When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave final approval yesterday [Tues/15] to legislation that would substantially increase the payments landlords are required to give tenants they evict using the Ellis Act, the supervisors made a key change designed to counter a recent eviction push by landlords.
The legislation, approved on a 9-2 vote with Sups. Mark Farrell and Katy Tang opposed, increases the current required relocation payments of $5,265 per person or $15,795 per unit (plus an additional $3,510 for those with disabilities or over age 62) up to the equivilent of two years rent for a comparable unit, which means tens of thousands of dollars.
For example, the Controller’s Office calculates that a family evicted from a two-bedroom apartment in the Mission District where they pay $909 per month would be entitled to $44,833 in relocation costs.
The legislation was originally scheduled to go into effect 120 days after passage in order to give city officials enough time to implement it. But after sponsoring Sup. David Campos heard that landlords were rushing to evict tenants before those fees went up, he checked in with the City Attorney’s Office and other departments to see whether they could be ready sooner. And after getting the greenlight, he amended the measure yesterday to go into effect 30 days after it’s enacted into law.
The question now is whether Mayor Ed Lee, who has not taken a position on the legislation, will act quickly to sign it. He has 10 days to decide, and given that the legislation was approved by a veto-proof majority, the question is really whether the mayor will support stalling the inevitable, thus encouraging more evictions at lower levels of relocation assistance.
But Mayor Lee has publicly touted his concerns about the eviction epidemic and support for Sen. Mark Leno’s Ellis Act reform legislation, SB1439. So I’m sure Lee is warming up his pen and preparing to sign the measure as I write this, right? We’ve got a message into his office with that question and I’ll update this post when we hear back.
UPDATE 4/18: Christine Falvey, the mayor’s press secretary, just finally responded to our inquiry and said, “The Mayor is reviewing and considering this legislation. I will keep you updated.” Apparently, he doesn’t feel the same sense of urgency that supporters of the measure feel.
If Friday was about jorts and flower crowns and Saturday was about sandstorms and solid “lesser” acts, then Sunday was about Coachella babies and big performers who totally brought it.
Arcade Fire played to their 80,000 lost souls with a world of possibilities ahead of them, introducing one of their tour de forces, “There’s a lot of kind of like fake VIP room bullshit happening at this festival and I just want to say that sometimes people dream of getting in places like that and it super sucks in there so don’t worry about it. This song’s called ‘The Suburbs’…”
Debbie Harry and Regina Chassagne sang “Heart of Glass” then Harry stood there looking shell-shocked and awkward during Chassagne’s “Sprawl II.”
There is an obvious predecessor to Pharrell’s (stupid) Vivienne Westwood hat — you know, the hat that contained all his friends that showed up to bounce around the stage with him on Saturday: Nelly, Diddy, Busta, Snoop, Gwen, et al. Beck’s hat is senior.
Much to the glee of the crowd, Beck took us on a mind-journey in his Hyundai during “Debra,” giving shout-outs to SoCal cities along the way. Tongue-in-cheek, sure, but the masses loved it as they “stepped inside the passenger door.” He played, along with his son Cosimo on tambourine, until the Golden Voice clock-watchers turned out the power.
AlunaGeorge gave a great performance, despite an outfit that included comfortable/restaurant worker-appropriate shoes. Shape-Ups? Troubling opening with an overwhelming bass line (she opened with “Attracting Flies”) but she adjusted very well.
DARKSIDE: Probably the best performance of the weekend. Nicolas Jaar (who played a solo DJ set on Friday in the Yuma tent) and Dave Harrington consecutively constructed and destroyed throughout their set. Plus Nicolas Jaar is dreamy.
Despite Neutral Milk Hotel’s lo-fi output, devoted fans worshipped every spangle-jangled second. Sing-alongs aplenty and clapping 30-somethings and mid-life couples with one and a half babies.
The 1975 brought fun and a bit of realness to the festival early on Sunday. Hot skinny slim-mustachioed gay boys and white jeans with matching boat shoes-sporting straight feys regaled.
Ty Segall gave the longest and loudest sound check in the history of outdoor festivals. They know we’re standing ring here, right?! The band’s energy was palpable.
CHVRCHES apologized for having to wear sunglasses because “we’re really not from here.” But their performance was anything but apologetic. Polished and clean.
Future Islands: I thought Black Flag front man Henry Rollins had been reincarnated as a less punk, more enraged white guy, mugging for the crowd, bleating and blathering with testosterone force.
Warpaint had the most crowded photographer’s pit. Full of 20-something bloggers and middle-aged stock photogs. The ladies did not disappoint.
As a photographer, I’m always hoping for a performance and a persona like Solange. She can just electrify with her presence. Not knowing at the time who she was, I actually snapped some great shots of her last year at Coachella, while watching the Jesse Ware performance — simply because I could not take my eye off of her adorable sundress covered in bright yellow lemons. This year onstage, she teased and taunted us in an orange shorts suit. At one point she jokingly admonished the YouTube videographer to get out of her crotch as she writhed and pined in front of his lens. Something for the gays, the girls and the bros! Yes, and big sis Beyonce showed up, duh.
Overall: Blood Orange, Holy Ghost, Warpaint, The Knife, Solange, DARKSIDE, the 1975 and Arcade Fire were absolute standouts.
San Francisco transit riders won some and lost some today [Tue/15] at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Board of Directors meeting. The board voted to repeal Sunday parking meters, effective July 1. It also asked SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin to add 18-year-olds into the Free Muni for Youth program, which will take effect Nov. 1.
But a proposal for free Muni for seniors and the disabled hit a snag, and the board decided it would evaluate their budget in January 2015 to identify available funding for the program. Until then, the program is in limbo.
“I think free Muni for seniors and people with disabilities is a great need, it’s a moral imperative,” said Tom Nolan, chairman of the SFMTA board. “It’s not a question if these things will happen, it’s when.”
Nearly 100 of advocates for the Free Muni For Youth and Free Muni for Seniors and the Disabled programs packed into the small board chamber at City Hall Tuesday. Some came in wheelchairs, others walked in carefully with canes, and small children bounded into the chamber playfully. At least 100 more people waited outside the doors of the chamber in line to speak. All came with a purpose: to tell the SFMTA that free Muni would help them live in a city increasingly inhospitable to poor and middle class San Franciscans.
“To some people $23 may not be much, but to (seniors), every penny counts,” Pei Juan Zheng, vice president of the Community Tenants Association told the board at public comment. She spoke in Cantonese, and was later translated by a woman at her side. “I know some senior couples who can only afford one Muni pass and share it, taking turns to go on doctor’s visits.”
Many public commenters reminded the board that free Muni for the disabled and seniors could be paid for by paid Sunday parking meters, which the SFMTA ultimately decided to repeal. The SFMTA’s budget proposal estimates free Muni for seniors and the disabled to cost about $4 million annually. Conversely, repealing paid parking meters is estimated to cost Muni $9.8 million annually. SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose said the loss could actually be as high as $11 million.
The reason for repealing the paid parking meters was made clear as day: Mayor Ed Lee and the SFMTA board are tip-toeing around car-driving voters, afraid several ballot measures to fund Muni this November will tank. To that end, they’re willing to appease drivers however they can.
“It’s clear we don’t have support for (paid Sunday meters),” board member Joel Ramos said after the vote. “We have failed, frankly, to convince the great majority of people. Read [San Francisco Chronicle columnists] Matier & Ross and see the sentiment out there, it’s a negative one.”
For his part, Mayor Lee was pleased the board enacted his repeal proposal. His statement to the press released shortly after the vote laid clear his need to appease car-driving voters.
“RepealingSundayparking meters is about making San Francisco a little more affordable for our families and residentson Sunday, plain and simple,” he wrote in his statement. “Instead of nickel and diming our residents at the meteron Sunday, let’s work together to support comprehensive transportation funding measures this year and in the future that will invest in our City’s transportation system for pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders and drivers alike.”
Just two weeks ago, Reiskin suggested reducing enforcement of Sunday meters, perhaps in efforts to find a compromise. He has repeatedly publicly stated his support for paid Sunday meters. Apparently he was outnumbered.
There are silver linings. In January the SFMTA board will mull a 7 percent transit service increase for 2016, additional funding for cleaning Muni’s fleet, and providing free Muni for low and moderate income seniors and disabled. The wait is due to the uncertainty of June contract negotiations with Muni workers, as well as the impending Muni funding ballot measures in November. If all goes well, the board said, funding may be identified for all of those projects. Until then, the loss of paid Sunday meters means Muni is out $9.8 million a year out of its $677 million budget.
The repeal of the paid markers doesn’t just hit transit riders though. Local businesses may also lose out.
Back in our story “Muni Fare Shakedown [2/25],” Jim Lazarus, senior vice president of public policy at the business-friendly San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, told us he is a supporter of the paid Sunday meters. “You can drive into merchant areas now where you couldn’t before,” he told us.
“The MTA’s purpose is to manage the effing streets, not do the mayor’s bidding,” she told the board. “This is a $9 million giveaway no one is asking for but Ed Lee.“
Health care costs are skyrocketing across the country, but two proposed ballot initiatives in California are aiming to rein in health care spending, which the Centers for Disease Control estimates at $2.6 trillion annually nationwide. Both measures are currently gathering signatures to be placed on the November ballot.
