Economic Inequality

Lee and Pelosi talk middle class jobs in unequal SF

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-SF) joined Mayor Ed Lee at a press conference yesterday [Tue 12] at Yerba Buena across from the construction site of a Central Subway station. It was billed as an event highlighting how “San Francisco has been in the lead” on creating middle-class jobs, investing in transportation, and ensuring fair wages for workers.

But as these words in the press advisory leapt out at us, we at the Bay Guardian responded with raised eyebrows. Really? It has?

The point of this media appearance, we learned upon arrival, was to promote House Democrats’ newly unveiled Middle Class Jumpstart agenda – a legislative package floated to bolster the middle class, in advance of the upcoming midterm election. Pelosi and Lee also sought to highlight the Central Subway as a transportation infrastructure project that’s spurring middle-class job creation (The $1.6 billion Central Subway project has also spurred mystifying questions as to how the money is actually being spent, but that’s a different story).

Creating middle class jobs

The message was clear: San Francisco Democrats are here to support the middle class. But that’s a tough sell. Everyone knows that the middle class is vanishing from San Francisco as skyrocketing property values make it increasingly untenable for middle-income earners to reside here.

Instead, recent studies have shown that what’s really on the rise is income inequality: Even the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out that the city’s own customized Gini Coefficient, a formula used to measure wealth distribution, puts San Francisco on par with Rwanda in terms of its economic inequality.

Earlier this year, a Brookings Institute report found that the income gap between the city’s rich and poor is growing faster than in any other US city.

We asked Lee about that growing income inequality trend at the press conference.

Here’s what he said in response: “These union jobs – and [Building Trades Council Secretary-Treasurer] Mike Theriault knows this better than anybody else here – are middle class jobs for all workers that just want to earn their way forward. And I think the more projects that we have that are infrastructure related, that are transportation related, that are water infrastructure related … are all part of reestablishing and making sure that we don’t lose that middle class. … I think in San Francisco, we simply need to do more, and part of my responsibility is to build enough housing aimed at that sector, along with helping our low-income families.”

So if you want to be on a public-works construction crew, there may be hope. Except if you live in the Bayview, where unemployment stands at a stark 17 percent as compared with the citywide level of 4.5 percent, where it appears these opportunities still aren’t resulting in job creation.

That Lee mentioned building new housing is interesting, too, given that he recently came under fire by for intervening to weaken an affordable housing measure proposed by Sup. Jane Kim for the November ballot. His agenda has sought to advance a goal of building 30,000 new housing units, but Kim’s proposal would have further strengthened the city’s commitment to building affordable housing.

Investing in transportation 

Central Subway construction may well have created union jobs – but the decision to emphasize transportation funding as a solution for saving San Francisco’s middle class seems to ignore Lee’s backlash against San Francisco Sup. Scott Wiener for advancing a ballot measure to automatically increase funding for Muni in correlation with population growth, a significant public transit investment.

As the Guardian previously reported, Lee went so far as to issue memos calling for possible budget cuts as payback for Wiener’s bid to increase transit funding. But when we asked the mayor what his position was on the measure, which will appear on the ballot as Proposition B, he said he didn’t have a position on it.

“My big focus on transportation is trying to get the $500 million Proposition A because that requires two-thirds, which his does not, and I need to focus my full attention on passing that transportation bond,” Lee told us. “I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on Proposition B, to be quite candid with you. … At this point, I’m not prepared to [take a position] because I don’t want it to be confusing for the public … and in a few months, I think you’re going to see some departments have to come back with revised budgets, to the non-delight of nonprofits, and programs that we had all agreed to fund.”

Ensuring fair wages for workers

Throughout the press conference, Lee and Pelosi repeatedly trumpeted a November ballot measure that seeks to raise the city’s minimum raise to $15 an hour by 2018. But it should be noted that this measure is a watered-down version of an earlier proposal put forward by a progressive coalition that hoped to get workers $15 an hour a year earlier.

It was scaled back after Lee convened a stakeholder dialogue to hash out a “compromise” measure, ostensibly to avoid a ballot battle between the bolder progressive measure and a competing proposal that business interests had contemplated rolling out to thwart the passage of a wage hike they deemed unacceptable. Technically, the measure headed to the ballot still holds the promise of designating San Francisco as having the highest nationwide minimum wage. But as a point of comparison with other cities where minimum-wage hikes are moving forward, median rent in Seattle is $1,190 – while median rent in San Francisco is $3,200. 

Pelosi: “Income inequality is a reality”

Finally, in response to our question on income inequality, Pelosi also decided to weigh in, delivering a very depressing history lesson.

“The income inequality is a reality, it’s a growing gap, it’s something that must be addressed,” she said, mentioning a proposed change to the federal tax code that would prevent CEOs from taking tax write-offs if they increased CEO pay by $1 million annually without also increasing workers’ wages.  “What’s happening now, it’s important to note, this is structural,” Pelosi said. “It’s not anecdotal. It’s real. Go back 40 years ago, the disparity between the CEO and the workers was about 40 times. … And as productivity rose, CEO pay rose, and workers’ pay rose. … That was called stakeholder capitalism.

“Somewhere around a dozen or so years ago, or maybe nearly 20, it became shareholder capitalism, which only had one thing: The bottom line. And that means that now, as productivity rises, workers’ wages stagnate and the CEO’s goes up like this.” Here Pelosi made a gesture indicating a sharp upward increase. “Now it’s about, I say 350, others say 400 times, the CEO pay versus the worker. It’s a right angle going in the wrong direction. It must be addressed.”

So there you have it, straight from Pelosi: CEOs who used to make 40 times their workers’ pay now earn 10 times more than that, while wages stagnate and the cost of living continues to rise. And leading San Francisco politicians are standing in front of the Central Subway construction site to say that projects like this, coupled with a provision to encourage CEOs to remember the little people when they get million-dollar raises, will restore the middle class.

Thank goodness the Democrats are looking out for the vanishing middle class in San Francisco and other cities. Don’t you feel better?

Of borders and love songs

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esilvers@sfbg.com

LEFT OF THE DIAL The way in which Diana Gameros first came to America is a world away from the heart-wrenching images we’re currently seeing in the news media of children who’ve been sent, on their own, to the U.S. border from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. At 13, she arrived on an airplane from her home city of Juarez, Mexico; the plan was to stay with an aunt who lived in Michigan for the summer. When Gameros visited her cousin’s school there, and saw that it had a swimming pool, among other luxurious-seeming facilities, her aunt asked if she wanted to go to that school and learn English. Gameros couldn’t say yes fast enough. She wound up staying three years, returning to Mexico for the second half of high school, and then moving back to the U.S. for college.

So no, no one ever sent her out on foot for the border, hoping that on the other side lay someone or something that could mean a brighter future.

And yet: “I’m kind of a fanatic when it comes to following this country’s immigration system and its history,” says Gameros, a fixture in San Francisco’s singer-songwriter scene for her thoughtful, melodic story-songs that contain both English and Spanish (she’s been referred to as the Latin Feist).

“I think there’s a lot that most American people don’t know. You hear people judging, calling these parents irresponsible…it’s so much more complicated than that,” she says. “People don’t know how the U.S.’s actions have affected these countries. People are risking their children’s lives because they need to be here. It’s not for the American dream, they’re not here to buy a nice car, a big house. They’re here because they want to eat, have a roof over their heads, fulfill basic necessities. It’s frustrating. There’s so much ignorance.”

Her unique perspective on border issues is one reason Gameros was selected to perform at MEX I AM: Live It to Believe It, a nearly weeklong festival organized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in conjunction with SF’s Consulate General of Mexico. Bringing together musicians, actors, visual artists, and academics from throughout Mexico from July 31 through Aug. 5, the festival includes classical, indie, and pop music and dance, lectures and discussion of Mexico’s achievements and challenges, and a meeting of minds around border issues.

The program in which Gameros will perform, on the evening of Friday, Aug. 1, is called “Ideas: North and South of the Border,” and aims to explore innovation in the sciences, arts, and culture in Mexico. Among the other speakers: astronaut Jose Hernandez, who grew up in the Central Valley as the son of immigrant farmers; he’ll discuss his journey from childhood (he didn’t learn to read or speak in English until he was 12) through getting a degree in electrical engineering and eventually being tapped by NASA. Rosario Marin, the first Mexican-American woman to serve as Treasurer of the United States, will also be present, along with Favianna Rodriguez, a transnational visual artist whose work “depicts how women, migrants and outsiders are affected by global politics, economic inequality, patriarchy and interdependence” and the director of CultureStrike, an arts organization that works to organize artists, writers, and performers around migrant rights.

On the afternoon of Saturday, Aug. 2, actress-dancer Vicky Araico will perform her award-winning monologue Juana In a Million, which chronicles an undocumented immigrant’s quest to find home.

The other musical performances throughout the week run the gamut from Natalia Lafourcade, a two-time Latin Grammy winning pop singer, to Murcof + Simon Geilfus, an electronic audio-visual collaboration, the award-winning percussion ensemble Tambuco, renowned composer and jazz musician Hector Infanzon, and more.

Gameros, whose 2013 album Eterno Retorno (Eternal Return) features a song called “SB 1070” (after the racist Arizona law designed to prosecute undocumented immigrants), says she thinks her music can be a subtle form of education, an artistic entry point for people who might not know or think much about immigration issues.

“It’s a topic that touches me deeply, so my protest music is my offering, my way to say I’m with you and I stand with you,” she says. “Though if you listen to my lyrics you might think many [songs] are love songs, or written to a lover who didn’t treat me right.”

Gameros adds that she hopes the Latino community in San Francisco will embrace the festival and show up, a sentiment that carries a particular weight as housing prices in areas like the Mission are changing the local face of the local Latino population. “Unless its the symphony doing something with a Mexican artist, we don’t really have access to events like this that are mainstream cultural celebrations, normally,” she says. “And there’s such a fascinating group of people all here for it — I just hope as many people as possible take advantage of it, that they come and hear these stories we have to tell.”

 

MEX I AM: LIVE IT TO BELIEVE IT

July 31 through Aug. 5, prices and times vary

Most events at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2700

www.ybca.org/mex-i-am

Boom asks “What’s the matter with San Francisco?” and offers insightful answers

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“What’s the matter with San Francisco?” asks the Summer 2014 issue of the Boom: A Journal of California, a quarterly magazine produced by the University of California Press, tapping an amazing array of writers to explore the struggle for the soul of San Francisco that has captured such widespread media attention in the last year.

The question on its cover, which all of the articles in this beautifully produced 114-page magazine explore from varying perspectives, is a nod to Thomas Frank’s insightful 2004 book, What’s the matter with Kansas? And the answer in both cases, argue writers Eve Bachrach and Jon Christensen in their cover story article, is the people.

“Specifically, the people who act time and again against their own interests, people who adhere to a narrow political line, whether it’s antipopulist in the nineteenth century or antiprogressive in the twentieth. By focusing on one set of values, this analysis asserts, the people don’t notice what they’re really losing until it’s too late — and San Francisco is no different,” they write.

