Housing

Pit bull in a pony tail

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Pit bull in a pony tail

FILM There’s been a string of movies lately pondering what Britney once called the not-a-girl, not-yet-a-woman syndrome. Two 2009 entries will earn Oscar nominations: Lone Scherfig’s An Education, about a 1960s British 16-year-old who learns a hard lesson about trusting an older, slippery suitor; and Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire, about a 1980s Harlem girl who’s already learned a lifetime of hard lessons by her 16th birthday. I’m not the first reviewer to compare either of these films to Fish Tank (both it and Precious snagged prestigious festival prizes in 2009), and I’m probably not alone in saying that Andrea Arnold’s gritty new drama is the superior choice among the three. If there’s justice, Fish Tank won’t be forgotten when next year’s award nominations roll out. (Arnold’s no stranger to Academy gold, having already picked up a statuette for her 2003 short film, Wasp.)

I’ll admit it: I’m an Arnold fanatic. If I had to point to one new filmmaker whose work most excites me, I’d likely pick Arnold. Her films are heartbreaking, but in an unforced way that never feels manipulative; her characters, often portrayed by nonactors, feel completely organic.

When I spoke to Arnold before the release of her 2006 Red Road — about a CCTV operator who hatches a slow-boil revenge plot — she elaborated on why she populates her scripts with such ordinary, yet deeply complex, characters: “I think all human beings are very complicated in their circumstances and their environments — sometimes people don’t always behave in the best way. It doesn’t mean to say that they’re bad. I like seeing people who may not be easily likable to start. But then when you get to understand them more, you have empathy for them.”

She was referring to the main character of Red Road. But she could have just as easily been describing Mia, Fish Tank‘s 15-year-old heroine. (In a story that kicks Lana Turner’s famous star-is-born moment in the teeth, first-time actor Katie Jarvis was discovered while arguing with her boyfriend at a train station.) Mia lives with her party-gal single mom and tweenage sister in a public-housing high-rise; all three enjoy drinking, swearing, and shouting. Mia is particularly good at slamming doors and sprinting away from trouble. The other girls in the ‘hood hate her; her only friend is a neighbor’s raggedy pony, whose tied-up existence both frustrates and fascinates her.

But much like sparkly-dreamer Precious, Mia has a secret passion: hip-hop dancing, which she practices with track-suited determination. And much like An Education‘s Jenny, Mia’s stumbling path toward womanhood becomes ever-more confusing with the appearance of an older man — here, mom’s foxy new boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender, from 2008’s Hunger). At first, it’s unclear what Connor’s intentions are. Is he trying to be a cool father figure, or something far more inappropriate?

Without giving away too much, it’s hard to fear too much for a girl who headbutts a teenage rival within the film’s first few minutes — though it soon becomes apparent Mia’s hard façade masks a vulnerable core. Her desire to make human connections causes her to drop her guard when she needs it the most. In a movie about coming of age, a young girl’s bumpy emotional journey is expected turf. But Fish Tank earns its poignant moments honestly — most coming courtesy of Jarvis, who has soulfullness to spare. Whether she’s acting out in tough-girl mode or revealing a glimpse of her fragile inner life, Arnold’s camera relays it all, with unglossy matter-of-factness.

FISH TANK OPENS FRI/29 IN BAY AREA THEATERS.

Stop the Transamerica condo high-rise!

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Stop the Transamerica condo high-rise!

The San Francisco Planning Commission and Recreation and Park Commission will hold a special joint meeting Jan. 21 to decide whether to allow the owner of the Transamerica Building to construct a 400-foot condo tower next door that would violate so many elements of the city’s Planning Code and rational planning policy that it’s almost impossible to list them all.

The building, which would contain 248 luxury housing units — something the city doesn’t need — would cast shadows on two city parks, make downtown traffic and air quality much worse (thanks to a four-level underground parking garage), and require special spot zoning to double the allowable height from 200 feet to 400 feet.

There is no conceivable policy reason to approve this abomination. Even so, Mayor Newsom’s Planning Department is pushing it, and four of the seven planning commissioners are Newsom appointees. If the mayor’s staff and appointees allow this project to go forward, it will be a lasting legacy of shame for his administration.

Aegon Corp. wants to build housing next to its landmark property, and nothing in the Planning Code discourages that. In fact, city planners are pushing for more housing downtown, close to workplaces. In theory, that should cut down on transportation needs and car use. And of course, just about everyone in town believes that San Francisco needs more housing.

In practice, the program hasn’t worked out. The new housing units built in downtown San Francisco have been purchased to a large extent by commuters who travel to Silicon Valley, by retirees who aren’t working anyway, by wealthy people who want a pied-à-terre in San Francisco and by real-estate speculators looking for a quick buck.

The high-end condos haven’t done anything to relieve pressure on the housing market and don’t meet the city’s urgent need for more housing for middle-class and low-income families. If anything, the luxury condo market downtown is overbuilt right now.

Still, if Aegon wanted to build a 200-foot tower within existing zoning parameters, the company could probably get away with it.

But that’s now what’s on the table. The 555 Washington St. building would be double the allowable height — and would violate Proposition K, the 1984 law that bars the construction of towers casting shadows on public parks. City planners acknowledge that both Sue Bierman Plaza and Maritime Park would lose sunshine if the high-rise is built.

In exchange, the developer has offered to give the city a new park. But that proposal is a scam, too. There’s already open space on the site — Redwood Park. That’s considered private property, to be used by Transamerica Building residents — but it exists only because the city mandated it in 1971 as part of the trade-off for constructing the Pyramid, which violated city height and bulk rules at the time.

The new park would include an additional 4,000 square feet, but also requires that the city sell Aegon part of a city street, Mark Twain Alley. Aegon will then use the air rights above that street to increase the bulk of the building, and construct a parking garage below.

So the city gives up public property to gain a slight addition to a park that the city forced the developer to construct in the first place — and in exchange lets the developer block the sun on two existing parks. This is considered a fair tradeoff?

In the wake of the construction of the Pyramid, the city adopted zoning rules that drove high-rises south of Market Street and imposed straight height limits on the edge of Chinatown and North Beach. The 555 Washington project would be a major, precedent-setting step backward.

And what’s the endgame here? What does the city get for bestowing a developer with a huge basket of favors? An unattractive building that will offer housing for a small number of very rich people.

The Planning Commission and Rec-Park Commission must both sign off on any proposal that casts shadows on a park. And while planning staffers have come up with some remarkably convoluted arguments (there weren’t good computer programs in 1984, and now we can track the sun better so it’s okay to rewrite the rules to allow more shade), the sunlight issue alone ought to derail this building. But there’s so much wrong with the proposal that any one of half-dozen issues should be enough to ensure that it never gets beyond the drawing board.

Thursday’s vote will be a test for Newsom and his commissioners. If they allow 555 Washington to proceed, it will be a sign that city planning is entirely in the hands of private developers and that any sense of reason has been lost in the process.

Clouds and mirrors

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Clouds and mirrors

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

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

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

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

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

ATLANTIS CITY

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

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

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

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

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

ART MAUL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GIMME DANGER

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

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

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

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

Or was it just art?

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Editorial: Stop the Transamerica condo high-rise!

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What’s the endgame here? What does the city get for bestowing a developer with a huge basket of favors?
If Newsom and his planning commissioners alllow 555 Washington to proceed, it will signal that city planning is entirely in the hands of private developers

Editorial: The San Francisco Planning Commission and Recreation and Park Commission will hold a special joint meeting Jan. 21 to decide whether to allow the owner of the Transamerica Building to construct a 400-foot condo tower next door that would violate so many elements of the city’s Planning Code and rational planning policy that it’s almost impossible to list them all.

The building, which would contain 248 luxury housing units — something the city doesn’t need — would cast shadows on two city parks, make downtown traffic and air quality much worse (thanks to a four-level underground parking garage), and require special spot zoning to double the allowable height from 200 feet to 400 feet.

Development stimulus would delay affordable housing construction

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By Steven T. Jones
onerincon.jpg
Would the partially completed One Rincon and other stalled luxury condo tower projects move forward if the city reduced their front-end fees, and is the cost worth benefit?

In order to encourage the development of more market-rate housing projects in San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom and his administration are trying to let developers pass a third of their affordable housing fees onto the buyers of their homes, who would eventually pay them though a 1 percent transfer tax – a change that the Controller’s Office says would delay collection of those fees an average of 16 years.

That’s the most controversial component in the package of pro-development proposals that’s headed to the Planning Commission on Thursday. Consolidating the collection of various developer fees within the Department of Building Inspection makes sense to many observers, and there’s some left-of-center support for another proposal to let developers delay fee collection until after the building is nearly complete, as long as they pay the city an additional surcharge.

But affordable housing advocates are howling about letting the developers of projects that don’t pencil out and can’t get bank loans avoid their obligations to help the city meet its urgent affordable housing needs, in the process exacerbating the growing imbalance between homes for millionaires and those for the working class. They say it’s the latest example of Newsom’s perverse belief in discredited trickle-down economic theories.

“This is the world as viewed by (Newsom economic advisor) Michael Cohen, that the way out of a real estate speculation bubble is to blow as hard as you can to re-inflate that bubble,” affordable housing activist Calvin Welch told us, noting that many of targeted property were bought at the height of that bubble and are aimed at buyers that are now in short supply because of the recession. “They have to fail and reset, then there will be development.”

City Living

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City Living

BEST LOCAL BLOG

N Judah Chronicles

Crazies, crashes, coins! Public transportation is way more exciting than the freeway. Share your tales of Muni woe (and whoa!) with blogger Greg Dewar.

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BeyondChron.org

Politics, current events, and culture coverage for people smart enough to distrust “the Voice of the West.” BeyondChron.org is the FUBU of local news sources.

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BEST TATTOO ARTIST

Freddy Corbin, Temple Tattoo

Corbin’s work can be found on the arms and necks of hipsters from here to China. Intricate, original, and flawless. In a word: gangsta.

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BEST TATTOO SHOP

Black and Blue

The renowned female artists at B&B may not be able to pee while standing (we think), but they’ll man up to the needles any day. The best tattoos in town.

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BEST POLITICIAN YOU LOVE TO HATE

Gavin Newsom

Is it his creepy smile, his perfect hair, or his questionable policies and personal life that irritates everyone so much? Whatever it is, the dude fucking sucks.

BEST POLITICIAN

Gavin Newsom

Er, time out. Newsom’s not that bad. He’s kind of sexy in a Zoolander sort of way, and he did stand up for gay marriage. Plus, he’s related to Joanna. Thumbs up, dude. You win.

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Homeless Prenatal Program

Being homeless sucks, but homeless and pregnant? Come on! Luckily, HPP has been assisting homeless mothers-to-be with their situation since 1998.

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BEST EMERGING ARTIST

Nanci Price Scoular

Scoular’s abstract painting style is like an onion, revealing layer after layer of the artist’s struggle to belong.

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BEST ART COLLECTIVE

Liberation Ink

Liberation Ink designs T-shirts and accessories for liberal arts majors, cute activists, and hippies with fashion sense. All profits support local grassroots organizations.

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BEST TOURIST SPOT LOCALS SHOULD VISIT

Alcatraz

Wading through hordes of blissfully ignorant, clam-chowder-chomping tourists is never much fun, but sometimes the destination is worth it. Alcatraz is such a place — the best, in fact.

www.nps.gov/alcatraz

BEST LOCAL AUTHOR

Broke-Ass Stuart

Stuart’s city guidebooks may fly off the shelves these days, but the dude’s still broke as shit. It doesn’t stop him from having fun, though, and it shouldn’t stop you either.

www.brokeassstuart.com

BEST LOCAL ZINE (PRINT)

The Loin’s Mouth

Read about the ups and tragic downs (plus anonymous sexcapades!) of Tenderloin dwellers every month in The Loin’s Mouth.

www.theloinsmouth.com

BEST LOCAL ZINE (WEB)

Big Top Magazine

Circus freaks, sideshow performers, exhibitionists, and straight-up weirdos. Big Top Magazine gives a voice to them all. Finally!

www.bigtopmagazine.com

BEST LOCAL RECORD LABEL

Six Degrees

Dedicated to the sweet and sexy sounds of international genre-bending, Six Degrees offers the best in contemporary music from across the globe.

