Board of Supervisors Archives — Page 27 of 82 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Ethics Commission opens the long and complex case against Mirkarimi

Sasha Cuttler

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April 23, 2012

Tonight’s first Ethics Commission hearing on the procedures and standards that will govern the official misconduct proceedings against suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi showed just how complex, contentious, and drawn out this unprecedented process will be.

The commission made no decisions other than setting a schedule for both sides to submit a series of legal briefs and responses over the next five weeks, on which the five-member appointed body will begin making procedural decisions during a hearing set for May 29.

Deputy City Attorney Peter Keith, who is representing Mayor Ed Lee and leading the city’s prosecution, took an aggressive tack in criticizing Mirkarimi for refusing to be deposed by him and announcing Lee’s intention to add that unwillingness to cooperate to the formal charges against Mirkarimi.

But Mirkarimi’s attorney Shepherd Kopp called that threat “beyond the pale. We have a legitimate legal question we need straightened out and we won’t be bullied.” That issue involves what rights and obligations Mirkarimi has in this process, which the commission has yet to establish.

Kopp complained that the mayor and City Attorney’s Office are usurping the commission’s charter-mandated role as the investigative body in official misconduct cases by issuing subpoenas for evidence and witnesses before the rules for the hearings have even been set or Mirkarimi has been presented with the evidence against him.

“Until we understand what the mayor’s evidence is, we have no way of preparing a defense,” Kopp said, adding that, “The charges were brought before the evidence was in the mayor’s possession.”

He called for the commission to take control of the investigation and establish discovery rules rather than letting the Mayor’s Office act on its own. “We feel like we have one hand tied behind our backs,” he said. “Whatever the rules are, they ought to apply to both sides.”

There’s very little that Kopp and Keith agree on at this point. Kopp wants the Ethics Commission vote to be unanimous if it recommends removal, as with juries on criminal cases, but Keith argues that a simple majority will do. The Board of Supervisors will make the final decision, with nine of 11 supervisors required to remove an official. Kopp says the standard of guilt should be “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but the city will likely argue for a lower standard, such as preponderance of evidence.

Kopp wants the commission to establish the standard that official misconduct must be related to the sheriff’s official duties and have occurred while he is in office, but Keith indicated that the events of Jan. 4, when the police began to investigate the domestic violence incident and before Mirkarimi was sworn in as sheriff, are an important part of their case.

Keith noted that Mirkarimi could demand a closed door hearing, as the courts have agreed that law enforcement officers are entitled to, but Kopp told the commission, “We do not intend to insist these hearings should be private. We want them to be public.”

There were even internal differences within the city. Ethics Commission Executive Director John St. Croix last week wrote a memo recommending that testimony from witnesses be in written form, but the City Attorney’s Office today wrote a last-minute memo arguing the need for live testimony and cross-examination of witnesses.

“A live hearing is going to better serve the goals of the commission,” Keith argued, calling for it to be “something of a mini-trial.” Kopp agreed with that characterization, calling it “akin to a criminal proceeding,” and with the need to allow live testimony: “I think it will be unavoidable for at least a couple witnesses.”

Commission members asked a number of questions to both sides, but with such a broad range of issues still to be decided, they seemed to be only tentatively scratching the surface and unsure how to proceed. But there were a couple questions from Chair Benedict Hur that were illuminating.

“Does the mayor dispute that he has the burden of proof here?” Hur asked Keith, who replied, “No.”

Keith cited Mirkarimi and his wife, Eliana Lopez, as two witnesses who will likely be the subject of live testimony and vigorous cross-examination. But when Hur asked Kopp whether he would object to the commission compelling testimony from Lopez, he said that’s connected to a variety of outstanding procedural issues and he wouldn’t be able to answer “for quite some time.”

Indeed, both sides have indicated that they would need at least 30 days to prepare their cases once all the procedural and evidentiary issues are resolved, pushing the hearing back until at least July, although all sides say they want the matter resolved as quickly as possible.

“The longer this drags out, the person being most prejudiced is the sheriff,” said Commissioner Paul Renne, who was appointed by District Attorney George Gascon in February and who opened the hearing by admitting having given a $100 campaign donation to Chris Cunnie, who ran against Mirkarimi. Ironically, it was Renne who seemed most taken aback by Keith’s threat to add Mirkarimi’s refusal to cooperate with the city’s prosecution to the charges against him.

But Kopp said Mirkarimi will be happy to offer his testimony and comply with requests for documents once the commission establishes the rules and procedures and exerts its authority over the proceedings: “If you think he’s got to cooperate and turn it over, we’ll do it.”

The first city brief is due April 30, but the most illuminating deadline will likely be May 7 when the Mayor’s Office must submit its proposed list of witnesses and a summary of their expected testimony, which should be an early indicator of the strength of their case against Mirkarimi.

Willie Brown’s “friends” at airbnb

Zelda Bronstein

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April 23, 2012

10

San Francisco’s treasurer, Jose Cisneros, usually operates out of the limelight, and he likes it that way. Most of what he does is about making sure the city’s money comes in propertly and doesn’t go out where it isn’t supposed to. But now he’s in the middle of a political battle not of his making, and he’s taking some undeserved hits, including from the Mayor’s Office.

