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Some questions for the mayor

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EDITORIAL Gavin Newsom doesn’t want to take direct questions from the supervisors. He rarely gets asked tough questions from the press and almost never from the public. Instead, as Steven T. Jones and Sarah Phelan report ("Mayor Chicken," page 13), all of his appearances are scripted, and he does a mighty job of ducking the hard questions.

But if he is indeed going to be holding a series of town hall meetings over the next few months, there’s a chance for the voters to pin him down. Here are a few things you might want to ask the mayor:

• Your own staff admits that the universal health care plan works only if employers are required to provide health benefits. Yet the Golden Gate Restaurant Association — your political ally — has sued to block this. Do you support the employer mandate? Will you call on the GGRA to drop the suit? Will you decline political contributions from the members of a group that is suing the city with the aim of destroying one of your key initiatives? Where will money come from if the suit succeeds?

• When you ignored the will of the voters and decided to hold these town hall meetings instead of appearing before the supervisors, you said the supes were invited to attend. But you knew it would be illegal for them to participate under the Brown Act without some expensive preparations. Why did you do that?

• Why isn’t your full appointments calendar posted on the Web? The only information the public gets is a listing of your public events. Where is the rest of the calendar?

• You say you support public power, but the city’s efforts are so far limited to Treasure Island and Hunters Point. If there were a ballot measure this fall calling for the city to buy out Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s system and set up a full-scale public power effort — similar to Sup. Tom Ammiano’s measure in 2000 — would you pledge to endorse it?

• The city’s general plan states that 64 percent of all new housing should be available for below-market rates. Sup. Sophie Maxwell has a proposal to make that city law. Do you support her legislation? If not, how will the city meet its affordable housing needs?

• The Planning Department acknowledges that the level of new market-rate housing being discussed for the eastern neighborhoods would inevitably destroy thousands of blue-collar jobs. Is that an acceptable trade-off?

• Broadband Internet service is arguably the most important public infrastructure American cities will build in the next 50 years. Why are you prepared to turn ours over to private industry? Would it not be worth $10 million — the estimated cost put out by Google and EarthLink — to build our own system?

• You asked for the City Attorney’s Office opinion that invalidated the successful referendum drive on the Bayview–Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan. Why aren’t you willing to submit this far-reaching plan to a vote? And if you believe in the plan’s community oversight provisions and deference to the Redevelopment Agency, why did you unilaterally offer the 49ers a new stadium at the old shipyard, which is within the plan’s area?

• Why haven’t you followed up on the promise you made a year ago, after expressing outrage over the racist and homophobic videos made by police officers, to form a commission charged with "changing the culture" of the Police Department? And after your office blocked a citizen-based community policing plan, why didn’t you offer some alternative? Are you content with the way the department is being run?

• Eight months ago, after vetoing a six-month trial period for closing JFK Drive to cars on Saturdays, you promised to study Sunday closures for six months and offer a compromise plan for Saturday closures. When can we expect that proposal, and will you now support Saturday closures?

Honestly: what’s so scary about answering questions from the supervisors?

We await his honor’s response. *

Tears and Happyness

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OPINION I’m not sure why the new movie The Pursuit of Happyness, starring Will Smith and his son, Jaden Smith, based on the life of previously homeless Chris Gardner’s rise to millionaire, is so hard to write about. I am rarely at a loss for words, especially about poverty, homelessness, and racism. Perhaps it’s because this movie made me so sad that even as I try for the 40th time to write this, my eyes well up with broken tears. Not tears for the amazing Horatio Alger, old-school, pre–New Deal, up-by-the-bootstraps, 1930s-esque, blind-to-flagrant-racism-and-classism story.

No, instead my tears are deep and blood-filled for myself and my mama, homeless in a broken-down car for years upon years on the bitter cold streets of Oakland; for fellow poverty scholars and formerly homeless welfare queens and Poor Magazine staff members; for Jewnbug and her mama, Vivien and Jasmine Hain, Laurie McElroy and her son, and all the other unseen children, adults, and elders who subsist homeless in America, barely holding on through countless overnight stays in the sidewalk hotel. Tears for the fact that homelessness can happen with the regularity that it does, that every year Sister Bernie Galvin from Witness for Homeless People mourns the loss of hundreds more people who have died on the streets of San Francisco, one of the richest cities in the world.

Or perhaps they are only tears for Gardner, a poor man of African descent who was so driven to "make it" in this capitalist reality that he didn’t see the tragic paradox of his own situation — his continual denial of the rampant racism in his Dean Witter internship. Tears for a man who came so close to not making it in that palace of oppression, as he and his son slept on the floor of a bus station bathroom.

Or maybe they’re just tears for the myth of the bootstraps and how there is no place for that lie in the 21st century as more and more people locally and globally hover on the dangerous precipice of homelessness, wrongly believing it’s just about working hard enough and anyone can achieve what they want.

Or maybe they’re tears of admiration — for an amazing and dedicated father who no matter what was there for his son, like so many of us poor mamas and papas.

Or maybe the tears are because Gardner, when asked on a radio show if he believed that there was an essential problem with him and his son being homeless in one of the richest cities in the world, replied with a resounding no: it was just about working harder, and anyone can achieve anything they set out to do.

Or maybe they are in fact tears for my son, who watched his mama cry from depression and the reality that no matter how hard you pull up your threadbare bootstraps and pound the pavement and pinch pennies and beg your landlord and stand in food lines and look for jobs and affordable child care, you still won’t make it. *

Tiny

Tiny, also known as Lisa Gray-Garcia, is the author of the new book Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America, published by City Lights Foundation, and the founder of Poor Magazine.

Localize it

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› news@sfbg.com

In what some experts are hailing as a first for sustainability movements in the United States, a coalition of policy organizations has unveiled a comprehensive campaign to reduce the Bay Area’s reliance on global markets in favor of a more locally based economy.

If the plan is embraced by local government agencies and brought to fruition, it could be the first significant reversal of the decades-long march toward globalization, which encourages powerful multinational corporations to exploit cheap labor and transport goods long distances.

The Bay Area is rife with testaments to globalization, from the rusty shells of once prosperous manufacturing plants to the gleaming big-box chain stores filled with cheap Chinese-made clothing and gadgets, from the customer service call answered in India to the foreign parts in our "American made" cars and computers.

Yet at the same time, there are the countervailing forces of localism. For every grocery store stocked with out-of-season produce grown across the world with petrochemicals by big agricultural corporations, there is a community farmers market selling locally grown organic fruit.

Most of globalism’s many faces have a local equivalent. Consumers can buy a burrito at Taco Bell or El Toro, a hammer at Home Depot or Cole Hardware, a new shirt from the Gap or a recycled garment from Held Over, and a bicycle assembled at a factory in China or Freewheel Cyclery.

Or on a grander scale, utilities can import kilowatts of energy from a coal-fired plant in Utah or buy wind and solar power generated in the Bay Area, city governments can contract with out-of-state corporations or locals, and financial institutions can push the status quo or value a more diversified (if less profitable) economic system.

The idea of the localization movement is to analyze the impacts of those choices and start a discussion of how local governments can facilitate the creation of an economy that is more sustainable and less exploitive, one that is unique to the Bay Area.

BEGINNING THE PROCESS


The coalition, which formed in spring 2006, recently released a 30-page report that details the purpose of its campaign and the group’s initial strategy for achieving its goals. The report, titled "Building a Resilient and Equitable Bay Area," and a two-page summary are available online at www.regionalprogress.org. More than two dozen organizations have already endorsed the report, including Oakland’s and Berkeley’s respective sustainability offices.

The coalition’s members include Redefining Progress, Bay Localize, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), the International Forum on Globalization, and the Center for Sustainable Economy. With the exception of the last, which is in Santa Fe, NM, all of the groups are located in either San Francisco or Oakland.

A key feature of the campaign — and the reason some experts describe the initiative as unique in the United States — is its scope. Efforts to localize individual sectors of regional economies have been under way for years. Berkeley, for instance, is considered a leader in the growing movement to shift from a food system dominated by a handful of giant agribusinesses propped up by federal crop subsidies to a system that relies more on local production and procurement of food. Similarly, many areas are considering ways of creating and encouraging the use of alternative — and local — energy sources to limit dependence on imported oil.

What sets the new Bay Area campaign apart from other localization initiatives is that it seeks to effect change across several sectors of the region’s economy simultaneously. It hopes to do so, in part, by achieving the cooperation and coordination of businesses, government officials, and community leaders at the federal, state, and local levels.

The report defines economic localization as "the process by which a region … frees itself from an overdependence on the global economy and invests in its own resources to produce a significant portion of the goods, services, food, and energy it consumes."

In an interview with the Guardian, John Talberth, one of the report’s primary authors and a PhD economist at Redefining Progress, stressed that economic "isolationism is not the goal of the campaign."

Instead, he said the goal is "reestablishing an efficient balance between imports and products made locally for local consumption." In other words, even if the Bay Area localizes its economy according to the strategy proposed by the coalition, many products would still be imported. The economy would, therefore, remain dependent on global markets — but much less so than it is now.

And that could have significant ramifications for the region, humans, and the planet.

THE PRICE OF PROGRESS


The report acknowledges the benefits of globalization, which has kept consumer prices low and forced corporations to become more efficient. But, the authors note, "it has come at a steep price."

That price includes "a loss of economic diversity, declining real wages and working conditions, increasing inequality, offshoring of environmental degradation, and a concentration of financial capital and economic decision-making in global corporations." The changes have left people "vulnerable to inevitable supply and price shocks in the post peak oil era."

In other words, perhaps global capitalism is reaching the point of diminishing returns. The coalition posits that the antidote is localization, which has great potential "for creating a wider range of local jobs and institutions, shielding our economy from global shifts, increasing the diversity and quality of goods and services we consume, distributing economic benefits in a more equitable manner, and protecting our environment."

The Bay Area is the focus of the coalition’s campaign because its member organizations are located here and because those members believe there is already a great deal of public support in the region for such a project.

Kirsten Schwind, programs coordinator at Bay Localize, told the Guardian there was an "overwhelmingly positive response" to a recent project targeted at supporting local food producers. Both Schwind and Don Shaffer, executive director of BALLE, cited Oakland’s Kaiser Permanente as an example of the increasing number of businesses that are altering their buying habits to favor local sellers. Shaffer also said the Oakland and San Francisco school boards are buying locally produced food and the Oakland City Council is setting targets for local energy production.

But even if much of the Bay Area is receptive to the idea of economic localization, other groups are not. There remains a powerful current of support in government, business, and academia for a predominantly global economy.

Traditional economists, for instance, are reflexively hostile to localization initiatives because such projects do not conform to the concepts embodied in so-called free-trade and free-market theories.

NAYSAYERS


The Guardian interviewed three UC Berkeley professors who do not agree with the report’s view of globalism. None of the professors had read the report — despite the fact that the Guardian forwarded it to them before the interviews — but all said they were familiar with the basic ideas behind localization.

Each expressed a knee-jerk hostility to the concept, but once they began discussing the details of localization, they agreed with the coalition on many points. And the professors’ initial objections to localization — including the notion that it would return economies to a more primitive state and that it is isolationist in principle — were mostly rhetorical and unrelated to the coalition’s specific recommendations.

Two of the professors — Daniel M. Kammen, who teaches in the Energy Resources Group as well as the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Department of Nuclear Engineering, and David Vogel, who teaches in the Haas School of Business, the Political Science Department, and the Goldman School — were immediately opposed to the idea of a comprehensive localization strategy.

Vogel, in particular, seemed at first to make light of economic localization, calling it a "romantic notion that periodically resurfaces," and more than once asked laughingly whether the coalition "expects Bay Area residents to watch only movies made in the Bay Area."

Another professor, Lee Friedman, a PhD economist who teaches at the Goldman School, said, "Globalization is a lot like the problem of gays in the military: mend it, don’t end it."

But Friedman likes the idea — a central one in the report — of including all costs in the price of goods. That’s particularly true of environmental costs. This might raise the price of electronics to pay for their disposal or of gas-guzzling vehicles to pay for their global-warming impacts — both ideas being explored by the European Union.

All three professors also had some very positive things to say about economic localization. Kammen, like Friedman, strongly believes that communities should pursue local — and low-carbon — energy production because the environmental impact associated with producing in a foreign country and shipping to the United States is far greater than that of local production.

"Localization advocates are making some excellent points that people ought to pay attention to," Friedman said. He agreed the Bay Area imports too much of its food. Vogel expressed a similar sentiment, saying that buying locally is a "great idea." He also said localization could help to address urban sprawl. By the end of the interview, Vogel softened his initially dismissive attitude toward localization, deeming "aspects of it interesting and attractive."

Talberth and other coalition members say challenging the economic concepts supporting globalization — like those taught by Friedman and most other economics scholars — is a central task of their campaign.

Critics of traditional economic theory have for a long time been saying that too many economists base their research and resulting recommendations on economic models that bear little resemblance to the way the real world operates.

Although economists often bristle at that criticism, Friedman has acknowledged to his students the flaws in prevailing economic models but said, "Until someone comes up with better models, people shouldn’t complain about the existing ones."

Yet Hazel Henderson, a coalition member and the author of Beyond Globalization, and Talberth say alternatives to the current models are well established and have been around for years. They criticize the fact that economic growth is measured by the gross domestic product (GDP), a simplistic calculus that doesn’t take into account economic activity that is harmful to people or the planet.

They prefer new indicators, like the genuine progress indicator (GPI), that account for costs and benefits the traditional indicators do not factor in. The report calculates the GPI for each of the Bay Area’s nine counties. The European Union has already adopted this kind of alternative measure of an economy’s well-being.

