Is Burning Man really making Bay Area technology titans, right-wing ideologues, and other uber-capitalists more community-minded? Do they really come back from the desert feeling more goodwill toward their fellow humans and then push egalitarian innovations to help the masses?
That’s one of the biggest reasons that burner apologists cite in defending the festival from any criticisms, responding to the raft of recent articles critical of how Burning Man is developing, including my own, with their own pieces extolling how the festival is making the world a better place. The rhetoric gets downright creepy and cult-like at times, summarily dismissing all dissent.
Frankly, I’ve long hoped that the stated ethos of Burning Man really would seep out into the world and influence our greed-based economic and political systems. There were even moments over the last 10 years when I really believed it might be happening. But I think that potential has been lost as the party and spectacle that is Burning Man overwhelmed the stated communitarian ethos that underlies it.
Right-wing firebrand Grover Norquist attended Burning Man this year and had a lovely time, as he explained in a UK Guardian opinion piece yesterday and a New York magazine article. Those who hosted him in Black Rock City LLC-run First Camp and showed him around even told us that Norquist “gets it” and how that will help Burning Man going forward.
But there’s a deceptiveness and a hollowness to this rhetoric, by both Norquist and the burner true believers. After all, Norquist flew onto the playa and stayed in accomodations that others set up for him and cleaned up after he left, cooking his meals for him while he was there.
Yet Norquist still has the audacity to write, “The story of Burning Man is one of radical self-reliance….The demand for self-reliance at Burning Man toughens everyone up. There are few fools, and no malingerers. People give of themselves – small gifts like lip balm or tiny flashlights. I brought Cuban cigars.”
Burning Man’s stated principle of Radical Self-Reliance is the one Norquist focused in on because it reinforced his libertarian worldview and belief that selfish actions somehow provide for the common good, and he’s now using Burning Man to promote that notion, to the glee of its leaders.
“A community that comes together with a minimum of ‘rules’ demands self-reliance – that everyone clean up after themselves and help thy neighbor. Some day, I want to live 52 weeks a year in a state or city that acts like this. I want to attend a national political convention that advocates the wisdom of Burning Man,” he writes.
Will Norquist also promote “Civic Responsibility” and “Communal Effort,” also stated burner principles, to his wealthy patrons? After all, the city he enjoyed wasn’t free. Maybe he didn’t pay $380 for his ticket, but most attendees do, much like paying taxes is the price of living in civil society, despite Norquist’s fierce opposition to taxes and government.
But there are other dangerous dynamics at play on the playa that would probably make Grover’s small heart grow three sizes larger, particularly the exploitation of labor by a handful of powerful elites. After all, Black Rock City LLC and its six board members claim the full economic value of all the volunteer labor that builds the city each year, from the art to the big theme camps to the people working gate in the middle of the night, hundreds of thousands of hours of volunteer labor.
At its core, libertarianism denies the very notion of exploitation, or that our freedom is limited by the dwindling economic opportunities that are available to us and the power some have to game markets. It promotes a deregulated world in which those with economic and political power can do pretty much whatever they want — something most progressives see as a race to the bottom that exploits both human and natural resources.
It’s no surprise that Norquist is a big fan of the so-called “sharing economy,” in which companies such as Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft help commodify and monetize people’s homes and vehicles, essentially creating low-wage jobs with no benefits while being heedless of their impacts on local housing markets or established employers like hotel or taxi companies.
Tech titans have been coming to Burning Man since the beginning, and I haven’t seen any evidence in San Francisco that they’ve internalized or promoted the principles of civic responsibility, communal effort, or decommodification. Burning Man may seem like a libertarian paradise to a casual observer, but clean-up crews will be there for the rest of the month to make the “leave no trace” ideal a reality, many big theme camps will be holding fundraisers all fall to pay off their debt from this year, and it’ll be up to cops and courts to decide what justice demands for the woman tragically killed by an art car this year.
Like most libertarians, Grover wants all the benefits of government — public roads, unspoiled federal lands, police protection of person and property, and other services that make Burning Man possible — he just doesn’t think the wealthy should pay their fair share for it.
I had dinner last night with Rev. Billy Talen, the inspiring anti-corporate activist at the center of the NYC-based Church of Stop Shopping and close friend of the festival’s organizers, and he’s also bothered by the trends he’s seeing at Burning Man, and openly wondering when the volunteers (like a surly one he encountered at the gate this year while Norquist was being feted inside First Camp) are going to catch on to the game.
That’s what a lot of people are wondering these days, how long Burning Man will still remain a vibrant and interesting place as more and more people pay to come watch and appreciate the hard work of a dwindling percentage of burners willing to put their time, sweat, and energy into making Black Rock City what it is each year.
And if there really is a larger societal value to the wealthy CEOs who come to party in exclusive camps and private art cars, then I think we’re all still waiting to see what that looks like. And waiting. In the meantime, Burning Man seems to be going the way of Animal Farm, where “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” that Orwellian distillation of a list of once-egalitarian principles.
Editor’s Note: Aug. 19 marks the Bay Area Global Health Film Festival, hosted by the Institute for Global Orthopaedics and Traumatology. The theme of this year’s festival is “Road Traffic Safety Locally … and Globally,” and is geared toward raising awareness about the need for road traffic safety improvements. In this opinion piece, representatives from the University of California at San Francisco Orthopaedic Trauma Institute, at San Francisco General Hospital, describe how all-too-common accidents can permanently injure pedestrians and bicyclists. And they voice support for Proposition A, the San Francisco Transportation and Road Improvement Bond.
By Amber Caldwell and Nick Arlas
San Francisco is a transit-first city. Everyone shares the need to get safely from point A to point B, preferably quickly. And the various options for doing so span the full spectrum from driving, biking, and walking, to public transit like MUNI and Bart, rideshare programs, taxis, and companies like Uber and Lyft.
As we go about our daily lives, transportation is one of the most important public infrastructure systems that San Francisco relies upon. It encompasses many controversial issues and is linked to other social equity campaigns including housing advocacy and urban gentrification.
Yet the issue of pedestrian and bike safety in San Francisco has made disheartening headlines as of late. 2013 was an especially deadly year, with 21 pedestrian and four bicyclist fatalities. San Francisco General Hospital alone cared for over 1,000 road traffic injuries, with an estimated $60 million annual cost. Organizations like the SF Bicycle Coalition and WalkSF have made biking and walking leading issues in debates over transportation policy and traffic safety. Mayor Ed Lee and our city government have responded by introducing a $500 million transportation bond measure for the Nov. 4th ballot. If it passes, a portion of the funding will be allocated for improving pedestrian and cyclist safety.
Less often discussed, however, is what happens to the pedestrians and bicyclists who are hit while going about their daily routines and permanently affected by all-too-common accidents. At the UCSF SFGH Orthopaedic Trauma Institute (OTI), these patients fill our wards, the operating room schedule and our hearts as we help to heal them from these injuries. We struggle with the balance between doing what we can and what should be done to curb the growing volume of patients we see annually due to preventable accidents.
What is alarming is the socio-economic impact these accidents have, not only on the person affected, but on the hospital and our city as a whole. Even in cases where the driver is at fault, it is rare for them to even be cited for a traffic violation in most cases. More importantly, personal injury insurance and health coverage barely cover the emergency services needed for these accidents, and most services offered at the hospital are subsidized by taxpayer dollars, which means we are paying for this on all sides. This is unacceptable.
There is currently a wave of momentum to address these complex issues and attempt to tease through how we as a city can rebuild, redefine and reinforce the safety in our city. This movement is supported by a global platform addressing road traffic safety as a public health campaign, through the World Health Organization’s Decade of Road Traffic Safety. This campaign tackles the myriad polices and resource investments needed to address the enormous impact road traffic accidents have on the world.
Injuries, mainly those resulting from road traffic accidents, account for greater disability and death than HIV, TB and Malaria combined. An average 5.8 million die annually, and for every death caused by these accidents, eight to 10 more are permanently injured.
To bring collective awareness around this issue and to change the landscape, the community needs to stand together not only in San Francisco but also around the world, to demand safer streets. The city is doing its part to outline a roadmap to curbing these alarming statistics, and a greater global campaign is underway to promote awareness and inspire activism.
We must stand up for the injured and for ourselves as local citizens to demand safer streets and protection from when accidents occur. We may not be able to prevent every accident, but we can improve the choreography of their outcome if we work together.
Amber Caldwell and Nick Arlas are Director of Development and Community Outreach Coordiator, respectively, at the Institute for Global Orthopaedics and Traumatology, UCSF Orthopaedic Trauma Institute, San Francisco General Hospital.
The Bay Area Global Health Film Festival begins Tue/19 at 6 p.m. at Public Works, 161 Erie, in San Francisco.
In a city dominated by Democrats, the endorsements of the San Francisco Democratic Party carry a lot of weight. Its slate card mailer, showing candidates’ headshots and the party’s positions on local measures, can serve as a cheat sheet for Dems heading to voting booths on Nov. 4.
At tomorrow’s [Wed/13] meeting, the Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC), the steering committee of the city’s Democratic Party, will vote on endorsements for the upcoming election – and while some votes may be predictable, others will be closely contested and could go either way.
Here are a few items we’ve been keeping an eye on:
Prop. G: “Anti-speculation tax”
Earlier this year, hundreds crowded into the Tenderloin Elementary School for a daylong Tenant Convention that sought to find ways to curb the tide of evictions sweeping San Francisco. Emerging out of that was the “anti-speculation tax,” a measure that will appear on the November ballot as Proposition G. Sponsored by Sups. Eric Mar, John Avalos, David Campos, and Jane Kim, the formally titled Additional Transfer Tax on Residential Property Sold Within 5 Years of Purchase seeks to discourage real estate speculators from buying up properties with the aim of flipping them, a process that tends to involve bringing down the hammer of the Ellis Act to evict long-term tenants.
Some tenant activists are concerned that the DCCC won’t throw its considerable weight behind this tenant-friendly initiative, crafted as a direct response to the city’s affordability crisis and ongoing displacement problem. “Many of the members of the Democratic Central Committee seem to have forgotten the core values of the Democratic Party,” tenant activists with the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition wrote in a Facebook post, urging supporters of the anti-speculation tax to turn out at tomorrow’s meeting.
Mary Jung, who chairs the DCCC, also serves as a paid lobbyist for the San Francisco Association of Realtors, which strongly opposes the anti-speculation tax. Following the June election, Jung came under fire for authorizing funds to be used for last-minute voter calls opposing Prop. B, a measure that was ultimately adopted, requiring voter approval for increasing waterfront building height limits. The DCCC came down against Prop. B, putting the party in line with developers and real-estate interests. Will the DCCC’s vote on the tenant-friendly Prop. G reflect this same allegiance?
For Prop. G, “I have a really hard time believing that the Realtors will put together a coalition for a ‘no’ vote,” said DCCC member Alix Rosenthal. “I’m sure the Realtors would settle for a ‘no endorsement,’” on that measure, she added, but said that outcome seemed doubtful too. Last June’s vote on Prop. B shouldn’t serve as a guide, she added. “Because the Warriors made the Prop. B vote very complicated, I think you’re not going to see the same voting coalition against Prop. G.”
BART Board: Fang vs. Josefowitz
As the Guardian noted in last week’s print edition, there are some fascinating political dynamics at play in the DCCC’s endorsement vote for BART’s Board of Directors. Longtime member James Fang, a Republican, faces a challenge from a well-funded newcomer in his early 30s, Nick Josefowitz, who’s a Democrat. That might sound like a no-brainer for the Dems, but there’s a catch. The city’s largest public employee union, SEIU Local 1021, is rooting for Fang over Josefowitz.
Organizer Gabriel Haaland says that’s because the Fang made a show of support for BART employees by walking the picket line last year during the BART strike. “It’s a priority for us to elect Fang,” Haaland told us. Plus, he pointed out, Josefowitz is in line with Mayor Ed Lee and has been championed by leaders in the tech sector, serving as a mayoral appointee to a city commission and benefitting from a fundraiser organized by Lyft cofounder Logan Green.
But DCCC member Matt Dorsey sounded a different note. “I get that some of my DCCC colleagues may have loyalties that may prevent them from supporting Nick,” he said. “But I’d plead with them not to make our party an instrument for Republican empowerment — because that’s exactly what a ‘no endorsement’ in the BART race will do.”
The DCCC can’t endorse Fang outright, because of his political affiliation, but it can decide whether to help or hurt Josefowitz by choosing to back him or vote “no endorsement.” The latter would limit his exposure as a candidate in a race where incumbent Fang has both wide name recognition and the backing of many prominent San Francisco Democrats.
District 10 race
Based on questionnaires submitted by candidates in the upcoming Board of Supervisors’ races, District 10 Sup. Malia Cohen has lined up a much longer list of endorsements than her challenger in that race, Tony Kelly.
But Kelly does have some prominent supporters, including former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, Sups. John Avalos and David Campos, and the Sierra Club.
While both Kelly and Cohen stated on their questionnaires that they are supportive of ranked-choice voting, Cohen has evidently requested a sole endorsement from the DCCC for her reelection. While there seems to be little doubt that Cohen will secure the DCCC’s backing, there’s a possibility that Kelly – or for that matter, any other District 10 candidate – could be added to the slate with a second- or third-place endorsement. Rosenthal, who is friends with Cohen, said this is unlikely since state and federal elected officials who send proxies to the DCCC tend to back incumbents to maintain existing working relationships.
Cohen also happens to sit on the DCCC, which means she can cast a vote for her own endorsement.
This perk is actually a reason why many politicians opt to get involved with the Democratic Party in the first place. “One of the reasons to get involved on the DCCC,” Rosenthal said, “is to help ensure that you yourself get endorsed by the Democratic Party.”
Check back here on Thu/14 for an update on how the votes went down.
BART Director James Fang is San Francisco’s only elected official who is a registered Republican, yet over the last 24 years, he has somehow managed to easily win election after election in a city dominated by the Democratic Party, often with the endorsements of top Democrats.
But this year, Fang is facing a strong and well-funded challenge from investor and former solar company entrepreneur Nicholas Josefowitz, a Harvard graduate in his early 30s. Thanks in part to support from the tech community — Lyft cofounder Logan Green is one of several prominent figures in tech to host fundraisers for him, according to Re/Code — Josefowitz has managed to amass a campaign war chest of about $150,000.
Josefowitz has also secured some key political endorsements, including from Sups. John Avalos, Eric Mar, and Scott Wiener, BART Director Tom Radulovich, former SF Mayor Art Agnos, and the Sierra Club.
After Josefowitz sold his solar company, RenGen, almost two years ago, “I got more and more involved in sustainable community advocacy,” he told us. “Then the BART strike happened and I was like, wow, this shouldn’t be happening.”
Josefowitz cited BART’s history of worker safety violations, last year’s unnecessarily divisive labor contract negotiations, the district’s massive deferred maintenance budget, property devoted to parking lots that could be put to better uses (he sees potential there for real-estate development), corrupt cronyism in its contracting, and lack of cooperation with other transit agencies as problems that urgently need correcting.
Fang is being challenged by well-funded Democratic newcomer Nicholas Josefowitz.
“BART does a terrible job at coordinating with other transit agencies,” Josefowitz told us, arguing the transit connections should be timed and seamless. “James has been there for 24 years, and if he was going to be the right guy to fix it, then he would have done it by now.”
But perhaps Josefowitz’s strongest argument is that as a Republican in liberal San Francisco, Fang’s values are out-of-step with those of voters. “Why is someone still a Republican today? … He’s a Republican and he’s a Republican in 2014, with everything that means,” Josefowitz told us. “He hasn’t been looking out for San Francisco and he’s out of touch with San Francisco values.”
We asked Fang why he’s a Republican. After saying it shouldn’t matter as far as the nonpartisan BART board race is concerned, he told us that when he was in college, he and his friends registered Republican so they could vote for John Anderson in the primary election.
“Some people feel the expedient thing for me to is switch parties,” Fang said, but “I think it’s a loyalty thing. If you keep changing … what kind of message does that send to people?”
Fang said he thought the focus ought to be on his track record, not his political affiliation. It shouldn’t matter “if it’s a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches mice,” he said. He pointed to programs such as seismic upgrades, completing the BART to the airport project, and instituting a small-business preference for BART contractors as evidence of his strong track record. “I’m a native San Franciscan — I’ve gone through all the public schools,” Fang added. “It’s very important to get people from a San Francisco perspective and San Francisco values.”