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BEST LOCAL PUBLISHING HOUSE

McSweeney’s

Like books? Pirates? Clever writing with a socially conscious twist? Dave Eggers and McSweeney’s wants you!

www.mcsweeneys.net

BEST TV NEWSCASTER

Dennis Richmond

In a perfect world, all news anchors would be like newly retired Richmond: cool, composed, and confident enough to rock the same mustache through decades of facial hair trends.

www.ktvu.com

BEST LOCALLY PRODUCED TV SHOW

Check, Please! Bay Area

Regular Bay Area residents review San Francisco’s finest restaurants. No pretense, no expertise, no bullshit. Genius!

www.blogs.kqed.org/food

BEST RADIO STATION

Energy 92.7 FM

Indie rock’s cool and all, but sometimes you just wanna bump Rihanna, Britney Spears, or Gunther. Cut a rug at Energy 92.7, the ass-movingest radio station in the Bay.

www.energy927fm.com

BEST STREET FAIR

Folsom Street Fair

More cock than a chicken fight! More ass than a donkey show! Break out those chaps and grab some lube when the sprawling granddaddy of leather events hits in September.

www.folsomstreetfair.org

BEST DOG-WALKING SERVICE

Mighty Dog

Most dog walkers stop after a stroll, but Mighty will take Fido to the beach, give him a trim, and maybe even introduce him to some hot tail.

1536 Alabama, SF. (415) 235-5151, www.mightydogwalking.com

BEST PET GROOMER


Little Ark
Grooming Shop: Best Pet Groomer
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY CHARLES RUSSO

Little Ark Grooming Shop

Dogs make nice child substitutes, but they can get dirty as hell. Clean ’em up at Little Ark, the best groom shop in town.

748 14th St., SF. (415) 626-7574

BEST VETERINARIAN

Pets Unlimited

Sick pets suck. They whine all day, smell nasty, and repel potential lovers. Get them fixed up at Pets Unlimited.

2343 Fillmore, SF. (415) 563-6700, www.petsunlimited.org

BEST CAMP FOR KIDS

Camp Galileo

Art, science, and outdoor activities for students from prekindergarten to entering fifth grade. Summer camp for creative types.

(415) 595-7293, www.campgalileo.com

BEST DENTIST

Dr. Natasha Lee, Better Living Through Dentistry

Drugs and alcohol will do the trick temporarily, but if you really want a better life, fix your grill at Dr. Lee’s.

1317 Ninth Ave., SF. (415) 731-9311

BEST DOCTOR

Dr. Scott Swanson, Parkside Chiropractic

Need a backiotomy? Head to Parkside Chiropractic, where Dr. Swanson will snap your spine back into action.

2394 31st Ave., SF. (415) 566-7134, www.parksidechiro.com

BEST MASSAGE THERAPIST

Joshua Alexander, CMT

He will listen to your body and honor what he hears with a plethora of techniques, including energy work modalities ranging from Swedish and deep tissue to shiatsu and polarity.

Castro and Market, SF. (415) 225-3460, www.joshuaalexandercmt.com

BEST MECHANIC

Pat’s Garage

Cars may never be as environmentally friendly as bicycles, but they get substantially closer at Pat’s, San Francisco’s premier green auto shop. Plus, organic coffee!

1090 26th St., SF. (415) 647-4500, www.patsgarage.com

BEST PLACE FOR A HAIRCUT

Dekko Salon

If you’re looking for a truly individualized experience, get your hair styled at swanky Dekko, San Francisco’s most luxurious hair and art gallery.

1325 Indiana, SF. (415) 285-8848, www.dekkosalon.com

BEST DAY SPA

Blue Turtle Spa

Cruelty-free skin products and beauty services for your worldly vessel. Animals shouldn’t have to suffer just so you can look pretty.

57 West Portal, SF. (415) 699-8494, www.blueturtlespa.com

BEST SHOE REPAIR

Anthony’s Shoe Repair

There’s nothing worse than showing up to a party in a scuffed-up pair of kicks. Anthony will restitch, resole, and stretch your shoes back to freshness.

30 Geary, SF. (415) 781-1338

BEST TAILOR

Cable Car Tailors

Throw your thrift store finds in a bag with some oversize slacks and wait for CC Tailors to work their magic.

200 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 781-4636

BEST ROOMMATE REFERRAL SERVICE

Craigslist

Where else can you find someone actively seeking a “sex-positive, 420-friendly, artsy-fartsy new housemate who likes cats and cooks vegan”?

www.craigslist.com

BEST LOCAL ANIMAL RESCUE

San Francisco SPCA

Rescuing distressed pooches and wayward felines since 1868, this SPCA outpost offers a stunning array of humane services.

2500 16th St., SF. (415) 554-3000, www.sfspca.org

BEST LAUNDROMAT

Brainwash

Drink beer, eat food, and wash duds with stand-up comedians, SoMa punks, live bands, and swingers from nearby One Taste Urban Retreat Center.

1122 Folsom, SF. (415) 861-3663, www.brainwash.com

BEST BICYCLE MECHANIC

Bike Kitchen

Give a man a bike; he’ll ride until it breaks. Give him the tools to fix a bike (the Bike Kitchen’s raison d’être); he’ll ride for life.

1256 Mission, SF. (415) 255-2453, www.bikekitchen.org

City Living

BEST PIRATES ON THE DIAL

We love the independents, and it doesn’t get much more independent than pirate radio. West Add Radio, on 93.7 FM, features some of the most adventurous musical programming in the city — from minimal techno crew Kontrol and Green Gorilla Lounge’s M3 to Cobain in a Coma, a show about music, celebrity gossip, and homo drug culture with a cult following, and Pancake Radio, with prolific DJ Ryan Poulsen. The advantage to flying under FCC radar? Anything goes — the seven dirty words, explicit lyrics, inappropriate banter, obscure kraut rock — if you’re lucky enough to pick up the signal. Otherwise, you can access the live stream and podcast archive online. (Hurray for the Internet.) In addition to its radio programming, West Add has become known for its parties, most significantly the monthly Italo-disco Ferrari at Deco Lounge, but also quirky nights such as “Merry Crass-mas,” a tribute to CRASS. West Add has also started releasing the free zine WAR in collaboration with Aquarius Records. Radio’s not dead!

www.westaddradio.com

BEST DRIVEWAY OF DESTINY

Driving in these eco-conscious times may be unfortunate, but since 2002, when artists Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin stenciled fortunes into each of its parking spaces, the North Beach Parking Garage has offered a curious kind of hope. Some fortunes are cookie classics (“Opportunity is fleeting”). Others are enticingly bawdy (“There is a party inside you” abutting “Your lovers [plural] will never wish to leave you”). Some contain road rage management tips (“It is often better to not see insult than to avenge it”) or reality checks (“Your trouble is that you think you have time”). The best of ’em trigger intriguing dilemmas for the superstitious — do you cast a shadow over your day by parking in “A whisper separates friends”? Do you wait for “You are not a has-been” to become free? If you need to come up for air, hit the garage’s roof: its lovely view of Saints Peter and Paul Church and the Transamerica Pyramid (along with nearby Chinatown clotheslines) will wipe your mind clear of ontological philosophizing.

735 Vallejo, SF. (415) 399-9564

BEST AMAZING JOURNEY INWARD


The Melvin M. Sweig Interfaith
Memorial Labyrinth: Best Amazing Journey Inward
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY CHARLES RUSSO

The ancient mystical tradition of the labyrinth lives on in front of Grace Cathedral with the ostentatiously named Melvin M. Swig Interfaith Memorial Labyrinth. Laid out in terrazzo in the meditation garden to the left of the cathedral entrance is a replica of the medieval 11-circuit labyrinth on the floor of Chartres Cathedral. A labyrinth is not a maze; there is but one path, and it leads to the center. Yet as with so many other things in life (childhood, religion, partying), the point is the journey. The walk through the labyrinth is surprisingly long and circuitous, one well suited to embodying your preferred metaphor. It’s difficult not to be contemplative as you slowly wend your way through the three stages of the labyrinth: purgation (the walk in), illumination (standing at the center), and finally, union (walking out). You may not have achieved perfect spiritual balance by the time you exit, but you can’t help feeling slightly more enlightened.

1100 California, SF. (415) 749-6300, www.gracecathedral.com

BEST MICROWAVE TOSS

Most people just throw their broken electronics in the trash. If your conscience won’t let you contribute to the 220 tons of e-waste dumped annually in the United States alone, consider hauling the dot matrix printer you’ve been guiltily hiding in the basement for the past 15 years to an electronics recycling service. Green Citizen boasts of its ability to recycle “anything with a plug.” CEO James Kao acknowledges that the actual output of reusable material is often small — consider alkaline batteries, which must be carefully broken down to get at a mere 3 mg of zinc. But the larger advantage is the safe disposal of the toxic substances within your cast-off gadgets, which can leach into the soil if left in landfills. Green Citizen even assigns a unique serial number to every item it recycles, so its various parts can be traced all the way to their final destinations. There’s a small fee for certain items, usually well under $10, but you’ll be a bit more free of guilt. Now about all that consumption …

591 Howard, SF. (415) 287-0000, www.greencitizen.com

BEST NO-NONSENSE KNOT REMOVAL

Forget the soothing new age music, bubbling indoor waterfalls, and arcane aromatherapy. Sometimes you’re broke, your back is full of knots, and all you want at the end of a rough week is a no-nonsense deep-tissue massage. At Jin Healing for Women a 60-minute full body will set you back $39 — or $30 if you buy a six-hour package. For that price, who cares if they don’t serve cucumber water or slather you in organic clay? The massage style falls somewhere between shiatsu and Swedish: the masseurs use oil, acupressure, and plenty of strength. The best part of the massage is arguably the hot towel treatment at the end. Some may complain that the place is too noisy — it’s not uncommon to hear the receptionist answering the phone or people talking outside — but it’s nothing that earplugs or an iPod can’t block out. While Jin Healing for Women is advertised as serving women only, some have found that men are not turned away if accompanied by a female friend or family member.

999 Powell, SF; 3557 Geary, SF. (415) 986-1111

BEST BUDGET SHRINKS

It’s not easy being blue — especially if you’re short on green and your health insurance doesn’t cover mental health services. Or if you don’t have health insurance at all. Luckily, the California Institute for Integral Studies offers “mind-body-spirit” counseling and psychotherapy on a sliding scale based on your income. The friendly CIIS therapists are graduate students and postgraduate interns working under the supervision of an instructor. With five counseling centers across the city, each with its own specialty, CIIS has expertise in a wide range of “therapeutic orientations,” including somatic, transpersonal, psychodynamic, and gestalt, as well as more conventional modes of psychotherapy. The holistic approach and alternative fee system make CIIS an ideal counseling center for a city like San Francisco.

www.ciis.edu/counseling

BEST BEATS KEEP BOPPIN’

North Beach has come a long way since the days when Lawrence Ferlinghetti et al. drank gallons of cheap red wine at Caffe Trieste. Though it’s now more frat boy than the best minds of a generation starving, hysterical, and naked, North Beach does sometimes remember its poetic beat heritage. For a weekend each May, Kerouac Alley — recently repaved with cobblestones and stone tablets engraved with quotes by Western and Chinese poets — is home to dozens of emerging and established artists showcasing their recent work in the open air for Art in the Alley. Live music, painting, poetry, and sculpture bring back the creative bohemian buzz that enveloped North Beach before the blonde beer haze did, and the art is always on display at fab sponsor Vesuvio bar for a couple of weeks before the festival. Perhaps best of all, at the end of the alley is surreal karaoke bar Bow Bow’s, where bartender Mama Candy serves a mean Tokyo Tea. After some heady art and a couple of those, you’ll be shouting lines from Howl yourself.

Kerouac Alley, between Columbus and Broadway, SF. www.vesuvio.com

BEST [EUPHEMISM] WAX

Women’s products and services are all about euphemism. Douche becomes a feminine cleansing product; a period becomes “celebrating one’s femininity.” And of course, the bikini wax, or Brazilian, is really a way to get hair off your cha-cha. Lonni of Lonni’s Punani dispenses with all niceties with the candid name of her Potrero Hill waxing service. Her motto? “Keeping San Francisco smooth one pussy at a time.” The name and motto may be blunt, even crass, but the end results will indeed leave a woman’s naughty bits smooth and ingrown-free. Lonni, a certified aesthetician and a pastry chef with a degree in sociology, forgoes mood lighting and new age music for bright environs, a rocking soundtrack, and fingers quick enough to make you forget she’s ripping hair off your most sensitive regions. (House calls are also offered.) And she doesn’t just stick to the punani: “manzilians” are happily performed as well.

