Development

Why North Beach works

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It’s time to piss some more people off, esp. the folks who think that highrise housing=urban density=good.

The Chronicle just announced that the American Planning Association has designated North Beach in SF as one of the best neighborhoods in American Why?

The 41,000-member organization took note of the atmospheric collage of low buildings around such historic gathering places as Grant Avenue and Washington Square. They also acknowledged the tenacious way that residents have fought to keep out chain stores and development projects that might water down “its eclectic mix of mom-and-pop shops, nightclubs and polyglot character (that) make it one of the city’s most unique and authentic communities,” according to the announcement.

What’s the message here? North Beach is dense — one of the densest parts of San Francisco. But it’s a real neighborhood, with local stores, locally owned businesses and local character.

And there are strict rules against chain stores.

Now check out the new highrises south of Market. The stores are all chains. There’s no neighborhood feel. It’s like someone dropped in a bunch of luxury hotels in a faux San Francisco setting.

If the city wants to build density, fine: But build real neighborhoods, with a mix of people, with local businesses, parks, street lfe. The highrises we’re building don’t do that.

Okay, commenters: let the attacks begin.

Political “Science” and Truth of Consequences

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[This article is excerpted from Norman Solomon’s new book “Made Love, Got
War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.”]

Contempt for the empirical that can’t be readily jiggered or spun is evident at the top of the executive branch in Washington. The country is mired in a discourse that echoes the Scopes trial dramatized in “Inherit the Wind.” Mere rationality would mean lining up on the side of “science” against the modern yahoos and political panderers waving the flag of social conservatism. (At the same time that scientific Darwinism is under renewed assault, a de facto alliance between religious fundamentalists and profit-devout corporatists has moved the country further into social Darwinism that aims to disassemble the welfare state.) Entrenched opposition to stem-cell research is part of a grim pattern that includes complacency about severe pollution and global warming — disastrous trends already dragging one species after another to the brink of extinction and beyond.

Disdain for “science” is cause for political concern. Yet few Americans and no major political forces are “antiscience” across the board. The ongoing prerogative is to pick and choose. Those concerned about the ravages left by scientific civilization — the combustion engine, chemicals, fossil-fuel plants, and so much more — frequently look to science for evidence and solutions. Those least concerned about the Earth’s ecology are apt to be the greatest enthusiasts for science in the service of unfettered commerce or the Pentagon, which always seeks the most effectively “advanced” scientific know-how. Even the most avowedly faithful are not inclined to leave the implementation of His plan to unscientific chance.

So, depending on the circumstances, right-wing fundamentalists could support the use of the latest science for top-of-the-line surveillance, for command and control, and for overall warfare — or could dismiss unwelcome scientific evidence of environmental harm as ideologically driven conclusions that should not be allowed to interfere with divinely inspired policies. Those kinds of maneuvers, George Orwell wrote in “1984,” help the believers “to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.”

In the first years of the twenty-first century, the liberal script hailed science as an urgent antidote to Bush-like irrationality. That was logical. But it was also ironic and ultimately unpersuasive. Pure allegiance to science exists least of all in the political domain; scientific findings are usually filtered by power, self-interest, and ideology. For instance, the technical and ecological advantages of mass transit have long been clear; yet foremost engineering minds are deployed to the task of building better SUVs. And there has never been any question that nuclear weapons are bad for the Earth and the future of humanity, but no one ever condemns the continuing development of nuclear weapons as a bipartisan assault on science. On the contrary, the nonstop R & D efforts for thermonuclear weapons are all about science.

When scientists found rapid climate change to be both extremely ominous and attributable to the proliferation of certain technologies, the media and political power centers responded to the data by doing as they wished. The GOP’s assault on science was cause for huge alarm when applied to the matter of global warming, but the unchallenged across-the-aisle embrace of science in the weaponry field had never been benign. When it came to designing and manufacturing the latest doomsday devices, only the most rigorous scientists need apply. And no room would be left for “intelligent design” as per the will of God.

The neutrality of science was self-evident and illusionary. Science was impartial because its discoveries were verifiable and accurate — but science was also, through funding and government direction, largely held captive. Its massively destructive capabilities were often seen as stupendous assets. In the case of ultramodern American armaments, the worse they got the better they got. Whatever could be said about “the market,” it was skewed by the buyers; the Pentagon’s routine spending made the nation’s budget for alternative fuels or eco-friendly technologies look like a pittance.

We’re social beings, as evolution seems to substantiate. Blessings and curses revolve largely around the loving and the warlike, the nurturing and the predatory. We’re self-protective for survival, yet we also have “conscience” — what Darwin described as the characteristic that most distinguishes human beings from other animals. Given the strength of our instincts for individual and small-group survival, we seem to be stingy with more far-reaching conscience.

Our capacities to take humane action are as distinctive of our species as conscience, and no more truly reliable. As people, we are consequences and we also cause them: by what we choose to do and not do. The beneficiaries of economic and military savagery are far from the combat zones. In annual reports, the Pentagon’s prime contractors give an overview of the vast financial rewards for shrewdly making a killing. To surrender the political battlefield to such forces is to self-marginalize and leave more space for those who thrive on plunder.

The inseparable bond of life and death should be healthy antipathy.

**********

We’ve had no way of really knowing how near annihilation might be. But our lives have flashed with scarcely believable human-made lightning — the evidence of things truly obscene, of officialdom gone mad — photos and footage of mushroom clouds, and routinely set-aside descriptions starting with Hiroshima. Waiting on the nuclear thunder.

Five decades after Sputnik, such apocalyptic dangers are still present, but from Americans in my generation the most articulated fears have to do with running out of money before breath. The USA is certainly no place to be old, sick, and low on funds. Huge medical bills and hazards of second-class care loom ahead. For people whose childhoods fell between victory over Japan and evacuation from Saigon, the twenty-first century has brought the time-honored and perfectly understandable quest to avoid dying before necessary — and to avoid living final years or seeing loved ones living final years in misery. Under such circumstances, self obsession may seem unavoidable.

There must be better options. But they’re apt to be obscured, most of all, by our own over-scheduled passivity; by who we figure we are, who we’ve allowed ourselves to become. The very word “options” is likely to have a consumer ring to it (extras on a new car, clauses in a contract). We buy in and consume, mostly selecting from prefab choices — even though, looking back, the best of life’s changes have usually come from creating options instead of choosing from the ones in stock.

When, in 1969, biologist George Wald said that “we are under repeated pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled — decisions that have been made,” the comment had everything to do with his observation that “our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed.” The curtailing of our own sense of real options is a concentric process, encircling our personal lives and our sense of community, national purpose, and global possibilities; circumscribing the ways that we, and the world around us, might change. Four decades after Wald’s anguished speech “A Generation in Search of a Future,” many of the accepted “facts of life” are still “facts of death” — blotting out horizons, stunting imaginations, holding tongues, limiting capacities to nurture or defend life. We are still in search of a future.

**********

And we’re brought up short by the precious presence and unspeakable absence of love. “All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie,” James Baldwin wrote, “that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” This love exists “not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

The freezing of love into small spaces, part of the numbing of America, proceeds in tandem with the warfare state. It’s easier to not feel others’ pain when we can’t feel too much ourselves.

If we want a future that sustains life, we’d better create it ourselves.

________________________________________________

Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” was published in October. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com

Lennar’s troubles continue

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A busload of 49er fans based in Bayview Hunters Point traveled to the 49ers headquarters in Santa Clara today to ask the team owners not to build a new stadium with developer Lennar. The group also requested a meeting with the York family regarding health problems they say are a result of Lennar’s activities.

In November 2006, the York family announced that the team was planning to leave San Francisco and relocate to Santa Clara. The announcement set off an intense competition to win the 49ers’ affections. As part of that battle, Mayor Gavin Newsom offered to build a new stadium at Hunters Point Shipyard—a move mayoral candidate Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai decried as “a dirty transfer of the shipyard.”

Jaron Browne of People Organized to Win Employment Rights, which participated in today’s bus ride, told the Guardian that the Yorks “weren’t able to come out and give a statement”.

“But we delivered an informational packet, including medical records and the personal accounts of people living in the surrounding neighborhood. Our message was, ‘Lennar is not a builder in good faith’,” Browne said.

The bus ride came the day after the San Francisco Board of Education voted unanimously, on the basis of their belief that the City’s precautionary principle requires them to take “anticipatory action” to prevent harm, to call on the Mayor, the Board of Supervisors, the Redevelopment Agency the Department of Public Health and other relevant City agencies to “require an immediate halt of Lennar’s development of Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard until an immediate and independent health and safety assessment can be conducted in cooperation with the SFUSD Superintendent and the School District’s School Health Programs Office and other relevant community organizations and City task forces like the SF Asthma Task Force.”

Their vote makes the School Board the first elected body in San Francisco to insist on a halt and comes ten months after a group of Bayview Hunters Point residents first started to ask for a temporary work stoppage until community health concerns could be addressed.

The School Board’s decision comes shortly after the California Department of Public Health’s, which is funded Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, released a report in response to concerns about Lennar’s grading operations at Parcel A.

The report finds, amongst many other concerns, that there are validity problems with the monitoring equipment that Lennar is currently using at the site, which is designed for indoor, not outdoor, conditions.

“Due to the novel application of the equipment for fence line monitoring,” notes the report, “CDPH is not able to interpret whether dust exposures in the community occurred that would explain some of the community health complaints such as headaches, bloody noses, adult onset asthma, respiratory symptoms, nausea and vomiting.”

The report also suggests beefing up monitoring and mitigation measures, and giving more power to City officials overseeing the site. It does not recommend any health screenings.

Lennar officials immediately issued a press release claiming that the report “supports recent findings by state and local public health professionals that grading operations at a construction site pose no significant long-term health threats to residents in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood.”

But a thorough reading of the CDPH’s report raises numerous concerns with Lennar’s monitoring operations and makes major recommendations for the site.

The underground campaign

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Click here for the Guardian 2007 Election Center: interviews, profiles, commentary, and more

› news@sfbg.com

Elections usually create an important public discussion on the direction of the city. Unfortunately, that debate isn’t really happening this year, largely because of the essentially uncontested races for sheriff and district attorney and the perception that Mayor Gavin Newsom is certain to be reelected, which has led him to ignore his opponents and the mainstream media to give scant coverage to the mayoral race and the issues being raised.

To the casual observer, it might seem as if everyone is content with the status quo.

But the situation looks quite different from the conference room here at the Guardian, where this season’s endorsement interviews with candidates, elected officials, and other political leaders have revealed a deeply divided city and real frustration with its leadership and direction.

In fact, we were struck by the fact that nobody we talked to had much of anything positive to say about Newsom. Granted, most of the interviews were with his challengers — but we’ve also talked to Sheriff Mike Hennessey and District Attorney Kamala Harris, both of whom have endorsed the mayor, and to supporters and opponents of various ballot measures. And from across the board, we got the sense that Newsom’s popularity in the polls isn’t reflected in the people who work with him on a regular basis.

Newsom will be in to talk to us Oct. 1, and we’ll be running his interview on the Web and allowing him ample opportunity to present his views and his responses.

Readers can listen to the interviews online at www.sfbg.com and check out our endorsements and explanations in next week’s issue. In the meantime, we offer this look at some of the interesting themes, revelations, and ideas that are emerging from the hours and hours of discussions, because some are quite noteworthy.

Like the fact that mayoral candidates Quintin Mecke and Harold Hoogasian — respectively the most progressive and the most conservative candidate in the race — largely agree on what’s wrong with the Newsom administration, as well as many solutions to the city’s most vexing problems. Does that signal the possibility of new political alliances forming in San Francisco, or at least new opportunities for a wider and more inclusive debate?

Might Lonnie Holmes and Ahimsa Porter Sumchai — two African American candidates with impressive credentials and deep ties to the community — have something to offer a city struggling with high crime rates, lingering racism, environmental and social injustice, and a culture of economic hopelessness? And if we’re a city open to new ideas, how about considering Josh Wolf’s intriguing plan for improving civic engagement, Grasshopper Alec Kaplan’s "green for peace" initiative, or Chicken John Rinaldi’s call to recognize and encourage San Francisco as a city of art and innovation?

There’s a lot going on in the political world that isn’t making the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The interviews we’ve been conducting point to a street-level democracy San Francisco–style in all its messy and wonderful glory. And they paint a picture of possibilities that lie beyond the news releases.

THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT


As the owner of Hoogasian Flowers on Seventh Street and a vocal representative of the small-business community, mayoral candidate Hoogasian describes himself as a "sensitive Republican," "a law-and-order guy" who would embrace "zero-based budgeting" if elected. "The best kind of government is the least kind of government," Hoogasian told us.

Those are hardly your typical progressive sentiments.

Yet Hoogasian has also embraced the Guardian‘s call for limiting new construction of market-rate housing until the city develops a plan to encourage the building of more housing affordable to poor and working-class San Franciscans. He supports public power, greater transparency in government, a moratorium on the privatization of government services, and a more muscular environmentalism. And he thinks the mayor is out of touch.

"I’m a native of San Francisco, and I’m pissed off," said Hoogasian, whose father ran for mayor 40 years ago with a similar platform against Joe Alioto. "Newsom is an empty suit. When was the last time the mayor stood before a pool of reporters and held a press conference?"

Mecke, program director of the Safety Network, a citywide public safety program promoting community-driven responses to crime and violence, is equally acerbic when it comes to Newsom’s news-release style of governance.

"It’s great that he wants to focus on the rock star elements, but we have to demand public accountability," said Mecke, who as a member of the Shelter Monitoring Committee helps inspect the city’s homeless shelters to ensure that people are treated with dignity and respect. "Even Willie Brown had some modicum of engagement."

Mecke advocates for progressive solutions to the crime problem. "We need to get the police to change," he said. "At the moment we have 10 fiefdoms, and the often-touted idea of community policing doesn’t exist."

Hoogasian said he jumped into the mayor’s race after "this bozo took away 400 garbage cans and called it an antilitter program." Mecke leaped into the race the day after progressive heavyweight Sup. Chris Daly announced he wasn’t running, and he won the supervisor’s endorsement. Both Hoogasian and Mecke express disgust at Newsom’s ignoring the wishes of San Franciscans, who voted last fall in favor of the mayor attending Board of Supervisors meetings to have monthly policy discussions.

"Why is wi-fi on the ballot [Proposition J] if the mayor didn’t respect that process last year?" Mecke asked.

Hoogasian characterized Newsom’s ill-fated Google-EarthLink deal as "a pie-in-the-sky idea suited to getting young people thinking he’s the guns" while only giving access to "people sitting on the corner of Chestnut with laptops, drinking lattes."

In light of San Francisco’s housing crisis, Hoogasian said he favors a moratorium on market-rate housing until 25,000 affordable units are built, and Mecke supports placing a large affordable-housing bond on next year’s ballot, noting, "We haven’t had one in 10 years."

Hoogasian sees Newsom’s recent demand that all department heads give him their resignations as further proof that the mayor is "chickenshit." Mecke found it "embarrassing" that Sup. Ross Mirkarimi had to legislate police foot patrols twice in 2006, overcoming Newsom vetoes.

"San Francisco should give me a chance to make this city what it deserves to be, " Hoogasian said.

Mecke said, "I’m here to take a risk, take a chance, regardless of what I think the odds are."

