Housing Archives — Page 23 of 76 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Tidbits on tech, race and gentrification in the Bay Area

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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February 6, 2013

The media and blogosphere have given us plenty to chew on lately as columnists, subversive Tweeters, and mischievous YouTube producers take to the Internet to examine issues of tech, race, class and gentrification in the Bay Area. To wit:

Chronicle muttering about Oakland Art Murmur San Francisco Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson is making noise about clamping down on the Oakland Art Murmur, saying Oakland is “asking for trouble” if it doesn’t rein in the popular, freewheeling monthly street festival that draws young creative types to the city center for art, food truck delights, street dance parties and the occasional African drum circle or impromptu magic show. “The street fair should be pared down to a manageable size,” Johnson proclaimed, pointing to a shooting that occurred at the last one to argue his point. It’s sad that an act of violence marred the latest Art Murmur, but we hope Johnson’s column isn’t a harbinger of some forthcoming campaign to sanitize the wildly successful, organically flourishing event. And for some reason, Johnson’s latest diatribe reminds us of this hilarious video we found on the Internet.

Using technology to examine issues of race and technology Jamelle Bouie, a journalist and blogger for The Nation, started a conversation about race and Silicon Valley in a thought-provoking article for The Magazine, revving up the Twittersphere by wondering out loud: “Why is tech writing so white?” Which promptly set off an online debate between Bouie, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, and a host of others who piled on to voice their own strong opinions on Silicon Valley and racial diversity. That exchange, in turn, was Storified by Buzz Feed staff writer Matt Buchanan, who also blogged it. Here’s how Buchanan distills the digital debate: “One of the side effects of the Valley’s belief in its own progressiveness is an occasional blindness to the gap between its belief and its reality. Spanning that disconnect for some is a myth that the Valley is a total meritocracy that isn’t subject to wider systematic problems of racism and sexism; that it is, in some ways, a truly hermetically sealed bubble.”

“Anti capitalist comrades” headed to court Remember when San Francisco prosecutors subpoenaed the Twitter account information of two activists who attended a Columbus Day protest that led to an ugly clash when the police showed up? The request for Twitter account information was abandoned after a host of civil liberties organizations challenged it on First Amendment grounds, but the protesters are still scheduled for a Feb. 8 court appearance on charges ranging from unlawful assembly to battery on a uniformed officer. On a website set up in support of the ACAC19 (the 19 arrestees identify as “anti-colonial, anti-capitalist comrades”), organizers say prosecutors’ demand for Twitter records should be regarded as “evidence that the SFPD is using the case to map and surveil radical political networks in the Bay area.” We don’t know the extent to which San Francisco cops are engaging in such surveillance, but if Twitter’s transparency report is any indication, police have shown a growing interest in social media interactions across the board. To Twitter’s credit, the company logs all law enforcement information requests and tallies them in regular reports. The most recent data shows that law enforcement agencies have filed 1,858 user information requests with the San Francisco-based tech company since Jan. 1, 2012. During the second half of last year alone, U.S. law enforcement agencies filed 815 user information requests.

Google Bus invasion As we mentioned in this week’s cover story, San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit’s 3,900-word meditation on the Google Bus as it relates to San Francisco’s housing affordability crisis is a must-read.

“Creative class” expert: Service workers should get paid more Today’s Morning Edition on NPR featured an interview with Richard Florida, an urban scholar who has studied the rise of the “creative class” in cities like London, Sydney and, yes, San Francisco. Apparently, Florida has arrived at the groundbreaking conclusion that in order to maintain healthy economic balance, cities ought to find ways to boost the pay of service workers. Here’s an excerpt:

“A city or a metro region is much better off – if it has a large share of knowledge workers, of innovators, entrepreneurs, artists, professionals that make up the creative class, the wages and income of that city go up. The problem is that others have said this has a trickle-down effect, that these wages benefit everyone. And I’ve been skeptical of that from the beginning … I’ve pointed out that places that have large creative class concentrations have a greater level of inequality.

“We actually looked at the amount of wages and salaries people have left after housing. If you do that, the creative class, they do better … but everybody else does worse. The point I’m trying to make with all this is that you’re better off with more knowledge workers, but sooner or later, we’re going to have to develop strategies in our country to boost the wages and salaries of the more than 60 million workers who deliver our services, who prepare our food, take care of our homes, wait on us in stores. We’re going to have to make their wages higher if everyone’s going to prosper.”

Out of place

Andrew Lam

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February 5, 2013

414

news@sfbg.com

In his State of the City address last week, Mayor Ed Lee cheerfully characterized San Francisco as “the new gravitational center of Silicon Valley.” He touted tech-sector job creation. “We have truly become the innovation capital of the world,” Lee said, “home to 1,800 tech companies with more than 42,000 employees — and growing every day.”

From a purely economic standpoint, San Francisco is on a steady climb. But not all residents share the mayor’s rosy outlook. Shortly after Lee’s speech, renowned local author Rebecca Solnit published her own view of San Francisco’s condition in the London Review of Books. Zeroing in on the Google Bus as a symbol of the city’s housing affordability crisis, she linked the influx of high-salaried tech workers to soaring housing costs. With rents trending skyward, she pointed out, the dearth of affordable housing is escalating a shift in the city’s cultural fabric.

“All this is changing the character of what was once a great city of refuge for dissidents, queers, pacifists and experimentalists,” Solnit wrote. “It has become increasingly unaffordable over the past quarter-century, but still has a host of writers, artists, activists, environmentalists, eccentrics and others who don’t work sixty-hour weeks for corporations — though we may be a relic population.”

LIMITED OPTIONS

The issue of housing in San Francisco is highly emotional, and there is perhaps no greater flashpoint in the charged debate than Ellis Act evictions.

When the housing market bounces upward, Ellis Act evictions tend to hit long-term tenants whose monthly payments, protected by rent control, are a comparative bargain. Even if they’ve submitted every payment on time and upheld every lease obligation for 20 years, these renters can find themselves in the bind of being forced out.

And they don’t just lose their homes; often they lose their community. San Francisco has become so expensive that many Ellis Act victims are tossed out of this city for good.

Enacted in 1986, the state law allows a landlord to stop renting units, evict all tenants, and sell the building for another purpose. Originally construed as a way for landlords to “go out of business” and move into their properties, the Ellis Act instead gained notoriety as a driving force behind a wave of evictions that slammed San Francisco during the tech boom of the late 90s. Between 1986 and 1995, just 29 Ellis evictions were filed with the San Francisco Rent Board; in the 1999-2000 fiscal year alone, that number ballooned to a staggering 440.

Under the current tech heyday, there are indications that Ellis Act evictions are gaining fresh momentum. The San Francisco Rent Board recorded 81 this past fiscal year, more than double that of the previous year, and there appears to be an upward trend.

TIC CONTROVERSY

Buildings cleared via the Ellis Act are typically repackaged as tenancies-in-common (TIC), where several buyers jointly purchase a multi-unit residence and each occupy one unit. Realtors often market TICs as a path to homeownership for moderate-income individuals, creating an incentive for buyers to enter into risky, high-interest shared mortgages in hopes of later converting to condos with more attractive financing.

The divide between TIC owners and renters came into sharp focus at a contentious Jan. 28 hearing, when a Board of Supervisors committee met to consider legislation that would allow some 2,000 TIC units to immediately convert to condos without having to wait their turn in a requisite lottery system.

One TIC owner said he was financially burdened, but had only entered into the arrangement because “I wanted to stay here and raise my family, but we couldn’t afford a single family home.” Yet tenants brought their own set of concerns to the table, saying the temptation to create TICs was putting a major dent in the city’s finite stock of rent-controlled units — the single greatest source of affordable housing in San Francisco.

“My feeling is, let’s stop doing TICs,” Tommi Avicolli Mecca, a tenants right activist with the Housing Rights Committee, told the Guardian following the hearing. “The city has to just start making sure that the condos that are built are the kind of thing [TIC buyers] can afford. Instead, we cannibalize our rental stock? That’s a reasonable way? You evict one group of people to house another: How does that make sense?”

The grueling five-hour hearing illustrated the sad fact that San Franciscans in a slightly better economic position were being pitted against economically disadvantaged renters. The two groups were bitterly divided, and all seemed weary, furious, and frustrated by their housing situations.

The condo-conversion legislation, co-sponsored by Sups. Scott Wiener and Mark Farrell, did not move forward that day. Instead, Board President David Chiu made a motion to table the discussion until Feb. 25, to provide time for “an intensive negotiation process.” Chiu, who rents his home, added: “While I myself would like to become a homeowner someday … I do not support the legislation in its current form.”

Sup. Jane Kim sought to appeal to the tenants as well as the TIC owners. “It’s very tragic that we have set up a situation where [TICs and renters] are pitted against one another,” she said. She hinted at what a possible alternative to might look like. “We should be looking at a ban of scale,” she said. “If we allow 1,800 potential units to go thru this year, are we willing to do a freeze for the next 8 to 10 years?”

It’s unclear what will happen in the next few weeks, but if this legislation makes it back to the full board in some form, the swing votes are expected to be Sups. London Breed, Malia Cohen and Norman Yee.

CASH OR EVICTION?

New protections were enacted following the late-90s frenzy to discourage real-estate speculators from using the Ellis Act to turn a profit on the backs of vulnerable seniors or disabled tenants. Yet a new wave of investors has discovered they can persuade tenants to leave voluntarily, simply by offering buyouts while simultaneously wielding the threat of an Ellis Act eviction. “The process got more sophisticated,” explains San Francisco Rent Board Deputy Director Robert Collins.

Once a tenant has accepted a check in lieu of eviction, rent-controlled units can be converted to market rate, or refurbished and sold as pricey condos, without the legal hindrances of an eviction blemish. Buyouts aren’t recorded with the Rent Board, and the agency has no real guidance for residents faced with this particular dilemma. “We don’t have the true number on buyouts,” says Mecca. “We don’t know how many people have left due to intimidation.”

Identity-wise, renters impacted by the Ellis Act defy categorization. A contingent of monolingual Chinese residents rallied outside City Hall recently to oppose legislation they believed would give rise to evictions; in the Mission, many targeted tenants are Latinos who primarily speak Spanish. From working immigrants, to aging queer activists, to disabled seniors, to idealists banding together in collective houses, the affected tenants do have one thing in common. When landlords or real-estate speculators perceive that their homes are more valuable unoccupied, their lives are susceptible to being upended by forces beyond their control.

The upshot of San Francisco’s affordability crisis is a cultural blow for a city traditionally regarded as tolerant, forward thinking, and progressive. In the words of Rose Eger, a musician who faces an Ellis Act eviction from her apartment of 19 years, “it changes the face of who San Francisco is.

Out of the Castro

By Tim Redmond

You can’t get much more Castro than Jeremy Mykaels. The 62-year old moved to the neighborhood in the early 1970s, fleeing raids at gay bars in Denver. He played in a rock band, worked at the old Jaguar Books, watched the rise of Harvey Milk, saw the neighborhood transform and made it his home.

He’s lived in a modest apartment on Noe Street for 17 years, and for the past 11 has been living with AIDS. Rent control has made it possible for Mykaels, who survives on disability payments, to remain in this city, in his community, close to the doctors at Davis Hospital who, he believes, have saved his life.

And now he’s going to have to leave.

In the spring of 2011, his longtime landlords sold the building to a real-estate investment group based in Union City — and the new owners immediately sought to get rid of all the tenants. Two renters fled, knowing what was coming; Mykaels stuck around. In September of 2012, he was served with an eviction notice, filed under the state’s Ellis Act.

He’s a senior, he’s disabled, his friends are mostly dead and his life is in his community — but none of that matters. The Ellis Act has no exceptions.

Mykaels spent a fair amount of his life savings fixing up his place. The walls are beige, decorated with nice art. Dickens the cat, who is chocolate brown but looks black, wanders in and out of the small bedroom. Mykaels has been happy there and never wanted to leave; “this,” he told me, “is where I thought I would live the rest of my life.”

There’s no place in the Castro, or even the rest of the city, where he can afford to move. Small studios start at $2,500 a month, which would eat up all of his income. There is, quite literally, nowhere left for him to go.

“A lot of my friends have died, or moved to Palm Springs,” he said. “But this is where my doctors are and where I’m comfortable. I’m not going to find a support system like this anywhere else in the world.”

Mykaels is the face of San Francisco, 2013, a resident who is not part of the mayor’s grand vision for bringing development and high-paying jobs into the city. As far as City Hall is concerned, he’s collateral damage, someone whose life will have to be upended in the name of progress.

But Mykaels isn’t going easily. The former web designer has created a site — ellishurtsseniors.org — that lists not only his address (460 Noe) and the names of the new owners (Cuong Mai, William H. Young and John H. Du) but the addresses of dozens of other properties that are facing Ellis Act evictions. His message to potential buyers: Boycott.

“Do not buy properties where seniors or the disabled have been evicted for profit by real estate speculators using the Ellis Act,” the website states.

Mykaels is a demon researcher — his site is a guide to 31 properties with 94 units where seniors or disabled people are being evicted under the Ellis Act. In some cases, individuals or couples are filing the eviction papers, but at least 14 properties are owned by corporations or trusts.

Mai told me that he knew a disabled senior was living in the building when he and his two partners bought it, but he said his plan all along was to evict all the tenants and turn the three-unit place into a single-family house. He said he hasn’t decided yet whether to sell building; “I might decide to live there myself.” (Of course, if he wanted to live there himself, he wouldn’t need the Ellis Act.)

Mai said he “felt bad about the whole situation,” and he had offered to buy Mykaels out. The offer, however, wouldn’t have covered more than a few months of market rent anyplace else in the Castro.

By law, Mykaels can stay in his apartment until September. If he can’t stave off the eviction by then, San Francisco will lose another longtime member of the city community.

