or the developers he’s representing. “Are they making threats? No,” she said. “I didn’t feel pressure at the meeting.”

But she did say she’d always be willing to hear out Brown’s side of the story. “He can just pick up the phone and call me,” she said.

Tomorrow’s meeting will include a closed session discussion of the issue, given its potential for legal actions. As for whether she and other supervisors may be swayed by the legal threat to settle on a lower fee amount, she told us, “That’s what the closed session is for.”

Kim indicated she intends to support the fees the parties originally agreed to. “I think the rates were set clearly,” she said. 

But we may have to take that promise with a grain of salt. Kim has sometimes talked tough, only to compromise later on, as she did with her Housing Balance legislation. After tomorrow’s closed session, we’ll see if her vote is as fiery as her rhetoric. ]

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report. 

San Francisco Democratic Party decides on endorsements for November election

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
-
27
San Francisco Democratic Party decides on endorsements for November election

At a meeting lasting about four hours last night [Wed/13], the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, the steering committee of the city’s Democratic Party, decided on its endorsements for the Nov. 4 election.

A lengthy round of voting followed nearly two hours of public comment, in which San Franciscans chimed in on everything from school board nominations to Proposition L, a motorist-friendly proposal that amounts to a step backward for the city’s transit-first policy. (The formal oppositional campaign slogan is “No on Gridlock, No on L,” but opponents who spoke at the meeting shortened it to the edgier “’L No.”).

Prop. L went down handily. Prop. E, the sugary-beverage tax, easily won the DCCC’s endorsement, as did Prop. J, the proposal to increase the city’s minimum wage.

But Prop. G – a measure crafted to stem the tide of Ellis Act evictions, known as the anti-speculation tax – was a close contest.

Before the DCCC members got down to the business of voting, many local advocates voiced support for Prop. G.

Housing activists lined up across the room while Dean Preston, executive director of Tenants Together, called for meaningful action on the city’s housing affordability crisis.

But the proponents’ show of support was followed by the opposite plea from a second group, which included a contingent of Asian property owners, who crowded into the front of the room to tell DCCC members that they felt the proposed increase was unfair. “We don’t deserve this!” A speaker said, conveying anger and frustration. “Look at our faces, we work hard for our properties.”

In the end, the vote came down to four abstentions, 13 votes for “no endorsement,” and 15 votes in support, tipping the scales in favor of Prop. G by a tiny margin.

Among those who abstained on that vote were Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Jackie Speier, and Assemblymember Phil Ting, all of whom voted by proxies. Sup. Scott Wiener voted “no endorsement,” while Sup. Malia Cohen abstained.

Decisions in the races for Board of Education and the city’s Community College Board were time-consuming, since it took several elimination rounds before the final candidate lists were settled.

The school board candidates to emerge with DCCC endorsements were Shamann Walton, Emily Murase, and Trevor McNeil. Notably, that list didn’t include Hydra Mendoza, an incumbent who also serves as education advisor to Mayor Ed Lee.

Endorsements for Community College Board, meanwhile, went to Amy Bacharach for a two-year term, and Thea Selby, Anita Grier, and Rodrigo Santos for four-year terms.

Things got interesting in the contest for BART board of directors, between longtime Republican director James Fang and a well-funded Democrat, Nick Josefowitz, who is in his early 30s.

The vote was complicated since SEIU Local 1021, a labor union with a long history of backing progressive causes in San Francisco, is pulling for Fang, who supported workers during last year’s BART strike. Yet Josefowitz has the backing of other progressive organizations, including the Sierra Club. “I think that BART needs new blood,” Sierra Club representative Rebecca Evans said during public comment.

In the end, the DCCC voted “no endorsement,” with that selection getting 17 votes, five abstaining, and 10 voting in favor of Josefowitz. The votes followed a round of comments.

“The Democratic Party is a means to an end,” DCCC member Rafael Mandelman said. “And the end that we are using the Democratic Party to achieve is a more socially just and better world… There are few local entities [to advance that] than SEIU Local 1021. I think it is acceptable for us to take ‘no’ position in this race.”

Several piped up to say they thought Josefowitz deserved the endorsement of the Democratic Party simply because he’s a viable candidate and registered Democrat in a race against a Republican.

But DCCC member Arlo Hale Smith weighed in to critique of Fang’s performance as a director. “I used to hold this BART Board seat 24 years ago,” Smith said. “He’s missed a third of the meetings and he doesn’t return phone calls. He hasn’t returned my calls in a year. This is not the kind of person who should be reelected. Period.”

In races for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and citywide offices, endorsements went to incumbents Carmen Chu for assessor-recorder, Jeff Adachi for public defender, Sups. Mark Farrell for District 2, Katy Tang for District 4, Jane Kim for District 6, Wiener for District 8, and Malia Cohen for District 10. No second- or third-place endorsements were made in the Board of Supervisors races despite multiple challengers.

Just before voting for endorsements began, DCCC member Alix Rosenthal admonished her colleagues for scant attendance during the candidate endorsement interviews, which were held the previous Saturday. “Only 12 out of 32 people showed up for interviews,” she noted. Half-jokingly, she added, “I know Outside Lands was happening.”

Lee and Pelosi talk middle class jobs in unequal SF

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
-
12
Lee and Pelosi talk middle class jobs in unequal SF

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-SF) joined Mayor Ed Lee at a press conference yesterday [Tue 12] at Yerba Buena across from the construction site of a Central Subway station. It was billed as an event highlighting how “San Francisco has been in the lead” on creating middle-class jobs, investing in transportation, and ensuring fair wages for workers.

But as these words in the press advisory leapt out at us, we at the Bay Guardian responded with raised eyebrows. Really? It has?

The point of this media appearance, we learned upon arrival, was to promote House Democrats’ newly unveiled Middle Class Jumpstart agenda – a legislative package floated to bolster the middle class, in advance of the upcoming midterm election. Pelosi and Lee also sought to highlight the Central Subway as a transportation infrastructure project that’s spurring middle-class job creation (The $1.6 billion Central Subway project has also spurred mystifying questions as to how the money is actually being spent, but that’s a different story).

Creating middle class jobs

The message was clear: San Francisco Democrats are here to support the middle class. But that’s a tough sell. Everyone knows that the middle class is vanishing from San Francisco as skyrocketing property values make it increasingly untenable for middle-income earners to reside here.

Instead, recent studies have shown that what’s really on the rise is income inequality: Even the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out that the city’s own customized Gini Coefficient, a formula used to measure wealth distribution, puts San Francisco on par with Rwanda in terms of its economic inequality.

Earlier this year, a Brookings Institute report found that the income gap between the city’s rich and poor is growing faster than in any other US city.

