Bayview

Best of the Bay 2010: Local Heroes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2010 LOCAL HERO

SHAREN HEWITT


“The thing I love most in life is being a grandmother for social change.”

“If you mess up, you fess up — and then you fix it up.” That’s one of the motivational philosophies Sharen Hewitt, founder and executive director of the Community Leadership Academy and Emergency Response Project (CLAER) passes on to the people she works with. Her organization provides peer-to-peer empowerment and civic engagement programs as well as immediate crisis stabilization for victims of violence, helping them get the support they need. CLAER is based in Bayview, “but we serve the whole city, which unfortunately needs us more than ever,” she says.

A community leader and organizer for decades, Hewitt has been a critical and unyielding voice on housing, voter registration, education, employment, and political access issues. Her current focus has been on easing recent tensions between the African American and Asian American communities, weeding through the crowded field of candidates running for District 10 supervisor, and “insuring continuing dialogue about the development of sound public policy in the face of diminishing resources.”

“We celebrate diversity, and we try to raise the bar every day,” she says of CLAER. “San Francisco is the richest city in the richest state in the richest country in the world. It should be unlimited in its capacity to serve.” 

 

2010 LOCAL HERO

ISO RABINS

“My favorite thing about the Bay Area is the coast along Route 1. It consistently amazes me.”

Food revolutionary Iso Rabins has organized the most intriguing — and fun — food events of the last year, expanding his health code-defying Underground Market far beyond its original berth in a Mission District home. But his keystone contribution to the Bay Area is his ability to communicate his vision of feeding communities without the agro-industrial machine — by recognizing the soil-generated bounty available to all of us if we know where to look.

“The way our society is structured right now didn’t seem like it paid attention to our local community. I think food is a great way to break through that,” Rabins says. His brainchild is forageSF, an organization that promotes hunting and gathering through wild food walks, eight-course foraged meals, and retail opportunities for foragers who spend days picking through the woods, fields, and coastlines. In the locavore-freegan vein, Rabins calls attention to a world beyond shrink-wrap and leaden government regulations. And his message is being eaten up by change-hungry SF. “I really think you can do business and help people at the same time,” he says.

 

2010 LOCAL HERO

KATHERINE PRIORE

“Something I love about San Francisco is being able to take yoga classes with the best teachers from here to Timbuktu.”

Eleven years ago Katherine Priore was an English teacher in Cincinnati’s public school system. After a particularly stressful day in the classroom, she finally took a close friend’s advice by attending said friend’s yoga class. Priore was instantly hooked. “I had never experienced such profound internal stillness. My stress was alleviated and the stream of anxious, teaching-related thoughts vanished in those 90 minutes.” It was this eureka moment that set Priore on the path to creating Headstand, an organization providing youth in economically disadvantaged areas with access to yoga.

The organization’s ultimate goal is to create a shift in the education system whereby the physical, emotional, and psychological health of students has the same importance as the academic skills they’re building. Headstand aims to do its part by integrating yoga into the curriculum, not just as an elective but as a requirement. Over the past two years, the organization has offered 1,400 yoga classes to 660 youths in the East Bay and San Francisco, and this fall it plans to bring Headstand to San Jose and Houston. With a slew of evidence that Headstand is positively affecting the lives of its students, all signs point to the early success of the program and to the potential it may just be starting to fulfill.

 

2010 LOCAL HERO

ERICA MCMATH SHEPPARD

“I love the Youth Speaks office. It doesn’t matter what I’m wearing or what I look like there.”

Odds were against Erica McMath Sheppard to be onstage at the Warfield this past March receiving thunderous applause from a sold-out crowd. But as McMath Sheppard’s powerful championship Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam spoken word performance put it, “I been helping myself my whole damn life .” Two things were clear under those bright lights: this woman has a story to tell, and the world’s going to hear it — no matter a difficult childhood, a disastrous trek through the foster care system, and eventual emancipation from her guardians at age 16.

In addition to her poetry laurels and longtime involvement with the Youth Speaks arts program, the Class of ’10 Leadership High graduate was senior class president, involved in the Black Student Union, and active in a slew of other extracurriculars — a record that earned her admission to Dillard University in New Orleans this fall. Does she consider herself a role model? “I’m not trying to be the voice for foster girls around the world,” she says. “But this is my dream.”

 

2010 LOCAL HERO

DONNA SACHET


“It’s not always easy to live in San Francisco — but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun.”

A constant presence on the queer and charitable scenes for years, Donna Sachet will go to any lengths to call attention to worthy causes — including rappelling down 38 stories of the Grand Hyatt San Francisco to raise money for the Special Olympics.

As a performer and sparkling personality, Sachet MCs the popular Sunday’s a Drag weekly brunch spectacular at Harry Denton’s Starlight Room, hosts the live coverage of the Pride parade on television, writes a society column for The Bay Area Reporter, and attends pretty much every charitable event worth attending. (You can always spot her by her impeccably tailored red outfits — she is, after all, Scarlet Empress XXX of San Francisco’s Imperial Court.) Her annual holiday Songs of the Season event and Pride Brunch fundraiser, along with her involvement with the Bare Chest Calendar benefiting the AIDS Emergency Fund, have raised thousands of needed dollars.

“You just have to do it,” she tells us of her unflagging energy. “I love my community. But even if it’s not particularly about your own community, we’re all in this together.”

 

2010 LOCAL HERO

VERNON DAVIS

“When I paint, I focus completely on what I’m doing and everything else fades.”

Freshly minted Pro Bowl superstar Vernon Davis has shown immense prowess on the football field since being drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 2006. His career is on the upswing, and last season he tied the NFL all-time record for most touchdowns as a tight end. Davis’ success is the product of natural talent combined with drive and vision. He grew up in inner-city Washington, D.C., where a wise grandmother helped him dodge the environment’s potential pitfalls.

That same talent, drive, and vision extend beyond the goal posts into more esoteric realms. He’s an avid painter and seeks to be a role model for kids who might be afraid to explore their creativity. Earlier this year he launched the Vernon Davis Scholarship Fund, which will benefit a deserving Bay Area art student who would otherwise not be able to afford college. “I want to keep encouraging kids, especially in the inner city, to stay on track and pursue their dreams.”

 

2010 LOCAL HERO

JANE MARTIN


“I love being around a really vibrant queer and progressive community.”

On March 8, labor activist Jane Martin helped organize a flash mob in the crowded lobby of San Francisco’s Westin St. Francis Hotel. The purpose was to spread the word about a worker-called boycott of the hotel and urge tourists coming in for Pride to stay elsewhere. For five raucous and entertaining minutes, members of Pride at Work/HAVOQ, One Struggle One Fight, and the Brass Liberation Orchestra burst through the doors to sing, play, and dance to Lady Gaga’s hit “Bad Romance,” warning bewildered patrons not to “get caught in a bad hotel.”

The result: A collaborative effort of young and innovative labor leaders like Martin became a viral YouTube sensation, reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers. Martin has been joining with hotel workers in picket lines and organizing around queer economic justice issues in the Bay Area since 2001. She led picket lines at the Omni Hotel to decry the company’s move of locking out thousands of workers. “To ultimately win was really exciting,” she said. “When the hotels backed off, that was really inspiring.”

She recently joined 1,000 in staging a protest at the home of GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman as part of her organizing work with the California Nurses Association. And, as always with Martin, there’s more in the works.

 

2010 LOCAL HERO

DAVID CAMPOS


“The Bay Area embodies the American spirit more than anyplace else in the country. You can be who you are without any fear.”

San Francisco is a city of immigrants, a place where generations of people have come — from all over the country and all over the world — for a fresh start in a welcoming environment. But Mayor Gavin Newsom put that tradition at risk this year when he directed law enforcement agents to start referring juveniles charged with crimes to federal immigration authorities. It’s been a disaster — in one case, a 13-year-old charged with stealing 46 cents was turned over to the feds, and he and his mom, who is married to a U.S. citizen, both faced deportation, breaking up a family.

San Francisco Sup. David Campos has led the battle to protect the city’s sanctuary policy — and has taken on the larger issue of immigration reform. An immigrant who arrived in the United States from Guatemala at 14 (and who couldn’t get federal financial aid to go to college because of his status), Campos isn’t afraid to challenge the growing nativist movement: “What’s made this country great,” he told us, “is taking talent from all over the world and integrating it into society. Now the current climate precludes that.” 

 

PHOTO OF VERNON DAVIS BY PETER BOHLER. ALL OTHER PHOTOS BY KEENEY + LAW.

Lennar’s plan illustrates San Francisco’s redevelopment problem

Mary Magee
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Today, the Board of Supervisors confirmed that though they are elected officials, they have been told that they can’t do anything except second a massive redevelopment plan for the Bayview that was developed, first by Mayor Willie Brown and then by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administrations. in cohoots with Lennar, an out-of-state private developer, and approved by a bunch of Brown and Newsom’s political appointees.


“At this point, a deal has been done and the Board has been neutralized,” Arc Ecology’s Saul Bloom said today. “It says a great deal about the process.”


Bloom spent today visiting the supervisors to explain the problems with the current Lennar plan, including a bridge that is proposed to be built across the environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough.


“Sup. Ross Mirkarimi said the bridge plan reminds him of the exact same through way that was argued for during the Fillmore plan,” Bloom said.”That would never happen now, at least not overtly,


Bloom added that shopping the no-bridge alternative around to the Board today wasn’t exactly uplifting.
“The sense we got was that we were dragging a dead body around.”


So far, Board President David Chiu has taken major heat by deciding to suggest a narrower bridge rather than no bridge.


But at least he took a stand. That is more than can be said for those colleagues of his on the Board that sat silently through the July 13/14 proceedings, presumably making sure they can be reelected with the help of deep-pocketed developers.


Here’s hoping that this latest redevelopment charade convinces the progressives on the Board to reform the Redevelopment Agency, so that private developers and political appointees can no longer trump the legitimate concerns of the residents of San Francisco and their duly elected supervisors


And no matter what people in the Bayview have been led to believe, the sad truth if that the promised jobs and housing aren’t likely to happen any time soon.


“The developer is not going to be running hog wild out there,” Bloom observed. “Part of the sad trick is that the only rush was for them to have control over the property.”


Bloom predicts that the plan will ultimately be headed to court.
“They will have lawsuits and elections to contend with,” he said. “The message that the environmental community takes away from all this is that it doesn’t pay to play well. No matter how much you spend to try and ensure that litigation is not the only way to obtain the desired outcome, ultimately the message that comes back from the city and the developer is, ‘Sue us!’ That brings out the worst political conduct not the most appropriate.”


The good news? Lennar’s Treasure Island’s EIR is on the street, and environmental justice advocates should be fully versed in reading such hefty tomes and figuring out where the body is buried. The bad news? Redevelopment and the Mayor’s Office still control the process.

The bridge isn’t the only problem with Lennar’s plan

Mary Magee
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I’m glad to see the New York Times circle back to the Candlestick-Shipyard development with an article that was a tad more critical than their previous piece.

But while I enjoyed NYT’s joke about how the proposed bridge over the Yosemite Slough “has become a 950-foot-long chicken bone that keeps getting stuck in San Francisco politicians’ throats,”  I’m afraid the Board is in greater danger of choking on the bones of red herrings that they have been fed about this project,  along with last week’s bombshell that the Board won’t be able to amend Lennar’s plan, after all, when it votes July 27 on this massive proposal..

D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly says if that bombshell turns out to be true, it’ll be another example of what he calls, “The bait and switch and switch,” on the deal.

“I’m worried that the Board is getting advice that is less about a case of not being able to vote, and more a case of, if you vote, you could open up the city to liability,” Kelly said.

“Back in 2008, folks were told, just vote for Prop. G because it’s just a concept and we’ll have a robust conversation about the plan itself, but they’ve been running away from that promise ever since,” Kelly explained. “And during the EIR hearings, we were told that folks were simply approving the environmental impact report, not the plan itself.”

Kelly’s critiques of Lennar’s plan and the process by which it has been winning final approvals helped him win former Board President Matt Gonzalez’s endorsement last week in the pivotal race to replace termed-out D. 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell.

But Kelly worries about the fallout that the next D. 10 supervisor will be left to mop up, if the Board goes ahead and approves Lennar’s plan, as is.
 
“What I’d dread to see happen is that this plan get bullied through on an up and down vote, and then a fifth, or even a tenth of people’s concerns prove to be true, and the next D. 10 supervisor spends the next 4-8 years apologizing to the people of the Bayview, because they won’t be able to do anything else for the area, and this plan keeps lumbering along and doesn’t even work,” Kelly explained.

He says he wants to know who can amend the plan, if it’s not the Board and when.

“ My concern is that after the July 27 vote, the city and Lennar will never have to come before the Board again,” Kelly said, pointing to the uncritical endorsement of the project EIR that the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions, the lead agencies on the plan, made June 3, and who would likely be tasked with any additional studies and findings.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi confirmed today that the Board has been told that it has limited reach because of Redevelopment law, which supercedes municipal law.”
“But, nonetheless, I’m going to try to make some amendments,” Mirkarimi said.

He noted that the five amendments that Board President David Chiu introduced July 12 during a Land Use Committee hearing were “very benign.”

‘They mostly restated what was already in the project agreement or project EIR,” Mirkarimi said. “So, they don’t amend much, because they are statements of what has already been evaluated or pre-agreed to by Lennar and the city. And they are very benign because they do not require any changes to the plan.”

Mirkarimi observes that the current process by which the city is trying to push this deal through is designed to lock the Board out.

“There are larger questions in play here about our relationship with the Redevelopment Agency and redevelopment law,” Mirkarimi continued. He notes that San Francisco is one of only a few counties in California where the Board is not the same entity as the Redevelopment Agency.

“It’s long overdue that we return to the idea of having the Board have authority over the Redevelopment Agency, it’s been a problem for 40 years,” Mirkarimi said,  referring to Redevelopment’s disastrous handling of the Fillmore, which resulted in the massive and mostly permanent displacement of the Western Addition’s African American community—a negative consequence that many fear will be repeated by the plan for Candlestick-Hunters Point.

“There is a real capitalization on a starving population which is desirous of and at times desperate for positive changes and for jobs and housing, which is understandable,” Mirkarimi continued. “But absent of any alternative, it’s logical that this plan would move forward.”

In an effort to improve the plan, Mirkarimi says he will try to introduce a range of amendments at the Board’s July 27 meeting.

‘These include an attempt to make sure that whatever changes the Board makes are indeed enforceable,” he said. “And I am not satisfied with the discussion on the bridge, and how the gate has been left open on a bridge of any kind.”

Mirkarimi notes that there has been a lot of fanfare surrounding a community benefits agreement that various community-based organizations, labor and the project proponents entered into, in spring 2008.

“But I think they can do better, especially in reaching out to a community that has a high ex-offender population, and connecting to other disadvantaged communities throughout the city,” Mirkarimi said.

He also wants to ensure that if public power is not implemented, or fails, then Community Choice Aggregation program would automaticcally take over.

Mirkarimi is further concerned that there is nothing in the current plan that defines the percentages of housing units offered for rental and for home ownership.

“We are proposing to build 10,500 units but we have no idea what percentage is rental,” he said, noting that he also has concerns about air quality, air monitoring and parcels of land that have not yet been cleaned up to residential standards.

“Parcel E-2 is the most famous, but it’s not the only one,” he said. “The bridge and Parcel  E-2 have become major distractions in that they have sucked the oxygen out of other areas of these gargantuan project.”

So, is it true that elected officials on the Board can’t amend a plan sent to them by the Redevelopment Agency, whose commissioners are all political appointees of the mayor?

“It’s a yes or no vote, if you will,” a deputy City Attorney told the Guardian, on background, noting that the Board could tell Redevelopment that it doesn’t like the plan and wants the Agency to make some changes and bring it some amendments.

“Ultimately, the Board has the final say, but it has to have gone through the Redevelopment process and its PAC (project area committee) and have seen a plan that has been referred to it by the Planning Commission,” the deputy city attorney continued.“So, they could communicate their dissatisfaction and the agency would have to take their view into account. It’s not that the Board has no authority, but it can’t decide unilaterally.”

The City Attorney’s Office also confirmed that under Redevelopment Law, local jurisdictions can decide how to implement redevelopment plans.

“In a number of jurisdictions, the city council has made itself a Redevelopment entity, just as our Board is also the Transportation Authority in San Francisco,” the deputy said.“And if the same body proposes the plan, it probably will be satisfied.”

The City Attorney’s office noted that if agencies that regulate permits to fill the Bay, as is  required to build a bridge over Yosemite Slough, deny the city those permits, then the city would require amendments to its planning documents, but no further environmental impact review would be required, if the bridge was gone.