WHAT’S NEXT?


Engaging the public is the coalition’s next big goal. Despite the overall support that Schwind and others say already exists in the Bay Area for localization, they admit there are challenges to mobilizing citizens.

"It’s well documented that people tend not to act unless there is a crisis," Shaffer said. But he also said that "giving people Armageddon scenarios" will not work because such stories are depressing and, more importantly, "people are too busy to think comprehensively about that sort of thing."

Instead, Shaffer and Schwind said the coalition plans on putting out a "positive, hopeful" message focusing on the benefits that will accrue to individuals and communities if they adopt localization.

Beyond getting the public involved, the coalition is encouraging local, state, and federal government organizations to conduct studies assessing the challenges and true costs of relying so heavily on global markets. Talberth acknowledged that:

"Getting [those] assessments done is a big challenge."

Ultimately, the coalition would like the Bay Area to serve as a model of localization for other areas in the United States. Shaffer said the group is "not looking to put a formulaic stamp on other regions" but hopes instead that such places will be influenced to adopt localization measures in light of the Bay Area’s success.

Shaffer said the food and energy sectors, along with retail, are already understood well by consumers, at least intuitively. So he predicts the coalition could achieve significant results in those sectors within five years. Spreading those advances to other parts of the economy could take another 10 years after that.

Shaffer, Talberth, and Schwind all said that change is coming whether people want it or not, mostly due to global warming. So they argue for the Bay Area to embrace change now and begin to make the needed changes gradually, before they are painfully thrust upon us. We can localize our world or simply accept whatever the global economy dishes out. *

A new “golden age?”

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By Tim Redmond

The bloggers are having a bit of fun with The Chronicle’s front-page New Year’s Eve assertion that San Francisco’s Golden Age is here again. I have to agree with Beyond Chron — the story was an embarassment that quoted only conservative, wealthy San Franciscans and ignored much of the city.

Yeah, reporter Carl Nolte, who is a good guy (and my neighbor in Bernal Heights) made the point that there have always been problems in San Francisco, including today. But his overall theme — that all this new development and soaring housing costs are somehow good for the city — is a crock.

I’m always the optimist, and I think that 2006 was a great year for local politics. But a “Golden Age?” No: what’s happening in the local economy is that San Francisco is becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. We are building housing for people who don’t live here, and destroying jobs for people who do.

I’ve argued in the past that in a boom-band-bust city, the busts are often better than the booms. That’s because the single greatest quality-of-life issue for most people (the non-rich) in San Francisco is the cost of housing. This boom is only golden for a very few.

Apple knowingly falsified documents. And that is a crime.

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By G.W. Schulz

So let’s get this straight. In 2001, Bay Area-based Apple Computer Inc. gave 7.5 million stock options to its CEO, Steve Jobs. The options were approved by the company’s board of directors at a meeting that never actually happened. The company also now admits that documents related to this imaginary meeting were fudged to make it appear that the necessary board approval had taken place.

The special committee formed by Apple to investigate the matter (which includes Al Gore) says no current member of management was aware of the falsified records. Jobs, the committee insists, was innocent, and as the public is often told during such controversies, the top exec was ignorant of the manipulation.

Steve Jobs sure gets paid a lot of money for a man who’s clueless.

From the Chronicle:

“Apple said Jobs was aware of some instances of backdating and even recommended favorable dates to grant options. But, the company said, Jobs did not financially benefit from these grants and did not understand the accounting implications.”

That’s sort of like arguing that a casino patron who got caught counting cards didn’t make a dime off it and had no idea how badly the hired muscle would kick his ass once they got him outside. He was still counting cards.

Monster dearest

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Move over, matchy-matchy Faye Dunaway of Mommie Dearest and much too armed and dangerous to hug Shelley Winters of Bloody Mama (possibly the lousy dowager emeritus, thanks to Lolita). Mamma mia, was there ever a year crammed with more bad mothering run stealthily amok, far from most of the multiplexes and the real-life broodies dragging their spawn to the latest animated feature?

If you weren’t busily entertaining your offspring in the big theater, you could easily slip into a small screening room to feel either much better about your parenting skills — or much worse. No, 2006 was not kind to materfamilias — anxiety was high over nurturing yet meddling, muddling, and sometimes castrating bitches with often loved but also neglected litters. The not-quite-model matrons who stood out were flagrantly flawed hard-luck ladies, straight outta the clink, outta rehab, outta options. They were both abusers and abused, working lousy jobs, distrusted, and desperate for a second chance — Norma Raes and Erin Brockoviches sans a speck of political consciousness. Mother’s Day 2006 in the movie houses was all about evil as well as Eve’s plight: succumbing to temptation and, of course, seeking redemption. Call this gaggle of generally downbeat, self-absorbed, Dumpster-realism gals the prodigal (single) mothers.

Homemakers or home wreckers? Welfare queens or queen me’s? In Running with Scissors, Annette Bening’s med-damaged, mad housewife-poet of a mumsy was all of the above, with alimony. Meryl Streep’s cunning Lioness D’Wintour fashion editor piss-take in The Devil Wears Prada juggled career and family nastily, taking a smooth stab at working matriarchs both biological and mentor-ological. And the small-town girls and comeback kids–turned–semimythic maternal figures of Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest women’s film, Volver, take a dreamily innocent, genre-specific, less-realistic gaze at motherhood. The women in Almodóville are decent, vivid, communal, and inadvertently, invariably deadly — these bleeder-brooders with bloody "women’s troubles" live in a world almost completely free of men (the few who do pop up are incestuously abusive), somewhere on the matrilineal border of Two Women and Juliet of the Spirits.

Like Volver‘s Cruz and Maura, two other rhyming cinematic mothers — played by two Maggies, Cheung and Gyllenhaal, in Clean and Sherrybaby, respectively — believe there’s life after a loss of innocence and even death. Birthing best-actress awards and considerations, Cheung’s Emily Wang and Gyllenhaal’s Sherry Swanson are hardened but not broken junkie wild children, needle thin and barely clinging to the cracked-out, earthly pavement as they stomp through Paris and malled-over America, regretfully scraping their way back from prison after dropping their offspring like puppies and drifting off into good nods. Physically, the two cut through their landscapes like blades, antimaternal babes who happen to have had babies.

Braless, tank-topped, and jiggling through the hood, Gyllenhaal’s Sherry has a physical presence that hybridizes the inhibition-free but inappropriately hot mama and the gawky, sunken-chested teen. Slouching through motels and institutions, suburbs and ghettos alike, she’s always the riveting center, despite her love for and hunger to be loved by her daughter. Since she kicked in prison, love has become Sherry’s drug — she wants to work with kids, she’s desperate to take up mothering — and she slyly seduces her daughter with toys, praise, and her alarming, sexualized, chaotic presence from the brother and sister-in-law who raised the girl in safety and warmth. With her discomfitingly sensual singing routine and ravenous desire for attention, Sherry is every parent’s worst nightmare, yet Gyllenhaal’s emotionally and physically naked performance and Laurie Collyer’s empathetic direction etch her into reality. You want to take care of this sad, sexy mum.

On another continent and aeons away in awareness, Cheung’s Emily is also a junkie who landed in jail — after her rock star boyfriend, Lee Hauser, OD’d — but she’s now working her way back into the good graces of her child and family. Resembling a razor-sharp noirish Q-Tip with a shock of black fro, music biz hanger-on Emily evokes obvious predecessors (the derided Asian-other and band destroyer Yoko Ono, the stoned-in-love partner in crime Marianne Faithfull) and less-expected women (delicate beauty with a battery-acid rasp Hope Sandoval). The archetypal snide rock bitch at the start, Emily waxes selfish, proud, mouthy, brawling, irresponsible, bad tempered, only reflexively working her power over Lee — her real hunger is for the next fix. Cheung, however, gives Emily a heart — when her mouth twists into a dreadful pyramid upon hearing that the court has given custody of her son to Lee’s parents.

Still, throughout the process of getting clean, growing humble, and peeling away the layers of posturing, Emily exudes a resigned intelligence that the fearless but somewhat unconscious Sherry lacks. Tearful with loneliness, Emily confesses to her friend Elena (France’s favorite wild woman, Beatrice Dalle), "I don’t know if I can take care of a child." Almost everyone in Clean is smarter than they appear at first glance, even if they are embroiled in the "romantic myth of music," as director Olivier Assayas puts it in a DVD interview. Emily’s race complicates matters further, raising questions similar to those aimed at world-trawling Western adoptive parents. Are the white middle-class Hausers more entitled to raise Cheung’s son than she is? Must she become trustworthy — or assimilate — in order to be with her child?

Both Cheung’s and Gyllenhaal’s performances make one wonder why these women’s struggles are reaching the screen at this time. We continue to grapple with the question of whether single parenting translates to less-than-optimal parenting. Perhaps, as the war pigs and an archetypally male principle run rampant elsewhere, we wonder how we’re supposed to keep the home fires burning. Where are the mothers, and how does one nurture after all the high times? Can we, perpetual adolescents, ever really settle down? Who raised all these people? *

KIMBERLY CHUN’S LADY FEAST 11

• Ivana Baquero in Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, Spain) and Ko Ah-sung Ko in The Host (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea).

• Clean (Olivier Assayas, France) and Sherrybaby (Laurie Collyer, US).

• The Descent (Neil Marshall, UK). A postfeminist love song to spelunking and Carrie.

• Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, Japan). The Ramones would be proud.

• The Queen (Stephen Frears, UK/France/Italy), with lady-in-waiting Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, US/France/Japan). Feeling those royal pains.

• The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, France/Italy). Charlotte Gainsbourg makes spectacles, sweater dresses, and felt-mation look trés belle.

• Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, South Korea). Red eyeliner, exploitation glam, and that scene with the grieving, vengeful parents …

• Volver (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain). Making us love Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, eyeliner, and push-up bras again.

The next big fight

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› steve@sfbg.com
San Francisco’s eastern neighborhoods — the Mission District, Potrero Hill, Showplace Square, Dogpatch, the Central Waterfront, and SoMa — are shaping up to be a prime battleground in the fight over who will determine the city’s future.
Can city officials, working with community groups, set development standards that will create adequate housing for all income groups, protect the job-generating businesses that use light-industrial property, and include enough open space and other community benefits? Or will the community have to, for the most part, simply accept what the market forces are willing to provide?
This is the basic dichotomy at the heart of the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, which has been in development for years and will be unveiled by the Planning Department sometime in 2007. In anticipation of that release, members of the Board of Supervisors are attempting a preemptive strike in the form of a resolution demanding the plan prioritize affordable housing and other public needs.
The 11-page resolution — which was sponsored by Supervisors Sophie Maxwell, Jake McGoldrick, Aaron Peskin, and Tom Ammiano — restates policies from the city’s General Plan, particularly its Housing Element, and emphasizes the need for the Planning Department to ensure those policies are reflected in land-use decisions for the eastern neighborhoods.
The problem is that the city isn’t meeting its goals, particularly in the realm of affordable housing. The resolution notes that the Housing Element calls for 28 percent of new housing to be affordable to people with moderate incomes, 10 percent affordable to low-income residents, and 26 percent affordable to those with very low incomes.
Yet the city’s inclusionary housing law calls for developers to offer only 15 percent of their units below market rate, and a study associated with that law’s recent update indicates most developers won’t build if asked to contribute more (see “Homes for Whom,” 6/18/06, at www.sfbg.com). The vast majority of what’s now being built isn’t affordable to even middle-class San Franciscans — a far cry from the 64 percent of such housing called for in city policies.
“We do not have a housing crisis in San Francisco,” Maxwell declared during a Dec. 12 hearing on the resolution. “We have an affordable housing crisis.”
Most of the progressives who constitute the board majority agree with Maxwell’s statement, which has been made before by housing activist Calvin Welch and some of the community groups pushing the resolution. They all want the eastern neighborhoods, where a disproportionate number of low-income San Franciscans live, to be where the city begins to correct its housing imbalance.
“We need land specifically set aside for affordable housing, and the best place to do that is in the eastern neighborhoods,” Maxwell said at the meeting. “Let’s make this official city policy.”
Or as McGoldrick told the Guardian, “What we’re talking about here is a paradigm shift of major proportions.” He sees the eastern neighborhoods as the ideal place to create and protect working-class housing with aggressive affordability goals, and he said, “Those developers who can’t meet those goals will have to build in other parts of the city.”
But real estate speculators and developers who have spent years waiting to move forward their projects in the neighborhoods have attacked the resolution and its goals. The stakes are extremely high. The plan will set standards for the 4,800 housing units already proposed in the eastern neighborhoods, including 11 projects in the Showplace Square area that total 1,800 units, and more on the way.
“Our projects are being held hostage,” Residential Builders Association president Sean Keighran told us, saying of his members, “They were speculators, but they were playing by the rules.”
Keighran insists RBA builders will help bridge the affordable housing gap if the city works in partnership with them and uses incentives like density bonuses and height variances rather than strict limits and set-asides. But the resolution, he said, “will be interpreted as a tool to stop market-rate housing.”
That’s something even progressive Sup. Chris Daly doesn’t want. Daly emerged as the primary critic of the resolution during the Dec. 12 meeting, blasting it as unnecessary and offering a list of confusing amendments that set the stage for Sup. Bevan Dufty to successfully continue consideration of the resolution to Jan. 9, 2007.
Welch and community leaders such as Tony Kelly of the Potrero Hill Boosters were unhappy with Daly’s maneuver. Kelly told us, “It’s the community groups of the eastern neighborhoods who pushed for this.” He felt it was important for the board to give planners specific marching orders. “It’s meant to say this is what we’ll accept.”
Daly said he supports the basic goals of the resolution — and even said at the meeting that he will ultimately vote for it — but he told the Guardian he would rather find creative ways to work with developers on increasing the amount of affordable housing than draw bright lines that might block market-rate housing.
“I’m not sure it’s the right resolution at the right time,” Daly told us.
During the meeting he also questioned city planner Ken Rich on what impact this nonbonding resolution would have and concluded that it’s merely symbolic, although Rich did say it might spur planners to investigate and present more mechanisms for meeting affordable housing goals.
Daly then suggested a complete revision of the Housing Element to overcome the “balancing act” Rich said planners must perform between competing imperatives, such as facilitating jobs, open space, and housing.
“The General Plan asks us for a lot of different things,” Rich told the board.
“If that’s a weakness in the General Plan, we need to work on that,” Daly said, making the motion that the resolution also require planners to develop a list of “contradictions in the General Plan that will require them to balance conflicting mandates.”
“That could be a thesis topic in itself,” Peskin responded.
Daly’s motion was discussed among the supervisors, clouding and sidetracking the discussion, but it was preempted by Dufty’s motion to delay the matter until the next board meeting. Maxwell said she’s not giving up on the measure, which she sees as necessary to focus planners who feel constrained by market forces.
“Affordable housing seems to be last on the list, and we want it to be a priority,” Maxwell said at the meeting.
It’s an open question whether she has enough votes to win approval and what kinds of pressures and distractions the RBA and its allies will bring to the debate. But the heated division over this simple resolution is a harbinger of what’s to come next year, when the real fight over San Francisco’s future socioeconomic makeup begins.
Or as Peskin said at the hearing, “This is just a preamble to our receipt of the plans themselves.” SFBG