Service Employees International Union authored the Charitable Hospital Compensation Act (CHCA) and the Fair Healthcare Pricing Act (FHPA), which are designed to directly deal with the high costs at nonprofit hospitals. CHCA seeks to cap the salary for executives at nonprofit hospitals at $450,000 a year, the same salary as the President of the United States. FHPA would limit the amount charged for services to 25 percent above the estimated costs of providing care.
“Health care costs have been out of control for years. These initiatives are two modest things we can do to rein that in. We can make sure that hospitals don’t take ridiculous profits on the materials and services they provide and we can hold pay for executives to a reasonable level” says Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), who endorsed both initiatives, “When so many people are struggling to pay for health care, it’s the least we can do.”
Executive pay at nonprofit hospitals is out of control. Former CEO of San Francisco-based Blue Shield of America Bruce Bodaken earned $4.6 million in 2010. Former CEO of Oakland-based Kaiser Permanente George Halvorso earned $6.7 million in the same year.
“Compensation” is strictly defined by the measure, including compensation in the form of bonuses, forgiven loans, and even access to a company car.
“There is some symbolic value to that… people say that running a hospital is like running a hospital is like running a city,” said Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW. “You will not find a mayor in America that makes anywhere close to $450,000 a year, let alone $1.5 million. In fact, the person in charge of leading America makes $450,000 a year. We think that [executive] compensation has gotten out of whack.”
The actual costs for services in US hospitals is also out of whack. According to the World Bank, the US spends 17.9 percent of its Gross Domestic Product on healthcare, the most of any country on earth. But, according to the World Health Organization, the US ranks a dismal 37th in quality of healthcare.
US hospitals have grown infamous for overcharging for services and things like aspirin and ibuprofen. On average in California, charging from 325-800 percent above the actual cost for those services and supplies. FHPA is aimed to help the US residents pay less for health care. Its goal is to lower the costs of services at non-profit hospitals by capping the amount charged for services to 25 percent above the estimated costs of providing care.
“Cost includes the salary of doctors, nurses and other caregiver… supplies, all of that… You take those costs and add 25 percent. That seems to us, a very healthy and large operating margin,” Regan said. “This will prevent the worst abuses by the most aggressive hospital providers in the state. Everyone knows hospital care costs too much, nobody knows what they’re going to get charged before they see bills… We believe this [FHPA] will reduce what patients are paying… and the hospital industry will be perfectly healthy.”
Both initiatives are also designed to increase transparency by forcing nonprofit hospitals to disclose their 10 highest paid executives and five ex-executives with the highest paid severance package, along with a detailed breakdown of the compensation or severance package, on a yearly bases.
They also have teeth. Penalties for violating any of conditions set forth in the initiatives can trigger fines of up to $100,000. Even with these blaring facts, the hospital industry is expected to fight the health care measures to the bitter end. SEIU has already fired shot by releasing an ad. But the hospital industry is predicted to dump millions into this battle to keep the status quo.
Both the California Hospital Association and the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California declined to comment on the initiatives. But a public relations officer from CHA told the Guardian that the hospital industry and SEIU are looking for a “non-initiative solution.”
However, critics of the initiatives have banded together to fight the pair of healthcare reforms. A CHA-funded group call itself Californians Against Initiative Abuse released an ad accusing the initiatives of being a ploy to increase SEIU’s power . Calling the initiates, “deceptive, dangerous and dishonest.”
Literature on the group’s website spells out healthcare domesday if the initiatives are approved in November, including layoffs, reduced services, and hospital closures — and a decrease of hundreds of millions of dollars in Medi-Cal funding, handing back what it claims is $1 billion in funds to the federal government.
Whatever the outcome of the November ballot, the consequences of keeping the current trend of health care costs are catastrophic.
“Without reasonable health care reform, there are estimates that the health care costs can reach 30 percent of GDP in the future.” California Sen. Mark Leno told the Guardian, “This is not sustainable. We have to get a handle on this.”
The family of Alejandro Nieto, the 28-year-old City College student and community activist who was gunned down by the San Francisco Police Department March 21, has filed a claim against the city in preparation for a lawsuit responding to what they allege was an unjustified shooting.
Friends, family and supporters of Nieto gathered in front of San Francisco City Hall April 14 with attorney John Burris, who is representing Nieto’s family. Burris is a prominent civil rights lawyer known for representing families whose sons have died as a result of officer involved shootings, including the family of Oscar Grant.
An initial examination of the body suggests Nieto died from wounds inflicted by at least 10 bullets, fired by multiple officers, Burris said. Police initially encountered Nieto in Bernal Heights Park in response to a 911 call reporting a man with a gun. Nieto, who was employed full-time as a security guard, actually possessed a Taser and not a firearm. Police said officers opened fire because he pointed the Taser at them, and they confused it with a gun when they saw a red dot emitted from the device after it was drawn, tracking officers.
Burris isn’t buying the police department’s account, but said he faces obstacles obtaining key information that would shed light on the incident.
“We have not been able to obtain the 911 audio,” or other communications records documenting what happened just before and after the shooting, Burris said. So far, the San Francisco Medical Examiner has not released an official report.
“That is part of the problem we are up against. We can make requests and ask for it to be preserved,” he said of the audio files, “but we cannot get it. And unfortunately, lawsuits are one way that we know we’re going to get it.”
Benjamin Bac Sierra, a friend of Nieto’s who is serving as a spokesperson for the family, waved a bundle of petitions he and community members had collected to call for an investigation at the local level. “Besides filing this claim, the family demands that San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon launch an official investigation into Alex’s killing by the San Francisco Police Department,” Bac Sierra said. “We demand that the district attorney fully investigate this case on behalf of Alex and his family.”
Burris said he believed moving forward with an independent lawsuit was necessary even as the Office of Citizen Complaints, an independent agency overseen by the San Francisco Police Commission, advances its own investigation.
“I’ve worked with the OCC on many cases in the past, but that’s on a parallel track. They have one process, we have another,” he said. “At the end of the day, we have to do our own to protect ourselves.”
Burris also said that given the recent history of federal prosecution against the SFPD, he believed the involvement of the U.S. Attorney’s office would be appropriate. “We’re requesting that the U.S. Attorneys here with the Department of Justice conduct an independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding Alex’s death,” Burris said, “and if necessary, file criminal charges against these officers.”
In a later conversation with the Bay Guardian, Bac Sierra noted that an audio recording of the shooting had been obtained from a neighbor of the park, who captured it through a home security system. Bac Sierra said the recording suggests two shots were initially fired, followed by a pause, followed by “a continuous volley” of shots. Bac Sierra, who declined to provide the neighbor’s name, said the sound file did not contain audible verbal communications prior to the shots being fired.
Community members angered by Nieto’s death have set up a website, justice4alexnieto.org, and have planned an event for the one-month anniversary of the shooting. Called Burritos on Bernal Hill, the gathering is scheduled for Monday, April 21, at Precita Park at 5pm.
That seems to be the idea the accrediting commission vying to close City College of San Francisco floated in a San Francisco Chronicle editorial Sunday, outlining a “new way out.”
To save itself, they wrote, the college must terminate its own accreditation and apply for “candidacy” status, essentially applying to be accredited as if it were a brand-new school.
“Candidacy would allow City College a fresh start,” wrote Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges Chair Sherill Amador, and Steven Kinsella, the co-chair. “It would have two to four years to complete its recovery and to ensure that it meets all accreditation standards.”
The recommendation is the latest twist in a long saga over the fate of City College of San Francisco.
Last July, the ACCJC told City College its degree accreditation would be revoked in a year, which would force the college to close. When the news first hit City College saw its enrollment drop by the thousands. The school served as many as 100,000 students at its highest enrollment, but now has a student body of 77,000. The college’s chancellor, Arthur Q. Tyler, noted the enrollment drop in a public letter.
Tyler strongly rebuffed the ACCJC’s Chronicle editorial.
“As you may have heard it has been suggested by some that City College apply for ‘candidacy status’ as a mechanism for addressing our current accreditation process,” Tyler wrote in a letter to the college community. “Let me be clear: we are not considering withdrawing our accreditation. To do so would severely harm our current and future students as well as undermine our current enrollment efforts.”
The editorial from the ACCJC may signal that the accrediting commission intends to deny any appeals made by City College, higher-ed experts told the Guardian. City College’s faculty union AFT 2121 President Alisa Messer agreed.
“The ACCJC — or at any rate, two of its leaders — have announced through this editorial that they have already decided to reject the college’s appeal and move forward with disaccreditation,” she told the Guardian. “Our concern all along has been that nothing CCSF could do would satisfy this commission. Unfortunately, this latest action appears to confirm that.”
“The commitment to reform and the accomplishments already made show that the college is on the right track,” Lee and Harris wrote. “City College has earned the right to finish the job by setting itself back on course.”
But the editorial penned by the ACCJC seems to rebuff any notion that they’ll give City College more time, unless City College revokes its own accreditation.
