News & Opinion Archives — Page 27 of 154 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Surfing to shoot

Andrew Lam

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January 22, 2013

rebecca@sfbg.com

Somewhere in rural Southern California, a Craigslist user is offering a Hi-Point 9mm carbine, a kind of semi-automatic rifle, for “straight trade” in exchange for a quad or dirt bike. A post from Craigslist in San Mateo screams “i NEED AMMO” — in bulk, for various kinds of rifles. And across the state, Craigslist ads for Glocks, Berettas and other handguns commonly turn up in the mix, often instructing prospective buyers to respond by text message only.

Selling guns is explicitly prohibited on the world-famous website with the signature purple peace sign. Firearms, ammunition, and less-lethal weapons hover near the top of Craigslist’s prohibited items roster — but a cursory search reveals dozens of firearms-related ads in various US cities. Meanwhile, the San Francisco-based classifieds forum is just one of thousands of websites where people who want to obtain guns can make discreet connections with private sellers.

Gun listings on the Internet make it extremely easy for people to buy firearms with the click of a mouse and no questions asked. But in many cases, this activity is perfectly legal, website terms-of-service notwithstanding.

Federally licensed firearms dealers are obligated by law to conduct background checks on all buyers, whether they’re selling at a gun show or online. But that’s not the case for unlicensed individuals who aren’t officially in the business of dealing weapons. And these private transactions — which are increasingly initiated online — account for an estimated 40 percent of U.S. gun sales, according to estimates by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Under federal law, there’s nothing barring an unlicensed individual from advertising a gun for sale online and then selling the weapon to a person living in the same state without the involvement of a licensed dealer. California law does go further to require the involvement of a licensed dealer in firearms sales, but the proliferation of Internet ads shows how difficult that is to regulate.

As long as the seller isn’t knowingly selling to someone who’s prohibited from gun ownership due to a violent criminal conviction or some other reason, federal law imposes no obligation to perform a background check for in-state transfers. This leniency, combined with the unprecedented availability of weapons online, is a focal point for legislative reform efforts.

FROM CRAIGSLIST TO ARMSLIST

The Guardian recently heard from a distraught Craigslist user from Illinois who’d launched a one-person crusade against a persistent string of gun ads posted in his hometown. “It’s an anything goes, no-holds-barred, 24/7 gun show,” he charged, adding that he’d flagged posts for AK-47s, AR-15s, high-capacity magazines, and other combat-style weapons listings for removal.

He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “The gun crowd outnumbers other folks around here,” he explained, and forwarded some profanity-laden responses he’d received after calling attention to the issue in an online forum and urging other community members to help him flag the posts.

Craigslist staff members were responsive to emails alerting them of the posts, he said, but the measures they took weren’t always effective. Ads were removed a few days after being flagged, but many just cropped up again later. Online chatter suggests that sellers remain undeterred. “The liberal whiners flag the ads, then you just repost it,” one user advised in an online message board.

In 2011, New York City authorities conducted an in-depth, undercover investigation of online gun sales. In 45 days, they discovered 1,792 unique Craigslist posts advertising guns in 49 states. In that time, just 584 — about 33 percent — were flagged for removal, investigators reported.

Susan Best, a press contact at Craigslist, didn’t respond to several Guardian queries seeking information about how the company is handling the issue of unpermitted gun postings.

Despite the Illinois crusader’s sense of futility, some private gun dealers have migrated away from Craigslist after experiencing pushback from community members who consistently flag the unpermitted posts. The number of gun listings on Craigslist barely registers in comparison with the thousands of weapons readily available on ArmsList.com, a site created to make it easy to shop for guns online.

ArmsList was started in 2009 “by gun owning and gun loving Americans,” according to the website, “after seeing firsthand how the popular marketplace sites on the Internet shun firearms.” Anyone casually browsing ArmsList gun ads can view phone numbers and emails of sellers without creating an account, and the website does not get involved in sales.

Disturbingly, the New York City investigation found that more than half of the private gun dealers contacted via ArmsList said they’d be willing to sell to buyers who said they couldn’t pass a background check. That’s illegal, but there isn’t much currently in place to prevent it from happening.

PRIVATE-SALE LOOPHOLE

Under California law, an unlicensed individual can sell a gun to another individual if both seller and buyer go through a fully licensed dealer, known as a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL). The FFL files paperwork for a background check, and releases the weapon only after the buyer’s name has cleared and a mandatory 10-day waiting period has passed.

“Bottom line: If you want to sell a firearm, you need to go through a licensed dealer,” says Michelle Gregory, a spokesperson for the California Department of Justice. “Even if they’re advertising online, they’ve still got to go through it.”

California’s rules are some of the strictest in the nation because lawmakers closed the “private-sale loophole” that exists under federal law, says Ben Van Houten, managing attorney at the San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The loophole, also known as the “gun show loophole,” refers to the federal law provision allowing in-state transfers of firearms between private individuals without FFL involvement.

“The issue of online gun sales is most dangerous in states that have not closed the private-sale loophole,” Van Houten says. “It’s easy to find people you can buy a gun from, without having to pass a background check.”

REFORMS ON THE HORIZON

Closing the private-sale loophole is a key piece of a broader gun-law reform agenda unveiled by President Barack Obama Jan. 16. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence applauded the move. “Obama’s commitment today — to support federal legislation to fix our background check system and to ban military-style assault weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines — confirms that we are at a historic moment,” the organization noted.

The state of New York recently passed gun laws that surpass even California controls, Van Houten noted, because new safeguards were enacted to regulate ammunition sales. In California, several legislative efforts have sought to tighten ammo sales, which are currently unrestricted, but none have been enacted into law.

On the federal level, US Sen. Dianne Feinstein has also introduced legislation to ban high-capacity magazine clips, which can quickly feed 30 rounds of ammo into a rifle. As the Obama Administration advances its gun-law reform agenda, Bay Area residents have also been stirred to action.

San Francisco celebrity Craig Newmark, who founded Craigslist in the mid-1990s and isn’t involved in its day-to-day operations, recently urged his followers to support an effort to prevent gun violence.

“One month after the tragic mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a group of Newtown, Connecticut citizens have organized to honor the lives lost by unveiling a national grassroots initiative committed to preventing similar tragedies,” announced a Jan. 14 post on Newmark’s website, CraigConnects. “The initiative’s a nonprofit called Sandy Hook Promise,” and it’s “asking folks across the country to make a promise to encourage and support common sense solutions. We must get all of America to sign the Sandy Hook Promise.”

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam

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January 22, 2013

3

EDITORIAL Airports are special. There are schools and roads and buildings — and rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike — named after famous and not-so-famous people, but airports, particularly major international airports, are, in a word, monumental. Tens of millions of people, many of them immigrants, have come through Kennedy Airport in New York, a place named after an inspirational leader who was killed before his time. We’re not so enamored with Reagan National in Washington, but the guy was a hugely influential president of the United States. Lt. Colonel O’Hare was a war hero.

That’s why the idea of naming San Francisco International Airport after Harvey Milk is so wonderful — and entirely appropriate.

There are lots of politicians in the world, and there have been many civic leaders who have done great things in and for San Francisco. But Harvey Milk was different, and special.

Milk was the first openly person gay person elected to public office in a major American city. He was an inspiration to tens of thousands of people, and his speeches, his signature line — “you’ve gotta give them hope — and his role as an LGBT icon made a better life possible for generations of young people who faced, and often still face, oppression, discrimination and fear.

It’s important to remember that, although he only served 11 months in office, Milk changed San Francisco, changed America, and changed the world. His bold actions forced the nation to accept a marginalized community. He represented the best of San Francisco, the essential spirit of rebellion, the demand for justice and the passion for equality that defines this city in the world.

And the struggle he embodied isn’t even close to over: All over the world, LGBT people are beaten, denied basic rights, killed for who they are. And if San Francisco can’t make a giant global statement against that, nobody can.

The renaming of SFO wouldn’t just honor a local political figure. I would make an international statement. The airport is a major West Coast hub, and people from all over the globe pass through its gates. While many of them won’t care who the airport is named for, others will — and an appropriate display in the terminals would educate countless visitors, many from countries and cultures where LGBT people are still not accepted, about the role Milk played in changing society’s attitudes.

We don’t take lightly the naming of civic institutions. There’s too much opportunity for political mischief, for someone like former mayors Willie Brown or Dianne Feinstein — neither of whom changed the city in a positive way or made dramatic statements — to get honored. That’s one reason that the San Francisco Airports Commission has declined to name anything after anyone who is still alive.

Sup. David Campos, who is promoting this idea, has taken the right approach: A decision this serious ought to go before the voters. The supervisors should place his charter amendment on the ballot, and the people of San Francisco should tell the world that the legacy of Harvey Milk is alive — and out there, our front, for everyone to see.

Alerts

Andrew Lam

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January 15, 2013

0

THURSDAY 17

Refugee Hotel

Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF. 6:30-8pm. Join photographer Jim Goldberg, photographer Gabriele Stabile, and journalist Juliet Linderman for a discussion about Refugee Hotel, a collection of photography and interviews documenting the arrival of refugees to the United States. Hosted by Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series published by McSweeney’s Books that illuminates contemporary human rights issues. Free before 5pm; admission is $5 after. Advance tickets encouraged. info@thecjm.org; 415.655.7881. If you can’t make the Thursday event, consider dropping by Gallery Carte Blanche (973 Valencia St, SF) Friday/18 at 6 pm, when Voice of Witness will host a talk and book signing for Refugee Hotel, followed by a reception.

SATURDAY 19

Protest Citizens United at Chevron Refinery

March departs Richmond BART station at noon; rally at Chevron Gate 14 (corner of Castro and Chevron Way), 1pm, Richmond. Chevron is widely known in these parts for letting loose a toxic plume of smoke that blackened skies last year when the refinery caught fire. What you may not have heard is that the oil behemoth also bears the distinction of being the single-largest contributor to a so-called Super PAC (for the GOP, naturally) since the Citizens United decision. On the third anniversary of the Supreme Court’s notorious ruling, which opened the floodgates to skyrocketing corporate contributions to political campaigns, activists are planning a march and rally outside the Chevron Oil Refinery. Live music from the Brass Liberation Orchestra will accompany the 2.5-mile walk, local activists and community leaders will speak at the rally.

MONDAY 21

Fracking in California

Gazebo Room, CPMC Davies Campus, 45 Castro Street, SF. 7-9 p.m. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is an environmentally damaging oil and gasdrilling technique that involves injecting high volumes of pressurized water, sand and toxic chemicals deep into the earth. It’s already taking place in nine California counties, according the Center for Biological Diversity. TransitionSF will host a free presentation on fracking with speakers Rose Braz, Climate Campaign Director of the Center for Biological Diversity; and Adam Scow, California Campaigns Director for Food & Water Watch. The talk will cover the environmental effects of fracking and offer ideas on how environmentalists can take action against it. Free.

Bungle in the jungle

Andrew Lam

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January 15, 2013

16

steve@sfbg.com

Talk about karma.

The Synthesis 2012 Festival, which marked the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, was supposed to be an opportunity to bring spiritually minded people together around the Kukulkan Pyramid in Chichen Itza, Mexico to help usher in a new age of cooperation and goodwill. That was the vision espoused by Executive Producer Michael DiMartino, a Californian who said he had been leading tours in the area for decades and setting up this event for years.

Instead, this anticipated moment of enlightenment became what can politely be called a clusterfuck, a descent into utter chaos for many volunteers and attendees. Hundreds of Bay Area people traveling to an uplifting holiday event found themselves stranded in an isolated location without the transportation, sustenance, or communications they’d been told would be available.

Now DiMartino is trying to settle a long list of refund demands, and there are threats of lawsuits on all sides.

When I first interviewed him about the festival, back in October, DiMartino was talking like a New Age prophet: “We, through our actions and intentions, create the world and take the path that we are creating,” he said.

So DiMartino is walking the rocky path of his own creation, facing recriminations for ignoring warnings about looming problems, and vilified both for his alleged managerial failures and for the sometimes appalling way he treated people.

About 150 people have joined the “Synthesis 2012 Scam Awareness” group on Facebook — which has barred Synthesis staff from joining the discussion — where they’re telling their stories of hardship and woe, sharing research into DiMartino’s history with other events, and organizing collective responses to the problem.

Micaela Teal Santos, who helped create and administer the Facebook group, told us her honeymoon trip turned into a nightmare of missing shuttles and meals and being forced to camp alone in the jungle after local authorities shut down the festival campground for several hours, missing the long-anticipated sacred ceremony at sunrise on Dec. 21.

It was one of many similar stories. People who were promised hotel rooms by DiMartino arrived to find those rooms had been given away to others and no vacancies were available — at a site far from any other accommodations. Shuttles that were supposed to bring revelers from other towns to the festival site never arrived, forcing people to spend hundreds of dollars on cabs or private shuttles, and volunteers who came early to create the festival often weren’t provided food or water at a site that turned out to be five miles from the nearest town.