At this important moment in time, San Francisco is fighting to retain the last significant remnants of the cultural and economic diversity that have made this such a world-class city, with today’s hyper-gentrification building off of previous waves of displacement to change the city in fundamental ways.

Sure, this struggle between capital and community has been part of San Francisco since its founding, a dynamic that animates our civic life and feeds important political movements that trickle out across the country. And local writer/historian Chris Carlsson has a great article documenting those movements, from the Freeway Revolt of the 1960s to the pro-tenant and anti-displacement activism around the last dot.com boom.

“Read one way, this short history demonstrates the relentless power of money in defining who is a San Franciscan and who can stay and who must go. But read another way, this history shows that there is historic precedent for optimism that the worst consequences of today’s creative destruction of the city can be averted if we know and use our history,” Carlsson wrote.  

But in a Q&A interview with author Rebecca Solnit, both celebrates that dynamic and explains why things are different this time: “You can image San Francisco as full of dynamic struggle that’s been pretty evenly matched between the opposing sides since the Gold Rush. There have always been idealists and populists and people who believe in mutual aid in the City of San Francisco. And there have also been ruthless businessmen and greedy people: the ‘come in and get everything and be accountable to nobody and hoard your pile of glittering stuff’ mentality has been here since the city was founded. But it has not been so powerful that it has rubbed out the other side.

“Now, however, it feel like Silicon Valley is turning San Francisco into its bedroom community. There’s so much money and so much power and so little ability to resist that it is pushing out huge numbers of people directly, but it is also re-creating San Francisco as a place that is so damn expensive that nobody but people who make huge amounts of money will be able to live here.”

After building off of previous gains, the capitalists of today, those who refuse to even acknowledge the political landscape and dynamics that have been developed over generations, seem to be moving in for the kill, armed with more powerful weapons of accumulation and displacement than their predecessors had or were willing to deploy.

“So what’s the matter with San Francisco? It’s becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, while Silicon Valley becomes a global power center for information control run by a bunch of crazy libertarian megalomaniacs. And a lot of what’s made San Francisco really generative for the environmental movement and a lot of other movements gets squeezed out. And it feels like the place is being killed in some way,” Solnit said.

Yet the issue pointedly avoids falling into us-vs.-them traps or trite demonization of techies, ultimately seeking to provide a more nuanced look at the city’s current cultural and economic clashes than the various East Coast publications have brought to the task. And the best of it is “The Death of the City? Reports of San Francisco’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

Written by Rachel Brahinsky, a former Bay Guardian staff writer who is now a professor at the University of San Francisco, the article echoes other concerns about the threats and challenges facing San Francisco, but she finds a potential “seed of the solution” in the city’s current zeitgeist.

For one thing, she challenges the convenient blaming of “techies” for the problems facing San Francisco, noting that some of the city’s best progressive organizing has been done by those with skills and/or jobs in the technology sector, often by people who despise the corporate managers and investors who run the industry as much as outsiders do.

“The problem isn’t tech, but corporate tech,” she writes.

Brahinsky also urges readers to broaden their lenses to consider San Francisco as part of the broader Bay Area, which now much confront the growing challenges of rising economic inequality and gentrification as a region, using the clashes here as a catalyst to finally pursue what she calls “ethical urbanism.”

“What is to be done? There is no lone policy shift that will salve these corporate tech wounds. There are many good solutions under debate now; with continued pressure they may become law in the same way that rent control moved from impossible to mainstream in 1978,” she writes.

The prescription she then offers includes fostering greater community engagement, developing regional policies that promote “community development without displacement,” not blaming techies for the sins of landlords, finding ways to increase the density of development without displacing or sapping vital public services, using open source tech tools to increase awareness and broaden the progressive movement, and “you need to fight like hell for the kind of city you want.”

Finally, in closing, she writes, “The San Francisco region’s most potent dreams are made of the kinds of struggles that refuse the sweeping change brought by the economistic forces of urbanism. What we witnessed in the winter of 2014 was a reawakening of this side of ‘San Francisco,’ a part of the city as mythic and real as the Gold Rush. The ongoing cacophony of protests, corporate tech-activist happy hours, housing lectures and forums, and the ballast of anti-eviction committees brought together by two months of tenants conventions are all signs of this legacy regathering steam. What happens next?” 

Bill would tax companies with wide CEO-worker pay disparities

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California companies pouring big cash on their CEOs may be forced to tighten the spigot under a new bill that seeks to limit CEOs paid excessively at the expense of their workers.

Senate Bill 1372, authored by state Sens. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) and Loni Hancock (D-Oakland), would increase taxes on companies with wide disparities between CEO and worker pay, and give a tax break to companies with a low ratio between CEO and worker pay.

“History has taught us that the gross disparity between CEO and worker pay is a direct threat to American democracy,” DeSaulnier said in a press statement. “It is unsustainable and a danger to our society. We must focus on restoring the middle class and stop fueling excessive income inequality.”

The pay-disparity bill cleared the Senate and Governance Finance Committee last Friday, and is headed to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Local tech companies have much reason to fear the bill. Larry Ellison, CEO of the Redwood City-based Oracle, was paid 1,287 times the median salary of an Oracle employee in 2012, according to a Bloomberg study. Ellison pulled in $96.2 million in 2012, and the median employee working for his company brought in $74,693.

That’s less pay gap, more pay canyon. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, a professor at UC Berkeley and a supporter of the pay-disparity bill, connected CEO pay with our troubled economy.

“This growing divergence between CEO pay and that of the typical American worker isn’t just wildly unfair. It’s also bad for the economy,” Reich wrote on his website last week. “It means most workers these days lack the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing — contributing to the slowest recovery on record. Meanwhile, CEOs and other top executives use their fortunes to fuel speculative booms followed by busts.”

The pay-disparity bill would lower taxes on companies with CEOs making less than 100 times more than its median employee. The tax rate for the company would be metered on a scale of CEO-to-worker pay ratio, with the highest penalties for companies paying their CEOs more than 400 times their median employee pay.

The bill also targets non-salaried independent contractors, a significant portion of the state’s workers.

Many local companies have wide pay gaps between CEOs and workers. In 2012, Apple had a CEO:worker pay ratio of 192:1, Wells Fargo had a ratio of 186:1, and Intel squeaked by with a ratio of 99:1, according to PayScale.com.

The PayScale.com study only looked at non-stock compensation. CEOs are often paid in stock and other bonuses, a significant part of their earnings. In lieu of this, recently many CEOs jumped on the $1 salary bandwagon, including Google CEO Larry Page. Ellison took home a single dollar for his salary in 2013, according to CNN Money.

This seemingly forward-thinking gesture is a good PR move, but in reality CEOs still take home millions of dollars in stocks, options, and bonuses. Page owned more than 24 million shares in Google as of 2013, for instance. Ellison took in $92.2 million in stocks, options, and other pay in 2013.

Luckily, that’s a loophole that DeSaulnier and Hancock considered when crafting the bill.

The bill would calculate executive compensation based on the Summary Compensation Table the company in question reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission. That includes salary, bonus, grants of stock options and stock appreciation rights, long-term incentive plan awards, pension plans, and employment contracts and related arrangements.

In 2012, the average CEO pay in California was $5,054,959, according to a statement from DeSaulnier, while the median worker pay in California was $48,029.

Below is a series of graphs detailing local Bay Area CEO and worker pay disparities, as of 2012.

Alerts: April 23 – 29, 2014

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WEDNESDAY 23

 

SF Public Defender’s Justice Summit

Koret Auditorium, San Francisco Public Library. www.tinyurl.com/justsummit. 30 Grove, SF. 9am-3pm, free. The Jury Is Out: The San Francisco Public Defender’s Justice Summit is a free public event exploring today’s most compelling criminal justice issues. Speakers will include San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, Nell Bernstein, author of Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated, Quentin Kopp, retired judge and former San Francisco supervisor, and more. The keynote speaker will be Gloria Killian, who was unjustly convicted of masterminding the 1981 robbery and murder of an elderly man and exonerated in 2002. Today, Killian is an attorney and the author of Full Circle: A True Story of Murder, Lies and Vindication.

 

THURSDAY 24

 

Forum on economic inequality

Unitarian Universalist Center, 1187 Franklin, SF. 7-9pm, free. San Francisco now ranks as the second most economically unequal city in the country. Tech companies get tax incentives. Rents rocket. So what’s next? Join Tim Redmond, editor of 48 Hills and past editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, to discuss this critical question.

 

 

Postal workers against privatization

Staples, 1700 Van Ness Avenue, SF. 10am-4pm.free. www.stopstaples.com. U.S. Postal Service workers unite again in an effort to combat the growing tide of privatization. The U.S. Postal Service and office-supply retail chain Staples have cut a deal that will replace some full-service post offices with smaller centers inside Staples stores — not staffed by USPS employees. Thus, postal service union members are organizing a national day of action targeting Staples stores nationwide.

 

FRIDAY 25

 

Poetry against displacement

Manilatown Heritage Foundation, 868 Kearny, SF. manilatown-heritage-foundation.org. 6-8pm, $5. In the spirit of activists Al Robles and Bill Sorro, the Manilatown Heritage Foundation invites you the community to join poets and musicians as they speak out against eviction and displacement in San Francisco. This event will honor tenants who are fighting eviction in San Francisco with poetry and music. Poets/Performers include: Alejandro Murguia, Avotcja, Caroline Calderon, Luta Candelaria, Luis J. Rodriguez, Jorge Argueta, Oscar Penaranda, Lou Syquia, James Tracy, Rupert Estanislao, Michael Warr, Po’ Poets of POOR Magazine, Marvin K. White, Neeli Cherkovski, Alan Kaufman, Genny Lim, Pete Yamamoto, Jack Hirschman, Agneta Falk, Pearl Ubungen, E Bone 415, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, and more.

 

SATURDAY 26

 

California on fire: climate chaos, inequality, urban transformation

McCone Hall, UC Berkeley campus, Berk. Californiastudiesassociation.berkeley.edu. 9am-5:30pm, free. Registration required. This daylong annual conference of the California Studies Association will examine fire from a wide variety of perspectives. How is it linked to climate change? Insurance policies? Real-estate prices? Join a wide array of academic experts for what promises to be a day of fascinating discussion.

 

SUNDAY 27

 

People’s Park 45th Anniversary

Celebration People’s Park, 2556 Haste, Berk. noon-6pm, free. Join the celebration of People’s Park’s 45th anniversary with live music, speakers, dancing, drumming, free food courtesy of Food Not Bombs and more — all in honor of one of the world’s most unique social experiments.

San Francisco’s untouchables

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Rebecca@sfbg.com

In one sense, San Francisco’s homeless residents have never been more visible than they are in this moment in the city’s history, marked by rapid construction, accelerated gentrification, and rising income inequality. But being seen doesn’t mean they’re getting the help they need.

