Employment

Behind the Bey empire

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Editor’s Note: The Chauncey Bailey Project, a collaboration of local media outlets including the Guardian, is investigating the circumstances surrounding the Aug. 2 murder of Bailey, an Oakland journalist who was reporting on the financial dealings of the Bey family’s Your Black Muslim Bakery at the time he was killed. For more information, including audio, video, and updates on the case, click here.

Since 2003, Esperanza Johnson, a former key figure within Oakland’s Bey organization, and her husband, Antron Thurman, have acquired nearly $2 million worth of East Bay real estate through a string of controversial deals tainted with allegations of deceit.

In five cases those deals led to litigation. Johnson, of Antioch, who also goes by the name Noor Jehan Bey, has twice been accused of fraud. Court records indicate that one of those transactions involved falsified documents.

One sale involving Johnson, a licensed real estate broker, led to criminal charges: Alameda County prosecutors in 2006 convicted a Johnson associate on fraud charges stemming from a deal that cost an East Oakland couple their home.

A broad array of characters have tangled with Johnson and Thurman in court, including a disabled Berkeley bus porter forced from his family home, an Antioch couple now facing foreclosure, and East Bay Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that builds homes for the poor and struggling. Combined, they claim to have lost at least $1.77 million in property, cash and equity in the deals.

The revelations about Johnson and Thurman come as authorities scrutinize the extensive real estate dealings of the Bey family and their bankrupt business, Your Black Muslim Bakery, including Johnson’s role as the broker for an Oakland woman named Paulette Arbuckle who is attempting to buy the bakery’s San Pablo Avenue headquarters. Johnson bore four of the Bey family patriarch’s dozens of children.

Bakery CEO Yusuf Ali Bey IV, 21, jailed without bail on kidnapping and torture charges, also is charged with real estate fraud: prosecutors say he bought an Oakland property under a false identity.

And bankruptcy trustee Tevis Thompson, who is overseeing the liquidation of Your Black Muslim Bakery’s assets, has claimed in court papers that Bey IV transferred $2.28 million in bakery properties to his mother, Daulet Bey, in a bid to “defraud creditors.” The trustee has sued for those properties’ return.

Devaughndre Broussard, a 20-year-old bakery associate, is charged with the Aug. 2 shotgun slaying of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey as he walked to work in downtown Oakland. Police say Broussard made a confession – later recanted – that he killed Bailey because the journalist was working on a story about the bakery’s finances and bankruptcy case.

Johnson, whose state business registration was suspended more than a year ago for failure to pay taxes and who with Thurman has more than $1 million in state and federal tax liens recorded against them, didn’t return numerous telephone calls and emails, and didn’t answer the gate at her Antioch home on two recent occasions.

Thurman refused to speak to reporters who approached him recently in Oakland.

A Los Angeles real estate consultant who reviewed Johnson’s transactions for the Chauncey Bailey Project said the trustee and judge handling the bakery’s bankruptcy should examine Johnson’s record.

They “should be made aware that a realtor on a transaction which requires the trustee’s approval has a murky… background,” said Eric Forster.

The attorney for the court appointed bankruptcy trustee charged with liquidating the bakery said Johnson’s transaction history would be probed.

“Obviously it is of some concern to us and we’re looking into it,” Eric Nyberg, attorney for trustee Tevis Thompson, said when informed of the cases.

He also noted that Arbuckle may not, in the end, be the highest bidder for the bakery. A hearing on her offer is scheduled for Nov. 29. If the $899,999 bid of Johnson’s client, Arbuckle, is successful and Johnson is “entitled to receive the commission, then we really don’t have an issue with it,” Nyberg said.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Real Estate, Tom Pool, wouldn’t discuss the Johnson and Thurman transactions.

Machado

Markus Machado and Gail Mateo said that when they wanted to buy a newer and bigger home in 2005, they went to a real estate broker they thought they could trust: Esperanza Johnson.

A Compton native, Johnson became involved with the Bey organization, a spin-off of the Nation of Islam, at the age of 12, taking the name Noor Jehan Bey.

She’s returned to using the name Esperanza Johnson, though she’s been listed in judgments against her by banks and credit-card companies as Nellie Bey, Nuri Bey, Noojean Bey and Noor Jehan Esperanza, a review of records by the Chauncey Bailey Project shows. And, in 2005 testimony, she said she still occasionally uses the name Noor Jehan Bey.

Johnson had hired Machado, a graphic artist, to create flyers for her Signature One Mortgage and Real Estate.

In a recent interview at his lawyer’s office, Machado described her as warm and gregarious – at first, anyway. Machado said Johnson arranged what seemed like an incredible deal: the couple could sell their 50-year-old Pittsburg house and move into a spacious four-bedroom home in a verdant Antioch subdivision, an ideal place to raise their three children and grow old together.

Johnson promised they’d pay about $1,600 a month for the new home, only a little more than their mortgage at the time. Machado said Johnson even agreed to forgo her usual commissions “because we were like family.”

They said Johnson had told them their credit was poor, and talked them into selling their Pittsburg house to one of her employees, Araceli Moreno, for $350,000 while putting the new home and mortgage in Moreno’s name as well. They expected to refinance the loan in about a year, when Moreno would sign the house over to them.

It seemed perfect – until the bills arrived.

The payments were $2,700 a month and soon ballooned higher, they now say in court records. And then Johnson – who in sealing the deal had diverted almost $58,000 of equity from their old home to others, and had won large commissions for herself by getting them an unfavorable mortgage – stopped taking their calls, Machado said as his wife sat next to him weeping.

The couple had trouble making the payments almost immediately and Moreno began receiving calls from the mortgage company. She sued Machado and Mateo last year.

“The point of (Moreno’s) lawsuit was to get them to refinance to get my client’s name off the loan and for her to go ahead and salvage what of her credit picture she could,” said Moreno’s attorney, Richard G. Hyppa of Tracy.

The couple counter-sued in November 2006, naming Moreno and Johnson as defendants, claiming that Johnson defrauded them. They are now months behind on the payments and stressed to exhaustion.

“I don’t sleep. Gail doesn’t sleep,” Machado said. “I was very naive. We were led down this primrose path because I trusted (Johnson) implicitly.”

After paying off what they owed on the Pittsburg house, about $190,000 was left over that should have been used for the down payment on the Antioch house. But the suit alleges that Moreno used only $77,973 toward the down payment.

Meanwhile, court records say Johnson arranged for another $10,000 to be paid out to Moreno, and for someone named Harry Hawkins to get $45,830 as “repayment of loans.” Machado’s lawyer, Ken Koenen, said attempts to locate Hawkins have been fruitless.

The suit also claims Johnson structured the Antioch mortgage so monthly payments would increase dramatically after a year, and so Machado and Mateo would have to pay an $18,000 penalty in order to refinance – thereby earning her a much larger commission.

Machado and Mateo now are several months in arrears on the mortgage in Moreno’s name. Default notices have arrived at the house.

“It’s an extremely painful thing,” Machado said. “We have been robbed of our peace of mind. We have to make decisions about whether to put food in the refrigerator or gas in the car. We’ve not even sure we’re going to have a place to live.”

Johnson hasn’t responded to the couple’s lawsuit and will likely be subject to a default judgment, Koenen said.

Chicago D&P
Johnson and Thurman in 2004 acquired a Hercules home after a federal judge had ordered it frozen as an asset of an investment company, Chicago D&P, that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had accused of fraud.
The property was supposed to be sold to help pay back investors – reportedly including at least 30 active-duty Marines and several churches – which had been cheated out of millions through Chicago D&P’s pyramid schemes.
The daughter of the company’s president had bought the property years earlier using a straw purchaser – a friend with better credit – as a front, according to court records.
That friend had been trying to get her name off the title for some time, and the daughter’s attorney – Githaiga Ramsey, who also worked for Thurman and Johnson on another case – persuaded her to sign the house over to them. Records shows Ramsey offered the friend $20,500 to complete the transaction but that the payment was never made.
The transfer of the house occurred after U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer ordered the property frozen. Thurman then turned around and sold it a month later to one of the employees of his bail bond business, Jamie Bonilla, for $460,000. Johnson filed Bonilla’s loan application.
Most of that money appears to have eventually gone to pay mortgages against the property when Thurman and Johnson acquired it for free. But first, Thurman received $60,213 from the deal’s escrow; and Ramsey got $31,000.
It remains unclear who lived in the house after Bonilla bought it.
Stephen Anderson, the receiver representing Chicago D&P’s bilked investors, wrote in April 2005 that he believed Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, had lived there.
Other documents show Madeeah Bey – another mother to several of patriarch Yusuf Bey’s children – used it as her mailing address in two December 2004 real estate deals.
It’s also unclear whether Thurman and Johnson knew of the court order freezing the house when they took possession of it. But in February 2005 Breyer held Ramsey in contempt of court for defying his order.
Ramsey and Thurman both repaid the money they received from the escrow when Thurman sold the house to Bonilla.
Bonilla, within a few months, then sold the house for $625,000 – a profit of $211,690 from a property that the receiver had originally wanted to sell to help repay the defrauded investors.
Anderson said a long legal battle to regain title to the house would’ve been too costly.
“We made an economic decision,” he said. “The objective of the receiver is to return as much money as possible back to the investors, and it was not difficult to determine we were going to get more money” by taking the $91,000 from Thurman and Ramsey than by “trying to unscramble that whole mess.”
Ramsey, who surrendered his law license while facing disciplinary charges from an unrelated case, wouldn’t discuss this case or others in which he was involved with Johnson and Thurman.
“My God, am I never going to get away from this?” he said. “I’m not involved and I don’t want to be. I’m not in contact with these people anymore.”
Bonilla could not be located.
Habitat for Humanity house
Antron Thurman married a woman named Sharon Clements in December 1987. Records show they separated seven months later and eventually filed for a divorce that was never made final.

In early 2000, Clements, as a single mother, moved into a home on 105th Avenue in Oakland built by the low-income housing nonprofit East Bay Habitat for Humanity. It gave Clements a no-interest $112,000 loan with no down payment.

Clements died in April 2003, leaving no will. Usually either there’s a clear legal inheritance, or else the nonprofit passes the deed to someone qualified for low-income aid, executive director Janice Jensen said. But Clements’ son was still a minor.

Clements’ home stood vacant for three years while her estate was sorted out in Alameda County Probate Court.

Then, in mid-2006, Thurman argued he was entitled to the low-income property as Clements’ surviving spouse, records show – even as he listed his address as Johnson’s Antioch home, and other records showed that in the previous few years he had bought and sold in excess of $1 million in East Bay real estate.

“Frankly, I didn’t even know about Mr. Thurman,” Habitat’s Jensen said. “I had no idea who he was or that he even existed until the attorneys got involved. When we looked at the deed, she was the only signature, so she bought that home herself.”

Still, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Marshall L. Whitley awarded Thurman the house, which had restrictions in place to preserve its affordability for low income people.

Thurman then sold it back to Habitat for Humanity for the $13,500 in equity that had accrued during the three years Clements owned it.

Alana Conner, an attorney for Thurman at the time, said she couldn’t independently recall details of the case and declined to discuss it.

Stewart

Mitzie Peters befriended Brandy Stewart in 2001, studying the Bible with her eventual victim, court records say.

Peters persuaded the cash-strapped AC Transit bus driver to deed the home at 1565 77th Ave. – which Stewart had inherited from her mother, and in which she, her husband and her three children lived – into Peters name and use Peters’ credit to get an equity loan. Peters promised to return the deed after a few days, keeping $12,000 from the loan as a fee.

“She said that because she loved me so much, she would never, ever think about doing this for anyone else, but she would help me to get the house refinanced,” Stewart would later testify.

Stewart deeded the house to Peters on March 11, 2003. But rather than sticking to the deal, Peters drained the property of all equity and gave nothing to Stewart, court records show.

Peters couldn’t have conducted the transaction without Johnson and her family.

As Peters’ broker, Johnson submitted a series of loan applications reporting Peters’ income as increasingly higher until the bank accepted the deal; she also allegedly coached Stewart in writing to the title company and falsely claiming Peters was her cousin.

Johnson’s sister, Ruquayya Jasmine Pennix, prepared Peters’ tax returns to send to the loan company, showing self-employment income that Peters later admitted was bogus; it’s unclear if Pennix knew that at the time.

Another of Johnson’s sisters – Fatima Ismail, who worked in Johnson’s office – drew up a phony lease showing Peters had derived rental income from Stewart’s house, according to court records.

Three months after she took title to Stewart’s house, Peters sold it to one of Johnson’s sons, Amir Bey. Under oath, Amir Bey later admitted he was just a straw buyer for his mother.

When arrested and charged with unrelated public benefits fraud, perjury and grand theft in July 2004, Peters made bail with Thurman’s Sinbad’s Bail Bonds.

As investigators also began probing her real estate activities, Peters gifted her Hayward condo to Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, who sold it a month later for about $400,000.

Peters then lived with Nisa Bey in Pittsburg until going to prison. Because her bail had been secured with the condo, Thurman later asked a judge to exonerate the bail and return more than $50,000 – to Nisa Bey.

The Alameda County District Attorney’s office interviewed Johnson, Thurman, and their attorney, Githaiga Ramsey – who had represented Peters until just two months earlier, and who had just arranged the Chicago D&P deal for them – in September 2004.

“Johnson seemed evasive when questioned about irregularities in the loan and application process,” inspector Paul Wallace wrote in court papers.

But Johnson wasn’t charged.

“We didn’t think we could prove the case against her beyond a reasonable doubt,” Deputy District Attorney Alyce Sandbach said. “We didn’t have enough to make her on a case of fraud… of having made knowing misrepresentations.”

Among additional charges filed against Peters in November 2004 was a felony grand-theft count for equity and title to the Stewarts’ home; she pleaded no contest to that and 15 other, unrelated counts a year later, and was sentenced in February 2006.

The Stewarts got the $50,374.10 bail money Thurman had tried to direct to Nisa Bey. A judge in January ordered Peters to pay $486,083.90 in the Stewarts’ civil lawsuit, but they haven’t seen a dime, their lawyers say.

Amir Bey and Johnson tried to evict the Stewarts, court documents show, but backed off when the couple obtained free legal help.

The Stewarts then sued Johnson, Peters and Amir Bey; Johnson eventually offered to deed the house back to Stewart, but with the equity drained, the Stewarts couldn’t afford the higher mortgage payments.

A judge in September 2006 ordered Johnson and Amir Bey to pay the Stewarts $100,000 – $20,000 up front and $1,667 per month for 48 months.

Rebecca Saelao, the Stewarts’ attorney, said this civil judgment became a lien on the house, and was subordinated to massive mortgages Johnson and Amir Bey had taken on the property and eventually defaulted on. The house was sold at auction last year for $80,900, public records show.

The Stewarts got only about $5,000 from the sale of the home they’d lost. They no longer live in the Bay Area, and couldn’t be reached for comment.

Taylor

Wrapped in a thin, sea-green blanket, Donald Taylor lay in a narrow bed at a Stockton nursing home recently, his frail 61-year-old body ravaged by diabetes and hypertension. His wheelchair was parked at his bedside, a walker he wants to learn to use, a few feet away.

Taylor is broke and relies on Medi-Cal, the state insurance program for the indigent, to bankroll his care and board at the Elm Haven Care Center.