Editor’s Notes

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San Francisco is spending $250,000 to create an economic development plan, and that’s probably a good thing. The city’s economy is changing; development pressure is threatening small businesses and light industry; local people can’t find jobs; and more and more residents are working out of town — it’s exactly the sort of situation that calls for some intelligent planning.
The current project, sponsored by the Mayor’s Office, is the result of a ballot measure approved two years ago that requires the city to measure the economic impact of policy decisions. For the most part, the legislation, by Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, is aimed at stopping progressive initiatives, but if it gets San Francisco headed in the right economic direction, that will be well worth a quarter million dollars.
If.
See, I’ve talked to the economist who is heading up the study and to the person in the Mayor’s Office who is coordinating it, and I’m afraid that they’re coming very close to missing the point.
The final study won’t be completed until the end of January, but the Board of Supervisors got a sneak preview a couple weeks ago, complete with a PowerPoint presentation and lots of the kind of talk that seems coherent only to academic economists. (Under “Conclusions,” the summary recommends that we “invest in and diversify the engines of innovation in the knowledge sector.” Whatever that means.)
The actual research in the preliminary documents seems fairly solid, and the evidence, while not surprising, is still alarming: San Francisco has lost thousands of families, jobs that don’t require a college degree are vanishing, and the income gap between the increasingly wealthy high end of the population and the increasingly squeezed middle and working classes is growing.
But missing from the study so far are what I consider the two most important factors in economic development in this city: housing and land use.
I work for a small business, and I have to hire people, and I can tell you that every small businessperson in this town (except the ones who have vast stores of venture capital to spend) is facing the same problem I am: it costs too much to live here. And if their businesses are operating in the eastern neighborhoods, they’re also facing the very real prospect that they may lose their leases and their places of business to make room for more million-dollar condos that their employees can’t afford, which will fill up with more people who work in Silicon Valley.
Last week I spoke with Ted Egan, the Berkeley economist who is heading up the project for ICF Consulting. He understands that locally owned businesses are the key to the local economy and that replacing imports and expanding exports is a crucial goal. But he also said that “housing outcome isn’t on our plate.”
That, I guess, is because the city defined the study that way. Jennifer Matz, who is deputy director at the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, told me that her office would be coordinating with city planners but that housing and land use were beyond the scope of this report.
If that’s the case, it won’t be a terribly useful document. SFBG

Pass Maxwell’s housing bill

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EDITORIAL Every city in California has to keep a general plan on its civic shelf, and every 10 years the plan — a detailed outline of future growth and development goals — has to be dusted off and updated. Most of the time, nobody pays much attention: when decisions on individual projects are made, conformance with the general plan means a lot less than the political connections of the developers.
But hidden in those documents are often some fascinating and potentially important bits of information — and that’s the case with the Housing Element of San Francisco’s plan.
According to that report, San Francisco has a critical need for more housing, which everyone knows and accepts. But the details matter, and in this case, the document says that all housing isn’t alike — and that, in fact, the city needs comparatively little of the sort of market-rate (read: million-dollar) condos that developers want to build. What the city’s official planning guideline actually says is that given San Francisco’s population, economy, and job mix, 64 percent of all new housing built in the city should be sold at below-market rates.
That’s right: the carefully researched conclusion of the professional city planners is that almost two-thirds of all new housing has to be affordable to working San Franciscans — which means only one-third of new housing should be luxury condos for high-end buyers.
That’s a pretty radical concept — but when you actually read the Housing Element, it makes perfect sense. Only a small fraction of the city’s current residents can afford the mortgage payments or rents required for most new market-rate units. And most of the jobs that will be created in this city in the next 10 years won’t pay enough to allow workers to afford those new condos. Instead, what San Francisco is becoming is a bedroom community for people who live elsewhere — and that’s not part of anyone’s planning goals.
So Sup. Sophie Maxwell has introduced a resolution that would make it official city policy that all new housing built in the eastern neighborhoods — ground zero for new development in the next decade — meet the goals of the San Francisco General Plan. That would mean that city planners could only approve new housing if 64 percent of the units were sold for prices that working San Franciscans can afford.
Her legislation isn’t perfect — for one thing, it’s just a policy resolution, which means that Mayor Gavin Newsom and the City Planning Commission can ignore it. But it’s a powerful statement about the extent of the city’s housing crisis, the utter failure of the mayor’s housing policy, and the complete inadequacy of virtually every new private housing development proposal now on the table.
As Steven T. Jones reports in this issue, the resolution has set off something of a furor, even on the left — and the fact that Maxwell was forced to continue it for a month is a signal that the Residential Builders Association (RBA) — which wants to turn the eastern neighborhoods into a jungle of luxury condos without strong affordable housing requirements — still has disturbing political influence.
Sup. Chris Daly, who expressed a lot of concerns about Maxwell’s resolution (and helped force the delay), argues that the measure actually calls for a total moratorium on new housing in the eastern neighborhoods, since it’s unlikely any private developer will build projects with 64 percent of the units at below-market prices.
That may be true. It’s also fine with us. San Francisco doesn’t need to build more housing that’s totally out of sync with what residents and small businesses need. And a moratorium would force Newsom, city planners, and developers to talk seriously about how to meet the affordable housing needs.
We are not convinced that building units that sell for, say, $300,000 is an impossible venture for the private sector, and we’re totally convinced that with a little vision, the city can expand dramatically its affordable housing stock. For starters, the city needs to protect its existing rental housing by making Ellis Act evictions prohibitively expensive and tightly controlling evictions and condo conversions (something Daly has called for).
Daly also says that what the city really needs is a better Planning Department and a more visionary commission and director. We agree. But the question on the table is simple: should the city, as a matter of policy, abide by the housing goals in its own General Plan? That’s a no-brainer.<\!s>SFBG

A sex offender’s story

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OPINION I am a registered sex offender. I have lived in San Francisco since 1997. I moved here from the state of Minnesota. I am also an openly gay male.
At the time I committed my crime, I was 19, he was 13. I was attending college in Duluth, Minn. I was running a personal ad, he sent me a letter, and I arranged to meet with him. We engaged in intercourse.
It was one of many mistakes I’ve made over the years. I’m also HIV-positive, have a history of substance abuse, and have mental illness. I’ve sought and received treatment. I have access to the help that I need.
I go to a wonderful health clinic in the Mission District of San Francisco. I have friends here. I’m politically active. This is my home.
I’ve been in a variety of living arrangements. I’ve held a number of jobs. I have clerical skills. I’m integrated into the community and getting help and support.
I’m on Supplemental Security Income right now. The plan was for me to go back to school, then go back to work. Those plans are on hold. My hopes and dreams hang in the balance.
Proposition 83, a law that passed in November, bars registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park. That means it bars us from living in San Francisco. It affects my life and the lives of thousands of others. Some are guilty only of having been entrapped. Many are transient.
Most of us have received various degrees of help. Some of us are more functional than others. We can be, and have been, rehabilitated. We hold down jobs, rent apartments, buy homes, get married, go to church, have friends, have families.
I have lived here for more than nine years, all that time in San Francisco, all that time within 2,000 feet of a school or a playground. I have not reoffended. Most sex offenders who receive treatment do not reoffend.
Most sex crimes take place in the home. Most of the offenders know the victim. Prop. 83 will not work. It’s draconian, and it’s unconstitutional.
The courts are now considering whether the law can apply retroactively to people who have already served their sentence and paid for their crime. If that ruling goes the wrong way, many of us could be forced out of our communities, away from the help we need.
I have no trust in the legislature or the governor. I hope and pray the courts will rule wisely.
I could lose everything. So could 93,000 other human beings.<\!s>SFBG
XYZ
XYZ is the pseudonym of a San Francisco community activist.