Not long ago, Lydia Bransten, who heads security at the St. Anthony’s Foundation on 150 Golden Gate, happened upon a group of teenagers clustered on the street near the entrance of her soup kitchen. They had video cameras, and were filming a homeless man lying on the sidewalk.

“They were putting themselves in the shot,” she said.

Giggling, the kids had decided to cast this unconscious man as a prop in a film, starring them. She told them it was time to leave. Bransten read it as yet another example of widespread dehumanization of the homeless.

“I feel like we’re creating a society of untouchables,” she said. “People are lying on the street, and nobody cares whether they’re dead or breathing.”

Condominium dwellers and other District 6 residents of SoMa and the Tenderloin are constantly bombarding Sup. Jane Kim about homelessness via email — not to express concern about the health or condition of street dwellers, but to vent their deep disgust.

“This encampment has been here almost every night for several weeks running. Each night the structure is more elaborate. Why is it allowed to remain up?” one resident wrote in an email addressed to Kim. “Another man can be found mid block, sprawled across the sidewalk … He should be removed ASAP.”

In a different email, a resident wrote: “The police non-emergency number is on my quick dial because we have to call so often to have homeless camps removed.”

It’s within this fractious context that the city is embarking on the most comprehensive policy discussions to take place on homelessness in a decade.

In 2004, city officials and community advocates released a 10-Year Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness. One only needs to walk down the street to understand that this lofty objective ultimately failed; people suffering from mental illness, addiction, and poverty continue to live on the streets.

Most everyone agrees that something should be done. But while some want to see homelessness tackled because they wish undesirable people would vanish from view, others perceive a tragic byproduct of economic inequality and a dismantled social safety net, and believe the main goal should be helping homeless people recover.

“The people living in poverty are a byproduct of the system,” said Karl Robillard, a spokesperson for St. Anthony’s. “We will always have to help the less fortunate. That’s not going to go away. But we’re now blaming those very same people for being in that situation.”

sabrina

Sabrina: “The streets can be mean.”

Guardian photo by Rebecca Bowe

 

HOMELESS MAGNET?

A common framing of San Francisco’s “homeless problem” might be called the magnet theory.

The city has allocated $165 million to homeless services. Over time, it has succeeded in offering 6,355 permanent supportive housing units to the formerly homeless. Nevertheless, the number of homeless people accounted for on the streets has remained stubbornly flat. The city estimates there are about 7,350 homeless people now living in San Francisco.

Since the city has invested so much with such disappointing results, the story goes, there can only be one explanation: Offering robust services has drawn homeless people from elsewhere, like a magnet. By demonstrating kindness, the city has unwittingly converted itself into a Mecca for the homeless, spoiling an otherwise lovely place for all the hardworking, law-abiding citizens who contribute and pay taxes.

That theory was thoroughly debunked in a Board of Supervisors committee hearing on Feb. 5.

“The idea of services as a magnet, … we haven’t seen any empirical data to support that,” noted Peter Connery of Applied Survey Research, a consultant that conducted the city’s most recent homeless count. “The numbers in San Francisco are very consistent with the other communities.”

He went on to address the question on everyone’s mind: Why haven’t the numbers decreased? “Even in this environment where there have obviously been a tremendous number of successes in various departments and programs,” Connery said, “this has been a very tough economic period. Just to stay flat represents a huge success in this environment.”

As former President Bill Clinton’s campaign team used to say: It’s the economy, stupid.

 

LIFE OUTSIDE

For Sabrina, it started with mental health problems and drug addiction. She grew up in Oakland, the daughter of a single mom who worked as a housecleaner.

“Drugs led me the wrong way, and eventually caught up with me,” she explained at the soup kitchen while cradling Lily, her Chihuahua-terrier mix.

“I had nothing, at first. You have to learn to pick things up. Eventually, I got some blankets,” she said. But she was vulnerable. “It can get kind of mean. The streets can be mean — especially to the ladies.”

She found her way to A Woman’s Place, a shelter. Then she completed a five-month drug rehab program and now she has housing at a single room occupancy hotel on Sixth Street.

“You don’t realize how important those places are,” she said, crediting entry into the shelter and the drug-rehab program with her recovery.

Since the 10-year plan went into effect, Coalition on Homelessness Director Jennifer Friedenbach told us, emergency services for homeless people have been dramatically scaled back. Since 2004, “We lost about a third of our shelter beds,” she explained. About half of the city’s drop-in center capacity was also slashed.

“Between 2007 to 2011, we had about $40 million in direct cuts to behavioral health,” she said at the Feb. 5 hearing, seizing on the lack of mental health care, one of the key challenges to reducing homelessness.

“The result of all three of these things, I can’t really put into words. It’s been very dramatically negative. The increase in acuity, impact on health,” she said, “those cannot be overstated.”

The need for shelters is pressing. The city has provided funding for a new shelter for LGBT homeless people and a second one in the Bayview, but it hasn’t kept up with demand. And for those who lack shelter, life is about navigating one dilemma after another, trying to prevent little problems from snowballing into something heinous.

Consider recent skirmishes that have arisen around the criminalization of homelessness. Department of Public Works street cleaning crews have sprayed homeless people trying to rest on Market Street. Sitting or lying on the sidewalk can result in a ticket. There are few public restrooms, but urinating on the street can result in a ticket. There are no showers, but anyone caught washing up in the library bathroom could be banned from the premises. Sleeping in a park overnight is illegal.

“The bad things that happen are when people don’t see homeless people as people,” said Bevan Dufty, the mayor’s point person on homelessness. “That’s the core of it — to be moved away, to be pushed away, citing people, arresting people.”

Friedenbach said the tickets and criminalization can ultimately amount to a barrier to ending homelessness: “You’re homeless, so you get a ticket, so they won’t give you housing, because you wouldn’t pay the ticket. And so, you’re stuck on the streets.”

 

ORDINARY EMERGENCIES

A man slumped over his lunch tray and fell to the floor. Within minutes, a medical crew had arrived on the scene, set up a powder-blue privacy screen, and cleared away a table and chairs to administer emergency care.

Throughout the dining hall, most continued lifting forkfuls of mashed potatoes, broccoli, and shredded meat to their mouths, unfazed. Volunteers clad in aprons continued to set down heaping lunch trays in front of diners who held up laminated food tickets. At St. Anthony’s, where between 2,500 and 3,000 hot meals are served daily to needy San Franciscans, this sort of thing happens all the time.

“A lot of our guests are subject to seizures, for one reason or another,” Robillard told me by way of explanation. Behind him, a pair of medics hovered over the man’s outstretched body, his face invisible behind the screen. “In almost all cases, they’re fine.”

Seizures are just one common ailment plaguing the St. Anthony’s clientele, a mix of homeless people, folks living on the economic margins, and tenants housed in nearby single room occupancy hotels.

Jack, an elderly gentleman with a gray beard and stubs on one hand where fingers used to be, told me he’d spent years in prison, battled a heroin addiction, and sustained his hand injury while serving in the military. He previously held jobs as a rigger and a train operator, and said he became homeless after his mother passed away.

St. Anthony’s staff members mentioned that Jack had recently awoken to being beaten in the head by a random attacker after he’d fallen asleep on the sidewalk near a transit station.

A petite woman with a warm demeanor, who introduced herself as Kookie, said she’d been homeless last August when she faced her own medical emergency. “I was in the street,” she said. “I didn’t know I was having a stroke.”

She’d been spending nights on the sidewalk on Turk Street, curled up in a sleeping bag. When she had the stroke, someone called an ambulance. Her emergency had brought her unwittingly into the system. At first, “They couldn’t find out who I was.”

She said she’d stayed in the hospital for six months. Once she’d regained some strength, care providers connected her with homeless services. Now Kookie stays at a shelter on a night-by-night basis, crossing her fingers she’ll get a 90-day bed. She’s on a wait-list to be placed in supportive housing.

Kookie unzipped a tiny pouch and withdrew her late husband’s driver’s license as she talked about him. Originally from Buffalo, NY, she lived in Richmond while in her early 20s and took the train to San Francisco, where she worked as a bartender. She’s now 60.

“When I was not homeless, I used to see people on the ground, and I never knew I would live like that,” she said. “Now I know how it is.”

kookie

Kookie: “I used to see people on the ground, and I never know I would live like that.”

Guardian photo by Rebecca Bowe

HOUSING, HOUSING, HOUSING

Way back in 2003, DPH issued an in-depth report, firing off a list of policy recommendations to end homelessness in San Francisco once and for all. The product of extensive research, the agency identified the most important policy fix: “Expand housing options.”

“Ultimately, people will continue to be threatened with instability until the supply of affordable housing is adequate, incomes of the poor are sufficient to pay for basic necessities, and disadvantaged people can receive the services they need,” DPH wrote. “Attempts to change the homeless assistance system must take place within the context of larger efforts to help the very poor.”

Fast forward more than a decade, and many who work within the city’s homeless services system echo this refrain. The pervasive lack of access to permanent, affordable housing is the city’s toughest nut to crack, but it doesn’t need to be this way.

At the committee hearing, Friedenbach, who has been working as a homeless advocate for 19 years, spelled out the myriad funding losses that have eviscerated affordable housing programs over time.

“We’ve had really huge losses over the last 10 years in housing,” she said. “We’ve lost construction for senior and disability housing. Section 8 [federal housing vouchers] has been seriously cut away at. We’ve lost federal funding for public housing. There were funding losses in redevelopment.”

A comprehensive analysis by Budget and Legislative Analyst Harvey Rose found the city — with some outside funding help — has spent $81.5 million on permanent supportive housing for the formerly homeless.

That money has placed thousands of people in housing. Nevertheless, a massive unmet need persists.

 

WAITING GAME

Following the hard-hitting economic downturn of 2008 and 2009, San Francisco saw a spike in families becoming homeless for the first time. Although a new Bayview development is expected to bring 70 homeless families indoors, Dufty said 175 homeless families remain on a wait-list for housing.

Yet the wait-list for Housing Authority units has long since been closed. And many public housing units continue to sit vacant, boarded up. Sup. London Breed said at a March 19 committee hearing that fixing those units and opening them to homeless residents should be a priority.

DPH’s Direct Access to Housing program, which provides subsidized housing in SROs and apartments, was also too overwhelmed to accept new enrollees until just recently. Since the applicant pool opened up again in January, 342 homeless people have already signed up in search of units, according to DPH. But only about a third of them will be placed, the results of our public records request showed.

Meanwhile, the city lacks a pathway for moving those initially placed in SROs into more permanent digs, which would free up space for new waves of homeless people brought in off the street.

City officials have conceptualized the need for a “housing ladder” — but if one applies that analogy to San Francisco’s current housing market, it’s a ladder with rungs missing from the very bottom all the way to the very top.

In the last fiscal year, HSA allocated $25 million toward subsidized housing for people enrolled in the SRO master-lease program. “It’s often talked about as supportive housing,” Friedenbach notes. “But supportive housing under a federal definition is affordable, permanent, and supportive.”