“They just gave (Chancellor) Brice Harris, Mayor Ed Lee and all of San Francisco a giant F.U.,” City College Trustee Rafael Mandelman told the Guardian.
All along, politicians and the college’s current administration towed the ACCJC line — even though the accreditors advocated for City College to disinvest in its neediest students, take away important neighborhood campuses serving disadvantaged communities, and ignored the college community’s wishes.
On the other side of the imaginary line in the sand, the faculty union and student protesters have advocated against many of the changes proposed by the ACCJC, calling its actions unjust. City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s lawsuit adopted the viewpoint of the the latter group, suing the ACCJC for using its position as accreditor to advocate for the “student success agenda,” which aims to transform community college into degree-mills at the expense of students not specifically seeking degrees.
“When you have a losing argument, change the subject,” they wrote. “That’s been the approach of certain City College defenders who want the attack an accreditation commission instead of the serious problems it has identified.”
Even the state community college chancellor criticized Herrera’s lawsuit, in an open letter penned just a few months ago.
“Court intervention is not necessary to keep City College open,” California Community College Chancellor Brice Harris wrote. “Characterizations that the cases before the court are a ‘last-ditch’ effort to ‘save’ City College are inaccurate and will do additional damage to the college’s enrollment.”
But Herrera filed for an injunction, which was granted by the judge, which would stop City College from closing until the legal proceedings have finished. The trial date is now set for October.
With the ACCJC signaling it has no intention of allowing an appeal, Herrera’s lawsuit, Mandelman said, may be the college’s only hope.
“The state chancellor, the mayor, and the Chronicle have all said ‘this is the way the process will work and Dennis Herrera should not have brought the lawsuit,'” he said. “Now it seems quite likely that lawsuit will be the only thing that can save City College.”
For Paul Simon’s 1986 hit album Graceland, both its production and its long-time success moved across boundaries of space, time, and genre. The movement continued this past weekend inside the San Francisco Jewish Community Center’s Kanbar Hall, where the quarterly UnderCover project and Faultline Studios presented a tantalizing tribute to Graceland, with each of 11 groups/artists performing one of the album’s 11 tracks.A bit about the album: Simon, recovering from an artistic slump and a failed marriage to Carrie Fisher (aka Princess Leia), had been turned on in the mid-1980s to the black South African pop music genre known as township jive, an infectious stew of early rock, jazz, and tribal syncopation. The songwriting and arrangements on Graceland formed an homage to a variety of South African music, and to that nation’s musicians, including Zulu Sipho Mchunu and his white bandmate Johnny Clegg. Simon traveled to the source of those sounds, recording input to the album from the a cappella township men’s choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo and others. As on his future albums showcasing world music, Simon had no problem integrating material and musicians from his own country, who on Graceland included jazzmen Randy Brecker and Steve Gadd, the Everly Brothers, Linda Ronstadt, the Rubin family of Zydeco fame, and members of Los Lobos.
Fely Tchaco. Photo by Steve Roby.
Following Simon’s example, the Oakland-based Rob Shelton, serving as music director for Friday and Saturday’s Graceland tribute concerts, culled an eclectic array from the Bay Area’s xenophillic talent pool; they were emceed throughout the evening by ebullient UnderCover founder Lyz Luke. As on Simon’s Graceland, horns and vocals played major roles throughout the evening. First up was Fanfare Zambaleta, a Balkan brass band who buoyed “The Boy in the Bubble,” the album’s opening track, on bursts of trumpet and euphonium. By contrast, the album’s title tune was given to guitarist and singer John Vanderslice, the closest thing to the songwriter’s solo act. Also changing from act-to-act throughout the evening were the projections on a large screen behind the performers, assembled by Elia Vargas. Zambelata got pulsing patterns; Vanderslice was backed by scenes of a road trip.
Fely Tchaco took “I Know What I Know” to a different but sympathetic corner of the vast African continent — her native Ivory Coast — dancing as well as singing, with booty-shaking impetus from conga player Paul Sonnabend and rest of her band. Mexican-born Diana Gameros put a folksy, slightly Latinized tinge on “Gumboots,” the song which first turned Simon towards South Africa and one of the few on the album not written by him. Music director Shelton appeared on keyboards with DRMS in their somewhat loungey version of “Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes.” Bill Baird, rather resembling Dana Carvey in a poncho, did “You Can Call Me Al,” but I wouldn’t know what to call his mixture of musical madness and madcap theater.
John Vanderslice. Photo by Don Albonico.
The Afrofunk Experience put “Under African Skies” under their soulful spell, with Sandy House and David James trading vocals. Sung by the thrilling, all-male, all-adult Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the album, “Homeless” had been co-written and arranged by that group’s leader, Joseph Shabalala. For UnderCover’s tribute, it was rearranged by Kevin Fox, Deke Sharon, and Eric Hagmann for the wide-ranged voices at various of points of puberty, constituting Fox’s Oakland-based Pacific Boychoir. They preserved the heavenly magic and the partly Zulu lyrics of Ladysmith, and brought tears to the eyes of proud parents and others.
Guy Fox and his quartet kept the “crazy” in “Crazy Love,” rocking up a storm. But it wasn’t they who triggered the fire alarm which temporarily drove audience and musicians onto the sidewalks Saturday evening. It was, reportedly, a rabbi, “kosherizing” the premises with a blowtorch. Outdoors, the pre-Pesach spirits stayed high, even among the goyim, and the music continued in informal festival mode. After a blessing from the fire department, everyone returned to the Kanbar, where the Trio Zincalo, with vocalist Katie Clover, evoked the Hot Club de France with their take on “That Was Your Mother.” The Midtown Social closed the show with their soul-shaking send-up of “All Around the World Or the Myth of Fingerprints,” summoning the rest of the evening’s performers to join them on stage and the audience to dance in the aisles.
Afrofunk Experience. Photo by Steve Roby.
The Graceland tribute will hop across the Bay to the Freight & Salvage this coming weekend, Sat/19 and Sun/20, performances added after the JCCSF shows quickly sold out. There’s also a recorded album of the tribute, mixed and mastered by Faultline Studios’ Yosh! (an UnderCover co-presenter) — but for any vital fan of Paul Simon and the vast menagerie of Bay Area talent, seeing this live is highly recommended.
Ed note:San Francisco journalist Jeff Kaliss, author of I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone, has been a fan of UnderCover since consulting on their Sly tribute show in January.
After more than a year in development, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu is introducting legislation today to legalize and regulate the short-term housing rentals facilitated by Airbnb and other online companies. But the legislation won’t address all the concerns of Airbnb’s critics — from landlords to tenants to labor to neighborhood associations — and it’s unclear why it took so long to develop.
Yet the introduction of legislation is the latest in a rapid series of developments surrounding the scofflaw but politically connected SF-based Airbnb, which announced a couple weeks ago it would finally collect and pay the transient occupancy taxes it has been dodging in recent years, and it issued new terms of services to its SF hosts making it clearer that short-term rental aren’t legal in San Francisco.
As the Chiu legislation says, “Under Chapter 41A of the San Francisco Administrative Code, renting a residential unit for less than a 30-day term is prohibited. Similar prohibitions are found in the Planning Code. These restrictions are designed to prohibit owners, businesses, and residents from converting rental units and other residences in the City from longer-term residential use to tourist use.”
The most significant change the legislation makes to the lawless status quo is legalizing most short-term rental and limiting them to just 90 nights per year, the flip side of the legislation’s requirement that residents physically occupy their units at least 275 days per year.
“You have to be physically present in your apartment for 275 days,” Chiu told the Guardian.
This legislation changes that prohibition for permanent city residents (which it defines as living in the city at least 275 days per year and 60 days in a row and with an intention to make the unit a permanent dwelling) who maintain liability insurance and register with the city — a requirement that could help landlords more easily identify and evict tenants who are breaking their leases by subletting (while names will be redated from the publicly available list, addresses won’t).
“This has been a difficult process but we didn’t see any other way around the issue but to do a registry so we know who’s doing these rentals,” Chiu told the Guardian.
The legislation doesn’t give many new protections to tenant renters, such as attempting to give them greater rights to sublet their units, and it explicitly reinforces city laws against charging guests more that tenants pay for their rent-controlled units. But it does prevent landlords from immediately evicting them after the first offense.
Airbnb and other companies would also be required to specifically notify San Francisco hosts about local laws and restrictions, which would be a step further than Airbnb’s recent move.
Chiu’s office will hold a press briefing on the legislation at 1pm before formally introducing the legislation at today’s Board of Supervisors meeting, so check back later for updates.
UPDATE 5PM:
In a press conference this afternoon inside City Hall, Chiu told reporters there has been “an explosion of short term rentals” in San Francisco in recent years, and even though they’re been illegal, “the current reality is these laws are broken everyday and enforcement in difficult.”
He described four major components of the legislation: distinguishing being unacceptable and reasonable short-term rentals, code compliance and enforcement, regulation of Airbnb and other rental platforms, and ensuring that taxes are paid on these rentals.
While Chiu said he wants to allow people to supplement their income by occasionally hosting paying guests, he said the legisation really targets “the worst offenders that have taken entire units off the market and turned them into year-round hotels.”