Josefowitz supporters say he has perhaps the best shot ever at defeating Fang, largely because of his prodigious fundraising and aggressive outreach efforts on the campaign trail. “He is doing all the things that someone should do to win the race,” Radulovich, San Francisco’s other longtime elected representative on the BART board, told us. “There’s a lot of unhappiness with BART these days.”
But in an interesting political twist, Fang has the endorsement of Service Employees International Union Local 1021, a champion of many progressive causes in San Francisco, after he walked the picket line with striking BART employees last year and opposed the district’s decision to hire a high-priced, union-busting labor consultant.
“It’s a priority for us to elect Fang,” SEIU 1021 organizer Gabriel Haaland told us. “When we needed him on the strike, he walked our picket line.”
SEIU Political Chair Alysabeth Alexander sounded a similar note. “In the middle of one of the most important and highest-profile labor fights in the nation, when two workers had to die to prove that safety issues were the heart of the struggle, Fang was the only board member who took a position for safety,” she said. “Every other member shut out the workers and refused to acknowledge that serious safety issues put workers lives at risk every day. If more BART Board members has the courage of Fang, two workers would be alive today.”
BART got a series of public black eyes last year when its contract standoff with its employees resulted in two labor strikes that snarled traffic and angered the public. Then two BART employees were killed by a train operated by an unqualified manager being trained to deliver limited service to break the strike, a tragedy that highlighted longstanding safety deficiencies that the district had long fought with state regulators to avoid correcting. Finally, after that fatal accident helped force an end to the labor standoff, BART officials admitted making an administrative error in the contract that reopened the whole ugly incident.
“One of the things that really opened my eyes in this labor negotiation is that often we get told things by management, and we just assume them to be true,” Fang said, noting that he’d questioned the agency’s plan to run train service during last year’s strike.
Yet Josefowitz said the BART board should be held accountable for the agency’s shortcomings in dealing with its workers. “It starts with having a genuine concern over worker safety issues, and not just at bargaining time,” he said. “If the board had acted early enough, that strike was totally avoidable.”
Indeed, BART’s decisions that led to the tragedy have been heavily criticized by the National Transportation Safety Board, California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, and the California Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment.
Fang also has the support of many top Democrats, including Attorney General Kamala Harris, US Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and former state legislator and current Board of Equalization candidate Fiona Ma, who told us: “I have endorsed one Republican in my political history, and that is James Fang for BART Board.” Noting that Josefowitz “just moved here,” Ma said, “The BART system is one of our jewels, and I don’t think we should elect first-time newcomers in San Francisco to manage it.”
Radulovich said he was mystified by prominent San Francisco politicians’ support for Fang, saying, “In this solidly Democratic town, this elected Republican has the support of these big Democrats — it’s a mystery to me.”
One reason could be Fang’s willingness to use newspapers under his control to support politicians he favors, sometimes in less than ethical ways. Fang is the president of Asian Week and former owner of the San Francisco Examiner, where sources say he shielded from media scrutiny politicians who helped him gain control of the paper, including Willie Brown and Pelosi (see “The untouchables,” 4/30/03).
But political consultant Nicole Derse, who is working on the Josefowitz campaign, told us that she thinks support for Fang among top Democrats is softening this year, noting that US Sen. Dianne Feinstein and state Sen. Mark Leno haven’t endorsed Fang after doing so in previous races.
“[Fang] has longstanding relationships with folks, but Nick is challenging people in this race to stop supporting the Republican,” Derse told us. “It’s now up to the Democratic Party and it’ll be interesting to see what they do.”
She was referring to the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, which plans to vote on its endorsements on Aug. 13. While DCCC bylaws prevent the body from endorsing a Republican, Ma and other Fang allies have been lobbying for no endorsement in the race, which would deny Josefowitz a key avenue for getting his name and message out there.
“This is going to be one of the most expensive races in BART’s history. He will kill me on money,” Fang said of Josefowitz. He suggested that his opponent’s candidacy underscores tech’s growing influence in local politics, and urged voters to take a closer look. “People are saying oh, it’s all about Fang. What about this gentleman?” Fang asked. “Nobody’s questioning him at all.”
Derse, for her part, noted the importance of having a well-funded challenge in this nonpartisan race. “It allows him the resources to get his message out there,” she said of Josefowitz. “Most San Franciscans wouldn’t knowingly vote for a Republican.”
“Die techie scum.” Those words are sprayed ominously on sidewalks throughout San Francisco. They’re plastered on stickers stamped on lampposts. They’re even scrawled in the bathrooms of punk bars, the very establishments now populated by Google-Glass-wearing tech aficionados.
Journalists from San Francisco to New York have opined on the source of the hate: Is it the housing crisis? Tech-fueled gentrification? Rising inequality? Those same journalists later parachute into the tech industry to periodically peer at its soul: Is tech diverse enough? Is it sexist? Is it a true meritocracy?
Those issues are often looked at in a vacuum, but perhaps they shouldn’t be. Perhaps those problems are all interconnected, and solving tech’s diversity problem is also part of solving income inequality in San Francisco, giving longtime San Franciscans a chance to join the industry many now view as composed of outsiders and interlopers.
The average Silicon Valley tech worker makes about $100,000, according to Dice Holdings Inc., which conducts annual tech salary surveys. Opportunity in the tech sector may bolster San Francisco’s middle-income earners, vanishing like wayward sea lions from the city’s landscape. Statistics from the US Census Bureau show that 66 percent of the city is either very poor or very rich, showing a hollowing out of the middle class.
Some tech CEOs are addressing their employment needs with a foreign workforce. Mark Zuckerberg and a cadre of tech CEOs have lobbied Senate and House Republicans to reform immigration in their favor, hoping to lure out-of-country workers to fill tech’s employment vacancies. Politico reported Sean Parker gave upwards of $500,000 to Republicans in 2014, all for the cause of immigration reform.
Conversely, a movement is already underway to bring San Franciscans into tech’s fold, based on the idea of a win-win scenario: San Francisco’s public school students are overwhelmingly diverse and lower income, while the tech industry is not.
Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yahoo recently released their diversity numbers, showing the companies are mostly white and male. This accusation has long haunted Silicon Valley.
Two years ago, Businessweek heralded the “Rise of the Brogrammer.” The stereotype is as follows: He preens as he programs in his popped collar, his startup funds fuel the city as he hunts “the ladies,” and he is insensitive toward women in the workplace in the most fratboy-like way imaginable.
Biz dev VP of @path just cracked lame jokes re: “nudie calendars,” frat guys + “hottest girls,” “gangbang” at #swsx talk. Cue early exit.
But while outlier brogrammer douche-bros certainly exist, whose classist opinions ignite widespread ire (think Greg Gopman’s statement comparing homeless people to “hyenas”), the real brogrammer threat is more insidious, more systemic.
“The brogrammer is always someone else,” wrote Kate Losse, a freelance journalist, in an April blog post. “He is THOSE Facebook guys who yell too loudly at parties and wave bottles in the air, he is not the nice, shy guy who gets paid 30 percent more because of his race, gender and appeal to the boy-genius fetishes of [venture capitalists].”
The overarching point of Losse’s article was this: There is a subtle sexism, and also racism, in the tech sector, which shuts out women and people of color. The looming stereotype of a douchey brogrammer can obscure the smaller, more indirect ways in which minorities and women are shut out of the industry.
Tech’s disturbing (but unsurprising) lack of diversity is being highlighted amid an economic backdrop that has resulted in widespread displacement of San Francisco’s working class and minorities.
Some are seeking to create opportunities for Bay Area communities of color within tech, as a way to even the scales. A swell of new applicants with programming skills — including people of color and women — may soon come knocking. But in the time it will take school-age coders to cycle through the first generation of new computer science classes, Silicon Valley is going to have to take a hard look in the mirror.
Some of the Bay Area’s hate toward tech may be rooted in a perceived lack of access. Longtime residents see a sea of newcomers, often white, often male, who aren’t pulling up a seat for minorities to join the new gold rush.
The age of the brogrammer is now, and it’s as socially progressive as the paleolithic era, meaning: not at all.
FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT
Talk to anyone in the realm of new technology companies and startups, and they’ll surely tell you this: Tech is an inspiring, creative field, where pure skill is the key to unlocking any job you’d like. The dress style is casual (hoodies, of course) and the perks flow like wine (or energy drinks).
When the Guardian visited the CloudCamp social good hackathon, we saw video game arcade machines in the ground floor and beer flowing throughout. Another company, Hack Reactor, had desks attached to treadmills and a life coach on hand to mind employee health. These are accoutrements de rigeuer, stunningly standard. But tales of true Silicon Valley excess abound: One CEO offers employees free helicopter rides, many offer in-house chefs and extravagant travel.
Interns in Silicon Valley are enjoying huge perks like free meals, massages, swimming pools, nap pods: http://t.co/BdaaOdC95P
Skill and ability alone are the keys to unlocking this lifestyle, the tech industry says. Workers’ fervor can take on an almost cult-like zeal.
“I think the sharing economy is addictive,” said Rafael Martinez-Corina, a panelist at the Share2014 sharing economy conference in May, touting tech’s biggest stars like AirBNB, Lyft, and Uber. “Once you get it, you want more and more. You get into car sharing, you want to get into food sharing, time sharing.”
He asked the audience, “Who else is addicted to sharing?”
Almost every hand went in the room shot right up. Cheers immediately followed. Hallelujah!
Mars Jullian, an engineer at AdRoll, told the Guardian that employees of tech companies with name-brand apps tend to exhibit more ego. AdRoll is a big player, but more behind the scenes, she said, giving her perspective on the attitudes of her fellow tech workers.
“Sometimes it seems tech people feel like they own the city,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s the right attitude to have. Sometimes it’s more important to be humble.”
One might forgive the tech workers for their enthusiasm. The industry, after all, has ushered in widespread transformation in business and communications, resulting in dramatic economic shifts. But with such a high concentration of wealth and influence in the Bay Area, the question of who gets to participate is key.
Google’s diversity numbers rocked the world outside Silicon Valley, but surprised few in the Bay Area. The behemoth is 70 percent male and 60 percent white, with Asians making up 30 percent of the company’s ethnic representation.
Soon after Google’s numbers were revealed, Facebook, Yahoo, and LinkedIn followed suit with their own diversity reports. Their numbers differ a bit from Google, showing more Asian employees, and slightly more women. The numbers look worse, however, when only technology jobs are factored in. The tech worker population among these companies is about 15 percent female.
Hadi Partovi, an early Facebook investor, now adviser, and ex-chief of Microsoft’s MSN, told the Guardian that despite the industry’s challenges, tech’s doors are open to people with skills, regardless of background.
“The computer doesn’t know if it’s being programmed by someone rich or poor, black or brown,” he told us in a phone interview. “A lawyer, for instance, is looked at more explicitly. Tech has the opportunity to be more meritocratic.”
But the tech sector’s pious belief that it functions as a world-changing meritocracy ignores a host of factors that serve to hinder inclusion.
Many have touted the education pipeline as the root cause of tech’s lack of diversity. The number of women pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is stunningly low, 24 percent, according to the US Department of Commerce. African Americans and Latinos also lag far behind their white and Asian counterparts in completing their computer science degrees, according to studies by the East Bay nonprofit Level Playing Field Institute.
Considering Asian groups is important: the Level Playing Field Institute draws a distinction between represented and underrepresented minority groups, acknowledging that ethnicity, income and class intermingle in complex ways. It’s those underrepresented groups like women, Latinos and African Americans LPFI identifies as groups lacking in tech.
But the pipeline is only one part of the problem. Subtle (and not-so-subtle) misogyny and racism, often labeled micro-aggressions, pervade hiring.
Level Playing Field is focused on creating opportunity for people of color and women in STEM fields. In an extensive tech-industry study conducted in 2011, called “Hidden Bias in Information Technology Workplaces,” researchers concluded: “Despite widespread underrepresentation of women and people of color within the sector, diversity is not regarded as a priority.”
Surveying more than 645 engineers, the study’s authors found that white men were the most likely to believe that diversity was not a problem that needed addressing in the tech sector. The study also found that underrepresented people of color (Latinos and African Americans), and women were more likely to encounter exclusionary cliques, unwanted sexual teasing, bullying, and homophobic jokes.
Sometimes, these instances blow up for the world to see.
THE MIRROR-TOCRACY
The workday text messages between Tinder’s co-founder Justin Marteen and former VP Whitney Wolfe went public after Wolfe sued Tinder, revealing the ugly waters women must sometimes navigate in tech. Marteen was allegedly harassing Wolfe over her new love interest, and Wolfe asked him to stop.
“Stop justin [sic]. Were at work,” Wolfe asked of Marteen, to which he replied, “Ur heartless… go talk to ur 26 year old fucking accomplished nobody. I’ll shit on him in life.”
He should have ended there. But he continued his rage at his ex-girlfriend.
“Hagsgagahaha so pathetic I even imagined a life w u. I actually thought u would be a good mother and wife. I have horrible judgement. He can enjoy my left overs,” he allegedly wrote. “You’re effecting my work environment,” she replied, “and this is very out of control. Please don’t do this during work hours.”
Besides an awful command of rudimentary spelling, the squabble showed the very real harassment women in tech are exposed to every day. When Wolfe went to Tinder CEO Sean Rad for help, she found herself out of a job.
Tinder is not an outlier, according to studies by Level Playing Field. Nor is it the only company to see its harassment go public. Earlier this year, GitHub’s CEO Tom Preston-Werner resigned after a former employee, Julie Ann Horvath, alleged she was harassed by him, his wife, and engineers.
While Github denied the allegations, Horvath was defiant: “A company can never own you. They can’t tell you who to fuck and who not to fuck. And they can’t take away your voice.”
But for every example of outright sexism or racism, there are multitudes of more subtle biases in the workplace. Level Playing Field’s studies found these biases are pervasive. They start as early as the hiring process.
Carlos Bueno is a former Facebook engineer, now tinkering behind the scenes at memSQL. He is of mixed ethnicity, Irish and Mexican, among others. “My father called us ‘Leprechan-os’,” he told us.
Bueno trained interviewers at Facebook, and like many there, he also conducted interviews. He said Facebook’s interview process was probably one of the best in the industry for screening out biases of the interviewer, but other companies were not as aware of bias as a problem.
“Every startup wants to be a big dog,” he said, describing the process. “But the point of a startup is to grow very large, very quickly. They don’t have time to learn. Some people take rules of thumb or investor advice and run with it.”
Paypal co-founder Max Levchin is looked to as a thought leader in the startup world. He touts the idea that diversity of perspective in a startup’s early phases can actually hurt its chances of success, hindering its speed in “endless debates.”
Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel once famously put it this way: “Don’t fuck up the culture.”
Bueno pointed to a real estate startup, 42Floors, as an example of a company adopting Levchin’s philosophy. It looks for potential hires who are a “cultural fit,” i.e., making sure the candidate and employer think alike.
One 42Floors interviewer explained this on the company blog: “I asked her how she was doing in the interview process and she said, ‘I’m actually still trying to get an interview. Well, I grabbed coffee with the founder, and I had dinner with the team last night, and then we went to a bar together.’ I chuckled. She was clearly confused with the whole matter. I told her, ‘Look, you just made it to the third round.'”
So the interview process for tech may involve coffee dates or “beer with the guys,” and the onus is on the interviewee to figure all of this out. Similar blog posts from 42Floors go on to call out interviewees who wear suits, or act too stodgy for their liking.
We spoke to Bueno extensively over burgers, but he put it best in his blog.
“You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth,” he wrote. “What wearing a suit really indicates is — I am not making this up — non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up.”
Founders back up their faulty hiring practices with faulty logic. “It’s so hard to get in, if you get in you must be good,” Bueno said. “But those two statements don’t support each other.”
Some students of color training to code have already caught a glimpse of how the mirror-tocracy functions.
OPENING THE DOOR
Eight years ago, Kimberly Bryant moved to San Francisco to work in biotech. She moved to the city because she believed it to be more racially and economically diverse. She worked adjacent to Bayview Hunters Point, and has since revised her view of the city as a welcoming multicultural environment.
Instead, she found a city with an African American population dwindling below six percent in a city of over 800,000, and a gutted middle class. Latinos are moving out in greater numbers too. Over the last decade, 1,400 Latinos left the Mission District, according to a recent report on displacement by Causa Justa / Just Cause. In the same time, 2,900 white residents flooded in.
The displacement data reveals a significant parallel: The diverse ethnic groups Silicon Valley lacks in its employed ranks are the very same ethnic groups being priced out of San Francisco.
Seeking to mitigate the ethnic and gender disparity in tech, Bryant formed Black Girls Code, a student mentor and workshop program. It first opened up shop in the Bayview, but has sinced moved on.