Blood in the water

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Mayor Gavin Newsom has long been considered a lock for reelection next year, a belief driven by his same-sex marriage gesture, hoarding of political capital, personal charm, and high approval ratings. Yet Guardian interviews with more than 20 political experts and insiders from across the ideological spectrum indicate that Newsom may now be more vulnerable than ever.
Just as San Francisco politicians are starting to calculate whether to run, the Newsom administration has suffered a series of political setbacks. In November alone, most of Newsom’s picks got spanked during the election, his veto of popular police foot patrol legislation was overridden by the Board of Supervisors, and he was caught off guard by the San Francisco 49ers’ announcement that they were moving to Santa Clara, taking with them Newsom’s hopes of landing the 2016 Summer Olympics.
“Until recently, I didn’t have a lot of hope,” Sup. Chris Daly, whom Newsom unsuccessfully worked to defeat, told us. “Now the progressives have a glimmer of hope. The mayor seems to be hurting from three or four episodes where he was caught with egg on his face.”
To many political observers — most of whom the Guardian allowed to speak anonymously in order to capture their most candid observations and plans — the defeats were indicative of a mayor who seems increasingly disengaged and out of touch. Even Newsom’s strategy of avoiding fights that might hurt his popularity has rankled many of his allies, who complain that this risk-averse approach has allowed the Board of Supervisors to effectively set the city’s agenda.
“This guy does not use one scintilla of his political capital on anyone or anything,” said former mayor Art Agnos, whose name has been dropped as a possible challenger to Newsom but who told us, “I’m not running.”
There are a number of strong anti-Newsom narratives out there, even on his signature issues, such as crime and homelessness, which persist as visible, visceral problems despite increased city spending on homeless services and controversial tactics like police sweeps and one-way bus tickets out of town for vagrants.
The mayor started his term by announcing during a radio interview that if the murder rate rose, he should be ousted from office. It did — remaining at 10-year highs through the past three years — handing his potential opponents a ready-made sound bite. The crime rate could be a powerful weapon when paired with Newsom’s failure to follow up on promises of police reform.
Newsom is still likely to offer up a long list of accomplishments in his usual statistics-laden style. But much of what he tries to take credit for was actually someone else’s initiative, such as the universal health care measure crafted by Sup. Tom Ammiano (who is running for the State Assembly and not taking a third run at the mayor’s office). Adding to Newsom’s problems in November was the lawsuit the Golden Gate Restaurant Association — a Newsom ally — filed challenging the measure.
Almost everyone we interviewed agreed that if Newsom does have approval ratings of around 80 percent, as has been reported, that support is very soft and may significantly erode during the campaign. “His support is an inch deep and a mile wide” was how one political analyst put it.
“His ‘skyrocketing’ approval rating is irrelevant,” one downtown politico told us. “People approve of the mayor like they approve of the color beige. If you fill an arena with 50,000 people and ask them to decide on what color to paint the walls, that color will always be beige. It’s not that they necessarily like beige; it’s that they will accept it as long as those freaks who want hot pink don’t get their way.”
And then there are his personal foibles. Newsom’s choice of girlfriends — from the Scientologist actress to the 19-year-old hostess — has found its way into print and caused the mayor to lash out in brittle ways that have hurt his relations with once-friendly outlets like the Chronicle, which openly mocked Newsom’s televised comments last month about how hard his job is and how he might not run for reelection.
Finally, there are the new electoral realities: this is the first mayor’s race in which challengers will receive public financing from a $7 million fund (almost all of which, Newsom campaign manager Eric Jaye argues, will be aimed at doing damage to Newsom) and the first with ranked-choice voting, allowing candidates to run as a team and gang up on the mayor.
Add it all up, and Newsom looks vulnerable. But that’s only the first part of a two-part question. The trickier part is who can run against Newsom, and that’s a question to which nobody has any good answer yet.
THE FIELD
Among the names being dropped for a mayoral run are Dennis Herrera, Aaron Peskin, Ross Mirkarimi, Matt Gonzalez, Kamala Harris, Mark Leno, Agnos, Susan Leal, Angela Alioto, Lou Girardo, Warren Hellman, Jeff Adachi, Tony Hall, Leland Yee, Daly, Michael Hennessey, Quentin Kopp, and Carole Migden. That’s quite a list.
Yet most say they are disinclined to run this time around, and none are likely to announce their candidacies in the near future, which is when most observers believe a serious run at Newsom would have to begin. Here’s the catch-22: nobody wants to run against Newsom unless his approval rating sinks below 60 percent, but it’s unlikely to sink that low unless there are rivals out there challenging him every day.
Two candidates who already hold citywide office and could aggressively challenge Newsom on police issues are Sheriff Hennessey and District Attorney Harris, both of whom have mainstream credentials as well as supporters in the progressive community. But both have expressed reluctance to run in the next mayoral election, at least in part because they’re also standing for reelection this fall and would need to leave their jobs to run for mayor.
Public Defender Adachi is a favorite of many progressives and could also run on police reform, but his job of representing sometimes heinous criminals could be easy for the Newsom team to attack Willie Horton–<\d>style.
Many of the strongest potential candidates are thought to be waiting four more years until the seat is open. City Attorney Herrera can take as much credit as Newsom for gay marriage and is a tough campaigner and formidable fundraiser who has clearly been setting himself up for higher office. Assemblymember Leno has won over progressives since his divisive 2002 primary against Harry Britt and could be mayoral material, particularly because he’s termed out in two years. But both are allies of Newsom and reluctant to run against him.
Several supervisors and former supervisors would love to beat Newsom, but the road seems steep for them. Daly just got beat up in his own reelection, so his negatives are too high to run again right now. Supervisor Mirkarimi might run, but some consider him too Green and too green and are urging him to wait four more years. Board President Peskin could also be a contender, but some doubt his citywide appeal and note a few bad votes he’s cast.
Challenges from Newsom’s right could include Kopp, the former legislator and judge; Hall, the former supervisor whom Newsom ousted from his Treasure Island post; businessman and attorney Girardo; financier and philanthropist Hellman; and Alioto, who ran last time. But these would-be challengers are generally less liberal than Newsom, who pundits say is as conservative a mayor as a town with an ascendant progressive movement will tolerate.
Finally, there’s Gonzalez, who four years ago jumped in the mayor’s race at the last minute, was outspent by Newsom six-to-one, and still came within less than five percentage points of winning. Many progressives are urging him to run again, noting that he is still popular and has the political skills to highlight Newsom’s shortcomings. But Gonzalez remains cagey about his intentions.
“I don’t believe I’m running for mayor. The chances are slim,” Gonzalez told us. “But I think he needs to be challenged.”
TEAM NEWSOM
Newsom campaign manager Jaye says he’s definitely expecting a challenge. And unlike most observers whom we spoke with, who are surveying the field and not seeing many people jumping in, Jaye expects a crowded free-for-all and a tough race.
“Is it likely to be a highly contested mayor’s race? Sure. Is that a good thing? Yes, I think it is,” Jaye said. “Every race in San Francisco is tough. The school board races here are fought harder than some Senate races.”
But Jaye thinks the new public financing system — in which mayoral candidates who can raise $135,000 will get $450,000 from the city — will be the biggest factor. “That’s one of the reasons I think everyone’s going to run,” Jaye said. “That guarantees it will be a crowded field.”
One political analyst said that’s the best scenario for defeating Newsom. He said dethroning the mayor will be like a pack of jackals taking down an elephant. No single challenger is likely to beat Newsom, but if he’s being attacked from all sides, he just might fall.
As for Newsom’s weaknesses and missteps, Jaye doesn’t agree the mayor is particularly weak and doesn’t think people will turn away from Newsom because of his candid comments on how the job cuts into his personal life.
“One of the reasons so many people like Gavin Newsom is he’s not afraid to be human in public and to be honest,” Jaye said, adding that his candidate is up for the challenge. “He is running for real and will run a vigorous race.”
Jaye concedes that the 49ers issue is difficult: Newsom will be hurt if they leave, and he’ll be hurt if he appears to give up too much to keep them here. The high murder rate and inaction on police reform are widely considered to be vulnerabilities, but Jaye said, “Gavin Newsom gets up every day and works on that problem, and if voters think another candidate has a better solution, they’ll look at it.”
Everyone agrees that candidates will enter the race late — which is what happened during the last two mayor’s races and is even likelier with public financing. If Newsom takes more hits or can’t get his head into the game, the sharks will start circling. “The next three months with what happens with the mayor will be telling,” another political insider told us.
One test will be with Proposition I, the measure voters approved Nov. 7 asking the mayor to show up for a monthly question time before the Board of Supervisors. Newsom reportedly has said he won’t come, which could look cowardly and out of touch to the voters who approved it and to the supervisors, who might make great political theater of the no-show. And if Newsom does decide to show up, most observers believe he might not fare well in such an unscripted exchange.
If Newsom implodes or appears weak in late spring, suddenly all those political heavy hitters will be forced to think about getting in the fray. After all, as just about everyone told us, nine months is like an eternity in San Francisco politics — and Newsom has the best job in town.