Planning Director John Rahaim, who also spoke at the press conference, said his office has been inundated with complaints and needed the tools to act: “This is an important issue we’ve been hearing about for quite some time.”
Significantly, Chiu said his legislation extends the short-term rental controls to buildings with two or more units, which have been increasingly targeted by owners seeking to skirt rent-control restrictions.
Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union, who worked with Chiu on crafting the legislation and spoke at the event, said his group is currently working with the City Attorney’s Office to help residents of eight small apartment building who were recently evicted by landlords seeking to make more money through short-term rentals.
“We’ve identified thousands of units that have been removed from the rental housing stock,” Gullicksen said.
While the legislation goes a long way toward addressing the situation, there are still some tricky hurdles to navigate. For example, although the legislation prevents tenants from charging more than they pay in rent, it does so on a monthly basis, potentially still allowing tenants to cover full month’s rent while living in the units at least three-quarters of the time — a provision sure to draw opposition from landlord groups such as the San Francisco Apartment Association, who consider that stealing.
Landlords will also likely use the registry to find tenants who violate no subletting clauses in their leases. Although the legislation prevents such tenants from being evicted for a first offense, they would need to comply with orders to desist. And those who don’t register would be blacklisted from using the sites, under a provision that requires the companies to cooperate with the city.
Airbnb issued a statement commending Chiu for introducing the legislation and supporting the goal of legalizing its operations, but it took issue with specific provisions and promised to rally its customers to help shape the legislation, which won’t like be considered in hearings until this summer.
“There are certainly provisions in this proposal that could be problematic to our hosting community, including a registration system that could make some of their personal information public, so there is much work to be done to ensure that we pass legislation that is progressive, fair, and good for San Francisco and our hosting community,” Airbnb wrote. “But this is an important first step, and it is just the beginning of what promises to be a very long process during which the entire Board of Supervisors will look at this proposal, hear from all sides—including our community—and make decisions about how to proceed.”
Mayor Ed Lee, who has been a steadfast supporter of Airbnb — a company invested in by Lee’s biggest political benefactor, venture capitalist Ron Conway — today seemed to signal his tentative support for the legislation, without committing to its details. Previously, Lee had supported Airbnb’s two-year effort to stonewall the city and refuse to pay its taxes, even after the Tax Collectors Office concluded they were owed, a position that became untenable as problems associated with short-term rental mounted.
“We were focused on helping an industry begin, but I believe with some smart regulation — particuarly now that Airbnb and perhaps others have indicated they want to pay the taxes associated with those rentals — I think we have a way forward. But we’ll get into all the details,” Lee told us following his monthly appearance before the Board of Supervisors.
As to whether he supports limiting short-term rentals to 90 days a year, Lee said, “That’s an open question. There needs to be some guidelines established because we do have very congested neighborhoods and I know that companies like Airbnb want to be good neighbors as well.”
A pilot project to fund healthy fruit and vegetable vouchers for food insecure San Franciscans was proposed at the Board of Supervisors Neighborhood Services and Safety Committee hearing last Thursday. The innovative solution would bridge a startling hunger gap affecting thousands of Social Security beneficiaries, often seniors and families, who have little to no access to healthy food.
Sup. Eric Mar called for the hearing on food insecurity, and afterward promised a bevy of solutions to address hunger.
“In one of the wealthiest cities in this world, no child, no senior, no person with disability should be hungry,” Mar said to the gathered crowd that day. “I know we have some work before us though.”
At the hearing, members of the San Francisco Food Security Task Force, St. Anthony’s Church, the San Francisco and Marin Food Bank, the SFUSD and other organizations, laid out a number of solutions to approaching food insecurity in San Francisco, which is defined not only by lack of food, but lack of nutritious and healthy food. For instance, a family may not be starving necessarily, but may subsist on malnutritious food, leading to a host of health problems.
At a City Hall food security hearing. 1 in 4 San Franciscans are food insecure, according to dept. of pub. health pic.twitter.com/xJQdlTztYp
Most vexing, health experts said, is even if every government food program were fully enrolled, it still wouldn’t be enough.
Fully enroll Cal-Fresh (food stamps). Feed every kid free lunch in every city school. Though many thousands would be fed, tens of thousands of San Franciscans would still remain hungry.
The service gap exists in a conflict of requirements: when seniors or other persons receive Supplemental Security Income, Social Security benefits known as SSI, they are ineligible for food stamps, known in California as Cal Fresh.
Teri Olle, associate director of policy at the San Francisco and Marin Food bank, said SSI benefits aren’t enough to live on in our high-cost city, let alone eat healthily with.
“SSI monthly is about $850. Imagine using that to pay your rent in San Francisco, and then try to buy food,” she said. “That’s not a lot of money.”
The latest numbers from the Social Security Administration show 45,223 San Franciscans receive SSI benefits. Their benefits range from $877 to $1,133 a month for single persons, though most benefits are on the lower end of that scale.
The San Francisco Food Security Task Force developed the voucher program to meet just that need. The program would give food vouchers to eligible seniors and families receiving SSI benefits who cannot afford healthy food. The vouchers could be redeemed specifically for fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables at local grocery stores and supermarkets.
A sample program run by UCSF’s Center for Vulnerable Populations found that a majority of participants in the pilot of the pilot, if you will, bought oranges, grapes, bananas and avocados. Participants ate healthier and more nutritiously. The spending also could spur the local economy, Olle said.
“Of course there’s a moral dictate to do something, and of course we all care,” she said. “But from a city perspective the important aspect is: what are we all spending?”
A year’s worth of healthy food to a senior costs the same as a day in the hospital, health experts at the hearing noted. And a presentation prepared for the hearing by the Food Security Task Force wrote that for every $1 invested in food stamps, $1.79 in local economic activity was spurred.
The voucher program is still in its planning stages, Olle said. Nickolas Pagoulatos, an aide to Mar, said the next step is to assign a city department to lead the pilot. The task force will make that recommendation in the coming months. After proposals are made, it will be up to the mayor or the supervisors to find city funding for the pilot, which would cost $512,000 and would serve 1,000 people.
Notably, the supervisors approved a mandate last December to eliminate food insecurity by 2020.
The fully implemented program serving 25,000 people is estimated to cost as much as $13 million. Advocates proposed private partners supply funding to supplement the program. But so far, everything is just a proposal.
“It’s definitely something we want to implement, work on, and try to find funding for,” Pagoulatos said.
Okay, so maybe I’m a little biased because how often does a music video shoot take place in yours truly’s little podunk hometown of Albany, California — which is where the dollar-beer-covered racetrack glory that is Golden Gate Fields technically lies, friends, not Berkeley — but this new Atmosphere video for the song “Kanye West,” which the hip-hop duo premiered today on Noisey, does feel a little like a “spot the East Bay shooting location” rendition of Where’s Waldo.
There’s plenty else to like, though: That’s also Oakland writer-superstar Chinaka Hodge in the role of leading lady, and local comedian/erstwhile Guardian opiner Nato Green as a scared-shitless corner store worker. Check it out below.
The duo’s new album Southsiders drops May 6 on Rhymesayers; this song will also be on The Lake Nokomis Maxi Single, released exclusively on vinyl for Record Store Day (that’s next Saturday, April 19, kiddos). They’ll be in town in August for Outsidelands.
Saturday brought a huge sandstorm to the festival grounds but didn’t diminish the excitement in the crowd, according to our guys in the field. “Head scarves turned into face masks.” Slideshow above, more below. All photos by Eric Lynch.
As the guitarist for Rocket From The Tombs and The Dead Boys, Cheetah Chrome helped write the sonic blueprint for punk rock — and after four decades in the music world, he continues to create his art with an uncompromising and independent attitude. The incendiary axeman, born Gene O’Connor in Cleveland, Ohio, recently released his first studio solo record, a seven song EP that finds him traversing some familiar aural terrain, while exploring some new sounds and different approaches at the same time.
The collection of tunes is made up of tracks recorded at three different recording sessions, two of which were recent efforts, while one actually dates all the way back to 1996.
“When I had first gotten cleaned up and was wanting to get back into playing again, Hilly [Kristal, the late owner of CBGBs] hooked me up to record some songs, and we were just about done when he started insisting that he wanted to put it out on ‘CBGB Records’ — and I was like, ‘Well, there is no CBGB Records!’ So we got into a tiff, and the masters ended up sitting around until after he died — we had settled our differences, the record just didn’t get talked about,” laughs Chrome over the phone from his home in Nashville.
“After Hilly passed away, his daughter called me up and said she found the masters, and asked if I wanted them, and sent them down to me. At the time I was working on a record with Batusis, and our record label decided they were going to go on hiatus, and gave us the masters free and clear.”
With a collection of both new and old material to work with, Chrome sat down with producer Ken Coomer and sorted through the tracks, some of which had multiple versions of the same song, and decided which ones he liked the best, and which ones he didn’t feel so strongly about anymore.
The resulting EP features some guitar sounds that will be instantly recognizable to fans of Chrome and his stint in one of the most infamous punk bands of all time, but also showcases a variety of other musical styles, as well as his prowess for writing strongly personal and emotional songs that should break any stereotypical misconceptions one might have about him. Kicking off with “Sharkey,” an instrumental reminiscent of the early surf guitar sound of the 1960s, the track takes on a more ominous tone with a layer of organ hovering over the guitars, an addition that came almost by accident while in the studio.