“I really saw and experienced the true diversity of the community in Oakland,” Bryant told the Guardian, of the nonprofit’s new home. “It’s just an amazingly incredibly diverse community in terms of race and economy. What San Francisco used to be,” she added, “but is no longer.”
Black Girls Code teaches K-12 students rudimentary coding skills, providing instruction in Ruby and Python. Although companies like Google and others have opened their doors with welcoming arms, she said, convincing her students that the tech world is ready for them has been challenging.
When she brought her young students to an industry event, TechCrunch Disrupt, she dodged a minefield of fratboy-like behavior that made her students feel unwelcome, she said. This is the same event that heralded a prank app called “titstare,” which invited users (presumably male) to upload photos of themselves staring at women’s breasts.
The app was displayed on a stage before some of the most influential players in the tech industry, but Bryant’s students were in the audience too.
“They were shocked, like everyone there. It was disconcerting for the parents and the girls,” she said. Though she’s careful not to overplay the damage done (the girls “laughed awkwardly,” she said), the takeaway of the conference was that women and girls were not the intended participants. “It’s like a frathouse. I thought, ‘oh my god, this is like college all over again. This sucks.'”
At Mission and 19th streets sits MEDA, a nonprofit that has long worked to help Mission residents gain a foothold in San Francisco workplaces. This begins even in the lobby, where a small kitchenette in the corner plays host to a chef who mixes up a mean ceviche, with spices admittedly leaving this reporter in tears. He aspires to open his own restaurant, and MEDA is helping him get there.
The upstairs houses a group of students called the Mission Techies. They seek support in their aspirations to enter the tech industry, but for them the dream may be further off than the chef’s.
Gabriel Medina, policy manager at MEDA, doesn’t mince words. These are the “challenge” kids, he said, but they’ve done him and program manager Leo Sosa proud.
The Mission Techies pull apart computers to learn about their innards.
Sosa described a visit from Google and Facebook engineers who taught his students rudimentary coding skills. One student, Jamar, was so engrossed in programming that one engineer asked: “Is he okay?!”
“Jamar is on the coding program, [and he’s] on fire,” Sosa told the Guardian, while sitting in a MEDA office.
But students like Jamar, an African American San Franciscan, face an uphill battle before they ever get to the step of applying for a job like one at Google.
After visiting some tech offices, the students felt less sure of themselves.
“They were like ‘I don’t see no black guys, I don’t see no Latinos. Leo, do you really think I can get a job here?'” Sosa told us. For them, the mirror-tocracy did not reflect an image they recognized.
By many measures, MEDA’s Mission Techies program is a success, taking kids of modest means and equipping them with digital skills that can aid their employment prospects. Mission Techies, Black Girls Code, and other programs such as Hack Reactor and Mission Bit all nip at the heels of the education pipeline leading to tech industry employment. They also share a common focus: They’re educating largely minority populations, often low-income, and located in the Bay Area.
The solution to tech’s diversity problem and to San Francisco’s displacement may spring from the same well: educate the people who live here to work in the local industry. But in order to do that effectively, afterschool and summer programs alone won’t do the trick.
The schools themselves need disruption.
WORKING TOGETHER
In the midst of the tech hub, the San Francisco Unified School District finds itself surrounded by tech allies. Still, change comes slowly.
Only five of SFUSD’s 17 high schools have computer science courses. Ben Chun, an MIT graduate and former computer science teacher at Galileo High School, told us the outlook is bleak without digital training in schools. Though kids sometimes teach themselves programming at home, most low-income students don’t have that opportunity.
“It’s a privilege thing,” he told us. If you have access to computers at home, you’re more likely to tinker and teach yourself. Those kids are more likely to be the Bill Gates of the future, he said, the self-starters and early computer prodigies.
“If you don’t have those things in place,” he said, “there’s a zero chance it will be you.”
When he first got to Galileo, his computer teacher predecessor taught word processing. But a lot has changed since 2006.
Partovi took his successes at Facebook and Microsoft and parlayed his money into a nonprofit called Code.org. The organization created its own coding classes for kids as young as 6, and compelled 30 school districts nationwide to create computer science courses based on its work.
Code.org’s tutorials have been played by millions of students.
Now it has its sights set on SFUSD’s 52,000 students, potentially solving tech and the school’s problems at once.
“It would for sure level that diversity gap,” Partovi told the Guardian. “All of the data released from Google, Yahoo, and others show a male-dominated industry. The pipeline of educated kids is actually much more diverse.”
But integrating tech in the district is slow, and likely years away. The district needs state standards to require computer science, something SFUSD Superintendent Richard Carranza has already lobbied Gov. Jerry Brown to change.
“The demand [for computer science classes] is coming from everywhere,” Carranza told us, including parents, students, the tech industry, and city leaders.
“What makes it a game changer is the partnership with our tech partners,” he said. “It gives our students the opportunity to interact elbow to elbow with people doing computer science out in the real world.”
But the tech workers those students are interacting with, though well meaning, remain the domain of the brogrammers. Will they hire SFUSD graduates with computer science skills when and if they’re ready? Will they be the right “culture fit?”
“There’s definitely a libertarian thread, a free market, red-toothed nature of things [in tech],” Bueno told us. “Talking to people in unguarded moments, that definitely leaks out. You’re not going to convince anyone by singing kumbaya and holding hands.”
But logical tech workers need look no further than the current numbers facing Silicon Valley to see the need to reach beyond their in-groups: 1.2 million new tech jobs will be created by 2020, studies from the US Department of Labor show. At the same time, 40 percent of the United States will be Latino and black by 2040.
When the minority is the majority, the brogrammers may become a dying species.
OPINION I left a 17-year career in film to become a taxi driver. I just wanted to be here full time, drive a taxi, and write.
I’ve taken cabs in several cities and countries over the last 20-odd years. When I got here in 1998, it took two hours for a taxi to get to my house on 43rd Avenue. I still never would’ve gotten into anyone’s personal car and paid them for a ride, no matter how hard it was to get a cab sometimes. Not in San Francisco. Not in Jamaica. Not in Jamaica, Queens.
I’m from Toledo, Ohio originally. We always went on road trips. Maybe being in such close proximity to Detroit, some of that car mojo rubbed off on us. My mother is the kind of woman who, at 70 years old, will drive cross-country alone, stopping to call me at 3am from deserted truck stops outside Amarillo, Texas. You might see why I’d drive a taxi.
I have a feeling that a lot of the anti-taxi contingent now in this city haven’t taken too many cabs. Cabs could never put me off because I’d taken so many of them and I knew I was safer in one than standing in a crosswalk. I’ve been hit by cars on foot and on my bike but I’ve never been in an accident in a cab. Not in London. Not in Los Angeles. Not here.
I don’t drive for Lyft or Uber because San Francisco cab drivers receive workers compensation and TNC drivers don’t. Because Lyft mustaches look unprofessional to me. I went to taxi school, got fingerprinted, had a background check, and got licensed.
My taxi has 24/7 commercial livery insurance. My company pays the bills if there’s an accident. San Francisco taxi companies don’t have bylaws stating that passengers cannot hold them liable. San Francisco taxi companies don’t have bylaws stating that passengers take taxis at their own risk. San Francisco taxi companies don’t have bylaws that can be legally interpreted to allow discrimination against passengers of any persuasion. We have to accept pets. And we have to be green.
San Francisco taxis pick up bartenders, sweet old ladies at the hospital who don’t have smart phones, teachers, lawyers, wheelchair users, people of color, San Francisco Giants, former mayor Willie Brown, hookers, trannies, ballerinas, and limo drivers. Everybody. You don’t need a smartphone, but you can always hail a cab using an app called Flywheel.
I’m not a fan of the smugness emanating from Lyft, Uber, et all. Perpetuating spurious claims that cab drivers are all scary or awful is neither cute nor clever. And it certainly isn’t true.
It’s far more likely for a passenger to physically attack a cab driver than the opposite. About a month ago, several men took a cab from my fleet to San Mateo and severely beat up the driver. We have video cameras in every single San Francisco cab, but that still didn’t guarantee this driver’s safety. Nonetheless crime and accidents in taxis are down significantly.
We’re mothers, fathers, grandparents, students, artists, musicians, and entrepreneurs. Cab drivers give companionship, counseling, and safe passage to their passengers.
I want to know how we can have faith in TNCs when drivers aren’t commercially licensed, fully insured, and packing security cameras. How should we feel about droves of these Uber and Lyft phones being shared by multiple drivers, when only one is on record? What happens when a TNC is wrapped around a pole and the driver is held responsibility for their own safety and well-being. These brand new cars won’t be paid off before we start to witness incidents such as this.
How’s a “young mother just trying to make some extra pocket money” going to feel when she has her wages garnished into perpetuity because she rear-ended someone? She’s personally liable with the TNC company. She’s your friend with a car who absorbs all legal responsibility whether she’s found at-fault or not.
As long as there’s a taxi industry, I’ll keep proudly driving my taxi in the city I love. I’ll pick up sweet and not so sweet old ladies, people in wheelchairs, people with dogs, and whomever else needs a ride wherever it is they need to go.
In their frantic desire to be first with the next big thing and to grab market share by any means necessary, tech companies often act before really thinking through the implications of their ideas. And with its latest idea — facilitating on-the-spot weddings during Pride weekend — rideshare company Uber has finally jumped the shark.
“We’re thankful to be based in San Francisco, a city that recognizes love doesn’t have to look any certain way. In honor of Pride week, we’re celebrating the inclusive idea that love is love with something that lasts a lifetime,” Uber wrote on its blog today in announcing “on-demand weddings.”
That’s right, this Saturday between noon and 6pm, customers using its app can select “UberWEDDING,” the company will send a crew out to marry you and your sweetie on the spot, promising that you’ll be hitched within an hour — or well before your Pride buzz wears off and you regain your senses.
“When your UberWEDDING arrives, we’ll get started right away. You’ll first work with our on-site notary to obtain your marriage license. Once the license is official, the violinist will begin to play and the ceremony will commence!” the company wrote.
So in the name of playing catch-up with Lyft and other competitors — and desperately trying to curry favor with the same-sex marriage crowd in the most superficial and tone-deaf way possible — Uber is turning a big decision that “lasts a lifetime” into an act on par with ordering a pizza when you’re hungry.
About a month ago, we wrote about how San Francisco International Airport Director John Martin was cracking down on rideshare drivers ferrying passengers to the airport.
In a formal letter, Martin enlisted the help of the California Public Utilities Commission to assist with enforcement actions against Uber, Lyft, and other so-called “transportation network providers,” whose drivers were found to be taking passengers to the airport despite a state decision requiring them to obtain permits from airport administrators to do so.
It appears CPUC President Michael Peevey took Martin’s plea for help seriously. In a letter dated June 10, Peevey called on TNCs to cease airport operations until they had secured permits from airport authorities. The letter warns that if the companies do not comply and are found to be in violation of the state’s decision governing TNCs, “the CPUC may revoke your permit to operate.”
Here’s the letter, which references operations in other California cities as well.
NOTE: This post has been updated from an earlier version.
Police at the San Francisco International Airport have been cracking down lately on unauthorized drivers working for Uber and other app-based “rideshare” companies. Drivers have been stopped and warned that it’s not legal to operate at the airport without required permits. But three rideshare companies have banded together to fight back – and now they’re trying to get Mayor Ed Lee to intervene on their behalf.
On April 7, SFO sent out hefty permit application packages to Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, and a couple other “transportation network companies,” as they’re formally called. To operate legally under recently passed state regulations and a new airport pilot program, the TNCs were directed to fill out the applications and obtain operating permits for their drivers.
But Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar have so far refused to fill out the applications, because they don’t like the rules.
Government agencies are supposed to write rules in collaboration with the industry stakeholders who are being regulated, Uber spokesperson Lane Kasselman insisted in an interview with the Bay Guardian, but “that didn’t happen in this process.”
Instead, SFO just wrote up a set of rules for rideshares that are similar to those regulating taxis, without ever consulting rideshare CEOs, Kasselman said. In particular, TNCs disagree with a rule requiring them to turn over names and associated information of all registered TNC drivers. They’re also unhappy with a rule stating that they must provide locational data showing TNCs on airport property.
Those rules are unreasonable due to “privacy concerns,” said Kasselman. Uber issues iPhones to its drivers that use GPS to automatically track the movements of drivers and passengers in real-time, for billing purposes.
Rather than enroll in the pilot program and sort out their concerns from there, the TNCs have decided to turn to Mayor Ed Lee for help.
“Despite the potential impact to thousands of rideshare small business owners, any and all requests on behalf of TNCs to meet with the Airport and discuss the level of detail mandated by the April 7th permit package have been rejected,” representatives from rideshare competitors Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar wrote in a jointly signed May 23 letter to Mayor Lee. “We have been told we cannot have a conversation with the airport, even on clarifying questions, until we complete and sign the application.”
What do they expect the mayor to do about it? “We’re hoping the mayor will broker a meeting,” said Kasselman. “They refuse to meet with us,” he added, referring to SFO.
While SFO is reportedly not on speaking terms with the TNCs (except via police officers issuing warnings to their drivers), SFO has been in touch with the California Public Utilities Commission, to enlist its help with the crackdown.
In a May 9 letter, SFO Director John Martin urged CPUC President Michael Peevey to order TNCs to halt all airport trips until further notice, effective until this permit problem had been cleared up.
Has Uber given any indication to its drivers that they shouldn’t be conducting business at the airport? “I think our drivers are looking to their riders about where they want to go,” Kasselman said when we asked about that. Sounds as if nothing has changed there.
What this seems to be leading up to is a standoff, where the airport is hoping the CPUC will intervene to enforce the rules, while the TNCs are hoping the mayor will intervene to get the rules bent to their liking.
Will Lee step into the fray? Outlook hazy, try again later. (Lee’s office hasn’t responded to requests for comment, but we’ll update this post if we hear back.)
UPDATE: Lee’s spokesperson Christine Falvey just responded to us with this comment:
“Mayor Lee is a strong supporter of the sharing economy because of the benefit it brings to everyday San Francisco residents. Ridesharing is an innovative transportation alternative for many City residents and SFO customers and the mayor is supportive of SFO’s proactive efforts to permit and regulate rideshare companies to ensure access, customer service and public safety. To your questions, Mayor Lee defers transportation policy decisions about airport transportation issues to his highly respected Airport Director John Martin and the Airport Commission.”
At the Share conference that I covered for this week’s Guardian, there were wildly divergent claims for how many vehicles carsharing companies such as City Car Share, Zipcar, and Getaround take off the road. I was also a little skeptical of claims that carsharing dramatically reduces overall driving and greenhouse gas emissions, so I decided to take a deeper look at the issue.
“For every car that is shared, we take seven cars off the road,” Board of Supervisors President David Chiu said during his presentation. The next day Getaround founder and spokesperson Jessica Scorpio cited a study claiming that 32 cars get taken off the road for every shared vehicle.
Luckily, one of the country’s top researchers in this area is right in our backyard. UC Berkeley civil and environmental engineering professor Susan Shaheen heads the school’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center and has been doing peer-reviewed studies on car-sharing for almost 20 years.
Her research, which is consistent with the body of academic research on carsharing from around the world, has found that each shared car takes between nine and 13 other cars off the road, figures that she says are amazingly consistent around the world. That big reduction is because households that have cars tend to get rid of at least one of them when they sign up for carsharing, while car-free households that want access to a car will choose (as Shaheen says is the case for about 25 percent of the people in each group, which adds up to 90,000-130,000 fewer cars on the road nationwide).
But Shaheen told us that she’s highly skeptical of the study showing 32 cars being taken off the road, an industry-sponsored study that was far less rigorous than her work, and whose authors intially wouldn’t share their work with her when she requested it. “It appears to be some kind of idealized number,” Shaheen told me. “I take this stuff pretty seriously.
The part about up to 13 cars being taken off the road has always made sense to me, and it’s certainly a benefit to cities have fewer overall cars on the road, particularly as they use parking spaces on public roads. But I was more skeptical of the claim that overall vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is reduced by carsharing.
Shaheen’s biggest study (“Impact of Carsharing on Vehicle Holdings,” a 2009 study she did with Elliot Martin and Jeffrey Lidicker) found overall VMT was reduced by 27 percent, even though her study frankly admits that about 60 percent of carsharing customers come from car-free households.