Luckily for DiMartino, he has been surrounded by people who really do embody the positive, patient, and resourceful values that the festival was meant to highlight, from his co-producer Debra Giusti (founder of the Harmony Festival) to Tulku and the Bay Area crew that created the AscenDance stage to the many volunteers who stepped up to address the myriad problems and voids that manifested as the event unfolded.

“That’s the real story, it’s how people under extreme adversity came together to make this happen,” said Giusti, who has been working almost every day since the festival officially ended on Dec. 23 to deal with its fallout, from the attendees still stranded in Mexico without money to get back to the bus filled with festival supplies that still hasn’t returned, to the dozens of attendees who say they feel cheated by DiMartino.

Many of the DiMartino’s biggest critics have made efforts to remain positive and couch their criticisms in the New Age style of empowerment and acceptance but it’s clearly been a bitter disappointment to attendees who hoped the festival would be a launching pad into a new era of harmony and hope.

In an interview with the Guardian, DiMartino disputed many of the characterizations on the Facebook site, darkly warning that his lawyer is looking into “the bandwagon of people on a witch hunt.” But he repeatedly said that he takes full responsibility for problems at the event and accepts that he will probably lose a significant amount of money once the final accounting is done.

“There were logistical breakdowns, but that doesn’t constitute a scam,” DiMartino said, noting that he is issuing some partial refunds and “dealing with people on a one-by-one basis.”

But both in his public and private statements, DiMartino’s tendency to blame the festival’s problems on Mexico, or on volunteers, or on forces beyond his control — or, as he repeatedly told me, “systemic problems,” as if it was a system he didn’t create and run — has only added to people’s frustrations with the festival.

Giusti defends DiMartino as a “visionary” who has problems with organization and follow-through. “Michael would act like everything was handled and it obviously wasn’t. It was very frustrating.”

We heard many stories of DiMartino not responding well, an approach that seems to have helped create many of the problems at the event. Two of the more compelling and condemning narratives come from two longtime festival organizers, Xochi Raye and Corey Rosen, who say DiMartino responded vindictively when they raised concerns about looming problems.

Rosen didn’t actually attend the festival, saying he was forced out of his production manager role for raising questions about preparations, such as the ill-fated decision to save money on transporting materials to the festival by using a volunteer crew and bus, which was turned around at the border by officials with concerns for their safety.

“My biggest issue was transportation and safety. Within the festival community, there is an ongoing joke about ‘safety third,’ but that is just a joke,” Rosen told me. “For them to call these unforeseen circumstances is bullshit…There are a lot of unforeseen circumstances that happen in events. But if you plan for the foreseeable one, you can handle the unforeseeable ones.”

Rosen goes so far as to say he doesn’t believe DiMartino’s claims to have made advanced reservations for shuttles and other services that didn’t materialize. “People were trusting that Michael had things taken care of, and when I wanted to double-check, people said we didn’t need to do that,” Rosen said. “Michael told me my negative comments would not create a positive outlook.”

DiMartino said his computer and many documents were stolen from his car in Playa del Carmen before the event, complicating festival logistics and making it difficult to provide the proof that people are requesting.

To those who believed that the end of the Mayan calendar, coinciding with other New Age beliefs that Dec. 21, 2012, would be signal the beginning of an era of expanded human consciousness, Chichen Itza was considered a place of spiritual power and significance. That clearly made people more trusting of DiMartino’s intentions.

Raye took over some of Rosen’s duties — and much more in Mexico, as problems developed in the run-up to the event. She wrote out a long narrative for the Synthesis 2012 Scam site that tells a harrowing tale created largely by DiMartino’s undelivered promises and bad behavior when questioned.

“Michael said he had been focusing on getting basic needs such as toilets and water in place by the time we landed, and yet basic needs were not established until we had been there for several days, resulting in production time and volunteers lost, as well as many people becoming sick,” she wrote.

Dozens of people told us that things would have been even worse if people on the ground didn’t take the initiative, noting that DiMartino even refused to come to the campground for five hours while police blocked access to weary attendees until after 2am, an incident he minimized to us, calling it a miscommunication and insisting “I had a personal arrangement with the property owner.”

Giusti said she and other staffers are moving rapidly toward resolution of all the problems surrounding Synthesis, from refunds to attendees (many of whom paid $499 each for a “full experience pass”) to compensation for staff, both financial and spiritual.

“Michael does need to come forward and apologize to people,” Giusti told us, noting that she is planning a healing ritual to bring closure to this whole saga. “He will sit in the center of a circle and hear what everyone went through.”

Spies on the corner

Andrew Lam

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January 15, 2013

23

rebecca@sfbg.com

In the Netherlands city of Eindhoven, the streetlights lining a central commercial strip will glow red if a storm is coming. It’s a subtle cue that harkens back to an old phrase about a red sky warning mariners that bad weather is on the way. The automated color change is possible because satellite weather data flows over a network to tiny processors installed inside the lampposts, which are linked by an integrated wireless system.

Lighting hues reflecting atmospheric changes are only the beginning of myriad functions these so-called “smart streetlights” can perform. Each light has something akin to a smartphone embedded inside of it, and the interconnected network of lights can be controlled by a central command center.

Since they have built-in flexibility for multiple adaptations, the systems can be programmed to serve a wide variety of purposes. Aside from merely illuminating public space, possible uses could include street surveillance with tiny cameras, monitoring pedestrian or vehicle traffic, or issuing emergency broadcasts via internal speaker systems.

The smart streetlights aren’t just streetlights — they’re data collection devices that have the potential to track anything from pedestrian movements to vehicle license plate numbers. And, through a curious process distinctly lacking in transparency, these spylights are on their way to San Francisco.

BIG PLANS

On Minna between Fourth and Sixth streets in downtown San Francisco, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has installed a pilot project to test 14 streetlights that are connected by a wireless control system. The city agency plans to gauge how well this system can remotely read city-owned electric meters, wirelessly transmit data from tiny traffic cameras owned by the Municipal Transportation Agency, and transmit data from traffic signals.

The pilot grew out of San Francisco’s participation in an international program called the Living Labs Global Award, an annual contest that pairs technology vendors with officials representing 22 cities from around the world. At a May 2012 LLGA awards summit in Rio de Janeiro, far outside the scope of the city’s normal bidding processes, a Swiss company called Paradox Engineering won the right to start testing the high-tech lights in San Francisco. Within six months, Paradox Engineering and the SFPUC had the Minna streetlights test up and running.

Meanwhile, the city has issued a separate Request for Proposals for a similar pilot, which will test out “adaptive lighting” that can be dimmed or brightened in response to sensors that register pedestrian activity or traffic volume. The city is negotiating contracts with five firms that will test out this technology in three different locations, according to Mary Tienken, Project Manager for LED Streetlight Conversion Project for the SFPUC.

Under the program, five vendors will be chosen to demonstrate their wireless streetlights on 18 city-owned lights at three test sites: Washington Street between Lyon and Maple streets; Irving Street between 9th and 19th avenues; and Pine Street between Front and Stockton streets.

LED streetlights are energy-efficient and could yield big savings — but the lights do far more than shine. The RFP indicates that “future needs for the secure wireless transmission of data throughout the city” could include traffic monitoring, street surveillance, gunshot monitoring and street parking monitoring devices.

So far, the implications of using this technology for such wide-ranging objectives have barely been explored. “San Francisco thought they were upgrading their 18,000 lamps with LEDs and a wireless control system, when they realized that they were in fact laying the groundwork for the future intelligent public space,” LLGA cofounder Sascha Haselmeyer stated in an interview with Open Source Cities. “Eindhoven is pioneering this with … completely new, intelligent lighting concepts that adapt to the citizen not just as a utility, but a cultural and ambient experience. So many questions remain,” he added, and offered a key starting point: “Who owns all that data?”

LUMINARIES IN LIGHTING

Phillips Lighting, which was involved in installing the Eindhoven smart streetlights system, played a role in launching the San Francisco pilot. Paradox Engineering recently opened a local office. Oracle, a Silicon Valley tech giant, is also involved — even though it’s not a lighting company.

“Oracle, of course, manages data,” Haselmeyer explained to the Guardian when reached by phone in his Barcelona office. “They were the first to say, ‘We need to understand how data collected from lampposts will be controlled in the city.'”

According to a press release issued by Paradox Engineering, “Oracle will help managing and analyzing data coming from this ground-breaking system.” Oracle is also a corporate sponsor of the LLGA program. It has been tangentially involved in the pilot project “because of a longstanding relationship we had with the city of San Francisco,” Oracle spokesperson Scott Frendt told us.

Paradox was selected as the winner for San Francisco’s “sustainability challenge” through LLGA, which is now housed under CityMart.com, “a technology start-up offering a professional networking and market exchange platform,” according to the company website.

In May of 2012, the SFPUC sent one of its top-ranking officials, Assistant General Manager Barbara Hale, to Rio for the LLGA awards summit. There, technology vendors of all stripes showcased their products and mingled with local officials from Barcelona, Cape Town, Glasgow, Fukuoka and other international cities. San Francisco was the only US city in attendance. San Francisco will even host the next summit this coming May at Fort Mason.

In Rio, Paradox was lauded as the winning vendor for San Francisco’s LLGA streetlights “challenge.” It didn’t take long for the company to hit the ground running. “Soon after the Rio Summit on Service Innovation in Cities, where we were announced winners for San Francisco, we started discussing with the SFPUC the objectives and features of the pilot project,” Paradox announced on the LLGA website. “Working closely with the SFPUC, we also had the opportunity to build solid partnerships with notable industry players such as Philips Lighting and Oracle.”

WINNERS’ CIRCLE

On Nov. 15, Paradox hosted an invite-only “networking gala” titled “Smart Cities: The Making Of.” The event brought together representatives from Oracle, the SFPUC, Phillips, LLGA, and the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, “to learn about the challenges of urban sustainability in the Internet of Things era,” according to an event announcement.

“The project we’re piloting with the SFPUC is highly innovative since it puts into practice the new paradigm of the ‘Internet of Things,’ where any object can be associated with an IP address and integrated into a wider network to transmit and receive relevant information,” Gianni Minetti, president and CEO at Paradox, stated in a press release.

The event was also meant to celebrate Paradox’s expansion into the North American urban lighting space, a feat that was greatly helped along by the LLGA endeavor. But how did a Swiss company manage to hook up with a San Francisco city agency in the first place — and win a deal without ever going through the normal procurement process?

San Francisco’s involvement in LLGA began with Chris Vein, who served as the city’s Chief Technology Officer under former Mayor Gavin Newsom. (Vein has since ascended to the federal government to serve as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation for President Barack Obama.)

To find the right fit for San Francisco’s wireless LED streetlights “challenge” under the LLGA program, a judging panel was convened to score more than 50 applicant submissions received through the program framework. Judges were selected “based upon knowledge and contacts of people in the SFPUC Power Enterprise,” Tienken explained. The scoring system, Haselmeyer said, measures sustainability under a rubric developed by the United Nations.

Jurists for San Francisco’s streetlight program were handpicked from the SFPUC, the San Francisco Department of Technology, Phillips, and several other organizations. An international jurist is designated by LLGA for each city’s panel of jurists, Haselmeyer said, “so as to avoid any kind of local stitch-up.”

He stressed that “the city is explicitly not committing to any procurement.” Instead, vendors agree to test out their technology in exchange for cities’ dedication of public space and other resources. Tienken, who manages the city’s LED Streetlight Conversion Project, noted that “Paradox Engineering is not supposed to make a profit” under the LLGA program guidelines. “We’ll pay them a $15,000 stipend,” she said, the same amount that will be awarded to the firms that are now in negotiation for pilot projects of their own.

“San Francisco is using this to learn about the solution,” Haselmeyer added. “This company will not have any advantage,” when it comes time to tap a vendor for the agency’s long-term goal of upgrading 18,500 of its existing streetlights with energy-saving LED lamps and installing a $2 million control system.

At the same time, the program clearly creates an inside track — and past LLGA participants have landed lucrative city contracts. Socrata, a Seattle-based company, was selected as a LLGA winner in 2011 and invited to run a pilot project before being tapped to power data.SFgov.org, the “next-generation, cloud-based San Francisco Open Data site” unveiled by Mayor Ed Lee’s office in March of 2012.

The mayor’s press release, which claimed that the system “underscores the Mayor’s commitment to providing state of the art access to information,” made no mention of LLGA.

PRIVACY AND PUBLIC SPACE

Throughout this process of attending an international summit in Rio, studying applications from more than 50 vendors, selecting Paradox as a winner, and later issuing an RFP, a very basic question has apparently gone unaddressed. Is a system of lighting fixtures that persistently collects data and beams it across invisible networks something San Franciscans really want to be installed in public space?

