Government

Sitting boundaries

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Sitting boundaries

Aggressive lobbying efforts by the San Francisco Police Department and some of its allies who are pushing a proposed sit/lie ordinance have irked some current and former members of the Board of Supervisors.

The legislation was privately created by new Police Chief George Gascón and then played up in the mainstream media. It would make it illegal to sit or lie down on public sidewalks. Supporters say it would make it easier for cops to target people who harass neighborhood residents.

But in other cities where similar laws have been passed, protests have erupted from homeless-advocacy organizations and civil liberties groups, which say criminalizing this behavior unfairly (and unconstitutionally) targets homeless people who have nowhere else to go.

In Portland, Ore., a similar law was enacted then overturned by the courts. In Los Angeles, an ordinance against sleeping on the sidewalk was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union, resulting in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2006 that unless adequate shelter is available for homeless people in L.A., arresting them for sleeping on the sidewalk amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

But an e-mail action alert included in SFPD Central Station Capt. Anna Brown’s monthly community newsletter encouraged people to contact the mayor and the Board of Supervisors to support the creation of a sit/lie ordinance. “Naturally, there is resistance from the left-leaning Board of Supervisors who feel this is an attack on the homeless population,” it noted.

That unusually overt political plea caught the eye of Aaron Peskin, former president of the Board of Supervisors and current chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, who called it “funky.” Peskin told us he’d never seen an advocacy pitch like this go out in a captain’s newsletter before, and he questioned whether this was an appropriate use of city resources.

But the City Attorney’s Office says this doesn’t fall under city laws banning electioneering by city employees, who are barred from using government resources to endorse a candidate or ballot initiative, or from doing any campaign-related work on city property.

Yet this kind of pitch “is not considered political activity,” Jack Song, a spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, told the Guardian.

But Sup. David Campos, a former police commissioner, frowned upon it nonetheless. “Something like this is not really helpful to the Board of Supervisors and the Police Department working together,” Campos said.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi took a similar view. At a recent Board of Supervisors meeting, he requested a hearing about the ordinance because he said the media-driven public debate had occurred without formal discussion. Anti-loitering and public nuisance laws are already on the books, Mirkarimi pointed out.

“What makes those laws inadequate?” he asked. “How would the proposed law augment what is already in effect?”

The alert wasn’t actually written by Capt. Brown, who included it in her newsletter. It was drafted by the Community Leadership Alliance, an organization headed by David Villa-Lobos, a longtime resident of the Tenderloin and a candidate for the District 6 Supervisor seat.

Since Gascón floated the idea of creating a sit/lie ordinance, CLA has kicked into high gear to mobilize support, most recently issuing its action alert e-mail to 8,000 recipients. Police captains were included in the e-mail blast, Villa-Lobos told us, but each captain decides independently what to include in his or her newsletter.

People sitting and lying on sidewalks is “a really, really big problem, especially in the crime-ridden areas,” Villa-Lobos said. “God bless the homeless, but it’s a big problem there too.” Several years ago, his organization tried to mount a campaign for a sit/lie ordinance, but it didn’t go anywhere. “People came out and said we were trying to violate civil rights,” he said.

The Community Leadership Alliance is active in the Tenderloin, SoMa, and the mid-Market Street area, and the group occasionally holds monthly meetings at the Infusion Lounge, an upscale nightclub owned by Scott Caroen, the chair of the organization.

Gascón worked with deputy city attorneys to draft the ordinance and all district police stations have submitted to their commanders a list of areas that they feel could benefit from the law, according to a Tenderloin district newsletter. Mirkarimi told the Guardian that some supervisors were kept in the dark for weeks about the fact that an ordinance had been drafted. “This wasn’t collaborative at all,” Mirkarimi told us. “We never received it until we demanded to see it.”

The Haight-Ashbury, where residents and visitors have been complaining about harassment from wayward traveling youth, has been ground zero for discussion about a sit/lie ordinance. A small group of irate residents there and the Park Station Capt. Teresa Barrett have rallied in support of the law, saying it would give police a new tool to target these disruptive street kids.

But it’s clear that the ordinance’s supporters want to see it applied broadly and to be used to roust the homeless in neighborhoods throughout the city.

“CLA feels that our sidewalks should be enjoyable and a place of social gathering, and that the ordinance could go a long way in helping our neighborhoods feel safer,” reads the Community Leadership Alliance alert that was included in the police captain’s newsletter. “It may also reduce the overall homeless population in San Francisco by discouraging people from coming to the city to beg for money.”

PG&E kicks press out of debate

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PG&E kicks press out of debate

By Brady Welch

news@sfbg.com

It sounded like a great story: a representative of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. agreed to a public debate over the merits of a ballot initiative the company essentially had paid to place on the California ballot. The measure seeks to curtail public power and clean energy in the state. And so far, PG&E has been loathe to discuss it in any open forum.

But on Jan. 27, PG&E’s political consultant, David Townsend, was scheduled to square off with state Sen. Mark Leno, a staunch foe of the measure, before what sounded like a great audience: the Northern California Power Agency, which represents 17 public power providers across the state.

At Sacramento’s Doubletree Inn, I headed to the lobby of the California Ballroom, where I found a woman sitting at a table adorned with the logo of the NCPA. “I’m a reporter here to cover the debate between Sen. Mark Leno and a representative from PG&E,” I said. “Would this be the right place?”

She smiled politely. Sorry, she said, you have to be an NCPA member and registered for the conference.

“I was invited by the senator,” I told her.

“Then you will have to wait until he gets here,” she said curtly.

I walked upstairs to the front desk — and just then, Leno walked through the main lobby’s sliding doors. I introduced myself, walked with him to the conference room, and quickly slipped in with some other attendees. Within three minutes, a man sitting next to me was called to the side by a steward who whispered something to him, and then just as quickly, returned to his seat. He turned to me.

Are you with the media? he whispered.

“I’m with a newspaper,” I said.

He then informed me that the conference was actually private, and sorry, I would have to leave. They would explain more outside.

After I was escorted out, Leno came up to me and explained that there had been a miscommunication. Turns out Townsend didn’t want the media around. And worse, the NCPA folks appeared to be taking his side. Leno arranged for me to hear his opening statement, but that was all.

The senator’s remarks were pointed. He noted that PG&E’s proposed legislation is not an initiative, but an amendment to the state Constitution. He mentioned the curtailing of free enterprise and a demise of state government. He likened the utility’s disrespect for the legislative process to a spit in the face, and at one point openly asked Townsend: “What good is your word?”

The political consultant, for his part, sat quietly. At times he rolled his eyes or bit his thumbs. When Leno was wrapping up, Townsend leaned over to the moderator and whispered something. The moderator then came over to me and said I’d have to leave.

So I walked out — but not without wondering: when exactly did PG&E hirelings get the right to exclude reporters from meetings filled with representatives of public agencies?

Leno himself wasn’t sure. “With all due respect to David Townsend,” he told the Guardian a few days later, “I don’t see why a consultant wouldn’t want to discuss the themes of his campaign in public. I think his decision not to allow the press to hear him speaks for itself.”

Despite multiple calls and e-mails, we couldn’t get NCPA director James H. Pope to tell us why he lets PG&E determine who can — and can’t — attend his sessions. Jane Cirrincione, NCPA’s assistant general manager for legislative and regulatory affairs, told us that Townsend was invited by her boss and was not authorized to speak publicly for PG&E.

But Peter Scheer, director of the California First Amendment Coalition, offered a possible explanation. NCPA, he contends, “is capitulating to PG&E’s demand for secrecy, not for ideological reasons, but simply because if the spokesperson walks, they don’t have a conference. The reasons for excluding the press are basically that mundane and stupid.”

Is the U.S. covering up murders at Guantanamo?

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By Steven T. Jones
harper suicides.jpg
Harper’s Magazine’s website has posted a disturbing expose that raises serious doubts about what the federal government claims were the simultaneous suicides of three Guantanamo Bay detainees in 2006, indicating that they may actually have been tortured to death at a secret interrogation facility known as Camp No.

Even worse, writer Scott Horton details how four prison guard whistle-blowers who had direct knowledge of flaws in the official story and the cover-up that followed went to the Justice Department last year, and that the Obama administration opted to continue the cover-up.

Slate’s Jack Shafer has attacked the story’s credibility and conclusions, but he does so mostly with a kind of sneering belittlement and disbelief that the military is capable of such a cover-up, while glossing over the evidence offered by multiple whistleblowers and the state of the three men’s bodies.

Harpers and Slate have engaged in an interesting back-and-forth on the issue, but based on what we know about the recent history of this country’s embrace of torture techniques, I have a hard time understanding Shafer’s dismissive tone about the doubts Horton raises. What do you think?

Newsom and O’Reilly celebrate conservatism

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By Steven T. Jones

Anyone who still thinks that Mayor Gavin Newsom is a liberal who has been unfairly maligned by the Bay Guardian and other wild-eyed San Francisco lefties should watch his appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show last night, in which Newsom praises O’Reilly (a right-wing reactionary if there ever was one) as a political moderate, correctly calls himself an economic conservative, and said he watches O’Reilly’s show every night and agrees with much of what he hears.

While Newsom meekly disagrees with O’Reilly’s ridiculous main premise that the situation in Sacramento and San Francisco proves that “liberal governance just don’t work,” he spends far more time agreeing with O’Reilly than challenging any of O’Reilly’s ludicrous and inaccurate assertions.

For example, O’Reilly blames California’s fiscal mess on liberals (actually, the main problem is our Republican governor and a two-thirds budget vote threshold that has let conservatives hold the state hostage) and casts San Francisco as increasingly overrun with homeless people and pot clubs (both of which have declined, leaving SF with just 22 licensed and well-regulated cannabis dispensaries).

Instead of defending traditional Democratic Party values (those that existed before Bill Clinton and others allowed them to be coopted by big corporations and anti-government crusaders) and his party’s current leaders, Newsom bends over backward to highlight his no-new-taxes stance and says, “We operate in a fiscally conservative manner.”

As the Chronicle reports today, San Francisco is facing a $522 million and growing budget deficit, which Newsom is only trying to increase with his proposed tax cuts and embrace of Reaganomics, while steadfastly refusing to work with others on finding new revenue sources. This is a recipe for disaster, but at least Newsom is sure to be invited back on his buddy Bill’s show, where he they can together celebrate the crash of civil society as we know it.

Meister: Obama’s promise to women

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It’s time to enact the Paycheck Fairness Act that would allow women to negotiate with employers for equal pay with men

By Dick Meister

(Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century.)

One of the most important promises made by President Obama in his State of the Union address has been largely overlooked – his promise to “crack down on violations of equal pay laws, so that women get equal pay for an equal day’s work.”

The need for that is great. Despite the 47-year-old law that promises women equal pay, their earnings remain well below men’s pay. They average only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, even though their work is obviously every bit as valuable to employers and society at large as the work of men.

The pay discrepancy is even greater for women of color. African American women earn 63 cents and Latinas 52 cents for every dollar earned by men.

It’s estimated that if women were granted equal pay, they could earn as much as $2 million more over the whole of their working lives. It’s also estimated that if women were paid equally, the number of families living in poverty could be reduced by as much as half. Women’s earnings are needed by most families, and in many cases, women are their family’s only breadwinner.

Even women doing the same work as men, or work that’s as valuable to employers as that of their male counterparts, almost always are paid less. It’s as bad for women in the professions as for others. Female nurses, for instance, physicians and surgeons, professors, school teachers and lawyers earn as much as 30 percent less than men in their fields.

President Obama already has signed a bill that should help narrow the male-female pay gap. It was, in fact, the very first bill he signed after taking office – the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act. It’s named for a retired tire plant supervisor in Alabama who discovered after nearly 20 years on the job that she was being paid less than male supervisors.

Ms. Ledbetter sued for discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the law requires workers to sue no later than 180 days after their discriminatory pay rate was set – even if, like Ms. Ledbetter, they don’t discover the pay discrimination until years later. As the result of the decision, hundreds of pay discrimination cases were thrown out of court.

Shortly after the Supreme Court acted, the House passed a bill that would have overturned the court’s outrageous decision. But Senate Republicans, claiming the bill would lead to a flood of unfounded suits against employers, blocked a vote, and President Bush vowed to veto the bill if it ever crossed his desk.

The bill that finally reached Obama’s desk for signing provides that the 180-day time limit for filing lawsuits under the Civil Rights Act doesn’t begin to run until the last discriminatory act by an employer.

What’s most needed now is enactment of the Paycheck Fairness Act that’s been pending for a dozen years. The bill made it through the House last year, but was blocked by Senate Republicans. Obama, who voted for the bill as a senator, is certain to sign the new bill – if it’s not kept from him by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

The Fairness Act would close loopholes in the 1963 Equal Pay Act that have made it relatively easy for employers to pay women less than their male co-workers holding the same jobs. The law would empower women to negotiate with employers for equal pay; prohibit retaliation against workers who share salary information with co-workers; strengthen government outreach, education and enforcement, and generally make the law much stronger.

There ‘s no doubting President Obama’s firm support for the act. As he’s said, “We won ‘t truly have an economy that puts the needs of the middle class first until we ensure that when it comes to pay and benefits at work, women are treated like the equal partners they are.”

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

Marijuana goes mainstream

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Marijuana goes mainstream

I’ve smoked marijuana on and off for most of my adult life, usually in the evening to help let go of the anxieties associated with being a progressive wage slave in an increasingly conservative capitalist country.

Buying my pot, which is California’s biggest cash crop, has always been a criminal transaction: in hushed tones or coded language, I arrange to meet a dealer I’ve been set up with through friends. And when I meet him (they’ve always been men), I give him cash in exchange for an eighth- or quarter-ounce of whatever kind of pot he’s selling.

I don’t know what variety I’m buying, who grew it, or how it was grown; whether violence or environmental degradation have occurred along the supply chain; or even whether it is an indica or sativa, the two most basic cannabis families that have differing effects on users.