Dark days in the Inner Sunset

By Rebecca Bowe

The living room in Rose and Willie Eger’s Inner Sunset apartment is where Rose composes her songs and Willie unwinds after playing baseball in Golden Gate Park. Faded Beatles memorabilia and 45 records adorn the walls, and a prominently displayed poster of Jimi Hendrix looms above a row of guitar cases and an expansive record collection.

It’s a little worn and drafty, but the couple has called this 10th Ave. apartment home for 19 years. Now their lives are about to change. On Jan. 5, all the tenants in their eight-unit building received notice that an Ellis Act eviction proceeding had been filed against them.

“The music that I do is about social and political things,” explains Rose, dressed from head-to-toe in hot pink with a gray braid swinging down her back. Determined to derive inspiration from this whole eviction nightmare, she’s composing a song that plays with the phrase “tenants-in-common.”

Cindy Huff, the Egers’ upstairs neighbor, says she began worrying about the prospect of eviction when the property changed hands last summer. Realtor Elba Borgen, described as a “serial evictor” in online news stories because she’s used the Ellis Act to clear several other properties, purchased the apartment building last August, through a limited liability corporation. The notice of eviction landed in the mailbox less than six months later. (Borgen did not return Guardian calls seeking comment.)

“With the [average] rent being three times what most of us pay, there’s no way we can stay in the city,” Huff says. “The only option we would have is to move out of San Francisco.” She retired last year following a 33-year stint with UCSF’s human resources department. Now, facing the prospect of moving when she and her partner are on fixed incomes, she’s scouring job listings for part-time work.

The initial notice stated that every tenant had to vacate within 120 days, but several residents are working with advocates from the Housing Rights Committee in hopes of qualifying for extensions. Huff and the Egers are all in their fifties, but some tenants are seniors—including a 90-year-old Cuban woman who lives with her daughter, and has Alzheimer’s disease.

Willie works two days a week, and Rose is doing her best to get by with earnings from musical gigs. Both originally from New York City, they’ve lived in the city 35 years. When they first moved to the Sunset, it resembled something more like a working-class neighborhood, where families could raise kids. The recent tech boom has ushered in a transformation, one that Rose believes “changes the face of who San Francisco is.” Willie doesn’t mince words about the mess this eviction has landed them in. “I call it ‘Scam-Francisco,'” he says.

The trio recently joined tenant advocates in visiting Sup. Norman Yee, their district supervisor, to tell their stories. Yee, who is expected to be one of the swing votes on an upcoming debate about condo-conversion legislation vehemently opposed by tenant activists, reportedly listened politely but didn’t say much.

As for what the next few months have in store for the Egers? “I can’t really visualize the outcome,” Rose says. “I can only visualize the day-to-day fight. And that’s scary.”

Fighting for a home in the Mission

By Tim Redmond

Eleven years ago, Olga Pizarro fell in love with Ocean Beach. A native of Peru who was living in Canada, she visited the Bay Area, saw the water and decided she would never leave.

Fast forward to today and she’s built a home in the Mission, renting a small room in a basement flat on Folsom Street. The 55-year-old has lived in the building for eight years; polio has left her wearing a leg brace and she can’t climb stairs very well, but she still rides her bike to work at the Golden Gate Regional Center. She’s a sociologist by training; the walls in her room are lined with bookshelves, with hundreds of books in Spanish and English.

The place isn’t fancy, and it needs work, but it’s hard to find a ground-floor apartment in the Mission that’s affordable on a nonprofit worker’s salary. Since 2011, when she moved in, she and her three housemates have been protected by rent control. And Pizarro’s been happy; “I love the neighborhood,” she told me.

The letter warning of a pending eviction arrived Jan. 16. A new owner of the building wants to turn the place into tenancies in common and is prepared to throw everyone out under the Ellis Act. There’s no place else in town for Pizarro to go.

“I’ve looked and looked,” she said. “The cheapest places are $2,500 a month or more. Maybe I’ll have to move out of the city.”

Pizarro’s building is owned by Wai Ahead, LLC, a San Francisco partnership registered to Carol Wai and Sean Lundy. I couldn’t reach Wai or Lundy, but their attorney, Robert Sheppard, had plenty to say. “San Francisco is going the way of New York,” he told me. “Manhattan is full of co-ops that used to be rentals, and lower-income people are moving to Brooklyn and Queens. That’s happening here with Oakland and further out.” He argued that TICs, like co-ops, provide home-ownership opportunities for former renters.

Sheppard, who for years represented tenants in eviction cases, said the Ellis Act is law, and America is a capitalist country, and “as long as there is a private housing market, there will be shifts of people as the housing market shifts.” He agreed that it’s not good for lower-income people to lose their homes, but “the poor will always be hurt by a changing economy. It’s called evolution.”

Pizarro told me she’s shocked at how expensive housing has become in the Mission. “It’s gotten so gentrified,” she said. “People show up in their BMWs. It’s starting to feel very isolated.”

She’s fighting the eviction. “I didn’t intend it to be this way,” she explained. “I just want to live here.” Lacking any family in the area, the Mission has become her community — “and I’m frustrated by the violence of how expensive it is.”

Affordability goes out of style

By Rebecca Bowe

Hester Michael is a fashion designer, and her home doubles as a project space for creating patterns, sewing custom clothing, weaving cloth, and painting. She’s lived in her Outer Sunset two-bedroom unit for almost two decades, but now she faces an Ellis Act eviction. Michael says she initially received notice last June. The timing was awful -– that same month, her husband passed away after a long battle with terminal illness.

“I’ve been here 25 years. My friends are here, and my business. I don’t know where else to go, or what else to do,” she says. “I just couldn’t picture myself anywhere else.”

Michael rents the upstairs unit of a split single-family home, a kind of residence that normally isn’t protected by rent control. Yet she leased the property in 1994, getting in under the wire before that exemption took effect. Since she pays below-market-rate rent in a home that could be sold vacant for top dollar, a target was essentially inscribed on her back when the property changed hands in 2004. That’s about when her long battle with the landlords began, she says.

From the get-go, her landlords indicated that she should look for a new place, Michael says, yet she chose to remain. The years that followed brought things falling into disrepair, she says, and a string of events that caused her feel intimidated and to fear eviction. Finally, she consulted with tenant advocates and hired an attorney. A complaint filed in superior court alleges that the property owners “harassed and retaliated [Michael] when she complained about the defective and dangerous conditions …telling [her] to move out of the property if she did not like the dangerous conditions thereat … repeatedly making improper entries into [the] property, and wrongfully accusing [her] of causing problems.”

Records show that Angela Ng serves as attorney in fact for the property owner, Ringo Chung Wai Lee. Steven Adair MacDonald, an attorney who represents both landlords and tenants in San Francisco housing disputes, represents the owners. “An owner of a single family home where the rent is controlled and a fraction of market has virtually no other choice but to terminate the tenancy,” MacDonald said when the Guardian reached him by phone. “They’ve got to empty it, and the only way to empty it is the Ellis Act.”

While Michael received an extension that allows her to remain until June 5, she fears her custom sewing business, Hester’s Designs, will suffer if she has to move. There’s the issue of space. “I have so much stuff in this house,” she says. And most of her clients are currently located close by, so she doesn’t know where her business would come from if she had to relocate. “A lot of my clients don’t have cars,” she says, “so if I live in some suburb in the East Bay, forget it. I’ll lose my business.”

The prospect of eviction has created a major dilemma for Michael, who first moved to San Francisco in 1987. While moving to the East Bay seems untenable, she says renting in San Francisco feels out of reach. “People are renting out small, tiny bedrooms for the same price as I pay here,” she says. With a wry laugh, she adds: “I don’t think there’s any vacant apartments in San Francisco -– unless you’re a tech dude and make seven grand a month.”

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam

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February 5, 2013

97

tredmond@sfbg.com

EDITORS NOTES People who rent apartments aren’t second-class citizens. In fact, under San Francisco laws, they have (and ought to have) many of the same rights as the landed gentry.

If you rent a place in this city, and you pay the rent on time, and abide by the terms of the lease, you should be able to stay in your home (and yes, it IS your home) as long as you want. The rent can only go up by a modest amount every year.

Landlords know that when they enter into rental agreements. Accepting a tenant means acknowledging that the person may want to say in his or her apartment for years, maybe for life; the rent the landlord sets for that unit has to be adequate to cover a share of the mortgage, expected maintenance costs, and a reasonable return on the owner’s investment.

When you buy a piece of rental property in the city, you are told that tenants live there; you’re told what rent they pay, you’re informed that you can’t raise it much, and unless your utterly ignorant of local law, you realize that the tenants have, in effect, lifetime leases since you can only evict them for “just cause” — which does not include your desire to make more money.

If the numbers don’t pencil out under those conditions, they you shouldn’t buy the place.

That’s how a sane rental housing system ought to operate. Unfortunately, the state Legislature has undermined local rent-control laws with the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict all their tenants, cease renting altogether, and turn the place into condominiums. Or, since there are limits on condo conversions in this city, into tenancies in common, which are not limited at all.

Sup. Scott Wiener wants to make it easier to turn TICs into condos; he says the poor TIC owners are having a tough time and can get better mortgage rates if they rules are changed. I don’t feel bad for them; they knew the rules when they bought their TICs. They have no right to convert to condos; that’s a privilege granted to a limited number each year, by waiting list and lottery. Buy a TIC? You should assume it will remain your ownership model for a long, long time.

The city can’t stop the TIC conversions, but it can set ground rules — for example, local law mandates a payment to tenants who are evicted, which can reach $5,000. Sounds big — but it won’t even pay two months’ rent on a new place in this market.

SO let’s be fair here: If you want to evict a tenant, who has and ought to have the right to a stable place to live, you should pay enough to make that person whole. Calculate market rent on a similar place; subtract the current rent the tenant is paying, and cover the difference — for, let’s say, five years.

If that makes TICs too expensive, and thus lowers property values by making evictions difficult and keeping rents low, fine: Property values are too high in this town anyway. And if it means more stability for lower-income people at the expense of property owners … well, I can live with that.

Supes call for stronger SRO safety measures

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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February 4, 2013

43

Supes call for stronger SRO safety measures

It’s no secret that tenants living in single room occupancy hotels (SROs) often grapple with health and safety issues, from bedbug infestations to plumbing problems.

At a committee hearing this afternoon, members of the Board of Supervisors will consider legislation [PDF] introduced by Sup. Eric Mar that would amend the housing code to require owners of SROs to install grab bars in common-area bathrooms, and to provide working phone jacks in each SRO unit.

These measures may seem relatively small, but Tony Robles of the Senior & Disability Action Housing Collaborative says installing grab bars can go a long way toward preventing falls, a leading cause of injury deaths for people older than 65.

In SROs, “there’s a lot of folks who have mobility problems,” Robles explains. “Many are disabled, or elders.” He said knows an elderly woman living in an SRO who recently fell and now faces hip surgery.

“This legislation is about safety, and it’s about quality of life,” Robles said. “It’s not just affluent folks who deserve to live in reasonably habitable conditions.”

Last June, advocates with Senior Action Network and several SRO collaboratives published detailed findings [PDF] from an in-depth survey of 151 SRO residents living in Chinatown, the Mission, SoMa and the Tenderloin. Most respondents were older than 55, and 62 percent identified as having a disability.

The in-depth study found that safety issues topped the list of residents’ concerns. Many respondents said they feared falling on the stairs or in the shower, and less than half reported having grab bars in their bathrooms.

The legislation, which was co-sponsored by Supervisors Jane Kim, David Campos and David Chiu, would also require SRO operators to install working phone jacks in residents’ rooms, which can be critical for tenants who need a way to communicate in case of an emergency.

According to the study findings, these low-income tenants face a host of other issues too:

“About one-third or more of survey respondents said their hotel had a problem with bedbugs, other infestations, visitor policy violations, electrical problems, unsanitary bathrooms, and harassment/ disrespect. One-fifth of respondents also cited problems with heat, plumbing, personal safety, fire safety, and maintenance and repairs.  More than half (53%) had no access to a kitchen in their building, and 18% of respondents said they skip meals due to lack of resources or facilities.”

San Francisco has more than 500 residential hotels, according to city records, with more than 19,000 units. An estimated 8,000 seniors and adults with disabilities live in SROs.

Robles remarked that it took courage for the SRO residents to speak up in hopes of improving their living conditions. “Tenants in theses SROs oftentimes are intimidated to say anything,” he said. “Some folks might have feared reprisal.”

Don’t just stand there — squat!

Zelda Bronstein

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January 31, 2013

59

You know I love this story. I love it so much I am going to be following it for weeks, and I hope for years. A homeless guy takes over a $2 million mansion in Florida, which was sitting empty while Bank of America dicked around and never sold or rented it, and now the bank is going to have a tough time getting rid of him.

Did I say I love this story?

Check it out:

It only gets more complicated. By invoking an obscure but never rescinded nor revised Florida law, Barbosa is using “adverse possession” to justify his claim in the house, as it allows a person to move in and claim title of a property “if they can stay there seven years.” Florida has suffered more than one similar case. The Sun Sentinel makes reference to a “handful” of adverse possession claims making their way through the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser’s Office, but Barbosa’s stands out because the house he’s possessing (adversely) is so valuable. And though Barbosa is certainly eccentric, posting a sign that he is the “living beneficiary to the Divine Estate being superior of commerce and usury” on the front of the home, he isn’t stupid. He even contacted the Appraiser’s Office to alert them that his tenancy had begun, presumably as he intends to stay for the required seven years.

We haven’t had any good high-profile public squats like this in San Francisco in years. Back in the day, my old friend Paul Kangas and his brother John were the kings of squats; Paul found an empty house in the Sunset in the late 1970s, with the paint peeling and the shutters hanging off the windows, moved into it, fixed it up, had the water and power turned on in his name and lived there for years. He didn’t operate in secret or the middle of the night; he got the lock re-keyed, moved all his stuff in, and acted like he owned the place. He fixed it up nicely, took care of the yard — and the neighbors loved him. An empty eyesore was now a clean, inhabited house.

