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Driving up the cost of housing

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Driving up the cost of housing

By Jobert Poblette

news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY If you think living in the Bay Area is expensive, think about what it would be like if you didn’t have access to public transportation. A new report by Chicago-based think tank Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) considers just that problem, offering a new way of understanding just what constitutes affordable housing.

The CNT report — dubbed the Housing and Transportation (H+T) Affordability Index (www.htaindex.cnt.org) — maps housing affordability for 337 metropolitan areas and provides before-and-after snapshots that show how affordability changes when transportation costs are taken into account.

Affordable housing is usually defined as consuming 30 percent or less of a household’s income, but CNT proposes a redefinition. Under CNT’s new definition, housing is only considered affordable if the sum of housing and transportation costs constitutes 45 percent or less of household income. That redefinition would have dramatic effects on the Bay Area’s affordability picture.

Many communities in the region that would have been considered affordable under the old definition — including large swaths of Hayward, Marin County, Sacramento, and Stockton — would be unaffordable under the new standard. And San Francisco, well served by public transit, would be deemed a lot more affordable.

The difference that smart planning and public transportation make can be huge, especially for households already feeling the pinch of a weak economy. According to CNT, transportation costs in “location efficient” neighborhoods — its term for “compact, mixed-use communities with a balance of housing, jobs, and stores, and easy access to transit” — can be as low as 12 percent of a household’s budget versus up to 32 percent for less efficient neighborhoods where residents must drive to jobs and services.

For example, CNT calculated an annual transportation cost difference of $2,780 between Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood, which it calls “compact,” and the city of Antioch, which it considers “dispersed.”

CNT says “location efficiency” in development can translate to big savings. According to its report, if 50 percent of new growth in the Bay Area occurs in compact rather than dispersed neighborhoods, the region could collectively save more than $1.1 billion in transportation costs.

Besides reducing a community’s environmental impact and improving residents’ quality of life, the report argues that things like walkability, proximity to jobs and services, and efficient public transportation help make an area more livable and affordable. The report also raises questions about the wisdom of cutting public transportation, especially in a period when many households are being forced out of their homes.

CNT hopes that its analysis will lead to more awareness for policy makers and more transparency for consumers. “What we’re looking for is a new definition of affordability, transportation cost disclosures for consumers, and incentives to build more compact communities around transit,” CNT spokesperson Nicole Gotthelf told us.

Gotthelf said the Bay Area has been at the forefront of this issue, specifically mentioning the work of the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the agency that plans, coordinates, and finances transportation in the nine counties that make up the region. “They’ve been actively trying to understand the housing and transportation trade-offs for Bay Area households.”

In turn, MTC offered support for the principles behind the CNT study. “We agree that it is good policy to promote the development of affordable housing at or near transit hubs,” MTC spokesperson John Goodwin told the Guardian.

In its “Transportation 2035 Plan for the San Francisco Bay Area,” which outlines how the agency will spend $218 billion in transportation funds over the next 25 years, MTC even sets out a goal of “decreas[ing] by 10 percent the combined share of low-income and lower-middle-income residents’ household income consumed by transportation and housing.”

Goodwin told us the agency is committed to smart growth principles: “The Bay Area is not unique, but I think the Bay Area is part of a vanguard … We are among the leading metro areas in making this a policy priority, and I feel confident in saying that this priority will continue to be affirmed.”

Goodwin pointed to the agency’s Transportation for Livable Communities (TLC) program, which is designed to promote development that “revitalizes central cities and older suburbs, supports and enhances public transit, promotes walking and bicycling, and preserves open spaces and agricultural lands.” Now in its 12th year, the TLC program has helped fund scores of transportation-related and affordable housing projects.

The MTC also administers the Housing Incentive Program, which “rewards communities … when they successfully promote high-density housing and mixed-use developments at transit stops to support transit use.” The program provides up to $3 million in grants to local governments that partner with developers to build housing near transit hubs.

Conversely, the agency also won’t approve funding for new transit stops that aren’t in dense areas. The thresholds require a minimum number of housing units within a half-mile radius of new transit stops, from 750 units for new ferry terminals to 3,850 units for new BART stations.

But the MTC’s efforts represent only one part of the equation. Goodwin said that coordination is key. “What we have here in the Bay Area is that decisions about transportation funding — for the most part — are conducted at the regional level, while land-use decisions are made at the local level. So it requires coordination between regional agencies like MTC and local cities and counties.”

In spite of the MTC’s efforts, huge problems plague the region. Housing costs in the Bay Area are among the highest in the nation. A recent report conducted by the Urban Land Institute — based on research conducted by CNT — found that, on average, Bay Area households spent $41,420 a year on housing and transportation, a whopping 59 percent of median income.

With budget crises affecting many of the region’s public transit providers, service cuts and fare hikes make the picture bleaker. Recently, AC Transit and Muni services were cut by almost 10 percent, causing longer waits and crowded buses — and a huge budget deficit could mean deep cuts in Caltrain service this summer. If these cuts force more Bay Area households to turn to cars, the region’s affordability can be adversely affected, even as households deal with the pressures of a weak economy.

On the national stage, several developments offer signs that smart growth principles — including the link between housing affordability and transportation — may be gaining wider traction. These developments are presenting smart growth and public transportation advocates with opportunities to push for reform.

Last year, three federal agencies — the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency — announced a partnership that would have the agencies working together on housing and transportation initiatives. The partnership laid out six “livability principles,” including commitments to provide more transportation choices, “promote equitable, affordable housing,” support existing communities, and “value communities and neighborhoods.” The new partnership’s rhetoric includes references to location and energy efficiency, transit-oriented and mixed-use development, and walkable neighborhoods.

On Capitol Hill, Congress is working on a new omnibus transportation bill to replace a bill that expired in 2009. The bill would provide billions in federal funding for highways and other forms of surface transportation. Consideration of the new bill in both the House and Senate has stalled, but some proposals emphasize the creation of transportation choices and livable communities. Transportation for America (www.t4america.org), a coalition of housing, transportation, environmental, and other groups, is mobilizing to promote public transportation and sustainable development in the new transportation bill, seeking to make CNT’s way of looking at the world into official U.S. policy.

Editor’s Notes

David Talbot
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Editor’s Notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce decided this month to release a scorecard ranking the members of the Board of Supervisors on business-related issues. The idea was pretty clear: make the progressives on the board appear “anti jobs” — although some of the selections (naming rights for Candlestick Park?) weren’t really jobs issues at all. And the scorecard wasn’t about jobs (after all, the biggest employers in San Francisco are public agencies); it was about the downtown agenda.

We typically wait until election time to review how the supes voted over the past two years, but since the Chamber is launching its assault early, we thought we’d add a dose of reality. On page 13, you can find our list of 20 key votes on a broad range of progressive issues and see how the district supervisors did.

There’s another guide in this issue, too — our annual look at the San Francisco International Film Festival. And in honor of the festival, we’ve done something unusual. There are two different versions of the Guardian cover, highlighting two different movies. Go ahead — collect ’em both. 

 

Cheating U.S. workers

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The drive to strengthen workers’ rights is one of the most important ever undertaken by an American administration

Hundreds of thousands of workers are being cheated by U.S. employers who blatantly violate the laws that are supposed to guarantee workers decent wages, hours and working conditions.

That’s been going on for a long time, but rarely as extensively as it was during the administration of George W. Bush. Thankfully, Bush is gone. And thankfully, President Obama and his outstanding Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, have this month launched a major campaign to try to overcome the very serious damage of the past.

Even the name of the campaign itself is very un-Bush-like. “We Can Help,” it’s called. Bush, of course, never so much as offered help to badly exploited workers. But he did, of course, offer plenty of help to their law-breaking employers.

So, just what are Obama, Solis and their allies in the labor movement and elsewhere up to? They’re taking some very big steps to encourage workers to report employer violations of the wage and hour laws – especially low-wage workers, who are the most exploited. And they’re trying to respond as quickly as possible to the workers’ complaints.

Undocumented immigrants, who are perhaps the most exploited of all workers, are being encouraged to make complaints and are promised they won’t be punished for their illegal status. As the Labor Department explains, all workers deserve decent treatment, whatever their legal status.

Solis’ Labor Department has made the campaign a top priority. The department has already hired more than 250 new investigators, increasing the number by more than one-third. Even with a lesser number, the department recovered more than $170 million in back pay for more than 200,000 workers since Obama took office.

The key element of the campaign is to make sure that workers understand their rights under the laws and report any violations of those rights.

Certainly there’s no doubt that there are plenty of violations to report. For instance, a recent survey of workers in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago found thousands of rampant abuses of low-wage workers, many of them undocumented immigrants. They worked in stores, in factories and offices, at construction sites, in janitorial and food service jobs, in  warehouses, in  private homes  and elsewhere.

More than one-fourth of the workers had been paid less than the legal minimum wage, often by more than $1 an hour less. That amounted to an average of more than $50 week in underpayments on wages that averaged not much more than $300 a week to begin with.

Many of the workers had been denied overtime pay or had their pay illegally docked for the cost of tools or transportation. Some were forced work without pay before and after their regular work shifts. Slavery is the word for that – being forced to work without pay.

Although the Labor Department is relying primarily on workers themselves to report on employers’ labor law violations, the department is also getting help from the AFL-CIO, its affiliated unions and other worker advocacy groups.

They are distributing posters, fact sheets and booklets spelling out the wage and hour laws and how to report violations, arranging meetings between workers and Labor Department staffers, holding forums at union halls, and other steps.

The department also has begun a publicity campaign in English and Spanish that includes TV ads featuring prominent Latinos, such as Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, and prominent Puerto Rican actor Jimmy Smits.

Win or lose, the drive to greatly strengthen workers’ rights is one of the most important ever undertaken by an American administration. And I strongly suspect it will come in a winner.

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

 

 

 

 

Editorial: No free ride for developers

David Talbot
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Under Newsom’s approach, the current residents and businesses of San Francisco will have to put up millions of dollars to cover the costs created by market-rate housing developers

The dumbest plan the Newsom administration has cooked up in a long time continues to make its way through City Hall. The mayor wants to defer fees for housing developers as a way to “stimulate” the economy — despite the fact that the city’s own economist concluded the plan would lead to the creation of a relatively tiny number of jobs and perhaps 40 or 50 new market-rate condos over the next two years.

And the cost would be staggering. Over the next 15 to 20 years, depending on how much the housing market picks up, $43 million worth of fees developers typically pay before they break ground could be deferred, an analysis by Fernando Marti, a member of the Eastern Neighborhoods Citizens Advisory Committee, shows. The city would get the money eventually — but buildings would go up before the cash to provide water and sewer service, public transportation, schools, parks, and other amenities is in the city’s accounts.

At the same time, information released by the city last week shows that the gap between the cost of the infrastructure needed for the Eastern Neighborhoods plan and the fees developers will pay is at least $100 million, and perhaps as much as $234 million.