I’ve been completely in the dark, both in terms of what I was buying and who was benefiting from the transaction, but that changed recently. I obtained a doctor’s recommendation to legally smoke weed — honestly citing anxiety as my affliction — and set out to explore the area’s best cannabis clubs.

It was a little strange and disorienting at first, this new world of expert purveyors of the finest Northern California marijuana and the various concentrates, edibles, drinkables, and other products it goes into. But what eventually struck me is just now normal and mainstream this industry has become, particularly in San Francisco, which has long led the movement to legalize marijuana.

Unlike in cities such as Los Angeles, where the rapid proliferation of unregulated pot clubs has made headlines and raised community concerns, San Francisco years ago made its clubs jump through various bureaucratic hoops to become fully licensed, permitted, and regulated, free to join the mainstream business community, pay their taxes, and compete with one another on the basis of quality, price, customer service, ambiance, and support for the community.

As Californians prepare to decide whether to decriminalize marijuana for even recreational use — on Jan. 28, advocates plan to turn in enough valid signatures to place that initiative on the fall ballot — it’s a good time to explore just what the world of legal weed looks like.

Pretty much everyone involved agrees that San Francisco’s system for distributing marijuana to those with a doctor’s recommendation for it is working well: the patients, growers, dispensary operators, doctors, politicians, police, and regulators with the planning and public health departments.

“It works and it should continue to be replicated,” Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who created the legislation four years ago that led to the current system, told us. “It’s now mainstream.”

Public health officials agree. “In general, we’re very happy about our relationship with the industry and their commitment to the regulations,” said Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, San Francisco’s environmental health director. “We did this well and we did it cooperatively with the clubs.”

Bhatia said there are now 22 fully-permitted clubs (and two more under review) in San Francisco, less than half the number operating when the regulations were created. He also said the city no longer receives many complaints from neighbors of clubs.

Misha Breyburg, managing partner of the nonprofit Medithrive, which opened just a few months ago on Mission Street, supports the process too. “The regulations generally are not easy, but I think that’s okay,” he said. “The process was long and cumbersome and stressful, but very fair.”

Martin Olive, director of the Vapor Room, one of the city’s largest and best dispensaries, agrees that the permitting process professionalized the industry: “I’m proud to be here because the city government has been amazing.”

Richard Lee — founder of Oaksterdam University in Oakland, which teaches marijuana cultivation and is the main financial backer behind the initiative to legalize and tax pot — said San Francisco and Oakland have demonstrated that cannabis clubs can function like any other legitimate industry and become a real asset to their neighborhoods and the local economy.

“Once they started legalizing the clubs, they had no more problems,” Lee told us. “It really is boring and really not a big deal. It’s only the prohibition that makes it exciting and a little scary.”

In fact, Lee said that normalizing and legalizing the marijuana industry is the best way to deal with the problems associated with the illegal drug trade, such as violence, creation of a criminal class, respect for law enforcement, wasted public resources, lost tax opportunities, unsafe growing operations, and environmental damage.

“We need to end cannabis prohibition to end the violence,” Lee said.

Bringing marijuana above ground also has created an artisanship that’s similar to the wine industry, elevating cultivation practices to an art form, improving the science behind it, and making users more sophisticated about subtle differences in taste and effect among the dozens of varieties now on the market.

But the growers themselves still exist in a murky gray area. Although they can get some legal cover as registered caregivers to a cooperative’s members, they’re still exposed to thefts, shakedowns, logistical difficulties, and raids by federal agents or even local police, such as the series of raids in the Sunset District last fall that targeted even legitimate growers for the clubs.

“Right now, cultivators have no air cover at all and they’re getting mixed messages,” Mirkarimi said, calling for the city to better protect growers and even consider getting into the business of growing pot for the clubs and patients. “General Hospital should dispense medical cannabis.”

That issue and others related to the city’s relationship with the industry are currently the subject of a working group convened by Sup. David Campos, a byproduct of which is the proposal to create a Medical Cannabis Task Force to advise the Board of Supervisors, an item the board was scheduled to vote on Jan. 26.

Mirkarimi said he’s also concerned about current rules that ban smoking in clubs that are within 1,000 feet of schools or drug treatment facilities, which has served to prohibit smoking in all but a few San Francisco clubs. Oakland bans smoking in all its clubs. “That’s where the laws could be modified, because you don’t want to take away that social vibe,” Mirkarimi said. “San Francisco needs to be a leader in activating the next step.”

Olive, whose club allows smoking and has a great social scene, agrees that something is lost when the clubs are forced to be simply transactional.

“This is a social healing medicine, and we’re here to promote an inviting atmosphere where people can share their stories,” Olive said. “The whole point is not to just come in and get your medicine, but to be a part of a community.”

That community can range from young stoners to dying old patients, who can both benefit from their communion. “It’s the hippies and the yuppies. Everyone comes here,” Breyburg said. Or as Olive told me, “There is something intrinsically rewarding to sharing a joint with someone, as silly as that sounds.”

The voter-approved Proposition 215 and state law are deliberately vague on what ailments qualify for a doctor’s recommendation, spawning a sub-industry of physicians who specialize in pot, like the ones at the clinic I visited, Dr. Hanya Barth’s Compassionate Health Options in SoMa.

The busy clinic charges around $130 for an initial visit and patients walk away with a legal recommendation, which is all state law requires to legally use marijuana (the clinic recommended also buying a $100 state ID card or a $40 card from the Patient ID Center in Oakland, but I didn’t need them to enter any of the clubs I visited).

The long forms patients fill out even suggest anxiety as an affliction that pot can help, but the clinic also asks patients to sign a waiver to obtain detailed medical records supporting the recommendation. When Barth learned that I have a shoulder separation for which I underwent an MRI a few years ago, she requested those records and added “shoulder pain” to my “anxiety” affliction.

“My goal is not just to give people a recommendation. I look at how I can help or support the person beyond just giving them a recommendation,” Barth told me, illustrating her point by showing me two packs of cigarettes from patients whom she said she convinced to quit smoking.

Her vibe combines the healer and the old hippie, someone who sees a plethora of uses for marijuana and generally thinks society would be better off if everyone would just have a puff and chill out. The clubs also don’t draw distinctions based on their customers’ reasons for smoking.

“There is a distinct difference between medical use and recreational use,” Olive said, telling stories about amazing turnarounds he’s seen in patients with AIDS, cancer, and other debilitating diseases, contrasting that with people who just like to get high before watching a funny movie, which he said is also fine.

But Olive said there’s an important and often under-appreciated third category of marijuana use: therapeutic. “They use cannabis to cope, to unwind, to relax, to sleep better, or to think through problems in a different way,” Olive said.

This third category of user, which I officially fall into, seems to be the majority people I encountered in the local clubs. And while it may be easy for cannabis’ critics to dismiss such patients as taking advantage of laws and a system meant to help sick people, Olive says they play an important role.

“They make it easier for the cannabis clubs to give it away to the people who really need it,” Olive said, referring the practice by most clubs of giving away free weed to low-income or very sick patients, which is supported by the profits made on sales.

The Vapor Room is widely regarded as having one of the best compassionate giving programs, and Olive estimated that the operation gives away about a pound per week through local hospice programs and by giving away edibles and bags of cannabis vapor at the club.

Some of the profits are also used to offer free massage, yoga, chiropractic, and other classes to their members, a system being taken to new heights by Harborside Health Center in Oakland, which has fairly high prices but uses that revenue to offer an extensive list of free services and laboratory analysis of the pot it sells, identifying both contaminants (such as molds or pesticides) and the level of THC, the compound that gets you high.

Olive said there’s also a positive psychological impact of legitimizing the use of marijuana: “It no longer feels like you’re doing a bad thing that you have to be sneaky about.”

As I created my list of the clubs I planned to review, I found abundant online resources such as www.sanfranciscocannabisclubs.com and www.weedtracker.com. But an even better indicator of how mainstream this industry has become were the extensive listings and reviews on Yelp.com.

I combined that information with recommendations from a variety of sources I interviewed to develop my list, which is incomplete and entirely subjective, but nonetheless a good overview of the local industry and the differences among the clubs.

Also, like our restaurant reviewers, I didn’t identify myself as a journalist on my visits, preferring to see how the average customer is treated — and frankly, I was amazed at the high level of friendly, knowledgeable customer service at just about every club. To comply with city law, all the clubs are fully accessible by those with disabilities.

So, with that business out of the way, please join me on my tour of local cannabis clubs, in the (random) order that I visited them:

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DIVINITY TREE

While the reviews on Yelp rave about Divinity Tree (958 Geary St.), giving it five stars, I found it a little intimidating and transactional (although it was the first club I visited, so that might be a factor). But if you’re looking to just do your business in a no-frills environment and get out, this could be your place.

The staff and most of the clientele were young men, some a bit thuggish. One worker wore a “Stop Snitching” T-shirt and another had “Free the SF8.” But they behaved professionally and were knowledgeable and easy to talk to. When I asked for a strain that would ease my anxiety but still allow me enough focus to write, my guy (patients wait along a bench until called to the counter) seemed to thoughtfully ponder the question for a moment, then said I wanted a “sativa-dominant hybrid” and recommended Neville’s Haze.

I bought 1/16 for $25 and when I asked for a receipt, it seemed as though they don’t get that question very often. But without missing a beat he said, “Sure, I’ll give you a receipt,” and gave me a hand-written one for “Meds.”

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: three years

Price: Fairly low

Selection: Moderate

Ambiance: A transactional hole in the wall

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Moderate

Access/Security: Easy. Membership available but not required

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GRASS ROOTS

Located at 1077 Post St. right next to Fire Station #3, Grass Roots has the feel of a busy saloon. Indeed, as a worker named Justin told me, many of the employees are former bartenders who know and value customer service. With music, great lighting, and nice décor, this place feels comfortable and totally legit. Whereas most clubs are cash-only, Grass Roots allows credit card transactions and has an ATM on site.

The steady stream of customers are asked to wait along the back wall, perusing the menus (one for buds and another with pictures for a huge selection of edibles) until called to the bar. When asked, my guy gave me a knowledgeable breakdown of the difference between sativa and indica, but then Justin came over to relieve him for a lunch break with the BBQ they had ordered in and ate in the back.

Justin answered my writing-while-high inquiry by recommending Blue Dream ($17 for a 1.2-gram), and when I asked about edibles, he said he really likes the indica instant hot chocolate ($6), advising me to use milk rather than water because it bonds better with the cannabinoids to improve the high. Then he gave me a free pot brownie because I was a new customer. I was tempted to tip him, but we just said a warm goodbye instead.

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: five years

Price: Moderate

Selection: High

Ambiance: A warm and welcoming weed bar

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy

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HOPENET

Hopenet (223 Ninth St.) is one of the few places in the city where you can smoke on site, in a comfortable, homey style, as if you’re visiting a friend’s apartment. In addition to the loveseat, two chairs, and large bong, there is a small patio area for smoking cigarettes or playing a guitar, as someone was doing during my visit.

Although the small staff is definitely knowledgeable, they all seemed stoned. And when I asked about the right weed for my writing problem, a gruff older woman impatiently dismissed any indica vs. sativa distinctions and walked away. But I learned a lot about how they made the wide variety of concentrates from the young, slow-talking guy who remained.

He weighed out a heavy gram of White Grapes for $15, the same price for Blue Dream, and $2 cheaper than I had just paid at Grass Roots. That was in the back room, the big middle area was for hanging out, and the front area was check-in and retail, with a case for pipes and wide variety of stoner T-shirts on the walls.

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: seven years

Price: Low

Selection: Moderate

Ambiance: Like a converted home with retail up front

Smoke On Site: Yes!

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy

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VAPOR ROOM

Vapor Room (607A Haight, www.vaporroom.com) is San Francisco’s best pot club, at least in terms of feeling like an actual club and having strong connections to its community of patients. It’s a large room where customers can smoke on site, giving this collective a warm, communal vibe that facilitates social interaction and fosters a real sense of inclusiveness.

Each of the four large tables has a high-end Volcano vaporizer on it, there’s a big-screen TV, elegant décor, and large aquarium. There’s a nice mix of young heads and older patients, the latter seeming to know each other well. But, lest members feel a little too at home, a sign on the wall indicates a two-hour time limit for hanging out.

Its early days in the spot next door were a bit grungier, but the new place is bright and elegant. It has a low-key façade and professional feel, and it strongly caters to patients’ needs. Low-income patients are regularly offered free medicine, such as bags full of vapor prepared by staff. Mirkarimi said the Vapor Room is very involved in the Lower Haight community and called it a “model club.”

But they’re still all about the weed, and they have a huge selection that you can easily examine (with a handy magnifying glass) and smell, knowledgeable staff, lots of edibles and concentrates, a tea bar (medicated and regular), and fairly low standardized pot prices: $15 per gram, $25 per 1/16th, $50 per eighth. And once you got your stuff, grab a bong off the shelf and settle into a table — but don’t forget to give them your card at the front desk to check out a bowl for your bong. As the guy told me, “It’s like a library.”

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: six years

Price: Moderate

Selection: High

Ambiance: Warm, communal hangout

Smoke On Site: Yes!

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy, but membership required

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MEDITHRIVE

The newest cannabis club in town, MediThrive (1933 Mission, www.medithrive.com) has a bright, fresh, artsy feel to it, with elegantly frosted windows and a welcoming reception area as you enter. This nonprofit coop takes your photo and requires free membership, and already had almost 3,000 members when I signed up a couple weeks ago. Tiana, the good-looking young receptionist, said the club recently won a reader’s choice Cannabis Cup award and noted that all the art on the walls was a rotating collection by local patients: “We’re all about supporting local art.”

The decorators seemed to have fun with the cannabis concept, with a frosted window with a pot leaf photo separating the reception area from the main room, while the walls alternated wood planks with bright green fake moss that looked like the whole place was bursting with marijuana. There’s a flat-screen TV on the wall, at low volume.

The large staff is very friendly and seemed fairly knowledgeable, and the huge selection of pot strains were arranged on a spectrum with the heaviest indica varieties on the left to the pure sativas on the right. Lots of edibles and drinkables, too. The cheapest bud was a cool steel tin with a gram of Mission Kush for $14 (new members get a free sample), while the high rollers could buy some super-concentrated OG Kush Gold Dust ($50) or Ear Wax ($45) to sprinkle over their bowls.