His room is dingy and, fluorescent-lit with peeling blue wallpaper and a television, foil wrapped around its rabbit-ear antennae, issuing forth static-filled sound. He spends his days “just doing nothing.”

He said he wonders what his life might be like now if he never encountered Antron Thurman. “I think about it quite often, but there’s nothing I can do… I think about how they took the house from me,” Taylor said haltingly in a soft, gravelly voice that contained little emotion.

In the 1950s Taylor’s parents bought a cozy two-bedroom home on a tree-shaded street in north Berkeley. He grew up there and lived there still as an adult, while working as a bus-station porter. When his parents died, he and his sister, Loretta Alexander, inherited the house; the mortgage was paid off.

In early 2001, according to interviews and court documents, stepbrother Frederick Myers Jr., approached the siblings with a plan: He would help them form a company to manage the house and another property they had inherited, an undeveloped Lake County parcel.

Myers asked them to transfer the two deeds to the new corporation, which he would helm for them. Taylor said he agreed at his sister’s urging, believing the three of them could profit from development of the Lake County parcel.

But Myers suddenly sold the Berkeley house to Thurman, pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars and disappeared, court documents say, catching Taylor and Alexander completely off guard.

“I felt I had been cheated,” Taylor said, adding that he believes Thurman and Myers worked in concert. “Fred Jr. took the house and sold it to (Thurman) and it’s been downhill ever since. He sold it out from underneath us.”

Myers could not be located. Thurman, asked if he remembered Taylor, refused to answer as he climbed into a Cadillac Escalade outside a home in the Oakland hills.

Alexander’s son, Tony Cole, expressed disgust at the way his mother and uncle were played. “That property slipped right out from underneath them,” he said in a phone interview. “They didn’t have the business sense to know what was going on.”

Taylor and Alexander in 2004 sued to reclaim the house. Myers never appeared in court, but Thurman – represented by Githaiga Ramsey – responded by filing his own suit, claiming he had legitimately bought the property for $374,388 and demanding that Taylor pay $1,500 in monthly rent or get out.

Taylor and Alexander eventually settled the case for $55,000; it took Thurman 10 months to pay them, court records indicate. Taylor’s attorney, Frederic Harvey, refused to discuss the case.

The two-story, beige stucco house with a large garage has steadily appreciated in value. Public records show Thurman sold it in 2004 to Madeeah Bey – the same relative who used the Chicago D&P house in Hercules as her address – for $520,000; she sold it for $850,000 less than a year later. The house is now assessed at $867,000.

Alexander died last year. Taylor lost most of his possessions including photos of his mother when he left the property.

“I’d like to tell him to go (screw) himself,” Taylor said of Thurman, his legs twitching quietly under the blanket.

University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students Lisa Pickoff-White, Robert Lewis, Nick Kusnetz, Vianna Risa Davila, Marnette Federis and Lucie Schwartz contributed to this story.

Thomas Peele and Josh Richman are staff writers for the Bay Area News Group; A.C. Thompson is a free-lance reporter working for New America Media and Bay Area News Group-East Bay; Bob Butler is a freelance reporter and president of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association.

Public safety, back on track

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OPINION About a year and a half ago, James was dealing drugs on a street corner in San Francisco. He wasn’t a hardened repeat offender, just a young man with little education and few prospects. He got arrested and soon faced adult felony drug charges for the first time.

California law sets the punishment for selling narcotics at up to three years in state prison. But we know that 7 out of every 10 people we send to California prisons will commit a new crime within three years of being released — the worst recidivism rate in the nation. If James ended up in state prison, there was a 70 percent chance that he would go straight back in a few years after his release, and we would actually be less safe, not more, for our trouble.

So instead of business as usual, we decided to try something new. We sent him to Back on Track, a program established by a reentry initiative created by my office in partnership with Goodwill Industries, other community service providers, and the business sector. After a year and half, Back on Track had put this former offender into the workforce and gotten him off the street.

Since we launched the initiative, more than 100 former offenders have successfully completed Back on Track. In the process, we’ve learned a lot about public safety and how to change the broken policies of the past that have crowded our prisons and jails without making us safer.

For decades, beginning with the war on drugs, there were only two brands of law enforcement: tough and soft. For decades we’ve chosen to get tough, but it’s mostly been tough on us: we’ve filled our state prisons to the breaking point with low-level offenders — mostly drug offenders.

Isn’t there a smarter way to keep us safe?

Through Back on Track we’re initiating a new brand of law enforcement. Low-level drug offenders are referred to Back on Track, where they face swift sanctions for making bad choices and clear incentives for making good ones. The participants receive the basic opportunities for living crime-free that most of us take for granted: concrete job training and employment; union-based preapprenticeships in the building trades; college enrollment and help navigating financial aid; tutoring, money management, and banking instruction; child care, anger management, and parenting support. That’s the carrot, but there’s a stick too. Drug sellers must plead guilty to enter the program, and if they are rearrested or terminated from the program, they go straight to jail — no excuses.

Fewer than 10 percent of Back on Track graduates reoffend — and the program costs only $5,000 per participant, compared to $35,000 per year to house them in jail.

In October we held a graduation ceremony for Back on Track, one of four we’ve hosted since we launched the initiative. James was among the 13 young men and women who graduated. Today all 13 have full-time jobs or are working while they go to school. None have reoffended. More than 100 people currently in the program are following in their footsteps. Every day they’re teaching us that even a modest investment in people, coupled with accountability and clear guidance, can keep our community safe.

Kamala D. Harris

Kamala D. Harris is San Francisco’s district attorney.

Transit or traffic

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Click here for the Clean Slate: Our printout guide to the Nov. 6 election

› steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco is at a crossroads. The streets are congested, Muni has slowed to a crawl, greenhouse gas emissions are at all-time highs, and the towers of new housing now being built threaten to make all of these transportation-related problems worse.

The problems are complicated and defy simply sloganeering — but they aren’t unsolvable. In fact, there’s remarkable consensus in San Francisco about what needs to be done. The people with advanced degrees in transportation and city planning, the mayor and almost all of the supervisors, the labor and environmental movements, the urban planning organizations, the radical left and the mainstream Democrats — everyone without an ideological aversion to government is on the same page here.

The city planners and transportation experts, who have the full support of the grass roots on this issue, are pushing a wide range of solutions: administrative and technical changes to make Muni more efficient, innovative congestion management programs, high-tech meters that use market principles to free up needed parking spaces, creative incentives to discourage solo car trips, capital projects from new bike and rapid-transit lanes to the Central Subway and high-speed rail, and many more ideas.

In fact, the coming year promises a plethora of fresh transportation initiatives. The long-awaited Transit Effectiveness Project recommendations come out in early 2008, followed by those from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority’s Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (an unprecedented, federally funded effort to reduce congestion here and in four other big cities), an end to the court injunction against new bicycle projects, and a November bond measure that would fund high-speed rail service between downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles.

But first, San Franciscans have to get past a few downtown developers and power brokers who have a simplistic, populist-sounding campaign that could totally undermine smart transportation planning.

On Nov. 6, San Franciscans will vote on propositions A and H, two competing transportation measures that could greatly help or hinder the quest for smart solutions to the current problems. Prop. A would give more money and authority to the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency while demanding it improve Muni and meet climate change goals.

Prop. H, which was placed on the ballot by a few powerful Republicans, most notably Gap founder Don Fisher (who has contributed $180,000 to the Yes on H campaign), would invalidate current city policies to allow essentially unrestricted construction of new parking lots.

New parking turns into more cars, more cars create congestion, congestion slows down bus service, slow buses frustrate riders, who get back into their cars — and the cycle continues. It’s transit against traffic, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

"If we are serious about doing something about global warming, it’s time to address the elephant in the room: people are going to have to drive less and take transit more" was how the issue was framed in a recent editorial cowritten by Sup. Sean Elsbernd, arguably the board’s most conservative member, and Sup. Aaron Peskin, who wrote Prop. A.

Peskin says Prop. H, which Prop. A would invalidate, is the most damaging and regressive initiative he’s seen in his political life. But the battle for hearts and minds won’t be easy, because the downtown forces are taking a viscerally popular approach and running against city hall.

The San Francisco Examiner endorsed Prop. H on Oct. 22, framing the conflict as between the common sense of "your friends and neighbors" and "a social-engineering philosophy driven by an anti-car and anti-business Board of Supervisors." If the Examiner editorialists were being honest, they probably also should have mentioned Mayor Gavin Newsom, who joins the board majority (and every local environmental and urban-planning group) in supporting Prop. A and opposing Prop. H.

The editorial excoriates "most city politicians and planners" for believing the numerous studies that conclude that people who have their own parking spots are more likely to drive and that more parking generally creates more traffic. The Planning Department, for example, estimates Prop. H "could lead to an increase over the next 20 years of up to approximately 8,200–19,000 additional commute cars (mostly at peak hours) over the baseline existing controls."

"Many, many actual residents disagree, believing that — no matter what the social engineers at City Hall tell you — adding more parking spaces would make The City a far more livable place," the Examiner wrote.

That’s why environmentalists and smart-growth advocates say Prop. H is so insidious. It was written to appeal, in a very simplistic way, to people’s real and understandable frustration over finding a parking spot. But the solution it proffers would make all forms of transportation — driving, walking, transit, and bicycling — remarkably less efficient, as even the Examiner has recognized.

You see, the Examiner was opposed to Prop. H just a couple of months ago, a position the paper recently reversed without really explaining why, except to justify it with reactionary rhetoric such as "Let the politicians know you’re tired of being told you’re a second-class citizen if you drive a car in San Francisco."

Examiner executive editor Jim Pimentel denies the flip-flop was a favor that the Republican billionaire who owns the Examiner, Phil Anschutz, paid to the Republican billionaire who is funding Prop. H, Fisher. "We reserve the right to change on positions," Pimentel told me.

Yet it’s worth considering what the Examiner originally wrote in an Aug. 2 editorial, where it acknowledged people’s desire for more parking but took into account what the measure would do to downtown San Francisco.

The paper wrote, "Closer examination reveals this well-intentioned parking measure as a veritable minefield of unintended consequences. It could actually take away parking, harm business, reduce new housing and drive out neighborhood retail. By now, Californians should be wary of unexpected mischief unleashed from propositions that legislate by direct referendum. Like all propositions, Parking For Neighborhoods was entirely written by its backers. As such, it was never vetted by public feedback or legislative debate. If the initiative organizers had faced harder questioning, they might have recognized that merely adding parking to a fast-growing downtown is likely to make already-bad traffic congestion dramatically worse."

The San Francisco Transportation Authority’s Oct. 17 public workshop, which launched the San Francisco Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study, had nothing to do with Props. A and H — at least not directly. But the sobering situation the workshop laid out certainly supports the assessment that drawing more cars downtown "is likely to make already-bad traffic congestion dramatically worse."

City planners and consultants from PBS&J offered some statistics from their initial studies:

•San Francisco has the second-most congested downtown in the country, according to traffic analysts and surveys of locals and tourists, about 90 percent of whom say the congestion is unacceptably bad compared to that of other cities.

•Traffic congestion cost the San Francisco economy $2.3 billion in 2005 through slowed commerce, commuter delays, wasted fuel, and environmental impacts.

•The length of car trips is roughly doubled by traffic congestion — and getting longer every year — exacerbating the fact that 47 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions come from private cars. Census data also show that more San Franciscans get to work by driving alone in their cars than by any other mode.

•Traffic has also steadily slowed Muni, which often shares space with cars, to an average of 8 mph, making it the slowest transit service in the country. Buses now take about twice as long as cars to make the same trip, which discourages their use.

"We want to figure out ways to get people in a more efficient mode of transportation," Zabe Bent, a senior planner with the TA, told the crowd. She added, "We want to make sure congestion is not hindering our growth."

The group is now studying the problem and plans to reveal its preliminary results next spring and recommendations by summer 2008. Among the many tools being contemplated are fees for driving downtown or into other congested parts of the city (similar to programs in London, Rome, and Stockholm, Sweden) and high-tech tools for managing parking (such as the determination of variable rates based on real-time demand, more efficient direction to available spots, and easy ways to feed the meter remotely).

"As a way to manage the scarce resource of parking, we would use pricing as a tool," said Tilly Chang, also a senior planner with the TA, noting that high prices can encourage more turnover at times when demand is high.

Yet there was a visceral backlash at the workshop to such scientifically based plans, which conservatives deride as social engineering. "I don’t understand why we need to spend so much money creating a bureaucracy," one scowling attendee around retirement age said. There were some murmurs of support in the crowd.

Rob Black, the government affairs director for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which is the most significant entity to oppose Prop. A and support Prop. H, was quietly watching the proceedings. I asked what he and the chamber thought of the study and its goals.

"We have mixed feelings, and we don’t know what’s going to happen," Black, who ran unsuccessfully against Sup. Chris Daly last year, told me. "The devil is in the details."

But others don’t even want to wait for the details. Alex Belenson, an advertising consultant and Richmond District resident who primarily uses his car to get around town, chastised the planners for overcomplicating what he sees as a "simple" problem.

Vocally and in a four-page memo he handed out, Belenson blamed congestion on the lack of parking spaces, the city’s transit-first policy, and the failure to build more freeways in the city. Strangely, he supports his point with facts that include "Total commuters into, out of, and within San Francisco have only increased by 206,000 since 1960 — more than 145,000 on public transit."

Some might see those figures, derived from census data, as supporting the need for creative congestion management solutions and the expansion of transit and other alternative transportation options. But Belenson simply sees the need for 60,000 new parking spaces.

As he told the gathering, "If someone wants to build a parking lot and the market will support it, they should be able to."

The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) is generally allied with the downtown business community on most issues, but not Props. A and H, which SPUR says could be unmitigated disasters for San Francisco.

"SPUR is a pro-growth organization, and we want a healthy economy. And we think the only way to be pro-business and pro-growth in San Francisco is to be transit reliant instead of car reliant," SPUR executive director Gabriel Metcalf told me in an interview in his downtown office.

He agreed with Belenson that the free market will provide lots of new parking if it’s allowed to do so, particularly because the regulatory restrictions on parking have artificially inflated its value. "But the negative externalities are very large," Metcalf said, employing the language of market economics.

In other words, the costs of all of that new parking won’t be borne just by the developers and the drivers but by all of the people affected by climate change, air pollution, congested commerce, oil wars, slow public transit, and the myriad other hidden by-products of the car culture that we are just now starting to understand fully.

Yet Metcalf doesn’t focus on that broad critique as much as on the simple reality that SPUR knows all too well: downtown San Francisco was designed for transit, not cars, to be the primary mode of transportation.

"Downtown San Francisco is one of the great planning success stories in America," Metcalf said. "But trips to downtown San Francisco can’t use mostly single-occupant vehicles. We could never have had this level of employment or real estate values if we had relied on car-oriented modes for downtown."

Metcalf and other local urban planners tell stories of how San Francisco long ago broke with the country’s dominant post–World War II development patterns, starting with citizen revolts against freeway plans in the 1950s and picking up stream with the environmental and social justice movements of the 1960s, the arrival of BART downtown in 1973, the official declaration of a transit-first policy in the ’80s, and the votes to dismantle the Central and Embarcadero freeways.