And, if these systems are ultimately used for street surveillance or traffic monitoring and constantly collecting data, who will have access to that information, and what will it be used for? Haselmeyer acknowledged that the implementation of such a system should move forward with transparency and a sensitivity to privacy implications.

“Many cities are deploying sensors that detect the Bluetooth signal of your mobile phone. So, they can basically track movements through the city,” Haselmeyer explained. “Like anything with technology, there’s a huge amount of opportunity and also a number of questions. … You have movement sensors, traffic sensors, or the color [of a light] might change” based on a behavior or condition. “There’s an issue about who can opt in, or opt out, of what.”

Tienken and Sheehan downplayed the RFP’s reference to “street surveillance” as a potential use of the wireless LED systems, and stressed that the pilot projects are only being used to study a narrow list of features. “The PUC’s interest is in creating an infrastructure that can be used by multiple agencies or entities … having a single system rather than have each department install its own system,” Tienken said. The SFPUC is getting the word out about the next batch of pilots by reaching out to police precinct captains and asking them to announce it in their newsletters, since “streetlighting is a public safety issue,” as Tienken put it.

Haselmeyer acknowledged that public input in such a program is important: “It’s very important to do these pilot projects, because it allows those community voices to be heard. In the end, the city has to say, look — is it really worth all of this, or do we just want to turn our lights on and off?”

LIGHTS, BUT NO SUNSHINE

One company that is particularly interested in San Francisco pilot is IntelliStreets, a Michigan firm that specializes in smart streetlights. IntelliStreets CEO Ron Harwood told the Guardian that his company was a contender for the pilot through LLGA; he even traveled to Rio and delivered a panel talk on urban lighting systems alongside Hale and a representative from Oracle.

A quick Google search for IntelliStreets shows that the company has attracted the attention of activists who are worried that these lighting products represent a kind of spy tool, and a spooky public monitoring system that would strip citizens of their right to privacy and bolster law enforcement activities.

“It’s not a listening device,” Harwood told the Guardian, when asked about speakers that would let operators communicate with pedestrians, and vice-versa. “So you can forget about the Fourth Amendment” issues.

Harwood seemed less concerned about the activists who’ve decried his product as a modern day manifestation of Big Brother, and more worried about why his company was not chosen to provide wireless LED streetlights in San Francisco. After being passed over in the LLGA process, Harwood said IntelliStreets responded to the RFP issued in the weeks following the Rio summit. Once again, Harwood’s firm didn’t make the cut.

Since his company provides very similar services to those described in the RFP, Harwood said he was “confused” by the outcome of the selection process. IntelliStreets’ Chief Administration Officer Michael Tardif was more direct. “Clearly we think this was an inside deal,” Tardif told the Guardian. Tienken, for her part, declined to discuss why San Francisco had rejected IntelliStreets’ application.

And when a public records request was submitted to the agency last August for details on San Francisco’s participation in LLGA, the response was opaque at best. “After a duly diligent search we find that there are no documents responsive to your request,” an SFPUC public records coordinator responded via email. “The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is not a participant, nor is involved with Living Labs Global Award. Please know that we take our obligations under the Sunshine Ordinance very seriously.” That was just an honest mistake, Sheehan tells the Guardian now by way of explanation. In the public records division, “Clearly, nobody had any familiarity with LLGA.”

No Oscar for the guv’s budget

Andrew Lam

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January 15, 2013

4

OPINION Given that Gov. Jerry Brown put out his proposed budget the same day that Oscar nominations came out, it’s tempting to make some comparisons.

Brown’s budget, like the nominated musical “Les Misérables,” has plenty of numbers, and will make some people cry.

But I take the new budget seriously, the same as every budget I’ve seen since I got to Sacramento. Unlike most of the recent budgets, this one doesn’t feature a big deficit. Give the Governor some credit for that, but let’s look at how he’s done it. Not all of it is pretty.

To start with, education gets a boost. That’s clearly what California’s voters wanted when they passed Proposition 30 in November. The budget will give more generous increases to the school districts that have more education challenges, and it boosts funding for higher education. We can cheer that.

It also funds the next steps for implementing federal health care reform. That bodes well for efforts to make sure all Americans and all Californians are insured. Under ideal circumstances, of course, we’d be talking about single payer.

There are other, less cheerful things in our future.

There’s an across-the board 20 percent cut to In-home Health Supportive Services beginning in November. This comes from an odd “optimistic” assumption from the governor that the courts that kept him from making those cuts earlier will let him do it now.

Child care funding is flat, which would be tolerable if it weren’t for past cuts. It’s hard to find a better investment in our state than child care. Kids in good child-care programs do better when they get to school. Child care allows more people to work and attend job training. Restoring child-care funding is critical for the state.

Keeping CalWORKS benefits at half of what they used to be is similarly shortsighted, as are cuts to the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, reductions in Medi-Cal provider rates and funding changes for students in higher education.

While preaching austerity, Brown keeps pouring money into a prison system that needs more reform. Sentencing and release programs could be altered to reduce the need for overstuffing prisons without risk to Californians. Overcrowding continues, with one women’s prison in the Central Valley at 180 percent of capacity. This is not stewardship that inspires confidence.

Prison programs to help people beat drug addictions and find jobs when they come out are gone. We are missing a chance for long-term reductions based on rehabilitation. Instead we continue to shuffle bodies around.

Spending choices are not the only problem. The governor skipped some ways of boosting revenue. What about the rules surrounding Proposition 13? Local jurisdictions would benefit from closing loopholes that allow corporations to avoid reassessment when property changes ownership.

I also want discussion of an oil severance tax. Here in the Bay Area — in Richmond and San Bruno — we’ve seen and lived with major downsides of the energy industry. I think it’s time that the oil producers who continue to make big profits pay a tax for the oil that’s taken out of California.

You can see that the Governor’s “director’s cut” budget doesn’t deserve a little gold statue — even if it is the best picture (fiscally) we’ve seen in a few years. We’ll look for silver linings when the Legislature starts working on our playbook.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano represents the 13th District.

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam

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January 15, 2013

12

EDITOR’S NOTES The guy who runs the San Francisco Housing Authority is in pretty serious doo-doo: His agency has just been placed on the federal government’s “troubled” list, and he’s getting sued by his own lawyer, and he’s hiding from the press while tenants complain that they can’t get basic repairs.

Although Mayor Ed Lee has so far officially stuck by Henry Alvarez, he’s already backing off a bit, and it’s pretty likely Alvarez will be gone when his contract expires this summer. He may be gone even sooner than that; there’s a growing chorus of voices calling on the mayor to fire him.

So at some point we’ll get a new director, who will make a handsome salary (Alvarez gets $210,000 a year plus a car and seven weeks paid vacation) and live in a nice house and go into work every day to deal with problems that are pretty damn far from his or her life.

That’s always the case to some extent with the heads of agencies who deal with the poor, but it’s particularly dramatic when you talk about the Housing Authority. Public housing is never luxurious, but in San Francisco, it’s been riddled with problems for many years. And frankly, I’m much more concerned about the tenants than about Alvarez or his management style.

I get that the Housing Authority has financial problems. The federal government long ago abandoned any serious commitment to funding housing in American cities, and the authority only recently managed to pay off a multimillion-dollar judgment from a lawsuit filed by the families of a grandmother and five children killed in a fire on Housing Authority property.

Yet, tenant advocate continue to complain that it can be hard, even impossible to get a response from the agency. When critics complain, the agency goes after them: The Housing Rights Committee went after the Housing Authority over evictions, and wound up getting investigated by SFHA employees who wanted to gut their city funding. And while some say Alvarez is a hard-charging person who demands results (and thus pisses some people off), nobody has used the words open, accessible or compassionate to describe him.

I’ve got an idea for the next director (or for Alvarez, if he wants to stick around). Why not live in public housing?

Seriously: Why shouldn’t the person who controls the safety and welfare of tenants in more than 6,000 units spend a little time understanding what their lives are like? Why not spend, say, one night a week in one of those apartments?

In the old days, judges used to sentence slumlords to live in their own decrepit buildings, which seemed to work pretty well: Once the guy in charge has to deal with the rats and roaches and broken windows, he’s much more likely to expedite repairs.

But it wouldn’t have to be punitive — just a chance to get a first-hand look at how the agency policies are working on the ground. The city employee unions have had a lot of success asking members of the Board of Supervisors to do a union worker’s job for a day; the director of the San Francisco Housing Authority could certainly live like one of his tenants every now and then.

Think of it as a management tool: What better way to figure out whether his staff is doing the job than to look at the end product? Or figure it as a way to stop being an asshole and see what people who live on less than ten percent of his salary really think of his administration.

War of the waterfront

Andrew Lam

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January 8, 2013

40

tredmond@sfbg.com

There’s a blocky, unattractive building near the corner of Howard and Steuart streets, right off the Embarcadero, that’s used for the unappealing activity of parking cars. Nobody’s paid much attention to it for years, although weekend shoppers at the Ferry Building Farmers Market appreciate the fact that they can park their cars for just $6 on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

But now a developer has big plans for the 75 Howard Street site — and it’s about to become a critical front in a huge battle over the future of San Francisco’s waterfront.

Paramount Partners, a New York-based real-estate firm that also owns One Market Plaza, wants to tear down the eight-story garage and replace it with a 350-foot highrise tower that will hold 186 high-end condominiums. The new building would have ground-floor retail and restaurant space and a public plaza.

It would also exceed the current height limit in the area by 150 feet and could be the second luxury housing project along the Embarcadero that defies the city’s longtime policy of strictly limiting the height of buildings on the waterfront.

It comes at a time when the Golden State Warriors are seeking permission to build a sports arena on Piers 30 and 32, just a few hundred feet from 75 Howard.

Between the proposed 8 Washington condo project, the arena, and 75 Howard, the skyline and use of the central waterfront could change dramatically in the next few years. Add to that a $100 million makeover for Pier 70, the new Exploratorium building on Pier 15, and a new cruise ship terminal at Pier 27 — and that’s more development along the Bay than San Francisco has seen in decades.

And much of it is happening without a coherent overall plan.

There’s no city planning document that calls for radically upzoning the waterfront for luxury housing. There’s nothing that talks about large-scale sports facilities. These projects are driven by developers, not city planners — and when you put them all together, the cumulative impacts could be profound, and in some cases, alarming.

“There hasn’t been a comprehensive vision for the future of the waterfront,” Sup. David Chiu told me. “”I think we need to take a step back and look at what we really want to do.”

Or as Tom Radulovich, director of the advocacy group Livable City, put it, “We need to stop planning the waterfront one project at a time.”

Some of the first big development wars in San Francisco history involved tall buildings on the waterfront. After the Fontana Towers were built in 1965, walling off the end of the Van Ness corridor in a nasty replica of a Miami Beach hotel complex, residents of the northern part of the city began to rebel. A plan to put a 550-foot US Steel headquarters building on the waterfront galvanized the first anti-highrise campaigns, with dressmaker Alvin Duskin buying newspaper ads that warned, “Don’t let them bury your skyline under a wall of tombstones.”

Ultimately, the highrise revolt forced the city to downzone the waterfront area, where most buildings can’t exceed 60 or 80 feet. But repeatedly, developers have eyed this valuable turf and tried to get around the rules.

“It’s a generational battle,” former Sup. Aaron Peskin noted. “Every time the developers think another generation of San Franciscans has forgotten the past, they try to raise the height limit along the Embarcadero.”

The 8 Washington project was the latest attempt. Developer Simon Snellgrove wants to build 134 of the most expensive condominiums in San Francisco history on a slice of land owned in part by the Port of San Francisco, not far from the Ferry Building. The tallest of the structures would rise 136 feet, far above the 84-foot zoning limit for the site. Opponents argued that the city has no pressing need for ultra-luxury housing and that the proposal would create a “wall on the waterfront.”

Although the supervisors approved it on a 8-3 vote, foes gathered enough signatures to force a referendum, so the development can’t go forward until the voters have a chance to weigh in this coming November.

Meanwhile, the Paramount Group has filed plans for a much taller project at 75 Howard. It’s on the edge of downtown, but also along the Embarcadero south of Market, where many of the buildings are only a few stories high.

The project already faces opposition. “The serious concerns I had with 8 Washington are very similar with 75 Howard,” Chiu said. But the issues are much larger now that the Warriors have proposed an arena just across the street and a few blocks south.

“Because of the increase in traffic and other issues around the arena, I think 75 Howard has a higher bar to jump,” Sup. Jane Kim, who represents South of Market, told me.

Kim said she’s not opposed to the Warriors’ proposal and is still open to considering the highrise condos. But she, too, is concerned that all of this development is taking place without a coherent plan.