Prepackaged buds

Open for: three months

Price: Moderate

Selection: High

Ambiance: Professional, like an artsy doctor’s office

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Very low

Access/Security: Easy, but membership required

————

KETAMA COLLECTIVE

At 14 Valencia St., Ketama is a testament to how silly it is that clubs within 1,000 feet of schools aren’t permitted to allow smoking on site. This former café has a large, comfortable seating area and full kitchen, both of which have had little use since a school opened way down the street last year, causing city officials to ban smoking at Ketama.

Pity, because it seems like a great place to just hang out. Yet now it just seemed underutilized and slow. The staff is small (one door guy and a woman hired last summer doing sales), and we were the only customers during the 20 minutes I was there (except for the weird old guy drinking beer from a can in a bag who kept popping in and out).

But it still had jars of good green bud, several flavors of weed-laced drinks and edibles, and a pretty good selection of hash and kief at different prices, and the woman spoke knowledgeably about the different processes by which they were created. To counteract the slow business, Ketama has a neon sign out front that explicitly announces its business — another indication the industry has gone legit.

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: five years

Price: Low

Selection: Limited

Ambiance: Dirty hippie hangout, but with nobody there

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy, but free membership required

————

MR. NICE GUY

Belying its name, Mr. Nice Guy (174 Valencia St.) thrilled and scared me, but not necessarily in a bad way. Located across the street from Zeitgeist, the thug factor here was high and so was the security, allowing no human interaction that wasn’t mediated by thick Plexiglass, presumably bulletproof.

After initially being told by a disembodied voice to come back in five minutes, I submitted my doctor’s recommendation and ID into the slot of a teller’s window, darkened to hide whoever I was dealing with. Quickly approved, I was buzzed into a small, strange room with three doors.

I paused, confused, until the disembodied voice again told me, “Keep going,” and I was buzzed through another door into a hallway that led to a large room, its walls completely covered in brilliant murals, expertly painted in hip-hop style. Along the front walls, a lighted menu broke down the prices of about 20 cannabis varieties.

Then finally, I saw people: two impossibly hot, young female employees, lounging nonchalantly in their weed box, like strippers waiting to start their routines. The only other customer, a young B-boy, chatted them up though the glass, seemingly more interested in these striking women than their products.

I finally decided to go with the special, an ounce of Fever, normally $17, for just $10. I opened a small door in the glass, set down my cash, and watched the tall, milk chocolate-skinned beauty trade my money for Fever, leaving me feeling flushed. It was the best dime-bag I ever bought.

Prepackaged buds

Open for: ???

Price: Moderate, with cheap specials

Selection: High

Ambiance: Hip hop strip club

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: High

Access/Security: High security but low scrutiny

————-

BERNAL HEIGHTS COLLECTIVE

Bernal Collective (33 29th St. at Mission) seemed both more casual and more strict than any of the other clubs in town — and it also turned out to be one of my favorites.

After refusing to buy pot for a guy out front who had just been turned away, I entered the club and faced more scrutiny than I had at any other club. It was the only club to ask for my doctor’s license number and my referral number, and when I tried to check an incoming text message, I was told cell phone use wasn’t allowed for “security reasons.” On the wall, they had a blown-up copy of their 2007 legal notice announcing their opening.

But beyond this by-the-book façade, this club proved warm and welcoming, like a comfortable clubhouse. People can smoke on site, and there’s even a daily happy hour from 4:20–5:20 p.m., with $1 off joints and edibles, both in abundant supply. Normal-sized prerolled joints are $5, but they also offer a massive bomber joint with a full eighth of weed for $50.

The staff of a half-dozen young men were knowledgeable about the 20 varieties they had on hand and offered excellent customer service, even washing down the bong with an alcohol-wipe before letting a customer take a rip from the XXX, a strong, sticky bud that was just $15 for a gram.

Buds weighed at purchase

Open for: five years

Price: Fairly low

Selection: High

Ambiance: A clubhouse for young stoners

Smoke On Site: Yes

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Fairly tight

————-

LOVE SHACK

This longtime club (502 14th St.) has had its ups and downs, the downs coming mostly because of its location on a fairly residential block. After taking complaints from neighbors, the city required Love Shack to cap its membership, although that seems to be changing because the club let me in, albeit with a warning that next time I would need to have a state ID card. It was the only club I visited to have such a requirement.

Once inside this tiny club, I could see why people might have been backed up onto the street at times. But the staff was friendly and seemed to have a great rapport with the regulars, who seemed be everyone except me. The knowledgeable manager walked me through their 20-plus varieties, most costing the standard street price of $50 per eighth, or more for stronger stuff like Romulan.

On the more affordable end of the spectrum was the $10 special for Jack Herrer Hash, named for the longtime legalization advocate who wrote The Emperor Wears No Clothes, a classic book on the history of the movement.

Buds weighed at purchase

Open for: eight years

Price: Moderate

Selection: High

Ambiance: Small, like a converted apartment

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Moderate

Access/Security: Tight

————-

COFFEE SHOP BLUE SKY

Blue Sky (377 17th St., Oakland)is based on the Amsterdam model of combining marijuana dispensaries with coffee shops, although it suffers a bit from Oakland’s ban on smoking. Still, it’s a cool concept and one that Richard Lee sees as the future of marijuana-related businesses because of the synergy between smoking and grabbing a bite or some coffee.

Most of Blue Sky is a small coffee shop and smoothie bar, but there’s a little room in back for buying weed. “We’ve got the best prices around,” said the guy who checked my ID, and indeed, $44 eighths and $10 “puppy bags” were pretty cheap. Customers can also sign up to do volunteer political advocacy work for free weed.

The only downside is the limited selection, only four varieties when I was there, although the woman at the counter said the varieties rotate over the course of the day based on the club’s purchases from growers.

Prepackaged buds

Open for: 14 years

Price: Low

Selection: Very limited

Ambiance: A fragrant little room behind a coffee shop

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy

————–

HARBORSIDE HEALTH CENTER

I have seen the future of legitimized medical marijuana businesses, and it’s Harborside (1840 Embarcadero, Oakland). With its motto of “Out of the shadows, into the light,” this place is like the Costco of pot — a huge, airy facility with a dizzying number of selections and even a “rewards card” program.

All new members are given a tour, starting with sign-up sheets for daily free services that include yoga, chiropractic, acupuncture, reiki, consultations with herbalists, and classes on growing. Then we moved to a section with the clones of dozens of pot plant varieties available for purchase (limit of 72 plants per visit), along with a potted marijuana plant the size of a tree.

Harborside is also blazing the trail on laboratory services, testing all of its pot for contaminants and THC content, labeling it on the packaging just like the alcohol industry does. Some of the smaller clubs don’t like how over-the-top Harborside is, and they complain that its prices are high. But those profits seem to be poured back into the services at this unique facility.

Prepackaged buds

Open for: three years

Price: High

Selection: Huge

Ambiance: A big, open shopping emporium

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Tight

————-

SANCTUARY

The people who run Sanctuary (669 O’Farrell St.), the first club to fully comply with the new city regulations and get its permanent license, have been active in the political push for normalizing medical marijuana, as a wall full of awards and letters from politicians attests. Owner Michael Welch was commended for his work by the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, where Sanctuary employee Tim Durning has been an active longtime member and former elected officer.

Sanctuary has a generous compassionate giving program and caters to lots of poor residents of the Tenderloin neighborhood. While the club is prohibited from allowing smoking, they fudge the restriction with a Volcano vaporizer. “A lot of patients are on fixed income and live in the SROs, where they can’t smoke, so we let them vaporize here whether they buy from us or not,” Durning told us.

Those who do buy from them find a huge selection — including 20 different kinds of hash and 17 varieties of buds — at a wide price range. Staffers know their products well and take their business seriously, giving a regular spiel to new members about responsible use, which includes maintaining neighborhood relations by not smoking near the business.

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: five years

Price: Low to moderate

Selection: High

Ambiance: Campaign headquarters for the marijuana movement

Smoke On Site: No, but vaporizing OK

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy

————–

GREEN DOOR

If low prices or a huge selection of edibles are what you seek, Green Door (843 Howard St., www.greendoorsf.com) could be the club for you.

Eighths of good green buds start at a ridiculously low $25 and go up to just $50 (the cheapest price for eighths at many clubs and also the standard black market price). If that’s not low enough, super-broke users can buy a quarter-ounce bag of high-grade shake for $40.

If you didn’t already have the munchies going in, you’ll get them perusing the huge menu of edibles: from weed-laced knockoffs of Snickers bars and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for just $5 to cupcakes, ice cream, or Chex party mix. They have lots of hash and other concentrates as well.

Somehow, the club also manages to have a strong compassionate giving program and contibutes to local civic organizations that include the Black Rock Arts Foundation, Maitri AIDS Hospice, and Friends of the Urban Forest.

The club itself is a little sterile and transactional, with an institutional feel and employees stuck behind teller windows. But even though that and the steady flow of tough-looking young male customers raise its thug factor a bit, the employees all seemed friendly and helpful, giving free edibles to first-time customers.

Prepackage buds

Open for: 8 years (4 here, 4 in Oakland)

Price: Cheap

Selection: High for edibles, moderate for weed

Ambiance: Like a community bank of cheap weed

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Moderate

Access/Security: Easy access, high security

————–

RE-LEAF HERBAL CENTER

While I had heard good things about Re-Leaf (1284 Mission St.), my first impression was that it’s a little sketchy. As the door guy was checking my recommendation card and ID, I asked whether they allow smoking on site. He looked as if this was a difficult question, paused, and finally told me to ask the people behind the counter.

The small club was blaring gangsta rap when I entered, after a while lowering the volume to compete less with the blaring television set to an ultimate fighting match. It had two small fridges filled with tasty-looking edibles and lots of vaporizers and other merchandise for sale, but only eight varieties of marijuana.

But the service was good, and after knocking $5 off my gram of Jim Jones (a variety I only found here) because I was a first-time customer, he told me it was OK to smoke on site. I sat down on the couch, but there were no bongs, vaporizers, pipes, or even ashtrays to use.

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: two years (three years at previous SF location)

Price: Fairly low

Selection: Limited

Ambiance: A loud head shop that also has some weed

Smoke On Site: Yes and no

Thug factor: Moderate to high

Access/Security: Easy

OMG those Prop. 8 backers are looney

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By Tim Redmond

And if you didn’t already know that, check this out. There’s more in the trial transcripts (pd):

And you say:
15 “The San Francisco city government is under
16 the rule of homosexuals.”
17 Do you see that?
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. Did you believe that, sir?
20 A. Yes, I believed that.
21 Q. Who are the homosexuals that San Francisco is under the
22 rule of?
23 A. Uhm, at that time, supervisor Tom Ammiano was a supervisor
24 there.
25 Q. And there was also a mayor, right?

1 A. Yes.
2 Q. The mayor was a homosexual, was he, according to you?
3 A. I don’t think so.
4 Q. You don’t think so? No, I don’t think so either

,

And

Well, let’s see, as we go through this, how you use words.
25 You go on to say that:

1 “After legalizing same-sex marriages they
2 want to legalize prostitution.”
3 Do you see that?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. Did you think the people who were opposing Proposition 8
6 wanted to legalize prostitution?
7 A. Uhm, that was a Proposition K at that time, on the
8 San Francisco ballot. And I saw several homosexual
9 politicians, they supported that. So I draw from that — from
10 their support that they want to legalize prostitution.
11 Q. But that didn’t have anything to do with Proposition 8;
12 did it, sir?
13 A. No.
14 Q. No, it didn’t.

And

Now, the second paragraph refers to Mayor Newsom. Do
8 you see that?
9 A. Yes.
10 Q. It says:
11 “The mayor says homosexuals are minorities
12 and should not be discriminated against.”
13 Do you see that?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Now, you would agree that homosexuals are a minority,
16 correct?
17 A. I — I don’t believe they are minorities.
18 Q. You don’t believe they are the minority?
19 A. I am a minority.
20 Q. You are a minority.
21 What percentage of the population do you think are
22 homosexuals?
23 A. My understanding of minority is —
24 Q. What percentage of the population —
25 A. — based on skin color.

1 Q. What percentage of the population is homosexual?
2 A. I — what I read is, about from 2 to 4 percent.
3 Q. 2 to 4 percent?
4 A. Right.
5 Q. Is that a minority, sir?
6 A. In terms of their sexual practice, it is.

I don’t even know what to say.

Who will fight corporate America?

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By Steven T. Jones
corpflag.jpg
This morning’s U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision overturning a 103-year-old law limiting corporate spending on elections is a huge setback for the people’s ability to counter the power of Wall Street and multi-national corporations, a development exacerbated by signals that the Democratic Party is retreating from even its nominally left-of-center initiatives in the wake of Tuesday’s loss of its Massachusetts seat in the U.S. Senate.

If this morning’s front page San Francisco Chronicle story is to be believed, Democratic congressional leaders are essentially abandoning health care reform and climate change legislation, shifting instead to focus on “creating jobs and cutting the enormous federal deficit.”

And if Mayor Gavin Newsom’s recent initiatives here are any indication, job creation is synonymous with corporate tax breaks, while deficit reduction probably means the elimination of even more government jobs, further enabling private sector excesses. Yes, the political climate in this country is turning as bleak and stormy as the California weather this week.

But at least downpours provide needed water. With progressive institutions from the anti-war movement to minor political parties at their weakest point in many years, it’s unclear who will unite and lead a public that is growing increasingly frustrated with this country’s political dysfunction and uneven economic recovery (that is, corporations are recovering but most people aren’t).

There are a few faint glimmers of hope. The Chron reports on an alliance between UC students and administrators to push for a reversal of deep cuts to education spending. And spending by labor unions was also unshackled by today’s court decision, which could be helpful if that movement wasn’t in such disarray right now and was willing and able to help lead a broad people’s movement.

But the question facing the country right now is this: who can effectively fight corporate America, and who is willing to do so?