We asked Lee about that growing income inequality trend at the press conference.

Here’s what he said in response: “These union jobs – and [Building Trades Council Secretary-Treasurer] Mike Theriault knows this better than anybody else here – are middle class jobs for all workers that just want to earn their way forward. And I think the more projects that we have that are infrastructure related, that are transportation related, that are water infrastructure related … are all part of reestablishing and making sure that we don’t lose that middle class. … I think in San Francisco, we simply need to do more, and part of my responsibility is to build enough housing aimed at that sector, along with helping our low-income families.”

So if you want to be on a public-works construction crew, there may be hope. Except if you live in the Bayview, where unemployment stands at a stark 17 percent as compared with the citywide level of 4.5 percent, where it appears these opportunities still aren’t resulting in job creation.

That Lee mentioned building new housing is interesting, too, given that he recently came under fire by for intervening to weaken an affordable housing measure proposed by Sup. Jane Kim for the November ballot. His agenda has sought to advance a goal of building 30,000 new housing units, but Kim’s proposal would have further strengthened the city’s commitment to building affordable housing.

Investing in transportation 

Central Subway construction may well have created union jobs – but the decision to emphasize transportation funding as a solution for saving San Francisco’s middle class seems to ignore Lee’s backlash against San Francisco Sup. Scott Wiener for advancing a ballot measure to automatically increase funding for Muni in correlation with population growth, a significant public transit investment.

As the Guardian previously reported, Lee went so far as to issue memos calling for possible budget cuts as payback for Wiener’s bid to increase transit funding. But when we asked the mayor what his position was on the measure, which will appear on the ballot as Proposition B, he said he didn’t have a position on it.

“My big focus on transportation is trying to get the $500 million Proposition A because that requires two-thirds, which his does not, and I need to focus my full attention on passing that transportation bond,” Lee told us. “I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on Proposition B, to be quite candid with you. … At this point, I’m not prepared to [take a position] because I don’t want it to be confusing for the public … and in a few months, I think you’re going to see some departments have to come back with revised budgets, to the non-delight of nonprofits, and programs that we had all agreed to fund.”

Ensuring fair wages for workers

Throughout the press conference, Lee and Pelosi repeatedly trumpeted a November ballot measure that seeks to raise the city’s minimum raise to $15 an hour by 2018. But it should be noted that this measure is a watered-down version of an earlier proposal put forward by a progressive coalition that hoped to get workers $15 an hour a year earlier.

It was scaled back after Lee convened a stakeholder dialogue to hash out a “compromise” measure, ostensibly to avoid a ballot battle between the bolder progressive measure and a competing proposal that business interests had contemplated rolling out to thwart the passage of a wage hike they deemed unacceptable. Technically, the measure headed to the ballot still holds the promise of designating San Francisco as having the highest nationwide minimum wage. But as a point of comparison with other cities where minimum-wage hikes are moving forward, median rent in Seattle is $1,190 – while median rent in San Francisco is $3,200. 

Pelosi: “Income inequality is a reality”

Finally, in response to our question on income inequality, Pelosi also decided to weigh in, delivering a very depressing history lesson.

“The income inequality is a reality, it’s a growing gap, it’s something that must be addressed,” she said, mentioning a proposed change to the federal tax code that would prevent CEOs from taking tax write-offs if they increased CEO pay by $1 million annually without also increasing workers’ wages.  “What’s happening now, it’s important to note, this is structural,” Pelosi said. “It’s not anecdotal. It’s real. Go back 40 years ago, the disparity between the CEO and the workers was about 40 times. … And as productivity rose, CEO pay rose, and workers’ pay rose. … That was called stakeholder capitalism.

“Somewhere around a dozen or so years ago, or maybe nearly 20, it became shareholder capitalism, which only had one thing: The bottom line. And that means that now, as productivity rises, workers’ wages stagnate and the CEO’s goes up like this.” Here Pelosi made a gesture indicating a sharp upward increase. “Now it’s about, I say 350, others say 400 times, the CEO pay versus the worker. It’s a right angle going in the wrong direction. It must be addressed.”

So there you have it, straight from Pelosi: CEOs who used to make 40 times their workers’ pay now earn 10 times more than that, while wages stagnate and the cost of living continues to rise. And leading San Francisco politicians are standing in front of the Central Subway construction site to say that projects like this, coupled with a provision to encourage CEOs to remember the little people when they get million-dollar raises, will restore the middle class.

Thank goodness the Democrats are looking out for the vanishing middle class in San Francisco and other cities. Don’t you feel better?

San Francisco rent explosion: Median rent for two-bedroom apartment tops $4K

Erica Hanna
-
84
San Francisco rent explosion: Median rent for two-bedroom apartment tops $4K

Hold onto your butts, a new study on San Francisco’s rental market (yes another one) reveals the city’s newest most expensive neighborhoods. 

Priceonomics went pretty darn viral last year upon release of its first study of San Francisco’s rental explosion, and round two is certain to blast through SF social media as well. And deservedly so, as the new high rental numbers are staggering.

Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is now $3,120. The median rent for a two-bedroom is now $4,000, and the median rent for a three-bedroom is $4,795, Priceonomics found.

It’s not a wonder widespread evictions are sending protesters onto the streets (and into the offices of real estate agents). The numbers are a good indicator of why any eviction from a rent-controlled unit today is also an eviction from San Francisco entirely: prices are just too damn high to find a new apartment at a comparable rate. 

The study breaks the data down by neighborhood. Hayes Valley topped the list, with a median rent of $3,750 for a one-bedroom apartment. The Financial District and the Castro were second and third most expensive, with the Bayview coming in last at $1,425 a month. 

neighborhoods

The study also noted that historically poor areas (derisively termed “backwaters”) have jumped in price, largely in part due to an influx of tech workers and their shiny UFO-like private shuttles. 

As the rents rise and turmoil bubbles over evictions, city legislation like Supervisor Jane Kim’s Housing Balance Measure was defanged by Mayor Ed Lee during negotiations over the past month. Still, there is some hope on the November ballot for relieving San Francisco’s housing crisis. Proposition G, the Anti-Speculation Tax, would discourage speculators from “flipping” properties for a profit by taxing them harshly. 

Of course that’s no silver bullet, and San Francisco will need to take a hard look at its affordable housing policies to stop these prices from rising, rising, rising. 

It seems like they couldn’t possibly go up higher, but then again, we always think that, don’t we? 

For more on Priconomics’ findings, check out the article here. 

rental map

Click the map for a higher-res version.

Housing balance and neighborhood stabilization

Michael Redmond
-
68

 

By Peter Cohen and Fernando Martí

OPINION

The Guardian last week published an editorial on the outcome of the process around the Housing Balance measure. We offer here an alternative perspective from the field.