Paul was no fool; he had researched the place and found out that the owner had died without leaving direct descendants or a clear will, and for a long time, nobody in the city or the legal system could figure out who actually did own it. Paul needed a place to live; this one was going to be empty for a long time. Why not use it?

John did the same thing with an abandoned house in the Mission, except that to open the door, he had to climb in a window. Somebody saw him, called the cops …. and he was arrested for burglary (for taking the front door knob, which he was going to replace.) He took the case to trial, and it was spectacular: His lawyer, Jonathan McCurdy, called a bunch of city officials and asked them who John had stolen the door knob from; “who,” he kept asking, “actually owns this property?” The title was unclear; nobody could answer the question.

Then John took the stand and said he wasn’t a burglar at all; he was a squatter, who was planning to take over, fix up, and live in an abandoned house.

The jury took about an hour to come back with a verdict of not guilty.

There are plenty of pieces of property around the Bay Area that are owned by banks and sitting vacant. Some of them are becoming eyesores. Somebody ought to be living there.

As we used to say, Don’t just stand there — squat!

Developer hypes art; screws artists

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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January 31, 2013

6

It’s late afternoon in Building 101 of the Hunters Point Shipyard artists’ colony, and Richard Bolingbroke has his forehead in his hands. The studio complex, which began as a squat in the 1970s, has been an artists’ sanctuary for decades, drawing flocks of curious visitors and housing internationally acclaimed residents. Bolingbroke has been there 17 years. “It’s like a sacred space,” he says.

But now, he and 15 other artists have been snagged in a minor wrinkle of the massive Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment project—and they’re being told they’ll have to vacate.

Lennar, the project developer, is using the artists’ presence as a selling point to market homes in the new neighborhood. Billboards touting art line the entrance to the site, where construction is expected to begin soon.

Lennar is obligated to relocate Eclectic Cookery, a commercial kitchen housed in a different shipyard building that’s slated for demolition. Under a scheme that caught many by surprise, the developer intends to demolish artist studios in one wing of Building 101 to make way for the kitchen.

Representatives of Lennar, the project developer, said at a Jan. 23 meeting that displacing 16 of the 150 artists now situated in Building 101 is the only workable solution.

Iconic poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti has a studio there. He won’t be impacted, but he emailed fellow artists expressing disapproval. “As a 32-year resident in Building 101, I am shocked by the way the city and Lennar are evidently willing to break their promise that 101 will be maintained solely as artists’ studios,” he wrote. “Allowing any commercial business to move into 101 opens the flood-gates to further evictions of artists. I hope this is not really the city’s long-range plan!”

The artists have been promised temporary spaces with subsidized rent, and eventual accommodations in newly constructed studios. But their rents are expected to increase in the long term. Beyond their tenancies, the move would trigger a permanent loss of affordable, highly sought-after studio space in Building 101.

Some have had studios in the World-War-II era complex for more than two decades, allowing them to continue practicing their craft in ever-pricier San Francisco.

“If I don’t leave this space, my rent won’t change,” said Travis Somerville, who was preparing for a show at the Crocker Art Museum when the Guardian stopped by his studio. Somerville has been there since 1989, and he’s dedicated himself to making art full-time. Lennar’s proposed arrangement “would not only force me off the shipyard,” he said. “It would force me out of San Francisco.”

At the Jan. 23 meeting, Lennar joined representatives of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency in hashing out the unpopular plan.

Company representative Jack Robertson broke it down in economic terms. “We’re a profit-motivated company here,” he said. “The city negotiated, very shrewdly, to require us to spend a whole lot of money up front for a whole bunch of community benefits. … We’re not getting anything out of that at all. And we’re not trying to. What we’re trying to do is make it work.”

Stacey Carter, an artist whose work is on display in Sup. Malia Cohen’s City Hall office, alerted Cohen to the issue, since her district includes the shipyard.

“The artists have been at the table, in the discussions, for a very long time. They’re an asset to the community,” Cohen told the Guardian. “We have been in touch with them, and my staff is very aware of their concerns.”

The multi-billion dollar redevelopment project will transform the landscape with 20,000 new homes, parking, and shopping amenities. It’s being financed in part with a $1.7 billion loan from a Chinese bank. Plans to accommodate the artists and the kitchen have been in the works for years, but Lennar realized only recently that its original plan for relocating Eclectic Cookery was unrealistic.

Scott Madison, who runs the commercial kitchen, is a longtime ally of the artists. He serves small businesses that can’t afford their own industrial kitchens, such as a client who cranks out 1,200 empanadas a day.

“We really want to stay on the shipyard,” Madison told the Guardian. “It has been known for a good many years now that Eclectic Cookery would likely need to be relocated. But it seems to be the nature of Lennar’s process that they don’t consider something until it’s right in front of their face.”

When Lennar first approached him about Building 101, Madison said, “We told them that this was not our first choice, because we definitely did not want to [cause] anybody to lose their studio.”

Lennar has indicated that any other option would either be too costly, or would disrupt the construction schedule. Delays translate to lower profitability.

Bolingbroke views the whole snafu as a culture clash between businesspeople and artists, and links it to a broader problem facing San Francisco. “It’s a bit like a tree,” he said. “Artists are like the roots. You can’t see them — but if you cut the roots off, the tree will wither and die.”

The machine

Andrew Lam

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January 29, 2013

127

steve@sfbg.com

Scott Wiener is a political machine.

I don’t mean that he’s part of a political machine, although he is arguably a member of a few nascent operations in town, from the old-school Democratic Party establishment to the morphing amalgam of groups pushing what he calls a “livability” agenda. I mean that Supervisor Wiener, who represents District 8, is a machine — almost robotic in his tireless, 24/7 engagement with all things political.

In just two years on the board, he’s become one of the most productive legislators in the city, courting controversy and taking on issues others had ducked. He is relentless in his quest to make government run more efficiently. He’s affable, mild-mannered and accessible, often willing to work with opponents — but he has an agenda for the city that he pursues aggressively.

Perhaps more than anyone at City Hall, Wiener embodies the current political zeitgeist in San Francisco, with its emphasis on civility and private-sector job creation. He isn’t the most powerful person in city government, but he’s playing an outsized role in shaping the city’s future — and that will only grow this week as he assumes the chair of the board’s Land Use Committee.

Wiener defies easy labels. Critics who call him an uncaring conservative aren’t quite right, and it’s equally tough to simply accept the “urbanist” and “good liberal Democrat” labels that Wiener applies to himself. And it’s hard to pin Wiener down on what sort of city he envisions, except for one with minimal bureaucracy where the trains and buses run on time.

In his City Hall office, where the walls contain little artwork, just the occasional reminder of past political episodes (like the framed Guardian butt cover from when he banned the nudists in the Castro from putting their bare asses on benches), he was happy to talk to me at length about policy. But he had less to offer on who he thinks this city is for — about who should be able to stay here, and who has to leave. He talks about preserving a safety net — but not about pushing back against gentrification and displacement with any tools up to the task.

In the end, his focus is on making government and the city’s infrastructure work well for those who are able to live in a city that’s become openly hostile to low-income and working-class people. He’s an agent of change — but his change is disturbing to progressives. He’s steadily moving legislation that makes it more difficult to counter trends that are gentrifying and sterilizing the city.

A BIT OF A NERD

Born in Philadelphia and raised mostly in the small, conservative New Jersey town of Turnersville, the young Scott Wiener always felt one step removed from his surroundings. So he poured himself into his studies. “I was always a bit of a nerd. I’ll admit I was voted most studious in high school,” Wiener said.

What social life he had centered around his synagogue in a Christian-dominated community. His parents — dad an optometrist, mom running his practice — were “very partisan Democrats” in a Republican county. Although they weren’t very politically active, Wiener’s earliest political memory is the 1980 presidential election that brought Ronald Reagan to power: “Our house was like a place of mourning.”

Involvement in Democratic Party politics seemed to just flow from his academic life, interning with a member of Congress as a teenager and then helping form a Democratic Club when he attended Duke University, which devoted itself to campaigning against then-Sen. Jesse Helms when Wiener was a sophomore.

Coming out as a gay man at the age of 20 wasn’t terribly traumatic in a family where his cousin and aunt were lesbians. His main concern was whether it might hinder his plan to run for president of his fraternity, the Jewish Alpha Epsilon Pi, but he won that election anyway.

Still, Wiener calls being gay and Jewish the “galvanizing experiences” of his formative years, particularly at a time when AIDS had devastated this new community he was joining, so his political activism focused on LGBT issues as he worked his way through Harvard Law School, choosing to settle in San Francisco in 1997.

Tall and gangly, almost obsessed with Democratic Party politics, his only real hobby or pastime is yoga, which he said “helps me stay sane.” Wiener has always been less fun-loving than many of the gay men around him in the Castro, the neighborhood he represents.

“Dating has not always been my strong suit,” Wiener said. He’s close to family and friends but really hasn’t had any serious romantic relationships to speak of. “Men are challenging.”

So he works, and works, and works. He’s been working the Castro with door-knocking intensity since well before his successful run for supervisor in 2010, during his long tenure on the Democratic County Central Committee and his day job as a deputy city attorney, focused mostly on defending the San Francisco Police Department.

Department heads have learned that he’s always on duty. “I was at Nancy Pelosi’s New Year’s party on Sunday, and I saw [SF Muni head] Ed Reiskin and I started walking up to him because I had like three things to talk to him about, and the look I saw in his eye was the same look that I think I sometimes get in my eye when a particularly aggressive constituent approaches me,” Wiener recalled.

It’s a look that Wiener has had to adopt regularly over the last two years as he’s sponsored a string of the city’s most controversial pieces of legislation.

AGENT OF CHANGE

Right now, Wiener is pushing legislation that would limit people’s opportunities to appeal development projects (dubbed “CEQA reform”) and co-sponsoring legislation that would let owners of tenancy-in-common (TIC) housing units pay a fee to bypass the city’s condo conversion lottery, which limits the removal of apartments from the rental market.

Both changes, two of the most controversial measures of this new legislative session, have been opposed by progressives for decades. And they follow Wiener’s sponsorship of the two most controversial pieces of legislation from the last session: his unsuccessful attempt to remove the exemption of nonprofits from paying the city’s Transit Impact Development Fee and his ban on public nudity, which passed on a 6-5 vote in November, making national headlines.

The two new bills reflect an agenda that’s popular with landlords, property owners, and developers — and opposed by tenants, neighborhood activists, and just about every progressive group in town.

Yet, at the same time, Wiener is supportive of nightlife and an advocate for Muni and bike lanes — softening his image as a downtown conservative and sometimes giving him a chance to divide the progressive community. And last year he cast the crucial eighth vote needed to create the CleanPowerSF public-power program and override a threatened mayoral veto.

“I strongly believe in the capacity of government to make people’s lives better,” Wiener said.

Wiener told me he believes in the social safety net and rent control. He says he has supported every tax measure on the ballot in recent years, he understands that Muni and other vital city infrastructure go deeper in the hole with every new development project the city approves, and he knows that San Francisco is becoming steadily less affordable to those on the bottom half of the economic spectrum.

Yet, even when pressed on the topic at length, he doesn’t have a good answer for how to maintain San Francisco’s long-term socioeconomic diversity. It’s almost as if that’ s not part of his consciousness. Instead, he’s making it easier for capitalism to have its way with San Francisco.

Tom Radulovich, director of Livable City, puts it this way: “One thing he’s really doing is reforms in the process of government. He wants to smooth the way for the transformation of the city.”

While smoothing the way for change is good for those who desire certain changes — whether it be a developer building luxury condos or the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition trying to add more bike lanes — there are often good reasons why change occurs in a slow, methodical way in San Francisco, a city of great wealth and power but also lots of checks and balances on how power gets wielded.

“Process is important in San Francisco,” Radulovich said. “For a lot of people that want to slow things down, they are very process focused, and he’s really messing with that.”

Wiener’s efforts particularly rankle people like Aaron Peskin, who started as a historic preservation activist before leading a prolific agenda (he said he authored 205 ordinances in eight years, far faster than Wiener’s pace) as a supervisor during the board’s modern progressive era.

Peskin — who successfully ran against Wiener for DCCC chair in 2008 and has fought him on historic preservation and other progressive issues since then — doesn’t mince words when describing Wiener’s agenda and key votes as supervisor: “Supervisor Wiener is intent on turning the clock back on San Francisco’s decades-long legacy of cutting edge legislation to protect consumers and the environment.”

Radulovich says the trend is upsetting the city’s balance in unpredictable ways. “The net result is he’s speeding everything up, the good, the bad, and the ugly. He’s taking the brakes off of change,” Radulovich said. “In all of these changes, it’s hard to tell what’s going to happen because these are big, complex systems.”

Wiener sees it differently. His bill to modify the city’s CEQA interpretation would make it harder to file multiple project appeals — and he thinks that’s a good thing: “There are people who want to the option to be oppositional and to just have something in their hip pocket, even if it has no merit.”

Yet activists fighting the measure say it also makes it easier for projects to slide through without proper public or environment scrutiny. For example, the city originally exempted the controversial Beach Chalet artificial turf project in Golden Gate Park from doing an Environmental Impact Report, which eventually found significant impacts to wildlife, drainage, and from bright artificial lights.

There are some who worry that the Land Use Committee will be more friendly to market-rate developers under Wiener’s leadership.

“I’m really concerned with the direction the city is going on land-use issues, particularly with him now chairing the Land Use Committee,” Tom Temprano, president of the Harvey Milk Club, told me. “It’s about the future of the city and who it’s being built for.”

Peter Cohen of the Council of Community Housing Organizations notes that Wiener’s focus during “affordable housing” discussions has been on middle class homeowners: “I’m interested to see if he pushes that narrative, that we’re not doing enough for the middle class, because it is a bit of a zero sum game with housing and land use.”

