Development Archives — Page 31 of 72 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

On Guard

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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September 27, 2011

news@sfbg.com

FRAUD OR ‘FAKED FACTS’?

“The only thing I care about,” Sen. Leland Yee proclaimed at a press conference outside City Hall Sept. 26, “is the Central Subway.”

The mayoral candidate called the press conference to announce that he wants the high-profile Chinatown transit project to move forward — yet he has concerns that it could be jeopardized by recent revelations of apparent waste, fraud, and abuse relating project contracts.

Yee announced he’d submitted a public records request to Mayor Ed Lee’s office, asking the interim mayor and candidate to turn over “all correspondence between the Mayor’s Office or the City Administrator’s Office and CCDC or powerbroker Rose Pak.”

The media event was prompted by reports in the San Francisco Chronicle revealing that the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC), an affordable housing nonprofit and Central Subway subcontractor closely aligned with Lee, had received about $750 per hour to attend project meetings, $578 per visitor for outreach, and $25,000 to host a single community meeting, figures he rattled off during the press conference.

“Those are the kinds of abuses, those are the kinds of mismanagement that has been going on, and we really need to put a stop to that,” Yee said, adding, “We now have a chance of derailing the Central Subway. And I, for one, am going to do everything that I can to ensure that the Central Subway, in fact, is built. But we cannot do that when you have these kinds of golden chairs, these kinds of waste and abuse … So what we are now asking is just simply the right of the public to know what’s been happening.”

Reached by phone, Rev. Norman Fong, who will replace outgoing CCDC executive director Gordon Chin in October, said he was concerned that his nonprofit organization — which has a mission of building affordable housing for low-income residents — had become a target for mayoral candidates looking to score political points. “I’m learning that politics is dirty,” he said.

Asked about the exorbitant payments to CCDC highlighted in the Chronicle, Fong said, “they’re all lies.” He pointed to a response penned by CCDC attorney Gen Fujioka in the local political blog Beyond Chron, charging that the numbers were inaccurate or distorted and taking San Francisco’s paper of record to task for what he deemed “faked ‘facts.'”

Yet it was tough to discern independently whether the math was fuzzy without the documents in hand. Recognizing this, Fong said his organization planned to address the issue publicly on Sept. 28 and make contract documents available on its website. “CCDC wants to be totally transparent,” he said. “We have nothing to hide.”

Meanwhile, Yee and CCDC aren’t the only ones at odds when it comes to discussing the finer points of the Central Subway deal.

On Sept. 19, retired Judge Quentin Kopp, a Central Subway opponent, mailed a letter to the Little Hoover Commission, an independent state oversight agency, urging it to conduct an audit of the use of state funds allocated to the Central Subway. Kopp cited an annual cost increase of $15.1 million (according to the Federal Transportation Administration) to San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) operations, increased travel times, and a dramatic decrease in projected ridership to back up his argument that “the project makes no sense from either a transportation or financial standpoint; it will result in a continuing waste of funds and inappropriate expenditures.”

Yet when the Guardian asked SFMTA chief Ed Reiskin in a recent interview to address these concerns, Reiskin responded as if this assessment was news to him. “I’m not sure what the discrepancies are that you’re talking about,” he said. “We have a lot more people who are going to be living along that corridor, and as you know with the Stockton bus we’re beyond capacity. So if it were going to cost $15 million more — which I don’t believe is correct — this is investment that we need to make.” (Rebecca Bowe)

LIFE AFTER DEATH

The state of Georgia killed a man who is quite possibly innocent last week, pushing the debate over the death penalty back onto the front pages. Well, some front pages — the execution of Troy Davis made page one of the New York Times, but was buried inside the San Francisco Chronicle.

Which is odd, because here in San Francisco, the death penalty is moderately big news: Nearly all of the candidates for district attorney are proclaiming how immoral, expensive, and ineffective it is.

In fact, if the change in attitude among San Francisco prosecutors in any indication, public sentiment on ending the barbaric practice may be shifting in the right direction.

Consider this: In 1999, three major candidates sought the office of D.A.: Former Supervisor (and defense lawyer) Terence Hallinan, veteran prosecutor Bill Fazio and Deputy Public Defender Matt Gonzalez. Hallinan was a death penalty foe, but was pretty quiet about it; he and Fazio wound up in a runoff, and Fazio asked Gonzalez to endorse him. Gonzalez told us he asked Fazio one question: Will you promise never to seek the death penalty? Fazio hemmed and hawed, but refused to make that promise. Hallinan won.

Today, candidate David Onek has made opposition to executions a centerpiece of his campaign. Fazio is loudly proclaiming his opposition to the death penalty. So is incumbent and former Police Chief George Gascon, who told us that he will never file capital charges (not even in the case of the murder of a police officer) and wants the death penalty repealed.

Maybe were getting somewhere. (Tim Redmond)

AFTER THE DEAL

During the debate earlier this year over giving big tax breaks to Twitter and other companies that create jobs in the Mid-Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods — an initiative pushed primarily by Mayor Ed Lee, his Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and Sups. David Chiu and Jane Kim — critics called the deal a wasteful giveaway that mostly benefited commercial landlords and rich corporations.

Not so, said advocates of the deal, touting the community benefits agreements (CBAs) that Twitter and other companies would be forced to enter into. They said it was all about keeping Twitter in town and eliminating the vacant storefronts in the Mid-Market area. And when City Economist Ted Egan said creating a punitive fee on vacant commercial properties would be more effective at that goal than tax breaks, Kim announced her intent to carry that legislation.

Later, Sup. David Campos — who voted against the Twitter deal, along with Sups. John Avalos and Ross Mirkarimi — also endorsed the idea and said he wanted to help Kim move it forward.

There were meetings and reports on the legislation, including a 15-page analysis by the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office in June that looked at how other cities have similar ordinances and how it would work here. It estimated that charging the owners of vacant commercial buildings (there are at least 77 in San Francisco, half of them owned by banks) could raise about $1.8 million per year (or as much as $17 million if we used Washington DC’s model of very steep fines), in addition to encouraging the owners to fill the buildings with tenants.

But then, the idea was quietly abandoned for the year. “The Budget Analyst and City Attorney determined that this change would need to go to the voters. The Revenue Coalition and neighborhood stakeholders decided not to pursue this legislation for the November 2011 ballot,” Kim legislative aide April Veneracion wrote to the Guardian.

She told us by phone that the decision was the consensus of a working group that included critics of the Twitter deal such as Coalition on Homelessness director Jennifer Friedenbach and SEIU Local 1021 Political Director Alysabeth Alexander. But Alexander says she’s still very supportive of the idea, as well as a fee to cover city costs on foreclosed properties.

“It’s still a high priority for our union,” Alexander told us, saying it was her understanding that Kim’s office didn’t get the required legal analysis back from the City Attorney’s Office in time to qualify for the ballot. But a review of documents under the Sunshine Ordinance turned up drafts of that analysis from as early as May 16, well in advance of the deadline for getting on this year’s ballot.

Veneracion (speaking for Kim, who refuses to talk to the Guardian) said the ordinance might end up on next year’s ballot: “We want to continue to pursue this.”

And what about Twitter’s CBA? Well, after initially saying publicly that the CBA must be in place before the legislation was approved, Kim decided to move the legislation forward anyway, saying the CBA would be completed imminently.

But that CBA still isn’t anyway close to completion, and it probably won’t be inked until later next year. OEWD Director Jennifer Matz said the final legislation doesn’t require the CBA until companies apply for the tax exclusion, which in Twitter’s case will be around November 2012.

“When they apply, that triggers the need for a community benefits agreement,” Matz told us. If only measures that benefited the city and its residents moved as rapidly through City Hall as those that benefit big corporations. (Steven T. Jones)

LA MISION. PRESENTE.

It felt as if, in the words of one observer, the entire San Francisco left was on hand Sept. 25 for a memorial service for Eric Quezada, the Mission District organizer and community leader who died Aug. 24 after a long battle with cancer. He was 45.

The speakers talked of his life as an activist, a hell-raiser, a champion soccer player, and a devoted father. But they also talked of the community he defended all these years — about the part of the Mission that doesn’t eat fancy tapas and sip $12 martinis on Valencia Street, the folks who fought displacement during the dot-com boom and fight every day for affordable housing, immigrant rights, tenant protections, and limits on speculation and gentrification. That Mission was his life’s work. Long may it survive.

The family needs help with medical expenses — and also to help with the education of Eric’s daughter, Ixchel. Contributions can be made at www.missionassetfund.org/ixchel or mailed to 470 Columbus Ave., Suite 211, San Francisco, 94133. Checks should be made payable to Eric Quezada Memorial Fund. A fundraiser is being held at Jane Morrison’s home at 44 Woodland Ave. on Oct. 16 between 3-5 p.m. (Redmond)

Moving the planet: The beat quickens in Buenos Aires

Andrew Lam

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September 23, 2011

0

In Day Two of our series on Moving Planet Day organizers and events around the world (check out yesterday’s chat with San Francisco MPD planner Morgan Fitzgibbons), we’re taking it south to Buenos Aires.

You might remember Matias Kalwill, founder of the bike-art website La vida en bici, from my article this summer on his city’s emerging bike culture. Since we last checked in, Kalwill has become the leading bike advocate in his city of nearly 13 million people. Over the last few months, Kalwill and his La vida en bici team have been painting a plaza not far from where he grew up. Their goal is to make Plaza Luna de Enfrente — which already includes a playground for the neighborhood kids — the first “bicifriendly” plaza in Buenos Aires. It’ll make a great backdrop for the day of political action and personal development that Kalwill and the Moving Planet Day organizers have planned.

Check out what Saturday will feel like in Argentina — we caught up with Kalwill via email last night in the middle of his pedal-powered preparations. Check in next week when we’ll hear about how the day went from an organizer in Austin, Tex. as well as other places around the globe.

SFBG: What is your role in your city’s Moving Planet Day events?

MK: I’m organizing the event. I invited Greenpeace Argentina, FARN, ITDP, and other NGO’s to participate. I’m also hosting a conference on “biking for sustainable development” and am the main author of the project proposal letter that will be handled to representatives of the National Congress on Saturday. I wrote the series “Moving Cities” for Treehugger Latin America, which had support from 350.org addressing urban mobility and the road to the MP events in Latin American cities.

Matias Kalwill and David Byrne on the musician and bike activist’s recent trip to Argentina.

SFBG: What inspired you to get involved?

MK: The chance to put on a high impact action connecting bikes and sustainability. The opportunity to share a common effort with people from all over the world. Bill Mckibben’s work, wich is amazing. Previous 350.org’s events in which I participated. The idea that we could share what’s happening in Buenos Aires with the rest of the country.

Buenos Aires’ Plaza Luna de Enfrente with it’s bici-friendly makeover — ready to go for Sat/24’s festivities.

SFBG: What does your city have planned for Saturday?

MK: We will be doing live art and music and conferences and personal workshops in the Plaza Luna de Enfrente, and then a ride to deliver a project proposal to representatives of the National Congress. The proposal aims to have urban cycling declared “of interest for the sustainable development of the country” by the Congress and can be read here. If eventually this project is aproved by the Congress, it will become a tool for local bike advocates, politicians, and activists all over Argentina. Awesome!

SFBG: How many people are expected to attend?

MK: I’m guessing 50 to 200.

SFBG: Why is this such a big deal?

MK: I feel it’s another step forward in the road to urban sustainable mobility. In this case, it’s a big one since there will be so many people doing similiar things at the same time. And because so much energy from all over the world will be focused on a few ideas it will be a strong push to get more people involved in the positive and urgent changes we are riding for.

SFBG: What do you hope that this day achieves?

MK: More visibility for these problems and more commitment to the solutions for sustainable mobility and climate change.

SFBG: How will you transport yourself to the festivities?

MK: With my dear bike of course!

SFBG: Complete this sentence: We can reverse the causes of man-made climate change if we…

MK: Come up with exciting and accessible ways to engage people in low-impact city life. Bikes are an excellent example of this: make it sexy and sustainable and available, and the hype is on!

Moving Planet Day Bay Area

Sat/24 10 a.m.-6 p.m., free

March starts at Justin Herman Plaza, SF

Afternoon activities at Civic Center Plaza, SF

www.moving-planet.org

Guardian forum: Everybody loves public power

Zelda Bronstein

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September 22, 2011

114

Guardian forum: Everybody loves public power

The Guardian candidates’ forum was a blast — standing room only at the LGBT Center, a great, lively crowd, and most of the candidates for mayor showed up. Not Ed Lee, though — we invited him, but he was a no-show. That’s typical — he’s skipped the vast majority of the mayoral debates and events, and when he does show up, he leaves early.

We set out to pin the candidates down on five key issues that came out of the Guardian’s summer issues forums. Shaw San Liu, our moderator, forced the mayoral contenders to give us yes-or-no answers, and our all-star celebrity panel of answer analyzers (Sue Hestor, Corey Cook and Fernando Marti) weighed in and raised signs to tell us whether the candidate had said Yes, No, or Waffled.

The questions:

1. Will you support the creation of a municipal bank to offer access to credit to small business instead of relying on tax breaks for economic development?

2. Will you support a freeze on condo conversions and the development of new market-rate condos until the city has a plan and the financing in place to meet the General Plan goal of 60 percent of all new units available at below market rate — and then index new market-rate housing to the creation of affordable units?

3. Do you have a viable plan to bring $250,000 a year in new revenue into the city to address the structural budget deficit?

4. Will you agree to opt out of the federal secure communities program and will you reverse Mayor Newsom’s policy and direct all local law-enforcement agencies not to cooperate with immigration authorities?

5. Will you support a proposal to either buy out PG&E’s San Francisco facilities or build a new city grid through a bond act so that San Francisco will control its own energy distibution system?

Only John Avalos answered Yes to all five. But it was remarkable how many of the candidates supported most or all of the progressive agenda we’ve developed. Every single candidate voiced support for a municipal bank. And every one of them said Yes to buying out PG&E’s distribution system so the city could run it’s own electric utility.

They had a lot more trouble with the notion of a freeze on new market-rate housing and condo conversions, and not all of them could explain how they would bring in $250,000 in new revenue. But I give them all credit for showing up and facing the tough questions and saying that, for the most part, they wanted to promote a progressive agenda.

Here are the scores:

John Avalos: Y, Y, Y, Y, Y

David Chiu: Y, W, Y, Y, Y

Bevan Dufty: Y, N, Y, Y,Y

Dennis Herrera: Y, W, Y, Y, Y

Phil Ting: NA. NA, Y, Y, Y (He came late and missed the first two)

Joanna Rees: Y, N, N, Y, Y

Leland Yee: Y, W, W, Y, Y

Jeff Adachi: Y, W, Y, Y, Y

Terry Baum: Y, Y, N, Y, Y

So five waffles on housing policy; nobody wants to stand up and say that we’re building too much housing for the rich and that it has to stop until we catch up with affordable housing. (At least Dufty was honest and told us he doesn’t want to cut off TIC and condo conversions).

I’m waiting for the video and I’ll post it when I get it.

Consequences of inaction

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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September 20, 2011

8

news@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance, although it sounds bright and cheery, remains shrouded in a cloud of inaction. Meant to increase transparency in city government, it hasn’t emerged from the bureaucratic fog since its establishment in 1994. Cases wait years to be heard and even blatant violations go unpunished, due to infighting and power disputes between the commissions that are supposed to enforce government compliance.

The Sunshine Ordinance outlines citizen’s rights to request document and information. Citizens can take their complaints about request denials to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, an 11-member committee appointed by the Board of Supervisors to ensure government compliance. If the task force decides a violation has occurred the case is handed over to the Ethics Commission, a five-member appointed board that will supposedly enforce the rulings with fines or ordering documents to be made public.

George Wooding, reporter for the Westside Observer and president of the West of Twin Peaks Central Council, is the complainant in one of the task force’s most recent cases. This spring Wooding requested emails from the Recreation and Park Department multiple times but was told the documents did not exist. What RPD didn’t know was that Wooding had the emails all along.

The task force unanimously found RPD guilty of withholding emails. This is the third major sunshine violation by RPD in three years. Even more surprising, not one RPD employee has been fined, suspended, or faced any kind of punishment or corrective action.

The episode is a case study in the total eclipse of sunshine enforcement in the city, and how one embattled department — the RPD, which has come under heavy scrutiny for efforts to monetize park resources (see “Parks Inc.”, July 12) — used that dysfunction to stifle dissent.

DILUTING DISSENT

George Wooding v. RPD began when Wooding was asked to be a panelist at a Commonwealth Club event on May 11. The event, titled “Golden Gate Park Under Siege,” was to be a discussion about possible development projects in the park. Other panelists were representatives of environmental and anti-development groups who claimed they were not given time to voice their concerns in Board of Supervisors meetings, and wanted a forum to do so.

Wooding says that the Commonwealth Club was bombarded with phone calls and emails weeks before the discussion.

“They were saying our panel was one-sided, which is really unusual, and the Commonwealth Club told us they were getting a lot of heat for such a little panel discussion,” Wooding said. “It was not going to be a big deal, in all honesty.”

The emails that Wooding had and the department denied include correspondence from Sarah Ballard, RPD’s director of policy and public affairs, to Kerry Curtis, co-chair of the Commonwealth Club Environment & Natural Resources Forum, indicating she had phoned the club as well and asked that the discussion be canceled due to its “deeply biased panel that has no interest in discussing facts.”

There are also emails between Susan Hirsch, director of the City Fields Foundation, a private group that has been installing artificial turf in public parks, from her business email address to the panel moderator Jim Chappell’s private email, urging him to reconsider the event.

“You and I discussed this project years ago; the private sector is contributing far more than $20 million to provide safe, accessibly, and yes, environmentally sound fields for kids all across San Francisco to use. We have a unique private/public partnership with Rec and Park; it’s too bad the focus is on something negative, rather than the positive impact,” Hirsch wrote.

Mark Buell, president of the Recreation and Park Commission, also emailed Greg Dalton, Commonwealth Club’s COO, from his private email address: “I find the title inflammatory, the participants biased, and the fact that no one from the Rec and Park Department invited hard to understand. As president of the Commission I would like to urge the club to both alter the title of the event to ‘issues facing the park’ and have the club ask a representative of the department to be on the panel.”

Shortly thereafter, Buell was added to the panel and the event was renamed “Golden Gate Park Under Siege?”

Buell says the situation has been blown out of proportion. “I got on the panel because I’ve been active with the Commonwealth Club for years and all of a sudden I read a very slanted title about something tantamount to the ruination of Golden Gate Park, and a panel of people who are all critics,” Buell told us.

Wooding says the panel went smoothly, but he was unsettled by the last minute changes. He asked around for any information about what happened and got the emails through a knowledgeable source close to the RPD.

“[RPD] has pissed off a lot of people because they came in with a hammer when they didn’t need a sledge hammer. One of the people they pissed off was really upset and ended up giving me the correspondence,” Wooding told us.

As a journalist, Wooding said, “I was thinking, ‘this is a great story but wait, I can’t use any of this information,’ so I thought about how I could get the information legitimately?”

Wooding immediately emailed Olivia Gong, a RPD secretary, making clear that he was requesting the emails in accordance with the Sunshine Ordinance. Gong replied that the department did not have any documents matching the request.

“Imagine how amazed I was when they claimed they didn’t exist,” Wooding said.

After a second request turned up nothing, Wooding knew they were hiding the emails. He then asked Gong how she had determined the emails did not exist. Gong forwarded emails she had sent to department members who replied they did not have responsive documents.

Wooding then filed a complaint with the task force, which voted unanimously that RPD was in the wrong. Not only did it claim the emails did not exist, but when it became clear that they did, the department said that members deleted the emails because some were sent on private accounts and did not directly pertain to RPD affairs.

“I just delete everything,” Buell says. “It’s not that I did anything, it’s just that I didn’t know the rules that you’re supposed to keep everything.”

Task Force Chair Hope Johnson says she was shocked by this argument. The California Public Records Act, which is more lenient than the Sunshine Ordinance, clearly lists emails as a form of government document that must be handed over on request. The Sunshine Ordinance covers emails as well, and all officials who serve on city boards were required to undergo sunshine training last year, outlining what public documents are and noting that it’s illegal under state law to destroy them.

“Just switching over to another email address lends itself to the idea that this is something they knew was underhanded and would not be received positively by the public,” Johnson said.

She says this is becoming a problem throughout city government.

“There’s not a lot of specificity about keeping emails. They need a retention policy,” Johnson says. “Obviously I think that they prefer it to be as vague as possible.”

POSSIBLE PUNISHMENT?

Although the task force found RDP in violation, punishment is up to the Ethics Commission, a separate entity at City Hall.

Enter bureaucratic gloom and doom.

Since 1993 the task force has given the Ethics Commission 19 sunshine violation cases. Only one has even been heard. The other 18 were dismissed or are still “pending investigation.” Government officials are therefore under no serious threat if they disobey the law.

Richard Knee, former chair of the task force, says there is obvious animosity between the task force and commission staff. Rather than enforcing punishment, the Ethic Commission staff claim that cases can be dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence, or require additional investigation, which stalls the process indefinitely.

“I don’t think there’s any confusion, I think it’s merely resistance,” Knee said. “We are not asking the Ethics Commission to re-adjudicate something we have already adjudicated. When we refer a matter to the Ethics Commission we are asking them to tack some kind of enforcement action on a violation we have already found exists.”

In the one case Ethics did hear, it turned the punishment decision over to the mayor as the “appointing officer,” who did nothing. It has, therefore, never enforced a penalty on any government official that the task force found guilty.

A report released in August by the Civil Grand Jury, entitled “San Francisco’s Ethics Commission: The Sleeping Watchdog,” criticizes the body’s record of inaction on both sunshine and campaign finance complaints.

“Because of the Ethics Commission’s lack of enforcement, no city employee has been disciplined for failing to adhere to the Sunshine Ordinance. The Commission has allowed some city officials to ignore the rulings of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force,” the report says.

Johnson says that since the report came out, her correspondence with the Ethics Commission has shifted slightly.

“They used to send us letters back saying they dismissed it, but recently we’ve sent over two cases and they agreed that there had been a violation,” Johnson said. “But they said they wouldn’t be able to do enforcements of any kind.”

She says that the Sunshine Ordinance won’t be taken seriously until the very people it is meant to monitor begin to enforce its stipulations.

“It’s difficult with the Ethics Commission because they keep all of their investigations secret,” Johnson says. “There is no external oversight, it is all the politicians, all of the people who appointed them, they are the only people who monitor what they’re doing.”

In response to the report, Johnson hopes the Ethics Commission will be urged to actually hear sunshine cases, and Wooding’s could be one of the first.

“The George Wooding case is a good example of how the Sunshine Ordinance can reveal oppression of a group of people who wanted to come together and have a constructive analysis,” Johnson said. “That should be something that’s allowed, and here’s the very entity that they want to have an analysis and discussion about shutting them down. And here are some documents that prove it.”

Wooding’s case will be heard once more by the task force on Sept. 27. It will almost certainly be sent to the Ethics Commission, but Wooding may be waiting awhile for any resolution.

“It’s probably going to take forever,” Wooding says. “Either I’ll just end up being another file in a cabinet somewhere, or this may even become an example, if it moves through, of how things should be done. There might be a lot more life in this than anyone ever imagined.”

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam

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September 20, 2011

0

THEATER

OPENING

Alice Down the Rwong Wrabbit Whole Emerald Tablet, 80 Fresno, SF; (415) 500-2323, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15. Opens Fri/23, 9pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 9pm. Through Oct 15. Karen Light and Edna Barrón perform their new comedy based on Alice in Wonderland.

Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief Boxcar Theatre Playhouse, 505 Natoma, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $15-35. Previews Sun/25, 3pm; Mon/26-Tues/27 and Sept 29, 8pm. Opens Sept 30, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Nov 5. Boxcar Theatre performs Pauls Vogel’s dark comedy, inspired by the three female characters from Shakespeare’s Othello.

Killing My Lobster Conquers the Galaxy The Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida, SF; www.killingmylobster.com. $10-20. Opens Thurs/22, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat-Sun, 7pm (also Sat, 10pm). Through Oct 9. The sketch comedy troupe returns with a sci-fi show.

Once in a Lifetime American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, SF; (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org. $10-85. Previews Thurs/22-Sat/24 and Tues/27, 8pm (also Sat/24, 2pm). Opens Sept 28, 8pm. Runs Tues-Sat, 8pm (Oct 7 performance at 7pm); Wed and Sat-Sun, 2pm (no matinees Sun/25 or Sept 28; additional performance Oct 2 at 7pm). Through Oct 16. ACT performs a revival of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s 1939 Hollywood satire.

“Shocktoberfest 12: Fear Over Frisco” Hypnodrome Theatre, 575 10th St, SF; (415) 377-4202, www.thrillpeddlers.com. $25-35. Previews Fri/23-Sat/24, 8pm. Opens Sept 29, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Nov 19. The Thrillpeddlers’ 12th annual Grand Guignol fest features three “noir-horror” plays by noted noir expert Eddie Muller.

BAY AREA

Phaedra Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $17-26. Previews Wed/21-Thurs/22, 7pm; Fri/23, 8pm. Opens Sat/24, 8pm. Runs Thurs, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm (starting Oct 5, also runs Wed, 7pm). Through Oct 23. Shotgun Players perform Adam Bock’s modern adaptation of the Racine classic.

The Taming of the Shrew Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Wy, Orinda; (510) 809-3290, www.calshakes.org. $35-66. Previews Wed/21-Fri/23, 8pm. Opens Sat/24, 8pm. Runs Tues-Thurs, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Oct 1, 2pm); Sun, 4pm. Through Oct 16. California Shakespeare Theatre’s last show of the season is a high-fashion, pop-art take on Shakespeare’s battle of the sexes.

ONGOING

“AfroSolo Arts Festival” Various venues, SF; www.afrosolo.org. Free-$100. Through Oct 20. The AfroSolo Theatre Company presents its 18th annual festival celebrating African American artists, musicians, and performers.