Pink-paint hate

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It was a little after 6 o’clock on the morning of Sept. 21 when Naomi Okada arrived to start her day at Lowell High School. The Japanese language teacher is often at work early, and after a short wait a custodian let her into the building. Okada made her way down the quiet, empty halls of the school and up a stairwell to the second floor, where she unlocked the door of the World Language Department office. She dropped her things by her desk, one among more than a dozen belonging to the language teachers who share space in the large office. As she entered the nearby kitchen to brew a pot of coffee, John Raya’s desk, in the corner by the door, caught her attention.
“I noticed there was paint all over his computer,” Okada told the Guardian. “My first impression was that it looked like a bucket of paint was poured over it.” Thick streams of pink liquid dripped from the monitor onto the keyboard and were splattered on the wall behind the desk and the chair in front of it.
She thought this might have been an accident, but since Raya was also an early riser and usually came in about a half hour after her, she decided to go look for him. She walked quickly down the hallway, past Spirit Week posters painted the same shade of pink, to Raya’s classroom. It was still locked. Moments later she ran into him in the hallway, and together they went back to the office.
Okada hadn’t yet passed close enough to the desk to see a note propped on the keyboard. It was Raya who would first read what it said:
“Big mouth fag!!!!! You start too much trouble in this department!!!! Mind your fucking business and go back to New York!!!!! Or Cuba or wherever the fuck you come from!!!!!”
“I was stunned,” Raya told us. “It didn’t hit me in the beginning. It was just bizarre. It didn’t make sense. And then the reality hit.”
Raya thinks the pink paint was chosen because he is gay and the words because he’s been speaking up about problems he sees in the language department in which he has taught French and Spanish for almost 20 years.
Soon the school’s interim principal, Amy Hansen, and assistant principal Peter Van Court would have the room closed off and guarded by security. John Scully, the police officer assigned to the school, would arrive to gather evidence that might identify who committed the hate crime.
And all of that would take just a few hours. The destroyed keyboard and desk chair would be removed and replaced. The paint would be wiped up, leaving spare vestiges of pink in the seams of the computer monitor and on the chalk tray behind it. By lunchtime it would seem as though this had never happened — and most of the school would still be unaware that it had.
Later, Inspector Milanda Moore of the San Francisco Police Department’s hate crimes unit would be assigned to the case, and Raya would ask her why a crime lab was not brought in. “She said that was Mr. Scully’s call,” Raya said.
“We didn’t really have a lot of evidence,” Scully told us. “I guess it’s a computer office classroom,” he said, misidentifying the room. “A lot of people touch computers. It would be hard to get a good fingerprint. I didn’t see the point.” He said rooms that see a lot of use and are heavily trafficked by kids are hard to fingerprint.
This, however, isn’t one of those rooms. It’s an office to which only faculty and administration have keys and access, and students are strictly forbidden from entering without supervision. And when Okada arrived for work early that morning, the door was locked, the lock was functioning fine, and there was no sign of a forced entry.
That’s led Raya and others at Lowell to a truly disturbing conclusion: the hate crime was committed, they suggest, not by a disgruntled student or misguided prankster but by a member of the faculty or an administrator.
If that’s true, then Lowell — the city’s premier public high school, a place that wins awards for its teaching and is lauded for its tolerant attitudes — has a staff member who has resorted to the sort of racist, homophobic act that’s rarely seen in San Francisco workplaces these days. And he or she still hasn’t been caught.
In fact, one of the oddest elements of this entire episode — and the fact that makes it more than a passing story of poor behavior — is the way the school administration has seemed to go out of its way to keep the whole thing under wraps. Students were never formally told what happened. Faculty were discouraged from discussing it. The student paper, the Lowell, was scolded for daring to print a story about it. Other than a student-organized response, there was no attempt to use the incident as a learning experience.
Some school officials are unhappy that the administration kept this so quiet. “I think that’s totally inappropriate,” Sarah Lipson, vice president of the Board of Education, told us. “We’ve tried so hard to be transparent. If you have no idea where this is coming from, you have to err on the side of transparency.”
And when we started to look into the crime, we discovered that it wasn’t an isolated event. The language department at Lowell is such a mess that a specialist in nonviolent communication has been hired to mediate. “It’s a very hot, polarized situation,” said Lynda Smith, a consultant with Bay Area Nonviolent Communication who works with couples and groups and teaches classes at San Quentin. “In my experience, the tension and the lack of trust in this department is one of the more extreme situations that I’ve encountered.”
The situation is raising some deep-seated questions about the way one of the nation’s top public high schools is managed.
Lowell is the kind of academic institution that inspires faith in the public school system. Last May, Newsweek ranked it 26 out of 1,200 top public schools in the country. Each year nearly 3,000 of San Francisco’s intellectually elite eighth graders vie for the 600 open slots, facing academic standards more rigid than those of any other high school in the city. The list of alumni is thick with Rhodes scholars and Nobel Prize winners, Beltway press secretaries and Ivy League college presidents.
The rigorous learning environment means “the students are so academically driven they rarely have time to look up from their books,” said Barbara Blinick, a social studies teacher and faculty sponsor of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). She thinks that’s what makes Lowell “one of the safest campuses in the city.”
“We fight over seats in the library,” student Beatriz Datangel said. “Last year someone got in trouble for throwing a cupcake.”
And Lowell has a reputation for being a safe and accepting place for queer students. “They’re not attacked, they’re not beaten up,” Blinick said.
“I have never been in or heard of a high school with as gay-positive an environment as Lowell has,” English teacher Jennifer Moffitt said. “That isn’t to say Lowell is perfect by any means, but it’s unusually open here. We have several openly gay faculty members as well as students.”
“Last year’s prom king and queen were both guys,” English teacher Bryan Ritter added. “And they both fought over the tiara.”
Which is why the hate crime committed against Raya was so shocking.
“I can’t believe that someone would target him,” Ritter said. “He’s such a nice guy. I don’t tolerate homophobia, and I can’t express how appalled I am that it’s happened in my own school.”
Ritter, like a majority of the faculty, first heard about the incident from Hansen the day after it happened.
Hansen told us she said “this was a horrible act, that it was an assault on all of us and we need to keep our ears open and be listening, because if students know and if students were involved, if you listen, kids talk.”
But if the incident was indeed an assault on “all of us,” the students were not included in that community. No public announcement was made to the student body. The monthly “Message from the Principal,” released just three days after the hate crime was discovered, painted a bright, sunny picture of a day in the busy life of Lowell, with Spirit Week in full swing and faculty steeped in annual curriculum development. There was no mention of the incident of hatred directed against a veteran faculty member.
“It seems to me it’s been downplayed from the very beginning,” said David Lipman, a Spanish teacher. “We were told at the beginning not to say anything to the students. So we didn’t say anything.”
“Somehow,” Lipman told us, “I’m just afraid that it’s not in the district’s interest to find out who did it. And it seems like no one will ever hear about it again.”
The school’s award-winning student paper, the Lowell, wasn’t comfortable with that approach. “The students hadn’t heard about it — that’s why we covered it in the paper,” said Ritter, who’s also faculty sponsor for the monthly publication.
Raya was very willing to talk about the crime with reporter Cynthia Chau, who didn’t have a difficult time getting details of what happened or leads as to why from him. Responses from the principal were not as forthcoming.
“She did talk to us, and she answered all of our questions,” said a reporter who assisted Chau with the front-page story. “Except for when it got to Raya’s allegations that were more controversial — when he said she hadn’t done enough to respond to the hate crime, about her showing favoritism, and that he had had a discussion with her about that. She said, ‘No comment, that’s between Mr. Raya and myself.’<\!q>”
After the story hit the hallways, Hansen scheduled a meeting with the journalism classes that publish the paper to discuss their moral obligations as reporters. Though Hansen had issues with a number of their articles, including the one on Raya, the overall impression the classes came away with was that she disapproved of them covering controversy.
“Her recommendation was that we shouldn’t report stories that may have a negative effect,” reporter Jason Siu said. “That doesn’t really work. As journalists, we should report the truth. If it’s happening on the Lowell campus, we should report it.”
John Raya has the quiet presence of the kid who sits in the back of the classroom minding his own business. The only edge in his otherwise soft voice is a Brooklyn accent, which dissolves when he speaks French or Spanish, the two languages he teaches at Lowell. It’s hard to believe he could incite enough animosity to drive someone to commit a hate crime against him.
But at Lowell he’s become the most vocal leader of an expanding group of teachers unhappy about the management of the language department.
Since June, Raya has been writing letters to various administrators and the Board of Education about what he perceives as inequities in the way classes are assigned to teachers and how students are selected for them. He’s been calling for more openness in decision-making processes, for a formal policy on who teaches which classes, and even for the department head, Dorothy Ong, to relinquish her position.
“Everyone in the department was getting copies of these letters,” Lipman said. “There were a lot of them. They were mainly in the weeks preceding the incident. They were about policy, fairness, equity — very professionally done. Your jaw dropped open because they pierced right to the heart. They were like when a senator is calling for the president to step down.”
High schools are often places where petty drama takes the stage as high art, where locker room cliques are nascent coffee klatches and conflict and competition are extracurricular activities. But behind the academic politics are sometimes real issues.
When Amy Hansen left Oakland’s Skyline High School to stand in as interim principal at Lowell for the 2006–<\d>07 school year, Raya was one of the first people to come by her office, a few days before school commenced in August. He wanted to talk about the World Language Department’s “long-standing history of conflict,” she said. “He raised concerns about how the department was run, he felt that he was not being treated fairly, and he raised a number of issues which I took seriously.”
At Lowell the 600 or so incoming students are asked to rank three options from the nine languages the school offers. Like many high schools in the country, Spanish is in high demand, second only to Chinese; more than half of Lowell’s students are Chinese American. Over the years, more sections of these popular classes have been added incrementally, but a concerted effort has also been made to skim off some kids into other, less popular languages, such as Korean, German, and Italian.
Herein lies the rift, which some view as philosophical — but which in practice leaves one person playing God. Every year about 100 unlucky students end up with the second or third language they picked. This balances the class sizes and lets the less-popular languages survive, but critics of the system think it undermines student choice — for the benefit of the adults who teach them. This year three Spanish classes and a French class were replaced with additional sections of German, Korean, and Advanced Placement Chinese in order to bolster the numbers.
According to Raya and his contingent, this was inexplicable, and so much tension existed in the department, they suspected the only reason it was done was to favor teachers who might otherwise be let go if the programs were cut.
“We voted as a department years ago — the languages that don’t support themselves, we’re going to let them die off,” Spanish teacher John Ryland said. Tagalog, Russian, and Greek had all seen the ax.
Part of the problem is that teaching at Lowell is a popular gig no one wants to lose. “There’s always the fear that a diminishing number of students taking certain classes leads to a change in who gets to teach classes and teach at Lowell,” social studies teacher Ken Tray told us.
It’s particularly rough in the language department, where changing preferences can mean the end of a job. “Other departments don’t have competition or concern that there will be enough kids signing up to teach their classes,” Tray said.
Ong, who decides which language classes to save (and who should teach them), denied there was any favoritism. “If you look at the whole picture, what is lost here? Nobody lost their job,” she said. “People can say I favor the lesser languages. I protect all languages as department head.”
Then there’s the AP issue.
Nearly 100 percent of Lowell students graduate, nearly all continue on to college, and the school’s basic requirements are geared toward getting them into at least the University of California system. Unlike many other schools, Lowell doesn’t limit the number of Advanced Placement, or college-level, classes a student can take, and many kids use them to heavily spice their transcripts and entice college admissions counselors.
For teachers, the advanced curriculum of AP classes is a chance to be challenged along with the kids. “Among teachers, there’s no shortage of desire to teach AP,” said Bryan Ritter, who teaches AP English.
And the school is happy to provide as many AP classes as it can. According to San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) policy, for every 20 AP exams that are taken by students, the district will fund one additional AP class. So 100 students testing means additional funding for one new teacher. “At Lowell we make a bundle off of that,” said Terry Abad, president of the Lowell Alumni Association.
The money is deposited in the school’s general fund, but rather than hire additional AP teachers, Lowell’s administrators ask staff members to teach multiple sections of AP classes. By doubling and tripling the number of AP classes one teacher instructs, the school frees up thousands of dollars to pay for other school services.
“From a financial perspective, if teachers weren’t teaching AP, we wouldn’t be able to fund school,” Abad said. “Without AP money Lowell would be a disaster.”
But another disaster is in the works, with overburdened teachers looking to dump classes and underburdened teachers wishing they could have them. “The idea of AP is to give a very intensive college experience and give teachers the time to properly attend to those classes. The whole system has been corrupted,” said David Yuan, an English teacher.
Nowhere in the school is that more obvious than the language department, where one teacher has four Chinese AP classes. “It’s a tremendous amount of work,” Xiaolin Chang said. “I’m hoping next year someone else will teach.”
Hansen said these concerns have not fallen on deaf ears. Two subcommittees have been established for reviewing the numbers to determine classes and another “to create policies and procedures that are written, so that it isn’t ‘I like you, I don’t like you, you’re cute, or whatever, the kids like you better.’ So that there’s some process,” Hansen said.
She refused to allow teachers to review old data to see if favoritism had played into past decisions and defended the language department chair. “I feel that in the limited time that I’ve been here, Ms. Ong deals with a staff of at least 18 or 19, all of whom feel passionate about their language, a complicated scheduling process, and I think she does a herculean task. She has the support of the majority of the faculty, who trust her and believe that she’s doing the best she can.”
Despite the concession to be included in future decision-making processes, Raya continues to wonder why there hasn’t been more of an effort to find out who trashed his computer and to rectify the rumors. “People still think a student did it. I’ve gotten lots of cards and e-mails from people, all supportive, but they keep thinking it’s a student,” Raya said.
But that seems almost impossible to believe, since no students had access to the area and there was no forced entry, “I would be very, very, very surprised if it wasn’t an adult,” Lipman said. “The note said you’re making too many problems for this department — students don’t know that.”
The district hired a private investigating firm, Brubeck and McGarrahan, to look into the situation, and Ellen McGarrahan released the findings of her investigation to SFUSD legal counsel Nov. 20. Her report states that 15 people — all faculty or staff — were interviewed. The investigators were unable to reach any conclusions.
But not everyone who uses the room was questioned. “I’m shocked that they haven’t questioned everyone in the department,” said Lipman, who was not contacted by any investigator. “I’m surprised they didn’t ask everyone what they knew. It seems like that would be the logical thing to do.”
Instead, on Oct. 23, during the middle of the school day, Raya was called downtown by Inspector Milanda Moore for almost three hours of what felt like a full interrogation. “My mistake was I didn’t get a lawyer. I didn’t think I needed one. She duped me. She said it was an interview,” Raya said. He told the inspector he didn’t have a key to the building or any knowledge of the security code to quell the alarm and was at a class at City College the night before and working out at the gym the morning the vandalism was discovered.
“She said, ‘Why don’t you take a polygraph?” I said, ‘I have no problem doing it, but I’ll do it on the condition that every administrator, every faculty member, and every student do it.’<\!q>”
Raya told her, “I’m the victim! Why are you asking me?”
At Raya’s interrogation, one of the letters he wrote to assistant principal Peter Van Court was touted as an example of how Raya was capable of orchestrating his own hate crime. “She [Moore] said to me the language in the hate crime note sounds like the language I used to Van Court in my letter. I said, ‘Excuse me, there’s nothing in that letter that says faggot.’<\!q>”
Inspector Moore refused to comment on this case, except to say it was still open.
Hansen is not a popular principal these days. Since September she’s been “dropping in” on classes for short observations, which she says are a way to get to know the school and encourage a pedagogical dialogue.
In theory, this sounds exactly like what an engaged administrator should be doing — but the practice has had a hard launch as teachers have perceived it as an opportunity for the administration to unfairly critique them at their jobs.
“The principal started off the school year wanting to have this intense conversation about our teaching. Dropping into classes was initially portrayed as a collegial part of an ongoing process of a development exercise,” said Ken Tray, a social studies teacher and United Educators of SF union representative. Instead, the principal’s practice of dropping into classes to casually observe teachers has created a backlash against her style and approach.
“A record number of grievances have already been filed this year,” Tray said. “Last year we had one grievance the entire year, and there were some very serious issues that came up.”
“They’re clearly a lot more than friendly, getting-to-know-you visits,” Yuan said. “There are a lot of people that are unhappy. It’s tense. This is essentially a new policy.”
An unprecedented meeting Nov. 2 drew more than half the faculty to a forum to air their concerns. Their biggest gripes: a lack of trust, a rush to judgment, issues with communication, a sense of top-down management, and a real worry that teachers were being unfairly evaluated, which is a violation of the contractual agreement between the teachers’ union and the district.
“Lowell does not have to be fixed,” Tray said. “It’s creating a faux crisis. What’s the issue here? We have outstanding students doing outstanding work. More punitive measures from the administration seem out of place.”
Some say Hansen may be a good principal who’s just at the wrong school. “I think she’s probably a pretty good turnaround principal,” Yuan said. “Her approach is good for schools with more difficult students.”
“I think everyone is pretty much united,” school board member Eric Mar said. “The principal is autocratic and doesn’t resolve conflict. The principal chosen is the wrong person for the school, and that’s one of the root causes for the conflict.”
November is Transgender Remembrance Month at Lowell. GSA posters commemorating transgender victims of hate crimes hang throughout the hallways, and on a busy afternoon the students rush by them, their arms loaded with books, their ears pressed to cell phones, appearing like the young professionals they hope to someday be.
When asked why the students weren’t informed or brought together as a group to discuss a hate crime on their campus, Hansen said, “We can’t, first of all, have a schoolwide assembly. We have 2,700 kids and we have an auditorium of 900 capacity.”
And she said, “We wouldn’t generally broadcast this kind of information. Whenever a computer’s stolen or something terrible happens, we don’t tend to broadcast it.”
However, the day before the hate crime was discovered, another teacher’s tires were slashed. Hansen went on the school’s broadcasting system, Radio Lowell, to denounce the slashing as an inappropriate way of dealing with anger and asked anyone in the community with information to come forward.
That wouldn’t necessarily be the way to handle a hate crime, but according to other professionals in the field, secrecy isn’t always the best route either.
Al Adams has handled a few hate crimes during his 19 years as a principal, even writing about a 1994 incident at his school, Lick-Wilmerding High, for the National Association of Independent Schools newsletter. He titled his article “When Homophobia Rears Its Head.”
“My rule of thumb with anything like this is to be open and honest and candid about it. That always goes a long way. Make sure the victim feels safe and also search out teachable moments,” Adams said.
“The most effective treatment of a hate crime is to shine the spotlight on it and make the perpetrators accountable,” said Sam Thoron, who recently retired after six years as national president of Parents for Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), an organization he’s been involved with since his daughter came out in 1990.
He said there’s a fine line between shining a light and making too big a deal, but “burying something like this tends to make it worse.
“I would expect the school to make a clear and public statement that this is not acceptable, but it’s awful easy to hide these things.”
Barbara Blinick, faculty sponsor of the GSA, was worried about the lack of candor. “That was a fault. I do think that could have been done better. [Hansen] made a choice not to make it public. But everyone knew about it, everyone was talking about it, and that’s why the GSA wanted to respond.” Blinick spoke with Hansen shortly after the incident and arranged for the GSA to do the outreach.
“The students have been really brave and thoughtful and working so hard,” Blinick said. “We all agree it took too long, and some of the tardiness was that we wanted it to be perfect.”
On Nov. 30, more than two months after Raya discovered his defaced desk, an outreach bulletin written by the GSA was distributed to the students, with a cover letter from Hansen denouncing homophobic discrimination but without specific mention of Raya or the hate crime that happened in the school.
Communities United Against Violence does outreach in the SFUSD through a speaker’s bureau, a program founded by Sup. Tom Ammiano. The group is often contacted by schools after a hate crime occurs, and since 1978 some 70 volunteers have been visiting schools such as Washington, Galileo, Ida B. Wells, and Mission to talk about what it takes to have an open and supportive community, “but we don’t get invited to Lowell,” program director Connie Champagne told us.
“They need to be coming here,” Blinick said. “That’s a really easy way to talk about these issues. They should be hitting every 10th-grade classroom, and I thought that they were.”
The private investigator’s report has been finalized, with no conclusion about who may have targeted Raya. The city’s investigation is ongoing and already reeks of a case gone stale for lack of evidence and witnesses.
Nothing further about it has been said to the faculty, and nearly everyone questioned by the Guardian said they hoped to hear something more soon. Conditions in the department haven’t necessarily improved, and veteran teachers are already looking forward to the end of the year.
“Who did it? That piece needs to get solved for them to move forward,” said the mediator, Lynda Smith, who, after two sessions, was not invited back by the administration.
“I’m so discouraged now,” Raya said. “I’m just at low ebb. I’m really disgusted. I don’t want to leave Lowell. I love Lowell. I’m addicted to Lowell. But the morale is so low I think it’s going to be my time to go. I never thought I would.
“The sad part is it’s not the kids. They’re the ones I will miss the most. It’s sad that this has to prompt me at 50 years old, spending more than half my life in this profession, to decide that this is the time to quit.”