Radulovich said Wiener may not be critical enough of projects that seek more than their zoning entitles them to, a growing problem in San Francisco that has set precedents for more intensive development and made it difficult to analyze cumulative impacts of the decisions: “Having a Land Use chair that going to move those things along will allow planning by exception.”

Between watching out for Wiener’s legislation and tracking the development projects that seem to keep springing out of nowhere, progressive activists are busy.

“He’s very busy. He’s amazingly prolific legislatively. I can’t keep up with him and I don’t know what his agenda is,” said Sue Vaughan, who works with the Sierra Club and sits on the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Citizens Advisory Council. “It just seems like everything he focuses on disempowers the voters and empowers the [wealthiest] 1 percent.”

POLITICS AND PERSONALITY

Even his critics have positive things to say about Wiener. “He’s a nice guy, and I have to give him credit for going out of his way to work with us,” Temprano said, praising Wiener’s advocacy on queer, nightlife, and small business issues and saying, “He’s a really good legislator.”

“That said, we have a fundamentally different approach to politics,” Temprano said. “A huge bone of contention is his handling of public space, including the nudity ban and removing the public benches” in the Castro.

Temprano criticizes Wiener for allowing social services to be slashed while local corporations get tax breaks and focusing more on the convenience of those middle class and above than the needs of those on the bottom, often by presenting “false choices,” as Wiener did in opposing free Muni for youth by saying that increasing efficiency in the system was more important.

“The folks who have more basic needs are being pushed out of this city,” Temprano said. “There are just so many needs right now, and so many of them come down to funding for social services and other things…We should be starting to re-fund programs that have been slashed in recent years.”

Wiener has served on the Budget Committee throughout his tenure on the board, presiding over the rollback of city services and maintaining of historically low levels of business taxation.

In fact, Temprano said Wiener’s engaging personal style and points of agreement with progressives make Wiener more effective in sometimes pushing issues that are hostile to progressive values. “It’s occasionally difficult to play hardball on some of these other issues,” Temprano said, noting that Wiener doesn’t seem to have a problem switching gears and playing hardball in undermining progressive reforms, something that requires those of the left to be ever-vigilant and take advantage of Wiener’s open-door policies. “We need to be incredibly vocal and incredibly organized.”

Adds Radulovich: “There’s something about him that’s refreshing. He’s different than the moderates of the past…He’s a moderate, but he’s the new generation of moderate.”

In fact, Radulovich said that progressives could learn lessons from Wiener in terms of broadening their base and reaching across the aisle on certain issues that needn’t be as polarizing as they often are in San Francisco, even around such emotional issues as growth and development.

“If you do anything differently, you get kicked out of the progressive camp,” Radulovich said, half-jokingly adding, “If you had an original idea since 1978, you’re suspect.”

In fact, Radulovich compared Wiener to a former supervisor who is his political opposite: “Scott is effectively driving the conversation in proposing things. Chris Daly used to do that.”

Peskin said that Wiener’s legislative success so far has less to do with his skills and strength than it does with the weakness of the progressive movement over the last two years.

“He’s only one supervisor, and it’s just that his colleagues need to stand up and start questioning his legislation. He backs down when people rise to the occasion,” Peskin said, noting that progressive activists may have become complacent after a decade when progressives had a majority at the board. “It’s a big wake-up call for activists and everyday folks in San Francisco who have not had to go down to City Hall to stop bad things from happening in 10 years.”

Peskin doesn’t buy the arguments that Wiener’s politics are nuanced and hard to pin down, saying he predictably supports those with money and power and undermines the average citizen in just about every vote. “He’s fundamentally a very ideologically conservative person,” Peskin said. “He’s radical in his conservatism.”

RENTERS PLIGHT

Wiener is now in the middle of a fight that pits the progressives and the two-thirds of city residents who rent their housing against the homeowners and real estate interests that have long sought to make it easier to turn housing units into condos.

The bill that created this controversy, which Wiener co-sponsored with conservative Sup. Mark Farrell, is a one-time amnesty that would allow some 2,500 TIC units to bypass the city’s condo lottery (limited to 200 conversions a year) and to become condos. Wiener says it’s aimed at helping TIC owners stuck in limbo with mortgages they can’t refinance.

“In my view, we need housing stability for everyone, and that includes tenants and it includes homeowners,” Wiener said. “We’ve seen in the foreclosure crisis that tenants aren’t the only ones who can have unstable housing. And right now, we have many TIC owners who bought…thinking that it was going to take five-seven years to win the lottery because that’s how it used to be, but now it’s 15 or 20 years.”

That, of course, is because so many former rental units were turned into TICs that the conversion list keeps growing. When TICs become condos, the property becomes worth more and easier to refinance.

“The financing for TICs is worse than it’s ever been,” Wiener said, noting that many TIC owners are underwater. “So the people in the TICs are really hurting. And if they lose their TICs, it’s not like they’re going away, they’re going to compete for rental units.”

But San Francisco Tenants Union head Ted Gullicksen said the courts have steadily eroded San Francisco’s ability to safeguard rent control and prevent apartments from being turned into TICs and condos. “If we make it easy for them to become TICs, we will have lost the only weak defense we have against conversion,” he said.

Gullicksen said the one-time offer will just lead to more TICs — and more evictions. “They’re saying if the line gets too long, don’t worry, we’ll deal with it,” he explained.

Gullicksen also disputes the argument that financing for TIC is difficult. The market slowed down after the fiscal crisis of 2008, “but in the past 8-12 months, they have begun to skyrocket again,” he said.

Gullicksen acknowledged that Wiener has a history of supporting pro-tenant legislation, particularly during his time on the DCCC when tenant groups were at war with Wiener’s predecessor, Bevan Dufty, and then-Mayor Gavin Newsom. But he said that Wiener changed after progressives took over the DCCC and he prepared to run for supervisor in a district that has gentrified, largely because of apartments being converted to TICs and condos.

“He made the decision that he was not going to be with progressives and to ally himself with the conservatives, moderates, and real estate people,” Gullicksen said.

Wiener disputes the characterization, saying that he strongly supports rent control and tenants, even though he also supports TICs and other home ownership opportunities.

COURTING CONTROVERSY

A Guardian analysis of legislation from the past two years shows Sup. David Chiu edging out Wiener in total legislative initiatives, 153-119, with the rest of their colleagues in double digits. But while Chiu has authored more ordinances and charter amendments (49) than Wiener (33), it is Wiener that has taken on the toughest fights and found himself at the center of big controversies far more often.

“I enjoy policy and I like legislating. We have a limited time here at City Hall as members of the Board of Supervisors, and I think you have to take the bull by the horns and pursue the policies that you think are important to the city, so I started doing that pretty quickly after taking office,” Wiener said. “I also think you have to be willing to take risks, so I’ve been willing to take on legislation that maybe others wouldn’t touch, or that others thought was too hard.”

Radulovich noted: “He’s not a cautious legislator, but he is a careful legislator. He’s not afraid of starting a fight, particularly with progressives. A lot of progressives are like, ‘If Scott Wiener is for it then it must be bad.'”

Vaughan is one of those activists who said she’s eventually learned not to trust Wiener or his legislation: “We’ve been galvanized and we feel like we have to watch what he’s doing very carefully.”

Like many progressive activists, Radulovich said he likes Wiener and respects his political skills, but he doesn’t see Wiener as sharing his political values: “His agenda is much more pro-business than mine, more about promoting laissez faire capitalism.”

Rafael Mandelman, who was elected to the City College of San Francisco board last year after losing to Wiener in the D8 race two years earlier, said he has been impressed by his former adversary.

“It’s unquestionable that he’s super hard-working, super dedicated, probably the most effective member on the Board of Supervisors,” Mandelman said. “He takes on controversial issues, and in some ways he courts controversy, but he generally leave people with good feelings.”

Mandelman differs from Wiener politically on issues like CEQA reform and historic preservation standards. “On the other hand, he has taken some principled stands against some big players,” Mandelman said, citing Wiener’s battles against the Academy of Art on student housing and the Hospital Council on TIDF.

Wiener rejects the accusation that he’s not engaged enough with the community or his critics. “I think that’s made up. And really, it’s a different way of saying, ‘I don’t agree with your legislation,’ therefore I’m going to say you didn’t take enough input ahead of time,” Wiener said. “I’ve had legislation where I had more than a year’s worth of meetings with different stakeholders before I introduced it.”

“Even on the nudity legislation, I had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of communications with constituents before introducing it, between Facebook, email, on the street, in the cafes, talking with people on both sides. I know some folks say I should have had a town hall meeting on it, but that’s just one way of communicating with people,” Wiener said. “I’m communicating with constituents seven days a week, in many different ways. So I think that criticism is unfounded.”

TRANSIT AND NIGHTLIFE

Part of Wiener’s power comes from having carved out unique niches for himself, including in two realms not traditionally occupied by fiscal conservatives: public transit and nightlife issues.

“Scott Wiener has been a tireless champion of nightlife issues since the beginning. One of his very first actions in office was to call for an economic impact study to better understand the entertainment industry’s contribution to the City’s economy,” said Guy Carson, the owner of Cafe du Nord and a founding board member of the California Music and Culture Association.

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum gives Wiener lots of unqualified credit for his leadership on transportation issues. “We’ve been really impressed with what a strong grasp he has of the city’s transportation needs, and he’s been willing to push in certain areas behind the scenes,” she said, contrasting the grandstanding that most politicians do on transit issues with Wiener’s more substantive position. “He comes in with a lot more policy understanding, and it’s clear he really rides Muni regularly.”

But even on transportation issues, some progressives fault Wiener. “We need to be really concerned about transit equity in this city, and that’s something I’d like to see more from him on,” Temprano said, calling on Wiener to show as much concerns for the needs of low-income communities that truly rely on Muni as he does with the needs of better-off Castro residents. “I’m always fighting with the MTA because they’re not doing a good enough job on Muni,” Wiener said. In fact, Wiener said he’s in contact with that supposedly independent agency almost every day, pushing them to make changes he wants: “To its credit, MTA does care about what the mayor and the supervisors think, and I give them a lot of credit for that because they could take a more blow-off kind of attitude with me, and I haven’t seen that, at least in my interactions with them.”

Wiener said his relationship with MTA head Reiskin is “very positive. I mean, I push him, but we have the kind of relationship where I can be very frank and tell him when I think he’s wrong, and he can be very frank and tell me when he thinks I’m wrong.” Reiskin agrees that his relationship with Wiener is a good one, because of Wiener’s hectoring as much as in spite of it. “My relationship with him is very good. He’s someone who really cares about the transportation system, particularly Muni, and he understands the importance of Muni to the city,” Reiskin said, praising Wiener for his willingness to get personally involved in the struggle. “He’s extended some political capital for it.”

Yet on the TIDF fight, the capital Wiener extended split the progressive movement and burnished his arguments that he’s independent from downtown, so the net result of that losing fight only served to strengthen Wiener politically. “There were no conversations on the front end, I can tell you that. It was sprung on us,” said Cohen, whose CCHO ended up partnering with the business community against transportation activists to defeat the measure. “It did not have to become as adversarial as it was and that was really disheartening. It’s hard to think that it wasn’t intentional.” Reiskin also said that issue was mishandled by his agency. “We failed in that process,” he said. “The fact that we’re pitting improving transportation against social services is not good.”

Yet both Wiener and Shahum cast it as a fight worth having. Wiener said they discussed dropping it when it was clear the votes weren’t there: “My gut was already telling me let’s do the vote, and she said, ‘You know, people need to say where they are on this.’ So we agreed to move it forward.”

And that was a vote he cited when I questioned him about his pro-business agenda. “You always have to be willing to disagree with your allies,” Wiener said. “So people say, ‘You always do what the Chamber of Commerce says,’ but that’s not true. I think I was number five on their scorecard this year because I supported CCA, I supported classifying banks as formula retail, and they scored on the TIDF.”

But Wiener denies there was any political calculation on the TIDF vote, and he cast that vote as a lesson in political organizing. “We have not been organized enough in term of building political power for pro-transit policies, whether it’s pedestrian safety or public transportation. We know that we’ve systematically underfunded Muni, we know that Muni does not do well in funding battles, it doesn’t have effective lobbying for it,” Wiener said.

“We had an all-star cast of public transit advocates up against the Chamber and it was a mismatch, so we need to build up much more institutional capacity for transit advocacy. That’s what we’re learning.”

Housing stability for all

Andrew Lam

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January 29, 2013

9

OPINION San Francisco is in the midst of a housing affordability crisis. It’s way too expensive to live here, and for those fortunate enough to have housing they can afford, we need to provide stability. This need for housing stability applies to renters as well as homeowners. If we’ve learned anything from the foreclosure crisis, homeowners are not all rich, and they are not all stable in their housing.

Last week’s Guardian argued against legislation I’m co-sponsoring, which provides one-time relief to owners of tenancies-in-common (TICs) — mostly middle- and working-class first-time homeowners who reside in their units — while providing strong protection to renters. While the editorial correctly stressed the need to support rent control, it failed to acknowledge the need to support housing stability for homeowners as well.

Rent control is one of the pillars of our city. It stabilizes housing prices, recognizes that housing isn’t just another commodity, keeps communities intact, and helps maintain San Francisco’s diverse fabric. I’ve long supported rent control, as reflected by my voting record. I supported a series of rent control measures designed to reduce evictions, including requiring sales disclosure of a unit’s eviction history, requiring increased relocation benefits to evicted tenants, outlawing harassment of tenants, and restricting use of the Ellis Act by real-estate speculators. As a member of the Board of Supervisors, I authored successful legislation to ban conversion of rent-controlled units to student dorms and to provide temporary affordable units to renters displaced by disasters.