All Atheists Are Muslim Stage Werx Theatre, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 517-3581, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 1. On the TV, CNN carries the dismal thumping of the Bush gang for more war. In the living room, a father and daughter are in a standoff over a proposed live-in boyfriend. It’s 2005, and a clash of generations, as Zahra tries to convince her immigrant Iranian American Muslim father that her white infidel boyfriend Duncan would make an ideal roommate. For her Muslim father, “the Duncan” has plenty of acceptable virtues — even his professed atheism is hardly an insurmountable obstacle to dad, who doesn’t seem to recognize the word but is sure it translates into a wishy-washy approach to the divine through an enthusiastic appreciation for gravity. But moving in together is a different story. How it plays out is the heart of comedian and solo performer Zahra Noorbakhsh’s uneven but charming and funny take on a familiar American family dynamic whose particular ethnic flavor includes a mild but timely geopolitical aroma. Playing herself as well as her loving mother, her bounding and big-hearted father (with his priceless Persian accent), and her good-natured but recalcitrant boyfriend, Noorbakhsh celebrates the immigrant experience while beating back the age’s pernicious appeal to stereotype and xenophobia with the far more realistic metaphor of a nice, crazy family dinner. (Avila)

American Buffalo Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; (415) 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm (no show Thurs/22). Extended through Oct 8. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs the David Mamet crime classic.

Cymbeline Parade Ground Lawn, Main Post, Presidio (between Graham and Keyes), SF; www.sfshakes.org. Free. Sat/24, 7:30pm; Sun/25, 2:30pm. The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival presents its annual “Free Shakespeare in the Park” performance.

Hunter’s Point St. Boniface Church Theater, 175 Golden Gate, SF; www.strangeangelstheater.org. $15-25 (no one turned away for lack of funds). Fri/23-Sat/24 and Sept 28-Oct 1, 7pm (also Fri/23, 2pm). Strange Angels Theater in collaboration with Jump! Theatre performs Elizabeth Gjelten’s musical drama about homelessness.

Joy With Wings: A Daughter’s Tale Alcove Theater, 415 Mason, Fifth Flr, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $32-50. Wed-Thurs, 8pm. Through Oct 6. Chaucer Theater performs Becky Parker’s drama about a mother’s love.

Night Over Erzinga South Side Theatre, Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; (415) 345-7575, www.goldenthread.org. $20-100. Thurs, 8:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 9. Golden Thread Productions’ season opener is the result of its first-ever Middle East America new play initiative (co-presented with Chicago’s Silk Road Theatre Project and New York’s Lark Play Development Center): playwright Adriana Sevahn Nichols’ story of three generations in an Armenian American family struggling with a history of violence, dispossession, and the tensions between individual and collective destiny in the modern world. The play begins at an overly dramatic pitch as a young woman (Sarita Ocón) summons the spirits of her grandparents. Director Hafiz Karmali’s staging is deliberately spare and sensible throughout, though this initial action feels alternately stiff and shuffling, and the recorded music can be overbearing, as the roots of a family saga are laid immediately before and after the 1915 genocide. But the second act settles into a surer and more engaging mode and tempo, as Ava (a sharp Juliet Tanner in a nicely shaded performance), rebellious American daughter of two Armenian exiles (Terry Lamb and Neva Marie Hutchinson), pursues a career as a popular dancer and singer and ends up estranged from her father for years (her mother, sole survivor of a massacred Armenian family, spends her latter years in a mental institution). Wooed by a charming Dominican crooner (an adept, appealing Brian Trybom), Ava starts a family of her own. While pregnant with daughter Estrella (the young, spirited Natalie Amanian), she re-establishes a shaky relationship with her repentant father. Old wounds and buried histories insure reconciliation won’t be easy, but the truth alone shows the way back to a sense of connection and communion for a family severed by injustice and unmoored in the drift of immigrant America. (Avila)

Not Getting Any Younger Marsh San Francisco, Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Oct 23. Marga Gomez is back at the Marsh, a couple of too-brief decades after inaugurating the theater’s new stage with her first solo show — an apt setting, in other words, for the writer-performer’s latest monologue, a reflection on the inevitable process of aging for a Latina lesbian comedian and artist who still hangs at Starbucks and can’t be trusted with the details of her own Wikipedia entry. If the thought of someone as perennially irreverent, insouciant, and appealingly immature as Gomez makes you depressed, the show is, strangely enough, the best antidote. Her narrative careens wildly from character-filled childhood memories (the earliest traumas on down) and stand-up-like shtick that turns over well-worn subject matter like babies with freshly piquant musings (idea for an “it get better” campaign for infants: you’ll be able to wipe yourself and chew your own food). There’s even something like wisdom, or anyway historical curiosity, in her skewed nostalgia for such childhood ephemera as Freedomland, a doomed Bronx-based Disneyland alternative Gomez is old enough to remember visiting. Needless to say, she looks and acts very good for her age, whatever it is exactly (there are, typically, no straight answers here).

The Odyssey Aboard Alma, Hyde Street Pier, San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, SF; www.weplayers.org. $160. Oct 1, 28-29, Nov 4-6, 11-12, and 18, 12:30pm. This “full afternoon adventure” (12:30-5pm) includes a sailing performance of tales from Homer by We Players (aboard an 1891 scow schooner), plus a light meal.

*Patience Worth Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; (415) 456-8892, www.symmetrytheatre.com. $20-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 2. In the second decade of the 20th century, a young new St. Louis bride named Pearl Curran (Megan Trout), looking to rise above her humble Ozarks upbringing yet with hopeless aspirations to be a singer, suddenly began channeling the spirit of a 16th-century woman named Patience Worth. The rest was literary history, here uncovered and subtly examined by playwright Michelle Carter in Symmetry Theatre Company’s thoughtful, gradually stirring world premiere, its second production after last year’s strong debut (with Anthony Clarvoe’s Show and Tell). Introduced to Patience by Emily Hutchings (Elena Wright) and her Ouija board, Pearl soon displaces the chagrined Hutchings — who has literary aspirations of her own she pedals doggedly to the leading publisher of the day (Warren David Keith) — and inverts the patriarchal order as her much older husband (Keith) plays stenographer to the virtuosic verbosity of the spirit. When she adopts a child for Patience whome she names Patience Wee (Alona Bach), she drives the desperately lonely young girl into the arms of her equally isolated mother (Jessica Powell) toward an unexpected and terrible inspiration. Director Erika Chong Shuch sets her able cast (headed by Trout’s sure take on a complex figure) atop an area rug backed by a line of trees and strewn over the bare earth, like a floating island of bourgeois respectability amid a wild and mysterious sea of natural and supernatural impulses, in a complex tale of female liberation that intersects with questions of fame, status, self-invention, ventriloquism, and a dark bargain with destiny that has something quintessentially American about it. (Avila)

Show Ho New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $20-32. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Oct 9, 2pm. Through Oct 9. Sara Moore performs her multi-character story about a clown in a low-rent circus.

Turandot War Memorial Opera House, 201 Van Ness, SF; (415) 864-3330, www.sfopera.com. $21-389. Thurs/22 and Oct 4, 7:30pm; Sun/25, 2pm; Oct 1, 8pm. The San Francisco Opera performs Puccini’s classic in conjunction with the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

BAY AREA

*A Delicate Balance Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $10-48. Tues, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Extended through Oct 16. Aurora Theatre performs Edward Albee’s comedy of manners.

Madhouse Rhythm Cabaret at Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Thurs, 7:30pm. Extended through Oct 6. Joshua Walters performs his hip-hop-infused autobiographical show about his experiences with bipolar disorder.

Of Dice and Men La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 1. Impact Theatre performs Cameron McNary’s comedy about a group of adult Dungeons and Dragons players.

*Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Tues-Sun, showtimes vary. Through Oct 30. The life of stage and screen legend Rita Moreno is a subject that has no trouble filling two swift and varied acts, especially as related in anecdote, song, comedy, and dance by the serene multiple–award-winning performer and Berkeley resident herself. Indeed, that so much material gets covered so succinctly but rarely abruptly is a real achievement of this attractively adorned autobiographical solo show crafted with playwright and Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone. (Avila)

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks. For complete listings, see www.sfbg.com.

Endorsement interviews: John Avalos

Zelda Bronstein

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September 19, 2011

17

Sup. John Avalos is running a grassroots progressive campaign for mayor. He is, he says, the only candidate talking about working-class people, and he wans to “create an administration that puts neighborhoods and people first.” He wants to create a municipal bank to use money the city now dumps into Wells Fargo and Bank of America for loans to small businesses and economic development. He told us that by the end of his eight years in office, he’d like to see the city bringing in $500 million a year in new revenue — for education, child care, Muni, parks, public health and other services. Check out the interview (audio and video) after the jump.

Avalos by endorsements2011

Central Subway: justice and jobs

Andrew Lam

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September 13, 2011

0

OPINION The Central Subway is a result of years of grassroots environmental transit justice organizing that San Francisco should be proud of. But in recent weeks, politicos and the media have stirred up a string of unfounded criticisms of the Central Subway — an essential project that will upgrade transit for the long term, create thousands of jobs in the midst of a recession, and expand opportunity for tens of thousands of San Franciscans who need to get to work everyday. Politicians who supported the project for years are now reversing themselves and calling it a “subway to nowhere” and a “boondoggle.” And short staffed newspapers find it easy paint a cartoon picture of City Hall and Chinatown “powerbrokers” who conspired to sell the city on an expensive project it doesn’t need.

But San Franciscans should ignore the overheated rhetoric of the moment and see the future value and need for this critical project — particularly when the Republicans in Congress are attacking us from the right. We need to unite as one city and not squander what might be the last opportunity to access federal funding to make the economic center of the city more transit accessible for all San Franciscans. In this limited space, we offer some of the facts about the project that seem to be missing in the present reporting.

The number of recent critics and media attention about the subway makes it appear that the subway’s costs and design were new news. Planning for the project began more than 20 years ago, and the essential alignment and projected costs have been agreed to and consistent since 2008. There is no new news.

The claims about skyrocketing costs are misleading, comparing different project proposals. The Civil Grand Jury and others fail to do an apples-to-apples comparison. The project costs have increased primarily because, in response to public feedback, the final project is a different project. It has a new alignment, new stations, and more contingency funds built in. The core costs for the project have not changed since 2008, when it was approved with broad support, including some of its present critics.

The critics who claim that not building the project will save future Muni operating costs fail to address the costs of doing nothing. The environmental impact report showed that the no-project option would cost even more. The absence of a subway would require Muni to run and maintain more buses on streets that will be more crowded and more gridlocked. (Ten years from now, if the critics succeed in killing the project, when you are stuck in traffic and late for work you will know who to blame).

Beneath the unfounded criticism about costs is actually a disagreement over values. The grand jury report relied upon by critics makes a only brief and superficial criticism about costs. The report actually devotes more attention and criticism to the location of the Chinatown station. The grand jury prefers a subway that runs closer to the financial district. For critics, the present project is a “subway to nowhere.” But for the Asian, black, and working class neighborhoods that will be connected via the subway and the T-line, this is a subway to jobs and economic opportunity.

Finally, we need to be clear that this is probably the last chance in many of our lifetimes for San Francisco to grow its transit system. While critics talk about alternate uses for the $940 million dollars of federal funding, the reality is we cannot redirect those dollars. The funding process for the subway is nearing the finish line after an arduous ten-year competitive federal application process. Given the federal budget, re-starting that application process may not merely mean a multi-year delay, it will likely mean there will be no funding to apply for and the loss of 30,000 jobs over the life of the project.

We urge all the mayoral candidates and our media pundits to tone down the rhetoric around the subway. We should not let short-term thinking and the heat of political passion of this campaign season kill a project that has had broad support for 20 years and will provide new transit that we desperately need for our city’s future.

Ultimately the subway is an issue about justice and access to jobs. Justice for some of the most densely populated neighborhoods in San Francisco, where 80% of the residents don’t own cars and rely entirely on public transportation. And we’re talking about the potential loss of thousands of construction jobs and access to jobs for those who need the transit to their workplaces.

Stand firm, San Francisco, for jobs and justice.

Rev. Norman Fong is the incoming director of the Chinatown Community Development Center. Mike Casey is the head of UNITE HERE Local 2.

Banking on misfortune

Andrew Lam

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September 13, 2011

11

news@sfbg.com

Unemployed San Franciscans are now receiving monthly benefit payments through a mandatory Bank of America debit card. While presented as a benefit to both recipients and the state, the initiative is the latest chapter in a long history of banks profiting off of the less fortunate.

In July, the California Employment Development Department (EDD) began distributing Bank of America debit cards to all California residents who receive unemployment benefits, “in what is one of the largest pre-paid card programs in the nation,” EDD spokesperson Dan Stephens tells the Guardian.

The cards, a result of a recent contract Bank of America won to implement the EDD’s new debit card system, replace the monthly unemployment check residents receive. The cards are also being used for disability insurance and paid family leave payments.

“We wanted a faster, safer, more convenient way for our customers to access their benefits,” Stephens says. But figuring out the new system takes time, usage fees can surface, and complaints have arisen.

“Now I have against my will been forced to become a B of A customer, which I don’t like,” says Cliff Liehe, a part time business teacher at City College who collects unemployment benefits during the summer. “I don’t want to do business with B of A. I hate them, and there’s a lot of staff members that feel the same way, throughout the state, not just City College.”

Liehe says that he dislikes B of A because it has a “corporate philosophy that I’ve disagreed with,” as well as, “terrible customer service and high fees.” Bank of America, the largest bank in the nation, angered the public by receiving a $20 billion federal bailout after buying Merrill Lynch in 2009, in the wake of the financial meltdown from which banks quickly recovered but the average American still hasn’t.

Money can be accessed on the debit card through purchases, unlimited ATM withdrawals, or transferred to a bank account. Liehe opted to have the money transferred to an account independent from B of A, but says he found the process challenging, and the information and instructions difficult to find.

Bank of America is not paying the EDD, but the new system will save the EDD approximately $4 million in initial savings due to decreased paper, printing, mailing, and check processing costs, Stephens tells the Guardian. He remains vague about the EDD’s plans for this money, but does make it clear that the agreement is a “no-cost contract” between parties.

However, Bank of America’s participation is far from charitable. “B of A is covering its costs through fees paid by banks and merchants who honor the cards. Interchange fees are received from businesses that use the ATM network,” Stephens says.

With 1.7 million Californians receiving unemployment benefits and using their cards at ATMs and retail establishments, Bank of America will be receiving a percentage off all this money spent, as well as gaining more than a million new customers, unless recipients have the know-how to have their money transferred to a different bank. This adds up to a substantial potential profit for America’s richest bank.

“We generally don’t comment on the profitability of individual programs or products, but we are pleased to be working with the EDD to provide more secure and convenient benefit payments to its constituents,” bank spokesperson Jefferson George told us.

What consumers don’t consider when using a credit or debit card to make purchases is that with each purchase, the merchant is paying a percentage back to the bank or other credit card processor. Here at the Guardian, for instance, we lose a significant percentage of our ad profits when advertisers pay with a credit card. With MasterCard and Visa, we lose 3.5 percent of the sales amount, and with American Express it’s 4.15 percent, on top of monthly processing fees.

“The issues with credit card charges in general is that it’s all about the small print,” says Hut Landon, Executive Director of Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. As with the Bank of America EDD card, unadvertised fees can occur through usage of debit and credit cards. On top of a base percentage, merchants must pay fees for rewards cards, mileage cards, and are sometimes charged for transactions, Landon explains. There is even a fee for manually entering credit card information instead of swiping it. The debit card fee is sometimes less, but merchants still could be suffering from the EDD’s new system.

“While this may be a good situation for Bank of America,” says Landon, “[for merchants] its definitely not a good deal.”

Joel Bleskacek, co-owner of Potrero Hill favorites Plow and Ruby Wine, tells the Guardian he pays between 1.5 percent and 3 percent for credit card transactions at his restaurant and wine store. That’s a significant amount of money lost with each transaction, money that goes directly to the banks or credit card processors. “For what we’re paying at the restaurant, I could hire a general manager to work if we only accepted cash,” Bleskacek says. But credit cards are more popular than cash at both his establishments. “A vast majority is credit card sales. People don’t seem to carry cash anymore. Same at the restaurant. An overwhelming majority of sales are through the credit card machine.” Credit card company’s earnings quickly add up. “Basically 2.5 to 3 percent of our entire economy is going to credit card companies…,” he says. “Somebody’s making some money.”

A new progressive agenda

Andrew Lam

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September 13, 2011

56

Over the past three months, the Guardian has been hosting a series of forums on progressive issues for the mayor’s race. We’ve brought together a broad base of people from different communities and issue-based organizations all over town in an effort to draft a platform that would include a comprehensive progressive agenda for the next mayor. All told, more than 100 people participated.

It was, as far as we know, the first time anyone tried to do this — to come up with a mayoral platform not with a few people in a room but with a series of open forums designed for community participation.

The platform we’ve drafted isn’t perfect, and there are no doubt things that are left out. But our goal was to create a document that the voters could use to determine which candidates really deserve the progressive vote.

That’s a critical question, since nearly all of the top contenders are using the word “progressive” on a regular basis. They’re fighting for votes from the neighborhoods, the activists, the independent-minded people who share a vision for San Francisco that isn’t driven by big-business interests.

But those of us on what is broadly defined as the city’s left are looking for more than lip service and catchy phrases. We want to hear specifics; we want to know that the next mayor is serious about changing the direction of city policy.

The groups who endorsed this effort and helped plan the forums that led to this platform were the Harvey Milk LGBT Club, SEIU Local 1021, the San Francisco Tenants Union, the Human Services Network, the Community Congress 2010, the Council of Community Housing Organizations, San Francisco Rising, Jobs with Justice, and the Center for Political Education.

The panelists who led the discussions were: Shaw-san Liu, Calvin Welch, Fernando Marti, Gabriel Haaland, Brenda Barros, Debbi Lerman, Jenny Friedenbach, Sarah Shortt, Ted Gullicksen, Nick Pagoulatos, Sue Hestor, Sherilyn Adams, Angela Chan, David Campos, Mario Yedidia, Pecolio Mangio, Antonio Diaz, Alicia Garza, Aaron Peskin, Saul Bloom, and Tim Redmond.

We held five events looking at five broad policy areas — economy and jobs; land use, housing and tenants; budget and social services; immigration, education and youth; and environment, energy and climate change. Panelists and audience participants offered great ideas and the debates were lively.

The results are below — an outline of what the progressives in San Francisco want to see from their next mayor.

ECONOMY AND JOBS

Background: In the first decade of this century, San Francisco lost some 51,000 jobs, overwhelmingly in the private sector. When Gavin Newsom was sworn in as mayor in January 2004, unemployment was at 6.4 percent; when he left, in January 2011, it was at 9.5 percent — a 63 percent increase.

Clearly, part of the problem was the collapse of the national economy. But the failed Newsom Model only made things worse. His approach was based on the mistaken notion that if the city provided direct subsidies to private developers, new workers would flock to San Francisco. In fact, the fastest-growing sector of the local economy is the public sector, especially education and health care. Five of the 10 largest employers in San Francisco are public agencies.

Local economic development policy, which has been characterized by the destruction of the blue-collar sector in light industry and maritime uses (ironically, overwhelmingly privately owned) to free up land for new industries in business services and high tech sectors that have never actually appeared — or have been devastated by quickly repeating boom and bust cycle.

Instead of concentrating on our existing workforce and its incredible human capital, recent San Francisco mayors have sought to attract a new workforce.

The Mayor’s Office has, as a matter of policy, been destroying blue-collar jobs to promote residential development for people who work outside of the city.

There’s a huge disconnect between what many people earn and what they need. The minimum wage in San Francisco is $9.92, when the actual cost of living is closer to $20. Wage theft is far too common.

There is a lack of leadership, oversight and accountability in a number of city departments. For example, there is no officiating body or commission overseeing the work of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Similarly the Arts Commission, the chartered entity for overseeing cultural affairs, is responsible for less than 25 percent of the budget reserved for this purpose

There’s no accountability in the city to protect the most vulnerable people.

The city’s main business tax is highly regressive — it’s a flat tax on payroll but has so many exceptions and loopholes that only 8,500 businesses actually pay it, and many of the largest and richest outfits pay no city tax at all.

Agenda items:

1. Reform the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to create a department with workforce development as a primary objective. Work with the San Francisco Unified School District, City College and San Francisco State to create sustainable paths to training and employment.

2. Create a municipal bank that offers credit for locally developed small businesses instead of relying on tax breaks. As a first step, mandate that all city short-term funds and payroll accounts go only to banks or credit unions that will agree to devote a reasonable percentage of their local loan portfolios for small business loans.

3. Reform procurement to prioritize local ownership.

4. Link economic development of healthcare facilities to the economic development of surrounding communities.

5. Link overall approval of projects to a larger economic development policy that takes as its centerpiece the employment of current San Francisco residents.

6. Enforce city labor laws and fund the agency that enforces the laws.

7. Establish the Board of Supervisors as the policy board of a re-organized Redevelopment Agency and create community-based project area oversight committees.

8. Dramatically expand Muni in the southeast portion of the city and reconfigure routes to link neighborhoods without having to go through downtown. Put special emphasis on direct Muni routes to City College and San Francisco State.

9. Reform the payroll tax so all businesses share the burden and the largest pay their fair share.

10. Consolidate the city’s various arts entities into a single Department of Arts & Culture that includes as part of its mandate a clear directive to achieve maximum economic development through leveraging the city’s existing cultural assets and creative strengths and re-imagining San Francisco’s competitive position as a regional, national and international hub of creative thinking. Sponsor and promote signature arts programs and opportunities to attract and retain visitors who will generate maximum economic activity in the local economy; restore San Francisco’s community-based cultural economy by re-enacting the successful Neighborhood Arts Program; and leverage the current 1-2 percent for art fees on various on-site building projects to be directed towards non-construction-site arts activity.

LAND USE, HOUSING AND TENANTS

Background: Since the office market tanked, the big land-use issue has become market-rate housing. San Francisco is building housing for people who don’t live here — in significant part, for either very wealthy people who want a short-term pied a terre in the city or for commuters who work in Silicon Valley. The city’s own General Plan calls for 60 percent of all new housing to be below-market-rate — but the vast majority of the new housing that’s been constructed or is in the planning pipeline is high-end condos.

There’s no connection between the housing needs of city residents and the local workforce and the type of housing that’s being constructed. Family housing is in short supply and rental housing is being destroyed faster than it’s being built — a total of 21,000 rental units have been lost to condos and tenancies in common.

Public housing is getting demolished and rebuilt with 2500 fewer units. “Hotelization” is growing as housing units become transitory housing.

Planning has become an appendage of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, which has no commission, no public hearings and no community oversight.

Projects are getting approved with no connection to schools, transit or affordable housing.

There’s no monitoring of Ellis Act evictions.

Transit-oriented development is a big scam that doesn’t include equity or the needs of people who live in the areas slated for more development. Cities have incentives to create dense housing with no affordability. Communities of concern are right in the path of this “smart growth” — and there are no protections for the people who live there now.

Agenda items:

1. Re emphasize that the Planning Department is the lead land-use approval agency and that the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development should not be used to short-circuit public participation in the process.

2. Enact a freeze on condo conversions and a freeze on the demolition of existing affordable rental housing.

3. Ban evictions if the use or occupation of the property will be for less than 30 days.

4. Index market-rate to affordable housing; slow down one when the other is too far ahead.

5. Disclose what level of permanent affordability is offered at each project.

6. Stabilize existing communities with community benefits agreements before new development is approved.

BUDGET AND SOCIAL SERVICES

Background: There have been profound cuts in the social safety net in San Francisco over the past decade. One third of the city’s shelter beds have been lost; six homeless centers have closed. Homeless mental health and substance abuse services have lost $32 million, and the health system has lost $33 million.

None of the budget proposals coming from the Mayor’s Office have even begun to address restoring the past cuts.

There’s not enough access to primary care for people in Healthy San Francisco.

Nonprofit contracts with the city are flat-funded, so there’s no room for increases in the cost of doing business.

The mayor has all the staff and the supervisors don’t have enough. The supervisors have the ability to add back budget items — but the mayor can then make unilateral cuts.

The wealthy in San Francisco have done very well under the Bush tax cuts and more than 14 billionaires live in this city. The gap between the rich and the poor, which is destroying the national economy, exists in San Francisco, too. But while city officials are taking a national lead on issues like the environment and civil rights, there is virtually no discussion at the policy level of using city policy to bring in revenue from those who can afford it and to equalize the wealth disparities right here in town.

Agenda items:

1. Establish as policy that San Francisco will step in where the state and federal government have left people behind — and that local taxation policy should reflect progressive values.

2. Make budget set-asides a budget floor rather than a percentage of the budget.

3. Examine what top city executives are paid.

4. Promote public power, public broadband and public cable as a way to bring the city millions of dollars.

5. Support progressive taxes that will bring in at least $250 million a year in permanent new revenue.

6. Change the City Charter to eliminate unilateral mid-year cuts by the mayor.

8. Pass a Charter amendment that: (a) Requires the development of a comprehensive long-term plan that sets the policies and strategies to guide the implementation of health and human services for San Francisco’s vulnerable residents over the next 10 years, and (b) creates a planning body with the responsibility and authority to develop the plan, monitor and evaluate its implementation, coordinate between policy makers and departments, and ensure that annual budgets are consistent with the plan.

9. Collect existing money better.

10. Enact a foreclosure transfer tax.

YOUTH, IMMIGRATION, AND EDUCATION

Background: In the past 10 years, San Francisco has lost 24,000 people ages 12-24. Among current youth, 5,800 live in poverty; 6,000 have no high school degree; 7,000 are not working or attending school; 1,200 are on adult probation.

A full 50 percent of public school students are not qualified for college studies. Too often, the outcome is dictated by race; school-to-prison is far too common.

Trust between immigrants and the police is a low point, particularly since former Mayor Gavin Newsom gutted the sanctuary ordinance in 2008 after anti-immigrant stories in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Some 70 percent of students depend on Muni, but the price of a youth pass just went from $10 to $21.

Agenda items:

1. Recognize that there’s a separate role for probation and immigration, and keep local law enforcement from joining or working with immigration enforcement.

2. Improve public transportation for education and prioritize free Muni for youth.

3. Create family-friendly affordable housing.

4. Restore the recreation direction for the Recreation and Parks Department.

5. Implement police training to treat youth with respect.

6. Don’t cut off benefits for youth who commit crimes.

7. Shift state re-alignment money from jails to education.

ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Background: When it comes to land use, the laws on the books are pretty good. The General Plan is a good document. But those laws aren’t enforced. Big projects get changed by the project sponsor after they’re approved.

Land use is really about who will live here and who will vote. But on a policy level, it’s clear that the city doesn’t value the people who currently live here.