Clouds and mirrors

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1
Clouds and mirrors

Carl Fisher turned a mosquito-plagued, malarial sandbar into Miami Beach, “The Sun and Fun Capital of The World,” in less than a decade — dredging up sea bottom to build the island paradise, an all-American Las Vegas-by-the- Sea, where Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason partied and Richard Nixon received two Republican nominations for president. Art Deco hotels lined the beach, bold as Cadillacs, defiant in the path of hurricanes, their confident Modern lines projecting postwar American power. Morris Lapidus, the architect of the Fontainebleau Hotel, understood that the skin-deep city Fisher conjured out of neon and sunshine was a stage for the leisure fantasies of the ruling class. When his iconic Collins Avenue hotel opened in 1954, Lapidus said he wanted to design a place “where when (people) walk in, they do feel ‘This is what I’ve dreamed of, this is what we saw in the movies.'”

For many years in Miami, that movie was Scarface, as Colombian drug lords shot it out in mall parking lots. A shiny new downtown skyline of banks and condos emerged during a recession economy from the laundered proceeds of drug smuggling. Today the cocaine cowboys have all died, or done their time and moved on. Their descendents are selling art.

Art Basel came to Miami Beach in 2002, and the rise of Miami as an international art world capital neatly coincided with the glory days of the housing bubble. According to Peter Zalewski of Condovulture.com, around 23,000 new condo units were built in and around downtown Miami during the Art Basel era — twice the amount built in the 40 previous years. The success of the international art exhibition has inspired a fever dream among city leaders, in which Miami’s skyline and neighborhoods are radically transformed by art world-related real estate development.

Cesar Pelli’s $461 million, 570,000-square-foot Carnival Center for the Performing Arts opened in 2006 in a moribund section of downtown known for its proximity to the faded 1970s-era mall, the Omni. That same year, the Miami Art Museum (MAM) hired as its new director Terence Riley, the former curator for architecture and design at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Heralded in his new city as “the Robert Moses of the new Miami millennium,” Riley initiated the development of Museum Park. This 29-acre complex would be home to new buildings for the Miami Art Museum and the Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium. It was to be built on the site of Miami’s last public waterfront park, Bicentennial Park, long a sort-of autonomous zone for Miami’s homeless residents. While the new MAM is not scheduled for completion until 2013, by 2007, a 50-floor, 200-unit luxury condo development, 10 Museum Park, had already been finished across the street.

Art Basel Miami Beach brings an estimated 40,000 people to Miami each year to look at art, party, and more important, look at celebrities as they look at art and party. The art fair, once dubbed “the planet’s highest concentration of wealth and talent,” generates an estimated $500 million in art sales each year. Yet while Miami leaders seek to present to the world Basel’s image of wealth and glamour, the iconic image of South Florida today has abruptly become the newly built and entirely empty condo development. Zalewski estimates that 40% of the condo units built since 2003 remain unsold. Florida’s foreclosure rate is the second-highest in the nation, and for the first time since World War II, people are leaving Florida faster than they are arriving. Just months before this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, a New York Times cover story told of the lone occupant in a towering Broward County condo that had gone entirely into foreclosure. As the fair approached, I wondered: can art really save a city like Miami? Or is its reliance on art world money part of the city’s collapse?

ATLANTIS CITY

At this year’s Art Basel, the glitz was, of course, played down, what with the global economic collapse and Art Basel’s main corporate sponsor, top Swiss bank UBS, now the subject of an FBI probe on charges of helping billionaire clients evade taxes. In the weeks before the opening of the fair, it was announced that the legendary UBS free caviar tent would not be open this year. One could not help but notice that the ice sculptures on the beach itself, hallmarks of the recent boom, were gone, already as fabled as the lost city of Atlantis.

Still, the epic “Arts and Power” issue of Miami magazine hit the stands on time, luxurious full-color spreads on oversize glossy pages. Press from all over the world wrote a month’s worth of previews leading up to the event, and on the day of the VIP vernissage, TV news reporters from all continents were there to dutifully record the arrivals of billionaires, celebrities, and fashion models at the Miami Beach Convention Center. As Art Basel Miami Beach 2009 opened, the floor of the convention center was eerily quiet, with hardly a sound except a hushed, determined whisper a bit like paper money being rubbed together. It seemed to me like everyone was doing her or his part, as if the whole art fair was a sort of performance art piece demonstrating the vigor of the free market in dark times.

This murmur ceased completely, and the air filled with the muted clicking of camera shutters, as Sylvester Stallone passed me on the convention floor. Stallone, too, was stoic, his expression hidden by dark sunglasses at mid-day. He stopped next to me and began to talk to TV news cameras about his own paintings on display, presented by the gallery Gmurzynska. Close-up and in person, clumps of the actor’s face, now just inches from mine, seemed to lay inert and dead like the unfortunate globs of oil paint he had arranged on his own canvasses. Pieces of puffy cheek hung limp and jowly under taut eyebrow skin, Botox and facelifts fighting age for control. For a paparazzi flashbulb moment, I thought I saw in Rambo’s sagging face a metaphor for the doomed efforts to prop up a whole failing way of life.

The Miami Beach Convention Center’s 500,000 square feet had been blocked out into booths and concourses that comprised a pseudo-city of art. As a city, it most resembled some parts of the new Manhattan — crowded yet curiously hollowed out and lifeless, under relentless surveillance, full of nostalgia for its former, more vital self. Groundbreaking art that once had the power to shock, move, or startle — Rauschenberg’s collages, Richard Prince’s Marlboro men, Barbara Krueger’s text block barrages — were presented here as high-priced real estate. In the city of art, time stood still; Matisse, de Kooning, and Duchamp had all retired to the same street. A sailor portrayed in a 2009 life-size portrait by David Hockney seemed to gaze wistfully across the hall toward a 1981 silk-screened print of a dollar sign by Andy Warhol. The life-size portraits by Kehinde Wiley felt just like the city in summer, how the radio of every passing car seems to be blasting the same song. A print of a photo of Warhol and Basquiat together in SoHo stood catty-corner to a 1985 Warhol paining of the text, “Someone Wants To Buy Your Apartment Building.”

I wondered if this city of art offered clues as to the kind of city that developers imagined Miami might become.

ART MAUL

Across Biscayne Bay, away from Miami Beach in the city of Miami, the fever dream of art was turning a down-and-out neighborhood in the poorest city in America into an outdoor art mall. Fifteen satellite art fairs and 60 galleries staged simultaneous exhibitions in Miami during the week of Art Basel Miami Beach. Virtually all this art was crammed into about 80 square blocks north of downtown Miami, bisected by North Miami Avenue. The area included Miami’s African American ghetto, Overtown, the warehouse district of the low rent Puerto Rican neighborhood, Wynwood, and the resurgent Miami Design District up to its shifting borders with Little Haiti.

Walking up North Miami Avenue and Northwest Second Avenue the night before the exhibitions began, I could see the usually moribund main drags transforming before my eyes. Warehouses vacant the other 50 weeks of the year were hastily being turned into galleries or party spaces. Solely for Art Basel week, the Lower East Side hipster bar Max Fish had built an exact replica of its Ludlow Street digs in an Overtown storefront. In Wynwood, the paint still appeared wet on a fresh layer of murals and graffiti running up and down the streets.

The modern-day Carl Fisher most perhaps most responsible for dredging this new art world Miami up from the bottom of the sea is Craig Robins. “I transformed the image of my city from Scarface into Art Deco,” is how Robins put it when I talked to him in the Design District offices of his development firm, Dacra. Widely considered to be the person who brought Art Basel to Miami Beach, Robins is, at a youthful 46, the man who perhaps more than anyone embodies the values and tastes of a new Miami where art and real estate have become as inseparable as fun and sun. Robins takes art seriously — he is a major collector of artists like John Baldessari, Elizabeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Richard Tuttle — and he made his name and fortune by restoring the derelict Art Deco motels on his native Miami Beach during the early 1990s into the international high-end tourist destination now known as South Beach. Today Robins is one of the principal owners of the warehouses in the Miami Design District and Wynwood.

With his casual dress, shaved head, and stylish Euro glasses, Robins could easily fit in as one of the German tourists who flock to the discos on the South Beach that he developed. His offices offer a rotating display of the works of art in his collection. Around the time of Art Basel, his staff had installed many works by the SoCal conceptual artist John Baldessari, in honor of Baldessari’s upcoming career retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London. Robins was friendly and projected a relaxed cool; when I’d met him on the convention center floor and asked for an interview, he gave me an affectionate shoulder squeeze and said, “Call my assistant and we’ll hang, OK?” A few days later, he grinned somewhat impishly when I sat down said, “I notice you sat in the Martin Bas chair,” as if it was a Rorschach test. Honestly, it was the only piece of furniture in the design collector’s office that looked dependably functional.

Not surprisingly, Robins was adept at explaining the art theory behind his development projects, and the ways Dacra is bringing art, design, and real estate together “to make Miami a brand name.” He said he learned from the successful preservation of historic buildings in his South Beach projects that consumers were starting to reject the cookie-cutter commodities of the mall and “starting to value unique experiences” made from “a combination of permanent and temporary things.” On the streets of the Design District and Wynwood, Robins sought to bring together restaurants, fashion showrooms, and high-end retail stores, surrounded by parties, international art shows, and public art. “This gives a richness to the experience of Miami,” Robins said. “That is the content that Miami is evolving toward right now.” I thought of Lapidus, the Godfather of Art Deco, and his quote about the Fontainebleau: In Wynwood, Robins wanted to turn not just a hotel lobby but an entire neighborhood into a place where visitors feel they have entered a movie.

Robins grew more excited as he discussed his vision. “With my work at Dacra, I build communities,” he told me. “When we brought Art Basel here, Miami immediately became recognized as a world-class city.”

Others are skeptical. “Miami will always be an attractive place for people to visit in December, but you can’t graft culture onto a city,” says Alan Farago of the widely read blog Eye On Miami. “It’s a mistaken belief that art can be a totem or a symbol of a great city without there being any substance. Miami will continue to be a pretender because there is no investment in local culture beyond building massive edifices like the Performing Arts Center.”

Indeed, the center — now renamed the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center, in honor of a wealthy benefactor — has become perhaps another in a long line of tragicomic failed improvements for the area. Bunker-like, it has been likened by some architecture critics to an upside-down Jacuzzi. Though 20 years in the making and long heralded by boosters as a building that would instantly make Miami a “world-class city,” the center has operated at a deficit and suffered from poor attendance since its opening. The future of Museum Park suddenly turned cloudy a month before the opening of this year’s Art Basel, when Miami Art Museum director Terrence Riley unexpectedly resigned days after unveiling the architects Herzog and de Meuron’s final model for the new buildings. Riley sited a desire to return to private practice as an architect, but online speculation had it that he already knew cash-strapped Miami would ultimately be unable to raise the money to build the museum.

Farago wonders what would change if the city did have the money. “In Miami on one hand, we have public school teachers using their own salaries to buy art supplies for their students,” he says. “Then we have these one-off art events and a performing arts center that brings us road shows of Rent, Annie, and 101 Dalmatians.”

When I asked Robins what lasting benefits Art Basel provided to the community, he cited a roster of new restaurants opened by star chefs and fashion showrooms. “It encourages people to come down here year-round,” he said. It was clear that Robins was discussing amenities designed for tourists, or for a speculative community of future residents who might be enticed to come to Miami.

I suggested that there were actually two different communities in Wynwood with potentially opposing interests. I told Robins I’d attended a community meeting held by the activist groups Power University and the Miami Workers Center. There, Wynwood residents discussed how their rents had doubled, how the city continued to neglect the facilities at Roberto Clemente Park, and how the increased presence of police escorting the art patrons to the new galleries had made them feel like they didn’t belong in their own neighborhood.

Robins, who had been very loose and calm during the first 45 minutes of our talk, became visibly upset. He launched into a sustained rant. “Well, look, active communities are a good thing,” he said, shaking his head. “But just because a community is active doesn’t mean it is rational. You go and sit in these meetings and half the people are nuts. Half are just there because they are miserable people and they have some soapbox to go and rant about all these things that they think they have some entitlement to attack government about when they never do anything themselves for anyone. I find that 20 percent of these people are totally irrational, mean-spirited people who would never agree with anyone about anything good.”

“What kind of people do you mean?” I asked.

“People who feel disenfranchised! They’re very angry. They have psychological problems and they want a forum to vent. I’m not implying we should stifle democracy — I’m a big believer in it! I’m saying these people should not be taken seriously by enlightened people!”

Robins rose to look at a clock on his desk. Not surprisingly, our time was up. I politely excused myself to the restroom. When I returned it was like no tantrum had ever happened. Robins’ impish grin even returned as I asked him to pose for a photo in front of one of his Baldessari prints. I had him stand in front of Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That are Different (By Sight/ First Version), a 1972-3 triptych of photos. As the artist looks into a mirror at clouds over his shoulder in the sky, he blows out a mouthful of twisting cigar smoke, trying to match their elusive shape in the air.

GIMME DANGER

Out on the streets of Wynwood, it was still mostly quiet, expectant, but the scene at David Lynch’s art opening gave one a sense of what the coming weekend would be like. Lynch was presenting photos from a book of staged stills he is releasing with a CD of music by Danger Mouse. Hundreds of hipsters, mostly locals, guzzled free booze and gawked when new Miami resident Iggy Pop showed up, shirtless as usual, in a Miami Vice-style blue blazer. As I watched the Godfather of Punk pose for pictures with his arm around Danger Mouse, I thought of the city of art, the Jackson Pollacks and Donald Judds together at last, on the convention center floor. I had the eerie feeling that the Internet had come to life.

I left the opening and walked at random through the streets of Wynwood at 2:00 a.m. While looking at murals and thinking about the changes Art Basel had wrought, I unexpectedly came upon a small street party of people I knew. The side street intersection was lit up like a stage with an enormous floodlight. Street artist SWOON stood high on a scissor lift, painting a mural on a warehouse wall, while below a couple of kids dressed like old tramps wrestled with a big, brown stuffed bear.