Since 1990, San Francisco has developed an incredible track record of building close to 30 percent affordable housing — but that ratio is quickly slipping away as new market-rate approvals far outstrip funding for affordable housing.

In many parts of our city, this imbalance in housing affordability is opening the door to displacement and gentrification at an unprecedented level, as long-term residents find they can no longer afford to live in their own neighborhoods.

The Housing Balance measure, developed as legislation for central city neighborhoods and introduced in April, and promoted by CCHO members TODCO and SOMCAN coming out of the West SoMa planning process, was intended to link market-rate development to affordable housing production by setting a goal of at least 30 percent affordable housing and establishing stricter conditions on approvals of market-rate housing whenever the city fell below this minimum balance. The Housing Balance measure was meant to compel all sides to work together to achieve a minimum of 30 percent affordability over time.

In June, Supervisor Jane Kim revised the Housing Balance to introduce it as a measure for the November 2014 ballot, extending the reach of the measure to not only establish a 30 percent affordable housing requirement for District 6, but across the neighborhoods of the city. Perceived as a threat by developers, this new proposal compelled the Mayor’s Office to put its own measure on the ballot — a so-called “poison pill” that would override the conditions placed on market-rate development by the Housing Balance. Since that time, the Mayor’s Office and Sup. Kim’s office engaged in extensive negotiations, which CCHO supported as a pathway to more substantive outcomes than simply a ballot “war.”

On July 29, negotiations produced a compromise measure — a policy statement that was introduced for the November ballot and agreed-upon terms for a work plan to take the policy statement into action. Though “compromise” is often considered a dirty word in politics, this measure represents a real potential win for affordable housing.

By putting the possibility of a housing linkage on the table, the negotiated outcome allowed Sup. Kim and housing advocates to up the ante to 33 percent affordable housing instead of the original 30 percent, and to get more immediate solutions for the housing crisis started immediately. The original Housing Balance was a tool to create leverage, but didn’t create ways to produce more affordable housing. This new measure establishes a package of policies and funding to set the conditions to reach the 33 percent minimum housing balance goal.

If approved by the voters, it will formalize the city’s commitment to maintain a one third affordable housing goal and set expectations on how to get there. While lacking the conditional use requirement “teeth” of the original Balance legislation, the policy and work plan sets up the conditions for a future Balance, compelling the city to do the following:

1) Establish a housing balance report and require public hearings to hold the city accountable to its goal of minimum 33 percent affordable housing;

2) Develop funding and site-acquisition strategies;

3) Develop a strategy to maintain one-third affordability citywide;

4) Make high-rise luxury developments pay their fair share of inclusionary obligations;

5) Establish a funded Neighborhood Stabilization Trust to acquire small-to-large buildings and take them out of the speculative market, preserving them in perpetuity as affordable housing;

6) Create immediate interim controls to protect PDR (production, distribution, repair/service) businesses and artists in SOMA from displacement.

The pieces of this agreement constitute a step towards addressing San Francisco’s ongoing affordability crisis and stabilizing neighborhoods facing rapid gentrification. It may seem less dramatic than the prospect of a ballot battle with developers. But it is a package to work with that was leveraged from the process. That said, we must keep an eye on the larger goal of real citywide affordability. Though 33 percent affordable housing production is higher than what we’ve achieved in the past, we must not forget this is only a floor — realistic given the funding goals of this measure, but an incremental step toward achieving the affordable housing we need to house all San Franciscans fairly.

Peter Cohen and Fernando Martí are co-directors of the Council of Community Housing Organizations.

 

Mayoral meltdown

Michael Redmond
-
95
Mayoral meltdown

joe@sfbg.com

When he launched an unexpected mayoral bid in 2011, Mayor Ed Lee campaigned on a platform of changing the tone of San Francisco politics. The appointed mustachioed mayor claimed he put the civility back in City Hall, marking a sharp departure from the divisive tone of city politics as progressives battled former Mayor Willie Brown, followed by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

“We’ll continue the high level of civility in the tone we’ve set since January, and solve the problems with civil engagement,” he told Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, then his mayoral opponent, at a 2011 debate.

Yet over the past two weeks, Mayor Lee has started swinging hard against supervisors who have introduced measures that go against his own priorities. So much for civility at City Hall.

 

COMPROMISE EVERYTHING

When asked about the outcome of her newly revised affordable housing measure, Sup. Jane Kim did not sound enthusiastic.

“It was definitely a compromise,” Kim said. But compromise is a word you use when you find a middle ground. By most accounts, Mayor Lee weakened the measure by hammering the right pressure points.

Kim crafted a novel solution to the city’s housing affordability crisis for the November ballot. Her initial Housing Balance Requirement would have established controls on market-rate housing construction, requiring a reevaluation whenever affordable housing production falls below 30 percent of total construction. The goal was to ensure that a certain amount of affordable housing would be built — but it was unpopular with housing developers.

Lee immediately drummed up a ballot measure in opposition to Kim’s, the Build Housing Now Initiative. The nonbinding policy statement asked the city to affirm his previously stated affordable housing goals. So what was the point?

It contained a poison pill which would have killed Kim’s Housing Balance Requirement. If Lee’s measure was approved, Kim’s would fail. The two politicians were in heated negotiations, trying to diffuse this ballot box arms race up to the very moment Kim’s measure went before the Board of Supervisors for approval at its July 29 meeting.

By the end of that process, Kim’s measure had been gutted.

Mirroring the mayor’s Build Housing Now Initiative, the new Housing Balance Requirement is a nonbinding policy statement asking the city to “affirm the City’s commitment” to support the production or rehabilitation of 30,000 housing units by 2020, with at least 33 percent of those permanently affordable to low or moderate income households.

Kim said she’d won funding pledges and promises for a number of affordable housing projects from the mayor. But Lee did not sign any agreement.

Essentially, the revised measure is a promise to promise, a plan to plan. Kim told us flatly, “We didn’t get the accountability we wanted.”

Political insiders told us the Mayor’s Office put pressure on affordable housing developers, who backed the original measure but later asked Kim to revise it to reflect the mayor’s wishes. The Mayor’s Office allegedly threatened to cut their funding next year, or divert projects to other affordable housing organizations.

Everyone acknowledged the mayor was pissed.

Tenants and Owners Development Corporation, an affordable housing developer in SoMa, sat in on the negotiations. The city paid $170,961 in contracts to TODCO last year, according to the City Controller, and over $250,000 the year before. John Elberling, president of TODCO, and Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, denied the mayor influenced them to ask Kim to revise her measure.