Climate change is going to affect San Francisco — people who live near toxic materials are at risk in floods and earthquakes.

San Francisco has a separate but unequal transportation system. Muni is designed to get people downtown, not around town — despite the fact that job growth isn’t happening downtown.

San Francisco has a deepwater port and could be the Silicon Valley of green shipping.

San Francisco has a remarkable opportunity to promote renewable energy, but that will never happen unless the city owns the distribution system.

Agenda items:

1. Promote the rebirth of heavy industry by turning the port into a center for green-shipping retrofits.

2. Public land should be for public benefit, and agencies that own or control that land should work with community-based planning efforts.

3. Planning should be for the community, not developers.

4. Energy efficiency programs should be targeted to disadvantaged communities.

5. Pay attention to the urban food revolution, encourage resident owned farmers markets. Use unused public land for local food and community gardens.

6. Provide complete information on what parts of the city are fill, and stop allowing development in areas that are going to be inundated with sea level rise.

7. Prioritize local distributed generation of electricity and public ownership of the power grid.

8. Change Clean Energy San Francisco from a purchasing pool system to a generating system.

Transportive

Andrew Lam

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September 8, 2011

2

MUSIC One way in which to think about the development of what could now be called “ambient electronic music” is to trace the attempts by musicians who fall under that banner to work against and around time.

Terry Riley’s legendary all night concerts of the late ’60s and early ’70s were enabled by a simple tape delay mechanism he dubbed the “time lag generator,” which repeated and echoed the notes Riley repeatedly sounded whether on organ or saxophone. Brian Eno devised Ambient music as a way to make the passing of “free” time — whether spent (as in Eno’s case) bed-ridden recovering from an injury, or, as with his breakthrough 1978 album Music for Airports (EG), waiting for a departing flight — less noticeable. And experimental duo Coil took things to new extremes when they claimed that the slowly evolving synthesizer drones on their composed-under-the-influence-of-psychedelics 1998 release Time Machines were meant to “dissolve time.”

It is fitting then, that J.D. Emmanuel prefers to be thought of as a time traveler rather than as a musician (the self-designation is practically everywhere you look on his website). There is something undeniably transportive about listening to Emmanuel’s expansive meditations for synthesizer and electronic keyboard. Clusters of notes gradually coalesce and dissolve around a dominant drone. Occasionally, he’ll introduce field recordings of environmental sounds — birds, lapping waves, wind — into the mix, but these serve as compliments to the synthesized elements rather than as sonic footholds of the outside world (the point of Emmanuel’s music isn’t to hold on to anything, but to drift).

But, as is now so often the case, were it not for the Internet (another sort of time machine) far fewer listeners would be drifting along. The three LPs of ambient music that Emmanuel self-released in the early to mid ’80s were long considered grails for private press collectors until a Belgian label did a limited re-release of Wizards, Emmanuel’s second album from 1982, in 2007 (followed by its inevitable distribution on file-sharing networks). A compilation of electronic works from 1979-82 followed in 2009, and last year Important Records re-issued Wizards to a wider audience and much critical acclaim which lead Emmanuel to start playing concerts after a near three-decade hiatus.

His closing night set is undoubtedly one of the anticipated highlights of the 12th annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, whose location at the Brava Theater should provide a comfortable venue for time traveling without moving.

Emmanuel expressly admits that his own musical approach was greatly shaped by listening to Riley and Steve Reich in 1970. Riley, is in many ways, the Kevin Bacon of electronic music, and his name — along with Reich’s and that of their New York minimalist associate LaMonte Young — make up a cannon unto themselves, leading to inevitable comparisons when discussing younger artists working in a similar vein. The appearance at SFEMF by another elder statesman of drone, Bay Area composer Yoshi Wada, who will be performing with his son Tashi Wada (a composer in his own right) actually brings things full circle.

The elder Wada moved to New York in 1967 and got introduced to drone music via Young and later studied with Pandit Pran Nath, the great North Indian singer who was also Young’s teacher at the time. Their influence is audible in the sonorous, shimmering drones heard on EM Records’ steady output of re-issues of Wada’s two official albums and various concert recordings from the ’70s and ’80s. The younger Wada has very much continued to in his father’s footsteps, exploring harmonic overtones and dissonance in his own practice, and their joint headlining performance on Saturday night is bound to be resonant in more ways than one.

12TH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL

Sept. 8-11

Brava Theater

2789 24th St., SF

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 3rd St., SF.

(415) 641-7651

www.sfemf.org

Team Avalos

Andrew Lam

-

September 6, 2011

63

When Supervisor John Avalos chaired the Budget & Finance Committee in 2009 and 2010, his office became a bustling place in the thick of the budget process. To gain insight on the real-life effects of the mayor’s proposed spending cuts, Avalos and his City Hall staff played host to neighborhood service providers, youth workers, homeless advocates, labor leaders, and other San Franciscans who stood to be directly impacted by the axe that would fall when the final budget was approved. They camped out in City Hall together for hours, puzzling over which items they could live without, and which required a steadfast demand for funding restoration.

“One year, we even brought them into the mayor’s office,” for an eleventh-hour negotiating session held in the wee morning hours, recounted Avalos’ legislative aide, Raquel Redondiez. That move came much to the dismay of Steve Kawa, mayoral chief of staff.

Avalos, the 47-year-old District 11 supervisor, exudes a down-to-earth vibe that’s rare in politicians, and tends to display a balanced temperament even in the heat of high-stakes political clashes. He travels to and from mayoral debates by bicycle. He quotes classic song lyrics during full board meetings, keeps a record player and vinyl collection in his office, and recently showed up at the Mission dive bar El Rio to judge a dance competition for the wildly popular Hard French dance party.

Yet casual observers may not be as familiar with the style Avalos brings to conducting day-to-day business at City Hall, an approach exemplified that summer night in 2010 when he showed up to the mayor’s office flanked by grassroots advocates bent on preserving key programs.

“My role is, I’m an insider, … but it’s really been about bringing in the outside to have a voice on the inside,” Avalos said in a recent interview. “People have always been camped out in my office. These are people who represent constituencies — seniors, recipients of mental health care, unions, people concerned about violence. It’s how we change things in City Hall. It’s making government more effective at promoting opportunities, justice, and greater livelihood.” Part of the thrust behind his candidacy, he added, is this: “We want to be able to have a campaign that’s about a movement.”

That makes Avalos different from the other candidates — but it also raises a crucial question. Some of the most important advances in progressive politics in San Francisco have come not just from electoral victories, but from losing campaigns that galvanized the left. Tom Ammiano in 1999 and Matt Gonzalez in 2003 played that role. Can Avalos mount both a winning campaign — and one that, win or lose, will have a lasting impact on the city?

Workers and families

No budget with such deep spending cuts could have left all stakeholders happy once the dust settled, but Avalos and other progressive supervisors did manage to siphon some funding away from the city’s robust police and fire departments in order to restore key programs in a highly controversial move.

“There’s a Johnny Cash song I really like, written by Tom Petty, called ‘I Won’t Back Down.’ I sang it during that time, because I didn’t back down,” Avalos said at an Aug. 30 mayoral forum hosted by the Potrero Hill Democratic Club. “We made … a symbolic cut, showing that there was a real inequity about how we were doing our budgets. Without impacting public safety services, we were able to get $6 million from the Fire Department. A lot of that went into Rec & Park, and health care programs, and to education programs, and we were able to … find more fat in the Police Department budget than anybody had ever found before, about $3 million.”

Last November, Avalos placed a successful measure on the ballot to increase the city’s real-estate transfer tax, which so far has amassed around $45 million in new revenue for city coffers, softening the blow to critical programs in the latest round of budget negotiations. “Without these measures that community groups, residents, and labor organizations worked for, Mayor Ed Lee would not have been able to balance the budget,” Avalos said.

More recently, he emerged as a champion of the city’s Local Hire Ordinance, designed as a tool for job creation that requires employers at new construction projects to select San Francisco residents for half their work crews, to be phased in over the next several years. That landmark legislation was a year in the making, Redondiez said, describing how union representatives, workers, contractors, unemployed residents of Chinatown and the Bayview, and others cycled through Avalos’ City Hall office to provide input.

His collaborative style stems in part from his background. Avalos formerly worked for Service Employees International Union Local 1877, where he organized janitors, and served as political director for Coleman Advocates for Children & Youth. He was also a legislative aide to former District 6 Sup. Chris Daly, who remains a lightning rod in the San Francisco political landscape.

Before wading into the fray of San Francisco politics, Avalos earned a masters degree in social work from San Francisco State University. But when he first arrived in the city in 1989, with few connections and barely any money to his name, he took a gig at a coffee cart. He was a Latino kid originally from Wilmington, Calif. whose dad was a longshoreman and whose mom was an office worker, and he’d endured a climate of discrimination throughout his teenage years at Andover High in Andover, Mass.

Roughly a decade ago, Avalos and a group of youth advocates were arrested in Oakland following a protest against Proposition 21, which increased criminal penalties for crimes committed by youth. Booked into custody along with him was his wife, Karen Zapata, whom he married around the same time. She is now a public school teacher in San Francisco and the mother of their two children, ages 6 and 9, both enrolled in public schools.

“John has consistently been a voice for disenfranchised populations in this city,” said Sharen Hewitt, who’s known Avalos for more than a decade and serves as executive director of The Community Leadership Academy & Emergency Response Project (CLAER), an organization formed to respond to a rash of homicides and alleviate violence. “He understands that San Francisco is at a major turning point in terms of its ability to keep families and low-income communities housed. With the local hiring ordinance, most of us who have been working around violence prevention agree — at the core of this horrible set of symptoms are root causes, stemming from economic disparity.”

Asked about his top priorities, Avalos will invariably express his desire to keep working families rooted in San Francisco. District 11, which spans the Excelsior, Ingleside, and other southeastern neighborhoods, encompasses multiracial neighborhoods made up of single-family homes — and many have been blunted with foreclosure since the onset of the economic crisis.

“Our motto for building housing in San Francisco is we build all this luxury housing — it’s a form of voodoo economics,” Avalos told a small group of supporters at a recent campaign stop in Bernal Heights. “I want to have a new model for how we build housing in San Francisco. How can we help [working-class homeowners] modify their loans to make if more flexible, so they can stay here?” He’s floated the idea of creating an affordable housing bond to aid in the construction of new affordable housing units as well as loan modifications to prevent foreclosures.

“That’s what is the biggest threat to San Francisco, is losing the working-class,” said community activist Giuliana Milanese, who previously worked with Avalos at Coleman Advocates for Youth and has volunteered for his campaign. “And he’s the best fighter. Basically, economic justice is his bottom line.”

Tenants Union director Ted Gullicksen gave Avalos his seal of approval when contacted by the Guardian, saying he has “a 100 percent voting record for tenants,” despite having fewer tenants in his district than some of his colleagues. “David Chiu, had he not voted for Parkmerced, could have been competitive with John,” Gullicksen said. “But the Parkmerced thing was huge, so now it’s very difficult to even have David in same ballpark. Dennis [Herrera] has always taken the right positions — but he’s never had to vote on anything,” he said. “After that, nobody comes close.”

Cash poor, community rich

There’s no question: The Avalos for Mayor campaign faces an uphill climb. Recent poll figures offering an early snapshot of the crowded field peg him at roughly 4 percent, trailing behind candidates with stronger citywide name recognition like City Attorney Dennis Herrera or the incumbent, Mayor Ed Lee, who hasn’t accepted public financing and stands to benefit from deep-pocketed backers with ties to big business.

Yet as Assembly Member Tom Ammiano phrased it, “he’s actually given progressives a place to roost. He doesn’t pussy-foot around on the issues that are important,” making him a natural choice for San Francisco voters who care more about stemming the tides of privatization and gentrification than, say, rolling out the red carpet for hi-tech companies.

One of Avalos’ greatest challenges is that he lacks a pile of campaign cash, having received less than $90,000 in contributions as of June 30, according to an Ethics Commission filing. “He can’t call in the big checks,” said Julian Davis, board president of Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, “because he hasn’t been doing the bidding of big business interests.” A roster of financial contributions filed with the Ethics Commission shows that his donor base is comprised mainly of teachers, nonprofit employees, health-care workers, tenant advocates, and other similar groups, with almost no representatives of real-estate development interests or major corporations.

Despite being strapped for cash, he’s collected endorsements ranging from the Democratic County Central Committee, to the Harvey Milk Democratic Club, to the city’s largest labor union, SEIU 1021; he’s also won the backing of quintessential San Francisco characters such as renowned author Rebecca Solnit; San Francisco’s radical bohemian poet laureate, Diane di Prima; and countercultural icon Diamond Dave.

While some of Avalos’ core supporters describe his campaign as “historic,” other longtime political observers have voiced a sort of disenchantment with his candidacy, saying it doesn’t measure up to the sweeping mobilizations that galvanized around Gonzalez or Ammiano. Ammiano has strongly endorsed Avalos, but Gonzalez — who now works for Public Defender (and mayoral candidate) Jeff Adachi — has remained tepid about his candidacy, stating publicly in an interview on Fog City Journal, “I like [Green Party candidate Terrie Baum] and John fine. I just don’t believe in them.”

Ironically, Sup. Sean Elsbernd, often Avalos’ political opposite on board votes, had kinder words for him. “John is intelligent, John is honest, and John has integrity,” Elsbernd told the Guardian. “I don’t think he knows the city well enough to serve as chief executive … but I’ve seen the good work he’s done in his district.”

Meanwhile, Avalos is still grappling with the fallout from the spending cut he initiated against the police and fire departments in 2009. Whereas those unions sent sound trucks rolling through his neighborhood clamoring for his recall from office during that budget fight, the San Francisco Police Officers Association (SFPOA), the San Francisco Fire Fighters union, and the plumbers’ union, Local 38, have teamed up now that Avalos is running for mayor to form an independent expenditure committee targeting him and Public Defender Jeff Adachi, a latecomer to the race.

“We’ll make sure we do everything we can to make sure he never sees Room 200,” SFPOA President Gary Delagnes told the Guardian. “I would spend as much money as I could possibly summon to make sure neither ever takes office.” Delagnes added that he believes the political makeup of San Francisco is shifting in a more moderate direction, to Avalos’ disadvantage. “People spend a lot of money to live here,” he said, “and they don’t want to be walking over 15 homeless people, or having people ask them for money.”

If it’s true that the flanks of the left in San Francisco have already been supplanted with wealthy residents whose primary concern is that they are annoyed by the sight of destitute people, then more has already been lost for the progressive movement than it stands to lose under the scenario of an Avalos defeat.

The great progressive hope?

Despite these looming challenges, the Avalos campaign has amassed a volunteer base that’s more than 1,000 strong, in many cases drawing from grassroots networks already engaged in efforts to defend tenant rights, advance workplace protections for non-union employees, create youth programs that aim to prevent violence in low-income communities, and advance opportunities for immigrants. According to some volunteers, linking these myriad grassroots efforts is part of the point. Aside from the obvious goal of electing Avalos for mayor, his supporters say they hope his campaign will be a force to re-energize and redefine progressive politics in San Francisco.

“All the candidates that are running are trying to appeal to the progressive base,” Avalos said. But what does it really mean? To him, being progressive “is a commitment to a cause that’s greater,” he offered. “It’s about how to alter the relationship of power in San Francisco. My vision of progressivism is more inclusive, and more accountable to real concerns.”

N’Tanya Lee, former executive director of Coleman Advocates, was among the people Avalos consulted when he was considering a run for mayor. “The real progressives in San Francisco are the folks on the ground every day, like the moms working for public schools … everyday families, individual people, often people of color, who are doing the work without fanfare. They are the unsung heroes … and the rising progressive leaders of our city,” she said. “John represents the best of what’s to come. It’s not just about race or class. It’s about people standing for solutions.”

When deciding whether to run, Avalos also turned to his wife, Zapata, who has held leadership positions in the San Francisco teacher’s union in the past. She suggested rounding up community leaders and talking it through. “The campaign needed to be a movement campaign,” Zapata told the Guardian. “John Avalos was not running because he thought John Avalos was the most important person in the world to do this job. Our question was, if John were to do this, how would it help people most affected by economic injustice?”

Hewitt, the executive director of CLAER, also weighed in. “My concern is that he has been painted as a leftist, rooted in some outdated ideology,” she said. “I think [that characterization] is one-dimensional, and I think he’s broader than that. My perception of John is that he’s a pragmatist — rooted in listening, and attempting to respond.”

Others echoed this characterization. “He doesn’t need to be the great progressive hope,” said Rafael Mandelman, an attorney who ran as a progressive in District 8 last year. “If people are looking for the next Matt Gonzalez, I’m not sure that’s what John is about. He’s about the communities he’s representing.”

As to whether or not he has a shot at victory, Mandelman said, “It’s a very wide field, and I think John is going to have a very strong base. I think he will get enough first-choice votes to be one of the top contenders. And with ranked choice voting, anything can happen.”

Film Listings

Andrew Lam

-

September 6, 2011

0

OPENING

The Apparition Genre-movie vets Ashley Greene and Tom Felton star in this supernatural thriller set on a college campus. (runtime not available)

Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star Comedian Nick Swardson stars as a wannabe porn star in this comedy from the director of The Hot Chick (2002). (runtime not available)

Chasing Madoff Doc about the investigators who brought down the notorious Ponzi scammer. (1:31)

Circumstance Thirteen (2003) goes to Tehran? The world of sex, drugs, and underground nightclubs in Iran provides the backdrop for writer-director Maryam Keshavarz’s lusty, dreamy take on the passionate teenagers behind the hijabs. Risking jail and worse are the sassy, privileged Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and the beautiful, orphaned Shireen (Sarah Kazemy), who, much like young women anywhere, just want to be free — to swim, sing, dance, test boundaries, lose, and then find themselves. The difference here is that they’re under constant, unnerving surveillance, in a country where more than 70 percent of the population is less than 30 years old. Nevertheless, within their mansion walls and without, beneath graffitied walls and undulating at intoxicating house parties, the two girls begin to fall in love with each other, as Atafeh’s handsome, albeit creepy older brother Mehran (Palo Alto-bred Reza Sixo Safai) gazes on. The onetime musical talent’s back from rehab, has returned to the mosque with all the zeal of the prodigal, and has hooked up with the Morality Police that enforces the nation’s cultural laws. Filmed underground in Beirut, with layers that permit both pleasure and protest (wait for the hilarious moment when 2008’s Milk is dubbed in Farsi), Circumstance viscerally transmits the realities and fantasies of Iranian young women on the verge. (1:45) (Chun)

Contagion Steven Soderbergh directs every movie star on the planet (Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, and about 67 others) in this thriller about a worldwide disease epidemic. (1:42)

Creature From Wikipedia: “The group decides to stop at a roadside convenience store owned by Chopper (Sid Haig), who tells them the tale of Lockjaw, a fabled god-like creature who is half-man, half-alligator.” Ergo, this is either gonna be terrible or the greatest movie ever made. (1:33)

Little Rock When the rental car driven by Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka) and Rintaro Sakamato (Rintaro Sawamoto) breaks down in nowheresville, California (actually, a small town called Little Rock), an air of disillusion hangs between the siblings, on vacation to “see America.” Holed up in a motel room, their disappointment is palpable, until a chance encounter with some locals sucks the pair into exurban American life. By the time their car is again roadworthy, Atsuko can’t bear to leave and decides to stay behind as her brother, the only one of the two who speaks a word of English, continues ahead without her. Communication is the driving force behind Little Rock and the language barrier somehow never gets stale; it certainly allows Okatsuka the opportunity for some superb acting. Despite some directorial flourishes (by Mike Ott), however, the story doesn’t really hold many surprises, and its inevitable conclusion is glimpsed long before it’s reached. (1:25) Roxie. (Cooper Berkmoyer)

*Love Crime See “Original Sin.” (1:46)

*The Man Who Fell To Earth See “Roeg, Warrior.” (2:19)

Puzzle A middle-aged housewife finds herself through jigsaw competitions in this Argentina-France co-production. (1:29) SFFS New People Cinema.

Shaolin Jackie Chan and Andy Lau star in Benny Chan’s historical kung fu extravaganza. (2:11) Four Star.

*Warrior Those wondering why the mixed martial arts scene has captured the imagination of so many can finally understand what the fuss is all about, now that it comes filtered through a melodramatic narrative akin to The Fighter (2010). Warrior‘s mis-en-scene is immediately recognizable: a prodigal returns, in the form of Tom Conlon (Tom Hardy). Once a talented teenage wrestler, the now-battered man is the damaged youngest son of alcoholic ex-boxer Paddy Conlon (Nick Nolte). Tom wants his father to train him for a major mixed martial arts tournament with a multimillion-dollar purse, though the two obviously still have a deadly hold on each other — the repentant Paddy is on the wagon and the emotionally bruised Tom harbors secrets he won’t reveal — and battle with cutting comments rather than fists. Tom isn’t the only prodigal in the house: Paddy has lost the trust of Tom’s bro, Brendan (Joel Edgerton), a former fighter and present-day physics high school teacher who’s struggling to make ends meet with an underwater mortgage. Though Warrior is no Raging Bull (1980), it almost outdukes The Fighter in terms of its brutal bouts, conveying the swift, no-holds-barred action of MMA in the ring, while giving actors plenty of drama to wrap their jowls ’round — particularly in Nolte’s case. His tore-up turn as an all-excuses patriarch is as heartbreaking as a solid kick to the jaw. (2:19) (Chun)

ONGOING

Apollo 18 (1:26)

*Beginners There is nothing conventional about Beginners, a film that starts off with the funeral arrangements for one of its central characters. That man is Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) at the ripe age of 75. Through flashbacks, we see the relationship play out — Oliver’s inability to commit tempered by his father’s tremendous late-stage passion for life. Hal himself is a rare character: an elderly gay man, secure in his sexuality and, by his own admission, horny. He even has a much younger boyfriend, played by the handsome Goran Visnjic. While the father-son bond is the heart of Beginners, we also see the charming development of a relationship between Oliver and French actor Anna (Mélanie Laurent). It all comes together beautifully in a film that is bittersweet but ultimately satisfying. Beginners deserves praise not only for telling a story too often left untold, but for doing so with grace and a refreshing sense of whimsy. (1:44) (Peitzman)

*Bellflower Picture Two Lane Blacktop (1971) drifters armed with “dude”-centric vocabulary and an obsession with The Road Warrior (1981) and its apocalypse-wow survivalist chic. There are so many pleasures in this janky, so-very-DIY, heavy-on-the-sunblasted-atmosphere indie that you’re almost willing to overlook the clichés, the dead zones, and the annoying characters. Seeming every-dudes Woodrow (director-writer-producer Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are far too obsessed with tricking out their cars and building a flamethrower for their own good — the misfits must force themselves out of the metal shop of the mind to meet women. So when Woodrow goes up against Milly (Jessie Wiseman) in a cricket-eating contest at a bar, it’s love at first bite. Their meet-gross morphs into a road trip and eventually a relationship, while the flamethrower nags, unexplained, in the background, like an unfired gun — or an unconsummated, not-funny bromance. These manifestations of male fantasy — muscle cars, weapons, and tough chicks — are cast in a dreamy, saturated, and burnt-at-the-edges light, as Glodell and company weave together barely articulated reveries and bad-new-west imagery with a kind of fuck-all intelligence, culminating in a finale that will either haunt you with its scattershot machismo-romanticism or leave you scratching your noggin wondering what just happened. (1:46) (Chun)

Brighton Rock Writer Rowan Joffe (2010’s The American) moves into the director’s chair for this Graham Greene adaptation, previously filmed in 1947 with an early-career star turn by Richard Attenborough. Joffe’s version updates Greene’s 1938 story to 1964, allowing the brutal actions of small-time hood Pinkie Brown to unfold as Britain’s mods vs. rockers youth riots boil in the background. Don’t get too excited, though — despite a cool premise and even cooler setting, and the presence of veterans Helen Mirren and John Hurt in supporting roles, Brighton Rock rages without a rudder. Pinkie is played by Sam Riley (so good as Ian Curtis in 2007’s Control), who snarls like a sociopathic James Dean and is so transparently hateful it’s hard to root for anything other than his hastened demise. Brighton Rock‘s most memorable element is probably Andrea Riseborough, an on-the-verge young Brit who’s being touted as the next Carey Mulligan. She has the thankless (yet showy) role of Rose, a naïve waitress who becomes entangled in Pinkie’s web after being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A far-from-storybook ending awaits, and you’ll experience little enjoyment watching the characters claw their way there. (1:51) (Eddy)

Buck This documentary paints a portrait of horse trainer Buck Brannaman as a sort of modern-day sage, a sentimental cowboy who helps “horses with people problems.” Brannaman has transcended a background of hardship and abuse to become a happy family man who makes a difference for horses and their owners all over the country with his unconventional, humane colt-starting clinics. Though he doesn’t actually whisper to horses, he served as an advisor and inspiration for Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998). Director Cindy Meehl focuses generously on her saintly subject’s bits of wisdom in and out of a horse-training setting — e.g. “Everything you do with a horse is a dance” — as well as heartfelt commentary from friends and colleagues. In the harrowing final act of the film, Brannaman deals with a particularly unruly horse and his troubled owner, highlighting the dire and disturbing consequences of improper horse rearing. (1:28) (Sam Stander)

Captain America: The First Avenger OK, Marvel. I could get behind 2008’s Iron Man (last year’s Iron Man 2, not so much), but after Thor and now Captain America, I’m starting to get cynical about this multi-year build-up to the full-on Avengers movie, due in May 2012. Can even a superhero-stuffed movie directed by Joss Whedon live up to all this hype? There’s plenty of time to ponder, and maybe worry a little, with Captain America’s backstory-explaining picture now in theaters. Chris Evans stars as the 90-pound weakling who morphs into a supersoldier, thanks to the World War II-era tinkerings of a scientist (Stanley Tucci) and an inventor (Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man’s dad). The original plan for the musclebound shield-bearer (fighting Nazis, natch) gets waylaid a bit when the newly famous Captain America becomes a PR prop for the U.S. government; it’s abandoned entirely when a worse-than-Hitler foe, in the guise of power-obsessed Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), threatens the world. Directed by Spielberg cohort Joe Johnston, Captain America is gee-whiz enjoyable enough, but it’s very nearly the same movie as Thor, which no amount of Tommy Lee Jones (as a sarcastic army colonel) wisecracks can conceal. And here’s an anti-spoiler: there’s no post-credits surprise in this one, so you can bolt as soon as they start to roll. (2:09) (Eddy)