The bear split open, and thousands of tiny white particles of stuffing poured out into a warm Miami breeze, swirling high into the air and reflecting the glow from the floodlight. I ran to join the kids, who were now playing and laughing in the sudden snowstorm. A guy I recognized from Brooklyn rode by on a tall bike. Bay Area artist Monica Canilao went careening by on a scooter with no helmet. A cop drove by and smiled and waved. Guys from Overtown with cornrows and gold teeth were laying out a spread of huge chicken legs on a flaming grill. Some punk kids from Brooklyn sat on the curb, drinking beer. A girl in the group laid her head on a boy’s shoulder as they all watched SWOON work.

For a second, I flashed back to the Stallone scene earlier in the day, back on the convention floor. Here, in this intersection, I had found something living and breathing. This could be the real city of art. But I also knew the SWOON mural was commissioned by Jeffrey Deitch. I stood and watched the painting and the dancing and laughing and eating in the fake December snowstorm and contemplated what the city would be like if we all had the free time, resources, and permission to take to the streets and transform the city any way we pleased. Was this a window to a different world where anything might be possible?

Or was it just art?

The second half of this essay will run in the Jan. 27 Guardian. *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Hard Times Handbook

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Hard Times Handbook

It’s tough out there. The recession is supposed to be over, although you’d never know it to walk the streets of San Francisco. But we’re here to help; our Hard Times Handbook offers tips on bargains, deals, and discounts to make those fewer dollars go further.

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Broke doesn’t mean bored

Eight great ways to have fun in San Francisco for $5 or less

By Johnny Funcheap

Living on a tight budget and still trying to have fun in San Francisco is a near impossible task. This is an expensive city, thanks to the reality that everyone wants to live in the tiny 49-square-mile cultural oasis — driving up rents and the cost of just about everything else.

Despite its reputation, the city is actually getting slightly more affordable, if ever so relatively. (In 2008 San Francisco actually fell in the rankings of most expensive cities in the U.S. from fourth to fifth.)

Leading the charge toward making the city a more affordable place to have fun are numerous businesses, government-run sites, and co-ops that are trying to survive in the recession themselves — and using big discounts and fun free events to try to lure you in.

Here’s a list of my favorite deals and freebies I’ve found so far for 2010.

CAFÉ ROYALE

Waving the flag high for nightlife in the Trendynob with its curved couches and velvet curtains is the cozy beer and wine bar Café Royale. This late-night venue (it’s open until 2 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays) stages more than 20 nights of free events each month, an eclectic mix of live entertainment that includes jazz bands, Beatles karaoke, book readings, slam poetry, stand-up comedy, and even the odd accordion night. You can dine on small plates and noshables until the wee hours, and wash them down with a robust selection of wines by the glass and creatively yummy Soju cocktails like the Pom Pom and Creamsicle. And for billiards fans, Café Royale has one of the few three-quarter size tournament tables in San Francisco at just 75 cents a game.

800 Post at Leavenworth. 415-441-4099. www.caferoyale-sf.com

COUNTERPULSE

More an arts and culture community hub than just a performance space, CounterPULSE serves as a home and venue for a diverse mix of local artists, dancers, and playwrights to practice and showcase their latest works. A majority of the events at this nonprofit theater (plays, dance performances, as well as classes and workshops) are free. For more elaborate productions that require tickets, CounterPULSE has a wonderful “no one turned away for lack of funds” policy. You can also get in free by donating a few hours of your time to the volunteer usher program.

1310 Mission at Ninth St., 415-626-2060. www.counterpulse.org

$5 MOVIE NIGHT

Saving money on going out to the movies used to mean you had to blag your way to a cheap ticket using a long-expired student ID or arrive by lunchtime to save a few bucks on a matinee ticket. The historic Roxie Theater has done away with all of those shenanigans, at least on Monday nights, with cheaper-than-matinee prices ($5) to all films (except for the odd film festival or special screening when regular ticket prices still apply). This stalwart of the Mission District, which recently celebrated its 100th birthday, is an independent art-house theater that shows limited-run art, music, foreign, and documentary films on two small screens.

Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., 415-431-3611. www.roxie.com

BART DISCOUNTS AND FREE RIDES

You didn’t think BART — notoriously expensive for commuters — could be the source of cheap events, did you? Well, mybart.org, run by the transit system, lists a calendar of free events that take place close to BART stations. The site also gives you access to an constantly updated bevy of special discounts like two-for-one theater tickets, museum discounts, and heavily-discounted tickets to Warriors and Cal basketball games. For those of you who only respond to free, mybart.org also puts together ticket contests with different prizes each week, like the chance to win one of five preloaded $50 BART tickets.

www.mybart.org

PIER CRABBING

Hell with Fisherman’s Wharf and its giant crab sign. Forget the pricey crab dinners at local restaurants. You can learn how to be your own crusty crab-fisher, right in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. The National Park Service staffers at the historic Fort Port (built in the 1850s) give free pier-crabbing demonstrations every Saturday morning from March to October. After the class, they’ll even loan you crabbing equipment so you can put your newly-learned skills to the test. Space is limited and advanced reservations are required.

Fort Point, Marine Drive, Saturdays, 10 a.m.–noon, March–Oct. (415) 556-1693 www.nps.gov/fopo

THE HISTORY OF BAY AREA ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

Feeling nostalgic? You can get a taste for the era when the Bay Area and the psychedelic music scene were the center of the rock ‘n’ roll universe at the Museum of Performance and Design’s free history exhibit “Something’s Happenin’ Here: Bay Area Rock ‘n’ Roll 1963-73.” On display at this one-of-a-kind exhibit are the full-size original painting that made in onto the Grateful Dead’s “Anthem in the Sun” album cover, costume pieces worn by stars like Janis Joplin and Sly Stone, and original posters from the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom, along with a collection of previously unseen rock photos. Visitors can also listen to rare audioclips and watch vintage film footage they probably never knew existed. Exhibit runs through Aug. 28. It’s free, but the museum suggests a $5 donation.

Museum of Performance and Design, Veterans Building, 401 Van Ness, Fourth Floor. Wed.–Sat., noon–5 p.m. www.mpdsf.org

AMERICAN BOOKBINDERS MUSEUM

If you’re really looking for a blast from the past, check out the free exhibit at this little-known museum. Bookbinding is the art of physically assembling and sewing the pages and spine of a book by hand — a skill that was made essentially obsolete (at least, for the purpose of mass-production) with the dawning of the Industrial Revolution. But the nonprofit American Bookbinders Museum, part of a working bookbindery that still practices this art, documents the history of how books used to be put together with exhibits celebrating the skilled artisans who bound books, samples of vintage papers, and a maze of large and terrifying-looking 19th- and early 20th-century binding and cutting machines (many of which could cut off all your fingers in one go if you stood too close).

1962 Harrison at 16th St., Saturdays, noon–4 p.m. and by appointment, (415) 710-9369. www.bookbindersmuseum.com

SAN FRANCISCO BICYCLE COALITION

Unless you want to walk, there’s really no cheaper way to get around town than on a bicycle. And for the tens of thousands of San Franciscans who use bikes as their main mode of transportation, the Bike Coalition is a co-op knight in shining armor. The advocacy group, whose members successfully fought more than 200 miles of bike lanes in the city as well as bike access on Muni and BART, also puts on and sponsors a handful of events each month such as free urban cycling workshops to help you navigate the city streets safely, themed guided bike rides, and many other bike-friendly events. Membership starts at $35 per year, but many of their events are free for nonmembers or for a $5 donation.

www.sfbike.org

D-STRUCTURE

Owned by former pro skater and X-Games judge Azikiwee Anderson, D-Structure in the Lower Haight blurs the line between retail store, art gallery and performance space in a big way. Every month, this self-described “lifestyle clothing brand culture store” lets local artists take over the space and use the entire store as their canvas. For launch parties, which take place several times each month, the merchandise displays of urban hoodies and t-shirts and hip beanies are pushed to the walls to make room for DJs and events that range from art openings with live painting to indie rock shows, hip hop album release parties and film screenings. And did we mention the open bar? During its nighttime events, most of which are free and open to the public, D-Structure has been known to bring in a truck load of beer; that’s what happened on New Year’s Eve.

520 Haight, 415-252-8601, Mon.–Sat., noon–8 p.m.; Sundays, noon–6 p.m. www.d-structuresf.com

Johnny Funcheap runs FunCheapSF.com, a free SF-based service that uncovers and shares a hand-picked recommendation list of more than 50 cheap, fun, unique Bay Area events each week.

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Drink early and often

Five great happy hours that offer bargain booze — and amazing food deals

By Virginia Miller

BAR CRUDO’S HAPPY HOUR

About the best crudo (and some of the best seafood) anywhere, Bar Crudo’s new digs on Divisadero Street provide ample room for you and your friends. You want to go at happy hour; there’s free food and you can also get sweet deal on what is arguably one of the best seafood chowders around. A creamy bowl rich with fish, mussels, shrimp, squid, potatoes, and applewood-smoked bacon goes for $5 (normally $14). Oysters from British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, and Washington are normally $2.50 each, but only $1 during happy hour. Beer and wine specials rotate, $5 for wine or $3 for beer — and we’re not talking PBR. Bar Crudo is known for a broad selection of Belgian and artisan beers, not to mention some beautiful wines.

Mon.–Thurs., 5–6:30 p.m. 655 Divisadero.415-409-0679. www.barcrudo.com

SEAFOOD HAPPY HOUR AT SWELL

For happy hour with a touch of class — and an affordable price — you can’t beat Swell, a delightful, under-the-radar crudo/seafood restaurant. The post-work crowd gets $1 oysters — and not just any oysters, but our own local Point Reyes’ bivalves. There’s ceviche with kampachi and butterfish or mackerel bruschetta with garlic-ginger oil ($8 each). For imbibing, sip $6 Bellinis and Kir Royals or $6 glasses of chardonnay, syrah, or rosé.

Mon.–Thurs., 5–7 p.m. 603 Bush. 415-956-0396. www.swellsf.com

AVENUE LOUNGE’S FREE BRATS ON SUNDAYS

I’ll give you three words: bacon bloody marys. That alone makes it worthwhile trekking to Outer Sunset’s Avenue Lounge on a Sunday. But it gets better: buy any of the $3 well drinks or draft beers ($5 to upgrade to Belvedere or Hennessy in your cocktail) and they’ll throw in free brats and chips. Yes, you heard right: dogs, beer, and football on the flatscreens for $3. At that price, you could settle in all day.

Sundays, 10a.m.–2 a.m.. 1334 Noriega. 415-731-3757

NAMU’S FREE-FOOD MONDAYS

Monday night is free food night at Namu, the Richmond District’s gem of an Asian fusion restaurant that combines Korean and Japanese cooking techniques with Cali-fresh cuisine. With an order of sake, beer, or glass of wine, you can nibble on what Namu is dubbing “drinking food”: bite-size tapas, skewers, and spreads with Asian flair. If you can’t stay out late on a Monday night, there’s a weekday happy hour from 5-7 p.m.

Mondays, 9:30–10:30pm. 439 Balboa. 415-386-8332.www.namusf.com

DOSA ON FILLMORE’S SOUTH INDIAN HAPPY HOUR

This Pac Heights wing of Dosa has the feel of a chic London Indian restaurant, with striking chandeliers and gorgeous Indian-influenced cocktails. The happy hour rocks with a rotating selection of beer (like India’s Kingfisher), wine (maybe a Dona Paula Argentinean malbec) and, yes, those cocktails (how about “Mood Indigo,” i.e., Buffalo Trace bourbon, jackfruit marmalade, Angostura bitters, and a splash of sparkling wine) for a mere $5 each. For the same price, there’s a range of South Indian snacks like cochin calamari sautéed in coconut milk and served with a julienned salad, or a mung sprout salad with fresh lentils, tomatoes, ginger, cucumber, grated coconut, chile, and mustard-seed oil.

Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–7 p.m. 1700 Fillmore. 415-441-3672. www.dosasf.com.

Virginia Miller writes about food for sfbg.com and offers advice for great meals at theperfectspotsf.com

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Drinks on the cheap

By Caitlin Donohue

“No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage.” So said our illustrious forefather and part-time debaucher, Thomas Jefferson, on the importance of happy hour. We are proud of the brave bar-owning San Franciscan souls who have held true to his vision of a nation built on cheap booze and high spirits. Here assembled are their numbers, true patriots that they are.

BAR ON CHURCH

Some days you want to get drunk and throw peanut shells on the floor. This is a practice aided and abetted by the B.O.C., which serves up 50 cent PBR’s (that elixir from the heavens for the broke-as-hell contingent) and free peanuts from 4-8 p.m. on Saturdays. Sit down, throw one back and get nutty with it.

198 Church, SF. (415) 355-9211. www.thebarsf.com

TSUNAMI SUSHI

With more than 100 sake bottles on the menu, Tsunami is usually off-limits to those with holes in their pockets. Not so during happy Hour (Mon.-Fri. 5-8 p.m., Sat. 6-9 p.m.) when all bottles and selected maki rolls are half off. Try the Sho Chiku Bai nigori sake, a sweet, creamy, unfiltered 720 ml that’ll only run you $16 — ureshii yo!

Mon.–Fri. 5–8 p.m., Sat. 6–9 p.m. 301B King, SF. (415) 284-0111. www.dajanigroup.net

EL RIO

Ah, Mondays at El Rio. If shuffleboard and easy access to cheap burritos isn’t enough to pull you Outer Mission-ward, than peep their very special Monday happy hour: $1 Pabsts, $2 wells all the live-long day. Get you in with that and then tell us you can’t hang with the hipster hangouts.

3158 Mission, SF. (415) 282-3352. www.elriosf.com

KYOTO SUSHI

Japanese businessmen have a reputation for sealing big deals utterly, blackout snookered. Something about how you can only really know a man when he’s being slapped by the waitress for being fresh or passed out drooling on your suit jacket. At any rate, sushi restaurants like to get you drunk. Check out Kyoto, where the anytime special of draft Sapporos for 99 cents will compel you to raise one to the salaryman.