ENDING THE VIOLENCE


Holmes and Sumchai have made the murder rate and the city’s treatment of African Americans the centerpieces of their campaigns. Both support increased foot patrols and more community policing, and they agree that the root of the problem is the need for more attention and resources.

"The plan is early intervention," Holmes said, likening violence prevention to health care. "We need to start looking at preventative measures."

In addition to mentoring, after-school programs, and education, Holmes specifically advocates comprehensive community resource centers — a kind of one-stop shopping for citizens in need of social services — "so individuals do not have to travel that far outside their neighborhoods. If we start putting city services out into the communities, then not only are we looking at a cost savings to city government, but we’re also looking at a reduction in crime."

Sumchai, a physician, has studied the cycles of violence that occur as victims become perpetrators and thinks more medical approaches should be applied to social problems. "I would like to see the medical community address violence as a public health problem," she said.

Holmes said he thinks the people who work on violence prevention need to be homegrown. "We also need to talk about bringing individuals to the table who understand what’s really going on in the streets," he said. "The answer is not bringing in some professional or some doctor from Boston or New York because they had some elements of success there.

"When you take a plant that’s not native to the soil and try to plant it, it dies…. If there’s no way for those program elements or various modalities within those programs to take root somewhere, it’s going to fail, and that’s what we’ve seen in the Newsom administration."

Holmes spoke highly of former mayor Art Agnos’s deployment of community workers to walk the streets and mitigate violence by talking to kids and brokering gang truces.

The fate of the southeast sector of the city concerns both locals. Sumchai grew up in Sunnydale, and Holmes lived in the Western Addition and now lives in Bernal Heights. Neither is pleased with the city’s redevelopment plan for the Hunters Point Shipyard. "I have never felt that residential development at the shipyard would be safe," said Sumchai, who favors leaving the most toxic sites as much-needed open space.

Despite some relatively progressive ideas — Holmes suggested a luxury tax to finance housing and services for homeless individuals, and Sumchai would like to see San Francisco tax fatty foods to pay for public health programs — both were somewhat averse to aligning too closely with progressives.

Sumchai doesn’t like the current makeup of the Board of Supervisors, and Holmes favors cutting management in government and turning services over to community-based organizations.

But both made it clear that Newsom isn’t doing much for the African American community.

ORIGINAL IDEAS


The mayor’s race does have several colorful characters, from the oft-arrested Kaplan to nudist activist George Davis to ever-acerbic columnist and gadfly H. Brown. Yet two of the more unconventional candidates are also offering some of the more original and thought-provoking platforms in the race.

Activist-blogger Wolf made a name for himself by refusing to turn over to a federal grand jury his video footage from an anarchist rally at which a police officer was injured, defying a judge’s order and serving 226 days in federal prison, the longest term ever for someone asserting well-established First Amendment rights.

The Guardian and others have criticized the San Francisco Police Department’s conduct in the case and Newsom’s lack of support. But Wolf isn’t running on a police-reform platform so much as a call for "a new democracy plan" based loosely on the Community Congress models of the 1970s, updated using the modern technologies in which Wolf is fluent.

"The basic principle can be applied more effectively today with the advent of the Internet and Web 2.0 than was at all possible to do in the 1970s," Wolf said, calling for more direct democracy and an end to the facade of public comment in today’s system, which he said is "like talking to a wall."

"It’s not a dialogue, it’s not a conversation, and it’s certainly not a conversation with other people in the city," Wolf said. "No matter who’s mayor or who’s on the Board of Supervisors, the solutions that they are able to come up with are never going to be able to match the collective wisdom of the city of San Francisco. So building an online organism that allows people to engage in discussions about every single issue that comes across City Hall, as well as to vote in a sort of straw-poll manner around every single issue and to have conversations where the solutions can rise to the surface, seems to be a good step toward building a true democracy instead of a representative government."

Also calling for greater populism in government is Chicken John Rinaldi (see "Chicken and the Pot," 9/12/07), who shared his unique political strategy with us in a truly entertaining interview.

"I’m here to ask for the Guardian‘s second-place endorsement," Rinaldi said, aware that we intend to make three recommendations in this election, the first mayor’s race to use the ranked-choice voting system.

Asked if his running to illustrate a mechanism is akin to a hamster running on a wheel, Rinaldi elaborated on the twin issues that he holds dear to his heart — art and innovation — by talking about innovative ways to streamline the current complexities that artists, performers, and others must face when trying to get a permit to put on an event in San Francisco.

"I’m running for the idea of San Francisco," Rinaldi said. He claimed to be painting a campaign logo in the style of a mural on the side of his warehouse in the Mission District: "It’s going to say, ‘Chicken, it’s what’s for mayor,’ or ‘Chicken, the other white mayor.’"

He repeatedly said that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; when we asked him what he’d do if he won, he told us that he’ll hire Mecke, Holmes, Sumchai, and Wolf to run the city.

Yet his comedy has a serious underlying message: "I want to create an arts spark." And that’s something he’s undeniably good at.

THE LAW-ENFORCEMENT VIEW


Sheriff Hennessey and District Attorney Harris aren’t being seriously challenged for reelection, and both decided early (despite pleas from their supporters) not to take on Newsom for the top job. In fact, they’re both endorsing him.

But in interviews with us, they were far from universally laudatory toward the incumbent mayor, saying he needs to do much more to get a handle on crime and the social- and economic-justice issues that drive it.

Hennessey said San Francisco’s county jail system is beyond its capacity for inmates and half of them are behind bars on drug charges, even in a city supposedly opposed to the war on drugs.

"I had this conversation with the mayor probably a year ago," Hennessey said. "I took him down to the jail to show him there were people sleeping on the floor at that time. I needed additional staff to open up a new unit. He came down and looked at the jails and said, ‘Yeah, this is not right.’"

Asked how he would cut the jail population in half, Hennessey — in all seriousness — suggested firing the city’s narcotics officers. He readily acknowledged that the culture within the SFPD is a barrier to creating a real dialogue and partnership with the rest of the city. How would he fix it? Make the police chief an elected office.

"From about 1850 to 1895, the San Francisco police chief was elected," he said. "I think it’d be a very good idea for this city. It’s a small enough city that I think the elected politicians really try to be responsive to the public will."

Hennessey said that with $10 million or $15 million more, he could have an immediate impact on violence in the city by expanding a program he began last year called the No Violence Alliance, which combines into one community-based case-management system all of the types of services that perpetrators of violence are believed to be lacking: stable housing, education, decent jobs, and treatment for drug addiction.

Harris told us so-called quality-of-life crimes, including hand-to-hand drug sales no matter how small, deserve to be taken seriously. But it’s not a crime to be poor or homeless, she insisted and eagerly pointed to her own reentry program for offenders, Back on Track.

More than half of the felons paroled in San Francisco in 2003 returned to prison not long thereafter, reaffirming the continuing plague of recidivism in California. Harris said more than 90 percent of the people who participated in the pilot phase of Back on Track were holding down a job or attending school by the time they graduated from the program. "DAs around the country are listening to what we’re saying about how to achieve smart public safety," she said of the reentry philosophy.

But at the end of the day, Harris is a criminal prosecutor before she’s a nonprofit administrator. And her relationship with the SFPD at times has amounted to little more than a four-year stalemate. Harris and former district attorney Terrence Hallinan both endured accusations by cops that they were too easy on defendants and reluctant to prosecute.

To help us understand who’s right when it comes to the murder rate, Harris shared some telling statistics. She said the rate of police solving homicides in San Francisco is about 30 percent, compared with 60 percent nationwide. And she said she’s gotten convictions in 90 percent of the murder cases she’s filed. Nonetheless, cops consistently blame prosecutors for crimes going unpunished.

"I go to so many community meetings and hear the story," she said. "I cannot tell you how often I hear the story…. It’s a self-defeating thing to say, ‘I’m not going to work because the DA won’t prosecute.’ … If no report is taken, then you’re right: I’m not going to prosecute."

YES AND NO


In addition to the candidates, the Guardian also invites proponents and opponents of the most important ballot measures (which this year include the transportation reform Measure A and its procar rival, Measure H), as well as a range of elected officials and activists, including Sups. Aaron Peskin, Tom Ammiano, Jake McGoldrick, Mirkarimi, and Daly.

Although none of these people are running for office, the interviews have produced heated moments: Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann took Peskin and other supervisors to task for not supporting Proposition I, which would create a small-business support center. That, Brugmann said, would be an important gesture in a progressive city that has asked small businesses to provide health care, sick pay, and other benefits.

Taxi drivers have also raised concerns to us about a provision of Measure A — which Peskin wrote with input from labor and others and which enjoys widespread support, particularly among progressives — that could allow the Board of Supervisors to undermine the 29-year-old system that allows only active drivers to hold valuable city medallions. In response, Peskin told us that was not the intent and that he is already working with Newsom to address those concerns with a joint letter and possible legislation.

"If San Francisco is going to be a world-class city, it’s got to have a great transportation infrastructure," Peskin told us about the motivation behind Measure A. "This would make sure that San Francisco has a transit-first policy forever."

Measure A would place control of almost all aspects of the transportation system under the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and give that panel more money and administrative powers in the process, while letting the Board of Supervisors retain its power to reject the MTA’s budget, fare hikes, or route changes. He also inserted a provision in the measure that would negate approval of Measure H, the downtown-backed measure that would invalidate existing city parking policies.

Ironically, Peskin said his approach would help prevent the gridlock that would result if the city’s power brokers got their wish of being able to build 10,000 housing units downtown without restrictions on automobile use and a revitalization of public transit options. As he said, "I think we are in many ways aiding developers downtown because [current development plans are] predicated on having a New York–style transit system."

Asked about Newsom’s controversial decision to ask for the resignations of senior staff, Peskin was critical but said he had no intention of having the board intervene. McGoldrick was more animated, calling it a "gutless Gavin move," and said, "If you want to fire them, friggin’ fire them." But he said it was consistent with Newsom’s "conflict-averse and criticism-averse" style of governance.

McGoldrick also had lots to say about Newsom’s penchant for trying to privatize essential city services — "We need to say, ‘Folks, look at what’s happening to your public asset’" — and his own sponsorship of Proposition K, which seeks to restrict advertising in public spaces.

"Do we have to submit to the advertisers to get things done?" McGoldrick asked us in discussing Prop. K, which he authored to counter "the crass advertising blight that has spread across this city."*

Stop the developers now

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EDITORIAL Sup. Tom Ammiano is taking a key step toward ending the gold rush by local housing developers who want to get their projects approved under the wire before the city can put in place new zoning controls for the eastern neighborhoods. The supervisors ought to approve his resolution as quickly as possible.

The eastern neighborhoods planning process has been under way for years; at this point the Planning Department is projecting final language for a proposal sometime around the end of the year. Then it will go to the supervisors, who will be able to debate, hold hearings on, and amend the plan. All of this will take months — and in the meantime, the Planning Commission keeps approving projects.

According to a startling document that the Planning Department posted on its Web site last week, some 30,000 housing units are in the pipeline — projects that have permits pending, have been approved, or are under construction. Nearly 5,000 units are already under construction, and applications for 142 projects, with a total of 9,305 units, are now before the department. That’s a whole lot of new construction, a whole lot of market-rate condos that don’t fit in with the city’s General Plan. Every one of the developers would like to get permission to go forward before any further limits are placed on housing construction.

And the Planning Commission seems happy to oblige: market-rate projects on César Chávez and Valencia streets both won the nod in the past few weeks, infuriating neighborhood activists who wanted to see more affordable housing. And to make matters worse, as Ammiano noted in introducing temporary controls for new housing, the commission rejected a proposal to collect fees of $12 per square foot to fund community amenities and mitigation. "Why the commission chose not to impose conditions on projects in the pipeline is beyond reason," Ammiano said.

His measure would deny permits for any new development in the eastern neighborhoods for the next 18 months or until a full eastern neighborhoods plan is approved by the Board of Supervisors. That makes perfect sense — everyone who wants to build housing in San Francisco knows that there are new zoning rules coming; there’s no surprise here. And if the commission is allowed to keep green-lighting market-rate housing without adequate planning for building the necessary parks, transportation infrastructure, police and fire stations, etc., the city will be absorbing as many as 30,000 new housing units without adequate mitigation.

There’s a larger question here too: as we pointed out last week (see "Our Three-Point Plan to Save San Francisco," 9/19/07), the current proposals in the eastern neighborhoods draft plans don’t do anywhere near enough to provide housing for working-class and low-income San Franciscans. The housing that’s in the pipeline will do nothing to bring down costs and will instead attract world travelers, speculators, and young Silicon Valley workers, who can afford small, expensive condos. That sort of housing policy doesn’t help fight sprawl or global warming, since it forces people who now work in San Francisco to move farther and farther out of town to find affordable places to live.

So the supervisors may decide to do the sane thing when they get the eastern neighborhoods plan and strictly limit new market-rate housing until the deficit in affordable units is under control. And there may be a ballot initiative to completely transform the way housing policy is set in this city (see "A Prop. M for Housing," 9/19/07). Allowing tens of thousands more luxury condo units to be built before the city has the chance to decide how it wants to handle future housing policy is a terrible idea.

Putting on hold projects that are almost certainly not consistent with the direction this city should go until there’s a chance to finalize the eastern neighborhoods plan is a no-brainer. The board should approve Ammiano’s proposal — with no special exceptions for any developer or any project.

On the bright side

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› amanda@sfbg.com

The most masterful crafters of fiction depend on the deliberate omission of details. Ernest Hemingway, in a 1958 interview with the Paris Review, called it the iceberg of a story, an eighth of which pierces the surface, known and visible, while an untold reality remains submerged beneath the narrative. This art of absentia served Hemingway well, layering his stories with nuance and mystery. The icebergs in Bjørn Lomborg’s Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming serve their author’s purposes too, but they’re likely to melt under the glare of critical scrutiny.

Lomborg, a Danish statistician and adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, examines the problem of climate change through the lens of expense, and according to his calculations, the public benefits of cutting carbon dioxide emissions aren’t worth the cost. If we really want to improve future conditions, he contends, we should pay more attention to social problems like hunger and disease, causes that have been relegated to the status of ugly stepchildren by the new hype around saving the climate. Early in the book he concludes that, calculated in purely economic terms, the Kyoto Protocol is a "bad deal." Every dollar spent cutting carbon emissions translates to 34 cents of "good" — a term he neglects to define.

Whatever his definition, it demands investigation. Lomborg is, after all, "the skeptical environmentalist," as he first made plain in 2001’s The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, which was roundly debunked by scientists and Lomborg’s avowed fellow environmentalists. The Union of Concerned Scientists got concerned with his optimism about the state of the natural world and convened a panel of leading experts, including biologist Edward O. Wilson, water expert Peter Gleick, and climate modeler Jerry Mahlman to delve into the details of his data. They determined that his conclusions were drawn from an artful manipulation of facts disguised by a narrative deftly criticizing other artful manipulators of facts.

In Cool It, Lomborg attempts to defame the doomsday scenarios presented by respected environmentalists and thinkers such as Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and James Hansen by focusing on their offal: the potential positive impacts of global warming. He points out that more people die from cold-related deaths than heat-related deaths and wonders why no one’s talking about the fact that fewer people may freeze to death in 2050.