“I didn’t hear my phone ringing saying we’ll pull funding for affordable housers if you don’t do X, Y and Z,” Cohen told us. Yet he acknowledged the mayor “brought certain leverages to bear” in the closed-door negotiations to “compromise” on Kim’s ballot measure. Then everything changed.

“Yes,” Cohen said, “we then convinced the lead supervisor to change her position.”

Despite being labeled as a “compromise,” many observers read this as a sign that Lee had prevailed. Now the same hammer is coming down on Sup. Scott Wiener.

 

BALLOT BATTLE

“I agree with the mayor on many things,” Wiener told us. But the mayor is targeting Wiener’s new Muni funding ballot measure, hoping to knock it off the ballot.

“It’s not personal,” Wiener said. “It’s a policy disagreement.”

The mayor has a transportation bond on the ballot, asking voters to pony up $500 million to fund Muni. But Lee already blew a $33 million hole into Muni’s proposed budget when he decided to pull a Vehicle License Fee measure off the ballot. When that measure began to poll badly, he got cold feet, and withdrew it.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s budget outlined a doomsday scenario if the funding ballot measures failed to pass. It would be impossible to improve transit travel time, reliability, or to fund pedestrian and bike safety projects, the SFMTA staff noted in recent budget presentations.

Seeing the potential fallout due to the mayor pulling the VLF measure, Wiener placed his own measure on the ballot, tying expansion for Muni funding to the city’s growing population. If passed, Muni could see a $22 million bump just next year.

Openly, the mayor told reporters he would hold the supervisors who supported Wiener’s ballot measure “accountable.” Lee then initiated a conversation about slashing funding to city programs, signaling that supervisors’ favored projects could be jeopardized.

“Last week, the Board of Supervisors sent a measure to the ballot that the budget does not contemplate,” Kate Howard, the mayor’s budget director, wrote in a memo. She directed departments to cut their budgets by 1.5 percent, and asked for “contingency plans” including a “revisit” of hiring plans and scaling back existing programs and services.

Wiener issued a statement describing the move as “an empty scare tactic.”

“For whatever reason,” he wrote, “the Mayor’s Office felt the need to issue these emergency instructions now — a full year before the fiscal year at issue, in the middle of an election campaign, without even knowing whether the measure will pass.”

John Elberling, president of TODCO, recalled when then-Mayor Willie Brown used the same schoolyard-bully tactics to ensure his favored measures passed.

“The punchline is there were competing ballot measures, one from our side and one from Willie’s side,” Elberling told the Guardian. “There was an effort to reach a compromise, but that failed. I was in the meeting where he shot it down.”

“He said ‘I will make the decisions,’ quote unquote. ‘There is no compromise unless I say there’s a compromise.’ That was quite memorable,” Elberling recalled.

When things didn’t go his way, “Willie Brown took a housing project away from us,” Elberling said.

But Mayor Lee’s bluster and anger is new, and Elberling said it should be taken with a grain of salt. “Is it a bluff? That’s always a question. Real retaliation like Willie did, that’s a real thing. But huff and puff, that goes on all the time.”

 

Kim’s affordable housing ballot measure gutted then approved

Erica Hanna
-
80
Kim’s affordable housing ballot measure gutted then approved

Housing is out of whack in San Francisco, and Sup. Jane Kim’s affordable housing ballot measure would’ve gone a long way towards fixing it. But that was then. Now, things are more uncertain. 

At yesterday’s [Tues/29] Board of Supervisors meeting, the board unanimously approved Kim’s Housing Balance proposal. But this was not her original ballot measure: it was gutted. Or as Kim told the board, “We were not able to come to an agreement on everything I wanted to see.”

Her originally proposed ballot measure required new housing developments to provide 30 percent affordable housing, with an opt-out mechanism possible through a hearing. Currently, developers can provide on-site affordable housing or pay money into a pot of affordable housing funding. That’s the system we’ve got now, and you can check San Francisco’s soaring rents and home prices to see how well that’s working out.

The 30 percent requirement was a strong, clear ask which may have spurred much-needed housing for middle and lower-income San Franciscans. Too strong, apparently. 

Kim’s negotiations with the affordable housing community and Mayor Ed Lee hit more than a few snags, sources told us. The mayor, frankly, didn’t like it. 

We reached out to the Mayor’s Office but didn’t hear back from them before press time. But it doesn’t take a soothsayer to see the mayor wanted the measure dead: He sent a strong signal by creating a rival ballot measure, which, if approved by voters, contained a “poison pill” which would’ve killed Kim’s measure.

“We were still negotiating down to the last minute what we’re announcing today,” Kim told the board. 

Kim’s new ballot measure no longer includes the 30 percent affordable housing requirement. In exchange for dropping the strong mandate, Kim said she wrested a number of concessions from the mayor, including: 

 

  • Pledges of a 33% affordability housing goal for all new development in Central SoMa and future area plans
  • Interim planning controls in the Central SoMa to prevent displacement in advance of the approval of the Central SoMa Plan
  • The creation of a Neighborhood Stabilization Trust to fund Affordable Housing Acquisition & Rehabilitation program
  • Commitment to identify new revenue to accelerate affordable housing projects languishing in the City’s pipeline and land acquisition strategies, including tiered in-lieu fees
  • Pledges to find sufficient funding to jumpstart public housing rehab and HOPE SF –without tapping the Affordable Housing Trust Fund
  • A legislative path forward to continue goals of Housing Balance Act, including unit count

 

Peter Cohen, co-director of the San Francisco Council of Community Housing Organizations, put the compromise this way: “What the supervisor ended up doing [through negotiation] is forcing the city to commit itself to substantive policies for real action, in exchange for that conditional use trigger [contained in the original legislation, which would have subjected market-rate projects to addition scrutiny when affordable housing dropped below 30 percent].”

“Obviously,” Cohen said, “some people think thats a bad tradeoff.”

So Kim lost the 30 percent trigger, but gained a number of compromises. So were they a big win for affordable housing advocates? 

Sources told us the Neighborhood Stabilization Trust is a long sought-after goal of the affordable housing community, but so far no plans have been revealed about how the trust (or any of the other proposals) would be funded. The ballot measure may offer Kim some leverage to make sure those promises are funded by Lee, especially considering San Francisco’s impending 2015 mayoral race. 

“We’re presenting [voters] a ballot measure that constitutes our core values and memorializes the agreement,” Kim told the board. “Housing balance had a large journey, and it does not stop today. Thirty percent: this is a goal we should commit to as a city. Our voters want this.”

Earlier Tuesday, Kim stood with Lee at the unveiling of 60 new affordable housing units on Natoma street. Now, without a mandate, the only guarantee the city will build more affordable housing is the mayor’s word.