In SROs, which are notoriously rundown — sometimes with busted elevators in buildings where residents use canes and wheelchairs to get around — people can fork over 80 percent of their fixed incomes on rent.

“An individual entering our housing system should have an opportunity to move into other different types of housing,” Dufty told the supervisors. “It’s really important that people not feel that they’re stuck.”

Amanda Fried, who works in Dufty’s office, echoed this idea. “Our focus has to be on this ladder,” she told us. “If people move in, then they have options to move on. What happens now is, we build the housing, people move in, and they stay.”

 

START OF THE CYCLE

Homelessness does begin somewhere. For Joseph, a third-generation San Franciscan who grew up in the Mission and once lived in an apartment a block from the Pacific Ocean, the downward spiral began with an Ellis Act eviction.

After losing his place, he stayed with friends and family members, sometimes on the streets, and occasionally using the shelter system (he hated that, telling us, “I felt safer in Vietnam”). He now receives Social Security benefits and lives in an SRO.

Homelessness is often a direct consequence of eviction. Last year, the city allocated an additional $1 million for eviction defense services. Advocates hope to increase this support in the current round of budget talks. The boost in funding yielded measurable results, Friedenbach pointed out, doubling the number of tenants who managed to stave off eviction once they sought legal defense.

There’s also a trend of formerly homeless residents getting evicted from publicly subsidized housing. Since 2009, the Eviction Defense Collaborative has counted 1,128 evictions from housing provided through HSA programs. Since most came from being homeless, they are likely returning to homelessness.

Dufty said more could be done to help people stay housed. “Yes, we’re housing incredibly challenged individuals. And we have to recognize that allowing those individuals to be evicted, without the city using all of our resources to intervene to help that person, that’s not productive,” he said. “It’s debilitating to the person. It’s just not good.”

Fried said the city could do more to provide financial services to people who were newly housed. “You were homeless on the street — you know you didn’t pay some bill for a long time. Really that’s the time, once you’re housed and stable, to say, ‘let’s go back and pull your credit.’ Once we have people in housing, how are we increasing their income?”

Gary

Gary: “If I knew how to fix it, I would.”

Guardian photo by Mike Koozmin

SEARCH FOR SOLUTIONS

The reopening of [freespace], a community space at Sixth and Market temporarily funded by a city-administered grant, attracted a young, hip crowd, including many tech workers. A girl in a short white dress played DJ on her laptop, against a backdrop where people had scrawled their visions for positive improvements in the city. Some of the same organizers are helping to organize HACKtivation for the Homeless, an event that will be held at the tech headquarters of Yammer on March 28. The event will bring together software developers and homeless service providers to talk about how to more effectively address homelessness.

“The approach we’re talking about is working with organizations and helping them build capacity,” organizer Ilana Lipsett told us. The idea is to help providers boost their tech capacity to become more effective. And according to Kyle Stewart of ReAllocate, an organization that is partnering on the initiative, “The hope is that it’s an opportunity to bridge these communities.”

Other out-of-the box ideas have come from City Hall. Sup. Kim, who stayed at a homeless shelter in 2012 during a brief stint as acting mayor, said she was partially struck by how boring that experience was — once a person is locked into a shelter, there is nothing to do, for 12 hours.

She wondered: Why aren’t there services in the shelters? Why isn’t there access to job training, counseling, or medical care in those facilities? Why are the staffers all paid minimum wage, ill-equipped to deal with the stressful scenarios they are routinely placed in? Her office has allocated some discretionary funding to facilitate a yoga program at Next Door shelter, in hopes of providing a restorative activity for clients and staff.

More recently, Sup. Mark Farrell has focused on expanding the Homeless Outreach Team as an attempt to address homelessness. Farrell recently initiated a citywide dialogue on addressing homelessness with a series of intensive hearings on the issue. He proposed a budgetary supplemental of $1.3 million to double the staff of the HOT team, and to add more staff members with medical and psychiatric certification to the mix.

But the debate at the March 19 Budget and Finance Committee hearing grew heated, because Sup. John Avalos wanted to see a more comprehensive plan for addressing homelessness. “I’m interested in people exiting homelessness,” he said. “I’d like there to be a plan that’s more baked that has a sense of where we’re going.”

Farrell was adamant that the vote was not about addressing homelessness in the broader sense, but expanding outreach. “We have to vote on: do we believe, as supervisors, that we need more outreach on our streets to the homeless population or do we not?” he said.

Sup. Scott Wiener defined it as an issue affecting neighborhoods. “When we’re actually looking at what is happening on our streets, it is an emergency right now,” he said. “It’s not enough just to rely on police officers.”

When other members of the board said homeless advocates should be integrated into the solution, Wiener said, “The stakeholders here are not just the organizations that are doing work around homelessness, they are the 830,000 residents of San Francisco … It impacts their neighborhoods every day.”

Asked what she thought about it, Kim told us she believed sending more nurses and mental-health service providers into the city’s streets was a good plan — but she emphasized that it had to be part of a larger effort.

“If you’re just going to increase the HOT team, but not services,” she said, “then you’re just sending people out to harass homeless people.”

 

STILL OUT THERE

Mike is 53, and he’s lived on the streets of San Francisco for five years. He was born in Massachusetts, and his brothers and sisters live in Napa. We encountered him sitting on the sidewalk in the Tenderloin. “I don’t like shelters,” he explained. “I got beat up a couple times, there were arguments.” So he sleeps under a blanket outside. “It’s rough,” he said. “I do it how I can.”

A few blocks away we encountered Gary, who said he’s been homeless in San Francisco for 17 years. He was homeless when he arrived from Los Angeles. He said he’d overdosed “a bunch of times,” he’s gone through detox five times, and he’s been hospitalized time and again. “Call 911, and they’ll take care of you pretty good.”

Gary is an addict. “If I knew how to fix it, I would,” he said. “Do yourself a favor, and lose everything. It’s like acting like you’re blind.”

Gary and Mike, chronically homeless people who have been on the streets for years, are HOT’s target clientele. “My slice of the pie is the sickest, the high-mortality, they’re often the ones that are laid out in the street,” said Maria Martinez, a senior staff member at DPH who started the HOT program.

“I went through years of the 10-Year plan,” she added. “Do I feel like I could take this money [the HOT team supplemental] and do something effective with it? Yes. Do I think there’s a lot of other things that we could address? Yes.”

Pressed on what broader solutions would look like, she said, “There has to be an exit into permanent housing. I’ve seen that we’ve been creative around that. We can make lives better. I say that vehemently. And permanent housing is critical to exiting out of homelessness.”

Mike

Guardian photo by Mike Koozmin

Left turn?

27

rebecca@sfbg.com

Dan Siegel, an Oakland civil rights attorney and activist with a long history of working with radical leftist political movements, joined a group of more than 150 supporters in front of Oakland City Hall on Jan. 9 to announce his candidacy for mayor.

With this development, the mayor’s race in Oakland is sure to be closely watched by Bay Area progressives. Siegel’s bid represents a fresh challenge from the left against Mayor Jean Quan at a time when concerns about policing, intensifying gentrification, and economic inequality are on the rise.

Siegel is the latest in a growing list of challengers that includes Joe Tuman, a political science professor who finished fourth in the 2010 mayor’s race; Oakland City Councilmember Libby Schaaf; and Port Commissioner Bryan Parker.

In a campaign kickoff speech emphasizing the ideals of social and economic justice, Siegel laid out a platform designed “to make Oakland a safe city.” But he brought an unusual spin to this oft-touted goal, saying, “We need people to be safe from the despair and hopelessness that comes from poverty and long-term unemployment. We need safety for our tenants from unjust evictions and … gentrification.”

Siegel voiced support for raising the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. He also called for shuttering Oakland’s recently approved Domain Awareness Center, a controversial surveillance hub that integrates closed circuit cameras, license plate recognition software, and other technological law enforcement tools funded by a $10.9 million grant from the federal Department of Homeland Security.

He spoke about pushing for improvements in public education “to level the playing field between children from affluent backgrounds and children from poor backgrounds,” and described his vision for reorganizing the Oakland Police Department to foster deeper community engagement.

Among Siegel’s supporters are East Bay organizers with a deep history of involvement in social justice campaigns. His campaign co-chair is Walter Reilly, a prominent Oakland National Lawyers Guild attorney who said he’s been involved with civil rights movements for years. “This is a continuation of that struggle,” Reilly told the Bay Guardian, adding that leadership affiliated with “a progressive and class-conscious movement” is sorely needed in Oakland.

Left Coast Communications was tapped as Siegel’s campaign consultant. Siegel’s communications director is Cat Brooks, an instrumental figure in Occupy Oakland and the grassroots movement that arose in response to the fatal BART police shooting of Oscar Grant, whose Onyx Organizing Committee is focused on racial justice issues.

Olga Miranda, an organizer with San Francisco janitors union, SEIU Local 87, also spoke on Siegel’s behalf during the kickoff event. “San Francisco has become for the rich, and we understand that,” she said. “But at the same time, Oakland isn’t even taking care of its own.”

Referencing a recent surge in Oakland housing prices due in part to an influx of renters priced out of San Francisco, she added, “Dan understands that if you live in Oakland, you should be able to stay in Oakland.”

Siegel’s decision to challenge Quan for the Mayor’s Office has attracted particular interest since he previously served as her legal advisor, but their relationship soured after a public disagreement.

In the fall of 2011, when the Occupy Oakland encampment materialized overnight in front of Oakland City Hall, Siegel resigned from his post as Quan’s adviser over a difference in opinion about her handling of the protest movement. Police crackdowns on Occupy, which resulted in violence and the serious injury of veteran Scott Olsen and others, made national headlines that year.

“I thought that the Occupy movement was a great opportunity for this country to really start to understand the issues of inequality in terms of wealth and power,” Siegel told the Bay Guardian when queried about that. “And I thought the mayor should embrace that movement, and become part of it and even become a leader of it. And obviously, that’s not what happened.”

Since then, his relationship with Quan has been “Cool. As in temperature, not like in hip,” he said during an interview. “I don’t want to make this personal. But we have a difference about policy and leadership.”

With Oakland’s second mayoral election under ranked-choice voting, the race could prove fascinating for Bay Area politicos. Also called instant runoff voting, the system allows voters to select their first, second, and third choice candidates. If nobody wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the last-place candidates are eliminated in subsequent rounds and their vote redistributed until one candidate crosses the majority threshold.

Quan, who ran on a progressive platform in 2010, was elected despite winning fewer first-place votes than her centrist opponent, former State Senate President Don Perata. She managed to eke out an electoral victory with a slim margin (51 percent versus Perata’s 49), after voting tallies buoyed her to the top with the momentum of second- and third-place votes, many gleaned from ballots naming Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan as first choice.

Early polling conducted by David Binder Research showed Quan to be in the lead with the ability to garner 32 percent of the vote, as compared with 22 percent for Tuman, who placed second. That’s despite Quan’s incredibly low approval ratings — 54 percent of respondents said they disapproved of her performance in office.