Lomborg never denies that climate change is occurring, but he proffers interesting statistics to show that things aren’t as bad as has been reported, and he blames the media for distorting facts by employing easy iconography — hurricanes, Mount Kilimanjaro, polar bears, Antarctica. And it’s true: the media often go for the easy image — such as Time‘s cover photo of a polar bear bereft on a chunk of ice, which played a role in bringing the term "global warming" into the common vernacular. Lomborg, by the way, made that same magazine’s "100 most influential people" list in 2004.

This influential person writes with cool-headed assurance that global warming will not adversely affect polar bears any more than hunting them does, that some populations of them are actually increasing, and that evolution will equip the fittest for the future. He writes, "Yes, it is likely that disappearing ice will make it harder for polar bears to continue their traditional foraging patterns and that they will increasingly take up a lifestyle similar to that of brown bears, from which they evolved." His back-of-the-book footnote to that statement reads: "The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment finds it likely that disappearing ice will make polar bears take up a ‘terrestrial summer lifestyle similar to that of brown bears, from which they evolved.’ "

And the hawks begin to circle. In a recent interview with Lomborg, Salon.com’s Kevin Berger said, "But you edited the quote. The whole thing goes like this: ‘It is difficult to envisage the survival of polar bears as a species given a zero summer sea-ice scenario. Their only option would be a terrestrial summer lifestyle similar to that of brown bears, from which they evolved. In such a case, competition, risk of hybridization with brown bears and grizzly bears, and increased interactions with people would then number among the threats to polar bears.’ " Lomborg defends himself by saying he talked to a different expert.

While it would be easy to discredit the remainder of the book based on this exposé, there is some worth in Lomborg’s reminder that we’ve been asleep at the wheel on far too many social problems, such as clean water, hygiene, disease prevention, and hunger. He isn’t wrong when he says that solving them would better equip populations for dealing with climate change. But further tugging at the roots of his footnotes is almost unnecessary because Cool It is virtually devoid of fully explored ideas.

For example, at a 2004 meeting the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a consortium of economists headed by Lomborg that think tanks on global challenges, drew up a global priority list of issues we should be addressing rather than shuttling cash toward cutting CO2 emissions. Ranking third is increased trade liberalization — code language for more NAFTA-type agreements, which have proved detrimental to developing countries. And what exactly is meant by number five, "development of new agricultural technologies"? Genetically modified organisms? Newer, stronger, somehow nontoxic pesticides? It’s hard to believe an environmentalist might promote pesticide use, but in his chapter on eradicating malaria Lomborg writes, "Concerns from Western governments, nongovernmental organizations, and local populations make it hard to utilize DDT, which is still the most cost-effective insecticide against mosquitoes and, properly used, has negligible environmental impact."

Such a statement underscores Lomborg’s priorities when it comes to health — both human and environmental. His definition of cost gives primacy to cold, hard cash at the "negligible" expense of humans and their environments. Likewise, when the discussion turns to ratifying Kyoto, which he claims — without much explanation — would cost the US economy $160 billion a year, the price tag refers solely to the cost of disrupting business as usual.

"If we try to stabilize emissions, it turns out that for the first 170 years the costs are greater than the benefits," Lomborg writes. But for the past 200 years we’ve been doing business on the cheap — and that shouldn’t be our baseline cost of existence. What’s the true cost of a species? Do we really know until it’s gone? What about the other negative environmental impacts of business as usual? Or the positive impacts of, say, more public transit to reduce car trips to reduce emissions? Plus, a decrease in the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas means more than just a decrease in carbon emissions. It means less mining, less drilling, less invasion into remote or protected areas questing for new ores. It means fewer oil spills, less mountaintop removal, less ground, water, and air pollution for the communities that have the misfortune of being sited in the backyards of industry.

In the book’s conclusion, Lomborg pushes for a $25 billion investment in research and design for alternative technologies. Seven times cheaper than adopting the Kyoto Protocol or establishing a rigorous carbon tax to encourage less CO2 emission, R&D investments are, in Lomborg’s economic rubric, a better deal.

Of course, there are already operational solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal units, vehicle-to-grid electric cars, and biodiesel recipes that could be more aggressively produced and adopted. But in Lomborg’s eyes they’re too expensive, bound to be replaced by superior technology, and thus a waste of money, to invest in now — he brushes aside economists who contend that prices will drop as demand increases. And beyond offering no ideas on diminishing the use of fossil fuel, he in fact encourages burning more in the communities that aren’t yet — though the sole upside to fossil fuels is economic cost, and the only cap on price is the perception of abundance.

He also fails to acknowledge that we can’t have both. We can’t have an increase in alternative technologies and an unabated use of fossil fuels. To actually deploy alternative technologies in the market — the hoped-for end result of all that R&D — would require the fossil fuels to step aside. This would, in turn, cut CO2 emissions. One must necessarily replace the other. There isn’t room for both. It’s like trying to put ice in a glass that’s already brimming with cold water.

One could argue that any adoption of alternative technologies would cover increased use, but that ignores what numerous researchers have pointed out: we should be universally deploying simple, effective, already established energy-efficiency measures. For the past 30 years California has done this, and despite projections and escautf8g energy use nationwide, the state’s needs have only increased in lockstep with the population — about 1 percent a year. Lomborg doesn’t aggressively push for energy efficiency, despite its cost-savings popularity with the same economically driven corporations, governments, and individuals likely to elevate Cool It to biblical status.

Lomborg criticizes as too extreme and costly proposals by Tony Blair and Gore to slash CO2 emissions by 50 or 80 percent respectively. Similarly he writes, "Restricting transportation will make the economy less efficient. Cutting back on hot showers, plane trips, and car use will leave you less well-off. It will also reduce the number of people being saved from cold, it will increase the number of water stressed [people], and it will allow fewer to get rich enough to avoid malaria, starvation, and poverty."

Is it too bold to ask people to foreswear some of the excesses they’ve enjoyed, to put to bed some creature comforts, to fundamentally change the way they perceive living in the 21st century if they hope for a 22nd century for their children? Lomborg doesn’t ask these questions, so Cool It becomes more of a distraction than a contribution at a time when environmentalists should be busy promoting solutions, not debunking the carefully crafted fables of Lomborg’s dollar-driven theses. *

COOL IT: THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST’S GUIDE TO GLOBAL WARMING

By Bjørn Lomborg

Alfred A. Knopf

272 pages

$21

Joining the party

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lit@sfbg.com
In 1946, after three and a half years spent fighting in the segregated US Army on the Pacific front of World War II, Nelson Peery returned to a home front marked by joblessness, mob violence, lynchings, police tyranny, and red-baiting hysteria. Discussing the homecoming of black veterans such as himself in his new memoir, Black Radical, he says, “We had become conscious defending other people’s freedom.”
Black Radical is the sequel to Peery’s first memoir, Black Fire, which takes us from Peery’s childhood during the Great Depression to the wartime experiences that lead to his expanding racial consciousness. Black Radical focuses on Peery’s time in the Communist Party, which he joins soon after his return to Minnesota. Shortly thereafter, Peery’s father, an American Legion stalwart, chooses patriotism over paternity and declares to the state legislature, “I have seen my seven sons swallowed in the bloody maw of Communism.” This “good Negro” pose is exactly what Peery has vowed to struggle against, although he is equally skeptical of black nationalism, embracing instead a Marxist analysis that sees the overarching system as the problem, not just white racists and their deluded allies.
Peery’s dedication to the Communist Party, which he likens to his commitment to his army division during the war, is sometimes stunning when juxtaposed to the organization’s systemic racism. And while he is forthright about his ethical struggles and political development, there is a staginess to much of the dialogue that transforms plot turns into vehicles for Peery’s soul-searching. But the book is also filled with anecdotes that lend emotional depth to Peery’s revolutionary rhetoric, such as when a white librarian hands him a copy of Karl Marx’s The German Ideology, though such a gesture could lead to her immediate dismissal. Or when Peery hosts legendary blues singer Leadbelly at his Minneapolis home and the singer ends up entertaining a crowd of 200 revelers that includes the visiting Dean of Canterbury.
Black Radical concludes in the LA neighborhood of Watts, where Peery attempts to do organizing work as relentless police harassment of poor black residents leads to the Watts uprising of 1965. Peery visits a supermarket where customers are piling their shopping carts high and then wheeling everything past smiling clerks. One woman tells Peery, “You can take whatever you want. They ain’t chargin’ today.” While the riots are eventually suppressed by 24,000 law enforcement thugs, this moment still illuminates the possibilities for the self-determination Peery invokes.
BLACK RADICAL: THE EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY
By Nelson Peery
New Press
272 pages
$24.95
READING
Sept. 20, 7 p.m., free
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus, SF
(415) 362-8193, www.citylights.com

Our three-point plan to save San Francisco

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› news@sfbg.com

Curtis Aaron leaves his house at 9 a.m. and drives to work as a recreation center director for the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. He tries to leave enough time for the trip; he’s expected on the job at noon.

Aaron lives in Stockton. He moved there with his wife and two kids three years ago because “there was no way I could buy a place in San Francisco, not even close.” His commute takes three hours one way when traffic is bad. He drives by himself in a Honda Accord and spends $400 a month on gas.

Peter works for the city as a programmer and lives in Suisun City, where he moved to buy a house and start a family. Born and raised in San Francisco, he is now single again, with grown-up children and a commute that takes a little more than an hour on a good day.

“I’d love to move back. I love city life, but I want to be a homeowner, and I can’t afford that in the city,” Peter, who asked us not to use his last name, explained. “I work two blocks from where I grew up and my mom’s place, which she sold 20 years ago. Her house is nothing fancy, but it’s going for $1.2 million. There’s no way in hell I could buy that.”

Aaron and Peter aren’t paupers; they have good, unionized city jobs. They’re people who by any normal standard would be considered middle-class — except that they simply can’t afford to live in the city where they work. So they drive long distances every day, burning fossil fuels and wasting thousands of productive hours each year.

Their stories are hardly unique or new; they represent part of the core of the city’s most pressing problem: a lack of affordable housing.

Just about everyone on all sides of the political debate agrees that people like Aaron and Peter ought to be able to live in San Francisco. Keeping people who work here close to their jobs is good for the environment, good for the community, and good for the workers.

“A lack of affordable housing is one of the city’s greatest challenges,” Mayor Gavin Newsom acknowledged in his 2007–08 draft budget.

The mayor’s answer — which at times has the support of environmentalists — is in part to allow private developers to build dense, high-rise condominiums, sold at whatever price the market will bear, with a small percentage set aside for people who are slightly less well-off.

The idea is that downtown housing will appeal to people who work in town, keeping them out of their cars and fighting sprawl. And it assumes that if enough market-rate housing is built, eventually the price will come down. In the meantime, demanding that developers make somewhere around 15 percent of their units available at below-market rates should help people like Aaron and Peter — as well as the people who make far less money, who can never buy even a moderately priced unit, and who are being displaced from this city at an alarming rate. And a modest amount of public money, combined with existing state and federal funding, will make affordable housing available to people at all income levels.

But the facts are clear: this strategy isn’t working — and it never will. If San Francisco has any hope of remaining a city with economic diversity, a city that has artists and writers and families and blue-collar workers and young people and students and so many of those who have made this one of the world’s great cities, we need to completely change how we approach the housing issue.

 

HOMELESS OR $100,000

The housing plans coming out of the Mayor’s Office right now are aimed primarily at two populations: the homeless people who have lost all of their discretionary income due to Newsom’s Care Not Cash initiative, and people earning in the neighborhood of $100,000 a year who can’t afford to buy homes. For some time now, the mayor has been diverting affordable-housing money to cover the unfunded costs of making Care Not Cash functional; at least that money is going to the truly needy.

Now Newsom’s housing director, Matt Franklin, is talking about what he recently told the Planning Commission is a “gaping hole” in the city’s housing market: condominiums that would allow people on the higher end of middle income to become homeowners.

At a hearing Sept. 17, Doug Shoemaker of the Mayor’s Office of Housing told a Board of Supervisors committee that the mayor wants to see more condos in the $400,000 to $600,000 range — which, according to figures presented by Service Employees International Union Local 1021, would be out of the reach of, say, a bus driver, a teacher, or a licensed vocational nurse.

Newsom has put $43 million in affordable-housing money into subsidies for new home buyers in the past year. The Planning Department is looking at the eastern neighborhoods as ground zero for a huge new boom in condos for people who, in government parlance, make between 120 and 150 percent of the region’s median income (which is about $90,000 a year for a family of four).

In total, the eastern neighborhoods proposal would allow about 7,500 to 10,000 new housing units to be added over the next 20 years. Downtown residential development at Rincon Hill and the Transbay Terminal is expected to add 10,000 units to the housing mix, and several thousand more units are planned for Visitacion Valley.

The way (somewhat) affordable housing will be built in the eastern part of town, the theory goes, is by creating incentives to get developers to build lower-cost housing. That means, for example, allowing increases in density — changing zoning codes to let buildings go higher, for example, or eliminating parking requirements to allow more units to be crammed into an available lot. The more units a developer can build on a piece of land, the theory goes, the cheaper those units can be.

But there’s absolutely no empirical evidence that this has ever worked or will ever work, and here’s why: the San Francisco housing market is unlike any other market for anything, anywhere. Demand is essentially insatiable, so there’s no competitive pressure to hold prices down.

“There’s this naive notion that if you reduce costs to the market-rate developers, you’ll reduce the costs of the unit,” Calvin Welch, an affordable-housing activist with more than three decades of experience in housing politics, told the Guardian. “But where has that ever happened?”

In other words, there’s nothing to keep those new condos at rates that even unionized city employees — much less service-industry workers, nonprofit employees, and those living on much lower incomes — can afford.

In the meantime, there’s very little discussion of the impact of increasing density in the nation’s second-densest city. Building housing for tens of thousands of new people means spending hundreds of millions of dollars on parks, recreation centers, schools, police stations, fire stations, and Muni lines for the new neighborhoods — and that’s not even on the Planning Department’s radar. Who’s going to pay for all that? Nothing — nothing — in what the mayor and the planners are discussing in development fees will come close to generating the kind of cash it will take to make the newly dense areas livable.

“The solution we are striving for has not been achieved,” said Chris Durazo, chair of the South of Market Community Action Network, an organizing group. “Should we be looking at the cost to developers to build affordable housing or the cost to the neighborhood to be healthy? We’re looking at the cumulative impacts of policy, ballot measures, and planning and saying it doesn’t add up.”

In fact, Shoemaker testified before the supervisors’ committee that the city is $1.14 billion short of the cash it needs to build the level of affordable housing and community amenities in the eastern neighborhoods that are necessary to meet the city’s own goals.

This is, to put it mildly, a gigantic problem.

 

THE REST OF US

Very little of what is on the mayor’s drawing board is rental housing — and even less is housing available for people whose incomes are well below the regional median, people who earn less than $60,000 a year. That’s a large percentage of San Franciscans.

The situation is dire. Last year the Mayor’s Office of Community Development reported that 16 percent of renters spend more than half of their income on housing costs. And a recent report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition notes that a minimum-wage earner would have to work 120 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, to afford the $1,551 rent on a two-bedroom apartment if they spent the recommended 30 percent of their income on housing.

Ted Gullickson of the San Francisco Tenants Union told us that Ellis Act evictions have decreased in the wake of 2006 Board of Supervisors legislation that bars landlords from converting their property from rentals to condos if they evict senior or disabled tenants.