Homeless in transit

Michael Redmond
-
25
Homeless in transit

joe@sfbg.com

For most people, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system’s stations are just that: transitory. Walk into Powell Station, zip down the escalator and glide out on a train, destination somewhere. But for homeless people drawn to BART stations, the agency is a place to be stationary, a home and safe haven from the elements, muggings, and other hazards of sleeping on streets.

But now, BART intends to reclaim the T in its name. It wants the homeless to be transitory and get out of the stations.

Last week, the agency announced new enforcement of existing safety regulations that ensure people can evacuate a BART station in an emergency. BART argues homeless people sleeping or sitting in BART station hallways are in the way of a swift evacuation.

This legal interpretation gave BART carte blanche to scoop the homeless up and out. On the first day of the new rules, 17 homeless people were removed from Powell Station, which the agency justified to news media by repeatedly showing a video of a smokey accident that sent passengers fleeing.

“We had places where a big puff of smoke would fill the station very quickly,” Jeffrey Jennings, BART Police’s deputy chief, told the Guardian. “People were running not knowing what happened, very fearful. Other people were lying down, tripping folks. We could have had significant injuries occur because of that.”

First time offenders get a verbal warning, the second offense garners a citation, and the third offense jail time, all in the name of safety.

But the idea that homeless sleepers in all parts of a BART station may be trampled seems a little silly. Sure, there are sections of BART that are narrow and should be kept clear, but a walk through Powell Station shows 20-foot wide hallways throughout. This is where the homeless often sleep and sit.

At 8pm on a Wednesday, Powell Station is quiet and mostly empty, except for Charles T. He’s sitting in a chair right by the Powell Street entrance, strumming a guitar (skillfully), singing Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay.”

His voice is a dead ringer for Redding’s: “Sitting on the dock of the Bay, wasting my good time… I have nothing to live for, looks like nothing’s going to come my way. So I’m just going to sit on the dock of the Bay.”

Some still sat in Powell Station that night, flouting the new ban. A woman in baggy clothes sat by the Fourth and Market streets stairwell, cuddling her very big, very droopy-faced Rottweiler. A bald man in soiled gray pants sat along the hallway to the next exit. Slightly past him lay a man with long black hair snoring next to the wall. And at the end of that hallway, two men stayed in each other’s orbit: a slender one in a red jacket and blue jeans slept with his dirt-caked hands folded over his stomach, while a portly man sat nearby on cardboard boxes, tapping his fingers to a silent tune.

The last man we saw sat with his feet pulled under his knees by the entrance to the Westfield Centre, studiously reading his Bible as he underlined passages from Revelations. The would-be scholar, Henry Terry, 59, greeted us with a smile.

Terry was born in Los Angeles, a child of Watts who was a kid during the violent 1965 riots when 34 people died, over 1,000 people were injured, and the neighborhood burned. Terry’s mother sent him to Alabama with his father.

Terry fondly recalls growing corn, peas, watermelon, okra, squash, and sugar cane. That’s food he doesn’t have ready access to nowadays.

After bouts with the bottle and drugs, Terry cleaned himself up and got a place to live at the Hotel Essex, part of the city’s Community Housing Partnership. But alcohol lured Terry back. While in rehab, he missed an important court date, and he was evicted.

Now he spends his nights holding his Bible sitting in a BART station, seeking guidance and shelter. “The only thing getting me back to functioning is reading God’s word,” he said.

Terry’s already been ousted due to BART’s new rules. But on this day, some of the officers were more lenient. “[The officer] told me to cross my legs the entire time I’m here,” he said, “so people walking don’t trip over you.”

They also asked him to leave the commuters be. “I don’t ask for food or money,” Terry said. He just wants shelter until he can appeal his eviction.

Counterintuitively, BART Police officers who already threw Terry out once are the reason he stays there. He said the streets are dangerous, and muggings by other homeless people are common. The gates to the station go down at 12:30am, and Terry sleeps next to them because he knows the BART police will keep the muggers away.

BART argues the new rule is about safety of the passengers. California Building Code 433.3.2.2 states, “There shall be sufficient means of exit to evacuate the station occupant load from the station platforms in four minutes or less.”

Though Terry was glad the officers left him alone to sit, the Guardian saw BART police apply the law to other homeless people: usually the ones mumbling to themselves, or, frankly, the dirtiest ones.

The two men in each other’s orbit were ousted. One tall and broad-shouldered officer woke the man sleeping in the red jacket.

“Excuse me sir, excuse me. Do you know about the new rules at BART?” he asked. After explaining the ban, he said “This is the first time, so I’ll give you a warning, the second time I will cite you. The third time, you go to jail.”

The officer recommended services they could call, together. He spoke kindly, even sweetly, but the result was the same as if he had been cruel: The man in the red jacket picked up his cardboard and went out into the streets.

We told Deputy Chief Jennings about the apparent selective enforcement, questioning the law had anything to do with safety. From our four hours of observation at Powell Station, it seemed to be applied only to the dirtiest or rowdiest people, or the ones specifically sleeping, we told him.

“Our policy is someone needs to be conscious, awake, and aware of their surroundings,” Jennings told us. “There’s no selective enforcement. We only have so many officers, so officers will be drawn more to someone who is not being quiet, or having a problem.”

He also told us they had never enforced the building code before because no one had ever thought to, until the idea occurred to a newly promoted sergeant.

To its credit, BART is making inroads to help the homeless. First, transit officials went to Bevan Dufty, the director of the Mayor’s Office on Homelessness.

“I was honest and said we don’t have on demand resources and our shelters are full,” Dufty told us. The Homeless Outreach Team is stretched to the limit. Dufty suggested BART hire its own help, which it did.

Its first full time Crisis Intervention Training Coordinator, Armando Sandoval, helps pair the homeless at BART stations with housing and other services. He targets his efforts on what BART calls its 40/40 list, which tracks the 40 homeless people that generate the most service calls to BART police. A BART press release said it placed 22 people with services within the last year.

“[Sandoval] hunts them down to see if he can work his magic with these folks,” Jennings said.

Supervisor Jane Kim is working with Dufty’s office to revamp BART’s new policy. “They clearly stretched safety concerns,” Kim told us. “It’s one thing to offer services, but another to force people out.”

BART’s Quality of Life service calls doubled from 2013 to 2014, according to a BART quarterly report, generated by complaints like public urination and disturbing the peace.

A BART police officer, who did not want to be named, told us he thinks BART has a hard choice: to let riders feel harassed and unsafe, or to oust people clearly in need of compassion. He said he saw the homeless population in the station swell with “the weather and the economy.”

“We have to do what we have to do,” he told us. But on the other hand, he said, “It’s not against the law to stink.”