When Schaaf announced her candidacy in November, Robert Gammon of the East Bay Express opined, “Schaaf’s candidacy … likely will make it much more difficult for Quan to win, particularly if no true progressive candidate emerges in the months ahead.” But Siegel’s entry into the race means there is now a clear progressive challenger.

The Guardian endorsed Kaplan as first choice in 2010, and gave Quan a second-place endorsement. While there has been some speculation as to whether Kaplan would run this time around — the David Binder Research poll suggested she would be a formidable opponent to Quan — Kaplan, who is Oakland’s councilmember-at-large, hasn’t filed.

Siegel, meanwhile, cast his decision to run as part of a broader trend. “I feel that not only in Oakland, but across the country, things are really ripe for change,” he told the Guardian.

Indeed, one of the biggest recent national political stories has been the election of Kshama Sawana, a socialist who rose to prominence during the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the Seattle City Council.

“When you have a city like Oakland where so many people are in poverty or on the edge of poverty, or don’t have jobs or face evictions,” Siegel told us, “it’s no wonder that the social contract falls apart. It seems to me that what government should do is elevate the circumstances of all people, and particularly people who are poor and disadvantaged.”

Beginning on broke

1

news@sfbg.com

Despite signs of economic recovery, many young people still face hard times due to high unemployment, low wages, and a lack of job opportunities. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee recently sought to tackle this issue locally with the rollout of Summer Jobs + 2013, a public-private partnership with an ambitious goal of providing 6,000 jobs and paid internships for San Francisco’s young adults. It was the most ambitious goal ever pursued in a city jobs initiative, with particular emphasis on low-income youth.

“I’m calling on all San Francisco companies to take on this challenge to support the youth of San Francisco,” Mayor Lee said at a press conference in April, when he joined House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi in unveiling the program, the local manifestation of an Obama Administration jobs initiative. “Creating meaningful employment opportunities for our young people today will set them up for success now and in the future.”

But Summer Jobs + is falling far short of its goal, resulting in the creation of only 3,200 summer jobs. The Mayor’s Office is still holding out for a possible influx of hires next month that could bring it closer to the goal before summer’s end, Gloria Chan with the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development told us.

Last summer, the Mayor’s Office launched a similar initiative aimed at providing 5,000 youth jobs and internships, and ultimately exceeded the goal by 200 positions. Roughly 32 percent of those jobs were in the private sector, predominantly tech. At the end of the day, only about 14 percent of the program’s participants locked down private-sector jobs, with employers ranging from Starbucks to Bank of America to Twilio.

Despite some success in helping young San Franciscans find work, the efforts so far amount to a kind of Band-Aid solution to a problem that goes much deeper and cannot be solved by simply teaching young people to draft polished resumes. Youth unemployment, particularly among low-income and marginalized groups, has worsened over time and is linked to a broader trend of economic inequality.

The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, recently turned an eye toward economic pressures facing young people with the release of a study titled, “Lost Generations? Wealth Building among Young Americans.” (see “Wealth vs. work,” May 1).

The institute found that among young people, “Average wealth in 2010 was 7 percent below that of those in their 20s and 30s in 1983. Even before the Great Recession, young Americans were on a strikingly different trajectory. Now, stagnant wages, diminishing job opportunities, and lost home values may be merging to paint a vastly different future for Gen X and Gen Y. Despite their relative youth, they may not be able to make up the lost ground.”

In the aftermath of the Great Recession triggered by the economic crash of 2009, millennials ages 16 to 24 have faced dramatically lower employment and income rates in comparison with their elders, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

In California, where unemployment stands at 10.5 percent, the millennial unemployment rate is 20.2 percent. Additionally, the median income of employed young adults in California fell from about $35,000 to $32,000 from 2005 to 2011, while other age groups recovered on average. In San Francisco, the unemployment rate for young people aged 16 to 24 was just shy of 14 percent in 2011, double that of individuals spanning ages 18 to 34.

“We know that there’s been a lot of reporting out there that the recession was particularly hard for young adults, but it’s also important to note that they are in a much bigger hole than everyone else,” Rory O’Sullivan, a policy director for Young Invincibles, told the Guardian.

Young Invincibles is a national organization that works to expand opportunities for young adults in education and employment, and to bring attention to the oft-ignored economic plight of young adults seeking a foothold in the job market.

Young Invincibles found the Great Recession hit young adults harder than any previous recession in recent history. A quarter of job loss experienced by millennials occurred after the recession ended, while the unemployment rate for 18 to 34 year olds has consistently been double that of those 35 and up.

“Young people usually take a big hit in a recession,” said O’Sullivan. “Since they’re often the first fired, last hired in a seniority system. You’re going to let go of recent hires and not the more experienced folks.”

It’s a problem that can potentially have broader effects in the long run. “There are huge consequences for the economy down the road if we have a whole generation out of work,” explained O’Sullivan. “Lack of internships and first jobs can really hurt a young person’s wages. If a young person graduates in a recession, their wages will take a hit for decades afterwards — and that could have huge consequences. We’re still a long way behind.”

There’s no easy fix for the myriad economic pressures surrounding young adults, but O’Sullivan points to public-private partnerships as a way to get young people back in the market, even though that doesn’t seem to be working in San Francisco. O’Sullivan said Young Invincibles would like to see more public service jobs created for young people. “There’s a huge demand,” O’Sullivan said. “Rebuilding after national disasters, building houses, tutoring. We have to do a better job of connecting young people to this workforce.”

No traffic for the rich

147

The more libertarian elements of the Bay Area have been complaining for years about carpool lanes on the freeways. If everyone’s stuck in traffic, and those lanes are open, why can’t everyone use them — and cut back on congestion?

Now, heeding those complaints (and moving in the fast lane toward privatization of the highway system), the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is moving to allow single-occupant vehicles to use the carpool lanes — for a price.

So the people who can afford to spent ten bucks extra a day can save time, too — and everyone else has to sit in traffic. A couple of problems with this scenario.

For one thing, the idea that moving more cars to the carpool lane will ease congestion on the rest of the road has no basis in fact or reality. Freeways are like jails — the more you build, the faster they fill up. Double the size of I-80 and soon it will still be as crowded. Build another Bay Bridge and it will be choked with cars in a year. That’s been the entire experience of American highway construction since World War II.

An open freeway encourages people to drive. When the price of waiting in traffic gets high enough, people either use transit or … carpool.

Which is the point of the carpool lanes. If a couple of people leave their cars at home, freeing up space for everyone else and in the process cutting down on fossil-fuel emissions, then they get to ride in a less-crowded lane. The carpool lanes are supposed to be more empty; that’s the idea.

Then there’s this notion of first-class and second-class highway travel.

In a perfect world, people whose time is worth more money would sacrifice cash to get where they’re going, and by sitting in traffic for half an hour less would earn tha extra money back at work, and all would even out. But even the most academic-minded economists know that’s not how the real world works. (Of course, in a perfect world we’d have such fast, cheap and effective transit systems that nobody would drive around the Bay Area at all.)

No: What will really happen is that wealthier people who want to go shopping or out to dinner or whatever and drive without sitting in traffic will get to do that, and poorer people will lose even more of their time to the commute, which they can’t afford to do anyway, and the level of economic inequality in the Bay Area will get worse. So will the air quality.

Brilliant idea.

Sea-level rise and development in SF

25

It’s good the Chronicle is taking on climate chance and sea-level rise. It’s good that Carolyn Lochhead is writing about the reality that storms like Hurricane Sandy are part of our future and that all types of coastal development are now at risk. It’s scary:

Naval bases, power plants, ports, highways – trillions of dollars of investment – sit on U.S. coasts because it once made sense to put them there. As people flocked to the shores, tiny beach towns became cities. Congress is hardly maintaining roads and bridges; its appetite for giant new sea walls around New York Harbor has yet to be tested. “You may be able to have the government rebuild New Orleans, and maybe you could have the government rebuild from Sandy,” said John Englander, author of “High Tide on Main Street,” a book on how rising seas will affect the coasts. “But as sea level rises and reclaims shoreline all around the United States and all over the world, governments can’t afford to reimburse that. It’s not just Miami, it’s Charleston, it’s downtown Seattle, it’s Sacramento, it’s every coastal city and city on rivers.”

 Oh yes — and it’s San Francisco, where sea-level rise doesn’t seem to be an issue in the city’s plan for massive real-estate development on the waterfront.

 The Chron has a map of what the Bay Area might look like after a two-foot increase in sea levels and a six-foot increase. It looks like this.

Of course, it might be okay because we can build super-tech levee that will create artificial waterfalls and protect us all from living on islands.

(You could argue that climate change isn’t about new technology, but that would be no fun — and would require actual political leadership.)

Anyway, here’s the problem with the Chron’s map: It makes San Francisco look just fine. The entire city is in white, safe from that pesky inundation that will ruin lesser parts of the bay.

Thing is, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission has spent a ton of time on sea-level rise, and has its own map, that’s a bit more accurate, or at least more detailed — and that shows some major-league problems for this city.

Check out the areas in blue: It’s most of the northen and eastern waterfront. That includes not only Mission Bay, where the city is pinning its hopes for a biotech boom, but also the site of the Warriors Arena, 8 Washington, and 75 Howard. In other words, the plan to make the waterfront into a heavily developed entertainment and residential neighborhood isn’t going to work for very long — unless everyone gives up his or her car and buys a boat. Or unless we, the taxpayers of San Francisco, spend billions protecting all this development that doesn’t make sense in the first place.

Oh, Treasure Island’s going to be a much smaller island, too.

It’s entirely possible — and likely — that state, federal, and local tax money will go to protect some essential, vulnerable coastal areas. It makes no sense to try to move both the San Francisco and Oakland airports; we’re going to build barriers to protect them. But how are we going to protect an arena that’s built out over the water when the water starts to lap up to the doors? Who’s paying for that?

The Chron has done a good job asking the questions at the national level — but, just as we so often see with economic inequality and tax policy, nobody wants to bring the message home.

The inauguration and the economic divide

112

Second inaugration speeches are hard; you have to be political without sounding partisan, inspiring without being divisive — and promise change and progress even if you haven’t accomplished what you wanted in the first term. The Obama address surprised me: He went left, making clear that he wants economic and social equality to be his final legacy. It’s getting rave reviews in the lib-blogosphere, where it’s been described as the speech liberals have been begging him to give for years. You can’t argue with the content — he mentions gay rights, global climate change, equal pay, protecting social security, economic inequality, the need for collective effort … he even talks about reforming the tax code.

So now comes the hard part: The struggle for economic justice has to go beyond a compromise plan that limits higher tax rates to people earning more than $400,000 a year.