But the condo market is so profitable that landlords are now offering to buy out their tenants — and are taking affordable, rent-controlled housing off the market at the rate of a couple of hundred units a month.

City studies also confirm that white San Franciscans earn more than twice as much as their Latino and African American counterparts. So it’s hardly surprising that the Bayview–Hunters Point African American community is worried that it will be displaced by the city’s massive redevelopment plan for that area. These fears were reinforced last year, when Lennar Corp., which is developing 1,500 new units at Hunters Point Shipyard, announced it will only build for-sale condos at the site rather than promised rental units. Very few African American residents of Bayview–Hunters Point will ever be able to buy those condos.

Tony Kelly of the Potrero Hill Boosters believes the industrial-zoned land in that area is the city’s last chance to address its affordable-housing crisis. “It’s the biggest single rezoning that the city has ever tried to do. It’s a really huge thing. But it’s also where a lot of development pressure is being put on the city, because the first sale on this land, once it’s rezoned, will be the most profitable.”

Land use attorney Sue Hestor sees the eastern neighborhoods as a test of San Francisco’s real political soul.

“There is no way it can meet housing goals unless a large chunk of land goes for affordable housing, or we’ll export all of our low-income workers,” Hestor said. “We’re not talking about people on welfare, but hotel workers, the tourist industry, even newspaper reporters.

“Is it environmentally sound to export all your workforce so that they face commute patterns that take up to three and four hours a day, then turn around and sell condos to people who commute to San Jose and Santa Clara?”

 

A THREE-POINT PLAN

It’s time to rethink — completely rethink — the way San Francisco addresses the housing crisis. That involves challenging some basic assumptions that have driven housing policy for years — and in some quarters of town, it’s starting to happen.

There are three elements of a new housing strategy emerging, not all from the same people or organizations. It’s still a bit amorphous, but in community meetings, public hearings, blog postings, and private discussions, a program is starting to take shape that might actually alter the political landscape and make it possible for people who aren’t millionaires to rent apartments and even buy homes in this town.

Some of these ideas are ours; most of them come from community leaders. We’ll do our best to give credit where it’s due, but there are dozens of activists who have been participating in these discussions, and what follows is an amalgam, a three-point plan for a new housing policy in San Francisco.

1. Preserve what we have. This is nothing new or terribly radical, but it’s a cornerstone of any effective policy. As Welch points out repeatedly, in a housing crisis the cheapest and most valuable affordable housing is the stuff that already exists.

Every time a landlord or real estate speculator tries to make a fast buck by evicting a tenant from a rent-controlled apartment and turning that apartment into a tenancy in common or a condo, the city’s affordable-housing stock diminishes. And it’s far cheaper to look for ways to prevent that eviction and that conversion than it is to build a new affordable-rental apartment to replace the one the city has lost.

The Tenants Union has been talking about this for years. Quintin Mecke, a community organizer who is running for mayor, is making it a key part of his platform: More city-funded eviction defense. More restrictions on what landlords can do with buildings emptied under the Ellis Act. And ultimately, a statewide strategy to get that law — which allows landlords to clear a building of tenants, then sell it as condos — repealed.

Preserving existing housing also means fighting the kind of displacement that happens when high-end condos are squeezed into low-income neighborhoods (which is happening more and more in the Mission, for example, with the recent approval of a market-rate project at 3400 César Chávez).

And — equally important — it means preserving land.

Part of the battle over the eastern neighborhoods is a struggle for limited parcels of undeveloped or underdeveloped real estate. The market-rate developers have their eyes (and in many cases, their claws) on dozens of sites — and every time one of them is turned over for million-dollar condos, it’s lost as a possible place to construct affordable housing (or to preserve blue-collar jobs).

“Areas that have been bombarded by condos are already lost — their industrial buildings and land are already gone,” Oscar Grande of People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights told us.

So when activists (and some members of the Board of Supervisors) talk about slowing down or even stopping the construction of new market-rate housing in the eastern neighborhoods area, it’s not just about preventing the displacement of industry and blue-collar jobs; it’s also about saving existing, very limited, and very valuable space for future affordable housing.

And that means putting much of the eastern neighborhoods land off limits to market-rate housing of any kind.

The city can’t exactly use zoning laws to mandate low rents and low housing prices. But it can place such high demands on developers — for example, a requirement that any new market-rate housing include 50 percent very-low-income affordable units — that the builders of the million-dollar condos will walk away and leave the land for the kind of housing the city actually needs.

2. Find a new, reliable, consistent way to fund affordable housing. Just about everyone, including Newsom, supports the notion of inclusionary housing — that is, requiring developers to make a certain number of units available at lower-than-market rates. In San Francisco right now, that typically runs at around 15 percent, depending on the size of the project; some activists have argued that the number ought to go higher, up to 20 or even 25 percent.

But while inclusionary housing laws are a good thing as far as they go, there’s a fundamental flaw in the theory: if San Francisco is funding affordable housing by taking a small cut of what market-rate developers are building, the end result will be a city where the very rich far outnumber everyone else. Remember, if 15 percent of the units in a new luxury condo tower are going at something resembling an affordable rate, that means 85 percent aren’t — and ultimately, that leads to a population that’s 85 percent millionaire.

The other problem is how you measure and define affordable. That’s typically based on a percentage of the area’s median income — and since San Francisco is lumped in with San Mateo and Marin counties for income statistics, the median is pretty high. For a family of four in San Francisco today, city planning figures show, the median income is close to $90,000 a year.

And since many of these below-market-rate projects are priced to be affordable to people making 80 to 100 percent of the median income, the typical city employee or service-industry worker is left out.

In fact, much of the below-market-rate housing built as part of these projects isn’t exactly affordable to the San Franciscans most desperately in need of housing. Of 1,088 below-market-rate units built in the past few years in the city, Planning Department figures show, just 169 were available to people whose incomes were below half of the median (that is, below $45,000 a year for a family of four or $30,000 a year for a single person).

“A unit can be below market rate and still not affordable to 99 percent of San Franciscans,” Welch noted.

This approach clearly isn’t working.

So activists have been meeting during the past few months to hammer out a different approach, a way to sever affordable-housing funding from the construction of market-rate housing — and to ensure that there’s enough money in the pot to make an actual difference.

It’s a big number. “If we have a billion dollars for affordable housing over the next 15 years, we have a fighting chance,” Sup. Chris Daly told us. “But that’s the kind of money we have to talk about to make any real impact.”

In theory, the mayor and the supervisors can just allocate money from the General Fund for housing — but under Newsom, it’s not happening. In fact, the mayor cut $30 million of affordable-housing money this year.

The centerpiece of what Daly, cosponsoring Sup. Tom Ammiano, and the housing activists are talking about is a charter amendment that would earmark a portion of the city’s annual property-tax collections — somewhere around $30 million — for affordable housing. Most of that would go for what’s known as low- and very-low-income housing — units affordable to people who earn less than half of the median income. The measure would also require that current housing expenditures not be cut — to “lock in everything we’re doing now,” as Daly put it — so that that city would have a baseline of perhaps $60 million a year.

Since the federal government makes matching funds available for many affordable-housing projects, that money could be leveraged into more than $1 billion.

Of course, setting aside $30 million for affordable housing means less money for other city programs, so activists are also looking at ways to pay for it. One obvious option is to rewrite the city’s business-tax laws, replacing some or all of the current payroll tax money with a tax on gross receipts. That tax would exempt all companies with less than $2 million a year in revenue — the vast majority of the small businesses in town — and would be skewed to tax the bigger businesses at a higher rate.

Daly’s measure is likely headed for the November 2008 ballot.

The other funding option that’s being discussed in some circles — including the Mayor’s Office of Housing — is complicated but makes a tremendous amount of sense. Redevelopment agencies now have the legal right to sell revenue bonds and to collect income based on so-called tax increments — that is, the increased property-tax collections that come from a newly developed area. With a modest change in state law, the city should be able to do that too — to in effect capture the increased property taxes from new development in, say, the Mission and use that money entirely to build affordable housing in the neighborhood.

That, again, is a big pot of cash — potentially tens of millions of dollars a year. Assemblymember Mark Leno (D–San Francisco) told us he’s been researching the issue and is prepared to author state legislation if necessary to give the city the right to use tax-increment financing anywhere in town. “With a steady revenue stream, you can issue revenue bonds and get housing money up front,” he said.

That’s something redevelopment agencies can do, and it’s a powerful tool: revenue bonds don’t have to go to the voters and are an easy way to raise money for big projects — like an ambitious affordable-housing development program.

Somewhere, between all of these different approaches, the city needs to find a regular, steady source for a large sum of money to build housing for people who currently work in San Francisco. If we want a healthy, diverse, functioning city, it’s not a choice any more; it’s a mandate.

3. A Proposition M for housing. One of the most interesting and far-reaching ideas we’ve heard in the past year comes from Marc Salomon, a Green Party activist and policy wonk who has done extensive research into the local housing market. It may be the key to the city’s future.

In March, Salomon did something that the Planning Department should have done years ago: he took a list of all of the housing developments that had opened in the South of Market area in the past 10 years and compared it to the Department of Elections’ master voter files for 2002 and 2006. His conclusion: fully two-thirds of the people moving into the new housing were from out of town. The numbers, he said, “indicate that the city is pursuing the exact opposite priorities and policies of what the Housing Element of the General Plan calls for in planning for new residential construction.”

That confirms what we found more than a year earlier when we knocked on doors and interviewed residents of the new condo complexes (“A Streetcar Named Displacement,” 10/19/05). The people for whom San Francisco is building housing are overwhelmingly young, rich, white commuters who work in Silicon Valley. Or they’re older, rich empty nesters who are moving back to the city from the suburbs. They aren’t people who work in San Francisco, and they certainly aren’t representative of the diversity of the city’s population and workforce.

Welch calls it “socially psychotic” planning.

Twenty-five years ago, the city was doing equally psychotic planning for commercial development, allowing the construction of millions of square feet of high-rise office space that was overburdening city services, costing taxpayers a fortune, creating congestion, driving up residential rents, and turning downtown streets into dark corridors. Progressives put a measure on the November 1986 ballot — Proposition M — that turned the high-rise boom on its head: from then on, developers had to prove that their buildings would meet a real need in the city. It also set a strict cap on new development and forced project sponsors to compete in a “beauty contest” — and only the projects that offered something worthwhile to San Francisco could be approved.

That, Salomon argues, is exactly how the city needs to approach housing in 2007.

He’s been circuutf8g a proposal that would set clear priority policies for new housing. It starts with a finding that is entirely consistent with economic reality: “Housing prices [in San Francisco] cannot be lowered by expanding the supply of market-rate housing.”

It continues, “San Francisco values must guide housing policy. The vast majority of housing produced must be affordable to the vast majority of current residents. New housing must be economically compatible with the neighborhood. The most needy — homeless, very low income people, disabled people, people with AIDS, seniors, and families — must be prioritized in housing production. … [and] market-rate housing can be produced only as the required number of affordable units are produced.”

The proposal would limit the height of all new housing to about six stories and would “encourage limited-equity, permanently affordable homeownership opportunities.”

Salomon suggests that San Francisco limit the amount of new market-rate housing to 250,000 square feet a year — probably about 200 to 400 units — and that the developers “must produce aggressive, competitive community benefit packages that must be used by the Planning Commission as a beauty contest, with mandatory approval by the Board of Supervisors.” (You can read his entire proposal at www.sfbg.com/newpropm.doc.)

There are all kinds of details that need to be worked out, but at base this is a brilliant idea; it could be combined with the new financing plans to shift the production of housing away from the very rich and toward a mix that will preserve San Francisco as a city of artists, writers, working-class people, creative thinkers, and refugees from narrow-minded communities all over, people who want to live and work and make friends and make art and raise families and be part of a community that has always been one of a kind, a rare place in the world.

There is still a way to save San Francisco — but we’re running out of time. And we can’t afford to pursue moderate, incremental plans. This city needs a massive new effort to change the way housing is built, rented, and sold — and we have to start now, today.* To see what the Planning Department has in the pipeline, visit www.sfgov.org/site/planning_index.asp?id=58508. To see what is planned for the eastern neighborhoods, check out www.sfgov.org/site/planning_index.asp?id=67762.

A Prop. M for housing

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EDITORIAL Big buildings are all the rage in San Francisco these days, and even the environmentalists often go along.

As many as 23 new complexes of 250 units or more, soaring from five or six stories to more than 1,000 feet, are on the drawing board, working their way through the city planning system, and more are almost certainly on their way. And yet there’s very little of the sort of outcry that we saw in the 1980s, when skyscrapers were turning downtown San Francisco into a wall of glass and steel cut by deep, dark, crowded canyons of streets.

This time around the high-rises aren’t, for the most part, office buildings. They’re condominiums — housing. And if you ask many of the major urban environmental groups, what you’ll hear is that density — more housing packed into existing urban areas — is good. Density fights sprawl. Housing near workplaces encourages walking and biking. Housing along transit corridors encourages people to get out of their cars. Urban density is the future: tightly packed cities full of people who don’t commute in private cars are our only hope to fight sprawl, congestion, and global warming. It’s called the new urbanism, and in San Francisco it goes like this: the only way to handle the influx of jobs and population growth is to build another 60,000 or so housing units, on every bit of available land.

But there’s a fundamental flaw in that argument.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that San Francisco is already the second-densest city in the United States. Leave aside the fact that density will come back to haunt us unless San Francisco is capable of creating real neighborhoods, with parks and open spaces, schools, new bus lines, police stations, and all of the other public goods that provide safety and quality of life — and that there’s nothing in any current planning document that shows how the massive, massive price tag for that sort of infrastructure will ever be paid. In a state where property taxes are strictly limited and civic infrastructure is already way overwhelmed and drastically underfunded, it would take extraordinary development fees on every new housing unit just to catch up, much less move ahead.

But let’s just suppose we could eliminate that problem. Would this sort of density be a good thing? No — not if the housing that gets built is mostly sold at prices set by the open market.

The density argument has to go beyond environmental theory and planning policy — because the issue in San Francisco isn’t how tall the buildings are or whether they’re along transit corridors. It’s about who gets to live there. And programs that offer some so-called inclusionary units, which mandate that 15 percent of the new housing be a little cheaper than the rest, aren’t going to cut it.

The facts are clear: the new housing that’s been built in San Francisco over the past 10 years — the downtown-centered, environmentally sound, dense housing — hasn’t helped eliminate commutes or fight global warming. The exact opposite has been happening: the people moving into these expensive, mostly small (and therefore non-family-friendly) units are world travelers who want a perch in San Francisco, retired empty nesters who aren’t going to work anyway, or reverse commuters who work in the tech industry in Silicon Valley. In many cases these new condos are creating more car trips: people who work out of town are buying them — and people who work in San Francisco are so badly priced out of the market that they’re moving farther and farther away.

We showed this two years ago when we went door-to-door in the new buildings to see who lived there and where they worked. Marc Salomon, a green policy wonk, has done a persuasive study using voter registration data that comes to a similar conclusion (see "Our Three-Point Plan to Save San Francisco," page 16). People who work in this city have to leave town to find housing they can afford; a lot of people who are moving into new housing here don’t work in town. It’s environmental psychosis.