"We really led the way for how a modern dynamic city can grow in a way that is sustainable. And that decision has served us well for 30 years," Metcalf said.

Tom Radulovich, a longtime BART board member who serves as director of the nonprofit group Livable City, said San Franciscans now must choose whether they want to plan for growth like Copenhagen, Denmark, Paris, and Portland, Ore., or go with auto-dependent models, like Houston, Atlanta, and San Jose.

"Do we want transit or traffic? That’s really the choice. We have made progress as a city over the last 30 years, particularly with regard to how downtown develops," Radulovich said. "Can downtown and the neighborhoods coexist? Yes, but we need to grow jobs in ways that don’t increase traffic."

City officials acknowledge that some new parking may be needed.

"There may be places where it’s OK to add parking in San Francisco, but we have to be smart about it. We have to make sure it’s in places where it doesn’t create a breakdown in the system. We have to make sure it’s priced correctly, and we have to make sure it doesn’t destroy Muni’s ability to operate," Metcalf said. "The problem with Prop. H is it essentially decontrols parking everywhere. It prevents a smart approach to parking."

Yet the difficulty right now is in conveying such complexities against the "bureaucracy bad" argument against Prop. A and the "parking good" argument for Prop. H.

"We are trying to make complex arguments, and our opponents are making simple arguments, which makes it hard for us to win in a sound-bite culture," Radulovich said.

"Prop. H preys on people’s experience of trying to find a parking space," Metcalf said. "The problem is cities are complex, and this measure completely misunderstands what it takes to be a successful city."

When MTA director Nathaniel Ford arrived in San Francisco from Atlanta two years ago, he said, "it was clear as soon as I walked in the door that there was an underinvestment in the public transit system."

Prop. A would help that by directing more city funds to the MTA, starting with about $26 million per year. "I don’t want to say the situation is dire, but it’s certainly not going to get better without some infusion of cash to get us over the hump," Ford told the Guardian recently from his office above the intersection of Market and Van Ness.

The proposed extra money would barely get this long-underfunded agency up to modern standards, such as the use of a computer routing system. "We actually have circuit boards with a guy in a room with a soldering iron keeping it all together," Ford said with an incredulous smile.

The other thing that struck Ford when he arrived was the cumbersomeness of the MTA’s bureaucracy, from stifling union work rules to Byzantine processes for seemingly simple actions like accepting a grant, which requires action by the Board of Supervisors.

"Coming from an independent authority, I realized there were a lot more steps and procedures to getting anything done [at the MTA]," he said. "Some of the things in Prop. A relax those steps and procedures."

If it passes, Ford would be able to set work rules to maximize the efficiency of his employees, update the outdated transit infrastructure, set fees and fines to encourage the right mix of transportation modes, and issue bonds for new capital projects when the system reaches its limits. These are all things the urban planners say have to happen. "It should be easy to provide great urban transit," Metcalf said. "We’re not Tracy. We’re not Fremont. We’re San Francisco, and we should be able to do this."

Unfortunately, there are political barriers to such a reasonable approach to improving public transit. And the biggest hurdles for those who want better transit are getting Prop. A approved and defeating Prop. H.

"It’s clear to people who have worked on environmental issues that this is a monumental election," said Leah Shahum, director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and an MTA board member. "San Francisco will choose one road or the other in terms of how our transportation system affects the environment. It will really be transit or traffic."

Shahum said the combination of denying the MTA the ability to improve transit and giving out huge new parking entitlements "will start a downward spiral for our transit system that nobody benefits from."

"We are already the slowest-operating system in the country," Ford said, later adding, "More cars on the streets of San Francisco will definitely have a negative impact on Muni."

But even those who believe in putting transit first know cars will still be a big part of the transportation mix.

"All of it needs to be properly managed. There are people who need to drive cars for legitimate reasons," Ford said. "If you do need to drive, you need to know there are costs to that driving. There is congestion. There are quality impacts, climate change, and it hurts transit."

"There are parking needs out there, and the city is starting to think of it in a more responsive way. We don’t need this to create more parking," Shahum said. "If folks can hold out and beat down this initiative, I do think we’re headed in the right direction."

Yet the Yes on A–No on H campaign is worried. Early polling showed a close race on Prop. A and a solid lead for Prop. H.

Fisher and the groups that are pushing Prop. H — the Council of District Merchants, the SF Chamber of Commerce, and the San Francisco Republican Party — chose what they knew would be a low-turnout election and are hoping that drivers’ desires for more parking will beat out more complicated arguments.

"The vast majority of San Franciscans call themselves environmentalists, and they want a better transit system," Shahum said, noting that such positions should cause them to support Prop. A and reject Prop. H. "But they’re at risk of being tricked by a Republican billionaire’s initiative with an attractive name…. Even folks that are well educated and paying attention could be tricked by this."

For Metcalf and the folks at SPUR, who helped write Prop. A, this election wasn’t supposed to be an epic battle between smart growth and car culture.

"For us, in a way, Prop. A is the more important measure," Metcalf said. "We want to focus on making Muni better instead of fighting about parking. We didn’t plan it this way, but the way it worked out, San Francisco is at a fork in the road. We can reinforce our transit-oriented urbanity or we can create a mainly car-dependent city that will look more like the rest of America."

“A cautionary tale, carefully delivered”

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› duncan@sfbg.com

Make no mistake: Eugene Robinson is a throwback — to a time when people used words like honor without being ironic or embarrassed. The vocalist for the 18-years-running art-rock-noise machine Oxbow, Stanford graduate, and Mac Life senior editor is also, to use his descriptor, a "fightaholic." As he says in the introduction to his forthcoming book Fight: Or, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You’d Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking (Harper), he shares his "obsession with the eternal, unasked, ‘Can I take him?’" Contrary to what one might assume, people who beat the bloody hell out of each other for fun or profit — Robinson is a mixed-martial-arts cage fighter — are not suffering from antisocial personality disorders but often adhere to a strict moral code. Though, he confessed during our interview in South San Francisco, sitting in my car and looking out over the bay, "I definitely have antisocial reasons as well."

How much of this testing one’s mettle in the "crucible of conflict" is just a dick-measuring contest? Only in the movies, or perhaps in cage fights whose opponents are carefully matched, does the victor triumph because he wants it more. In any given fight a win can usually be attributed the basic physical facts of size and strength, so what’s the point of fighting if you’re merely measuring attributes?

Robinson told me about a fight he had with a Red Sox fan while loading Oxbow’s van in Maine. The Sox, who serve as the home team even for the New England hinterland, had just been humiliated by the Yankees to the tune of 19–2. Three Sox fans strolled by, and one inevitably asked the frontperson what the fuck he was looking at. Given multiple chances to bow out, the guy kept pushing, and ultimately had his ass handed to him. "At that point," Robinson said, "I was honor bound to deliver the lesson he had so aggressively been seeking. Whatever happened in that exchange, it wasn’t dick measuring. It was a cautionary tale, carefully delivered."

But do people really learn from being whupped on? My thinking on this subject has evolved along the lines of my employment. When I delivered pizzas for Pizza Hut in a hot pink Lacoste-style shirt, I was forced to eat spoonfuls of shit doled out by every disgruntled lard ass whose Meat Lover’s Special arrived 10 minutes late. "Someday," I thought, "someone is going to fuck that guy up." Needless to say, it was a precarious act to hang the smothering cloak of my rage on that altogether insufficient nail of "someday." When I moved on to working security at clubs, I realized that yes, someday someone will kick that guy’s ass, and it may as well be today. As the old activist saw goes, "If not now, when? If not me, who?" But after some time, I realized that the behavior of others wasn’t worth getting upset, let alone violent, over. Not because it wasn’t satisfying to deliver lessons, but because no lessons were learned. In this way, I found working in nightclubs as dissatisfying as substitute teaching.

If you fight someone and they win, then might is right, and whichever asshole behavior they were indulging in before the fight is justified. If you fight them and they lose, they will immediately work the victim angle for sympathy and punitive damages. Any attitude adjustment is clearly fleeting.

"This is a valid critique," Robinson told me, but it doesn’t derail his motivations. "The few seconds that we’re together, I’ve got to hope for the best." He recounts a situation when a member of another band was having a high-volume conversation at the edge of the stage while Robinson and Oxbow guitarist Niko Wenner were playing as an acoustic duo. After Robinson warned the musician to "shut the fuck up," things got heated. Audience members tried to cool things out, but, in Robinson’s words, "this evenhanded, kind of neutered approach didn’t pay heed to the reality of the moment. Which is, you had an enemy of art, and you had somebody who was trying to be the standard-bearer of Eros." He pauses. "Forget about all that. If I’m standing at a café and somebody is screaming at the top of his lungs next to me, I’m asking him 100 percent of the time to shut the fuck up. You don’t have to live all over me. It’s boorish. And rude. And uncouth. And in that way, it’s a form of bullying."

While it may seem excessive to put a spindly, long-haired dude in a Texas boogie-rock band in a submission hold called an ultimate head and arm, I can’t argue with Robinson’s reasoning: "Disrespect begets disrespect." In any case, the vocalist does allow for the possibility of walking away. But walking away for him has more to do with the Japanese concept of saving face, of avoiding conflict with honor, than with the Christian ethic of turning the other cheek. "Am I doing this out of graciousness or am I doing it out of fear?" he asked. "I think way too many people will choose to look the other way out of fear. My whole life has been a testament to avoiding base fears."

For this, I’ve got to respect the guy. Robinson may be derided on the Web as a prick, a sadist, and an egomaniac, but let’s look at the lessons: (1) You are honor bound to follow through on a promise. (2) Art is worthy of respect. (3) Fear should be avoided as a motivation. Sounds pretty fucking reasonable to me. Though, in my own top five, I try — and sometimes fail — to add: (4) Violence should be avoided as a teaching tool.

Really, though, we live in a time when shit talking is considered a sport in itself. Go to theoxbow.com and look at some of the live footage. Robinson trances out onstage and strips down to his underwear, and the band plays the sound of a psychological meltdown. Knowing what you know and seeing what you see, why would you fuck with him?

"To a certain degree, culturally, we’ve been neutered. And that’s what civilization is about: to get us to places of greater peace," Robinson said. "But clearly, that aspect of it is not working." I’d have to agree that it’s not working, especially in social situations, where people seem to assume a disconnection in the causal, karmic links between action and consequence. Witness the hapless Scotsman in the 2003 Christian Anthony documentary Music for Adults. He gets pantsed in front of a crowd by Robinson, who asks, with what seems genuine concern, "Did that hurt? Did I hurt your feelings?" before adding the rejoinder "It’s an Oxbow show. That’s what happens." *

OXBOW

Wed/17, 9 p.m., $10

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

www.12galaxies.com

EUGENE ROBINSON

In conversation with V. Vale and James Stark

Nov. 8, 6 p.m., $5

SF Camerawork

657 Mission, SF

www.sfcamerawork.org

No compromise on ENDA

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EDITORIAL The move by US Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) to remove protections for transgender people from a landmark antidiscrimination bill has set off a remarkable furor in the queer community nationwide. The condemnation of the Frank move by even fairly mainstream lesbian and gay organizations is a sign of how far trans people have come — and the fact that Frank, the first openly gay man to serve in Congress, isn’t budging is a sign of how far the political establishment still has to go.

But the full bill, without the cuts, is still very much alive, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–San Francisco) needs to move it to the floor and bring it to a vote.

HR 2015 has been a priority of the Human Rights Campaign and other national LGBT groups for years. The bill, also known as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, in its original version would have outlawed employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The second part of that phrase is critical, not just to transgender people but to queer workers in general: as the American Civil Liberties Union points out in a legal analysis of the changes, the gay and lesbian people most likely to face discrimination in the workplace are those who don’t hew to traditional male and female roles. Effeminate men and butch women are far more at risk than, say, a gay man who can easily pass as straight. "The more masculine a gay man is or the more feminine a lesbian is, the less the likelihood of discrimination," the ACLU notes. As the Lambda Legal Defense Fund writes, "This new bill also leaves out a key element to protect any employee, including lesbians, gay men and bisexuals who may not conform to their employer’s idea of how a man or woman should look and act. This is a huge loophole through which employers sued for sexual orientation discrimination can claim that their conduct was actually based on gender expression, a type of discrimination that the new bill does not prohibit."

But the politics are more difficult. Frank argues that Congress might pass a stripped-down version of the bill, but the votes aren’t there for anything that can be described as protecting transgender people. Some protection for some lesbians and gays, he argues, is better than none at all.

That ignores the reality, which is that George W. Bush is going to veto any bill that protects queer people from discrimination anyway. The fight over HR 2015 is largely symbolic; the bill won’t become law until there’s a Democrat in the White House. And if the gender-identity language isn’t in the bill this time, it will be much harder to add it in later.

All civil rights advances seem hopeless at first. The first marriage-equality bill in the California Legislature faced strong opposition, but Assemblymember Mark Leno (D–San Francisco) kept bringing it back — and every time it came up, it got more votes. ENDA’s got the same prospects.

Of course, there’s a larger issue here: compromising on civil rights is always unacceptable. And as writer Wayne Besen puts it, "A minority as small as the trans community will never have the political clout to go it alone, nor will they have the funds to wage a credible fight in Congress unless Bill Gates wakes up tomorrow and decides to have a sex change. To put it bluntly, their only chance at legal protection is under the gay and lesbian banner."

The HRC has been awfully weak, refusing to pull its support for the watered-down bill, but most other LGBT groups nationwide are urging Congress not to accept the Frank proposal. We agree. The fate of HR 2015 is in the hands of Pelosi, who can simply bring the original bill to the floor. That’s what activists should push her to do.

Injunction dysfunction

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› news@sfbg.com

When seven people were shot in the span of 12 hours in June at the Friendship Village and Yerba Buena Plaza East housing complexes in the Western Addition, city and community leaders decided immediate action was necessary to remedy the increasing level of gang violence.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who represents the area, demanded 24-hour police patrols as a temporary measure. Rev. Regnaldo Woods of Bethel AME had a broader vision — get the gangs to call a truce. But City Attorney Dennis Herrera already had his own plan well in the works, a controversial approach that has nonetheless been embraced at City Hall by leaders desperate for solutions to the intractable and escautf8g problem of gun violence.

Herrera and his staff in July announced they were seeking civil gang injunctions in the Western Addition and the Mission District modeled on a similar effort last year against the Oakdale Mob in Bayview–Hunters Point. He went after alleged members of the Norteña gang in the Mission and targeted three gangs in the Western Addition, all centered on Eddy Street and the public housing complexes that stretch from Gough to Divisadero: Eddy Rock, Chopper City, and Knock Out Posse.

Two Superior Court judges, Patrick Mahoney and Peter Busch, heard arguments for and against the injunctions Sept. 18 and are expected to issue rulings at any time. The injunctions would prevent the alleged gang members they name from associating with one another within a prescribed area, among other restrictions.

The injunctions have pitted Herrera and his allies against Public Defender Jeff Adachi, civil liberties advocates, and some community groups, who have rallied to stop the injunctions and criticize them as a "criminalization of people of color," a charge Herrera stridently rejects and has publicly condemned as "race-baiting."

But beyond the emotional politics of this controversial tactic, there are some practical problems with the injunctions, particularly in the Western Addition, where they may stifle community-based solutions to the problem of gang violence.