Colombiana (1:47)

Conan the Barbarian Neither 3D (unnecessary) nor Game of Thrones‘ Jason Momoa (beefcake-y) are enough to make this Conan the Barbarian competition for the 1982 Schwarzenegger classic. This new take is a barely adequate adventure movie helped along by Rose McGowan’s leering turn as an evil witch with Freddy Krueger claws. Would that everyone involved (including frequent remake director Marcus Nispel) had McGowan’s razor-sharp grasp of tone; as a whole, the film is never quite sure if it’s a camp-tastic voyage (the prologue, containing Conan’s birth and much Ron Perlman nostril-flaring, suggests what might have been) or a semi-straightforward fantasy actioner. A totally forgettable female lead (Rachel Nichols), a he-was-scarier-in-Avatar villain (Stephen Lang), a blah mixture of two tired plots (revenge + “chosen one”) — there’s just not a lot here, aside from a few hilarious lines of dialogue and Momoa’s muscles. He was so great in Game of Thrones, though, I suspect this dud won’t keep his career from skyrocketing. (1:42) (Eddy)

Cowboys and Aliens Here ’tis in a nutshell: the movie’s called Cowboys and Aliens — and that’s exactly, entirely what you’ll get. Director Jon Favreau may never best 2008’s Iron Man (actor Jon Favreau will prob never top 1996’s Swingers, but that’s a debate for another time), but that doesn’t mean he won’t have a good time trying. Cowboys is a genre mash-up in the most literal sense; as the title suggests, it pits Wild West gunslingers (Harrison Ford as a crabby cattleman, Daniel Craig as an amnesiac outlaw) against gold-seeking space invaders who also delight in kidnapping and torturing humans. As stupidly entertaining as it is, this is a textbook example of a pretty OK movie that could have been so much better … if only. If only the alien characters had a little bit more District 9-style personality. If only the story had a shred of suspense — look ye not here for “spooky” and “mysterious;” this shit is 100 percent full-on explosions. If only Craig’s comically fine-tooled physique didn’t outshine his wooden acting. And so forth. (1:58) (Eddy)

Crazy, Stupid, Love Keep the poster’s allusion to 1967’s The Graduate to one side: there aren’t many revelations about midlife crises in this cleverly penned yet strangely flat ensemble rom-com, awkwardly pitched at almost every demographic at the cineplex. There’s the middle-aged romance that’s withered at the vine: nice but boring family man Cal (Steve Carell) finds himself at a hopeless loss when wife and onetime teenage sweetheart Emily (Julianne Moore) tells him she wants a divorce and she’s slept with a coworker (Kevin Bacon). He ends up waxing pathetic at a slick nightclub where he catches the eye of the well-dressed, spray-tanned smoothie Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who appears to have taken his ladies man stance from the Clooney playbook. It’s manly makeover time: GQ meets Pretty Woman (1990)! Cut to Cal and Emily’s babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), who is crushing out on Cal, while the separated couple’s tween Robbie (Jonah Bobo) hankers for Jessica. Somehow Josh Groban worms his way into the mix as the dullard suitor of Hannah (Emma Stone) in a hanging chad of a storyline that must somehow be resolved in this mad, mad, mad, mad — actually, the problem with Crazy, Stupid, Love is that it isn’t really that crazy. It tries far too hard to please everybody in the theater to its detriment, reminding the viewer of a tidy, episodic TV series (albeit a quality effort) like Modern Family more than an actual film. Likewise I yearned for a way to fast-forward through the too-cute Jessica-Robbie scenes in order to get back to the sleazy-smart, punchy complexity of Gosling, playing adeptly off both Carrell and Stone. (1:58) (Chun)

The Debt On paper, The Debt has a lot going for it: captivating history-based plot, “it” actor Jessica Chastain, Helen Mirren vs. Nazis. And while the latest from John Madden (1998’s Shakespeare in Love) is fairly entertaining, the film is ultimately forgettable. Chastain plays Rachel, a member of an Israeli team tasked with capturing a Nazi war criminal and bringing him to justice. Mirren is the older Rachel, who is haunted by the long-withheld true story of the mission. Although The Debt traffics in spy secrets, it’s actually rather predictable: the big reveal is shrug-worthy, and the shocking conclusion is expected. So while the entire cast — which also includes Tom Wilkinson, Sam Worthington, and Ciaran Hinds — turn in admirable performances, the script is lacking what it needs to make The Debt an effective drama or thriller. Like 2008’s overrated The Reader, the film tries to hide its inadequacies under heavy themes and the dread with which we remember the Holocaust. (1:54) (Peitzman)

The Devil’s Double Say hello to my little friend, again— and rest assured, it’s not a dream and you’re seeing double. New Zealand filmmaker Lee Tamahori gets back to his potboiler roots with this campy, claustrophobic look back at the House of Saddam Hussein, based on a true story and designed to win over fans of Scarface (1983) with its portrait of mad excess and deca-dancey ’80s-ish soundtrack. The craziest poseur of all is Hussein’s son Uday (Dominic Cooper), a petty dictator-in-the-making — and, according to this film, a full-fledged murderous pedophile — who chomps cigars and wraps his jaws around schoolgirls while Cooper happily chews scenery. Uday needs a double to sidestep all those troublesome assassination attempts, so he enlists look-alike childhood friend Latif (also Cooper) to get the surgery, pop in the overbite, bray like a madman, make appearances in his stead, and function as a kind of pet human. Never mind Ludivine Sagnier, glassy-eyed and absurd in the role of Uday’s favorite sex kitten Sarrab — Double is completely Cooper’s, who seizes the moment, investing the morally upstanding Latif with a serious sincerity with just his eyes and body language and infusing evil odd job Uday with a dangerous, comic-book unpredictability. To his credit, Cooper imbues such cult-ready, blow-the-doors-off lines as “I love cunt! I love cunt more than god!” with, erm, believability, even as the denouement rings somewhat false. (1:48) (Chun)

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark If you’re expecting a traditional haunted house story, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark might be a disappointment. The film, which was co-written by Guillermo del Toro, has a lot in common with his Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) — both movies are more dark fairy tale than horror. They follow a young girl who discovers a mystical world around her, much to the disbelief of the adults around her. It’s worth noting that Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is lighter fare: despite all the peril involved, it’s actually pretty fun. Young Bailee Madison, who made such an impression in 2009’s Brothers, is a charming lead, precocious but believable. And Katie Holmes is surprisingly sympathetic in her role as the caring stepmother, a nice switch from the standard fairy tale trope. As with Fright Night, the ad campaign for Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is misleading, so here’s hoping audience members looking for a gory slasher will appreciate a whimsical fable instead. (1:40) (Peitzman)

Fright Night Don’t let the spooky trailer fool you: the Fright Night remake is almost as silly as the original. In fact, it follows the 1985 film closely, as young Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) comes to realize that his neighbor Jerry (Colin Farrell) is a vampire. The biggest change is a smart one — this Fright Night transforms late-night TV host Peter Vincent into Criss Angel-type illusionist Peter Vincent (David Tennant). The casting is spot on all-around, and frankly, Farrell is a lot more believable than Chris Sarandon as the seductive bad boy. The only real problem with the new Fright Night — other than the unnecessary 3D — is that it never fully commits to camp the way the original did. There’s a bit too much back-and-forth between serious scares and goofy blood splatters. Luckily, it’s still an entertaining remake that doesn’t crap all over a classic. It’s also a great reminder that vampires don’t have to be moody — remember, they used to be fun. (2:00) (Peitzman)

*The Future Dreams and drawings, cats and fantasies, ambition and aimlessness, and the mild-mannered yet mortifying games people play, all wind their way into Miranda July’s The Future. The future’s a scary place, as many of us fully realize, even if you hide from it well into your 30s, losing yourself in the everyday. But you can’t duck July’s collection of moments, objects, and small gestures transformed into something strangely slanted and enchanted, both weird and terrifying, when viewed through July’s looking glass. Care and commitment — to oneself and others — are two vivid threads running through The Future. Cute couple Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) — unsettling look-alikes with their curly crops — appear at first to be sailing contently, aimlessly toward an undemanding unknown: Jason works from home as a customer-service operator, and Sophie attempts to herd kiddies as a children’s dance instructor. But enormous, frightening demands beckon — namely the oncoming adoption of a special-needs feline named Paw-Paw (voiced by July as if it’s a traumatized, innocent child). Lickety-splitsville, they must be all they can be before Paw-Paw’s arrival. The weirdness of the familiar, and the kindness of strangers, become ways into fantasy and escape when the couple bumps up against the limits of their imagination. This ultra-low-key horror movie of the banal is obviously remote territory for July (2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know). The Future is her best film to date and finds her tumbling into a kind of magical realism or plastic fantastic, embodied by a talking cat that becomes the conscience of the movie. (1:31) (Chun)

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (1:35)

The Guard Irish police sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) is used to running his small town on his own terms — not in a completely Bad Lieutenant (1992) kind of way, though he’s not afraid to sample drugs and hang with hookers. More like, he’s been running the show for years, and would prefer that big-city cops stay the hell out of his village. Alas, a gang of drug smugglers is doing business in the area, so an officious group of investigators from Dublin (horrors!) and America (in the form of an FBI agent played by Don Cheadle) soon descend. His mother’s dying, his brand-new partner’s missing, and between all the interlopers on both sides of the law, Boyle’s having a hard time having a pint in peace. Good thing he’s not as simple-minded as all who surround him think he is. Writer-director John Michael McDonagh (brother of playwright Martin, who directed 2008’s In Bruges — also starring Gleeson) puts an affable Irish spin on what’s essentially a pretty typical indie comedy, with some pretty typical crime-drama elements layered atop. Boyle’s character is memorably clever, but the film that contains him never quite elevates to his level. (1:36) (Eddy)

Gun Hill Road Though the visibility of gays and lesbians in cinema remains (largely) confined to independent film, Rashaad Ernesto Green, in his debut feature Gun Hill Road, uses the creative freedom afforded by that closeting to explore issues of race and confused sexuality amid the Latino population of the Bronx. Esai Morales is Enrique, a former drug dealer returning from prison to his wife Angela (Judy Reyes) and teenage son Michael (Harmony Santana). But everyone seems to have moved on with their lives. Angela is having an affair, and Michael has created a new persona, Vanessa. Green’s film focuses on the relationship between the damaged Enrique and Michael, whose cross-dressing and budding transsexuality puts the family members at odds. Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and an entry in this year’s Frameline Film Festival, Gun Hill Road is one in a recent spate of films that deals with coming out in an urban setting. Like Green’s film, Peter Bratt’s La Mission (2009) offered a picture of homophobia in the Latino community. But Gun Hill Road, despite its bulging dramatic heft, shirks the after-school-special formula of La Mission by imagining complex characters rather than hewing them from instantly recognizable, sympathetic archetypes. (1:28) (Ryan Lattanzio)

*Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 Chances are you aren’t going to jump into the Harry Potter series with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. So while the movie is probably the best Harry Potter film yet, it’s more a fitting conclusion than a standalone film. For fans of the books, there are no real surprises — this is a close adaptation. And for those Harry Potter movie fans who haven’t read the books, shame on you, and kudos if you managed to not get spoiled. It’s hard for me to offer a serious critical analysis of Part 2, because it represents the end of a long and very emotional journey. (Everyone in that audience was crying. Everyone.) I will say that, as was the case in the book, there are a few overdone, schmaltzy moments that aren’t really necessary. But in the context of the series, they’re forgivable — this may not be the great cinematic event of our generation, but Harry Potter as a whole is sure to be one of our most enduring cultural icons. (2:10) (Peitzman)

*The Hedgehog You needn’t possess the rough, everyday refinement of the characters of The Hedgehog to appreciate this debut feature by director-screenwriter Mona Achache — just an appreciation for a delicate touch and a tender heart. Eleven-year-old Paloma (the wonderful Garance Le Guillermic) is too smart for her own good, bored, neglected by her parents, and left to fend for herself with only her considerable imagination and a camcorder. She drifts around her fishbowl of privilege, a deluxe art nouveau-style apartment building in Paris, leveling her all-too-wise gaze on its denizens and plotting certain suicide on her 12th birthday — that is until a new resident appears in her viewfinder: a kindly Japanese gentleman Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa). He has as much of a connoisseur’s eye as Paloma — the proof is in his unlikely focus of attention, the building’s concierge Renée Michel (Josiane Balasko, resembling a burly Gertrude Stein), who hides her cultured and bookish inclinations behind a gruff, drab exterior. They recognize in each other a reverence for an almost monkish life of the mind, the austere elegance of wabi-sabi, and the transient beauty of rough-hewn imperfection, even in the sleek, well-heeled heart of the City of Light. To the credit of Achache, working with Muriel Barbery’s novel, these unlikely fragile friendships between outsiders take hold in a way that sidesteps preciousness and stays with you long after its pages have turned. (1:40) Smith Rafael. (Chun)

The Help It’s tough to stitch ‘n’ bitch ‘n’ moan in the face of such heart-felt female bonding, even after you brush away the tears away and wonder why the so-called help’s stories needed to be cobbled with those of the creamy-skinned daughters of privilege that employed them. The Help purports to be the tale of the 1960s African American maids hired by a bourgie segment of Southern womanhood — resourceful hard-workers like Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) raise their employers’ daughters, filling them with pride and strength if they do their job well, while missing out on their own kids’ childhood. Then those daughters turn around and hurt their caretakers, often treating them little better than the slaves their families once owned. Hinging on a self-hatred that devalues the nurturing, housekeeping skills that were considered women’s birthright, this unending ugly, heartbreaking story of the everyday injustices spells separate-and-unequal bathrooms for the family and their help when it comes to certain sniping queen bees like Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard). But the times they are a-changing, and the help get an assist from ugly duckling of a writer Skeeter (Emma Stone, playing against type, sort of, with fizzy hair), who risks social ostracism to get the housekeepers’ experiences down on paper, amid the Junior League gossip girls and the seismic shifts coming in the civil rights-era South. Based on the best-seller by Kathryn Stockett, The Help hitches the fortunes of two forces together — the African American women who are trying to survive and find respect, and the white women who have to define themselves as more than dependent breeders — under the banner of a feel-good weepie, though not without its guilty shadings, from the way the pale-faced ladies already have a jump, in so many ways, on their African American sisters to the Keane-eyed meekness of Davis’ Aibileen to The Help‘s most memorable performances, which are also tellingly throwback (Howard’s stinging hornet of a Southern belle and Jessica Chastain’s white-trash bimbo-with-a-heart-of-gold). (2:17) (Chun)

*Higher Ground Higher Ground does not bite off more than it can chew. I guess that should go without saying, but it’s striking how comfortably Vera Farmiga (in her directorial debut) tackles this story of devotion and doubt. Based on the memoirs of Carolyn S. Briggs, who co-wrote the screenplay, this deeply personal film follows Corrine Walker (Vera Farmiga) from her adolescence through the trials of youth and middle age, her marriage to high school sweetheart Ethan (Joshua Leonard), and their lives as members of a small hippie Christian community. Although religion serves as a backdrop for Higher Ground, it doesn’t suffocate the human element of the story; it’s less a film about Christianity than it is about the challenges one woman faces as she tries to find room for herself amidst faith. Farmiga treats her subjects with empathy and humor and crafts a thoughtful, tender slice of sixties Midwest Americana. (1:49) (Cooper Berkmoyer)

*The Interrupters With concern from society and government as a whole at low ebb, communities at greater risk of violence from within than ever have had to come up with their own peace-making solutions. The Interrupters, the latest documentary by Steve James (1994’s Hoop Dreams), shows dedicated efforts to help one of the nation’s worst centers of such bloodshed: Chicago. “Violence is like the great infectious diseases of all history,” says epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, in that it can be stopped from spreading to epidemic proportions by numerous “initial interruption(s) of transmission” at its source. He translated that perspective into the founding of CeaseFire, an organization that doesn’t aim to summarily end the existence of gangs and drug trade. Instead, its plain but hardly simple mission is to stop the shootings, stabbings, etc. which are exacerbated by unemployment, broken families, and other sources of stress whose cumulative effect can rapidly escalate a casual dis to a mortal confrontation. Under CeaseFire’s auspices, Tio Hardiman created the Violence Interrupters program, which drafts people from the community — many former gangbangers themselves — as mediators wading into conflicts to defuse them before things get out of hand. It takes considerable will and nerves of steel; “interrupters” have been shot at, and during the course of this documentary’s year-long span one volunteer lands in the hospital for his trouble. But The Interrupters makes a powerful case against the inevitability of hopelessness turning into violence. (2:05) (Harvey)

*Love Exposure Sion Sono’s Love Exposure opens with the claim that it’s “based on a true event,” which is no doubt its first joke. After the death of his saintly mother, youthful protagonist Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) adapts to the adoption of the priesthood by his father (Atsuro Watabe), though it’s harder to accept the eventual intrusion of an insanely needy new parishioner (a memorable Makiko Watanabe), a crackhead-acting real-life succubus who swiftly destroys dad’s faith and vocation. As a result Yu falls in with a bad crowd, becoming its Jesus in a weird pseudo spiritual observance of taking “peek-a-boo panty photos” while remaining otherwise chaste in anticipation of meeting his own personal Madonna — Holy Virgin and Ciccone personae inclusive. High school heartache, martial arts, Ravel’s Boléro, female impersonation, and the insidious manipulations of an agent (Sakura Ando) from the mysterious, Scientology-like Zero Church all factor prominently in a careening story whose takes on religion, sin, and redemption are nothing if not antic. Just what Sono is saying, however, tends to get lost in the blur. Exposure‘s sheer onslaught, not to mention its scale, have made bowled-over converts out of many viewers. Whether its crazy quilt requires 237 minutes, or 90, or 900 for that matter, is an open question — is the writer-director really going somewhere here, or just going and going and going? (3:57) Roxie. (Harvey)

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed “Hollywood hack” visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) (Harvey)

Motherland When Raffi Tang (Francoise Yip) learns of her estranged mother’s death, the prodigal-daughter returns to her hometown, San Francisco, only to discover that nothing is as first supposed. Forced to contend with the protracted legal battle between her late mother and re-married father (Kenneth Tsang) as well as an incompetent (and poorly acted) police detective (Jason Payne), Tang drifts, looking distracted, lost, and maybe vaguely concerned throughout the first two thirds of the film. Yip does little to enliven a flat script rife with stock phrases and worn cinematic conventions, and while her emotional distance seems genuine, it’s boring nonetheless. Motherland is, to its credit, an angry movie — director Doris Yeung drew on her own experience with the murder of her mother — but the rage fizzles when it finally does erupt, smothered by uninspired acting and a directionless screenplay. (1:33) (Berkmoyer)

*My Perestroika Robin Hessman’s very engaging documentary takes one very relatable look at how changes since glasnost have affected some average Russians. The subjects here are five thirtysomethings who, growing up in Moscow in the 70s and 80s, were the last generation to experience full-on Communist Party indoctrination. But just as they reached adulthood, the whole system dissolved, confusing long-held beliefs and variably impacting their futures. Andrei has ridden the capitalist choo-choo to considerable enrichment as the proprietor of luxury Western menswear shops. But single mother Olga, unlucky in love, just scrapes by, while married schoolteachers Lyuba and Boris are lucky to have inherited an apartment (cramped as it is) they could otherwise ill afford. Meanwhile Ruslan, once member of a famous punk band (which he abandoned on principal because it was getting “too commercial”), both disdains and resents the new order just as he did the old one. Home movies and old footage of pageantry celebrating Soviet socialist glory make a whole ‘nother era come to life in this intimate, unexpectedly charming portrait of its long-term aftermath. (1:27) Balboa. (Harvey)

*The Names of Love Arthur (Jacques Gamblin) is a 40-ish scientist being interviewed about the threat of a bird flu epidemic when his radio broadcast is interrupted by 20-something Baya (Sara Forestier), who denounces him on-air as a “fascist” for frightening the public. But then, Baya tends to use that label rather indiscriminately, applying it to anyone who might conceivably have views to the right of the dial — and Arthur is in fact a solid liberal, which means she can bed him for love. As opposed to the many, many other men she beds as a self-described “political whore,” seeking out conservative types in order to seduce them and hopefully induce an idealogical shift by whispering sweet nothings (“Not all Arabs are thieves,” etc.) as they orgasm. Raised by parents whose emotions are so tightly wound his mother won’t acknowledge her parents were Jews killed at Auschwitz, Arthur has a hard time adjusting to a relationship with a lover who is faithful emotionally but sees promiscuity as her propagandic gift to the world. Meanwhile Baya’s largely Algerian family treats garrulous political argument as the very air they breathe. This odd-couple story written by Baya Kasmi and director Michel Leclerc deals with serious issues in both humorous and respectful fashion, making for one of the more novel, delightful and depthed French romantic comedies in a long time. Added plus: lots of antic gratuitous nudity. (1:42) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*One Day Why do romantic comedies get such a bad rap? Blame it on the lame set-up, the contrived hurdles artificially buttressed by the obligatory chorus of BFFs, the superficial something-for-every-demographic-with-ADD multinarrative, and the implausible resolutions topped by something as simple as a kiss or as conventional as marriage, but often no deeper, more crafted, or heartfelt than an application of lip gloss. Yet the lite-as-froyo pleasures of the genre don’t daunt Danish director Lone Scherfig, best known for her deft touch with a woman’s story that cuts closer to the bone, with 2009’s An Education. Her new film, One Day, based on the best-selling novel by David Nicholls, flirts with the rom-com form — from the kitsch associations with Same Time, Next Year (1978) to the trailer that hangs its love story on a crush — but musters emotional heft through its accumulation of period details, a latticework of flashbacks, and collection of encounters between its charming protagonists: upper-crusty TV presenter Dexter (Jim Sturgess) and working-class aspiring writer Emma (Anne Hathaway). Their quickie university friendship slowly unfolds, as they meet every St. Swithin’s Day, July 15, over a span of years, into the most important relationship of their lives. Despite the blue-collar female lead and UK backdrop that it shares with An Education, One Day feels like a departure for Scherfig, who first found international attention for her award-winning Dogme 95-affiliated Italian for Beginners (2000). (1:48) (Chun)

*Our Idiot Brother If you thought 1998’s The Big Lebowski had eked all the humor that it could from the Dude, well, screenwriter (and Vanity Fair contributor) Evgenia Peretz, her not-so-idiotic brother (director Jesse Peretz), and star Paul Rudd would differ. They correctly guessed that there are still laughs to be wrung from a shaggy stoner in floral jams, only this time with less fuuuck-s and more benevolent, idiot-savant good vibrations. Dazed and confused broheim 2.0 (Rudd) is glimpsed through the jaded, harried prism of his three dysfunctional, supposedly normal sisters: frumpadelic mom Liz (Emily Mortimer), queen-bitch Vanity Fair writer Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), and slatternly would-be comedian Natalie (Zooey Deschanel). A good-hearted naïf who’s easily entrapped by a uniformed police officer claiming to need some pity doobage, Ned has just emerged from the joint and is now couch-surfing among his sibs, exposing the hypocrisies of bourgie-hipster Brooklyn, as well as the infidelities and vanities of family, friends, and partners (Steve Coogan, Rashida Jones, Adam Scott, and Hugh Dancy) as he goes, in his own good-natured, aw-shucks way. As innocuous (and desexualized) as Andy Griffith beneath the hippie trappings, this dude-with-a-little-d knows where his real family is — with his dog, Willie Nelson, who loves him just as unconditionally. Beastie besties have never seemed so innocent as they are in this proudly feel-good comedy, and despite a cringe-y, saccharine soundtrack and lackadaisical pacing, Rudd’s charismatic sunny slacker and some pointed jabs at the follies of the cooler-than-thou save this indie-that-could. (1:36) (Chun)

*Point Blank Not for nothing did Hollywood remake French filmmaker Fred Cavaye’s last film, Anything for Her (2008) as The Next Three Days (2010) — Cavaye’s latest, tauter-than-taut thriller almost screams out for a similar rework, with its Bourne-like handheld camera work, high-impact immediacy, and noirish narrative economy. Point Blank — not to be confused with the 1967 Lee Marvin vehicle —kicks off with a literal slam: a mystery man (Roschdy Zem) crashing into a metal barrier, on the run from two menacing figures until he is cornered and then taken out of the action by fate. His mind mainly on the welfare of his very pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya), nursing assistant Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) has the bad luck to stumble on a faux doctor attempting to make sure that the injured man never rises from his hospital bed. As police wrangle over whose case this exactly is — the murder of an industrialist seems to have expanded the powers of the stony-faced, monolithic Commandant Werner (Gerard Lanvin) — Samuel gets sucked into the mystery man’s lot, a conspiracy that allows them to trust no one, and seemingly impossibly odds against getting out of the mess alive. Cavaye never quite stops applying the pressure in this clever, unrelenting cat-and-mouse and mouse-and-his-spouse game, topping it with a nerve-jangling search through a messily chaotic police station. (1:24) (Chun)

*Rise of the Planet of the Apes “You gotta love a movie where the animals beat up on the humans,” declared my Rise of the Planet of the Apes companion. Indeed, ape must not kill ape, and this Planet of the Apes prequel-cum-remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) takes the long view, back to the days when ape-human relations were still high-minded enough to forbid smart apes from killing those well-armed, not-so-bright humanoids. I was a fan of the original series, but honestly, I approached Rise with trepidation: I dreaded the inevitable scenes of human cruelty meted out to exploited primates — the current wave of chimp-driven films seems focused on holding a scary, shaming mirror up to the two-legged mammalian violence toward their closest living genetic relatives. It’s a contrast to the original series, which provided prisms with which to peer at race relations and generational conflict. But I needn’t have feared this PG-13 “reboot.” There’s little CGI-driven gore, apart from the visceral opening and the showdown, though the heartbreak remains. Scientist Will (James Franco, brow perpetually furrowed with worry) is working to find a medicine designed to supercharge the brain in the wake of Alzheimer’s — a disease that has struck down his father (John Lithgow). When the experimental chimp that responds to his serum becomes violently aggressive, the project is shut down, although the primate leaves behind a surprise: a baby chimp that Will and his father name Caesar and raise like a beloved child in their idyllic Bay Area Victorian. Growing in intelligence as he matures, Caesar finds himself torn by an existential dilemma: is he a pet or a mammal with rights that must be respected? Rise becomes Caesar’s story, rendered in heart-wrenching, exhilarating ways — to director Rupert Wyatt and his team’s credit you don’t miss the performance finesse of Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter in groundbreaking prosthetic ape face in the original movies — while resolving at least one question about why humans gave up the globe to the primates. One can only imagine the next edition will take care of the lingering question about how even the cleverest of apes will feed themselves in Muir Woods. (1:50) (Chun)