There’s only one way to change that — the environmentalists and the housing activists and the progressive policy makers have to acknowledge an incontrovertible fact: sound environmental policy in an urban setting like San Francisco has to start with sound social and economic policy, and in San Francisco that means abandoning developer-driven housing and starting over. It means testing all new projects not on the basis of how close they are to jobs or bus lines or how many cars they will allow underneath or what their density is, but on the basis of how much the housing will cost and who will be able to rent or buy it.

And by those standards, none of the new high-rise buildings in the planning pipeline is even close to a good idea.

In this week’s cover story we describe an alternative approach to housing policy. It’s a three-part program, and the first two elements — preserving existing rental housing and finding a new funding mechanism for affordable-housing construction — are either already on the progressive agenda or rapidly moving forward. The third element is something new — but it deserves serious discussion.

It’s the idea, first put forward by Salomon, of adopting a comprehensive, citywide housing policy that would resemble the 1986 ballot measure known as Proposition M. Prop. M was designed to limit the impact of runaway commercial office development, and it set specific priority policies for all new projects, including the preservation of neighborhood character. It also strictly limited the amount of new office space that could be built in any one year and mandated that developers compete for the right to build. The projects that best suited the city’s needs (not the developers’ needs) would get the go-ahead; the others wouldn’t make the cut.

Imagine how that would work for housing. Say the voters passed a measure that limited new for-profit, market-rate housing to 500 units per year. The developers who wanted to win that lottery would have to come to the table with good offers — plenty of affordable set-asides, green buildings, structures that weren’t out of synch with the area, money for parks, schools, and other neighborhood services…. What could possibly be wrong with that?

San Francisco needs a cap on new housing for the rich and a mandate that all housing meet community needs. A well-crafted Prop. M–<\d>style ballot measure might energize the neighborhoods, force elected officials to talk seriously about housing … and save San Francisco. That ought to be on everyone’s agenda.*

Forget the neighbors: build away!

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OPINION Having considered San Francisco something of a utopian American city (certainly compared with others), I assumed the only reason city officials were on the verge of allowing perfect little Valencia Street to be turned into Emeryville West was that they were simply unaware of what a handful of developers and a few folks in the Planning Department were cooking up.

All they needed was to hear from the neighbors, some responsible concerned adults, to call their attention to this under-the-radar remaking of our beloved Mission. Giant, five-story luxury condo blocks would be so obviously wrong for Valencia, so against the will of the vast majority of the citizens who live here, and so clearly in violation the intent of the law we passed to protect our neighborhoods that they would simply say, "Holy cow, thank you!" and stop it.

No. See, it doesn’t work that way.

Proposition M (the law passed by San Franciscans in the 1980s to protect the way our city looks and feels from just such neighborhood-crushing development) is not treated as law or as a defining statement by San Franciscans about how they want their city developed. Rather, it is ignored.

After months of work and research, countless meetings, and coordinating the support of hundreds of concerned neighbors into one large group, we waited more than 20 hours to speak for three minutes in front of the Planning Commission about just one of these giant condo projects, at 700 Valencia.

When we finally got our three minutes (at 11:45 p.m.!), two commissioners were literally asleep. The gavel swung. Approved.

It was like the people of San Francisco never showed up.

Like Prop. M never passed.

Like the Mission didn’t exist as a real neighborhood.

The feeling was like "OK, I’ve finally done something more than vote to actually make this city I’ve lived in and loved for so many years a better place. I’ve joined up with other idealistic San Franciscans, mostly wonderful neighbors I’d never even met before, who worked far more valiantly than I on this process. And it doesn’t matter."

The law, and the people of San Francisco and the Mission, are all simply impediments, nuisances, to developers making their money, the planning commissioners getting home to bed, and the people with degrees at the Planning Department who believe, incredibly, that they should personally get to change and remake ("plan") this historic, world-famously beautiful city.

It’s happening as you read this. The middle-finger building going up obscenely in front of the Bay Bridge is just the beginning. The destruction of Valencia Street may soon be an afterthought.

I’m suddenly very skeptical about the future livability of the neighborhood I’ve proudly been part of for more than 20 years. But it may not be too late to save yours.

Call, write, and visit your supervisors! Remind them that Prop. M is still the voice of the people.*

Dan Hoyle is a Valencia Street activist. He can be reached at savevalencia@gmail.com

Letters as leverage

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› news@sfbg.com

It’s a thin, seemingly innocuous letter. The Social Security Administration mails it when names and Social Security numbers don’t match on an employee’s I-9 form. The intent is to make sure workers receive their benefits.

But unions and immigrants have long charged that unscrupulous employers use SSA "no match" letters to harass undocumented workers and squelch union organizing efforts. Now, after a failed immigration debate in Congress, the George W. Bush administration wants to pass a regulation that would explicitly turn the letter into an immigration enforcement tool.

Activists fear this could result in massive firings and retaliation against workers organizing with unions. Employers complain it could lead to an economic slump in industries dependent on undocumented labor. A temporary injunction granted by a San Francisco judge is the only thing holding back letters across the country; it ends Oct. 1.

Bay Area activists have been national leaders at the intersection of immigrant rights and labor movements. They are now shaping national policy on this new regulation in the courts and promise wide-scale street action and workplace walkouts if it goes into effect.

A look at past and present related Bay Area organizing may shed light on the future of the national issue.

BAY AREA ORGANIZING


US companies file hundreds of millions of W-2 forms with the SSA every year. The SSA uses them to calculate how much it owes workers at retirement. When the name and the Social Security number do not match, the SSA sends a "no match" letter to the employee to clear up the discrepancy. The letters are also sent to employers who have more than 10 employees with no match. These letters have nothing to do with immigration law, and employers are not required to take any adverse action against these employees.

But under the new Department of Homeland Security regulation, no-match letters may be seen as evidence that an employer knowingly employed an undocumented worker. The letters would include a leaflet from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement informing employers that they must fire workers who cannot resolve no matches with the SSA or reverify their work authorization within 93 days. If the companies do not, they may be subject to fines or criminal charges.

The rule was drafted more than a year ago but was not announced by Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff until Aug 10. "The magnet that brings most economic migrants into this country is work," he explained. "And if we have worksite enforcement directed at illegal employment, we strike at that magnet."

Brooke Anderson, an organizer with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, told the Guardian that this is an unlikely scenario. Workers will not leave the country; they will simply be forced into underground economies, rotate through different jobs, and become even more vulnerable.

Anderson was among a delegation of more than 30 labor, faith, and community leaders that presented a letter Aug. 30 at the regional SSA office in Richmond. The letter outlined their concerns and asked that the SSA send out no-match letters only to employees, not employers.

"DHS is using an incomplete, hodgepodge system intended to ensure our economic security to implement a regressive immigration policy that Bush failed to pass in Congress," Anderson told us. "The SSA as an agency should have a spine and say no to DHS and no to the Bush administration."

If the ICE inserts do go out with no-match letters, she predicts walkouts and massive street actions.

The regulation is also being challenged in a lawsuit filed by the Central Labor Council of Alameda County. The AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the San Francisco Central Labor Council have joined it. The plaintiffs claim that because the SSA’s database is full of errors, many citizens and legal immigrants could end up losing their jobs. They also argue that the DHS has exceeded its authority by seeking to use the SSA to enforce immigration laws.

US District Judge Maxine Chesney in San Francisco granted a nationwide temporary restraining order Aug. 31, blocking the SSA from sending letters with ICE inserts. The order is in effect until Oct. 1, when another federal judge here, Charles Breyer, will decide whether to grant another injunction.

"DHS is trying to create a huge terror, to give the illusion that they are doing something," Bill Sokol, a lawyer with Weinberg, Roger, and Rosenfeld, the firm representing the Central Labor Council of Alameda County, told us. "Workers are afraid, but we must dial down people’s fear and terror under our new gestapo."

He said the law will have little impact if employers understand it and do not abuse it. If employers overreact, however, the result could be disastrous. Sokol said employers are already firing employees immediately after receiving the letters.

HISTORY


Unions and immigrant workers across the country have charged that no-match letters have been used to stifle workers’ rights since the SSA began sending them to employers in 1994. Activists in the Bay Area have played a key role in resisting these efforts, setting national precedents upholding worker rights.

When a San Francisco Travelodge fired workers after they began organizing with a union in 1999, allegedly due to Social Security no matches, the terminated employees took it to court. The next year they won an arbitrator’s decision that the firing, based solely on no-match letters, was a violation of their union contract.

Local community pressure on the SSA also resulted in the inclusion of cautionary text in the letter. The no-match letter now states that employers "should not use this letter to take any adverse action against an employee…. Doing so could, in fact, violate state or federal law and subject you to legal consequences."

Activists at Oakland’s Labor Immigrant Organizers Network wrote a resolution in 1999 asking the AFL-CIO to renounce its support of the employer-sanctions provisions of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the federal law that for the first time made it illegal for an undocumented worker to hold a job. Their agitation is credited in part for a resolution the AFL-CIO passed in 2000 calling for the repeal of sanctions and for a legalization program for undocumented workers.

The letters remained a potent tool for antiunion activity. A 2003 survey by the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that 25 percent of workers listed in no-match letters reported that their employers fired them in retaliation for complaining about inadequate worksite conditions. More than one in five workers reported that their employer fired them in retaliation for union activity.

San Francisco opposed the DHS no-match regulation when it was proposed last year. An August 2006 resolution by the Board of Supervisors said it may lead to employers "using it as a device to fire, intimidate, harass, or underpay employees." It promised that the city would defy the regulation if it received a no-match letter for a city employee.

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce also came out against the regulation.

But some employers embraced the proposed regulation. Uniform manufacturer Cintas fired hundreds of employees across the country, allegedly responding to the proposed guidelines after receiving no-match letters during a union organizing drive. Organizers said the company targeted employees involved in the union and jumped the gun on new regulations.

The Woodfin Suite Hotel in Emeryville fired 21 housekeepers in December 2006, also allegedly due to no-match letters. The workers claim the Woodfin retaliated against them for organizing with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a labor-affiliated think tank, to enforce the living-wage law (see "Calling in the Feds," 6/13/07).

A yearlong campaign targeting the Woodfin has brought the issue to a national audience.

FALSE INFORMATION


Organizers say the regulations are far less strict than the news media has portrayed them, adding to an atmosphere of hysteria and fear among employers and workers. Francisco Ugarte, a lawyer with the Oakland firm of Leonard Carder, held up several San Francisco Chronicle articles at a Sept. 13 workshop for union organizers as examples of media inaccuracies.

An employer is not required to fire an employee after 90 days, as news accounts have stated. The employer has 90 days to fix discrepancies, and the worker has three days after that to fill out another I-9 form with a new Social Security number. If it appears credible, employers must accept the new I-9, Ugarte said.

The ICE insert in the SSA letter will terrify employers, he predicted, but the rule does not create any new information sharing between the SSA and other governmental agencies. The SSA is actually prohibited by law from sharing private data with any other governmental agencies.

There are also no automatic fines assessed to employers, as news accounts have implied. ICE will only levy fines if it raids employers and finds that they did not address no-match discrepancies. It is unlikely that the DHS will be able to enforce the regulations; in announcing them, Chertoff said the agency would rely largely on self-policing.

Even if this is the case, organizers fear that the DHS’s no-match regulation will provide employers with another tool to squelch immigrant workers’ rights. Comprehensive immigration reform is still needed to reconcile employers’ demands for workers, immigrants’ needs for employment, and US immigration policy.*

Sucks to be you

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

My wife and I are the proud parents of an eight-month-old boy. While I was prepared for the postpartum lull in the bedroom, I was not at all prepared for the combination of sex and nursing.

My wife has gotten really into attachment parenting and co-sleeping and it took me a while to get comfortable with having sex with the baby in the bed, but, generally, my appreciation for the rare opportunity always ends up outweighing any discomfort. However, the last two times we’ve had sex, he has awakened in the middle of things, and rather than stopping, my wife has just put him to her breast and said to go ahead with things on my end. I’m really not comfortable sharing my wife with my son in this way. And frankly, no matter how much she moans and sighs, I just don’t think she can be that into it when her attention is divided like that!

When I’ve brought up my concerns, she accuses me of not having our son’s best interests at heart and points me to all of the attachment parenting literature about how not responding to his needs will hurt his neurological and emotional development. I don’t want to hurt my son, but I also don’t want to sleep with a vending machine. You’re a mom now — am I being a jerk?

Love,

Married to the Lunch Lady

Dear Lady:

My first response to your letter (after the admittedly rude cackling noise I made on reaching the part where she gaily calls out, "Carry on!" as though she hadn’t just grabbed the child and held him out in front of her as a human shield against any further attempted intimacies on your part) was sorrow that it was unprintable. You are not, after all, a sad, snaggy guy being slowly pushed out of the marital bed when the little one said, "Roll over!" You are a (female) online bud of mine who wrote this letter as an exercise following a discussion of what makes for good column fodder, and I bless you for it! It’s a great letter, fictional or not, and hey, lookit, I don’t even have to correct your spelling. So let’s just act as if, shall we?

Your wife has not so much adopted attachment parenting as she has, I wager, been assimilated by the Übermamas, a leaderless cult whose hive mind is headquartered at the MotheringDotCommune Internet forums. It is fashionable in that milieu not only to parent children to within an inch of their lives but to view husbands the way a lady mantis might describe her views on marriage and partnership, if asked: good for one job only, and that easily performed without thought or decision-making privileges or, indeed, a head. Dude, you must reclaim your head and put a stop to this — if not for yourself, then for your son! What sort of model of manhood is this for him?

Actually, he’ll be fine. It’s you I worry about. You must know that attachment parenting does not even require that you adopt what is optimistically known as the "family bed" (often, in practice, a "Mommy and baby while Daddy sleeps on the couch" bed), let alone the abomination that is "Oh, carry on, don’t mind him stuck on my tit here." All shock and revulsion at the actual act aside (about which more in a minute), you must realize that "go ahead with things on my end" means that there’s nothing going on on her end. I’m sure there are readers who will spaz out over the child abuse aspect, but I assure you there is none. This isn’t about sexualizing the child; it’s about desexualizing you. You will soon find yourself consigned to, at best, the couch or, at worst, someone else’s couch. If nobody’s ready to have the baby sleep in his own room yet (I am not a huge fan of banishing baby, myself) then get a side sleeper or a dresser drawer or something and let him snooze away peacefully in there while you and your wife snuggle or sleep or do other things starting with s. Speaking of which, this is serious.

Now, as for what your wife may be feeling, I confess to oversimplifying in an earlier column when I denied that suckling could ever feel anything like, well, sucking. Of course it can. Not only are the sensations superficially similar (although I don’t advise partners to do the weird rhythmic press-and-swallow thing while making a fishy-mouth face, not sexy), we have only so many physiological responses available to us. Nursing can feel good, and it releases the same hormones that sex, or rather having had sex, does. I’d even venture to say that the release of good feelings (mostly hormonal-emotional, but to some extent physical as well) is adaptive, evolutionarily speaking. Then I’d say that that’s all very well but we have evolved pretty far and we can keep these things separate and I heartily encourage us to do so. More later.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Green City: Gray-water guerillas

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› sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The task sounded simple: help our friend Kristal set up a bathtub in her backyard over the Labor Day weekend so she could soak under the stars and her plants could drink the gray water.