"[The injunctions] slowed us down considerably," Woods, a life-long Fillmore resident, told the Guardian. "It’s going to impact the movement if it stays as it is. I think there needs to be changes."

Woods and other leaders from Bethel and from his nonprofit, Up from Darkness, met with the gang members a total of 43 times throughout the summer. When word of the injunctions spread, Woods said he had to restart from square one. Rather than bring people together for a dialogue, he had to explain why this was happening, what the injunctions meant, and how the injunctions would affect those included.

Woods planned to hold a summit, which "shot callers" from each of the gangs would attend and at which they would call a truce as well as receive access to employment guidance and mental health services. The summit never happened, but gang violence in the Western Addition nevertheless decreased rapidly in the following months. Northern Police District Capt. Croce Casciato said there hasn’t been a gang-related homicide in the district since May.

The American Civil Liberties Union says the injunctions will strip alleged gang members of due-process rights and give police a roving warrant to harass whomever they deem a gang member. Adachi and Kendra Fox-Davis, of the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, said their offices have received numerous complaints from youths in the Mission and the Western Addition that police are already using the injunctions to hassle people even before they’ve been approved.

"There’s been a tremendous amount of misinformation about the injunctions," Adachi said. He questions the effectiveness of injunctions and said these give police carte blanche to harass anyone they suspect of being affiliated with gangs. His biggest issue, though, is the fact that the alleged members don’t have the necessary resources to contest the label.

Herrera derided the racial implications levied by Adachi, and in an e-mail to us, press secretary Matt Dorsey wrote, "The fact is, the debate over these proposed injunctions — most especially the one in the Mission — has been characterized by increasingly dishonest and inflammatory rhetoric. This isn’t just someone’s innocent misunderstanding, either: ‘the criminalization of people of color’ is wildly misrepresentative, and it’s deliberate."

Herrera acknowledges people’s concerns, but he stands by his decision.

"I really wish it wasn’t necessary that it has come to this point where I say, ‘Hey, this is a tool we have to pursue,’" Herrera told us. "But the facts are the facts. We have a gang problem in San Francisco. I think I’d be neglecting my responsibility if I didn’t bring another tool to the table to help address the issue."

Woods doesn’t raise the same racial concerns that Adachi does, and he isn’t too animated about the civil liberties issues. To him, the injunctions are just too broad and counterproductive to the community-based approaches that have the best chance of addressing the problem. He thinks the gang members themselves must help solve the problems they’ve created.

"It’s us getting together every day and doing something positive," said Steve Johnson, a 27-year-old targeted member of Eddy Rock, which claims the Plaza East housing complex as its turf. "It has nothing to do with the injunction. We’re trying to get all the different complexes in the Western Addition together."

Paris Moffet, the alleged leader of Eddy Rock, added, "We’re the only ones stopping the violence. We needed to. We are going to stop this."

It may come as a surprise that reputed gang members might be helping to stop the violence that was once a part of their daily lives, and several members of Eddy Rock acknowledged they have a long way to go in reshaping their images.

But, they say, they are committed to reforming themselves, and they recently held a barbecue at the complex parking lot to display some of their positive work. In the small community center at Plaza East — locally known as the OC, for "Outta Control" — Eddy Rock, with the help of Woods and others, has created Open Arms, a nonprofit geared toward educating the younger kids in the complex about staying in school and computer literacy.

Asked about the sudden turnabout by Eddy Rock, Marquez Shaw, a 26-year-old alleged member of the gang, explained that the level of violence at Plaza East had taken its toll on everyone, not just uninvolved residents. "[The violence] affected me, very much so," he said. "There’s been more bloodshed here than anywhere else in the community. We’re the only ones man enough to do something."

But Herrera said the recent relative quiet in the area doesn’t make up for more than five years of chaos. "Has there been a lull? Yeah," he said. "But earlier in the summer there were some brazen shootings. June isn’t that long ago."

Woods acknowledged that the members shouldn’t be given a free pass, considering their troubled past. "They’re not angels," he said. "But let’s try to help them before they go to prison. That way you might save the old lady’s life. You might save a youngster’s life. If they had something to do, they wouldn’t do the shootings."

At the Aug. 14 Eddy Rock barbecue, about 50 or so people from the Plaza East complex snacked on ribs, chicken, hot links, and spaghetti. Two beat officers from the Northern Station stood in the distance and oversaw an impromptu football game between juveniles and alleged gang members.

A clipping of a newspaper article hangs on the wall in the community center; it’s about how director Spike Lee is urging inner-city youths to make films about their experience growing up with violence and to use the Internet to broadcast them to others.

Given a camera, Shaw has done just that. During a recent visit to Plaza East, he was using iMovie to edit a video that he planned to post on YouTube. On the video, an older black man says, "Now it’s time to look at what’s going on, not what’s happened in the past."

Nas’s "I Know I Can" plays on Hannibal Thompson’s video as he flatly explains how the area is deprived of proper resources and lacks preventative measures. Thompson, a 20-year-old named in one of the injunctions as a member of Eddy Rock, says six of his friends have been murdered since 2005 — three of them less than a block away, at Eddy and Laguna, where cameras affixed to streetlights are meant to deter criminal activity. He said increased police presence and the work of Woods have led to the decrease in violence, something he embraces.

"The best thing that ever happened to this community was the 24-hour police patrol. That’s way better than the injunction," he said. "They should have done that years ago."

Casciato doesn’t doubt that Eddy Rock, which has terrorized residents for years, might have turned the corner. But he calls the injunctions one additional tool to fight the long-term battle against gang violence. Casciato said it was too soon to tell how an injunction would affect regular police procedure. Like others in the community, though, he emphasized the effectiveness of outreach work.

"There has been a great collaborative effort on the community’s part," Casciato said. On gang members reforming themselves, he said, "I’m sure they did. Success is going to come from within, not from the outside. All our efforts are for naught if there’s no buy-in."

Under the current terms of the injunctions, the aforementioned barbecue would be prohibited, since it involved literally the whole gang. The targeted individuals could freely associate with one another inside the community center but would need to go in and out separately, which critics say is not a realistic scenario. If targeted members violate the injunctions, they can be charged with misdemeanors and put in jail for up to five days.

The injunction tactic "undermines antiviolence efforts of community advocates and organizations working in the Western Addition, like Woods, by effectively preventing the individuals most in need of support services from participating in them," Fox-Davis wrote in an e-mail.

Herrera and his deputies submitted more than 4,000 pages of evidence, including expert declarations from the gang task force, which detailed the reign of terror of the three gangs. He said they’ve been careful to name only shot callers in the injunctions and to carefully detail the case against them.

Fox-Davis and other critics contend the Western Addition injunction is too broad, unlike the first one in Oakdale, which only covered four square blocks. A total of 15 blocks are designated as the "safety zone" in the Western Addition, stretching from Eddy and Gough in the east to Eddy and Webster in the west, bordered by Turk and Ellis to the north and south, for Eddy Rock.

For Chopper City and KOP — which had in the past aligned themselves against Eddy Rock — the safety zone is a six-block area north of Turk to Ellis, between Divisadero and Steiner, which includes the Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King housing complexes. In Bayview, only one of 22 targeted members lived in the housing complex, whereas a total of seven of 19 identified members of Eddy Rock live within that purposed safety zone, according to the City Attorney’s Office.

"The restrictions that are proposed in this injunction go far beyond what is necessary to address the nuisance the city attorney claims is being caused by gang violence," Fox-Davis said.

But Herrera says the "nuisance" amounts to communities being terrorized by violence and his office would be remiss to not address the problem. A total of 11 homicides in three years have been linked to the three Western Addition gangs, according to court documents.

"I’ve never been one to say we should be dissuading communities from being involved and trying find solutions and making contributions to solving the problem. To me it’s not mutually exclusive. It’s not an either-or proposition. I think it’s important that we get the community to be a vital stakeholder in trying to stem the tide of violence," Herrera said. "But there has to be accountability."

To quell critics’ concerns, Herrera said his office has included numerous safeguards, including training cops to properly enforce the injunctions. Targeted members also have a "buyout option," meaning if they can prove that they are no longer involved in gang activity, they can appeal to have their names removed from the list.

Herrera points to the perceived success of the injunction in Bayview as proof that the tactic is effective in restoring calm and peace to neighborhoods once plagued with murder. Herrera also notes that the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution almost unanimously that supported injunctions by the city attorney.

Mirkarimi, however, said his support of the current injunctions being sought was "tentative at best" and said he considered them "an act of desperation." He too said community work and traditional police enforcement — like the 24-hour patrols — are better ways of addressing the root causes of gang violence.

The alleged members of Eddy Rock agree.

"We just need something to do," said Maurice Carter, 32. "We did the crime, we did the time. Now we just want a second chance."

Pelosi sells out the trans community

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Barney Frank

Why are Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank throwing the transgender community under a train? Frank says it’s because America isn’t ready to have an employment-rights bill include trannies: “there is more resistance to protection for people who are transgender than for people who are gay, lesbian and bisexual.”

This leaves mainstream gay organizations with the prospect of either supporting a bill that actively allows discrimination against trans people — or pulling their support for a bill that protects (some) queer people. There’s a press conference this afternoon on the issue; more to come.

Lennar’s troubles continue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The works

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Some films glean artful pleasure from the pains of labor. One flourishing subgenre or strain of documentary tackles working conditions in countries across the world, highlighting the plight of the marginalized to make ends meet and maintain dignity in the face of unjust or extreme conditions. In a sense, Ghosts and Numbers and Luchando, two features at this year’s San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, belong to this group, but they are most interesting for the ways that they differ from it, in content and style. Both movies highlight the precariousness of labor and favor a less direct and centralized consideration of employment’s role in shaping an individual’s existence.

Ghosts and Numbers and Luchando are like distant cousins; they are blood-bound by an integral interest in the working class, but they reside in different lands and possess divergent personalities. In fact, the title of each film suggests something about its filmmaker’s approach to theme.

Alan Klima’s Ghosts and Numbers is a bit cryptic, with a penchant for interweaving ostensibly unrelated elements. One may wonder what the relationship is between ghosts and numbers, but the more relevant inquiry relates to that between labor and modernity. Convictions and a critique can be discerned amid Klima’s clever array of images and concerns, but no easy conclusions are reached.

Noelle Stout’s Luchando, on the other hand, is more up-front and focused in its presentation of the titular subject matter. Of course, the title’s meaning is obscure for non-Spanish speakers, and, even in Spanish, the term is slang instead of a standard word for people who get paid for having sex. But once the slang is understood (it is explained onscreen by one of the subjects), there is no uncertainty that Luchando is a clear and determined depiction of the lives of Cuban hustlers, without any overt class analysis.

These films share a relatively subtle sense of subversion. Klima’s Thailand-set documentary presents the quagmires of modernization and shows compassion for its victims at a time when the more popular sentiment is to rally patriotically around the Asian country’s entrance into the global community (and thus celebrate a preference for glistening urbania over a bucolic tradition). Klima observes lottery-ticket sellers as they discuss the vulnerable state of their occupation in the face of human-replacing technology and governmental limitations. Their earnest and desperate presence contrasts powerfully with other more reflective components and is part of an almost unsettling mixture of elements. Shots of unfinished Bangkok skyscrapers are matched with a voice-over concerning the Thai economy. Abstracted imagery is paired with stories of encounters with ghosts. Vérité-style footage is used for political protest and for a visit to a fortune-teller. At worst, these methods are a bit desultory, with some scenes in need of truncation. But aside from those moments, Ghosts and Numbers glimmers with a rare blend of mystery and humanity.

The humanity of Luchando is more intimate. Whereas Klima’s film uses cinepoetic musings to break up its direct human engagement, Stout’s presents pure portraiture — though it is difficult not to succumb to awe before Havana’s photogenic splendor. Stout surreptitiously captures the daily lives of four prostitutes, hesitantly heeding the warning of subjects when cops appear on the scene. These moments and bits of testimony give the sense that her subjects exist on the outskirts of safety, perpetually in a danger zone because of their gay identity or association. This is most poignant in the case of the transgender woman who is verbally assaulted as the film opens and later talks about being forced to dress as a man. Perhaps Luchando would be enhanced by a look outside the immediate scope of its subjects, in order to get a larger sense of the social conditions in which they are struggling. But there is also satisfaction to be found in its tightly focused account of lives that are both ordinary and foreign.

The sixth SF DocFest runs Sept. 28–Oct. 10 at the Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF. Information about tickets ($10) and a complete schedule can be obtained by calling (415) 820-3907 or visiting www.sfindie.com.


GHOSTS AND NUMBERS

Tues/2, 7 p.m.; Oct. 7, 2:45 p.m.; $10

LUCHANDO

Sat/29 and Oct. 5, 9:15 p.m.; Oct. 6, 7 p.m.; $10

For an interview with Luchando director Noelle Stout, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

The billion-dollar rate hike

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EDITORIAL Nobody wants to pay higher electric rates, but the real issue about Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s new rate hike is its impact not just on residents and small businesses, which will bear the brunt of it, but on the Northern California economy as a whole. And figures we have received from the California Public Utilities Commission show that the hit will be close to $1 billion.

The San Francisco supervisors need to demand a comprehensive study of how the city’s economy will directly suffer.

A little background: In 2002, Irwin Kellner, an economist at Hofstra University in New York, did an analysis of how public power on Long Island affected the region’s economy. His research showed that the Long Island Power Authority, which had replaced a private power company four years earlier, had reduced rates by 20 percent — and that had injected $2 billion into the Long Island economy. The lower rates "helped Long Island stave off the effects of a national recession and the terrible events of Sept. 11 [2001]," Kellner concluded (see "The $620 Million Shakedown," 9/4/02).

The reason is simple: when residents and small businesses have lower electric bills, they tend to spend that money locally — and since local spending tends to generate more local spending, every dollar that’s spent in a local economy has an impact of as much as $5.

On the flip side, if private utilities raise rates, they tend to suck money out of the local economy and ship it to out-of-town investors, subsidiaries, and projects.

We used Kellner’s model — with his consent and guidance — and concluded at the time that PG&E’s rate hikes had cost the San Francisco economy $620 million. The Board of Supervisors, at the request of Sup. Chris Daly, asked the city controller to pursue this issue, review our work, and release an official report on the impact of high PG&E rates on San Francisco.

No report was ever issued.

Fast-forward to 2007, when PG&E has announced that it’s raising rates on residents and small businesses. (Many big customers will get a rate reduction.) Figures we obtained from the CPUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates show that the rate hike will cost residents $121 million per year and small businesses $74 million per year. Together, that’s a $195 million annual hit. According to Kellner’s formula, which multiplies that annual cost by five, the total impact on the Northern California economy will be $975 million — almost $1 billion per year.

The State Legislature ought to commission a study on how this will affect employment, tax revenues, and other key economic indicators. San Francisco, a city that still hasn’t fulfilled its historic public power mandate, should do the same thing. The supervisors should ask the controller to explain why Daly’s request was never honored — and demand a full, detailed report on the economic impact of this damaging rate hike, with a deadline. And if the controller can’t do it, they should assign it to Budget Analyst Harvey Rose.