The message is clear. Under Newsom’s approach, the current residents and businesses of San Francisco will have to put up millions of dollars to cover the costs created by market-rate housing developers. In fact, Newsom’s administration is already suggesting special levies on property in the impacted areas to make up the difference.

In underserved areas like the Eastern Neighborhoods, where transit and open space are already inadequate to meet current needs, the situation is particularly harsh. “They want to have the Eastern Neighborhoods pay higher taxes than anyone else to mitigate the impacts of new stuff that was supposed to pay for itself,” planning activist Tony Kelly, who is running for District 10 supervisor, told us. “This is a non-starter.”

The problem is nothing new — although a lot of pro-development activists have been denying it for years: new high-end housing development doesn’t pay its own way. If more than 40,000 new residents are going to live in the southeast part of town, San Francisco will have to build schools, police stations, firehouses, bus and rail lines, parks, and in some cases new roads. Then the city will have to hire (and train) cops, bus drivers, firefighters, gardeners, and teachers. None of that is cheap — in fact, the Eastern Neighborhoods Infrastructure Finance Working Group estimates that the actual cost of providing basic infrastructure would be about $22 for every square foot of new development.

The developers howl at that sort of number and insist they can’t afford it, so the city is prepared to charge closer to $10 a square foot. To make up the difference in the Eastern Neighborhoods, the working group suggested some form of tax-increment financing — that is, the city would borrow against the expected new property tax revenues from the new development and use that to build infrastructure. The mayor took that off the table, wanting any new revenue to go right to the General Fund.

And, of course, under the mayor’s current plan, the modest fees developers actually have to pay will be deferred for several years, making the problem even worse. So the only way to pay for the costs of new housing development is some sort of special property-tax district in the affected neighborhoods.

Add to this the fact that the mayor’s proposal would mean the immediate loss of at least 400 affordable housing units, and the whole thing becomes untenable.

The supervisors have amended the fee-deferral plan to make it a bit less awful, but the whole approach is still completely backward. City fees aren’t holding up housing construction; the weak market and tight credit are to blame for that. And when those conditions change, developers will be poised — as always — to make a vast amount of money selling overpriced condos for millionaires in San Francisco. And if they can’t pay their own way, the city shouldn’t allow them to break ground.

 

No free ride for developers

David Talbot
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No free ride for developers

EDITORIAL The dumbest plan the Newsom administration has cooked up in a long time continues to make its way through City Hall. The mayor wants to defer fees for housing developers as a way to "stimulate" the economy — despite the fact that the city’s own economist concluded the plan would lead to the creation of a relatively tiny number of jobs and perhaps 40 or 50 new market-rate condos over the next two years.

And the cost would be staggering. Over the next 15 to 20 years, depending on how much the housing market picks up, $43 million worth of fees developers typically pay before they break ground could be deferred, an analysis by Fernando Marti, a member of the Eastern Neighborhoods Citizens Advisory Committee, shows. The city would get the money eventually — but buildings would go up before the cash to provide water and sewer service, public transportation, schools, parks, and other amenities is in the city’s accounts.

At the same time, information released by the city last week shows that the gap between the cost of the infrastructure needed for the Eastern Neighborhoods plan and the fees developers will pay is at least $100 million, and perhaps as much as $234 million.

The message is clear. Under Newsom’s approach, the current residents and businesses of San Francisco will have to put up millions of dollars to cover the costs created by market-rate housing developers. In fact, Newsom’s administration is already suggesting special levies on property in the impacted areas to make up the difference.

In underserved areas like the Eastern Neighborhoods, where transit and open space are already inadequate to meet current needs, the situation is particularly harsh. "They want to have the Eastern Neighborhoods pay higher taxes than anyone else to mitigate the impacts of new stuff that was supposed to pay for itself," planning activist Tony Kelly, who is running for District 10 supervisor, told us. "This is a non-starter."

The problem is nothing new — although a lot of pro-development activists have been denying it for years: new high-end housing development doesn’t pay its own way. If more than 40,000 new residents are going to live in the southeast part of town, San Francisco will have to build schools, police stations, firehouses, bus and rail lines, parks, and in some cases new roads. Then the city will have to hire (and train) cops, bus drivers, firefighters, gardeners, and teachers. None of that is cheap — in fact, the Eastern Neighborhoods Infrastructure Finance Working Group estimates that the actual cost of providing basic infrastructure would be about $22 for every square foot of new development.

The developers howl at that sort of number and insist they can’t afford it, so the city is prepared to charge closer to $10 a square foot. To make up the difference in the Eastern Neighborhoods, the working group suggested some form of tax-increment financing — that is, the city would borrow against the expected new property tax revenues from the new development and use that to build infrastructure. The mayor took that off the table, wanting any new revenue to go right to the General Fund.

And, of course, under the mayor’s current plan, the modest fees developers actually have to pay will be deferred for several years, making the problem even worse. So the only way to pay for the costs of new housing development is some sort of special property-tax district in the affected neighborhoods.

Add to this the fact that the mayor’s proposal would mean the immediate loss of at least 400 affordable housing units, and the whole thing becomes untenable.

The supervisors have amended the fee-deferral plan to make it a bit less awful, but the whole approach is still completely backward. City fees aren’t holding up housing construction; the weak market and tight credit are to blame for that. And when those conditions change, developers will be poised — as always — to make a vast amount of money selling overpriced condos for millionaires in San Francisco. And if they can’t pay their own way, the city shouldn’t allow them to break ground.

The Chamber of Commerce scorecard: You gotta be kidding

Zelda Bronstein
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The Chamber of Commerce scorecard: You gotta be kidding

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce has released a voting scorecard on the supervisors — and it’s a bad joke. The Chamber says the scorecard shows who are top opponents of business in the city, the ones who don’t support “job creation and government efficiency” — two poll-tested buzzwords the Chamber will try to use in supervisorial campaigns this fall.


But there are only ten votes on the scorecard — and they don’t even remotely represents the most important jobs, business or economic issues the board has addressed in the past year.


Seriously: Does anyone think that naming rights for Candlestick Park has had a huge impact on the ability of businesses to create jobs in the city? How about a resolution supporting a proposed Contemporary Art Museum?


And since small, locally owned independent businesses are the single largest private-sector job generators, how does the Recurrent Energy deal — a giveaway to a big power company — help create jobs?


Of course, that’s not what this is about. The scorecard issues were carefully chosen to make the progressives look bad. And, as always, the Chamber has completely ignored the fact that the largest employers in San Francisco are public-sector agencies, and that cutting government programs and blocking new sources of revenue are the real “job killers.”


We’re putting together our own scorecard, measuring a wider range of votes on key issues in the past year. What were the most important? What really mattered to San Franciscans? The comment lines are open.

Stop mistreating working women!

David Talbot
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0

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

Although the global recession has had a serious impact on working men and women alike, two new reports make clear that women in the United States and throughout the world have suffered most because of long-standing discrimination.

The findings come from two highly regarded sources – the United Nations’ International Labor Office (ILO), and the New Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank headed by John Podesta, former chief of staff for President Clinton.

Above all, the reports show the critical need to combat the worldwide mistreatment of working women, especially in these times of economic distress. The initial blow of the recession was felt in work dominated by men, such as finance, manufacturing and construction. But the main impact has shifted to other areas of work, including service work, where women generally are dominant.

Nevertheless, as the CAP report notes, “Most of the jobs that have been lost have been lost by men, leaving millions of women and mothers to support their families.”

That’s a rough task for many women. For though they’re usually doing essentially the same work as men, or the equivalent of it, women earn substantially less than the men – internationally, 30 to 40 percent less, despite a narrowing of the gap in recent years. The gap is narrower within the United States, but even so, U.S. women average only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.

The pay gaps exist in part because, as the ILO’s Sara Elder says,  “We still find many more women than men taking up low pay and precarious work, either because this is the only type of job made available or because they need to find something that allows them to balance work and family responsibilities. Men do not face these same constraints.”

And it may get worse for women, even after the recession ends, since “we know from previous crises that female job-losers find it more difficult to return to work as economic recovery settles in.”

What’s needed everywhere, of course, is equal treatment for working women – paying them the same as men doing comparable work and otherwise treating them the same.

In the United States that would mean cracking down on the widespread violations of the 47-year-old Equal Pay Act that has never delivered its promise to guarantee women equal treatment on the job.

Better yet would be the passage – and strict enforcement  – of the long stalled Paycheck Fairness Act. It would close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act that have made it relatively easy for employers to discriminate against women in pay and other matters.

It’s estimated that if U.S. women were granted equal pay , they could each earn as much as $2  million more over the whole of their working lives. It’s estimated as well that equal pay would reduce the number of families living in poverty by as much as half.

Probably the most essential reform aside from paycheck fairness would be, as the CAP report recommends, worldwide updating of basic labor standards “to recognize that most workers have family responsibilities and need predictable and flexible work schedules, family and medical leaves and paid sick days.” That would assure that women “who stay employed to support their families” won’t end up unemployed because of  “family-work.

At least in the United States, those and other reforms would likely win broad public support. A recent poll cited in the CAP report showed that “a large majority of Americans support new, more family-friendly workplace policies.” Eighty-five percent “said businesses that fail to adapt to needs of modern families risk losing good workers.”

And businesses that fail to adapt will be furthering the mistreatment of working women that’s gone virtually unchecked for far too many years. No matter what the recession – or its end – brings, we will not have a truly healthy economy until working women are guaranteed their full rights.

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

Recology’s Nevada landfill blocked

Mary Magee
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Recology’s Nevada landfill blocked

The Las Vegas Review-Journal is reporting that the Planning Commission in Humboldt County, Nevada blocked Recology’s landfill expansion application in Winnemucca, which is halfway between San Francisco and Salt Lake City.

The news comes close on the heels of the Guardian’s report that San Francisco has tentatively selected Recology to dispose of the city’s waste in Yuba County.

The LVRJ articles notes that “Recology wants to haul in 4,000 tons of garbage a day from Northern California communities for the next 95 years and dump it on the desert playa about 28 miles west of Winnemucca.”

Adam Alberti, a spokesman for Recology and the Jungo Land Co., is quoted as saying that the commission’s decision “could cost the region more than $660 million and new jobs.”

And U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is quoted as calling the proposed dump a threat to Nevada’s “sovereignty and dignity.”

“The proposal to dump a mountain of California trash in Nevada is a lose-lose proposition for our state,” Reid said. “The people of Humboldt County have made it clear they don’t want other states dumping trash in their backyards, and I applaud their decision. “

Asked if there was a connection between the proposed Nevada dump and San Francisco’s trash, given that the city is only proposing a ten-year contract with Recology in Yuba County, Alberti said the landfill Recology was pursuing in Nevada is a “speculative effort” and that San Francisco “prohibits its waste from being taken out of state.”