The current legislation I’m co-sponsoring will provide needed relief to struggling TIC owners, many of whom are experiencing serious financial distress, while protecting the small number of tenants who live in these units. TIC owners have group mortgages, meaning that if one owner defaults, all owners default. They pay double the interest rate other homeowners pay and usually cannot refinance. The legislation will allow them to convert their units to condos and obtain their own mortgages, at lower rates and less foreclosure risk.

While some caricature TIC owners as speculators and wealthy people, that’s untrue. Many TIC owners are quite middle class, former renters who scraped together a down payment to purchase a home. Many are teachers, social workers, public employees, and other workers who are anything but speculators. These are people who, if they didn’t own TICs, would be renting. They aren’t Martians who dropped out of the sky. They’re our neighbors, co-workers, and fellow San Franciscans. They are part of the city’s fabric.

Under the legislation, owner-occupied TICs that are in the condo lottery will be able to convert to condos by paying a fee of $20,000 per unit, with the proceeds dedicated to affordable housing. Buildings with Ellis Act and other problem evictions are typically prohibited from condo converting in San Francisco, under a 2006 law, and that restriction applies to this legislation. In other words, this legislation won’t encourage Ellis Act evictions. Moreover, buildings that aren’t owner-occupied can’t condo convert. Nor can buildings with more than six units. The legislation is one-time in nature and not an ongoing invitation to condo convert.

The legislation covers very few units with tenants — 85% are owner-occupied — and protects this small number of tenants by mandating they receive lifetime leases, with full rent and eviction controls identical to our rent control laws. This protection is stronger than what most tenants receive in buildings that win the condo lottery currently.

Renters and homeowners both deserve housing stability. This legislation moves us in that direction.

Supervisor Scott Wiener represents District 8.

LGBT icon evicted, leaving town, blasting Wiener

Zelda Bronstein

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January 29, 2013

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LGBT icon evicted, leaving town, blasting Wiener

Documentary filmmaker and longtime queer community activist and leader David Weissman is leaving San Francisco — because he and three other tenants of his place on Oak Street have been evicted under the Ellis Act. These evictions are happening all over town; it’s a disaster. Weissman isn’t going quietly, though; he’s penned a sharp letter to Sup. Scott Weiner that’s making the rounds in tenant and LGBT circles and creating enough controversy that Wiener has put out a long response.

Weissman told me the rash of Ellis Act evictions is horrifying, particularly when seniors are involved. “So many people who have lived through the AIDS epidemic are now finding themselves unwanted and adrift,” he said. “There have always been two competing visions of San Francisco, and the one that’s ascendant now says that people who can own property and make a lot of money will make this a better city. But I’ve always believed that what makes this city great are the creative types who don’t always have a lot of money.”

Read his letter to Wiener and the supervisor’s response after the jump. (UPDATE: It’s worth noting what Weissman posted below, that he is not becoming homeless and spends half his time in Portland, where he will no doubt now live. He won’t be a San Franciscan any more. He writes: “Thanks to everyone for your kind words of support. The letter was intended to bring attention to the larger issues at stake, that most renters in SF are in serious and increasing risk of Ellis Act eviction. As most of you know, my own situation is unusual, in that I’ve been living back and forth between SF and Portland since 2004, with the full knowledge of my benevolent late landlords. I will always be a San Franciscan in my heart, and am trying to find ways to maintain some kind of base there.”

Dear Supervisor Weiner:

We’ve met a few times. I’m the producer of the documentaries We Were Here and The Cockettes, both of which chronicle the history of Gay San Francisco. I’ve been a San Franciscan since 1976. In 1979 I was on the campaign staff of Prop R, a rent-control initiative that didn’t pass, but which pushed the Board of Supervisors to pass the significantly weaker Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Law. I subsequently became a Legislative Aide to Supervisor Harry Britt. I worked a couple of campaigns with Dick Pabich and Jim Rivaldo, and also worked closely with Bill Kraus — heroic leaders whose names I hope are familiar to you.

I am being forced out of my apartment that I’ve rented since 1986 due to the Ellis Act. This will end my 37-year residency in San Francisco. I must say that I find your policies regarding housing in San Francisco — your consistent bias toward home ownership at the expense of tenants and affordability, to be dismaying, and an affront to the legacy of Harvey Milk. In my own situation, it has been extremely clear that the limitations on condo conversion provided somewhat of an impediment to the immediate eviction of everyone in my building (all gay, 3 out of 4 of us are seniors), motivating the landlord to at least pay us to leave rather than just evict us at very minimal cost to him. But even this is appalling — your efforts should be toward further combating the effects of the Ellis Act, rather than contributing to the tsunami of evictions that is destroying the fabric of our City. No buyout can compensate for the loss of our homes.

I don’t doubt that you have good intentions, and that you have done some good things as Supervisor. Though you didn’t live here in the worst of the AIDS years, I assume you’ve been somewhat impacted by that history. But for those of us who elected Harvey Milk, who fought the Briggs Initiative and Anita Bryant, who created this amazing gay community centered around Castro Street, and then who fought for our lives and the lives of our brothers through two decades of AIDS deaths… having a gay supervisor promoting policies that are forcing so many of our generation out of our homes and out of the City to which we have given so much is heartbreaking.

Wiener’s response, posted on Facebook:

Hi David. Yes, we have met several times, and I’ve always been a huge admirer of your work. You’re an icon in our community. “We Were Here” is one of the best and most moving films I’ve ever seen.

Your email is deeply distressing to me. It’s awful that the Ellis Act was used to evict you and the other tenants out of your building. I don’t support the Ellis Act and I publicly supported Mark Leno’s (unfortunately unsuccessful) legislation to restrict its use. Back in the 90s, when I was a new lawyer, I defended numerous tenants against the wave of evictions at the time, both Ellis Act and Owner-Move-In evictions, and it was as heartbreaking then as it is now. I’m truly sorry that this happened to you and sorry for the City that you now are leaving. I would be more than interested in helping you find a place in San Francisco that you can afford. Please let me know if you want my help in that effort. I’m at your disposal.

It took me a day to respond to this email, because it’s a challenging response to write. Something terrible happened to you. You have every right to be angry and frustrated that so many great years in San Francisco, building our community, may come to an end this way. (I truly hope that we can avoid that, of course.) But, I do need to respond to some things that you said in your email about me. I hate to have to respond -– since what happened to you was so awful -– but I don’t think that your comments about me, which you’ve now disseminated publicly, are fair or accurate. It’s not accurate to describe my policy bent as having a “consistent bias toward home ownership at the expense of tenants and affordability.” I know you disagree with my legislation to provide one-time relief to owner-occupied TICs that are at risk of foreclosure, and I’ll get to that in a bit. I’m not sure how much you know about my public positions and votes over a decade on housing issues, but I’ll describe them for you. While I do support helping people achieve home ownership –- and I don’t in any way run away from that — I’ve supported just about every pro-tenant measure that’s appeared on the ballot, including measures that my predecessor and Mayor Newsom opposed (that’s not a criticism of my predecessor or Mayor Newsom, both of whom I strongly supported, but we had a difference of opinion). I supported Prop B, which required disclosure to prospective condo purchasers of the unit’s eviction history. That went on the ballot after the Mayor vetoed it, and I supported it. I supported Prop H, which increased relocation payments to tenants in no-fault evictions. That went on the ballot after the Mayor vetoed it, and I supported it. I supported Prop M, which banned and created penalties for harassment of tenants. That went on the ballot after the Mayor vetoed it, and I supported it. And, as noted, I supported Mark Leno’s effort to restrict the application of the Ellis Act. I also supported limiting or banning condo conversion for units that were made vacant through use of the Ellis Act.

As a member of the Board of Supervisors I’ve continued my work supporting tenants. I authored and passed legislation banning universities (including Academy of Arts University) from converting rent-controlled apartment buildings into student dorms. That was a huge win for tenants, and I pushed it through against intense opposition. I authored and passed the Good Samaritan Ordinance, which was supported by tenants groups and which provides affordable temporary apartments for tenants who are displaced by disasters.

Now, let’s talk about my work around affordable housing. I was one of the people who negotiated the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, Prop C, which appeared on last November’s ballot and won. I campaigned for it passionately. It will generate $1.5 billion for affordable housing in coming decades. I’ve been closely involved with the 55 Laguna project, which will create quite a bit of affordable housing, including affordable housing for LGBT seniors. I’ve supported every transition-age youth housing project that’s come to the board, all of which have been controversial. I’ve publicly begged Larkin Street to create more youth housing in the Castro.

I stand by my record on housing policy, including support for tenants and for creation of affordable housing. Your perception of my overall record simply isn’t accurate.

As for my TIC legislation, I respect your opposition to it, but I don’t think it’s fair to state that by helping struggling TIC owners stay in their homes –- and helping them avoid foreclosure -– I’m forcing gay people from their homes. David, you and I don’t know each other well, but if you got to know me, you’d know that I’ve spent my entire adult life (which has been more years than you might think) fighting for the LGBT community. Whether playing a key role in building the LGBT community center, fighting my neighbors on Collingwood Street when they tried to get rid of LYRIC, leading the charge to restore HIV funding cuts in our city budget, to helping get transgender people health coverage under Healthy San Francisco, or sponsoring the legislation that created the LGBT senior task force, support for my brothers and sisters in this community has been at the core of everything I do.

The TIC legislation is not what its opponents have painted it to be. I’ve posted a full explanation of the legislation here.
This legislation provides one-time relief to TIC owners in owner-occupied TICs that are in the condo lottery. San Francisco law restricts or prohibits condo conversion for buildings that have had Ellis Act or other bad eviction history. This legislation sticks by those restrictions. These TIC owners are in serious trouble. They purchased thinking they’d be able to convert in 5-7 years. It’s now looking like 15-20 years. That’s 15-20 years on a group mortgage –- where if one owner defaults everyone defaults -– paying double the interest rate of other homeowners, and being unable to refinance even if you’re about to experience a balloon payment on the mortgage. If we don’t help these TIC owners, we’re going to see a wave of foreclosures and people losing their homes. While I fully understand the opposition to condo conversion, I guess my question is whether allowing these homeowners to go into foreclosure is a good thing for the city. I don’t think it is. This is a one-time and discrete piece of legislation designed to help a group of San Francisco residents -– primarily long-time residents -– who are in serious trouble.

These TIC owners aren’t aliens who landed here and snapped up units. Almost every TIC owner I’ve ever met is a first-time homeowner who rented for years (often renting for a lot of years) and then scraped together a down payment to be able to purchase a place. They’re middle class, since if they were wealthy they’d be able to buy more than a TIC. Many are people who’ve lived here for a very long time –- 15, 20 years or longer. Many are gay. These are San Franciscans just like you and I are. They, too, are part of the fabric of our city. I don’t think it’s anti-tenant, anti-gay, or anti-anything to provide them with some help by letting them condo convert their units so that they can have housing stability.

It’s estimated that 85% of these TIC units are owner-occupied. And for the very small number of tenants who live in these buildings, the legislation mandates that they receive lifetime leases with full rent and eviction controls. Again, 85% of the units are occupied by their owners.

David, I regret having to respond to you like this. That’s pretty much the last thing I want to do with someone who’s going through something as traumatic as what you’re experiencing. But, since you made a pretty bald public assertion about what I stand for and who I advocate for, I thought it necessary to respond.

Condo conversion legislation on hold for now

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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January 28, 2013

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Following a contentious five-hour hearing, a committee of the Board of Supervisors postponed voting on a controversial housing proposal, and agreed to revisit the issue on Feb. 25. Over the next few weeks, opposing sides are expected to negotiate a possible alternative.

Authored by Sups. Scott Wiener and Mark Farrell, the proposed condo conversion impact fee would have allowed as many as 2,000 tenancy-in-common (TIC) units to be immediately converted to condos for a fee, allowing owners to bypass a housing lottery system that places an annual cap on conversions.

While TIC owners voiced frustration about the backlogged lottery system, tenants expressed fears that the legislation could give rise to a wave of Ellis Act evictions if landlords or speculators interpreted it as a signal that lucrative condo conversion would be easier to achieve.

Prior to the hearing, a group of tenants gathered in front of City Hall in a show of opposition to the condo-conversion legislation, waving signs that read, “Stop the Attack on Rent Control.”

“The reality is, if this legislation passes, there will be more evictions in San Francisco,” said Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee, who spoke at the rally.

Tenant advocates worry that the legislation would result in a permanent loss of affordable, rent-controlled units from the city’s housing stock, at a time when rents are soaring. When landlords rent out their condos or TICs in San Francisco, there’s a key difference: TICs are covered by rent control, but condos are exempt.

“I’ve been evicted three times,” one woman said while addressing members of the Land Use & Economic Development Committee. “I know so many people who have gotten evicted. I don’t know anyone who’s won their case against eviction.”

During the hearing, Farrell adopted a defensive tone against critics who’d described the proposal as an attack on rent control. “The tactics that these opponents have deployed is out of line,” he said. To assuage concerns, he noted that he and Wiener had included a provision guaranteeing lifetime leases for existing tenants in units that qualified for condo conversion under the program.

But Sup. Jane Kim drilled down on this detail, questioning whether such an agreement would be legally enforceable in the long run. In response, a representative from the City Attorney’s office said he thought the provision was on solid legal ground, but noted that the specific matter “has not been litigated before,” meaning there is still a question as to whether it could withstand a court challenge. When Kim asked if any funding was set aside to enforce these lifetime leases, the response was “no.”

Board President David Chiu proposed holding off on a vote for several weeks. “I do not support the legislation in its current form,” he said. If the current generation of TIC owners were allowed to convert this time, he explained, the next generation’s frustrations with the housing lottery would only “lead us back to an identical debate in a short period of time.”

Kim echoed this point. “My concern was that … folks were looking at this legislation as an ice-break for more condo conversion,” she said just after a public comment session that lasted several hours. And she acknowledged that there is a larger problem to consider. “It’s very tragic that we have set up a situation where [TICs and renters] are pitted against one another,” she said.

Ed Lee’s State of the City: What evictions? What displacement?