The issue is whether a company financed by Mayor Ed Lee’s buddy Ron Conway should have to pay hotel taxes. It seems pretty simple on the surface: Airbnb, which mediates arrangements where San Francisco residents rent out their homes to tourists as an alternative to hotel rooms, doesn’t want to be responsible for paying the 14 percent tax that all the hotels in town have to cough up. Cisneros, following the law, says the company isn’t exempt and has to pay taxes just like anyone else in the hotel industry.

But airbnb is closely connected to Lee and his idea of the “sharing economy,” and the Mayor’s Office has gone so far as to say in public that Cisneros is abusing his discretion and should let the tax bill slide.

That’s crazy — tax enforcement is not under the “discretion” of the treasurer. It’s a policy matter for the mayor and the supervisors. And if the mayor wants to ask the supes to exempt a billionaire’s pet startup from taxes, go ahead: Find someone to introduce that legislation. But Cisneros is only doing his job — and that includes forcing even hip young startups to pay taxes.

Oh, but it gets jucier. Willie Brown, who like Lee has close ties to Conway, is now tweaking Cisneros in his Chronicle column:

While we’re at it, an alert to city Treasurer Jose Cisneros: Former Mayor Art Agnos threw an air mattress on the floor for Ross Mirkarimi when a judge barred the suspended sheriff from being with his family. Mr. Treasurer, equal protection under the law says you should send Agnos a notice if you’re going after all these other people.

I think there’s a difference between letting an old friend sleep in your place (or even renting him a room for a few months) and running a business that portrays itself as a service for tourists. And I wonder: Does Brown represent airbnb, or is he invested in the startup? No way to tell — he has complete freedom to hype anyone or trash anyone, despite even clear conflicts of interest that would get any other columnist at the Chron fired. I called him to ask if he has any connections to the company, but as usual, he hasn’t called back.

Judge denies Mirkarimi motions; city process begins Monday

Sasha Cuttler

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April 20, 2012

35

Judge denies Mirkarimi motions; city process begins Monday

Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn today denied all motions by Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi’s legal team challenging his suspension without pay, city procedures, and the constitutionality of the city’s official misconduct charter language, saying it’s premature to conclude Mirkarimi isn’t being treated fairly.

“But the courthouse door remains open,” Kahn concluded, inviting Mirkarimi to return after the Ethics Commission establishes rules of procedure and evidence, which it will begin doing on Monday. Today’s rulings, and another yesterday, in which Kahn ruled against a motion to disqualify the City Attorney’s Office from overseeing the proceedings, clears the way for the Ethics Commission to consider recommending to the Board of Supervisors that Mirkarimi be removed from office.

Kahn also seemed to agree with Mirkarimi’s team that Mayor Ed Lee didn’t give him a fair hearing before suspending him or that he made an argument for suspending him without pay. But Kahn sided with the city on the legal question of whether Mirkarimi has a “property interest” in his salary, which would have triggered the right to a hearing before being suspended, making such procedural questions moot.

“If there was a property right, what the mayor stated would not be adequate due process,” Kahn said, referring to Lee’s affidavit describing their March 19 meeting, where Lee told Mirkarimi to resign or be suspended. Lee claims he gave Mirkarimi the opportunity to tell his side of the story, which Mirkarimi denies, saying the mayor had made up his mind and wasn’t interested in the real story. On the salary question, Deputy City Attorney Sherri Kaiser said Mirkarimi would be entitled to full back pay from his suspension period if the supervisors vote to keep him in office, arguing that he isn’t being harmed.

Mirkarimi was suspended based on language in the city charter that was adopted in 1996 – banning “conduct that falls below the standard of decency, good faith and right action impliedly required of all public officers” – that has never been reviewed by the courts and which Mirkarimi attorney David Waggoner contends is unconstitutionally vague.

But Kahn didn’t agree, saying, “The charter is not so clearly outside the bounds of California law that I should preempt the processes.”

Waggoner complained that the city procedures didn’t set rules of evidence or procedure or standards of guilt, making it difficult to prepare a defense, a point to which Kahn seemed sympathetic, noting the variety of legal standards for different types of cases, from “beyond reasonable doubt” to “a preponderance of evidence.”

“We don’t know which of any of those is going to apply here. Is that a problem?” Kahn asked Kaiser.

She said no, that Mirkarimi and his legal team could return to court for help “if the commissioners really mess up” in the work they’ll begin on Monday. “That summarizes my view. It is hypothetical to say the procedures are going to be unfair,” Kahn agreed.

Addressing reporters after the hearing, Kaiser praised the judge’s rulings and offered a small window into what will likely transpire in the coming months: “Certainly, the sheriff is going to have to testify under oath and not just to the media.” (Waggoner told reporters “no comment” when asked whether Mirkarimi will indeed testify under oath).

Kaiser’s apparent dig at the various media interviews that Mirkarimi has just started to grant this week echoes statements that have come from District Attorney George Gascón, who has criticized Mirkarimi’s characterization of his guilty plea and the behaviors that constituted false imprisonment, calling the media accounts “disturbing and telling.”