Gray water is water from the sink, shower, bathtub, and washing machine, but not the toilet. And I’ve been inspired by its use since reading gray-water guerrillas Laura Allen, July Oskar Cole, and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine’s book Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground (Soft Skull, 2007).

Allen, Cole, and Woelfle-Erskine describe how to install fairly radical gray-water systems, including dry and composting toilets and rainwater capture zones, as well as ways to recharge groundwater with rain gardens and treat gray water using homemade wetlands.

Installing gray-water systems usually requires government permits, and public health officials caution that flawed systems can spread disease and contamination. But our system was a simple one meant to dispose of clean hot water that cascades from the tub into a lava rock–filled drainage ditch that will hopefully, in time, support a small wetland.

Like many Californians, Kristal can only afford a tiny place, but she has hit the rental jackpot with her latest abode. It’s a barn red, vine-covered cottage behind a bigger house, but it comes with a private yard, thanks to artfully placed trellises and interwoven tree branches.

The only downside of her cottage is the absence of an indoor bathtub, so Kristal decided to set up a cast-iron bath outdoors and fill it with water piped by a hose from her sink. We tried it out July 4, and it was magical looking at the fireworks while sitting in steaming water that wasn’t steeped with hot-tub chemicals.

But when Kristal let out the plug, the gray water splattered out noisily and created an unsightly, muddy hole in the yard. This growing mess got Kristal worried that she would attract mosquitoes, kill her plants, and rot her cottage foundations. So I decided to help, relying on the gray-water guerrillas’ manual and my husband’s years of experience in restoring wetlands. Together, the three of us talked through the science, economics, and aesthetics of the proposed project to come up with a viable plan.

The science was simple but critically important, given that we were contemputf8g creating a homemade wetland near other dwellings and gardens. Water flows downhill and follows the path of least resistance, while wetlands, which are nature’s water purification system, create breeding grounds for native plants, insects, and animals. As such, they are fragile ecosystems that are easily harmed by bleach, bath salts, and any boron-containing products. So it’s critical to use all-natural, biodegradable soaps in a tub whose gray water will flow into homemade wetlands.

We reconciled these principles with Kristal’s need for inexpensive materials, her love of simple designs, and her desire to camouflage unsightly plumbing. In the end, we settled on a cascading system that uses cinder blocks to elevate Kristal’s tub and a wine barrel to hold the gray water, which flows by gravity into the barrel and then into the wetlands.

To control and direct water flow, we linked the barrel by way of a garden hose to a piece of slotted, corrugated drainage pipe. We buried the pipe in a lava rock–filled trench that was dug in a serpentine shape so that the gray water flows away from homes and into the lowest part of the garden, which is filled with sandy, drainage-friendly soil.

After a hard weekend of work, Labor Day found us basking in a freshly painted and elevated aquamarine bathtub, imagining how great Kristal’s wetlands will look once she adds water-loving plants like native cattails, which will attract a host of dragonflies, frogs, and beetles. Then we pulled the plug and waited anxiously for the tub to drain. To our delight, the water swirled smoothly into the barrel, then gurgled quietly underground.

Eureka! We were now bona fide gray-water guerrillas and had experienced, in microcosm, the challenges people grapple with, yard by yard, block by block, as they try to green the concrete jungle, one low-impact development at a time. It was exhilarating, empowering, and addictive. But before we had a chance to fully recover, Kristal was on her feet, talking about installing a solar-powered water heater this Thanksgiving. *

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

A new planning director from Seattle

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rahaim.jpg
Meet the new boss, John Rahaim

In theory, the San Francisco city Planning Commission gets to decide who runs the department, but in practice, it’s up to the mayor — who has announced today that the new Planning Director will be John Rahaim, who now holds that same job in Seattle. Rahaim has apparently informed the folks in Seattle that he’s accepted the job, although I don’t think the commission has formally offered it to him. And, of course, he has to resign his new position immediately, before he even starts work. Welcome to San Francisco.

I don’t know much about Rahaim, but I found one interview that he did with a Seattle radio station in which he made it pretty clear who calls the shots in major development decisions:

MANY AMERICAN PLANNERS ADMIRE WHAT’S HAPPENED IN VANCOUVER. BUT THEY SAY STANDARD PRACTICE IN CANADA CAN’T FLY ON THIS SIDE OF THE BORDER.

RAHAIM: “Rightly or wrongly, in American society we rely on private developers to build.”

SEATTLE CITY PLANNER JOHN RAHAIM SAYS UNLIKE CANADA, WHERE THE GOVERNMENT DETERMINES HOW AND WHAT DEVELOPERS WILL BUILD, IN THIS COUNTRY WE RELY ON INCENTIVES TO ENCOURAGE DEVELOPERS TO CARRY OUT AN OFFICIAL VISION.

RAHAIM: “And it’s the only way to achieve some of these goals…We don’t nearly influence the market the way other governments do, where development is a privilege, not a right. But nonetheless we do. These programs, subsidies, do influence the market.”

Seattle’s had a downtown housing building boom, just like San Francisco, and of course, if the guy didn’t share Newsom’s basic philosophy, he wouldn’t have been offered the job.

UPDATE: My error on the process. In fact, the commission sent three names to the mayor, including Rahaim’s, and the mayor made the choice. That’s how it works. So Rahaim has the job — until, of course, he follows the mayor’s directive and resigns.

Slow down the land rush

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EDITORIAL At around 11:30 p.m. on the evening of Aug. 30, the San Francisco Planning Commission, its members bleary-eyed and half asleep, approved an eight-unit housing development at 736 Valencia St., despite the anguished pleas of the neighbors. The project includes no affordable housing and is legally designated as condominiums, which means it doesn’t fit the stated goals of the eastern neighborhoods’ planning process, which is supposed to promote affordable housing.

But that planning process is still under way, the proposals so far are weak, and, in the meantime, every developer in town is trying to sneak under the wire and get a project approved before the new rules take effect. And the Planning Commission is allowing that to happen. The supervisors need to intervene now, before it’s too late.

The blueprint for zoning in the city’s eastern neighborhoods — some 2,200 acres that include the central waterfront, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Showplace Square and East SoMa — is critical to the city’s future. Those areas include many of the last industrial sites and blue-collar jobs in the city — and developers are eyeing the land for a massive influx of high-end housing.

If there are going to be decent-paying jobs that don’t require advanced academic degrees in San Francisco, and affordable housing for low-income and working-class people, it will require careful use of this land.

And so far, the signs aren’t good.

The project at 736 Valencia is a perfect example. The commissioners failed to account for the fact that this relatively small project is part of a much larger land grab in the neighborhood; at least six other projects are in the pipeline for a small stretch of that street, and together they’ll have a significant impact on the area. The last thing the Mission — desperate for family and affordable housing — needs is a long strip of new million-dollar condos, built with little in the way of community amenities and little regard for the needs of residents. And yet the commissioners have made it very clear that they aren’t going to slow anything down.

In effect, that means the entire eastern neighborhoods plan — and the hope for a significant increase in affordable housing in town — could be almost pointless. By the time the plan is in place — early next year at the earliest, and that may be an optimistic timeline — a lot of the land may already be spoken for, and a lot of nonconforming projects may already be under construction.

Remember: every market-rate housing project takes away land that could be used for affordable housing. And at this rate, there is no way the city can come close to meeting the goals set in the General Plan, which call for more than 60 percent of new housing in town to be available at below-market rate.

The supervisors need to step in, fast, and pass legislation barring any new development in the eastern neighborhoods until a final plan is in place. The land rush is on, and time is running out.<\!s>*

Newsom’s tin cup

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EDITORIAL We’re glad that Mayor Gavin Newsom is angry at the conditions in the city’s public housing projects. Denouncing the head of the Housing Authority as well as the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development made for good press, and it’s possible that Newsom will actually follow up and try to improve some of the third world conditions at places like Sunnyvale and Hunters View.

But his notion that the way to solve the problem is to bring rich people on a tour and hope they will donate money is embarrassingly wrong. It’s the sort of idea that sounds like it came out of the darkest recesses of the Bush White House — the notion that the wealthy will just come to the aid of the poor, volunteering to do what’s right, as soon as they recognize the need.

Let’s us be clear here: public housing has been a horrible mess for years now. If Newsom is suddenly upset about the conditions, it’s only because he hasn’t been paying much attention. As we reported back in October 2005 (see "A Place Called Despair," 10/19/05), the city’s housing projects have been an unimaginable mess: raw sewage flowing through the yards, toilets backing up into kitchen sinks, toxic mold, people living in apartments that are legally and morally uninhabitable, terrifying violence … the list goes on and on. And we haven’t heard a whole lot out of the Mayor’s Office until this sudden burst of righteous anger.

Let us also be clear: a few donations from a few of the many, many multimillionaires in San Francisco aren’t going to solve the problem. It’s pathetic to see the mayor of one of the world’s great cities begging for alms from the same people who have helped create the economic conditions that make it so difficult for the city to provide for its residents’ basic human needs.

There are exceptions, but for the most part, the wealthy and powerful of San Francisco — with the acquiescence of Newsom — have put their considerable resources to bear over the years pushing for low taxes, cuts in city services, and reductions in the money that goes to the poorest residents of this town. Care Not Cash, Newsom’s signature policy measure, was a cruel attack on welfare recipients. His budgets have put hefty raises for police officers above the needs of public housing residents. And now he acts like a little charity, a few crumbs from the swells, will turn things around.

If Newsom really wants to take his rich pals on tours of the city’s public housing wasteland, we can suggest a different educational monologue. Rather than trying to summon up some patrician pity, Newsom ought to say:

This is what the antitax policies that have fattened all your wallets have created. This is what happens when the city lets market-rate developers determine housing policy. This, frankly, is what you get when you rely on the private sector to set public policy.

And if he really wants to address the public housing problem, he should tell the powerful interests who support him that he wants their backing for some serious new revenue measures — say, a hefty increase in the real estate transfer tax — to fund affordable housing in San Francisco.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Isn’t it just great that San Francisco was about to enter into a long-term contract to turn part of our municipal infrastructure over to a company that is laying off 40 percent of its employees, floundering around trying to find a business plan, and getting entirely out of the line of work Mayor Gavin Newsom had in mind?

I feel good that the young mayor (who is acting more and more like a little kid every day) was so careful in preparing plans for a citywide wi-fi service that he never acknowledged, up to the very end, that his public-private partnership was poorly conceived and headed for the rocks.

And now it’s just so special that he wants to blame the Board of Supervisors for scrutinizing the contract — which is exactly what any decent legislative body is supposed to do at a time like this.

The EarthLink nosedive happened at the perfect time for San Francisco. If the company had hung on a little longer to its business plan for citywide wi-fi, the mayor might have managed to push enough supervisors to sign on to the deal. Or his November ballot measure might have passed, and the board might have been afraid to defy the voters. This might have been a grand little fiscal, legal, and political nightmare that could have stalled any progress on municipal broadband for years.

Newsom still insists that he was on the right track. "EarthLink would have been legally obligated to fulfill its promises to San Francisco, and we would have had a functioning wi-fi system by now," Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle.

But the reality is, a company that doesn’t want to do a job that no longer fits into its business strategy — and a company having enough financial problems that it’s had to cut its staff almost in half — isn’t what you would call an excellent partner. And we can all thank the fact that this Board of Supervisors is relatively independent of the Mayor’s Office for our not being stuck in a rotten deal.

San Francisco doesn’t have a terribly good record of negotiating public-private partnerships or development deals. Back in the early 1980s, then-mayor Dianne Feinstein personally took control of the negotiations with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. for a long-term contract to transmit the city’s power. The deal was about as bad as it could get — everything for PG&E, nothing for the city — but the mayor insisted it was an excellent contract, and she and PG&E’s lobbyists rammed it through a compliant Board of Supervisors. It’s wound up costing San Francisco tens of millions of dollars, and the city’s been trying to get out of it for years. PG&E’s franchise fee is the lowest that any city charges a private utility in California — and it was assigned in perpetuity by a compliant Board of Supervisors in the 1930s.

We’re supposed to be a little more sophisticated today. District elections have ended the mayoral rubber stamp at City Hall, and the mayor should understand that any time he works out a deal like this, the supes are going to give it a hard look. If it’s so great for everyone, then making the details public as early as possible, working with the board (instead of refusing even to show up), and sharpening the deal will make things even better.

That’s not how this mayor does business. And you can tell. *

Antiauthoritarian cities

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Archaeologists have discovered that one of the oldest urban areas in the world was built in a way that completely defies conventional wisdom about how cities grow. Last week, a group of researchers working in Syria published a paper in Science about a 6,000-year-old city called Brak, a once-thriving urban center in northern Mesopotamia (now northern Syria, near its border with Iraq). It has long been believed that cities begin as dense centers that grow outward into suburbs. Brak, however, began as a dispersed group of settlements that formed a rough ring shape and gradually grew inward to form an urban center that boasted a massive temple and a thriving import-export trade in tools and pottery.

Built sometime between 4200 and 3900 BCE, Brak eventually grew to 130 hectares, making it one of the largest known cities of its era, surpassed in size only by Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. Long buried under a tell — a hill of accumulated debris and layers of urban development — Brak’s early history has only recently been revealed. Archaeologists are racking their brains to figure out why the place doesn’t follow known patterns of city growth.

Harvard anthropologist Jason Ur, one of the researchers investigating Brak, writes that Brak’s history might mean that urban development can be an emergent property of many immigrant groups coming together in the same region. Early cities might have spontaneously arisen via the development of a handful of neighboring villages. This flies in the face of older theories, which hold that cities develop when a ruling elite or a set of dominant institutions creates a dense, hierarchical city center whose culture and populations spread outward from it.

Brak reflects a "bottom-up" model of city evolution, in which a central political power is built slowly out of diverse cultural interests. According to Ur and his colleagues, Brak’s layout "suggests both dependence on but some autonomy from the political power on the central mound…. This pattern suggests a greater role for noncentralized processes in the initial growth of Brak and lesser importance for centralized authority."

Short of hopping into a time machine, we’ll never know for certain if Brak’s layout reflects its citizens’ attitudes toward centralized authority or not. What we do know, however, is that not all cities develop in the same way. More important, we now have social scientific theories to explain why that might be — theories that can help us understand urban development in the contemporary world as well. Cities today could be evolving from decentralized areas, out of geographically dispersed groups that do not view themselves as subject to one dominant set of institutions.

Brak might be an example of how cities would grow if neighborhoods had more social and political autonomy. What if, for example, we considered a city to be a federation of neighborhoods rather than a downtown with satellite suburbs? Would that be the foundation for an antiauthoritarian citiscape?

To answer, let’s contemplate a possible modern-day version of Brak: Silicon Valley, a region of dispersed urban centers that have formed a loose economic federation via the computer industry and proximity to freeways. Residents of Silicon Valley may not consider the area to be one city, but it’s very possible that people excavating the toxic remains of Silicon Valley 6,000 years from now will interpret the area as a single urban unit.