In fact, the best thing I read this weekend was a NY Times piece by Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who argues forcefully that continued economic inequality is prolonging the recession. It’s also destroying the nation’s future:

Our skyrocketing inequality — so contrary to our meritocratic ideal of America as a place where anyone with hard work and talent can “make it” — means that those who are born to parents of limited means are likely never to live up to their potential. Children in other rich countries like Canada, France, Germany and Sweden have a better chance of doing better than their parents did than American kids have. More than a fifth of our children live in poverty — the second worst of all the advanced economies, putting us behind countries like Bulgaria, Latvia and Greece. Our society is squandering its most valuable resource: our young.

Stiglitz says what few in Washington want to admit: We can’t get the economy going again without rebuilding the middle class, and we can’t do that without higher taxes on the rich and a lot more public investment in education. Oh, and all this talk of how it’s out of our control is bullshit:

There are all kinds of excuses for inequality. Some say it’s beyond our control, pointing to market forces like globalization, trade liberalization, the technological revolution, the “rise of the rest.” Others assert that doing anything about it would make us all worse off, by stifling our already sputtering economic engine. These are self-serving, ignorant falsehoods. Market forces don’t exist in a vacuum — we shape them. Other countries, like fast-growing Brazil, have shaped them in ways that have lowered inequality while creating more opportunity and higher growth. Countries far poorer than ours have decided that all young people should have access to food, education and health care so they can fulfill their aspirations.

Makes me think about some of what I hear out of San Francisco City Hall. Oh, we can’t do anything about economic inequality; that’s a national issue. Or maybe it’s a state issue. I bet there’s not an elected official in town today who woudn’t proclaim complete agreement with everything Obama just said — and there are very few of them who are trying to bring that message back home.

In San Francisco, we give tax breaks for businesses that create high-end jobs that drive poor people out of town. We happily seek development without considering the impact it will have on existing vulnerable populations. We even struggle over free Muni for low-income youth. We do nothing — nothing — to reclaim wealth from the 1 percent and put it into local housing, public education, and job-training that could make a dent in our local economic inequality.

Mr. Mayor: Are you even paying attention?

 

 

 

 

 

 

$3,000 an hour — is that fair?

51

Does anyone really think it’s ok for the average CEO to make so much more money than the average worker that a person earning the median income in this country would have to work 244 years to earn what the median CEO earns in a year?

I mean, I think $3,072 an hour is pretty excessive pay for anyone, but let’s give the conseratives their due: The person worked hard, and deserves to earn what the maket will pay him or her. If the typical worker in this country earned $500 an hour, that would be fine — the person at the top ought to earn more than his or her employees (at least, that the capitalist way) — but multiples of 244-1 are excessive an unstable.

Why not link CEO pay to the pay of the average worker? Why not say that no CEO can get more than 10 times (or even 20 times) what the lowest-paid person at that company makes? Nice incentive to pay your workers more.

Have at it, trolls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dick Meister: Labor’s David vs. GOP’s Goliath

0

By Dick Meister

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

Organized labor is doing exactly what it must do to combat the onslaught against unions being waged by Republican politicians nationwide, throwing lots of money and lots of ground troops into the election campaigns of Democrats – most especially President Obama’s campaign for re-election.

The AFL-CIO made it official with a ringing endorsement of Obama. Federation President Rich Trumka declared that “as president, Barack Obama has placed his faith in America’s working men and women to lead our country to economic recovery and our full potential. So we’re putting our faith in him.”

Trumka acknowledged that the AFL-CIO has sometimes disagreed with Obama and “often pushed his administration to do more – and do it faster.” But he said there never has been any doubt about Obama’s commitment to working families.

On the other hand, Trumka noted, the Republicans seeking their party’s presidential nomination have all “pledged to uphold the special privileges of Wall Street and the 1% that have produced historic economic inequality and drowned out the voices of working people.”

Trumka characterized working people as “the Davids standing up to Goliath in today’s politics. Our strength is in our numbers, our values and plain hard work. When we come together, we are formidable.”

Labor’s political forces have indeed been formidable in past elections, putting millions of dollars and millions of union members into the campaigns of labor-friendly Democrats such as Obama. The AFL-CIO pledges to do even more for Obama’s re-election bid, aided in part by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that allows unions to go door-to-door to solicit support from non-union voters as well as union members.

Unions expect to spend $400 million this year on national, state and local elections, fully one-fourth of it coming from a key AFL-CIO affiliate, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The Service Employees International Union expects to mobilize 100,000 of its members, many of them public employees. The AFL-CIO itself anticipates spending nearly $7 million it has collected primarily for campaigning among non-union voters.

The federation aims to outdo its extraordinary campaign for Obama’s election in 2008. A quarter-million union volunteers took part in that effort, knocking on 14 million doors, making 76 million phone call, sending out 57 million pieces of mail and distributing 29 million leaflets at work sites.

It’s certainly true that Obama has generally been a good friend to organized labor. But what, specifically, has he done for working people and their unions? Why do unionists feel he’s deserving of so much union money and so much union effort?

Why? The AFL-CIO’s Trumka cites, for example, Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which “saved or created 3.6 million jobs” and averted a second Great Depression. There’s also Obama’s championing of comprehensive health insurance reform which “set the nation on a path toward health security,” and Wall Street reform that will eventually lead to reversal of the financial deregulation “that put our entire economy at risk.”

Re-electing a labor-friendly president will be only a part of labor’s election-day mission. Unions will be campaigning at least as hard to defeat the many anti-union Republicans who are running at the local, state and national level and threatening the very existence of unions.

As AFL-CIO Political Director Michael Podhorzer notes, “they’ve clearly tried to weaken unions and drain our treasuries. But the consequence has been more like kicking a hornets’ nest than draining our resources.”

Unions hope to repeat their success of last November in Ohio, where they waged a major campaign that repealed a Republican-sponsored law that greatly weakened the collective bargaining rights of the state’s public employees. It was an overwhelming victory with 62 percent voting for repeal, only 38 percent for retaining the law, which was similar to those proposed elsewhere, along with other anti-union measures.

The AFL-CIO is confident that it can rally millions of voters for Obama in Ohio and other battleground states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Unions have already had a major impact in Wisconsin, where voters have approved the holding of recall elections for Gov. Scott Walker, his lieutenant governor and four Republican state senators because of their support for legislation that stripped public employees of their collective bargaining rights. Previous labor campaigns led to the recall of two other Republican state senators.

Obama would seem to need unions as much as they need him. The latest polls indicate that only about half the citizenry approves of the job he’s doing. He’s going to have to work hard to win over the large body of Americans who apparently don’t share labor’s view of him, but who could be convinced to at least give him another four years to meet their expectations.

Labor’s election–year role, in short, will be to do much of the convincing needed to help rally millions of voters behind their friend in the White House. That would be highly rewarding to labor and to millions of Americans, union and non-union alike.

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

Guardian editorial: And now we recommend a national Occupy Day

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EDITORIAL In less than three months, the Occupy movement has changed the national political debate — and possibly the course of U.S. history. A small group of protesters, derided in the mainstream media, grew to a massive outpouring of anger at economic inequality. It’s no coincidence that politicans at all levels have begun to respond. At least five different measures aimed at raising taxes on the rich are in the works in California. In Kansas Dec. 6, President Obama made one of the most progressive speeches of his career, talking directly about the need for economic justice.

While even some supposed allies say the encampments weren’t effective, the truth is that the out-front, in-your-face tactic of holding nonstop protests in the financial heart of places like Manhattan and San Francisco got attention. The visibility of the Occupy camps forced everyone to pay attention. The U.S. economy is in a crisis; less disruptive tactics wouldn’t have worked. But now most of the emcampments are gone, broken up by police forces and scattered from the central areas of major cities. It’s crucial that this growing and powerful national movement not fall apart after the almost inevitable crackdown on one style of protest. Occupy needs to look forward and plan its next steps.

Some of that is already happening, with Occupy activists targeting home foreclosures and marching on West Coast ports. But it’s worth considering another tactic, too: Occupy ought to begin planning now for a massive spring mobilization in Washington and a series of nationwide actions that could bring millions more people into the movement.

Part of the strategy of the Occupy camps was to maintain a presence, day after day — and that made perfect sense when the movement was starting. But single-day events, if organized on a massive scale as part of a larger campaign, can have a profound and lasting impact.

The original Earth Day — April 22, 1970 — involved 20 million people across the United States. There were events in hundreds of cities and thousands of high school and college campuses. It brought together old-school, sometime stodgy conservation groups with radical young environmentalists, the United Auto Workers with people concerned about pollution from car exhaust. It was, by any reasonable account, the birth of the modern American environmental movement.

The other great thing about Earth Day — and the reason it makes a great model for the Occupy movement — is that it was largely a grassroots event. Although there was a national office, most of the work was done spontaneously, in local communities, with no top-down direction.

And everyone — from Washington D.C. to the state capitols and city halls — paid attention.

Mass marches and mobilizations helped end the Vietnam War, spark the Civil Rights Movement and fight the anti-labor politics of the Reagan Administration. None of those events took place in isolation, any more than a national Occupy Day would take place in isolation. The nation’s ready for major economic change — and organizing a national event alone could help make stronger connnections among the broad constituency that is the 99 percent.

 

 

Occupy’s next steps

6

EDITORIAL In less than three months, the Occupy movement has changed the national political debate — and possibly the course of U.S. history. A small group of protesters, derided in the mainstream media, grew to a massive outpouring of anger at economic inequality — and it’s no coincidence that politicians at all levels have begun to respond. At least five different measures aimed at raising taxes on the rich are in the works in California. In Kansas Dec. 6, President Obama made one of the most progressive speeches of his career, talking directly about the need for economic justice.

While even some supposed allies say the encampments weren’t effective, the truth is that the out-front, in-your-face tactic of holding nonstop protests in the financial heart of places like Manhattan and San Francisco got attention. The visibility of the Occupy camps forced everyone to pay attention. The U.S. economy is in a crisis; less disruptive tactics wouldn’t have worked. But now most of the encampments are gone, broken up by police forces and scattered from the central areas of major cities. It’s crucial that this growing and powerful national movement not fall apart after the almost inevitable crackdown on one style of protest. Occupy needs to look forward and plan its next steps.

Some of that is already happening, with Occupy activists targeting home foreclosures and marching on West Coast ports. But it’s worth considering another tactic, too: Occupy ought to begin planning now for a massive spring mobilization in Washington and a series of nationwide actions that could bring millions more people into the movement.

Part of the strategy of the Occupy camps was to maintain a presence, day after day — and that made perfect sense when the movement was starting. But single-day events, if organized on a massive scale as part of a larger campaign, can have a profound and lasting impact.

The original Earth Day — April 22, 1970 — involved 20 million people across the United States. There were events in hundreds of cities and thousands of high school and college campuses. It brought together old-school, sometime stodgy conservation groups with radical young environmentalists, the United Auto Workers with people concerned about pollution from car exhaust. It was, by any reasonable account, the birth of the modern American environmental movement.

The other great thing about Earth Day — and the reason it makes a great model for the Occupy movement — is that it was largely a grassroots event. Although there was a national office, most of the work was done spontaneously, in local communities, with no top-down direction.