1756 18th St., SF. (415) 215-7678, www.lonnispunani.com

BEST PUPIL PAINTER

Master artists don’t always work on canvas or paper. Steven R. Young, BCO, uses little plastic orbs as his canvases. And his work never appears in museums: you see it on people’s faces, and most of the time, he’s so good you never know it’s there. Young paints eyes — false eyes, replacements for people who have lost a real eye to accidents, disease, or surgery. The ocularist gets referrals from the top surgeons in the Bay Area, but his studio hardly looks like a doctor’s office: he has the TV blaring much of the time, and he jokes around with his customers, particularly kids. In the end, though, he’s all business as he replicates, by hand, with tiny, fine brushes, the exact look of a customer’s companion eye, restoring much comfort and confidence. His shop also handles the fabrication and custom fitting. The results can be uncanny — we’ve known people who went to Young for a prosthesis, and even from very close you couldn’t tell the fake eye from the real one.

411 30th St., Oakl. (520) 836-2123, www.stevenryoungocularist.com

BEST DRUG-FREE ALTERED STATE


Kelly Vogel at Float: Best Drug-Free Altered Stat
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY CHARLES RUSSO

Sometimes other people are just too much to bear. And it’s always their fault, isn’t it? The guy at the liquor store forgets to stock your brand of cigarettes. Some yuppie in a fancy car nearly runs you off the road. Your manager fires you, your landlord evicts you, your friends diss you. Don’t you wish you could just make them all disappear for a while? Well, if you’ve ever seen the movie Altered States, you know all about sensory deprivation chambers, those weird water tanks psychology students use to study brain chemistry and sleep cycles. In a deprivation chamber you are utterly alone. Your body is suspended in warm water, your ears are submerged so you can’t hear a thing, and it’s totally dark, odorless, and soundproof. The entire world melts away, and you’re left with raw brain waves. Outside of a ketamine trip, it’s the most detached experience humanly possible. Lose yourself at Float, then, an art gallery with a room full of deprivation tanks.

1091 Calcot Place, Unit 116, Oakl. (510) 535-1702, www.thefloatcenter.com

BEST LOOK TIGHT, HAIR DID

Everybody’s meetin’ Down at Lulu’s — for new clothes and a new hairdo. Co-owners Seth Bogart (of raunchy electro-rap band Gravy Train!!!) and Tina Lucchesi set up shop two years ago and describe the Down at Lulu’s ambience as “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls takes a field trip to the candy factory.” Which is another way of saying that this is a place for hot-blooded people who aren’t afraid of color or taking a dare. They’ll cut you — and you’ll like it! They’ll bleach you and they’ll blow you — dry — and you’ll come back for more! If you’re a girl, you can find the purse you love while you’re waiting for your dye job to set. If you’re a pouty-lipped boy with shaggy hair, ask them to style you like Matt Dillon circa 1979 and you’ll be sure to send a rebel army of crushes over the edge. Down at Lulu’s, that’s where it’s at.

6603 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 601-0964, www.downatlulus.com

BEST REVOLUTION ON WHEELS


Clancy Fear of Pedal Revolution:
Best Revolution on Wheels
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY CHARLES RUSSO

You know, the hippies weren’t just dirty, fatuous potheads with annoying slogans and bad taste in clothes. They were also big into causes. You say you want a revolution? Well, c’mon — we all wanna change the world. There’s got to be an easier way than adopting a baby from Mali, you know? I mean, you’re gonna have to feed and water that kid for, like, 18 years — without the benefit of Brangelina’s army of nannies. How about this for a solution? Not only is Pedal Revolution a full-service bike shop, with both new and used rides, but it’s also a nonprofit that helps at-risk youth gain valuable skills to keep them off the streets. It accepts tax-deductible donations of bicycles, and for $30 a year you can become a member and work on your bike at the Community Membership Workbench, which will give you some skills and save you a bundle on repair costs. Also, the shop’s got really cool logo T-shirts, which means you can show you care without, you know, growing dreadlocks and playing hacky sack in Golden Gate Park.

3085 21st St., SF. (415) 641-1264, www.pedalrevolution.org

BEST STROBOSCOPIC ZOETROPER

Burning Man has inspired and elevated some amazing Bay Area artists over the years, but Peter Hudson, a.k.a. Hudzo, has become a star both on and off the playa using a unique medium: stroboscopic zoetropes. Hudzo is a San Francisco carpenter and stagehand who has designed sets for the San Francisco Opera, Kink.com porn flicks, and the upcoming Milk movie. His first piece for Burning Man, Playa Swimmers, used strobe lights and precise molds of the human form to give the appearance of figures swimming in the desert sands. He’s returned every year with steadily more ambitious projects, which culminated last year in Homouroboros: a bicycle- and drum-powered carousel that conjured up the vision of a monkey swinging from limb to limb, then taking a bite from an apple delivered by a snake slithering down a vine. Installations in San Jose, Minneapolis, and other cities followed. Now Hudzo is busy putting together his next piece, Tantalus, working with a huge group of committed volunteers out of his SoMa home.

www.hudzo.com

BEST PURIFICATION SCRUB-DOWN


Imperial Spa: Best Purification Scrub-down
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY CHARLES RUSSO

Housed in a fortresslike former bank building with a forbiddingly windowless exterior, Imperial Spa is easy to mistake for a more, ahem, sensual retreat than it is. This traditional Korean spa, however, turns out to be a model citizen, complete with hot and cold pools; an array of sauna rooms, including an ultratoasty “yellow clay fomentation” space; and its own unforgettable twist: a “purification” body scrub that essentially takes off the top layer of epidermis. Women lie on plastic-lined tables with little to hide behind apart from a teensy towel draped over the booty, while industrious ladies in black bras and panties soak them down, then proceed to zealously scrub every single part of the body with what feels like a scouring pad. And that means every part — parts that you never imagined being attacked with such vigor. Don’t be afraid; don’t be very afraid — you’ll never feel silkier than when you emerge, after an application of milky essential oils, cleaner than you’ve ever felt. Men are also welcome, although their purification scrub is administered by a man, minus the bra and panties.

1875 Geary, SF. (415) 771-1114, www.imperialspa.biz

BEST TIBETAN FREEDOM FIGHTER

It’d be far too easy and predictable for the Guardian to give Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius a sarcastic Best of the Bay award for spending the last year beating up the homeless and their advocates in a succession of articles. But Nevius reached a new level of hilarity April 10. When the controversial Olympic torch made its way to San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom was so worried pro-Tibetan demonstrators would clash with supporters of Beijing and the Olympic Games that he clandestinely diverted the torch’s route at the last minute. The result, according to Nevius, is that the swelling crowds of people who were defending China near the ballpark, where the torch was originally expected to pass, didn’t threaten the critics of China’s human rights record. In other words, Nevius seemed to imply that Newsom saved free speech. Uh, yeah. All the red flags in the world are no match for the colossal figures who appeared in San Francisco to support Tibet and condemn Beijing — including actor Richard Gere and motherfucking Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu, you might recall, sleeps with a Nobel Peace Prize around his neck. The pro-Tibet movement doesn’t need Gavin Newsom. Nice try, though, Nevius.

BEST MOVING ONWARD AND UPWARD

Ever-lurking danger in the streets means that many city kids barely leave their own block, let alone experience the pleasure of long bike rides. But thanks to Cycles of Change, East Bay youth are learning how to venture through the urban jungle and beyond safely on two wheels. The 10-year-old collective, headed by Maya Carson and Grey Goykolevzon, draws inspiration from the famed Bikes Not Bombs project and other like-minded organizations. Run in the basements of approximately 13 Alameda County schools, COC takes kids on training rides and shows them how to obey the rules of the road and navigate safe routes from home to school. Serious bike club members pedal up into the hills on longer rides and also learn marketable skills like bicycle repair and how to run their own after-school programs. The organization, soon to be a nonprofit, would love you to donate any unwanted nonrusty, functional bikes to its bike shop in Alameda.

(510) 595-4625, www.cyclesofchange.org

BEST GIRL-TO-GIRL SUPPORT

It takes a girl to understand the issues other girls face today regarding relationships, body image, pregnancy, and parents who don’t understand, or can’t help, or worse, abuse them. It also takes a girl who’s worn those shoes to know how to help another girl get where she wants to go. For the past 10 years, the young women who run GirlSource have been training local low-income teens for their future, by teaching them how to build a Web site, digitally edit photos, take leadership roles, and express themselves through writing. The results are impressive. After receiving SAT prep and counseling on all the teen issues that can thwart potential co-eds, most of the girls participating in the program go on to attend college, where GirlSource continues to support them. Some of them come back to offer peer counseling to new girls coming up, thus completing an important cycle in creating better community.

1550 Bryant, Ste. 675, SF. (415) 252-8880, www.girlsource.org

BEST BLING RECYCLING

Before you run down to Best Buy for a new laptop or television set, check out Midtown Loan, San Francisco’s most respected and experienced (50 years in the biz!) pawnshop and cash-advance boutique, for better deals. Conveniently located on beautiful Sixth Street, right where the Civic Center and Tenderloin neighborhoods join up with SoMa at Market Street, Midtown Loan stocks only the finest used jewelry, timepieces, diamonds, tools, and electronics. But that’s not all. Midtown Loan is a working person’s dream come true: a place where you can actually trade your unwanted luxury items for cold hard cash and even get a cash advance on your next paycheck while you’re at it. Got an extra MacBook Pro lying around? A Rolex you never wear? Throw the whole bundle into a dirty backpack and run down to Midtown Loan before your snooty neighbors catch on.

39 Sixth St., SF. (415) 362-5585, www.midtownloan.net

BEST TORCHBEARER FOR THE ’60S

The Unity Foundation, a lively nonprofit, was founded in 1976 to keep the flames of the l960s alive and “promote world peace, cooperation, and unity.” Its founder and president, Bill McCarthy, is a classic ’60s entrepreneur, renowned for producing the stunningly successful 20th- and 30th-anniversary Summer of Love celebrations in Golden Gate Park. Unity accomplishes its ambitious mission through cultural and educational events, media campaigns, and a monthly television program on SF Access, channel 29, called Positive Spin, which is produced by McCarthy himself. Unity hosts annual Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for children in the Mission District, organizes a weekly street-cleaning program, and has thrown three Unity Fairs in the Mission. The foundation also puts together special public service announcements for the United Nations and presents UN-specific segments on its TV program. McCarthy recently set up his own camera crew to get exclusive coverage of a speech by UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon at San Francisco’s World Affairs Council. The United Nations Association, a grassroots UN support group, has recognized Unity with its top national citizenship award.

744 Treat, SF. (415) 550-1092, www.unityfoundation.org

BEST WAY TO SUSTAIN YOURSELF

Isn’t it time you stopped just eating healthy and started eating with a conscience? Eat with the Seasons can help you do just that. The community-supported agriculture program, developed a few years ago by farm-family descendant Becky Herbert, delivers locally grown, sustainably produced, high quality organic foods to a drop-off point near you. In conjunction with farms located in San Benito and Santa Cruz counties, Eat with the Seasons assembles personalized produce boxes stamped and sealed with your name on them. Every week you choose what seasonal fresh produce you feel inclined to graze on, how many cage-free eggs you want to fry up, the amount of fair trade coffee you can slurp down, and how much grass-fed beef you fancy barbecuing. Then the Seasons folks collect it all, wrap it up, and deliver it to various drop-off locations in the Bay Area. That means next Sunday you can sleep in without worrying about being late to the farmers market snatch-and-grab.

(831) 245-8125, www.eatwiththeseasons.com

BEST KIDS IN THE ALLEY

Owing to an unfortunate blip in city zoning laws, alleyways less than 32 feet wide don’t count as — or get spruced up as — streets, and for years Chinatown’s alleys were dark, dirty, and dangerous. Enter Adopt-an-Alleyway, whose youthful volunteers, all from local high schools and colleges, beautify and monitor the neighborhood’s walkways, issuing regular “alleyway report cards” to the local press. AAA also runs the Chinatown Alleyway Walking Tour, which squires you along the back streets under the guidance of locals aged 16 through 23. You’ll get a dose of sightseeing and some interesting nuggets of history — such as the fact that Waverly Place was once known as Fifteen-Cent Lane because of its multiplicity of cheap, queue-braiding barbers, and that Spofford Alley was home to Sun Yat-sen’s secret revolutionary headquarters. You’ll also get honest opinions about an aging neighborhood from young people interested in civil rights and housing issues, and who provide an emotional connection and a real sense of place to tourists, of all people. You may, however, also get a good-natured lecture on litter (meddling kids).