But Mirkarimi shot back at Gascón today, noting that the two men “have had some very high-profile disagreements” when Gascón was police chief and Mirkarimi chaired the Board of Supervisors Public Safety Committee. They had high-profile clashes over requiring police to do foot patrols, the crime lab controversy, budget issues (including Mirkarimi’s unsuccessful efforts to find out how much Mayor Gavin Newsom’s police security detail was costing the city as he ran for governor), and Gascón’s controversial public statement equating people of Middle Eastern descent (such as Mirkarimi, who is Persian) with terrorists.

“It sometimes bubbles up in the course of these proceedings,” Mirkarimi said of Gascón’s alleged personal or political animosity toward him.

Asked for a response, District Attorney’s Office spokeperson Stephanie Ong Stillman wrote, ““It is the duty of the San Francisco District Attorney to uphold the law,
regardless of who violates it and without political motivation. Ross Mirkarimi was afforded the same rights as any defendant. We treated his case no differently than any of the 776 domestic violence cases our office charged and reviewed last year.”

Where would Jesus park?

Zelda Bronstein

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April 18, 2012

31

The Examiner’s big front-page head, “Pay to Pray,” reflects the opposition of some religious folk, including the Rev. Amos Brown, who was one of the worst supervisors in San Francisco history, to Sunday afternoon meter enforcement. OMG! People won’t be able to go to church because they’ll have to feed the meter! It’s sexist, too, since: Women go to church! And, apparently, none of the Rev. Brown’s parishoners walk or take the bus.

But let’s put a little reality into this. First of all, the meters are good for four hours, and if you’re listening to Rev. Brown preach for that long, you need to take a break to feed the meter anyway. But in all seriousness, we know exactly what’s going to happen here: The cops and meter-readers who patrol the areas around the churches aren’t going to issue tickets while services are going on. They never do. Anywhere.

Drive along Valencia some Sunday morning — the church-goers just park in the middle of the street. It’s fine — no tickets. It annoys the hell out of me, since you can’t go to, say, yoga on Sunday and park in the middle of the street without getting a ticket, maybe because Jesus never did yoga or something, but the reality is, nobody in any of these churches is going to have to pay anything.

At least, the ones who drive won’t. The poor souls who take the bus to church don’t get free passes on Sunday. They have to fork over the full fare like the rest of us.

And shouldn’t all these people of the cloth be encouraging their flocks to be good Christian citizens and avoid driving when they don’t need to? Aren’t all the bishops and stuff denoucing global warming? Isn’t God an environmentalist?

Pay to pray. As they say at the churches back where I came from, Yougoddabefuckinkiddin.

In city workers’ shoes

Andrew Lam

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April 17, 2012

6

We both work under City Hall’s iconic dome as civil servants. While I often work late into the evening hours as a supervisor, Robert’s back-breaking work as a janitor is often done past the midnight hour, five nights a week.

I had the opportunity to meet Robert last week, as part of the “Walk A Day In Our Shoes” program of Service Employees International Union, Local 1021.

Robert is 52 years old. He’s worked for the city since 1999. Before that, he worked for San Francisco Unified School District. He sweeps and mops the floors and stairs of the famous rotunda and cleans 150 cubicles.

Last week, Robert had me take off my jacket and tie, roll up my sleeves and do his job for a while. I swept the marble floors, which are truly unending. I mopped the grand marble staircase behind happy couples exchanging wedding vows. He let me attempt to push a gigantic whirring machine that felt more like a Zamboni than a vacuum.

When I was younger, I had a summer job as a janitor at a public high school, so I know how truly strenuous Robert’s job is.

Robert injured his spine as a result of pushing that heavy vacuum for years. When he was in the hospital treating his spinal injury, the doctors discovered cancer. While in chemotherapy, he didn’t miss a day of work. He lives cancer-free today.

Robert is also a green pioneer at City Hall — he started a recycling program here before it was popular to do so. After that, the rest of the city caught on. He has photos of himself and the past four mayors in his home. He offers directions to visitors. He has a son, and they both live in his sister’s home. He speaks lovingly of his wife, who he lost to diabetes several years ago.

As our economy evolves, we can’t leave people like Robert — those who support our world-class city —behind. While we court businesses who create new jobs in our city, we also need to reinvest in the people who do the important work that often goes unnoticed.

Hospital workers are up at 4am, preparing meals for patients. Library technicians provide bilingual translation for our children. Others, like Robert, are up until 1am, making sure we have a clean and safe environment to work every day.

After years of concessions to balance deep budget deficits, city workers experienced ongoing cuts to their wages and benefits. In current contract negotiations, they are being asked to give hundreds more each month in healthcare costs to insure their children.

We appreciate all they have done to help our city in times of need. As our city recovers economically, it’s time to thank them, to ask others to help shoulder the costs for affordable housing, parks and recreation facilities and schools, and to reform our local business tax — which is paid by only 10% of our city’s companies.

Last week, I got to know a fellow civil servant whose work we need to remember to value. Which is why I will stand alongside Robert, labor unions, nonprofits, community members and neighbors on Wednesday, April 18, in front of City Hall from 4pm to 7pm. Please join us in supporting the workforce that supports us all, 24 hours a day.

David Chiu is president of the Board of Supervisors.Thousands of community allies, elected officials, and SEIU 1021 members will rally on Wednesday, April 18 to close tax loopholes on mega banks and corporations from 4pm to 7pm at City Hall.