“If you had heard the way that song started out you wouldn’t believe it — it was acoustic. I was messing around with an organ, and started paying those chords, and the next thing you now, it turned into that!” Apparently, that transition from acoustic to rock is not unusual in Chrome’s world — and although much more of the acoustic sound has remained in some form or another on the solo EP, many of his earlier songs started out life on an acoustic guitar — a fact that might not be so clear to admirers of his searing playing on an electric guitar.
“A lot of the Dead Boys stuff was written on an acoustic guitar — when we first started, I had a Gibson SG that I was using, I was pretty poor, I only had one other guitar, an Epiphone 12 string. One night at rehearsal I was messing around and did something stupid and cracked the neck on the SG,” says Chrome.
“So all I had for a little while was this acoustic 12-string — so Stiv and I wrote a lot of songs on that, ‘Not Anymore,’ a lot of the stuff on the first album was written acoustically.”
On the new record, two of the songs, “Stare Into The Night” and “No Credit” were actually written around the time that the Dead Boys were breaking up — and “East Side Story” and “Rollin’ Voodoo” have been kicking around for a while as well, they had just never been recorded the way that Chrome says he had heard them in his head.
After the record was finished the way he wanted it, the EP was finally released late last year on Plowboy Records out of Nashville, a company that Chrome now works for as creative director and director of A&R; it’s a position that he sees as being able to try to right some of the wrongs that he had to deal with when the Dead Boys were screwed over by record labels in the early days. “We’re probably one of the most artist friendly labels out there right now!”
On the current short run of West Coast tour dates, Chrome says fans can expect to not only hear songs from the new record, but also tunes spanning his entire career.
“We’re going to throw a couple of unexpected ones in there, a couple I haven’t done on previous tours, so it should be fun.”
Cheetah Chrome With The Street Walkin’ Cheetahs, Jack Killed Jill, The Vans Sat/12, 9pm, $12 Thee Parkside 1600 17th St, SF www.theeparkside.com
The Nintendo game Super Smash Bros. Melee was supposed to be a party game, “fun for the whole family,” as the kids say.
Mario sets Princess Zelda on fire. Donkey Kong smacks Pikachu so hard the little yellow rodent flies across the screen. Commercials for one version of the game feature Bugs Bunny-esque cartoon smackings, as costumed actors roll down a grassy knoll. The adorableness of Melee belies a mystery: How did a Nintendo game from 2001 become the focus of cutthroat national video game competitions?
A documentary playing at the Roxie this Sunday, The Smash Brothers, tells that tale, following seven competitive gamers as they thumb their joysticks furiously, competing for prestige.
Remember the 80s Fred Savage flick, The Wizard? In it, Savage dons his Power Glove and competes to be the world’s best Super Mario Bros. 3 player. Same difference, only this isn’t fiction, and the name of the game is Super Smash Bros. Melee.
Melee is a crossover “brawler” video game featuring Nintendo characters from a myriad of its franchises, some famous, some not: Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Donkey Kong, Pokemon and more. Heroes fight heroes, villains fight villains, and everybody fights everybody — it’s like watching the Nintendo equivalent of Superman versus The Joker versus Spiderman in a free for all battle, a silly, grand ol’ time. At least at first.
The opening title sequence to Super Smash Bros. Melee, on the Nintendo Gamecube.
The game, released in 2001, was soon discovered by ultra-competitive video gamers, known in the community as Smashers. Melee spawned regional, then national tournaments, and cash prizes and collectives of frenzied gamers playing to this day. Three local Smash-fans, Ross Boucher, Saikat Chakrabarti and Supratik Lahiri saw the documentary and clamored to bring it to the big screen in San Francisco.
Their reasoning was this: Despite the fan following remaining strong for 13 years, Melee is still on the fringes in the competitive video game world (a fringe of a fringe, if you will). Competitors for more mainstream games, like League of Legends, garner big cash sponsorships from Mountain Dew and other companies. Melee only jumped back into the competitive circuit last year.
“The fascinating thing about Smash is that relatively speaking, it’s a pretty small, tight community,” Lahiri told the Guardian. In a video game world played mostly online and with distance between players measured in the thousands of miles, this is unique.
“Everyone knows each other,” he said.
There are 1,400 members of the Official NorCal Melee group on Facebook, still holding tournaments in and around San Francisco to this day. About 50 or so competitors pop up at Folsom Street Foundry (in SoMa) for Tuesday Game Nights, where they get their smash on. (Yes, I said it. No, I won’t take it back).
The documentary first ran on YouTube October last year, garnering critical acclaim in the gaming press. Divided into chapters, it’s a four hour saga of the ultimate in-the-weeds gaming knowledge, following the world’s top Melee players: Azen, PC Chris, Korean DJ, Mew2King, Ken, Isai and Mango. In the film, their hands flurry across their Gamecube controllers with intentional speed, like Jimi Hendrixes of the video game world.
A tournament Melee match between Ken and PC Chris.
Lahiri is in awe of their technical proficiency.
“I’m really bad at all these games. Whenever you think ‘oh i’m a little good,’ you learn better,” he said. “I went to the Folsom Street Foundry, and watching the players’ hands, they’re on a totally different playing sphere.”
The speed of play is so vital to the fighting between say, Mario and Link, that TV speed becomes an issue. Modern televisions’ fancy HD features create heavy lag times between button pressing and onscreen motions.
“With Smash there’s a whole debate about which television you use,” Lahiri explained. “Smash still is mostly played on old CRTs (televisions). They’re a pain to deal with because they’re heavy and bulky, but the competitive scene thrives on the response time.”
But for all the love of Melee from the competitive community, the video game’s creator hasn’t loved them back. Smash Bros. franchise creator Masahiro Sakurai told gaming press repeatedly that he doesn’t agree with turning Melee into a competitive game. “Fighting games have a very high barrier to entry for new players, while Smash was always meant to appeal to lots of people from different gaming communities,” Sakurai told gaming outlet Gamespot last year.
Lately he’s changed his tune. In a video broadcast from Nintendo only this week, Sakurai seemed to acknowledge the Melee competitive community. The new Smash Bros. sequel (due out this winter) will have a “For Fun” and “For Glory” mode, he announced. The “For Glory” mode reflects many of the rules (no silly weapons, people!) and stages (flat only, less jumping!) that competitive Smashers favor.
Though The Smash Brothers film is a brisk four hours, the movie will be halved by an intermission featuring a Q&A with the film’s director, Travis Beauchamp.
The whole point of Sunday is the love of the game, Lahiri said. The last question The Guardian asked is the most important of all: what character do you play with? This is important knowledge in the Melee community, demonstrating fighting temperament.
“Officially i’m a Captain Falcon player,” he said. Captain Falcon is known for his trademark “Falcon Punch!” catchphrase, twisted into memes all over the inter-webz. Lahiri uses a competitive (and silly) character, but remains humble about his skills. “Let me put it this way, the director, Travis, is better at the game than I am.”
Tickets to The Smash Brothers are $10 online, and $15 at the door. All of the proceeds will go to the Child’s Play charity, which donates video games, books, and toys to children in hospitals all over the US.
THE SMASH BROTHERS
Sun/13, 2pm, episodes 1-5; 4:15-5pm, intermission and director Q&A; 5-7:30pm, episodes 6-9, $10-15
Fun fact: I’m bad at festivals. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, per se: there’s live music, the outdoors, fried food, great people-watching.
It’s just that — well, okay, I lied, I usually don’t enjoy them. I’m not 22 anymore. I don’t like waiting in long lines for disgusting Port-a-Potties. The sound is often unpreventably terrible. Trying to see all the bands you really care about becomes a headache-inducing feat of scheduling Sudoku. And the people-watching, while entertaining, often devolves into being so annoyed at/dismayed by the people around me that I’m too distracted to enjoy the music.
I’m great at parties, I promise!
Here’s the thing: I truly love a lot of the acts on the lineup at Coachella this year. OutKast, The Dismemberment Plan, come on. And the fact that I’m not going to see the Replacements tonight makes me feel all kinds of superfan failure feelings (see: the name of my column).
I can’t be alone in my competing excitement about this year’s artists and total lack of desire to physically be on the hot, crowded premises for their shows. Thus, without further ado — before your social networks start blowing up with pictures of your friends having The Time of Their Lives there — a step-by-step guide to doing Coachella this weekend from the comfort of your own home.
Step 1:Get dressed. Ladies, you’re gonna want one of these.
On the bottom, go for the timeless, comfortable class of cutoff shorts that let the entire bottom half of your ass hang out the leg holes (you can Google image-search that one yourself). Pair with tall, furry boots. If you’ve been working out lately — or even following the Coachella diet — and really want to show off your complete lack of self-awareness, try appropriating the rich, storied culture of a persecuted people with your headgear. Guys, you can do this one too.
Step 2. Hit the hardware store and garden supply center. You want a high-powered space heater and several bags of very dry dirt — we’re in a drought here, after all. On the way home, collect a full trash bag of empty beer bottles, used condoms, and other detritus from the street. (Optional, depending on personal preference: Buy drugs.) When you get home, turn the heater on full blast and close the windows; then scatter dirt and garbage everywhere.