Sarah’s Key (1:42)

*Senna When Ayrton Senna died in 1994 at the age of 34, he had already secured his legacy as one of the greatest and most beloved Formula One racers of all time. The three-time world champion was a hero in his native Brazil and a respected and feared opponent on the track. This eponymous documentary by director Asif Kapadia is nearly as dynamic as the man himself, with more than enough revving engines and last minute passes to satisfy your lust for speed and a decent helping Ayrton’s famous personality as well. Senna was a champion, driven to win even as the sometimes-backhanded politics of the racing world stood in his way. A tragic figure, maybe, but a legend nonetheless. You don’t have to be an F1 fan to appreciate this film, but you may wind up one by the time the credits roll. (1:44) Smith Rafael. (Berkmoyer)

Seven Days in Utopia (1:38)

Shark Night 3D (1:31)

Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness This documentary cuts to the chase right at the beginning: yeah, Sholem Aleichem was the guy who wrote the Tevye stories that inspired Fiddler on the Roof. But filmmaker Joseph Dorman isn’t trying to make Fiddler: Behind the Musical. Instead, he takes an in-depth look at the life, writing career, and cultural significance of “one of the great modern Jewish writers — and our greatest Yiddish writer,” per the film’s press notes. Fans of Jewish lit will be particularly engaged by Sholem Aleichem’s tale; raised in a shtetl in what’s now the Ukraine, he moved around Europe and to the United States pursuing various careers, but always writing the popular stories that addressed not just Jewish life, but broader issues facing turn-of-the-last-century Jews, including the cross-generational conflicts that make up much of Fiddler‘s plot and humor. That said, this film does rely an awful lot on PBS-style slow pans over black-and-white photos and intellectual talking heads; one suspects the subject himself (so devoted was he to entertaining the regular folk who gobbled up his tales) would’ve preferred his life story to unfold in a livelier fashion. (1:33) (Eddy)

*Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure Once upon a time (1987 to be exact), two young men moved to San Francisco from the Midwest. Eddie Lee “Sausage” and Mitchell “Mitch D” Deprey wound up living in a somewhat derelict apartment in the Lower Haight. The paint was peeling and the walls were thin, but the rent was cheap. What Eddie and Mitch didn’t count on was having Peter J. Haskett and Raymond Huffman as their neighbors. “You blind cocksucker. You wanna fuck with me? You try to touch me and I will kill you in a fucking minute.” “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up little man!” The insults, tantrum throwing, and threats of violence coming from next door were constant. Eddie and Mitch started to lose sleep; after one failed attempt at complaining to Raymond’s face (he threatened death), they started tape-recording the endless geyser of vitriol — first, as possible future evidence, but also out of a growing voyeuristic fascination with these two seniors who had to be the world’s oddest and angriest odd couple. The rest is history. Mitch and Eddie started including snippets of Peter and Ray’s bickering on mix tapes for friends. Somehow, the editor of the now-defunct SF noise music zine Bananafish heard a snippet and approached Mitch and Eddie about distributing compilations of the recordings to a large network of found sound fans. Gradually “Peter and Raymond” became known and much-beloved characters. Their warped repartee inspired several theatrical adaptations, short animated films, pages of comic book panels by artists such as Dan Clowes, and even a one-off single from Devo side project the Wipeouters. Matthew Bate’s documentary Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure is much an attempt to comprehensively recount the above long, strange trip from start to finish; it is also the newest chapter in the now 20-year saga of Peter, Raymond, Mitch, and Eddie. (1:30) Roxie. (Sussman)

30 Minutes or Less In some ways, 30 Minutes or Less is reminiscent of 2008’s Pineapple Express: both are stoner action comedies about normal people shoved into high-stakes criminal activity. But while Pineapple Express was an exciting addition to the genre, 30 Minutes or Less is a flimsy 80-minute diversion that still feels like a waste of time. Jesse Eisenberg plays Nick, a pizza delivery boy who is forced to rob a bank after two would-be criminals strap a bomb to his chest. Strangely, Eisenberg was more charming as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010) — and his buddy Chet (Aziz Ansari) doesn’t exactly up the likability factor. There’s actually the potential for an interesting story here: something darker seems appropriate, given that 30 Minutes or Less was inspired by a true story with a very unhappy ending. But the film completely fumbles, delivering an action comedy that’s neither tense nor funny. That means the pizza’s free, right? (1:29) (Peitzman)

The Tree of Life Mainstream American films are so rarely adventuresome that overreactive gratitude frequently greets those rare, self-conscious, usually Oscar-baiting stabs at profundity. Terrence Malick has made those gestures so sparingly over four decades that his scarcity is widely taken for genius. Now there’s The Tree of Life, at once astonishingly ambitious — insofar as general addressing the origin/meaning of life goes — and a small domestic narrative artificially inflated to a maximally pretentious pressure-point. The thesis here is a conflict between “nature” (the way of striving, dissatisfied, angry humanity) and “grace” (the way of love, femininity, and God). After a while Tree settles into a fairly conventional narrative groove, dissecting — albeit in meandering fashion — the travails of a middle-class Texas household whose patriarch (a solid Brad Pitt) is sternly demanding of his three young sons. As a modern-day survivor of that household, Malick’s career-reviving ally Sean Penn has little to do but look angst-ridden while wandering about various alien landscapes. Set in Waco but also shot in Rome, at Versailles, and in Saturn’s orbit (trust me), The Tree of Life is so astonishingly self-important while so undernourished on some basic levels that it would be easy to dismiss as lofty bullshit. Its Cannes premiere audience booed and cheered — both factions right, to an extent. (2:18) (Harvey)

*The Trip Eclectic British director Michael Winterbottom rebounds from sexually humiliating Jessica Alba in last year’s flop The Killer Inside Me to humiliating Steve Coogan in all number of ways (this time to positive effect) in this largely improvised comic romp through England’s Lake District. Well, romp might be the wrong descriptive — dubbed a “foodie Sideways” but more plaintive and less formulaic than that sun-dappled California affair, this TV-to-film adaptation displays a characteristic English glumness to surprisingly keen emotional effect. Playing himself, Coogan displays all the carefree joie de vivre of a colonoscopy patient with hemorrhoids as he sloshes through the gray northern landscape trying to get cell reception when not dining on haute cuisine or being wracked with self-doubt over his stalled movie career and love life. Throw in a happily married, happy-go-lucky frenemy (comic actor Rob Brydon) and Coogan (TV’s I’m Alan Partridge), can’t help but seem like a pathetic middle-aged prick in a puffy coat. Somehow, though, his confused narcissism is a perverse panacea. Come for the dueling Michael Caine impressions and snot martinis, stay for the scallops and Brydon’s “small man in a box” routine. (1:52) (Devereaux)

The Whistleblower (1:58) Smith Rafael.

*!Women Art Revolution Bay Area artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s vibrant look back at the first waves of feminist art in the ’60s and ’70s is an extremely necessary and impassioned recounting of a history that perpetually seems to be on the edge of erasure. Mixing old and new interviews with artists, critics, and scholars — many of which are from Hershman Leeson’s own personal archive — !W.A.R. lets those who stood at the frontlines of one the most significant movements in contemporary art tell their own stories. Seeing and hearing the testimonies of the likes of Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman, B. Ruby Rich, Judy Chicago, Carolee Scheeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and Ingrid Sischy, one after another, is dazzling — like being in the presence of an Olympian summit — even as their overlapping tales of pushback, casual misogyny and outright ridicule from critics, the art establishment, and in some cases, their colleagues, paint a damning picture of just how endemic sexism was, and as the need for a film such as !WAR attests to, in many ways still is. (1:23) (Sussman)

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. Due to the Labor Day holiday, theater information was incomplete at presstime.

Central subway becomes issue in mayor’s race

Zelda Bronstein

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September 6, 2011

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Central subway becomes issue in mayor’s race

The central subway — for years, one of those San Francisco projects that almost everyone in local politics supported — has suddenly become a major issue in the mayor’s race.

After a blistering civil grand jury report (PDF) saying that the project has become too expensive and will take cash away from Muni’s other priorities, some city officials and transit activists, including those who once were backers of the subway, are now saying it’s time to call the whole thing off.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera was the first major candidate out of the box to denounce the project, telling the Chronicle that the subway has “ceased to be a prudent investment” and that it’s time to pull the plug. It’s likely that Herrera will continue to push Mayor Ed Lee on the cost of the project and its transit value, and the other candidates will have to figure out where to go.

There’s no question — this is an expensive proposition, $1.6 billion for a 1.7-mile line. Most of the financing is also federal and state money, meaning San Francisco’s only on the hook for a little more than $100 million — as long as the construction comes in at or under budget.

And powerful players like AECOM stand to make huge amounts of money off the deal.

At the same time, almost all of Chinatown is united behind it. “The community has been working on this for a long time. It’s the first thing we’ve all worked on together,” Rev. Norman Fong, who is about to take over as director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, told me. Supporters of the subway started some 20 years ago, and collected 20,000 signatures supporting a new transit option in a community where the vast majority of residents are transit-reliant. A delegation of seniors and tenant leaders went to Washington, D.C. to lobby for it. “And everyone in town signed off on it in 2008, when the cost was $1.2 billion,” Fong said.

It makes for strange politics — most of the same people who are really pushing the central subway are trying to stop state Sen. Leland Yee from becoming mayor — but Yee is also a strong proponent of the subway. David Chiu is, also, telling me that the grand jury just “rehashed arguments that we’ve heard before” and that there’s “enormous funding from the federal government.”

I have yet to hear from John Avalos, but this one is not going away.

The America’s cup confusion

Zelda Bronstein

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September 2, 2011

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If the sponsors (and city officials) are right, the America’s Cup is going to be a huge event, attracting hundreds of thousands of spectators, many of whom will want to be on the San Francisco waterfront to watch. But it’s never been clear to me exactly how that’s going to work — how are all those (rich) people who are used to getting around in limos going to travel from their downtown hotels to the viewing areas? If the city wanted to do this right, we should close down the Embarcadero and some of the feeder streets to all vehicles (except ambulances — always needed when rich old people get excited) and force everyone to travel by pedicab. Buy up a fleet of several hundred of the human-powered vehicles and let all the unemployed teenagers get a shot at driving them. Job creation for youth; environmentally sound transportation; potentially fun bumper-car action with well-heeled patrons screaming in fear.

Remember: The f-line, even with improvements, can’t possibly handle the necessary traffic. And the AC types aren’t going to ride the train anyway. No way private cars can all fit without massive gridlock.

So: Pedicabs. My suggestion.

In the meantime, there’s this little problem of 8 Washington.

See, the developer of what would be the city’s most expensive condos ever is planning on excavating 110,000 cubic yards of soil for a massive underground parking garage — right along the Embarcadero, and right during the America’s Cup events. The Draft Environmental Impact Report for 8 Washington indicates that the dump trucks (about 20 big trucks per day, and possibly a lot more) would be using that roadway to get to 101 or 280.

Actually, if activist Brad Paul is correct, there’s no way the developer can excavate that much dirt in the time frame that it’s supposed to happen unless the number of trucks is closer to 300 a day. Imagine all of that happening while 100,000 people are trying to get to the waterfront to watch the show. Oh, and according to the DEIR for the America’s Cup, the Embarcadero will be CLOSED during that period.

The fact is, the 8 Washington project is not only a terrible idea (just what the city needs — more condos for mega-millionaires) but would directly screw up the whole America’s Cup effort. And the amazing thing is that the AC people and the Mayor’s Office don’t seem to be paying attention.

Paul has put together a lengthy critique of the whole mess that makes great reading if you’re into this sort of thing. So I thought I’d just post it all here. Warning: It’s long. Enjoy.

August 15, 2011

Bill Wycko
Environmental Review Officer
San Francisco Planning Department
1650 Mission Street, Suite 400
San Francisco, CA 94103

Re: COMMENTS ON DRAFT EIR FOR 8 WASHINGTON STREET/
SEAWALL LOT 351 PROJECT
Case No. 2007.0030E

Dear Mr. Wycko:

I am writing to my provide my comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Report (“DEIR”) for this project, a document that is incomplete, inadequate and in places quite misleading. I’ve organized my comments in sections beginning with a detailed discussion of how the project’s construction schedule has been greatly underestimated. This is followed by discussions of the DEIR’s failure to address key Housing and Population issues, misstatements regarding historic obligations related to Golden Gateway, comments on recreation issues, and more. In general, I believe the DEIR fails to present objective information and analysis, it omits a number of relevant issues that are critical to the ability of public officials to make objective and informed decisions about the project and it is filled with judgments and assertions that are not supported by facts.

The DEIR is incomplete and inadequate in the following areas:

I. THE DEIR CONSTRUCTION SCHEDULE FOR 8 WASHINGTON IS BOTH INACCURATE AND MISLEADING.

The DEIR construction schedule is based on overly optimistic assumptions that are totally unrealistic; the ramifications of these erroneous assumptions need to be carefully considered as they will cascade throughout the project requiring major revisions to the DEIR before it can be considered accurate and complete.

At the bottom of page II.19 it states:

      Project construction, including demolitions, site and foundation work,
      construction of the parking garage, and construction of the buildings,
      would take 27-29 months. Assuming that construction would begin in 2012,
      the buildings would be ready for occupancy in 2014. The first phase of the
      construction would take about 16 months and would include demolition
     (2 months), excavation and shoring (7 months), and foundation and below
      grade construction work (7 months).

While the DEIR unequivocally states the project will take 27-29 months to construct, from 2012 to 2014, facts provided elsewhere in the DEIR together with current city policies, the City’s America’s Cup Host and Venue Agreement and basic math indicate that this schedule is not tenable. The remainder of this section provides the data and analysis that lead to the conclusion that construction of 8 Washington will take much longer than 27-29 months, almost TWICE AS LONG, with excavation taking 2.5 to 3 TIMES longer.

Table 1: Requested Changes to the overall DEIR construction schedule

ACTIVITY MINIMUM MAXIMUM

DEIR’s construction schedule: 27 months to 29 months

    Actual excavation schedule:  18 months          22 months
    — DEIR estimate for excavation – 7 months           – 7 months
    + Increased excavation time  11 months      to       15 months
    + Archeology delays              .5 months      to         2 months
    + America’s Cup delays                  2.5 months       to         5 months
    + Weather delays                        .25 months      to         1 months

ACTUAL CONSTRUCTION TIME 41 months to 52 months

To refute the numbers in Table 1, project sponsors must present additional, verifiable data supporting their unrealistic assumptions, beginning with the claim that the first phase of construction takes 16 months with a mere seven months allocated for excavation/shoring.

A. The DEIR fails to accurately ascertain and analyze the excavation/shoring schedule.

The DEIR states on page II.20 that “approximately 110,000 cubic yards of soil” will be excavated from the site for an underground garage (approximately 90,000 cubic yards) and other foundation work during the seven (7) month “excavation” portion of the projected timeline. It later states excavation will take place 6.5 hours per day with an average of 20 truck trips per day (pg.IV.D.31). Assuming the average dump truck holds 12 cubic yards of dirt (typical payload for a dump truck), that would mean:

· 110,000 cu. yards/12 cubic yards per truck = 9,166 truck trips

· 20 trucks/day X 12 cubic yards/trip = an average of 240 cu. yards/day

· 110,000 cu. yards/240 cu. yards per day = 458 working days for this task

Could this task be completed in seven (7) months as claimed in the DEIR? NO.

     ·5 working days per week X 52 weeks = 260 working days per year
             – 11 holidays per year
                   249 total working days/year

·458 days to finish task/249 working days per year = 22 months (not 7)

For this to take 7 months as the DEIR asserts, the following would have to be true:

· 20 trucks/day X 7 months (145 working days ) = 2,900 total truck trips

· 110,000 cu. yards/2,900 trucks = each truck must average 38 cubic yards/trip
Empirical evidence exists, however, proving the DEIR’s claim that the excavation portion of the schedule will take seven months is inaccurate and misleading:

CASE STUDY #1: San Francisco General Hospital Rebuild Project

A recent SF General Hospital (SFGH) Newsletter reports the hospital’s contractor just finished hauling 120,000 cu. yards of dirt from the 45’ deep hole that was dug to build two basement levels and the foundation for a new hospital building. This is as close as anyone is likely to get to replicating what 8 Washington proposes, a three level 40’ deep underground garage accounting for most of the 110,000 cubic yards of dirt that must be removed from the site.

A call to the SFGH Rebuild office revealed their excavation process took seven (7) months with an average truck load of 13 cu. yards per trip. How was that possible?

“The average truck load was 13 cubic yards. Some days we had
over 300 truck loads hauled in one day. This volume was possible
through use of a paved drive that allowed trucks to enter the side, be
loaded up then tires washed to prevent dirt on road causing storm-
water pollution and dust.”

The SF General site is just a few blocks from U.S. 101 with direct access via Potrero Ave., thus minimizing potential traffic conflicts. The 8 Washington site will require driving long distances on city streets including “The Embarcadero, Harrison Street, and King Street… likely the primary haul and access routes to and from I-80, U.S. 101, and I-280 (pg. IV.D.31).” Imagine 300 trips a day on one of these streets.

CASE STUDY #2: SF PUC’s New Hetch Hetchy Reservoir Tunnel

A recent Oakland Tribune story (4/8/11) describes construction of a new 3.5-mile tunnel designed to protect the water supply from SF’s Hetch Hetchy reservoir from major earthquakes by boring a 2nd, state-of-the-art tunnel from Sunol to Fremont alongside the existing 81-year-old Irvington Tunnel. The article states:

      “By the time the New Irvington Tunnel is completed in 2014, crews will have
        excavated about 734,000 cubic yards of material—the equivalent of 61,000
        dump-truck trips, said officials with the SF Public Utilities Commission.”

Dividing 734,000 cubic yards of soil by the 61,000 dump truck trips that the PUC says are necessary equals 12 cubic yards per truck trip. Given this job’s overall size and $227 million budget, it would seem to confirm the fact that the most efficient excavation equipment for the 8 Washington site will be 12 cubic yard dump trucks.

In light of these facts and the analysis provided above, the only way 8 Washington could meet its proposed seven (7) month excavation schedule would be to:

a) schedule up to 300 TRUCK TRIPS A DAY, over 10 TIMES the average number of trips per day (20) stated in the DEIR and 3 TIMES the absolute maximum of 100 truck trips per day (pg. IV.D.31) along the Northeast Embarcadero during a period of time that directly overlaps with the major America’s Cup events and activities, something specifically prohibited by the City’s America’s Cup Host and Venue Agreement ,

OR

b) average 38 cubic yards of dirt per truck trip, 3 TIMES the average truck payload of both the PUC’s Irvington Tunnel project and SF General Hospital’s 120,000 cubic yard excavation project—assuming that 38 cubic yard trucks: a) exist in sufficient quantity in the Bay Area, b) would be available during that period of time described and c) would be allowed on The Embarcadero, Harrison St., King St., Washington St. and Drumm St. by the City. [see photo comparison of 12 cubic yard vs. 30 cubic yard trucks below]

Unless the project sponsor can demonstrate that one of these two highly unlikely scenarios is possible, then the EIR must reanalyze a number of impacts (e.g. Land Use, Air Quality, Greenhouse Gases) based on a revised excavation schedule, one that takes 2.5 to 3 TIMES as long as the one described in DEIR to complete excavation work, and this 22 month timeline assumes NO archeological remains are found on site and the City imposes NO stop work orders related to America’s Cup (see below).

This 15-month difference between the excavation period analyzed in the DEIR and the ACTUAL time it will take to complete the excavation (22 months vs. 7 months) is a major deficiency in the DEIR with profound impacts. For instance, some of the most significant unavoidable negative impacts described in the DEIR involve degraded air quality both during and after construction. Adjusting the environmental analysis to reflect how long excavation will actually take means significant air quality impacts related to excavation (with the greatest detrimental effect on seniors, children and people exercising) will persist for 2.5 to 3 TIMES LONGER than described in the DEIR. This flaw also requires significant revisions to other sections of the DEIR.

In light of this new information, the next draft of the EIR must contain an analysis of this longer overall construction period—two months for demolition; a range of 18 to 22 months for excavation (not seven months); a built-in range of time for the shutting down of the site when archeological artifacts are uncovered, documented and extracted (something the DEIR’s archeology consultant states is “likely” ); and the building construction period. Finally, given these overly aggressive excavation schedule estimates, all other estimates for later construction phases must now to be cross checked for accuracy by independent contractors (e.g. not working for 8 Washington developer or the source of the prior DEIR excavation estimate).

B. The actual construction timeline for 8 Washington will be 41-52 MONTHS.
If the project sponsors disagree with this assessment, they must provide the Planning Department with much more detailed information on how they expect to achieve a shorter construction period given the restrictions described in the DEIR itself as well as mathematical analysis described above. For instance,

– Did the developers err when they reported that the average number of truck
   trips per day would be 20 as analyzed in the DEIR? If so, what number do they
   choose to use now and how does that impact various aspects of the DEIR analysis
   such as air quality, conflicts with pedestrians, MUNI and America’s Cup, etc..

– Does the developer plan to raise the limit of truck trips per day from 100 (as
   per the DEIR) to 300 truck trips per day? If so, how often will this happen and
   how will these changes impact various aspects of the previous EIR analysis (e.g. air
   quality, traffic/transit/pedestrian conflicts, America’s Cup)?

– Does the developer plan to lengthen the average workday or work six days a
   week? If so, how often and how would this impact the previous DEIR analysis?
   NOTE: The DEIR construction schedule (27-29 months) was not predicated on the
   trucks operating 6 days a week EVERY WEEK. But even if the developer ran dump
   trucks 6 days a week for the ENTIRE excavation period it would still take TWICE AS
   LONG as the DEIR states to remove 110,000 cubic yards of dirt .

– Where is the project sponsor planning to route 100 to 300 trucks a day as they
   leave the site, particularly during the various America’s Cup trials (2012) and
   finals (2013) when vehicular traffic will be severely limited or prohibited?
   Washington Street? The Embarcadero? Drumm Street? Clay Street?, where exactly?

– Have the developers located a source of 30+ cubic yard trucks and secured
   city permission to use them on the specific streets described in the DEIR?
   It seems fair to assume the SF General Hospital’s excavation contractor would have
   done this if it were possible (and the SF PUC’s Irvington Tunnel contractor). See the
   three photos below to get a sense of the size difference between a typical 12 cubic yard
   dump truck and the type of tractor-trailer rig required to carry 30 cubic yards or more.

As the questions and examples (SF General Hospital) above demonstrate, the DEIR’s claim that 110,000 cubic yards can be excavated in seven months defies the laws of physics and math, not to mention the America’s Cup Host & Venue Agreement between the City and Larry Ellison’s Oracle BMW Racing Team

A thorough reading of the DEIR’s Archeology section and the America’s Cup Host and Venue Agreement indicate that additional time must be built into the construction schedule for predictable work stoppages related to both issues.

KNOWN ARCHEOLOGICAL RESOURCES IDENTIFIED ON THIS SITE IN THE DEIR

On page IV.C.12, the DEIR’s archeology consultant, Archeo-Tec, identifies the Gold Rush ship Bethel as located under a portion of the site and states that “If discovered, the Bethel would be the oldest known (and perhaps most intact) archeological example of an early Canadian built ship (Pg. IV.C.3)”. On page IV.C.11, the archeology consultant states “Significant archeological resources are likely to exist at this site”. The DEIR, goes on to state the proposed project will destroy a portion of city’s original Seawall causing “the largest disturbance of the Old Seawall to date”.

As a result of these DEIR findings, the archeology consultant should now be asked for an estimate of the time required to mitigate the discovery of the Bethel and other likely finds (e.g. original Seawall, other Gold Rush ships, original Chinatown). This “likely” work delay should be built into the construction schedule and stated as a range. For purposes of the matrix below (Table 1) we chose a time of two weeks to two months based on anecdotal information from other similar sites. Archeo-Tec, the archeology consultant, should be able to come up with a more precise estimate.

KNOWN AMERICA’S CUP SCHEDULING CONFLICTS

Based on recent MTA staff presentations on protocols for the America’s Cup, it seems clear that traffic, particularly construction dump trucks, will be banned from Washington Street, Drumm Street and The Embarcadero during major America’s Cup events that include, at a minimum, the America’s Cup World Series warm-up races (July/Sept. 2012), the penultimate Louis Vuitton Cup Series (July/August 2013) and the America’s Cup finals (Sept. 2013).

This represents a minimum of 2.5 months that must be added to the construction schedule, something the DEIR authors should have included if they had read the America’s Cup DEIR which states there are 9+ weeks of races associated with this event in 2012/2013. The extra few weeks added to the low end range in Table 1 (below) are there to accommodate last minute weather delays and various large non-racing events held along the waterfront that will require closure of The Embarcadero, Washington Street, Drumm Street, etc.

Table 1 below lays out a more credible and realistic construction schedule based on the factors described at length above, taken directly from the DEIR or readily available from the city (e.g. America’s Cup DEIR) and the America’s Cup Host and Venue Agreement.

Table 1: Requested Changes to the overall DEIR construction schedule

ACTIVITY MINIMUM MAXIMUM

DEIR’s construction schedule: 27 months to 29 months

    Actual excavation schedule:  18 months          22 months
    — DEIR estimate for excavation – 7 months           – 7 months
    + Increased excavation time  11 months      to      15 months
    + Archeology delays              .5 months      to         2 months
    + America’s Cup delays                   2.5 months        to         5 months
    + Weather delays                        .25 months      to         1 months

ACTUAL CONSTRUCTION TIME 41 months to 52 months

To refute these numbers, the project sponsors must not only present a verifiable and detailed plan to remove 110,000 cubic yards (9,167 truck trips) in seven months that the City has signed off on but also produce a letter from the City and Oracle BMW Racing granting a waiver from Section 10.4 of the America’s Cup Host and Venue Agreement that would allow 20 to 300 trucks a day to drive along The Embarcadero, Washington Street or Drumm Street during major America’s Cup events in 2012 and 2013.