Zelda Bronstein

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January 28, 2013

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Ed Lee’s State of the City: What evictions? What displacement?

Mayor Ed Lee punctuated his State of the City speech with a nice little quip: “Every San Franciscan deserves a clean, safe place to call home.” I agree.

So why, in a speech lasting more than an hour, did the mayor not once mention that thousands of San Franciscans are facing the loss of their homes — and will be forced out of the city — because of the same policies that he’s proudly promoting?

These things are always self-congratualtory and full of the requisite bullshit. But Lee’s description of the State of the City was nothing more than a fantasy to the two-thirds of San Franciscans who live in rental housing, many of whom are living with an unacceptable level of insecurity. Much of the city’s rental stock — and the effectiveness of rent control — is at risk at speculators are buying up properties, tossing the tenants out with the Ellis Act, and converting them to tenancies in common. This is a massive civic crisis, brought on in part by the boom in tech jobs and the consequent boom in high-paid young people who want to live in a city that has virtually no vacant housing.

We saw this before, under Mayor Willie Brown; we called it the Economic Cleansing of San Francisco. It was awful, and it’s happening again.

But you wouldn’t know that to hear the mayor completely ignore the issue.

Oh, Lee gave it a toss-off line; gee, the rent is too high, but we can’t ignore the laws of supply and demand. Gee, we’re going to build 45,000 new housing units, and that will fix everything.

But Lee, of all people, ought to know that housing in San Francisco has never followed the laws of supply and demand. This is a highly irregular market, because demand is essentially unlimited. Housing fills us as fast as you build it. And none of the new housing that’s currently under construction or in the pipeline will be affordable to current SF residents who live in rent-controlled units and are at risk for eviction.

When you’re evicted under the Ellis Act in San Francisco today, to make room for someone with more money, you wind up having to leave the city. That’s the bottom line. And everywhere you turn, tenants are facing that ugly prospect.

The mayor spent much of his time talking about jobs. That’s fine; he’s proud that the unemployment rate in the city has fallen to 6.5 percent, but he insists he won’t rest until everyone has a job. Actually, most economists would say that’s impossible; capitalism, by its nature, exists with a structural unemployment rate that rarely falls below 4 percent. In fact, 4 percent is generally considered “full employment.”

More important, the overall rate is 6.5 percent, but it’s way higher for people without college degrees, for youth, and for African Americans. (It’s above 50 percent for transgender people.) The tech boom isn’t providing jobs for all of the unemployed current San Francisco residents; a lot of the jobs are going to people who don’t live here and are moving here for employment. They are putting pressure on the existing housing stock. That always leads to displacement.

None of this is to say that tech jobs are bad or that we shouldn’t have companies that pay high wages locate in San Francisco. What it means is that the city first has to protect its existing vulnerable populations — and that’s not happening.

I would encourage Mayor Lee to talk to the Housing Rights Committee, or the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, or any of the other tenant lawyers who are fighting desperately every day to state off evictions. He’d get a very different picture of the state of the city.

Why Mission Bay isn’t a train wreck

Zelda Bronstein

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January 23, 2013

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Now that the city planning director is comparing neighborhood activists to war mongers and meanies, it’s worth a moment to look back at how the city wound up with what the Chron is now calling a vibrant success of a medical-tech development at Mission Bay.

That site used to be a Southern Pacific railroad yard, but in the early 1980s, the old robber barons realized that a lot of their property had more value as real estate than as railroads. So SP decided to develop Mission Bay, eventually spinning off Catellus Corp. as the developer. The first plan was a disaster, a mix of highrise office buildings, hotels and a little bit of housing. Then-Mayor Art Agnos got it toned down a little, but the proposal he and Catellus put forward in the late 1980s was still a mess — more office space than housing, nowhere near enough in the way of community amenities, something an old-school builder with no concern for public process might have gotten away with in another city, but it wasn’t going to fly here. Of course, Catellus and the mayor both argued that this was the best deal the city could possibly get; more housing or different uses just wouldn’t pencil out.

Those same darn crazy activists that the planning director hates forced a public vote on the plan — and it was overwhelmingly rejected.The next day, Catellus came back to the table — and offered dramatic improvements in housing and amenities. In the end, UC decided to move into the site, building what I consider a hideously ugly campus with not a single decent piece of architecture — but without giant highrises and with at least some open space and community facilities. There’s actually a chance that this could become a viable neighborhood — thanks not to the developer, the mayor, or city planning, but to meddlesome neighborhood people.

Funny how that works.

Alerts

Andrew Lam

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January 22, 2013

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THURSDAY 24

Forum: What’s Next for Progressives

Unitarian-Universalist Center, 1187 Franklin, SF. tinyurl.com/pdasf-prog. 7-9pm, free. “Why wait years to challenge the rightward momentum coming from the top of the Democratic Party?” Author and activist Norman Solomon writes in a recent essay. “There is no better time to proceed … than right now.” At this public forum sponsored by the San Francisco chapter of Progressive Democrats of America, Solomon will join panelists Karen Bernal, chair of the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party, and Jodi Reid, executive director of the California Alliance for Retired Americans, in an exchange of ideas for advancing progressive ideals in national politics.

MONDAY 28

Rally to Stop Attack on Rent Control City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett, SF. tinyurl.com/for-tenants. 12pm, free. Join housing activists for a rally on the steps of City Hall to fend off proposed legislation that could result in an increase in tenant evictions to make way for condominiums. After the rally, make your voice heard at a public hearing of the Board of Supes Land Use Committee at 1 p.m.

MONDAY 28

Benefit for Strike Debt Roxie Theatre 3117 16th St., SF. tinyurl.com/no-debtBA. 7:30-9:30pm, $10. “You Are Not A Loan” is a fundraiser for Strike Debt Bay Area, a regional chapter of the Occupy Wall Street-affiliated Strike Debt, created to “foster resistance to all forms of debt imposed on us by the banks.” Featuring performances by the legendary Jello Biafra, comedians Sean Keane, Kevin O’Shea and others; drag star Lil’ Miss Hot Mess, and more.

SATURDAY 26

Roe v Wade: 40th Anniversary Celebration Justin Herman Plaza, SF. 10am-noon, free. Join this community celebration for women’s rights. Featuring appearances by Dancing without Borders’ One Billion Rising Dance Flash mob, balloon twisters, airbrush tattoos, a facepainter, Bubble artist Sterling the Bubblesmith, live music by Trapdoor Social, pro-choice banners and speeches by legal abortion pioneer Pat Maginnis and other community advocates. Silver Ribbon to Trust Women coalition.

TIC legislation is a rent control issue

Andrew Lam

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January 22, 2013

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OPINION If legislation introduced by Supervisors Scott Wiener and Mark Farrell passes the Board of Supervisors next month, up to 2,000 tenancies in common will be allowed to bypass the lottery process and convert to condominiums.

Add those to the nearly 6,000 conversions that have occurred from 2001-2011 (according to stats from the Department of Public Works), and you have a sizable chunk of rent-controlled units that will have been yanked from our housing stock in the past decade or so in a city that can’t afford to lose rental units, especially those that preserve affordability while tenants live in them. TICs are still under rent control; condos lose it when they’re sold.

Which makes the Wiener and Farrell legislation a rent-control issue. Not to mention a really bad idea at a really bad moment in time.

San Francisco’s perennial housing crisis can’t possibly get worse. Rents are the highest in the country — and still rising. The average rent in the city these days is $3,000. The vacancy rate is low.

Ellis Act evictions, a tool for creating TICs by allowing a landlord or speculator to circumvent just-cause eviction protections, are on the upswing. They’re not as high as they were at the height of the dot-com boom of the late 90s, but, considering that these days many landlords and speculators threaten tenants with Ellis or buy them out rather than do the dirty deed, the number of folks displaced for TICs is higher than what is recorded at the Rent Board. Some tenants have actually received letters from new landlords with two checkboxes — one for Ellis and the other for a buyout. Take your pick, which way do you want to be tossed out and possibly left homeless?

The folks being displaced are from every district and represent the diversity about which we always brag: longterm, generally low-income seniors, disabled people, people with AIDS, families, and people of color. And they’re less likely to find other apartments they can afford.

Wiener claims that buildings where there are evictions will not be eligible for conversion, but many of the TICs currently in the lottery, which will be eligible for conversion under the Wiener/Farrell legislation, were created by evictions. Almost 20 percent of the units in the pipeline were formed before legislation was put into place to restrict conversions if tenants are ousted. How many of the other 80 percent are the result of threats and buyouts, de facto evictions? Or were entered into the lottery even when they shouldn’t have been?

Brian Basinger, founder of the AIDS Housing Alliance, was evicted from his apartment for a TIC, yet his place was converted to a condo, despite the fact that he’s a protected tenant.

Allowing as many as 2,000 conversions not only diminishes the rent-controlled housing stock, but it also jacks up rents. Not to mention it gives speculators incentive to do more Ellis evictions or buyouts — after all, though Wiener and Farrell say this is a one-time only deal, once Pandora’s box is opened, it’s going to be hard to keep it shut. I think landlords and speculators know that.

The Housing Element of the City’s General Plan, adopted in 2009, instructs officials to “preserve rental units, especially rent controlled units, to meet the City’s affordable housing needs.”

This legislation won’t preserve rent-controlled units. It’s a bad fit for our city.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca, who’s worked for the Housing Rights Committee for 13 years, is a longtime queer tenants right/affordable housing advocate.

The battle of Brotherhood Way

Zelda Bronstein

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January 22, 2013

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Brotherhood Way is a creature of another era. Tucked between the San Francisco Golf Club and ParkMerced, it was long known as Stanley Way. But in 1958, under Mayor George Christopher, the city, which owned all of the land on the south side of the street, turned that property over to a long list of religious institutions and renamed the street to reflect its role as a place for houses of worship. It’s now home to six churches or synagogues and nine religious schools. It has its own (religious) neighborhood association.

And this quiet little corner of the city has been the scene of a pitched battle over a plan to build 182 housing units on an empty patch of land on the north side of the street.

Opponents of the project say the area was set aside for educational and religious uses, not housing — and they argue that the expansion of ParkMerced will add too much congestion to the area. Supporters say the west side of town needs to acept more housing and more density.

It’s gotten ugly: At one point, the Archbishop himself ordered the pastor of St. Thomas More Catholic Church to quit agitating against the development. Sean Elsbernd, who represented the district for eight years, infuriated neighbors when he supported the project, and later apologized for his insensitivity to their concerns.

And seven years after the Planning Commission and the supervisors gave the project a green light, it still hasn’t broken ground.
Now the developers are ready to go — and the churches, aided by retired Judge Quentin Kopp, are trying once again to shut it down.

Kopp’s been arguing for some time now that the project needs to go back for a new permit because too much time has passed and nothing has happened. But he’s got another argument, too, and he brought it to the Board of Appeals Jan. 9. See, the original deal had a problem with transit access, since there isn’t enough Muni capacity along Brotherhood to handle 300 or so new residents. So the developer agreed to build two pedestrian walkways from the project up to Font Blvd. in Park Merced. But according to Kopp’s appeal, ParkMerced management never agreed to the easements that would be necessary to build a path through its property.

Instead, in 2008, Zoning Administrator Larry Badiner unilaterally changed the requirement, allowing for one footpath to the edge of Park Merced — with some vague agreement that later there might be an extension to the Muni stop. That, Kopp argues, should have triggered a new Conditional Use application and a new hearing. Oh, and in the meantime, ParkMerced has just moved to greatly expand the size of its complex, so maybe that should be considered, too.

The Board of Appeals rejected Kopp’s arguments, but he’s petitioning for a rehearing, in part because the board chair wasn’t present for meeting. Kopp argues that this is a quasi-judicial board — “and you don’t go before the Supreme Court with only eight of the nine members present.” Under city rules, though, four out of five is a quorum and able to hear the matter.

Kopp has another argument, too — one that’s unusual, perhaps unique: He claims none of the board members actually read his original appeal brief.

Kopp, see, asked during the hearing if all of the members had read the papers he submitted, and none of them responded affirmatively. “It is appearent and inferable that no members of the short-handed Board of Appeals had read Appelants’ brief before the hearing, or at all,” the motion for rehearing states. “The manifest failure of the four members present to real Appellants’ carefully-prepared brief constitute extraordinary circumstances and injustice.”

I’ve been able to reach two of the board members, Frank Fung and Darryl Honda, and both insist they read the brief. “I read every case in its entirely,” Fung said, “and so does everyone on this panel.” Honda, who is new to the board, also said he read the documents. “I bust out the highlighter pen and go through all of the briefs in every case,” he said.

So why didn’t they answer Kopp’s question? Well, Fung says, it took them all by surprise: “I don’t think any one has every asked that before.”

I’ll let you know if the petition for rehearing is accepted.

The inauguration and the economic divide

Zelda Bronstein

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January 21, 2013

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The inauguration and the economic divide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Mayor: Are you even paying attention?

The (bad) Warriors deal, by the numbers

Zelda Bronstein

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January 17, 2013

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Rudy Nothenberg, who ran Muni and the city’s water system, was chief administrative officer, negotiated the deal for the Giants ballpark, and served under six San Francisco mayors, stopped by the office last week to talk to us about the Warriors Arena. We’ve had our fights with Nothenberg (as we would with anyone who was that close to Willie Brown and Dianne Feinstein) but the guy knows more about City Hall, public works, private development, and infrastructure finance than almost anyone alive. So we were happy to hear what he had to say.

Let’s be clear, here: Nothenberg lives near where the arena is slated to be built, and, as he was quick to tell us, he doesn’t want it in his backyard. But he also presented a compelling case that San Francisco is getting ripped off. And he had a few pointed things to say about the lack of negotiating skills among the members of Mayor Ed Lee’s administration.