(415) 984-1478, www.chinatownalleywaytours.org

BEST SERENITY FOR YOUR BUCK

When you walk into the lovely surroundings of the Mindful Body holistic health, fitness, and well-being studio in Pacific Heights, the first thing you notice is the silence. The receptionists speak like calm kindergarten teachers, and you find yourself moving more carefully and opening doors as if they might break. The place oozes relaxation — even the bathrooms, equipped with shower stalls and clean robes, smell ultra-aromatherapeutic. “Through a consistent practice of ‘mindful’ or focused activities, we learn how to tap into our inner intelligence and make choices leading to a life of integrity, fulfillment, peace and harmony,” says founder Roy Bergmann. OK, then! As long as it comes with a back rub. Yoga classes for $15 (with price breaks for memberships and packages) and $70-per-hour massages are definitely a draw here, and the services offered, including the not-as-scary-as-it-sounds Chinese organ massage, or chi nei tsang, are top-notch and myriad. But it’s the highly qualified and serenity-minded staff that really make the Mindful Body a bargain. The friendly teachers, facilitators, and masseurs are worth their weight in Zen.

2876 California, SF. (415) 931-2639, www.themindfulbody.com

BEST SYMPHONY OF INSTRUCTION

In an ideal world, every public school in America would have a music program, complete with appreciation classes, live performances, instruction in playing instruments, and a full curriculum of classical, contemporary, and multicultural styles. Until this utopian vision is realized, though, at least we have Adventures in Music, the San Francisco Symphony’s fantastic community education program. Operating in partnership with the San Francisco Unified School District, the program has been working with students in first-through-fifth grades for five years, training teachers to integrate music into their classrooms, providing kids with instruments and educational supplies, presenting participatory in-school performances four times a year, and bringing classes on a field trip to Davies Symphony Hall for a special concert. AIM encourages students to learn musical concepts and terminology, to become familiar with the sight and sound of different musical instruments, and to understand critical listening as well as music as a medium of artistic expression. And yes, AIM’s education bridges musical genres, ranging from Western classical to traditional Chinese.

(415) 552-8000, www.sfsymphony.org

BEST QI TO HIGHER LEARNING

Western medicine is great for acute problems — like, say, restarting your ticker after a heart attack. But for chronic, systemic, or difficult-to-diagnose ailments, the Eastern approach still seems to have the market cornered on treatments that actually work. (This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.) Acupuncture, acupressure, herbal remedies, medical qigong, and a variety of movement and body work techniques ease the pain of sleep disorders, headaches, chronic fatigue, and joint injuries for many. Which is why we love Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College, a Berkeley institution that not only trains future practitioners but also provides consistent, affordable clinic services to the community. Student workers are skilled and well supervised — but if you’re still not comfortable with them, you can work with a pro for a slightly higher price. The relief you may find from your migraines or your tennis elbow, though, will be priceless.

2250 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 666-8234, www.aimc.edu

BEST DIY DEMYSTIFICATION

They say that once you learn how to ride a bike, you’re pretty much set for life — until the tire pops, your bar tape frays, and the shifting gets a little funky. A bicycle repair class can be a daunting thing, but Dan Thomases’s “Bike Maintenance in Three Parts,” offered every three months or so, clears an essential path toward demystifying your rock hopper or 10-speed. The three-part series is run out of Box Dog Bikes, a Mission shop co-owned by Thomases, and takes you from repairing flats to replacing cables and trueing wheels. The Sunday-evening classes are cheap, and more important, small — making for lots of individualized instruction and talk therapy between you, Thomases, and your bike. Thomases says he was inspired by his dentist dad, who schools his patients on preventative maintenance. “I’m hoping the classes will give people an idea of what it takes to be responsible for your bike.”

494 14th St., SF. (415) 431-9627, www.boxdogbikes.com

Outside SF Federal Building, freedom of assembly is carefully controlled

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By Rebecca Bowe

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

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

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

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

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

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

Know Your Class

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

When Jack Hall died, flags were flown at half-staff throughout Hawaii, longshoremen closed the ports of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego for 24 hours, and thousands of other workers in Hawaii and all along the west coasts of the United States and Canada also stopped work to show their respect.

That was 40 years ago. Yet Jack Hall, one of America’s greatest labor leaders, is still remembered fondly by many working people. In Hawaii, where he was regional director of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, many ILWU members had a paid holiday on Jan. 2, the date of his death. Others will have a holiday on the Feb. 28th anniversary of Hall’s birth.

It would be hard to exaggerate Jack Hall’s importance. He was director of organization for the ILWU and one of its two vice presidents when a stroke killed him in 1971 at age 55 in San Francisco. But it was not what he had done during the previous 18 months in the drafty, run-down headquarters presided over by the legendary Harry Bridges that made Hall extraordinary.

Rather, it was what Hall had done before then in Hawaii, where he served for more than a quarter-century as the ILWU’s regional director. He was the key leader in bringing industrial democracy to Hawaii, transforming Hawaii from virtually a feudalistic territory controlled by a few huge financial interests into a modern pluralistic state in which workers and their unions have a major voice.

As former Gov. John Burns of Hawaii said, Hall Brought about “the full flowering of democracy in our islands.”

Hall’s first job was as a sailor in 1932. He sailed to the Far East, where he saw grinding poverty that sickened and angered him and, he later recalled, “determined which side of the fence I was on.” Hall landed in Hawaii four years later, a tall, skinny 26-year-old sent by the Sailors Union to help striking longshoremen win union recognition. Hall soon emerged as a leader of the longshoremen and later as a principal leader in organizing sugar and pineapple plantations.

Virtually all phases of life in the islands were controlled by five extremely powerful holding companies, popularly known as “the Big Five,” that owned the plantations. The workers, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Puerto Rican and others, were purposely segregated by race and ethnicity to keep them from acting jointly. They lived in company housing on the plantations where they worked, bought their food and clothing in company stores there, and had little choice but to do exactly what the bosses told them to do, at pay of less than 50 cents an hour.
The battles waged by Hall and his fellow organizers to overcome the employers’ absolute domination of their workers’ lives often got brutal. There were beatings, an attempt on Hall’s life, and a great furor over Hall’s admitted political radicalism.

The strike was the only weapon available to the workers. But when workers of a particular nationality struck to demand union rights, they’d be replaced immediately with workers of another nationality.

Hall, a tough, plainspoken, hard-drinking man, talked with the workers endlessly about the obvious need to bring them together in a single union. He spoke to them individually and often in meetings that were held in secret, outside the closely guarded plantations. He told the workers over and over that they could not achieve the unified strength necessary to overcome exploitation if they continued to remain apart because of racial and ethnic differences.

“Know your class,” Hall told them, “and be loyal to it.”

Finally, by the mid-1940s, the ILWU managed to organize workers on the plantations, as well as on Hawaii’s waterfronts. That gave the ILWU a powerful role in Hawaii’s economy that led the union quickly to a major role in Hawaii’s political life as well.

Hall helped put together a political league that became one of the most important political forces in Hawaii and the most racially and ethnically mixed such group anywhere. The union league helped break 50 consecutive years of Republican control of the State Legislature, which in turn led to passage of the most progressive laws of any state and helped make the ILWU as dominant in Hawaiian life as were the Big Five plantation owners before the coming of the union.

Plantation and longshore workers still are the backbone of the ILWU in Hawaii, but Hall long ago led the union into just about every other industry in the islands. Bakers, factory workers, automobile salesmen, supermarket clerks and a wide variety of other workers, especially including hotel workers and others in Hawaii’s ever-expanding tourist industry – all carry union cards.

Union membership is their guarantee of economic and political rights and rewards, of dignity and self-respect and the chance to determine their own destinies, of an effective voice on the job and in their communities, of fair and equal treatment their forebears could only dream of.

Jack Hall left a truly remarkable legacy.

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

Editorial: The mayor’s race starts now

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Ross and Jeff and any other progressive candidates need to decide soon if they are serious about running for mayor and either announce that they are running or step out of the way so someone else can step forward

EDITORIAL Back in 2007, when no leading progressive stepped in to run against Gavin Newsom, Sup. Chris Daly called a convention in the hope that someone would come forward and take up the challenge. All the major potential candidates showed up and spoke, but none announced a campaign.

Let’s not go there again.

We’re two years into Newsom’s second term, and the city’s a mess. After absorbing a round of brutal cuts last year, the budget’s still half a billion dollars out of whack. The mayor’s only answer at this point is to cut more (then raffle off to landlords the right to get rich by evicting tenants and turning apartments into condos). The Newsom agenda hasn’t created jobs or addressed the housing crisis or resolved the unfairness of the tax code or taken even the first steps toward energy self-sufficiency. Over the past year, he’s been largely inaccessible and hostile to the press, a mayor who won’t even tell the public where he is and what he does all day.

A candidate who wants to change the direction at City Hall should have no problem getting political traction in 2011. But the progressives are still floundering. And while the race is two years away, the more centrist candidates are already out the door. Sup. Bevan Dufty has announced he’s in the race, and state Sen. Leland Yee might as well have announced since everyone knows he’s running. Same for City Attorney Dennis Herrera. And at a certain point — in the not-too-distant future — those candidates will be starting to line up endorsers and making promises to major financial backers and constituency groups, which aren’t going to wait around forever for the progressives to settle on someone willing to make the immense effort to mount a serious campaign for mayor.

So the potential candidates — starting with Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and Public Defender Jeff Adachi — need to decide, soon, whether they’re serious about this or not, and either announce that they’re running or step out of the way so someone else can step forward.

With public financing, a candidate in San Francisco doesn’t have to be as well-heeled as Newsom was his first time around. It won’t take $6 million in contributions to win. But a progressive who wants to be the next mayor needs to demonstrate he or she can do a few key things, including:

•<\!s>Motivate and unite the base. Labor (or at least the progressive unions), the tenants, the left wing of the queer community (represented to a great extent by the Harvey Milk LGBT club), the environmentalists, and the progressive elected officials have to be fairly consistent in backing a candidate or downtown’s money will carry the day. So Mirkarimi and Adachi (and anyone else who’s interested) ought to be making the rounds, now. If that critical mass isn’t there, the campaign isn’t going to work.

•<\!s>Develop and promote a signature issue. Newsom won in part because he came up with the catchy “care not cash” initiative. Voters frustrated with years of failed homeless policies (and an incumbent, Willie Brown, who said the problem could never be solved) were willing to try something new (however bogus it turned out to be). Nobody’s developed a populist way to approach city finance. Nobody’s got a workable housing or jobs plan. What’s the central issue, or set of issues, that’s going to define the next progressive mayoral campaign?

•<\!s>Put together a central brain trust. This city’s full of smart progressives who have experience and ideas and can help put together a winning platform and campaign strategy. A good candidate will have them on board, early.

•<\!s>Herrera, Yee, Dufty, and others who might run (including Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting) are already out there looking for progressive supporters and allies, but none has yet offered an agenda the city’s left can support. Dufty pissed off the tenants by refusing to back stronger eviction protections. Herrera pissed off immigrant advocates by refusing to be as aggressive in supporting the city’s sanctuary law as he was in defending same-sex marriage (and because he hasn’t officially announced yet, he’s still not taking stands on political issues). Yee tried to sell off the Cow Palace. Ting has taken some great initiatives (forcing the Catholic Church to pay its fair share of property transfer taxes), but hasn’t developed or spoken out on the broader issues of city revenue. More of those candidates have been leaders in the public power movement.

It would be inexcusable if the progressives, who control the Board of Supervisors, are forced to pick a mayoral candidate by default. It’s time to end the speculation and dancing and find a candidate who can carry the progressive standard in 2011.

Best of the Bay 2009: Local Heroes

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ANGELA CHAN

As staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, Angela Chan has been at the forefront of a yearlong effort to ensure that all undocumented juveniles have the right to due process in San Francisco.

That effort began last summer, shortly after Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had just decided to run for governor, announced that undocumented juveniles henceforth would be reported to federal authorities the minute they are booked on suspicion of having co

mmitted a felony — and before they can access an immigrant-rights lawyer.

These changes primarily affect Latino youth, but Chan, whose Cantonese-speaking parents ran a restaurant in Portland, Ore., sees the broader connections to other immigrant communities.