With the Board’s July 27 vote around the corner, D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly says he has a bunch of concerns that include, but are not limited to the bridge, starting with the projects financing mechanisms.

Kelly points to the fact that city staff recommended and the Board approved July 13 that “significant blight in the project area cannot be eliminated without the increase in the amount of bonded indebtedness from $221 million to $900 million and the increase in the limitation on the number of dollars to be allocated to the Agency from $881 million to $4.2 billion.”
 

Kelly wants the city to explain to the Board how much tax increment financing money will be left for the Bayview, now that the area’s debt ceiling has been tripled.

“Does this mean that all BVHP property tax revenues for the next 30 years will go towards paying down this debt and nothing else?” Kelly asked. “And what will that mean for the rest of BVHP in terms of service and programs it won’t be able to afford?

Kelly would also like to see the Board request an audit of Lennar’s record on Parcel A. As Kelly points out, the Navy conveyed Parcel to the city in 2004, and the city gave Lennar the green light to develop 1,600 mostly luxury condos on that parcel, in 2006.

“But no one has ever done an audit of Parcel A,” Kelly said. “Given the scrutiny that the Board usually brings to five figure numbers, the supervisors should be demanding this information, since we are dealing with a ten-figure number ($4,220,000,000) in future.”

It would be helpful if the City would also brief the Board as to who it believes will be investing in the project,  including the investment companies’ names,  their board of directors, and whether these companies are based in the US. Rumors are swirling that some project proponents have entered into side-deals that involve limited liability companies that are selling Lennar’s proposed condos to folks in China, and that a $1 million investment in a condo could translate into a work permit for the condo owner or occupant.

Kelly worries that the city and Lennar’s joint redevelopment plan is being allowed to squeak past the Board’s financial review simply on the basis of vague estimates.
“They rely once again on promises that won’t show up,” Kelly said, pointing to a recent report that emerged from the Controller’s Office.

Arc Ecology’s Saul Bloom notes that the Controller used averaged figures in that report, an approach that neatly obscures the fact that many of the project’s alleged and benefits– will not be created or felt for years. Bloom for his part is hoping the Board can introduce a maritime uses amendment. This would allow relatively unskilled jobs to be created at the shipyard in short order, compared to vague promises of  building a green tech office park there, some day.

Last week, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor Michael Cohen suggested that plan amendments would delay project construction.

But Cohen was quick to add that, “702 acres of waterfront land in San Francisco is an irreplaceable asset. It’s not a question of if—but when—it gets developed.”

Others are less sure that Cohen’s much promoted vision will ever translate into reality.

So, here’s hoping the Board will grill Cohen and city staff over the financial details, including the internal rate of return (IRR) that Lennar is demanding, and what will happen to promised community benefits, if the IRR doesn’t pencil out. D. 10 candidates DeWitt Lacy, Chris Jackson and Tony Kelly have suggested that some form of liquidated damages  are needed, but if the City believes these are unnecessary, it should explain why.

And then there are questions about the impact on air quality of the traffic related to an additional 24,500 residents and 10,000 workers into the city’s southeast.

Personally, I was fascinated by an April 2010 report from the Redevelopment Agency in which the agency discussed the challenges of driving piles through contaminated soil, which is what could happen if a bridge is built over the Yosemite Slough. In the past, the city made the argument that the NFL and the 49ers were requiring this bridge.

But last week, in the wake of Santa Clara’s vote in favor of a new stadium for the 49ers near Great America, the city began arguing that the bridge would make the project more attractive to financers, because employers want to get their employees quickly in and out.

This was the first time I ever heard city staff make that particular argument and they made it when it’s still not clear who these employers even are.

 So, let’s flesh out the list of potential employers, so the Board can determine if design decisions are being made in the interest of the local community or out-of-state businesses.

And then there’s the fact that it appears that this proposed $100 million bridge would only save commuters a few minutes, while permanently filling the San Francisco Bay.

Today, the Sierra Club, the Golden Gate Audobon Society, the California Native Plant Society and San Francisco Tomorrow released a report that asserts that the Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard EIR “misrepresents the need for a bridge.”

“A statistical review demonstrates that a route around Yosemite Slough could be as efficient as a bridge route while being better for the environment,” stated a letter that the Sierra Club-led environmental coalition released today. “It’s time for the Board of Supervisors to reject the bridge alternative and insist that the feasible upland route around Yosemite Slough be seriously considered.”

The letter argues that a regression model result found in the Transportation Study Appendix F of the Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Phase 11 EIR provides “no statistically significant evidence to support the claim that a 5 minute increase in transit travel time would lead to a 15 percent decrease in transit ridership, or, indeed, to any decrease in ridership.”

“Therefore, routing the BRT around Yosemite Slough is as consistent with a transit-first redevelopment goal as a bridge alternative, but without the environmental damage wrought by the bridge,” the Sierra Club-led report states in summary. “The results of the regression analysis used in the EIR and relied upon to support the bridge alternative have been misinterpreted in such a way that even if they were statistically significant they are off by a factor of ten: the decrease in transit ridership associated with 5 extra minutes of transit time would be predicted to be approximately 1.5 percent, not 15 percent,” it concludes.

“When the analysis [presented in the Sierra Club’s letter] is combined with previous analyses by LSA Associates (which estimate the increase in travel time would be approximately 2 minutes, rather than the 5 minutes in the final EIR) and other available information, one must reach the conclusion that the FEIR misrepresents the effect on travel time and ridership that would result from a route around Yosemite Slough. Overall, it poses further questions about the need for a bridge over San Francisco’s largest wetland restoration project.”

The Sierra Club-led report lands two weeks after Board President David Chiu introduced his July 12 package of amendments which seeks to narrow the bridge, not eliminate it, and require the Board to hold hearings before the Navy transfers Parcel E-2 to the city.

It’s a good idea for the Board to require hearings before E-2 is transferred to the city. But does this mean the Board will be able to direct the Navy, when it’s time to decide whether to cap or excavate the contamination in that parcel? The answer appears to be no. All the Board can do is to reject the Navy’s proposed solution.

But how would this work? What would happen then? And Parcel E-2 isn’t the only parcel on the shipyard where seriously nasty stuff has been found and is still be cleaned up.

The good news is that at this point, the project still doesn’t belong to the Board.

The bad news is that, as of tomorrow, it could belong to them, if the supervisors opt to approve Lennar’s plan with a simple up-down vote. And given the rush and the political pressure that the process has been subjected to since 2006, it’s almost certain that some scandal will engulf the project, some time in the future. And this Board of Supervisors’ names will be on it. Even if nothing ever gets built at the shipyard.

“How can the city say nothing will be built for years, because we have promised so much, when they say out of the other side of their mouth, that the only way that we can make these promises to the community, is if the community supports the plan?” Kelly asks. “On what planet do we think this makes sense? I think we are moving out of the solar system with every passing week.”

There’s no crime in members of the Board admitting tomorrow that they have not read the entire plan and don’t understand all the details. As the folks in Alameda humbly admitted last week, when they kicked out developer SunCal, it took them years to understand what was being proposed—including the fact that the project might leave their city in the hole, financially.

But it would be a crime for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to vote yes on this massive proposal without first having done that homework. Yes, I’ve heard supervisors say in the past they are deferring to Sup. Maxwell, since the project lies in her district. But Maxwell is termed out, and the project will impact all of the city, especially in terms of its ethnic and economic diversity, in future. So, as we’ve said, buyer beware!

 

Board accepts EIR, but vows to amend Candlestick-Shipyard plan

Mary Magee
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Text by Sarah Phelan, images by Luke Thomas


At the end of a ten-hour hearing to appeal the final environmental impact report  for the city and Lennar’s massive Candlestick-Shipyard redevelopment project, the Board voted 8-3 to accept the FEIR, with only Sups. John Avalos, Chris Daly and Eric Mar voting to reverse certification of what they said was a flawed document.


But the vote does not mean the Board has voted to accept the city and the developer’s final redevelopment plan. That plan will come before the Board on July 27, and the supervisors are expected to introduce a slew of amendments, in addition to  five amendments that Board President David Chiu introduced earlier this week.


These amendments are intended to address longstanding concerns about toxins at the shipyard, limited liability on the part of the developer, the questionable need for a bridge over Yosemite Slough, the reality that Bayview residents may be cut out of any upcoming jobs, and the desire to nail down efforts to use public power at the site


“We can’t do the amendments here, we are frozen out, all we can do is an up and down vote on the EIR for now,” Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian last night. 
Mirkarimi anticipates that the Board will seek additional mitigations, such as requiring liquidated damages to shore up a community benefits agreement that Labor entered into with Lennar in May 2008.


Mirkarimi said the Board would also seek to increase workforce development benefits.
“Thirty percent of the target workforce population are ex-offenders, so while they might get training, currently they won’t get jobs other than construction,” Mirkarimi observed.


Mirkarimi was proud of the Public Power amendment that Chiu has already lintroduced, pointing to an ordinance that he and then Sup. Gerardo Sandoval introduced and Mayor Gavin Newsom signed into law, in March 2006. This public power ordinance established that “where feasible, the City shall be the electricity provider for new City developments, including military bases and development projects.”


“PG& E was ripped when we pushed that through,” Mirkarimi said.


During yesterday’s marathon hearing, the supervisors grilled city staff on issues that have proved to be key sticking points, as the city seeks to win final project approvals, even though they cannot address these issues with amendments until the July 27 meeting.


The Board questioned the wisdom of moving forward with development on the Shipyard, as the Navy continues to clean up radiological contamination and other toxins at the site, including Parcel E-2, which contains some of the nastiest pollution at the yard.


“Why not just wait until the CERCLA process is completed?” Sup. Campos asked, referring to the fact that the Navy is responsible for shipyard clean up, under CERCLA, which is also known as the Superfund Act.


Campos question came after acclaimed environmental scientist Wilma Subra and national environmental human rights lawyer Monique Harden, challenged the sanity of having the Navy digging out toxins while a developer simultaneously installs infrastructure at the same site.


Subra, who works in Superfund sites throughout the U.S, warned the Board that it’s very common to find contamination at these sites after they have been declared clean.


“So, the number of samples isn’t the magic answer,” Subra said, referring to the city’s constant refrain that the Navy has taken thousands of samples at the site. Subra also warned that it is not uncommon for a contractor to dig into an area that has been capped, thereby potentially exposing workers and the community to contamination and resulting in legal stand-offs, as various parties argue as to who has responsibility to fix the resulting mess.


Harden, who is based in New Orleans but also has an office in D.C., expressed concern over the plan to begin construction on some shipyard parcels, even as the Navy continues to remove radiologically contaminated sewers and other deep infrastructure at the site.
“That’s like a person jumping up and down on a bed that another person is trying to make up,” Harden said


But Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s chief economic advisor countered that there was no scientific evidence to support Subra or Harden’s concerns.


“It’s a very common situation, especially on brownfields,” Cohen said, (though the Shipyard is a Superfund site that’s been contaminated with radiological waste that was sandblasted off ships returning from a Bikini Atoll atomic testing experiment gone awry.)


“It’s the basis for shipyard artists and the police being on the site for many years,” Cohen continued. “It’s safe based on an extraordinary amount of data.”


But Cohen did agree that language in Chiu’s Parcel E-2 amendment should be changed from “should” to “shall” to indicate that city oversight is a requirement, not a request, when it comes to final decisions over the transfer of this particular parcel.


Mark Ripperda of U.S. EPA assured the Board that his agency is not going to permit transfer of parcels for development until cleanup is completed.
“We are not going to allow any transfer until we are convinced it’s safe,” Ripperda said.


Sup. Eric Mar chastised the EIR for its apparent failure to adequately discuss the impacts of the proposed development on schools in the surrounding area.


“There is less discussion of the impacts on schools than there is of the A-Bomb, which was held at the Shipyard for 1 to 2 days,” Mar said. “The analysis seems very weak.”


And Daly expressed frustration that the Board was being asked to take a decision when it lacked sufficient information about and understanding of the project.


“How do we know it’s safe? ” Daly asked, noting that, “Money talks, bullshit walks.”
(His point resonated as City staff scrambled to find key information within the 7,000 pages of comments and responses in the massive FEIR documents, and Amy Brownell of the city’s Public Health Department rattled off a series of measurements and schedules that few on the Board seemed to understand.)


“The risks are acceptable,” Brownell said. “And the only people allowed on the property [during the development] will be the ones doing the work.”


The Board also challenged the need for a bridge over the environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough, especially in the wake of the June 2010 election in which Santa Clara voters approved building a new stadium for the 49ers near Great America.


“One reason I’ve been given for [the need for the bridge] is the financial viability of this project,” Campos said.


Cohen replied that if the city does not to build the bridge, “it elevates the financial risk.”


“Parcel C [on the shipyard] has been zoned for green tech, and for major employers, having that direct connectedness to BART and the T-Third is very important.”


Cohen also indicated that, thanks to the project’s huge reliance on tax increment financing, the loss of the bridge would translate into lost property tax revenues.


“Some of the repayment comes from generation of tax increment financing, so the failure to have a bridge here, degrades the potential of property tax revenues, and so you get much less tax increment,” Cohen stated.


The Board also expressed concerned that under the current terms of the deal they are now set to consider July 27, the developer has limited liability—an arrangement that has got supervisors worried that the city, and Bayview residents whose increased property taxes will help pay for the development, could end up on the wrong end of the financial hook.


Campos pointed to the disposition and development agreement (DDA) that the city drew up with Lennar.
“I’m specifically worried about a provision that on the face of it limits the developer’s liability,” Campos said, pointing to language that seems to say that “monetary damages are inappropriate”—conditions that Campos deemed, “Very unusual.


Cohen responded that the deal reflects the reality that, “the Navy, not Lennar is responsible for the cleanup.”
He added that the city retains the legal ability to sue, various remedies and, ultimately, “the right of reverter” (which folks call the “nuclear option” since it involves kicking out the developer, but losing everything in the process.)


“This is an incredibly frontloaded project,  in which we have the ability to terminate the developer at the cost of millions of dollars,” Cohen said.


But while the city and the developer ultimately affirm EIR certification, the decision left the Bayview community deeply divided, with many concerned that the FEIR failed to address their concerns, while others rejoiced, believing that they will benefit from jobs that will be created during the development’s 10-15 year build out and beyond. Only time will tell how it all plays out, but stay tuned as the Board prepares to try and make the plan the best it can in face of all these competing concerns.


 

Board votes on Candlestick-Shipyard project EIR appeal today

Mary Magee
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All images by Luke Thomas

The Chronicle’s suggestion that the city’s massive Candlestick-shipyard project may be facing smoother sailing seems like wishful thinking to those who attended a July 12 noontime rally that was organized by POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) and featured two Louisiana-based advocates who protested the project’s EIR and shared many of the longstanding concerns about project cleanup, infrastructure and financing.

The Chronicle was of course referring to five amendments to the city’s massive redevelopment proposal that Board President David Chiu introduced during yesterday’s July 12 meeting of the Board’s Land Use committee. The Chron interpreted these amendments as a sign that Chiu plans to approve the project’s environmental impact report, which comes before the Board today, after several groups appealed the final EIR that the Planning Commission approved last month.

But while city officials fear the developer will walk, if the Board does not approve the final EIR, some environmental advocates hope a better plan could be reached.

At POWER’s July 12 rally, nationally acclaimed environmental scientist Wilma Subra called on the District Attorney’s environmental justice department to “step up.” Subra claimed that the project’s final EIR “failed to evaluate and assess the cumulative impacts of exposure to children, adults and the environment as a result of exposure to all of the chemicals at the site.”

Monique Harden, co-director and attorney for Advocates for Environmental Health Rights (AEHR) of New Orleans, Louisiana, pointed to “deep flaws in the environmental regulation system,” as a reason why low-income communities of color should be concerned about the proposed plan.
“Why in the middle of an environmental crisis caused by BP in the Gulf am I coming to San Francisco?” Harden asked. “Because San Francisco is providing unequal environmental protection to its residents. As a resident of New Orleans, I’m concerned that San Francisco is careening towards making a decision that can crush the future of Bayview Hunters Point,”

But as local Bayview resident Jose Luis Pavon began talking about seeing gentrification occur in his lifetime within San Francisco, he and others got shouted down by a group of yellow and green-shirted project supporters, who were led by a guy calling himself Bradley Bradley and Alice Griffith public housing resident Stormy Henry.
“This is the devil’s trick in the last hour,” Henry said of the POWER rally.

Henry shared her heartfelt belief that if the Board approves the project’s final EIR, she and other Alice Griffith residents will get desperately needed new housing units. even if it takes some years to build them. Others in her group were unable to answer media questions: they had difficulty speaking in English, but were clutching neatly written statements in support of the project that they later read aloud at the Board’s Land Use Committee hearing.