Like Silicon Valley dwellers, residents of Brak may have thought of themselves as living in a series of linked villages, united by nothing more than a system of commerce and a set of roads. Does this mean that authority in Brak was truly decentralized? Maybe the urban development of Brak belies a deeper truth, which is that centralized authority does not always reveal itself via tall buildings at a city’s core. An entire region may bow to the authority of an economic system that stratifies it into rich and poor, and yet never have a common culture. Decentralized urban spaces are not necessarily antiauthoritarian ones.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who wonders if Google has a time-displaced satellite office in Brak.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

You’d think that this was a Republican town, with the way the local news media have been bashing not only the left but also some of the better, more effective, and more functional progressive institutions in San Francisco. I wouldn’t waste my time with this stuff, but there are real issues here.

I woke up Aug. 21 to a San Francisco Chronicle headline proclaiming "Anti-gentrification Forces Stymie Housing Development." The piece, by Robert Selna, opened with the sad, sad tale of a poor auto shop owner who wants to "build eight apartments and condominiums on an empty lot next to his Mission District auto shop and rent some of the apartments to his mechanics."

Well, it turns out that the evil Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition is fighting that plan, Selna reported, "insisting that [the] project not go forward until the city evaluates how new development on the city’s east side will affect industrial land, jobs, and housing."

The message: a little entrepreneur is getting hosed by a big, bad "not in my backyard" group that wants to stop new housing. The implication (and this is just the latest example of this stunning lie): the left in San Francisco is against building housing.

Well, for starters, MAC is playing only a modest sideline role in fighting the 736 Valencia project, a five-story structure that is designated legally for condos and includes no affordable housing. The real opposition is a group called Valencia Neighbors for Community Development. The issue, Valencia neighborhood activist Julie Ledbetter said, is that as many as nine new market-rate housing projects are in the pipeline for a short stretch of Valencia, and they shouldn’t be approved one by one without any regard for the cumulative impact.

MAC activist Eric Quezada told me that the organization has indeed taken the position that the city shouldn’t go forward with any more market-rate housing projects until it’s completed a legally mandated environmental study of the cumulative impacts of high-end condos on displacement, blue-collar jobs, and overall land use.

But that doesn’t mean MAC is against housing.

In fact — and this is the killer here — MAC emerged in the dot-com era almost entirely out of the nonprofit housing community. Some of its earliest and most prominent members were (gasp) housing developers. Just for the record, nonprofits have built something like 25,000 low- and moderate-income housing units in this city in the past 25 years. That is housing the city needs, housing that meets the city’s own clearly stated goals. And the progressives, people like the MAC members, are essentially the only ones who have built any affordable housing in the city at all.

Selna told me that he didn’t write the headline and "isn’t taking sides in this." I realize it’s not all his fault that he’s stumbled into a political hornet’s nest — but he has.

Then in the Aug. 22 SF Weekly, Matt Smith wrote that the left is turning this city into nothing but a tourist trap by promoting "a price-goosing apartment shortage of 30,000 to 70,000 units." That’s what, 140 giant new towers, or 7,000 10-unit buildings … that will go where? And what if (as is likely) rents still don’t come down? (Smith had no comment when I called him.)

And now C.W. Nevius of the Chronicle wants to shut down the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council Recycling Center so that homeless people won’t have any money … and will what — panhandle more aggressively? Break into cars? Makes perfect sense to me.

Green City: Signs of asbestos

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› sarah@sfbg.com

A new front has opened up in the fight for environmental justice in the asbestos-dusted Bayview–Hunters Point community, this time featuring a Nation of Islam–affiliated nonprofit that’s using Proposition 65 — California’s "right to know" law — to force Lennar Corp. to take responsibility for what activists say is a failure to provide clear and reasonable warning that thousands of Californians are being exposed to asbestos on a daily basis in Bayview–Hunters Point.

It’s a creative use of the 21-year-old law to promote environmental justice.

On Aug. 2, the Center for Self-Improvement and Community Development, which runs the Muhammad University of Islam school next to the Parcel A work site, filed suit individually, and on behalf of the public, against Lennar Corp., Lennar Homes of California, Lennar Communities, Lennar BVHP, Lennar Associates Management, and Lennar’s subcontractor, Gordon N. Ball.

At issue is the alleged failure of Lennar and its subcontractor to notify the surrounding community of exposures to asbestos dust during the 16 months that an entire hilltop has been graded on Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard in preparation for developing a 1,500-unit condominium complex.

The suit contends that Lennar and Ball engaged in construction site activities, including grading, scraping, and excavation of materials containing asbestos as well as storage and transportation of materials off site, and continues to engage in these activities without first providing "the adjacent community and persons working at the site with toxic health hazard warnings under California’s ‘right to know’ law."

Enacted in 1986, Prop. 65 was intended to protect California citizens and the state’s drinking water sources "from hazardous chemicals and to inform [citizens] about exposure to any such chemicals." As such, it requires the state to maintain lists of hazardous chemicals and requires businesses to provide a "clear and reasonable warning" before exposing individuals to any of these listed chemicals.

But though asbestos has been listed as a carcinogen since 1987 and has been subject to Prop. 65’s warning requirements since 1988, Minister Christopher Muhammad, who heads the school, claims he first learned that asbestos was in Lennar’s Parcel A construction dust six months after grading began in 2006 —and two months after Lennar admitted to the city that its air monitoring equipment hadn’t been working.

"I did not know that the dust contained asbestos until a young worker, Christopher Carpenter, blew the whistle in October 2006, the same day he got fired from the site after asking the crew to stop digging on account of the dust being too heavy," Muhammad told the Guardian. He recalled how Carpenter visited the school, worried it hadn’t been notified after he saw children playing right next to Lennar’s site.

"The dust clouds were so thick during the summer of 2006, they were like minitornadoes on the hill, which is surrounded by water, so the wind swirls upwards," Muhammad said. He noted that the baseball courts, classroom windows, and jungle gym are 10 feet from a chain link fence that is the only thing separating Lennar’s site from the school, and noted that a Boys and Girls Club, a public housing project, and many residences lie in close proximity to Parcel A, whose dust was seen drifting across the entire neighborhood.

There’s a strong case here: there’s no doubt that the construction project was generating asbestos dust — and still may be. The suit seeks to prohibit Lennar and Ball from engaging in construction activities or any other work at the site "without first providing clear and reasonable warnings to each exposed person residing, working, or visiting the adjacent community and to workers at the site regarding asbestos exposures."

Enforcing Prop. 65 is the responsibility of the state attorney general, the local district attorney, or the city attorney, but as attorney Andrew Packard told us, the law also allows private entities to sue.

Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, said the office is "keeping an eye on the situation, including this private effort, and would take it very seriously if a determination is made that a case of action exists in favor of the city."

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

The death of Polk Street

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› news@sfbg.com

Click here to read about the Polk’s long, queer history

Kelly Michaels was following the San Francisco dream when she escaped her small Alabama hometown at 17 and hitchhiked westward. It was 1989.

"I had stars in my eyes," Michaels told the Guardian, sitting on the floor of her friend’s small single-room occupancy Tenderloin apartment, hints of a Southern drawl now paired with Tammy Faye mascara and bleached-blonde hair. "When you’re 16 or 17 and have dreams of being famous, you come to California — and you probably end up on Polk Street in drag."

Michaels arrived on Polk with little more than blue jeans, a bra, and rubber falsies to her name, making ends meet as a street sex worker. It wasn’t what she was looking for; the Polk was plagued with drugs and violence. But her dad was embarrassed by his transgendered daughter and didn’t her want her back. The neighborhood was a home.

She found a community at fierce Polk Gulch trans and boy-hustler bars like Q.T. and Reflections, where clientele included one "big, tall, black Egyptian transsexual hell-raiser" known to draw a gun. Scores of boy hustlers "coming in daily from the Greyhound station" danced naked on the bars. At the end of the night, Michaels’s new family members would pool their money and rent a hotel room for $30.

"The bars were the churches, the sanctuaries," Michaels’s friend Terri, an African American man in his 50s, told us. "You weren’t really going to be hassled there."

Not any more. "Polk Street is dead," Michaels told us. "Dead as fuck now."

THE NEW POLK STREET


The new kids on the block are calling it "revitalization."

After the three-decades-old gay bar Kimo’s is transferred to a new owner at the end of September, there will be only two queer bars left on a street that was San Francisco’s gay male center in the 1960s and a gritty, affordable home for low-income queers, trans women, and male sex workers in the following decades. Where scores of hustlers lined up against seedy sex shops and gay bars just a few years ago, crowds of twentysomething Marina look-alikes now clog the sidewalks in front of upscale clubs.

Polk’s queer residents and patrons are now being priced and policed out of their neighborhood — and their city — as business and tourism interests continue to eat away at the city’s center. Lower Polk Gulch, just blocks north of City Hall and one block east of Van Ness, has in the past few years succumbed to multimillion-dollar businesses, upscale lofts, increased rents at SRO hotels and apartments, and a new million-dollar city streetscape beautification plan. The related increase in policing and new efforts to clean up the street is making the area an unwelcoming place for the marginal queers who for so long called it home.

It has been the most down-and-out segments of the queer population — male sex workers, trannies, young people, poor people of color, and immigrants — who have often been the queer population’s boldest and most innovative actors, pushing the movement forward in new ways. What does queer San Francisco lose when our most marginalized members are pushed, policed, and priced out of the city?

HEART OF A COMMUNITY


Michaels stood under a neon purple Divas sign, advertising the three-story transgender club that has stood in Polk Gulch for more than three decades. Divas manager Alexis Miranda, a friend, stepped outside to chat, and a dozen characters from the neighborhood stopped by to shoot the shit. One man rubbed Miranda’s belly through her leopard bodysuit. "This is my baby," he told us jokingly.

Divas is as much a community center as it is a club. Girls from out of town and out of the country know to come to Divas when they step off the boat, plane, or bus. Many trans immigrants make a living as prostitutes, and while Miranda insists that she does not allow them to work inside the club, the close vicinity of San Francisco’s tranny prostitute district has meant tension for Divas.

Miranda told us the police have been targeting the club because of complaints from new merchants. "Some of the people who have new businesses don’t want the people who live here to stay. They want to close us down," she said. "They’re trying to gentrify the neighborhood."

Neville Gittens, a police spokesperson, told us that the San Francisco Police Department performs "regular enforcement in that area" but said any targeted operations cannot be discussed.

Theresa Sparks, a trans woman who chairs the Police Commission, said Miranda made the same claim at the commission meeting Aug. 15. "I don’t know if that’s true or not," Sparks told us. "My intent is to find out what is going on."

Sparks agreed that gentrification is driving trans people out of the Polk Gulch neighborhood: "It is very, very difficult for a transgendered person to survive in this city."

Miranda pointed to a bar across the street. Until 2000, the Lush Lounge was the cruisy trans and hustler bar Polk Gulch Saloon. Now, under a new owner, white twentysomething heterosexuals sip apple pie martinis.

Sonia Khanna, a 28-year-old trans woman with long, curly brown hair and mocha skin told us she doesn’t feel welcome there. "If you’re a tranny, they think you’re a whore," she said.

Miranda said the owner, Steve Black, ejected her when she went to welcome him to the neighborhood. Miranda, a former empress in San Francisco’s Imperial Court System, reported him to the Human Rights Commission. The inquiry was closed when the owner informed the commission that he allows transgendered people into the bar. He didn’t deny tossing out Miranda; he said he just disliked her personally.

The bigger problem may be the neighborhood’s increased property values. Divas owner and Polk Gulch resident Steve Berkey told us that rents have pushed out other established queer businesses on Polk. The only reason Divas stays open is that he owns the building. "It used to be that so many girls lived in the neighborhood," he said. "They packed the place. But now rents have driven them off."

CENTER OF THE STORM


The reasons behind the death of the queer Polk are complex, likely including the ascendance of the Internet as a social networking tool, rising property costs, and the aging of the bars’ core clientele and owners. But most of the community’s rancor has focused on the most visible manifestation of change: neighborhood associations representing new, upscale businesses working with police and the city to clean up the streets.

At the center of the storm is a glass-walled architecture studio at the bottom of Polk Gulch, around the corner from Divas. Two freshly planted palm trees in front of the studio are conspicuous on a site next door to a bleak, institutional homeless shelter outfitted with security cameras and across the street from a porn shop promising "Hot Bareback Action!"

Case+Abst Architects has been the workplace and home of husband and wife Carolyn Abst and Ron Case since they were lured by the area’s low cost in 1999. The trees were the first of 40 planted in a campaign they initiated last year as cofounders of Lower Polk Neighbors. Abst told the San Francisco Chronicle in September 2005 that she "wants a fruit stand [on Polk Street], and we’ll take a Starbucks too."

The group has had an impact: District Attorney Kamala Harris said at a recent community meeting organized by the LPN that she has responded to association agitation by having representatives of the District Attorney’s Office walk the neighborhood with police and installing high-tech surveillance equipment to gain more criminal convictions. Sup. Aaron Peskin has asked the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to include the Lower Polk in its Neighborhood Marketplace Initiative, a program designed to revitalize neighborhood business districts. As part of this program, a part-time staff person now acts as a liaison between Lower Polk merchants and police. Another city program is scheduled to spend $1 million on installing new lights and planting trees later this year.

Activists say the LPN focus is not on outreach, therapy, or support for the Polk’s marginalized residents but on pushing undesirables out of the neighborhood and ejecting outreach programs like a local needle exchange.

Last year Abst was the subject of a "wanted" poster put up on Polk by the group Gay Shame. The group calls the LPN a "progentrification attack squad" whose goal is to "remove outsider queers and social deviants from our neighborhood in order to accelerate property development and real estate profiteering."

The hustler bar Club RendezVous lost its lease in 2005 after the property was bought and razed. Its co-owner, David Kapp, didn’t return our phone calls seeking comment, but he told the Central City Extra in February 2006 that a "smear campaign" by the LPN stopped him from relocating down the street. A First Congregational Church is now being constructed where RendezVous once stood. The church was designed by Case+Abst.

Case told us that the Planning Department wanted to see neighborhood support for the RendezVous move. The LPN asked that RendezVous provide security, but the bar’s owners refused. "They always had younger, underage boys hanging out," Case said. "There are a lot of families in this neighborhood. We wished them well, but it’s also a community." He told us he wants not to gentrify the neighborhood but to make it clean and safe.

But safe for whom?

Chris Roebuck, a medical anthropologist at UC Berkeley, told us that the increased policing has also meant increased harassment of trans women. Sex workers, many of them immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines, and Thailand, are "increasingly being pushed into the alleyways, into unsafe spaces," he said. He’s also noticed a criminalization of what he called "walking while trans" in the six years he has spent interviewing trans women on Polk Street.

At a community meeting with the district attorney earlier this month, two trans women said the police, despite sensitivity trainings, do not take them seriously when they report a crime.

"Getting rid of the public space for trans women and drug users is not safe for them," Polk resident Matt Bernstein Sycamore (a.k.a. Mattilda) told us. "Deportation [of immigrant sex workers] is not a safe space. The needle exchange actually does make people safer. Getting rid of it does not make people safer."

Sycamore, editor of the book Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients, is concerned with what he calls a "cultural erasure" in the area. "Polk Street has been the last remaining place where marginalized queers can come to figure out how to cope, meet one another, and form social networks," he told us. "That sort of outsider culture has been so dependent on having a public space to figure out ways to survive. That is the dream of San Francisco — that you can get away from where you came from and cope, and create something dangerous and desperate and explosive."

POLK VILLAGE?


When Kimo’s changes hands at the end of September, San Francisco will lose one of the last vestiges of a hustler culture housed on Polk Street since at least the early 1960s.