1233 Van Ness, SF.(415) 351-1234. www.kyotosushi-sf.com

BRAIN WASH LAUNDROMAT

Now here’s a multitask for you: get drunk, listen to good music, and wash your clothes. Only one spot in the city where that’s a go — and to celebrate the lineup of fresh tunes and clean threads, Brain Wash Laundromat is offering $1 Pabst during happy hour and $3 wine glasses all the time. Drop by for its acoustic open mic nights Tuesdays at 7 p.m.

1122 Folsom, SF. (415) 861-3363. www.brainwash.com

BEAN BAG CAFE

Not only does this sunny, warm café serve the most bangingest breakfast burrito and plethora of bean blends in the city, the folks there have a soft spot for the low-income set. Bean Bag proves it with $1.75 Stella Artois and 21st Amendment beers on tap; just the ticket for easing your way through that mid-afternoon caffeine-booze transition. Just don’t spill on the laptop and you’re golden, you pillar of the community, you.

Bean Bag Café. 601 Divisadero, SF. (415) 563-3634 *

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How to fight foreclosure

By Caitlin Donohue

You’ve finally found your dream home, an apartment so well-loved even you can afford it. You settled in, cleaned the carpet, set the mouse traps … and then the eviction notice arrives: your landlord’s been foreclosed on. And the bank that owns the place now wants you out.

It’s happening a lot in this city, where tenants get caught in the financial meltdown through no fault of their own. But don’t panic: in most San Francisco buildings, foreclosure isn’t a legal grounds for eviction. But you’ll have to stand up for your rights.

Here’s what the San Francisco Tenants Union advises:

•If you sense your landlord’s at the brink of foreclosure, watch for telltale signs: realtors checking out the property or repairs that go unresolved. Keep in mind that lack of money is no defense for maintaining property, so call the Department of Building Inspections at 415-558-6200 for help with holding property-owners to their repair responsibilities.

•Once the eviction notice due to foreclosure arrives, find out if you are covered by rent control. If you aren’t (if your rental was built after 1979 then you definitely aren’t) the bank has the power to evict you within 90 days. If you do have rent control, you have eviction protection. This means the bank can’t evict you or raise your rent.

Unfortunately, the bank might not know that if it’s based outside the city or state. Ignore the letters to vacate and contact the bank of its property agent directly to let them know you have protection. Then file a wrongful eviction petition with the SF Rent Board, which also handles cases from Oakland, Berkeley and West Palo Alto (forms available at the office at 25 Van Ness, SF or online at www.sfgov.org/rentboard).

•Rent control or no, landlords can only collect rent on foreclosed properties until the deed of trust has gone to the bank. Determine who has control of your property to avoid paying rent twice. This information is available at the City Assessor’s Office at 415-554-7915. Send letters to the bank and to your landlord saying you have the money but don’t know who to pay. Until you can determine who has control, don’t pay rent.

For more resources, check out SF Tenants’ Union Web site at www.sftu.org.

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Avoid check-cashing fees

By Caitlin Donohue

ATM charges, big old monthly fees, frustrating commercials — oh Lord, save us from these banks! But you can’t live without ’em either — the average unbanked American spends 5 percent of his or her income at the check-casher. In San Francisco, we drop a total of $40 million a year accessing our own money — not to mention how much goes toward money order fees.

Enter the Bank of San Francisco, the mayor’s brainchild that allows city residents to open a checking or savings account for $5 a month or less. The bank is open to those without Social Security numbers as well as residents who have a poor record with accounts in the past. Go to www.bankonsf.org for more information on the program, or keep an eye peeled for one of the 140 participating city banks that have a “Bank on SF” sign in their window. There’s no reason to pay check-cashing fees any more.

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Food so cheap, it’s free

Let’s level here: how broke are you? Two-for-one beers and discounted oysters are all well and good for the casually unmonied, but there are times when one needs a real deal on nutrition — like, food that really is free. If we’ve got your number, here’s the Web site for you: www.freeprintshop.org, whose printable calendar lists 20 organizations that dish up meals open to all comers, including Food Not Bombs’ vegetarian dinners, which are served four times a week in U.N. Plaza. Free Print Shop gets the posthumous thumbs-up from Abraham Maslow: the up-to-date info on shelters, mental health, and neighborhood resources in the city has the bottom tier of your hierarchy of needs covered. Except for maybe the sex part; that might be another Web site. (Caitlin Donohue)

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Inner peace, by donation

It is said that whenever Buddha would speak to an audience that had not yet recognized him as their spiritual teacher, he would first expound on the concept of dana, or giving. If the listeners were unable to grasp this basic principle, he knew they weren’t ready for the Four Noble Truths.

Would that all yoga studios were this enlightened. I mean, $20 for 90 minutes of inner peace?

We are lucky that with a little bit of looking one can find financially accessible ayurveda even here, in the city of yoga-yuppies. Case in point: Yoga to the People, whose beautiful new Mission District studio (and fixture Berkeley location) offers three classes a day by donation, some of them by candlelight and all of them dana approved. And they’re not the only ones. Here’s a list of places that will relieve that tension you’ve been holding, including the strain in your wallet. (Caitlin Donohue)

YOGA TO THE PEOPLE

Class schedule online, donations

2673 16th St., SF

64 Shattuck, Berkeley

www.yogatothepeople.com

GREY AREA FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS

Mondays, 6-7:30 p.m., donations

55 Taylor, SF

www.gaffta.org

SPORTS BASEMENT

Sundays, 1-2:30 p.m., free

1590 Bryant, SF

(415) 575-3000

LAUGHING LOTUS

Mon.-Fri. 2:30–3:45 p.m., donations

3261 16th St., SF

(415) 335-1600

www.laughinglotus.com

SATORI YOGA STUDIO

Mondays, 4:15– 5:15 p.m., free

40 First St., SF

(415) 618-0418

www.satoriyogastudio.com

PURUSHA YOGA

Saturdays, 11 a.m., free

Main entrance of Botanical Gardens

Golden Gate Park

Ninth Ave. and Lincoln Way, SF

(415) 694-8412

www.purushayoga.org

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Learning to love the rec centers

With free gyms, darkrooms, and play areas, city rec centers may be the athlete (or artist’s) answer to the bum economy

By Molly Freedenberg

I’ve always though of recreation centers as places where kids took cheap summer camp classes or attended awkward junior high school dances. But these city-funded centers are actually some of the coolest, most affordable, and least appreciated resources any community has to offer — and especially so in San Francisco.

From weight rooms and basketball courts to dance studios, dog parks, and performance-ready auditoriums, SF’s neighborhood centers offer a variety of resources for budget-conscious adults as well as their kids. Use of most facilities is free (or, on rare occasions, costs a nominal fee) and classes and workshops are priced low with a sliding scale and scholarship option.

Why does the city allocate $34.5 million in general fund support to maintain these centers every year? According to Elton Pon, spokesperson for the Recreation and Park Department (which also oversees public spaces like Golden Gate Park and Coit Tower), “they keep the city sane.”

We’ve outlined the resources at some of our favorite centers, but check parks.sfgov.org for a full list, sfreconline.org for programs, or call (415) 831-5520 for information on renting rec center buildings.

CHINESE RECREATION CENTER

This Nob Hill neighborhood center caters primarily to youth in Chinatown, which is most apparent weekdays after 3 p.m. when its gym areas fill up with teenage boys. But everyone can enjoy volleyball, basketball, and even dance in its indoor gym, outdoor hoops, and mini weight room. The secret to getting some grown-up time? Visit early on weekdays or after 7 p.m.

1199 Mason. (415) 292-2017

EUREKA VALLEY REC CENTER

Well-maintained and recently renovated, this Castro District facility is a favorite for its resources and fantastic location (there’s a grocery store right next door, not to mention the full Castro shopping corridor a block away). Parents love that the indoor and outdoor play areas are especially good for toddlers. Dog-owners love the enclosed dog run. Sporty adults appreciate that the basketball court is regularly relacquered, while event planners focus on the auditorium with raised stage and 70-seat capacity. Special bonuses? An LGBT Teen Center and an especially girl-friendly gym scene.

100 Collingwood. (415) 831-6810

HARVEY MILK ARTS CENTER

Geared more toward artists than athletes, this recently reopened center in Duboce Park is a dream-come-true for creative-leaning folks on a budget. With dark room, dance studio, costume room, meeting spaces, and variety of other opportunities, HMAC is a fantastic and affordable alternative to adult education courses, expensive dance studios, and booked-up theater spaces.

50 Scott. (415) 554-9523

MISSION REC CENTER

This hidden gem, often overlooked by athletes headed to Mission Cliffs, offers everything your K-12 schools did — without the homework or early call-time. Mission Rec provides a weight area, ping pong tables, squash courts, a dance studio (complete with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and enclosed storage space), basketball court, outdoor playground area, and a full auditorium with stage and curtains (and food prep area).

2450 Harrison. (415) 695-5014

POTRERO HILL REC CENTER

Most people notice the baseball fields first — a full-block expanse of green, grassy oasis in the center of what’s still mostly an industrial area. But this city property also offers a well-maintained indoor basketball court, recently revamped playground, decent tennis courts (though lights rarely work), and a dog-friendly area that notoriously extends to the rest of the park when games aren’t in session. Not feeling sporty? Check out the infamous mural of O.J. Simpson (who apparently used to frequent the park as a kid) or the fantastic view of the city and the bridge from the south/southeast end of the park.

801 Arkansas. (415) 695-5009

RICHMOND REC CENTER

Catering primarily to the very young and the very old, people in the middle can certainly appreciate this classic neighborhood meeting spot. Play badminton, volleyball, or take advantage of the dance studio (where many city dance programs are held). Or just people-watch: weekdays are great for spying toddlers in the big indoor play area or quieter play-and-craft spot; weekends are when older Asian ping pong masters take over.

251 18th Ave. (415) 666-7020

UPPER NOE REC CENTER

Newish, bright, and clean, this well-loved and well-funded facility also is one of the few with its own Web site (hosted by friends of the Noe Valley Recreation Center). The bright, shiny spot offers indoor and outdoor basketball courts, a playground, baseball field, tennis court, dog park, and (according to parents-in-the-know), an inordinately nice sandbox. Indeed, this spot is known for being especially good for babies and toddlers. Another bonus? A multipurpose room that can be rented for small events features an A/V system, stage area with upgraded theater curtains, and a large movie screen with a projector.

30th Sreet, west of Church. (415) 695-5011. www.noevalleyreccenter.com

Restoring majority rule

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Restoring majority rule

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lame duck response to California’s projected $20 billion state deficit has given supporters of more than 30 budget and revenue-related state initiatives now in circulation a renewed sense of urgency as they scramble to gather signatures and qualify proposed solutions to the state’s ongoing financial emergency for the November ballot.

But while this plethora of initiatives reflects widespread frustration over the state’s broken system of governance, disagreement rages over how to fix it and how best to restore majority rule to California.

“These are the hardest decisions a government must make, yet there is simply no conceivable way to avoid more cuts and more pain,” the governor told reporters Jan. 8 as he released a new budget proposal calling for $8.5 billion in cuts to state workers’ wages, health and human services, and prisons; a legally questionable $4.5 billion shift in other funds; and $6.9 billion in federal reimbursements that have yet to be approved.

Even steeper social services cuts are in the works, Schwarzenegger warned, if the feds don’t comply with this request for a bailout. But he refused to target corporations and millionaires as revenue sources, clinging instead to the standard Republican pledge not to raise taxes.

“We didn’t hear him say, ‘We are going to pinch the wealthy and the corporate,'<0x2009>” State Sen. Mark Leno observed. “He is definitely setting his sights on the social safety net.”

Recent revolts within the public university system, including the November takeover of UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall, suggest that tuition hikes, layoffs, and reduced study options have brought students to the tipping point.

But UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff fears that without restoring majority rule to the state’s budget and revenue-related measures, such revolts only address symptoms, not causes, of the impasse.

So Lakoff decided to author the California Democracy Act, an initiative that would replace the state’s two-thirds requirement on budget and revenue bills with a simple majority vote, after Sen. Loni Hancock invited him to meet with a group of Democratic state senators last spring.

“She said the Democrats were having problems getting anything done, and I went away saying, ‘this is ridiculous,'<0x2009>” Lakoff said. “It occurred to me that since the problem came by way of the initiative process, then it was possible to rectify it that way.”

Proposition 13, approved by voters in 1978, limited property tax increases and required a two-thirds supermajority in the Legislature to approve most new tax increase, measures that contributed mightily to the state’s bleak financial situation.

California also requires a two-thirds vote for the Legislature to approve the annual budget, along with only Arkansas and Delaware. On Jan. 5, Sonoma State philosophy professor Teed Rockwell told the Potrero Hill Democratic Club to endorse Lakoff’s initiative, noting that California is the only state to require two-thirds vote on budget and revenue bills.

“I have learned that essentially everything that is uniquely wrong with California results from this one fact,” Rockwell said.

California has the largest number of millionaires in the U.S., but as Rockwell observed, thanks to the fiscal stranglehold of the Republican minority, “We do not have enough money to keep our parks open or maintain affordable tuition at our public colleges. And the extremists in Sacramento want to solve this problem by decreasing taxes on millionaires and increasing taxes on the middle class.”

Rockwell noted that of the 22 states that produce oil in the U.S., all have oil severance taxes, including Sarah Palin’s Alaska and George W. Bush’s Texas — except California.

But while the California Democracy Act simply resolves that “all legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote,” neither the state Democratic Party nor the major unions are willing to support Lakoff’s measure, citing its bad results in the polls.

Instead, veteran legislator and California Democratic Party Chair John Burton is backing a Hancock proposal that seeks to reduce to a simple majority the Legislature’s voting requirement on budget bills.

Lakoff warns that budget bills merely determine how to slice the pie, while revenue bills determine the size of the pie. This means that if Democrats succeed in only reforming the state’s budget voting requirements, they’ll still be stuck with having to make painful cuts.