As these project supporters prepared to move inside to attend the Land Use Committee meeting and lobby supervisors for their suppor, D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly shared his concerns that the Navy has a demonstrated history of finding nasty things at the shipyard years after they say everything’s clean, and that this pattern could jeopardize the plan.

“This happened at Parcel A,” Kelly said, referring to the first and only parcel of land that the Navy transferred to the city for development in 2004. “Since then, Parcel A has gotten smaller and as they found stuff on sites they then renamed as new parcels, like UC-3, which has radiological contamination in a sewer line that goes into the Bayview. So, that means the contamination is now in the Bayview.”

Kelly is concerned that the city is trying push through EIR certification before the Navy completes an environmental impact statement (EIS) related to shipyard cleanup activities. “The EIS is supposed to go before the EIR, as far as I know,” Kelly said

At the Land Use Committee meeting, Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes Candlestick and the Shipyard,said, the project was about “revitalization and opportunity.”

She noted that the certification of the project’s final EIR has been appealed to full Board’s July 13 meeting. She further noted that she intends to introduce legislation next week to address concerns that Ohlone groups have expressed.

The next two hours were full of testimony from a bevy of city officials, beginning with Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor in the Office of Workforce and Economic Development.

“Every single element [of this project] has been discussed and debated at countless meetings,” Cohen claimed, as he sought to quell fears that the community had not been properly consulted with over the plan. “As we get closer to a vote, all of a sudden pieces of paper start circulating, criticizing project and suggesting that community involvement just began,” he continued. ” That’s factually untrue.”

He also sought to reassure the supervisors that the Board will have a say-so as to whether the city accepts early transfer of shipyard parcels from the Navy.
“Neither the city nor the developer have any specific authority over the cleanup,” Cohen said, noting that the cleanup is governed by specific rules set out in CERCLA [Comprehensice Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, aka Superfund].

“Regardless of what we do, CERCLA will continue to be the regulatory tool,” Cohen said. ” I urge you not to be confused by CEQA and CERCLA.”

So, how can the city implement Prop. P, which voters overwhelmingly supported in 2000, urging the Navy to clean up the shipyard to highest attainable standards.
“Prior to any transfer, US EPA and DTSR have to concur in writing that the shipyard is safe,” Cohen explained, noting that, thanks to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the Navy has already spent over $700 million on shipyard cleanup efforts.

“We have 250 artists at the shipyard….but not a shred of scientific evidence to say that the shipyard is not safe,” Cohen claimed. “It’s safe to develop the shipyard in precisely the manner we are proposing.”

When Sup. Eric Mar raised the question of radiological contamination on Parcel UC-3, Cohen downplayed Mar’s concerns.
“The exposure levels are lower than watching TV,” Cohen claimed. “The primary source is very low level radiation from glow-in-the-dark dials.”
Indicating a map that showed a network of old sewers (in blue) and old fuel lines (in red) under the entire development area, Cohen said, “The radiological contamination that has and will be addressed at the shipyard is quite low level. You have radiation, you get nervous. We asked EPA to come out and do a scan to deal with the issue.”

IBI Group’s David Thom, the lead architect and planner for the project said the plan is designed “to connect new development back into the Bayview.”
“And this plan connects the Bayview through to the water.”

Tiffany Bohee, Cohen’s deputy in the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, insisted that project’s proposed bridge is better than Arc Ecology’s proposed alternative route, which would not involve constructing a bridge over an environmentally sensitive slough.
“The non-bridge route increases the number of intersections,” Bohee said, seeking to turn an environmental question (the impact of bridge on wildlife and nature experience) into a public safety issue.”
She claimed the BRT route over bridge was 5-10 minutes faster than Arc’s proposed alternative, “because there are fewer turns, it can go at higher speeds.” But Arc’s studies suggest the BRT route over the bridge is only a minute faster, and would cost over $100 million.

Bohee noted that $50 million from the sale of 23 acres of parkland for condos at the Candlestick Point State Recreation Area (CPSRA) will be “set aside for the state, and won’t be able to be raided by the city,” with $40 million going to improvements, and $10 million to ongoing operation and maintenance costs.

She also cited additional benefits that the project would bring to the community, including thousands of construction job opportunities.

“We are working with City Build to make sure they are for local residents,” Bohee said.“And there is absolutely no displacement for the rebuild,” Bohee continued referring to proposal to place current Alice Griffith public housing iresidents n new units, on a 1-1 basis

Eric Mar said he was impressed by many elements of the plan, but continued to express reservations.
“I’m still concerned that is seems to serve newcomers as proposed to existing residents,” he said. “And I’m still not convinced that the bridge is the best for existing residents.”

Rhonda Simmons, who works in Cohen’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development,  tried to flesh out details of the project’s job creation promises.
“The most immediate workforce is related to the construction site, and as you know, this project goes over a 15-20 year span,” Simmons said, pointing to green tech and retail as job opportunities that will exist once the project is built.

Mar expressed concern that the jobs may not be at the level of D.10 residents
“How is this gonna bring their skill level up?” he asked.
“The idea is that training gives first level entry at a variety of building trades,” Simmons said, pointing to the project’s large solar component.

“What about women?” Sup. Maxwell asked
Simmons pointed to retail opportunities,
“The idea of the training is to give folks job readiness skills, like getting there and showing up on time,” she said

Mar wanted to know who would have oversight of monitoring and compliance.
“In the city we have a tapestry of folks who do contract compliance,” she said. “The oversight will come from a variety of places.”

After Kurt Fuchs of the Controller’s Office listed the estimated economic benefits of the project, Board President David Chiu observed that the city is “at a crossroads.”

“I do not plan to prejudge,” Chiu continued, as he introduced his five amendments to regulate the Parcel E-2 cleanup, the size of a proposed bridge over the Yosemite Slough, expand healthcare access in the Bayview, create a workforce development fund and lay the groundwork for bringing public power to the project.

During public comment, Bayview resident Fred Naranjo pleaded for project support.  

“Please don’t let the train leave the station,” Naranjo said. “If Lennar leaves, the Bayview will never be developed.”

And Tim Paulson, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council expressed hope that an agreement was getting closer.
“There really is a path to getting this done,” Paulson said. “This really is a model project in many ways for the rest of the United States.”
But D. 10 resident Linda Shaffer with the Yerba Buena chapter of the California Native Plant society indicated the huge pressure exerted on folks to support the project
“I do not want to be classified as an opponent, but we have concerns,” Shaffer said, noting that her group has filed an appeal of the project’s final EIR.

And while the Sierra Club’s Arthur Feinstein thanked Chiu for proposing to reduce the size of the bridge, he pointed out that Chiu’s amendment wasn’t really a compromise.
“That’s because it’s still a bridge,” Feinstein said, as he explained how noisy the area surrounding the slough will become as traffic whizzes by.

Connie Ford of the Labor Council accused some project critics of being “disrespectful.”
Ford took particular issue with claims that the project will gentrify the area
“The neighborhood is changing,” she said. “Since 1990, African American families have been leaving the Bayview in huge numbers. I encourage you to see this project as a good plan.”

Gabe Metcalfe of SPUR expressed his unconditional support for the plan,
“This plan is being asked to fix a huge number of problems,” he said.
Noting that the bridge continues to be a sticking point, Metcalfe said he sees opposition to every transportation project these days.
“We seem to be in a moment when you can’t build anything without it being opposed.”

But other speakers from the Sierra Club reiterated their stance that there are better and viable options to the bridge, noting that it is too costly, and that the surrounding community and wildlife would be better off without it.”

All these competing viewpoints suggest that whatever decision the Board makes today, it will take some time and create plenty of uproar. So, here’s hoping the Board votes in a way that will truly benefit the D. 10 community, not career politicians, city officials and out-of-state developers. It’s about time.

Buyer beware of Candlestick-Shipyard project

Mary Magee
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Board President David Chiu has introduced five amendments to the city’s Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment proposal. All five are a good start, but longtime observers question if they are too little, too late, in the face of intense lobbying by a city and a developer intent on getting project approvals before a new Board and possibly a new mayor occupy City Hall in January 2011.

Chiu’s amendments address key concerns with the city’s proposed redevelopment plan, and they come as the Board prepares for its July 13 hearing into three separate appeals of the project’s final EIR certification, as well as amendments to the Bayview Hunters Point and Shipyard redevelopment plans.

Two of Chiu’s amendments seek to address concerns about the clean-up of radiologically impacted waste at Parcel E-2 on the shipyard, and environmental impacts of a proposed bridge over Yosemite Slough.

Chiu’s other three amendments seek to finance the expansion of the Southeast Health Center, create a workforce development fund and analyze the feasibility of providing public power, including natural gas at the site.

But while all five amendments are welcome, some observers worry they do not fully address concerns about the project’s sustainability, financing and infrastructure.  But before we get to those concerns, let’s review Chiu’s five amendments in greater detail:

1. The Parcel E-2 amendment.
This amendment declares that the Board’s adoption of CEQA findings for the project “shall not in any way imply support of a cap for Parcel E-2.” 

As such, this amendment is a critical step towards insisting that the parcel get completely cleaned up, not just capped, as the Navy is currently proposing. On the other hand, it’s not a watertight demand to excavate and haul away all contamination from this parcel, which is the cleanup alternative that many in the community would prefer..

Instead, Chiu’s Parcel E-2 amendment declares that the U.S. EPA, California EPA and the Navy, “should pursue the highest practicable level of cleanup for Parcel E-2.”
And that the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency “should not accept the property unless and until that cleanup is satisfied.”

It also establishes that the Board shall conduct a hearing regarding final cleanup strategies for Parcel E-2 before a final remedy is selected, urges the U.S. EPA, California EPA and the Navy to participate in such a hearing, and further establishes that the Board shall conduct a separate hearing prior to any transfer of Parcel E-2 to Redevelopment.”

(There was some question as to why the Board was saying “should” in some parts of this amendment, and “shall” in others. The reason I heard was, you can’t force the Navy to do anything, but you can urge them, and you certainly can refuse to accept the property, if it is not cleaned up a city’s requirements.But this needs to be clarified.)

2. The Yosemite Slough Bridge amendment
Chiu notes that the city’s EIR for the project analyzed a non-49ers-stadium alternative that “includes an approximately 41 ft. wide bridge spanning the Yosemite Slough which is limited to bike, pedestrian and transit use.”
“However, in the event the San Francisco 49ers elect to build a new stadium on the shipyard site, the project will include a bridge spanning Yosemite Slough that is wider than 41 ft. across to accommodate game-day traffic,” Chiu’s amendment states.
(So, Chiu’s amendment doesn’t throw the bridge entirely out with the 49ers’ stadium, and that leaves environmental groups uneasy, afraid that the anticipated 25,000 new residents in the proposed development will subsequently push for legislation to allow for a wider, car-accessible bridge.)

3. The Southeast Health Center amendment
Chiu’s Southeast Health Center amendment demands that the developer contribute $250,000 to the Redevelopment Agency for a needs assessment study regarding the need to expand the center and the ongoing health needs of local residents, and, to the extent such expansion is needed, to help pay for predevelopment expenses associated with this expansion.
The capital costs for expanding the center would be funded through a combination of  tax increment dollars, a $2 million Wellness Contribution paid by the developer, and the City’s ability to finance savings that would accrue to the Department of Public Health by moving from leased space into owned space at the expanded center.

4. The Workforce Development Fund amendment
Chiu’s amendment would modify language in the current community benefits agreement to require the developer to contribute $8,925,000 to a workforce development fund to be used for programs “designed to create a gateway to career development, fiirst for residents of District 10 and secondly for “at-risk job applicants.”
(A member of the public suggested that veterans be specified as “at-risk job applicants,” an idea D. 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell seemed to support during yesterday’s July 12 Land Use Committee hearing, which was where Chiu introduced his five proposed amendments.)

 5. The Public Power amendment 
Chiu’s public power amendment notes that the SFPUC confirmed the feasibility of providing electric service to the shipyard sire, but requires the agency to update this study and include the Candlestick site and include “an analysis of the feasibility of providing natural gas to the project site.”

But will these steps be enough to ensure that the development actually delivers on its promises of thousands of jobs, and hundreds of affordable housing units,? And is a bridge really necessary across Yosemite Slough, if the 49ers go to Santa Clara as planned?

Long-term observers of the project point to the first phase of the project, which began on the shipyard’s Parcel A, as a warning of where things might end up.

“We approved the fast-tracking of Parcel A based on a bevy of assurances and enthusiastic endorsements from the best and brightest this administration has to offer,” said a source who wishes to remain anonymous. “But what has happened since then, and what are we to learn from this experimental test case?”

This source noted that recent maps of the shipyard show that Parcel A, which the Navy conveyed to the city in 2004, has since been carved up into several new pieces.

“How did Parcel A get divided into two areas that don’t even border one another?” my source asked.

The answer appears to be that sections of the shipyard, including Parcel A,  have since been renamed as new and separate parcels, after it was discovered that shipyard sewers on those parcels contained radiologically contaminated material.

One of these sewer lines, as indicated on recent project maps, leads from a site now known as Parcel UC-3, into the Bayview. In other words, it appears to lead off the shipyard site and into the surrounding community. If so, this raises concerns that shipyard contamination is no longer limited to the shipyard in the Bayview, and could be impacting residents and businesses that are not covered by the Navy’s clean-up commitments.

Either way, it seems that the Board could use an update on what happened on Parcel A, since it was conveyed, what’s the deal with UC-3, and other recently renamed parcels, before they consider an early transfer of the rest of the shipyard.

“How can we start Phase 2 of the project, when we haven’t completed Phase 1?” my source asked.

And since the Navy is still tasked with cleaning up the rest of the shipyard parcels, it would be helpful if the Navy updated the Board on what the Navy is proposing in its Records of Decisions for each of these parcels, including UC-3, before the Board votes on Phase 2 of the project.

My source also noted that since the project plans to use 100 percent recycled water at the site, it would be helpful to have an update as to how issues with sewer contamination and groundwater concerns might impact the project’s sustainability plans.

“These issues touch on half of the documents that make up the EIR, but are now obsolete, because of the issue of radioactive contamination on UC-3,” my source claimed.

And then there’s the question of fproject financing and who the developer for the project actually is, these days.

“The city’s exclusive negotiating agreement (ENA) was with Lennar, so who is CP Development and why do we have an ENA with them?” my source asked.”What happened to Lennar? And why would we be obligated to negotiate solely with this CP Development group?”

Now, hopefully the Board has greatly reassuring answers to all these questions, so that the community can rest assured that the supervisors really do understand the ramifications of a project that they are being asked to approve in what appears to be an awful hurry.

Yes, there are plenty of project supporters who keep on urging “no delays.” I understand their concerns. They want jobs, housing, parks and other promised community benefits. And I don’t blame them.

But it’s up to the Board to ensure that it doesn’t get rushed into approving a project that perhaps doesn’t guarantee any or all of these things. So, let’s keep asking questions so the Board of Supervisors doesn’t end up with buyer’s remorse, but instead can truly claim to having secured a deal that really helps all the folks who currently live and work in the city’s southeast sector. Stay tuned.

 

 

T

 

 

D. 10 candidates DeWitt Lacy, Tony Kelly and progressive planners blast Lennar’s plan

Mary Magee
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Recently, I spent some time talking with D. 10 candidates DeWitt Lacy and Tony Kelly about Lennar’s redevelopment plan for the shipyard and Candlestick Point. I also attended a Progressive Planners forum that addressed the massive development proposal. Those conversations and the issues they raised seem timely in light of the city’s crazily tight schedule for trying to ram final approvals for the project past government agencies this summer. And in light of three appeals that have been filed against the city’s recently certified final environmental impact report for the plan, raising concerns that the city will get bogged down in expensive and time-consuming litigation if it doesn’t get the plan right, while it still can.

(Lest other D. 10 candidates complain that they weren’t interviewed, too, I’d like to clarify that I’ll be covering the race between now and November, and I look forward to hearing what they all think at the Board’s July 13 meeting to hear appeals of the city’s final environmental impact report (FEIR) for the project. )

Both Lacy and Kelly are critics of Lennar’s plan, but not in a knee-jerk obstructionist way. Instead, they bring considered and informed critiques to the table at a time when the community desperately needs good advice and a workable strategy, if residents are to get needed amendments and concessions, before the developer get the green light, or before the Board puts  a moratorium on the project until the city’s FEIR flaws are ironed out.

Lacy is a bright and earnest candidate who learned lessons from the school of life, while growing up in San Jose in a working class family. Lacy says his father worked in an Adidas warehouse until he was injured on the job, and his mother worked as a secretary in Atari’s corporate office, but was laid off after two years.

