Land Use

CPMC’s new numbers threaten St. Luke’s and the mayor’s deal

Sasha Cuttler
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9

Can San Franciscans trust California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) not to shutter St. Luke’s Hospital once the company gets what it wants from the city? And has the Mayor’s Office, in its desire to please the business community and building trades, accepted and promoted a bad deal that doesn’t adequately protect the city’s interests?

Those are some of the questions that arose Monday during a hearing on CPMC’s $2.5 billion, multi-hospital development proposal before the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee when officials from the Mayor’s Office revealed that the development agreement they negotiated with CPMC might not be good enough to keep St. Luke’s open.

As we’ve reported, CPMC (a subsidiary of Sutter Health, a not-for-profit corporation that nonetheless has a well-earned reputation for profiteering and other bad corporate behavior) is seeking to build a 550-bed regional luxury hospital atop Cathedral Hill. In exchange, the development deal requires CPMC to rebuild St. Luke’s, a seismically unsafe hospital in the Mission District that is relied on by many low-income San Franciscans (as well as the city, which would otherwise have to shoulder more of that burden at General Hospital).

After years of stalled negotiations between CPMC and two consecutive mayors, Mayor Ed Lee announced a deal in March that would have CPMC build a smaller version of St. Luke’s (with just 80 beds) and agree to keep it open for at least 20 years as long as CPMC’s operating margins didn’t dip below 1 percent in two consecutive years.

Activists had criticized the deal as too small, too short, and without enough guarantees, but Mayor’s Office officials have consistently said they were confident it was enough to keep St. Luke’s from being shuttered. But now, based on new revenue projections offered by CPMC, even those officials have lost confidence in the deal and say it needs to be renegotiated.

“These new 2012 projections, while still showing CPMC will not breach the 1 percent margin, do not offer the same comfort level we previously had,” Ken Rich of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development told the committee.

The news hit like a bombshell, shaking the confidence of even supervisors who strongly supported the deal, such as Sup. Scott Wiener, who called it a “surprising, critical piece of information” and said, “It’s very, very important that this issue is quickly resolved.”

For supervisors who were already skeptical of the deal and CPMC – such as Sup. David Campos, whose District 9 includes St. Luke’s – it was further evidence that this was a bad deal that needed more work before being brought to the board. The Planning Commission has already approved the project and the full board was scheduled to consider it in just a few weeks.

“What does that say about the way the negotiation was done?” Campos told us. “How half-baked can something be? What have we done to verify the numbers that CPMC gave us? And what does this say about CPMC?…If the numbers on St. Luke’s aren’t accurate, how can we trust the rest of what they’re telling us?”

Yet during the hearing, when Campos tried to get reassurances from CPMC officials and requested that the board be allowed to review the company’s financial records, he was rebuffed and belittled by CPMC attorney Pam Duffy – who later tersely apologized for her comments after Committee Chair Eric Mar criticized them as “insulting to the board.”

Campos had questioned Rich about why the city was relying on CPMC rather than independently assessing the numbers. “Maybe if you had done an audit, you wouldn’t be in this position of being surprised by the numbers that were given to you,” Campos told Rich.

But Rich said “projections are guesses, we can’t ever guarantee that they are right,” noting that CPMC had revised its revenue estimates downward for the years after St. Luke’s would open (when it would be absorbing the high costs of construction), making its profit margin slimmer. “CPMC took a more conservative approach to forecasting the rate of increase in hospital charges as well as patient volumes in light of the greater uncertainty in health care finance,” Rich said.

So Campos asked whether the supervisors could review CPMC’s data. Rich, who has reviewed it, replied, “The conditions under which we were shown CPMC’s projections is that those are confidential.”

Campos noted that it is the board’s job to review and approval this deal to determine whether it’s in the city’s best interests, which shouldn’t simply involve trusting CPMC. “Why should the executive branch of the government see those numbers but not the legislative branch?” he asked.
“It’s really not our call,” said Rich, noting that he had no objections to the request.