But Hancock, who has been living with the results of this fiscal gridlock since she was elected to the state Assembly six years ago and helped sponsor the failed oil severance tax initiative in 2006, believes decisions to cut prison or education spending are not trivial.

“Last year Democrats gave $2 billion in tax breaks just to get one desperately needed Republican vote on the budget,” Hancock told the Guardian. “And now the Republicans are asking for takeaways on environmental and labor protections that they otherwise wouldn’t have any power to negotiate.”

“I am a realistic idealist,” Hancock continued. “I believe we are better off to get the majority vote to pass the budget. That way, the minority might begin to negotiate and have a more rational conversation. I’m very pleased that throughout the state, folks are recognizing that state governance is broken.”

California Tax Reform Association executive director Lenny Goldberg told us it’s hard to choose between the Lakoff and Hancock initiatives.

“It’s a question of what’s achievable, of how to focus energy,” Goldberg said. “Lowering the vote requirement for the budget would eliminate some of the hostage-taking and help reverse the corporate loopholes that the Democrats were forced to accept to get a budget passed. So at least it would make the budget process better.”

But he agrees that budget reform only makes the Democrats solely responsible for the budget, while preventing them from raising revenue.

“So there is some disagreement whether it’s better to do one, if you can’t do tax reform,” he said. “In the end, it’s a strategic, not substantive, question. Is it better to do budget alone, or not at all? Personally, I think we’re better off doing budget reform than nothing — but it’s a close call.”

Hancock and Lakoff both believe that a competing initiative, endorsed by Schwarzenegger and funded by the group California Forward, is the poison pill in the upcoming fiscal equation.

“Unfortunately, it’ll make it harder to raise fees,” Hancock said.

“It should be renamed California Backward,” Lakoff quipped, noting that while the California Forward initiative supports a simple majority on budget bills, it seeks to raise to two-thirds the voting threshold on new fees.

California Forward executive director Jim Mayer said his organization supported Prop. 11, the redistricting measure that passed in November 2008, “as a start to melt the political gridlock.

“And our two initiatives will help legislators do a better job of spending the pie,” Mayer added, noting that his group is talking to Democrats and Republicans as well as counties, cities, and branches of the Chamber of Commerce.

One of California Forward’s initiatives seeks to change the budget vote requirement to a simple majority and create a two-year budget cycle. It also forces the Legislature to use one-time revenues for one-time expenditures — and requires a two-thirds vote on fee increases, raising Democrat hackles.

“When the Legislature attempts to replace what’s currently a tax on utilities with a fee, currently they can do that with a simple majority. But people on the right tend to worry that if you eliminate a tax and call it a fee, it’s illegal,” California Forward spokesperson Ryan Rauzon explained.

The other initiative would allow county governments to identify priorities and raise revenue with a simple majority vote, Mayer said, a plan he claims is about “empowering local governments.”

Newsom’s faith-based economic plan

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By Steven T. Jones
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The theory that cutting taxes on corporations and the rich creates wealth that eventually trickles down to help everyone — a policy that drastically widened the income gap — is back, and in San Francisco of all places.

Is it “ideological” to question whether the business tax cuts that Mayor Gavin Newsom is proposing will exacerbate the city’s huge budget deficit, potentially doing far more harm than good? Press Secretary Tony Winnicker, who finally returned my call about the proposal, told me that it is.

But Winnicker denied that conservative economic ideology is behind Newsom’s belief in the healing power of business tax cuts, calling it simply “practical” and telling me, “The mayor doesn’t share your hostility toward the private sector.”

That may be true, but I don’t share his hostility toward the public sector, which would lose even more of the “jobs” that Newsom claims to value so highly in order to pay for his experiment in trickle-down economics. Winnicker grudgingly acknowledged that short-term fiscal reality – and the fact that they didn’t study how much revenue will be lost before proposing the plan, or in the year since it was first pitched — but argued that it will somehow help the city over the long run.

“We believe that enacting these tax incentives, particularly the payroll tax credit for new hires, is one of the single biggest things we can do for economic growth,” Winnicker said.

But he couldn’t cite any evidence supporting that belief, which is a matter of faith for economic conservatives. Yet even the city’s fairly conservative economist, Ted Egan, says that reducing government spending in order to cut business taxes just isn’t smart.

Newsom’s corporate giveaway

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By Steven T. Jones
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After going through a ridiculous security check (I waited 15 minutes for an “escort,” but they never even inspected my bag) to get into Mayor Gavin Newsom’s invite-only State of the City speech last night in the Asian Art Museum, I chatted with my colleague Melissa Griffin, the blogger and Examiner columnist, as Newsom worked the room.

The mayor eventually wound his way over to me, and when I turned to greet him, he gave me a playful shove, knocking me off balance and telling me, “Be nice!” Just minutes into his speech, in which he promoted corporate tax breaks and a discredited “local economic stimulus package,” I understood what he meant.

When he introduced this trickle-down economics initiative almost a year ago, we cited studies showing that it was a political gimmick that didn’t work and shot down Newsom’s claim that the city’s economist supported this giveaway of public funds to the private sector.

But last night, Newsom chided the Board of Supervisors for not scheduling hearings on his proposal to waive payroll taxes for new businesses and new jobs, create tax credits for health insurance costs, and extend current tax breaks for biotech companies, seemingly oblivious to the fact that such actions will add to the massive budget deficit that he barely mentioned.

The Chronicle today quoted gleeful Chamber of Commerce head Steve Falk and the chilly reaction that this strange initiative got from supervisors, but San Francisco Democratic Party chair Aaron Peskin went even further, this morning telling us, “I am so disappointed that the mayor of San Francisco is taking a page from the playbook of the Republican Party. This sounds like Ronald Reagan’s trickle down economics. In an era when some of the richest corporations have made zillions of dollars and the U.S. government just gave them zillions more, now we’re going to close hospitals and say we can’t pave our streets.”

Prison report: Jails v. education

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By Just A Guy

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They’re spending a lot on prisons, but not on lunch — this is what CDCR serves

According to an article in the SFGate and the governor’s State of the State address the governor wants to increase spending on higher education and reduce spending on prisons. Personally, I don’t care if this is political wrangling or not, it’s about the most sensible thing to come out of the governor’s office in quite some time with respect to prisons and prison spending.

“It’s a very simplistic solution to a very complex problem,” said Sen. George Runner, R-Lancaster. “I believe the first priority of state government is to keep people safe. To cap that certainly doesn’t make any sense to me.”

You know, sometimes simple solutions to complex problems are the only solutions that work. It seems as if California and its government have been over thinking the whole issue on prisons for quite a while. If more money is spent on higher education then maybe less people will go to prison? Simplistic, yes, but makes sense, right?

What’s so complex about the problem anyway? The complexity really lies in how, after many years of an increasing prison budget and a decreasing higher education budget, years of crying out how awful EVERY SINGLE PERSON in prison is, years of political maneuvering, the political folks will reduce costs while standing by their claims that less spending on prisons erodes public safety. That is the complex part.

There will be many detractors like Sen. George Runner, but they are not thinking long term or big picture. They appear to be concerned only with their political futures, either that or they are just idiots (maybe both). I have, in many past blogs, expressed the idea that if you educate you reduce public safety risk. If these politician’s are really concerned with public safety they will gladly make more funds available to higher education.
Meanwhile, take a look at the pictures in this blog and ask…who is really making money from CDCR. It ain’t the inmates!

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CDCR celebrates the capture of inmate cell phones — but who do you suppose smuggles them in an makes money off them?

Oh — and they aren’t spending much money on maintenance, either — at least, not when it comes to the plumbing. Everything at CDCR seems to be in the shitter:

Meister: Get off the bandwagon, Willie

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City employees and working people generally need all the friends they can get in these perilous times. Willie Brown is not likely to be one of those friends in need.

By Dick Meister

(Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century.)

As former Mayor Willie Brown suggested in his Sunday Chronicle column on Jan. 3, “it’s time for politicians to begin an honest dialogue” about civil service. For starters, Willie should get his facts straight and get off the anti-public employee bandwagon that so many politicians are riding these days.

Brown said, for instance, that “the deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life.”

Not so, Willie. Public employees were paid less because, if they were qualified for their jobs – as shown by civil service tests and other means – they were more likely to continue working for the government and were willing to accept long-term benefits – primarily health care and pensions – in lieu of higher pay.

The SF Weekly still gets it wrong

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By Tim Redmond

I found it somewhat amusing that the SF Weekly’s writers, Benjamin Wachs and Joe Eskenazi, were really worried about whether we would be “professional” in responding to an inaccurate story about city finance:

We appreciate that the Guardian was kind enough to send us its letter prior to running its article, likely this week. Communications from the paper’s reporter have been thoughtful and professional — so we hold out hope that this may be an article that could do more than simply obscure San Francisco’s gaping weaknesses with analytical smokescreens. On the other hand, it may yet be a hit piece written for the benefit of the city political bodies the Guardian openly aligns itself with and shills for — and who are responsible for some of the misgovernment highlighted in our story

And then go on to respond to us with a piece that’s mostly snark – snark being the refuge of reporters who don’t really have facts to lean on.

I’m going on KQED’s Forum show Friday morning to debate the Weekly guys about this, which will be fun, but in the meantime I have to set something straight.

From the Weekly story:

The Guardian gets to break its own rules and compare San Francisco’s budget to L.A.’s and Chicago’s by “add[ing] to the L.A. and Chicago city budgets a percentage of the L.A. County and Cook County spending equal to each city’s percentage of the county population.”

This would make perfect sense — if it didn’t make no goddamn sense. You can’t just determine overlapping city and county budgets via long division; cities are cities and counties are counties because they have differing, separate services. L.A. City and County each have their own Departments of Public Works, Building Inspection Departments, road crews, parks departments, you name it. Cities pay for their own services because they usually don’t use the counties’. Simply adding a lump sum of county costs on to city costs makes about as much sense as multiplying the city numbers by Planck’s Constant.

Whoa – Planck’s Constant. Dude – you musta gone to college or something.

The fact is that you not only CAN compare SF to Los Angeles and Chicago by accounting for both city and county spending – you HAVE TO.

A little lesson in public finance here, since that’s one college class the Weekly boys apparently slept through.

Most communities in the U.S. have four basic levels of government – federal, state, county, and city (or township, or town). Some have even more (village etc.) and some have fewer (Connecticut abolished county-level government many years ago). And there are special districts, like BART and AC Transit and school districts and mosquito abatement districts and lots more.

But for this particular argument, we’re looking at state, county and city government. That’s what you get in California.

The counties, as operating arms of the state, provide many, many services – expensive services – to people who live in cities. In Los Angeles, for example, there’s a city police department that handles law enforcement. But after someone’s arrested by the LAPD, the COUNTY district attorney, the COUNTY public defender, and the COUNTY courts system take over. And if the perp is guilty, the COUNTY sheriff takes custody (or else the state does).

Los Angeles COUNTY provides much of the welfare money for poor residents of Los Angeles CITY. Los Angeles COUNTY runs the system that counts the ballots for Los Angeles CITY elections.

You get the point.

So if you want to compare spending in the city of Los Angeles to spending in the CITY AND COUNTY of San Francisco, you have to either (a) eliminate all of the functions that count as county services in San Francisco or (b) much simpler, estimate what percentage of the L.A. county budget goes to services in L.A. city.

We took a rational approach – take the population of L.A. city and the population of L.A. County, and apportion to L.A. city a percentage of the county budget equivalent to the proportion of county residents who live in the city. That’s probably a low estimate of county spending in L.A. city, since more of the crime and welfare needs of the county are situated in that one city than in any other part of the vast county.

But whatever, we’ll take the lowball number.

Not magic, not physics, not chemistry, just basic common-sense and a basic understanding of how finance works in American cities.

Is this perfect? No. What you really need to do is analyze exactly how much government money – state, federal, city, county, special district etc. – is spent in every city you want to compare. That’s a bigger task than either the Weekly or the Guardian has taken on so far.

And I admit – we may be wrong by a few percent one way or the other. But we aren’t the ones trying to claim that the city spends vastly more money than anyone else who compares to us.

Oh, and as for this:

On the other hand, it may yet be a hit piece written for the benefit of the city political bodies the Guardian openly aligns itself with and shills for — and who are responsible for some of the misgovernment highlighted in our story

Let me point out that most of the problems the Weekly points to are management issues that properly belong in the office of the Mayor of San Francisco.

And I don’t know in what possible universe – other than a Weekly hallucination – anyone could argue that Gavin Newsom is someone the Guardian is, or has ever been, aligned with.

Is SF spending too much money?

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By Tim Redmond

When the SF Weekly ran its cover story a couple of weeks ago calling San Francisco “the worst-run big city in the U.S.” my first thought was to ignore it. That kind of claim is meaningless; it’s just a flashy headline, and the story didn’t back it up with much more than a few examples of bad management of the sort that occur in cities all over.

So what makes San Francisco “the worst?” Well, part of it, said the Weekly, is the fact that SF spends more money per capita than any comparable city and county. In fact, according to a chart the Weekly included in its story, SF spends more than twice as much per capita as Philadelphia (which is actually a comparable city, with big-city problems and a fairly rich service mix) and spends more than four times as much as Indianapolis (which isn’t comparable for a lot of reasons).

But the minute I started paying attention to that chart, I knew there was something really wrong. Melanie Ruiz and I spent some time checking it out, and we found that the “comparisons” are somewhere between misleading and totally bogus.

Here’s what we found.

What’s important here is that it’s really hard to compare any two cities in America on this level. Cities are organized in so many different ways, and their budgets are set up so differently, that any direct comparison is going to look like apples to oranges.

For example, Philadelphia and San Francisco both have extensive, costly public transportation systems. Taxpayers in both cities underwrite those systems. But in Philly, the system, known as the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority, is a distinct agency (like BART is out here); the city and county of Philadelphia contributes $63 million a year to its operations, but the major overhead costs are outside of the city budget.

There’s an airport in Philly, too. It’s expensive to run, just as SFO is expensive to run. It mostly pays for itself through landing fees, just as SFO does. In San Francisco, the cost of the airport (which takes no taxpayer money) is included in the city budget; in Philly, it’s not.