No pass for Newsom

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom may tell the media that he’s not sure he wants his job anymore, but the reality is that he’s been running for reelection for months. His campaign team is in place, the fundraising is about to kick into high gear, and when 2007 dawns Newsom will start to line up endorsements, put money in the bank, and do everything possible to clear the field. That’s not just a campaign consultant’s fantasy: right now there’s no clear, obvious opponent for a mayor whose poll ratings are almost unimaginably high.
But Newsom can’t be allowed to run without any credible opponent. Somebody has to challenge Newsom — and it’s not as impossible as it might seem.
As Steven T. Jones reports (“Blood in the Water,” page 12), Newsom’s popularity is broad but not terribly deep. He’s got a lot of feel-good political capital that dates back to the same-sex marriage days, but there are a lot of really serious problems facing the city — and when you get right down to it, Newsom hasn’t done a hell of a lot to address any of them. For the past year San Francisco politics and public policy have been driven by the Board of Supervisors, with the mayor reacting. Other than cutting welfare payments for homeless people, it’s hard to think of a single major local initiative that the mayor has taken on. He certainly hasn’t ended homelessness. He hasn’t brought down the violent crime level. He hasn’t improved Muni. He hasn’t done much to create jobs and clearly hasn’t made the city a better place for small locally owned independent businesses.
He’s letting developers call the shots at the Planning Department, letting landlords drive housing policy, following the lead of some very bad actors downtown on education, and letting the city’s structural budget problems fester.
In 2003, Newsom was a strong front-runner from day one and beat back a dramatic challenge from Matt Gonzalez, in part because he had so much money. This time around, money may not be the deciding factor: with public financing in place, a candidate who can raise a respectable sum (a few hundred thousand, not a few million) will be able to mount a competitive effort. And with ranked-choice voting (RCV), several candidates challenging Newsom from different perspectives might leave the mayor unable to pull together a clear majority. (If RCV had been in place in 2003, it’s entirely possible, if not likely, that Gonzalez would have been elected mayor.)
The list of people who have either talked about running or are being pushed by one interest group or another is long, and some of the strongest potential challengers seem to be biding their time. It’s true that the filing deadline isn’t until August, and in both 1999 and 2003 late entrants in the progressive camp made the best showings.
Still, if Newsom has the field to himself all spring and summer and nobody challenges his statements, questions his record, or offers people an alternative, the incumbent will try to anoint himself as the inevitable winner.
So at the very least, progressives need to make sure the mayor isn’t allowed to coast this spring. The supervisors need to keep pushing issues like police reform. They need to make sure the budget hearings point up the mayor’s real priorities. And elected officials and civic activists should hold off on endorsing Newsom by default, unless and until he presents some evidence that he’s going to do a lot better in the next four years than he’s done in this term.

TUESDAY

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Dec. 5

Music

Little Ones

If there could be a band that captured the euphoria of playtime, pillow fights, and recess, it would be the Little Ones. The band’s brand of melodious psychedelic power pop puts a smile on the face of even the most cynical music snob. With an abundance of las, optimistic oohs, and no shortage of hand claps, the Little Ones bring happiness back in a big way. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

With Small Sins and Pants Pants Pants
9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
www.wearethelittleones.com

Music

… And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead

I saw Trail of Dead open for the Sex Pistols at a reunion show in England. The audience – primarily 40-year-old balding ex-punk rockers – was in no mood to watch any band other than the Pistols, so they booed Trail of Dead unmercifully. After two songs, singer Conrad Keeley said, “OK, this is a punk rock show, and we’re going to play it like a punk rock show. Fuck you, fuck the Sex Pistols, we’re all going to fucking die!” They then proceeded to launch into the most hardcore set I’ve ever seen. They’re appearing with the Blood Brothers, a band I used to play really loud whenever a hippie drum circle happened outside my window in college. Got them to move and get jobs within five minutes. (Aaron Sankin)

With the Blood Brothers and Celebration
8 p.m.
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$20
(415) 346-6000
www.livenation.com
www.trailofdead.com
www.thebloodbrothers.com

Elsbernd’s bad police plan

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As if the San Francisco Police Department didn’t have enough trouble with discipline, Sup. Sean Elsbernd has introduced a charter amendment that would allow the police chief to suspend officers for as long as 45 days. That doesn’t sound so bad, but it’s a terrible idea, and the supervisors should kill it.
Let’s start with a dose of reality here: in a lot of jurisdictions police officers don’t get suspended for 45 days. They don’t run amok and wind up with months-long unpaid vacations. They get fired.
That’s not surprising: people with a license to carry a gun and shoot to kill — with the legal right on the basis of their own judgment to take another person’s life — don’t have the right to mess around with the rules.
We’re not talking about tiny, inoffensive infractions here: the stuff that merits a long suspension in this city isn’t minor offenses like rude conduct or bad language. It’s clear, unequivocal abuse of authority, excessive force, brutality, lying to cover up illegal conduct. In many cases the officers who are found guilty of these crimes — and they are crimes — shouldn’t be carrying guns and badges any more.
But it’s damn hard to fire a police officer in San Francisco, so people who have no business on the force cling to their jobs after disciplinary actions that amount to stiff fines.
Right now the chief can suspend a cop for as long as 10 days. That requires no formal action by the civilian Police Commission, no public record, no chance for community input. The idea is that fairly minor offenses should be taken care of quickly and that the head of the department should be empowered to handle them. Beyond 10 days, the case goes to the commission — and it should.
In the wake of the state Supreme Court decision known as Copley, the public has only very limited access to information about police disciplinary cases. In November three members of the Police Commission tried to keep the process as open as possible, and David Campos, Theresa Sparks, and Petra DeJesus deserve thanks for the effort. But with Joe Alioto Veronese — who made a grievous policy error — as the swing vote, the attempt went down, 4–3. So now, most of what cops do to get in trouble and most of what the city does to try to keep them in line will happen behind closed doors.
But at least the commission is a civilian agency, and at least some of the members have demonstrated a commitment to real oversight, and at least there’s a chance that cops who commit heinous offenses will face more than a quiet slap on the wrist and a clandestine pat on the back and a wink and a nod and a message that the rules don’t really apply to San Francisco’s finest.
It’s crazy that policy makers are even having this argument. But if San Francisco is going to continue to allow cops who ought to be back in civvies to stay on the force, an accountable civilian panel ought to be making that decision. SFBG

EDITOR’S NOTES

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
Like far too many liberals, I spend far too much time listing to NPR, which can lead to a special kind of brain rot: I once actually sat through an hour-long program on Mormon folk songs that included a long, upbeat, and respectful ode to Brigham Young “and his five and 40 wives.” Jesus, that’s a lot of wives.
But there are things I love, and Science Friday is one of them. While I was fighting the traffic on my way back from a friend’s house in Healdsburg last week, I heard a fascinating interview with Michael Pollan, the UC Berkeley journalism professor who’s written a series of New York Times articles and now a book on how truly weird food production is in the United States in 2006.
Of course, everyone was digesting a big Thanksgiving dinner, and Pollan wasted no time getting to his thesis: if we are what we eat, then most of us are a mixture of corn and petrochemicals.
He’s got evidence of this too: he has a friend in the biology department at Berkeley who ran a bunch of samples of fingernail and hair clippings from students and learned that much of the carbon that makes up the basic organic structure of a lot of human bodies can be traced back to one Midwestern grain and some fossil fuels.
The cow or turkey or pig you ate was fed with corn. The sugar in the salad dressing came from corn. The calories in the sodas the kids were drinking came from corn. And the corn came in part from ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which came from petroleum.
The point of all of this is that America has created a monocrop food system (well, duocrop — a lot of the animal protein that we eat comes from soybeans). That’s not healthy for a long list of ecological reasons — and it’s really bad for the economy.
The thing is, very little of what we eat comes from anywhere near where we live. Iowa, one of the most agriculturally productive parts of the world, imports almost all of its food these days. The corn grown in the state is shipped to giant centralized animal feedlots, which ship meat elsewhere.
I mention all of this, which is hardly news to a lot of people, because it plays into something that’s going on the first week in December in San Francisco. Dec. 4 through 10 is Shop Local First Week, which sounds kind of like small-town-Chamber-of-Commerce-boosterish stuff (and indeed, Mayor Gavin Newsom, who clearly isn’t paying attention, has formally endorsed it), but there’s a lot more behind this. The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, which sponsors the event, actually has a fairly radical economic platform emphasizing how local merchants — and not big chain stores and other out-of-town corporations — benefit local economies. In the food world, that means buying stuff grown somewhere near you (not hard around here). In the arena of holiday shopping (and consumer behavior in general), it means patronizing locally owned outfits — and not giving your dollars to the chains.
Our main news story this week (see “The Morning After,” page 18) illustrates well how big chain owners operate: the combine owned by Dean Singleton, which now controls almost all the big papers in the Bay Area, is laying off journalists and (maybe) outsourcing jobs to India. The San Francisco Chronicle is outsourcing its printing, killing the local press operators union.
And the money all leaves town. SFBG