Step 3. Invite some friends over. You’re not into big crowds, but come on, you’re not anti-social. Bonus points if you can get a local celebrity, like John Waters, Rider Strong, or the Tamale Lady. Instagram the shit out of everything they do, such as taking selfies, taking more selfies, and sitting on their bodyguards’ shoulders, smoking blunts.
Step 4. Put on some tunes. To get that special “festival” sound, try turning the volume and bass up until every single element is distorted, then wrap your speakers in heavy blankets. Follow up by either standing with your ear smashed against them or walking half a mile away. Here’s a playlist featuring all of Friday, to get you started:
Step 5. Sometime around 5am (your mileage may very depending on drugs of choice), try going to sleep. Hey, look at that — you’re in your own bed! If you want to get that authentic camping feeling, make your friends stay over and sleep in super-cramped positions next to you. Ideally, you’ll wake up to the sound of someone vomiting five feet away from your head. I’m lucky enough to have a bedroom window facing 16th Street; again, YMMV.
But don’t think about that now. Get a little bit of rest. Drink some water. Tomorrow’s another long, glorious day of the best music festival you’ve ever been to, and if you want to have document the Time of Your Life, you’re gonna need your energy.
[More seriously — we do have a photographer at Coachella this weekend, check back here for cool photos that are not the result of me gleefully Google image-searching “Coachella headdress terrible.”]
This morning (Fri/11) kicked off with yet another Google bus blockade in San Francisco’s Mission District, only this time housing activists said a Google employee is directly to blame for displacing residents.
The blockade, which took place at 18th and Dolores streets, was short-lived but featured speeches by tenants facing eviction, as well as a giant cardboard cut-out depicting 812 Guerrero, a seven-unit building where tenants are facing eviction under the Ellis Act.
The property owner is Jack Halprin, a lawyer who is the head of eDiscovery, Enterprise for Google. He moved into one of the units after purchasing the building two years ago and served eviction notices on Feb. 26, according to tenant Claudia Triado, a third grade teacher at Fairmount Elementary in San Francisco who lives there with her two-year-old son.
The Bay Guardian left a voice message for Halprin requesting comment. We will update this post if he returns the call.
After the bus blockade, activists proceeded to 812 Guerrero and staged a short rally on the front steps.
Evan Wolkenstein, who teaches Jewish literature at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay, said he’s lived at 812 Guerrero for eight years. Other tenants facing eviction from the property include an artist and a disabled person, he added.
During the Google bus blockade, minutes before police officers arrived to clear a path for the bus by urging protesters onto the sidewalk, Wolkenstein gave a speech about the overall impact the tech sector is having on San Francisco.
This evening, Eviction Free San Francisco will continue its protest activities with a march to the homes of teachers who are facing eviction, beginning at 20th and Dolores streets at 5pm.
It’s Friday, which means only one thing: new movies R herrre! Though Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier will probably keep body-slamming all the box-office competition, there are some not-to-be-missed flicks just arriving in theaters, including two fascinating docs and two eerie tales, including the remarkable Under the Skin. Read on!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTS4AsJprm4
Cuban Fury Nick Frost, Rashida Jones, and Chris O’Dowd star in this romantic comedy about competitive salsa dancing. (1:37)
Dom Hemingway We first meet English safecracker Dom (Jude Law) as he delivers an extremely verbose and flowery ode to his penis, addressing no one in particular, while he’s getting blown in prison. Whether you find this opening a knockout or painfully faux will determine how you react to the rest of Richard Shepard’s new film, because it’s all in that same overwritten, pseudo-shocking, showoff vein, Sprung after 12 years, Dom is reunited with his former henchman Dickie (Richard E. Grant), and the two go to the South of France to collect the reward owed for not ratting out crime kingpin Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir). This detour into the high life goes awry, however, sending the duo back to London, where Dom — who admits having “anger issues,” which is putting it mildly — tries to woo a new employer (Jumayn Hunter) and, offsetting his general loutishness with mawkish interludes, to re-ingratiate himself with his long-estranged daughter (Emilia Clarke). Moving into Guy Ritchie terrain with none of the deftness the same writer-director had brought to debunking James Bond territory in 2006’s similarly black-comedic crime tale The Matador, Dom Hemingway might bludgeon some viewers into sharing its air of waggish, self conscious merriment. But like Law’s performance, it labors so effortfully hard after that affect that you’re just as likely to find the whole enterprise overbearing. (1:33) (Dennis Harvey)
Draft Day Kevin Costner stars in this comedy-drama set behind the scenes of the NFL. (2:00)
Finding Vivian Maier Much like In the Realms of the Unreal, the 2004 doc about Henry Darger, Finding Vivian Maier explores the lonely life of a gifted artist whose talents were discovered posthumously. In this case, however, the filmmaker — John Maloof, who co-directs with Charlie Siskel — is responsible for Maier’s rise to fame. A practiced flea-market hunter, he picked up a carton of negatives at a 2007 auction; they turned out to be striking examples of early street photography. He was so taken with the work (snapped by a woman so obscure she was un-Google-able) that he began posting images online. Unexpectedly, they became a viral sensation, and Maloof became determined to learn more about the camerawoman. Turns out Vivian Maier was a career nanny in the Chicago area, with plenty of former employers to share their memories. She was an intensely private person who some remembered as delightfully adventurous and others remembered as eccentric, mentally unstable, or even cruel; she was a hoarder who was distrustful of men, and she spoke with a maybe-fake French accent. And she was obsessed with taking photographs that she never showed to anyone; the hundreds of thousands now in Maloof’s collection (along with 8mm and 16mm films) offer the only insight into her creative mind. “She had a great eye, a sense of humor, and a sense of tragedy,” remarks acclaimed photographer Mary Ellen Mark. “But there’s a piece of the puzzle missing.” The film’s central question — why was Maier so secretive about her hobby? — may never be answered. But as the film also suggests, that mystery adds another layer of fascination to her keenly observed photos. (1:23) (Cheryl Eddy)
The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden Extensive archival footage and home movies (plus one short, narrative film) enhance this absorbing doc from San Francisco-based Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller (2005’s Ballets Russes). It tells the tale of a double murder that occurred in the early 1930s on Floreana — the most remote of the already scarcely-populated Galapagos Islands. A top-notch cast (Cate Blanchett, Diane Kruger, Connie Nielsen, Josh Radnour) gives voice to the letters and diary entries of the players in this stranger-than-fiction story, which involved an array of Europeans who’d moved away from civilization in search of utopian simplicity — most intriguingly, a maybe-fake Baroness and her two young lovers — and realized too late that paradise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Goldfine and Geller add further detail to the historic drama by visiting the present-day Galapagos, speaking with residents about the lingering mystery and offering a glimpse of what life on the isolated islands is like today. (2:00) (Cheryl Eddy)
Interior. Leather Bar. James Franco and Travis Mathews’ “docufilm” imagines and recreates footage cut from the 1980 film Cruising. (1:00) Roxie.
Joe “I know what keeps me alive is restraint,” says Nicolas Cage’s titular character, a hard-drinking, taciturn but honorable semi-loner who supervises a crew of laborers clearing undesirable trees in the Mississippi countryside. That aside, his business is mostly drinking, occasionally getting laid, and staying out of trouble — we glean he’s had more than enough of the latter in his past. Thus it’s against his better judgement that he helps out newly arrived transient teen Gary (the excellent Tye Sheridan, of 2012’s Mud and 2011’s The Tree of Life), who’s struggling to support his bedraggled mother and mute sister. Actually he takes a shine to the kid, and vice versa; the reason for caution is Gary’s father, whom he himself calls a “selfish old drunk.” And that’s a kind description of this vicious, violent, lazy, conscienceless boozehound, who has gotten his pitiful family thrown out of town many times before and no doubt will manage it once again in this new burg, where they’ve found an empty condemned house to squat in. David Gordon Green’s latest is based on a novel by the late Larry Brown, and like that writer’s prose, its considerable skill of execution manages to render serious and grimly palatable a steaming plateload of high white trash melodrama that might otherwise be undigestible. (Strip away the fine performances, staging and atmosphere, and there’s not much difference between Joe and the retro Southern grindhouse likes of 1969’s Shanty Tramp, 1974’s ‘Gator Bait or 1963’s Scum of the Earth.) Like Mud and 2011’s Killer Joe, this is a rural Gothic neither truly realistic or caricatured to the point of parody, but hanging between those two poles — to an effect that’s impressive and potent, though some may not enjoy wallowing in this particular depressing mire of grotesque nastiness en route to redemption. (1:57) (Dennis Harvey)
OculusTim (Brenton Thwaites) and Kaylie (Karen Gillan) are grown siblings with a horrible shared past: When they were children, their parents (Rory Cochrane, Katee Sankhoff) moved them all into a nice suburban house, decorating it with, among other things, a 300-year-old mirror. But that antique seemed to have an increasingly disturbing effect on dad, then mom too, to ultimately homicidal, offspring-orphaning effect. Over a decade later, Tim is released from a juvenile mental lockup, ready to live a normal life after years of therapy have cleaned him of the supernatural delusions he think landed him there in the first place. Imagine his dismay when Kaylie announces she has spent the meantime researching aforementioned “evil mirror” — which turns out to have had a very gruesome history of mysteriously connected deaths — and painstakingly re-acquiring it. She means to destroy it so it can never wreak havoc, and has set up an elaborate room of camcorders and other equipment in which to “prove” its malevolence first, with Tim her very reluctant helper. Needless to say, this experiment (which he initially goes along with only in order to debunk the whole thing for good) turns out to be a very, very bad idea. The mirror is clever — demonically clever. It can warp time and perspective so our protagonists don’t know whether what they’re experiencing is real or not. Expanding on his 2006 short film (which was made before his excellent, little-seen 2011 horror feature Absentia), Mike Flanagan’s tense, atmospheric movie isn’t quite as scary as you might wish, partly because the villain (the spirit behind the mirror) isn’t particularly well-imagined in generic look or murky motivation. But it is the rare new horror flick that is genuinely intricate and surprising plot-wise — no small thing in the current landscape of endless remakes and rehashes. (1:44) (Dennis Harvey)
Rio 2 More 3D tropical adventures with animated birds Blu (Jesse Eisenberg) and Jewel (Anne Hathaway) and their menagerie of pals, with additional voices by Andy Garcia, Leslie Mann, Bruno Mars, Jamie Foxx, and more. (1:41)
Who is Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow? In the 137-page federal complaint detailing charges that led to the high-profile arrest of Sen. Leland Yee, Chow, and 24 others two weeks ago, Chow is described as the powerful “Dragonhead” of an ancient Chinese organized crime syndicate, “overseeing a vast criminal enterprise involved in drugs, guns, prostitution, protection rackets, moving stolen booze and cigarettes, and money laundering,” as we reported at the time.