Back when Nothenberg was talking to the Giants about a stadium at Third and King — at that point a district of dilapidated and underused warehouses — always kept a card in his back pocket. “I always knew that if things didn’t work out and we didn’t build the stadium, that would be okay too,” he said. In other words: You can’t get a good deal if you’re not prepared to walk away. And when it comes to the Warriors proposal, the mayor has made it so clear that this is his legacy that the team knows the city will never walk away. So one side of the talks can demand pretty much anything, and the other side has no leverage.

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that just about every development lawyer, political consultant, and lobbyist in town is already working on the project. “They have co-opted everyone,” Nothenberg — no stranger to the dark side of politics — told us.

The exact terms of the deal are still not public, which is a bit odd since the city has already started its environmental review. (Can you really do an environmental impact report on a project when you don’t know what the project actually is? Two difference state courts have come to opposite conclusions, so for now the answer is: maybe.)

But there’s enough information out there for Nothenberg to give us a basic rundown on the financing — and it doesn’t look good. “The Port is really not getting anything out of the deal,” he said. The city will get some increased sales and business taxes, and the Warriors will have to pay housing and transit fees. But there won’t be a lot of new property tax revenue, since that will all go to pay for the arena.

Here’s how Nothenberg laid out his analysis:

The Warriors have to spend $120 million to replace Piers 30-32. (Costs a lot to build such a huge structure over the water.) To make the team whole, the city will sell the Warriors a seawall lot on the other side of the Embarcadero for $30 million, then give the $30 million right back to the team. Then the city will set up an Infrastructure Finance District — the 2013 equivalent of a redevelopment agency — use the future tax increments to fund a $50 million bond. The Warriors get the bond money; the city pays it back. Oh, and then the city gives the team $30 million worth of rent credits, meaning the Warriors will probably never pay any rent at all for the use of that public property. And to make it sweeter, San Francisco will pay the Warriors 13 percent interest on the rent-credit money.

Meanwhile, the local taxpayers will have to come up with a huge amount of money to increase Muni capacity, since the existing transit can’t possibly handle the load of the new arena. Yes, the Warriors, like any developer, will have to pay a modest transit impact fee — “but it’s laughable to thing that this will ever cover the capital and operating costs,” Nothenberg said.

To summarize: The wealthy owners of a professional sports team will get free waterfront land to build an immensely valuable new arena. The city will pay to bring the fans there and get them home, deal with the traffic impacts — and get almost nothing in return.

Good one, Mr. Mayor.

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam

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January 15, 2013

12

EDITOR’S NOTES The guy who runs the San Francisco Housing Authority is in pretty serious doo-doo: His agency has just been placed on the federal government’s “troubled” list, and he’s getting sued by his own lawyer, and he’s hiding from the press while tenants complain that they can’t get basic repairs.

Although Mayor Ed Lee has so far officially stuck by Henry Alvarez, he’s already backing off a bit, and it’s pretty likely Alvarez will be gone when his contract expires this summer. He may be gone even sooner than that; there’s a growing chorus of voices calling on the mayor to fire him.

So at some point we’ll get a new director, who will make a handsome salary (Alvarez gets $210,000 a year plus a car and seven weeks paid vacation) and live in a nice house and go into work every day to deal with problems that are pretty damn far from his or her life.

That’s always the case to some extent with the heads of agencies who deal with the poor, but it’s particularly dramatic when you talk about the Housing Authority. Public housing is never luxurious, but in San Francisco, it’s been riddled with problems for many years. And frankly, I’m much more concerned about the tenants than about Alvarez or his management style.

I get that the Housing Authority has financial problems. The federal government long ago abandoned any serious commitment to funding housing in American cities, and the authority only recently managed to pay off a multimillion-dollar judgment from a lawsuit filed by the families of a grandmother and five children killed in a fire on Housing Authority property.

Yet, tenant advocate continue to complain that it can be hard, even impossible to get a response from the agency. When critics complain, the agency goes after them: The Housing Rights Committee went after the Housing Authority over evictions, and wound up getting investigated by SFHA employees who wanted to gut their city funding. And while some say Alvarez is a hard-charging person who demands results (and thus pisses some people off), nobody has used the words open, accessible or compassionate to describe him.

I’ve got an idea for the next director (or for Alvarez, if he wants to stick around). Why not live in public housing?

Seriously: Why shouldn’t the person who controls the safety and welfare of tenants in more than 6,000 units spend a little time understanding what their lives are like? Why not spend, say, one night a week in one of those apartments?

In the old days, judges used to sentence slumlords to live in their own decrepit buildings, which seemed to work pretty well: Once the guy in charge has to deal with the rats and roaches and broken windows, he’s much more likely to expedite repairs.

But it wouldn’t have to be punitive — just a chance to get a first-hand look at how the agency policies are working on the ground. The city employee unions have had a lot of success asking members of the Board of Supervisors to do a union worker’s job for a day; the director of the San Francisco Housing Authority could certainly live like one of his tenants every now and then.

Think of it as a management tool: What better way to figure out whether his staff is doing the job than to look at the end product? Or figure it as a way to stop being an asshole and see what people who live on less than ten percent of his salary really think of his administration.

Despite settlement, Wells Fargo still in housing activists’ crosshairs

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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January 10, 2013

15

Federal regulators cut a deal with 10 major banks to “speed up housing relief,” major news outlets reported earlier this week – but to exactly no one’s surprise, the amount promised to struggling homeowners is a pittance compared with the overwhelming losses sustained during the foreclosure crisis. National consumer advocates criticized the deal as a lost opportunity to demand some accountability from Wall Street. In San Francisco, neighborhood activists with Occupy Bernal dismissed the agreement as falling short and vowed to continue campaigning against Wells Fargo, a primary mortgage lender based in San Francisco and one of the 10 financial institutions to sign on.

The bank settlement replaced a mandatory, independent foreclosure review process that financial institutions were required to take on following revelations of widespread abuses, like robo-signing. Created to benefit homeowners who faced foreclosure in the wake of these shady lending practices, the program was ultimately chalked up as a failure for being too slow, costly and ineffective. Not only did it reach just a tiny fraction of those eligible to file claims, said Bruce Mirken of the Greenlining Institute, but “as of the end of the year, nobody had actually gotten any money.”

Instead of continuing down that fraught path, big lenders such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and others agreed to shell out $8.5 billion to settle the claims. Under a process that remains far from clear, payments are supposed to be distributed among 3.8 million struggling households nationwide – some of whom went through foreclosure in 2009 and 2010, and others currently in danger of losing their homes.

Local housing activists were cynical. “Wells Fargo and the other big banks have agreed to paying principal reductions and affordable permanent loan modifications about 20 times. They haven’t done it yet, and they’re not going to do it unless we make ’em,” said Buck Bagot, a neighborhood activist who has been organizing around foreclosure issues with Occupy Bernal. In San Francisco alone, more than 1,200 foreclosed properties turned up in a quick search on Trulia.com – many listed at prices exceeding $500,000.

The situation is far worse in the East Bay. From 2006 to 2011, one out of every 14 Oakland households faced foreclosure and had their property reverted back to the bank, according to data compiled by the Urban Strategies Council, an Oakland-based nonprofit working on anti-poverty issues. East Oakland was hit hardest, with data visualizations showing between 165 and 409 properties per census tract that had reverted back to lenders in 2008. (You can view detailed geographic foreclosure data compiled by the Council here.)

“The amount of wealth that has been sucked out of communities is astonishing,” said Mirken, of the Greenlining Institute, a Berkeley-based research advocacy organization focused on economic justice. “It’s not at all clear that the $8.5 billion is at all in relation to the trillions in wealth that was drained from communities in the foreclosure crisis.” In California there are currently 208,435 foreclosed homes up for sale, according to data recently accessed on housing tracking site RealtyTrac, with average price listings of around $273,000. The amount that stands to be gained by selling off bank-owned properties exceeds the total settlement payout by many orders of magnitude.

Mirken said he was glad the banks are promising at least some form of relief to struggling homeowners, even if it’s small potatoes. “I’m not dismissing this as nothing,” he said. “But it feels like the response has never matched the scale of the problem.”

Meanwhile, some nationwide consumer advocates blasted the deal. “The capped pool of cash payments is wholly inadequate in light of the scale of the harm,” said Alys Cohen, staff attorney for the National Consumer Law Center. “If the reviews had been done right the first time, banks would have been on the hook to pay far more to homeowners, even though the planned scheme fell far short of full compensation.”

Occupy Bernal staged a protest at the Bayview branch of Wells Fargo several weeks ago in an effort to draw attention to abusive lending practices that disproportionately affected African American, Asian and Latino homeowners. Bagot told the Guardian there are more to come. As for the bank settlement deal, he scoffed: “These governmental chickens live in the chicken coop that’s run by the fox.”

Feds downgrade troubled Housing Authority

Zelda Bronstein

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January 8, 2013

9

Feds downgrade troubled Housing Authority

The federal government has declared the San Francisco Housing Authority a “troubled” agency and dispatched agents to review the agency’s finances and management failures.

The team of experts from the Department of Housing and Urban Development arrived Jan. 7 and has begun poring over the SFHA’s books.

The federal decision came in an October 31 letter to the city’s Housing Authority Board, with a copy to Mayor Ed Lee.

“The Board of Commissioners of the San Francisco Housing Authority should take immediate action to identify the sources of the performance deficiencies and develop and implement a plan to recover” at an “acceptable level of performance,” wrote HUD in its letter.

The troubled ranking is further bad news for Executive Director Henry Alvarez, who was hired in 2008 to help steady the agency’s management. He has since faced allegations of mistreatment and discrimination by some of his top staff, including the agency’s lawyer. He is the target of three lawsuits by his staff.

In addition to the “troubled” status for public housing, SFHA already faced stepped up monitoring if its Section 8 program that provides rental assistance for program participants in privately owned units. The agency scored zero points in its section 8 program because it failed to submit its report.

San Francisco’s “troubled” status was due to low scores for management of the agency and its finances. On financials, SFHA scored five points out of a possible 30, and on management it scored 12 points out of a possible 25. On physical conditions, SFHA squeaked above the cut-off with 27 out of 40 points. The agency’s total score was 54 out of a possible 100.

The score was a drop from score of 75 the prior year. The SFHA explains the change as new scoring criteria by HUD. The looming issue is the lack of effective management at the agency’s top level.

The arrival of a HUD team this week for a week-long examination of the Housing Authority will produce a plan for the agency to correct its management and financial practices with a set of deadlines and specific actions. Failure to implement the plan can bring new consequences with even tighter oversight.

“HUD is at SFHA offices starting today,” said Bill Ford, SFHA attorney speaking for the agency on Monday. “They are reviewing the situation related to the Troubled status. That’s why they are here. They will help develop a plan to pull the agency out of Troubled status.”

The agency had managed to stay off the troubled list — a designation for those scoring under 60 out of 100 points–for the previous two years. A troubled status can make San Francisco ineligible to compete for special funding beyond what it receives by formula.

HUD scoring lags by several months after the agency’s year-end as local officials and federal officials go through appeals and responses before settling on a final outcome. The current troubled status is for the SFHA year that ended September 30, 2011.

SFHA scores for the year ending September 30, 2012 are tentatively estimated also to be in the troubled category or possibly a point or two higher to earn it a “substandard” ranking. Those results are expected shortly to be followed by additional appeals and reviews.

Some one out of 10 San Francisco households receive some form of federal housing aid, not including those who benefit from lower mortgage interest rates under FHA and other federal homeownership mortgage programs.

SFHA earned high marks in the credit market for its HOPESF program that aims to replace decrepit public housing and expand the number if units. That process involves to outside managers to develop and operate and does not rely on SFHA management.

Do we need more luxury condos?

Andrew Lam

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January 8, 2013

0

There’s no shortage of high-end housing in San Francisco. If you can afford to pay $6,000 a month for your rent or mortgage, you’re going to find a nice place to live. And there’s no study anywhere in any corner of the City Planning Department suggesting that current San Francisco residents really want new luxury condos downtown.

In fact, all evidence suggests the contrary — the market for high-end downtown housing is new residents, people who are moving here to take tech jobs, empty nesters moving from the suburbs, or world travelers looking for a pied-a-terre in one of the greatest cities on Earth.

But when the City Planning Department analyzes a project like 75 Howard, that’s not part of the discussion.

The Dec. 12 preliminary environmental study on the “market-rate” (read: $1 million and up for waterfront views) project never addresses the question of what value this type of housing would bring to the city. Instead, it talks about projections from the Association of Bay Area Governments, which says that San Francisco will grow by 52,000 households by 2030.

So a project that’s creating fewer than 200 housing units, and creating a net of 77 jobs, isn’t big enough to be a factor in the future of either jobs or housing.

But in the process, the study makes a remarkable statement, one that underlines everything wrong with city planning policy. Buried on page 48 of a 151-page preliminary study is the following: “In addition, the demand for housing by the net increase in number of employees would be more than offset by the dwelling units that would be constructed on site under the proposed project or its variants.”

That sounds like bureaucratise, and it is, so allow me to translate: The project will create 186 housing units and 77 jobs. More housing than jobs; what’s there to worry about?

Well: The 77 employees at 75 Howard will work in the restaurants and stores, or in the garage under the building, or in maintenance. Not one of them will make even remotely enough money to afford to buy one of the condo units in the building.

So the project — like so much of the development that happens in San Francisco — will create jobs for people who can’t afford to live here, and housing for people who don’t currently work here. That imbalance is utterly unsustainable, spells disaster for the future of the city — and is pretty much hard-wired into current planning and housing policy.

War of the waterfront

Andrew Lam

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January 8, 2013

40

tredmond@sfbg.com

There’s a blocky, unattractive building near the corner of Howard and Steuart streets, right off the Embarcadero, that’s used for the unappealing activity of parking cars. Nobody’s paid much attention to it for years, although weekend shoppers at the Ferry Building Farmers Market appreciate the fact that they can park their cars for just $6 on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

But now a developer has big plans for the 75 Howard Street site — and it’s about to become a critical front in a huge battle over the future of San Francisco’s waterfront.