“I grew up in an immigrant community in a white working-class neighborhood,” Chan explained. “I saw the barriers — language, culture, racism, xenophobia — and I realized that there was not a lot of power and awareness. I learned to appreciate civil rights.”

As a teenager, Chan was determined to become an attorney. The temporary passage of California Prop. 187 — prohibiting undocumented immigrants from using social services, health care, and public education — intensified her determination. Chan graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, and has been able to focus on this particular juvenile justice battle thanks to a Soros Justice Fellowship and the ALC’s “innovative, fluid, creative, and client-centered vision.”

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“I’ve tried different ways of challenging inequality — direct confrontation, anger — but I’ve found the best way is through policy, and being very educated and strategic,” Chan said.

She said she’s hopeful that Sup. David Campos has the votes this summer to pass veto-proof amendments to the city’s undocumented-youth protection policy. As she put it: “People are starting to understand the difference between the juvenile and adult justice system and the issues around due process.” (Sarah Phelan)

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JULIAN DAVIS

Take a look at just a few of the things Julian Davis has done: He ran the 2008 public-power campaign. He’s on the board of San Francisco Tomorrow. He’s president of the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center. He’s a founder of the MoMagic Collaborative, which fights youth violence in the Western Addition. He’s on the board of the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation. He’s been appointed by the Board of Supervisors to serve on the Market-Octavia Citizens Advisory Committee. He’s a founder of the Osiris Coalition, which is working to ensure that public-housing tenants have the right to return to their homes after renovations. He’s hosted countless events for charities and political campaigns.

Then think about this: he’s only 30.

Davis grew up in Palo Alto, and moved to the corner of Haight and Fillmore after getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy from Brown University. Philosophers weren’t exactly in demand at the time, so he wound up “playing my guitar on the streets for burrito money” while starting a PhD program at Stanford.

He also saw three people shot to death on his corner. “And I realized,” he explained, “that the academic life wasn’t going to be for me.”

Davis started organizing against community violence, and, inspired by Matt Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign, ran for supervisor in 2004. That got him started in local politics. He’s headed to law school at Hastings this fall, and it’s a safe bet that he’ll be a leader in the progressive political community for years to come. (Tim Redmond)

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DAVID SCHOOLEY

“He’s a visionary. He’s very determined. He never gives up.”

That’s how Ken McIntire, executive director of San Bruno Mountain Watch, describes David Schooley, who founded the Mountain Watch nonprofit four decades ago.

“For many years, David led every Sierra Club hike, organized every restoration party, and even took the bus to community fairs up and down the Peninsula so he could set up a table and distribute fliers about San Bruno Mountain,” McIntire recalls.

Now snowy-haired and allegedly semiretired, Schooley, 65, remains as nimble as a goat when it comes to hiking across his beloved mountain, which rises and cuts across the Peninsula just south of San Francisco in San Mateo County — and whose ecosystem has been identified as one of 18 global biodiversity hotspots in need of protection

Schooley’s love for the mountain — which is covered with low-growing grasses, coastal sage, and scrub year-round and is dotted with wildflowers each spring — led him to found SBMW in 1969 and fight the expansion of the Guadalupe Valley Quarry and the growth of nearby Brisbane. Both were threatening to destroy the biggest urban open space in the United States and the habitat of rare butterflies, including the San Bruno elfin.

As Schooley explains, while the mountain is often hit with strong gusty winds and enveloped in thick fog, it is a great butterfly habitat and the last fragment of an entire ecosystem — the Franciscan region — the rest of which has been buried beneath San Francisco’s concrete footprints.

Two years ago, Schooley had the pleasure of once again finding the tiny raspberry-colored elfin caterpillars on some sedum (its host plant) on the north-facing upper benches of the quarry.

“It’s a miracle,” Schooley told me at the time, delighted by this living example of nature’s ability to overcome human-made damage on the mountain.

At the time, Schooley was hoping the state park system would annex the property where the elfins were found. That hasn’t happened yet. But as McIntire says of Schooley (who dreams of a wildlife corridor that runs from the bay to the ocean), “David is always pushing for more open space around the mountain, for more nature and less development, and trying to reach a bigger audience.” (Sarah Phelan)

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SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE

The San Francisco Mime Troupe is the conscience of the city, our proudest export, and — as it celebrates its 50th year — perhaps our most enduring sociopolitical institution. That’s a lot of kudos to heap on an artists’ collective, particularly one that delivers its theatrical social satire with such over-the-top comedy and music, but it isn’t a statement that we make lightly.

The SFMT embodies the very best San Francisco values — limitless creativity, a hunger for justice, courage under fire, an uncompromising commitment to creating a better world, and a progressive missionary zeal — and offers a powerful and entertaining reminder of those values every July 4, when it presents its new show in Dolores Park.

After it sings (and preaches) to the progressive choir of San Francisco, the troupe hits the road, visiting such less-than-enlightened outposts as the Central Valley and rural Northern California, delivering important messages to audiences that need to hear them most. “First of all, it’s humorous, so that breaks down a lot of barriers from the get-go,” SFMT general manager Jenee Gill tells us.

But even here in the early ’60s, the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission tried to use obscenity laws to ban the SFMT from performing in public parks. The troupe successfully fought the commission in court, setting an important free speech precedent. Modern San Francisco has grown up with the SFMT showing us the way forward with its uniquely high-stepping, knee-slapping, consciousness-raising style, and we’re a better city for it. (Steven T. Jones)

All local heroes photos by Pat Mazzera

Meet Lolita… and dig on New People’s Tokyo trends

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Text and photos by Caitlin Donohue

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“Sweet lolita” Maria Elena-Diaz is cute as a button shopping at SF’s new hotspot for Japanese subculture

It is rare that you see live baby dolls perusing the racks at an American mall. Abercrombie & Fitch just isn’t cornering the bonnet and bloomer market these days.

But- not to sound redundant- the Japanese do things differently. Case in point: New People, the newest import shopping center to open up in Japantown. It’s here that a subculture from the Empire of the Sun based on dressing like Strawberry Shortcake is finding new visibility in San Francisco.

New People is a vast complex of urban Japanese culture, housing five floors of various wonders and accoutrements. One story is devoted to art, a gallery showing sleekly interesting works in a variety of mediums from stuffed animal chandeliers to leaves rendered in ceramic. One floor’s all about film, now featuring a full month of movies about music in the basement theater. They’ve got a small café offering Blue Bottle coffee and bento boxes that encourages leisurely manga perusal and a vast selection of Japanese tchotchkes- smoke machines, psychedelic origami paper and brave vegetable action figures. But it’s their floor devoted to hard-to-find Japanese clothing labels that makes New People a truly unique place.

The mall is the home of Kyoto-based Sou Sou shoes- tabi footwear in stylee patterns reminiscent of children’s bedding with unusual, toe-cleaving designs. It is also the only west coast retailer of clothing brands Black Peace Now and Baby, The Stars Shine Bright– two O.G. names in the lolita/goth scene from Tokyo.

Tenant Torment

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Tenant Torment

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s mid-December decision to announce — on YouTube — that he planned to introduce legislation to protect San Francisco renters from foreclosure-related evictions has outraged tenants rights organizations.

They say Newsom is trying to undermine a much stronger bill by Sup. John Avalos that would give thousands of tenants in newer buildings the same protections as tenants in buildings constructed before 1979.

The mayor’s bill is a classic piece of politics — stealing some of the limelight and giving political cover to mayoral candidate Sup. Bevan Dufty, who voted against Avalos’ package but doesn’t want to be seen as anti-tenant.

This way Newsom and Dufty can enthusiastically support a bill that won’t offend as many landlords — while the mayor vetoes a more robust tenant-protection measure.

Dufty’s decision to side with Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, and Sean Elsbernd in voting Dec. 8 against Avalos’ just-cause legislation gave Newsom veto power over a package that would have empowered thousands of renters.

The Avalos legislation seeks to extend just-cause eviction requirements and protections to tenants in units that are not now subject to eviction controls, which includes most residential rental units built after June 13, 1979. That’s when the city’s current rent control law took effect — and as part of a compromise needed to get the votes for that law, its framers agreed to exempt all “newly constructed” housing.

Newsom’s proposal would only protect those tenants from one category of evictions.

While Newsom promised to introduce his counter-proposal Dec. 15, nothing has come from the Mayor’s Office of Housing so far, fuelling suspicions that the legislation is in fact being drafted by Michael Yarne, a former developer who now works for the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

Asked Dec. 16 if the Mayor’s Office has submitted any tenant protection legislation, mayoral spokesperson Joe Arellano e-mailed the Guardian, “Not yet. Still ironing out a few details.”

‘OUTRAGEOUS’

In his YouTube address, Newsom said he was committed to vetoing the Avalos legislation, which he claimed was “well-intended” but “went too far.”

His alternative, Newsom said, would protect tenants from the “predatory nature of banks” and “other circumstances” related to “macroeconomic challenges.”

Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, described Newsom’s play as “outrageous.”

“The mayor is essentially stealing a bill that came out of the community, watering it down and taking credit for other people’s work,” she said.

“Probably the most frustrating part of this is that there was no attempt to work with any of us,” Shortt added.

As Shortt notes, if Avalos’ legislation doesn’t pass, tenants in at least 10,000 rental units that have come onto the market since 1979 will be left without just-cause eviction protection. That means they can be tossed out for almost any reason.

Shortt’s estimate includes 1,900 units at Trinity Place, 113 units at 430 Main St., 308 units at 333 Harrison St., 113 units built by the Emerald Fund in the Castro District, 192 recently completed units at Strata in Mission Bay, 179 units at 1 Polk St., 720 units at 1401 Market St., 52 units at 818 Van Ness Ave., 5,679 units at Park Merced, and 720 units at Archstone, 350 Eighth St.

But her estimate doesn’t factor in the thousands of potential rentals in the pipeline for Treasure Island, the Candlestick Point shipyard development and the old Schlage Lock site.

Facing a mayoral veto and unwilling to leave tenants without any hope, Avalos introduced an amended version of his just-cause evictions package that addressed Dufty’s concerns about unintended consequences during the board’s Dec. 15 meeting.

“Dufty said he was worried that if someone was in the military and was sent to Afghanistan or decided to go to Harvard to finish their master’s and then wanted to return to their apartment, they’d have to pay a relocation benefit,” Avalos legislative aide Raquel Redondiez explained.

So Avalos amended his legislative package to provide an owner the option of giving additional notice in lieu of making relocation payments for owner move-in eviction of a newly converted single-family home or individually-owned condominium, provided the tenant was initially given specified notice of this status.

The amended bill would also allow eviction from a condominium unit with separable title that had been rented by the developer for a limited time prior to sale of the unit, when the developer has given specified advance notice to the renters.

But Dufty still voted against the amended legislation.

Dufty’s legislative aide Boe Hayward claimed the office didn’t cut a deal with Newsom. “We heard Newsom was interested in introducing legislation but we haven’t seen a draft,” Hayward said. “Michael Yarne mentioned it.”

NO DATA

Hayward told the Guardian that part of Dufty’s problem was an absence of data to support advocates’ claims that people in non-rent-controlled units are being evicted without cause.

“I’ve heard anecdotally that this has happened, but I’ve never seen anyone testify that this has happened,” Hayward said.

He also said Dufty wants Avalos to sit down with small property owners and the San Francisco Apartment Association to hear their concerns.

Shortt acknowledged that such data is hard to come by, but noted that this data gap occurs precisely because there is currently no reporting requirement for evictions that occur in buildings built after June 1979.

“For folks in non-rent-controlled units, it’s like the Wild West,” she said. “Landlords can say ‘I want you out’ and they don’t have to give a reason.

“Right now, such evictions are perfectly legal,” Shortt added, noting that part of the benefit of Avalos’ proposed legislation is that these evictions would be tracked and monitored in future.

She said the mayor’s alternative doesn’t address the larger problem. “While foreclosures are a huge piece of the problem, they are not all of it. There is all this new construction going on. And now that the housing market has turned, units that are either being built or temporarily marketed as rentals, not condos. We’re gaining more units without protections. We can’t just turn a blind eye and say there is no problem and wait for a crisis.”

Dufty told the Guardian that he voted Dec. 15 against Avalos’ amended proposal because “small property owners weren’t invited to the table to dialogue. There needs to be more dialogue between tenant advocates and property owners to come to common ground.”