How can that be? Doesn’t it seem like driving would increase when you give more people access to something as expensive as an automobile, particularly in a small, congested city like San Francisco that has such a variety of other good transportation options? Shaheen does admit that one study focused specifically on San Francisco did indeed find that overall VMT does increase among carsharing customers in their first year using the service.
But the studies by Shaheen and other researchers show that VMT among carsharing customers drops in subsequent years, often quite dramatically, as people figure out that it’s not really so hard to get around by public transit, bike, or on foot. “When people use carsharing, they use it less and less and less,” Shaheen told us.
And when it comes to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, Shaheen said her studies and those of other researchers — including the 2010 “Greenhouse Gas Emission Impacts of Carsharing in North America,” who she and Martin did for the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University — found dramatic reductions.
“This study contributes to mounting evidence that carsharing is lowering GHG emissions
by providing people with automotive access on an as-needed basis,” the study concludes, with the reduction in VMT compounded by the fact that carsharing encourages people to get rid of older, more polluting cars and instead drive new, more efficient vehicles.
Still, despite all of that evidence, Shaheen admits that it’s tough to say carsharing causes less overall driving in the city of San Francisco, although she thinks it’s likely that it does. Not only is her survey based on self-reported data, but it’s also based on national aggregations that can’t be unpacked to comment on specific locales.
And her study predated rapid and drastic changes on the streets of San Francisco over the last five years, where bike lanes and ridership have been expanded, bikesharing has been introduced (another area that Shaheen has studied in detail), Muni has had its ups and downs, the population has increased, parking costs have increased and morphed, and Lyft and other ridesharing companies have filled the streets with a new category of cars (that latter development is the subject of her latest research project that is now underway).
“Things are changing really rapidly,” she told us.
Each of those variables affect whether someone chooses to drive a car, and they can be constantly shifting. For example, driving might become a far less attractive option as automobile congestion increases, particularly if the city expands the capacity for cyclists and Muni riders.
Shaheen is also looking forward to technological advances in data collection, allowing her to use less self-reported data, something she is already able to do with Bay Area BikeShare: “With bike sharing, they are so transparent. They share all the data, it’s like a party for me.”
So as carsharing and ridesharing companies seeks to bolster their claims to being an unqualified benefit for society, those companies should be willing to share detailed usage data with Shaheen and other independent researchers, which will help us all move beyond the hype to make informed public policy decisions.
“This is important,” Shaheen told us. “I take this very seriously because I want these to be numbers that policymakers can use.”
Last week’s two-day Share conference in San Francisco came at an auspicious moment for companies that define themselves as part of the new “sharing economy,” which ranges from peer-to-peer services and products brokered online to various cooperative ventures designed to minimize resource consumption.
Most of these growing companies are part of San Francisco’s technology industry, using web-based interfaces to conduct their economic transactions. And some have been making local enemies and headlines recently by disrupting key aspects of urban life, from Airbnb impacting the housing and hotel markets to Lyft and Uber upending the taxi industry.
In fact, the biggest battle brewing at City Hall these days is over widely watched legislation by Board of Supervisors President David Chiu to regulate and legalize the short-term rentals facilitated by Airbnb and similar companies. And state agencies based in San Francisco are now working on regulations that would affect Lyft and its ilk.
So we decided to listen in as disciples of the sharing economy talked among themselves about the challenges and opportunities facing what they call the “new economy,” one that is at an important crossroads that will determine whether the interests of communities or capital guide its evolution.
CHIU DECLARES WAR
When Chiu took the stage at the Share conference, he was joining a sharing economy community that, he said he would probably be a part of today if he hadn’t gone into public service, citing his own experience with tech startups before running for supervisor.
“I believe we are becoming the capital of the sharing economy,” Chiu said, citing examples of San Francisco’s “ethos of sharing” that include the Summer of Love, Burning Man, and the fact that “we are a community that wants to foster trust among strangers to build what I think is one of the most amazing cities in the entire world. But we’re also a city that is expensive. The rent is too damn high.”
Chiu spoke proudly of San Francisco’s environmentalism and his own legislative contributions to that legacy. And he said “we are a city of innovation,” lauding the technology industry. “We understand that keeping up with the Joneses may not be the way to go,” he said. “In fact, sharing with the Joneses, I think, is the better path.”
In Chiu’s formulation, the sharing economy is the synthesis of all of these values and goals. By using computers and smartphones to facilitate the sharing of goods and services, we use less stuff and consume fewer resources, in the process opening up economic opportunities for more people.
He sounded like the most enthusiastic of sharing economy true believers, but with a couple of caveats, acknowledging how those “pesky taxes” on most of these economic transactions go unpaid, and how Airbnb and similar companies have removed apartments from the housing market for local residents.
“Shareable housing has both helped and exacerbated our housing crisis,” Chiu said, describing how he spent more than a year working on legislation that would regulate and legalize short-term housing rentals in San Francisco, where they are now considered illegal “hotel conversions” (see “Into thin air,” 8/6/13, and dozens of other Guardian stories and blog posts on the issue).
Chiu’s legislation would require Airbnb hosts to register with the city, rent out only their primary residence, and occupy that space for at least 275 days per year (which Chiu has said limits Airbnb hosts to just 90 rental nights per year, although critics dispute that interpretation).
“I thought this was a reasonable solution, but two weeks later there was a major press conference attacking it,” Chiu told Share attendees, referring to the coalition of landlord, neighborhood, labor, and affordable housing groups that have come out against the legislation, calling it a blanket rezoning of residential property around the city, pledging an initiative campaign challenging it.
“In part, this is politics. I’m in the midst of a race for the state Assembly this year, my opponent has supporters who have been protesting the Twitter headquarters, throwing rocks at Google commuter shuttles, vomiting on Yahoo buses, referring to tech workers as not real San Franciscans,” Chiu said.
Then Chiu ramped up his rhetoric, equating progressive concerns about the tax breaks and special treatment that Chiu, Mayor Ed Lee, and others have extended to tech companies in San Francisco with a war on the sharing economy and the forced deportation of its workers.
“They are calling for war on you, even though they don’t realize that what you are doing is helping to make sure we’re addressing our income inequality, we’re empowering everyday people by building community and using technology,” Chiu said. “All of you need to get involved in the political debate. You’re busy trying to change the world, but status quo interests are actively trying to ship you to Menlo Park, Oakland, and San Jose.”
In the end, Chiu did urge those starting up companies to “think early about how your paradigm meshes with existing laws and regulations,” but that tepid call for civic responsibility and good corporate citizenship did little to dull his feeding of techie exceptionalism, fearmongering, or appeals to vaguely libertarian values.
AIRBNB’S BOOSTERS
The pep rally atmosphere of the session got pumped up even more by Airbnb’s Douglas Atkin and venture capitalist Ron Conway, both of whom had nothing but glowing praise for the burgeoning industry and its customers, offering none of the caveats put forth by Chiu or the speaker who followed him, White House staffer Greg Nelson, who talked about the challenging access, equity, and regulatory issues facing the industry.
“We at Airbnb and PEERS think the sharing economy is a jolly good thing,” Atkin said in a charming British accent, presenting the sharing economy as an unstoppable and uniformly positive force that is replacing “the old economy, the last economy.”
As an advertising executive in that old economy, “I was the devil,” Atkin said. Now playing the role of savior, he spoke with an evangelical flair as he flashed Airbnb slides and videos, telling the crowd “there’s been a decentralization of wealth, control, and power” because “you can’t do this new economy without creating community.”
It was easy to forget that Atkin represents a company that Wall Street analysts have valued at $10 billion, despite having a business model that is illegal in many cities, causing some hosts to be evicted and others to evict their tenants, while the company and its investors move quickly to cash out with an initial public stock offering.
Among those who would profit handsomely from that IPO is Conway, a billionaire who already got far richer late last year from being “an early investor in Twitter,” as he described himself to the crowd after being introduced as someone who “has really led the way of connecting the tech industry to the public sector.”
Indeed, Conway spoke proudly of funding the politicians who pushed the package of tax breaks for Twitter and other technology companies that followed it into the mid-Market area, most notably Mayor Ed Lee, the biggest beneficiary of Conway’s largesse among San Francisco politicians.
Conway speaks the language of the technology sector that he’s been sponsoring with angel investments since the early days of the last technology boom, making seemingly common sense appeals that hide his conservative ideology, just as he switched his political party registration from Republican to decline-to-state when he became active in San Francisco politics (see “The Plutocrat,” 11/27/12).
But for the careful listener familiar with San Francisco political history, there were some intriguing revelations in his address that were probably lost on the average techie in attendance that morning.
For example, Conway talked about his role following up his advocacy for the Twitter tax break with behind-the-scenes work helping to craft the business tax reform measure in 2012 — which the Controller’s Office analysis found just happened to give the technology companies that Conway was invested in a substantial tax cut.
“Now all the companies enjoy this,” Conway said in reference to Twitter’s tax break, “because Prop. B was passed a year and half ago.”
He also then admitted that Airbnb owes its phenomenal growth to the widespread economic desperation triggered by the financial collapse of 2008 and an economic recovery that still hasn’t reached the average citizen struggling to cover their housing costs.
“Airbnb, for example, would not be here today if there wasn’t an economic crisis and a recession in 2008 in New York, where people had to decide to rent out a room in their house or I get foreclosed on my mortgage. It was that basic. Airbnb wouldn’t be here today if people all over New York didn’t save their mortgages and start using this product. And then by word of mouth it spread around the world because it is so convenient and so practical,” Conway said.
Conway is conservative on financial issues, but more moderate on social issues, and he talked about his advocacy work on gun control and immigration reform. Yet even on those issues, where it is almost exclusively Republicans who are blocking the changes Conway says he wants, he turns the gridlock into an anti-government argument.
“We need term limits in Congress,” the former Republican said, citing a standard conservative trope that got a big applause from the Share conference crowd.
Finally, he elevated the current struggles in San Francisco over the sharing economy into key battles that will shape the future of the new economy.
“This [Airbnb] legislation that David Chiu has proposed, which in the next few months will go to the Board of Supervisors is crucial legislation the whole country will watch,” Conway said, calling for everyone in the crowd to get involved and lobby their supervisors. “David Chiu needs help. This would not pass if it went to a vote today, it wouldn’t come close to passing. So we have to change this. We want to do on the local level what we have to do on the national level: Organize and conquer!”
ACCESS AND EQUITY
After Conway came an intriguing panel discussion about equity and environmental issues with Nikki Silvestri of Green for All, Vien Truong with the Greenlining Institute, and Adam Werbach, the former Sierra Club executive director who started the stuff-sharing company Yertle.
It was moderated by GreenBiz.com editor Joel Makower, who cited information from the previous day’s sessions about how it’s mostly middle class white people who use the sharing economy. “The reality is it’s not that inclusive,” he said, and all his guests agreed and talked about the need to broaden its benefits.
“How do you marry the economy with people?” Truong said as she discussed that challenge. And it’s an urgent need, as Werbach said while answering a question about how the sharing economy could help bring about a new kind of environmentalism aimed at producing and consuming less stuff.
“What’s wrong with the old environmentalism is we’re not achieving our mission. Climate change is what’s wrong with the old environmentalism,” he said.
Werbach cited the goal of replacing about a quarter of the things we now buy with shared goods, even though Amazon and other companies have made it easier than ever to have new products shipped around the world: “It is cheaper, faster, and easier to get something new than to get something used from right next door.”
But Silvestri said the limited participation in the sharing economy makes it difficult to see it as the solution yet, calling for the sharing economy to address access and equity issues, something that marginalized groups would respond to if it was based on true values of sharing.
“Coming from my own background, African Americans had to share because white people wasn’t giving us nothing,” she said. By that same measure, she also said that low-income people feel wary of being taken advantage of by sharing companies and customers: “When you’re in survival mode, you’re wary of people taking from you.”
That’s one reason why Silvestri said that black communities are slower to adopt sharing with strangers, whether it be their homes or cars, something that could be overcome with more personalized outreach: “If I look you in the eye, you might not come take my shit.”
She said that for all the talk at the conference about “community,” the community of strangers that makes up the sharing economy isn’t a true community, something that needs to change to realize the lofty goals that many espouse.
“The sharing economy is new enough that if we figure out this problem early then all of us can actually participate,” Silvestri said.
Werbach agreed, saying the sharing economy has great potential, but only if it makes the right moves now. “This is the beginning of a movement, but the people aren’t here yet,” he said. “We’re at the very beginning of this story.”
He defines the struggle of the moment as one between human and economic values, hoping the sharing economy’s customers will determine its values: “There is an interesting wild west movement now. We need people to do the recruiting so Wall Street doesn’t do the recruiting.”
STRAIGHT TALK
The closing plenary session at Share illustrated the divergent attitudes and goals that mark the sharing economy, in which some members feel a collective responsibility to meet important societal goals, while others seem more interested in just making money and mouthing the rhetoric of sharing.
New York University economics professor Arun Sandararajan, who runs the Collaborative Economy Project that studies and promotes the sharing economy, said it has the potential to develop in ways that will either exacerbate or reduce the income inequality that has become such a growing public policy concern.
Sandararajan expressed hopes that the sharing economy could increase the economic growth rate and lower the wealth gap by broadening access to capital and opportunities for entrepreneurship. But he also argued that the sharing economy has the potential to change the terms of the debate by giving more people access to goods and services than their incomes might otherwise allow.
“We have to go beyond measuring inequality in terms of income and wealth,” he said, offering a conception likely to appeal to the wealthy, but probably not those struggling to get by, even if they were able to get more hand-me-downs through Yerdle or odd jobs through TaskRabbit.
Others on the panel illustrated the dichotomy between do-gooders and profit-seekers more clearly, showing how broadly those in the sharing economy are trying to define it these days.
Jose Quinonez runs the nonprofit Mission Asset Fund, a nonprofit on Valencia Street that assists with peer-to-peer microlending, an amazing program that seemed to have little in common with the investor-backed companies that dominated the agenda. “I didn’t know I was part of the sharing economy until today,” he told the crowd.
In an earlier session, Quinonez called out the self-congratulatory tone by some boosters. “As we talk about the word inclusive it’s very easy to forget the people not invited to the party…We have to make sure we’re not making an exclusive sharing economy.”
Next came Denise Cheng, an academic who has been studying the sharing economy for the MIT Center for Civic Media, and she had perhaps the most poignant and insightful answer to the question the conference posed about what will best catalyze the sharing economy.
“Straight talk will catalyze the sharing economy,” Cheng said.
She discussed how the broad label of the sharing economy gets claimed by everyone from small idealists who truly want to promote the idea of sharing to self-interested corporations who use the label for political cover and really mean “renting.”
“When we say sharing economy, we actually mean a lot of things,” she said. “Companies that adopt the sharing economy label are not necessarily adopting the values of the sharing economy.”
Compounding that deception is the fact that companies like Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb are profiting from business models that are often illegal on the local level, but doing little to help drivers or hosts who get in trouble with local authorities: “When someone has to answer on the local level, it’s the providers who are on the front line.”
There was a very different tone and message that came from the subsequent guests to join the panel, who shamelessly promoted their companies and didn’t seem to take heed of Cheng’s call for straight talk.
“Sharing cars is how we can catalyze the sharing economy,” Jessica Scorpio, wearing a T-shirt of the car-sharing company she helped found, Getaround. She called car-sharing “a gateway drug to the sharing economy,” noting that car-sharing customers often go on to use other sharing economy products and services.
“Sharing cars is transforming the fundamentals of our transportation system,” Scorpio said, claiming that each shared car takes up to 32 cars off the road, a figure that doesn’t square with the body of peer-reviewed research on the subject, which places the actual number at nine to 13 cars.
Hyperbole and exaggeration are common among the biggest boosters of sharing economy companies, as are the sins of omission and misdirection — all of which are perhaps what prompted Chang’s “straight talk” prescription.
Sunil Paul, co-founder and CEO of the ridesharing company Sidecar, gave a long and detailed presentation on the supposedly ambiguous definition of “commercial transactions,” calling for what he called a “safe harbor” for sharing activities, without once mentioning the word that he was actually talking about and dancing around: taxes.
“There are certain activities that should be beyond the commercial reach of government,” Paul said, describing his clients who drive customers around the city like taxi drivers less than full time. “We need a safe harbor for sharing that protects these activities from being considered commercial.”
Paul said that Sidecar and other sharing economy companies have “blurred the line between what is personal and what is commercial,” comparing the activities his company facilitates to carpooling and arguing that people should be able to cover the annual cost of driving, say around $10,000, without it being considered a commercial activity (i.e. a taxable transaction).
“As long as you don’t make a profit from it, it’s not a commercial transaction,” Paul said, redefining the very concept of commercial.