D. Significant Transportation and Energy issues that were not addressed in DEIR.

More specific information related to the construction process needs to be provided and analyzed in the EIR, particularly regarding the far reaching impacts of those 9,166 dump truck trips, impacts that go beyond the immediate Northeast Waterfront.

The DEIR states “While the exact routes that construction trucks would use would depend on the location of the available disposal sites, The Embarcadero, Harrison Street, and King Street would likely be the primary haul and access routes to and from I-80, U.S. 101, and I-280”. At a minimum, The EIR needs to include information on where the two or three most likely disposal sites are located, based on recent experience (SF General Hospital excavation) so that one can analyze the extent of potential conflicts on the Bay Bridge or 101 South where other trucks will be transporting dirt to and/or from the Transbay Terminal project, Hunters Point Shipyard, Mission Bay, Treasure Island, etc. Without this information, the City could find itself creating significant traffic conflicts on the Bay Bridge or highway 101 that greatly increase air quality, traffic and transit problems without having analyzed these potential impacts in a flawed EIR.

Simply saying “While the exact routes that construction trucks would use would depend on the location of the available disposal sites” isn’t adequate or acceptable. Assumptions must be made regarding most likely disposal sites and routes to those sites and what additional cumulative impacts these routes (and 9,166 trucks) will create. The EIR must provide a MAP of the route to be used for hauling soil, all the way from the departure point at 8 Washington to the final destination(s) with an explanation of where trucks will drive and what restrictions there are on hours, size of payload, safety, etc. for the various streets, highways and bridges they will travel on. If the options include trucking the soil to San Francisco’s southern waterfront to transfer it to barges, then this needs to be disclosed and analyzed, including the potential routes and destinations of those barges.
In addition, to accurately compare the environmental impacts of the project sponsor’s ‘Preferred Project’ to the “No Project” alternative (energy consumption, traffic impacts, air quality degradation, etc.), one needs to know not only the destination of the approximately 9,166 dump truck trips but also the average miles per gallon of a typical dump truck. For instance, if the final destination for the soil was 100 miles away and a typical dump truck averages 8 miles per gallon of diesel fuel, then:

9,166 truck trips X 200 miles per round trip = 1,833,200 miles for all dump trucks;

1,833,200 gallons/8 MPG = 229,150 gallons of diesel fuel that would be burned.

In other words, the city’s choices would be:

229,150 gallons of diesel fuel used to transfer 110,000 cubic yards 1,833,200 miles

VS.

ZERO (O) gallons of diesel fuel used if the NO PROJECT alternative were approved.

E. Importance of accurate, detailed information re: the construction process.

Given the above discussion, it is clear that the construction schedule set forth in the DEIR is inaccurate at best and has led, in many cases, to the significant understating of major negative impacts associated with this project. The lack of a detailed discussion of some of the key aspects of the construction process, e.g. the route and destination of 9,166 dump trucks, is also highly problematic.

Without a complete and thorough analysis of the impacts of a of an overall construction schedule that is TWICE AS LONG as the one analyzed in this DEIR, city officials will be missing much of the critical information they need to determine whether or not the developer’s ‘Preferred Project’ is necessary, desirable or feasible. A complete and factual analysis of this issue must be included in the next draft of the EIR which, given this and other major inaccuracies and omissions (see below), should be recirculated in draft form.

II. THE DEIR FAILS TO DISCUSS OR ANALYZE ANY CRITICAL HOUSING ISSUES RELEVANT TO 8 WASHINGTON OR UNIQUE ENVIRONMENTAL AND ENERGY IMPACTS THOSE HOUSING ISSUES CREATE.

A. Impacts of the project on the City’s Housing Needs were Not Analyzed in DEIR. The DEIR states that potentially significant impacts to Population and Housing will not be discussed because the 2007 NOP/Initial Study found that the proposed project would not adversely affect them. Unfortunately the DEIR lacks the basic information needed to reach such a conclusion and, as we will demonstrate, an objective review of relevant 2008-2011 housing data contradicts this conclusion.

The world, particularly regarding housing, has changed radically since 2007. Relying on housing and population information from 2007 ignores the financial and housing meltdown of 2008 and is simply indefensible. In addition, back in 2007, the EIR consultants were relying on stale, seven-year-old census data while today they have access to a multitude of fresh 2010 census data. No one can dispute that the housing environment today could not be more unlike the housing environment in 2007.
By relying solely on pre-2008 housing data from the 2007 NOP/Initial Study, this DEIR lacks any of the basic information needed to conclude that this project would not have adverse effects on Population and Housing and must now revisit and thoroughly analyze these issues.

B. The DEIR fails to analyze how the type and price of housing proposed for
8 Washington determines whether or not it meets the city’s housing needs.

One of the project objectives (Pg II.14) is to “help meet projected City housing
needs.” How is that possible, given the fact that the developer has publicly stated
that these will be “the most expensive condominiums in the history of SF” ? With a
$345,000,000 project cost , 8 Washington’s 165 units will cost $2.0 million a unit
just to build . To secure financing and a ‘reasonable’ profit, each unit will have to
sell for $2.5-$5 million with penthouses selling for $8-$10 million.

Nowhere in the DEIR is ANY of this discussed. There is no analysis of how these
very high sales prices will determine who lives at 8 Washington (e.g. how many San
Francisco families could afford these prices?) and how the incomes of these new
residents ($250,000 to over $1 million/year) will dramatically change a number of
the environmental impacts of the project, with major implications for sustainability
and energy use, among other things.

The final EIR must state the average cost to build each unit and the range of
sales prices expected so that public officials can assess for themselves whether
the proposed condos will or will not “help meet projected City housing needs.”

The 2009 Housing Element, signed into law by Mayor Ed Lee on June 29, 2011, states that 61% of the housing need in San Francisco is for below-market-rate housing—serving families making 30-120% of Area Median Income (AMI), and only 39% of the city’s housing need is for market rate housing (120% to 500+% AMI).

As Planning staff and Commissioners know from their Housing Element discussions, the luxury condos proposed for this project are so expensive they will not help the city meet its current unmet housing needs. If this project objective (Pg II.14) is left in the final EIR, it should include a note explaining that the project, as proposed, is unlikely to meet this objective for the following reasons:

Condominiums selling for $2.5 million and more fall into the one segment of the city’s housing market that is currently overbuilt and has historically been over represented in relation to the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) goals that underpin the updated 2009 Housing Element of the city’s General Plan. An ABAG report on housing needs vs. housing production in SF (1999-2006) that came out in 2007—a report that should have informed the 2007 NOP/Initial Study for 8 Washington—states RHNA Allocations (Goal), Permits Issued (Permitted) and % of Allocation Permitted (% of RHNA Goal) by income category as follows:

Table 2: SF Housing Production (1999-2006)*

Housing Type  Very Low    Low              Moderate       Market Rate
by Income    Income Income Income           Housing
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
% of AMI:    21-50% 51-80% 81-120%         120-500+%
Annual income: [21-50K] [57-81K] [85-123K]   [123K-$1million+]
———————————————————————————————————-
·RHNA Goal (units)   5,244       2,126   5,639                7,363

·Permitted 4,203 1,101 661 11,474

·% of RHNA Goal 80% 52% 12% 156%

* from a 2007 ABAG report entitled: A Place to Call Home

A chart like this, showing housing goals by income group (based on RHNA numbers from the State Office of Housing and Community Development), must be included in the DEIR so public officials can analyze what portion of the city’s unmet affordable and middle income housing needs, if any, the proposed project would meet. It illustrates something local housing experts have long known, that the city consistently comes in well above its RHNA goals for market rate condos, and has historically fallen short of its goals in all other categories for affordable housing, the housing that serves the 61% of San Franciscans that cannot afford ‘market rate’ housing.
C. Dramatic changes to the San Francisco housing market since the 2007 NOP/ Initial Study were not acknowledged and analyzed in the DEIR. All the traditional (pre-2007) sources of funding for the city’s affordable housing programs have dried up since the 2008 housing crash. Redevelopment tax increment funds will either be significantly reduced to pay the state to avoid closure of the SF Redevelopment Agency, or they will be eliminated altogether. Proceeds from the state’s $2.8 billion Affordable Housing Bond (Prop. 1C) are all spent. The federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit, a major source of funding for affordable housing, is under attack by House and Senate Republicans and may not survive.

This indicates that San Francisco won’t come close to meeting its pre-2007 affordable housing production levels until we find a new permanent local source of funding for affordable housing. How long will that take? The DEIR must address this issue.

Another chart that must be included in the DEIR shows the city’s RHNA goals by income category combined with a summary of a recent SF Business Times (6/24/2011) chart showing all San Francisco residential projects under construction, permitted or in the planning pipeline . Such a chart would look something like Table 3 below:

Table 3: Where does the city need help in meeting its RHNA goals?

          Extremely Low       Very Low            Low             Moderate          Market Rate
                 Income          Income           Income            Income               Housing
         Below 30% AMI          31-50%            51-80%           81-120%              120-500+%
    [21K-30K]         [35K-50]        [57K-81K]      [85K-120K]        [120K-$1M+]
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

RHNA      439/yr.                   439/yr.           738/yr.            901/yr.                    1,632/yr.
Goals:      10.5%        +          10.5%      +      18%        +     22% = 61%           39%
# of units                    of total        of total
% of goal
                             All Affordable Categories Combined            Market Rate_

Underway: 470 units 1,557 units

Approved: 8,751 units 30,878 units

In Pipeline:                   780 units                     4,184 units
________________________________________________________________________
                          10,000 units             36,619 units
            or                     or
          21.5% of all units                 78.5% of all units

56% of RHNA goals 300% of RHNA goal
in all affordable categories in market rate category
Some version of Table 3 must be included in the revised DEIR to help public officials determine whether the significant negative environmental impacts this project creates are outweighed by the ‘need’ for the type of housing that 8 Washington provides given the priorities set forth in the Housing Element of the General Plan and what the above-mentioned SF Business Times chart tells us about likely housing production for each segment of the city’s housing needs (from 2011-2014).

Table 3 demonstrates that in a few years, if nothing changes, the city will have approved and built out 300% of its RHNA goal for Market Rate projects (such as 8 Washington) but only 56% of its RHNA goals for all other housing that serves San Franciscans making 30% AMI to 120% AMI. But given what we now know about the current lack of funding for affordable housing, the exact opposite of what was true in 2007 (when the city had significant amounts of Redevelopment tax increment and other affordable housing funds), many of the affordable housing projects listed by the Business Times are now on hold and unlikely to come on line by 2014. This means the mismatch between market rate (39% of need but 300% of production) and all categories of affordable will be even greater than Table 3 indicates.

To be fair, one could argue that some of the market rate housing on the Business Times chart may not be built soon either given that banks have been reluctant to lend money lately. However, a recent article in the SF Chronicle (8/11/11) entitled “Rents Go Through Roof” indicates that the city’s housing market is roaring back; Dennis Robal, property manager with Chandler Properties, reports “Noe Valley apartments that were $2,000 a month a year ago are now going for $2,400”. These kinds of increases, driven by new renters from the tech sector, are prompting major increases in investments by financial institutions in new rental housing.

Regarding the condo market, the one group of potential condominium buyers that
have not suffered financially from the economic meltdown are the very people who
caused it, the Wall Street investors, derivatives specialists, hedge fund managers,
etc. who are now making record salaries and bonuses. These are some of the people
8 Washington will be marketing to because they have the cash to spend $2.5-$10
million on a second, third or fourth home in San Francisco.

NONE of this housing analysis appears in the DEIR yet including it in the DEIR is
critical to the ability of public officials to make informed, rational decisions on this
project, particularly claims by the developer that this project will “help meet
projected City housing needs”. The information and analysis described above is
necessary to allow city officials and all readers to determine accurately and
objectively what portion of San Francisco’s unmet affordable and middle income
housing needs, if any, 8 Washington would meet.

Each year, as the City assesses how well it is meeting its RHNA (state) housing goals, the one area that has consistently over produced is high-end market rate housing affordable to people making $250,000 to $1 million+ a year.
How does building second, third and fourth homes for this demographic “help the city meet its housing needs?”

The unmet housing needs in San Francisco are for people making from 30%-50% of median income all the way up to 100-120%, not people making $250,000 to $1,000,000+ a year (200-500% or more of area median income). The DEIR needs to discuss the following questions to be considered complete, adequate and accurate, questions such as:

How does this project relate to the objectives, policies and goals of San Francisco’s recently enacted 2009 Housing Element of the General Plan?

What portion of San Francisco’s affordable and middle-income housing needs will this proposed project actually meet?

How many other projects under construction, approved or in the pipeline (see June 24,
2011 SF Business Times chart) will meet the needs of San Franciscans who can afford market rate housing vs. those that meet the needs of the 61% of SF residents needing below market housing?

What percentage of “residents” of these condos will be using this housing as their primary residence vs. as second, third and fourth vacation homes?

Given that numerous studies show transit use goes down as income goes up,
how likely is it that these new owners will use public transit?

Again, the answer to each of these questions provides critical information that public
officials need to assess for themselves whether the proposed condos will or will
not “help meet the projected City housing needs.”

Everything that’s happened since the 2008 economic/housing meltdown has made our housing problems worse, something the DEIR doesn’t attempt to analyze, arguing instead that a 2007 NOP/Initial Study—competed a year before the housing bubble burst—absolves it of all such responsibility, an argument that is factually absurd.

D. The DEIR fails to acknowledge, measure or analyze the unique environmental impacts generated by owners who can pay $2.5 to $10 million for luxury condos.

Building housing for this demographic has measurable impacts on transit and energy use that were not included in the DEIR. We know from national studies that low-and middle- income residents are far greater consumers of public transit than people with higher incomes. Imagine how much different public transit use will be when this inverse relationship includes people who can afford $2.5-10 million condos that come with 1-for-1 parking (costing almost $100,000 a space to build).

But a far greater environmental impact than driving private cars was not addressed in this DEIR, an impact resulting from lifestyle differences one can anticipate with some members of this highest of high-end demographics: owning and/or using private jets.

It’s reasonable to assume that five of the 165 condo buyers at 8 Washington (just 3% of all buyers) are Wall Street hedge fund managers, derivatives traders or venture capitalists using these condos as second, third or fourth homes. It’s also reasonable to assume that these five buyers will use their condos 1.5 times a month on average and commute to and from SF aboard private business jets, a perfectly rational assumption for Wall Street executives making tens of millions in salary and bonuses each year. Why would they fly private jets rather than take Southwest…because they can. The fact that a handful of people that are this wealthy will buy units at 8 Washington must be factored into any environmental analysis of a project that will explicitly market to this high-end demographic. That analysis must include, among others, the following:

Table 4: The Jet Fuel Burn Rate for Luxury Condominiums
___________________________________________________________________________
Mid to large size business jets used to fly cross country (e.g. Hawker 800XP, Gulfstream G2/G3, Bombardier Global Express) average 400 gallons of jet fuel per hour and take six hours to fly New York to SF and five hours to fly back for an 11 hour round trip :

     · 11 hours X 400 gallons per hour = 4,400 gallons of jet fuel per trip
          a typical family car burns 1,200 gallons of gas per year so one flight from
          NYC to SF equals almost four years of driving a typical family car.
               ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

        · 1.5 trips/mo. = 6,600 gallons/mo. X 12 mo. = 79,200 gallons of jet fuel/year

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Using our example of 5 residents, the numbers over one year and 20 years are:

· 5 X 79,200 gallons/per year = 396,000 GALLONS OF JET FUEL A YEAR or
equivalent to driving a family car 330 years, A THIRD OF A MILENNIUM, per year.

· 396,000 gallons/year X 20 years = 7,920,000 GALLONS of jet fuel in 20 years
equivalent to driving family car 6,600 years, OVER 6 MILLENIUM, in 20 years.

Given these condos cost $2+ million to build and will sell for $2.5 to $8 million or more, it seems quite reasonable to assume a mere 3% of these buyers—just five (5) buyers out of 165 —will be part-time residents wealthy enough to commute to San Francisco by business jet. If this is a reasonable assumption , then the DEIR must include the mathematical calculations above to show the true energy costs of this project. In fact, it would also be reasonable to assume a few other buyers will use private business jets to commute from LA, San Diego, Denver, etc. The only way to prevent this, forbidding buyers to own or use corporate jets, is of course impossible.
This is just one example of how housing prices—and who lives in that housing—greatly changes environmental impacts and why this analysis must be included in the DEIR for 8 Washington. As condo prices reach $2.5-10 million, it’s reasonable to assume a number of buyers will use them as a second, third or fourth homes and that some of those buyers will travel here by jet, not car or public transit. On the other hand, if units at 8 Washington were affordable or market rate rental or affordable-by-design condos (80%-150% AMI), it’s very unlikely any of its residents would own or use business jets. Price does matter with regard to energy consumption and transit use.

Given these facts, the 8 Washington DEIR must analyze such questions as:

How many solar panels do you need to make up for 396,000 gallons of jet fuel per year?

How many low flow toilets make up for 396,000 gallons of jet fuel per year?

How many double pane windows make up for 396,000 gallons of jet fuel per year?

How many on-demand hot water heaters make up for 396,000 gallons of jet fuel per year?

Looking at the longer term impacts of this excessive consumption of energy resources:

How many solar panels compensate for 7,920,000 gallons of jet fuel over 20 years?

How many low flow toilets make up for 7,920,000 gallons of jet fuel over 20 years?

How many double pane windows make up for 7,920,000 gallons of jet fuel over 20 years?

How many on demand water heaters make up for 7,920,000 gallons of jet fuel over 20 years?

Having this information in the DEIR is necessary for the Planning Commissioners or Board of Supervisors to make informed decisions about 8 Washington, especially when the project sponsor keeps touting it as state-of-the-art, sustainable, LEED certified (at Gold or Platinum level), etc. When added to the project sponsor’s insistence on building a 420-car underground (below sea level) garage, one has to question how one can call this a model of sustainable development or let the DEIR include sustainability as a project objective.

Unless the DEIR seriously and objectively addresses questions of how the price of housing and who lives in that housing impacts environmental sustainability, we risk creating a backlash against things like LEED certification and terms like “sustainability”. They could easily become just another example of slick marketing and “greenwashing”. Everyone agrees that building 10,000 s.f. McMansions in the Sierra Foothills on 2-acre lots—even if they’re LEED certified at the highest level—is NOT sustainable development. Why is it any less absurd to use “green” and “sustainable” to describe $2.5-$10 million condos built as second and third homes for extremely wealthy part-time residents, some of whom commute from their primary residence by private jet?

The DEIR must provide public officials with the data and information they need to analyze all the significant impacts that units this expensive have on the environment. With this information, decision makers might choose to require a much smaller garage or no garage at all (insisting on more efficient use of nearby existing garages). They might also choose to support a much smaller project or no project at all, based on the lack of demonstrable need for this housing type and all the other negative impacts described above. But they cannot make any of these decisions in a rational and objective manner without all the facts, many of which are missing from this DEIR.

E. The DEIR confuses project “objectives” with city mandated requirements with regard to Inclusionary Housing, then fails to discuss any of the relevant issues around this city policy.

The project objective (Pg II.14) that talks about the project’s ability “to help meet
projected City housing needs” reads in full:

“To develop a high-quality, sustainable and economically feasible
   high-density, primarily residential, project within the existing
   density designation for the site, in order to help meet projected
   City housing needs and satisfy the City’s inclusionary affordable
         housing requirement;”

Satisfying the city’s inclusionary affordable housing requirement, for this or any market rate housing development, IS NOT an Objective, and stating it as such is misleading. It is, in fact, legally mandated by city ordinance. The developer doesn’t have a choice in the matter and it should be stricken from this Objective. However, this reference to inclusionary housing leads one to ask several questions that are never addressed in the DEIR but should be. An Inclusionary Housing section must be added that answers questions such as:

What are the specific requirements for including permanent below market rate (BMR) units in all market rate projects and how many would be required on-site for this one?

Did the developer ever consider building on-site BMR units and if not, why not?

If the developer did consider and reject on-site BMR units, why?

If the developer has decided to pay the in-lieu affordable housing fee, what would it be and how and where (e.g. within a 1-mile radius of the project) would it be spent?

Given that the in-lieu fee charged developers to buy out of providing BMR units on-site is based on construction costs and sales prices for “average” condos, how will the extraordinarily high construction costs and sales prices for these condos impact the in-lieu fee? If it doesn’t impact the fee, would an appropriate mitigation measure be amending the Inclusionary Housing policy so that it does?

Mentioning the inclusionary requirement as part of an objective stating that the project seeks to “help meet projected City housing needs” is misleading and inaccurate. It tries to infer that the funding for 30 affordable units provided by the developer’s inclusionary requirement is helping to meet this objective when, in fact, relying on inclusionary payments to advance the city’s affordable housing goals will only drive the city further out of compliance with its state mandated RHNA goals. The following example clearly demonstrates the validity of this claim:

TNDC’s proposed affordable family apartment project at Eddy and Taylor Streets is typical of the projects now stalled in the city’s affordable housing pipeline due to the lack of affordable housing funding from traditional sources. But the Eddy and Taylor project is a 150 unit development, not 30 units. For it to go forward, you would need the inclusionary housing funds from FIVE market rate projects like 8 Washington. What would that do to San Francisco’s RHNA goals:

         If: 165 market rate units are needed to fund 30 affordable units,
Then:   825 market units (5X) are needed to fund 150 affordable units (975 total units).

         If: out of a every 975 new housing units, 825 are market rate & 150 are affordable,
   Then: for each new 975 units built in SF: 85% are market rate, 15% affordable.

But the 2009 Housing Element of San Francisco’s General Plan (based on the state RHNA goals) calls for 39% OF NEW HOUSING TO BE MARKET RATE (NOT 85%). Relying on Inclusionary Housing off-site payments to fund affordable housing clearly runs counter to the housing production goals set forth in the 2009 Housing Element in the General Plan as well as the RHNA goals for San Francisco established by the state of California. Furthermore, as SB375 Sustainable Development funding criteria begins influencing state funding decisions, by driving our RHNA numbers toward 85% market rate, projects like 8 Washington could jeopardize San Francisco’s ability to apply for and receive state and federal infrastructure and transit funding.

The only way to bring San Francisco’s housing production numbers back into line with the goals in the Housing Element (and RHNA numbers) is to create a new local permanent and dedicated source of funding for affordable housing. These relevant facts regarding the impacts of inclusionary housing must be included in the DEIR.

III. THE DEIR IGNORES THE GENTRIFICATION/DISPLACEMENT IMPACTS OF THIS PROJECT THAT WILL RESULT IN THE LOSS OF HUNDREDS OF RENT CONTROLLED UNITS IN THE GOLDEN GATEWAY BY ENCOURAGING THE FURTHER HOTELIZATION OF ITS 1,200 RENTAL APARTMENTS

The other ‘partner’ in this project is Timothy Foo, who bought Golden Gateway from Perini Corp. about 20 years ago. Only 20% of the 8 Washington site is on Port land, while 80% of the site is on land owned by Mr. Foo and currently occupied by Golden Gateway’s community recreation center. However, Mr. Foo’s only mention in the DEIR is in a footnote to the first sentence of the Introduction which states: “On January 3, 2007, an environmental evaluation application (EE application) was filed by San Francisco Waterfront Partners II (the “project sponsor”) on behalf of the Golden Gateway Center*”. That footnote says “*Golden Gateway Center, Authorization Letter from Timothy Foo, December 27, 2006”).

In addition to violating the original Golden Gateway development agreement that required Perini (and future owners) to preserve the recreation center in exchange for deep discounts in land prices charged by Redevelopment, for some time now Mr. Foo has also been converting rent controlled apartments in the Golden Gateway to short term rental use (e.g. on one floor of a high-rise tower, a third of the units are rented this way). These conversions have been documented by the Golden Gateway Tenants Association, the Affordable Housing Alliance and the San Francisco Tenants Union. While such conversions are not unique to the Golden Gateway Center (see attached Bay Citizen article), they are illegal and violate city zoning, rent control and apartment conversion ordinances.

The DEIR must address this issue by posing the following questions to Mr. Foo and incorporating his answers into the DEIR. He must provide this information because as the owner of 80% of the underlying land that comprises the 8 Washington site, he has had and continues to have a direct financial stake in this project. He must be asked the following questions:

How many of Golden Gateway’s 1,200 rental apartments are currently being used as hotel rooms and/or short-term rentals and/or rented to persons other than those using them as primary residences or directly related to the person residing there (e.g. corporations, business organizations, apartment brokers).

Has Mr. Foo consulted with either the Rent Board or the Planning Department as to the legality of his use of apartments in Golden Gateway as hotel rooms or short-term rentals under applicable city zoning codes, the San Francisco Rent Control ordinance or the city’s Apartment Conversion Ordinance?

Upon receiving and analyzing this information from Mr. Foo, the DEIR must then answer the following questions:

Is the ‘hotelization’ of Golden Gateway and other large apartment complexes likely to increase with the approval of 8 Washington, a development that:

a) builds 165 high-end luxury condos ($2.5 – $10 million each)
on Mr. Foo’s property—creating a much more upscale
environment adjacent to his Golden Gateway apartments;

b) provides Mr. Foo with $10-15 million (what he’s likely to
be paid for his 80% of the site) that can be used to upgrade
his rent controlled apartments at Golden Gateway in order to attract even more higher paying hotel users; and

c) if no mention of these conversions is made in the DEIR, after these written comments have been submitted, will send a clear
message to Mr. Foo and others that the City has no intention of
enforcing its own zoning, rent control and apartment conversion
ordinances, thereby encouraging even more conversions.

If conversions like those at Golden Gateway are not stopped soon, the city is at risk of losing thousands of residential apartments in its downtown neighborhoods.

What kind of mitigations would prevent the further hotelization of the Golden Gateway’s 1,200 rent controlled apartments?

With larger apartment complexes such as Golden Gateway, Parkmerced and Fox Plaza, owners get around the current prohibition on renting residential apartments for less than 30 days as hotel rooms (an action that is legally prohibited by the San Francisco Apartment Conversion Ordinance) by leasing them for more than 30 days to third parties (e.g. corporations, apartment brokers). These intermediaries then rent the apartments for anywhere from a day or two to a few weeks to a month or two.

A simple amendment to the Apartment Conversion Ordinance that changes “you cannot rent an apartment for less than 30 days” to “you cannot rent or occupy an apartment for less than 30 days” would prevent Golden Gateway and others from renting apartments for anywhere from a few days to up to four weeks. Preventing 30-60 day rentals would be a more complicated matter.