“Recology has no contract in Winnemucca, and you have to have a landfill open before you can enter into a contract,” he said.

Here in San Francisco, District 10 candidate Eric Smith said he wants to see a whole lot more light being shone on the debate about what to do with the city’s trash.

“There needs to more transparency and accountability in the debate, which needs to include looking at all aspects of the issue, including where and how we transport our trash,” Smith said. “Should we barge, rail or truck it? What are the economic and environmental consequences? And is this something the citizens and ratepayers of San Francisco can support? Instead, there appear to be three main companies duking it out under cloak of darkness.”

Where’s teacher?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Where’s teacher?

By Brady Welch

news@sfbg.com

Horace Mann Middle School principal Mark Sanchez sounded exhausted when we reached him on March 26. It wasn’t because Horace Mann is such a tough school, although the Mission District campus does have a disproportionate number of at-risk students. And it wasn’t because it was the Friday before spring break, although that might have had something to do with it.

All week Sanchez had been reeling from news that a whopping 10 out of his 20 full-time teachers had been issued pink slips by the San Francisco Unified School District. Including counselors, a vice principal, and other staff, the budget cuts essentially lopped off 24.6 percent of the school’s workforce, an unprecedented blow that speaks volumes about the state of California public education.

“A lot of the kids were wondering if the school was getting shut down,” Sanchez said. And although Horace Mann isn’t closing, with so many axed teachers, it might seem like a new school to many students come August. “If a significant number [of teachers] are moved, we don’t know what we’re in for.”

There is a legend that you will meet the person who will seal your fate long before the final event happens. And in an interesting turn of events, it was Sanchez who, as president of the Board of Education in 2007, hired current SFUSD Superintendent Carlos Garcia. Attempting to close a staggering $113 million budget gap over the next two years, it fell to Garcia on Feb. 23 to send out 645 layoff notices across the district in a list that included 163 administrators, 239 elementary school teachers, 124 high school teachers, and 104 middles school positions. Horace Mann was hit particularly hard because so many of its staff lacked seniority. Final decisions on layoffs will be made next month by the school board.

The first indications of this massive fiscal blood-letting came Jan. 20, when Garcia sent a letter to the entire district on learning of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget. The document was a glaring reminder of how bad things had gotten in Sacramento, and the superintendent wrote candidly of what he saw and what it meant for the district. “These numbers are large, and they will be devastating.”

Aside from the extraordinary blow to personnel, the proposed SFUSD budget will increase class sizes, freeze salaries, cancel summer school except for those who need credits to graduate, and reduce the number of days of classroom instruction to 175 annually, putting the district in conflict with a state law mandating at least 180 days. Given its deep cuts, Sacramento probably won’t enforce the statute.

“The state itself is in such a budget crisis,” Sanchez told us. “And [it’s] refusing to raise taxes. The fix has to be at the state level.”

But that’s been difficult since the passage of Proposition 13, the 1978 measure that limits property tax increases and gives control of whatever revenue is generated directly to the state. Because all state budgets must pass the Legislature with a two-thirds super-majority vote, a disciplined minority of virulently antitax Republicans block budgets that adequately fund education nearly every time.

Yet now, the bill for that political stalemate is coming due at schools like Horace Mann.

Beyond the numbers and politics, the Guardian wanted to get a closer look at how this regular cycle of cuts and layoffs is affecting teachers and students, so we spoke to a couple of eighth grade English teachers at Horace Mann who described it as dismal.

“I try to put it at the back of my mind, to be honest,” said Matt Borowsk, one of the 10 teachers at Horace Mann who received a pink slip. Borowsk reiterated a common sentiment that all teachers — potentially laid off or not — just want to do their jobs and focus on their classes. “I want to be able to stay and do my work and make improvements. And I want to do what I can for the school community and work with students,” he said. “I’m still in it, and I’m in it for the long run, despite what issues the district has about keeping their teachers.”

Gail Eigl, a teacher at Horace Mann for eight years who is tenured and therefore not at risk of a layoff, concurred. “No one I know who got a pink slip has changed their attitude. People are trying to stay focused on the present and teach.”

It’s an admirable response, and one Eigl understands well. She was laid off after her first year there in 2001. “Six of us got pink slips,” she recalled. “It was terrible.” She went looking for a job in South San Francisco, but in a strange turn of events, SFUSD called and offered her a job at Argonne Elementary in the Richmond District. A year later, she was back where she started at Horace Mann, and until now, she hadn’t really looked back.

“It’s like the school keeps having problems,” she said, an opinion that also hints at SFUSD’s skewed notion of teaching as a stable career path.

Borowski offers a similar story. This year’s pink slip is his second. Last year he received one after teaching only a year in Burlingame, which is how he ended up in San Francisco. Such rampant doling out of pink slips has nothing to do with Borowski’s performance. Rather, it has everything to do with seniority. And because the state is in such a crunch, it’s hard to stay in any school long enough before the budget’s grim reaper comes to collect.

“People who are able to stick through the first five years, they genuinely want to be a good teacher, make seniority, and not have to worry about it,” he said. And “because Horace Mann is a school where new teachers go, because it’s a tough school, then they’re the most vulnerable to layoffs. Which starts this vicious cycle.”

It’s classic Catch-22. Facing such a budget shortfall, how does SFUSD keep teachers who have little or no seniority teaching in the very schools whose litany of needs put those teachers there in the first place? In many ways, these are the most committed and passionate teachers the district has, and they represent for their classes a level of discipline and stability absent in many of their students’ home lives.

Many of Eigl’s students are low-income, speak English as a second language, or both. Some of their parents are deceased, others are undocumented immigrants, and a few are in jail.

“I honor tenure,” she told us. “I know there’s a reason for it. But right now, it doesn’t seem to be working for us.” Eigl brings up the case of a new parent liaison the school received this year, a critically important position that takes time building solid relationships with students’ families. “She got a pink slip too,” Eigl told us, the exasperation evident in her voice.

“I think people are really defeated inside. It’s so frustrating,” she continued. When asked what she meant by that, Eigl became heated. “It’s California! We’re supposed to be the richest economy. We should have money for schools. Why are other states doing so much more? We’re at the bottom. Where’s the money?” She suggested that Horace Mann should be granted special status because of its high-needs student body.

“It’s almost predictable that students who have a lot of unpredictability in their lives will suffer for this,” Sanchez told us. “It will be destabilizing for them. Teachers will get disrupted as well. A lot of what you do in schools has so much to do with outside the classroom, and it takes a lot of time to get acclimated.” At a tough school like Horace Mann, he says, “there’s been a lot of professional development and new programs.”

Borowski stresses the sentiment forcefully. “It’ll be devastating if the pink slips go through. It’ll be a huge mess.”

Both teachers participated in the massive statewide protests against the cuts on March 4. But other than letting Sacramento know how public educators feel, nothing concrete has come out of it. Sanchez suggested that it might be possible to sue the state for violating its statute on the minimum number of school days. Even SFUSD, at the last Board of Education meeting on March 23, didn’t rule out the possibility of suing the state for lack of adequate funding.

Negotiations are ongoing between the district and the United Educators of San Francisco teachers union about final layoffs. Those will be finalized May 15. Meanwhile, teachers at Horace Mann and across the district will continue to do their jobs despite how grim the outlook may be. As Eigl puts it, “It’s like out of a book from a bad future.”

Access denied

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Access denied

rebeccab@sfbg.com

If tuition goes up to $40 per course unit at the community college where Dielly Diaz is working toward her associate of arts degree, she’s not sure she’ll be able to afford it. But Diaz isn’t just worried about her own shot at an education. She also wonders what’s in store for her 19-year-old daughter, a student at Laney Community College in Oakland. For parents scrambling in the face of the economic downturn even as their kids prepare for the future, she said, “it’s like we’re getting hit both ways.”

Diaz, who is 39 and originally from Venezuela, says she decided to enter Berkeley City College’s adult education program to earn her degree because the recession threw her into a precarious position, shaking the stability of her job as a mortgage loan officer. When she started just a year ago, tuition was $20 per course unit. It has since gone up to $26, and now the California Legislative Analyst’s Office is recommending ratcheting it up to $40.

Even as students are being asked to shell out more, California’s community colleges are reeling from the impacts of budget cuts: faculty layoffs, swelling class sizes, fewer available courses, and reductions in student services. For students hoping to transfer to other public institutions in the California State University (CSU) or University of California (UC) systems — or even for those seeking to develop a skill set that can garner a living wage — maneuvering the shredded educational framework can be frustrating. This past year, roughly 250,000 students statewide were denied access to community colleges due to a lack of course availability, according to education advocacy group Against Cuts.

“When you see all that, it’s like OK, I feel like I really need to do something,” Diaz said. “It’s not like we can just sit and wait, letting the cuts happen. I think we can really get organized.”

Between school, work, and being a mom, Diaz started pitching in on community outreach for Against Cuts, a grassroots effort that took shape last fall in the wake of devastating education cutbacks. It was one of hundreds of organizations that collectively launched mass demonstrations decrying funding slashes to education on March 4. The newly energized education movement plans to propel another mass rally to descend on Sacramento in the fall, Diaz noted, in the meantime focusing on awareness-raising efforts like an April 17 teach-in at Berkeley City College.

California’s community colleges are unique among the state’s higher education institutions in that they represent a gateway for nontraditional students to get a foothold for career advancement or a fresh start for people trying to improve their lives. They also offer an affordable option to complete lower-division coursework before transferring, a path that’s starting to become a bottleneck since courses needed to meet transfer requirements have been affected by cuts.

Yet even as fees climb and class sizes balloon, more people are opting to go the community college route, and demand for enrollment is only expected to increase. Some are college-age students whose families have been priced out of other institutions.

“We’re having this flood of people from the CSUs and UCs now trying to do their freshmen and sophomore year with us and then transfer,” notes Berkeley City College faculty member Joan Berezin. Others are individuals who can’t find work in an economic climate marked by 12.5 percent unemployment. “When we get hog-tied and cut and restricted, we close off possibilities to everyone,” Berezin says. “People who’ve just lost their jobs, people whose parents have lost their jobs, they’re all coming to us.”

Of the nearly 3 million students attending community college statewide, women and people of color are in the majority, and 80 percent work while attending school. It’s still a relative bargain for education, but fees are keeping pace with the rising costs of housing, transportation, childcare, and food.

“I have students who are homeless, who are living in their cars,” Berezin notes. “So we can say, oh, $40 a unit, that’s not a big deal. But if you’re taking 12 units and you have no income — and you don’t qualify for financial aid ’cause you don’t have an address … that’s a huge amount of money.”

Financial aid is available, but with narrow eligibility requirements — and even some of that funding may be headed for sacrifice on the budgetary chopping block. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget for the 2010-11 fiscal year proposes suspending new awards for the Competitive Cal Grant Program, for a savings of $45.5 million. About 70 percent of Cal Grant award recipients attend community colleges.