“It’s a good question to be asking,” she said. “We want some development along the waterfront, but the question is how much.”

Alex Clemens, who runs Barbary Coast Consulting, is representing the developer at 75 Howard. He argues that the current parking garage is neither environmentally appropriate nor the best use of space downtown.

“Paramount Group purchased the garage as part of a larger portfolio in 2007,” he told me by email. “Like any other downtown garage, it is very profitable — but Paramount believes an eight-story cube of parking facing the Embarcadero is not the best use of this incredible location.”

He added: “We believe removing eight above-ground layers of parked cars from the site, reducing traffic congestion, enlivening street life, and improving the pedestrian corridor are all benefits to the community that fit well with the city’s overall goals. (Of course, these are in addition to the myriad fees and tax revenues associated with the project.)”

But that, of course, assumes that the city wants, and needs, more luxury condominiums (see sidebar).

Among the biggest problems of this rush of waterfront development is the lack of public transit. The 75 Howard project is fairly close to the Embarcadero BART station, but when you take into account the Exploratorium, the arena, and Pier 70 — where a popular renovation project is slated to create new office, retail, and restaurant space — the potential for transit overload is serious.

The waterfront at this point is served primary by Muni’s F line — which, Radulovich points out, “is crowded, expensive, low-capacity, and not [Americans with Disabilities Act]-compliant.”

The T line brings in passengers from the southeast but, Radulovich said, “if you think we can serve all this new development with the existing transit, it’s not going to happen.”

Then there are the cars. The Embarcadero is practically a highway, and all the auto traffic makes it unsafe for bicycles. The Warriors arena will have to involve some parking (if nothing else, it will need a few hundred spaces for players, staff, and executives — and it’s highly unlikely people who buy million-dollar luxury boxes are going to take transit to the arena, so there will have to be parking for them, too. That’s hundreds of spaces and new cars — assuming not a single fan drives.

The 75 Howard project will eliminate parking spaces, but not vehicle traffic — there will still be close to 200 parking spaces.

And all of this is happening at the foot of the Bay Bridge, the constantly clogged artery to the East Bay. “Oh, and there’s a new community of 20,000 people planned right in the center of the bridge, on Treasure Island,” Peskin pointed out.

Is it possible to handle all of the people coming and going to the waterfront (particularly on days where there’s also a Giants game a few hundred yards south) entirely with mass transit? Maybe — “that’s the kind of problem we’d like to have to solve,” Radulovich said. Of course, the developers would have to kick in major resources to fund transit — “and,” he said, “we don’t even know what the bill would be, and we don’t have the political will to stick it to the developers.”

But a transit-only option for the waterfront is not going to happen — at the very least, thousands of Warriors fans are going to drive.

The overall problem here is that nobody has asked the hard questions: What do we want to do with San Francisco’s waterfront? The Port, which owns much of the land, is in a terrible bind — the City Charter defines the Port as an enterprise department, which has to pay for itself with revenue from its operations, which made sense when it was a working seaport.

But now the only assets are real estate — and developing that land, for good or for ill, seems the only way to address hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance and operating costs on the waterfront’s crumbling piers. And the City Planning Department, which oversees the land on the other side of the Embarcadero, is utterly driven by the desires of developers, who routinely get exemptions from the existing zoning. “There is no rule of law in the planning environment we live in,” Radulovich said. So the result is a series of projects, each considered on its own, that together threaten to turn this priceless civic asset into a wall of concrete.

Hacking the US debt

Andrew Lam

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January 8, 2013

2

OPINION The so-called Fiscal Cliff has been averted. But the country actually has a much bigger issue — the debt ceiling.

For the uninitiated, the debt ceiling is exactly what it sounds like, an artificial limit imposed by Congress the keep the president from borrowing money. The ceiling was originally passed back in 1917 to prevent the government from excess spending during the First World War. Besides its constitutionality being questionable, it’s also useless and dangerous.

The far right goes bananas about the national debt, and points to the ceiling as a way to keep it from growing. But the debt growth in question is simply to pay back bills on products and services that Congress already used. So to impose a ceiling now is not to cut growth, but to default on US creditors.

The Republicans are refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless they get huge cuts in social programs — and if current spending hits the ceiling, the United States would be unable to pay its bills.

But there’s a solution, a way President Obama could get around the GOP and its threats altogether. It’s a unorthodox — but legal. Call it debt hacking.

Obama could simply direct the Treasury to print a series of platinum coins in denominations of at least $1 trillion. It’s not perfect, and it’s not without potential cost — but compared to defaulting on debt or cutting Social Security and Medicare, it’s not a bad option.

The president is legally barred from asking the US Mint to print more money — gold coins or paper bills — without the permission of Congress. But under an obscure 1996 law, there’s an exception for platinum.

So upon realizing that the GOP leaders in Congress will push the republic into default, President Obama could direct the Mint to produce, say, three coins — each with the face value of $1 trillion. The coins would be deposited into the general treasury account at the Federal Reserve. This would then be converted into credit to buy back and retire enough debt to give Obama, and the country, some breathing space.

In fact, Obama could do something even bolder and create more coins, to go beyond breathing space and pay off almost all the national debt except for that held by Social Security. But that sort of action — the government just printing new money — can, many economists warn, create hyperinflation.

Still, the Federal Reserve magically produced about $30 trillion to help bail out banks not long ago, and there was little discernible inflation. The government wouldn’t actually be creating new money — it would simply be replacing debt that the country pays interest on with paper (or digital accounting) that it doesn’t. And right now, inflation is the least of our national worries; a little inflation might even help homeowners and those with heavy credit-card debt pay off what they owe with cheaper money in the future.

Of course, no government can do this on a regular basis. The US Dollar could lose its reserve status if investors start to fear the potential of future platinum coins appearing. But what are the alternatives? US dollars and US debt are, and will remain, trusted investments. China may not purchase as many bonds in the future, but the money we save on interest payments could be well worth it.

It’s a crazy idea, but these are crazy times — and if the GOP continues to threaten to destroy the economy, Obama might want to consider something bold.

Johnny Venom is an economist and commodities trader.

Disappearing poles

Andrew Lam

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January 8, 2013

5

steve@sfbg.com

Political dynamics on the Board of Supervisors moved into uncertain new territory this week with the inauguration of two new members -– London Breed and Norman Yee –- who break the mold in representing districts that have long been predictable embodiments of opposite ideological poles.

Breed and Yee are both native San Franciscans with deep roots in their respective districts, which they tapped to win hotly contested races against challengers who seemed more closely aligned with the progressive politics of Dist. 5 and the fiscally conservative bent of Dist. 7. Both tell the Guardian that they represent a new approach to politics that is less about ideology and more about compromise and representing the varied concerns of their diverse constituencies.

“I don’t see everything as a compromise, but I want to be sure we find compromises where we can and don’t let personalities get in the way,” said Yee, whose background working in education and facilitating deals as a school board member belies District 7’s history of being represented by firebrand opponents of the progressive movement.

Some of the strongest champions of the pro-tenant, anti-corporate progressive agenda have come from the Haight and Dist. 5, a role that Breed has no intention of playing. “When you talk about the progressives of San Francisco, I don’t know that I fit in that category,” Breed told us. “I’m a consensus builder. I want to get along with people to get what I want.”

Yet what Breed says she wants are housing policies that protect renters and prevent the exodus of African-Americans, and development standards that preserve the traditional character of neighborhoods against corporate homogenization. “I don’t see the difference between my causes and progressive causes,” she said, claiming a strong independence from some of the monied interests that supported her campaign.

We spoke a few days before the Jan. 8 vote for board president (which was scheduled after Guardian press time, and which you can read about at the SFBG.com Politics blog). Neither Yee nor Breed would tip their hands about who they planned to support -– the first potential indication of their willingness to buck their districts’ ideological leanings.

Breed had raised some progressive eyebrows by telling the Guardian and others that she admired moderate Sup. Scott Wiener and would support him for president, but she had backtracked on that by the time we spoke on Jan. 5, telling us, “I’m going into this with an open mind.

“I’m waiting on my colleagues to decide who has the most votes,” Breed said, ing a candid take on valuing compromise over conflict. “I really would like to see us walk into this all together.”

Yee had similar comments. “They’re all competent people and can be leaders, it just depends on where they want to lead us,” he said. “I value people who can work with anyone and see themselves as facilitators more than as dictators.”

Both Breed and Yee come from humble roots that they say give them a good understanding of the needs of the city’s have-nots. Breed was raised in the public housing projects of the Western Addition, an experience that makes her want to solve the current dysfunction in the San Francisco Housing Authority.

“I can’t tell you what needs to be done, but I can tell you something is wrong,” Breed told us. “My goal is to get to the bottom of it and be extremely aggressive about it.”

Yee grew up in Chinatown, his father an immigrant who worked as a janitor, his mother a garment worker. They later lived in the Sunset and the Richmond, and Yee moved into his district’s Westwood Park neighborhood 26 years ago.

When Yee was eight years old, the family saved enough money to open a grocery store at 15th and Noe, and he said that he basically ran the store in his teen years while his father continued working another job.

That was where Yee developed his deep appreciation for the role that small, neighborhood-serving businesses play in San Francisco. In an era before credit cards, he would offer credit lines to local customers struggling to make ends meet; that experience showed him how stores like his family’s were essential parts of the city’s social and economic fabric.

“That’s why I value small businesses,” Yee said, calling that his top focus as a supervisor. “They’re going to have a bigger voice now.”

Yee draws a clear distinction between the interests of small business and that of the larger corporations that dominate the powerful San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Asked where he might have placed on the Chamber’s recent scorecard ranking supervisors’ votes — where Yee’s predecessor, Sean Elsbernd, got the highest marks — Yee said, “Probably not on their A list. They are just one entity in San Francisco and I’m not going to be judged just by them.”

At 63 years old, Yee is by far the oldest member of the youngest Board of Supervisors in recent memory, while Breed, at 38, is closer to the current average. Yee hopes his age and experience will help him forge compromises among all the supervisors.

“People draw their lines, but I try to listen to people and see where their lines are,” Yee said. “It’s a balancing act, but at the same time, there’s things I’ve been working on all my life, like education and safety net issues, and this district does care about those things. At the same time, they care about their homes. Are these issues in conflict? I don’t think they have to be.”

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam

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January 8, 2013

12

tredmond@sfbg.com

EDITOR’S NOTES Everybody’s talking about the new data on the price of housing in San Francisco, which is in part because everybody talks about the price of housing in San Francisco anyway and in part because the figures are just so alarming. The figures show that the median rent in San Francisco is $3,100 a month — and while it’s hard to know exactly what that means, since some three-bedroom and larger units are in the mix, most San Francisco rentals are smaller, and I’m hearing tell of people paying more than $2,000 for a studio.

Insane. This hurts everyone, particularly small businesses. The much-reviled payroll tax doesn’t really affect the bottom lines of most businesses, but the cost of housing absolutely does, since it drives up the cost of employing people. High rents are way worse for business than high taxes. I don’t get why all the downtown types refuse to see that.

At any rate, I was listening to KQED’s Forum this morning, and the guests, including an economist from Trulia, the real-estate analysis outfit, kept talking about the “healthy” housing market. Again: Insane. This housing market is about as unhealthy as any capitalist market anywhere in the country. It’s increasing the wealth gap, impoverishing thousands, forcing vast amounts of displacement and making the city less diverse. In what economic universe is that “healthy?”

When I write about this sort of stuff, my beloved trolls all say that’s just how markets work and that any form of regulation (say, rent controls on vacant apartments) just makes things worse. (Not true — see Berkeley in the 1980s.) But it all raises a fun question, and gives me a chance to make a very immodest proposal that is no more outrageous than the existing situation for people who want to live in San Francisco.

Maybe we should take housing in this city out of the private market entirely, regulate it like a public utility — and assign it by seniority.

Remember the college housing lottery? First year, you got stuck with a small dorm room, just like everyone else. You lived with it, and with the roommates they assigned you; rich student, poor student, we all lived in the same place under the same conditions.

Sophomores had a little more choice, and by senior year you could pick the best housing on campus. Nobody complained about unfairness; that’s just how the deal worked.

So imagine if everyone who first arrives in San Francisco (or graduates here and enters the job market) had to live in a small SRO or mini-studio. Twitter executive, nonprofit worker, unemployed person — all of us start out with the same housing conditions.

After you’ve stuck around a while, demonstrating a commitment to the community, you move up — say, after five years you get a one-bedroom apartment, after ten you get a flat, and after 20 years you get a house of your own. People who start families would get more space, but on the same type of schedule. Everyone pays the same monthly rent for the same size place, and eventually, after time, vests into home equity.