Lacy recalls how his parents opened their own janitorial business, in the hope of making a better life for their six children.  He says that it was while cleaning homes alongside his mother, that he began to recognize the need for working class improvement and growth.

 In 1995, Lacy moved to San Francisco, where he has worked in the District Attorney’s office and formed his own law practice—experience that could serve District 10 well, since it’s home to many working-class residents and will be ground zero in the battle for construction-related contracts and environmental and economic justice, if Lennar’s massive redevelopment plan goes ahead,

“I know how to craft legislation for social justice,” Lacy said.

Lacy observes how Michael Cohen, Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor in the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, has repeatedly told folks that land transferred to Lennar will be subject to a “right of reverter.”
This means the Redevelopment Agency may re-take ownership of the land, if the developer fails to substantially complete the infrastructure in the time frame set forth in the city’s development and disposition agreement (the DDA)

But Lacy observes that this “nuclear option” isn’t likely to happen with so much riding on the Lennar deal, and he stresses that additional controls are needed, if the city is to ensure that the deal remains in the best interest of San Francisco, not just the developer.

Lacy’s probably right about that. (Remember how hard the community had to fight to just get an extra 15 days to read and comment on the project’s six volume draft EIR over the winter holidays?)

And how much political pressure was exerted to ram the city’s EIR for this project across the certification line on June 3, five days before Santa Clara voters decided to support a stadium for the 49ers near Great America.

“What’s needed is an impartial arbiter,” Lacy said. “The city needs regulatory controls and the capacity to fine Lennar if it breaks promises to build affordable housing, create jobs and hire locals. You’re not going to be able to hold their feet to the fire without that.”

“I’m not saying that we should be obstructionists, critics who are trying to prevent stuff for the sake of a political battle,” Lacy added. “But we need new blood. The benefit of my campaign is that I’m not downtown’s candidate. I’m a civil rights attorney, who can help the district by figuring out what battles we need to be fighting and which battles are winnable. And I want to make sure there are jobs and business opportunities for working-class folks in San Francisco. You shouldn’t have to be a doctor or lawyer to afford to live here.”

Lacy believes the Navy should remove the radiologically impacted landfill on the shipyard’s Parcel E2.
“That ground has to be taken out of there,” Lacy said. “I would hope the City Attorney’s Office would get involved and advocate for the people. But leadership is about taking a stance when no one else is.”

With the city suggesting that it can still win back the 49ers, Lacy said that he too, would love it if the 49ers decided to stay.
 
“But not at the cost of our health and safety,” Lacy said, referring to the city’s repeated claim that it needed to rush certification of the final EIR for Lennar’s project, if there was to be any hope of winning back the team.

“ I don’t think the solution is the rush,” Lacy said. “I say, let’s make sure we clean up the shipyard properly—and bring back the Warriors [a professional basketball team that relocated to San Francisco in 1962, until 1971, when it moved to Oakland].”

I also hung out with D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly, at an event that POWER hosted as part of a Progressive Planners Forum, the day after Lacy and I unsuccessfully tried to access the shipyard, and the same day that POWER was also blocked from the yard.

Kelly has been tracking issues in and around District 10 for years, and, much like Lacy,  he’s not afraid to speak his mind on the issues.

For instance, Kelly is incensed by the city’s attempt to ram through approval of the final EIR for Lennar’s development, when the Navy has yet to complete an environmental impact statement related to its proposed clean up activities at the shipyard..
“Is the EIS ever a trailer to the EIR?” Kelly asked. “It’s like planning on Mars.”

Kelly has also expressed concern over the developer’s plan to build two peaker plants in the community.

And he is worried about the consequences of the city’s plan to turn the entire Bayview into a project survey area for Lennar’s Candlestick/Shipyard plan.

“How do you pay for any other improvements in the Bayview, when the shipyard redevelopment plan sucks all the air out of the room?” Kelly said

But Kelly’s biggest concern right now is that once Lennar gets its final approvals this summer, “the developer will never talk directly to the community again.”

At the Progressive Planners Forum that Kelly attended, speakers also voiced measured criticisms of Lennar’s plan.

“The plan has some important elements, especially in the job areas, but I think it adds up to gentrification, which is disruptive to the surrounding community, families and the last bastion of the black community in San Francisco,” said Chester Hartman, who has authored over 18 books on race and urban planning, including the acclaimed City For Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco.

“There is a need for a response in terms of an alternative approach,” Hartman advised.
“It doesn’t have to be a detailed, but it should include a basic philosophy and goals, and retain good parts of the original plan.”

Peter Marcuse, Professor of Urban Planning at Colombia University, said the situation at the shipyard reminded him of the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf.

“Cap the land sounds like cap the spill,” Marcuse said, noting that in both cases the community is fighting to get folks who dumped toxins to clean them up.

Marcuse criticized the privatization of the planning process, as illustrated by the City’s claim that it has entered into a “public-private” partnership with Lennar,  and the community’s experience that the city and the developer keep ignoring or dismissing the public’s feedback and opinions.

 “There should have been a range of alternatives open for discussion,” Marcuse said. “Instead, there is a sense, of this mega project’s inevitability. And once the developer has title to the land, the city has to negotiate what should be a public matter.”

Marcuse critiqued the use of tax increment financing, which will use increased taxes on property throughout the Bayview to finance improvements in one relatively small area, the 770 acres of land that, as Marcuse put it, “got sold to Lennar for $1.”

“This is a form of government subsidy,” Marcuse warned.

“There have been some negotiations,” Marcuse continued. He pointed to the community-led Prop. F, which in the spring of 2008 sought to establish 50 percent affordable housing in the development. And the community benefits agreement (CBA) that the San Francisco Labor Council hammered out at in May 2008, in an attempt to nail down benefits for the community in exchange for the Council’s support for the Lennar-financed Prop. G in June 2008.

“But these negotiations with Lennar start on basis that Lennar’s interests have to be protected equally with those of the City and its residents,” Marcuse commented. “It ought to be a public responsibility to show the community what the alternates to Lennar’s vision are.”

Marcuse concluded by suggesting a moratorium on Lennar’s plan to allow for a community-based visioning process, in which residents could express their desire for housing, diversity, open space and protection against environmental hazards

‘The City should then come up with an alternative to Lennar’s plan—and listen to Lennar,” he said. “But this is a public responsibility, rather than a private negotiation with a corporation that has been a beneficiary of a huge subsidy and starts to make a huge profit, the minute its housing units begin to sell.”

Miriam Chion, who works for the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), also expressed concerns with Lennar’s massive plan, which proposes to build thousands of mostly luxury condos at Candlestick Point, with a smaller number on the shipyard.

“We are in the 21st century, how can we continue to use same mechanisms of displacement?” Chion said. “And how can we do that to the African American community, which we have displaced over and over, and which has managed to build a community here, in spite of everything?”

According to Lennar’s plan, 68 percent of its proposed 10,000 units will be built at market rate. Of the remaining 32 percent of units, only 15 percent will be built at truly affordable rates, with an additional 15 percent geared towards the working middle-class income levels, such as those enjoyed by police, fire fighters, nurses and teachers.

But two Bayview residents who attended POWER’s progressive planners’ forum expressed frustration at what they perceived as outsiders trying to tell locals what’s best.

“If you haven’t lived here, you don’t know about the Bayview,” one resident said. “If they are going to do what they are going to do, they should do it all the way, and change things for the better. I’m tired of seeing kids under 12, playing outside at 11 p.m. So, if you are not from here, you can’t come on my ground and pass judgment. If you’d been and lived here, I don’t think you’d see this negatively.”

“$700 million has been spent on cleaning up shipyard, and producing highly technical reports on it,”  another local resident said. “Highly intellectual discussions are not helping, we need some action today.”

“No one here is against development,” countered long-term Bayview resident Espanola Jackson, while a Bayview resident named Nyese resurrected longstanding concerns that the developer fatally broke community trust when it failed to control asbestos dust at the site, when it began grading the shipyard’s Parcel A .

“Four years ago, I found out that they were sending home workers at the shipyard, without informing the surrounding community,” Nyese recalled. “My son was having excessive nosebleeds, so it was phenomenally insulting that they didn’t not notify us.”
“Lennar is just a name, a conglomeration of shareholders,” Nyese further noted. “We need development. But we don’t need it on chemically toxic land.”

These competing concerns indicate that all the candidates in the D. 10 race are going to have to be asking critical questions as they track the progress of Lennar, the city and the Navy’s plans this summer. Failure to do so will cost them credibility within the community—and possibly the supervisor’s race this fall, though downtown money will pour in to support whichever candidate is deemed most likely to rubberstamp present and future development and contracting plans. Stay tuned. It’s going to be a (politically) hot July.

 

Political litmus test for Hunters Point Shipyard access?

Mary Magee
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4

Even though the U.S. Navy abandoned the Hunters Point Shipyard in 1974, the military has continued to control access to the shipyard that helped launch the A-Bomb. That’s because the Navy still owns most parcels of land on the shipyard and remains on the hook for cleaning up pollutants on these sites, including a radiologically impacted dump on Parcel E2, which has been deemed to be the dirtiest land on the site.

Currently, the Navy is proposing to cap, not excavate this landfill, despite repeated requests from the local community, and a citywide vote in support of Proposition P in 2000, which urged the Navy to clean up the land to the best extent possible, which would mean excavating the Parcel E2 landfill and replacing it with clean uncontaminated soil. And oddly, the City appears to want government agencies and officials to sign off on its final EIR for Lennar’s massive 770-acre redevelopment plan for the shipyard and Candlestick Point, even though the Navy has not yet completed an environmental impact statement (EIS) related to its proposed shipyard cleanup activities.

Currently, the Navy controls access to the facility beyond a couple of trailers that the city’s Redevelopment Agency has set up just within the yard’s main gate. And to gain access to the shipyard these days, you need to call or visit Redevelopment’s trailer and get a pass. Or, alternatively, if you know any of the artists who continue to rent studios at shipyard, you can call them to try and get the city to give you a pass.

Underlying these limits to accessing the shipyard are some legitimate safety concerns related to equipment and excavations on what is now an active clean up and construction site, along with fears that untoward characters could break into the abandoned buildings or bother the artists who still have studios in operation at the shipyard. But has an additional political litmus test been put in place when it comes to critics of Lennar’s redevelopment plan, who want to access to the yard? If so, does it mirror the tap dancing that the local community has had to undergo to get its voices heard as Lennar pushes to get final approval for its shipyard/ Candlestick Point redevelopment plan.

Those questions resurfaced last week when a private security guard manning the shipyard’s front gate denied access to D. 10 supervisor candidate DeWitt Lacy, who had dropped by hoping to take this reporter around the yard as part of an ongoing conversation about Parcel E2, which Lacy believes needs to be excavated completely, and how best to hold the Navy accountable for cleaning up a mess it created decades ago. The security guard told Lacy that folks who want to visit must get a pass at the Redevelopment Agency trailer.

At the Redevelopment trailer, Micah Fobbs, administrative assistant for W.B. Kennedy and Associates, which has a contract with Redevelopment’s Citizen’s Advisory Committee. told Lacy that without a preauthorized pass, he couldn’t let us onto the site. Fobbs added that he would be happy to take us on a tour himself, but he could not leave the trailer unmanned, since he was the only staff member there at the time. Fair enough. Though the rebuff gave us the feel that the City doesn’t want pesky investigative reporters that have been critical of the development running around the site. “And if they found out I was a civil rights attorney, they probably wouldn’t want me out here, either,” Lacy joked.

But the next day, I encountered what sounded like overt hostility to other critics of Lennar’s plan, when I tried to ride along on what had been billed as a “Toxic Tour of the Navy Shipyard” by POWER (People Organizing to Win Employment Rights). POWER had advertised its tour in an email which said it would involve 23 expert urban planners, who happened to be in the Bay Area for a Progressive Planning Forum. The tour was billed as happening on the morning of June 17, before an afternoon discussion at POWER’s Third Street office in the Bayview, which was to focus “on alternative approaches to the city’s current plan for development at the Shipyard/ Candlestick Point.”

Caught in traffic, I didn’t arrive at the Boys and Girls Club on Kiska Road in Bayview Hunters Point in time to join POWER’s kick-off get together. So, I headed direct to the shipyard, a move that meant I arrived alone and ahead of the school bus that POWER had rented for the occasion. At the gate, I was told by the security guard that I couldn’t get in, that another guard lost his job for letting unauthorized individuals onto the site, that POWER didn’t have a pass and that they’d been warned to watch for POWER “because they want to stop the development.”

“If you are not authorized with badges, you are not let through,” the guard said, giving me the telephone number of the Hunters Point Duty police officer, who in turn said I needed to call the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which in turn told me to call the folks at the Redevelopment Agency’s shipyard trailer. And so I called Fobbs again, who confirmed that the Navy still controls all the property, except Parcel A which has already been conveyed to the City which in turn has granted developer Lennar the right to develop thousands of condos on that particular parcel.

“As far as viewing the rest of the property, you have to put in a request, and no photography or videography is allowed,” Fobbs said. This stated ban on photography came as a surprise, given recent photos of the shipyard that ran in a New York Times article about Lennar and the city’s vision for the 770-acre property.

And the sudden difficulties in gaining media access seemed odd, given that Lennar’s PR firm, Sitrick and Company, offered to take the media on a tour on the morning of June 3—the day the Redevelopment and Planning Commissions subsequently approved the final EIR for Lennar’s plan to redevelop the rest of the shipyard, plus Candlestick Point, a FEIR that has now been appealed to the Board, on the grounds that it was rushed for political reasons, leading to fatal flaws in the final document.

“Well, if folks come here through Redevelopment or the Mayor’s Office, then they have been able to take photographs,” Fobbs said. “But we have had people trying to climb fences and get through doors of some of the buildings.” (Fobbs last comment was a reference to a recent climbing of the fence that the Nation of Islam’s Leon Muhammad engaged in, in an effort to determine if air quality monitoring devices near the Nation’s school and Oakdale public housing site were operating. (After Muhammad scaled the fence and reported that he’d found an empty bin where monitoring equipment was supposed to be, a kafuffle ensued, with the US EPA saying Muhammad was looking in the wrong place for the monitors which, it claimed, were in operation.)

Ultimately, Fobbs told me to call Redevelopment’s Audrey Kay if I wanted a tour, and several shipyard artists told me they would be happy to arrange a day pass so I can visit their studios and hear concerns that they will be required to move from a couple of shipyard buildings before replacement studios have been completed–an arrangement that would amount to a breach of promise that Lennar and the city previously made to the shipyard artists.

Shortly after I was turned away for a second time, POWER’s bus arrived at the gate, only to be blocked–a denial of access that meant 23 progressive planners were forced to view the shipyard from various remote viewing spots atop the hills that surround the site.

Together these episodes left me wondering what kind of political litmus test could end up being enforced at the site, if Lennar’s mega project gets the green light this summer, and what will happen if the Board decides to kick the plan back to the drawing board until the Navy completes a environmental impact statement and all of the community’s ongoing environmental and economic justice concerns are addressed.

So stay tuned, and don’t forget to mark July 13 on your calendar when the full Board of Supervisors is tentatively to hear appeals of the project’s final EIR, which the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions rubberstamped June 3. And, as always, it will be revealing to see which candidates in the hotly contested race for D. 10 supervisor, show up and speak truth to power.

 

 

An online defense of print—and a plug for the Public Press’ first print edition

Mary Magee
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An online defense of print—and a plug for the Public Press’ first print edition

I spent my lunch hour yesterday indulging in what media critics say could soon be a lost experience: reading the first print issue of a newspaper.

As I turned the pages of a pilot print edition of the San Francisco Public Press, which has been in existence online since March 2009, I was surrounded by folks who were tapping out messages on plastic coated cell phones or sitting scrunched at table trying to read stuff on laptops.

And I began to wonder, will there be a print renaissance in my life time as upcoming generations begin to feel the impacts of too much screen and keyboard time? And begin to realize the benefits of having a print presence in this increasingly digital world? Or is print really going to go the way of the dinosaurs?

Maybe it’s because I’m old school, but I actually believe there’s a future for print journalism, though it may be a limited one. To my mind you can’t beat the sensation that comes from leafing through a newspaper, while sipping morning coffee, or the welcome relief of reading the news in hard copy, after staring at computer screens all day. And then there’s the fact that I’m never going to get mugged, or have my car broken into, because someone wants to steal a newspaper–something that can’t be said if you leave your Kindle or Blackberry or fancy laptop around.

Yeah, I never have to worry about sand at the beach, or water in the bath, when I read a print newspaper. And I can rest assured that when I am done with my paper, and leave it in a coffee shop, someone else can read it, or recycle it in their blue bin or reuse it as the proverbial bird cage liner or fish wrap.