People in Philly who get sick and have no insurance don’t die in the streets – but that city and county doesn’t fund a public hospital the way SF does.

In fact, San Francisco’s budget includes just about everything that any city offers. It’s not that this city provides services nobody else does (well, we do, but that doesn’t explain the budget differences entirely). It’s that other cities and counties don’t include those services in their budgets.

Now, the folks at the Weekly, who criticized our story before it was even out, argue that

Yes, our city pays for things others don’t — but, then, other cities have to maintain aging infrastructure weakened by extreme heat and cold. Other cities have to keep up municipal vehicles ravaged by salt. Other cities have to shovel snow. Other cities have miles and miles more pothole-filled streets to look after. Other cities’ Sheriff’s Departments have many more responsibilities than San Francisco’s. Other cities have police forces larger than several European nations’ standing armies and security costs that dwarf this city’s.

All of which is true – and makes the point that you can’t do exact comparisons without doing a whole lot more work than the Weekly did on its chart.

But most of those items are million-dollar items – shoveling snow costs Denver, for example, millions a year – but not hundreds of millions or billions. Same for filling potholes. (Most cities don’t have Sheriff’s Departments, by the way – that’s a county function – and the county sheriffs who do more work are policing unincorporated areas. And the only city with that massive police force is New York, which is so unusual that it’s hard to compare it to any other American city.)

But the bottom line is, those are (comparatively) small-ticket items. The items that make a city budget seem huge are the departments and programs that run in the multiple hundreds of millions of dollars, and those tend to be things like public hospitals, transit systems, and airports. In SF, they account for more than $2 billion a year – and because of the way this city is set up, all of that goes in the same $6.5 billion budget.

We tried several ways to make a better comparison, which you can see here (pdf)

We compared general funds to general funds (something the Weekly got wrong). We deflated the SF budget by taking out those big-ticket items that other cities don’t include in their budgets. We tried to find cities more comparable to SF – big cities with big-city problems and services – and we tried to adjust those budgets to account for the fact that some of those cities get extensive services that are paid out of separate county budgets.

And we did something else: We took into account the cost of living. The vast majority of what the city budget (here and elsewhere) goes for is salaries of city workers. It costs a lot more to live here, so we pay our workers better. There are plenty of academic studies that look at comparable costs of living in cities; we used a generally accepted one.

And when we were done with all of this we came to the conclusion that SF doesn’t spend more than comparable cities; it’s really about the same.

Now that’s probably unfair to San Francisco (and Los Angeles). We’re in California, where the state doesn’t spend as much per capita on programs that aid cities as other states do. Yes, the state has a budget of more than $100 million dollars, but 40 percent of that goes for education – and in many other states, local property taxes pay for much of the cost of public schools. In California, thanks to Prop. 13, local property taxes are inadequate to provide decent public schools, so the state has taken up the burden.

When you take that factor out of the state budget, and compare California to other states, the per-capita spending is pretty low.

Our comparisons aren’t perfect. There are other cities to look at, other line items to examine, other methods of comparing that are also valid. The folks who read this blog (and the folks at the Weekly) will no doubt argue with our methods, and I bet somewhere in there we made some mistakes. But overall, I think our approach is more accurate.

People who live in cities typically pay taxes to several levels of government – the feds, the state, special districts (like BART), school districts (except in California), counties and the cities themselves. I would argue that San Franciscans probably pay less per capita than the residents of many other cities (certainly less as a percentage of their income). We just pay it all into one big pot.

That’s why the SF Weekly chart was so misleading. And why this kind of argument shouldn’t be used to say that San Francisco spends too much money on government.

I’m not going to argue that local government is perfect, or that it’s free or corruption and waste. There’s a lot of waste in San Francisco (does the mayor really need five press aides?) and plenty of inefficient spending.

But overall, it’s not a whole lot worse than other cities. That’s my conclusion.

Outside SF Federal Building, freedom of assembly is carefully controlled

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By Rebecca Bowe

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GSA’s denial of a permit for an event outside the SF Federal Building inspired some art.

Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP), a homeless advocacy group based in San Francisco, says he’s got busloads of people from cities up and down the West Coast headed into San Francisco Jan. 20 for a rally designed as a plea to the Obama Administration to make affordable housing a priority. But the estimated 1,500 participants in the event, dubbed “Homelessness Ends With a Home,” were left without a home base after word came down from the San Francisco Federal Building that the permit to hold it there had been revoked.

The event has since been changed to a permitted march that will go by the building, but Boden says the message he’s getting from the feds is essentially that freedom of assembly outside the new federal building will only be granted on narrowly defined terms, and with restrictions on the number of people who can attend. The San Francisco Federal Building, a green-design tower on Mission and 7th streets that opened in 2007, houses the offices of senators Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Jean Gibson, Regional Public Affairs Officer at General Services Administration (GSA), a government agency that manages the new federal building, says the permit denial was “no effort to silence the group,” but purely a decision to ensure functional operation and public access to the building.

WRAP had initially applied to hold the event in the plaza outside the building, and Boden says he specified in his permit application back in October that roughly 1,500 people were expected to attend, and that they planned to use a sound system. GSA approved the application and sent the nonprofit an event permit on Nov. 30, according to Boden. But a couple days later, after he called to ask where the port-o-potties should be placed, he says GSA responded with a disheartening email.

“After further review, General Services Administration (GSA) has made the decision to deny the use of the San Francisco Federal Building plaza area on January 20, 2010,” the email stated. “Thanks in advance for your understanding regarding this matter.”

Mount Vision Pond

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Rating: C

A few years ago, authorities told us that Mount Vision Pond, in Point Reyes National Seashore, may become too clogged with debris for swimming as early as this season. The reason: the federal government won’t pay to clean out and fix the dam of this half-acre manmade site. Instead, said then-PRNS district ranger Marc Yeston (currently the chief ranger at Colorado’s Black Canyon Of The Gunnison National Park and nearby Curecanti National Recreation Area): “It’s going back to nature.”  

Legal status:

Property of Point Reyes National Seashore.

How to find it:

From San Francisco, take Highway 101 north to the Sir Francis Drake Boulevard exit. Follow Sir Francis Drake through San Anselmo and Lagunitas. At the intersection with Highway 1, go north to the Point Reyes National Seashore office in Olema, pick up a map, and then follow Bear Valley Road to Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. Take Sir Francis past Inverness and Tomales Bay State Park and follow the signs to North Beach. Turn left on Mount Vision Overlook Road. Stay on Mount Vision for about 1.4 miles. Look for a wide shoulder with several parked cars on the right. Take the trail that starts here. It veers to the right down a hill 300 feet or so to the pond. If you pass some residences on the left, you’re on the wrong trail. At the end, enter the water via a grassy spot on the dam face

The beach:

Mount Vision is a 150-foot-long lake surrounded by plant growth. “Half of the lake is now marsh,” says Robert Carlsen, of Sacramento.

The crowd:

Sometimes no one, usually fewer than 10 people, both clothed and unclothed.

Problems:

Trail around pond becoming choked by plants; increase in reeds and mud; dam appears to be eroding; trail needs maintenance; cold, fog (but less than at Limantour); no social atmosphere; trail shoes needed.

The year in blog

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By Steven T. Jones
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It’s been a big year on this blog, as I discuss in this week’s paper. To go along with that story, I’m including in this post a ridiculous number of links to issues and stories that we covered the most in 2009, as well as some to one-time or limited coverage stories that we liked. We hope you find this useful.

Fiscal issues
The year began with the Board of Supervisors calling for a special election on revenue measures to prevent deep cuts to city government, but that effort was thwarted by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s preference for hollow fiscal gimmicks and opposition to general tax increases. Similarly, on the state level, Republican opposition to revenue side solutions has all but destroyed the California Dream — including the state’s commitment to supporting quality, affordable higher education – prompting calls for a constitutional convention in the near future, as the political dysfunction leads to bad decisions about critical state resources.

Police oversight and crackdowns
The fatal shooting of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer a year ago led to a long saga of promised civilian oversight that still hasn’t been delivered. In the meantime, San Francisco got a new police chief who promised reforms, but has so far delivered only crackdowns, pushing the city closer to the Death of Fun as popular events and nightclubs face an ever more restrictive enforcement environment. Police also failed to own up to a bungled murder investigation.

City life
The face of San Francisco began to change in 2009, for better and worse. Lennar and PG&E continued to corrupt the local political system, compromise the promise of green power, break promises, and subvert popular will. But partially countering their corporate malevolence were grassroots efforts to reclaim the streets and promote alternative transportation options (despite a major defeat this year for those who want motorists to pay for more of their societal impacts), including the long–awaited construction of bicycle projects after a three-year ban.

Meister: Union rights for airport screeners

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Airport screeners and other vital employees of the
Transportation Safety Agency should finally have the basic rights and protections they have so long needed and deserved

(Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.)

The underpaid, overworked and otherwise poorly treated airport screeners who are essential to air passenger safety may finally be winning their long struggle for the badly needed union rights guaranteed other federal employees.

There are more than 40,000 screeners –- a first line of defense against terrorism — posted at X-ray machines, checkpoints and elsewhere in air terminals throughout the country. They work for the Transportation Safety Agency (TSA) that was set up in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 1, 2001.

Such related workers as federal border guards and immigration and Custom Service employees are unionized. But in 2003, President Bush denied union rights to screeners and other TSA employees on grounds that their unionization would somehow “threaten national security.”

A majority in the House and Senate voted in 2007 to restore the screeners’ union rights. But the congressional majority wasn’t large enough to overturn a veto threatened by the president, and the attempt was abandoned.

Denying the fundamental right of unionization to the screeners, as the United Nations’ International Labor Organization ruled, violates “core labor standards.”

The screeners’ need for unionization should be as obvious as the nation’s need for their invaluable service. Their complaints are widespread and numerous. They cite, for instance, inadequate pay, low morale, a high rate of workplace injuries, unfair promotion and scheduling policies, arbitrary work rules and high turnover rates.

The screeners’ hope for wining union rights rests primarily with President Obama, who voted as a senator to grant screeners union rights and promised during his presidential campaign to make granting them the rights “a priority for my administration.”

Winning congressional approval won’t be easy, but is also expected, despite stiff opposition expected to be led by a notably anti-labor Republican senator, John DeMint of South Carolina. He argues, much as George Bush had argued, that unionizing TSA employees would amount to putting air security and safety in the hands of those old right-wing bugaboos, “union bosses.”

Senator DeMint and his reactionary colleagues probably will lose their attempt to deprive some of our most deserving workers their basic rights. But they undoubtedly will cause some damage along the way to their ultimate defeat.

DeMint already has managed to stall Senate confirmation of Obama’s nominee to head the Transportation Safety Agency and carry out the reforms sought by Obama and TSA‘s employees. He’s invoked Senate rules to postpone the vote on whether to confirm the president’s appointment of a well-regarded former FBI agent and assistant chief of the Los Angeles Airport Police, Erroll Southers, to run the agency.

In the meantime, two government employee unions are competing for the right to represent TSA employees once they are granted union rights. The competition undoubtedly will result in more and stronger employee demands for improved conditions as the two unions vie vigorously to represent them.

One of the unions is the largest of federal employee unions, the 600,000-member American Federation of Government Employees, the other the 150,000-member National Treasury Union. But despite its much smaller size, the Treasury Union won three years ago in competing with the Federation of Government Employees to represent airport Customs and border protection officers.

The unions have been waging a vigorous campaign , signing up members, establishing union locals at airports nationwide, helping workers appeal unfair disciplinary actions, filing grievances against employer mistreatment and other actions. Both unions have promised to press hard for pay raises, better promotion policies and work rules and other matters important to TSA employees.

No matter which union wins, it’s certain that the airport screeners and other vital employees of the Transportation Safety Agency should finally have the important basic rights and protections they have so long needed and so long deserved.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister,com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Editor’s Notes

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Editor’s Notes

A year ago, we were dancing in the streets celebrating Barack Obama’s election. Now we’re marching in the streets protesting his escalation of the war in Afghanistan — and a lot of us are calling for the defeat of his signature legislation. That’s a failure that goes well beyond a couple of bad policy decisions, and it threatens more than just the next few years of Obama’s presidency.

The late philosopher Herbert Marcuse used to say that the worst disaster of the Vietnam War was the division it created between the baby boomers and their parents, the generational distrust that would last well beyond the final artillery fire. And I fear that the worst legacy of Afghanistan and the mess that is health care reform will be another deep blow to whatever fragile faith remains among young Americans that a well-meaning president and his party can make a difference, the faith that government can accomplish something worthwhile — and that the public sector is worth the fight it takes to save it from a well-organized and lavishly funded effort to continue the privatization of the United States.

The fight over the public option in the health care bill wasn’t just about containing costs, or preventing tax hikes, or mandating fair competition. The insurance industry knew that from the start.

One of the reasons the radical right has always hated Social Security is that it’s a government program that helps people, one that tens of millions of citizens rely on and support. When the government sends you a check every month, you tend to think of the folks in Washington as something other than crooks, liars, and villains.

And if the government offered health insurance that cost less than the private companies, covered more, and was less of a hassle to use, then millions more American voters would begin to realize that the public sector can do some things very well — much better than private industry. And that would be a social transformation on the scale of the New Deal.

So that’s why the insurers and their toadies wouldn’t allow it to happen — and why, in the wake of the Afghanistan fiasco, Obama’s failure to force the issue is such a momentous disappointment.

Just look around the streets of San Francisco at any antiwar demonstration and you see the problem. We’re mad at the president, not at the insurance industry. Nobody’s marching in front of the headquarters of the handful of big companies that have — as a matter of course and intentional policy — destroyed the health care system in America. We figure: hey, they’re just big businesses, doing what they do.

So instead, we’re going to be pissed off for a long time at the man who — maybe for just a moment, one bright shining moment — had the ability to turn around about 50 years of cynicism and distrust that has poisoned American politics. And we should be pissed, because he let us down. He promised us hope. Now he’s giving up, without even putting up much of a fight.

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