And remember, this is a company that is already having a profound impact on the regulated taxi industry — of which Sandararajan said, “I think the taxi service as we know it will largely cease to exist in a few years” — just as other sharing economy companies steal market share from other industries, as Airbnb is doing to the hotel industry, also while avoiding taxes on those transactions.
FROM TALK TO ACTION
“One of the things we like to do in the sharing economy is talk about the sharing economy — a lot!” Jesse Biroscak, an Airbnb host and founder of BayShare, said during a session at Share entitled “Shareable Cities: From Concept to Action.”
It was the first thing I heard upon arriving at the conference, but I already knew it was true after covering this movement over the last couple years, a point that was emphasized strongly by the excited evangelism that I heard again and again over the next 24 hours.
But for all the talk that those in the so-called sharing economy do about the sharing economy, there is often a deliberate vagueness to it that tries to mask its many contradictions and paradoxes.
Its biggest proponents are anxious to go big — defined by a strange mix of idealism (for environmentalism, libertarianism, economic and social equity, and an odd and often contradictory assortment of other goals) and the desire to cash in on the new gold rush — before the opportunities slip away (thanks to competitors, government regulators, or an economic downturn).
“I’m tired of talking about it, I want to do things,” said Biroscak, a regular Airbnb host from San Francisco, without ever really defining the things he wants to do.
BayShare also seems to have a vagueness of purpose, defining itself on its slick website as “an organization whose mission is to make the Bay Area the best place on the planet for sharing. As this movement grows, BayShare will explore how city stakeholders and the sharing community can work together to help the Sharing Economy flourish in the Bay Area to benefit the city, businesses, and communities. The organization looks to be a resource for the Mayor’s Working Group on the Sharing Economy.”
But that working group, which Mayor Ed Lee announced when Treasurer Jose Cisneros was holding hearings two years ago to determine whether Airbnb and other companies should pay the city’s transient occupancy tax, never actually convened. It was simply a stall tactic that evaporated after Cisneros ruled that the tax was indeed owed.
Still, BayShare lists many of the biggest sharing economy companies among its “members,” including Airbnb, RelayRides, Lyft, Yerdle, Vayable, City Car Share, Suppershare, and Get My Boat. Biroscak described the advocacy work that he and BayShare do, work that he urged all of the attendees to get involved with, so that public agencies understand and support this growing economic sector.
“This is called lobbying, and that’s okay. Lobbying is not a dirty word,” Biroscak told the crowd.
Lobbying may not be a dirty word, but it is a regulated activity in San Francisco and other cities, and neither Biroscak nor BayShare are registered lobbyists with the San Francisco Ethics Commission, which they should be if they are indeed lobbying.
Biroscak even boasted of a partnership with the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management that BayShare secured last year on behalf of its member companies to provide their services to local residents in the event of an emergency.
“The sharing economy was born here, and partnering with BayShare, we are committed to ensuring that San Francisco supports this emerging sector’s success and nurturing even greater civic involvement,” Mayor Ed Lee said last June in a press release announcing the partnership, while Chiu said, “I’m confident that BayShare will improve the communication between this emerging sector and local government as ‘collaborative consumption’ evolves and grows in San Francisco.”
But when we reached Biroscak by phone, he said that BayShare doesn’t really have any agreements with the city, and that it doesn’t actually represent its “member” companies or get any money from them. And he said BayShare “definitely does not consider itself a lobbying organization,” instead defining it more vaguely as “a convener and facilitator.”
But as a self-styled spokesperson for the movement — “I try to speak for the San Francisco sharing economy as an industry,” he said at the conference — Biroscak issued a call to action to a crowd that mostly seemed to be puttering on their electronic devices and only half paying attention: “We need to stand up for what we want, but we want to do it in a coordinated way.”
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report.
Global capitalism is a wasteful system that produces way too much stuff and uses too much energy shipping that stuff all over world, causing problems ranging from global warming and pollution to trade deficits and exploitation of workers. It certainly makes sense to facilitate more local economic transactions, include peer-to-peer transfers of services, goods, and other resources.
So there is real potential for social and environmental good in the so-called sharing economy that we again cover in this issue (see “Renting isn’t sharing”). But there are also important concerns about equity, access, honesty, and transparency that are being raised within the movement and by its outside critics.
The sharing economy is at a crucial crossroads right now, facing rising demands for government regulation. Yet the greedy self-interest of wealthy investors and the young company executives they fund is threatening to subvert what really could develop into an important movement.
So it’s time for Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and other local companies to finally come clean with San Francisco and other cities in which they operate, pay their taxes, take responsibility for their impacts, and engage in an honest public dialogue about how to promote what’s best about their companies and minimize the harm they’re doing.
It’s been over two years since the San Francisco Tax Collector’s Office ruled that Airbnb should be paying the city’s transient occupancy tax on the short-term rentals it facilitates, which the company simply refused to do, abetted by Mayor Ed Lee and other powerful supporters.
That’s bad corporate behavior that is an insult to the values espoused within the sharing economy. Now that Airbnb has legislation it helped craft that would legalize and regulate its activities, it has finally agreed to start collecting and paying that tax sometime this summer.
That’s not good enough. Airbnb should pay its back taxes — at least going back two years, or even further if it wants to be a good corporate citizen — before City Hall considers legalizing its disruptions to the local housing market. All the players involved should also be open to a full and open discussion about short-term rentals this summer, with the possibility of substantial changes in the proposed legislation.
The sharing economy genie is out of the bottle and it’s not reasonable to think San Francisco can stop home- or ride-sharing at this point. There are too many people that value these services and they do have benefits. But it’s time to have a more full and honest debate over reasonable regulations that will serve as a model for other cities.
Learning to share and make better use of limited resources is an important goal that could indeed lead to new economic models, but the perversion of that term by greedy capitalists such as Ron Conway is an insult to the shared progressive values of San Francisco.
Yes, you’ve found San Francisco out. You’ve got us. Our city is not the bastion of equality we claim it to be.
It’s something most San Franciscans know, but now you, the country, are getting a peek at how discriminatory our local institutions can actually be.
Just last week, the news of Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep’s discrimination against young Jessica Urbina went viral. Urbina just wanted to wear a tuxedo in her yearbook photo, and the Catholic school, Sacred Heart, said it would not print her photo in a yearbook because she wasn’t in a dress.
The resulting social media firestorm blew up in national media, propelled by the hashtag #jessicastux. Today Sacred Heart issued an apology, offering to work on its policies moving forward.
“On Friday, May 16, the school communicated that it will change its policy regarding senior portraits. We agree with our students who showed solidarity with their classmate that the current policy regarding senior portraits is not adequate to meet the needs of our families or our mission. We will involve our students, families, and Board in crafting the updated policy.
…
Many people suggest that the past few days have been deeply revealing about our school community. We agree. We are an imperfect community that can and does fail. We are a community that is open to self-reflection, and to the constructive criticism and leadership of its students, as well as to the criticism from members of our broader community. We are a community that strives to grow, improve and do what is right. We are a community that sees, in all situations, an opportunity to learn.”
But before we let Sacred Heart be crucified in the court of public opinion, let’s remember an old religious maxim: let ye who is without sin cast the first stone. And when it comes to inequality, San Francisco has many sinners.
Yes, dear country, you spent the last week utterly aghast that San Francisco, the champion of marriage equality, could discriminate against an LGBT teen.
You really don’t know the half of it.
Take our public schools. Even as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of Brown vs. the Board of Education, an investigative report by the San Francisco Public Press revealed massive inequality in San Francisco public elementary schools. Though the SFUSD suffered funding cuts totalling $113 million in the 2009-10 school year (after numerous annual state cuts), some public schools managed to stave off layoffs and provide excellent facilities for their children. The catch? Only the elementary schools attended by rich families survived, bouyed by nearly $3 million in PTSA fundraising in 11 elementary schools.
But 35 of SFUSD’s elementary schools raised no money at all. These schools are not surprisingly attended mostly by the city’s poorest families, and their schools were met with brutal cuts.
The SFUSD is only now allowing students to wear hats (including some religious headgear), and is only now considering raising its minimum wage to San Francisco’s minimum of $10.24 an hour (as a state entity, it only has to pay $8 an hour).
And lest we pick on the schools too much, the explosive tech industry has had its impacts on San Francisco equality too. As taxi drivers flock to rideshare companies like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar, there are fewer drivers to drive wheelchair-accessible taxis. Those rideshare companies don’t yet have a plan to offer service to our city’s many persons with disabilities. Even our beloved regional transit system, BART, has new proposed “trains of the future” offering less space for electric wheelchairs to move around as well.
Also, did we mention one in four San Franciscans are food insecure? That means about 200,000 San Franciscans don’t have enough money to eat healthily, and many are near starvation.
Yes, dear country, San Francisco espouses many loving principles, and we do have an innate sense of justice to help immigrants, the poor, and the marginalized.
San Francisco’s “sharing economy” may be on its way to getting “catalyzed” thanks to this week’s Share Conference, but ridesharing companies also are getting called out – by the director of San Francisco International Airport, for operating illegally.
In a May 9 letter to California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey, SFO Director John Martin requested assistance in enforcing new rules governing Internet-based companies such as Lyft, Uber, and SideCar.
Known in regulatory parlance as TNCs, or transportation network companies, these “ridesharing” businesses are mandated by a CPUC decision to acquire permits before picking up or dropping off airport passengers. The companies provide apps and online payment systems allowing drivers to earn cash driving people around.
In early April, SFO sent out permit application packets to Lyft, Uber, Sidecar, Summon (formerly known as InstaCab) and Wingz (formerly known as Tickengo). Included in the packets “was a letter reminding the TNCs that operating on the airport’s roadways without a permit violates” the state requirement, the letter notes.
But more than a month later, “none of these TNCs have applied for an airport permit,” Martin informed Peevey, “yet they continue to conduct commercial business on the airport’s roadways.”
From April 16 to May 5, police based at the airport apparently performed a TNC crackdown, issuing warnings to 110 drivers for unpermitted operation. By May 15, the number of drivers to receive warnings from law enforcement had climbed above 150, according to SFO spokesperson Doug Yakel.
“Several drivers did not have proof of insurance,” Martin wrote. “One did not have a driver’s license.” Of the 110 who were discovered to be operating illegally, 101 were driving for UberX.
“Eighty percent of the Uber-x drivers did not have trade dress [logos marking them as TNCs] on their vehicles,” as required under the CPUC ruling, Martin wrote. “One Uber-x driver reportedly asked to an officer, ‘why should I advertise for them?’ Four of the Uber-x drivers had no proof of insurance.”
“It’s not the drivers, per se,” Yakel said. “It’s up to the companies they are driving for to submit the permit. We want the TNCs to communicate to their drivers.” He noted that the permitting would begin as a pilot program.
The Bay Guardian phoned Uber for comment, and received this statement from spokesperson Lane Kasselman: “Although SFO’s proposed pilot program raises some concerns about rider and driver privacy, we look forward to working with airport leadership to resolve these issues and ensure that uberX driver partners are able to serve Bay Area residents wherever and whenever they need a ride.”
The TNCs are edging into the market of taxicabs, limousines, and other ground transportation vehicles that have traditionally operated at the airport. While Yakel noted that SFO is “very open to new forms of ground transportation,” and interested in helping the companies to comply with state and airport permitting regulations, he characterized illegal TNC operation as a safety concern.
He also said the companies should be operating “on a level playing field” with existing transportation providers.
That means displaying an airport-issued decal in car windows, offering proof that the drivers are covered by TNC-provided insurance as long as they’re on airport property, and paying a trip fee of $3.75. “Every other form of transportation at SFO that’s authorized … is subject to the same standard,” Yakel said.
In his letter, Martin called on the CPUC to “engage in enforcement activities” and to issue a notice to Uber, Lyft, SideCar and the others to stop allowing rides to the airport until airport permits have been issued. He also asked that the CPUC require TNCs to post prominent notices on their websites, informing drivers and customers that there would be no more rides to the airport until further notice.
Airport administrators are scheduled to meet with the CPUC next month for further discussion.
Board of Supervisors President David Chiu and his campaign for the California Assembly aggressively courted votes and support from the technology community this morning [Wed/14] at the two-day Share conference, accusing opponent David Campos and his progressive allies of “calling for a war on you.”
Chiu spoke at the Opening Plenary session, the only elected official invited to address this $795 per person conference on the “sharing economy,” the term adopted by Airbnb, Lyft, TaskRabbit, Yerdle, Uber, and the rapidly growing list of companies that facilitate peer-to-peer online economic transactions.
Conway called on attendees to lobby their supervisors to support current legislation by Chiu to legalize and regulate Airbnb’s business model in San Francisco. “This legislation by David Chiu is crucial, legislation the whole country will be watching,” Conway said. “David Chiu needs your help. This would not pass if it came to a vote today.”
Chiu spent more than a year crafting his Airbnb legislation, which was greeted with mixed reactions last month, including being slammed by a coalition that has pledged to put a rival measure on the November ballot, a campaign that Chiu today implied Campos was part of (Campos told us he has not taken a position on either the Chiu legislation or the proposed ballot measure).
“I thought it was a reasonable solution, but two weeks later there was a press conference attacking it,” Chiu told Share attendees, ramping his rhetoric in describing “people throwing rocks at Google commuter shuttles” and other alleged local hostilities directed at the tech industry.
“They are calling for a war on you, even though they don’t realize that what you are doing is helping to make sure we’re addressing our income inequality, we’re empowering everyday people by building community and using technology,” Chiu said.
Before the session began, a Chiu campaign worker stood outside the conferene entrance at the Marine Memorial Building handing out photocopies of an anonymous May 11 hit piece on the new blog called SF Techies Who Vote entitled “3 Things Every Tech Worker Should Know about Supervisor David Campos.”
Campos told the Guardian that the attacks, including the Conway-funded mailer that just hit mailboxes today, shows that Chiu and his supporters are desperate with just 20 days until the primary election, but that Chiu’s tone belies his claims to focus on civility and getting past the divisive political rhetoric of old.
“For someone who says he tries to bring people together, David Chiu is trying to scare people into thinking there’s a war going on. I don’t know where that comes from,” Campos said. “The idea that we have a war on the techies and the tech industry is ridiculous.”
Instead, Campos said that he and his progressive allies have been trying to address the eviction and displacement crisis that is connected to the tax breaks and other special treatment that Chiu, Mayor Ed Lee, Conway, and their allies have given to big technology companies.
“Asking that they pay their fair share doesn’t mean we’re against them,” Campos said, noting how overtly Chiu has recently been casting his political fortunes with Lee, Conway, and their economic policies. “It seems that David Chiu and Ron Conway are joined at the hip.”
We at the Guardian will have much more coverage for the Share conference and its claims to be the “new economy” that will change everything — including some revealing interviews that I did at last night’s reception at the Airbnb headquarters — in next week’s Bay Guardian.
Transit options for wheelchair users and people with disabilities are under threat in the Bay Area, and riders are losing ground on multiple transit fronts.
In late April and early May, hundreds of advocates for those with disabilities took to the streets, protesting BART’s Fleet of the Future, a touring mockup of a new BART trains slated to roll out in 2017.
The trains are a step backward in wheelchair accessibility, among other issues, advocates said.
Just last month, advocates for senior and those with disabilities stormed a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors meeting, asking for free Muni for the most economically disadvantaged among them. They were denied based on dollar amounts, while drivers were given an $11 million giveback restoring free Sunday parking meters.
The SFMTA promised to revisit the issue in January. Meanwhile, San Francisco’s wheelchair accessible taxi fleet has seen its drivers flee to so-called “rideshare” companies — whose cars aren’t equipped to carry wheelchairs — causing what officials say is a record low number of wheelchair accessible taxi trips.
Compounding that decision was the SFMTA’s March adoption of its Transit Effectiveness Project, which the agency billed as expanding service by 12 percent and improving the system’s efficiency, but some advocates for seniors and the disabled noted it removed some bus stops, requiring longer walks by those who have a hard time getting around.
The transit troubles cover most of the transportation options available to San Franciscans with disabilities, and that’s the problem.
“We’re one of the most transit-dependent populations,” Peter Mendoza, a community organizer with the Independent Living Resource Center, told the Guardian. He also uses a wheelchair. “Everything we do in our everyday life, we mostly do with public transportation.”
Their needs are simple: getting groceries, seeing a movie, picking up their kids from school. People with disabilities are now in a multi-pronged fight for their right to everyday mobility, and to do so with dignity.