“This award is dispersed according to income and GPA,” explained Theresa Tena, director of fiscal policy at the Community College League of California. “Many of our students have a high GPA and a low income.” Some 22,500 students receiving this financial help would be affected by the proposal — and Tena says more than 150,000 eligible students already compete for the award packages.

Research increasingly shows that students from working-class families are being priced out of college — even community college — and that it’s harder to pay their own way without taking on serious amounts of debt. A California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) report found that in 1975, a community college student would have earned well over the amount needed for a year of school, including housing and other expenses, by working a summer job in retail. Today that same student would only be able to scrape together about two-thirds of the needed amount — and that’s assuming every single penny was saved.

“In the old days, going to community college was a break-even proposition,” notes Adrian Griffin, assistant director of research and policy development for the CPEC. “With stagnating wages at the low end of the job market, it doesn’t work this way anymore.”

The blow to community colleges caused by a loss in state revenue and consequential budget cuts mirrors the damage done to the entire public education system. While the recession has triggered especially hard times, this low point follows a long-term trend of diminishing state funding for education. In 1965, the state general fund provided $15 for every $1 paid in fees by UC or CSU students, according to the CPEC. By 2009–10, that state contribution had declined to $1.40 for every dollar paid in fees. “We’ve gone from a taxpayer-supported system to a semi-privatized system,” Griffin observed.

This point hasn’t been lost on the education advocates at Against Cuts, who are pushing for reform in tax policy as a solution for restoring public education in California. An information packet created by the group highlights a nearly 50 percent decline in the share of corporate income paid in taxes since 1981, even as corporate profits have shot up.

“There is no reason for education to be cut in California, the world’s eighth-largest economy,” Diaz said. “We can’t just continue to accept and accept and accept. Having a population that does not have access to education is dangerous.”

The Daily Blurgh: Howdy, gaybor!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The Daily Blurgh: Howdy, gaybor!

Tuesdays will occasionally be given over to a guest columnist. This week, please welcome a bitter queen.

Have you heard? Gayboorhoods are becoming extinct. So sayeth Matt Katz tosday in Obit mag, a self identified straight man who has spent enough time among that mythic fairy land, “where gay people lived and hung out, somehow fulfilling stereotypes while simultaneously stimulating social justice” (via hand jobs?) to tell us of the local color that once flourished there and to lament their passing.

Thank God we have intrepid Margaret Meads like Katz  — who even once let a gay squeeze his bicep at the gym (no homo!) — to wax nostalgic about the good old days of double dutch jumping trannies on the corner. You see, children, the gayborhood was a wonderful, rainbow-hued place of escape “where cleverness, artistry and merriment is applauded.” Huzzah! You know, I still can’t go out in the Castro without some Oscar Wide wannabe vomiting bon mots onto my chinchilla gilette to the applause of onlookers.

But seriously, even though Katz’s commentary on the changing face of urban gay life has as much nuance as a college freshman’s five paragraph essay (to wit: “The demise of the gayborhood indicates that America is more mixed – ethnically, economically, sexually — than ever before.”), his overall thesis is true, to some degree. Yes, there is greater social acceptance of homosexuality and thus less need for the self preservation of a ghetto. Yes, the Internet is a factor, at least in the demise of bar culture — even though bars continue to be perhaps the only reason anyone still frequent gayborhoods (see the Katz’s final ‘graph). And yes, the Castro is a Pottery Barn-upholstered shell of its former hedonistic self blah blah blah.

But to applaud gayborhoods as the superficial pleasure domes of memory where “people don’t pretend that the real world is anything all that important” is to wholly ignore their historical importance as sites of political organizing and resistance (that’s “stimulating social justice”). Oh, and speaking of queer political activism, there’s that other factor that shook up the gayborhood. You know, AIDS. But don’t go looking for any mention of it in Katz’s obit. Why would he want to talk about an unattractive thing like that? Get Lil Miss Ally another Long Island Iced Tea. I’m going back to dusting my Erte lamps.

Revenue for all

David Talbot
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Revenue for all

OPINION Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut: this is the sound of your government — parks, schools, playgrounds, hospitals, clinics, public transportation, programs for youth and seniors, arts, social services, the whole fabric that makes San Francisco what it is — fading away as state and local politicians refuse to raise revenue to revitalize our economy.

Mayor Gavin Newsom and big business groups have promoted a defeatist politics of low expectations, cutting spending, laying off city workers by the thousands, and offering tax breaks to businesses and developers rather than tapping San Francisco’s deep pockets of wealth to generate economic opportunities citywide.

It’s time for a new path: a fiscal politics of optimism, opportunity, and addition rather than subtraction. It’s time for an unapologetic progressive taxation movement for this November’s ballot and beyond, to make the city’s great wealth — individual and corporate, often badly undertaxed — work for all San Franciscans.

As California crumbles, local revenue movements could fuel a statewide campaign of towns, cities, and counties to overturn Proposition 13. San Francisco can take the lead with progressive taxation to create jobs, promote small neighborhood businesses, expand affordable housing and public transit, save public health, and more.

A citywide campaign for progressive taxes is building, including leaders from community-based nonprofits, grassroots organizing and neighborhood groups, labor unions, and some corners of City Hall. There are many promising ideas; with the right political will and organizing, the city could, for instance, tax large-scale real estate and levy profits from large firms. Progressive taxes could, at minimum, bring in close to $100 million and help save critical city services.

To win this campaign, a strong coalition must educate and mobilize the public about the vital importance — and citywide benefit — of raising revenue through targeted taxes on large firms and wealthy individuals. The city’s political leaders will need prodding, pressure, and support to get this done.

Progressive taxation will benefit all of San Francisco, not just some — working-class people of color and immigrants who endure the cuts’ harshest effects, everyone from youths to seniors, and vitally needed city employees like social workers, nurses, librarians, park workers, and firefighters.

The politics of austerity poses false choices between public safety and public health — as if health isn’t a safety issue. San Franciscans of all stripes must reject the pitting of services and "constituencies" against each other, reject the wedge politics that pit labor against nonprofits (both of which work to uplift working-class and poor residents), and unify around progressive revenue.

Nobody likes taxes, least of all the middle class, working class, and poor (the vast majority of us) who shoulder the bulk of the burden. But wealthy individuals and corporations can and must pay their fair share. According to a 2007 World Wealth Report produced by Merrill Lynch, 123,621 households in the Bay Area — many of them in San Francisco — "had $1 million or more in financial assets in 2007, up 10.8 percent from the year before," the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

At a Feb. 14, 2007 Town Hall on Poverty in Bayview-Hunters Point, Newsom asserted, "we haven’t addressed the wealth divide; we haven’t addressed the health divide; we haven’t addressed the economic divide … why in a city like San Francisco has income inequality grown like it has?"

Yet Newsom and others continue to avoid progressive taxation — despite polls suggesting such measures can win. Tell Mayor Newsom, and your district supervisor, to make San Francisco’s wealth work for everyone. Now. *

Christopher Cook, an award-winning journalist and former Bay Guardian city editor, is communications director for the Revenue for All campaign of Budget Justice, a coalition of members from dozens of community organizations, labor unions and their allies working to raise revenue and protect the most vulnerable San Franciscans from budget cuts.

Zion I is home and grown

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Zion I is home and grown

Marriage, jobs, cars— ten years can be a stretch for a lot of things in our world, but the hip-hop created by Zion I is still fresh after a decade, the signs of wear and tear only showing on the albums themselves. Producer AmpLive and emcee Zumbi make up the Bay Area duo—playing Thurs/1 at the Rickshaw Stop and Fri/2 at the Independent— who have just returned from a 35-city tour around the country. Zumbi says they’re officially “ready to vibe with the hometown crowd.”

“The tour was great, but I need to get my life and routine back together,” Zumbi said over the phone while prepping for his regular show on Oakland’s Youth Radio. Sharing the bill with Cali-raggae stars Rebelution and Soja, the laid-back hippy crowd proved to be quite different than the fans Zion I usually sees when they share the stage with other hip-hop artists. 

 

“A lot less ego and a lot more energy,” he said, noting that the tour consistently had an average of one to three thousand people in the audience. “Usually on a tour, it fluctuates. Some nights are big and others just have 50 people. The consistency brought out a lot of energy. Every night was so exciting— never a drag.”

 

His favorite stop on the tour was definitely New Orleans. The massive amounts of reconstruction throughout the city reminded him a lot of where he calls home— West Oakland. 

 

“The old Victorian houses, next to the new condos and all the construction. New Orleans was like my neighborhood three times over. It was nuts.”

 

Zion I

 

Back on his home turf, Zion I is the same cat you met back in the late ‘90s: prominently loaded with thick, luscious beats from AmpLive’s unpredictable bag of tricks and smooth, conscious lyrics from the mouth of Zumbi. Funk, soul, D&B, and space vibes remain as they have throughout Zion I’s career, but their sixth and most recent release, The Takeover (Gold Dust Media, 2009), really hits home by honing in on these qualities. Sharp hooks, anchored melodies and beats that bump make this album congruent with Kanye-style hits. 

 

“We switched up our process and did lots of revisions on this album. We’d change up one song like two, three or four times. I’d write three or four raps for each beat,” he said, which is quite a contrast to the previously process: Amp would make the beat, Zumbi would write the rhyme and they’d record. 

 

Such a drastic change in work ethic doesn’t just come out of nowhere. 

 

“Well, we’ve been in this for ten years…” he starts out. “And Amp just got married and had baby. And we both just bought houses.” The truth comes out: they’ve grown up. And so has their music. “We’re ready to take on more responsibilities. This is where we are. We are grown men with something to say.”

 

Zumbi considers each song like a journal entry, a story in each song that reflects where these two men have been, what they’ve seen and the thoughts the journey has inspired. 

 

And he wraps it up in one perfect statement: “One of the most beautiful things in life is to watch an artist evolve.”

 

 

Zion I


Thurs/April 1

Rickshaw Stop 

155 Fell St, SF

9pm, $18/20

www.rickshawstop.com

 

Fri/April 2

Independent

628 Divisadero Street, SF

9pm, $18/20

www.theindependentsf.com


Trash talk

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Trash talk

Sarah@sfbg.com

The battle to win San Francisco’s lucrative garbage disposal contract turned nasty as city officials tentatively recommended it go to Recology (formerly Norcal Waste Systems), causing its main competitor, Oakland-based Waste Management, to claim the selection process was flawed and bad for the environment.

Recology is proposing to dispose of San Francisco’s nonrecyclable trash at its Ostrom Road landfill in Yuba County, which is double the distance of the city’s current dump. The contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, would run until 2025.

For the past three decades, the city has trucked its trash 62 miles to the Altamont landfill near Livermore, under an agreement that relied on the services of the Sanitary Fill Company (now Recology’s SF Recycling and Disposal) and Oakland Scavenger Company (now Waste Management of Alameda County).