And everyone — from Washington D.C. to the state capitols and city halls — paid attention.

Mass marches and mobilizations helped end the Vietnam War, spark the Civil Rights Movement and fight the anti-labor politics of the Reagan Administration. None of those events took place in isolation, any more than a national Occupy Day would take place in isolation. The nation’s ready for major economic change — and organizing a national event alone could help make stronger connections among the broad constituency that is the 99 percent.

Why we need Occupy

7

Not than anyone needs this kind of reminder any more, but more reports seem to come out every day highlighting the level of economic injustice in the United States. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development reported Dec. 5 that the United States now has the fourth-highest inequality level in the OECD, behind only Mexico, Chile and Turkey. Not distinguished company. Perhaps more important:

Income taxes and cash benefits play only a small role in redistributing income in the United States … only in Korea, Chile and Switzerland is the effect still smaller.

In other words, not only are we among the worst countries on Earth for economic inequality, we aren’t doing shit to change the situation.

Oh, and by the way — San Francisco has the worst income inequality in California.

That’s why we need Occupy. Because nobody else is making us pay attention.

Will Occupy message reach Sacramento?

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One of the early tests of the political impact of the Occupy movement will come in the next two months, as California prepares to make drastic further cuts in education and social services for the poor and the Democratic governor begins — cautiously and hesitantly — to talk about new revenues.

The numbers from the Legislative Analysts Office are fairly bleak — the state budget relied on $4 billion in revenue that hasn’t been collected. That’s because Gov. Brown and the Democrats in the Legislature assumed that the economy would pick up more than it has. We don’t know what the final shortfall will be — but because the budget deal included automatic trigger cuts, it’s clear that K-12 education, CSU and UC are going to get hit again, as will, for example, medical assistance for the disabled.

So just as students and faculty all over the state are protesting existing cuts and tuition hikes, more are on the way. I expect this will go over extremely well on the campuses.

The cops may be poised to shut down OccupySF, but this is a movement that isn’t about to go away. And if the governor and the Democrats in the Legislature (who are going to be running from new districts next fall) start to feel the heat and realize that the Occupy movement is already influencing the political debate and will, directly or indirectly, be playing a major role in state and national politics, they’re going to have to respond.

How? Well, the Legislature can always decide to scrap the cuts and raise taxes now. Unlikely, since that would require a two-thrids vote and the Republicans still care more about their no-taxes pledge than they do about the tens of thousands of people (including in their own districts) who are taking to the streets to protest economic inequality.

More likely the talk will be about November, 2012, and what sort of revenue measures Jerry Brown wants to put on the ballot. And that’s where the politics of Occupy can have a significant impact.

There are so many ways to go with tax measures; the easiest, in some ways, is to talk about the state sales tax, which bothers the GOP hardliners (like any tax) but bothers the big-business world a lot less. Most of any sales tax hike would be paid by consumers and the poor would pay more than the rich; typically, big business groups are willing to accept a sales tax hike before they’ll go for anything more progressive.

Obviously, the best option is to do exactly what Occupy is talking about, and raise the income tax on the top brackets (and cut corporate loopholes, and pass an oil severance tax). And that’s what will drive the California Chamber of Commerce types absolutely mad.

But I think a there’s a way to make this a winner at the polls, and a winner for the legislators who push it — and maybe even a winner for a Dem or a moderate Republican in some of the potential swing districts. Just call it a One Percent Tax — that is, a tax on the One Percent. Could be a combination of income taxes and corporate taxes, as long as it’s a package carefully written to target largely the wealthiest in the state.

Hard for anyone these days to oppose something that is totally defined and promoted that way. Gives the Occupy movement something to vote for. Could save jobs, keep classrooms open, keep sick people alive … I see no downside at all.

 

 

Occupy SF: Chron, Ex set the eviction stage

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The OccupySF camp is filthy. There’s violence, drugs and disease. Half the protesters are just drunken thugs who are there to party and make a mess. It’s a public-health hazard. Jeez, it looks like the message is lost and the place has to go.

That’s what the Chron and the Ex are saying — and it’s a perfect setup, a ready-made public excuse for Mayor Ed Lee to send the cops in with riot gear and an eviction notice. It could happen tonight, or tomorrow night.

Frankly, Lee needs the bad (for Occupy) press. The movement’s goals are popular in this city, and when he came very close to evicting the campers, with cops running around the city in buses, his popularity dropped. He saw what happened to Jean Quan in Oakland; her tear-gas assault on Occupy Oakland may have been the end of her political career.

But hey, it’s different now: The daily papers are proclaiming that the encampment isn’t about economic inequality any more. It’s devolved into an unruly mob that can’t be tolerated. Who can blame Lee for cleaning it up?

That also happens to be an utterly unfair characterization of what’s going on. Sure, there are homeless people in the camp, and yes, some of them have mental health issues. But OccupySF is talking about the 99 percent, some of whom have suffered greatly in this economy — and it’s no surprise that some of them part of the occupation. Yes, it’s a challenge, but it something that OccupySF is taking on. Oh, and by the way — the homeless people and people with mental health issues (that sometimes lead to violence) will still be on the streets of San Francisco is they evict the Occupy encampment. But they’ll be worse off than they are today.

Yael Chanoff just filed her report on what’s really going on at OccupySF:

At last night’s General Assembly, OccupySF organizer Philip Oje debriefed on that days meeting with Mayor Ed Lee, and participants in the 150-person meeting debated the best next steps. Several different viewpoints were discussed. Many were indignant about reorganizing camp to appease the city, saying that “I didn’t come her to comply with city ordinances that change every day. I came here to do what I think is right.”
Others believed believed that the camp should do everything possible to comply with the city in order to hopefully avoid a raid (and maintain credibility if one does occur.) It was generally acknowledged that the situation was a Catch-22: The camp could not comply with requirements such as maintaining four feet of space between tents without expanding past Justin Herman Plaza, but the city refused to allow any expansion to stand until their requirements were met. In general, those assembled agreed that regardless of the city’s difficult to follow guidelines, a clean-up would benefit the health and well-being of campers, and got to work.

This comes after a hard week of dealing with the frustrating realities of human interaction in a cramped space. The encampment has grown steadily since its start, and in recent weeks has been home to upwards of 300 people on a regular basis. Many campers would agree that in the past two weeks that tensions have built as high as they did. When Examiner Reporter Mike Aldax spent 24 hours at camp, it was during the peak of conflict.

Indeed, many at OccupySF are frustrated. There is a general feeling that there is not enough time in the day to maintain a safe and caring community that does not exclude anyone as well as progress with the political agenda that the movement stands for. However, there is also a basic agreement that those with addiction, mental illness, and other causes of suffering are affected directly by an unjust society in which a small percentage hoards vast majority of wealth while the masses struggle to afford food, shelter, health care and education; to attempt to exclude those who are in desperate situations, the most in need of emergency action to change our system and our lives, would be morally intolerable hypocrisy.

As famed radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen put it when he came to speak at the encampment November 12, “At the same time you’re building a resistance movement, you’re being put in the position of dealing with the needs of those who have been dispossessed and damaged by the system.”

It’s true: according to Connie Ford, a member of OPEIU Local 3 which represents many on the city’s Homeless Outreach Team, “The homeless come there because it’s safer than the shelters.”

This has caused difficulties in the past few weeks that the camp has been struggling to deal with. The solution is starting to come together. After physical fights began to become a major problem last week, the camp stepped up the process of enacting a culture of community policing. The night of November 15, when “Instigator Jimmy” was involved in an altercation during a general assembly, about 50 formed a mass between him and camp and slowly pushed him off the site, chanting “Whose park? Our park.” As one camper put it, “Jimmy’s individual will was extinguished by our collective will.” This is an experiment in radically non-violent coercion.

Since then, this tactic has been employed to greater and greater success. Last night, when one camper began to instigate conflict, it only took 10 or so others to cause him to leave in the same way, and hardly disrupted the peaceful mood at the site.

In addition, despite starting out completely unequipped to provide medical and mental health to the masses for free, OccupySF has set up a medical tent run by nurses from the National Nurses Association and several “emotional assistance” spaces, one of which has been facilitated by the Icarus Project and other groups with alternative approaches to mental health. According to an OccupySF press release today:
“Forty clergy, including bishops, have recently formed as ‘San Francisco Interfaith Allies of Occupy’ because we share the concerns of the ninety-nine percent,” said Rev. Carol Been of CLUE California, “and they have asked us for help because they were not prepared to handle homelessness, mental illness, people attracted for unseemly reasons not associated with the occupation. Resources have recently begun to be put into place.”

It seems that all of this grappling with difficult issues and hard work on the part of OccupySF has begun to pay off. Last night after General Assembly, campers worked to clear off the Bacci Ball courts as per the city’s request, take down tarps, and space out tents to the extent that they could without expanding past Justin Herman Plaza (renamed by some Bradley Manning Plaza.) Camp was clean and vastly quieter than it had been in previous days.

Around midnight, there were about 30 people awake, talking and playing mellow drums on the outskirts of camp while hundreds more slept in the approximately 180 tents. One man who had been sleeping there three weeks said, “There’s a new energy. After we cleaned, a lot of the riff-raff left.” With a grin he added “It looks like there’s still some, but they’ve been over there having some kind of profound conversation all night,” gesturing to the camp east side.

I pitched my tent about 10 feet from the “profound conversation” and drifted off easily, though I admittedly prefer a nice buzz of humanity while I sleep. I was, however, woken up around 6:00, when others began waking up and excitedly discussing the fact that the camp had made it through the night without a police raid.

It remains to be seen if the same will be said for tonight.

 

 

 

Ed Lee’s challenges

2

EDITORIAL Mayor Ed Lee has always talked about bringing the city together, about avoiding division and harsh conflict. And how that he’s won a four-year term, he’s going to have to address a wide range of city problems that in the past haven’t responded well to consensus and compromise.

He’s going to have to do it in the wake of an election in which the centrist candidates all finished low in the pack — and the strongest progressive actually won more votes than anyone else on Election Day. And his victory comes at a time when there’s more concern over economic inequality than this country has seen since the 1930s — represented most visibly by the large and growing OccupySF encampment.

The mayor received huge financial support — in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — from some of the same people and businesses that the Occupy movement is targeting. Some of his campaign contributors have an conservative economic agenda that’s way to the right of the center of San Francisco politics. And some of his closest allies (and strongest supporters) are, to put it kindly, ethically challenged.

So it’s not going to be easy for the mild-mannered mayor to lead the city — and if he wants to be successful, he needs to work with and not ignore the left.

There are a few critical steps that would show the people who opposed him that he’s not a captive of big-business interests and that he can be trusted:

1. Appoint a real progressive to Sheriff-elect Ross Mirkarimi’s District Five supervisorial seat. If Lee is really a mayor who’s above petty politics, the chief criterion for the appointment shouldn’t be loyalty to Lee.