Paramount Partners, a New York-based real-estate firm that also owns One Market Plaza, wants to tear down the eight-story garage and replace it with a 350-foot highrise tower that will hold 186 high-end condominiums. The new building would have ground-floor retail and restaurant space and a public plaza.

It would also exceed the current height limit in the area by 150 feet and could be the second luxury housing project along the Embarcadero that defies the city’s longtime policy of strictly limiting the height of buildings on the waterfront.

It comes at a time when the Golden State Warriors are seeking permission to build a sports arena on Piers 30 and 32, just a few hundred feet from 75 Howard.

Between the proposed 8 Washington condo project, the arena, and 75 Howard, the skyline and use of the central waterfront could change dramatically in the next few years. Add to that a $100 million makeover for Pier 70, the new Exploratorium building on Pier 15, and a new cruise ship terminal at Pier 27 — and that’s more development along the Bay than San Francisco has seen in decades.

And much of it is happening without a coherent overall plan.

There’s no city planning document that calls for radically upzoning the waterfront for luxury housing. There’s nothing that talks about large-scale sports facilities. These projects are driven by developers, not city planners — and when you put them all together, the cumulative impacts could be profound, and in some cases, alarming.

“There hasn’t been a comprehensive vision for the future of the waterfront,” Sup. David Chiu told me. “”I think we need to take a step back and look at what we really want to do.”

Or as Tom Radulovich, director of the advocacy group Livable City, put it, “We need to stop planning the waterfront one project at a time.”

Some of the first big development wars in San Francisco history involved tall buildings on the waterfront. After the Fontana Towers were built in 1965, walling off the end of the Van Ness corridor in a nasty replica of a Miami Beach hotel complex, residents of the northern part of the city began to rebel. A plan to put a 550-foot US Steel headquarters building on the waterfront galvanized the first anti-highrise campaigns, with dressmaker Alvin Duskin buying newspaper ads that warned, “Don’t let them bury your skyline under a wall of tombstones.”

Ultimately, the highrise revolt forced the city to downzone the waterfront area, where most buildings can’t exceed 60 or 80 feet. But repeatedly, developers have eyed this valuable turf and tried to get around the rules.

“It’s a generational battle,” former Sup. Aaron Peskin noted. “Every time the developers think another generation of San Franciscans has forgotten the past, they try to raise the height limit along the Embarcadero.”

The 8 Washington project was the latest attempt. Developer Simon Snellgrove wants to build 134 of the most expensive condominiums in San Francisco history on a slice of land owned in part by the Port of San Francisco, not far from the Ferry Building. The tallest of the structures would rise 136 feet, far above the 84-foot zoning limit for the site. Opponents argued that the city has no pressing need for ultra-luxury housing and that the proposal would create a “wall on the waterfront.”

Although the supervisors approved it on a 8-3 vote, foes gathered enough signatures to force a referendum, so the development can’t go forward until the voters have a chance to weigh in this coming November.

Meanwhile, the Paramount Group has filed plans for a much taller project at 75 Howard. It’s on the edge of downtown, but also along the Embarcadero south of Market, where many of the buildings are only a few stories high.

The project already faces opposition. “The serious concerns I had with 8 Washington are very similar with 75 Howard,” Chiu said. But the issues are much larger now that the Warriors have proposed an arena just across the street and a few blocks south.

“Because of the increase in traffic and other issues around the arena, I think 75 Howard has a higher bar to jump,” Sup. Jane Kim, who represents South of Market, told me.

Kim said she’s not opposed to the Warriors’ proposal and is still open to considering the highrise condos. But she, too, is concerned that all of this development is taking place without a coherent plan.

“It’s a good question to be asking,” she said. “We want some development along the waterfront, but the question is how much.”

Alex Clemens, who runs Barbary Coast Consulting, is representing the developer at 75 Howard. He argues that the current parking garage is neither environmentally appropriate nor the best use of space downtown.

“Paramount Group purchased the garage as part of a larger portfolio in 2007,” he told me by email. “Like any other downtown garage, it is very profitable — but Paramount believes an eight-story cube of parking facing the Embarcadero is not the best use of this incredible location.”

He added: “We believe removing eight above-ground layers of parked cars from the site, reducing traffic congestion, enlivening street life, and improving the pedestrian corridor are all benefits to the community that fit well with the city’s overall goals. (Of course, these are in addition to the myriad fees and tax revenues associated with the project.)”

But that, of course, assumes that the city wants, and needs, more luxury condominiums (see sidebar).

Among the biggest problems of this rush of waterfront development is the lack of public transit. The 75 Howard project is fairly close to the Embarcadero BART station, but when you take into account the Exploratorium, the arena, and Pier 70 — where a popular renovation project is slated to create new office, retail, and restaurant space — the potential for transit overload is serious.

The waterfront at this point is served primary by Muni’s F line — which, Radulovich points out, “is crowded, expensive, low-capacity, and not [Americans with Disabilities Act]-compliant.”

The T line brings in passengers from the southeast but, Radulovich said, “if you think we can serve all this new development with the existing transit, it’s not going to happen.”

Then there are the cars. The Embarcadero is practically a highway, and all the auto traffic makes it unsafe for bicycles. The Warriors arena will have to involve some parking (if nothing else, it will need a few hundred spaces for players, staff, and executives — and it’s highly unlikely people who buy million-dollar luxury boxes are going to take transit to the arena, so there will have to be parking for them, too. That’s hundreds of spaces and new cars — assuming not a single fan drives.

The 75 Howard project will eliminate parking spaces, but not vehicle traffic — there will still be close to 200 parking spaces.

And all of this is happening at the foot of the Bay Bridge, the constantly clogged artery to the East Bay. “Oh, and there’s a new community of 20,000 people planned right in the center of the bridge, on Treasure Island,” Peskin pointed out.

Is it possible to handle all of the people coming and going to the waterfront (particularly on days where there’s also a Giants game a few hundred yards south) entirely with mass transit? Maybe — “that’s the kind of problem we’d like to have to solve,” Radulovich said. Of course, the developers would have to kick in major resources to fund transit — “and,” he said, “we don’t even know what the bill would be, and we don’t have the political will to stick it to the developers.”

But a transit-only option for the waterfront is not going to happen — at the very least, thousands of Warriors fans are going to drive.

The overall problem here is that nobody has asked the hard questions: What do we want to do with San Francisco’s waterfront? The Port, which owns much of the land, is in a terrible bind — the City Charter defines the Port as an enterprise department, which has to pay for itself with revenue from its operations, which made sense when it was a working seaport.

But now the only assets are real estate — and developing that land, for good or for ill, seems the only way to address hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance and operating costs on the waterfront’s crumbling piers. And the City Planning Department, which oversees the land on the other side of the Embarcadero, is utterly driven by the desires of developers, who routinely get exemptions from the existing zoning. “There is no rule of law in the planning environment we live in,” Radulovich said. So the result is a series of projects, each considered on its own, that together threaten to turn this priceless civic asset into a wall of concrete.

Disappearing poles

Andrew Lam

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January 8, 2013

5

steve@sfbg.com

Political dynamics on the Board of Supervisors moved into uncertain new territory this week with the inauguration of two new members -– London Breed and Norman Yee –- who break the mold in representing districts that have long been predictable embodiments of opposite ideological poles.

Breed and Yee are both native San Franciscans with deep roots in their respective districts, which they tapped to win hotly contested races against challengers who seemed more closely aligned with the progressive politics of Dist. 5 and the fiscally conservative bent of Dist. 7. Both tell the Guardian that they represent a new approach to politics that is less about ideology and more about compromise and representing the varied concerns of their diverse constituencies.

“I don’t see everything as a compromise, but I want to be sure we find compromises where we can and don’t let personalities get in the way,” said Yee, whose background working in education and facilitating deals as a school board member belies District 7’s history of being represented by firebrand opponents of the progressive movement.

Some of the strongest champions of the pro-tenant, anti-corporate progressive agenda have come from the Haight and Dist. 5, a role that Breed has no intention of playing. “When you talk about the progressives of San Francisco, I don’t know that I fit in that category,” Breed told us. “I’m a consensus builder. I want to get along with people to get what I want.”

Yet what Breed says she wants are housing policies that protect renters and prevent the exodus of African-Americans, and development standards that preserve the traditional character of neighborhoods against corporate homogenization. “I don’t see the difference between my causes and progressive causes,” she said, claiming a strong independence from some of the monied interests that supported her campaign.

We spoke a few days before the Jan. 8 vote for board president (which was scheduled after Guardian press time, and which you can read about at the SFBG.com Politics blog). Neither Yee nor Breed would tip their hands about who they planned to support -– the first potential indication of their willingness to buck their districts’ ideological leanings.

Breed had raised some progressive eyebrows by telling the Guardian and others that she admired moderate Sup. Scott Wiener and would support him for president, but she had backtracked on that by the time we spoke on Jan. 5, telling us, “I’m going into this with an open mind.

“I’m waiting on my colleagues to decide who has the most votes,” Breed said, ing a candid take on valuing compromise over conflict. “I really would like to see us walk into this all together.”

Yee had similar comments. “They’re all competent people and can be leaders, it just depends on where they want to lead us,” he said. “I value people who can work with anyone and see themselves as facilitators more than as dictators.”

Both Breed and Yee come from humble roots that they say give them a good understanding of the needs of the city’s have-nots. Breed was raised in the public housing projects of the Western Addition, an experience that makes her want to solve the current dysfunction in the San Francisco Housing Authority.

“I can’t tell you what needs to be done, but I can tell you something is wrong,” Breed told us. “My goal is to get to the bottom of it and be extremely aggressive about it.”

Yee grew up in Chinatown, his father an immigrant who worked as a janitor, his mother a garment worker. They later lived in the Sunset and the Richmond, and Yee moved into his district’s Westwood Park neighborhood 26 years ago.

When Yee was eight years old, the family saved enough money to open a grocery store at 15th and Noe, and he said that he basically ran the store in his teen years while his father continued working another job.

That was where Yee developed his deep appreciation for the role that small, neighborhood-serving businesses play in San Francisco. In an era before credit cards, he would offer credit lines to local customers struggling to make ends meet; that experience showed him how stores like his family’s were essential parts of the city’s social and economic fabric.

“That’s why I value small businesses,” Yee said, calling that his top focus as a supervisor. “They’re going to have a bigger voice now.”

Yee draws a clear distinction between the interests of small business and that of the larger corporations that dominate the powerful San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Asked where he might have placed on the Chamber’s recent scorecard ranking supervisors’ votes — where Yee’s predecessor, Sean Elsbernd, got the highest marks — Yee said, “Probably not on their A list. They are just one entity in San Francisco and I’m not going to be judged just by them.”

At 63 years old, Yee is by far the oldest member of the youngest Board of Supervisors in recent memory, while Breed, at 38, is closer to the current average. Yee hopes his age and experience will help him forge compromises among all the supervisors.

“People draw their lines, but I try to listen to people and see where their lines are,” Yee said. “It’s a balancing act, but at the same time, there’s things I’ve been working on all my life, like education and safety net issues, and this district does care about those things. At the same time, they care about their homes. Are these issues in conflict? I don’t think they have to be.”

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam

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January 8, 2013

12

tredmond@sfbg.com

EDITOR’S NOTES Everybody’s talking about the new data on the price of housing in San Francisco, which is in part because everybody talks about the price of housing in San Francisco anyway and in part because the figures are just so alarming. The figures show that the median rent in San Francisco is $3,100 a month — and while it’s hard to know exactly what that means, since some three-bedroom and larger units are in the mix, most San Francisco rentals are smaller, and I’m hearing tell of people paying more than $2,000 for a studio.

Insane. This hurts everyone, particularly small businesses. The much-reviled payroll tax doesn’t really affect the bottom lines of most businesses, but the cost of housing absolutely does, since it drives up the cost of employing people. High rents are way worse for business than high taxes. I don’t get why all the downtown types refuse to see that.

At any rate, I was listening to KQED’s Forum this morning, and the guests, including an economist from Trulia, the real-estate analysis outfit, kept talking about the “healthy” housing market. Again: Insane. This housing market is about as unhealthy as any capitalist market anywhere in the country. It’s increasing the wealth gap, impoverishing thousands, forcing vast amounts of displacement and making the city less diverse. In what economic universe is that “healthy?”

When I write about this sort of stuff, my beloved trolls all say that’s just how markets work and that any form of regulation (say, rent controls on vacant apartments) just makes things worse. (Not true — see Berkeley in the 1980s.) But it all raises a fun question, and gives me a chance to make a very immodest proposal that is no more outrageous than the existing situation for people who want to live in San Francisco.

Maybe we should take housing in this city out of the private market entirely, regulate it like a public utility — and assign it by seniority.

Remember the college housing lottery? First year, you got stuck with a small dorm room, just like everyone else. You lived with it, and with the roommates they assigned you; rich student, poor student, we all lived in the same place under the same conditions.

Sophomores had a little more choice, and by senior year you could pick the best housing on campus. Nobody complained about unfairness; that’s just how the deal worked.

So imagine if everyone who first arrives in San Francisco (or graduates here and enters the job market) had to live in a small SRO or mini-studio. Twitter executive, nonprofit worker, unemployed person — all of us start out with the same housing conditions.

After you’ve stuck around a while, demonstrating a commitment to the community, you move up — say, after five years you get a one-bedroom apartment, after ten you get a flat, and after 20 years you get a house of your own. People who start families would get more space, but on the same type of schedule. Everyone pays the same monthly rent for the same size place, and eventually, after time, vests into home equity.

What should cities encourage? Stability, community involvement, respect for elders … all of those things fit into this plan. People who might otherwise never meet each other would be thrown into living in the same places; high-paid professionals would learn what life was like for working stiffs (and vice versa).

It’s an eminently fair way of allocating a scarce resource. Anyone have a better idea?