He’s half right. Though being homeless and dirty may not be illegal, it may get you thrown out of a BART station.

Article details bullying and retribution by the Mayor’s Office

Sasha Cuttler
-
78
Article details bullying and retribution by the Mayor’s Office

People are talking about this article from Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle about how much three fall ballot measures will cost the city, but many progressives and political outsiders are more focused on the juicy details lower down in the article about the spiteful, bullying political tactics practiced by the Mayor’s Office these days.

Mayor Ed Lee and his top aides are said to be “fuming” that Sup. Scott Wiener and five of his colleagues placed a measure on the fall ballot that would give Muni more money as the city’s population increases — and that “the mayor’s office seems to be hinting that it will target programs important to the six supervisors who voted to place Wiener’s proposal on the ballot.”

The measure is retroactive to 2003, the last time Muni had an increase in its funding from the city General Fund, so it would mean an immediate funding bump of $20 million or more, which the mayor is disingenuousnessly casting as budget buster. Keep in mind this same mayor unilaterally ended Sunday meters this year, costing Muni about $10 million a year, and supports corporate welfare programs that cost the city $17 million last year.

This spiteful and retaliatory approach to public policy by Lee, the elected official with the most control over the city’s pursestrings, and his minions was also a big factor in Sup. Jane Kim’s capitulation to the Mayor’s Office on her housing balance measure. Sources tell the Guardian that affordable housing advocates were threatened with reduced city funding from the Mayor’s Office if they continued to push for Kim’s original measure.

The Chronicle article was based largely on a Controller’s Office memo claiming the three ballot measures — the Muni measure, a proposal to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2018, and reauthorization of the Children’s Fund — would be the “largest voter-directed increase in general fund spending in a single election in city history,” costing $104 million by 2018.

More than half of that is from the minimum wage increase, which will increase the city’s cost of contracting low-paid nonprofit workers to perform public services. But in this increasingly expensive city, does anyone really think $15 per hour is an unreasonable wage? Should the city itself be exploiting workers?

After the city recently slashed building and planning fees charged to developers, and in a city that continues to coddle big corporations and landlords rather than tax them fairly, the Mayor’s Office ire over policies that help low-wage workers and Muni riders is particularly telling of its values and priorities.  

Housing ballot measures would weaken city policy

Sasha Cuttler
-
47
Housing ballot measures would weaken city policy

EDITORIAL Under the misleading guise of encouraging the development of more affordable housing in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee and Sup. Jane Kim have sponsored a pair of fall ballot measures that actually weaken existing housing policy in San Francisco. It’s a ruse that shouldn’t fool politically savvy San Franciscans.

Lee has the authority to place his Build Housing Now measure on the ballot, although he may withdraw it under his backroom deal with Kim. But the Board of Supervisors should reject Kim’s City Housing Balance measure, a once-promising proposal that she last week made toothless and counterproductive. What she called a “compromise” was actually a capitulation to developers and the Mayor’s Office [Editor’s Note: The board was scheduled to consider Kim’s measure on July 29 after Guardian press time, which is why we posted this editorial early at sfbg.com, where print readers can check for an update].[UPDATE: The board unanimously approved the amended measure.]

Kim’s original measure called for market-rate housing developers to get conditional use permits and perform additional economic studies on their projects when affordable housing production falls below 30 percent of total production. She then weakened it with several exemptions, yet it was still a check against runaway development of luxury housing.

But her new measure, much like Lee’s, is little more than a wishful policy statement calling for the city to seek the goal of 33 percent of housing affordable by moderate income San Franciscans and below (usually defined as those making 120 percent of area median income or less) and 50 percent by the more vaguely defined “working middle class.”

While neither measure includes any enforcement or funding mechanism to help reach that goal, it’s noteworthy that the goals themselves weaken those the city set for itself in the Housing Element of the General Plan, which call for 60 percent of new housing construction to be affordable to those with moderate incomes and below. The board adopted an amended version of this Housing Element just last month.

This is politics at its very worst: Politicians claiming to be doing one thing in order to score points with voters and appear responsive to their concerns, while they actually do just the opposite and try to disguise that fact with disingenuous rhetoric.

Kim’s allies in the labor and progressive political communities tell us they’re disappointed in her capitulation at such a crucial moment in determining whether San Francisco becomes a city of the rich or whether it can retain its socioeconomic diversity.

We were also disappointed, although we weren’t surprised. There’s an ugly, money-driven brand of politics being practiced at City Hall these days, and Kim has repeatedly shown herself to be more concerned with her future political prospects than living up to the progressive values she has long espoused.

Will San Francisco voters give Muni more money to serve a growing population?

Sasha Cuttler
-
56
Will San Francisco voters give Muni more money to serve a growing population?

Beating up on Muni and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is a perennial pastime for many San Franciscans, who will be given the opportunity to put their money where their mouths are this November. Will they be willing to give Muni the money it needs to serve its growing ridership, even at the cost of other city programs and priorities?

The Board of Supervisors yesterday [Tues/22] voted narrowly to place Sup. Scott Wiener’s Muni funding measure on the fall ballot. It would increase General Fund contributions to the SFMTA as the city population increase, retroactive back to 2003 when the current rate was set, giving the agency an immediate $20-25 million boost to serve the roughly 85,000 new residents the city has added since then.

“For too long City Hall has been slow to prioritize transit funding,” Wiener said in a press release. “We are a growing city, and we need to take firm steps to ensure that our transportation system keeps up with that growth.  Improving transit reliability and capacity and making our streets safer are key to that goal.”

While everyone says they support Muni — even David Looman, the proponent behind the Restore Transportation Balance initiative that seeks more SFMTA funding for cars, which will also appear on that ballot — Wiener has been the rare strong advocate locally for actually giving the agency more money.

Mayor Ed Lee created a $10 million hole in the SFMTA budget by demanding the repeal of charging for parking meters on Sunday this year, and then he dropped his support for a local increase in the vehicle license fee this year, prompting Wiener to introduce his Muni funding measure, which the mayor would have the authority to terminate if voters approve a VLF increase in 2016.

A $500 million general obligation bond transportation measure backed by Lee and the full Board of Supervisors will also appear on the November ballot, but it will go mostly to cover Muni’s capital needs, not the growing demands on its operating budget.

Wiener’s Muni funding measure yesterday barely got the six votes this charter amendment needed to qualify for the ballot: those of Wiener and Sups. London Breed, David Campos, David Chiu, Malia Cohen, and Jane Kim (Sup. John Avalos was absent).

In recent years, there’s been a rift in the city’s progressive coalition between environmental and transportation activists on one side and affordable housing advocates on the other, who sometimes battle over city funding they see as a zero sum game. So it will be interesting to watch how the politics surrounding this measure shape up going into the fall campaign season.  