Letters as leverage

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› news@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

BAY AREA ORGANIZING


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HISTORY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FALSE INFORMATION


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

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

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

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

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

Anonymity trouble

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Pundits of the Internet age are fond of excoriating the Web because anyone can post on it anonymously. Andrew Keen, whose recent book Cult of the Amateur is a good primer on why people hate the Web, highlights the horrors of anonymity in his work, contrasting the millions of unnamed Web scribblers with honorable, properly identified writers of yesteryear. Keen’s point is that people who don’t put their names on what they’ve written don’t feel responsible for it; therefore they feel little compunction about lying or misrepresenting their chosen subjects. After all, an anonymous writer doesn’t have to worry that their reputation will be tarred — unlike, say, a writer at the New York Times, whose byline appears on his or her articles.

Every social stereotype has a caricature associated with it, and the "anonymous Web writer" has theirs. They’re always portrayed as a he, first of all. And he’s inevitably described as being "some blogger writing in his basement in his pajamas." In other words, this anonymous person is not a professional (hence the pajamas) and probably poor (he lives in a basement). He’s a nobody, a loner who lashes out at the world from his dismal cell, hiding behind his anonymity and destroying the good reputations of nice people.

Where does this sad little man like to post his anonymous invective? Wikipedia, of course. He can change any entry without leaving his name, adding lies to biographies of innocent mayoral candidates and spewing spam all over facts. And the best part is that most people take Wikipedia seriously. They regard it as a reliable source of knowledge, despite the fact that it’s written by unknown, basement-dwelling bloggers in pajamas.

That’s why I was so gratified when California Institute of Technology grad student and mad scientist about town Virgil Griffith released his software tool Wikiscanner, which you can use to quickly check on who has been editing Wikipedia entries anonymously. You see, whenever you edit a Wikipedia entry, the encyclopedia logs your unique IP address, which can often be tracked back to a physical location, including your place of employment. Even if you think you’re being stealthy with your anonymous writing, you’re not. Wikipedia sees all.

And now the public can see all if they visit Griffith’s Wikiscanner site (wikiscanner.virgil.gr). Turns out that all the anonymous propaganda and lies on Wikipedia aren’t coming from basement dwellers at all — they’re coming from Congress, the CIA, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Somebody at Halliburton deleted key information from an entry on war crimes; Diebold, an electronic-voting machine manufacturer, deleted sections of its entry about a lawsuit filed against it. Someone at Pepsi deleted information about health problems caused by the soft drink. Somebody at the New York Times deleted huge chunks of information from the entry on the Wall Street Journal. And of course, the CIA has been editing the entry on the Iraq war.

Wikiscanner allows you to search millions of edits, perusing a precise record of all the changes that have been made. While you can’t figure out exactly who at the CIA made the changes to the entry on the Iraq war, you can be sure the changes came from somebody on the CIA’s computer network.

Griffith created Wikiscanner for a frankly political reason. As he told the Times of London, he did it "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike." In the process, however, he’s revealed something far more fundamental than the fact that acolytes of Pepsi and the CIA will stop at nothing to propagandize on behalf of their employers: he’s undermined the myth of the anonymous blogger in the basement.

It turns out that the people who are hiding behind anonymity online for nefarious or selfish reasons are not little guys in pajamas but the very bastions of accountability that haters of the Web have deified. It’s not a mean dude with a grudge who is spreading lies on Wikipedia but rather a member of the federal government or a journalist at the New York Times. Cultural anarchy online is coming not from the hordes of scribbling bloggers but from the same entities that have always posed a danger to culture: corporations and governments who refuse to take responsibility for what they’re doing.<\!s>*

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who once had the urge to do an anonymous edit on Wikipedia but was scared people would find out she’d done it.

Dust devils

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› sarah@sfbg.com

A year has passed since Lennar Corp. officials admitted that subcontractor CH2M Hill failed to install batteries in dust-monitoring equipment at Parcel A, a construction site in Hunters Point Shipyard where an asbestos-laden hilltop was graded to build 1,600 condominiums (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07).

The admission sparked a steadily growing political firestorm in Bayview–Hunters Point, further fueled by evidence that Gordon Ball, another Lennar subcontractor, for six months failed to adequately water the site to control dust and by a racially charged lawsuit in which three African American employees of Lennar allege they were subjected to discrimination and retaliation after they refused to remain silent about the dust issue. The lawsuit, set for a case management hearing Aug. 17, also claims that Ball committed fraud involving the Redevelopment Agency’s minority-hiring requirements.

Bayview–Hunters Point residents angry about the situation have found an ally in Sup. Chris Daly, who has called for a halt to construction at the site until an independent health assessment is conducted to the satisfaction of the community, including the Muhammad University of Islam School, which is adjacent to the Parcel A site and has been exposed to dust. The Board of Supervisors was scheduled to consider Daly’s resolution Jul. 31, after the Guardian‘s press time.

"This issue is of such a high level of importance," Daly told us. "There’s now a mandate for progressives in San Francisco to talk about environmental justice and to take action."

Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes the shipyard, told us that she understands the concerns of Daly and the community. "But when you get down it … the dust is inconvenient, but it is not harmful in the long term," she said.

Maxwell believes the city’s Department of Public Health should have done more outreach and updates, "but it has brought the situation under control." That sentiment was echoed by the city’s environmental health director, Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, who told us, "This is the first time we have implemented dust control, and this is an industry that had never been regulated. And in the end, things got better. We did our job in pushing a regulated community that grudgingly complied with our regulations."

In June, after residents complained that the dust was causing nosebleeds, headaches, and asthma, the DPH released a fact sheet that stated, "You may have heard there are reasons to worry about your health because of the construction dust generated by the redevelopment of Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard. That is not true."

A July 5 informational DPH memo claims that when workers tried to do dust training and outreach at the end of June, their efforts "were significantly hindered by representatives of the Muhammad University of Islam," who allegedly disrupted training sessions, followed DPH workers, and told residents not to listen to the DPH workers.

On July 9, DPH director Mitch Katz testified at a hearing of the supervisors’ Land Use Committee that the city had imposed the highest standards possible to control dust. Katz also claimed that exposure to the dust was not toxic and that there is no proof that health problems were caused by the dust.

But at the same hearing, Nation of Islam minister Christopher Muhammad demanded testing "by people the community can trust," and he accused the city of "environmental racism." Noting that asbestos-related diseases often don’t manifest themselves for at least 20 years, Muhammad claimed, "The problem that we’re seeing in Bayview–Hunters Point is dust related."

After the DPH abandoned plans to do door-to-door outreach in favor of a series of health fairs, a coalition of activists calling itself POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), some wearing masks and hazmat suits, closed down a July 17 homeownership seminar at Lennar’s shipyard trailer.

"Some folks did a picket outside, while inside, folks who own homes or live in public housing in the area were asking a lot of questions," POWER’s Alicia Schwartz told us. "We are for development that prioritizes the needs of low-income communities of color who have long been absent from the decision-making process, not development that puts the health and safety of families and the elderly at risk."

Two days later Marcia Rosen resigned as executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. SFRA board member London Breed told us that the resignation was "a long time coming" and said she wished Rosen had taken a stronger stand on Lennar and Ball in the winter of 2006.

Breed says the agency "will always be a bad word to African Americans because of what happened in the Western Addition…. But we have a great opportunity in Bayview–Hunters Point to make it into something wonderful for the community."

Maxwell, whose grandson attended the Muhammad school’s Third Street campus, wonders why the minister refuses to move his students back to Third Street. "Lennar understands that this has become a PR nightmare and they are going to have to get contractors who are supportive of and understand the rules and regulations," said Maxwell, who is about to introduce legislation that she hopes will better control construction dust citywide.

Meanwhile, Dr. Arelious Walker of the True Hope Church of God in Christ told us that he and a group of like-minded pastors have formed the African American Revitalization Consortium, "a highly vocal and visible group in strong opposition to the shutting down of the shipyard without scientific proof."

"We support 100 percent the notion that the dust from Parcel A does not cause any long-term health risks. The project must continue because of its economic impacts. One little group does not speak for us all," said Walker, who met with Mayor Gavin Newsom, Maxwell, and Katz on July 23.

Acknowledging that the outcry over Parcel A has raised awareness of the dust issue, Walker said, "For years in the urban community, the environment was not the issue, but now we’ve woken up." Walker and his fellow ministers rallied about 200 people at City Hall on July 24 to express support for Lennar’s development and confidence in city officials.

Yet Daly said that faith may be misplaced: "It’s going to be a struggle to deal with the construction-related impacts of Lennar’s development at the shipyard, but the issue is much bigger, and it points to the need for an alliance between progressives, the African American community, and the southeast neighborhoods." *

Who’s behind the wheel?

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› news@sfbg.com

In 1997, Dirk, a taxi driver of 20 years, was stabbed in the neck by a hitchhiker he picked up after his last shift. Ten years later, blind and brain damaged because of the loss of blood, he still receives income of roughly $1,800 a month from his taxi medallion.

Under city law, he’s supposed to be driving.

Medallions are among the most prized — and disputed — permits in town. The city owns all 1,381 of the medallions, which allow the holders to operate taxis. But under a 1978 law known as Proposition K, only active drivers — later defined as people who put in an annual minimum of 800 hours behind the wheel — are eligible to hold the permits.

The medallion holders have a lucrative deal: when they aren’t driving, they can lease out the permits to other drivers. And since a lot of cabs are on the road 24 hours a day 365 days a year, those lease fees can add up.

Not surprisingly, there’s been some abuse over the years. You get a permit by putting your name on a list and waiting as long as 15 years. Some people who haven’t driven in years — people who don’t even live in the area — have risen to the top of the list, seized medallions, and pocketed the cash, hoping nobody would notice.

Recently, though, the city’s Taxicab Commission has been cracking down — and that has put people like Dirk in limbo and raised a series of political and legal questions that go to the heart of the city’s cab-permit system:

Does a disabled driver have a right to keep his or her medallion? Is it cruel to simply yank the permit — and the income — from somebody who may have been injured in the line of work? Or is allowing nondrivers to keep their medallions unfair to the thousands of working cabbies who are paying $91.50 a shift to lease a permitted cab and waiting in line for a permit to open up?

What right should someone who gets a valuable city permit, at no cost, have to keep using that permit to earn income when he or she no longer meets the permit requirements?

Taxicab Commission executive director Heidi Machen says the answers are straightforward. "Permit holders who are not meeting their requirements are abusing a public permit," she told the Guardian. "Proposition K was never set up as a retirement plan."

Joe Breall and Elliot Myles disagree — and they’re taking the issue to court in a case that could have lasting implications for the city’s taxicab industry, medallion holders, and other drivers.

The two Bay Area lawyers filed a class action lawsuit against the Taxicab Commission on June 25 on behalf of an estimated 150 disabled drivers who hold taxi medallions in the city. They argue that the driving requirement violates the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

"These are long-term drivers who have a disability that simply does not allow them to drive now," said Breall, who represents National Cab Co.

One of the case’s two named plaintiffs, William Slone, is a medallion holder with a lung disease that requires him to be hooked up to an oxygen tank 24 hours a day. The other, Michael Merrithew, has a physical disability so severe that he cannot operate his taxi.

Machen has hired two investigators to crack down on medallion holders who are not fulfilling their requirements — whether a scofflaw is a healthy 30-year-old woman living in Hawaii but reaping her medallion’s profits or an elderly man who must use a wheelchair but is still using the medallion as his source of income.

"The ADA does not require a public agency to waive an essential eligibility requirement for a government program or benefit," Machen wrote in a memo dated Feb. 16, 2006.

The Taxicab Commission isn’t just yanking permits from anyone who gets hurt. Under its current policy, temporarily disabled medallion holders can apply to take one year off every five years and receive a 120-day driving exemption in each of the three years following that disability leave.

But the lawsuit argues that this policy "effectively sanctions all taxicab permit/medallion holders with disabilities other than temporary illness that prevent or substantially limit their ability to drive taxi cabs personally."

The lawsuit argues that disabled permit holders, under the ADA, should be relieved of the full-time driving requirement until their disabilities are medically resolved. In the case of some drivers, that could effectively give them use of city-owned medallions free, for life.

TRICKY ENFORCEMENT


Prop. K was written by recently retired San Mateo Superior Court judge Quentin Kopp, who was then a city supervisor. Kopp told us that permits were being bought and sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and working drivers couldn’t afford them. The system, which is fairly unusual, was designed to ensure that cabbies — not investors, corporations, or speculators — got the benefits of the city-owned permits.

So Prop. K required that a permit be returned to city and passed on to the next person on the long waiting list if the holder stops driving. Other large cities, such as New York, still maintain a system in which permits may be auctioned off instead of being publicly owned.

The 941 post–<\d>Prop. K medallion holders, Machen said, can receive $1,800 to $3,000 a month for leasing their permits. There are roughly 6,000 taxi drivers in the city; a full-time cab driver makes about $24,000 a year, but those full-timers with permits can add another $20,000 or more to their income by leasing.

"It’s a city permit. If someone stops using it, it reverts to the city," Kopp told us. "There’s no provision for a grace period or something of that sort. Seven times voters rejected efforts to appeal or change it."

In fact, in 2003 voters overwhelmingly rejected a measure that would have allowed disabled drivers to keep their permits.

Elliott Myles of Oakland’s Myles Law Firm, which handles disability cases, told us that Prop. K is "irrelevant."

"The obligation to modify or waive comes from the ADA, a federal law binding on the commission," he wrote in an e-mail.

Although Kopp says Prop. K was intended to ensure that only active drivers get permits, the 800-hours-a-year rule isn’t in the law. Specific driving rules were added to the city’s Police Code in 1988.

And enforcement of the law has changed in the past few years. When the Taxicab Commission revoked the medallion of disabled driver Querida Mia Rivera in 2003, the decision was overturned by the Board of Appeals on the grounds that it violated the rights of Rivera — who had driven for 35 years before needing a wheelchair and becoming legally blind — under the ADA.

In response to the reversal, then-director Naomi Little implemented a policy to accommodate both temporarily and permanently disabled medallion holders, which paralleled the city’s catastrophic-injury program. This meant the modification or waiver of the 800 hours was overseen by the Department of Public Health.

"A disabled permit holder may apply for a waiver or reduction of the driving requirement, and the waiver or reduction, in appropriate cases, may be renewed on a yearly basis," Little wrote in a memorandum to Sup. Jake McGoldrick on July 30, 2003.

But in February 2006 the Taxicab Commission adopted Resolution 2006-28, which returned the city to the policy of strictly following the letter of Prop. K (although the panel allows temporary reprieves for people who are injured but could return to driving).

Michael Kwok, a former commission staffer who oversaw disability requests, said such a policy allows the permit waiting line to move faster.

Allowing a permanently disabled person to retain his or her permit is "not fair to the public," said Kwok, who uses a wheelchair. "It’s case by case."

The result is an enforcement process that can be tricky, to say the least.

On Aug. 17, 2004, for example, a physician wrote to the commission arguing that a disabled driver who was "suffering from failing eyesight and dizziness" and occasional arthritis in his hands should be taken off the road. "Please release him from taxi driving effective immediately for public safety," the doctor wrote. "He is advised not to drive a taxi as soon as possible."

Commission staffer Tristan Bettencourt, who was overseeing ADA compliance at the time, responded by reducing the driver’s yearly driving requirement to 400 hours, or 78 four-hour shifts, over the next year.