BART’S FLAWED NEW FLEET
A walking tour of BART’s Fleet of the Future shows much is new: computer screens with live GPS updates of the train’s location, triple-bike racks, and redesigned seats. BART Vehicle Systems Engineer Brian Bentley proudly showed us the new touch screens in the driver’s cockpit.
For people with disabilities, the Fleet of the Future is a step backward. Their first beef with BART’s new trains is a simple one: there’s a pole in the way of the door.
Hundreds of disability advocates protested BART’s public tour of its newly redesigned trains just last week, with more protests planned for the future. All they want is the damned pole moved.
The handhold in question features a triple-pronged design: what begins as one vertical metal column branches into three partway off the ground.
“Where the pole is now is in the path of travel for the accessible seating area,” Mendoza said. “People holding onto the poles and the power wheelchairs will be in a sense be trying to occupy the same space.”
BART’s Fleet of the Future will arrive in limited numbers in 2015, and fully roll out by 2017, according to the BART website. BART plans to use the new trains for decades. So will BART move the pole to a different location in the car before then?
“It’s too soon to say,” BART spokesperson Alicia Trost told the Guardian. “That’s why we’re doing outreach.”
Trost told us BART did its due diligence by garnering feedback from the BART Disability Task Force. But the DTF, a volunteer body serving like a consistent focus group, informed BART of the pole-problem years ago.
“From day one, they identified the pole as being a problem,” BART Access Coordinator Ike Nnaji told us. Now, he said, “the pole has been moved slightly.”
The triple column handhold has also been raised since the initial outcry. But advocates say the changes still haven’t solved mobility problems. And lack of BART access would be especially poignant, as the trains are now one of the most seamless public transit trips a wheelchair rider can take, advocates told us.
Unlike a Muni or AC Transit bus, no one needs to strap in a wheelchair user on a BART train. After an elevator ride to the train platform (assuming they’re working), they easily roll onto the train: no muss, no fuss.
“On BART, I can be a regular customer,” longtime disability rights activist Corbett O’Toole told the Guardian. “I can ride it with dignity.”
The wheelchair-using community isn’t the only one with BART concerns. Emergency intercoms have long been an issue with the deaf community, O’Toole told us. The BART train’s new video screen would be a natural place to integrate visual emergency communication, she said.
Trost told us BART is trying to balance the needs of many communities, from bicyclists to folks not tall enough to reach the handholds.
“It’s public transit, you try to help everyone,” she said. But people with disabilities are a group with federal law mandating consideration of their access, Mendoza said.
We asked BART if the agency had specific employees (besides the DTF) in charge of ensuring American with Disabilities Act compliance. BART spokesperson Luna Salaver told us the agency doesn’t have an ADA compliance officer, but its engineering staff and consultants are well-versed in ADA compliance issues.
BART’s board may take a direct vote on disability access modifications to the Fleet of the Future at its May 22 meeting, but that may be subject to change.
While the wheelchair accessibility of the Fleet of the Future is hotly contested, the future of rideshare disability access remains a mystery to most.
RIDESHARE TROUBLES
Regulations task the taxi industry with providing wheelchair accessible cabs, something the rideshares don’t do, at least not yet. And as taxi drivers flee to the more profitable rideshare industry, fewer and fewer wheelchair accessible taxis are being driven in San Francisco.
Worryingly, the newest numbers from the SFMTA paint a portrait of hundreds of stranded wheelchair users. In January 2013, there were 1,379 wheelchair trips via taxi cab, according to numbers provided by the SFMTA, which regulates taxis. This January, that number plummeted to nearly half that.
The drivers just weren’t there. The SFMTA Board of Directors voted in January to offer a $10-per-trip cash incentive for drivers that pick up wheelchair users. But it was like a bandage on a gaping wound: the number of taxis picking up wheelchair users in San Francisco has not yet increased.
And Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar aren’t yet equipped to pick up wheelchair users.
As we’ve previously reported, Lyft, Sidecar, and Uber were recently required to file disability access plans with the California Public Utilities Commission. Some mention researching wheelchair access in the future, but most of the one-page plans tout their apps’ ability to speak to visually impaired users. None promise wheelchair-accessible cars.
The SFMTA is trying to lure taxi drivers back from these Transportation Network Companies through waived permit fees. Deputy Director of Taxi Services Christiane Hayashi said, “the total cost to the public of the TNC phenomenon is over $3 million and counting.”
Despite the stark numbers offered by the SFMTA, the CPUC doesn’t see the situation as a crisis. At a hearing on accessible transit, Marzia Zafar, the director of policy and planning division at the CPUC, told the Guardian there isn’t enough data at this point to say why the disabled community isn’t riding taxis as often as they did before.
“The commission will step in once we have information, verifiable information, that there’s a divide between the disabled and abled communities,” she said. “If there is such discrimination (on part of the TNCs), we will step in and bridge that divide.”
The CPUC could require TNCs to provide access, BART may modify its Fleet of the Future, and the SFMTA can still provide free Muni for seniors and people with disabilities in January.
And in the meanwhile, people with disabilities are waiting for a ride which may or may not ever arrive.
The wrongful death lawsuit against Uber for the New Year’s Eve death of six-year-old Sofia Liu moved forward, as Uber filed its defense May 1.
Uber’s defense filing claims the driver that struck Liu, Syed Muzzafar, was not an Uber employee and he had no reason to interact with the Uber app at the time of Liu’s death.
The suit also claims that Muzzafar signed an agreement with Uber acknowledging those facts.
“Under that Transportation Services Agreement,” the lawsuit states, “[Muzzafar] acknowledged that he was not an employee, agent, joint venturer or partner of Rasier (Uber’s subsidiary) for any purpose; rather, he was an independent contractor.”
Liu was killed after Muzzafar collided with her and her family in the Tenderloin on New Year’s Eve. Liu’s mother, Huan Kuang, and Liu’s brother, Anthony, were both injured but survived. The family, represented by attorney Christopher Dolan, filed the suit at the end of January seeking unknown damages.
Back in March we asked Dolan if Uber offered condolences to the Liu and Kuang family.
“Absolutely not. Basically their message is ‘it’s too bad,’ but its not their problem,” Dolan told us. “They said, ‘jeez our hearts go out to them but we’re not responsible.’”
“At the time of the accident, Mr. Muzaffar was not providing transportation services through the Uber App,” the lawsuit states. “He was not transporting a rider who requested transportation services through the Uber App. He was not en route to pick up a rider who requested transportation services though the Uber App. He was not receiving a request for transportation services through the Uber App.”
Of course, Muzzafar did have the Uber app on waiting for a fare request, driving around as he waited for a fare request on the app.
The lawsuit mentions this as well, saying he was looking at a “GPS-generated map with his location,” and had “no reason” to interact with his phone.
All told Uber makes 22 specific defense claims in the response, most fairly standard in these cases.
But in the truest sense of the new digital “sharing” economy defense number nine claims an app, by definition, is not liable for such claims.
“Plaintiffs’ products liability claim is barred,” the lawsuit states, “because the Companies primarily provide services, not products.”
OUR CLEAN SLATE VOTERS GUIDE TO TAKE TO THE POLLS IS HERE.
Editor’s Note: Election endorsements have been a long and proud part of the Guardian’s 48-year history of covering politics in San Francisco, the greater Bay Area, and at the state level. In low-turnout elections like the one we’re expecting in June, your vote counts more than usual, and we hope our endorsements and explanations help you make the best decisions.
GOVERNOR: JERRY BROWN
There is much for progressives to criticize in Jerry Brown’s latest stint as governor of California. He has stubbornly resisted complying with federal court orders to substantially reduce the state’s prison population, as well as shielding the system from needed journalistic scrutiny and reforms of solitary confinement policies that amount to torture. Brown has also refused to ban or limit fracking in California, despite the danger it poses to groundwater and climate change, irritating environmentalists and fellow Democrats. Even Brown’s great accomplishment of winning passage for the Prop. 30 tax package, which eased the state back from financial collapse, sunsets too early and shouldn’t have included a regressive sales tax increase. Much more needs to be done to address growing wealth disparities and restore economic and educational opportunity for all Californians.
For these reasons and others, it’s tempting to endorse one of Brown’s progressive challenges: Green Party candidate Luis Rodriguez or Peace and Freedom Party candidate Cindy Sheehan (see “Left out,” April 23). We were particularly impressed by Rodriguez, an inspiring leader who is seeking to bring more Latinos and other marginalized constituencies into the progressive fold, a goal we share and want to support however we can.
But on balance, we decided to give Brown our endorsement in recognition of his role in quickly turning around this troubled state after the disastrous administration of Arnold Schwarzenegger — and in the hope that his strong leadership will lead to even greater improvement over his next term. While we don’t agree with all of his stands, we admire the courage, independence, and vision that Brown brings to this important office. Whether he is supporting the California High-Speed Rail Project against various attacks, calling for state residents to live in greater harmony with the natural world during the current drought, or refusing to shrink from the challenges posed by global warming, Jerry Brown is the leader that California needs at this critical time.
LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR: GAVIN NEWSOM
Gavin Newsom was mayor of San Francisco before he ascended to the position of Lieutenant Governor, and we at the Bay Guardian had a strained relationship with his administration, to put it mildly. We disagreed with his fiscally conservative policies and tendency to align himself with corporate power brokers over neighborhood coalitions. As lieutenant governor, Newsom is tasked with little — besides stepping into the role of governor, should he be called upon to do so — but has nevertheless made some worthwhile contributions.
Consider his stance on drug policy reform: “Once and for all, it’s time we realize that the war on drugs is nothing more than a war on communities of color and on the poor,” he recently told a crowd at the Democratic Party convention in Los Angeles. “It is fundamentally time for drug policies that recognize and respect the full dignity of human beings. We can’t wait.” In his capacity as a member of the UC Board of Regents, Newsom recently voted against a higher executive compensation package for a top-level administrator, breaking from the pack to align with financially pinched university students. In Sacramento, Newsom seems to come off as more “San Francisco” than in his mayoral days, and we’re endorsing him against a weak field of challengers.
SECRETARY OF STATE: DEREK CRESSMAN
Although the latest Field Poll shows that he has only single-digit support and is unlikely to make the November runoff, we’re endorsing Derek Cressman for Secretary of State. As a longtime advocate for removing the corrupting influence of money from politics through his work with Common Cause, Cressman has identified campaign finance reform as the important first step toward making the political system more responsive to people’s needs. As Secretary of State, Cressman would be in a position to ensure greater transparency in our political system.
We also like Alex Padilla, a liberal Democrat who has been an effective member of the California Senate. We’ll be happy to endorse Padilla in November if he ends up in a runoff with Republican Pete Peterson, as the current polling seems to indicate is likely. But for now, we’re endorsing Cressman — and the idea that campaign finance reform needs to be a top issue in a state and country that are letting wealthy individuals and corporations have disproportionate influence over what is supposed to be a democracy.
CONTROLLER: BETTY YEE
The pay-to-play politics of Leland Yee and two other California Democrats has smeared the Assembly. Amid the growls of impropriety, a report by the Center for Investigative Reporting has painted Speaker of the Assembly John Perez, a leading candidate for Controller, with a similar brush. CIR revealed Perez raised money from special interest groups to charities his lover favored, a lover later sued for racketeering and fraud.
Betty Yee represents an opportunity for a fresh start. On the state’s Board of Equalization she turned down campaign donations from tobacco interests, a possible conflict of interest. She also fought for tax equity between same-sex couples. The Controller is tasked with keeping watch on and disbursing state funds, a position we trust much more to Yee’s careful approach than Perez’s questionable history. Vote for Yee.
TREASURER: JOHN CHIANG
While serving as California’s elected Controller, John Chiang displayed his courage and independence by refusing to sign off on budgetary tricks used by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and some legislative leaders, insisting on a level of honesty that protected current and future Californians. During those difficult years — as California teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, paralyzed by partisan brinksmanship each budget season, written off as a failed state by the national media — Chiang and retiring Treasurer Bill Lockyer were somehow able to keep the state functioning and paying its bills.
While many politicians claim they’ll help balance the budget by identifying waste and corruption, Chiang actually did so, identifying $6 billion by his estimate that was made available for more productive purposes. Now, Chiang wants to continue bringing fiscal stability to this volatile state and he has our support.
ATTORNEY GENERAL: KAMALA HARRIS
Kamala Harris has kept the promise she made four years ago to bring San Francisco values into the Attorney General’s Office, focusing on the interests of everyday Californians over powerful vested interests. That includes strengthening consumer and privacy protections, pushing social programs to reduce criminal recidivism rather than the tough-on-crime approach that has ballooned our prison population, reaching an $18 billion settlement with the big banks and mortgage lenders to help keep people in their homes, and helping to implement the Affordable Care Act and the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state.
Harris has maintained her opposition to the death penalty even though that has hurt her in the statewide race, and she brings to the office an important perspective as the first woman and first African American ever to serve as the state’s top law enforcement officer. While there is much more work to be done in countering the power of wealthy individuals and corporations and giving the average Californian a stronger voice in our legal system, Harris has our support.
INSURANCE COMMISSIONER: DAVE JONES
We’ve been following Dave Jones’s legislative career since his days on the Sacramento City Council and through his terms in the California Legislature, and we’ve always appreciated his autonomy and progressive values. He launched into his role as Insurance Commissioner four years ago with an emergency regulation requiring health insurance companies to use no more than 20 percent of premiums on profits and administrative costs, and he has continued to do what he can to hold down health insurance rates, including implementing the various components of the Affordable Care Act.
More recently, Jones held hearings looking at whether Uber, Lyft, and other transportation network companies are adequately insured to protect both their drivers and the general public, concluding that these companies need to self-insure or otherwise expand the coverage over their business. It was a bold and important move to regulate a wealthy and prosperous new industry. Jones deserves credit for taking on the issue and he has earned our endorsement.
SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS: TOM TORLAKSON
This race is a critical one, as incumbent Tom Torlakson faces a strong challenge from the charter school cheerleader Marshall Tuck. An investment banker and Harvard alum, Tuck is backed by well-heeled business and technology interests pushing for the privatization of our schools. Tech and entertainment companies are pushing charter schools heavily as they wait in the wings for lucrative education supply contracts, for which charter schools may open the doors. And don’t let Waiting for Superman fool you, charter schools’ successful test score numbers are often achieved by pushing out underperforming special needs and economically disadvantaged students.
As national education advocate Diane Ravitch wrote in her blog, “If Tuck wins, the privatization movement will gain a major stronghold.” California ranks 48th in the nation in education spending, a situation we can thank Prop. 13 for. We’d like to see Torlakson advocate for more K-12 school dollars, but for now, he’s the best choice.
BOARD OF EQUALIZATION: FIONA MA
Fiona Ma was never our favorite member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and in the California Legislature, she has seemed more interested in party politics and leadership than moving legislation that is important to San Francisco. There are a few exceptions, such as her attempts last year to require more employers to offer paid sick days and to limit prescription drug co-payments. But she also notoriously tried to ban raves at public venues in 2010, a reactionary bill that was rejected as overly broad.
But the California Board of Equalization might just be a better fit for Ma than the Legislature. She’s a certified public accountant and would bring that financial expertise to the state’s main taxing body, and we hope she continues in the tradition of her BOE predecessor Betty Yee in ensuring the state remains fair but tough in how it collects taxes.
ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 17: DAVID CAMPOS
The race to replace progressive hero Tom Ammiano in the California Assembly is helping to define this important political moment in San Francisco. It’s a contest between the pragmatic neoliberal politics of Board of Supervisors President David Chiu and the populist progressive politics of Sup. David Campos, whom Ammiano endorsed to succeed him.
It’s a fight for the soul of San Francisco, a struggle to define the values we want to project into the world, and, for us at the Bay Guardian, the choice is clear. David Campos is the candidate that we trust to uphold San Francisco’s progressive values in a state that desperately needs that principled influence.
Chiu emphasizes how the two candidates have agreed on about 98 percent of their votes, and he argues that his effectiveness at moving big legislation and forging compromises makes him the most qualified to represent us in Sacramento. Indeed, Chiu is a skilled legislator with a sharp mind, and if “getting things done” — the prime directive espoused by both Chiu and Mayor Ed Lee — was our main criterion, he would probably get our endorsement.
But when you look at the agenda that Chiu and his allies at City Hall have pursued since he came to power — elected as a progressive before pivoting to become a pro-business moderate — we wish that he had been a little less effective. The landlords, tech titans, Realtors, and Chamber of Commerce have been calling the shots in this city, overheating the local economy in a way that has caused rapid displacement and gentrification.