Alternative Ink discusses the flurry of SF ballot measures moving through City Hall

Sasha Cuttler
-
6
Alternative Ink discusses the flurry of SF ballot measures moving through City Hall

Digging deep during the height of summertime fun and frivolity, we Guardianistas showed up in force last night for another lively and informative edition of our biweekly radio show, Alternative Ink, on BFF.fm. Listen to the podcast here (but don’t be fooled by the first minute from a past show, it’s a false front we used to hide this week’s treasure).

With the fall ballot being filled out inside City Hall in recent weeks, we discussed rival housing measures sponsored by Sup. Jane Kim and Mayor Ed Lee, as well as the anti-speculation tax. We also covered the Restore Transportation Balance (placed on the ballot by citizens) and Let’s Elect Our Elected Officials (which was narrowed denied a spot on the ballot by the Board of Supervisors) measures that have been burning up the SFBG comments section lately.  

We talked tech, prompted by our pair of long and insightful stories in last week’s issue, and we previewed an interesting story in our coming issue about how San Francisco is dealing with a flood of young immigrants who have showed up seeking refuge status. As always, the show was peppered with great music, this time with a decidedly international flair thanks for our award-winning Art Director Brooke Ginnard’s return from a three-week vacation in Europe (welcome back, Brooke).

After doing the show for a few months now, we’re starting to hit our stride — so much so that we’ve decided to do a live version of the show on the evening of Aug. 28 at the LGBT Center. So stay tuned for more information about the lineup for that show, and please tune in to our next radio show on Aug. 3. 

Housing supply and demand theory on trial at City Hall

Erica Hanna
-
43
Housing supply and demand theory on trial at City Hall

The November ballot is shaping into a housing supply theory showdown, and yesterday’s [Thu/17] Board of Supervisors Rules Committee hearing was the first round.

The committee hosted two hearings on rival housing proposals for the November ballot: Sup. Jane Kim’s City Housing Balance Requirement and Mayor Ed Lee’s Build Housing Now initiative. The two purport to set similar goals for building affordable housing, but Lee’s proposal contains a poison pill that would invalidate Kim’s measure. 

The mayor’s philosophy on housing, a strict supply and demand argument, was on full display. 

“[Housing] is a competition based on who has the most dollars in their pocket, and the ones with the most dollars win,” Olson Lee, director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing said at the hearing. “If we limit the supply, the people with the most dollars will win.”

The arguments are a little complicated, but let’s try to break them down: Kim’s initiative lays out a requirement for new construction to build 30 percent affordable housing and 70 percent market-rate housing. Currently, new construction projects can build on-site affordable or pay a fee into a pot, known as the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. If new construction needs to be exempt from the balance requirement, under Kim’s measure, that can be decided by the Planning Commission. 

But the mayor and his deep-pocketed development allies are shrinking away from this like the Wicked Witch of the West from water. Affordable housing doesn’t make a dime for developers, and the mayor fears Kim’s policy will slam the breaks on market-rate housing construction. 

Activist and San Francisco historian Calvin Welch argues supply and demand housing theories won’t solve the San Francisco housing crisis, via 48hills.

Yet Kim’s measure is based on what many progressives in San Francisco believe: San Francisco’s housing market is hot, profits are high, demand is insatiable, and building lots of market rate housing that will never be affordable to most San Francisco won’t solve the city’s affordable housing crisis. The construction pipeline won’t slow down with a few dings to profit margins, she argued. 

“I just have to say if building 30 percent affordable housing will halt development, we’re in a whole lot of trouble,” Kim said to her critics. “We have to build. Even people that make money leave San Francisco every day.”

No one is saying Kim doesn’t believe more housing needs to be built. But Lee’s staffers emphasized a belief that more housing construction alone is the solution to the city’s ills, a strategy that hasn’t exactly netted stellar results recently. They also defended the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, as the Mayor’s Office of Housing is funded about “40 percent” from developer’s fees, Olson Lee said. Sarah Dennis Phillips, from the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, argued sharply that any hit to developer’s fees, even marginal ones, would result in a loss of dollars for the city’s General Fund, the funding pot feeds most city services.

The mayor’s ballot initiative essentially asks for a vote of confidence in his plan to build or rehabilitate 30,000 housing units by 2020, which some in the press have pilloried as depending heavily on already-existing units. While 30,000 sounds like a lot, the Controller’s Office said San Francisco would need as many as 100,000 housing units to even make a dent in San Francisco’s skyrocketing housing prices, according to the SF Examiner (though he has since written the Examiner to say his sentiments were misconstrued). The city’s Civil Grand Jury recently released a scathing report of the mayor’s 30,000 housing unit goal, saying “While the residential real estate market is enjoying a strong recovery, it is doubtful the city can build its way out of the current affordability crisis.”

Meanwhile, people are losing their homes and fleeing the city. Some who are holding on by a thread came out to speak at the dueling hearings. 

“I have health challenges including cerebral palsy,” Justin Bennet said during public comment. He spoke with a difficulty in his jaw, haltingly and with much effort. He said the housing market made it difficult to move from the dangerous areas of the city he calls home. “I’ve been robbed outside several residences I’ve lived in, so I’m hoping for a change in my housing situation in the future. Thanks for letting me speak.” 

A family came up to the podium to speak, with two young housing activists, a brother and sister, 9 and 6, saying they didn’t want to see so many lose their homes.

Advocates from the SEIU 1021, South of Market Community Action Network, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and the Chinese Progressive Association, to name a few, were on hand at the hearing. They were also on hand for a press conference on the steps of City Hall shortly before the hearing. Ed Donaldson from ACCE called out the mayor’s housing measure, saying its only intent was to torpedo Kim’s. 

“I say we should play chicken with the mayor,” Donaldson said at the podium. Metal bands have sung with less volume than the baritone he used while booming, “Let’s see if he has the gall.”

Inside the hearing, Patrick Valentino (who championed luxury development on the waterfront) and Tim Colen of the Housing Action Coalition spoke, defending the mayor’s measure.

“As San Francisco, as a city in affordability, we’re failing. Our rate of failure is accelerating,” he said flatly. He criticized Kim’s plan and asked, “Where’s the money? No one disagrees we need it. The shortcoming I see in the housing balance measure is its premise that if we increase restrictions on market rate housing, it helps subsidize housing.” 

He argued instead to gather more stakeholders together (i.e. deep pocketed developers) to negotiate more private funding, a strategy he said that worked in the past. 

As others came to the podium to argue against developer greed, Colen watched on, shaking his head, seemingly in disagreement. When someone in public comment argued that developers so far have shirked their responsibilities to build affordable housing, he shook his head again and left the hearing room. 