Pushing back

Andrew Lam

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April 17, 2012

0

Dexter Cato has no right to be here.

He’s standing on the corner outside the house he bought in 1990. His four kids, still teenagers, grew up here. He was living here when his wife, Christina, passed away following a car accident in 2009. Next door is the house he grew up in, having spent all his life on Quesada Avenue, in the wide streets and residential friendliness of the Bayview.

Still, the bank says Cato doesn’t belong here anymore, evicting him when his home went into foreclosure in August 2010. Yet Cato and his community not only fought back and reoccupied the home last month, they have turned it into a community center and base of operations from which to fight other foreclosures in the area.

The house, at the corner of Quesada and Jenning, is draped with banners, such as “Banks: no foreclosures!” and “keep families in our homes!” In the rain on March 16, when they were unfurled on the property that has remained vacant for nearly two years, surrounded by neighbors and friends, Cato moved back in. It was a gamble and an act of civil disobedience. Now they feel festive; it’s been a month, and no one has shown up to tell Cato he has to leave.

It has become a home base for a who’s who list of “foreclosure fighters,” the name taken on by Cato and others who have, in recent months, gone to extreme means to prevent banks from foreclosing on their homes. There’s Vivian Richardson, who got her foreclosure rescinded after 1,400 emails to her loan servicer. There’s Alberto Del Rio, who was ignored and told that his paperwork was lost during a Kafka-esque two-year loan modification attempt, only to win a meeting with top Wells Fargo executives last month after Occupy Bernal got behind his cause. There’s Carolyn Gage, who took a cue from protesters downtown and occupied her Bayview home in November.

Those taking on the foreclosure crisis certainly have a big task ahead of them. Since the market collapsed in 2008, there have been 12,410 foreclosures in San Francisco, according to data from RealtyTrac as compiled by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). The neighborhoods with the most foreclosures are Ingleside-Excelsior/Crocker Amazon, Visitacion Valley/Sunnydale, and Bayview-Hunters Point, with more than 1,000 in each neighborhood. But the number of home foreclosures are in the hundreds in every neighborhood in San Francisco.

Despite the pandemic, many San Francisco residents say they felt distinctly alone in the events surrounding receiving notice of default.

“I’ve lived in Noe Valley since 1972,” said Kathy Galvess, an activist we spoke to Cato’s basement. “I didn’t know anybody who had been foreclosed on.”

When she got her eviction notice and, hooking up with ACCE and Occupy Bernal, faced her situation and the extent of the crisis, she wondered if her neighbors knew something she didn’t.

“I asked around the neighborhood, no one had any idea,” she said. “That’s how the banks get away with it. We suffer in silence.”

Carolyn Gage echoed that sentiment. “A while ago, foreclosure was shameful. But now it shouldn’t be. It’s happening in a systemic way, so people are getting over that shame,” she told me and several neighbors March 24 during a barbecue at Cato’s house.

This shame came in part from the illusion that the onslaught of seemingly affordable home loans from the housing bubble’s height were, in fact, affordable.

“The easy money fueled the ability for people to refinance every one or two years. A lot of people did that and just lived on it. Certain people used it, some abused it, others got caught up in it,” said CJ Holmes, a real estate broker in Santa Rosa who became interested in understanding the meanings of the crisis when the value of property she owned plummeted in 2008.

While President Bush signed on to Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008, and bailouts to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continued to roll out well into the Obama presidency, foreclosures were steadily clearing San Francisco of longtime residents, not to mention property tax and home values on foreclosure-stricken blocks.

There were advocates working on the behalf of those getting evicted. The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment looked into cases and worked to discern the complex chain of entitlement, talk to the right people, and try to get loans modified. HUD-certified organizations like the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA) and the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation (SFHDC) counseled homeowners and waded through paperwork.

“The modification process takes an average of 12 months to complete,” said Jose Luis Rodriguez, a foreclosure counselor with MEDA, in an email. The loan modification process can make or break a homeowners chances of keeping their home, leaving them in what he called “purgatory.”

Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting later concluded that in 84 percent of foreclosure cases, there was some kind of faulty paperwork.

“We’d fax documents to banks and they would habitually lose documents. We’d have to fax them sometimes up to 10 times,” said Jonathan Segarra, director of communications for MEDA.

Alberto Del Rio had the same issue. During his loan modification struggle, “we kept having to sign up for a new case,” Del Rio told me. “About every three months. Generally because they lost paperwork, or paperwork wasn’t properly transmitted.”

“There was no callback on their part,” he said. “We would have to call to get updates and they would say: oh, it’s closed, you have to start over with the paperwork now.”

But this lost paperwork epidemic, an emblem of the carelessness that ran rampant through the mad expansion of the subprime mortgage industry, has more than one face. It is likely due to lost paperwork, for example, that Cato has been living in the home that is, technically, no longer his.

No one seems to have the title.

At the time of sale, it was owned by Wells Fargo. According to transaction records, the foreclosure is being serviced by American Home Mortgage Servicers; they get a portion of the money, but do not own it. According to Wells Fargo representatives, that bank is now the trustee of the mortgage, also known as the beneficiary.