The DEIR must address how constructing 8 Washington could encourage, help fund and accelerate Mr. Foo’s conversion of the 1,200 units at Golden Gateway from rent controlled apartments to hotel use as well as the impacts this would have on the city’s housing goals as set forth in the San Francisco’s 2009 Housing Element and its RHNA goals. For instance, if we’re converting housing to non-housing (hotel) uses as fast or faster than we are creating new housing units, we will never dig ourselves out of our current housing crisis and that outcome would have catastrophic impacts on the environmental and economic sustainability of San Francisco as a city.

The DEIR must also describe, in detail, the kind of mitigations (see above) that, if enacted, could mitigate the potential impact of losing more that 165 rent controlled apartments at the Golden Gateway, erasing the gain, on paper, of 165 luxury condos.

IV. FREQUENT USE OF THE WORD “PRIVATE” AS A MODIFIER OF THE GOLDEN GATEWAY RECREATION FACILITIES THROUGHOUT THE DEIR IS BOTH MISLEADING AND INNACCURATE IN LIGHT OF THE RECENT PRIVITIZATION AND FEE STRUCTURES IMPOSED ON THE CITY’S “PUBLIC’ RECREATION FACILITIES AND SWIMMING POOLS.

The current fee structure for public recreation facilities in San Francisco results in situations where the cost of attending ‘public’ pools can often exceed fees charged by the “private” Golden Gate Tennis & Swim Center (GGTSC).

The use of the term “private” in this context throughout the DEIR appears to be an attempt to justify the loss of GGTSC facilities for the 3-4 years that it would be shut down if the “preferred project” were approved (see section I.A for actual construction schedule) as well as the permanent loss of five of nine tennis courts, the basketball court and the current, family-friendly ground level swimming pools, Jacuzzi and open space.

In the past, the city’s public recreation facilities, including its swimming pools, were “public” in every sense of the word—open long-hours, open 6-7 days a week and “free” to residents. In recent years, however, the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department has increased resident user fees, reduced hours and increased the privatization of its facilities in response to ongoing budget deficits. Today, both the ‘private’ Golden Gateway facility and ‘public’ pools are open to anyone, anyone who is willing to pay the fees that they charge. Neither is free.

A. The DEIR fails to discuss the privatization of the City’s recreation centers: According to a 7/9/11 SF Chronicle article, the city is now leasing 23 of its 47 recreation centers to outside interests (e.g. nursery schools, private classes) with the city staffing only a dozen (12) of the 47 former “public” recreation centers. Seven (7) of the remaining recreation centers are under renovation and five (5) are vacant, unavailable for any kind of use “because no one has leased them and there is no money for city workers to run them”. Out of a total of 47 city recreation centers, only 12 are staffed by city workers who run programs for residents, many of them for a fee, during reduced days and hours.

The City also runs nine “public” swimming pools in neighborhoods such as North Beach, the Mission, Bayview, Visitacion Valley, etc. These pools used to be open five or six days a week and were free for residents. Today, residents pay $5 for each swim and $7 for adult swim lessons/water exercise. Children under 17 pay $1 per swim and $2 for swim lessons/water exercise ($3 for a swim & a class together).

Active Recreation Facilities: Public vs. Private… is there a difference anymore?

Each time a family of two adults goes to a city pool it costs $10 per visit to swim and up to $14 per visit if they participate in swim lessons or water exercise. If that family went three times a week, it would cost them $120-$168 per month depending upon how many times they took a swim vs. participated in swim lessons/water exercise. That comes to at least $1,440 dollars per year. Additional swim lessons/water exercise classes drive costs of using a “public” pool even higher.

Now imagine a family of two adults living at the Golden Gateway who currently swim every day at the Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Center. At the city’s North Beach (public) pool, it would cost them $200 a month ($10/swim X 20 days) to swim Tuesday through Saturday (the pool is closed Sunday/Monday) and their schedules would have to match specific windows each day when the pool is available for adult lap swimming. Compare that to the two pools at the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Center—one just for swimming laps; one for kids, families and seniors that are open seven days a week for longer hours.

B. Comparative Costs. Because our hypothetical couple live at the Golden Gateway Apartments they automatically receive a discounted membership of about $170 per month ($85 each) to use the two pools, full gym across the street and have the ability to reserve tennis courts at $20 per use. Since the Golden Gateway was built (1960’s), residents have always received discounted membership at this facility, one of two community benefits Redevelopment required, along with Sidney Walton Square, in exchange for entitlements to build both the Golden Gateway (1,150 rental units) and the adjacent Gateway Commons (condominiums). Redevelopment felt both amenities were needed to meet the open space and active recreation needs of what was to become one of the densest residential communities in San Francisco and discounted the land for the GGTSC and Gateway Commons in exchange for the owner maintaining an active recreation facility at the GGTSC in perpetuity.

Even for those who don’t get the Golden Gateway resident discount, memberships to the Tennis and Swim Center that don’t include automatic access to the tennis courts cost about $220 a month to swim 30 days a month, the same price two adults would pay to swim only 20 days a month at the North Beach pool, a facility with no gym and only one pool and therefore greater restrictions on when they could swim laps. It should also be noted that over 300 “guests” are admitted free to the Golden Gateway recreation facility each month, a total of 3,000 to 4,000 guests each year. We are not familiar with a similar policy for free guests at the North Beach pool (or any other city pools).

Clearly, the recent privatization and escalating fee structures at the city’s “public” recreation centers/swimming pools have erased any real distinctions between public facilities and private facilities as viewed by local families and residents. But one of 8 Washington’s main justifications for closing the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Center for 3-4 years during construction—and downsizing the replacement facility—
is that it is a “private” club maintained for the selfish interests of the few.

Putting aside the fact that 8 Washington’s condos will cost $2 million each to build and will sell for $2.5 to $5 million each and up (for upper floors), making them unaffordable to 97% of all San Franciscans (talk about catering to “the few”), the issue of who uses the current recreation facilities on this site is an important one that the DEIR must address. The similarities outlined above between today’s Golden Gateway recreation facilities and the City’s current “public” recreation centers/swimming pools contradicts the impression created by the DEIR in its current form with so many derogatory references to GGTSC as a ‘private’ club.

It is imperative that public officials have the information outlined above regarding the current costs of “public” recreation in front of them so they can decide for themselves what distinctions, if any, exist in today’s world between this ‘private’ club and so called “public” alternatives. This information is precisely what an EIR is suppose to provide to officials charged with making these kinds of decisions.

For these reasons, we must insist that you provide—in the Comments and Responses document—a clear, complete explanation of this issue, with a chart (see attached for potential template) that compares the facilities, hours, programs and costs to San Francisco residents of the city’s nine (9) “public” swimming pools with the current Golden Gateway recreation facility fee structure. Without such an analysis critical information will be lacking, information that Planning Commissioners, Park and Recreation Commissioners, Port Commissioners and the Board of Supervisors will clearly need as they assess the validity of the developer’s claims about who is served by the current facilities (and what environmental impacts they have) versus those who’ll be served by the proposed project (and its environmental impacts).

Without this information, it will be difficult for these public bodies to make informed decisions as to whether to grant or not grant the conditional use authorizations, upzonings and dozens of separate approvals and permits needed for this complicated and controversial project to proceed.

V. THE DEIR FAILS TO ADDRESS OR ANALYZE ANY OF THE MAJOR ECONOMIC ISSUES RELATED TO THIS PROJECT, ISSUES THAT HAVE SIGNIFICANT ENVIRONMENTAL AND FINANCIAL IMPACTS ON THE NEIGHBORHOOD AND THE CITY.

Several of the project sponsor’s and the Port’s objectives for this project speak to the “economic” benefits of the project for the developers, the Port and the City. The DEIR and other Port documents talk about the need to develop SWL 351 in order to generate revenue for badly needed Port infrastructure work. But the Port’s financial term sheet for this project is unrealistic, misleading and relies on depriving the city of $32 million in general fund dollars as part of a proposed Infrastructure Financing District.

This section addresses the DEIR’s lack of analysis or scrutiny regarding the ‘alleged’ financial benefits of the project as described in the Port’s Term Sheet for Seawall Lot 351 with San Francisco Waterfront Partners (“Term Sheet”) and how that Term Sheet, if executed, would have very real environmental impacts with regard to transit, open space, recreation, housing and population. An examination of the Term Sheet demonstrates that the stream of income on which the term sheet’s finances rely cannot be achieved. An objective analysis of “payments” described in this Term Sheet leads one to a much more pessimistic set of income projections than those presented in the September 23, 2010 Director’s Recommendation to the Port Commission. That report describes three payment sources as follows:

(1) a land lease with annual payments of $120,000 per year;
(2) future payments triggered by resale of condos created by the Project;
(3) a to-be-established Infrastructure Financing District (IFD) that allows
a portion of growth in property taxes to be reinvested in public facilities;

That third source of funding is particularly troubling since it requires a sizeable appropriation of City General Fund revenues ($32 million) by the Port for its own purposes. We will now examine each of these proposed “payment” schemes to determine how realistic they are as well as the potential environmental and economic consequences they create for San Francisco’s residents and taxpayers:
1. Lease Payments. It is easy to refute the likelihood of the $120,000/year lease payment for parcels to be used as open space with related facilities. The second paragraph of Director’s Recommendation (page 5) states: “If engineering and cost analyses deem additional funding is needed to finance agreed upon public improve- ments, the Port agrees to designate some or all of the $120,000 per year park rent to augment financing of these public improvements.” If the developer produces “engineering and cost analyses” showing “additional funding is needed to finance agreed upon public improvements,” the Port will “designate some or all of the $120,000/year in park rent to finance public improvements,” improvements that the developer is responsible for. Suddenly this $120,000 of alleged “rent” could become no rent. Is that likely to happen? You be the judge:

A Little Recent History

The developer of 8 Washington is San Francisco Waterfront Partners, a partnership between Pacific Waterfront Partners and CALSTRS, the same partnership that developed Piers 1½, 3 and 5 across the street. According to the Port’s rent rolls, San Francisco Waterfront Partners makes rent payments for Piers 1½, 3 and 5 of $41,666.67 per month or $500,000 annually. But 90% of this is wiped out by a rent credit of a $450,000 annual rent credit ($37,500.00 per month). This means that the actual rent for Piers 1½, 3 and 5 paid by San Francisco Waterfront Partners isn’t $500,000/year, but $50,000/year or 1/10 of the original rent. Knowing this, it seems highly likely that the Port will grant a similar rent credit to 8 Washington, a credit that it has already offered in the Term Sheet approved last year.

The DEIR needs to discuss this and ask the following questions to help establish for public officials whether or not 8 Washington has the possibility of generating resources to fix up the Port’s historic infrastructure.

Was the $450,000 rent rebate given Piers 1½, 3 and 5 given for “public improvements” in the same way the 8 Washington Term Sheet proposes to give 8 Washington an up-to-$120,000/year (100%) rebate for “public improvements?

How much of this $120,000/year lease payment to the Port is guaranteed?

Based on recent history with this developer (see above box), it would appear that claiming a $120,000 per year lease payment is, at best, a gross overestimate.

2. Future payments triggered by resale of condos (aka increased transfer tax). The second source of payments (around $25 MILLION over life of the lease) involves the developer recording covenants “committing all owners to transfer payments to the Port of ½ percent of sale value for all sales of the residential condominiums and all re-sales of commercial condominiums” (from Director’s Report, Page 4), in other words, a ‘voluntary’ increase in the transfer tax.

This idea of obligating future owners to a special transfer “fee” was already tried, unsuccessfully, several years ago by then Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office as a way to provide ‘stimulus’ for large condo developers with approved projects who were trying to get financing. In exchange for agreeing to binding future condo owners to ‘voluntarily’ pay a 1% increase in the real estate transfer tax (but not calling it a “tax”), the Mayor’s Office proposed relieving the developers of 1/3 of their affordable housing requirement. That idea failed to get off the ground for both legal and political reasons. Regarding this proposal:

How does the Port plan to argue this increase in the real estate transfer TAX is not really a tax and do so in a way that convinces the Pacific Legal Foundation, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and SF Board of Realtors not to sue?
Mayor Newsom’s failed proposal did trigger an multi-stakeholder discussion of a broader, legally defensible strategy, going to the voters for a permanent, across the board increase in the transfer tax on ALL real estate transactions (above the median home price) generating tens of millions of dollars a year for affordable housing. A portion of this new money would fund traditional affordable housing built by non- profit housing development corporations, but a portion would also be available to for-profit housing developers to buy down their affordable housing obligations. All sides agreed to this compromise and to place it on the November 2010 ballot, because it HAD to go to the voters, just as the ½% transfer tax increase proposed in this Term Sheet would need voter approval.

NOTE: The reason that this proposal was not on the ballot that November, as reported in the New York Times, was because Mayor Newsom refused to support it or ANY tax increase, no matter how much support it had, for fear of giving his Republican opponent in the Lt. Governor’s race an issue to use against him in the 2010 election.

If the best legal and political minds in the city couldn’t figure out a way to “voluntarily” increase the real estate transfer tax without going to the voters then, how does the Port propose to do the same thing for 8 Washington now?

3. New IFD Funding Mechanism. The third weak link in this financing plan is the as yet “to-be-established Infrastructure Financing District (IFD) that will allow a portion of growth in property taxes to be reinvested in public facilities.” Port Director’s Recommendation, page 2. While the concept is an interesting one, it is in its infancy in San Francisco. The Board of Supervisors is in the process of setting up a pilot IFD with seven or eight property owners on Rincon Hill to test this model.

To date, citywide discussions about the use of tax increment financing tools, such as the IFD, have linked their use to funding a larger set of neighborhood infrastructure needs and public benefits previously identified through adopted Area Plans such as Eastern Neighborhoods, Market Octavia and Rincon Hill and not for the specific needs of individual projects or developers (e.g. 8 Washington).

Looking ahead, it isn’t hard to imagine the kind of criteria the Board of Supervisors might adopt to determine what developments could avail themselves of IFDs. Those with significant legal, political and financial challenges, such as 8 Washington, would not score well. Nor would projects that dramatically reduce and eliminate active recreation facilities serving middle-income families and seniors for over 45 years. Finally, projects that undo decades old community benefits agreements, provided as part of a Redevelopment plan (e.g. Golden Gateway’s permanent active recreation center), probably wouldn’t pass muster .

Assuming the city eventually creates IFDs in certain circumstances, how does the Port make the case for THIS project, given the growing political and legal opposition to it, the long standing community resource that it destroys and the fact that the Board of Supervisors won’t give up $32 million for it (see below).

4. Diversion of property taxes from the General Fund to the Port. The majority of the 8 Washington/SWL 351 site is NOT Port property, but under the jurisdiction of the City and County of San Francisco. Exhibit A of the Term Sheet shows the boundary of the 0.64 acre under Port control (SWL 351) and the 2.51 acres portion currently privately owned by Golden Gateway on AB168, 171, 291 (80% of the site). SWL 351 (the Port land) is only 20% of the total development site.

While these blocks were under the jurisdiction of the Redevelopment Agency, the property tax increment was diverted from the City’s General Fund to that Agency. Following termination of the Redevelopment project area several years ago, however, ALL property tax revenue from this land flows to the General Fund. The Port now proposes to divert the property tax increment from the portion of this site NOT UNDER PORT JURISDICTION away from the General Fund and to the Port.

The Port Director’s Term Sheet Recommendation on page 6 proposes “a new Port IFD” covering both SWL 351 and the Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Club (WHICH IS NOW ENTIRELY UNDER THE CITY’S JURISDICTION AND TAXING AUTHORITY). Under the “new Port IFD” all the property tax increment from development on non-Port property would be diverted FROM the General Fund TO the Port. Toward the end of the Term Sheet recommendation the Port Director does state that the Board of Supervisors would have to agree to this arrangement, which prompts several questions that should have been asked and answered in the DEIR:

Who from the city, not the Port, agreed to including these IFD financial terms in the Term Sheet?

Which members of the Board of Supervisors were consulted regarding this planned appropriation of property tax revenue from the city’s general fund?

What would lead the Port to think ANY current or future Board of Supervisors would ‘voluntarily’ turn over $32 million in General Fund dollars to the Port, providing a $32 MILLION CITY SUBSIDY FOR LUXURY CONDOS when the Board is struggling with massive budget deficits, layoffs and cuts to vital city programs?

The DEIR must address whether or not this project is financially viable because if it is not, then the public facilities and infrastructure the project has promised to provide cannot be built. The DEIR must also assess the likelihood of the Board of Supervisors turning over $32 million in General Fund monies as a subsidy to the Port for this and other Port projects and analyze what environmental impacts this loss of $32 million to the city would create over time: what parks wouldn’t be maintained, which parks and recreation centers closed, what transit lines discontinued or run less frequently, etc.; actions that would not have been necessary had the city kept that $32 million. Specifically, the DEIR must answer the following questions:

Can 8 Washington’s public facilities (e. g. Jackson Commons, other open space) ever be built with IFD funding, given that:

a) the IFD is predicated on the Port capturing 100% of the tax increment generated by 8 Washington even though the Port only owns 20% of the site, and

b) according to recent testimony before the Planning Commission by Michael Yarne (OEWD), under state law IFD’s are prohibited on land that “is currently, or was previously part of a redevelopment area”?

Under what circumstances does the Port anticipate that the current (or a future)
Board of Supervisors would voluntarily give up its 80% of this tax increment
($32 million out of $40 projected by the Port) to fund public improvements for
LUXURY CONDOS at 8 Washington or other Port projects?

Has the Port had any discussions with the Board of Supervisors regarding this?

If so, what was the Board’s reaction?

Has the Port or project sponsor had state legislation passed (or introduced) that
provides the necessary waivers from the current state prohibition against
setting up IFD’s in former redevelopment areas?

Again, this is information that public officials must have to make informed, objective
decisions about the impacts of this project.

VI. THE DEIR FAILS TO DISCLOSE THAT 8 WASHINGTON IS THE FOURTH ATTEMPT TO CONVERT THE GOLDEN GATEWAY TENNIS & SWIM CLUB FROM CITY MANDATED ACTIVE RECREATION USE TO CONDOMINIUMS. IT PRESENTS VERY BRIEF AND MISLEADING INFORMATION REGARDING THE HISTORIC RECORD SUPPORTING THE REQUIREMENT TO PRESERVE THE CURRENT ACTIVE RECREATION FACILITIES ON SITE IN PERPETUITY.

The DEIR addresses this issue very briefly in a footnote on page II.3 that states:

2 The original development agreement governing the Golden Gateway Center Lots required the developer to provide non-profit community facilities as part of the overall development with the Golden Gateway Center. In Section 4 (a) of the Agreement for Disposition of Land for Private Development (“Agreement”) between Perini-San Francisco Associates (the “Developer’) and the Redevelopment Agency, dated August 27, 1962, the Developer agreed to maintain “community facilities of a permanent nature… designed primarily for use on a nonprofit basis” (page 25 of the Agreement). Subsequent to the Agreement, the Agency and Golden Gateway Center (the successor to the Developer) entered into a Second Supplement and Amendment to the Agreement (“Second Supplement”) on March 14, 1976. Section 1(d) of the Second Supplement deleted Section 4(a) of the agreement (page 12 of Second Supplement) and thereby removed the requirement to maintain community facilities on the property in exchange for the dedication of Sydney Walton Park for perpetual use as a public park.

This interpretation of those documents contradicts evidence previously by individuals with intimate, first hand knowledge of those Golden Gateway redevelopment agreements. Those comments are attached as:

Exhibit A: A May 9, 1984 letter from then Mayor Dianne Feinstein that begins:“As a supervisor and as mayor, I have a long history with the redevelopment plan and agree with those who maintain that this site has always been considered set aside for recreation and open space.”

Exhibit B: An August 8, 1990 letter from Robert Rumsey to then redevelopment director Ed Helfeld that states:

“I happened to be Deputy Director of Redevelopment in the late 1950’s and early
    1960’s when the Golden Gateway redevelopment plan was adopted by the city and
    when Perini Corp. was subsequently selected as the developer of the Golden Gateway
    over eight other competitors… I feel it is important to place on the record the view of
    the staff and commissioners of the agency at the time of selection: The provision of that
    open space and recreational space was a significant factor in the selection of the
    Perini proposal. And clearly, the space was presumed to be kept that way in
    perpetuity” (underlining Mr. Rumsey’s).

Exhibit C: A January 24, 2003 letter from Senator Dianne Feinstein reiterating that:

   “I have a long history with the redevelopment area at Washington and Drumm Streets
    and concur with those who believe this space was intended for recreation and open
    space. Please oppose further development of the Golden Gateway Tennis & Swim Club.”

These letters came in reaction to THREE previous unsuccessful attempts to develop the Golden Gateway Recreation Center as condominiums. Those attempts included:

1. Perini Corp. (early 80’s). The original developer of the Golden Gateway project proposed replacing the Golden Gate Tennis & Swim Club (GGT&SC) with a 9-story condominium project, in violation of its original approvals for the larger project that called for the GGTSC to serve as one of two major community benefits (along with Sidney Walton Sq.) in perpetuity. NOTE: This took place after the Second Supplement and Amendment to the Agreement referenced in Footnote 2 (above) was executed. Clearly, then Mayor Feinstein, had a very different interpretation of the Second Supplement than that of the author of Footnote 2 when she says in her letter that “I agree with those who maintain that this site has always been considered set aside for recreation and open space.”

2. Perini Corp. (early 90’s). Again the owners of the Golden Gateway proposed replacing the project’s active recreation center with a condo project. This time, a letter from former Redevelopment Director Robert Rumsey date 8/8/90 provides extensive evidence that the interpretation of events contained in Footnote 2 is neither complete nor accurate. His detailed first hand description of that transaction which took place in the 1970’s is quite instructive. In addition to his comment that:

     “I feel it is important to place on the record the view of the staff and commissioners
      of the agency at the time of selection: The provision of that open space and
      recreational space was a significant factor in the selection of the Perini proposal.
      And clearly, the space was presumed to be kept that way in perpetuity”

his letter states that “if it is now proposed that there is a loophole permitting that space to be invaded by condominiums, I would consider that to be most unfortunate for the city” and describes the land use negotiations that allowed Perini to substitute 155 low-rise condos for the four remaining high-rise rental towers that were suppose to be built as Phase III of the redevelopment plan. According to Rumsey, the agency finally, “albeit reluctantly” agreed to let Perini make this change “because some seven years had elapsed since completion of Phase II and there was otherwise no prospect for building on those long-barren blocks”.

Rumsey then states that the Agency’s October 28, 1975 minutes show the debate over what the Agency should charge Perini for the land that made up Phase III (now Gateway Commons condominiums) focused on “whether it should be $8.45 a square foot, the price established 15 years earlier, or a more realistic 1975 price of $15-$20 a square foot”. He then states:

      “My new successor, Arthur F. Evans, said he might agree with the higher number if
      the land was offered without restrictions, such as requirements of open space. And
      he added: Amenities such as Sidney Walton Square and the Golden Gateway tennis
      courts were on land that was not income producing, and since no one could build
      highrise buildings on this area, its value could be considered zero.”

As a result of this discussion, according to Rumsey, “Evans and the commission agreed to hold the land sales price to the original $8.45 a square foot, as the agency continued to view the open and recreation space to be in perpetuity.”

Based on Rumsey’s letter and substantial community opposition, this second attempt to replace the GGT&SC was defeated.

3. John Hamilton, developer (2003-04). In the mid-90’s Perini sold Golden Gateway to Timothy Foo and a group of investors. In 2003, developer John Hamilton proposed another condo tower on the site. Senator Feinstein’s January 24, 2003 letter was responding to that proposal. After reiterating her conclusion that “this space was intended for recreation and open space”, she goes on to say, “increasing the height of the Club would drastically change the picturesque panorama of the Bay and would create shadow effects on the newly constructed Embarcadero. Further, development of more residential units would increase traffic noise and pollution, and disregard the original understanding between City officials and area residents that open space and recreational amenities should be preserved.”

4. Current 8 Washington Street/SWL 351 proposal is the 4th Attempt (2006-present) to develop condos on this site and demolish the Golden Gateway’s active recreation center, a facility that’s successfully fulfilled its intended purpose for almost 50 years.

In his written comments on 8 Washington’s DEIR dated August 11, 2010, Mr. Edward Helfeld, Director of the Redevelopment during the second attempt to demolish the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club speaks to the original purpose of the facility, how it has successfully served San Francisco’s recreation needs for over four decades and how relatively inexpensive it is compared to other tennis facilities in the city. He also writes that “As Executive Director (1987-1994) I was in total support of retaining Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club”.

Any public official or member of the general public reading the current DEIR would have no knowledge of these three previous attempts to build on this site, their outcome and the role former city officials have played in confirming that the Golden Gateway active recreation center was meant to be preserved as an active recreation center in perpetuity. The Comments and Responses to the 8 Washington Street/SWL 351 DEIR must include this historic information in order to be considered accurate, complete and objective.

VII. ADDITIONAL COMMENTS ON THE 8 WASHINGTON DEIR

A. The DEIR’s Introduction presents confusing and conflicting information regarding how, when and by whom environmental review for this project was initiated. The first two paragraphs of the DEIR’s Introduction (pg. Intro.1) raise some troubling questions about how environmental review for 8 Washington was carried out that need to be addressed more completely and forthrightly. The timeline for environmental review is described as follows (quoting from the DEIR):

1. “On January 3, 2007, an environmental evaluation application (EE application) was filed by San Francisco Waterfront Partners II (the “project sponsor”) on behalf of the Golden Gateway Center for a project at 8 Washington Street and the adjacent Seawall Lot 351, which is owned by the Port….(the Port is not a co-sponsor of the proposed project, but has authorized San Francisco Waterfront Partners II to submit an EE application that includes Seawall Lot 351).”

2. “On August 15, 2008, the Port issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the development of Seawall Lot 351. Two parties submitted timely proposals: SF Waterfront Partners II and a development group led by Dhaval Panchal (which later withdrew its proposal).”

3. “On November 10, 2008, the Port reissued the RFP for this project.”

4. “On February 24, 2009, the Port Commission authorized Port staff to enter into an exclusive negotiating agreement with SF Waterfront Partners II, finding that the proposal submitted by SF Waterfront Partners II meets the requirements of the RFP and meets the Port’s objectives for Seawall Lot 351.”