What should cities encourage? Stability, community involvement, respect for elders … all of those things fit into this plan. People who might otherwise never meet each other would be thrown into living in the same places; high-paid professionals would learn what life was like for working stiffs (and vice versa).

It’s an eminently fair way of allocating a scarce resource. Anyone have a better idea?

Lamebows 2013

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January 2, 2013

0

marke@sfbg.com

POODLES ON PARADE Marriage, the military, nudity bans, Bravo TV: queople, why must we torture ourselves! It’s true that we are everywhere, lurking even in the aeries of stupid-headedness. But queen, please, put down that can of mentally challenged and back slowly away in your new cha-cha heels. Here I am once again to call my people out for their foibles of faggotry with the annual Lamebow Awards. Even in a banner year for LGBT wins, we still clutched a Gucci full of dumb.

The cliches write themselves: My Dearest Scott Wiener, I write this not as someone who disagrees profoundly with your “moderate” politics or your collection of Banana Republic v-neck sweaters. I write this because, this year, a supervisor named Wiener, representing the Castro, got so obsessed with a few naked guys that he rammed through a nudity ban (oh, and a bunch of other awful stuff, too) that made national news. I have to talk to my relatives back East about all this. My great-aunt-in-law almost choked to death on her turkey from laughter. Please stop.

Not helping: Mountain-out-of-molehill blogger Michael Petrelis in turn became obsessed with Wiener’s penis, attempting to snap a pic of the Supes’ member at a City Hall urinal. Not making this up. Nor this: it took too long for Petrelis’ camera from the ’90s to warm up, so he only managed a shot of Wiener brushing his teeth, post-pee. Petrelis is being sued by Wiener.

Seriously not helping though: In August, 28-year-old Floyd Corkins II, a former LGBT center volunteer, attempted to storm the Washington, DC headquarters of the Family Research Council (recently and correctly categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center), shooting a security guard.

You just helped, actually: We never knew we should be boycotting Sodastream products because they are manufactured in illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. But thanks to a widely viewed YouTube video — in which it appears a peaceful Code Pink protest inside Sodastream-carrying Cliff’s Variety in the Castro is violently broken up by hysterically screaming Cliff’s employees — we know! Troll is successful.

The fact is, you’re late: “The fact is, I’m gay,” Anderson Cooper wrote to blogger Andrew Sullivan by way of coming out. Anderson Cooper is the Clay Aiken of our generation.

The fact is you’re veeery late: As her 50th birthday approached, Kristy McNichol came out. “She hopes that coming out can help kids who need support,” said her publicist. There are no kids who know who Kristy McNichol is.

And you’re just trapped in a closet full of spray-on hair forever now: Many, many of John Travolta‘s male masseurs “opened up” about his happy endings. His response? A horrifying Christmas album reunion with Olivia Newton John full of the most awkward sexual metaphors ever. Greased lightning!

Freedom to fly, to fail: Director Lena Wachowski came out beautifully, vocally, and powerfully as a transgender person with deep thoughts about the nature of sexual identity. Too bad Cloud Atlas had me rolling my eyes to the high heavens.

Hide your buns, hide your wings: Reviving his meme career somewhat, Antoine Dodson said she was gonna eat Chik-fil-A anyway. Well-played.

I’m sorry: Castigating Log Cabin Republicans is easier than finding Anderson Cooper on Grindr, but watching them bend over backwards to justify supporting the Tea Party party when even our president had “evolved” on gay marriage was a real hoot. Especially because they had to say “fiscal” so many times.

All of us: While we were all arguing over gay shit (as usual), a young musical genius named Frank Ocean quietly erased the goalposts and went public with his generation’s sublime, amorphous “meh” about sexual labels. Let’s catch up.

More school security? Maybe not.

Andrew Lam

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January 2, 2013

9

OPINION I pretty much live in schools. Almost every morning, I get my three-year-old ready for pre-school, my seven-year-old ready for first grade, and myself ready for high school, where I teach English. Almost everyday, I’m in at least three schools. But never before had I thought so thoroughly about school security until Monday, Dec. 17, when I drove my daughters, and then myself, to school for the first time after the shootings in Newtown.

My first stop is my daughter’s public elementary school in San Francisco. Because I often have an 8am class and am pressed for time, I almost never walk her into school. I pull up along a curb, where fifth graders clad in fluorescent vests open the back door of my car to escort my daughter out. From there, she walks alone into a side door and then out onto an outdoor basketball court, where the whole school gathers every morning. Her teacher then takes my daughter to her classroom, which is, incidentally, closest to the front door to the school, which is always open during the day. A potential shooter would have no problem entering, and with enough ammunition and a deadly enough gun, he could kill at will.

I asked for the first time that day: would it be better to close off the campus?

The next stop is my three-year-old daughter’s pre-school. There, I park my car, get her out, and walk to the front entrance, where an administrative assistant buzzes me in upon recognition. Because it’s busy in the mornings, I often hold the door for other parents trying to get in. Of course, it would be very easy for a killer to force his way in behind one of us, or he could simply shoot the glass if he was determined enough.

Again, the questions arise: should the director have a gun in her office? Should we put up metal doors? Should the school hire a security guard monitoring cameras before letting parents and children into the school?

Finally, I arrive at my high school, which is a rather affluent independent school. I park on the street and walk right in. Often the receptionist doesn’t even notice me. We have a completely open campus, with many doors into which someone could enter with no resistance whatsoever. We have security guards, but they are unarmed and more concerned with directing traffic around the school than with a potential intruder. All of our students have off-campus privileges. Should we keep students on campus? Should we bar all the doors? Place an armed security guard at every entry point into the school?

The answer I’ve come to is no.

The question of school security gets at the very nature of what schools are. Schools both are and are not of the world. On the one hand, schools are a place that prepares our youth for the world. They’re also a place where young people can learn to take risks, where they can make mistakes before they go out into the “real” world. On the other hand, however, schools reflect our neighborhoods, our counties, our cities, our states, our country, and our world.

If we bar our schools off from the outside world, the message that we’re sending to our children is that the world is a place to be feared, a place where calculus won’t do you any good — but where a gun will. To “secure” our schools is to admit our collective failure at making the outside world safe. It is to admit that one of the fundamental values of any society, and in particular our American society—trust—has been broken.

I would hope instead that we work now to change the world enough to communicate to our children that the world is, in fact, a place that is not just safe but that they are invited into, a place where they can thrive and find happiness rather than a place to fear and hide from. Our responsibility is not to gate schools off from the world but to take the need for gates down altogether.

Scott Laughlin teaches English at University High School.

White men behaving (very) badly

Andrew Lam

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January 2, 2013

69

Could it be — the worst year ever?

I keep asking. And every time the Offies come around, I find myself boggled yet again. Our awards for the very worst — the dumbest, the most tasteless, the most truly offensive acts of the year past — keep sinking lower and lower.

But what can we do? There are still Republicans, and this year a lot of them ran for high office, and every single one made a fool of himself. There are still politicians who think you can run for San Francisco supervisor even if you live in Walnut Creek, and elected leaders who find the courage deep in themselves to prevent a bunch of old men from walking around with their sagging asses and limp dicks out.

There are still entertainers who punch psychics, and gun nuts who blame mass murder on TV sex, and … well, a whole lot of people who have made this a banner year for the Offies.

SUPPORT OUR BRAVE, HEROIC TROOPS! (EXCEPT THE MEN WHO FUCK MEN)

The audience at a Republican presidential primary debate booed a gay solider who called in from Iraq with a question about don’t ask, don’t tell.

FROM A GUY WHO HAD TO BUY OXYCONTINS AND VIAGRA ON THE STREET, THIS SORT OF THING IS AN OBVIOUS CONCERN

Rush Limbaugh attacked law student Sandra Fluke, calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” because she testified that health-care plans should cover contraceptives.

THERE ARE MEN SO BRILLIANT THAT WE STAND IN AWE OF THEIR INTELLECT

Mitt Romney said he really liked Michigan because the trees were all the right height.

GIVING NEW MEANING TO THE 1 PERCENT

Herman Cain proclaimed that for every woman who claimed he sexually harassed her, there were a thousand others who didn’t.

IF WE WANTED A DRESS CODE ON AIRLINES, WE’D START WITH THOSE DREARY PILOT UNIFORMS

An American Airlines pilot kicked a woman off a flight for wearing a shirt that said “if I wanted the government in my womb I’d fuck a senator.”

PROBLEM IS, BUSH MADE THAT ONE A CABINET-LEVEL POSITION

Rick Perry proclaimed in a debate that he was going to do away with three agencies of the federal government, but after listing Commerce and Education, he couldn’t remember what the third one was, identifying it only as “oops.”

FOR SOMEONE WHOSE NAME MEANS ASS-CUM JUICE, THAT’S A REALLY PRETTY PICTURE

Rick Santorum said that he’d listened to John F. Kennedy’s speech on the separation of church and state and it made him want to throw up.

LOOK! UP AT THE RAMPARTS! THE MAN WITH THE HAIR!

Donald Trump, mistakenly believing Romney won the popular vote but lost the election, called the election “a sham and travesty” and called for “revolution.”

BUT HE COULD HELP THEM OUT WITH A FEW BINDERS FULL OF WOMEN

Romney insulted the British by saying the nation didn’t appear ready to host the Olympics.

FINE, JUST TAKE RICK PERRY WITH YOU

More than 50 thousand people signed a White House petition asking for permission for Texas to secede.

GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, ATHEISM AND OVERSTIMULATED GLANDS DO. HAPPY FRIDAY, SHOOTERS!

On the same day that a gunman opened fire at a showing of the Dark Knight movie in Colorado, the National Rifle Association’s magazine sent out a tweet that read: “Good morning, shooters! Happy Friday.”

A Congressman from Texas, Louie Gohmert, argued that the Dark Knight shootings happened because of “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs.”

Mike Huckabee blamed the massacre in Newtown, CT on atheism. “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” Huckabee said on Fox News. “Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

Timothy Bordnow at Tea Party nation said the shooting was caused by too much sexual stimulation in the media . “There is a reason why young people commit these sorts of crimes, and sex plays no small part. Their passions are eternally inflamed, and they wander the Earth with no outlet for their overstimulated glands.”

Megan McArdle, the Daily Beast writer, urged the victims of mass shootings to gang-rush the shooter so he wouldn’t kill as many people.

The head of the National Rifle Association said the only way to stop mass murders of school children is to post armed guards in every school.

WOW — THE DISTRICT 8 SUPERVISOR HAS BEEN OVERWHELMED BY A COUPLE OF OLD MEN’S FLACCID DICKS

Sup. Scott Wiener promoted a ban on public nudity in San Francisco.

WHEN YOU’RE A MAJOR LOSER, EVEN MONEY CAN’T BUY YOU LOVE

Michael Breyer, who has never been elected to anything, spent roughly $1 million trying to win a state Assembly seat as the candidate of “traditional San Francisco values,” and lost badly.

AND THESE PEOPLE ARE COOPERATING WITH HOMELAND SECURITY?

Confetti thrown in the Giants parade turned out to be lightly shredded internal police documents that included home addresses and social security numbers of officers.

GUESS IT’S OKAY TO PERJURE YOURSELF IF YOU’RE THE MAYOR

Mayor Ed Lee testified under oath that he’d never discussed the Ross Mirkarimi case with members of the board of Supervisors, although friends of Sup. Christina Olague said she’d been open about her talks with the mayor on the topic.

NOW, WHICH ONES ARE THE IRON MONSTERS OF DEATH?

A San Francisco bicyclist who was allegedly trying to beat a speed record crashed into and killed a 71-year-old man in the Castro.

UNFORTUNATELY, THERE’S NO MALPRACTICE STATUTE GOVERNING THAT AUGUST PROFESSION

Political consultant Enrique Pearce oversaw perhaps the worst district election campaign in history, helping Olague become the first incumbent ever to lose in ranked-choice voting in SF.

SOMEHOW, REPRESENTING WALNUT CREEK AT CITY HALL DIDN’T SEEM LIKE SUCH A GOOD IDEA

Union official Leon Chow dropped his challenge to Sup. John Avalos when the SF Appeal revealed that he didn’t live in District 11, or even in San Francisco.

WHEN MEN ARE JUST TOTAL DICKS: THE GOP REDEFINES RAPE

1. Divine providence rape (Rick Santorum): “The right approach is to accept this horribly created .. gift of life, accept what God is giving to you.”

2. Honest Rape (Ron Paul): “If it was an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room.”

3. Forcible Rape (Paul Ryan): Federal law should prevent abortion except in the case of “forcible rape.”

4. Emergency Rape (Linda McMahon): “It was really an issue about a Catholic Church being forced to issue those pills if a person came in with an emergency rape.”