ACCE has claimed that Wells Fargo “sold the house back to itself,” and that American Home Mortgage Services, the company currently servicing the loan, is a subsidiary of Wells Fargo. Ruben Pulido, a Wells Fargo spokesperson, denies this.

“That’s incorrect. American Home mortgage services is completely different and separate from Wells Fargo,” Pulido told us.

But Martinez believes that “they’re different entities in that they work separately, but they’re the main servicer for Wells Fargo, they only service for Wells Fargo.”

Calls and emails to American Home Mortgage Services went unanswered.

Last fall, as an angry mass suddenly emerged from the American public, cries of “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” rang through the streets. Occupy Bernal and ACCE have had success in the city government, gaining support from Sups David Campos and John Avalos, who represent some of the hardest hit districts, helping facilitate meetings between Wells Fargo representatives and homeowners with foreclosure horror stories, with some success.

Activists also went for more civil disobedience-style tactics. These were on display Feb. 22, when dozens of supporters showed up at Monica Kenney’s Excelsior home. Kenney was in the midst of dealing with a foreclosure that didn’t seem right. She had received a forbearance agreement and made the first payment on it June 27, then was surprised to learn that, June 28, her house had been sold at auction.

“At this point I wrote Wells Fargo and I said, I have this paperwork, and I want you to honor it and rescind the foreclosure,” Kenney explained when she came to speak with us at the Guardian offices. She gave us copies of the forbearance agreement.

“Their response was, we did nothing wrong and the foreclosure will stand,” she said. “So at that point I decided I would fight to retain my home.”

After dishing out most of her savings in a lawsuit and eviction stays, the fight looked grim, and her house was slated for eviction. The plan — the last line of defense — was to simply bring as many people as possible to Kenney’s home and hope they could fend off eviction. Kenney remembers her nerves, huddled up that cold morning with veteran foreclosure fighter Vivian Richardson, worried that no one would show up.

“Then, at six in the morning, I had foreclosure fighters, neighbors, friends, Occupy Bernal, Occupy folks period, they just started showing up at the house, and just sat down, hunkered down with me and said, we’ll do whatever we can to at least dissuade the sheriff,” she recalls

It worked. And it hasn’t stopped working. Many people who have joined with Occupy Bernal and ACCE are still in their homes thanks to everything from lobbying politicians to civil disobedience. Some were evicted despite the protest movement’s best efforts but, thanks to newfound community, they avoided homelessness.

Kathy Galvess wasn’t able to keep her home, but her experience was made much more pleasant by Occupy Bernal. “Stardust got the moving truck and helped me move, out of the goodness of his heart,” she told me. “And if it wasn’t for Vivian, me and my sister would be wandering the streets in these storms we’ve been having.”

It’s that community, it’s that tireless work, it’s that victory in the midst of a sea of ongoing challenges that was celebrated at the barbecue at Cato’s house. It’s hard to know the future of the occupied home. The goal of the coalition supporting it was to keep it until April 24, the day of a Wells Fargo shareholders meeting that a large coalition of advocates are determined to shut down.

But for now, the place has become a community center and a symbol of hope and defiance. Politicians have certainly taken note. The Board of Supervisors passed a resolution last week urging banks to suspend foreclosures in San Francisco.

“It’s great,” Cato said. “That’s what the house is useful for right now. Everyone’s coming in and asking, how can we be a part of this, how can we help.”

Activists hope to turn resolution into real foreclosure suspension

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April 12, 2012

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On April 10, the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution calling for a temporaray suspension on foreclosures in San Francisco.

The resolution “urges city contractors and all mortgage and banking institutions to suspend foreclosure activities and related auctions and evictions until State and Federal measures to protect homeowners from unfair and unlawful practices and provisions for principle reductions are in place.”

This comes after a report from Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting found that 84 percent of foreclosures in San Francisco in the past three years involved faulty paperwork and, likely, fraud.

The resolution does not require anything, but instead urges the city to work on behalf of constituents swept up in the foreclosure crisis.

It urges all city departments, “including but not limited to, the offices of the Mayor, the Assessor-Recorder, the City Attorney, the District Attorney, and the Sheriff, to take proactive steps and measures to ensure that the City and County of San Francisco prevents and protects its resident form illegal foreclosures, auctions, and evictions.”

“The controller is supposed to audit every case beyond what was in Phil Ting’s report. Based on that information the glaring illegal activity for the banks, the district attorney and city attorny should sue the banks and file an injunction to stop foreclosures. I think those are some of the steps we could take,” said Julien Ball, an anti-foreclosure activist with Occupy Bernal.

The resolution also “urges the Mayor to direct…our city lobbyists in the California State Capital to prioritize support for California Homeowners Bill of Rights state bills.”

This series of bills, proposed by state attorney general Kamala Harris, would include efforts to stop dual tracking- when homeowners still in the process of a loan modification are simultaneously tracked for foreclosures. The package also includes a ban on robosigning and other practices that can constitute fraud in foreclosure proceedings.

Sups. Avalos and Campos sponsored the resolution, and Kim, Mar, Olague and Cohen co-sponsored.

Occupy Bernal’s goal remains a city-wide moratorium on foreclosure, and towards that end, the resolution represents an important step. It puts San Francisco on record as being against unfair foreclosures and related evictions,” said Ball, “and its something we can use to put pressure on the banks and public officials to act.”