Now, what’s especially interesting about the San Francisco Public Press—and distinguishes it from most other print newspapers currently available—is that it’s free of advertisements. Or, as the folks at the Public Press like to say, it’s “ad-free news in the public interest.”

    “Why no ads?” the Public Press asks. “As the newspaper advertising market has drained to Internet competitors, we need to search for other sources of income to support quality journalism. Advertising has also warped the content of the newsroom, both explicitly and subtly, encouraging newspapers to shift their coverage to topics of interest to businesses and wealthy readers—the target of ads. Noncommercial news, while often less lucrative, has the luxury of independence.”

The Public Press also devotes some wordage to explaining why they have turned to ink:
    “Newspapers help bridge the digital divide,” they state, noting that San Francisco’s 2009 City Survey showed that more than 34 percent of households with income under $50,000 cannot access the Internet at home via personal computers.
    “Newspapers serve as communal touchstones,” they continue, observing how isolating digital widgets can be, compared to reading a print newspaper in public.
    “We want to pay our hardworking staff for the work they do,” they add, reminding us that folks buy 50 million newspapers everyday in the US, but are still averse to paying for news online.
    “People use paper and electronic devices differently,” they conclude. “There are times and places when even the most tech-savvy Bay Area digerati enjoy some screen relief.”

I got my hands on a copy of the San Francisco Public Press’ first print edition, because Lila Lahood, SFPP’s director of operations, and SFPP contributor Christopher D. Cook, who wrote a timely piece about Lennar using federal taxpayer funds to balance its books, stopped by the Guardian with a stack of papers.

And while they were in newspaper delivery mode, Lahood and Cook also shared their thoughts on “Lessons Learned” from their first foray into print.

“We missed our deadline,” Lahood admitted, observing how, in future, the Public Press plans to focus less on breaking news and more on timely features to avoid deadline stress. The plan going forward, Lahood said, is to publish a print edition on a quarterly basis, with the hope of becoming a monthly print publication at some point next year.

“Some of us we stayed up the whole night, filings our full package at 6 in the morning,” Lahood added, tipping her hat to the “strong and committed core” of Public Press workers that made this first print edition possible.

‘Though most of us are journalists, we worked for publications that were already in existence before we arrived,” Lahood continued, acknowledging that the team had much to learn about putting out a print edition from start to finish this first time around.

‘But we showed it could be done,” Cook added.  “There is a solid professional publication now in the public sphere, making a dent in the San Francisco community.”

Available in 35 bookstores and newsstands in the Bay Area, the Public Press’ print edition is also available on the street for $2 a pop—an exercise in sales that isn’t as easy as the guys who peddle the Street Sheet (a monthly tabloid written primarily by homeless and formerly homeless people) make it look.

“It’s hard to sell newspapers on the street,” Cook acknowledged. “We knew it was going to be challenging. When you are out there, standing on the corner in the urban crunch, no one has an interest, but the minute you connect to folks, on an individual level, it changes.”

On June 22, the Public Press’s first pilot newspaper hit the streets. At 28 pages long, it includes two sections, three investigative reports, a full-page graphic novel and 50 articles from staff members and a broad spectrum of public media and civic groups, including KALW, KQED, Commonwealth Club, World Affairs Council, California Watch and Consumers Union.

I found the Public Press’ special section on Treasure Island intriguing and informative—the kind of in-depth investigation that’s hard for one journalist to pull off, but is crucial if the city of San Francisco and all its many residents are going to make informed planning and development decisions.

I appreciated the wide-range of articles in the Public Press’ main section, including items on the ongoing battle over the future of the open-air sewage digesters that have been stinking up the Bayview for decades now.

I loved the “Sit, Lie, Get Deported” comic strip that merges photos with hand-drawn illustrations and uses the actual words of politicians, city officials, activists and gadflies to help illustrate its point.

And I’m still trying to finish the crossword. In fact,  I plan to read the SFPP’s first printedition from front to back over the July 4 holiday weekend, when I’ll have the time to really absorb and enjoy it.

“Ideally, news will appear in print first, then online, so there’s interest in seeking out the print edition,” Lahood told me, noting that the Public Press’ first edition amounts to about 70,000 words. “So, it a novel, in length,” Lahood laughed. “People are, if not starving, at least very hungry for news analysis and investigative reporting. There are a lot of online sites that aggregate other publications content, and then there’s the corporate model of the Chronicle, but while there is some good reporting in town, there are fewer reporters.”

No kidding. All the more reason for this reporter to write an online defense of print, in the hope that you rush out to secure your copy of the Public Press’s first print edition and evaluate this new model of journalism. I think you’ll be glad you did.

Lennar’s litmus test

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Lennar’s litmus test

sarah@sfbg.com

None of the many stakeholders tracking the progress of Lennar Corp.’s massive Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment plan registered surprise when the Board of Supervisors received three appeals to the Planning Commission’s June 3 certification of the project’s final environmental impact report (FEIR).

Instead, everybody who has been watching the political juggernaut that has been pushing for quick approval of the project over the past month said they anticipated that the FEIR would be appealed, and perhaps litigated. But the real question is whether the project will be substantially changed.

In the seven months since the project’s draft EIR was released, the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions have repeatedly rejected all arguments and recommendations made by its critics to improve or delay the plan, rushing the approval along on a tight schedule (“The Candlestick Farce,” 12/21/09).

The rush job occurred even as numerous groups and individuals warned that the DEIR comment period was too short, (“DEIR in the headlights,” 02/03/10) and complained that the city and the developer had dismissed crucial data and testimony while exploiting fears the San Francisco 49ers would leave town if the city didn’t act quickly (“Political juggernaut,” 06/02/10).

What’s less clear is whether the Board of Supervisors has the political will to heed these appeals and correct what opponents say are serious flaws in the city’s FEIR. The appeal that the Sierra Club, Golden Gate Audubon Society, California Native Plant Society, and San Francisco Tomorrow filed June 21 lists nine deficiencies.

These included the FEIR’s failure to look into an alternate Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) route around Yosemite Slough or adequately assess impacts resulting from the landfill cap on Parcel E2 and the transfer of 20 acres of public shoreline land in Candlestick Point State Recreation Area (CPSRA) to build high-end housing.

“The FEIR failed to analyze those elements of the project’s sustainability plan that could have significant environmental impacts, including two proposed heating and cooling plants (which appear to be power plants) to serve 10,500 housing units and a projectwide recycling collection system,” the coalition further charged.

The appeal also voiced concern that the FEIR failed to adequately assess impacts resulting from the construction and maintenance of the development’s underground utility matrix, impacts to the bird-nesting in the proposed 34-acre wetland restoration project at the state park, and delays to eight Muni lines.

But the Sierra Club-led coalition also indicated that by removing provisions for a bridge over Yosemite Slough, transfer of land in the state park, and compromised clean-up efforts at Parcel E2, resolution of many of these disputed issues could be expedited.

“If the Board of Supervisors acts promptly, revisions to the EIR may be made quickly and result in a minimal delay in the progress of the project,” the coalition stated.

The Sierra Club’s Arthur Feinstein told the Guardian that the coalition’s top three concerns are “very important, but the six other issues are also very real.”

“Here we have a city cutting 10 percent of its bus service while saying that eight bus routes will need to be improved because of the project, and admitting that the development will increase air pollution in a district that has the highest rates of asthma and cancer without identifying mitigations such as reducing parking spaces in the proposal,” Feinstein said.

POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) also filed an FEIR appeal June 21 listing a broader range of environmental and economic justice-related concerns.

These included the FEIR’s failure to analyze and mitigate for displacement that would be triggered in the surrounding neighborhood by developing 10,500 mostly market-rate housing units in the area and “failure to provide for adequate oversight and enforcement of the terms of the early transfer” of the shipyard from the Navy.

POWER also cited the FEIR’s failure to adequately mitigate against the impact of sea level rise, the risks associated with potential liquefaction of contaminated landfill at the shipyard in the event of an earthquake, and health risks related to chemicals of concern at the shipyard. The group also faulted the city’s failure to get the Navy to prepare an environmental impact statement on its clean-up plan before the FEIR was completed.

Finally, Californians for Renewable Energy (CARE) filed a five-point appeal June 23 charging that the project contravened the intent of Proposition P (which voters approved in 2000, urging the Navy to remediate shipyard pollution to the maximum extent possible), that the project’s FEIR is incomplete because the Navy (which still retains jurisdiction over the project lands) has not yet completed its EIS, and that the FEIR approval process was tainted by 49ers-related political pressure.

“The pre-set goal of maintaining the 49ers in San Francisco has colored the environmental analysis of this decision,” CARE noted, referring to the city’s rush to get the project’s FEIR certified on June 3 — five days before Santa Clara County voters approved a new stadium for the 49ers near Great America .

The appeal filings mean the Board of Supervisors is required to hold a hearing within 30 days, a move that places a roadblock, at least temporarily, in the way of the city’s tight schedule to secure final approvals for Lennar’s megaproject before summer’s end.

Board President David Chiu told the Guardian that the Board’s Land Use Committee will move forward with a July 13 meeting to hear a list of proposed amendments related to the underlying plan along with the FEIR appeals.

“We are back at the board Land Use Committee July 12 with 10 items related to the project,” said Chiu, who is a member of the Land Use Committee. The three-member committee is chaired by Sup. Sophie Maxwell, who represents the project’s District 10; Sup. Eric Mar is vice-chair.

“The next day, July 13, has been tentatively set for a full meeting of the full board,” Chiu continued. He acknowledged that the FEIR related materials are dense and complex, telling us that “they form the largest pile on my desk, and it’s about five inches high.”

But he wasn’t about to prejudge the outcome. “We do need to clean up the area and rebuild it in such a way that it will dramatically increase affordable housing and jobs and support a livable diverse community,” Chiu said. “Obviously there are still a lot of questions and concerns about the proposed project and the board will push to make sure all these issues are adequately addressed.”

CARE president Michael Boyd said he hoped the board would take his group’s appeal seriously and fix the plan’s fundamental shortcomings. “That means going back to square one,” he said.

But others were less sure that the board would seek to overturn the entire plan. “Everyone in the community would like the best level of clean-up,” said Saul Bloom, whose nonprofit Arc Ecology has tracked the proposed shipyard clean-up for three decades. “But what’s possible and practical? And will the city be supportive of that or the most expeditious solution?”

Bloom reserved gravest concern for plans to cap, not remove, the contaminants from the shipyard’s Parcel E2. “The concern is that if you put a cap on E2 without a liner then contaminants could scootch out during a seismic event, or over time, and cause problems because of the parcel’s close proximity to surrounding groundwater and the San Francisco Bay,” he said. “But to place a liner in there is very expensive because you’d have to excavate E2, at which point you might as well replace it with clean soil.”

Bloom acknowledged that the Navy has argued that excavation would cause a nasty smell and nobody knows what is going to be released in the process.

“But long-term Bayview residents like Espanola Jackson have made the point that the community already lives within nose-shot of the southeast sewage treatment plant and would rather put up with a few years of nasty smells, given the relative benefits of cleaning the yard up,” he said. “And how do we know a cap will be protective given the Navy’s argument that we don’t know what’s down there?

“The thing that makes the most sense here is to clean up the shipyard to the best possible extent, but the city isn’t planning to do that,” Bloom added. “And the environmental community’s bottom line has always been the bridge [over Yosemite Slough, which the Sierra Club opposes]. So the sense is that if the bridge goes away, so does their problem.”

Benefits: June 23-June 29

David Talbot
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0
Benefits: June 23-June 29

Ways to have fun while giving back this week


Wednesday, June 23

Water Bond Happy Hour
Join the Food and Water Watch team in helping to get people to vote NO on the California Water Bond, which will appear on the November ballot. Meet other people who care about the issues and discuss a sustainable water future for California and how water issues effect us all. Featuring stainless steel water bottle raffles to benefit Food and Water Watch, a local non-profit corporate accountability organization.
6 p.m., free
Elixer Bar
3200 16th St., SF
www.foodandwaterwatch.org

Thursday, June 24

Ecocity Builders Art Auction
Ecocity Builders is a non-profit dedicated to reshaping cities, towns, and villages for the long-term health of human and natural systems. Attend this slient art auction to help raise funds for Ecocity featuring hors d’oeuveres and an artist talk with Richard Register.
6 p.m.; $50 donation, fee goes towards bidding
SPUR Urban Center
654 Mission, SF
(510) 452-9522
www.ecocitybuilders.org

Saturday, June 26

Like Water for Chocolate
Inspired by chapter three of Laura Esquivel’s acclaimed novel, Like Water for Chocolate, this fundraiser will feature the spice of Mexico and the heat of love simmering in this fusion of food and performance. Proceeds to benefit Word for Word and Z Space. There is no parking at the performance site. Guests should park at the Mill Valley Middle School parking lot, where they will be shuttled to Hillside Gardens starting at 4:15 p.m. The event will be held outdoors, so dress warmly and comfortably.
5 p.m., $250
Hillside Gardens, Mill Valley
via Mill Valley Middle School
425 Sycamore, Mill Valley
(415) 626-0453

Walk in the Wild
Attend the Oakland Zoo’s annual fundraiser featuing vendors from over 90 restauants, caterers, bakeries, wineries, and breweries offering beverages and cuisine to be enjoyed while walking around the zoo and live music and dancing. Proceeds support the Oakland Zoo’s conservation, education, and animal enrichment programs. This event is 21 and over.
5 p.m., $150
Oakland Zoo
9777 Golf Links Road, Oakl.
www.oaklandzoo.org
(510) 632-9525

Sunday, June 27

Fundraiser for Alan
Alan, who has worked as a waiter at the historic Old Clamhouse in Bayview for 12 years, was one of the four cyclist who were purposely run down by a driver on June 2nd in the Mission and Potrero Hill neighborhoods. Alan has severe injuries to his head and face and has had to undergo 14 hours of surgery. Help raise money for his medical bills at this fundraiser where a door donation of $20 gets you a plate of food from the buffet, one free drink, and two raffle tickets. Featuring live music and a DJ.
3 p.m., $20 donation
The Old Clamhouse
299 Bayshore, SF
(415) 826-4880


Monday, June 28

Honduras Resiste
Watch three videos presented by the Bay Area Latin America Solidarity Coalition (BALASC) on the one year military coup that happened in Honduras in 2009,starting with The Coup and the Popular Resistance, followed by Exposing a Fraudulent Election, and ending with False Democracy in Honduras, and the U.S. Complicity.  Proceeds to benefit the Popular Resistance in Honduras.
8 p.m., $6
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
http://balasc.org

Day after 49ers vote, EPA says shipyard dust monitoring OK

Mary Magee
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Day after 49ers vote, EPA says shipyard dust monitoring OK

The day after the 49ers scored “a touchdown with Santa Clara voters“, the U.S. EPA announced it has finalized a report about asbestos dust control issues at the Hunters Point Shipyard.

Maybe the timing is all just a big coincindence. But the U.S. EPA was hopping mad earlier this year when Lennar claimed that “Obama’s EPA” had declared the shipyard dust conditions safe, after viewing a draft copy of the U.S. EPA report.

So, there’s one worldview that says the U.S. EPA delayed release of its final report, so it wouldn’t get mixed up in the city’s hearings on the final EIR for Lennar’s Candlestick/Shipyard development.

Either way, if the 49ers really do leave, that’s more land for Lennar to build houses on.

There’s also the worldview that says the 49ers used the Santa Clara vote to squeeze a better deal out of San Francisco.(And as Lenny Kravitz likes to sing, it ain’t over ’til it’s over.)

But with city officials admitting  that it doesn’t make financial sense to build a new stadium, it’s easy to arrive at the view  that the city used fears that the 49ers would leave to rush approval of the city’s final EIR for the Lennar project, a vast document that could have used more scrutiny and review time.

Anyways, amid  the competing conspiracy theories, it’s worth taking the time to read the report i its entirity. And if you don’t have the time for all that, here is the full text of the cover letter that the US EPA released today:

“Dear Bayview Hunters Point Community and Stakeholders:

EPA has finalized the report entitled, “U.S. EPA’s Final Review of Dust/Naturally Occurring Asbestos Control Measures and Air Monitoring at the Former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard (June 9, 2010).” 

“About the Report:

EPA conducted a technical review of dust mitigation plans and an independent laboratory analyses of data associated with the City and Air District’s efforts to control naturally-occurring asbestos and dust associated with construction activity on Parcel A at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. EPA also evaluated metals and radiation data for both the Parcel A development work and Navy activities on the Shipyard. “

“EPA made independent technical advisory services available to community members to review the data and EPA’s draft report.  EPA held a public meeting for the community to hear comments from the technical expert.  The comments and EPA’s responses are attached to the final report. “

“Naturally-occurring asbestos in dust at construction sites is a widespread concern in California where serpentine soil is common.  EPA’s report finds that best practices for dust monitoring and mitigation are in place at Parcel A and the Hunters Point Shipyard to protect the community by keeping exposures to asbestos, metals and radiation in dust within
acceptable levels.”