5. Legitimate Rape: (Todd Akin): “If it was a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

CALL IT BIEBER RAGE; IT’S DANGEROUS SHIT

After a Justin Bieber concert, Lindsay Lohan punched a psychic in the face at a New York nightclub, then threw her personal assistant out of the car.

YEP, AND IT DOESN’T LOOK ANY BETTER THE SECOND TIME

Romney’s campaign manager said that his candidate would change his right-wing positions for the fall campaign: “It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.”

AND IF HE GOES WITH THEM, IT WILL ALL BE WORTH WHILE

Newt Gingrich proposed sending 13,000 Americans to the Moon and creating a new state there.

AND WE ALL WONDER WHY THE MEDIA IS DOING SO SMASHINGLY WELL THESE DAYS

After Gabby Douglas became the first black woman to win the Olympic gold medal in all-around gymnastics, the news media reported on problems with her hair.

AND YOUR VIEW OF THE WORLD IS OVER, OVER, OVER, OVER

Justice Antonin Scalia, in defending his argument that sodomy is legally equivalent to murder, told law students at Princeton that the Constitution is not a living document, it’s “dead, dead, dead, dead.”

MAKES YOU WONDER ABOUT THE POOR SOUL WHO CAME IN AT 99

Kim Kardashian fell 90 places, to 98, on AskMen Magazine’s list of the worlds 100 most desirable women.

SADLY, “GOTTA CATCH ‘EM ALL” DOESN’T MAKE SUCH A GREAT CAMPAIGN SLOGAN

Herman Cain said his life’s philosophy came from a Pokemon song.

WE’RE GLAD THAT HIS FAITH HAS GIVEN HIM SUCH AN UPLIFTING ATTITUDE

Romney said he’s “not concerned about the very poor.”

HE WAS PROBABLY SHITFACED, TOO, BUT SINCE HE DOESN’T DRINK HE CAN’T REMEMBER THAT EITHER

Romney said he didn’t remember beating up a gay student at his prep school and cutting off his long hair.

IT’S A GOOD THING MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL ISN’T LOOKING FOR ANOTHER JOHN MADDEN

A full 78 percent of Americans thought Ryan Seacrest was doing a good job broadcasting from the Olympics, although most of them couldn’t figure out what he was actually doing.

HE ALSO TOLD US THAT TAX CUTS AND DEREGULATION WOULD IMPROVE THE ECONOMY, SO HE’S GOT A WINNING RECORD HERE

Karl Rove on election night kept insisting the Romney still had a chance to win.

TALK ABOUT A BLOWN COVER

David Petraus resigned as CIA director after an affair with a woman who was threatening another woman who might have had a thing for him.

TOO BAD — HE MIGHT HAVE HAD TO SEEK ASYLUM IN THE NEW REPUBLIC OF TEXAS

A petition to allow every American to punch Grover Norquist in the dick was removed from the White House website.

WE’RE WITH THE GOVERNMENT OF BELIZE; THIS MAN IS “BONKERS”

One-time software mogul John McAfee fled Belize claiming the cops would persecute him after he was sought for questioning in the shooting death of his neighbor — using a body double, faking a heart attack, pretending he was crazy, and winding up in Miami.

IT SUCKS TO BE STINKING RICH AND OWN FOUR HOUSES AND HAVE TO LIVE WITH REJECTION

Ann Romney was deeply depressed that her husband didn’t win the election, telling friends she though it was their fate to move into the White House.

AND WHEN ASKED IF SOMEONE THAT MORONIC COULD ACTUALLY RUN FOR PRESIDENT, HE SAID “I’M A REPUBLICAN, MAN”

Marco Rubio, when asked about the age of the Earth, said “I’m not a scientist, man.”

EASY — THE ONES WHO ARE GETTING PAID ARE THE ONES PRETENDING TO BE INTERESTED IN NASTY OLD FRENCHMEN

After Dominique Strauss-Kahn was held overnight in Lille to be questioned about possible connections between a prostitution ring and orgies he attended in Paris and Washington, his lawyer said: “I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other woman.”

DUDE — THAT’S THE TERRITORY OF SERIOUS LOSERS

Vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan lied about his time in the marathon.

GO AHEAD, CLINT — MAKE OUR DAY

Surprise guest speaker Clint Eastwood addressed GOP convention delegates for 12 minutes, during which he carried on an imagined dialogue with an empty chair he identified as President Obama.

AND YES, HE DID GET A FAIR AMOUNT OF THE STUPIDITY VOTE

Santorum told a gathering of conservatives in Washington, “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”

The next board president

Andrew Lam

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January 2, 2013

9

EDITORIAL The president of the Board of Supervisors does more than bang the gavel at meetings, tell people to put their clothes back on, and run for higher office. It’s a powerful position largely because the president makes appointments — to the Planning Commission, the Police Commission — and unilaterally decides who serves on which board committees.

Two years ago, Sup. David Chiu, who won the top post in 2009 with progressive support, wanted re-election, and the left wasn’t siding with him anymore. So he cut a deal with the conservative members, appointing the right-wing of the board to plum committee posts — and making life harder for progressives who wanted to pass Legislation or prevent bad developments from happening.

He clearly likes the job and would love to hold it for a third term. But that won’t be easy — Sup. Scott Wiener, who is to the right of Chiu on many issues, is also interested, as is Sup. Jane Kim, who has always been close to Chiu, and Sup. David Campos, who is one of the leading progressives. None of the candidates can count to six right now, so somebody’s going to have to back down or make a deal.

And before that happens, the candidates ought to tell us something about what they plan to do.

Chiu’s 2011 committee appointments were a bit of a shocker, although, in retrospect, the horse trading shouldn’t have surprised anyone. In fact, after he made his decisions, and put Carmen Chu, one of the most conservative supervisors, in charge of the Budget and Finance Committee and put the conservative Scott Wiener and the moderate Malia Cohen on Land Use and Economic Development, and put conservative Sean Elsbernd in charge of two committees, he told us that he felt he had no choice. If the progressives had voted for him, he wouldn’t have had to reward the conservatives.

This time around, with two new supervisors taking office (a more centrist Norman Yee replacing Elsbernd and a more moderate London Breed replacing Christina Olague) everything is up in the air. The progressives still have a solid three votes, and can sometimes count on Jane Kim and Chiu. That’s not enough to elect a president, but it’s coming pretty close.

Based on experience, skills, and temperament, our first choice for board president is Campos, who would be fair to everyone, approachable, and a voice for open government and community participation. But if Campos can’t get six votes, he and his progressive colleagues should ask anyone who want their support to be open about what he or she plans to do.

Who will be on the budget committee? Rules? Land Use? Where will he or she look for candidates for commissions? We know it would look unsightly if, say, Chiu named in advance his preferences for key committees — and then those people voted for him. But the reality is, those discussions are happening anyway, those deals being cut — and it’s happening behind closed doors, where the public (and the other supervisors) can’t watch.

Let’s bring all of the discussions into the sunshine, and have an open debate about the next board president.

Putting transit first

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December 26, 2012

268

By Stuart Cohen, Leah Shahum, Rob Boden, and Elizabeth Stampe

OPINION Every day, San Franciscans pay the price of an underfunded transportation system. We have all experienced painfully overcrowded bus rides … or, worse yet, the bus that never shows up. Now, Muni is reducing service during Christmas week, as it is faced with a $7 million deficit this fiscal year.

Today, we are finally facing up to the reality that our declining transportation system hurts us all. It hurts our economy and it hurts people all along the economic spectrum. San Francisco is a world-class city in many ways, but we have a long way to go to have a world-class transportation system.

San Franciscans want better transit options: reliable, fast, comfortable buses, and safe and pleasant streets for walking and biking. San Franciscans support the city’s official transit-first policy, but lacking political will, the city hasn’t delivered on it.

By failing to make the tough decisions to fund our transit system, our leaders have put the burden on those who depend on affordable transportation options most. Transportation is one of the top expenses for people living in the Bay Area, after housing, and an exponentially greater burden for those with lower incomes.

Who will be hurt most by Muni’s skeletal service this holiday week? Working families.

That is why our organizations are proud to have joined together recently to support a proposal to update the Transit-Impact Development Fee (TIDF), which would have ensured that major developments pay their fair share into the city’s transit system. This would have included large nonprofits like Kaiser and the Exploratorium, when they build major new developments that generate thousands of new trips. The fee, probably about 1 percent of costs, would have paralleled the existing development fees for water, sewer, parks, and even art, that nonprofits already pay. It would not have included small nonprofits, and of course most nonprofits never build developments at all.

It would have helped visitors to large institutions have more dependable transit to get there, and helped the whole transportation system work better for everyone.

But it didn’t pass, and last week’s opinion piece (“The Muni vs. housing clash,” 12/18/12) mischaracterized the issue, suggesting a trade-off between basic services and transportation. But good, reliable, safe transportation is a basic service. Just like housing and health care, it’s something everyone should have access to, and something our city has declared a priority with its transit-first policy.

Unsafe streets are inequitable streets; low-income people and people of color are more likely to be hit by cars while walking. Underfunded transit is inequitable; low-income people have fewer options aside from walking or taking the bus, and the stakes are higher when the bus is late or doesn’t arrive.

Funding transit is a core progressive value. Great public transit — and being able to get around the city under your own power, by walking and bicycling — are great equalizers in a city like ours.

We should be investing more and expecting more from our transit system. Our organizations are proud to be doing just that. It’s time to help San Francisco finally live up to its transit-first policy — because that means putting people first.

Stuart Cohen works with TransForm, Leah Shahum with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, Rob Boden with the San Francisco Transit Riders Union, and Elizabeth Stampe with Walk San Francisco.

More recycling fallout

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December 26, 2012

84

The unintended consequences of closing the Haight Ashbury’s only recycling center are about to ripple through small businesses in the neighborhood. As the recycling center’s final days loom, merchants are gearing up to face new fees — as much as $100 a day.

But they may get a reprieve sooner than they think.

State law requires stores that sell beverages in cans and bottles to take them back for recycling — unless there’s a functioning recycling center within a half-mile radius.

With the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council recycling center gone, Whole Foods supermarket, the largest purveyor of beverages on Haight Street, will be faced with a decision — provide bottle and can buy-back services, or pay a $100 a day fee instead. If Whole Foods decides to pay the fee and not provide recycling in the area, small businesses in the Haight will be forced to make the same choice — only they won’t be able to afford the $36,500 a year fee.

San Francisco’s Department of the Environment doesn’t enforce those fees, but does provide oversight on recycling in San Francisco. Guillermo Rodriguez, spokesperson for the department, said that his office is in the planning stages of creating a mobile recycling center, which could roll out in early 2013.

“Certainly it’s not in our interest to have those businesses pack up and move out,” Rodriguez said. The mobile recycling center gives the neighborhood a new option.

If a recycling center serves the Haight neighborhood, the small businesses in the area could avoid paying the steep fees, and from having to go through the trouble of seeking exemption.

“Its similar to food trucks,” Rodriguez said. “After they finish for the day, they leave. But they’d set up at a usual time in a usual spot.”

San Francisco Supervisor Christina Olague, whose district includes the Haight Ashbury, said she was working on a way for HANC to turn into a mobile recycling center. Though she said that those talks had since stalled, Rodriguez said that if HANC wanted to be a partner in the new mobile center, the Department of the Environment would be open to it.

Why does the state of California expect small businesses to provide a can and bottle buy-back program on site, or face fees in the first place?

Rodriguez explained that the laws weren’t necessarily made with San Francisco in mind.

“When the rules were drafted, San Francisco was the exception, as we are for a lot of things,” Rodriguez told us. “The law was written for the suburbs, where small businesses generally have parking lots where recycling can easily be handled.”

The San Francisco Recreation and Parks department has long pushed for the Haight recycling center’s ouster. Sarah Ballard, spokesperson for the department, said the recycling fees and regulations that will hit local businesses aren’t Rec-Park’s problem.

“HANC has been on a month to month lease for over a decade,” she said. “The Parks Department have never sought to stop them from seeking non-park property to continue to run their business.”

Basically, HANC can operate wherever it wants to — just not in Golden Gate Park. And there aren’t a whole lot of other low-cost open spaces where the center can set up shop.

Small businesses we’ve talked to say they don’t have the space, staff, or ability to handle buying back recyclables. Fred Kazzouh, owner of “Fred’s New Lite Supermarket” on Haight and Masonic streets, doubted he’d get a reprieve from the fee.

“I mean if we all apply for an exemption, there’ll be half a mile radius without a recycling center,” Kazzouh said. “I saw recycling centers on Safeway on Webster (street) and I don’t see why Whole Foods can’t do it.”

Kazzouh’s store has been in the Haight neighborhood since 1995. The Haight has long been known as a place that draws alternative people, he said. And that’s the way he likes it.

“I don’t like to be in the clean neighborhood with the white picket fence and suits and ties,” Kazzouh said. “That’s not a real life. Its a very fake life.”