That agreement allowed up to 15 million tons of San Francisco’s municipal solid waste to be handled at Altamont or 65 years of disposal, whichever came first. As of Dec. 31, 2007, approximately 11.9 million tons of the capacity had been used, leaving a balance of 3.1 million tons, which the city estimates will be used up by 2015.

Currently Recology collects San Francisco’s curbside trash, hauls it to Pier 96, which is owned by the Port of San Francisco, then sends nonrecyclables to the Altamont landfill operated by Waste Management.

After SF’s Department of the Environment issued a request for qualifications in 2007, Waste Management, Recology, and Republic Services were selected as finalists. The city then sent the three companies a request for proposals, asking for formal bids as well as details of how they would minimize and mitigate impacts to the environment, climate, and host communities, among other criteria.

Republic was dropped after a representative failed to show at a mandatory meeting, and Recology was selected during a July 2009 review by a committee composed of DOE deputy director David Assmann, city administrator Ed Lee and Oakland’s environmental manager Susan Kattchee.

The score sheet suggests that the decision came down to price, which was 25 percent of the total points and made the difference between Recology’s 85 points and Waste Management’s 80 in the average scores of the three reviewers. But the scores revealed wide disparities between Kattchee’s and Lee’s scores, suggesting some subjectivity in the process.

For instance, Kattchee and Lee awarded Recology 15 and 23 points, respectively, for its “approach and adherence to overarching considerations.” Kattchee awarded 13 points to Recology’s “ability to accommodate City’s waste stream,” while Lee gave it 24 points. And Kattchee awarded Waste Management 13 points and Lee gave it 20 for its proposed rates.

When the selections and scores were unveiled in November, Waste Management filed a protest letter; Yuba County citizens coalition YUGAG (Yuba Group against Garbage) threatened to sue; and Matt Tuchow, president of the city’s Commission on Environment, scheduled a hearing to clarify how the city’s proposals was structured, how it scored competing proposals, and why it tentatively awarded Recology the contract.

Emotions ran high during the March 23 hearing, which did little to clarify why Recology was selected. Assmann said that much of the material that supports the city’s selection can’t be made public until the bids are unsealed, which won’t happen until the city completes negotiations with Recology and the proposal heads to the Board of Supervisors for approval.

YUGAG attorney Brigit Barnes said Recology’s proposal could negatively affect air quality in Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, Yolo, Sacramento, and Yuba counties, and does not attain maximum possible reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. Barnes pointed to a study commissioned by Waste Management showing the company’s biomethane-fueled trucks emit 68 percent fewer greenhouse gases than Recology’s proposed combination of trucks and trains.

Barnes further warned that Recology’s proposal might violate what she called “environmental justice strictures,” noting that “Yuba County has one of the lowest per capita incomes and one of the highest dependent populations in the state.”

She also claimed that awarding the contract to Recology would create a monopoly over the city’s waste stream and could expose the city to litigation. “Every aspect of garbage collection and waste treatment will be handled by Norcal’s companies,” Barnes stated, referring to antitrust laws against such monopolies.

Deputy City Attorney Tom Owen subsequently confirmed that the two main companies that handle San Francisco’s waste are Recology subsidiaries. “But it’s an open system,” Owen told the Guardian. “Recology would be the licensed collectors and would have the contract for disposal of the city’s trash.”

Irene Creps, a retired schoolteacher who lives in San Francisco and Yuba County, suggested at the hearing that the city should better compare the environmental characteristics of Ostrom Road and the Altamont landfill before awarding the contract. She said the Ostrom Road landfill poses groundwater concerns since it lies in a high water table next to a slough and upstream from a cemetery.

“It’s good agricultural land, especially along the creeks, red dirt that is wonderful for growing rice because it holds water,” Creps said of Recology’s site. “I’d hate to see that much garbage dumped on the eastern edge of Sacramento Valley.”

Livermore City Council member Jeff Williams said the Altamont landfill has the space to continue to dispose of San Francisco’s waste and he warned that Livermore will lose millions of dollars in mitigation fees it uses to preserve open space.

“Waste Management has done a spectacular job of managing the landfill and they have a best-in-their-class methane control system,” Williams said, noting that the company runs its power plants on electricity and its trucks on liquid methane derived from the dump.

Williams pointed out that the Altamont landfill is in a dry hilly range that lies out of sight, behind the windmills on the 1,000-foot high Altamont Pass. “It’s many miles from our grapevines, in an area used for cattle grazing because it’s not particularly fertile land,” Williams said. “We are filling valleys, not building mountains.”

Waste Management attorney John Lynn Smith told the commission that the city’s RFP process was flawed because it didn’t request a detailed analysis of transportation to the landfill sites or fully take into account greenhouse gas emissions, posing the question: “So, did you really get the best contract?”

David Gavrich, who runs San Francisco Bay Railroad and Waste Solutions Group, testified that he helped negotiate the city’s contract 35 years ago, saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, and that the city needs to be smarter about this contract.

Gavrich and port director Monique Moyer wrote to the Department of the Environment in June 2009, stating their belief that shipping trash by rail directly from the port “can not only minimize environmental impacts, but can also provide an anchor of rail business from the port, and a key economic engine for the local Bayview-Hunters Point community, and the city as a whole.” But Gavrich said DOE never replied, even though green rail from San Francisco creates local jobs and further reduces emissions.

“Let the hearings begin so people get more than one minute to speak on a billion-dollar contract,” Gavrich said, citing the time limit imposed on speakers at the commission hearing.

Wheatland resident Dr. Richard A. Paskowitz blamed former Mayor Willie Brown’s close connection to Recology mogul Michael Sangiacomo for the company’s success in pushing through a state-approved 1988 extension of its Ostrom Road Landfill while assuring Yuba County residents that the site would only be used as a local landfill.

“The issue is that Yuba County is becoming the repository of garbage from Northern California,” Paskowitz said, claiming that the site already accepts trash from Nevada.

Members of the commission told Assmann that they wanted an update on the transportation issue, but they appeared to believe the process was fair. “One guy got the better score,” Commissioner Paul Pelosi Jr. said. “The fact that they may or may not have permits or the best location, that’s for the Board of Supervisors to take up.”

Recology spokesperson Adam Alberti told the Guardian that its bid was predominantly about handling the waste stream. “Everybody’s bid included transportation, so you include the cost of getting the trash there. But primarily we were looking at the cost of handing the city’s waste,” Alberti said. “Recology’s Ostrom Road facility has more than enough capacity to hold not only San Francisco’s, but also the surrounding region’s, waste.”

Alberti said Recology is still pursuing a permit for a rail spur to get the waste from Union Pacific’s line, which ends some 100 yards from Ostrom Road site. Still, he said the company is confident it will be awarded, calling this step “a pro forma application with Yuba County.” Alberti also noted that it’s normal for host communities to object to landfills but that Yuba County stands to gain $1.6 million from the deal in annual mitigation fees.

Assmann told the Guardian the selection process took into account issues raised at the hearing. “The important thing in a landfill is to make sure there is no seepage, no matter how much rainfall there is, “Assmann said. “And there are still two hurdles Recology needs to clear: a successful negotiation, and the approval of the board.”

Study: Cuts to health programs a bad plan for state economy

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to understand that people who earn less shell out a greater percentage of their income from month to month than those occupying more elite ranks. Anyone fortunate enough to be holding down even a low-paying gig in a state where unemployment stands at 12.5 percent knows that basic living expenses can quickly consume a paycheck in San Francisco.

A study released by the Center for Labor and Research Education at the University of California at Berkeley has found that cutting relatively low-paying jobs in the state’s health and human services sector would deal a harsher blow to California’s financial health than alternative budget-balancing measures, like raising taxes on the wealthiest residents. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed cutting $6.4 billion from California’s health and human services budget, part of his solution for closing a roughly $20 billion budget gap.

“The budget proposals that the governor is making would … significantly worsen the economic crisis in the state, rather than pull us out,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the Labor Center at UC Berkeley.

The report highlights “multiplier” effects of hypothetical cuts to statewide health and human services programs. The study examined the impacts of cutting $1 billion each from Medi-Cal, Healthy Families, and CalWORKS – state programs that assist low-income families – and found that the resulting losses would total 98,600 jobs for all three combined. The worst impacts from cuts to those programs would come from indirect consequences, according to Jacobs. Since those programs are funded in part from federal dollars, a loss in federal funding matched for every dollar the state invests also takes a toll.

A $1 billion cut to state funding for In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS), which aids disabled and elderly people who want to remain in their homes, would result in a statewide loss of 215,900 jobs, the report found.

Meanwhile, generating that same $1 billion through taxes from households in the highest income bracket in California would result in a comparatively lower job loss of 6,400, the research group estimated.

Health Access, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, used the study’s findings in its own report to predict ramifications of the actual proposals in Schwarzenegger’s budget. According to Health Access, a minimum of 42,384 jobs would be lost as a result of proposed health cuts to Healthy Families and Medi-Cal, with more than $2.7 billion lost in business activity. It predicted 370,000 jobs would be wiped out if IHSS were eliminated altogether.

In a tumultuous economic downturn like the one facing California right now, “the best stimulus is funds in the pockets of low-income families,” according to Jacobs. Cutting these health and human service programs, which employ low-income workers and serve residents living near the poverty line, would do just the opposite.

Speaking of multipliers, Jacobs noted that corporate tax cuts produce the absolute worst bang for the buck out of any other schemes to fix the economy.

Harry Bridges: Working class hero

David Talbot
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He died 20 years ago this month, but I can still see him, a tall, wiry, gray-haired, hawk-nosed man. I can hear him.

I see him pacing restlessly back and forth behind the podium at union meetings, nervously twirling a gavel, puffing incessantly on a cigarette. I hear him calling on members, white, black, Asian, Latino, in the broad accent of his native Australia, actually encouraging debate and dissent.

He died in San Francisco at the age of 88 — Harry Bridges, co-founder and for 40 years president of one of the most influential organizations in this or any other country, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

Bridges often was irritating to the ILWU’s friends and foes alike. He was irascible and obstinate. But he was unquestionably one of the past century’s greatest leaders.

Bridges was not in it for money. His salary as union president was far less than he would have made had he remained a working longshoreman. Bridges was in it because of his unswerving belief in “the rank-and-file,” as he once told me, a naive and inquisitive young Chronicle reporter — “the working stiff, that’s who! Can you understand that?”

I understood, eventually. And though I and others sometimes harshly questioned Bridges’ specific notions of what was needed by working people, none could legitimately question his incredible commitment, skill and integrity.

“The basic thing about this lousy capitalist system,” Bridges declared, “is that the workers create the wealth, but those who own it, the rich, keep getting richer and the poor get poorer.”