“Effective for whom? That’s what’s important,” Campos told us during his endorsement interview, noting that, “Most people in San Francisco have been left behind and out of that prosperity.”
Campos has been a clear and consistent supporter of tenants, workers, immigrants, small businesses, environmentalists — the vast majority of San Franciscans, despite their lack of power in City Hall. Chiu will sometimes do right by these groups, but usually only after being pushed to do so by grassroots organizing and lobbying efforts.
Campos correctly points out that such lobbying is more difficult in Sacramento, with its higher stakes and wider range of competing interests, than it is on the local level. Chiu’s focus on always trying to find a compromise often plays into the hands of wealthy interests, who sometimes just need to be fought and stopped.
We have faith in Campos and his progressive values, and we believe he will skillfully carry on the work of Ammiano — who is both an uncompromising progressive and an effective legislator — in representing San Francisco’s values in Sacramento.
ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 19: PHIL TING
Incumbent Phil Ting doesn’t have any challengers in this election, but he probably would have won our support anyway. After proving himself as San Francisco’s Assessor, taking a strong stance against corporate landowners and even the Catholic Church on property assessments, Ting won a tough race against conservative businessman Michael Breyer to win his Assembly seat.
Since then, he’s been a reliable vote for legislation supported by most San Franciscans, and he’s sponsoring some good bills that break new ground, including his current AB 1193, which would make it easier to build cycletracks, or bike lanes physically separated from cars, all over the state. He also called a much-needed Assembly committee hearing in November calling out BART for its lax safety culture, and we hope he continues to push for reforms at that agency.
PROPOSITION 41: YES
Over a decade ago, Californians voted to use hundreds of millions of our dollars to create the CalVet Home and Farm Loan Program to help veterans purchase housing. But a reduction in federal home loan dollars, the housing crisis, and a plummeting economy hurt the program.
Prop. 41 would repurpose $600 million of those bond funds and raise new money to create affordable housing rental units for some of California’s 15,000 homeless veterans. This would cost Californians $50 million a year, which, as proponents remind us, is one-tenth of 1 percent of the state budget. Why let hundreds of millions of dollars languish unused? We need to reprioritize this money to make good on our unfulfilled promises to homeless veterans.
PROPOSITION 42: YES
This one’s important. Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown sought to gut the California Public Records Act by making it optional for government agencies to comply with many of the requirements built into this important transparency law. The CPRA and the Ralph M. Brown Act require government agencies to make records of their activities available for public scrutiny, and to provide for adequate notice of public meetings. Had the bill weakening these laws not been defeated, it would have removed an important defense against shadowy government dealings, leaving ordinary citizens and journalists in the dark.
Prop. 42 is a bid to eliminate any future threats against California’s important government transparency laws, by expressly requiring local government agencies — including cities, counties, and school districts — to comply with all aspects of the CPRA and the Brown Act. It also seeks to prevent local agencies from denying public records requests based on cost, by eliminating the state’s responsibility to reimburse local agencies for cost compliance (the state has repeatedly failed to do so, and local bureaucracies have used this as an excuse not to comply).
SF’S PROPOSITION A: YES
Prop. A is a $400 million general obligation bond measure that would cover seismic retrofits and improvements to the city’s emergency infrastructure, including upgrades to the city’s Emergency Firefighting Water System, neighborhood police and fire stations, a new facility for the Medical Examiner, and seismically secure new structures to house the police crime lab and motorcycle unit.
The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to place Prop. A on the ballot, and a two-thirds majority vote is needed for it to pass. Given that San Franciscans can expect to be hit by a major earthquake in the years to come, upgrading emergency infrastructure, especially the high-pressure water system that will aid the Fire Department in the event of a major blaze, is a high priority.
SF’S PROPOSITION B: YES
As we report in this issue (see “Two views of the waterfront”), San Francisco’s waterfront is a valuable place targeted by some ambitious development schemes. That’s a good thing, particularly given the need that the Port of San Francisco has for money to renovate or remove crumbling piers, but it needs to be carefully regulated to maximize public benefits and minimize private profit-taking.
Unfortunately, the Mayor’s Office and its appointees at the Port of San Francisco have proven themselves unwilling to be tough negotiators on behalf of the people. That has caused deep-pocketed, politically connected developers to ignore the Waterfront Land Use Plan and propose projects that are out-of-scale for the waterfront, property that San Francisco is entrusted to manage for the benefit of all Californians.
All Prop. B does is require voter approval when projects exceed existing height limits. It doesn’t kill those projects, it just forces developers to justify new towers on the waterfront by providing ample public benefits, restoring a balance that has been lost. San Francisco’s waterfront is prime real estate, and there are only a few big parcels left that can be leveraged to meet the needs of the Port and the city. Requiring the biggest ones to be approved by voters is the best way to ensure the city — all its residents, not just the politicians and power brokers — is getting the best deals possible.
SF SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE: DANIEL FLORES
Daniel Flores has an impressive list of endorsers, including the Democratic, Republican, and Green parties of San Francisco — a rare trifecta of political party support. But don’t hold the GOP nod against Flores, who was raised in the Excelsior by parents who immigrated from El Salvador and who interned with La Raza Centro Legal while going to McGeorge School of Law. And he did serve in the Marines for six years, which could explain the broad range of support for him.
Flores is a courtroom litigator with experience in big firms and his own practice, representing clients ranging from business people to tenants fighting against their landlords. Flores told us that he wants to ensure those without much money are treated fairly in court, an important goal we support. We also liked Kimberly Williams and hope she ends up on the bench someday, but in this race, Flores is the clear choice.
CONGRESS, DISTRICT 12: NANCY PELOSI
This was a hard decision for us this year. Everyone knows that Pelosi will win this race handily, but in past races we’ve endorsed third party challengers or even refused to endorse anyone more often than we’ve given Pelosi our support. While Pelosi gets vilified by conservatives as the quintessential San Francisco liberal, she’s actually way too moderate for our tastes.
Over her 21 years in Congress, she has presided over economic policies that have consolidated wealth in ever fewer hands and dismantled the social safety net, environmental policies that have ignored global warming and fed our over-reliance on the private automobile, and military policies that expanded the war machine and overreaching surveillance state, despite her insider’s role on the House Intelligence Committee.
Three of her opponents — Democrat David Peterson, Green Barry Hermanson, and fiery local progressive activist Frank Lara of the Peace and Freedom Party — are all much better on the issues that we care about, and we urge our readers to consider voting for one of them if they just can’t stomach casting a ballot for Pelosi. In particular, Hermanson has raised important criticisms of just how out of whack our federal budget priorities are. We also respect the work Lara has done on antiwar and transit justice issues in San Francisco, and we think he could have a bright political future.
But we’ve decided to endorse Pelosi in this election for one main reason: We want the Democrats to retake the House of Representatives this year and for Pelosi to once again become Speaker of the House. The Republican Party in this country, particularly the Tea Party loyalists in the House, is practicing a dangerous and disgusting brand of political extremism that needs to be stopped and repudiated. They would rather shut the government down or keep it hopelessly hobbled by low tax rates than help it become an effective tool for helping us address the urgent problems that our country faces. Pelosi and the Democrats aren’t perfect, but at least they’re reasonable grown-ups and we’d love to see what they’d do if they were returned to power. So Nancy Pelosi has our support in 2014.
CONGRESS, DISTRICT 13: BARBARA LEE
Barbara Lee has been one of our heroes since 2001, when she was the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, braving the flag-waving nationalism that followed the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon to warn that such an overly broad declaration of war was dangerous to our national interests. She endured death threats and harsh condemnation for that principled stand, but she was both courageous and correct, with our military overreach still causing problems for this country, both practical and moral.
Lee has been a clear and consistent voice for progressive values in the Congress for 16 years, chairing both the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Progressive Caucus, taking stands against capital punishment and the Iraq War, supporting access to abortions and tougher regulation of Wall Street, and generally representing Oakland and the greater Bay Area well in Washington DC. She has our enthusiastic support.
CONGRESS, DISTRICT 14: JACKIE SPEIER
Jackie Speier has given her life to public service — almost literally in 1978 when she was an aide to then-Rep. Leo Ryan and survived the airstrip shootings that triggered the massacre at Jonestown — and she has earned our ongoing support. Speier has continued the consumer protection work she started in the California Legislature, sponsoring bills in Congress aimed at protecting online privacy. She has also been a strong advocate for increasing federal funding to public transit in the Bay Area, particularly to Muni and for the electricification of Caltrain, an important prelude to the California High-Speed Rail Project. In the wake of the deadly natural gas explosion in San Bruno, Speier has pushed for tough penalties on Pacific Gas & Electric and expanded pipeline safety programs. She has been a strong advocate of women’s issues, including highlighting the epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses and in the military, seeking greater protections, institutional accountability, and recourse for victims. More recently, Speier has become a key ally in the fight to save City College of San Francisco, taking on the federal accreditation process and seeking reforms. Speier is a courageous public servant who deserves your vote.
Who is Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow? In the 137-page federal complaint detailing charges that led to the high-profile arrest of Sen. Leland Yee, Chow, and 24 others two weeks ago (see “Crime and politics,” April 1), Chow is described as the powerful “Dragonhead” of an ancient Chinese organized crime syndicate, “overseeing a vast criminal enterprise involved in drugs, guns, prostitution, protection rackets, moving stolen booze and cigarettes, and money laundering,” as we reported at the time.
Not so, famed defense attorney Tony Serra told a crowd of reporters at Pier 5 Law Offices in San Francisco’s North Beach, where he and fellow attorneys were joined by supporters wearing red tees bearing the slogan “Free Shrimp Boy” last week.
Attorneys Serra and Curtis Briggs described a five-year federal operation to target Chow and ensnare him in wrongdoing, insisting he had wanted no part in criminal activity. Serra said agents had “stuffed money into his pocket” despite his protests, and noted that his legal team was representing Chow pro bono because he has no money. (Rebecca Bowe)
AIRBNB COMES CLEAN
Airbnb came clean last week, sending out new terms of service drafted April 7 that customers must agree to before conducting further business starting April 30. The new agreements seem intended to address longstanding issues in San Francisco that the Guardian first raised in May 2012 (“The problem with the sharing economy,” 5/1/12), and have been recently joined by other journalists in spelling out and highlighting.
In the opening of its new Terms of Service, Airbnb wrote (in all caps): “IN PARTICULAR, HOSTS SHOULD UNDERSTAND HOW THE LAWS WORK IN THEIR RESPECTIVE CITIES. SOME CITIES HAVE LAWS THAT RESTRICT THEIR ABILITY TO HOST PAYING GUESTS FOR SHORT PERIODS. THESE LAWS ARE OFTEN PART OF A CITY’S ZONING OR ADMINISTRATIVE CODES. IN MANY CITIES, HOSTS MUST REGISTER, GET A PERMIT, OR OBTAIN A LICENSE BEFORE LISTING A PROPERTY OR ACCEPTING GUESTS. CERTAIN TYPES OF SHORT-TERM BOOKINGS MAY BE PROHIBITED ALTOGETHER. LOCAL GOVERNMENTS VARY GREATLY IN HOW THEY ENFORCE THESE LAWS. PENALTIES MAY INCLUDE FINES OR OTHER ENFORCEMENT. HOSTS SHOULD REVIEW LOCAL LAWS BEFORE LISTING A SPACE ON AIRBNB.”
It seems like a good first step. Next we’ll see whether the company follows through with paying its local taxes and working with the city on legislation to legalize more of its business model in San Francisco. (Steven T. Jones)
NEW RIDESHARE REGULATIONS PROPOSED
Rideshare companies must provide their drivers with insurance. That was the gist of a public letter released last week by the California Insurance Commission, addressed to the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates transportation network companies such as Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar.
“While smart phone technology is bringing new business opportunities to the marketplace and new transportation choices for consumers, our investigative hearing revealed serious insurance gaps in the current business model of Transportation Network Companies such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar,” Insurance Commissioner David Jones wrote in a statement to press. “As long as TNCs are encouraging non-professional drivers to use their personal vehicles to drive passengers for a profit, a risk which personal automobile insurance simply does not cover, TNCs should bear the burden of making sure that insurance is provided. Our recommendations will ensure there is insurance protection for passengers, drivers and pedestrians.”
Whether the TNCs should provide insurance has been the subject of intense debate in state and local governments over the past year. The recommendations to the CPUC come specifically out of a hearing on TNC insurance that Jones held March 21. The Guardian also wrote an editorial, “Sharing economy should share its wealth,” calling for rideshares to provide insurance, not only because it’s unfair competition (insurance costs money to provide, a burden taxi companies carry but not TNCs), but because people and TNC drivers in accidents were left for broke, lacking inadequate insurance. (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)
ELLIS ACT REFORM ADVANCES
Sen. Mark Leno’s Senate Bill 1439 — which would protect rent-controlled housing in San Francisco by amending the Ellis Act, including making property owners wait at least five years after buying a property to evict tenants under the act — cleared its first legislative hurdle last week.
The Senate Transportation and Housing Committee passed the measure on a 6-4 vote, and it heads to the Senate Judiciary Committee next. The bill has strong support in San Francisco, from progressive constituencies through Mayor Ed Lee to support by leaders in the business community and tech world.
Yet the measure faces a tough road in Sacramento, where the landlord lobby and other conservative interests oppose it. “A bill that could strip San Francisco landlords of their freedom to leave the rental housing business heads to a key Senate committee next month,” the California Apartment Association wrote last month in an alert to its members.
But as Tenants Together demonstrated in a recent study of how the Ellis Act has been used in San Francisco since its passage in 1985, a legislative reaction to a California Supreme Court case upholding rent control laws, the legislation has largely been a tool used by real estate speculators to clear rent-controlled buildings of tenants. The study found that 51 percent of Ellis Act evictions took place within a year of the property being purchased, 68 percent within the first five years, and 30 percent of Ellis Act evictions were from serial evictors, often by businesses specializing in flipping properties for profit.
“California’s Ellis Act was specifically designed to allow legitimate landlords a way out of the rental business, but in San Francisco this state law is being abused by speculators who never intend to be landlords,” Leno said today in a prepared statement. “As a result, longtime tenants, many of them seniors, disabled people, and low-income families, are being uprooted from their homes and communities. The five-year holding period in my bill would prevent these devastating evictions from forever changing the face of our diverse city.” (Steven T. Jones)
FROM GOOGLE BUS TO GOOGLER’S HOME
The morning of April 11 kicked off with yet another Google bus blockade in San Francisco’s Mission District, only this time housing activists said a Google employee is directly to blame for displacing residents.
The blockade, which took place at 18th and Dolores streets, was short-lived but featured speeches by tenants facing eviction, as well as a giant cardboard cutout depicting 812 Guerrero, a seven-unit building where tenants are facing eviction under the Ellis Act.
The property owner is Jack Halprin, a lawyer who is the head of eDiscovery, Enterprise for Google. He moved into one of the units after purchasing the building two years ago and served eviction notices on Feb. 26, according to tenant Claudia Triado, a third grade teacher at Fairmount Elementary in San Francisco who lives there with her 2-year-old son.
The Bay Guardian left a voice message for Halprin requesting comment, but got no reply
After the bus blockade, activists proceeded to 812 Guerrero and staged a short rally on the front steps.
Evan Wolkenstein, who teaches Jewish literature at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay, said he’s lived at 812 Guerrero for eight years. Other tenants facing eviction from the property include an artist and a disabled person, he added. During the Google bus blockade, minutes before police officers arrived to clear a path for the bus by urging protesters onto the sidewalk, Wolkenstein gave a speech about the overall impact the tech sector is having on San Francisco. (Rebecca Bowe)
“They’re totally unfair competition,” said cab driver Jonathan Khin, a 20-year cabbie who came to San Francisco decades ago from Burma. “They don’t have to pay regulations and fees that we do.”
The drivers complaints over the rideshares, known legally as Transportation Network Companies, were many: the TNCs don’t provide adequate insurance for drivers, don’t have the number of cars regulated (like cabs are), and don’t have to pay regulatory fees that cabs currently pay. This all leads to an uneven playing field, and the taxi cab industry is getting creamed.
“I have 50 percent less daily riders,” than he used to, said Myo Winn, a 10-year driver for companies like Yellow Cab and DeSoto.
Cabbie Jonathan Khin holds up his SFMTA issued taxi ID, one of the many regulatory elements of the taxi industry that rideshares, or TNCs, do not provide.
But the taxi industry has its own cross to bear. It’s no secret that finding a taxi in San Francisco can be nigh-impossible at some hours, and even in some neighborhoods. Carl Macmurdo, the president of the Medallion Holders Association, didn’t mince words about it: “There’s been bad, poor service over the years from our industry.”