“That involves exposing and shaming banks through public protests, blasting them with phone calls, calling out their board members, its necessary if we have to stand in front of somebody’s home to stop them from being evicted we’ll do that to,” said Ball.

They plan to escalate these tactics April 24, when a coalition of groups has declared that it will “shut down” an April 24 Wells Fargo shareholders meeting in San Francisco.

Lee veto protects the SFPD’s ability to spy on you

Sasha Cuttler

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April 11, 2012

15

Lee veto protects the SFPD’s ability to spy on you

Mayor Ed Lee yesterday vetoed legislation that would have banned San Francisco Police Department officers working with the FBI from conducting covert surveillance on law-abiding citizens. Not terrorists, not criminals, not foreign spies, but people like you (well, people like you who are Muslim, protesters, visitors to certain websites, or people who otherwise have caught the attention of the FBI) who are not even suspected of criminal activity.

While Lee says he will support a so-called “consensus ordinance” introduced yesterday by Sup. Jane Kim, the sponsor of the vetoed measure, his veto letter makes clear that he wants San Francisco to reserve the right to spy on whoever the FBI wants to, echoing post-9/11 fear-mongering and right-wing bait-and-switch tactics while still trying to placate civil libertarians with his rhetoric.

“This ordinance intends to amend the Administrative code to require the San Francisco Police Department to either terminate a counterterrorism Memorandum of Understanding with the Federal Bureau of Investigation or materially restrict the interaction between the two law enforcement bodies,” his veto letter begins.

That MOU with the FBI is the one that the SFPD secretly entered into back in 2007 (which was exposed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union after a long public records court battle) that placed SFPD officers under FBI control without recognizing state and local privacy and civil rights restrictions. The resulting scandal caused the SFPD to apologize and work with the Police Commission on a general order clarifying that local officers must obey those restrictions, which Lee, Police Chief Greg Suhr, and some supervisors have maintained is good enough.

But six members of the Board of Supervisors didn’t agree with this “trust us” approach, noting that future chiefs and Police Commissioners can change the policy at any time, and saying protecting the privacy and civil rights of city residents and visitors is an important enough issue to be formally codified in local law.

John Crew, the police practices expert for the ACLU, has said that the only reason to oppose the ordinance is if officials want to reserve the right to spy on law-abiding citizens, and Lee seemed to signal as much by writing “the restrictions it places on our Police Department overly constrain their ability to protect our City from very real threats.” And he enumerated those “threats” by equating those being spied on for their political beliefs or because of their ethnicity with terrorists who want to blow us up.

“Recently, the United States Department of Homeland Security raised San Francisco’s risk rating – we are now considered the fourth-highest terrorism target risk in the nation along with cities like New York and Washington, DC. Protecting San Franciscans is the most important responsibility I have as Mayor. This goal, however, does not justify a trampling of constitutionally protected principles, and we have a government structure in place to ensure this dichotomy never materializes,” Lee wrote.

See what he did there? There was nothing in this measure that limited the FBI or SFPD’s ability to monitor suspected terrorists, which they’re already free to broadly define, particularly since 9/11 and the USA Patriot Act and other police state changes, including the very creation of the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security. But civil libertarians have been trying to hold the line and prevent the FBI – which has a long and sordid history of spying on law-abiding citizens and using that intel for political sabotage – from going after anyone who looks different or criticizes this country’s leaders or policies.

It’s great that Lee, who was a civil rights attorney decades ago, gives lip service to that concern and says he’s willing to work with the Coalition for a Safe San Francisco on legislation that would allow a hearing by the Police Commission of any future JOAs with the FBI after it’s been signed. But Kim’s statement that, “It’s a compromise that essentially will accomplish the same thing” just isn’t true, as the activists who pushed this tell us. The vetoed measure was already a compromise, with Kim making many amendments at the request of Suhr and repeatedly delaying final consideration of the measure so any other concerns could be addressed.

The JOA should have been suspended and rewritten, as the city of Portland, Oregon did when these same concerns were raised there, with no detriment to its relationship with the FBI. But even that request to suspend our JOA had already been removed from the watered down ordinance that Lee vetoed. “When we work together to create solutions that represent our shared values, we make San Francisco a safer, better City together,” Lee piously wrote, glossing over his unwillingness to work with the coalition before vetoing the measure. “He won’t even meet with civil rights groups on this,” Crew told me last week, as the Coalition was trying to talk with Lee to head off a veto.

Activists like Shahid Buttar, executive director of Bill of Rights Defense Committee and a member of the Coalition, are trying to look on the bright side and they say they’re happy that Lee now wants to work with activists on the issue. But the compromise and consensus are what’s been happening over the last several months – now, it’s simply Lee bowing to the SFPD rather than trying to regulate it and trying to save face on a bad veto.

As Buttar told us, “It’s disappointing that Mayor Lee would choose to overrule the voice of residents of the city and their representatives on the Board of Supervisors.”

San Francisco’s loss

Andrew Lam

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April 10, 2012

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news@sfbg.com

San Francisco is increasingly losing its working and creative classes to the East Bay and other jurisdictions — and with them, much of the city’s diversity — largely because of policy decisions that favor expensive, market-rate housing over the city’s own affordable housing goals.