District Five supported Avalos over Lee by a solid margin (in the Haight, Avalos got twice as many votes as Lee). The district has been represented by two people, Matt Gonzalez and Mirkarimi, both of whom were elected as Green Party members. It’s almost certainly the most left-leaning district in the city, and deserves a supervisor who represents that political perspective. Most of the qualified people who fit that description supported a candidate other than Ed Lee for mayor.

2. Don’t send the cops to roust OccupySF. The movement has support all over the city and is making an historic statement. It’s probably the most important political demonstration in San Francisco since the 1960s. A mayor who has any shred of a progressive soul should recognize that the most important issue facing this city and this nation is the wealth and income gap and help OccupySF make its voice even louder.

3. Present a plan for more than a “cuts only” budget. Yes, the sales tax measure lost, putting a hole in the city budget, and yes, it will be a year before a credible new revenue measure can go on the ballot. But now is the time to start bringing people together to look at what comprehensive tax reforms might be more appealing than a regressive sales tax.

4. Don’t give away the city to the One Percent. A developer wants to build 160 condos for the very, very rich on the waterfront at 8 Washington. Mayoral ally Rose Pak supports the project. It’s about as blatant an example as possible of something that only benefits multimillionaires, and it will be one of the first major land-use decisions Lee will have to grapple with. Making his opposition clear would demonstrate his independence.

5. Run an open administration. Both previous mayors, Gavin Newsom and Willie Brown, were openly hostile to the press, hostile to open government and supremely arrogant. Lee has a different personal style — and he ought to show that he respect the Sunshine Ordinance by directing his departments to abide by the rulings of the Sunshine Task Force.

That’s what good government would look like.

Guardian editorial: Mayor Ed Lee’s challenges

21

 Mayor Ed Lee has always talked about bringing the city together, about avoiding division and harsh conflict. And now  that he’s won a four-year term, he’s must address a wide range of city problems that in the past haven’t responded well to consensus and compromise.
He’s going to have to do it in the wake of an election in which the centrist candidates all finished low in the pack — and the strongest progressive actually won more votes than anyone else on Election Day. And his victory comes at a time when there’s more concern over economic inequality than this country has seen since the 1930s — represented most visibly by the large and growing OccupySF encampment.
The mayor received huge financial support — in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — from some of the same people and businesses that the Occupy movement is targeting. Some of his campaign contributors have an conservative economic agenda that’s way to the right of the center of San Francisco politics. And some of his closest allies (and strongest supporters) are, to put it kindly, ethically challenged. So it’s not going to be easy for the mild-mannered mayor to lead the city — and if he wants to be successful, he needs to work with and not ignore the left.
There are a few critical steps that would show the people who opposed him that he’s not a captive of big-business interests and that he can be trusted:

1. Appoint a real progressive to Sheriff-elect Ross Mirkarimi’s District Five supervisorial seat. If Lee is really mayor who’s above petty politics, the chief criterion for the appointment shouldn’t be loyalty to Lee or Willie Brown or Rose Pak et al.  District Five supported Avalos over Lee by a solid margin (in the Haight, Avalos got twice as many votes as Lee). The district has been represented by two people, Matt Gonzalez and Mirkarimi, both of whom were elected as Green Party members. It’s almost certainly the most left-leaning district in the city, and deserves a supervisor who represents that political perspective. Most of the qualified people who fit that description supported a candidate other than Ed Lee for mayor.

2. Don’t send the cops to roust OccupySF. The movement has support all over the city and is making an historic statement. It’s probably the most important political demonstration in San Francisco since the 1960s. A mayor who has any shred of a progressive soul should recognize that the most important issue facing this city and this nation is the wealth and income gap and help OccupySF make its voice even louder.

3. Present a plan for more than a “cuts only” budget. Yes, the sales tax measure lost, putting a hole in the city budget, and yes, it will be a year before a credible new revenue measure can go on the ballot. But now is the time to start bringing people together to look at what comprehensive tax reforms might be more appealing than a regressive sales tax.4. Don’t give away the city to the One Percent. A developer wants to build 160 condos for the very, very rich on the waterfront at 8 Washington. Mayoral ally Rose Pak supports the project. It’s about as blatant an example as possible of something that only benefits multimillionaires, and it will be one of the first major land-use decisions Lee will have to grapple with. Making his opposition clear would demonstrate his independence.

5. Support public power and community chocie aggregation. And appoint SPUC commissioners with visible, credible public power credentials. PG&E has maintained its illegal private power monopoly in San Francisco for decades  by muscling  mayors to appoint only PG&E-friendly commissioners who keep City Hall safe for PG&E.

6.  Run an open administration. Both previous mayors, Gavin Newsom and Willie Brown, were openly hostile to the press, hostile to open government and and supremely arrogant. Lee has a different personal style and he ought to show that he respects the Sunshine Ordinance by directing his departments to abide by the rulings of the Sunshine Task Force. That’s what good government would look like.

Powerful, mostly peaceful Oakland action ends badly

19

After a long day of mostly peaceful demonstrations by thousands of protesters who joined OccupyOakland’s General Strike and Day of Action yesterday, it’s still unclear why the Oakland Police – which had stood down the entire day, leaving the movement to self-police – massed in riot gear around midnight and used tear gas and other projectiles to clear the streets and make a reported 80 arrests.

Spokespersons for the Oakland Police Department and Mayor Jean Quan haven’t returned Guardian phone calls, and reports in the Oakland Tribune and other media outlets don’t indicate exactly what prompted police to change tactics and aggressively confront the demonstration. Protesters had taken over a vacant building and erected barricades in the streets shortly before riot police showed up, and it appears from a Tribune video that a dumpster was set on fire after the police showed up.

Before the standoff between city officials and demonstrators in Oakland again took a violent turn, the day was notable for its lack of police presence around the occupied Oscar Grant Plaza and nearby 14th and Broadway epicenter. And despite a small number of masked agitators who broke bank windows and sprayed graffiti – much to the chagrin of most protesters who actively opposed such tactics – the movement was remarkably nonviolent and self-policing, particularly given a crowd of what seemed to be around 10,000 people at its peak. Protesters even handled traffic control, using a megaphone to help motorists through intersections congested with passing demonstrators.

“This is an extraordinarily peaceful collection of diverse people,” Sen. Loni Hancock (D-Oakland) told the Guardian just after 5 pm as a massive march left the encampment to shut down the Port of Oakland. “I feel like they’re doing what no elected person can do: they’re putting economic equity issues in front of the American people.”

“This is beautiful and powerful. This I love,” agreed Oakland City Council member Libby Schaaf, beaming as the peaceful march took off, although she told us that she was disappointed to see Oakland businesses vandalized, including her beloved Noah’s Bagels. “Fight greed, not bagels.”

Most of the crowd condemned the violence, and many openly worried that it would undercut the positive demonstration of people power and the airing of frustration with economic injustices in the country. But even Hancock said a few bad apples shouldn’t spoil people’s understanding of what an important day it was.

“I’m very grateful to them for calling attention to economic inequality. It is in the interests of cities that this issue take center stage,” Hancock told us. “There are so many things that have been talked about that are now on the stage and it’s a very important conversation to have.”

But many in the movement were disappointed nonetheless, despite the myriad successes in shutting down business nonviolently. Around 3 pm, a crowd of thousands marched past a Chase Bank at 20th and Berkeley streets where the front window had been shattered, as was the case with at least six other businesses. Taped to the windows were signs reading “We are better than this” and “This is not the 99%. Sorry, the 99%”.

As the huge crowd repeatedly chanted “peaceful protest,” Ryan, a 31-year-old Oakland resident, expressed his frustration over vandalism he blamed on out-of-town instigators. “People from Oakland would not damage their city like that,” he told me. “Last week was beautiful, we were dancing and singing in the streets,” he said, referring to the largely nonviolent response to police violence, “but this is bullshit.”

Large protests almost always have members who want to escalate the conflict and who see breaking windows as a legitimate tactic, and yesterday there were sometimes tense conflicts between protesters who disagreed on the issue. Another complex issue is how to now view Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, whose support for last week’s violent police crackdown prompted calls for her recall or resignation, although her subsequent apology, the re-encampment of Frank Ogawa Plaza, and yesterday’s police stand down caused some to rethink whether to actively oppose her.

“My goal for today is to spur the international movement forward and to show what we’re capable of,” said 23-year-old Iris Brilliant, who got more actively involved in OccupyOakland after the crackdown and said she was happy to see the police kept at bay. “It’s important to push this forward.”

But Tania Kappner, a 41-year-old teacher from Oakland, still hadn’t forgiven Quan or the police for the violent excesses in last week’s raid. She was camped out in Oscar Grant Plaza in a tent with the sign “Mayor Quan Must Go!”

“It’s good she’s not sending them in on us today, but she never should have done it in the first place,” Kappner told us. “We’re calling for her to go and the police who did it to be jailed.”

With the decision to again unleash the riot police and tear gas and arrest big numbers of people – which was the very thing that prompted such huge numbers of people to turn out yesterday, giving OccupyOakland the numbers and power to easily shut down the port and dozens of businesses – Oakland and the larger Occupy movement might again find itself back at square one.

The National Lawyer’s Guild, which had observers on hand to witness the late-night police crackdown, issued a statement today condemning the city’s actions and saying they violate a crowd control police the NLG helped the city write to settle lawsuits stemming from the OPD’s use of rubber bullets to clear anti-war protesters from the Port of Oakland back in 2003.

“Like we saw last Tuesday, the OPD actions in the late night hours violated numerous provisions of the Crowd Control Policy and the Constitutional rights of activists,” explained NLG’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter president Michael Flynn. “Our legal observers did not disobey any police orders and neither did many of the other arrestees.”
“The Crowd Control Policy clearly prohibits shooting munitions into a crowd,” added NLG attorney Rachel Lederman. “While the police are allowed to use tear gas, they are supposed to use a minimum amount and only where other crowd control tactics have failed.  It is not at all clear that less violent and less provocative measures would not have sufficed to achieve any legitimate law enforcement objectives last night.”

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee has reportedly assured OccupySF that he won’t follow through on threats to raid the camp if tents aren’t removed, at least not anytime soon (many observers speculate that he’ll at least wait until after next week’s mayoral election). But Lee has been unwilling to make a clear public statement that raids are now off the table.

When we sought to clarify Lee’s position and get his reaction to a Board of Supervisors resolution calling for the city to allow a 24/7 encampment, his Press Secretary Christine Falvey wrote: “The mayor has not focused on the resolution, but has been focusing on meeting with clergy, labor, occupysf demonstrators and his department heads to make sure that the site is kept clean, safe and accessible for everyone. He remains concerned about overnight camping and the public health and safety issues that brings. That said, he has seen some good progress over the last few days because of his open communication with the group. DPW cleaned up the site over the weekend and the demonstrators helped facilitate the cleanup. Tents were moved off the Bocce Ball Court as well. The group is working with Fire and Public Health officials to make some improvements. The dialogue is ongoing.”

Photos by Steven T. Jones