On a recent night, six gray-haired men sat chatting or reading the paper, relics of Polk Street’s heyday. A young man with a shaved head and black hoodie stood outside the front door and gave a suspicious look to a young blonde woman in bikini straps who breezed in with two friends, laughing, oblivious to him. A sign in front read "No Loitering In Front of These Premises."

The state’s Department of Alcohol Beverage Control mandated the warning, Kimo’s bartender John David told us. He said he thinks that was the result of pressure from the LPN. "Kimo’s is the new whipping boy," he told us. "RendezVous is out, and now it’s our fault that people are on the streets."

Case denies that his group had anything to do with the crackdown on Kimo’s.

A tall man with shaggy brown hair standing on the sidewalk near Kimo’s, who asked to be identified by his porn-actor name, Eric Manchester, complained that a way of life is coming to an end. Manchester said he started hustling on Polk at age 17 after leaving the "redneck, racist town" of Martinsville, Ind., in 10th grade and being stationed in San Diego by the Navy.

"It wasn’t just money for me," Manchester told us. "This was a good place to come and get advice, comfort, support. There are people that need people, and they’re going to take that all away. San Francisco is going down the tubes. All the heterosexual people are moving in. They like the police-state mentality."

Among the new arrivals is the owner of the $6.5 million O’Reilly’s Holy Grail Restaurant that stands just a few doors down Polk Street from Kimo’s. On a recent evening, a musician played soft jazz on a black grand piano, while men in starched pastel button-down shirts stood around on the hickory pecan floor.

Myles O’Reilly opened the restaurant two years ago, when he also transformed a low-rent residential hotel above the space into 14 European-style hotel suites. Neighbors point to the property as a tipping point in Polk’s transformation. But O’Reilly sounded almost defeated when he talked about his "multimillion-dollar jewel in the middle of the desert."

"We are only a couple blocks from City Hall and Union Square," he told us. "But tourism doesn’t come this way."

With the goal of transforming the area, he teamed up with John Malloy, the head of the recently founded Polk Corridor Business Association, who has also chaired the LPN.

One of their projects is on view outside the restaurant and along the street. Colorful banners read: "Welcome to Polk Village … working together to build a cleaner, safer, more beautiful community." The PCBA plans to circulate a petition to officially change the name of Polk Gulch to Polk Village in a few years, but O’Reilly isn’t waiting. He defiantly lists the restaurant’s address as 1233 Polk Village on his building.

That "village" will house a small army if these merchants have their way. "We need foot patrols up and down Polk Street," Malloy, who lives in the neighborhood, told us. "We’re going to get more police even if we have to go out there and hire them ourselves."

O’Reilly took out his cell phone and started showing me photos. "This is defecation on the sidewalk outside," he said, pointing to a smudgy image. "This is condoms on the sidewalk. You see this lovely photograph? That’s a condom in the flowerbed. That’s what my son had to see this morning. And nobody helps."

"There are 1,000 condos being built here," O’Reilly said. "Something has to be done to restrict the number of street people."

VANISHING NEIGHBORHOODS


The Tenderloin, and to a lesser extent Polk Gulch, risked being swallowed by the expanding downtown financial district and tourist industries in the late 1970s. But in the 1980s, community activism secured a moratorium on the conversion of residential hotel units, required luxury hoteliers to contribute millions of dollars in community mitigations, downzoned dozens of blocks of prime downtown property, and created a nonprofit housing boom.

It is these achievements that new merchants and residents point to when distancing themselves from the word gentrification. LPN cofounder Case told us that because apartments in the area are rent controlled, gentrification is "not possible."

Not so, said Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee. "Look at the Castro," he told us. "It’s full of rent-controlled buildings. All you have to do is evoke the Ellis Act, or you buy out the tenants."

Or look next to the Congregational Church construction on Polk. There stands an almost-completed four-story building whose 32 units are being sold for up to $630,000. A large glossy poster in its window advertises the units’ "open living and dining areas," along with "stainless steel appliances, custom cabinets, [and] granite counters."

Brian Bassinger, cofounder of the AIDS Housing Alliance, told us that in one of the buildings where his organization houses people a few blocks south of Polk Gulch, rent is now $1,700 a month, up from $1,325 just a few years ago.

Gayle Rubin, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and a historian of South of Market leather cultures, told us that gay neighborhoods are disappearing across the country as the core of major cities are transformed into high-value areas. This puts pressure on the economic viability of queer neighborhoods, most of which — despite the stereotype of the wealthy gay — have taken root in marginalized, poor neighborhoods.

"Polk Street is just one little battle in the war," Mecca told us. "The Mission was a working-class lesbian area. That whole lesbian culture got lost overnight. The bustling culture of queer artists in the Castro — all gone. The South of Market leather scene — gone. Parts of our culture, the very thing we came to San Francisco for, keep getting wiped out."

Kelly Michaels did develop a certain amount of celebrity as a performer at the famed club Finocchio’s and as a porn star; fans still post photos and gush over her online. And she remains drawn to the Polk, even if her relationship with the neighborhood is deeply ambivalent.

"It’s so evil, so dark, full of drugs and despair," she told us outside Divas. "But this is my home and my family."

"The people left here are going to fight for their home," she said. "Some people have been here forever. Their whole life is here. It’s impossible to get an apartment in other places of this city."

"This is a sanctuary," she said. "They’re taking the sparkle out of San Francisco."

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s all unofficial at this point, but I’m hearing that Mayor Gavin Newsom is (finally) getting ready to appoint a new city planning director, a fact that sounds like an uninteresting bit of bureaucratic business but is actually one of the most important decisions he’ll ever make. And it will impact everyone who lives in the city, for years to come.

The director of city planning holds an immensely powerful job in this town. You wonder why there are too many cars on the streets and too many tall office buildings downtown, why there’s not enough affordable housing and not enough open space, why Muni is overcrowded and doesn’t run on time? I can trace all of those problems back to decisions made by the city’s planning directors over the past several decades.

In theory, the director reports to the Planning Commission, which sets policy on things like desirable types of development, where offices should go, where blue-collar jobs should be protected, and how many new people can be crammed into a geographic area without overwhelming the capacity of the streets and the transit systems. The way city planning textbooks talk about the job, planners develop visions of urban space, looking at what patterns of land use and development will improve the quality of life in a community, then set zoning rules to foster those visions.

In reality, here’s what’s been happening under the incumbent, Dean Macris, in San Francisco:

A developer who wants to make a lot of money building a project — these days, probably a high-rise full of expensive condos — hires a fancy architect and comes to the planning director with a proposal. The fancy architect talks about (to use the sort of language you actually hear inside the Planning Department) "a tall, slender shaft rising between the mounds of the downtown skyline" — no, I didn’t make that up — and next thing you know, Macris is in love. Oooh, he wants that tower — so he and his staff devise planning rules and guidelines to make it possible for the developer to build it.

(Of course, the way the Planning Department budget works only encourages that sort of behavior. Much of the money to run Macris’s fiefdom comes from developer fees. No developers, no fees.)

Then the activists come along and demand that the developer kick something back to the community. So the developer — who stands to make an absolute killing on the project — throws a few dollars around for a little bit of affordable housing and a few community amenities. And next thing you know, there’s an enormous high-rise under construction.

Developer-driven planning is, by definition, terrible. It was under Macris’s prior reign, in the 1980s, that something like 30 million square feet of high-rise office space was built downtown, driving up housing prices, attracting more traffic, overburdening Muni, and, since high-rise offices cost more to serve than they pay in taxes, hammering the city budget.

And now the city is poised to make some absolutely critical decisions about the future. We need a real planning director who isn’t a developer toady.

The search is down to two or maybe three candidates, at least one of them truly awful. And I hear from good sources that Newsom is listening to Macris’s advice on the choice. I fear for my city.<\!s>*

Redevelopment’s new face

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› sarah@sfbg.com

City Hall’s cavernous marble corridors echoed Aug. 14 with the footsteps of a band of sharply dressed African Americans, many of them ministers and all of them come to voice support for Fred Blackwell’s appointment as executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

Blackwell, who has a master’s degree in city planning from UC Berkeley and has been working for the Mayor’s Office of Community Development since 2005, most recently as director, won’t be the first African American to occupy the agency’s top post.

But Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to nominate Blackwell was seen by many as a hopeful sign that the agency might proactively address problems that have torn apart the Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point community in the past year and continue to dog the agency in the Western Addition.

These concerns include the suspicion that Newsom’s plan to fold Candlestick Point into the already controversial Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment project is less about wooing the 49ers to stay and more about jumping into bed with Lennar Corp., a deep-pocketed and politically connected development company (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07).

The deal gives Lennar the right to develop 6,500 new housing units and take over the cleanup of Hunters Point Shipyard — a move mayoral candidate Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai described as "the dirty transfer of the shipyard" (see "And They’re Off," 8/15/07).

A growing body of Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point residents has asked the city to temporarily shut down construction at the shipyard’s Parcel A because of concerns about the toxic dust being kicked up (see "Dust Devils," 8/1/07).

And then there’s lingering ill will from the 1960s, when redevelopment caused the massive displacement of African Americans from the Western Addition.

So will Blackwell be able to solve the agency’s deep-rooted problems? Newsom described Blackwell as "an outstanding choice" when nominating him Aug. 10, while agency commission president Rich Peterson called Blackwell "smart, of high integrity, well known by community leaders, and familiar with the unique opportunities as well as important lessons learned of redevelopment in the city."

But while commissioner Francee Covington declared that "a new day is dawning at the agency" shortly before the commission voted 7–<\d>0 to appoint Blackwell, the African American community still has its concerns.

Minister Christopher Muhammad, who has led the voicing of concerns about the Parcel A dust, was proud to see an African American in a position of leadership. "But we are still going to hold your feet to the fire," he said. "Redevelopment is not just about the redevelopment of physical structures but [also] about the redevelopment of human beings."

Noting that Blackwell is a 1991 graduate of Morehouse College, Rev. Amos Brown said, "I find no fault in this man, and you will not find any either in terms of fitness for this office," while local resident Randall Evans voiced his belief that "the only folks gonna take care of black people’s business are black folks."

Activist-journalist Ace Washington observed that Blackwell is "coming into a very hot seat. He needs some ice cubes to sit down. Only time will tell if he stands by his convictions. It doesn’t matter if the director is black, Latino, Asian, or white. All of us here are saying, ‘Ah, a breath of fresh air.’<\!s>"

Rev. Arnold Townsend said, "We trust the resources are there to help community — and not to tell the community what to do. Because until that dynamic changes, it won’t matter who is executive director."

Blackwell conceded that he had misgivings about heading an agency founded in 1948 to remove blight, a mission that many say has been tainted by racism since its inception. "I admit I was not leaping and jumping when my name first surfaced, but I look forward to working with you all," Blackwell told the commission.

Blackwell later told the Guardian he hopes "to foster a sense of equity and opportunity and a broader vision of community development."

"The legacy of redevelopment and urban renewal is not a good one," he said. "The residue is still there, but trust is only built through action."

Describing the Western Addition and Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point as "two bookends in terms of redevelopment," Blackwell said he hopes "to close out the agency’s relationship with the Western Addition and make sure responsibility is transferred seamlessly to the appropriate agencies."

As for Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point, "we should take stock of what we should and should not do, get on the right track, and create opportunities for people who live there," he said.

But Sumchai wants to put the agency under the control of the Board of Supervisors: "You could appoint Jesus of Nazareth and still have problems as long as the agency is locked into its current structure."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi says putting an African American at the head of the Redevelopment Agency "makes a lot of sense, considering the egregious and negative impact the agency has had on the African American community…. But no matter how well-liked Fred Blackwell is, that does not compensate for the deficiencies of the Redevelopment Agency’s aims and competence."<\!s>*

Fall Arts: Before and after Halloween

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

1. Death Sentence Not to be confused with The Brave One (see "Popcorn — and Human Pies"), but you’re forgiven if you do: old-school vigilantes are the new hotness. Splat packer James Wan (Saw) directs this adaptation of Brian Garfield’s novel — the sequel to Death Wish — in which a brush with violence turns a mild-mannered dude (Kevin Bacon) into the human equivalent of Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance. (Aug. 31)

2. Halloween John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) is damn near perfection. Its sequels are no less delightful ("Eight more days till Halloween, Silver Shamrock!"), but all have lacked the artistic impact of the original. This ninth trip to happy Haddonfield is technically a remake, which under normal circumstances would be outright sacrilege. But as I’ve been intrigued by director Rob Zombie’s previous films — and the cast he’s lined up is pretty mind-blowing, with Udo Kier, Ken Foree, Adrienne Barbeau, Clint Howard, Danny Trejo, and about a zillion others — I’ll have to see the thing before I start, uh, screaming for vengeance. (Aug. 31)

3. The Darjeeling Limited So you didn’t really dig The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, except for the Willem Dafoe parts ("Not if I see you first, sonny"). You know you’re duty bound to see Wes Anderson’s latest, which stars Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman (who cowrote the script with Anderson and Roman Coppola) as brothers traveling across India. Prediction: there will be quirkiness. (Sept. 28)

4. Into the Wild Director Sean Penn adapted his screenplay from Jon Krakauer’s best-seller about a recent college grad who up and moves to the Alaskan wilderness. Emile Hirsch — one of those young actors who shuttle between arty (The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys) and big-budget (2008’s Speed Racer) — stars as the lad yearning for adventure. (Sept. 28)

5. Elizabeth: The Golden Age Whoever heard of Cate Blanchett before Elizabeth? Cast in every movie made since (seems like, anyway), the striking Aussie returns to the character that made her famous with Shekhar Kapur’s sequel to his 1998 tale about Queen Elizabeth I’s rise to power. Clive Owen appears (as Sir Walter Raleigh). Helen Mirren does not. (Oct. 12)

6. Rogue The director of Wolf Creek does the Australian tourism board another favor. A giant favor, in fact. A giant, crocodile-shaped favor. I believe the phrase you’re looking for is "Fuck yeah!" (Oct. 12)

7. American Gangster This film’s got a checkered backstory — it was supposed to be made a few years ago by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), and when the production went south, Denzel Washington got something like $20 million as part of his play-or-pay deal. Ridley Scott’s in the director’s chair now, with Russell Crowe and moneybags Washington having a thesp-off amid the 1970s Harlem drug trade. (Nov. 2)

8. Leatherheads When George Clooney acts, I’ll most likely see the movie. When Clooney directs, my ass hustles to the theater — even for a romantic comedy … about football … set in the 1920s. John Krasinski (The Office) and Renée Zellweger (The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre) star alongside the sultan of suave. (Dec. 7)

9. I Am Legend Holy long-in-development blockbuster — can you believe this movie’s finally coming out? The director of Constantine puts wily wisecracker Will Smith through his sci-fi paces in Richard Matheson’s tale of Earth’s last (human) inhabitant. (Dec. 14)

10. Aliens vs. Predator If you go see The Christmas Cottage — the first and hopefully last movie inspired by one of Thomas Kinkade’s stunningly craptastic paintings — you are hereby sentenced to spend all of Jesus’ birthday watching the Predator go mano a tentacle with Alien critters galore. I’ll be the sicko in the seat next to you, bleary-eyed from my traditional holiday Silent Night, Deadly Night–<\d>athon. (Dec. 25)<\!s>*

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