Newsom and his commissioners just love Candlestick/Shipyard report

Mary Magee
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4

 Text by Sarah Phelan, photos by Luke Thomas

Today, I’m dedicating Michael Franti’s  “Say hey, (I love you)” to the entire Redevelopment Commission and the four Planning Commissioners who approved the City’s final Environmental Impact Report plan for Lennar’s Candlestick/ shipyard development. I’m doing so, not because I love these commissioners, who are  all mayoral appointees, but because they all seem to love everything about the final report, despite ongoing concerns about building a bridge over an environmentally sensitive slough, taking park land for luxury condos and unresolved questions about the Navy’s cleanup of the shipyard.(Yes, the EIR doesn’t address the toxic cleanup, but does it make sense to approve it before the Navy has completed its cleanup assessment plan?)

I’m also dedicating Franti’s bubbly soul-lifting song to Planning Commissioners Christina Olague. Kathrin Moore and Hisashi Sugaya for refusing to rubberstamp the final EIR or the related CEQA findings. Thanks guys for having some moral backbone!

Mayor Gavin Newsom, presumably tweeting while leaving town again on the Lt. Governor campaign trail, hailed yesterday’s rubberstamping process as a critical milestone.
“This is a major milestone for our efforts to transform the shipyard from an environmental blight to a showcase of jobs, affordable housing, parks and green-technology investment for the Bayview and our entire City,” Newsom said in a press release. “The approvals of the EIR and Redevelopment Plan reflect the years of hard work, rigorous study and extensive community involvement invested in revitalizing our City’s Southeastern Waterfront…our progress today is a testament to their leadership and commitment to thoroughly cleaning up the Shipyard so we can forge ahead towards a new vision for Hunters Point.”

One of the key points to emerge from last night’s hearing is the bifurcated nature of the process, which yesterday let the city push the EIR certification through, before the Navy completes a related EIS (environmental impact statement) about the cleanup on the shipyard—including areas of land where Lennar hopes to develop homes if the 49ers leave.

Fog City Journal’s Luke Thomas told me today that during public comment, the Nation of Islam’s Minister Christopher Muhammad called the commissioners “paid prostitutes” and “political whores” and said there would be a “political earthquake” if the commissioners go forward with EIR. 

“However, I don’t think he understood that the EIR and the EIS (which deals with the toxic cleanup) are two separate documents,” Thomas said, accurately noting that the joint commission was only voting on the EIR yesterday.

(According to Thomas, the Minister also promised that coalition of activists that would dog Newsom up and down the State during his campaign for Lt. Governor to expose Newsom’s record, so expect more fireworks along the campaign trial this summer.)

Another key fact to emerge from yesterday’s hearing was the lack of public comment on the part of almost all the candidates running to replace D. 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes this massive development. Only Kristine Enea, Tony Kelly and Espanola Jackson spoke on the record—with Enea in favor of the plan with amendments, and Kelly and Jackson opposed as things currently stand.

Now, you’d think that everyone running in this race would be eager to show D. 10 constituents (and beyond) that they were at the meeting, not only silently tracking, but also publicly expressing their opinions. And while it’s true that Marlene Tran and DeWitt Lacy filled in speaker cards, Chris Jackson showed up during the proceedings, and Lynette Sweet got ushered into the press box by Sup. Bevan Dufty, none of these D. 10 candidates got their thoughts in the public record. Now, no doubt Cedric Akbar, Bill Barnes, Isaac Bowers, James Calloway, Malia Cohen, Ed Donaldson, Marie Franklin, Rodney Hampton Jr., La Vaughan Moore, Geoffrea Morris, Steve Moss, Jacqueline Norman, Nina Pickerrell, Dwayne Robinson, Diane Wesley Smith, Eric Smith, (and the many others rumored to be running) had their reasons for not being there, and I’d be happy to hear all about it from all of them between now and the November election.

But it doesn’t instill confidence in candidates when they won’t say in public what they are only too willing to say off the record. So, kudos to Enea, Kelly and Jackson for taking that leap and refusing to act like politicians before they have even been elected.

“So much of it was shocking but not surprising,” Tony Kelly told me today, after he recovered from last night’s meeting which lasted until 2 a.m. ‘Everyone knew there would be a snappy 4-3 decision by the Planning Commission on the stuff that mattered. And in a way, I can see why the mayoral appointees on the Commission would decide that they would leave it to the elected officials on the Board to stop this plan. But there was zero excuse for the lameness of the Redevelopment Commission [who are all mayoral appointees]. Still, it showed what the Planning Commission [which today consists of four mayoral appointees, and three Board appointees] must have been like  before it was reformed [and still consisted solely of mayoral appointees].”

“It was heartbreaking to see the endless parade of Bayview Hunters Point residents saying, ‘I need a job,’ or ‘ I need to live in a new house,’ as they argued in favor of certifying the project’s final EIR, despite all the flaws,” Kelly acknowledged.

Still, as Kelly points out, the city could have pushed to acquire foreclosed housing in D. 10 so residents in substandard public housing could be relocated into decent units now, instead of having to stay at least another five years, or longer, in rat, cockroach and sewage inundated units, under Lennar’s plan.

Kelly also notes that the city could have used the Redevelopment Agency’s “massive power” to do stuff up and down Third St, where unemployment is especially visible.

“Having done planning elsewhere, this plan [for Candlestick and the shipyard] is like planning on Mars,” Kelly said. ‘This is a bigger badder version of 555 Washington.”

Last but not least, Kelly voiced concern that a couple of peaker plants will be built within Lennar’s project area.
.“There are going to be two combustion turbines generating steam heat, but not electricity within the project boundaries,” Kelly clarified. “That means they don’t have to register as a power plant, but they will be generating greenhouse gases. The only difference is they won’t be generating electricity.”

So, now the charade of approvals heads to the Port Commission, which has got some folks asking whether Port Commissioner Stephanie Shakofsky, another Newsom appointee should recuse herself , given that her non-profit is clearly such a fan of the project.

 

 

Political juggernaut

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Political juggernaut

sarah@sfbg.com

City officials are scrambling to secure final approvals to allow Lennar Corp. to move forward with its 770-acre Candlestick/Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment of San Francisco’s impoverished and polluted southeast sector. But the community remains divided on the project, raising concerns that wary residents will end up being steamrolled by this politically powerful juggernaut.

Some groups say the project needs major amendments, but fear it will be rushed to the finish for political reasons. Others say they are hungry to work and desperate to move into better housing units, so they don’t want all the myriad project details to slow that progress. And Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration is arguing that approving the project’s final environmental impact report by June 3 is crucial if San Francisco wants to keep the San Francisco 49ers in town.

But many observers fear Lennar wants its entitlements now before its project can be subjected to greater scrutiny that could come with the November elections. Newsom, who made Lennar’s project the centerpiece of his housing policy, will be replaced as mayor if he wins the lieutenant governor’s race. And a crowded field of candidates, many of them progressives concerned about the project’s impacts on the poor and the environment, are vying to replace termed-out Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes Lennar’s massive territory.

“It’s 180 percent about the 49ers,” land use attorney Sue Hestor told the Guardian, referring to the city’s proposed rush job, as evidenced by a rapid entitlement schedule that the Newsom’s administration wants city commissions and the board to follow.

Under that schedule, which Hestor procured from the Mayor’s Office, Planning and Redevelopment commissioners are expected to certify the project’s final 6,000-page EIR, adopt California Environmental Quality Act findings, approve amendments to the project’s original disposition and development agreement, and authorize land trust and open space reconfigurations — all during a June 3 meeting where public comment will likely last for many hours.

Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, a community-based nonprofit that tracks the development, says this schedule stretches the credulity that this is a deliberative process. “There’s no way anyone could make a functional reasoned assessment,” Bloom told us. “How do you have any meaningful public conversation under those circumstances?”

Michael Cohen, Newsom’s chief economic advisor, asserted in an April 29 article in The New York Times that Lennar’s plan is a “really, really good project,” echoing the glowing praise he’s heaped on the project since its conception.

“But there’s nothing new in their proposal,” Bloom told us. “That’s because they haven’t been listening to the public’s concerns. [Cohen] says, ‘Haven’t we talked enough? The community’s been waiting all these years!’ But waiting to get what done?”

Lennar’s project — which had early backing from Newsom, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and other political power brokers — was sold as creating “jobs, housing, and parks” and “revitalizing the abandoned shipyard” when voters approved the Lennar-financed Proposition G in 2008.

“Proposition G is from the community and for the community,” Lennar’s campaign promised. “You can turn the abandoned Hunters Point Shipyard into a clean, healthy, sustainable, livable neighborhood — a place where people can raise their children.”

The shipyard once employed thousands of workers, including African Americans who were recruited from the South in the 1940s and ’50s. But the district’s economic engine fell into disrepair when the military left in 1974. Today the neighboring Hunters Point and Bayview neighborhoods have the highest unemployment and crime rates and the largest concentration of African American families in the city.

But the city’s final EIR for the project, which the Planning Department released mid-May, shows that 68 percent of the developer’s proposed 10,500 new housing units will be sold at market rates unaffordable to area residents, and that many of these units will be built on state park land at Candlestick Point.

Lennar is also proposing to build a bridge across the environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough, significantly changing the southeast waterfront. Lennar says it plans to develop the project’s remaining 3,000 units at below market prices, including one-for-one replacement of rundown Alice Griffith public housing units. Its proposal includes a dozen high-rise towers, 2.7 million square feet of commercial space, 1 million square feet of retail space, a performing arts theater, and an artists colony.

Lennar claims its proposal will create 1,500 construction jobs annually during the project’s 20-year build-out, along with 10,000 permanent jobs, thanks to a United Nations Global Compact Sustainability Center and a vaguely defined green technology office park.

The project and its impacts are already an issue in this year’s District 10 supervisor’s race (see “The battle for the forgotten district,” Feb. 23). Candidate Chris Jackson says Lennar’s proposal is weak when it comes to creating well-paying, low-skilled green collar jobs. He supports Arc’s proposal to including green maritime industrial use at the shipyard.

Arc recommends that the city’s final EIR allow recycling and repairing of ships, including the Suisun Bay Ghost fleet — decommissioned U.S. Navy, cruise, and ferry ships — arguing that “ship recycling and repair are resurgent strategic industrial activities yielding employment opportunities for our existing pool of skilled and unskilled workers.”

Jackson, who was elected to the Community College Board in 2008 and recently jumped into the District 10 race, wants the city to assert that the project is not a regional housing plan.

“It’s a local housing plan for local residents,” Jackson asserts. “It’s not here to provide housing for Silicon Valley. It’s for Bayview-Hunters Point and District 10 residents.”

Jackson understands why some local residents want no delays on final EIR approval: “I can never blame folks in Alice Griffith public housing for coming out and saying ‘no delays.’ They really want something real, housing that is not rat and cockroach infested.”

As a policy analyst (a position he’s quitting to focus on the District 10 race) for the San Francisco Labor Council — which gave key backing to the project in the 2008 election — Jackson knows labor is frustrated by all the project meetings. “I try to tell them it’s better to get this project right than rush it through and find out later that it goes against the interests of labor,” Jackson said.

In May 2008, the Labor Council signed a community benefits agreement (CBA) with Lennar. Since then labor leaders have urged no delays on the project’s draft EIR review. But Jackson believes the city must demand that financial consequences, such as liquidated damages, be a project approval condition if the developer reneges on the CBA.

“Right now the only push-back the city has is to threaten to kill the whole project if Lennar doesn’t meet its timeline,” Jackson said. “But people are really invested in this project, and I don’t believe anyone would pull the trigger and end the entire development. We don’t need to throw everything out; we just need to change them.”

Jackson wants to see the inclusion of a special-use district that would create a cooperative land trust to ensure affordability and home ownership opportunities for local residents. “I love open space and sustainability, but I also want affordable housing and real light-industrial opportunities that can employ people living in the district now.”

Special-use districts, Jackson argues, give city commissioners a way to amend this project to make it more acceptable.

Jackson wants to see strong tenant protections for public housing residents. “The vast majority of those residents are African American. At the end of the day, I want to see economic and environmental justice, so we can say we brought the right change to our community.”

Jackson also would like to see a more independent Mayor’s Office. “Don’t you feel like its 2002/2003, and that if you speak out against the project, it’s like you are speaking out against the Iraq war, and all of a sudden you are not patriotic?”

Fellow District 10 candidate Eric Smith concurred. “The powers that be are definitely moving this thing forward,” he said. “And this is a monster train, a juggernaut that is gathering steam. But how it shakes out down the road remains to be seen. My whole mantra is that there needs to be greater transparency down the line. If I become the sheriff, I’ll be shining a light on all this stuff.”

Smith warned that the community needs to work together or it won’t win a better deal. “It’s clear that folks in the city are hoping against all odds that Lennar can pull this stuff off so they can prove all the naysayers wrong and these community benefits can be realized, and that scrutiny of the projects can go on while all this happens,” he said.

But Arthur Feinstein, the Sierra Club’s political chair, worries that the city’s rush job is resulting in seriously flawed documents and decision-making. “It’s difficult for folks to digest 6,000 pages of comments and responses on the draft EIR in the three weeks since planning posted them online,” Feinstein said. “And nothing has changed despite all the comments, which is why it continues to be a nonsense process.”

Feinstein says the Sierra Club’s top concerns are the Parcel E-2 cleanup on the shipyard, a deal to transfer 23 acres at Candlestick Park for development, and the bridge over Yosemite Slough.

“You can cover most of the site,” he said. “But when it comes to Parcel E-2, where the dump burned for six months in 2002, that’s only 20 acres, it could and should be removed. This is the environmental justice issue that has the community up in arms.”

Feinstein worries about the precedent that selling a state park for condos sets. “This is our park, and they are shrinking it.” He is also concerned that the developer wants to bridge Yosemite Slough for cars.

How many of these concerns will be addressed at the June 3 hearing, which is just days before Santa Clara County voters decide whether to try to lure away the 49ers with a new publicly financed stadium? We’ll see.

Older ‘n’ wider

David Talbot
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0
Older ‘n’ wider

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS One night the Maze came over because that’s what he does. He comes over. Sometimes he brings his dinner with him.

This time he brought his dinner with him.

He started pulling things out of his backpack as if they were rabbits: part of a loaf of cranberry bread! Hummus! Broccoli! Rabbits! In the water bottle holder on his bike was a half-empty bottle of semi-important wine. Me, I’d already eaten.

Another thing the Maze does is worry. He hedges his bets, shakes his head, and assigns point values to things that most people just try to put into words. I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes language doesn’t cut it, but given a choice between it and math … I mean, in matters of the heart, come on: poetry vs. calculus?

The Maze is, for example, lonely. He wants to write; he wants to edit; he wants to sing, soar, shred on the guitar, or at least be in a band. These are just examples.

I like to dance. I get the two-step. I look the Maze in the eye, run the numbers with him, shake my head, want and wonder what he wants and wonders, and just generally try to be useful.

Sometimes I even threaten to throttle or kick him.

"I don’t know, Dani," he said. "I just don’t know."

"Me neither," I said, having a sip of his half-full bottle of bike-rack red. We were standing in my kitchen. As opposed to sitting. I forget why. Maybe he was fixing to leave.

"I mean, I just don’t get it. What am I supposed to do?"

If I knew, I would have said. I’m a good friend. If he would have cried, I would have cried. Existential dilemma loves company.

"Is there something I’m doing wrong?" he asked, sincere pain in his voice, his forehead all wrinkled and labyrinthine (which is how he got his name). And he said it again: "Am I doing something wrong?"

"I don’t think so," I said, because I honestly didn’t. But then a possibility occurred to me. "When you make pasta," I asked, "you’re not rinsing it after you strain it, are you?"

He looked more confused than before. "No," he said.

"Good, then, no, you’re not doing anything wrong."

I wasn’t exactly joking. As far as I know, this is the only real, unequivocally always wrong mistake one can make in life. And even then, it could be argued that if you’re cooking noodles for soup, a cold rinse might not be a bad idea. You know, so they don’t overcook in the broth.

But how did I get here? Speaking of existential dilemmas.

It was my birthday, and for my birthday I listened to Abba without guilt. I ate at Boogaloos. I got older. Had late-night hot wings with Earl Butter. Lunch: a smashed sandwich at Tartine. For my birthday the Pod bought my ticket and we all watched a baseball game at the Coliseum. I had a hot dog and a beer. For dinner I ate grilled salmon with a squeeze of lemon over quinoa and swirled kale with tamari sauce.