That could have left an unsafe driver on the road, Myles said.

"I find this reprehensible," he told us. "In most medical-injury suits, evidence of medical condition can only be given by qualified health care professionals."

Bettencourt, who left his job last year, said the Taxicab Commission shouldn’t be deciding whether someone is fit to drive or not. "We didn’t give out driver’s licenses," he told us. "If you hold a driver’s license, someone from the Department of Motor Vehicles has certified you."

According to Jan Mendoza, a public information officer at the DMV, a license needs to be renewed every five years — a process that can take place online if a person has a clean record. People over the age of 70, however, have to visit the office in person to take both a vision and a driving test.

Taxi drivers should not have any guarantee of lifetime entitlement, Bettencourt said. He added that the lack of a safety net for people who lose their means of employment is not something a San Francisco taxi regulator can solve; it’s a national problem.

EXIT STRATEGY?


Thomas George-Williams, who chairs the United Taxicab Workers, looks at the issue from the perspective of drivers who don’t have permits — the ones he considers second-class citizens in a two-tier system.

All San Francisco cab drivers are effectively independent contractors who are responsible for their own disability and retirement funds. And the drivers who don’t have permits get no benefits from the system at all.

Medallion holders "use the income of their medallions for disability insurance," George-Williams told us. "We need an exit strategy for all drivers, including medallion holders, and we don’t have that."

Charles Rathbone, a driver for 30 years and a medallion holder for 10, points to the harsh truth: there’s a key difference between the two cabbie classifications. "For drivers without medallions, there’s nothing to revoke," he told us.

Rathbone, a member of the Medallion Holders Association, spoke at the Taxicab Commission meeting July 13 to lay out two steps he felt the city should take before revoking a permit. He asked for two weeks’ advance warning and an appeals process.

"When I become disabled, I don’t want my only exit strategy to be a kick in the ass from the taxi commission," Rathbone later told us.

His speech was spurred by the June suicide of Lindsey Welcome, a 61-year-old medallion holder of 10 years who had not driven for seven of those years due to severe muscular dystrophy. Welcome’s medallion, which she leased out through Luxor Cabs, was scheduled to be revoked at the Taxicab Commission’s June 26 meeting.

"Her medallion was her only means of support," Kathleen Young, Welcome’s friend of 30 years, told us.

Rathbone feels many disabled medallion holders hide their disabilities for fear of the consequences, endangering themselves and the public.

One of the more severe recent taxi incidents happened March 26, 2003, when a 68-year-old permit holder crashed into a Market Street ATM, badly injuring a pedestrian and immobilizing two others.

"Too many people are driving when they shouldn’t be," said Bettina Cohen, Rathbone’s wife and editor of the MHA newsletter, which publicized the pending disability lawsuit on its front page last month.

Allowing disabled drivers to keep their permits may have its own downside: Carl Macmurdo, president of the MHA, acknowledged that the long waiting line for medallions means people will acquire them later in life and so will often be able to fully enjoy them for only a short time.

"[The city’s] giving permits to 70-year-olds and then taking them back," Macmurdo, who waited 13 years to get his permit, said.

Myles shared similar sentiments. "Every permit holder, just like every person, runs the risk of disability," he told us. "This question [of the disabled holding on to their permits] affects not only every current permit holder but every driver who is waiting in line to get a permit in the future."<\!s>*

Needed: a campaign against privatization

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EDITORIAL Of all the cities in the United States, San Francisco ought to be most aware of the perils of privatization. Much of the city burned down in 1906 in part because the private Spring Valley Water Co. hadn’t kept up its lines and thus was unable to provide enough water for firefighting. A few years later, in one of the greatest privatization scandals in American history, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. stole what was supposed to be the city’s publicly owned electricity, costing the local coffers untold hundreds of millions over the past 80 years.

This is a city that votes 80 percent Democratic and has always opposed the Ronald Reagan–George H.W. Bush–George W. Bush agenda. A large part of the local economy depends on public employment (the city, the state, the federal government, and the University of California are by far the largest employers in town, dwarfing any of the biggest private-sector companies).

And yet Mayor Gavin Newsom, who likes to say he’s a progressive, is pushing an astonishing package of privatization measures that would shift public property, resources, and infrastructure into the hands of for-profit businesses. He’s talking about privatizing the golf courses, some city parks, and even Camp Mather. He’s promoting a tidal-energy deal that would give PG&E control of the power generated in a public waterway. He hasn’t lifted a finger to stop the ongoing PG&E–Raker Act scandal. And he’s determined to hand over a key part of the city’s future infrastructure to Google and EarthLink (see Editor’s Notes, p. 1).

This nonsense has to stop.

It’s hard to fight privatization battle by battle. Every single effort is a tough campaign in itself; the companies that want to make money off San Francisco’s public assets typically have plenty of cash to throw around. They’re slick and sophisticated, hire good lobbyists, and generally get excellent press from the local dailies. And it works: even board president Aaron Peskin, who generally knows better, is now talking about accepting the private wi-fi deal.

So what this city needs is a unified, organized campaign against privatization.

When Reagan arrived in the White House in 1981, the single biggest item on the agenda of his political backers was an attack on the public sector. The way the right-wingers saw it, government took money from the rich and gave it to the less well-off. Government regulated business activity, costing major corporations a lot of money. Government — "the beast," they called it — had to be beaten back, demonized, and starved.

So the Reaganites used their top-rate public relations machine to make the public sector appear riddled with waste and fraud. They cut taxes, ran up record (for the time) deficits, and forced Congress to eliminate a lot of social programs. More and more of what the government once did was turned over to the private sector — the way the radical right liked it.

That political agenda still rules Washington, D.C., where even a fair amount of the war in Iraq has been privatized, turned over to contractors who are making huge profits while Iraqi and American kids die.

The attack on government has worked so well that even a very modest plan by Bill Clinton to create a national health care system was killed by the insurance industry.

But privatization doesn’t work. Private-sector companies and even nonprofits don’t have to comply with open-records laws and can spend money (including taxpayers’) with only limited accountability. Most private companies are about making money first and serving the public second; that means when private operators take over public services, the prices go up, worker pay goes down (and unions are often booted out), and the quality of the delivery tanks. Look at the real estate development nightmare that has become the privatized Presidio. Look at the disgrace and disaster that the privatized Edison School brought to the San Francisco Unified School District. Look at the glitzy café and the pricey parking lot that have replaced good animal care at the privatized San Francisco Zoo. Look at what has happened around the world when Bechtel Corp. has taken over public water systems — rates have gone up so high that some people can’t afford this basic life necessity.

Look what’s happened to the American health system. Look what’s happened in Iraq.

Government isn’t perfect, and the public sector has lot of management, efficiency, and accountability issues. But at least the public has some hope of correcting those problems. San Francisco ought to be a place where a major movement to take back the public sector is born and thrives.

Almost everyone in town ought to have an interest. Labor, obviously, opposes privatization. So should neighborhood advocates (who care about public parks and open space), environmentalists (because the entire notion of environmentalism depends on a healthy public sector), progressive community groups, and politicians. Even more conservative groups like the cops and firefighters ought to see the need to prevent their jobs from being outsourced to a private vendor.

A campaign against privatization could link wi-fi, PG&E, tidal power, and the golf courses. The campaign could force anyone running for office to address a no-privatization pledge. It could appear any time one of these rotten schemes pops up in town — and send a message that San Francisco doesn’t accept the economic agenda of the radical right.

Who’s going to call the first meeting? 2

Calling in the feds

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› news@sfbg.com

An upscale Emeryville hotel embroiled in a nasty, yearlong labor dispute appears to have called on the owner’s conservative political connections to bring about an immigration audit of the hotel. Worker advocates say the move was an effort to intimidate immigrant workers involved in a campaign to enforce a living-wage law.

Kurt Bardella, a spokesperson for US Rep. Brian Bilbray (R–San Diego), told the Guardian that a representative of the Emeryville Woodfin Suites contacted Bilbray’s office for assistance Feb. 1.

The request came within weeks of Alameda County Superior Court and Emeryville City Council rulings requiring the Woodfin to rehire the 21 workers it fired just before Christmas, allegedly due to worker Social Security numbers not matching federal records. That injunction was in effect pending an investigation of workers’ claims that the hotel had retaliated against them for organizing to enforce Measure C, a living-wage law passed by Emeryville voters in 2005.

"We were contacted by one of the HR people at the Woodfin Suites," Bardella told us. "They told us about the situation" and explained that they "had no mechanism" to deal with it, he said.

Bilbray, who chairs the House Immigration Reform Caucus and is one of the most vocal opponents of the recent immigration bill, wrote directly to the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in February to request that it investigate the immigration status of Emeryville Woodfin Suites employees in order to "to create a mechanism for the employer to address this issue."

Bilbray represents the suburban San Diego district in which Woodfin Suites president Samuel Hardage lives. "We treated this as a constituent issue," Bardella told us.

Hardage is not only a constituent; he has consistently contributed to Bilbray’s campaigns for at least the past 13 years, donating $4,200 in 2006. A George W. Bush Pioneer, having raised $100,000 for the 2004 election, Hardage is also a major player in California and San Diego Republican politics.

Workers say the ICE audit was an intimidation tactic that should not have been used against them while they were trying to assert their rights, and ICE’s internal policies raise questions about whether the agency should have gotten involved in this labor dispute.

For months the Woodfin Suites has tried to justify firing workers who organized for better labor conditions by alluding to fears of reprisal by ICE. In a May 8 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, General Manager Hugh MacIntosh castigated the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), a labor-affiliated think tank that supports the hotel’s workers, for "resorting to well-worn intimidation schemes to secure workers’ support for their organization drives."

The "fact that our hotel has been asked by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide employment records, coupled with the agency’s raids in the Bay Area, suggests that our actions are anything but voluntary," he wrote.

The Bilbray connection significantly undermines this claim and could be significant in a pending state lawsuit by the workers. It is against the law for an employer to fire workers for organizing for better working conditions, regardless of immigration status. Under current immigration laws, however, it is also common.

"Employers often contact immigration authorities … in order to avoid liability," Monica Guizar, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, told us. "It is a well-known and documented tactic that employers use to stymie union organizing campaigns [and] escape liability for vioutf8g workers’ rights."

In recognition of this abuse, memorandums from the Department of Labor and internal ICE regulations have been established to dissuade worksite interventions when a labor dispute is occurring. Advocates have successfully invoked these guidelines to terminate deportation proceedings and prevent raids in the past, but immigrant workers are still incredibly vulnerable.

ICE Special Agent’s Field Manual section 33.14(h) requires that agents use restraint where a labor dispute is in progress and the complaint about employees’ immigration status "is being provided to interfere with the rights of employees to … be paid minimum wages and overtime; to have safe work places … or to retaliate against employees for seeking to vindicate those rights."

Additionally, a 1998 memorandum of understanding between the Department of Labor and ICE (then known as the INS) directs immigration agents to "avoid inappropriate worksite interventions where it is known or reasonably suspected that a labor dispute is occurring and the intervention may, or may be sought so as to, interfere in the dispute."

Guizar confirmed that these regulations are still in place under ICE. Monica Virginia Kites, a spokesperson for ICE, declined to comment on these internal regulations.

At a noisy Saturday-morning picket in front of the Emeryville Woodfin Suites, Luz, a 42-year-old from Mexico City, told the Guardian that managers never questioned her immigration status during the three years she was a housekeeper at the hotel — until she started working with EBASE to enforce Measure C.

One day, Luz told us, her manager rushed her and other workers into the hotel’s attic, because "ICE was driving around outside and could come." According to Luz, the manager told them that "this could be a result of us supporting Measure C or working with EBASE."

The measure mandates a $9 per hour minimum wage for hotel workers and requires overtime pay for employees who clean more than 5,000 square feet of floor space during a shift. The Woodfin contributed $27,500 to an anti–Measure C campaign committee, filed two unsuccessful lawsuits that challenged its constitutionality, and then simply failed to comply with the law.

"They said we weren’t entitled to rights because we were immigrants," Luz recalled. "They started to say that our Social Security numbers didn’t match and that we would have to leave. This problem never came up until we asked for our rights."

In September 2006, Woodfin workers filed a class-action lawsuit seeking back pay. The Woodfin finally agreed to come into compliance with Measure C the following month, but it also told almost 30 workers that it had found problems with their Social Security numbers. On Dec. 15, the Woodfin suspended 21 workers and gave them two weeks’ notice that they were to be fired.

On the extensive Web site the Woodfin has devoted to the dispute, the hotel claims it was "forced to move to terminate their [workers’] employment" after receiving Social Security Administration "no-match" letters for them. "Today," it claims, "failure to act appropriately on a no-match letter may be considered evidence of an employer’s conscious disregard for the law."

This is false, according to Social Security Administration spokesperson Lowell Kepke. It is in fact "illegal for a company to fire an employee based solely on a no-match letter," he told us.

Because it has been so often abused, the letter itself states that employers "should not use this letter to take any adverse action against an employee…. Doing so could, in fact, violate State or Federal law and subject you to legal consequences."

An emergency ordinance returned workers to the Woodfin while the city investigated their retaliation claims, but on April 27 the hotel defied the ordinance by firing 12 immigrant workers, again citing problems with Social Security numbers.

The city issued a notice of violation; even probusiness city council member Dick Kassis, who opposed Measure C, called the Woodfin’s behavior "morally reprehensible" at a May 1 council meeting. On May 3 police arrested 38 people at a civil disobedience protest supporting the workers in front of the hotel, including Assemblyperson Loni Hancock and Berkeley city council member Kriss Worthington.

The almost maddeningly soft-spoken and reasoned Emeryville city council member John Fricke, who in February was the target of an unsuccessful restraining order filed by the hotel over his alleged "threatening" behavior, posed the following conundrum to us: why would a successful business continue to pursue litigation that is not cost-effective?

"I’m assuming their success is based on their business acumen," he said. Yet as a lawyer, he estimates that attorney fees are well above $100,000, on top of another $100,000 in fees borne by the city and at least that much in worker back pay. "You would think the wise business decision would be to cut one’s losses," he said.

One possible answer: EBASE organizer Brooke Anderson said this is actually an "ideological battle."

The Woodfin’s Hardage has spent more than $230,000 since 2000 to fund conservative politicians and ballot measures, including political committees that have taken antiunion and antitax positions on state and local ballot propositions, according to EBASE. He chaired the San Diego County Republican Party from 1995 to 1997 and has served as a fundraiser in several Republican campaigns.

Hardage cofounded the Project for California’s Future in 2001, which the Heritage Foundation describes as "a multi-year, multi-million dollar project" to prepare Republican candidates for California office and "represents a first-ever program to rebuild the conservative bench from the water board level on up."

The project’s cofounder is Ron Nehring, the passionately antilabor vice chairman of the California Republican Party and senior consultant to Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Nehring was also once director of government affairs for the Woodfin Suites.

A 2005 report by the Center on Policy Initiatives, a progressive think tank, names Nehring, Hardage, and Norquist among those who have helped the Republicans target San Diego as a model for their plan to radically cut government funding, permanently weaken labor unions, and privatize public services.

The ideological battle manifested itself at the Saturday-morning picket, which pitted roughly 15 College Republicans from Bay Area schools against 25 laid-off workers and supporters, each group with a bullhorn, separated by barricades and cops.