Not so, famed defense attorney Tony Serra told a crowd of reporters at Pier 5 Law Offices in San Francisco’s North Beach district, where he and fellow attorneys were joined by supporters wearing red tees bearing the slogan “Free Shrimp Boy.”
Attorneys Serra and Curtis Briggs described a five-year federal operation to target Chow and ensnare him in wrongdoing, insisting he had wanted no part in criminal activity. Serra said agents had “stuffed money into his pocket” despite his protests, and noted that his legal team was representing Chow pro bono because he has no money.
Here are a few words from Serra, followed by Briggs.
Eli Crawford, a longtime friend of Chow’s who said he’d worked as an orderly at a Dublin prison when Chow was held in solitary confinement there years ago, described Chow as a spiritual person who had taken a vow to disengage from wrongdoing in the wake of his criminal past.
Chow was initially appointed a federal public defender, but the team of lawyers has stepped in to take over his defense. Serra said he believed they would enter pleas of not guilty on all counts on Tuesday, when a court hearing is scheduled before a federal magistrate. A court date tomorrow (Fri/11) will deal primarily with discovery, he said. In May, the defense attorneys plan to bring a motion for bail.
Asked about Chow’s link to Yee, Serra said he believed there was “no nexus, no relationship whatsoever.” Serra said he doubted if all defendants named in the complaint would proceed to trial, guessing that some would cooperate or take plea deals.
“If we are really going to trial with Yee,” Serra said, he’d have to think carefully about whether to move for a separate trial.
“Sometimes the strategy is, no, I want to be with him – mainly because, one, there’s no nexus, and two, he’s going to go down,” Serra said. “And that gives the jury, maybe a satisfied appetite, you know, for justice.”
There’s plenty of talk about how influential the band was on the mainstream music scene and the commercial record industry, and even more on the tragedy and tortured soul of Cobain; yet in all of the discussions, dissertations and analysis of the Nirvana phenomenon, if that’s what you want to call it, it almost feels that one key component has been left on the backburner — the fact that the band made some absolutely amazing music, and has touched multiple generations of fans with that gift.
Sure, Nirvana moved millions of units in record stores, and they knocked Michael Jackson out of the number one spot in the Billboard charts. For people like me, however, those are secondary accomplishments, footnotes in what the band meant to us. I didn’t hear about Nirvana by watching MTV or keeping track of what was hot in the Billboard 100. I was 12 years old when Nevermind came out. I was turned on to them by a friend at a sleepover in junior high school, a personal connection that I doubt is seldom done anymore in the age of the internet.
This was when I first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — it was late at night, and after we had been told to go to sleep. After we turned out the lights, my friend turned on a small flashlight and got out his Walkman — that’s a portable cassette tape player, for you youngsters — from underneath his bed and passed it over to me. He told me that he had heard this new song by some new band, and that I needed to hear it — but he hadn’t wanted to play it earlier out loud with his kid brother and parents around for some reason.
He told me that I would probably feel like jumping up and running around the room, and that it had this crazy energy about it.
I put on my headphones, and hit play.
I haven’t been the same person since.
When the first chords came out of the headphones, I wasn’t sure what to think — by the time the distortion, drums, and bass kicked in and had gone through about two bars, I was hooked. My friend was right, after the subdued verse, the musical anticipation was palpable from the build-up of the pre-chorus; by the time the “hello, hello, hello, how low” burst into the all-out aural assault of “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous,” I was practically jumping out of bed, mad with an energy I had never known before.
Nirvana became the soundtrack to my life, and while they opened up the doors to so much more music for me in the ensuing years, they remain my favorite band, the lynchpin for what I’ve become as an adult. I’ve been covering music professionally for almost a decade and a half now; I wouldn’t be doing so if it wasn’t for Nirvana. While I am excited that the band is getting the recognition they so rightly deserve now with the Hall of Fame induction, it is with bittersweet emotions that they are doing so, being so close to the anniversary of the death of their driving force, their heart and soul, Kurt Cobain.
There is a quote from Cobain that has been repeated often over the years, but I think it might sum up best the feelings and attitude that I took away from Nirvana and their music. As the band was starting to catapult to fame in late 1991, he was asked what the name Nirvana meant to him. He replied, “The word that has come up in every definition that I’ve read is freedom. So we kind of like to think of our music as musical freedom.”
I think that is what I and so many countless fans around the world took from Nirvana. A sense of freedom. Not just musically, but artistically, culturally, and personally. A gateway to being your own person, regardless of what those around you or what society as a whole might think of you. The blurry photo of the band in the liner notes to Nevermind features Cobain flipping the bird to the camera. I think that attitude of “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want” has transcended generations, and is part of what keeps Nirvana a force to be reckoned with.
I consider myself very lucky to have seen Nirvana live in concert once; that experience, in 8th grade, at the age of 14, further cemented the impact that the band would have on my life. The raw energy and emotion of the show makes it the one to which all others that have come after have been held up to. Some have come close, none have ever matched it.
In Septembe rof 2011, I made the pilgrimage to Seattle ito visit an exhibit celebrating Nirvana’s legacy and impact on popular culture and the 20th anniversary of Nevermind at the Experience Music Project museum, “Nirvana: Taking Punk To The Masses.” It featured a treasure trove of artifacts and interactive installations; seeing the actual instruments that were used to create the music that has had such a profound effect on my life was awe-inspiring; as was gazing at hand-written lyric sheets, original demo tapes, artwork, family photos, stage props, and more.
In an article I wrote about the experience, I noted that when my friend and I came to the end of the exhibit, we both commented that while it was an amazingly touching experience to see what was there, it somehow seemed too short, that there really should have been more to it. It was then that we looked at each other and came to what should have been an obvious realization; for all their influence and impact on our lives and the lives of millions of fans around the world, Nirvana only existed for a mere seven years. Their career, like Kurt Cobain’s life, was cut much too short. In that short time, however, they made an incredible impression on their fans, myself being one of them.
It’s hard to sum up more than 20 years worth of feelings and emotions in one simple article; I’ve done my best here for now. Kurt, Krist, and Dave: Congratulations on your induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And more importantly, thank you for the music.
“They’re totally unfair competition,” said cab driver Jonathan Khin, a 20-year cabbie who came to San Francisco decades ago from Burma. “They don’t have to pay regulations and fees that we do.”
The drivers complaints over the rideshares, known legally as Transportation Network Companies, were many: the TNCs don’t provide adequate insurance for drivers, don’t have the number of cars regulated (like cabs are), and don’t have to pay regulatory fees that cabs currently pay. This all leads to an uneven playing field, and the taxi cab industry is getting creamed.
“I have 50 percent less daily riders,” than he used to, said Myo Winn, a 10-year driver for companies like Yellow Cab and DeSoto.
Cabbie Jonathan Khin holds up his SFMTA issued taxi ID, one of the many regulatory elements of the taxi industry that rideshares, or TNCs, do not provide.
But the taxi industry has its own cross to bear. It’s no secret that finding a taxi in San Francisco can be nigh-impossible at some hours, and even in some neighborhoods. Carl Macmurdo, the president of the Medallion Holders Association, didn’t mince words about it: “There’s been bad, poor service over the years from our industry.”