He said owners are already keeping thousands of rent-controlled units off the market and fears they’ll do the same with post-1979 units. “I don’t want to legislate to the extremes and create a ripple effect where post-1979 units are kept off the market. I’m trying to find ways for folks to rent out their units.” Dufty also said he hadn’t seen the mayor’s proposed legislation.

Shortt said she doesn’t understand what Dufty hopes to achieve by convening landlords and tenant groups. “I feel like we’ve made it clear where we’re willing to go on this, and I can’t imagine anything the San Francisco Apartment Association or others might say that would convince us otherwise. Maybe it’s just a torture technique.”

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PROTECTING FAMILIES FROM EVICTIONS

Another major tenant protection bill — Sup. Eric Mar’s legislation to protect families from owner move-in evictions — is headed to the full Board of Supervisors in January. The legislation follows what Mar calls “a couple of minor tweaks” during a Dec. 14 Land Use Committee hearing that took place after months of vetting his bill with the public and family, tenant, and landlord advocacy groups.

The bill seeks to protect families with children from eviction through the OMI process, but would preserve the right of a landlord’s family to evict a tenant’s family, Mar explained.

“During these challenging economic times, our city needs to do whatever it can to ensure that our families are able to live and work here,” Mar said. “This legislation will help our city protect one of our most vulnerable populations: families with children.”

During the hearing, Mar observed that San Francisco is the third most expensive county in the nation for renters and that rent-controlled housing, which encompasses about 70 percent of the city’s rental housing stock, contributes to maintaining a balanced city.

“When a rent-controlled unit is vacated voluntarily or through eviction, the landlord can bring the rental property up to current market rate, making these units unaffordable for our working class and low-income families,” Mar said.

Ted Gullicksen, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, said children need to be protected from no-fault evictions.

“San Francisco protects seniors and other vulnerable tenants from no-fault evictions like the so-called owner move-in eviction,” Gullicksen observed. “We see many families with children being evicted in San Francisco, too often resulting in the family being forced to leave the city where their children were born.”

Advocates say the problem is serious. “We see families flee San Francisco every year due to evictions such as owner move-ins,” said Chelsea Boilard, family policy and communications associate at Coleman Advocates for Children.

Representatives for the San Francisco Apartment Association and other landlord groups spoke out against Mar’s proposal, arguing that anyone with children would have a permanent protection and raising similar objections to ones raised in hearings on Sup. John Avalos’ just-cause legislation.

By the meeting’s end, Mar had amended his legislation to address concerns around the definition of “custodial parent,” including the worry that a 19-year-old could sublease a room to a 16-year-old pretending to be the “custodial parent.”

But Sup. Sophie Maxwell came out against Mar’s amended proposal, which is headed to the full board in January at the recommendation of Mar and Board President David Chiu. All three supervisors sit on the Land Use committee.

“I’m not comfortable with a yes on this legislation,” Maxwell said. “I think we need a comprehensive look at our rental laws and what we need to do. Otherwise, we’ll end up with a hodgepodge.” (Sarah Phelan)

The next budget battle

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The next budget battle

EDITORIAL There is some good news — in a manner of speaking — about Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed midyear budget cuts: they don’t just affect Muni, recreation and parks, human services, and public health. The departments that have been hammered hardest in the past year still face spending reductions — but so do police and fire. The $6 million in Police Department cuts and $1.7 million in Fire Department cuts actually exceed the $7.4 million that the Department of Public Health will have to absorb.

That, of course, requires some context — over the past few budget cycles, DPH has lost far more money than public safety. And the Fire Department has far more fat than its modest cut reflects. And the Human Services Agency is still taking a $3.3 million hit. And the mayor is still keeping five press secretaries. And it’s not at all clear how much of the cuts will involve paring the bloated management ranks, and how much will be the further elimination of front-line services.

And this is just the start — the budget deficit for next year is more than $400 million, and the blood on the floor by the time that’s resolved will make this round look easy.

But the very fact that some of the sacred cows of San Francisco are facing their own financial pain sends an important message: this budget crisis won’t be solved just by screwing the poor — and the unions representing the cops and firefighters are going to have to step up and work with the rest of organized labor to push for some new revenue. And they’ll need to put up some money and reach out to the more conservative voters to promote the tax increases San Francisco desperately needs.

Now it’s up to the supervisors to put in motion the process to take substantial changes in the way the city is funded out of the discussion stage and into the policy arena.

When Newsom was running for governor, it was almost impossible to get him to talk seriously about raising revenue; he clearly wanted to be the candidate who could talk about balancing a city’s budget without raising taxes. Now that he’s not looking for votes in the Central Valley, he’s been a little more open to the idea that a cuts-only budget won’t work the next time around.

Unfortunately, the two main ways he wants to raise money are both terrible ideas. Newsom is talking about gutting the condominium conversion limits and allowing anyone who pays a fee to get a permit to turn an apartment into a condo. That would have a devastating impact on the city’s rental housing stock. He also wants to sell off taxicab permits — a plan that would undermine the city’s longstanding policy of allowing working cab drivers to use the permits at a modest fee and create a structure where the right to drive a cab would be determined at auction and given to the highest bidder.

The condo conversion plan is unlikely to get six votes, and the progressive supervisors should make it clear that a taxi privatization proposal isn’t the best way to solve the budget crisis, either. Then the mayor and the board can start working on a progressive tax plan to put before the voters next year.

The Budget Committee will be ground zero for the debate. Sup. John Avalos chaired that committee through last year’s harrowing budget battles, but in the past the job has rotated. If Board President David Chiu intends to appoint a new chair for next year, he should name one of the two qualified progressives with background on the committee. Either Sup. Ross Mirkarimi or Sup. David Campos would be an excellent choice.

The Big Zero – SF version

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By Steven T. Jones
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I can’t stop thinking about Paul Krugman’s wonderfully biting recent commentary, “The Big Zero,” and his persuasive point that in the last decade, “we achieved nothing and learned nothing.” The Nobel laureate economist was talking about the national economy, but I think his point can also be applied to other realms as well, and specifically to San Francisco.

Sprawl development and over-reliance on the automobile have strained public resources and contributed to global warming, bad air quality, and diminished quality of life. The bursting of the housing bubble and its related lies shows clearly that most people can’t afford to buy a home and must rent. Stagnant wages, decimated 401Ks, and the dead promise that we’ll be OK if we work hard and play by the rules show that we’re all in the same boat, equally vulnerable to hard times and ultimately dependent on government and each other if things really get bad.

So what are we doing with these lessons learned? The core of this city’s housing policy is to simply let an untrustworthy, financially weak corporation, Lennar, build 16,000 homes – the vast majority for sale at pricey market rates – in the two most isolated parts of the city: southeast SF and Treasure Island (which will need to be severely hardened against rising seas). And to make it worse, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s big revenue idea is to let rich people buy their way out of the condo conversion lottery, further depleting the rental stock relied on by two-thirds of city residents.

We’re promoting shitty private sector jobs at all cost (including refusing to adequately tax big corporations) and cutting public sector jobs that have good pay and benefits without a thought, in the process hurting our public health and social service functions. Newsom is still taking his cues from the realtors, landlords and Chamber of Commerce – who have all been so obviously wrong in their advocacy this decade – and refusing to even meet with advocates for tenants, immigrants, environmentalists, and the working class, the very people who most need the help and attention of the Mayor’s Office.

To me, being a progressive simply means that we can do better, that we can progress, that we can learn from the past to improve the future. So Krugman’s insightful column should be a wake-up call, a needed reminder that the economic conservatives like Newsom have been dangerously wrong and that we need to chart a new course.

Editorial: Sitting on the sidewalk is no crime

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Passing the new law might make the supervisors look tough on crime–but it’s not going to make Haight Street any safer

EDITORIAL The recent San Francisco Police Department crackdown on street kids in the Haight Ashbury conclusively proves two things:

1. Chief George Gascón is a media hound who will shift policy and priorities in an instant in response to a couple of newspaper stories, and

2. There’s no need for any new law against sitting on the sidewalk.

Even before the ink was dry on a column by the Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius, who lives in the East Bay suburbs, decrying the “aggressive punks” in the Haight, the Park Station had stepped up foot patrols in the neighborhood. Cops walking beats began making arrests, targeting young people who allegedly had threatened shoppers and residents.

And the crackdown has had an impact. “It proves exactly what I’ve been saying,” Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who represents the district, told us. “When you put cops out on the streets, walking beats on foot, you get results.”

One of the reasons you get results is simple deterrence: Beat cops may not be able to stop every gangland shooting in the Western Addition or the Mission or Bayview. But when you’ve got enough uniformed officers walking up and down Haight Street, life becomes a lot more unpleasant for small-time thugs. And while not every case will get prosecuted, not every case has to — this isn’t murder we’re talking about. It’s bad behavior by a group of people that will continue only as long as it’s tolerated.

Haight Street has attracted more than its share of social problems over the years, and neighborhood organizing has helped address many of them. Community leaders, merchants, and residents worked with the cops in the 1970s to drive heroin dealers out. A decade or so later, neo-Nazi skinheads met the same fate. In no case has the problem been solved by long jail sentences or tougher laws.

Yet with Nevius pushing the issue, there’s a call for a ban on sitting and lying on the sidewalk — a move to criminalize behavior that, for the most part, over many years, has not been a serious law-enforcement problem. We’ve seen this siren song before — in the early 1980s, when Dianne Feinstein was mayor, San Francisco police began conducting massive sweeps, arresting homeless people who congregated on the sidewalk and charging them with violating a law that banned blocking a thoroughfare. The ACLU took the city to court, the Guardian wrote several stories about it, homeless advocates complained loudly — and while the courts ultimately upheld the law, the sweeps came to an end.

And the misdirected law-enforcement did nothing to address the problem of homelessness. It didn’t make the streets safer — or put one more person in an affordable housing unit.

A law banning sitting on the sidewalk would have similar problems. “It gives the police a way to arrest people based entirely on the way they look,” said Alan Schlosser, legal director for the ACLU of Northern California. Homeless people, people who have no intention of doing anything violent or dangerous — anyone who happens to be sitting in the wrong place could be swept up and charged with a crime.

Passing a new law might make the supervisors look tough on crime — but it’s not going to make Haight Street any safer. There’s no reason to outlaw the nonviolent, non-threatening act of sitting on a public sidewalk — particularly when simply enforcing existing laws against harassment, assault, threats, and other violent behavior is a lot more effective. The supervisors should resist any move to pass a “sit/lie” law that will be hard to enforce, ripe for abuse, and probably won’t survive the inevitable (expensive) court challenge.

The DEIR that ate Christmas!

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Text by Sarah Phelan. Photo by Ben Hopfer.

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I don’t know if Mayor Newsom took a copy of the city’s 4,400 page draft environmental impact report (DEIR) for Lennar’s proposed massive Candlestick/Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment on vacation at the swanky Mauna Kea Beach Hotel in Hawaii.

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This is what a room at the Newsoms’ get away (from the folks wanting more time to read the DEIR) hotel in Hawaii looks like.

But if he did, he’d need an extra suitcase just to carry the darn thing, not to mention an ante chamber to store it, when he goes swimming, or whatever, in between readings.

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As our illustration shows, a volume of this massive six-volume report is the size of a phone book. And way denser.
That’s because it’s packed with all kinds of interesting information. Which is why folks have been asking Newsom to extend the public comment period on this document, which was released in mid-November, to mid-February.

This requested extension would give folks three months to read, digest and comment on one of the most important and legally binding documents to land on Newsom’s desk since he became mayor. And the last month of this requested extension wouldn’t be unencumbered by Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years.

But to hear Newsom’s appointees on the Redevelopment and Planning Commissions, those folks asking for a mid-February extension are just whining, or don’t plan on reading the documents at all. And anyways, who cares if the public doesn’t get their comments in time. Because there’ll be plenty of opportunity to comment later on, right?

Wrong. The DEIR public comment period represents one of the few moments when comments have to be put into the public record—and replied to. That was not the case during all those hundreds of meetings that city staff and project boosters like to quote as alleged evidence that there has been plenty of public input into this process.

In fact, when folks were worried about the prospect of selling off a slice of Candlestick Park so that Lennar could build luxury condos on prime waterfront land, they were told, don’t worry, they’ll be plenty of opportunity to review this plan when the environmental impact report comes out. But now it’s all, hurry up and finish, already.