But when Campos asked CPMC’s Duffy, she offered a legalistic refusal, and when Campos tried to explain his reasoning, she said, “I heard your speech a moment ago” and added, “this isn’t really a game of gotcha.”

When Campos said the board was simply exercising its due diligence over an important project. she said “nothing unusual or untoward has occurred here, and the suggestion that might be the case, I think it unfair.”

But Campos wasn’t alone in wanting more reassurance from CPMC, who supervisors, labor leaders, and community activists have criticized for its secrecy and bad faith negotiating tactics with both the city and its employee unions.

“This announcement is shocking, on a number of levels,” Board President David Chiu said at the hearing, noting that he had met with CPMC officials just days earlier and they hadn’t mentioned the new developments, instead assuring him that their operating margins were high and the deal protected St. Luke’s. “It’s not a great way to build the trust we’ll need to move this forward.”

Rich said he had learned of the new numbers 12 days earlier, drawing a rebuke from Campos and others who said the supervisors should have been notified earlier. But Rich said that he was hoping that the problem would be solved through negotiations with CPMC before the hearing, but that talks over the issue have so far been fruitless.

“We would have vastly preferred to have an agreement in hand,” Rich told the committee, reassuring the supervisors that the Mayor’s Office will not support the project until the St. Luke’s issue is resolved to its satisfaction.

But Sup. Malia Cohen criticized CPMC as an untrustworthy negotiating partner. “CPMC has an interesting corporate culture,” she said, noting that the company has repeatedly misled supervisors and community leaders, accusing it of being “disingenuous in its negotiations.”

Chiu emphasized that this is a make-or-break issue: “This is an escape clause that could allow St. Luke’s – and what St. Luke’s means to the city – to not be operational. So this is an incredibly important question.”

Campos said this latest episode only added to his suspicion that CPMC will play games with its finances to shutter St. Luke’s – whose construction must be completed before CPMC can build Cathedral Hill Hospital – once it gets the lucrative regional medical center that it really wants.

“How do we know they aren’t transferring money out of CPMC into Sutter in order to shut down St. Luke’s?” Campos said, adding that he wants to see a clear guarantee that St. Luke’s will remain open as a full-service hospital. “This deal, as far as I’m concerned, is not ready for prime time.”

Hospital standoff

Andrew Lam
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2
Hospital standoff

steve@sfbg.com

The controversial and long-awaited proposal by California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) to build a 550-bed luxury hospital atop Cathedral Hill and to rebuild St. Luke’s Hospital has finally arrived at the Board of Supervisors — where it appears to have little support.

So far, not one supervisor has stepped up to sponsor the deal, and board members say it will have to undergo major changes to meet the city’s needs. “There are still a lot of questions that remain,” Sup. David Campos told us, citing labor, housing, community benefits, and a long list of other issues that he doesn’t believe CPMC has adequately addressed. “It tells me there’s still more work to be done.”

CPMC, which is Sacramento-based nonprofit corporation Sutter Health’s most lucrative affiliate, has been pushing the project for almost a decade. Its advocates have subtly used a state seismic safety deadline for rebuilding St. Luke’s — a hospital relied on by low-income residents of the Mission District and beyond — as leverage to build the massive Cathedral Hill Hospital it envisions as the Mayo Clinic of the West Coast.

But the project’s draft environmental impact report shows the Cathedral Hill Hospital would have huge negative impacts on the city’s transportation system and exacerbate its affordable housing crisis. And CPMC has been in a pitched battle with its labor unions over its refusal to guarantee the new jobs will go to current employees or local residents and be unionized. There are also concerns with the market power CPMC will gain from the project, how that will affect health care costs paid by the city and its residents, and with the company’s appallingly low charity care rates compared to other health care providers (see “Lack of charity,” 12/13/11).