That bad service left the taxi companies wide open for “disruption,” as the tech companies call it. But that disruption came at a cost — the still-young TNC industry has struggled to provide adequate insurance to its drivers, even suggesting that drivers personal insurance policies would protect them while ferrying customers. As we’ve written about before, this has left passengers, drivers, and even pedestrians left with huge bills for collisions that taxi companies have a history of paying out with less hand-wringing.
If the TNCs provided insurance like taxis did, would the taxi industry still have a problem with them?
“Yes,” Macmurdo told the Guardian, as the horns from nearby cabs continued to honk. “Seattle deregulated taxis and let medallions be open, and it was chaos. Government [regulations] balance the need between available cab service and the ability of drivers to make a decent living. There are thousands of the TNCs on the road and it’s destroyed the industry. There are too many vehicles on the road competing.”
“Our role is not to play favorites,” she told the Guardian, standing in the courtyard of the CPUC building just after the protest ended. “We made the [TNC industry] safe, and let the free market do its job.”
Other regulatory bodies have gone the opposite way. Seattle City Council last month voted to limit TNC vehicles to 150 in the city at any one time, and the protest came on the heels of the California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones issuing a public letter to the CPUC calling for TNCs to carry the burden of insurance.
Uber and Lyft have made progress in expanding their insurance coverage, he said, but the gap still exists, putting drivers, passengers, and pedestrians at risk.
“Our investigative hearing revealed serious insurance gaps in the current business model of Transportation Network Companies such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar,” Jones wrote in a statement to the press. “As long as TNCs are encouraging non-professional drivers to use their personal vehicles to drive passengers for a profit, a risk which personal automobile insurance simply does not cover, TNCs should bear the burden of making sure that insurance is provided. Our recommendations will ensure there is insurance protection for passengers, drivers and pedestrians.”
The report from the insurance commissioner asserted a long standing complaint of taxi drivers. Personal auto insurers, the report wrote, are not planning to offer coverage of TNC drivers “in the near future, if ever.”
Now it’s up to the CPUC to create new, stricter regulations to protect the public. Those regulations may come as soon as September, Zafar said.
A key provision in the JOBS Act, a legislative package signed into law by President Obama in April of 2012, was hailed as a huge victory for the ever-growing real estate industry, removing many of the bothersome impediments that keep it exclusively in the realm of the upper echelon.
The vast majority of real-estate deals are controlled by private equity firms and “accredited” investors whose individual net worth is $1 million or more. But the JOBS Act opens up new territory by allowing for “crowdsourcing” investment funds, introducing the option of pooling financial resources with up to 500 other “non-accredited” investors, meaning anyone making $100,000 or less a year for an individual, or $300,000 for couples.
This potentially opens the floodgates to a much larger portion of the population — but it could have positive or disastrous implications for San Francisco’s housing affordability crisis, depending on how it’s used.
Walk down nearly any street in San Francisco, and you can virtually watch the city change by the moment. With reports of mass displacement and staggering income inequality, the city is desperate for a way to stem the tide of evictions and curb the loss of affordable housing.
This idea of using crowdfunding has drawn some interest as a possible tool for restoring balance. At the same time, at least one company has seized on it to do just the opposite, making it easier for real-estate investors to flip properties and escalate displacement, the only difference being that one need not be a member of the exclusive upper crust to get in the game.
The recent campaign to save the historic black owned bookstore, Marcus Books, led by the San Francisco Community Land Trust, sought to take advantage of crowdfunding as a way to preserve an iconic cultural location and housing for long-term residents.
Fundrise, a D.C. based real-estate startup, helped the Land Trust set up a fundraising campaign in an effort to raise $1 million. Although it failed to hit the target, the organization “was able to raise $750,000,” according to Tracy Parent, SFCLT’s Organizational Director. (Marcus Books is hosting a town hall meeting on Sat/12 at 1pm to discuss plans for the future.)
Yet a different picture emerged when we talked to Aaron McDaniel, CEO of San Francisco real estate startup Tycoon Real Estate.
McDaniel says the JOBS Act provision “can be used as a tool to get into the industry” for those who want to break into the business of flipping houses, a sentiment echoed in a Business Insider article by Nicholas Carlson earlier this year that asked the question: “How can I get into San Francisco’s house-flipping, rent-gouging market?” To wit:
“It used to be that if an investor wanted in the San Francisco real estate market, that investor would have to have at least a few hundred thousand dollars around for a down payment. Not anymore. Thanks to the JOBS Act and a new Kickstarter-like website called Tycoon Real Estate, people with a few thousand dollars in savings can now invest in flipping houses the way only millionaires used to be able to.”
In other words, anyone looking for a get-rich-quick scheme can cash in on the city’s red-hot real-estate market. As the Business Insider observed:
“If [Tycoon Real-Estate] gets big and starts funneling even more capital into the San Francisco real estate market, all those people throwing rocks at Google buses and whining about rents are certainly going to come after the startup, accusing it of fueling an already dangerous bubble.”
Therein lies the danger that could actually speed up displacement in the city. And with San Francisco housing prices at an all-time high, there’s strong incentive for any random person with a thousand dollars or so lying around to give it a go.
As Parent noted, to her knowledge, no other organizations looking to combat displacement have sought to create crowdfunding campaigns of their own for the purpose of preserving rent-controlled housing, rather than flipping it. But Parent is holding out some hope. Even though “we were not successful” in raising the $1 million needed to save Marcus Books, she said, “we will use Fundrise again.”
San Francisco songwriter Dylan Shearer has been kicking around the Bay Area since 2005, but something in his voice sounds like he just arrived here in a time machine from London in 1965. Like a less-buoyant Ray Davies (or a less-suicidal Nick Drake?) there’s an impressive authentic, cozily British gloom to the California-born singer’s work.
His new LP garragearray, out April 15 through a collaboration between Castle Face and Empty Cellar Records, expands on the immersive, melodic, rainy-day moods of his last couple efforts, 2012’s Porchpuddles and 2009’s critic favorite Planted/Plans.
New for this record are some rather heavy-hitting collaborators: On bass you have Petey Dammit from Thee Oh Sees (who, if you have no Facebook friends freaking out and posting about it every 10 minutes, seem to have officially ended their much-bemoaned hiatus with the announcement of a few shows in London and LA), and Comets on Fire‘s Noel von Harmonson on drums, with production by Eric Bauer (Mikal Cronin, Ty Segall, Sic Alps, a shit ton of others).
Here’s our favorite of the two advance tracks he’s put out — beautiful, sunshiney day outside be damned.
Check with Empty Cellar for show dates around the LP release.
San Francisco 49ers star quarterback Colin Kaepernick, player Quinton Patton and Seahawks receiver Ricardo Lockette are being investigated for sexual assault by Miami police, according to reports earlier today by TMZ sports (and other media outlets).
The name of the woman at the center of the allegations was redacted from the report, which was obtained by sports site Deadspin. The only descriptor available is that she is African American.
Tuesday night, April 1, she went to visit Lockette’s apartment, she told officers. Kaepernick and Patton were there as well, and she mixed them drinks and the players all drank shots. The players told her in order to take a shot she needed to take a hit of a bong “filled with marijuana,” according to the report.
From the report:
“They sat down, talked, and watched the basketball game. She started to feel light headed and went to a bedroom to lie down. [Redacted name] took off her jacket and jewlery. Mr. Kaepernick came behind her into the bedroom and started kissing her. She advised they were kissing [mouth] and Mr. Kaepernick started to undressed [sic] her. She got completely naked. Mr. Kaepernick told her that he was going to be right back and left the bedroom. They did not have sex. [Name redacted] advised that she was in bed naked and Mr. Patton and Mr. Lockette opened the door and “peeked” inside. She told them ‘what are you doing? Where is Colin? Get out!’ They closed the door and left. She cannot remember anything after that.'”
Next, the woman alleged, things took a turn for the worse.
“[Name redacted] woke up in a hospital bed and doesn’t remember how she got there or who transported her to the hospital. [Name redacted] advised that she has had a sexual relationship with Mr. Kaepernick in the past.”
49ers General Manager Trent Baalke told TMZ reports that the team is “gathering the pertinent facts.” The full text of the incident report is below.
In the opening of its new Terms of Service, Airbnb wrote (in all caps): “IN PARTICULAR, HOSTS SHOULD UNDERSTAND HOW THE LAWS WORK IN THEIR RESPECTIVE CITIES. SOME CITIES HAVE LAWS THAT RESTRICT THEIR ABILITY TO HOST PAYING GUESTS FOR SHORT PERIODS. THESE LAWS ARE OFTEN PART OF A CITY’S ZONING OR ADMINISTRATIVE CODES. IN MANY CITIES, HOSTS MUST REGISTER, GET A PERMIT, OR OBTAIN A LICENSE BEFORE LISTING A PROPERTY OR ACCEPTING GUESTS. CERTAIN TYPES OF SHORT-TERM BOOKINGS MAY BE PROHIBITED ALTOGETHER. LOCAL GOVERNMENTS VARY GREATLY IN HOW THEY ENFORCE THESE LAWS. PENALTIES MAY INCLUDE FINES OR OTHER ENFORCEMENT. HOSTS SHOULD REVIEW LOCAL LAWS BEFORE LISTING A SPACE ON AIRBNB.”