But now that a draft version has been released, and is available online—or in the offices of the Redevelopment Agency and the Planning Department, it’s critical that folks read all of it, and not just the executive summary. It’s also important that folks not versed in “DEIR speak” find professionals that are to give them independent feedback, and that they then submit written comments to Redevelopment and Planning, the city’s two lead agencies on this project, by the deadline that the city has set.

The city’s original deadline was Dec. 28–the minimum 45-day public review period that’s required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), when a project has to be reviewed by state agencies. That’s why a lot of folks showed up at the city’s two DEIR hearings on Dec. 15 and Dec. 17 to voice their concerns. And while I sympathize with the plight of Alice Griffith residents, who continue to live with cockroaches and backed-up sewers and leaking roofs and broken windows, and unemployed workers in this town, rushing DEIR review won’t get housing built or jobs created any sooner. What it will do is increase the chances that the city will get sued.

Which is why folks who seriously want to read and comment on the DEIR asked the city for the Feb. 12 extension. Instead, they got a patronizing rebuff from Newsom’s commissioners, who gave them a 15-day extension, which ends Jan. 12. Along with the opportunity to voice their concerns one more time before Redevelopment on Jan. 5.

That’s why some folks are planning to ask Newsom not to be a Grinch, by faxing copies of a poster that features a cool looking Grinch to City Hall. So, while it won’t be snowing in Hawaii, it could be snowing faxes in the Mayor’s Office. As the poster notes,

“Don’t be a Grinch! Mister Mayor. Don’t steal Christmas and New Years. Your staff released the draft environmental impact report a week and a half before Thanksgiving.”

“Your staff had two years to work on it, but your commissioners just gave the public two months to read 4,400 pages. It’s unfair to steal the public’s Christmas and New Years’ to meet an arbitrary deadline.”

“Extend public comment on the Candlestick Point Hunters Point Shipyard draft environmental impact report (DEIR) to Feb. 12, 2010.”

This follows on the heels of a letter that a broad coalition of environmental and community groups, along with concerned Bayview Hunters Point residents, sent to Newsom before the Dec. 15 and 17 hearings, asking for the Feb. 12 extension, a copy of which follows:

The Candlestick farce

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The Candlestick farce

No one was really surprised when commissioners for the Redevelopment Agency and Planning Department voted last week to only give the public a Scrooge-like 15 days to review a six-volume, 4,400-page draft environmental impact report for Lennar Corp.’s massive 700-acre Candlestick Point redevelopment project.

Everybody knew that Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor, wanted to jam this proposal through the certification process by early June in a last-ditch effort to win back the 49ers, even though the team has said it wants to go to Oakland if the City of Santa Clara doesn’t vote to build a new stadium.

The decision gives the public until Jan. 12th to submit written comments on the DEIR. A broad coalition of community and environmental justice groups asked for a 45-day extension.

And the entire process — including condescending remarks by commissioners, a fight, the forcible removal of several members of the audience, and statements from developer allies that were, at best, highly misleading — can only be described as a farce.

The rush to approve the document is entirely political. Santa Clara voters go to the ballot June 8 to decide if they want to build the 49ers a fancy facility near Great America. But June 8 is the same day, according to a spreadsheet maintained by city Shipyard/Candlestick planners, that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is scheduled to approve the EIR for Lennar’s proposal.

The city’s DEIR envisions building a new 49ers stadium on the shipyard — a position that would allow thousands of luxury condos to be built on the site where the team currently plays, including a significant slice of Candlestick Point State Recreation Area.

To meet the increasingly artificial-looking June 8 EIR deadline, Cohen signaled he’d only be able to squeeze out 15 extra days for draft EIR review.

LENNAR’S PAID SUPPORTERS

With Cohen nowhere in sight at the DEIR hearings last week, his deputy, Tiffany Bohee, was left to kick off Redevelopment’s Dec. 15 and Planning’s Dec. 17 DEIR hearings.

“Time does matter for this project,” Bohee told commissioners, claiming that the project has been vetted exhaustively, including at least 177 public meetings — when the truth was that the public had never had an opportunity to review the complete draft EIR, a binding legal document, before its recent release.

“The consequence of delays is that it precludes the city’s ability to get ahead of the Santa Clara election in June,” Bohee said.

Bohee’s introduction was followed by a string of “no delay” and other off-point comments from representatives of the San Francisco Labor Council, the San Francisco Organizing Project, SF ACORN, and other groups that signed a community benefits agreement with Lennar in May 2008 that promised them millions of dollars in work and housing benefits — provided they show up at public meetings and support the development.

SF Labor Council vice president Connie Ford told commissioners that her organization “looks forward to the day when much-needed resources and support comes our way.”

A dozen residents of the Alice Griffith public housing project talked about their deplorable living conditions.

Asked by Redevelopment commissioner London Breed what the impact of a DEIR review extension would have on the planned rebuild of the Alice Griffith project, Bohee said, “It will jeopardize our ability to get any city decision on the project by June. As a result, delays to Alice Griffith could be indefinite.”

But that’s a stretch — at best. According to Lennar and the city’s own schedule, new Alice Griffith replacement units won’t be available before 2015 at the earliest. An additional 30 days of environmental review at this point will make no difference.

THE BOZO COMMISSIONERS

Compounding the city’s half-truths was the patronizing attitude of those commissioners who thought that their opinion of the DEIR should satisfy members of the public who hadn’t had enough time to review it.

“I think it’s an extremely well done document,” Planning commissioner Michael Antonini told a crowd that had sat through five hours of testimony and been warned by Planning Commission chair Ron Miguel that they’d been thrown out if they spoke during others’ testimony.

Bizarrely, planning commissioner Bill Lee tried to use the fact that the public wasn’t making many substantive comments on the DEIR as an argument against giving anyone more time to read it. Commissioner Gwyneth Borden made the equally odd argument that since people are almost certain to sue the city over the DEIR, there’s no reason to give an extension now.

And Miguel asked the public to put their faith in some vague meeting in the future rather than agreeing to what were asking for at the meeting. “I do believe that when all the comments are considered and answered and the final EIR comes before us and the Redevelopment Agency, that everything will come together,” Miguel said.

By that time, Arc Ecology’s director Saul Bloom, Jaron Browne of People Organized to Win Employment Rights, and POWER’s attorney Sue Hestor told the commissioners that they believe the project’s impacts on transportation, state park habitat, and the foraging requirements of the peregrine falcon had not been adequately analyzed. Eric Brooks of the Green Party expressed concern that sea level rise will be more pronounced than the DEIR projections.

Bloom also explained that a lack of adequate review time hindered his staff’s ability to prepare comments in time for a hearing that came only a month after the DEIR’s release.

Planning Commission vice president Christina Olague and commissioners Kathrin Moore and Hisashi Sugaya tried to extend the review period to February. As Olague pointed out, the commission recently granted a public DEIR review extension to a 15,959-square-foot parcel in Russian Hill, which is tiny compared to Lennar’s 708-acre proposal in the Bayview, where residents have the city’s lowest educational levels

But the Planning Commission’s 4-3 vote against a February extension revealed how mayoral appointees ignore common sense once they have their political marching orders.

COHEN’S FANTASY

“This appears to be all about Cohen’s fantasy of out-maneuvering Santa Clara to get the 49ers to move into a new Hunters Point stadium,” Hestor told the Guardian.

Hestor also pointed to a Dec. 18 San Francisco Business Times guest editorial titled “Business Leaders Can Save the Niners” that Planning Commissioner Michael Antonini had clearly written before Planning’s marathon Dec. 17 hearing.

“The editorial illuminates why, at the Planning Commission on Dec. 17, Antonini argued against any extension for public comment on the DEIR beyond Dec. 28,” Hestor said, noting that Dec. 28 was the absolute minimum DEIR review period required under the California Environmental Quality Act — a review period that straddled Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Kwanza and Christmas (see Holiday Snowjob, 12/09/09).

Earlier this month, a coalition of environmental and community development groups, including Arc Ecology, the Sierra Club, the Potrero Hill Democratic Club, San Francisco Tomorrow, Literacy for Environmental Justice, Young Community Developers, the Neighborhood Parks Council, the South East Jobs Coalition, Walden House, Urban Strategies Council, India Basin Neighborhood Association, California Native Plants Society, Golden Gate Audubon Society, and the Bayview Resource Center, wrote to Mayor Gavin Newsom, requesting a 45-day DEIR review extension.

The request seemed further vindicated when it became apparent that most of the people who showed up at the DEIR hearings, including those opposed to extending the review period, admitted that they had not actually read the documents in question. And the commissioners’ failure to honor the extension request represents a new low in a process that threatens to become a classic lesson in the dangers of public-private partnerships.

Opponents of giving the public a decent chance to read the DEIR argue that there have already been hundreds of meetings on the proposed project. But as Bloom pointed out, the character and focus of EIR is different from any other document that has been produced for discussion. “If an issue is not raised during the EIR process, it cannot be raised subsequently,” Bloom said. “Releasing an EIR during the holiday season and providing the minimum amount of time allowable under the law for public review undermines the public’s ability to evaluate an EIR and disenfranchises people at one of the most critical points of the project approval process.”

Bloom also noted that a standard strategy for drastically limiting public input while appearing to be transparent is to spend time evaluating nonbinding documents while providing the minimum time required to evaluate the legally binding stuff.

“The Phase 2 Urban Design Plan released in October 2008 was in public discussion until it was approved in February 2009 — five months,” Bloom observed, noting that nothing in that document was legally binding. Neither was Lennar required to disclose negative effects of its plan. But an EIR is a legally binding document. “It’s a fiction that a 45-day DEIR public review extension would have cause a domino effect of indefinitely delaying the approval of the project,” Bloom added.

The next budget battle

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The next budget battle

EDITORIAL There is some good news — in a manner of speaking — about Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed midyear budget cuts: they don’t just affect Muni, recreation and parks, human services, and public health. The departments that have been hammered hardest in the past year still face spending reductions — but so do police and fire. The $6 million in Police Department cuts and $1.7 million in Fire Department cuts actually exceed the $7.4 million that the Department of Public Health will have to absorb.

That, of course, requires some context — over the past few budget cycles, DPH has lost far more money than public safety. And the Fire Department has far more fat than its modest cut reflects. And the Human Services Agency is still taking a $3.3 million hit. And the mayor is still keeping five press secretaries. And it’s not at all clear how much of the cuts will involve paring the bloated management ranks, and how much will be the further elimination of front-line services.

And this is just the start — the budget deficit for next year is more than $400 million, and the blood on the floor by the time that’s resolved will make this round look easy.

But the very fact that some of the sacred cows of San Francisco are facing their own financial pain sends an important message: this budget crisis won’t be solved just by screwing the poor — and the unions representing the cops and firefighters are going to have to step up and work with the rest of organized labor to push for some new revenue. And they’ll need to put up some money and reach out to the more conservative voters to promote the tax increases San Francisco desperately needs.

Now it’s up to the supervisors to put in motion the process to take substantial changes in the way the city is funded out of the discussion stage and into the policy arena.

When Newsom was running for governor, it was almost impossible to get him to talk seriously about raising revenue; he clearly wanted to be the candidate who could talk about balancing a city’s budget without raising taxes. Now that he’s not looking for votes in the Central Valley, he’s been a little more open to the idea that a cuts-only budget won’t work the next time around.

Unfortunately, the two main ways he wants to raise money are both terrible ideas. Newsom is talking about gutting the condominium conversion limits and allowing anyone who pays a fee to get a permit to turn an apartment into a condo. That would have a devastating impact on the city’s rental housing stock. He also wants to sell off taxicab permits — a plan that would undermine the city’s longstanding policy of allowing working cab drivers to use the permits at a modest fee and create a structure where the right to drive a cab would be determined at auction and given to the highest bidder.

The condo conversion plan is unlikely to get six votes, and the progressive supervisors should make it clear that a taxi privatization proposal isn’t the best way to solve the budget crisis, either. Then the mayor and the board can start working on a progressive tax plan to put before the voters next year.

The Budget Committee will be ground zero for the debate. Sup. John Avalos chaired that committee through last year’s harrowing budget battles, but in the past the job has rotated. If Board President David Chiu intends to appoint a new chair for next year, he should name one of the two qualified progressives with background on the committee. Either Sup. Ross Mirkarimi or Sup. David Campos would be an excellent choice.