“It’s definitely changing the character of the city,” said James Tracy, an activist with Community Housing Partnership. “It drains a big part of the creative energy of the city, which is why folks came here in the first place.”

>>Is Oakland cooler than San Francisco? Oaklanders respond.

Now, as San Francisco officials consider creating an affordable housing trust fund and other legislative changes, it’s fair to ask: Does City Hall have the political will to reverse the trend?

Census data tells a big part of the story. In 2000, the median owner-occupied home in San Francisco cost $369,400, and by 2010 it had more than doubled to $785,200. Census figures also show median rents have gone from $928 in 2000 up to $1,385 in 2010 — and even a cursory glance at apartment listings show that rents have been steadily rising since then.

Tracy and other affordable housing activists testified at an April 9 hearing before the Board of Supervisors Land Use and Economic Development Committee on a new study by the Budget and Legislative Analyst, commissioned last July by Sup. David Campos, entitled “Performance Audit of San Francisco’s Affordable Housing Policies and Programs.”

“There’s a hearing right now at City Hall about our housing stock and how it’s been skewing upward toward those with higher incomes,” Board President David Chiu told us, noting that it is sounding an alarm that, “Creative individuals that make this place so special are being driven out of the city.”

Oakland City Council member Rebecca Kaplan said that San Francisco’s loss has been a gain for Oakland and other East Bay cities, which are enjoying a new cultural vibrancy that has so far been largely free of the gentrifying impacts that can hurt a city’s diversity.

“You can add more people without getting rid of anybody if you do it right. Most of development is looking at places that are now completely empty like the Lake Merritt BART station parking lot, empty land around the Coliseum, and the West Oakland BART station,” Kaplan told us. “We have to commit to revitalization without displacement.”

Yet the fear among some San Franciscans is that we’ll have just the opposite: displacement that actually hinders the city’s attempts at economic revitalization. “What’s at stake is the economic recovery of the city,” Tracy said. “You can’t have such a large portion of the workforce commuting into the city.”

TOO MANY CONDOS

A big part of the problem is that San Francisco is building plenty of market-rate (read: really expensive) housing, but not nearly enough affordable housing. The report Campos commissioned looked at how well the city did at meeting various housing construction goals it set for itself from 1999 to 2006 in its state-mandated Housing Element, which requires cities to plan for the housing needs of its population and absorb a fair share of the state’s affordable housing needs.

The plan called for 7,363 market-rate units, or 36 percent of the total housing construction, with the balance being housing for those with moderate, low, or very low incomes. Developers built 11,293 market rate units during that time, 154 percent of what was needed and 65 percent of the total housing construction. There were only 725 units built for those with moderate incomes (just 13 percent the goal) and just over half the number of low-income units needed and 83 percent of the very low-income goal met.

“We have to do a better job of monitoring and evaluating each project,” Chiu said. “Every incremental decision we make determines whether this will be a city for just the wealthy.”

The situation for renters is even worse. From 2001-2011, the report showed there were only 1,351 rental units built for people in the low to moderate income range, people who make 50-120 percent of the area median income, which includes a sizable chunk of the working class living in a city where about two-thirds of residents rent.

“The Planning Commission does not receive a sufficiently comprehensive evaluation of the City’s achievement of its housing goals,” the report concluded, calling for the planners and policymakers to evaluate new housing proposals by the benchmark of what kind of housing the city actually needs. Likewise, it concluded that the Board of Supervisors isn’t being regularly given information it needs to correct the imbalance or meet affordable housing needs.

Policy changes made under former Mayor Gavin Newsom also made this bad situation even worse. Developers used to build affordable housing required by the city’s inclusionary housing law rather than pay in-lieu fees to the city by a 3-1 ratio, but since the formulas in that law changed in 2010, 55 percent of developers have opted to pay the fee rather than building housing.

Also in 2010, Newsom instituted a policy that allowed developers to defer payment of about 85 percent of their affordable housing fees, resulting in an additional year-long delay in building affordable housing, from 48 months after the market rate project got permitted to 60 months now.

Tracy and the affordable housing activists say the city needs to reverse these trends if it is to remain diverse. “It’s not even debatable that the majority housing built in the city needs to be affordable,” Tracy said.

Mayor Ed Lee has called for an affordable housing trust fund, the details of which are still being worked out as he prepares to submit it for the November ballot. Chiu said that would help: “I will require a lot of different public policies, but a lot of it will be an affordable housing trust fund.”

GROWTH AND DIVERSITY

San Francisco’s problems have been a boon for Oakland.

“With much love and affection to my dear SF friends, I must say that Oakland is more fun,” Kaplan told us. “Also I think a lot of people are choosing to live in Oakland now for a variety of reasons that aren’t just about price. We have a huge resurgent art scene, an interconnected food, restaurant, and club scene, a place where multicultural community of grassroots artists is thriving, best known from Art Murmur.”

There is fear that Oakland could devolve into the same situation plaguing San Francisco, with rising housing prices that displace its diverse current population, but so far that isn’t happening much. Oakland remains much more racially and economically diverse than San Francisco, particularly as it attracts San Francisco’s ethnically diverse residents.