Even some of the ritzier stores along Haight St. aren’t bothered by the homeless population there. Firras Zawaideh, owner of Liquid Experience on Haight, sells high end (expensive) alcohol that few homeless people can afford.

He said he thinks only the transplants and new folks to San Francisco are bothered by them.

“I’m a native San Franciscan, from the Sunset [district],” Zawaideh said. “We’re the ones who don’t hate the homeless. Its all the transplants from New York and the midwest who complain about it.”

Zawaideh already handles bottle and can buy-back through his store, though he said that no one has ever taken advantage of it. But with HANC closing, he dreads the idea of people bringing cans and bottles en masse to his store.

“Say on a busy Friday night someone comes in with a cart full of recyclables,” he said. “Then what? I have to help them out too?”

The mobile recycling center would exempt Zawaideh of that responsibility. But if neighbors of HANC complained about the homeless population, would the same customers cause a problem for the mobile center as well?

Rodriguez said he wouldn’t speculate on if the homeless population that now uses the Haight recycling center would follow the food trucks around as well.

“I think we’ll have to take it as it comes,” Rodriguez said. Though he wanted this to be clear: “Not everyone that participates, frankly, is a homeless person.”

Fred Kazzouh was dubious that the homeless population would go away with HANC’s closure. “If HANC goes away, the homeless won’t go with them,” Kazzouh said. “The homeless will just have less people fighting for them.”

Reports from the end of the world

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December 26, 2012

6

TULUM, MEXICO — Sometimes you need to just listen to the universe and the many ways she conspires to set your path. That seems particularly true while visiting the Yucatan to cover the end of the Mayan calendar, the galactic alignment, and the winter solstice. Things at the grand festival that was supposed to be happening did not go according to plan — to say the least.

I was supposed to be Chichen Itza, attending the Synthesis 2012 Festival and perhaps the Ascendance party. But several factors lined up to keep us in Tulum, miles away from the Mayan pyramid where the much-awaited festivities were to take place.

For one thing, there was my sweetie’s bout with bad ceviche. But there was also the general disorganization of an event that was supposed to bring thousands of people, many of them Americans, to a part of the world not exactly set up for mass tourism.

The shuttle service from Tulum to the festival essentially fell apart. Our hotel room at the festival also disappeared, along with rooms offered to performers at the festival by organizers who overbooked and overpromised, apparently too optimistic in this moment’s power to provide.

They also seemed to have a little too much confidence in the welcome they would receive from locals: The sound system delivery crew was turned away and threatened with violence. The show eventually went on after organizers found a sound system provided by a local vendor — but the scene was chaotic.

I tried to get more information about the sound system truck, but the festival organizers ignored my request for a copy of the email describing the incident that was sent to performers. Musician Jeff Scroggins told me he’d been informed that the truck was pulled over by locals, who told the crew to go away and said they’d be shot if they returned.

My press contact minimized the incident, which left the festival without amplified sound for its first day. But the incident does seem to get at an inherent tension between local life in a small Mexican town and the hopes and ambitions of outsiders who came to layer a big festival onto this sacred moment.

Festival organizers seemed pretty overwhelmed by the fact that, as one musician taking a break from the madness told us, “everything that could go wrong did go wrong.” Or as media spokesperson Candice Holdorf told me, “It’s kind of like radical self-reliance,” borrowing a phrase from Burning Man.

On the other hand, the Mayans that I’ve talked to about the end of their Long Count calendar on this trip, like my cab driver yesterday in Tulum and someone we met a few days ago in Playa del Carmen, mostly just shrug when I ask about 12/21.

Perhaps we’re all projecting lots of our first-world hopes and desires onto this occasion. When I interviewed Peter Mancina — a cultural anthropologist who studies Maya culture (and who works as a board aide to Sup. David Campos) — he emphasized to the modern Mayan people are still plentiful and have diverse viewpoints on the world. Similarly, author John Major Jenkins told me that he didn’t want to see the Mayan people and their needs get lost in this moment.

It’s been amazing to watch the rapid transformations of space taking place all around us as this once-pristine beachfront develops ever-more amenities for the visiting tourists.

The Yogashala hotel across the road from our Pico Beach cabanas had a new roadside room and sign added over the last two days. Next door, an Italian couple opened a roadside juice bar two weeks ago. On the other side of that, Jaguar Restaurante was staffed mostly by people who have been here for weeks, months tops. And as I write these words, a new beach is being rapidly built right before my eyes.

But tourism is still tourism, and there is certainly a reverence and respect for the Mayan culture being expressed by all the festival goers that I’ve talked to, even if this may be one in a series of culture moments that are part of this age of transformation and the creation of values that are different than the ones we’ve inherited from older generations.

As astrologer Rob Breszny told me, people are emotional beings, and there’s something about transformation festivals that mark a moment and allow us to build on it, from the days of Woodstock through the annual exercise in community building that is Burning Man. And with this log thrown onto the fire, perhaps those interested in transformation will burn a little brighter.

Tulum is still pretty close to paradise, with its white sands beaches, warm clean seas, chill happy people, and wonderful off-the-grid abundance. Here, it’s easy to commune with the natural world, which seems to be what this day calls for. Whether its the symbols in the sky created by the outlines of unfamiliar birds, or the dots of bioluminous organism on the beach as we celebrated the arrival of Dec. 21, they all seem portentous of something better.

Measuring displacement

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December 26, 2012

116

EDITORIAL You can’t build much of anything substantive in San Francisco without doing an environmental impact report. You can’t pass significant legislation without doing an economic impact report. But the most important issue facing San Francisco today is largely ignored by those studies — and is only rarely even discussed as part of the city’s economic development and planning policies.

At a press conference and rally Dec. 19, housing activists decried the huge upswing in evictions in San Francisco this year. At least 26 buildings are facing Ellis Act evictions — where every tenant must go so the landlord can sell the place vacant — “and those are just the ones we know about because a tenant has sought help,” said Housing Rights Committee organizer Tommi Avicolli Mecca.

In every case, longtime San Franciscans — many of them low-income, disabled, families, or people of color — are being displaced from their homes, and probably from the city. Nobody at City Hall even measures the full numbers year by year, but the Tenants Union reports that Ellis Act evictions have tripled since 2011.

These aren’t just random acts by individual property owners; they’re part of a much larger trend created by city policies. And they ought to be tracked, measures — and mitigated — the same way environmental or economic impacts are.

Let’s call it a Displacement Impact Report.

The outline could be exactly the same as an EIR. A designated city official, either in the City Planning Department or working for the city’s economist, would analyze every piece of legislation and every proposed development of more than a certain size to determine if it “could lead to significant displacement of existing San Francisco residents.” If the answer is no, the project or bill gets a green light to move forward; if the answer is yes, the sponsor, or the city, has to prepare a DIR.

A DIR would look, for example, at the impact the Twitter tax break would have on Ellis Act evictions. Not an impossible task at all — environmental and economic consultants do this sort of work all the time. You look at how many jobs the tax break will create, how many of those jobs will go to people who are not current SF residents, how much they’ll be paid — and what the residential vacancy rate is for apartments and houses in the range they can afford. Add into the mix current plans for housing construction in that range, and plans for low-income housing for people who might be displaced.

Historical data could easily create models for how many new highly paid employees it takes to create one individual or family displacement. It would be at least as accurate as a lot of the economic and environmental models used every day in city and regional planning agencies.

If an environmental impact report turns up significant and unavoidable effects, the project sponsor is required to look at mitigations — and decision-makers can be held accountable for whether that happens. For example, a tax break that is expected to lead to the displacement of 50 low-income San Franciscans would have to be accompanied by the construction of 50 new permanently affordable rental units, or the creation of rent subsidies adequate to protect the vulnerable populations facing the loss of their homes.

Politicians and business leaders routinely complain that some legislation will lead to job losses — but the loss of people’s homes isn’t in the mix. It should be.

Someone on the Board of Supervisors ought to draft and introduce a bill adding DIRs to the list of requirements before major policy and development changes are approved. It could be the most important bill of 2013.

Preaching that the end is near

Andrew Lam

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December 19, 2012

0

Rev. Billy Talen started off as a trickster, a performance artist, and a political activist appropriating the role of the evangelical preacher (a la Jerry Farwell or Jimmy Swaggert). He was the pastor of the Church of Stop Shopping, standing in front of the Disney Store in Times Square railing against the evils of sweatshops and consumerism.

That was more than 10 years ago, and Talen, his choir, and his flock have grown and evolved since then, although they retained their core tactic of invading the citadels of commerce to engage in performance art and civil disobedience. They renamed themselves the Church of Life After Shopping, wrote books and made a movie called What Would Jesus Buy?, and then became the Church of Earthalujah five years ago when their focus switched to climate change and environmental justice issues.

Along the way, their issues and concerns became more dire, the threats they were addressing elevated to matters of survival rather than social justice. So with the Dec. 21, 2012 date approaching, Talen returned to Times Square — this time fitting right in with its doomsday preachers — and wrote a new book called The End of the World, which he’ll release in Times Square on that auspicious date.

“I’ll be back with a science-based Armageddon,” Talen told me. “Now I’m looping all the way around the tracks back to Times Square where I started. But Hurricane Sandy makes this not so tongue-in-cheek.”

When Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City and the surrounding coastline with the rare strength of superstorm that climatologists say will be more common in our warming world, Talen said it was a wake-up call for those insulated by that urban environment.

“New York doesn’t have climate, we have culture,” Talen said, but Sandy changed that perspective and brought the reality of climate change home, right into the heart of capitalism. “The idea that nature is beyond the city limits, that may be over now.”

Talen said there’s “ecosystem collapse going on everyday. Earth is a total ecosystem and Earth has a tipping point, just like local ecosystems have tipping points.” His latest book leans heavily on the research of Barnosky and his team, which Talen said dovetails perfectly with the Mayan prophecies and the hopes that the galactic alignment will spark a shift in global consciousness that wakes us up to pressing problems that demand immediate action.

“It allows us to have a stage for the question, a frame for the question. We have to ask very basic questions about our survival,” Talen said. “We have this uncanny mythic, prophetic calendar, this 5,000-year calendar ending and beginning. And we have the scientists saying the same thing, so where does that leave you?”

The Muni vs. housing clash

Andrew Lam

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December 18, 2012

73

OPINION Two votes at the Board of Supervisors and the Municipal Transportation Agency Dec. 4 laid out a stark contrast between two different approaches to transportation advocacy — one based on a sense of justice and the idea that public transit is an issue of equity, and another based on the self interest and transactional politics of a cash-strapped transportation agency and its dedicated allies.

After years of work, organizing transit riders and talking to policy makers from the local to the regional levels, a scrappy group of transit justice advocates, many of them young, most of them people of color, got the Municipal Transportation Agency board to approve a $1.6 million plan to fund free Muni passes for low-income youth. It sent a strong message that a new kind of transportation advocacy has arrived, one that puts race, class, and environment at the center.

Meanwhile, a separate vote was taking place at the Board of Supervisors that seemed to pit community organizations, nonprofit service providers, and affordable housing developers on opposite sides of the fence from what has become a mainstream transportation and bicycle advocacy community.

We should have been on the same side. But a last-minute maneuver by Sup. Scott Wiener to add to the MTA’s strained budget (a worthy goal) by expanding the 30-year Transportation Impact Development Fee (TIDF) to include nonprofits that provide critical services in our neighborhoods backfired and sent his amendments out the door in a 9-2 vote.

Many transportation and bicycle advocates seemed incredulous that the rest of the world did not accept their arguments.

I consider many of these transportation advocates friends and acquaintances whom I have known and worked with for years. But rather than seeing themselves as part of a greater social justice movement rooted in the communities who are most affected, some of these advocates have become increasingly narrow in their scope, single-minded in their pursuit of funding for bike lanes and bulbouts, as well as rapid transit projects serving downtown commuters.

Real-world politics requires that activists, organizers, and policy advocates be flexible and willing to figure out how to work with others very unlike themselves. Recently an organization I work for was able to work in a broad coalition, convened by the mayor, to develop and campaign for a Housing Trust Fund to create a permanent source of funding for affordable housing, as a direct response to the State of California taking away the city’s housing budget when it dissolved the redevelopment agencies. We walked into the room knowing that we would have to make tough decisions, and have to take those back to our allies in the progressive movement.

But we also walked in with non-negotiables. We were not going to entertain any attempt at weakening rent control by tying the Housing Trust Fund to lifting the condo conversion lottery. We would not support a set-aside without increasing city revenue to support not just our housing trust fund but also critical health and social services. We do not screw over our broader movement for pure self-interest.

We stand at a crossroads, and we could very well end up with two different transportation advocacy communities, both talking about the same thing, but with very little to say to each other. As the old mineworker’s song used to say, it’s time to decide: “Which side are you on?”