It appears from this timeline that the ‘project sponsor’, SF Waterfront Partners, was selected to carry out the 8 Washington project on January 3, 2007 when they were “authorized” (by the Port) to submit an Environmental Evaluation (EE) application officially beginning environmental review. However, there’s no explanation in the DEIR as to why, 18 months later (August 2008), the Port decided to issue an official RFP to select a developer for Seawall Lot 351.

This makes no sense given that Seawall Lot 351 was included in the January 3rd EE application submitted by SF Waterfront Partners (if not as designated developer, then in what capacity?). Then three months later (November 2008), we’re told the Port reissued the RFP with no explanation as to why. Finally, on Feb. 24, 2009, twenty five months after SF Waterfront Partners filed the EE application and began the environmental review process, the Port Commission authorizes staff to enter into an exclusive negotiating agreement with SF Waterfront Partners (SFWP) to develop SWL 351. This raises troubling questions that need to be addressed in the DEIR to give public officials (and the general public) a clearer sense of the appropriateness, completeness and legality of the current environmental review process.

The DEIR must explain:

1. Is this how environmental review is normally sequenced? Is it routine for a developer that has not yet been selected by the Port to undertake a specific project, let alone negotiated an Exclusive Negotiating Agreement (ENA) with the Port for said project, to submit an EE application to Planning for this project that they haven’t yet been selected to develop and then for the Port, eighteen months later, to issue the first RFP to select a developer for the project and have a developer other than the one who submitted the EE respond to the RFP—then drop out (with no explanation why in the DEIR), then have the RFP reissued six months later and then finally,
25 months after the current developer of 8 Washington submitted the EE, the Port finally selects said developer (SFWP) as the official developer of 8 Washington and begins negotiating an ENA? Is this NORMAL procedure?

2. How could the Port authorize SFWP’s EE application without a written agreement designating SFWP as the approved developer of SWL351? Is this standard procedure in these matters?

3. If this EE process was, in fact, legal prior to August 2008, why did the Port reverse course on August 15, 2008 and issue an RFP for SWL 351 (a site already included in the EE application filed 18 months earlier)? Doesn’t the initial applicant in the EE process have to be either the property owner or his designated developer and be able to demonstrate site control? How would that have been possible back in January 3, 2007 for SWL 351?

4. What role did SFWP play in drafting the RFP (and Port’s objectives for SWL351)?

5. What reasons did the second respondent to RFP give for “withdrawing his proposal?”

6. Why was the RFP reissued on November 10, 2008?

7. When on January 3, 2007, the Planning Department accepted an environmental evaluation application (EE) “filed by San Francisco Waterfront Partners II (the “project sponsor”) on behalf of Golden Gateway Center for a project at 8 Washington Street and the adjacent Seawall Lot 351”, was Planning aware that San Francisco Waterfront Partners had not been and could not be legally designated as “project sponsor” for SWL 351 at that time?

8. Why didn’t the fact that SFWP had no legal basis to claim that it was the “project sponsor” for SWL 351 invalidate the EE application? The DEIR states that the Port “authorized San Francisco Waterfront Partners II to submit an EE application that includes Seawall Lot 351” but wouldn’t that imply SFWP would eventually be selected as the developer and discourage other developers from submitting responses to the Port’s August 15, 2008 RFP given that SFWP had been working with Planning staff on the environmental evaluation for 18 months already?

9. Is what happened in January 2007 legal? If not, when did the Planning Department become aware of this problem and what did it do about it?

10. Having now publicly described this chronology in the DEIR, what legal impact does this have today on the environmental and project review process?

11. Would any other developer be allowed to begin the environmental review process on a project for which they had neither been designated developer nor had site control?

These questions MUST be answered in the DEIR given the bizarre and confusing chronology that now appears in it regarding how environmental review was initiated for this project.

B. In other Port documents related to 8 Washington, San Francisco Waterfront Partners II is described as a partnership between Pacific Waterfront Partners (PWP) and California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS). However, the involvement of CalSTRS in this project appears nowhere in the DEIR. Given that CalSTRS has already spent over $23 million dollars in predevelopment funds for 8 Washington, the DEIR must contain some mention of CalSTRS as a member of this partnership and the fact that the same partnership (PWP and CalSTRS) developed Piers 1½, 3 and 5 across The Embarcadero from this site.

Finally, the first sentence of the Introduction to the DEIR refers to the fact that “on January 3, 2007 an environmental evaluation application (EE) was filed by SF Waterfront Partners on behalf of the Golden Gateway Center for a project at 8 Washington”. That footnote references “Golden Gateway Center, Authorization Letter from Timothy Foo dated Dec. 27, 2006.”

For this DEIR to be complete and accurate it must address several key questions including:

1. Who is developing this project? Pacific Waterfront Partners? CalSTRS? Golden Gateway Center (Timothy Foo)? What are their relationships to each other and the proposed project?

2. What precisely is the relationship between these three entities and the Port?

3. What was the understanding between SFWP, Timothy Foo and the Port when SFWP submitted its EE application on behalf of Golden Gateway Center? All three are mentioned in the relevant discussion in the DEIR.

C. The DEIR is inadequate and incomplete due to its failure to include A Community Vision for San Francisco’s Northeast Waterfront. The DEIR is inadequate and biased in discussing the Planning Department’s Northeast Embarcadero Study (NES), while failing to include an equally detailed discussion of the background and recommendations of the study prepared by Asian Neighborhood Design entitled A Community Vision for San Francisco’s Northeast Waterfront, dated February 2011, which was presented to the Planning Commission on July 7, 2011.

The second sentence in the third paragraph of the Introduction states that the purpose of the Northeast Embarcadero Study (NES) was “to foster consensus on the future of Seawall Lot 351 and at other seawall lot properties on the northern waterfront” and leaves the reader with the impression that it succeeded in this goal by stating how many public workshops were held (five) and “on July 8, 2010, the San Francisco Planning Commission adopted a resolution that it ‘recognizes the design principles and recommendations of the Study’ and urges the Port of San Francisco to consider the recommendations of the NES when considering proposals for new development in this area”.

To be accurate and truthful, the DEIR should mention the level of anger and frustration expressed by the majority of the public that attended these five workshops who felt the Port, who was paying for the NES, was dictating its conclusions in order to facilitate the approval of the
8 Washington. For example, when 30-40 people at a workshop opposed the notion advanced by Planning staff that The Embarcadero needed a “hard edge” and that “higher heights” were appropriate for the 8 Washington site and only 6-8 people expressed support for these ideas, the notes from that meeting would later say that opinion was divided on these matters. To its credit, the Planning Department states clearly in the final draft of the NES that they failed in their goal of achieving consensus on the future of SWL 351.

The DEIR needs to include this information to provide a more accurate representation of the outcome of the NES process.

People were so upset by what they perceived as a transparent attempt to ‘justify’ 8 Washington, that they began their own community-based planning process to address the larger issues of reconnecting Chinatown, North Beach, Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill to the Waterfront; healing the wounds left by the ramps to the Embarcadero Freeway by making Broadway, Washington and Clay Streets more pedestrian, bicycle and transit friendly; and fostering consensus on the future of Seawall Lot 351 and at other seawall lot properties on the northern waterfront.

Four major community organizations representing thousands of local residents, small businesses and property owners became the primary sponsors/organizers of this “Community Vision for the Northeast Waterfront” and hired Asian Neighborhood Design to assist them in developing it. These organizations included: Friends of Golden Gateway; Golden Gateway Tenants Association; Telegraph Hill Dwellers and Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association. Stakeholders from Chinatown, Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Fisherman’s Wharf and other neighborhoods also participated.

On July 7, 2010, when the Planning Department staff presented the NES to the Planning Commission, AND and the four sponsors of the “Community Vision for the Northeast Waterfront” were invited to present a summary of their planning work to date.

The DEIR fails to make any mention of the alternative plan created by these four community groups with AND’s help. It needs to describe this study, how it differs from Planning’s NES and include it in the final EIR so public officials can evaluate the merits of both studies for themselves.

The DEIR must describe the reasons why this alternative community planning process was undertaken and include a detailed discussion how the proposed project would or would not conform to each of the recommendations contained in A Community Vision for San Francisco’s Northeast Waterfront?

I am attaching a copy of the AND Study: A Community Vision for San Francisco’s Northeast Waterfront to these comments and ask that it be included in the EIR so that readers and public officials can gauge for themselves if it was more successful in “fostering consensus on the future of Seawall Lot 351 and at other seawall lot properties on the northern waterfront” than the Planning Department’s Northeast Embarcadero Study (NES).

D. The DEIR tries, unsuccessfully, to minimize the loss of iconic views of Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill from in front of the Ferry Building with its argument about ‘episodic’ views and a new claim that “trees” already obscure the views of Coit Tower from in front of the Ferry Building, views enjoyed by millions of tourists, residents and office workers each year. As demonstrated in Figure IV.B-3: View B (page IV.B.7), the height and mass of the proposed project would completely obstruct views of Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill currently seen from the Embarcadero Promenade at the northern end of the Ferry Building. This significant adverse effect on the visual quality and scenic vistas enjoyed by the public puts the project in direct conflict with a number of city and Port planning policies. The DEIR’s conclusion that this would not create a substantial adverse effect on a scenic vista because “Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill would continue to be visible from numerous vantage pointes in the vicinity of the Project site and the City” is a biased and subjective judgment that is not based on fact. This ‘episodic’ argument could be used to claim that NO building ever blocks an important view because if you walk far enough past the offending structure, you might get the view back.
The comment about trees blocking the view of Coit Tower from in front of the Ferry Building must be stricken from the document. I just came from standing at the main entrance of the Ferry Building and I could clearly see Coit Tower and most of Telegraph Hill. While several trees in front of the F-line stop across the street did impede the view around the edges, these trees could easily be pruned to eliminate the problem.

E. The DEIR’s Traffic and Transit Data is Seriously Out of Date.

The traffic data relied upon by the DEIR in reaching its conclusions is incredibly stale, having been based on surveys done in 2006-2007 and with 2000 census data (page IV.D.5 of the DEIR). These studies must be updated. For example, the assumptions made in the DEIR that the existing conditions at the Embarcadero/Broadway and Embarcadero/Washington intersections are “satisfactory” (at LOS D) defy logic. Anyone familiar with the real time conditions at these intersections knows that this assessment could not be based on a factual analysis of current conditions at peak periods which, by the way, often occur on weekends (not studied in DEIR).

Also out of date is the transit information relied upon by the DEIR in reaching its conclusion that the project would not result in significant transportation impacts to transit systems (Impact TR-2), having been based upon data on capacity and utilization of individual MUNI lines from 2007 (page IV.D.9 of the DEIR). This data should also be updated. For example, whoever was responsible for the assumption in the DEIR that the F-Line is not at capacity during peak periods has never ridden the F-line at peak periods. The America’s Cup will only make this worse.

F. The DIER belittles Pedestrian Safety Issues. The DEIR states that: “Conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles could occur at the project garage driveway, which could cause the potential inbound vehicles to queue onto Washington Street. Outbound vehicles would queue inside the garage and would not affect street traffic. Conflicts between outbound vehicles and pedestrians could still occur, but their effect on pedestrians would be reduced because pedestrians on the sidewalk have the right-of-way.” (page IV.D.25). I’m sure the fact that pedestrians have the right-of-way is of great comfort to families of children and seniors who’ve been struck and killed by cars. This statement is insulting and MUST be stricken from the DEIR. It’s also not true.

In the very next paragraph the DEIR makes the following statement about these potential vehicular and pedestrian conflicts at the garage driveway:

“The number of vehicles and pedestrians per minute are relatively small (about one vehicle and three pedestrians every 30 seconds on average) and it is therefore not anticipated that the proposed project would cause any major conflict or interfere with pedestrian movements in the area.” (page IV.D.25)

These numbers translate to 2 cars and 6 pedestrians every minute or 120 cars and 360 pedestrians an hour (or approximately 1,440 cars and 4,320 pedestrians coming into potential conflict in any given 7 am to 7 pm period). The DEIR’s conclusion that such conflict between vehicles and pedestrian movement would be “less than significant” makes no logical sense and is simply not supported by the facts presented in the DEIR.

G. The DEIR must include a new fence around the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club in its NO PROJECT Alternative. Finally, the comments often heard about the “ugly green fence” around the GGTSC reminds us that the DEIR must let the reader know that it is the owner of the property, Mr. Timothy Foo, who is responsible for the ugly “green fence”. First, he has put the GGTSC operator on a month-to-month lease making it difficult for them to make a substantial investment in a nicer fence. Second, Mr. Foo himself stands to gain financially if 8 Washington is approved, so he has no incentive to fix the fence since its unsightliness is being used as an argument for demolishing the current facility. This simplest way to correct this bias would be to:

Include a rendering of the site with a new, attractive fence in the NO PROJECT alternative .

For the reasons stated in this letter, I believe this DEIR is seriously incomplete and inadequate to address the potentially significant impacts of this project. I urge you to revise the document and re-circulate it in draft form.

Sincerely,

Brad Paul

Dick Meister: Busting the union busters, a labor day lament

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September 2, 2011

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By Dick Meister

This is not a very happy Labor Day for labor, considering the continued heavy attacks on public employee unions, which have become the vanguard of organized labor. More than one-third of public employees are now in unions, while only about 7 percent of private sector workers are unionized.

Probably nothing could be more damaging to the labor movement in general than the attempts by anti-union forces to weaken unions at all levels of government by trying to limit– if not withdraw – their collective bargaining rights and right to strike, in addition to unilaterally cutting the pay and pensions, health care and other benefits their unions have won in bargaining.

Although that’s all been done in the name of budget balancing, it’s more accurately described as union busting, spurred on by the steady increase in public employee union members, even as the number of private sector unionists has been declining.

It hasn’t helped unions, either, that President Obama has turned out to be far less friendly to labor than he’d promised while securing lots of union money and lots of union supporters to help him win the presidency. Ironically, the key role unions played in Obama’s election has led to moves by anti-union forces to try to also weaken unions’ political rights.

The best example of the heavy pressures public employees and their unions are feeling is in Wisconsin, where the movement to strip public employees of their union rights began, under notoriously anti-labor Gov. Scott Walker.

Republican Walker is not only seeking to deny unionization to most state, county and municipal employees. He’s also been pushing measures that would increase the employees’ contributions to pension and health care funds by up to 50 percent, require their contracts to be re-negotiated yearly, and no longer allow unions to deduct dues from employee paychecks. It’s hard to imagine a union surviving under such restraints. Certainly Gov. Walker and his political friends don’t imagine it.

Wisconsin is but one of at least 18 states, including several once considered union friendly, where public employees are under heavy attack. On the federal level, supposedly labor-friendly Obama has imposed a federal pay freeze.

Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, is trying to outdo Walker. He’s proposing, among other anti-union measures, to eliminate the bargaining rights of more than 35,000 of Ohio’s public employees, to outlaw teacher strikes, prevent child care and home care workers from unionizing and repeal a rule that requires paying union wages to non-union workers on public construction projects.

Gov. Walker, however, remains the poster boy for anti-labor stalwarts. His most outrageous act has been to back a new state law that requires about two-thirds of Wisconsin’s school districts to use employee handbooks to replace collective bargaining agreements that for decades outlined the teachers’ pay and duties.

Substituting the handbooks for negotiated contracts gives school administrators the authority to dictate broad changes in the teachers’ working conditions without so much as consulting the teachers. In some school districts, even the administrators were not consulted before the handbooks with their stringent new conditions were issued.

Teachers are probably our most important public employees. Yet despite their great importance – or maybe because of it – Gov. Walker is eagerly supporting, not only a withdrawal of teachers’ collective bargaining rights, but also an end to teacher tenure, which protects them from unwarranted attacks by union foes such as Walker.

Walker also wants a substantial increase in the already high contributions to their health insurance by teachers and teacher retirees and changes that curtail the teachers’ basic rights and security by allowing them to be hired on a year-to-year basis. The new rules also mandate that in times of financial constraint, seniority can no longer be a basis for deciding which teachers to lay off.

Some Wisconsin school districts are even trying to reduce the number of sick days allowed teachers, however unwise it may seem to have teachers with possible communicative illnesses remain in the classroom because they can’t afford to take days off.

Other districts are doing away with at least some paid holidays or changing extra days used for professional development into workdays and cutting paid lesson preparation periods in half. The Wisconsin Journal Sentinel’s Erin Richards quotes one of Wisconsin’s major teacher union leaders as noting that teachers across the state have been most concerned with losing prep time, which can have a direct effect on the quality of lessons and student performance.

Gov. Walker and other leading Republicans don’t seem to be much concerned about that. What’s more important to them is cutting Wisconsin’s education budget, the influence of teachers on education policy and, of course, all but eliminating the union rights of teachers and all other public employees.

But Walker may very well have gone too far. The negative reaction has been strong and growing in Wisconsin and elsewhere. It’s widely realized that if the public employee union busters are successful, private sector unions throughout the country will feel even stronger opposition. And it’s clear that if anti-union forces can weaken the public employee unions that are the strongest segments of today’s labor movement, it’s more than likely that private sector unions will be the next target.

The good news is that recently, Wisconsin voters easily turned back a GOP attempt to recall two strong pro-worker state senators who had helped lead the fight against Walker’s anti-worker legislation. The fight began in the spring when Republicans targeted eight Democratic senators for recall – and lost. There have been nine recall elections since then and labor has won five of them.

Labor and the Democrats had hoped to wrest control of the State Senate from the GOP. But though failing to do so, they did narrow the Republicans Senate majority to a razor-thin 17-16.

Democrats and union leaders are rightly celebrating the pro-labor election victories as a possible opening shot against anti-labor extremism nationwide, which could in turn lead to an attempt to recall Gov. Walker or at least force him to back off.

Actually, Walker has done his labor enemies a great favor by provoking public outrage that has brought important new strength and solidarity to the cause of working people and their unions everywhere.

So it may be a happy Labor Day after all, thanks to a labor opponent.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

A wave

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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August 31, 2011

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marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO And so, interest in user-friendly dance music has come to the point where it can support a full-fledged, all-ages, traveling arena festival tour, a kind of mid-period Lollapalooza for ravers of all stripes called Identity, which features a pretty thrilling grab bag of 35 acts in 20 cities, and rolls into Shoreline Amphitheatre on Sat/3. Well, why the hell not? It’s good to go big once in a while.

(Unlike Lollapalooza, however, Identity carries nary a hint of grassroots activism or cosmic enlightenment — although there are “glow products” for sale in the Vendor Village. Also, for something called “Identity” there’s an awfully pale-faced sausage-fest lineup. Both of these things, however, may just be an accurate reflection of contemporary electronic dance music mega-party affairs in general.)

Alongside marquee names like DJ Shadow, Crystal Method, Pete Tong, and Hercules and Love Affair and intriguing, less-familiar-Stateside acts Rusko, Nero, and Steve Lawler — not to mention heroes of hype Steve Aoki and Skrillex — is someone very familiar to San Franciscan clubgoers. Headlining Identity is Kaskade, a.k.a. Ryan Raddon, who made his early career in the city at OM Records before leaping to Billboard Dance Chart fame and becoming SF’s entry into that overwhelming, slightly horrifying, always fascinating pop-tech monster ball that includes Deadmau5, Tiësto, and David Guetta.

“It wasn’t really my ambition to get so big that here I am headlining this massive tour, which can be exhausting,” Kaskade told me over the phone as he prepared to jet off between Identity dates to play the UK’s famed Creamfields Fest. (As someone whose appearance at a block party sparked a full-on riot in LA last month, Kaskade’s down-to-earth, surfer-dude demeanor is a bit disarming.)

“My passion is really more about producing than DJing, although doing I.D. has been awesome and exposed me to new sounds and different audiences. It’s a great party. And it does feel more and more that the pop sound is coming around to what I’ve been doing. A wave of electronic music seems to be taking over right now. I don’t specifically compose for pop singers like Guetta, but I can see how my sound fits in with what’s happening, and that’s why it’s reaching more people.”

That sound is a thoroughly accessible, silky smooth, slightly melancholic series of usually vocal-based anthems that always seems to be shimmering on a Mediterranean beach somewhere (expensive sunglasses come to mind) even as it inexorably builds to its climaxes and breakdowns. New release “Eyes,” with singer Mindy Gledhill is emblematic, the aching breeziness pioneered by local OM and Naked Music labels in the early 2000s pumped up on the big-money, stadium-sized steroids of Kaskade’s current home, Ultra Records, based in New York City.

Headlining Identity has buoyed Kaskade’s mainstream standing, but hopping aboard has had other advantages as well. “One of the best things about the Identity tour is that I get to work on my own stage show, to turn the music into a whole experience. Most of the time as a DJ, I just come into predetermined venues like Ruby Skye and at least have a good light rig. But now I can really expand my musical ideas conceptually, with video projections and amphitheater effects. Opening up to that kind of thing, along with hearing what the other Identity acts like Datsik and Le Castle Vania are doing — I don’t get to go to other peoples’ shows very much because I’m always playing somewhere — that’s changed some of my ideas drastically.”

Is coming back to San Francisco a kind of triumphant homecoming? “I don’t think of it that way. I really don’t think I ever left San Francisco, or that anyone can ever really leave San Francisco. Obviously the Bay Area means a lot to me in terms of my development, but I think a lot about moving back there. The people are genuinely into the music — and they’re used to a high level of quality.”

Identity Festival Sat/3, 1 p.m., $60. Shoreline Amphitheater, Mountain View. www.idfestival.com.

BAD SHOES ANNIVERSARY

The local electro label pumps out a good share of thoughtful bangers, this free party at recently expanded swankity club Sloane Squared is a perfect chance to plug in to the crews’ mindbending doings. With Baan, Ear Jerker, MPHD, Dane O, and Teleport.

Wed/31, 10 p.m., free. Sloane Squared, 1525 Mission, SF. www.badshoesrecords.com

MATTHIAS TANZMANN

Cleverly fiendish, heavily electric house and techno, expertly mixed by this famous German, celebrated for his close association with Ibiza club Circoloco.

Fri/2, 10 p.m., $5 advance. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com

ZUZUKA PODEROSA

Brazil-via-Brooklyn baile funk warrior queen gets provocative and splashes some neon rap over bass-heavy electronic tracks at one of my favorite monthly parties for downright friendliness and forward-thinking global jams, Braza!

Fri/2, 10 p.m., $10. SOM, 2529 16th St., SF. www.som-bar.com

D. DIGGLER AND KOLLEKTIV TURMSTRASSE

Repping Frankfurt and Hamburg respectively, these two acts are heroes of headspace-commandeering minimal techno — with duo Kollektiv considered by many to be among the best live acts in the world. Their sometimes haunting tracks will give the monthly Kontrol party an intense vibe.

Sat/3, 10 p.m.-6 a.m., $20. EndUp, 401 Sixth St., SF. www.kontrolsf.com

OPTIMO

Glaswegian geniuses of the extended 12-inch, this duo can make any retro track sound delightfully contemporary: classic rock, ska, dub, ’80s pop, it’s all fair game. Local “punch-drunk disco nihilists” Mi Ami, a band that’s garnered its own international fame, leads the charge.

Sat/3, 9 p.m.-4 a.m., $10 advance. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

ADRIAN SHERWOOD

One of the almighty princes of dub ruled the ’80s with treatments of Depeche Mode, Coldcut, the Woodentops, and Sinead O’Connor, released the first Black Uhuru records, cofounded the storied On-U Sound System, and is now helping celebrate excellent weekly Dub Mission’s 15th (!) anniversary. This is one of those “wows.”

Sun/4, 9 p.m., $15 advance. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.dubmission.com

TOM MIDDLETON

British Jedi master of smart tech-house in the 1990s has gone through a number of stylistic changes and clever monikers, but has never been afraid to let his classical and jazz training shine through his tracks. He’s headlining the grand Stompy + Sunset Labour of Love party.

Sun/4, 2 p.m., $20. Cafe Cocomo, 650 Indiana, SF. www.pacficsound.net

Film Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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August 30, 2011

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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Apollo 18 Faux-found-footage horror flick about a top-secret moon landing gone terribly awry. (1:26)

The Debt On paper, The Debt has a lot going for it: captivating history-based plot, “it” actor Jessica Chastain, Helen Mirren vs. Nazis. And while the latest from John Madden (1998’s Shakespeare in Love) is fairly entertaining, the film is ultimately forgettable. Chastain plays Rachel, a member of an Israeli team tasked with capturing a Nazi war criminal and bringing him to justice. Mirren is the older Rachel, who is haunted by the long-withheld true story of the mission. Although The Debt traffics in spy secrets, it’s actually rather predictable: the big reveal is shrug-worthy, and the shocking conclusion is expected. So while the entire cast — which also includes Tom Wilkinson, Sam Worthington, and Ciaran Hinds — turn in admirable performances, the script is lacking what it needs to make The Debt an effective drama or thriller. Like 2008’s overrated The Reader, the film tries to hide its inadequacies under heavy themes and the dread with which we remember the Holocaust. (1:54) (Peitzman)

Film Socialisme For the record, Jean-Luc Godard is alive and well and still making thought-provoking films. (1:41) SFFS New People Cinema.

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy Thirtysomethings in the Hamptons do the darndest things. (1:35)

*Higher Ground Higher Ground does not bite off more than it can chew. I guess that should go without saying, but it’s striking how comfortably Vera Farmiga (in her directorial debut) tackles this story of devotion and doubt. Based on the memoirs of Carolyn S. Briggs, who co-wrote the screenplay, this deeply personal film follows Corrine Walker (Vera Farmiga) from her adolescence through the trials of youth and middle age, her marriage to high school sweetheart Ethan (Joshua Leonard), and their lives as members of a small hippie Christian community. Although religion serves as a backdrop for Higher Ground, it doesn’t suffocate the human element of the story; it’s less a film about Christianity than it is about the challenges one woman faces as she tries to find room for herself amidst faith. Farmiga treats her subjects with empathy and humor and crafts a thoughtful, tender slice of sixties Midwest Americana. (1:49) (Cooper Berkmoyer)

*The Interrupters See “Chicago Hope.” (2:05)

*Love Exposure See Trash. (3:57) Roxie.

Seven Days in Utopia If the sports sub-sub-genre “existential golf drama” is your idea of a good time, you’re in luck this week. (1:38)

Shark Night 3D Just realized this movie is rated PG-13. DISLIKE. (1:31)