That bad service left the taxi companies wide open for “disruption,” as the tech companies call it. But that disruption came at a cost — the still-young TNC industry has struggled to provide adequate insurance to its drivers, even suggesting that drivers personal insurance policies would protect them while ferrying customers. As we’ve written about before, this has left passengers, drivers, and even pedestrians left with huge bills for collisions that taxi companies have a history of paying out with less hand-wringing.
If the TNCs provided insurance like taxis did, would the taxi industry still have a problem with them?
“Yes,” Macmurdo told the Guardian, as the horns from nearby cabs continued to honk. “Seattle deregulated taxis and let medallions be open, and it was chaos. Government [regulations] balance the need between available cab service and the ability of drivers to make a decent living. There are thousands of the TNCs on the road and it’s destroyed the industry. There are too many vehicles on the road competing.”
“Our role is not to play favorites,” she told the Guardian, standing in the courtyard of the CPUC building just after the protest ended. “We made the [TNC industry] safe, and let the free market do its job.”
Other regulatory bodies have gone the opposite way. Seattle City Council last month voted to limit TNC vehicles to 150 in the city at any one time, and the protest came on the heels of the California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones issuing a public letter to the CPUC calling for TNCs to carry the burden of insurance.
Uber and Lyft have made progress in expanding their insurance coverage, he said, but the gap still exists, putting drivers, passengers, and pedestrians at risk.
“Our investigative hearing revealed serious insurance gaps in the current business model of Transportation Network Companies such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar,” Jones wrote in a statement to the press. “As long as TNCs are encouraging non-professional drivers to use their personal vehicles to drive passengers for a profit, a risk which personal automobile insurance simply does not cover, TNCs should bear the burden of making sure that insurance is provided. Our recommendations will ensure there is insurance protection for passengers, drivers and pedestrians.”
The report from the insurance commissioner asserted a long standing complaint of taxi drivers. Personal auto insurers, the report wrote, are not planning to offer coverage of TNC drivers “in the near future, if ever.”
Now it’s up to the CPUC to create new, stricter regulations to protect the public. Those regulations may come as soon as September, Zafar said.
Rideshare companies must provide their drivers with insurance. That was the gist of a public letter released today from the California Insurance Commission, addressed to the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates transportation network companies such as Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar.
“While smart phone technology is bringing new business opportunities to the marketplace and new transportation choices for consumers, our investigative hearing revealed serious insurance gaps in the current business model of Transportation Network Companies such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar,” Insurance Commissioner David Jones wrote in a statement to press. “As long as TNCs are encouraging non-professional drivers to use their personal vehicles to drive passengers for a profit, a risk which personal automobile insurance simply does not cover, TNCs should bear the burden of making sure that insurance is provided. Our recommendations will ensure there is insurance protection for passengers, drivers and pedestrians.”
Whether the TNCs should provide insurance has been the subject of intense debate in state and local governments over the past year. The recommendations to the CPUC come specifically out of a hearing on TNC insurance that Dave Jones, the insurance commissioner, held March 21. The Guardian also wrote an editorial, “Sharing economy should share its wealth,” calling for rideshares to provide insurance, not only because it’s unfair competition (insurance costs money to provide, a burden taxi companies carry but not TNCs), but because people and TNC drivers in accidents were left for broke, lacking inadequate insurance.
A taxi driver-led protest calling for the CPUC to require TNC companies to provide insurance is starting at noon, today. Below we’ll embed the insurance commissioner’s letter to the CPUC.
[Update 4/10: Visit our story on the taxi driver-led protest, here.]
The insurance policy describes exclusions, limits, and explicit descriptions of who is insured, all details that evaded the public, the taxi industry, and some regulatory bodies trying to investigate Uber and its insurance coverage.
Uber confirmed with the Guardian that the leaked policy was legitimate, but did not directly answer our questions about the consequences of it being leaked.
William Rouse, general manager of Los Angeles Yellow Cab and a former president of the Taxicab Association, said the insurance document raised some troubling questions.
The first problem lies in a semantics game the company may use to distance itself from paying out insurance, he said. “Uber is insuring through Rasier LLC, but contractually drivers contract with Uber. They state in the policy that it kicks in only when Raiser is liable. What we have here is a shell game. Who is Rasier?”
Uber is the parent company of Rasier, Andrew Noyes, an Uber spokesperson, told us. But how listing Rasier versus Uber as the main insurance carrier will affect insurance claims down the road remains to be seen.
Exclusions in the policy are many, such as one for the “movement of property by mechanical device.”
It states: “‘Bodily injury’ or ‘property damage’ resulting from the movement of property by a mechanical device (other than a hand truck) unless the device is attached to the covered ‘auto’” is excluded from coverage. Spokesperson Andrew Noyes said this exclusion deals with unloading and offloading of material from a vehicle via a pallet jack or forklift.
One wonders what exclusion Uber used to argue against insurance payment in an incident last year, when a driver using Uber drove into a fire hydrant, which flew 81 feet down Divisadero and landed on a woman named Claire Fahrbach. The resulting geyser flooded several nearby businesses. Fahrbach is suing Uber for medical coverage, litigation that is still ongoing.
Many revelations from the document are sure to come, and the Guardian will seek analysis from insurance industry experts on the leaked document.
Uber’s insurance practices came under sharp investigation after the New Year’s Eve death of six year old Sofia Liu, who died after a collision with a car driven by a driver who had been using the Uber app.
“We have not made the policy — in its entirety — public,” Noyes wrote to us. But now that Uber’s insurance policy is released, advocates and the public can openly discuss the legitimacy and reach of Uber’s insurance.
San Francisco. New York. Seattle. Cities and states across the country are grappling to regulate the so called rideshare companies, known legally as Transportation Network Companies, such as Uber, Sidecar and Lyft.
The municipalities grappled with many questions: who pays the medical bills, the fees to repair or replace damaged autos, or pay for the damage to property in an car accidents with Uber vehicles? A number of lawsuits filed against Uber so far show that the company has been unwilling to pick up the tab.
At a state insurance hearing in Sacramento last week, the personal automobile insurance industry blasted Uber for shifting some insurance liability onto its drivers’ personal insurance policies.
“It is well documented and publicized that the business model does attempt to shift the cost and the risk to the drivers personal auto insurance,” said Armand Feliciano, the vice president of the Association of California Insurance Companies. But personal insurance is not for people driving what is essentially a taxi cab, he said.
“The risks are fundamentally different,” Feliciano said to the state insurance commissioner. Rideshare companies need to “step up and be the insurers of their drivers. That’s the right policy decision.”
Uber has repeatedly stated they do not want their insurance policy revealed to the public.
When we repeatedly asked him if it was troubling to Uber that their insurance policy was leaked, despite public affirmations that it remain private, Noyes wrote to us “not sure what you mean.”
The California Public Utilities Commission directly regulates rideshares, or Transportation Network Companies, is one of the few regulatory bodies to have a copy of the policy, but so far it has declined to distribute it openly.
We contacted the CPUC for clarification as to why they withheld the documents, but they asked for more time to get back to us, and did not reply before press time.
Now that’s changed. We’re embedding Uber’s insurance policy below. If you have any analysis, tips or concerns, please email us at news@sfbg.com.
Transportation Network Companies, more commonly known as “rideshares,” have operated in legal limbo regarding their insurance since their creation. This came to a head on New Year’s Eve with the death of six-year-old Sofia Liu, who was killed in a collision with an Uber car driven by a man named Syed Muzzafar. Uber claimed in a blog post that because Muzzafar was not ferrying a passenger at the time, and only using the app to search for fares, that he was not officially covered by their insurance.
That insurance gap left Muzzafar on the hook for the little girl’s death and the injuries of her family, the subject of a lawsuit that could end up seeking some $20 million in damages.
So far, Uber has not provided any compensation to Liu’s family. But it has revised its insurance policy, suggesting future collisions may be covered.
In a blog post, Uber announced that “in order to fully address any ambiguity or uncertainty around insurance coverage for ridesharing services,” it would expand drivers’ insurance “to cover any potential ‘insurance gap’ for accidents that occur while drivers are not providing transportation service for hire but are logged onto the Uber network and available to accept a ride.”
Uber’s new policy will cover up to $100,000 per incident for bodily injuries and $25,000 per incident for property damage. But the blog specifies that the money will not kick in if a driver’s personal insurance covers a collision, as appears to be the case with the New Year’s Eve incident.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick said that the Syed Muzzafar’s personal insurance policy had offered to pay the claim, but had not yet followed through.
Uber’s spokesperson Andrew Noyes declined to comment when we asked him about this.
Notably, a coalition of rideshares including Lyft and Sidecar and a handful of insurance companies banded together to develop new insurance policies. The group’s work is ongoing, though the intent looks positive — new insurance policies specific to Transportation Network Companies developed by a coalition of industries would be a great step for driver, passenger and pedestrians alike.
But for now, commercial and personal insurance policies rarely, if ever, cover TNC drivers. And Uber’s new insurance? It’s great, as long as Uber follows through. (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)
Indecisive Democrats let real-estate developers win
By a slim margin, the governing body of the San Francisco Democratic Party voted Wed/12 to oppose a controversial June ballot measure, Proposition B, concerning waterfront height limits.
The initiative would require city officials to get voter approval before approving new building projects that are taller than what’s legally sanctioned under a comprehensive waterfront land-use plan. Prop. B stems from an effort last November, authored by the same proponents, to reverse approval for a luxury waterfront development project called 8 Washington, which exceeded building height limits. In the run-up to that election, the DCCC sided against the 8 Washington developers, and aligned itself with those seeking to strike down the 8 Washington height-limit increase in order to kill the project.
But this time, under the leadership of chair Mary Jung — who is employed as a lobbyist for the San Francisco Association of Realtors — the DCCC came down on the side of powerful real-estate developers.
The vote was surprising to some longtime political observers, given that until recently the DCCC was known as a progressive stronghold in San Francisco politics. Its slate cards are distributed to Democrats throughout San Francisco, and Democrats make up the vast majority of city voters.
In a politically significant outcome, the DCCC’s opposition to Prop. B was decided by a slim 13 to 12 vote. The threshold for it to pass or fail was much lower than usual, because so many DCCC members simply refused to take a stand.
San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu — who not only opposed 8 Washington but helped gather signatures for the referendum to challenge it — was among those who abstained. Chiu’s decision to abstain sets him apart from Campos, his opponent in the upcoming Assembly race, who voted to endorse Prop. B. Had Chiu voted, Prop. B’s opponents would not have had the votes to get the upper hand.
When reached for comment, Chiu told the Bay Guardian he still hasn’t formed an opinion on the measure, and that he’s waiting on a pending city analysis and the outcome of a lawsuit challenging it.
“There’s been very little analysis and I could take money away from affordable housing and cost the city money fighting a lawsuit,” he said, citing the money that developers would be spending on political campaigns as the potential source of affordable housing money.
“I am open to supporting the measure, as someone who passionate about waterfront development,” he added, citing the lead role he took in opposing the 8 Washington project. (Rebecca Bowe)
Local support for national LGBT housing rights
At the Tue/11 Board of Supervisors meeting, Sup. David Campos introduced legislation to encourage large-scale developers to protect the housing rights of the LGBT community.
Same-sex couples nationwide are more likely to experience discrimination in their search for senior housing, a study by the Washington, D.C. based Equal Rights Center found.
To investigate, testers posed as gay or straight couples with otherwise nearly identical credentials, then submitted inquiries on senior housing in 10 different states. They discovered that in 96 out of 200 tests, those posing as lesbian, gay or bisexual residents experienced at least one type of adverse, differential treatment.
Meanwhile, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality, one in five transgender U.S. residents has been refused a home or apartment, and more than one in ten has been evicted, because of their gender identity.
Federal law does not expressly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. California law does, as do laws in 19 other states. Given these gaps in legal protection, real-estate providers can adopt their own policies to prohibit LGBT discrimination.
Campos’ proposal would require large-scale developers who wish to build in San Francisco to prove their commitment to equal housing opportunities.
“We want to know whether a developer hoping to build in San Francisco is protecting LGBT housing rights when they own or manage housing in states where legal protections don’t exist,” Campos explained. “By collecting this information, we can highlight best practices and urge those who do not have these policies to do the right thing.”
Transportation Network Companies, more commonly known as “rideshares,” have operated in legal limbo regarding their insurance since their creation. This came to a head on New Year’s Eve with the death of six-year-old Sofia Liu, who was killed in a collision with an Uber car driven by a man named Syed Muzzafar. Uber claimed in a blog post that because Muzzafar was not ferrying a passenger at the time, and only using the app to search for fares, that he was not officially covered by their insurance.
It was an insurance gap that left the driver on the hook for the death of a little girl and the injuries of her family. San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency Taxi Director Christiane Hayashi estimated the lawsuit to be at around $20 million, based on her experience. No amount has been specified by either party as of yet, but so far Uber has not compensated the family for Liu’s death.
Now it seems there’s a glimmer of hope that future collisions may be covered.
“In order to fully address any ambiguity or uncertainty around insurance coverage for ridesharing services, Uber is becoming the first and only company to have a policy in place that expands the insurance of ridesharing drivers to cover any potential ‘insurance gap’ for accidents that occur while drivers are not providing transportation service for hire but are logged onto the Uber network and available to accept a ride.”
The policy will cover $50,000/individual/incident for bodily injury, $100,000 total/incident for bodily injury and $25,000/incident for property damage, according to their blog post.
But Sofia Liu’s family is still out of luck, apparently.
The blog specifies that the money will not kick in if a driver’s personal insurance covers a collision, and that seems to be the case with the New Year’s Eve incident.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick said that the Syed Muzzafar’s personal insurance policy had offered to pay the claim, but had not yet followed through.
When we contacted Uber’s spokesperson, Andrew Noyes, to offer proof of this, he declined.
Uber has also promised insurance coverage before, in the form of their $1 million policy. But still many pedestrians and passengers have filed suit with the company when Uber declined to pay for their medical coverage, like Claire Fahrbach, a woman who was walking down Divisadero when an Uber car hit a fire hydrant, sending it flying into her. Her injuries were substantial, and she quit her two jobs. She immediately left San Francisco to live with her parents for financial and medical support. Her hospital bills are steep, and she is currently tangled in a lawsuit with Uber.
When we asked Noyes if the new policy agreements would allow Uber to pay out insurance to the many injured passengers and pedestrians suing Uber for coverage, Noyes would only speak off the record. But in case you’re wondering, it all basically amounted to “no comment.”
Uber’s lack of coverage extends well beyond Fahrbach and her injuries, with drivers nationally left uninsured to various degrees. Popular car insurance provider Esurance wrote about it on its blog shortly after Valentine’s day:
“Though TNCs are now required to carry $1 million in liability insurance, this coverage is designed to protect riders and pedestrians and pay for damages to other vehicles. The policy doesn’t have to cover the driver’s car or the driver’s injuries (and it doesn’t kick in at all unless the TNC driver is found at fault). And because of the livery exclusion, the driver’s standard personal insurance likely won’t cover accidents either. So, instead of adding to their income, the TNC driver could be left holding the bag.
…
Though we can’t speak for all insurance companies, the livery exclusion is pretty universal. According to our definitions of coverage, TNC drivers would need commercial insurance since a personal auto policy through Esurance doesn’t cover both personal and commercial use of a vehicle. In all states except California, we’re unable to offer a standard policy to TNC drivers. And in California, the driver’s standard coverage doesn’t apply during a ride-share trip.
If you’re driving for a TNC, the California Department of Insurance urges you to contact your insurance company and see if there are gaps in your coverage that are putting you at risk. You might be better off with a commercial policy. (Esurance doesn’t offer commercial auto insurance, but you can get it through our partner.) Since Lyft is already available in 20 cities (and UberX in dozens), this is good advice no matter where you live.”
So Esurance’s personal policy does not cover an Uber driver, and other insurance companies have stated on the record at KQED and other outlets that they won’t cover personal or commercial insurance for a TNC driver (like Uber).
Notably, a coalition of rideshares including Lyft and Sidecar and a handful of insurance companies banded together to develop new insurance policies. The group’s work is ongoing, though the intent looks positive — new insurance policies specific to Transportation Network Companies developed by a coalition of industries would be a great step for driver, passenger and pedestrians alike.
But for now, commercial and personal insurance policies rarely, if ever, cover TNC drivers. And Uber’s new insurance? It’s great, as long as Uber follows through.