Fernando Martí works at the San Francisco Information Clearinghouse

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam

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December 18, 2012

5

tredmond@sfbg.com

EDITORS NOTES The president promised “meaningful action,” but did not mention guns once in his response to the unthinkable killing spree in Newtown, Connecticut. The gun nut lobby argued that if the teachers at the school had been armed, one of them might have shot the killer — suggesting that we ought to devolve into the worst parodies of the Old West (where, in truth, many towns, like Dodge City, banned handguns altogether).

And there was the usual hand wringing by observers on all sides about how hard it is to get gun-control laws through Congress, how the Second Amendment has been interpreted, how gun-registration laws didn’t prevent Adam Lanza from killing his mother and stealing her (legally purchased and registered) .233 Bushmaster rifle.

It’s infuriating that this keep happening, and nobody seems to be able to gather the political courage to tell the truth: We are allowing tens of thousands of Americans (including some who are deeply disturbed and dangerous) to own weapons of mass destruction.

Seriously: We spent a trillion dollars and the lives of 4,488 US soldiers to wipe out suspected WMDs in Iraq. We talk over and over about how Iran must not be allowed to obtain a WMD; nuclear nonproliferation has always been a centerpiece of our foreign policy.

And nobody argues that nuclear bombs don’t kill people, or that the crazy dictator with a war wish will find other ways to inflict carnage.

There’s a difference. A crazy guy with a machete could have done some serious damage in the Sandy Hook elementary school — but he wouldn’t have killed 20 children and six adults. In fact, a madman with a pistol would have killed some people, but not as many — and some of those shot might have lived.

In this case, a rifle that belongs on a battlefield of war, with huge ammo cartridges, allowed Lanza to put multiple bullets into the tiny bodies of every one of his victims. Nobody had a chance.

You have to appreciate West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who is a devoted hunter and lifelong member of the National Rifle Association, who made the point nicely:

“I don’t know anybody that needs those multiple clips as far as ammunition in a gun. The most I’ve ever used in my rifle is three shells. Usually you get one shot, and every seldom ever two.”

Exactly. There is no need for anyone who wants a gun for self-defense, for sport, or for hunting to carry 30 rounds at a time. And if you think that your assault weapon is going to protect you when the black helicopters of the United Nations Storm Troopers arrive to force us into a World Government, you’re seriously delusional.

No: People buy these guns because they think it’s cool to have massive firepower. It’s fun shooting off a whole lot of rounds at a target. It’s also cool to have a car that goes 240 miles an hour and runs with open heads, and it’s fun to drive it drunk on city streets at high speeds. But we have decided as a society that we don’t think the potentially lethal impacts on others make it worth allowing those sorts of fun.

I get it — we’re not going to become Canada (too bad) or Western Europe. Americans like guns. Fine. We’re not going to eliminate standing armies all over the world, either. But we can stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Or at least we could try.

Wrong side of history

Andrew Lam

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December 11, 2012

1

tredmond@sfbg.com

In June, 2006, the august and powerful Association of Alternative Newsweeklies held its convention in Little Rock, Arkansas — and to the surprise of most of us, former President Bill Clinton agreed to come and speak. He even took questions.

I had one.

“Mr. President,” I said, “when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he knew it would cost his party votes in the South. But he did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do. Same-sex marriage is a civil-rights issue; why can’t Democrats like you stand up and support it?”

He ducked brilliantly, telling us all the great things he did for gay people (I know, Jim Hormel, ambassador to Luxembourg). He never answered the question.

That was how much of the Democratic Party leadership was acting in the days (and years) after Gavin Newsom set off a political bombshell in 2004 by legalizing same-sex marriage in San Francisco. Newsom got calls from a wide range of liberal party leaders begging him to reconsider. Even San Francisco Dems made statements that, in retrospect, are mortifying.

So as we prepare for the Supreme Court to decide if it’s on the right side of history, let us take a moment to reflect on all the Democrats who weren’t.

Leading the list is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who now supports marriage equality but at the time proclaimed that it was “too much, too fast, too soon.” (In other words, just be patient, little gay ones, your time will come. Eventually.)

Even Rep. Barney Frank, the first openly gay member of Congress, said Newsom had broken the law and would only “feed the flames of fear.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi for the first weeks of the city gay marriage celebrations stayed far, far away from the issue, although (after she realized how immensely popular the move was in her district) she broke down in late March 2004 and said she approved of Newsom’s actions.

Sen. John Kerry, during the 2004 presidential campaign, not only proclaimed that only a man and a woman could get married but said he would support state legislation banning same-sex nuptials. He didn’t publicly change his mind until 2011.

Barack Obama, as a candidate for president, never endorsed same-sex marriage and, according to some accounts, refused to have his picture taken with Newsom at a 2004 fundraiser in SF. In fact, during the 2008 Democratic primary, none of the major candidates endorsed same-sex marriage. Some of the commentary was laughable — then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proclaimed that “gay marriage is between a man and a woman,” and the Hartford Courant denounced Newsom for “turning City Hall into a wedding mill for homosexuals.” Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders, who said she supported same-sex marriage, said the mayor’s “lawlessness” was “just unbelievable.” But on a more sober note, there were, in February, 2004, exactly zero major national Democratic Party officials who came to Newsom’s support. Most of them ran for cover. And when the US Supreme Court decides, as it must, that marriage is a civil right for all, they’ll have a lot of explaining to do.

Choked out

Andrew Lam

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December 11, 2012

0

news@sfbg.com

When a struggle occurs in jail, it happens behind closed doors where the only witnesses are usually on opposite sides of the law. And when a struggle between these adversaries results in death of an inmate, a lot of questions emerge, questions that can linger for years if not publicly addressed.

Three years ago, a 31-year old inmate named Issiah Downes died in a San Francisco jail cell following a confrontation with deputies. After a yearlong investigation, San Francisco Chief Medical Examiner Amy Hart determined the death was a homicide. Weeks later, Downes’ mother Esther filed a wrongful death suit against the city, which was ultimately settled for $350,000, a significant sum that could have been even higher if she wasn’t too ill to pursue a trial.

Yet the deputies involved remain on the job, working in the jail, with nobody ever punished for what at least one witness said was a homicide that should have had consequences for more than just city taxpayers.

According to the lawsuit, on September 7, 2009 Downes complained about the televisions in his unit being turned off. Deemed a disturbance, he was transferred to a segregated area of the jail. The transfer turned into a scuffle involving multiple deputies who forced Downes to the ground. He was then moved into a “safety cell” where another struggle broke out and he was held prone on the floor while deputies allegedly applied pressure to his back and neck. After complaining that he could not breathe, Downes lost consciousness and was soon declared dead.

The lawsuit named the deputies involved with restraining Downes as Mel Song, Juan Guitron, Edward Gutierrez, Ken Lomba, Kevin Macksound, and Dan White. No charges were pressed against anyone. What’s more, the Sheriff Department’s Communications Director Susan Fahey confirmed that all the deputies named as defendants in the civil suit are still employed by the department in the jail.

While the story has slowly faded from the headlines, one witness has been knocking on doors across San Francisco in an attempt to tell his version of events and bring some light to this man’s murky death. Dennis Damato was in jail at the time and remembers it being a quiet day as he and other inmates watched college football. “Miami played Florida State,” Damato told the Guardian. “I was on a top bunk at the end of the row.”

From his bunk, Damato saw Downes step into the hallway outside the cell and he says Downes was not resisting deputies or being confrontational. “There was no commotion. This guy wasn’t doing anything,” says Damato, who saw a deputy approach and stand beside Downes. “He (Downes) was just standing there nice and quiet and [a deputy] was standing to his left. I did not see them communicate.”

Damato says he looked away for a moment to check the score of the game and when he turned back, he saw the deputy attacking Downes, who was in handcuffs. “He was bent over, handcuffs in front of him, and the deputy had him in a choke hold,” Damato told us. “Mr. Downes was saying he can’t breathe. His eyes were bulging while being choked and brought down.”

Damato says Downes was already on the floor when more deputies arrived to assist and roughly 15 minutes passed before they dragged Downes to a secluded room. Convinced that Issiah Downes was murdered, Damato has reached out to everyone from the DA’s office to the Sheriff’s Department but he says he was shut down at every turn: “They’d say ‘it’s over with. Go home.'”

The deputies could not be reached for comment because the Sheriff’s Department didn’t make them available or release their contact information as we requested.

After Downes’ death the Medical Examiner’s Office investigated and the subsequent report confirms that Downes suffered blunt trauma to his neck (in addition to his torso and extremities), consistent with Damato’s claim that Downes was strangled.

“Were it not for the physiologic stresses imposed by the struggle and restraint, there is no reasonable medical certainty that Mr. Downes would have died at the moment he did.” Assistant ME Judy Melinek, M.D. Concluded in her report. “The manner of death, homicide, indicates that the volitional actions of others caused or contributed to this death.”

Although Chief Medical Examiner Amy Hart said her findings did not speak to any unlawful behavior on the part of the deputies, Esther Downes’ attorney, Geri Green, says, “I think it was very brave of her to call it a homicide,” noting that the finding strengthened the family’s case against the city.

That “homicide” call came after a yearlong investigation that included analyzing a prone restraint method called “figure four,” which incident reports from deputies say Downes was placed in moments before his death. In a figure four, a person lies in a prone position, hands held behind his/her back with knees bent and feet held in the air. Prone restraint is not uncommon but it is controversial as its various methods have lead to deaths.

Downes weighed more than 300 pounds and the autopsy found evidence of pressure on his neck and back. The report summarizes an interview with a trainer for the Sheriff’s Department who said the hold is often difficult to accomplish on an overweight person. Additionally, other inmates reported hearing Downes yell that he could not breathe and a jail nurse said she could hear loud moaning coming from the safety cell where Downes was restrained.

Fahey said the department looked into the matter. “The department conducts its own internal investigation but its report is not public record,” Fahey told us. The Police Department also investigated but in an email, spokesperson Albie Esparza said the results are confidential under laws protecting peace officers. “The case file was handled by SFPD, however those are not public records under section 6254(f) of the Government Code, which protects case files, even after a case has been terminated.”

Ellen Hirst, a spokesperson for then-Sheriff Mike Hennessey, told reporters at the time that the department believed all procedures were executed properly. The department’s official “Safety Cell Use” policies, which we reviewed, state “A prisoner may remain restrained, with handcuffs, waist chains, and/or leg irons as necessary, while in the safety cell to prevent self-inflicted injury” for no more than one hour. Yet the department’s “Use of Force” policies state, “Choking and the use of carotid restraint are not allowed by the SFSD.”

The ME concluded the cause of death to be probable respiratory arrest during prone restraint with morbid obesity. That conclusion, along with the report’s other findings, lead Esther Downes’ to charge in her lawsuit that the deputies used excessive force and illegal and unconstitutional restraint procedures on her son and “in an effort to conceal the homicide, conspired to cover up the cause and manner of death.”

Attorney Ben Nissenbaum is an associate with the renowned John Burris Law firm in Oakland, which has done extensive work on civil rights and police brutality including the Rodney King case. He says the need to further subdue an inmate in a segregated area of the jail is suspicious.

“Why would you restrain a person in a safety cell?” says Nissenbaum. “They’re already restrained. All you have to do is close the door.”

He also noted that safety cells — unlike the rest of a jail facility — are not equipped with surveillance cameras. “There are no cameras or video inside the safety cells and that is common knowledge among deputies,” Nissenbaum told us.

Although the Sheriff Department’s investigation report is not public record, it doesn’t appear that it found any criminal conduct. San Francisco District Attorney’s Office spokesperson Stephanie Ong Stillman told us, “We would have to be presented with something showing criminal conduct before we prosecute anyone…When someone dies in jail, it’s a Sheriff’s investigation.”

Over at City Hall, the City Attorney’s Office — which deals with civil suits against the City — wasn’t exactly eager to pursue the matter. “We have to consider the cost for the city of taking the case to trial,” says City Attorney spokesperson Matt Dorsey, adding that a trial is often not in the city’s best interest.

The case didn’t go to trial and was officially closed on May 18, 2011, two months after San Francisco settled with Esther Downes for $350,000. She died last June near her home in Hawaii and her surviving relatives declined comment on the lawsuit or Issiah Downes.

Like many of those who find their way into the judicial system, Downes had personal problems. He was morbidly obese, suffered from schizophrenia, received counseling for suicide (at one point he tried to gouge one of his eyes, leaving him partially blind), and had previous convictions for involuntary manslaughter, robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and battery of a police officer. Yet he was paying his debts to society and getting help. He was a member of what public officials like to call “society’s most vulnerable”, which might turn out to be a great understatement if his mother’s conspiracy charge and Dennis Damato’s story are true.