Harry Bridges’ lifelong task, then, was to shift wealth from those who owned it to those who created it – a task he began in 1934, when he led his fellow longshoremen in a strike aimed at winning true collective bargaining rights from West Coast shipowners.

As Bridges’ biographer Charles Larrowe recalled, “The shipowners said ‘no,’ said it with tear gas vigilantes and billy clubs wielded by cops who thought they were in the front lines against a communist takeover. Up and down the coast, the waterfront was turned into a battlefield.”

Police bullets killed 10 men during the three-month-long strike that also prompted a four-day general strike in San Francisco. But the longshoremen ultimately got what they had demanded, most importantly, an end to the notorious system of job allocation known as the “shape-up. “

Previously, jobs were parceled out by hiring bosses in exchange for kickbacks from the longshoremen who lined up on the docks every morning clamoring for work. But after the strike, job assignments were made by an elected union dispatcher at a union-controlled hiring hall, using a rotation system that spread the work evenly among longshoremen. The victory was downright revolutionary, and had a profound impact on workers and employers nationwide.

Within two years, Bridges joined with Lou Goldblatt, the brilliant young leader of the warehousemen who worked closely with longshoremen on the docks. They brought the two groups together into a single powerful union. the ILWU, under the banner of the newly established Congress of Industrial Organizations — the CIO.

The union ultimately extended its jurisdiction to virtually all waterfront workers on the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada and to workers in a wide variety of occupations in Hawaii.

Bridges and Goldblatt used their potent base to help lead drives by other CIO unions that spread unionization from the waterfront to many other industries throughout the West at a time when employers treated workers as chattel, giving them little choice but to accept near-starvation wages and whatever else the employers demanded.

For the ILWU, Bridges and Goldblatt drafted a union constitution that still is unique in the control it grants members. Many union constitutions give members very little beyond the right of paying dues in exchange for the services provided them by the union’s securely entrenched bureaucrats. But the ILWU constitution guarantees that nothing of importance can be done without direct vote of the rank-and-file.

No one can take ILWU office except through a vote of the entire membership; no agreement with employers can be approved except by a vote of all members; the union cannot take a position on anything without membership approval.

The ILWU helped set important precedents that enhanced the civil liberties of everyone through its strong opposition to those who tried to deny constitutional rights to Bridges and others by labeling them Communists. The union’s efforts included an eight-year-battle against attempts to deport Bridges to Australia that ended with a Supreme Court ruling that enabled him to become a U.S. citizen in 1945.

The ILWU under Bridges was an outspoken foe of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, even at a time when most other unions enthusiastically supported involvement. And members backed their opposition to oppressive regimes abroad by refusing to handle cargo bound for or coming from their countries.

Thanks in large part to Bridges, the ILWU also was one of the first unions to be thoroughly integrated racially, and otherwise has always been probably the country’s most socially conscious union. And its members, now including women, have long been among the most highly compensated workers in any field, while at the same time benefitting from labor-saving equipment that makes their work easier. The new equipment and methods on the docks have brought employers higher profits, which union negotiators have made certain they share with dock workers.
The ILWU used its employer-provided pension funds to finance construction of low-rent apartments in San Francisco’s St. Francis Square, an extremely rare example of what the union calls “cooperative, affordable, integrated working-class housing.”

Harry Bridges led the way to that and much more which benefited the working stiffs to whom he devoted his life — and many, many others. As a newspaper that once reviled him as a dangerous radical said on his death, “He sought the best of all possible worlds. This one is much better due to his efforts.” Boy, is it.

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

Endless hookup

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Endless hookup

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Where are the turntablist masters of yore? They’ve gone missing, replaced by the likes of the Hood Internet.

It’s true. The art of the hip-hop mix, once protected by the Skratch Piklz and the X-Men (a.k.a. X-ecutioners) and the Beat Junkies and Triple Threat, has returned to the province of the sound editors, just like in the early 1980s. The problem was the turntable itself. A painful lesson of the ugly aughts was to never trust technology. Hardware emerges, changes, and is destroyed according to consumerist tastes. The alchemical idea may be subject to manipulation by the likes of Steve Jobs, Rupert Murdoch, and Eric Schmidt, but it is eternal in its adaptability to any mechanical form.

So while scratch DJs take to message boards and cry over Panasonic allegedly discontinuing its Technics 1200 line (which turned out be a false rumor), rockists and electronic heads open their laptops, launch Serato and Reason software, and get to mixing. It’s not like those turntable masters aren’t missed, though. While they spun and cut soul, funk, and hip-hop with finely nuanced techniques, like 16th century woodblock cutters, the new editors and mashup artists skip stones across genres, leaving small ripples of pop delight that quickly dissipate.

It’s a different aesthetic, that’s for sure. The Hood Internet consists of Chicago-based musicians Aaron Brink and Steve Reidell. Both moved there after finishing college — Brink at the University of Michigan and Reidell at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Initially they formed May or May Not, a “noisy pop band,” as Reidell called it, and made beats on the side for rappers “you would have never have heard of” until producers like Girl Talk and Them Jeans inspired them to create the Hood Internet Web site in 2007. Using Acid Pro and Ableton Live, they flooded the Web with smart, imaginative mashups of the Shins vs. Crime Mob, and Jim Jones vs. Daft Punk. It was a hobby: Reidell was an art director for Smart Bar, and the site’s array of cheeky collages is testament to his superior design skills. Brink is a clinical psychologist. They’ve performed around town and occasionally landed spot gigs on the weekend, but this spring marks their first extended national tour.

“I left my job earlier this year to be able to focus on the Hood Internet,” Reidell says. He’s calling from a video set in Chicago, and the resulting clip will be for “Chicago 3016,” a new single the Hood Internet produced with local MC Kid Static. It’s a reference to Chicago’s failed bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. “There’s a great hip-hop scene here right now, from Kid Static to the Cool Kids and Kidz in the Hall. Freddie Gibbs, he’s from Gary, Indiana, but he’s basically Chicago since we’re such close neighbors.”

Unless they’re showing some hometown love — they recently mashed together buzzing Chi-town newcomers Bin Laden Blowin’ Up’s “Chi Don’t Dance” with Broken Bells’ “Citizen” — the Hood Internet tends to use radio hits, flipping recognizable raps over rock and dance tracks. Hence, The Hood Internet Mixtape Vol. 4 includes “Bring the Tabloid Sores,” where Chuck D.’s stentorian boom from “Bring the Noise” rides over Nosaj Thing’s eerie electronic remix of Health’s “Tabloid Sores.” Less brilliantly, it also includes “Swaggin’ Out,” which pairs Soulja Boy’s muttering boast from “Turn My Swag On” with Joe Jackson’s smooth jazz-pop “Steppin’ Out.” “There’s a handful of irony in what we do. The mashup itself is an ironic form of music,” Reidell says. “We live in an age where anyone can do it if you’ve got Garageband and download some a cappellas.”

The Hood Internet operates in a pop context. It isn’t simply plundering black music for source material and reshaping it for white hipsters. Collected into the ongoing Hood Internet Mixtape series, these sounds represent how much of the audience, black and white, consumes music today. To the duo’s credit, their approach is more innovative than the hordes of mixtape DJs that artlessly smack Lil Wayne “exclusives” together with little care for flow or context, or even the old-school jocks who scratch and blend like it was still the ’90s. But these tracks also demonstrate how hip-hop has been reduced by much of its audience into a series of sugary sensations — again, the skipping stones analogy. It’s music for partying, getting laid, and working out at the gym, not for intellectual exploration. You can’t blame the Hood Internet’s clever and innovative response for the current pop miasma, though.

“In recent months I’ve digested the new Freeway & Jake One album, Pill’s 4180 mixtape and Freddie Gibbs’ mixtapes as intensely as the CFCF and Caribou album,” Reidell answers when asked if he takes hip-hop seriously. “That said, a lot of pop music — and a lot of hip-hop falls into that being that it’s popular — is disposable. It’s not because it’s hip-hop, it’s because a lot of pop music is disposable. The Hood Internet mixes a lot of that stuff. But while we might mix Gucci Mane one day, we’ll mix a really thoughtful Anti-Pop Consortium track the next day.

“I think there’s some value to it because it’s introducing people to things they might not otherwise have heard,” he continues. “It’s time-stamped to a certain degree, and it’s for partying. But there’s value to that, too. People like to have a good time.”

THE HOOD INTERNET

With Tobacco (of Black Moth Super Rainbow) and the New Slave

Sat/27, 10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Cut administration, not schools

Zelda Bronstein
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30
Cut administration, not schools

I received an interesting opinion piece this week from a group of teachers and parents working on sfbudgetblog.com, which looks at the San Francisco School District budget. They make some valid points:


By T.R. Amsler
Just when you think you’ve reached bottom, California schools find another shovel. Next year, San Francisco school children face even deeper cuts as many lose summer school, face increased class sizes and witness the dismissal of beloved teachers.


In identifying Sacramento as the crux of the problem, San Francisco schools superintendent Carlos Garcia has advocated a lawsuit against the state of California for failing to provide adequate funding to educate all children.
While we wait for a lawsuit that has not been filed, his proposed a 2010-11 budget slashes funding to classrooms while protecting central office jobs.


We wholeheartedly support Garcia’s effort to hold California accountable for the shameful under-funding of our schools. But change at the state level will take time—and in the meantime, we are baffled as to why, on a local level, he is not demonstrating the kind of ethical leadership we know he believes in.


Because of the state cuts, San Francisco must reduce its schools budget by $113 million over the next two years. The superintendent proposes making over 50% of those cuts from schools and classrooms. Over $8 million of the cuts are achieved by increasing K-3 class size—impacting our youngest and most vulnerable children. Over $8 million is slashed from Targeted Instructional Improvement Block Grant funds for the city’s lowest performing schools. Another $4.5 million comes from summer school programs for our struggling high school students. Garcia saves over $3 million by eliminating supplemental counseling funds for high schools supporting college readiness. Another $9 million is saved through furlough days, cutting instructional time for all students when we need to be expanding it.


Some say these draconian cuts are the only option. Some say we cannot find cuts in the central office because it is already lean. Yet the facts suggest otherwise: Compared to four similar-sized school districts (Elk Grove, Santa Ana, San Bernadino, and Capistrano), San Francisco spends significantly more on administration ($462 per student in SF compared to an average of $387) and less on instruction ($4,763 per student in SF compared to an average of $5,685).
Where does San Francisco spend its money instead of schools? This year, the district spent $340 million in centrally-budgeted services, as compared to $257 million in school-based funding. A portion of the central funds flows to schools in the form of centrally-funded staff, but the majority does not. There are many talented people working in the central departments, and many of the central services are helpful. But in a crisis, we must ask: do non-classroom-based expenditures better support student achievement than direct support of classrooms?