The Woodfin provided free rooms for the student counterdemonstrators, Ryan Clumpner, a UC Davis senior and chair of the California College Republicans, told us. Surrounded by signs such as "Quit ‘Stalin’: Get Back to Work," and "Respect the Law," Clumpner said he was "here supporting the Woodfin, which is being unfairly targeted by unions."

"I’ve actually done housecleaning," he said. Between semesters one summer, he said, he made $7 an hour cleaning rooms at UC Davis; immigrants supporting families in the Bay Area should also be content with this wage, he said. "If they want to make more, they can move up to supervisor positions," he said. "They’re here for a reason. This country is offering economic opportunities. The economic benefit is the reason they’re here, not the problem."

On the other side of the barricades, Luz said, "My idea is that you have to work hard and give a lot to the company so that they give something back to you in return. We gave them the best service, so they should give us reasonable salaries."

Retaliatory actions against immigrants organizing to improve their work situations have increased across the country in the past few years, just as high-profile raids have resulted in the detentions, arrests, and removals from the United States of thousands of immigrant workers.

The Woodfin is "an example of the need for just and fair immigration reform, coupling the legalization of undocumented workers in this country with strong labor- and employment-law enforcement," Guizar told us.

City Manager Pat O’Keefe told us that in the coming few weeks the city will be announcing a decision about its investigation into worker complaints and the Woodfin’s operating permit. *

Why we’re with Mark Leno

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OPINION The choice confronting voters in the State Senate District 3 primary in June 2008 is about electing the best candidate who personifies the direction, tone, and future of the progressive movement. Voters want positive changes, unequivocal vision, tangible accomplishments, and a leader who drives the movement forward.

Mark Leno represents the best progressive choice for that type of change. He is an articulate, innovative, and effective assemblymember who always makes a concerted effort to reach out to the people he serves with boundless energy; he will work equally hard as a senator.

As a legislator, Leno ensures that the voices of his constituents are well represented. His issues are driven by the communities he serves. He focuses on advancing controversial issues despite opposition in Sacramento, and he continues to achieve impressive political, cultural, and social milestones.

While serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Leno created the nation’s first medical cannabis identification program, which has become a model for similar programs across California.

On environmental issues, Leno has also won nationwide acclaim for his efforts to promote the use of renewable energy sources such as solar power in San Francisco and across the state.

When it comes to tenant rights, Leno’s legislative record speaks for itself. After many suffered the negative impact of Ellis Act evictions, he authored Assembly Bill 1217 to protect the disabled, elderly, and disadvantaged single-room-occupancy tenants from becoming homeless.

Leno has earned his reputation as a champion and visionary by introducing legislation that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity in housing and employment. Much like the transgender medical benefit legislation that he introduced as a member of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, his AB 196 is arguably one of California’s most significant nondiscrimination laws ever enacted to protect transgender people.

In 2005, Leno’s groundbreaking LGBT civil rights legislation to support marriage equality was the first in the nation to win approval by both houses of a state legislature. Although Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill, Leno has reintroduced it and will not quit until it becomes law.

Leno is running for the District 3 State Senate seat because he believes that elective offices belong to the people. He will bring to the office his integrity, experience, and accomplishments in protecting marginalized and underserved communities, promoting environmental protection, and developing alternative sources of energy, and he’ll still remain independent of special interests. He introduces innovative solutions to difficult problems and represents the values of the people of Northern California.

For all these reasons, Mark Leno is our best choice for change. *

Theresa Sparks is president-elect of the San Francisco Police Commission. Cecilia Chung is deputy director of the Transgender Law Center.

SF, the next generation

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OPINION Do you dream of a city where housing is affordable, where the diversity of our heritage is celebrated, where there are good schools in every neighborhood, where all children are safe, and where the next generation reaps the rewards of their families’ hard work?

This dream for San Francisco is possible. But it will require our determination to claim San Francisco as a city of opportunity for all. And it starts with our children — the 100,000 children who call this city their home today. They deserve the opportunity to see this dream come to life.

But the future being built before our eyes threatens these dreams and the values that have made San Francisco great. With 25,000 luxury condos on the way and very little housing planned that low- and middle-income families can afford, San Francisco may become a city only for the wealthy, with all its neighborhoods sold to the highest bidders.

And without affordable family housing or quality education, the children of today will be shut out of the city’s prosperity, unable to afford to stay in the city they call home.

We have called on the mayor, the Board of Supervisors, the superintendent of schools, and the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education to commit to Next Generation SF — a broad and long-term agenda developed by our parent and youth leaders to claim San Francisco as a city of opportunity for all.

The Next Generation SF agenda has three priorities:

•More affordable family housing. Double the city’s current affordable family housing pipeline of 1,500 units (recently revised to 1,700) to 3,000 units by 2011. This seems modest when two-thirds of the city’s families (about 39,000 families) are currently in a housing crisis, according to the city’s own data.

•Good schools for all. Increase the opportunity for all students to go on to college or living-wage work, with an emphasis on students who are currently being left behind. Make the racial achievement gap in the SFUSD public schools (the most alarming gap in the state) the number one priority for the soon to be hired superintendent of schools. Raise the achievement of all students so that at least 60 percent of students in all racial groups have the opportunity to go to college by 2011.

•Safety and security for all. Increase city budget investments in the safety and economic security of SF families, above the legal requirements. After running last year’s successful $10 million Budget 4 Families campaign, we are supporting this year’s Family Budget Coalition $20 million campaign for high-quality child care, violence prevention and alternatives to incarceration, youth employment, family support services, and health and after-school services.

But in order to create hope and opportunity for all San Franciscans, it will take the whole city to raise the next generation. Join Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth and more than 80 labor and community organizations May 12 at the Rally for the Next Generation at the Civic Center from 11 a.m.–1 p.m. *

NTanya Lee

NTanya Lee is executive director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth.

A law school of their own

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› culture@sfbg.com

In today’s "I’m gonna sue you" world, in which lawyers are called sharks (and often rightly so), getting a law degree from a school that offers the class "Education for a Just, Sacred and Sustainable World" might seem a little backward. However, since the ’70s a number of schools have been encouraging students to study law as a tool for practicing social advocacy — not just for lining corporate pockets (or their own).

One of the Bay Area’s banner examples is the New College of California, which — founded in 1975 out of the civil rights movement — has the oldest public interest law program in the country. But there are other stops for those with lawyerly aspirations. Golden Gate University not only offers certification in public interest law but also gives a number of incentives for students interested in helping local communities. UC Hastings College of the Law has the in-house Civil Justice Clinic, which gives students a chance to add an activist bent to their education. And most other nearby schools — from UC Berkeley’s School of Law to the University of San Francisco — now offer some kind of public interest law specialty.

So what are these programs like? Is this law lite?

Certainly not, Civil Justice Clinic director Mark Aaronson says. For example, clinic courses — which deal with employment law, housing law, and disability benefits among other areas of social interest — are very serious. In fact, students handle real cases and are advised by professional lawyers. As part of the course work in Aaronson’s Community Economic Development Clinic, students may survey community needs or translate court documents for neighborhood residents. The school is even more rigorous thanks to the fact that the yearlong program is limited to just eight students, giving them plenty of firsthand experience handling real-life legal situations. "Lawyers have to learn to lawyer in context, dealing with real problems as they occur — not just hypotheticals in a classroom," Aaronson says.

And UC Hastings’s dedication to this program goes beyond classes and course work. A number of student-led organizations offer a chance for community involvement: one group volunteers at outreach centers in SoMa along with UCSF medical students to provide medical care and legal advice to the underserved.

So where do graduates of these social justice law programs go? Some join private law firms, of course, or find government jobs serving communities in need. But others, such as Paul Hogarth, use their education to do something else entirely.

Hogarth is now the managing editor for BeyondChron.com, a daily news site produced by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic that tries to raise awareness about the Ellis Act and tenant housing rights. But first he attended Golden Gate University with help from its Public Interest Law Scholars Program, a scholarship fund that gives up to $15,000 in tuition aid and a $5,000 internship stipend to five students a year. He says the skills he gained at Golden Gate are integral to his job now.

"Sometimes I’ll write a story about a court case, and I’ll do a legal analysis of it," Hogarth says. "I also cover City Hall, and I can read legislation that’s going through and then say, ‘Well, this is what the law will do.’ "

Had Hogarth chosen to work for a nonprofit or as a public defender or prosecutor, he would’ve been eligible for a generous tuition repayment assistance grant from Golden Gate University.

It seems one of the greatest benefits of joining these programs, though, is being surrounded by like-minded people passionate about social change. For example, Antonia Jushasz, a teacher in the Activism and Social Change masters program at New College, spoke at a protest rally against the Iraqi Oil Law at Chevron Corp. headquarters March 19 with four of her students looking on — making up an impromptu class.

It’s not exactly what most of us think of when we imagine a law education. And graduates from these programs don’t exactly fit the stereotype of one of the world’s most hated professions. But it just proves as there’s more than one way to be a lawyer, there’s also more than one way to become one. So if you imagine your lawyer self as more of a dolphin (or an otter or maybe a sea lion) than a shark, don’t worry. There’s a place for you too. *

NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA

School of Law

50 Fell, SF

(415) 241-1300

www.newcollege.edu

GOLDEN GATE UNIVERSITY

536 Mission, SF

1-800-GGU-4YOU

www.ggu.edu

UC HASTINGS COLLEGE OF THE LAW

Civil Justice Clinic

100 McAllister, suite 300, SF

(415) 557-7887

www.uchasting.edu

UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO SCHOOL OF LAW

2130 Fulton, SF

(415) 422-6307

www.usfca.edu/law

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY SCHOOL OF LAW

Center for Social Justice

785 Simon Hall

Piedmont and Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-4474

www.law.berkeley.edu/cenpro/csj

>

Help them help you

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› culture@sfbg.com

Following the tornado of cutbacks and downsizing that ripped through the Bay Area, the job market has finally regained its footing, which is great news for all kinds of people, from recent grads to employees unsatisfied with their current jobs. But you don’t have to go it alone.

We’ve asked some of the Bay Area’s experts on job searching — recruiters — to guide those seeking gainful employment. Since these are the people who sell job seekers to potential employers on a daily basis, we figure who better to provide valuable insight about landing that dream job (or dream income)?

Our panel of experts: Linda Carlton, president and CEO of FinanceStaff, a recruiting resource for accounting and finance professionals in Northern California; Daniel Morris, director of staffing at Trulia, a real estate search engine poised to double in size within the next year; and Madison Badertscher, an independent recruiter currently placing engineers and computer programmers in Silicon Valley.

And just in case you’re worried about how the recruiting industry affects local job seekers, keep in mind that the demand for skilled employees is so high — especially in fields such as engineering, finance, and graphic design — that recruiters are forced to look outside the Bay Area in order to find them. This means recruiters typically aren’t threatening local job seekers (though Morris points out there are certainly people who would disagree). Furthermore, recruiters say, the global perspective that international candidates tend to bring to Bay Area–based positions is often a weighty plus.

The general consensus is that the Bay Area job market is enjoying a renewed vigor. The jobs are out there and the conduits to them are many and varied. There is simply nothing to lose by taking advantage of the myriad recruiting resources available to you, whether you are just entering the workforce or still searching for the perfect job. So use this advice, and then go get ’em:

GO ONLINE


As you might’ve guessed, the Internet is a great place to start your search — and from the looks of top job boards such as Monster.com, HotJobs.com, and Craigslist.org, all kinds of companies are hiring. But don’t hesitate to post your résumé online as well — contrary to the popular belief that you’ll just get lost in the shuffle, recruiters say this is the first place they look when trying to fill a position.

Carlton says she starts here because it’s where the most eager candidates tend to post their résumés. Morris agrees, pointing out that it’s the best place to cast a wide net.

WRITE A RESUMESSAY


Keep in mind, though, that your résumé is the only way you’re representing yourself on these job boards. So make sure you’ve put your best foot forward. Carlton recommends thinking of your résumé as an essay. Employers will make inferences from what they see, she says. Anything that could potentially look bad, such as a series of short-term jobs, should be given due explanation. Morris says previous successes should be quantified in a strong résumé. Sales accomplishments, for example, should be listed in quantifiable terms.

If you don’t have tons of experience, though, don’t fret. You might get just as far emphasizing how passionate you are about the potential job. Morris, for example, looks to staff Trulia with employees who have a history of doing more than is expected of them. And though Badertscher says education and relevant experience are important, she points out that credentials can be secondary to a strong willingness to learn.

BEFRIEND A RECRUITER


Job applicants who know exactly where they want to work and what they want to do are often best off aligning themselves with in-house recruiters, who frequently develop close relationships with the hiring staff at their companies. These recruiters know the company culture, including what makes the hiring manager tick.

Applicants who have a range of ideas about what they would like to be doing or where they want to work should look for agency-based recruiters or independent recruiters, as both can help narrow the search.

Agency-based recruiters, such as Carlton, often work with companies that want to be presented with lots of candidates. They also help fill temporary jobs, which can be a great way for a job seeker to test a particular position, company, or industry before making a commitment.

But agency-based and independent recruiters have a bevy of tools to help job seekers identify what they want. For example, Carlton uses a range of personality profiling methods in order to aid applicants, including tests such as Myers-Briggs, Omni Profile, and Kathy Kolbe’s method of measuring how people like to apply themselves.

CONSIDER RECRUITING


With so many companies looking to hire, recruiting itself has become a viable — but somewhat nebulous — career choice. There’s a particularly high demand for recruiters in the Bay Area, thanks to lower unemployment rates. But how does someone become a recruiter?

It’s certainly not an obvious path. Carlton says the best way is to get hired by one of the big national firms, receive some structured training from them, then go out on your own or join a smaller firm when the process becomes intuitive. "The great thing about being a recruiter is that you can do it anywhere," she says.

A wide range of backgrounds can lead to a lucrative career in recruiting. The important thing is getting the skills you need for the job. For example, Morris learned about generating leads and closing deals while working in sales at an Atlanta tech firm. Badertscher learned to be detail-oriented from her previous career in event planning. And Carlton first expressed her interest in talking to people about their careers as a high school guidance counselor — an interest she later supplemented with an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

"Recruiting is really a social science — the field can be lucrative, but it’s tough to succeed if money is your main motivation," Carlton says. "I love it when I can help someone find their dream job and help a client find the perfect person. That’s what it’s all about." *

FINANCESTAFF

300 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, suite 210, Oakl.

(510) 465-6070

www.financestaff.com

TRULIA

500 Treat, suite 200, SF

1-866-7-TRULIA

www.trulia.com

KOLBE A INDEX TEST

www.kolbe.com

>

Stand up for immigrants, Mr. Newsom

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OPINION President George W. Bush’s war on immigration is wreaking havoc on San Francisco’s immigrant community. Across the Bay Area and in San Francisco, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have been carrying out raids at homes and workplaces, near schools, and, in broad daylight, on the streets. Hundreds of immigrants have been deported, devastating families, separating parents from United States–born children, and leaving entire neighborhoods in a state of fear.