The morning after

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
The plight of newspapers is a popular news story these days, from a late-August cover package in the Economist (“Who Killed the Newspaper?”) to National Public Radio’s On the Media last week (“Best of Times, Worst of Times”).
It’s usually told as the story of an industry on its deathbed, bleeding from self-inflicted wounds and those delivered by Wall Street, Main Street, Craigslist, and the blogger’s laptop. Ad revenues have nose-dived in recent years. Circulation is down nationwide. Journalism scandals and shortcomings have damaged the whole profession’s credibility.
And staff newspaper blogs alone won’t be enough to bring a new generation of tech-savvy Americans back to hard-copy publications that even smell stodgy and old.
Yet the bottom line is still the bottom line. The truth of the matter is that many publicly traded newspaper companies have healthy profit margins ranging between 15 and 20 percent. But the tendency of the doom and gloom business press to sensationalize bad news may actually make things easier for William “Lean” Dean Singleton, the cost-cutting king of Denver-based MediaNews Group, which recently announced a round of staff reductions at its Bay Area newspapers. The cuts came amid claims of a massive dip in ad income just a few months after Singleton promised that his company’s buyout of local newspapers wouldn’t diminish the quality or quantity of journalism here.
“Given continued declines in revenue, we need to reduce expenses significantly, and thus have no alternative but to implement a reduction in [the] work force,” George Riggs, who was recently appointed to lead the company’s Northern California operations, told employees in a memo Oct. 20. Several such memos have now been posted on the Internet.
If this is how quickly the news biz can turn ugly, it’s a wonder MediaNews was attracted to print journalism in the first place. Who knows what newspapers around here will look like in another few months? How much fat can they trim before they start hitting bone?
They aren’t just cutting staff. The Bay Area’s newspaper establishment is now outsourcing work to circumvent those pesky labor unions. The press operators’ union at the San Francisco Chronicle — which was the sole union holdout against management’s demand for expanded control and decreased benefits — could disappear in three years as a result of a new printing contract with a Canadian company. MediaNews recently announced plans to outsource ad production positions to India.
Consolidation already has amounted to fewer reporters covering individual stories that are distributed to several publications, including at least one story about the latest layoffs. That means fewer editorial perspectives on key public policies (and possibly fewer editorial positions) for readers in a market that’s notorious for its high intellectual demand and robust political participation.
Only an ongoing federal Justice Department investigation and a civil lawsuit threaten to slow down big changes going on at the Bay Area dailies. A federal judge ruled just before deadline in real estate mogul Clint Reilly’s antitrust claim against the Hearst Corp., publisher of the Chronicle, and MediaNews that for now, at least, the two could not combine circulation and advertising operations to save money.
The companies had secured a court order sealing key records unearthed during discovery, including depositions and exhibits, citing the right to protect confidential trade secrets. It’s an ironic move for a group of papers that have regularly sued government agencies for public records and made a great show of their First Amendment pieties.
Federal Judge Susan Illston on Nov. 28 blocked the two companies from merging some advertising and distribution operations, a consolidation she said was probably illegal under antitrust laws. And she sounded her concern that Hearst isn’t the “passive equity investor” it had represented itself in court to be. She also revealed the contents of letters written in March and April by company executives: “Hearst and MediaNews will enter into agreements to offer national advertising and internet advertising sales for their Bay Area newspapers on a joint basis, and to consolidate the Bay Area distribution networks of such newspapers, all on mutually satisfactory terms and conditions, and in each case subject to any limitation required to ensure compliance with applicable law.” (For more extensive information on the ruling and related coverage, see www.sfbg.com.)
For those who regard newspapers as more of a public trust than an engine for deep profits, the future is starting to look a bit unsettling.
When Singleton expanded his control over the Bay Area threefold last summer, he temporarily quelled some discontent by assuring skeptics that there were no planned changes in staffing and salaries as a result of the transactions.
“We’re looking forward to doing a lot of good things here in Northern California,” Singleton told San Jose Mercury News staffers, according to the paper’s story on the buyout.
But employees at the papers still had every reason to be nervous about Singleton’s $1 billion takeover of the Contra Costa Times, the Mercury News, and other papers from the Sacramento-based McClatchy Co.
MediaNews already owned the Oakland Tribune, the San Mateo County Times, and the Marin Independent Journal among others in California before it carved excess properties out of McClatchy, which had grown too large following its purchase of the Knight Ridder chain earlier this year.
The purchases allowed Singleton to seize almost complete control of 14 metropolitan and suburban media markets. The only remaining daily print competitor in the Bay Area was the Chronicle and its parent company, the Hearst Corp., which subsequently purchased $300 million in MediaNews stock, a deal the feds are still investigating. When the transaction with Hearst was finalized, top executives at MediaNews were collectively awarded about $2 million in bonuses.
Some profiles of Singleton have depicted him as a good old-fashioned newspaper journalist, but knowing his cost-cutting reputation, only a fool would assume there were no plans to consolidate major operating functions to save money regardless of any promises made. Singleton has always been more about business than news.
Clustered ownership and shared management were prominent features of the company that MediaNews presented to investors at a Deutsche Bank “Global High Yield” conference in October. An April letter that reappeared in federal court last week during a hearing in Reilly’s suit confirmed that MediaNews and Hearst hoped to shed costs by possibly combining circulation and advertising operations.
Layoffs are also a big part of Singleton’s MO. Respected but tough Contra Costa Times editor Chris Lopez was let go in October because he’d become “redundant,” according to a memo company executive John Armstrong sent to employees.
“That came as a shock to a lot of people in the newsroom,” one source at the paper told the Guardian. Known for handing cash rewards out of his wallet to reporters who nailed concise stories for the front page, Lopez had attempted to play down Singleton’s reputation when the purchases were announced. Lopez had been at the paper for more than six years and had helped earn Singleton a Pulitzer Prize during a six-year stint at the company’s flagship Denver Post, received for its coverage of the Columbine shootings.
“In better times, we might have found a way to ignore an extra position or two or even three,” Armstrong wrote in the memo.
Lopez insisted to the Guardian in a phone interview that he had proposed his own termination to ease anticipated cuts elsewhere.
“My layoff from the paper was not unexpected,” Lopez said. “It caught the staff off guard, but I saw it coming. I made the recommendation. I was trying to save some jobs in the newsroom.”
The loss of an experienced editor may have saved some jobs … for now. But maybe not for long. Reporters have been asked to summarize their beats for managers to determine how they can cover single subjects for a number of papers. The idea seems to be maximizing staff output rather than ensuring broad coverage of the communities.
A story about Lopez’s departure written by a Times reporter also appeared on the Merc’s Web site. MediaNews is also looking into multimedia deals with local TV stations and arming reporters with cameras for podcasts, one source told us.
Armstrong told the Guardian in a phone interview that opinion columnists, for instance, could still cover the same stories. “But we had found some situations where reporters were sent to the same events like Oakland [Raiders] away games.” He said offering buyouts to staffers has been “successful,” but it wasn’t enough to stem declining revenue, triggering the need for “involuntary” layoffs.
All of this may make sense from a strictly economic perspective. After all, doing more with less is a widely accepted imperative for profit-driven corporations. But there is a public price that will be paid for this reality: Bay Area citizens will get less original reporting and fewer perspectives on the news.
A former senior staffer at a major Bay Area daily wrote an open missive outlining recent major stories covered by fewer reporters: “Three months after MediaNews Group added two major Knight Ridder dailies to its far-flung Northern California newspaper group, news coverage is well on its way to being homogenized in this formerly competitive market.”
The observation is borne out by a Guardian survey of three major MediaNews papers. Out of 10 top recent cultural and political stories in the Bay Area, nine were covered by the same reporter, who wrote the same article for all three papers. (For details, visit www.sfbg.com.)
Under the recent layoff announcement, the Merc could lose up to 101 employees, half from its newsroom, while more than 100 business-side positions will be reportedly moved to a new, nonunionized San Ramon office of the California Newspapers Partnership (CNP), a consortium of companies including Gannet Co. and Stephens Group that helped MediaNews fund its recent purchases. The centralized San Ramon space could continue to fill up with employees from the business side of the papers who have been forced to reapply for their jobs under the CNP corporate moniker. They would presumably fall out from under union protection.
The company’s Peninsula and East Bay papers saw cuts across their operations from Walnut Creek to San Mateo. Armstrong told the Times the layoffs were “broad but not deep.” East Bay Express writer Robert Gammon, a former Tribune reporter and union organizer, revealed in early November that MediaNews planned to leave behind the Tribune’s historic downtown tower and move many of its staffers to the San Ramon office. News-side functions could be moved to a cheaper spot across from the Oakland Coliseum.
“The question is how do we continue to put out a paper people want to read if we continue to cut further?” Luther Jackson, executive officer for the San Jose Newspaper Guild, which represents almost 500 workers at the Merc, asked the Guardian. “I have a concern that when newspapers face increased competition for advertising, why are we cutting service? Does it work for readers? Does it work for advertisers?”
The Bay Area isn’t alone. In the complex transactions that took place over the summer, Hearst bought the St. Paul Pioneer Press from McClatchy and shifted it to MediaNews in exchange for stock in the company. At the Pi Press, as it’s known in Minnesota, 40 positions were cut in November. A MediaNews paper in Los Angeles, the Daily News, recently axed its publisher and 20 other workers.
MediaNews enraged union workers at the Merc when it offered them a contract during September negotiations that was unlike anything they’d seen at the paper before. The company has since toned down some of its harsher demands but asserted that if a tentative agreement were accepted by Nov. 30, the Merc might see fewer layoffs, Jackson told the Guardian.
The proposal would grant management the right to modify insurance coverage without telling the union, freeze the paper’s pension plan and replace it with a 401(k), and change the types of work that could be assigned to nonunion employees. It would also allow the paper to hire new workers at “market-rate” salaries, which means their pay increases could be capped at lower rates.
The company may choose to simply not replace costly veterans who are retiring or accepting buyouts, meaning cub reporters could find themselves with fewer seasoned mentors around to help teach them government and private sector watchdogging.
The guild foresees losing nearly 200 members if the full number of layoffs and worker transfers are carried out. And many guild members fear it may also mean the beginning of the end of newspapers as we know them.
Corporations have the right to see to their bottom lines. But communities and individuals also have a right to the fruits that independent, competitive journalism bestows. And that’s the right being asserted now in civil court by Clint Reilly.
While federal and state investigators have largely been idling, Reilly sued Hearst, MediaNews, and its other business partners last summer. He asked Judge Illston to temporarily halt the transactions until the trial begins in his antitrust claim against the companies. She denied Reilly’s initial request for a preliminary injunction, in part because the Hearst investment had not been officially inked, even though the trial isn’t expected to start until this spring.
In her opinion, however, she suggested parts of the deal were troubling and has not ruled out forcing MediaNews to give up some of its newly acquired assets. Earlier this month Reilly’s attorney, Joe Alioto, again asked the judge for an injunction. The renewed appeal was inspired in part by the recently announced job cuts.
The plaintiffs are arguing Hearst and MediaNews previously withheld a letter from the court that the two companies had signed agreeing to discuss the possibility of combining some circulation and advertising functions to save money. In his request Alioto told the judge the companies were “rapidly consolidating, commingling, and irrevocably altering their San Francisco Bay Area newspapers so as to frustrate this Court’s ability to provide an effective remedy for their antitrust violations.”
During a tense hearing last week on the matter, Alioto asked that top Hearst and MediaNews executives be ordered to testify immediately. He suggested Hearst’s board of directors would never have agreed to invest $300 million in MediaNews if it couldn’t also merge distribution and ad sales with its competitor.
“I don’t think there is any doubt that they intend to end up with newspapers that are very different than they are today,” Alioto said. He wants any such discussions stopped by the court, adding, “We believe they intend to wipe out the possibility of any of these papers to remain freestanding. These papers will not be the same within a very short amount of time.”
Hearst attorney Daniel Wall angrily fired back that no one was trying to deceive the court with a price-fixing agreement and that the companies were merely discussing the possibility of “pro-competition collaboration,” which Wall described as a business partnership lawfully permitted by the Justice Department. He disclosed that the Chronicle was bleeding millions of dollars annually, partially because of lost revenue to the Web, and exclaimed that drastic cost reductions were necessary to keep the paper alive.
“These are tough times for newspapers, and they need to take cost out of the system,” Wall told the judge. “They need to find new revenue streams.”
Hearst has already faced something akin to all of this before. Reilly sued it in 2000 when the company bought the Chron and attempted to nix competition by shutting down its long-held San Francisco Examiner. Reilly didn’t block the deal, but the Justice Department forced Hearst to keep open the reliably conservative Examiner, today owned by another Denver-based company.
This week Illston ruled that Hearst and MediaNews must temporarily stop any agreements to combine advertising sales and distribution networks until Dec. 6, when she’ll decide whether to extend her prohibition on merging business operations.
Reilly has emerged over the last decade as a serious pain for corporate media executives and unshakable critic of concentrated newspaper ownership in the Bay Area. His most recent lawsuit charges that the Hearst and MediaNews partnership would dilute fair competition and limit alternatives for both readers and advertisers.
“They started the blood flow with the firings,” Alioto told reporters after the hearing. “We think when they’re done with this they’re going to have entirely different newspapers.”
Recent job losses don’t stop at just MediaNews. The Chronicle is getting in on the action too.
Divisive contract negotiations between the Chronicle and the Web Pressman and Prepress Workers Union Local 4 over the last two years ended recently when the union “reluctantly approved” an agreement, union treasurer Paul Kolter told us. The union was the last holdout at the paper to accept drastically reduced workers’ rights.
By successfully pushing its will on the unions, Hearst has virtually ensured that the press operators won’t pose much of a threat to the company anymore, because around the same time it signed a $1 billion outsourcing deal with the Canadian printing company Transcontinental.
The union’s new contract is up in about three years, and there are no assurances Local 4 will have any workers in the new plant Transcontinental has promised to build. That could mean the end of its relationship with the Chronicle and about 225 workers from the paper that it represents.
The previous contract ended in the summer of 2005, and under the paper’s new publisher, Frank “Darth” Vega, management called for drastic cuts in salaries and benefits. The two groups spent several intervening months battling over the proposed changes.
In July, Vega prepared the paper for a strike, issuing a memo that outlined exactly how to keep the paper operating throughout a work stoppage, and hired a notorious security firm that specializes in handling labor disputes.
The union points out that while the Chronicle complains of massive financial bloodletting, its parent company, Hearst, has somehow scraped together enough money for a brand-new $500 million office building in midtown Manhattan, the construction of which was completed over the summer. The company also sold the sprawling 82,000-acre ranch that surrounds Hearst Castle to the state early last year for nearly $100 million. It was once home to the notoriously belligerent and imperialistic newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
Union members say there are wide ramifications to what’s happening here. In July the World Association of Newspapers published a report describing how more news services globally, including the New York Times, were outsourcing major tasks, even news reporting, to save money.
“There are a lot of labor unions that have an interest in what is happening with us,” Local 4 organizer and press operator Bruce Carlton told members at a meeting in late October. “If this flies, it will be a blueprint on how to break unions. We will be sent back into the ’30s.”
The mood is dark for many employees working under MediaNews and Hearst. The scrappy feel and hard-driving reportage of the CoCo Times under Lopez and Knight Ridder are believed by some to be at risk following the purchases. “No one thinks we’re going to be a better newspaper because of this,” one source at the paper told us.
In another memo MediaNews executive Armstrong wrote to Bay Area staffers last week, he stated that the company, in fact, predicted its “advertising revenue challenges.”
“We have no additional job reductions planned due to economic conditions, but we cannot guarantee that additional reductions might not be necessary in the future,” he wrote. “Our job level is dependent on our revenue performance.”
The memo also shows that the company plans to sell an office in Danville and two parking lots in downtown Oakland.
News accounts depicted third-quarter earnings for MediaNews based on Securities and Exchange Commission filings as a windfall profit caused by its purchases of the Times and the Merc. But the company’s ad revenue and circulation are actually down a few percentage points, and it made $16 million from the July sale of an office building in Long Beach, which offsets a simple analysis of its financial standing.
It’s still a company that topped $1 billion in revenue last year, a figure that has increased steadily since 2002, but Singleton has never feared doing business with loads of debt on the books, which he’s always used to fuel new purchases. For the Bay Area papers, MediaNews took on a $350 million bank loan in August.
MediaNews has still managed to take recent dire economic forecasts to a fever pitch despite its confidently large debt burden, enabling the company to implement a business model that’s hardly new for Singleton. He knows how to make money. Interestingly, for an industry that’s supposedly on the ropes, several billionaires (who didn’t become wealthy by investing poorly) have in the last few weeks publicly expressed interest in purchasing some of the nation’s largest dailies.
The Boston Globe noted earlier this month that rock industry tycoon David Geffen and grocery chain investor Ron Burkle were considering a bid for the Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times. That paper recently endured a major shakeup when a top editor was fired for refusing to execute job cuts demanded by the company. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch has considered a run for the Globe, and more buyout rumors have floated around the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant. Such deals could signal a fundamental shift in how newspapers are regarded with respect to their newsgathering responsibilities.
“Geffen has reportedly told associates that he’d be happy with returns comparable to the 3 or 4 percent he might get from municipal bonds,” the Globe wrote. Others have discussed turning individual newspapers into nonprofits.
But Singleton probably isn’t going anywhere, and a lot of people are going to have to learn how to get along with him around here, Texas drawl and all, unless the feds shut down his party.
Knight Ridder was a respected newspaper chain before investors grew restless and demanded greater short-term profit margins. It was sold earlier this year to McClatchy (begrudgingly for some top execs and Pulitzer-wielding journalists who openly fought with Knight Ridder’s financial backers prior to the sale). Knight Ridder posted a profit margin of nearly 20 percent in 2004.
Employees of the chain wrote a chilling open letter shortly before it was sold: “Knight Ridder is not merely a public company. It is a public trust. It must balance corporate profitability with civic purpose. We oppose those who would cripple the purpose by coercing more profit. We abhor those for whom good business is insufficient and excellent journalism is irrelevant.” SFBG