If San Francisco were to cut 20% from these central office budgets, we could save $68 million a year and close the budget gap without touching a penny of school-based funding. This would mean radically rethinking how the central office works—but if the alternative is radically slashing our schools, that’s some rethinking we cannot afford to put off.
Garcia’s proposal is to drastically defund school sites, fundamentally changing the experience of students and families. The radical shift however needs to happen not to families, but to the central office.


A group called the Children’s Allocation Team has created an alternative set of central office cuts that demonstrate the real possibility of protecting our schools and classrooms during this budget crisis. We need district staff to engage in this kind of creative thinking too.


In the San Francisco Chronicle on January 27, Superintendent Garcia wrote, “I recognize that we are in the midst of extraordinarily difficult economic times, but to place that burden on our children is morally unethical.” We agree.
Now we need our superintendent to make the morally ethical budget cuts he calls for. It is time to radically re-think the central office, not to fundamentally defund classrooms. We can, and we must, close the budget gap without touching classrooms and students.


T.R. Amsler has been a high school teacher and journalism teacher for ten years. SFbudgetblog.com is a collection of teachers, parents and administrators losing sleep to represent their investigations and analysis of the SFUSD local budget. Read, consider and contribute at www.sfbudgetblog.com


 

A blind date with Mama Lion

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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8
A blind date with Mama Lion

Mama Lion had all the characteristics my ears had been searching for: a jaw full of sharp guitars, a soft, Patti Smith-like growl, and a wardrobe of psychedelic, ‘70s melodies. It took only a second, but after our first audio introduction on the ol’ Web, I knew I needed to hear her again. Typing up an email or two, I mustered up the courage and asked Mama Lion— who’ll be performing Mon/22 at El Rio and Tues/23 at Retox Lounge— out to dinner— all three of them. 

I showed up at the restaurant, Pakwan, a Pakistani Indian joint in the Mission, promptly at six-thirty, still a little sweaty from my bike ride there. Mama Lion members, Hannah Frances Healy, Victor Mitrani and Gabe Gipe, met me by the counter a few moments later and we all ordered our chosen items for the anticipated feast. I went for the spinach and lentil combo and Mama Lion picked out an assortment of steamy mushy items that looked strange and smelled amazing. 

 

During the hour that followed, conversation flowed without effort, the nan was devoured, we laughed, I cried (only a little on the inside as I fought off the spiciness of my meal) and when the bowls were left in a stain of reds and browns, not only was my stomach satisfied, but the four of us had really managed to have a successful first date. Even without the goodbye kiss or a promise to call, Mama Lion and I covered all first date bases.

 

 

The Past

The members of Mama Lion all grew up in the same San Diego school district and Mitrani and Frances Healy started a band together in high school. The three of them went to different colleges, but when they all relocated to San Francisco, the band was born. 

 

Careers

Frances Healy (vocals, guitar) is a dog walker, or as I see it, a canine chauffer/soccer mom combo. She drives around the city, picking up dogs in a van and takes them to Golden Gate Park. Mitrani (guitar) went to school for accounting but is totally not down for a nine-to-five in the profession, so he’s been doing maintenance work. Gipe (drums) is still a student, dreaming about one day becoming a history teacher, currently feeding the bank account with PT jobs at Apple and Starbucks. 

 

Personality

Mama Lion thinks it’s pretentious to say their sound is ‘unclassifiable’, but they’re also not comfortable with pinpointing a specific genre. Somewhere under the indie-blanket, the band takes direction from their old school influences: strong guitar attitude from Sonic Youth and the Pixies and more mellow tones from Cat Stevens and Simon and Garfunkel. 

 

Childhood

When Mama Lion was young, the band took on whatever gig they could find, meaning they ended up in some odd, very quiet spaces. A performance at the former Green Earth Café turned out to be the opening act for a group of belly dancers, shocking the crowd of little old ladies drinking tea. 

 

Confessions

Mitrani is a “Riot Grrrl at heart—a riot boi?” While writing his guitar parts, Mitrani imagine he’s pissed off, hanging out in a parking lot with a bunch of feisty ladies. Frances Healy was an anthropology major and likes to analyze people and situations in her lyrics. Gipe gets angry before putting together his drum part and puts himself in the mood to hurt something, like overly picky Starbucks customers. 

 

Looking for a new musical love interest yourself? Mama Lion plays two intimate shows this week.

 

 

Mama Lion

Mon/22, 7pm, $8

El Rio
3158 Mission, SF

www.elriosf.com

 

Tues/23, 8pm

Retox Lounge

628 20th St, SF

www.retoxsf.com

 

Anti-war movement seeks allies

Sasha Cuttler
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7
Anti-war movement seeks allies

By Jobert Poblete

This Saturday (March 20) will mark the seventh anniversary of the Iraq war and local groups are mobilizing for another round of protests to oppose the occupation of Iraq and the expansion of the war into Afghanistan. But this year’s program will also highlight local struggles as well, with speakers delving into the fight for more public education funding and the march passing by two hotels where union workers are in strained negotiations for a new contract.

The protest is being organized by ANSWER – Act Now to Stop War and End Racism – a coalition notorious for its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to protest. Besides its plugs for Iraq, Afghanistan, public education, and local labor struggles, flyers promoting Saturday’s protest include demands around jobs, Palestine, Latin America, and Haiti. ANSWER organizer Chris Banks told us that these seemingly disparate issues are connected.

“There is a finite amount of resources in our society,” Banks said. “And if those resources are used on wars and to bail out banks, then we can’t use them for schools, health care, and public transit. The wall between foreign policy and domestic policy is a fictitious wall.”

This year’s protest will focus on the economic crisis and on “bailing out people instead of banks.” Students who helped organize the recent March 4 Day of Action are part of the coalition mobilizing for the Saturday protest and students and teachers will be among the speakers at the rally at Civic Center. Protest endorsers include the United Educators of San Francisco, a union that represents more than 6,000 public school employees. Dennis Kelly, president of UESF, told us that the protest “ties directly in with our concerns about the California state budget, that the priorities being set are the wrong priorities.”

The rally will be followed by a march that will pass by the Hilton and the Four Seasons, two hotels where members of Unite Here Local 2 are without a contract because of a negotiating impasse with management. The biggest point of contention between the hotels and union is over health care. (Union members currently pay $10 a month for family coverage but the hotels want to increase that to $200 a month.)

Israel Alvaran, a community organizer at Local 2, said that the health care issue provides a connective thread between the anti-war movement and his union’s struggles. “We believe in stopping the wars in the Middle East,” Alvaran said. “They’re driving the war economy that’s preventing people at home from getting affordable health care, public education, programs for creating jobs and building the economy.”

Alvaran hopes the March 20 protest will help raise the visibility of hotel workers and show the hotel corporations that the union has broad community support. He also said that including workers’ struggles in the protest is important because it exposes young activists joining the anti-war movement to labor and union issues.

Banks echoed this desire to raise public consciousness about local issues. “As much as possible, we want people to make the connection between local struggles and imperialist wars,” Banks said. “People go into political motion for different reasons. We want them to come out on March 20 and they’ll have opportunities to hear speakers representing different movements.”

Saturday’s protest will begin with a rally at Civic Center Plaza at 11 a.m. At noon, protesters will march through downtown San Francisco before returning to Civic Center. 

Occupation! exhibit highlights racism at SF businesses

Sasha Cuttler
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1
Occupation! exhibit highlights racism at SF businesses

By Cécile Lepage

San Francisco has always had a liberal streak, but not so its business community, as a current exhibit highlights. In 1963 and ‘64, San Francisco was hit with massive demonstrations that denounced businesses’ discriminatory hiring practices and demanded equal work opportunity for African-Americans. Crowds picketed on Auto Row, in front of Mel’s Drive-In, Lucky Store, the Sheraton Palace Hotel, and Bank of America.

The Main Library exhibit “Occupation! Economic Justice as a Civil Right in San Francisco, 1963-64” retraces a struggle for economic justice that was specific to the city by the Bay, where thousands of African-Americans had moved to during World War II to work on the shipyards. When the war effort wound down, they were the first to be fired. Only direct actions—sit-ins, sleep-ins, and shop-ins—were able to shake the status quo: they led to more than 260 employment agreements for minority workers. There’s only a few days left to discover this important yet underrepresented piece of SF history: the display ends on March 27.

We spoke with curator Nancy J. Arms Simon about the exhibit and its relevance:

SFBG: How did this exhibition come to be?

NAS: It was actually the brainchild of Susan Goldstein, from the San Francisco History Center, and Catherine Powell, the director of the Labor Archives and Research Center. They had talked about collaborating on an exhibit related to labor, drawing from both collections.

In the meantime, I had fallen in love with the photographs of the photojournalist Phiz Mezey that I had discovered at the Labor Archives. She documented the April ‘64 demonstrations on Auto Row. So, it was a perfect blending. Those pictures are amazing because esthetically they’re incredible. On every single one of them, the layout just keeps your eyes circling. And the other part is that Phiz Mezey had been removed from her position at San Francisco State University, where she had been a professor. She had refused to sign the Communist Levering Act that all public employees were required to sign. In the 1950s, anyone who worked for a state agency had to sign an anti-communist oath.

While she was petitioning San Francisco State for years to get her job back, which she did in 1978, she was also trying to support herself and her kids. And so she became a documentary photographer. So I had become intrigued with her and with that story. When I started the project, I thought it would be an exhibit on the Auto Row protests. I didn’t even realize that this was part of a greater series of events that had spanned for two years.

SFBG: What were people asking for?

NAS: What they wanted was jobs, what I refer to as front-end jobs. I don’t like the idea of using the terms skilled and unskilled labor, because too many things that are very skilled get lumped under unskilled labor.

Blacks in San Francisco were assigned to jobs where they didn’t interact with the public. Basically, they weren’t allowed to. So they were allowed to be mechanics, janitors, but they weren’t allowed to be service people: bank tellers, waitresses, salesmen. There were two big pushes conjointly going on. There was the push for equality in housing, to end the segregation in housing, and also this push for jobs. If you don’t have access to jobs, there’s so much that you lose along with that. There’s that compounded effect of not saving to send your kids to college or provide for your own retirement… 

SFBG: But during the Second World War, [President] Roosevelt had enacted the Fair Employment Practices Act that made discrimination unlawful with companies that held government contracts.

NAS: But it was slated to end once the war was over. It was voted through to continue slowly across the country state by state, but it wasn’t nationwide until ‘64, when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. So for 20 years, from 1945 to 1964, people who had known a certain quality of life were fighting just to maintain it. Laws to promote equality might have been enacted, or agreements might have been signed, but having the law didn’t mean anything. There was this understanding that you can never let out the pressure; you have to keep pushing to make sure that that equality is actually enacted.

SFBG: How did the protesters organize their actions?