There are few other neighborhoods that feel the ICE war more than the Mission District, the Latino heart and soul of San Francisco. So it was especially painful to sit through a two-hour town hall meeting orchestrated by Mayor Gavin Newsom on March 26 at César Chávez Elementary School in the Mission. Never once did he acknowledge vocal community members’ concerns over ICE sweeps and civil rights abuses. Instead, as predicted, he kept to the script, selecting two dozen questions out of 70 that were submitted by more than 250 attendees. Despite the loud chants, luchadores dressed in capes and masks, and bold visuals that called for a stop to the ICE raids, the mayor continued to talk and talk and talk some more about the health care access initiative.

Health care access is an important issue — residents and workers throughout the city appreciate the mayor’s efforts and welcome any relief for the thousands of uninsured, low-income, and undocumented residents of San Francisco. But right now the streets of the city are hot, and immigrant families are scared to leave their homes, send their kids to school, go to work, or even seek medical care at General Hospital for fear of being swept up, displaced, and deported.

Fortunately, there are some protections in the city. In 1989 the immigrant-rights movement, with the support of elected officials, established the sanctuary ordinance, which bars city officials, the Police Department, and other city agencies from cooperating with federal immigration officials. But in light of the most recent aggression, the time has come for our mayor and our elected officials to do more.

In 2004, in a rightful act of civil disobedience, a defiant Newsom stood up for justice by marrying same-sex couples, a landmark event in US civil rights history. It’s time for the mayor to once again stand up for justice by supporting the immigrants who make great contributions to this city and the nation.

Mayor Newsom, show us that your stance on civil rights has no limits and is inclusive of immigrant workers and families. Show us that you were not just currying favor or seeking votes but are truly committed to all civil rights issues.

Join with us:

• March with the immigrant community to protest the ICE raids.

• Convene a meeting with ICE officials, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and community members.

• Increase city resources for legal and educational services that help immigrants get on the pathway to legalization.

• Support the current day-laborer center and use day laborers’ input in the future expansion and creation of worker centers.

• Support the immigrant-led planning process in the Mission District, which calls for more affordable housing and jobs. *

Oscar M. Grande

Oscar M. Grande is a community organizer with PODER, People Organized to Demand Employment Rights.

Truth about the eastern neighborhoods

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EDITORIAL The next battle for San Francisco’s future will be fought in significant part in what the Planning Department calls the eastern neighborhoods — South of Market, the central waterfront, the Mission District, Potrero Hill, and Showplace Square. That’s where planners want to see some 29,000 new housing units built, along with offices and laboratories for the emerging biotech industry that’s projected to grow on the outskirts of the UCSF Mission Bay campus.

On March 28 the Planning Department released the final draft of a socioeconomic impact study of the area, which, with 1,500 acres of potentially developable land, is one of San Francisco’s last frontiers.

For a $50,000 report, the study doesn’t really say much. It puts an overall rosy glow on a zoning plan that will lead to widespread displacement of blue-collar jobs and dramatically increased gentrification. And it fails to answer what ought to be the fundamental questions of anything calling itself a socioeconomic study.

But within the 197-page document are some stunning facts that ought to give neighborhood activists (and the San Francisco supervisors) reason to doubt the entire rezoning package.

On one level it’s hard to blame Linda Hausrath, the Oakland economist who did the study: the premise was flawed from the start. The study considers only two possibilities — either the eastern neighborhoods will be left with no new zoning at all or the Planning Department’s zoning proposal will be implemented. Her conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the official city plan offers a lot of benefits. That’s hard to argue: the current zoning for the area is a mess, and much of the most desirable land is wide open for all sorts of undesirable uses.

But there are many, many ways to look at the future of the eastern neighborhoods beyond what the Planning Department has offered. Neighborhood activists in Potrero Hill have their own alternatives; so do the folks in the Mission and South of Market. There are a lot of ways to conceive of this giant piece of urban land — and many of them start and end with different priorities than those of the Planning Department.

Two key issues dominate the report — housing and employment in what’s known as production, distribution, and repair, or PDR, facilities. PDR jobs are among the final remaining types of employment in San Francisco that pay a decent wage and don’t require a college degree. The city had 95,000 of these as of 2000 (the most recent data that the study looks at), and 32,000 of them were in the eastern neighborhoods.

Almost everyone agrees that PDR jobs are a crucial part of the city’s economic mix and that without them a significant segment of the city’s population will be displaced. "There are two ways to drive people out of San Francisco," housing activist Calvin Welch says. "You can eliminate their housing or eliminate their jobs."

The city’s rezoning plan seeks to protect some PDR uses in a few parts of the eastern neighborhoods. But many of the areas where the warehouses, light industrial outfits, and similar businesses operate will be zoned to allow market-rate housing — and that will be the end of the blue-collar jobs.

When you build market-rate housing in industrial areas, the industry is forced out. That’s already been proved in San Francisco; just remember what happened in South of Market during the dot-com and live-work boom. When wealthy people move into homes near PDR businesses, they immediately start to complain: those businesses are often loud; trucks arrive at all hours of the day and night. City officials get pestered by angry new homeowners — and at the same time, the price of real estate goes up. The PDR businesses are shut down or bought out — and replaced with more luxury condos.

Thousands of PDR jobs have disappeared since the 2000 census, the result of the dot-com boom. And even the Hausrath report acknowledges that 4,000 more PDR jobs will be lost from the eastern neighborhoods under the city’s plan. That’s more than would be lost without any rezoning at all.

The vast majority — more than 70 percent, the report shows — of people who work in PDR jobs in San Francisco also live in San Francisco. Many are immigrants and people of color. A significant percentage live in Bayview–Hunters Point, where the unemployment rate among African Americans is a civic disgrace. What will happen to those workers? What will happen to their families? Where will they go when the jobs disappear? There’s nothing in the report that addresses these questions — although they reflect one of the most important socioeconomic impacts of the looming changes in the region.

Then there’s affordable housing.

According to the city’s reports and projections, two-thirds of all the new housing that is built in the city ought to be available below the market rate. That’s because none of the people who are now being driven from San Francisco by high housing costs — families, small-business people working-class renters, people on fixed incomes — can possibly afford market-rate units. In fact, as we reported last week ("The Big Housing Lie," 3/28/07), the new housing that’s being built in San Francisco does very little to help current residents, which is why more than 65 percent of the people who are buying those units are coming here from out of town.

San Francisco is one of the world’s great cities, but it isn’t very big — 49 square miles — and most of the land is already developed. The 1,500 developable acres in the eastern neighborhoods are among the last bits of land that can be used for affordable housing. And in fact, that’s where 60 percent of the below-market housing built in the city in the past few years has been located.

But every market-rate project that’s built — and there are a lot of them on the drawing board — takes away a potential affordable housing site and thus makes it less possible for the city to come close to meeting its goals. The Hausrath report completely ignores that fact.

Overall, the report — which reflects the sensibilities of the Planning Department — accepts the premise that the best use of much of the eastern neighborhoods is for high-end condos. Building that housing, the report notes, "would provide a relief valve" to offset pressures on the market for existing housing.

But that’s directly at odds with the available facts. The San Francisco housing market has never fit in with a traditional supply-and-demand model, and today it’s totally out of whack. Market-rate housing in this city has come to resemble freeways and prisons: the more you build, the more demand it creates — and the construction boom does nothing to alleviate the original problem.

The new condos in San Francisco are being snapped up by real estate speculators, wealthy empty nesters, very rich people (and companies) who want local pieds-à-terre, and highly paid tech workers who have jobs on the Peninsula. Meanwhile, families are fleeing the city in droves. The African American community is being decimated. Artists, writers, musicians, unconventional thinkers — the people who are the heart of San Francisco life and culture — can’t stay in a town that offers no place for them to live. Is this really how we want to use the 1,500 precious acres of the eastern neighborhoods?

The Hausrath study was largely a waste of money, which is too bad, because the issue facing the planning commissioners, the mayor, and the supervisors is profound. The city planners need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a rezoning plan that makes affordable housing and the retention of PDR jobs a priority, gives million-dollar condos a very limited role, and prevents the power of a truly perverse market from further destroying some of the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. *

The big housing lie

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EDITORIAL San Francisco’s official housing policy is pretty clear: the city is supposed to encourage the construction of new homes for local families who are getting priced out of the local market, for the local workforce, and for people who live here but are homeless or in marginal housing situations. And a full 64 percent of the new housing built in the city is supposed to be below market rate.

Nowhere in any policy document or political pronouncement by any city official is there a claim that San Francisco needs to build more housing that will attract very wealthy people who live somewhere else.

Yet that is exactly what our current policy is doing, new evidence collected by activist Marc Salomon suggests.

Salomon did something that city planners should have done a long time ago: he performed a detailed analysis, based on public records, of every new residential construction project during the past 10 years in District 6 (where most of the new high-end housing has gone). He cross-checked all the addresses with the Department of Elections’ voter files to see how many of the residents of those pricey condos had lived in San Francisco previously. His data is posted on www.sfbg.com; it shows that of 2,390 registered voters who were in 3,675 new units in 2006, 790 had been registered in San Francisco as of March 2002 and 1,590 had not.

That means that a full two-thirds — 66.81 percent — of those residents came here from somewhere else. Put another way, only one-third of the new housing that was built in District 6 went to San Franciscans.

"These numbers," Salomon writes, "indicate that the city is pursuing the exact opposite priorities and policies of what the Housing Element of the General Plan calls for in planning for new residential construction."

Or as housing activist Rene Cazenave told us, "Not only are we failing to meet the requirement that 64 percent of new housing be affordable, we’re not even helping existing San Franciscans."

Yes, there have always been and will always be new arrivals to San Francisco; this is a town of immigrants, and those people need places to live. But only a tiny fraction of the people who have moved here during the past half century could ever afford this sort of luxury housing. It’s a different population the developers are attracting — and this deserves a serious policy debate.

San Francisco is losing some of its most valuable population by the day. Families are fleeing in droves; first-time home buyers who want to settle here for the long term are driven away. San Francisco’s workforce — service-industry employees, public-sector workers, small-business people, and the vast majority of wage earners whose incomes are inadequate to buy a million-dollar condo — is finding it impossible to live here.

That’s a major civic problem. And the housing that’s getting built is doing little to solve it.

Salomon freely admits his figures aren’t perfect and may be off by a few points. But even if he’s off by 25 percent or more, the results are still alarming. And the city needs to follow this up right away.

The city Planning Department needs to immediately undertake a comprehensive study of who is buying the new housing built in San Francisco — a study that looks at demographics, migration patterns, and employment. That can be compared to the well-documented housing needs in the city. And not another market-rate condo project should be approved until that study is complete.

In fact, if the city drags its feet here, housing activists should start talking about a ballot initiative that would bar the construction of any new housing that doesn’t meet the criteria and needs established by current city planning policy. San Francisco doesn’t need to give up valuable land to create high-rise havens for rich retirees, speculators, and the owners of corporate pieds-à-terre. *

Superlist No. 829: Safe houses

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› superlists@sfbg.com

In 1971 community activist Bea Robinson improvised a battered-women’s shelter in the garage of her San Jose home. Thanks to demands for shelter legislation by women’s rights groups of the same era, an ample network of Bay Area safe houses is now available to women from all walks of life — from abused mothers and trafficked teens to marginalized immigrants and disempowered queers.

Each of the listed shelters is communal, confidentially located, child friendly, and multilingual. They also offer or can help secure longer-term housing, counseling, and legal aid. Other services include food, clothing, transportation, employment assistance, and play areas. Calling one of these confidential 24-hour crisis lines starts the shelter intake process and connects battered women to the Bea Robinsons of the Bay Area.

In an effort to keep families united, Oakland’s A Safe Place (510-536-SAFE, www.asafeplacedvs.org) accepts male children up to age 17. During the maximum eight-week stay, residents receive counseling while younger children participate in play therapy.

Substance-free women and their children may reside indefinitely in one of the 16 beds at Marin Abused Women’s Services (MAWS) (English: 415-924-6616; Spanish: 415-924-3456; men’s line: 415-924-1070; www.maws.org). MAWS works globally to educate communities about the sociopolitical roots of domestic violence. In 1980, MAWS initiated ManKind, a male-led program that reeducates imprisoned abuse offenders and confronts community beliefs that support male violence.

San Francisco’s Asian Women’s Shelter (AWS) (1-877-751-0880, www.sfaws.org) renders services in 31 Asian languages. The AWS serves all women but is especially outfitted for Asian immigrants who speak little to no English. An average stay at its 18-bed shelter lasts 12 to 16 weeks, though extensions are often granted. The Queer Asian Women Services program supports lesbian, bisexual, and transgender survivors of relationship violence. The AWS also confronts forced labor and sexual exploitation via the Asian Anti-Trafficking Collaborative. Its affiliate, Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach, offers pro bono legal services.

Building Futures with Women and Children (1-866-A-WAY-OUT, www.bfwc.org), a 20-bed safe house in San Leandro, doesn’t exclude women with substance abuse or mental health issues, as do some shelters. A typical stay at this former overnight winter relief refuge also known as Sister Me Home can last up to 21 weeks. Programs include child tutoring, parent support groups, and family night — one night per week of guided mother-child bonding.

The Emergency Shelter Program (ESP) (1-888-339-SAFE, www.espca.org) in Hayward can accommodate 40 women and their children, including teen boys, for 12 weeks. The ESP also accepts single teen mothers and functions as a homeless shelter for those who have been evicted, are out of work, or are experiencing familial hardship.

As San Francisco’s largest domestic violence shelter, La Casa de las Madres (adults: 1-877-503-1850; teens: 1-877-923-0700; www.lacasa.org) can house up to 35 women and children for eight weeks at a time. Thanks to a 24-hour intake, women can be admitted to the shelter whenever necessary. Art therapy and animal-assisted counseling give residents a chance to learn, relax, and have fun. The teen program offers a 24-hour emergency crisis line and youth-tailored services for battered or at-risk girls.

Next Door Solutions to Domestic Violence (408-501-7550, www.nextdoor.org), whose crisis line hasn’t changed for the past 34 years, is Robinson’s brainchild. The shelter can accommodate up to 19 women and children for as long as four weeks. Elderly battered women older than 50 can benefit from the unique MAVEN (Mature Alternatives to Violent Environments Now) program, which offers home visits and recreational activities. On-site legal services include court accompaniment and support for undocumented immigrants.

The Riley Center (415-255-0165, www.rileycenter.org), a program of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of San Francisco, gives priority to women and children in immediate danger. Its 25-bed shelter, known as the Rosalie House, provides a 12-week refuge. Families receive private rooms, though women without children may have to share accommodations. Residents perform basic chores in shared living spaces. Prospective residents should call the crisis line for a confidential interview with a trained counselor.

Safe Alternatives to Violent Environments (SAVE) (510-794-6055, www.save-dv.org) is in Fremont but serves the world over. It offers a 30-bed shelter — the only battered shelter in Fremont, Newark, and Union City — where women and their children can reside for 12 weeks. Counseling with a licensed clinical therapist is available for a sliding-scale fee. SAVE also holds free drop-in support groups facilitated by certified domestic violence counselors on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Concord’s STAND! Against Domestic Violence (1-888-215-5555, www.standagainstdv.org) manages additional offices in Richmond, Antioch, and Pittsburg to better serve its Contra Costa County hub. The Rollie Mullen Center, a six-building complex containing its 24-bed shelter, can accommodate families and individuals for up to six weeks. On-site services and amenities include long-term transitional housing, a computer lab, and a playroom. *

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