Fast Food Nation

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Book lovers always lament movie adaptations: they rarely deliver. But Fast Food Nation, like a swift injection of growth hormone, adds flesh and character to the very real problems of where America’s food comes from and the different ways it’s absolutely mishandled. The feature film is based on the 2001 nonfiction book by journalist Eric Schlosser, who helped director Richard Linklater finesse the screenplay into something of a morality tale tracing the true origins of a Mickey’s hamburger.
Following the tangled strands of food production and consumption, the film jumps between the perspectives of exploited immigrant workers clad in Hazmat suits in a meat processing plant and Greg Kinnear playing the hapless corporate hack trying to figure out just how in the heck his company’s Big Ones are coming up contaminated on the buns. There’s a predictable arc to the narrative, most noticeable in teenage character Amber (Ashley Johnson), a bright-eyed Mickey’s employee who gets a see-the-light lesson from her ex-activist uncle (Linklater favorite Ethan Hawke). Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) as the apathetic burger flipper is the perfect antidote to Amber’s painful optimism, serving up some old food service clichés. But his spit in the burger isn’t the biggest “eww-gross” moment.
Linklater, a vegetarian, wasn’t able to get permission to shoot in an American meat processing plant, so the movie uses real footage from a Mexican one that agreed to be filmed because Schlosser’s tale casts a true light on America’s despotic immigration policies. The scenes of women trading sex for jobs at the border-town plant become very believable when juxtaposed with images of real-time slaughter. Schlosser said workers at a Greeley, Colo., plant whom he interviewed for the book criticized the movie after a screening in Denver — the Mexican plant looked too sterile and unrealistic compared to where they work.
It’s been 100 years since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle inspired laws to reform meat packing plants. By turning journalism into fiction and transutf8g that from print to real, stomach-turning imagery, Fast Food Nation once again questions America’s massive appetite. I still haven’t eaten meat since I saw the scene in which a cow’s skin is stripped off its body with a chain and a winch, a process more befitting an offshore oil rig than a slaughterhouse. (Amanda Witherell)
FAST FOOD NATION
Opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters
See Move Clock at www.sfbg.com
www.foxsearchlight.com/fastfoodnation

Journalists need to fight back

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EDITORIAL At the annual awards dinner Nov. 9 of the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists, the mood was somber. One of the winners of the Journalist of the Year award, Josh Wolf, was behind bars for refusing to give unpublished material to the authorities. Two others, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada of the San Francisco Chronicle, were only free pending appeal of a judge’s order that they go to jail unless they reveal the names of confidential sources.
On the eve of the dinner, the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Dean Baquet, had been fired for refusing to go along with drastic newsroom job cuts ordered by an out-of-town corporate headquarters. The event’s keynote speaker, Jerry Roberts, had been forced to leave his job as editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press after the multimillionaire publisher demanded that basic news reporting be squelched.
The buzz around the room was that more layoffs were coming at the Contra Costa Times and San Jose Mercury News, papers just recently purchased by Dean Singleton, who now owns every major daily in the Bay Area except for the San Francisco Chronicle (which is owned by Hearst, one of his business partners). And indeed, the CoCo Times announced the day after the dinner that it had cut jobs across the board and was outsourcing some production work to a firm with facilities in India.
Linda Jue, the president of the SPJ chapter, made a point in her opening remarks about the need for journalists to take a more active stance, to fight against the assault on freedom of the press and journalistic standards that’s happening across the country. She had exactly the right point — and local and national journalism groups need to wake up and start paying attention.
These are particularly ugly times — the amount of government secrecy, particularly at the federal level, is almost unprecedented. But there’s something else just as bad going on: consolidation of media ownership is destroying the profession of journalism. And that’s something that groups made of working journalists have to start addressing.
There are all sorts of ways to get started. The SPJ, both local and national, ought to formally request the federal Justice Department to overturn the deal that gave Singleton hegemony over the Bay Area market and should press for a full investigation into Hearst’s role in the deal. These organizations (including the big unions that represent newspaper workers) ought to be working with the likes of Media Alliance in demanding that the Federal Communications Commission tighten the rules on ownership of broadcast media. Publicly traded companies that own newspapers should face organized shareholder-resolution campaigns opposing debilitating newsroom cuts. They should look at ways to support San Francisco investor Clint Reilly in his lawsuit against the Singleton deal and should at the very least issue statements on it. They should send regular delegations to see Wolf in jail and should press Rep. Nancy Pelosi to demand a federal shield law — an end to the federalizaton of law enforcement investigations (which can land people like Wolf in jail).
Sure, the Internet is changing the face of the media industry, and there are all kinds of other challenges — but in the end, no matter what the publishing platform, there will always be a need in a democratic society for qualified professional reporters and editors. And those of us in that line of work need to stand up to make sure that big media chains demanding obscene corporate profits don’t suck the life out of American journalism. SFBG

Yes, the news is grim, but that is why journalists need to fight back

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

SOS: The news in the media is grim and getting grimmer by the day. Journalists and journalism schools and journalism organizations have been much too passive in this time of great peril and need to start fighting back, particularly through their journalism organizations. The Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists struck the right note at its splendid annual Excellence in Journalism awards dinner last Thursday night. Below, in our editorial for Wednesday’s Guardian, are some of our ideas for action. We will be presenting more on a regular basis. Check our previous ideas in the Guardian and on the Bruce blog. Meanwhile, join SPJ, Media Alliance and FAIR, and follow the media news on the Romenesko media column at Poynter.org and ChainLinks.org, the newspaper union website of news alerts and stories in the land of ChainLinks.

And support the independent voices. And support the independent- minded journalists on the chain papers who risk their jobs to fight the forces of consolidation and chains-are-us journalism, mainstream and alternative.

Much more to come, send along your ideas, B3

SFBG: Journalists need to fight back

More Hellman and SFSOS

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By Steven T. Jones
I just got another call from Warren Hellman, who said he was saddened to see a group he founded but later disavowed — the sleazy conservative attack organization SFSOS — is one of the only groups in town to oppose the school bond measure Proposition A, which Hellman actively supports (his band will even be playing the campaign’s election night party at Slim’s tonight).
“For once, there is goodwill all around on something,” Hellman said of the school bond, which business groups such Committee on Jobs and progressives such as the SF People’s Organization enthusiastically support.
But he’s ashamed to see SFSOS opposing it, sending messages of concern to the group’s leader, Wade Randlett, and funder, Don Fisher, asking the group to send a message to its list noting that most business groups support it.
“It’s a personal vendetta on the part of the guy who runs SFSOS,” Hellman said.
That guy, Randlett, suddenly started attacking the school district last year when the superintendent was at odds with the school board. Randlett was secretly having an extramarital affair at the time with the superintendent’s spokesperson Lorna Ho (Randlett has since left his wife, Tamsin Randlett, and is still with Ho), which seemed to have been what prompted SFSOS to flip its focus from parks and potholes to the schools. And apparently, Randlett holds a grudge like few others, so he’s urging voters to deny needed school facilities to the kids. It’s a telling testament to the guy and the group that is leading the attacks on Chris Daly and openly supporting challenger Rob Black. It’s not too late to grab a Daly sign from his 16th and Mission HQ and do everything you can to keep this kind of sleaze out of City Hall.

More Hellman on SFSOS

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By Steven T. Jones
I just got another call from Warren Hellman, who said he was saddened to see a group he founded but later disavowed — the sleazy conservative attack organization SFSOS — is one of the only groups in town to oppose the school bond measure Proposition A, which Hellman actively supports (his band will even be playing the campaign’s election night party at Slim’s tonight).
“For once, there is goodwill all around on something,” Hellman said of the school bond, which business groups such Committee on Jobs and progressives such as the SF People’s Organization enthusiastically support.
But he’s ashamed to see SFSOS opposing it, sending messages of concern to the group’s leader, Wade Randlett, and funder, Don Fisher, asking the group to send a message to its list noting that most business groups support it.
“It’s a personal vendetta on the part of the guy who runs SFSOS,” Hellman said.
That guy, Randlett, suddenly started attacking the school district last year when the superintendent was at odds with the school board. Randlett was secretly having an extramarital affair at the time with the superintendent’s spokesperson Lorna Ho (Randlett has since left his wife, Tamsin Randlett, and is still with Ho), which seemed to have been what prompted SFSOS to flip its focus from parks and potholes to the schools. And apparently, Randlett holds a grudge like few others, so he’s urging voters to deny needed school facilities to the kids. It’s a telling testament to the guy and the group that is leading the attacks on Chris Daly and openly supporting challenger Rob Black. It’s not too late to grab a Daly sign from his 16th and Mission HQ and do everything you can to keep this kind of sleaze out of City Hall.

Hellman on SFSOS and Daly

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By Steven T. Jones
I spoke recently with Warren Hellman, the San Francisco investment banker that Business Week called “the Warren Buffet of the West Coast.” He’s a fascinating guy, someone who has drawn the ire of progressives by founding the downtown groups Committee on Jobs and SFSOS, but who has also joined with progressives to support the Healthy Saturdays closures in Golden Gate Park and other measures.
Among other topics, Hellman talked about SFSOS, which is leading the nasty and deceptive attacks on Sup. Chris Daly, just as it did on supervisors Jake McGoldrick and Gerardo Sandoval a couple years ago using mailers so heinous that both Hellman and Sen. Dianne Feinstein walked away from the group, leaving the Gap’s Don Fisher as its primary funder.
“SFSOS started doing the opposite of what I thought they would be doing, so it was fairly easy for me to part company with them. What I thought we were doing is trying to figure out ways to make the city better, not just being an antagonistic, nay-saying, attack organization. I’m not a huge fan of Gerardo Sandoval, but I thought the attacks on him were beyond anything I could imagine ever being in favor of myself. And it was a series of things like that and I said I don’t want anything more to do with this,” Hellman told the Guardian.
Hellman is still friends with Fisher, even though “there’s stuff that we just disagree on.” He considers Fisher a “very charitable man,” but Hellman has less than charitable things to say about SFSOS frontman Wade Randlett.
“If all things were equal, I’d just as soon that SFSOS went away,” Hellman said.
Hellman likes authentic, passionate people and has friends across the political spectrum, such as SEIU’s Josie Mooney. As for Daly, Hellman said, “I admire Chris Daly. I disagree with Chris on a lot of things he believes, but there are also probably a lot of things I would agree with Chris on. And I respect him.”

Bayview’s perspective

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› steve@sfbg.com
Consider the perspective of Marie Harrison and her political allies in Bayview — including the owners and writers at the San Francisco Bay View newspaper — whose support for Proposition 90 has put them at odds with the progressive political community.
Harrison, who is running for supervisor against incumbent Sophie Maxwell, lives on Quesada Avenue just off Third Street, in a diverse neighborhood bustling with vitality. Residents have transformed the wide median on her street into a gorgeous community garden. Almost all the houses are owner-occupied and well maintained.
“Blight” is not a word that most people would use to describe this neighborhood. Yet that is the word city officials have used to justify their decision earlier this year to turn this neighborhood and the rest of Bayview–Hunters Point into the biggest redevelopment area in city history over the strident objections of Harrison and others.
Redevelopment is a process that collects annual property tax increases into a fund that the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency uses to subsidize favored development projects, usually working with big developers and often bundling properties together for them to use, seizing the land by eminent domain if need be.
“The Redevelopment Agency is like a monster,” Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, a physician who covers the environment for the Bay View, told the Guardian while sitting in Harrison’s house.
For Harrison and others who moved to this neighborhood after being forced out of the Fillmore by another redevelopment effort that began in the ’60s, redevelopment means one thing: displacement of existing residents, or “repeopling,” a disturbing term that Harrison said she found in some Redevelopment Agency literature. They see it as simply a land grab by greedy developers working in cahoots with Mayor Gavin Newsom and the political establishment.
“Yeah, we’d like to see our community built up and look nice. But does that mean I don’t get to live here?” said Harrison, who, like many Bayview residents, owns her home but struggles to get by: she works, and her husband has two jobs, but they still live month to month.
It is that fear that caused Harrison to support Prop. 90 even after editors at the Guardian and other progressive voices tried to convince her that the state measure’s damaging aspects far outweigh its protections against eminent domain.
While Harrison admitted, “I see some things in Prop. 90 that scare the shit out of me,” she said, “desperation has set in.
“They’ve taken all hope. I see that I have to protect my community. Somebody has to remove the fear…. In this community, [Prop. 90 is] a hope and a chance.”
Where Maxwell and city leaders who favor redevelopment see progress, Harrison and others see an insidious conspiracy to take control of Bayview away from the people who live there.
And the narrative that city government is out to get Bayview has recently been reinforced by other actions: Newsom’s announcement that he wants to use Bayview–Hunters Point as a staging ground for the 2016 Olympics; expanded plans for upscale housing development around Candlestick Park; City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s rejection of a seemingly successful referendum drive challenging the Bayview Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan and the refusal of the Board of Supervisors to allow a vote on the matter; city staffers issuing regular citations to Bayview property owners to make improvements or risk fines; the Housing Authority’s failure to properly maintain the projects it manages; Herrera’s decision this month to seek civil injunctions preventing the free association of purported members of the Oakdale Mob; and the Redevelopment Agency’s Oct. 17 decision to let Lennar Corp. out of its pledge to build rental units on Parcel A of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.
Add it all up, and it becomes understandable why many Bayview residents buy into the vision that Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff has repeatedly put on the front page of his newspaper: “the bulldozers are at our borders,” just waiting to turn Bayview into one more white yuppie enclave and make a handful of politically connected developers rich in the process.
Officials strenuously deny this is true, arguing that this redevelopment project is all about helping the area by building more affordable housing, infrastructure, and open space and noting how the plan strictly forbids the seizure of residential property by eminent domain.
“The agency has that historical baggage, but we haven’t done anything like that in many years,” Marcia Rosen, director of the Redevelopment Agency, told us.
That hasn’t allayed fears in Bayview or among its allies outside the community, most notably Brian Murphy O’Flynn, whose North Beach property was seized by the city in 2003 to be turned into a park.
“I thought, ‘These people are getting steamrolled,’” O’Flynn told us. “The people there are going to be displaced…. It comes down to money. [Powerful people] want that neighborhood. It’s right on the water, and it’s going to make some people rich.”
Nonetheless, O’Flynn has concerns about the other impacts of Prop. 90, so much so that he has parted ways with his Bayview allies on the measure and refused requests by Prop. 90 advocates to join the campaign.
“I have no position on 90,” O’Flynn said. “But I understand how it came about.” SFBG

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