“We’re not looking at a situation where the people moving into town are necessarily predominantly white,” Kaplan said. “We’re having large growth in quite a range of communities, including growing Ethiopian and Eritrean and Vietnamese populations…If you don’t want to live in a multicultural community, maybe Oakland’s not your cup of tea.”

According to the 2010 census, a language other than English is spoken at home in 40.2 percent of Oakland households, compared to 25.4 percent in San Francisco. “Almost every language in the world spoken in Oakland,” Kaplan said.

African Americans make up 28 percent of Oakland’s population, compared to only 6.1 percent in San Francisco, and 6.2 percent of the population of California. In San Francisco, the number of black-owned businesses is dismal at 2.7 percent, compared to 4 percent statewide and 13.7 percent in Oakland. The census also finds that 25.4 percent Oaklanders are people of Latino origin, compared to San Francisco at 15.1 percent and 37.6 percent statewide. San Francisco is 33.3 percent Asian, compared to Oakland at 16.8 percent and all of California at 13 percent.

Both cities are less white than California as a whole; the state’s white population is 57.6 percent, compared to 34 percent in Oakland and 48.5 percent in San Francisco.

Gentrification shows its face differently depending on the neighborhood. Some say Rockridge, a trendy Oakland neighborhood where prices have recently increased, has gone too far down the path.

“Rockridge has been ‘in’ for a long time, but the prices are staggering and it isn’t as interesting any more,” Barbara Hendrickson, an East Bay real estate agent, told us.

The nationwide foreclosure crisis didn’t spare Oakland and may have sped up its gentrification process. “The neighborhoods are being gentrified by people who buy foreclosures and turn them into sweet remolded homes,” observed Hendrickson.

Yet Kaplan said many of these houses simply remain vacant, driving down values for surrounding properties and destabilizing the community. “I think we need a policy where the county doesn’t process a foreclosure until the bank has proven that they own the note,” said Kaplan, who mentioned that the city has had some success using blight ordinances to hold banks accountable for the empty buildings.

And as if San Francisco didn’t have enough challenges, Kaplan also noted another undeniable advantage: the weather. “The weather is really quite something,” she said. “I have days with a meeting in San Francisco and I always have to remember to bring completely different clothing. Part of why I wanted to live in California was to be able to spend more time outdoors, be healthy, bicycle, things like that. So that’s pretty easy to do over here in Oakland.”

Heading East: The flight from San Francisco

Andrew Lam

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April 10, 2012

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EDITORIAL There is no simple free-market solution to gentrification and displacement. There’s no way a crowded city like San Francisco can simply rely on the forces of supply and demand to protect vulnerable populations. And there’s no way the city’s flawed housing policy can prevent the loss of thousands of San Franciscans — particularly young, creative people who help keep a city lively — from fleeing to a town where they can actually afford the rent.

Richard Florida, the famous social and economic theorist who coined the term “creative class” argues that artists and writers and geeks and musicians are the forces that drive modern economies. His pioneering 2002 essay in the Washington Monthly was titled “Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.”

Florida’s something of an elitist and he ignores the contributions that tens of thousands of others (including retired people, union members and nonprofit workers) make a community. He idolizes tech culture and often ignores issues like class and race.

But he’s got a point: Nobody who’s doing anything cool wants to live in a city where everyone is rich and everything is clean and boring. And that’s the danger San Francisco faces.

Just go over to Oakland for a few days and talk to all the people who were once part of this city’s cultural scene. They’ll tell you what anyone with any sense knows: You don’t attract creative people to a city by giving out tax breaks for corporations and building fancy office space. The rock bands that Florida talks about aren’t going to stay in a city because it has high-end jobs for people with advanced degrees. Artists need a place where they can afford the rent.

San Francisco is still a great urban center, by any possible standard, and has all the qualities of diversity, openness, energy, politics and fun that have made generations of immigrants from all over the world want to make it their home. But at a certain point, housing becomes more important than all of the other development issues that local government can address.

Take Andy Duvall, a musician we interviewed who was part of San Francisco for 15 years before he was literally priced out of town. For half of what he was paying in the Mission, Duvall has more than twice the space in Oakland — and the situation is just getting worse. While most of the country is still mired in a deep housing slump (and parts of San Francisco are facing a foreclosure crisis), rents in this town are soaring, beyond the affordability of almost anyone who currently lives here. According to the city’s own statistics, only about 10 percent of San Franciscans can afford the rent on a median market-rate apartment. That means if they’re evicted or lose their homes, they have to leave town.

The supervisors held a hearing April 9 on affordable housing, and the message was profound: “Affordable housing preserves the neighborhood in more ways than one; residents are the foundation on which the economy is built. From any angle, if we can’t afford to live here, there is no city,” observed Val Sinckler, a Western Addition resident.

But while the mayor is working to attract companies that will pay high-end salaries to people who can afford to pay far more rent than the average San Franciscan, he’s a long way from coming up with the money to even begin to mitigate the problem.

An effective policy to preserve San Francisco requires strict regulation (to prevent evictions and displacement), a mandate that commercial developers build housing for their workforce and that residential developers meet the needs of low- and moderate-income residents — and a large investment of public money in affordable housing. If Lee isn’t willing to talk serious about those three crucial elements, then he’s presiding over the decline of one of the world’s coolest cities.

Editorial: The flight from San Francisco

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April 10, 2012

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