Budget cuts are the calm before the storm

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By Steven T. Jones
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The real news from Mayor Gavin Newsom’s announcement yesterday of $45 million in mid-year budget cuts was that it didn’t make news (this Chron story was buried on page A15). But make no mistake that this is the calm before a budget storm that will really get howling next month when Newsom introduces his proposal to let TIC owners buy their way out of the condo-conversion lottery. Progressives strongly oppose the proposal because it could rapidly deplete the rental housing stock in a city where most residents rent, but where developers just aren’t building new rental housing.

Newsom’s budgets in recent years have stuck it to social services and front-line workers, but this round of budget cuts was actually much closer to progressive priorities, hitting the bloated public safety departments and high salary managers the hardest. “We were rather judicious in this round,” Newsom told the Examiner. “The next round, I can’t promise that.”

Newsom is still refusing to earnestly pursue new general revenue options (and belittling those who argue they are necessary and that the mayor’s support for them is crucial), so the question next month is whether the Board of Supervisors can decisively defeat the sellout of the condo conversion lottery (as well as the privatizing of taxi medallions, Newsom’s other big revenue idea that progressives hate) and convince Newsom that he’s going to need to work cooperatively with progressives to close the $522 million budget hole that the city is facing.

Dufty loses the tenant vote

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By Tim Redmond

Sup. Bevan Dufty, the first candidate to formally enter the San Francisco mayor’s race, just took a big political hit. By voting against a bill that would have protected tenants from unjust evictions, he’s angered one of the city’s largest and most powerful voting blocs.

The bill, by Sup. John Avalos, was important to the tenant movement. It extends to renters in buildings constructed after 1979 the same protections that the occupants of older buildings enjoy. It’s particularly important now, when so many buildings are facing foreclosure; under city law, foreclosure isn’t a “just cause” for eviction, but some tenants are losing their homes after foreclosure actions anyway.

Dufty has never been a great tenant vote, but this one should have been easy. The Avalos bill doesn’t put any more housing under rent control, or limit rent hikes, or impose any taxes or fees. There’s no direct economic impact on any landlords.

I couldn’t reach Dufty for comment today, but if the Chronicle quoted him accurately, his explanation was pretty weak:

Dufty told The Chronicle he would have supported the legislation had it simply addressed foreclosure-driven evictions. He feared that as drafted, the proposed law “would have too many unintended consequences,” particularly when it comes to condominium owners who want to move back into units that have been rented out. The burden on owners who try to evict on that basis could prove too harsh when it comes to time and money, he said.

The problem with that arugment is that owner move-in has always been a just cause for eviction. The Avalos bill wouldn’t change that. You own a condo, you rent it out and you want to move back in, you can evict the tenant.

The real problem here is what landlords think of as “rent-control creep.” Once you start allowing eviction protections on newer buildings, they fear, the next step might be actual rent controls on those buildings. So they fought against the bill.

The landlords have money, and if they see Dufty as their ally, they may reward him with campaign contributions. But the progressive vote is going to be important in the next mayor’s race, and so far — unless Sup. Ross Mirkarimi or Public Defender Jeff Adachi jumps in the race — the progressives don’t have a clear candidate. And while there will be a lot of issues in the race, this will be a big one, and I think the vote will hurt Dufty.

Of course, that assumes there’s a more pro-tenant candidate — and that’s not clear at this point. The others who are widely mentioned as potential contenders are state Sen. Leland Yee, Assessor Phil Ting and City Attorney Dennis Herrera. Herrera has traditionally declined to comment on issues like this, in part because he’s the city’s chief legal officer and has to defend the legislation and also because city law bars him from endorsing candidates or taking stands on ballot measures. But he told me several weeks ago that if he announces for mayor, he will openly discuss any issues facing the city.

When I called him today, he made the same promise again — then told me that he hasn’t announced for mayor yet, and so is declining to comment on whether he supports the Avalos bill. Ting told me he wasn’t familiar enough with the bills details, although, like Dufty, he said he supports eviction protections for tenants in foreclosed buildings.

I’m still waiting to hear from Yee.

Holiday snowjob

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Holiday snowjob

sarah@sfbg.com

Shortly before Thanksgiving, San Francisco city officials announced that the draft environmental impact report for Lennar Corp.’s massive Hunters Point Shipyard-Candlestick Point redevelopment proposal was finally available, and that the public has 45 days — until Dec. 28 — to read and comment on the 4,400-page document.

Envisioned to include more than 10,000 homes (most of them market-rate condos) spread over 708 acres in southeast San Francisco, the project — whose vague outlines city voters affirmed by approving Prop. G in June 2008 — is the centerpiece of the city’s housing strategy for the next 25 years.

At a Nov. 5 presentation, Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor, told the city’s Planning Commission that the DEIR was a "milestone." But critics warn that this milestone could become a millstone around the city’s neck if it fails to extend the DEIR review period, as a coalition of environmental groups and a state agency are requesting. Cohen did not return repeated calls for this story.

These groups are concerned that the city of San Francisco, Lennar’s partner in this billion-dollar deal, is trying to rush through a controversial project before anyone can review its details. Forty-five days is the minimum required under California Environmental Quality Act guidelines for a project that also needs to be reviewed by state agencies and the groups want the deadline extended to mid-February.

The southeast sector has historically been home to low-income communities of color, and fears are running high that this project will continue the destructive, gentrifying legacy of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which shares lead agency responsibilities for this project with the Planning Department.

After Redevelopment Agency projects in Western Addition and Yerba Buena displaced much of San Francisco’s African American population, there is concern that if this project isn’t carefully considered, it could finish the job in the remaining parts of town with significant black populations: Bayview and Hunters Point, which are both in the plan area.

"People would have to read 130-plus pages per day since the DEIR’s release to complete it by the first public hearing," said Kristine Enea, who sits on the board of the India Basin Neighborhood Association and is a candidate in the 2010 race to replace termed-out District 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell.

Downloadable at the Planning Department’s Web site, the Shipyard-Candlestick DEIR envisions an influx of 24,465 new residents and the possible building of a new 49ers stadium on a site that is radiologically contaminated, seismically vulnerable, and will undoubtedly be adversely affected by climate change-induced sea level rise.

As such, it requires significant chunks of time to digest and comment on — something folks are urged to do at two public hearings in mid-December or in writing by Dec. 28.

"The timeline is incredibly short," Arc Ecology’s executive director Saul Bloom told us. So a coalition that includes Bloom, Enea, Arc Ecology, the Urban Strategies Council, the Sierra Club, the California Native Plant Society, and the Potrero Hill Democratic Club is urging Mayor Gavin Newsom to extend the DEIR public review period to 90 days.

"We believe that a public review period totaling 90 days ending on Feb. 12, 2010 is necessary and of appropriate length for the public and our organizations to review, discuss, and comment on this complicated tome," the coalition wrote in a Dec. 7 letter.

Also seeking a time extension is the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), a state agency charged with reviewing large projects that may impact the bay, although the agency did sign onto the coalition’s letter. BCDC studies project that much of the project area could be inundated with rising water levels caused by global warming.

Technically, the lead agencies have the authority to extend EIR comment periods, but because they are controlled by mayoral appointees, the coalition is appealing to Newsom. The coalition letter notes that the project will nearly double the population of Bayview-Hunters Point, and that the newly released DEIR was nearly two years in the making.

"The city’s project staff reasonably took the time to provide what in their opinion is an adequate review of the project," the coalition wrote. "The public similarly deserves 12 weeks to examine and comment on your work."

City officials have been patient with Lennar, recently granting the company a six-month delay in construction of housing at Phase 1 of the development, which sits at Parcel A of the shipyard. As a result, construction for Phase 2 is not expected to start until 2015 and continue until about 2035.

So coalition members say at 45-day delay isn’t asking much. The letter makes clear that the coalition isn’t opposed to the project or Newsom’s administration, but that its members expect "public engagement and transparency in government."

"It is our view that a 45-day public review period for a document as complex and lengthy as the DEIR is simply inadequate under any circumstances," the coalition wrote, adding that the document’s release over the Thanksgiving, Christmas, Kwanza, and Hanukkah holidays is "particularly troubling." By contrast, Santa Clara Countyoffered an extended comment period for its DEIR on its proposed new 49ers stadium.

"By releasing a six volume, 4,400 page document a week and a half before Thanksgiving, you have demanded that the public and community based organizations choose between civic duty, prearranged vacation time, and obligations to family and faith," the coalition wrote, noting that the city effectively shortened even this prep time to 25 days by holding public hearings one month after the DEIR’s release.

Unlike Prop. G or previous discussion about Phase 1 of the project, the coalition reminded Newsom that an EIR is an administrative decision document, and the DEIR is the part of the approval process where ideas become concrete plans to be approved in a lawful process. "Transparency in government is not just a matter of letting the public see information," the coalition observe in the letter. "The capacity to act on what one sees is critical to transparency and the length of the look has a direct effect on the quality of observation."

Or as Bloom warned the Guardian, the current 45-day review period will likely result in a polarized dialogue. "It will lead to the squeezing out of any of the middle-of-the road perspective from folks who are not opposed to development but think the proposed project could be better," Bloom warned. "And if that happens, no modifications will be possible."

The DEIR will be the subject of two public hearings: Dec. 15 at 4 p.m. in City Hall Room 416 by the Redevelopment Agency and Dec. 17 at 1:30 p.m. in City Hall Room 400 by the Planning Commission.

Empty threats

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Empty threats

sarah@sfbg.com

A controversial change to San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy — requiring due process to play out before city officials turn arrested undocumented immigrant minors over to federal authorities — officially becomes city law this week. But its implementation is still in limbo.

Last month, the Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 to override a veto of the legislation by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who says he won’t implement it anyway because he thinks it violates federal law. Authored by Sup. David Campos, the legislation goes into effect Dec. 10, and the city’s Juvenile Probation Department has 60 days to implement it, meaning the new policy kicks in Feb. 8.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera sought assurances from Joe Russoniello, the US Attorney for Northern California, that he wouldn’t prosecute local officials who follow the amended sanctuary city policy, as Russoniello had intimated to reporters. Russoniello refused to do so.

"I have no authority, discretionary or otherwise, to grant amnesty from federal prosecution to anyone who follows the protocol set out in the referenced ordinance," Russoniello wrote in a Dec. 3 letter.

But as UC Davis law professor Bill Ong Hing said Russoniello hasn’t cited any case law to support his position that following the ordinance could amount to harboring a fugitive from justice.

"It’s no more than hot air," Hing wrote Dec. 4 in a San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Coalition Dec. 4 press release. "While Russoniello has been vocally opposed to San Francisco’s pro-immigrant policies for two decades now, nothing will come of his empty threats…There has never been a federal prosecution anywhere in the country against city officials for following sanctuary ordinances."

In fact, it’s possible that Russoniello — a holdover appointee by President George W. Bush — won’t even get the opportunity."

The legal newspaper The Recorder reported Dec. 4 that the Obama administration is close to announcing Melinda Haag, a former federal prosecutor, as Russoniello’s replacement.

"Recently the Justice Department informed Russoniello that he could not hire any more personnel for the office, multiple sources said, which could suggest a choice for his successor is coming soon," the article stated, although it also noted that FBI background checks have yet to be completed. "So even if a successor is chosen soon, it would be several weeks before a name is submitted to the U.S. Senate, much less confirmed."

Despite Newsom’s public statements that he won’t enforce the new law, City Attorney’s Office spokesperson Matt Dorsey recently assured a group of civil rights advocates that Newsom’s comments have "no legal effect," and that Herrera intends to vigorously defend the new sanctuary law.

Representatives of 70 community groups last week showed up at the office to urge Herrera to enforce the law. "Hundreds of community members and community organizations poured our hearts into the democratic process for over a year," Cynthia Muñoz-Ramos of the St. Peter’s Housing Committee told Dorsey. " We worked hard to pass a policy to restore due process rights to undocumented youth. Our city officials must be open and accountable to us. City Attorney Herrera should advise the mayor that he cannot refuse to implement the due process policy. It’s past time to restore due process rights for all of our city’s youth. Justice delayed is justice denied."

After the meeting, Muñoz and more than a dozen community advocates told us they were frustrated by Newsom’s stance and that innocent kids were already being ripped from their families, creating deep-seated fear within the immigrant community that cooperating with local police could result in racial profiling and referral to the feds.

Angela Chan, staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, told us, "We agree with City Attorney Herrera’s stated intention to vigorously defend the duly-enacted, legally sound policy. It is paramount for Herrera to take immediate steps to uphold the law, including advising the mayor that he cannot refuse to implement this law."

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