Kidding!!! I had chicken and waffles, of course. This time at Frisco Fried, which is cheaper than anything I have come across, chicken-and-wafflewise. Six bucks for two thighs and a waffle! You can barely get a burrito for that price anymore.

But before you move to Bayview, this is not the cheapest chicken and waffles in the Bay Area. A bird named Jay just told me: Oakland’s Home of Chicken ‘n Waffles, or Home O’ as I call it for short because chicken and waffles now goes without saying (as does the letter ‘f’), has a weekday happy hour special. Between 4 and 7.

But I have to go back to Frisco Fried first and find out what a burger dog is. I can’t speak for their Rice-a-Roni, but the mac ‘n’ cheese was really wonderful. The waffle was okay. The chicken, fried to order, was super-hot and crazy juicy — not quite as flavorfully battered as Auntie April’s or Farmerbrown’s Little Skillet if you’re keeping score, Maze, but definitely up there. *

FRISCO FRIED

Tue.–Thu. 11 a.m.–7 p.m.; Fri. 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

Sat. noon–9 p.m.; Sun. noon–7 p.m.; closed Mon.

5176 Third St., SF

(415) 822-1517

D/MC/V

No alcohol

The chicken ‘n diet

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The chicken ‘n diet

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS We went down there, the Mountain and me, way down South of Market, and we found the little alley, placed our little order at the window, and sat on the loading dock, our feet dangling in the street. We sipped sweet tea and ate our breakfast out of boxes, with our hands. All my other friends, even Earl Butter, are fasting, doing cleanses, or otherwise flirting with vegetarianism by way of getting healthy — in response to which I have been eating nothing but chicken and waffles.

There’s good news out there. I’ll tell you what it is, and then I’m going on strike. But I wonder if I can trust the Guardian to print a blank page with just the words "Cheap Eats is on strike" in the middle of it. So maybe I’ll hold the spot with dada and gobbledygook … but wait, but that would be pretty much business-as-usual.

Hmm. It has also occurred to me of course to write restaurant reviews until my demands are met — to review the most boring restaurant(s) I can find, in the most boringly straightforward language I can mustard.

Think: completely unbuttered sentences without any grill marks whatsoever, stacked one on top of the other until you feel bricked in by important information, yet entirely unentertained.

Scary, innit?

Well, certainly flavorless, but I can do this, I think. The problem is it would be way more work than I am accustomed to, and I’m not sure that when you go on strike you’re supposed to work harder. Help me, labor organizers. It’s a topsy-turvy world, my world, and I am essentially (don’t forget) a chicken farmer. I don’t know anything about getting anything — except maybe eggs.

So …

Waffles. Chicken. Here’s what I know.

Farmerbrown’s Little Skillet is a good place to get greased, goo’d, and sweetened. And I mean all over your clothes, too, because there aren’t any tables to eat at. That’s OK, we’re human. This is why we have Laundromats. Not to mention napkins, but I don’t always remember about those.

You place your order at the window, then you eat across the alley on a loading dock or little wooden bench. And if you think that sounds just wonderful, wait’ll you crunch your teeth into that juicy fried chicken. It was the best I’d had since Auntie April’s, which was the best I’d had since Gravy’s. And suddenly we’re saying something.

Suddenly, chicken and waffles are alive and well — maybe even trendy — and not in Oakland this time, or even L.A., but right here in the city known as "The City." Where I live.

Auntie April’s Chicken ‘n’ Waffles is on Third Street in Bayview, and it’s an actual sit-down restaurant. Their Belgian-style waffles are about as satisfying as Gussie’s, but the chicken (fried to order, of course) is way, way better. And the combo is cheaper.

Even Farmerbrown’s Little Skillet, which is associated with Farmerbrown’s fancy-pants Tenderloin soul food restaurant, is cheaper than Gussie’s. Two pieces and a waffle for $8. Pick your pieces.

Not bad, considering one piece and a waffle at Gussie’s is $7.79, $9-something if you want a breast. (You don’t.)

Farmerbrown’s waffles, also Belgian style, were perfect: crispy outside with a soft middle. And their sweet tea was spectacularly sweet. Probably goes better with the pulled pork sandwich — which I think was the only other thing on the menu.

So I don’t know what to say. Slight edge to Auntie April for the fried. But Farmerbrown’s got her beat on the iron. Guess I’ve got two new favorite restaurants. Maybe more. There’s Frisco Fried, also in the Bayview, and Sockywonk says Hard Knox is doing chicken and waffles now too.

It’s an exciting time to be a restaurant reviewer. On a chicken-and-waffle fast. Send money. Someone. *

AUNTIE APRIL’S CHICKEN ‘N’ WAFFLES

Daily: 8 a.m.–3 p.m.

4618 Third St., S.F.

(415) 643-4983

Cash only

No alcohol

FARMERBROWN’S LITTLE SKILLET

Mon.-Sat. 9 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

360 Ritch, S.F.

(415) 777-2777

Cash only

No alcohol

Violence in the Bayview — and solutions

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Violence in the Bayview — and solutions

By Chris Jackson

OPINION The outpouring of emotion surrounding the tragic death of Tian Sheng Yu — the elderly Chinese man who was savagely beaten to death by two African Americans — resonates with me. My family has been in the Bayview for more than 40 years, and I know firsthand the pain caused by street violence.

I, too, have witnessed what seems to be going on now: the polarizing of people who use race as a shorthand to determine who is dangerous and who is not. It’s a sad realization to see these sorts of divisions creep into the public discourse in San Francisco in 2010.

Let’s be clear. The Asian American community has every right to feel outrage over being targeted for violent attacks. As a black elected official, I am the first to stand with them in solidarity — violence against my neighbor is violence against me. Pure and simple.

But there is more to this story, as is often the case. For as it turns out, in San Francisco, African Americans are also prime targets of violent crime, and at a disturbing rate. My neighborhood is a good example of what’s going on. In District 10, which includes the southeastern part of the city, 36 percent of our residents are Asian American, and 28 percent are African-American. But if you take a look at the last 136 reported aggravated assaults, African Americans were targeted 89 times — that’s more than 68 percent of the total aggravated assaults.

Pitting one racial group against another is cowardly and wholly misguided. Recent reports of community meetings where inflammatory language is used to divide us by race do nothing to solve the underlying problems. The truth is, we are all suffering and need to work together to find solutions to make our community safer.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s legislation to mandate foot patrols is a good start. We need a real community policing model that emphasizes on-the-ground, respectful contact between the police and community members.

But our main focus should be on preventive measures. We need to expand drop-in center hours from one afternoon a week to five days a week beginning this summer. Crime happens every day, not just once a week.

Our youth should be put to work on neighborhood beautification projects. If young people are busy working to beautify their neighborhood, they will take more pride and personal responsibility for what happens in it.

We need to get back to the basics as well, and address the poor lighting that exists in areas of high crime. As a city, this is a cosmetic fix that can reap big rewards.

These are simple solutions, and the problems unleashed by Tian Sheng Yu’s death run far deeper. But every journey starts with a first step. Let’s just make sure that first step takes us forward, to a place of shared concern so we can all contribute to making our community safer.

Chris Jackson is an elected member of the Community College Board and lives in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood.

 

On the Cheap Listings

David Talbot
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0

On the Cheap listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THURSDAY 20

Open Show #13 Rayko, 428 3rd St., SF; (415) 495-3773. 7pm, free. Attend this interactive art salon and social mixer where five curated presenters will showcase a 20 image story or a 4-7 minute multimedia/video project. The audience is encouraged to engage presenters with questions and feedback.

FRIDAY 21

Bead and Design Show Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (530) 274-2222. Fri.-Sun. 10am-6pm; $10, good for all three days. Visit more than 150 artists and artisan exhibitors displaying and selling precious stones, jewelry, vintage and contemporary beads, metalwork, cloisonné, ceramics, handmade clothing, and more. You can also check out workshops and demonstrations in techniques such as jewelry design, metal work, bead making, found object jewelry, and more.

Fourteen Hills San Francisco Motorcycle Club, 2194 Folsom, SF; http://14hills.net. 7pm, free. Get a taste of new work by emerging and established writers at this Spring 2010 release of Fourteen Hills, San Francisco State University’s international literary magazine featuring poetry, fiction, short plays, literary nonfiction, and art. The release party to feature readings, art, DJ music, food, and great raffle prizes.

BAY AREA

Skank Bloc Bologna Number Four Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Bancroft, Berk.; (510) 642-0808. 7:30pm, $5. Attend the release party for Anne Colvin’s Skank Bloc Bologna, a looseleaf collection of works from an international cast of artists, writers, and poets, featuring a duet of music and verse with artist William Wiley playing the didgeridoo and poet Michael Hannon reciting.

SATURDAY 22

Harvey Milk Day Various locations throughout the Castro, SF; visit www.milkday.org for more info. 8am-2am, various prices. Celebrate the Castro neighborhood and its vibrant culture and history on the first ever Harvey Milk Day, a day of recognition for civil rights activist Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in 1978. Events and activities to include a milk and cookies street fair, a free screening of “Milk” at the Castro theater, a Tour de Castro Tricycle race, a dedication of a new Civil Rights mural, and much more.

Open Gardens Angle of Repose, 1625 Plymoth, SF; Boyd’s Passage to India, 2619 Baker, SF; Live Oak Garden, 106 Collins, SF; Playful Pines Street Gardens, 2418 Pine, SF; Sea Cliff, 4 Sea Cliff, SF; Urban Labyrinth Garden, 1620 Plymouth, SF; 1-888-842-2442. 10am-4pm, $5 per garden. Take a stroll through some of San Francisco’s private gardens and help support the Garden Conservancy’s work to preserve exceptional American gardens.

BAY AREA

Slicing the Budgetary Pie Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists’ Hall, 1924 Cedar, Berk.; www.notmypriorities.org. 7pm; free, donations encouraged. Discuss the U.S.’s budget priorities and the militarism of our society with the group Not My Priorities while sharing some delicious pie. If you’d like to donate a pie, email office@bfuu.org.

SUNDAY 23

All You Can Dance Day Alonzo King LINES Dance Center, 5th floor, 26 7th St., SF; (415) 863-3040. 1pm, $5. Sample half hour dance classes geared towards adult dancers of all levels including hip hop, ballet, jazz, and more.

Capsule Design Festival Octavia between Fell and Grove, SF; http://uniondesignsf.com. 11am, free. Celebrate Bay Area fashion, accessory, and house wares designers at this all day outdoor street fair featuring 140 independent designers, music, food, and a special section of SF couture.

Sunday Streets Bayview 3rd St. and King to Terry Francois to Mariposa, 3rd St. from Mariposa to Carroll (Bayview Playground), SF; sundaystreetssf.com. 10am-5pm, free. Stroll, skate, cycle, people watch, or participate in activities and events spaced out along the car-free route at this Bayview Sunday Streets celebration coupled with the Bayview Festival. Meet up with the San Francisco Bike Coalition at Illinois and 3rd St. at 3pm for a tour of some of the newest bike lanes in town.

MONDAY 24

Make My Monday Fort Mason Center Firehouse, Laguna at Beach, SF; www.fortamson.org/mmm. 6:30pm, free. Support the local art community at this art-making party featuring music, cocktails, and freshly made art for sale for $5-$50. Watch at artist Rebecca Peters hand-colors linocuts and Robert Harris creates triptychs, while DJ Fingersnaps will set the mood.

Sheryl WuDunn Palace of Fine Arts Theater, 3301 Lyon, SF; (510) 786-2500, ext. 226. 6:30pm, free. Hear Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist and co-author of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Sheryl WuDunn, in conversation with Kavita Ramdas, president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, as they discuss how to empower women worldwide with financial resources.

BAY AREA

Chill with the Union Night Bay Area IWW Office, 2022 Blake, Berk.; bayarea.iww.org. 7pm, free. Find out more about the Industrial Workers of the World Union (IWW), network, and socialize at this event featuring a talk about green-worker alliances with Judy Bari, Darryl Cherneym and Earth First.

TUESDAY 25

Bishop Christopher Sanyajo LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market, SF; www.clgs.org. 6pm, free. Attend this public forum featuring Bishop Christopher Sanyojo, a Ugandan voice for equality, in conversation with Rev. Roland Stringfellow.

For Lit, Talks, and Benefits listings, visit the Pixel Vision blog at www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision.

Alerts

David Talbot
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0

alert@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY, MAY 19

Solutions for Survival

Empower young people, support vivacious media, and support work on climate justice at this launch/fundraiser for this global youth media program that aims to uncover local, equitable solutions for climate change. Featuring guest speakers, food and wine, DJs, a silent art auction, and more.

7:30 p.m., free

Women’s Building

3543 18th St., SF

www.projectsurvivalmedia.org

THURSDAY, MAY 20

"Stand-In" for Safety


Protest the proposed "sit/lie" ordinance, which would make it illegal to sit or lie on SF sidewalks. The law would target sex workers, homeless people, youths, and immigrants, pushing them further underground and into more isolated, dangerous situations and areas.

Noon, free

Corner of Polk and Sutter, SF

www.allwomencount.net

FRIDAY, MAY 21

Rally for Peace


Say no to the war in Afghanistan, where deaths of U.S. troop Afghan civilians continue to rise. Demand that we bring our troops home now.

2 p.m., free

Corner of Acton and University, Berk.

(510) 841-4143

Berkeleygraypanthers.mysite.com

SATURDAY, MAY 22

Live in Peace March


Join KIPP Bayview Academy (KBA) students and community members for this peace march through the Bayview neighborhood to promote peaceful resolutions to social issues culminating in a scholarship ceremony. The Live in Peace March offers students and community members the opportunity to take a public stance against issues plaguing southeastern SF and attempts to ignite social change from within neighborhoods.

Noon, free

KIPP Bayview Academy

1060 Key, SF

www.kippbayarea.org

Walk to End Poverty


Help raise awareness about poverty at this walk around Lake Merritt followed by a multicultural family party featuring jazz, dance, kids activities, a community awards ceremony, and more.

10 a.m. walk, 11 a.m. party; free

Lake Merritt Bandstand

666 Bellevue, Oakl.

(510) 238-2362

SUNDAY, MAY 23

Beach cleanup


Celebrate World Turtle Day by removing plastic litter and garbage from Ocean Beach to help endangered leatherback sea turtles. The waters off San Francisco are popular with leatherbacks looking to feed on jellyfish, but ingesting plastic bags and other human garbage is known to kill leatherbacks worldwide.

10 a.m., free

Meet at north Ocean Beach

1000 Great Highway, SF

www.seaturtles.org

Rally against the pope


Join San Francisco and East Bay atheists in a call for a transparent investigation into the policies of the Catholic Church, which have perpetuated the sexual abuse of children all over the world. Demand the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI.

9:30 a.m., free

St. Mary’s of the Assumption Catholic Church

111 Gough, SF

www.atheists.meetup.com

Save the Whales


Show your opposition to the International Whaling Commission’s proposal to remove the ban on commercial whaling at this rally featuring SF Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and others.

Noon, free

Steps of San Francisco City Hall

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF

www.greenpeace.org 2

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 255-8762; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Streets of San Francisco: ICP goes for inner city phame

John Elberling
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Streets of San Francisco: ICP goes for inner city phame

If you live in San Francisco and pay attention to public art, you might already be familiar with the work of longstanding Bay Area graffiti crew Inner City Phame (ICP). Their prolific murals – diverse in style and magnetic in form – grace walls across the city. There’s a tribute to Malcolm X on Third and Kirkwood in Bayview-Hunters Point, featuring intricately crafted aliases free floating among inspired quotes. On a vibrant wall on the corner of 19th and Mission, comic book characters from Ironman to Dr. Evil swing between stylized names forged in cracked stone. An Azteca-themed mural up the street on 25th has a jaguar warrior getting down with the gods. And ICP also curates the street level walls of the Defenestration building on 6th and Howard (that old tenement hotel with furniture flying out of the windows), making a dynamic open-air gallery out of abandoned space. Wait, who said graffiti wasn’t art?

“The first graffiti I saw when I was a kid growing up in the Mission was the Chicano writing on our walls,” says Twick, ICP veteran and original member of the group of close-knit friends, founded by Il Charo (then named Jes 446) back in 1988. “We called it Cholo writing, because that’s what it was. The walls decorated the names of the gang members of the neighborhood.” Surprisingly little of San Francisco’s Cholo writing has been documented, although street art researches have traced the origins of its Los Angeles cousin back to eastside barrios in the 1930s. What we do know is that today’s hip-hop tradition of graffiti didn’t take off in the Bay until ’83, a year that marked the momentous PBS broadcast of Henry Chalfant’s and Tony Silver’s Style Wars. After watching the stunning documentary about New York’s burgeoning youth culture, thousands of kids around the world racked some aerosol cans and took to the streets. A thirteen-year-old Twick, who had already tried to his hand at Cholo graffiti, was one of them.