There’s a stark divide in housing philosophy, and supply and demand’s ability to save San Francisco will soon see a trial by voter if Kim’s charter amendment can win six vote at the full Board of Supervisors. 

The mayor’s policies seem to be more of the same, Kim said, and now the city seems to be fighting over the crumbs of developers’ fees. Despite opposition from the mayor, Kim told the Guardian she’s open to new ideas from the mayor. 

But she also said she won’t back down. 

“We’re on a two-fold path right now. If there’s a compromise to get [the city] to 30 percent affordable housing, like new revenue, we’re open to that compromise,” she said. “But we always intended this to go to the ballot.”

San Francisco to study dropping speed limit to 20 mph for pedestrian safety

Erica Hanna
-
30
San Francisco to study dropping speed limit to 20 mph for pedestrian safety

As a part of a citywide effort to eliminate all pedestrian deaths by 2024, San Francisco will study the impact of reducing speed limits to 20 mph. 

“This is a reasonable issue to look into making San Francisco streets safer,” Sup. Eric Mar said, in a public statement. “There is too much excellent work and research going into it nationally and internationally to ignore.” 

The study was proposed by Mar as part of Vision Zero – a Swedish concept adopted by San Francisco at the behest of Sup. Jane Kim earlier this year. The initiative aims to reduce pedestrian deaths to zero within 10 years, with a focus on educating drivers, engineering roads for safety, and enforcing traffic laws (which the SFPD agreed to reform ealrier this year). Data from the study should be available in early fall. 

Where the speed changes would occur is the subject of the study. “We’re going to the experts,” Peter Lauterborn, Mar’s aide, told the Guardian. That’s the whole point of the study, he said, to figure out where and by how much speed could be reduced in the city to save lives. 

Modest adjustment to speed limits lowered pedestrian mortality rates in cities across the world.

Paris, London, cities in Sweden, and New York all implemented speed limit reductions to save pedestrian lives. According to the British Medical Journal, serious traffic-related fatalities or injuries decreased by 46 percent in 20 mph zones in London. 

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and the San Francisco Police Department got on board with the Vision Zero pedestrian safety plan, proposed by Sup. Jane Kim, earlier this year. 

According to California’s Office of Traffic Safety, San Francisco was ranked number one for traffic fatalities and injuries in 2011, compared to other similarly sized cities. 

“The overall frequency of traffic fatalities in the City of San Francisco constitutes a public health crisis,” the SFMTA warned in its Vision Zero web post. 

The statistics the SFMTA presented may seem dry, but tell the tale of preventable pain pedestrians suffered at the mercy of autos: Over the ten years from 2002 to 2011 the City lost a total of 310 lives to traffic fatalities. Each year alone on average 800 people are injured and 100 severely injured or killed while walking in San Francisco.

Sweden also saw fewer pedestrian crashes, despite increased traffic density. 

Walk SF has repeatedly advocated to fix intersections that are known to be especially dangerous, as only six percent of SF intersections are responsible for 60 percent of pedestrian crashes. Most of these areas are located in SoMa and the Tenderloin districts, the latter is where 6-year-old Sofia Liu was killed on New Year’ Eve. 

Walk SF’s Executive Director Nicole Schneider told us 20 mph zones would make it easier for cars to stop, expand drivers’ view of streets, and decrease the force of impact. 

In 2011 the city instituted 15 mph school zones after strong advocacy from Walk SF and other groups. While Schneider didn’t have any statistics about the impact of the speed limit on hand, she did say that there is a “perception of change” in these zones. 

But there are environmental benefits of slower speeds as well, Lauterborn told us: driving slower uses less gas. 

The U.S. Department of Energy says that speeding, rapidly accelerating, and frequently braking can decrease gas mileage by 33 percent. A lower speed limit would decrease driving costs as well as protect pedestrians. 

Lauterborn said even if the study shows a 20 mph speed limit would be beneficial, there are state laws that might prevent SF from lowering the speed limit. Local governments can only set the speed limit lower than 25mph on streets smaller than 25 feet wide or in business, residential, or school zones. To lower the speed limit to 20mph on a street like Sunset, the city would likely need state permission. 

At a fiery Board of Supervisors hearing on Vision Zero in January, a pedestrian who was hit by a car in 2013 named Jikaiah Stevens offered a scathing critique of current vehicle collision policies. “What is their incentive to drive safely when there are no consequences?” Stevens asked the board that night. A 20 mph limit may go a long way towards preventing pedestrian injuries like Stevens’.

“Let’s Elect Our Elected Officials” rejected at the Board of Supes

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
-
90
“Let’s Elect Our Elected Officials” rejected at the Board of Supes

At today’s (Tue/15) Board of Supervisors’ meeting, members of the board voted 6-5 against placing a proposal on the November ballot that would create special elections when vacancies arise on the Board or in the Mayor’s Office.

If approved by voters, the measure would have immediate impacts on San Francisco’s political landscape. Board President David Chiu is vying for a seat in the California Assembly against Sup. David Campos, which will leave a vacancy on the board one way or another. 

But Sup. John Avalos, who authored the charter amendment proposal, noted that “this measure is not about any existing mayor or any existing supervisor.” Instead, Avalos described the measure as a bid to make city policy more democratic. 

“It will allow voters to decide who fills vacancies in special elections,” Avalos said.

As things stand, when a supervisor’s seat is vacated, it’s up to the mayor to appoint that official’s replacement. When a mayor’s seat is vacated, a much more rare occurrence, it’s up to “a small minority of people – us,” to appoint the city’s top elected official, Avalos said. “This shapes how decisions are made, often behind closed doors.”

Taking this question to voters via special election would ultimately be more democratic, he added. “If you are on the fence on this measure, I hope you can still send this ballot measure over to the voters,” Avalos told his colleagues.

Sups. London Breed, Katy Tang, and Scott Wiener each spoke in opposition to the idea.

“It’s not a perfect system, but no system ever is,” Breed said. “I’m not sure what problem we’re trying to solve with changing the charter.”

Wiener sounded a similar note. “There are various ways you can do it, and no way is necessarily better or worse,” he said of the current system for appointing vacancies. “I don’t see how the system that we have is in any way broken.”

But Sup. David Campos chimed in to challenge that framing. “The question before this board is not, what is the best system? … The question is a lot simpler than that,” Campos said, “Since we are talking about democracy. The question is: Will we give voters in SF the opportunity to decide for themselves what the best system is? Let’s not you and I pre-judge what the voters are going to say.”

In the end the measure failed six to five, with Sups. Mar, Avalos, Campos, Chiu, and Jane Kim voting in favor.

123...15Page 1 of 15

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org