NAS: There’s a lot of lessons on how you effectively make change. There was a lot of unity amongst the groups, CORE, the WEB Du Bois Club, and the Ad-hoc Committee to End Discrimination. They had lawyers in place. Before a protest, they would decide who could afford to get arrested, and who couldn’t. So the people who could afford to get arrested would go to a certain level, they would maybe go inside the building. And all the leaders always made a point to get arrested, because they knew that that would get more press. And they also intentionally clogged the courts. They made sure that hundreds of people would get arrested just to slow things down and make it more difficult on the system.

It was really effective. And I think there’s a lot of these lessons that we miss today. They started with Mel’s Diner and they did get the owner to sign the agreements. Over at Lucky Store grocery, they did a shop-in. This is non-violent protest at its most beautiful! They went in and filled their shopping carts, they got to the counter and got them all run through. Remember, this is all scanned by hand. And then, once everything was scanned, they would say, “I will pay for these groceries once you give better jobs to Blacks,” and then they would leave. And all these bagged groceries filled the entire floor! All this stuff had to be put away. Plus people were picketing outside the store. So not only are you creating this major headache and throwing this wrench in the wheel, you’re also blocking people from shopping. So they were significantly cutting into their income.

SFBG: The Sheraton Palace Hotel rally was the biggest protest to take place.

NAS: It was really hard to narrow it down to a few statements to get into a showcase! About 1,500 protesters surrounded the hotel on March 6, 1964. There were other events leading up to that, though, they had tried negotiations, they had started smaller pickets outside. There would have been a court order to end the picket. So this is all building up.

During the major protest, I think 450 people entered the building and wouldn’t leave the lobby. The police carried them out, but they came back. They slept in overnight. And then the mayor, Jack Shelley, stepped in. He worked on the negotiation process and made it happen. After that, literally, the day they signed the agreement, they started picketing on Auto Row. This is how well organized they were. At the same time, other businesses were signing agreements for hiring Blacks, because they didn’t want this kind of press to happen. Remember, this is all happening in “liberal” San Francisco, so the fact that this is not good press for them counted.

SFBG: In the outcomes, you were careful to underline how these events had an impact on individuals’ lives.

NAS: It’s so easy for us in hindsight to know that civil rights were the right thing to fight for. But just think about what it would take out of somebody to get arrested. Tracy Sims, who later became Tamam Tracy Moncur, basically took the fall for her group. Because there were so many people arrested, they sent them to court in groups of 10 to12 people. She ended up getting 60 days in jail, plus a $200 fine. It was horrible for her. She was an idealistic 18-year-old. She knew she was doing the right thing. They were successfully changing laws just to confirm she was doing the right thing. And then she’s punished. After she served her time, her mother was already back on the East Coast, and she went to live with her mom.

SFBG: You were able to gather artifacts to tell this story, pins in particular.

NAS: These are all part of the Labor Archive collection. Graphically, they’re so simple, easy to read. You see them in photographs and they absolutely pop out. My favorite one is this “= Quality” one. It’s timeless. You’ve got the word play of equality equals quality. It’s got the silhouettes of a white child and a black child. What does equality really mean? It means equal quality for everybody. It’s not just a word. I really love that one, because it’s still so contemporary. Objects have got a power of their own. If you can stop and think of what’s involved, why they were created, and all the places they’ve been to… Some of the old pins will have the printer’s union stamp and the sheet metal workers’ stamp Look at that! That’s pride in your work right there.

Editorial: Who wins with the Transamerica condos?

David Talbot
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4

The developers aren’t offering to build something that will create permanent jobs for local residents. They want a huge favor from San Francisco: they want the city to ignore its own planning rules, ignore its park-shadow ordinance, and hand over a piece of city street, just to make their project more profitable.

EDITORIAL  As the Planning Commission prepares to vote March 18 on a pointless and overly large condominium complex next to the Transamerica Pyramid, let us take a moment to look at who would benefit from the project’s approval.

The project sponsors, Aegon USA and Lowe Enterprises, would get the right to shadow public parkland, turn a city street into a private parking garage, and construct a project far beyond the allowable height for the location. They’d construct 248 luxury condos, which the city doesn’t need and will do nothing for the housing crisis. The developers would also make a lot of money on the deal; that’s why they want spot zoning to double the allowable height. When it comes to these sorts of projects, taller is more profitable.

And the two companies asking for these civic favors aren’t exactly San Francisco outfits that share the city’s values.

Aegon is a giant insurance and finance company based in the Netherlands that bought out the local Transamerica Company in 1999. The money Aegon makes on the deal won’t stay in San Francisco; even Aegon’s American subsidiary doesn’t have a home office here.

The company’s PAC is a major contributor to Republican causes and candidates (although some Democrats get money, too, particularly the likes of Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, one of Aegon’s top-dollar friends, who is among the main reasons the Senate won’t pass a public option for health insurance). And over the past 10 years, Aegon PAC has contributed $39,500 to Lifepac, a Columbus, Ohio-based anti-abortion group.

Then there’s Lowe Enterprises, based in Los Angeles. The company’s chairman, Robert Lowe, and his employees were among Arnold Schwarzenegger’s top donors, with a whopping $159,500 in contributions to the Republican governor. Lowe is also a big supporter of Meg Whitman’s campaign for governor, and is on her finance committee.

So here we are in Democratic San Francisco, with a mayor who will be running on a Democratic ticket for statewide office (and a mayor, by the way, who loves to talk about supporting small local business and keeping money in the local economy) preparing to give a huge financial gift to a pair out out-of-town companies that share their wealth with right-wing Republicans.

Of course, it’s no surprise that a real estate developer would support Republican candidates — and it’s no surprise an insurance company would be working against health care reform. And if the city granted or denied building permits based on the politics of the applicant, there’d be serious legal consequences (and there should be). These things ought to be decided on the merits; developers who contribute to Democrats (like the Shorenstein Company) deserve the same scrutiny as the ones who give to Republicans.

But this isn’t a typical development deal. Aegon and Lowe aren’t asking for a permit for a project that meets the current zoning laws. They aren’t offering to build something that will create permanent jobs for local residents. They want a huge favor from San Francisco: they want the city to ignore its own planning rules, ignore its park-shadow ordinance, and hand over a piece of city street, just to make their project more profitable — and to give them more money that can go to opposing health-care reform and opposing abortion rights and electing right-wing Republicans. And they’re offering the city nothing in return.

On the merits, the project richly deserves to be rejected. The only reason to approve it is to grant a civic boon to a bunch of out-of-town corporations that ought to be embarrassed to be asking a favor from San Francisco. And the Planning Commission should be embarrassed to consider granting it.

Who wins with the Transamerica condos?

David Talbot
-
0
Who wins with the Transamerica condos?

EDITORIAL As the Planning Commission prepares to vote March 18 on a pointless and overly large condominium complex next to the Transamerica Pyramid, let us take a moment to look at who would benefit from the project’s approval.

The project sponsors, Aegon USA and Lowe Enterprises, would get the right to shadow public parkland, turn a city street into a private parking garage, and construct a project far beyond the allowable height for the location. They’d construct 248 luxury condos, which the city doesn’t need and will do nothing for the housing crisis. The developers would also make a lot of money on the deal; that’s why they want spot zoning to double the allowable height. When it comes to these sorts of projects, taller is more profitable.

And the two companies asking for these civic favors aren’t exactly San Francisco outfits that share the city’s values.

Aegon is a giant insurance and finance company based in the Netherlands that bought out the local Transamerica Company in 1999. The money Aegon makes on the deal won’t stay in San Francisco; even Aegon’s American subsidiary doesn’t have a home office here.

The company’s PAC is a major contributor to Republican causes and candidates (although some Democrats get money, too, particularly the likes of Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, one of Aegon’s top-dollar friends, who is among the main reasons the Senate won’t pass a public option for health insurance). And over the past 10 years, Aegon PAC has contributed $39,500 to Lifepac, a Columbus, Ohio-based anti-abortion group.

Then there’s Lowe Enterprises, based in Los Angeles. The company’s chairman, Robert Lowe, and his employees were among Arnold Schwarzenegger’s top donors, with a whopping $159,500 in contributions to the Republican governor. Lowe is also a big supporter of Meg Whitman’s campaign for governor, and is on her finance committee.

So here we are in Democratic San Francisco, with a mayor who will be running on a Democratic ticket for statewide office (and a mayor, by the way, who loves to talk about supporting small local business and keeping money in the local economy) preparing to give a huge financial gift to a pair out out-of-town companies that share their wealth with right-wing Republicans.

Of course, it’s no surprise that a real estate developer would support Republican candidates — and it’s no surprise an insurance company would be working against health care reform. And if the city granted or denied building permits based on the politics of the applicant, there’d be serious legal consequences (and there should be). These things ought to be decided on the merits; developers who contribute to Democrats (like the Shorenstein Company) deserve the same scrutiny as the ones who give to Republicans.

But this isn’t a typical development deal. Aegon and Lowe aren’t asking for a permit for a project that meets the current zoning laws. They aren’t offering to build something that will create permanent jobs for local residents. They want a huge favor from San Francisco: they want the city to ignore its own planning rules, ignore its park-shadow ordinance, and hand over a piece of city street, just to make their project more profitable — and to give them more money that can go to opposing health-care reform and opposing abortion rights and electing right-wing Republicans. And they’re offering the city nothing in return.

On the merits, the project richly deserves to be rejected. The only reason to approve it is to grant a civic boon to a bunch of out-of-town corporations that ought to be embarrassed to be asking a favor from San Francisco. And the Planning Commission should be embarrassed to consider granting it.

Bill Barnes leaps into the District 10 race

Mary Magee
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Bill Barnes leaps into the District 10 race

The already crowded field of candidates battling to become the next D 10 supervisor just got even more crowded.

Bill Barnes, who is currently working as Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier’s legislative aide, and has previously served as researcher for SF Firefighters Local 798, legislative aide for Sup. Fiona Ma, and legislative aide and campaign manager for Sup. Chris Daly, has entered the race.

Barnes, who turns 33 on April 3, says he is working between now and his birthday, on qualifying for public financing–a vital step for anyone who wants to compete against the handful of candidates that are backed by big private money in this race.

Barnes says he decided to throw his hat into the ring because there has not been enough talk about neighborhood issues, social inequity and displacement.

“The talk is always about creating jobs, but jobs for who?” Barnes said. “Will it be for folks who have lived in the community for their entire lives, or folks from out of town?”

In the next decade or two, it’s likely that the majority of subcontracts in the city will be centered in District 10, but there are no guarantees of who will get that work.

Barnes identified UC Regent Ward Connerly‘s Prop. 209, which amended the state constitution to prohibit public institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, as being a big part of the problem.

Noting that he worked to address the issue of local minority hiring while working for Ma, Barnes says race continues to play a major role when it comes to who gets the work in District 10.

“I plan to work to repeal Prop. 209, or figure out a better way to go,”Barnes said. “All too often contracts are issued that are way too big. That makes it impossible for a smaller locally-owned business to be competitive.”

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