“I fell in love with the art form right away and wanted to duplicate what the writers in New York were doing,” Twick recalls. Along the way Twick found a mentor in Antie 67, who introduced to him the values and elements of hip-hop culture – from the craft of lettering to break dancing and emceeing. It was an apprenticeship. Like many other kids, Twick felt pulled into an exciting and creative underground world, one that for the most part, kept him out of the real trouble. “I didn’t choose my destiny my destiny chose me,” he says.

Soon enough more and more crews popped up, a unique Bay Area style developed and an ever-evolving ICP made a name for itself on the walls across the city. “We dubbed the style we do Phunk,” Twick explains, “meaning, knowing the foundation of a letter and creating from that: stretching it here and there, adding connections – some arrows and a few bends in the right places with a shadow or a 3d.” Funkified calligraphy is readable, unlike widlstyle, which has helped ICP garner a large audience of appreciators and street notoriety.

In recent years San Francisco has taken an active role on trying to eliminate graffiti. City policies have enforced strict regulations on private property owners to buff vandalism and enacted tougher surveillance and punishments on the writers. Graffiti is known as a quality of life crime, but it seems easy enough make just the opposite case. “We don’t destroy neighborhoods and communities – we beautify them,” Twick says. While ICP now paints many legal murals and members sell canvases in galleries, Twick still highlights that the practice is fundamentally rooted in both an unsanctioned approach and the aesthetics of the tag. So, ICP maintains a balance between two worlds. “The most important thing we stand for is our family and our cultures, inspiring young minds through art – not violence – and blessing our community with colorful murals,” says Twick. “And we will continue to be one of the top crews in the Bay Area.”

 

 


Goat news

Mary Magee
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Goat news

City Grazing, the adorable weed-eating goat herd in Bayview, has a ton of upcoming events, starting tomorrow, May 12, at 6 p.m., when City Grazing founder David Gavrich will talk at a community forum on the urban farming movement at the Commonwealth Club.

Other speakers include Novella Carpenter (author of Farm City), Jason Mark, manager of Alemany Farm and editor of Earth Island Journal. Tickets are $20 and the price includes local, sustainable food. 

On Sunday, June 20, City Grazing’s ambassador Momma Goat will be at the Giants County Fair with her two 3-month-old kids as part of CUESA’s Urban Eats program

And on Sunday June 27, City Grazing will make goat history by providing the first goats ever to join the SF Pride Parade!  So, keep an eye out for their Goat Float.

The organization is also finalizing its new state of the art goat shelter design, redesigning its website, and looking for volunteers. Maa!

Pioneers! O Urban Pioneers!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Pioneers! O Urban Pioneers!

By Robyn Johnson

culture@sfbg.com

People are returning to land like it’s the 1970s all over again, but they’re not packing up for Vermont, letting their hair go au naturel, and unplugging from the grid to do it. Urban agriculture is sprouting up like, well, sprouts. And while we all feel strongly about sustainability and pay a lot of lip service to higher ideals, the majority of us probably aren’t willing to adopt the radical homemaker lifestyle and sacrifice cell phone coverage, The Colbert Report, or regular social interactions. The following cursory guide highlights a few urban farms in SF and immediate environs where you can volunteer or access food, as well as resources for cultivating your space in the concrete tangle (even if you live in a third-story apartment) and options for the time-honored tradition of gleaning.

 

MANY FARMHANDS MAKE LIGHT WORK

Community farms offer support not always available for the individual plots of community gardens (which typically have astronomically long wait-lists anyway), or even your own cramped Bay Area backyard. And for 60-hour-work-weekers, it might be taxing to grow more than a bit of basil or mold on that cheese in the back of the fridge. If you don’t have the time, energy, space, or inclination to follow famed urban farmer Novella Carpenter’s fantastic example (ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com), consider volunteering at the following places to satisfy your green thumb’s bidding.

As Chris Burley, the director of Hayes Valley Farm (www.hayesvalleyfarm.com) told me, “People are looking for a tangible way to get their hands dirty and address the impacts of our ecologically destructive, industrialized food system while doing something meaningful and connecting with their community.” And that’s exactly the goal that the farm, located off Laguna and Fell steets, has been aiming to fulfill since its inception as a way to revitalize an unused lot, once a freeway onramp, into a shared space.

Although the farm is still taking root, so to speak, the plan is to eventually grow enough fresh and organic food to feed the neediest nearby members plus the volunteers working to cultivate the space. Education also plays a major part in the function of the project, with Thursday and Sunday “work parties” where people can get that hand-dirtying experience, as well as regular classes on urban gardening and permaculture.

Altho Quesada Gardens Initiative (www.quesadagardens.org) primarily operates as a community-directed organization that seeks to strengthen the social systems of Bayview-Hunters Point, local food production has become one of the top concerns of the neighborhood. The resident-led nonprofit connects and maintain backyard farms and free food-producing community gardens throughout the area. In one of the neater facets of its food justice work, the group also helps maintain the kitchen garden of roving supper club Old Skool Café (www.oldskoolcafe.org), which employs at-risk or previously incarcerated youth. With such kick-ass people, it’s no wonder that urban farm hero Will Allen adopted one of the satellite gardens on his visit to the Bayview. Community volunteer meetings and gardening days tend to be informal, so e-mail for specific opportunities.

Sometimes the best things in life really are free. Located at Gough and Eddy on land kindly lent by the Lutheran Church, The Free Farm (www.thefreefarm.org) intends to give away 100 percent of its produce. Still in its initial development stages, the fledgling project welcomes volunteers every Saturday and Wednesday from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. to help with the launch. Working in tandem with its sister organization, The Free Farm Stand in the Mission also offers fresh fruits and vegetables donated by other local urban farmers. Although places like Little City Gardens (www.littlecitygardens.com) and folks who glean from public land contribute, the bulk of the produce comes from the 18th Street and Rhode Island (www.18thandrhodeisland.org) farm maintained by the SF Permaculture Guild, which offers volunteer opportunities as well. With a goal to sextuple the farm’s output within the next five years, it could probably use a little bit more help. Work days are on Friday.

For West Oakland residents, two nonprofits have been power-housing to combat the food desert that plagues the area. City Slickers Farms (www.cityslickerfarms.org) operates several all volunteer-run farms throughout the neighborhood that could always use a few extra work hands. Collectively these six lots cultivate ducks and chickens, bee hives, veggies, fruit trees, and medicinal herbs, the produce of which are distributed through the Saturday Farm Stand on a sliding scale or work-trade basis — no one’s turned away. And if you still have a mighty urge for some composting, weeding, planting, and mulching, People’s Grocery (www.peoplesgrocery.org) runs three farms that constantly need tending. The 55st Street location tends fruit trees, culinary herbs, and vegetables; 59th Street is a slightly less cultivated space in collaboration with Berkeley’s Spiral Gardens Community Food Security Project (www.spiralgardens.org), which runs its own food garden off Oregon and Sacramento streets for you West Berkeleyites. People’s Grocery’s newest land acquisition, the plot behind the California Hotel off of 35th and Chestnut streets, hosts a greenhouse and a biointensive microfarm that replaced its 3.5 acre Sunol site last January.

 

HOME SWEET URBAN HOMESTEAD

If you have access to private land to cultivate, or even if you don’t, the following resources will set you on the path to food freedom. These classes, demonstration sites, and professional landscaping services will help you turn backyards, rooftops, and even windows into humming generators of small-scale urban agriculture.

Before you even think to take a shovel to your virgin backyard or start a worm bin, visit Garden for the Environment (www.gardenfortheenvironment.org). A one-acre demonstration garden in the heart of Golden Gate Heights that also teaches organic food production and sustainable landscaping with weekly workshops, you can see how it’s done before trial-and-erroring on that graywater irrigation system or chicken coop. The resource directory on its Web site also serves as an invaluable aid for at-home troubleshooting. Hotlines for gardening and composting issues, where to find recycled lumber, how to test your soil, manure suppliers, wasp removal companies — it’s all there.

DIY food production classes abound everywhere in the Bay Area but the one-stop shopper won’t find a better resource than the Institute of Urban Homesteading (www.iuhoakland.com) in Oakland. It offers a comprehensive curriculum ranging from beekeeping, butchery, goat farming, brewcraft, herbal medicine, bread making, fermentation, berry patches, and other topics of the same ilk. It’s a real crash course in manifesting your inner Laura Ingalls Wilder. With no central location, classes are taught in the teachers’ homes, which presents a neat opportunity to see real-time urban homesteading and the different ways people create sustainable places in an urban setting. Also consider Urban Kitchen SF (www.urbankitchensf.com) and BioFuel Oasis (www.biofueloasis.com) in Berkeley for supplementary courses.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and green behind the ears, several services will landscape your yard into a cornucopia of organic delectables and even continue the maintenance if you just can’t do anything with that black thumb of death. Star Apple Edible Gardens (www.starappleediblegardens.com) provides a range of services throughout the Bay Area, the simplest being consultations and composting tutorials. You also can order ready-made kitchen gardens or go whole kit and caboodle and have customized “garden design and installation, pathway and hardscape installation, irrigation design and installation, planting, plant feeding and cultivation, regular harvesting of your garden crops, and design, installation, and maintenance of composting systems.” Other similar businesses include All Edibles (www.alledibles.com), which specifically works with East Bay dwellers, and Chris Sein of Wildheart Gardens (www.wildheartgardens.com), who also consults on backyard chickens and mushrooms.

For a lot of us in the Bay Area, the dream of having a backyard is about as likely as Glenn Beck admitting that Obama is not a herald of an impending Orwellian dictatorship. So what can the more dispossessed among us do to return to the soil? Popular in Europe and becoming more so here, rooftop gardens are a great solution to space issues. Graze the Roof (www.grazetheroof.blogspot.com), the community vegetable patch on top of Glide Memorial Church, hosts rooftop gardening workshops. You can also gain experience by volunteering on work days every Thursday or first Saturdays. For those feeling less than philanthropic or sociable, pop over to your local bookstore to pick up the Use Your Roof Guidebook by Bay Area Localize (www.baylocalize.org). Seven bucks and four easy chapters gets you on your way to a more edible roof.

For balcony-less apartment dwellers, and maybe those with vaulted ceilings, window farms have become the new rooftop gardens. An open-source project that’s evolved over the past year, Windowfarms (www.windowfarms.org) gives how-tos for its innovatively cheap and space-conscious hydroponics system — jerry-rigged from repurposed plastic water bottles, tubing, and fish tank pumps that hangs in vertical columns in the window — as free PDFs on its Web site. It also hosts community boards where members share improvements to the system, which is constantly being updated. Alas, window farms can only really successfully raise leafy greens, but having a homegrown salad in a studio apartment is still pretty darn amazing.

If you already have your urban farm bustling along — or even just a prolific citrus tree — then yard-sharing is a great way to spread the fruit of your labor throughout the community. Neighborhood Fruit (www.neighborhoodfruit.com), SF Glean (www.sfglean.org), and Produce to the People (www.producetothepeople.org) will gladly help you to unload the excess bounty and distribute it to the hungry.

Events listings

David Talbot
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0

Event Listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 21

"Out in Israel" Various locations, visit www.outinisraelsf.org for more details. It’s not too late to catch some of the events taking place across the Bay Area in celebration of queer Israeli culture. On Wed/20 folk singer Yael Deckelbaum will be performing at Muse Gallery (614 Alabama, SF; (415) 279-6281) at 8:30pm, free. On Thurs/21 Israeli chef and TV personality Gil Hovav will takeover Regalito’s Restaurant (3481 18th St., SF; (415) 503-0650) for a 6pm and 8pm seating wherehe will entertain guests while making traditional Israeli cuisine with a Mexican influence available at two pre fix price points of $25 or $40. For more free events, talks, and performances, visit www.outinisraelsf.org.

"Water Dilemma – Bottled or Tap?" San Francisco Main Library, Latino Hispanic Room, 100 Larkin, SF; (415) 557-4400. 6pm, free. Consumers are provided with yearly test results on contaminant levels in tap water, but the bottled water industry is not required to disclose any testing results. Hear the Director of the California Office of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) Renee Sharp discuss this disparity and the EWG’s recent discovery of array of chemical contaminants found in every bottled water brand.

THURSDAY 22

Book Arts and Environmental Awareness San Francisco Center for the Book, 300 DeHaro, SF; (415) 565-0545. 1pm, free. Celebrate Earth Day by taking part in free activities like free printmaking, green typography, making "Save – Don’t Pave – the Bay" postcards that can be mailed to elected representatives, and more.

FRIDAY 23

Academy of Sciences Neighborhood Days California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.calacademy.org. Through June 13. Look up which weekend your zip code gets you a free pass into the Academy of Science, grab your housemates and photo ID with proof of residency, and get your science on. The Parkside and Sunset (94116, 94122) neighborhoods are up first.

Earth Day at City College City College of San Francisco, 50 Phelan, SF; (415) 239-3580. 11am, free. Attend this environmental fair featuring live music, instructions on how to compost including information about the new city ordinance, how to fix your bike, how to recycle, and more.

Free Dance Classes ODC Dance Commons, 351 Shotwell, SF; (415) 863-6606. Various times through May 2, free. In honor of National Dance Week, ODC is offering free dance classes in many different styles, like Afro-Cuban modern, tango, hip hop, ballet, contemporary, flamenco, belly dancing, and more.

SATURDAY 24

Swan Day Hanuman Center, 4450 18th St., SF; www.womenarts.org. 10am; $35 all day pass, individual event passes available for less. Show your support for women in the arts at this all day festival featuring a multicultural blessing, a Haitian dance workshop, an open mic, screenings of short films, and more.

Twin Peaks Bioregion Meet in Golden Gate Park, SF; call (415) 564-4107 or email iris@natureinthecity.org to RSVP and for exact meeting location. 4pm, $10-20 donation to support nature in the city. Explore the wilderness of the live oak woodlands of Golden Gate Park, Mt. Sutro, Twin Peaks, and Glen Canyon and learn about species and habitats, issues and controversies.

BAY AREA

Salute to the Women of Congo Fotovision, 5515 Doyle, Emeryville; (415) 725-1636. 1pm, $1-35 suggested donation. Make creative cards to show your support and recognition of the courageous women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Postcards will be distributed to women on the Congo as an act of solidarity and compassion. Materials are provided, but you are welcome to bring your own photographs.

SUNDAY 25

Hot.Fat.Femmes Good Vibrations, 603 Valencia, SF; (415) 522-5460. 7pm, free. Enjoy a fiercely intellectual panel of voluptuous vixens, fattiesexuals, and fat activists at this evening of body positive, sex positive and size affirming fat girl love hosted by Virgie Tovar. Tovar will read from her most recent work and there will be a photo exhibit featuring hot fatties.

People’s Earth Day Women’s Building, 3543 18th St., SF; www.greenaction.org. 2pm, $10-$50 suggested donation. Join Greenaction and youth and women community leaders from Kettleman City and Bayview Hunters Point for an afternoon of live theater, local foods, and solidarity with these polluted communities that are fighting for health and justice.

Poem for Mother Earth Galeria de la Raza, 2857 24th St., SF; (415) 826-8009. 4pm, $5. Take part in this indigenous healing day for Earth Day featuring poets, artists, musicians, and story-tellers of all ages presenting an afternoon of Bi-lingual performance and action. In conjunction with POOR magazine, a poor and indigenous people led, non-profit grassroots arts organization.

BAY AREA

People’s Park Anniversary Concert People’s Park, Telegraph at Dwight, Berk.; www.peoplespark.org. Noon, free. Enjoy music from Antioquia, Funky Nixons, Phoenix, Wingnut Breakfast, and many more as well as activities, a circus workshop, drum circle and more to celebrate the 41st anniversary of People’s Park.

MONDAY 26

"Leaders at the Lab" Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab, suite 200, 301 8th St., SF; (415) 861-3940. 7pm, free. Choreographers, dancers, dance-makers, and enthusiasts are invited to attend this talk with choreographer Alonzo King, who will discuss the career choices he made in order to succeed in the ever-changing climate of dance-making art.

TUESDAY 27

Underground Market San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut Street, SF; foragesf.com. 4pm, free. Taste and purchase food that is being produced in backyards and home kitchens in the Bay Area at this underground market presented by Forage SF. The market will feature live music, homemade baked goods, raw chocolate, raw honey, jams, jellies, pickles, kombucha, and more.

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