CPMC had refused to budge in negotiations with the Mayor’s Office under two mayors, for which Mayor Ed Lee publicly criticized the company’s intransigence last year. But under pressure from the business community and local trade unions who support the project, Lee cut a deal with CPMC in March.

That development agreement for the $2.5 billion project calls for CPMC to pay $33 million for public transit and roadway improvements, $20 million to endow community clinics and other social services, and $62 million for affordable housing programs, nearly half of which would go toward helping its employees buy existing homes.

While those numbers seem large, community and labor leaders from San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Justice (SFHHJJ), which formed in opposition to the project, say they don’t cover anywhere near the project’s full impacts. And given that CPMC made about $180 million in profit last year in San Francisco alone — money that subsidizes the rest of Sutter’s operations — they say the company can and should do better.

“This is about standing up to corporate blackmail,” SFHHJJ member Steve Woo, a community organizer with the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, told us.

 

PIVOTAL PROJECT

CPMC is perhaps the most high-profile project the board will consider this year, one that will impact the city for years, so the political and economic stakes are high.

The Planning Commission voted 5-1 on April 26 to approve the deal and its environmental impact report, citing the project’s economic benefits and the looming deadline for rebuilding St. Luke’s. The Board of Supervisors was scheduled to consider the appeal of that decision on June 12 (after Guardian press time), but activists say supervisors planned to continue the item until July 17.

In the meantime, the board’s Land Use Committee has scheduled a series of hearings on different aspects of the project, starting June 15 with a project overview and presentation on the jobs issue, continuing June 25 with a hearing on its impacts to the health care system. Traffic and neighborhood impacts would be heard the next week, and then housing after that.

Calvin Welch, a progressive activist and nonprofit affordable housing developer, said the project’s EIR makes clear just how paltry CPMC’s proposed mitigation measures are. It indicates that the project’s 3,000 new workers will create a demand for at least 1,400 new two-bedroom housing units. Even accepting that estimate — which Welch says is low given that many employees have families and won’t simply be bunking with one another — the $26 million being provided for new housing construction would only create about 90 affordable studio apartments.

“We’re going to end up, if we want to house that workforce, subsidizing CPMC,” Welch told us.

Compounding that shortcoming is the fact that the Cathedral Hill Hospital is being built in a special use district that city officials established for the Van Ness corridor — where there is a severe need for more housing, particularly affordable units. The SUD calls for developers to build three square feet of residential for every square foot of non-residential development.

“That would require building 3 million square feet of residential housing with this project,” Welch said. “We don’t think $26 million meets the housing requirement for this project, let alone what was envisioned by this [Van Ness corridor] plan.”

SFHHJJ is calling for CPMC to provide at least $73 million for affordable housing, with no more than 20 percent of that going to the company’s first-time homebuyer assistance program. That assistance program does nothing to add to the city’s housing stock and critics call it a valuable employee perk that will only increase the demand for existing housing — and thus drive up prices.

But the business community is strongly backing the deal, and the trade unions are expected to turn out hordes of construction workers at the hearing to make this an issue of jobs — rather than a corporation paying for its impacts to the community.

“After a decade of discussion, debate and compromise, the city’s departments, commissions, labor, business and community groups all agree on CPMC,” San Francisco Chamber of Commerce President Steve Falk wrote in a June 8 e-mail blast entitled “Message to the Board of Supervisors: Don’t Stand in the Way of Progress.”

“The fate of our city’s healthcare infrastructure now lies solely with the Board of Supervisors,” the Chamber says. “When it comes time to vote, let’s insist they make the right choice.”

Yet it’s simply inaccurate to say that labor and community groups support the deal, and both are expected to be well-represented at the hearings.

 

CARE FOR WHOM?

Economic justice issues related to health care access and costs are another potential pitfall for this project. SFJJHH activists note that no supervisors have signed on to sponsor the project yet — which is unusual for something this big — and that even the board’s most conservative supervisors have raised concerns that the city’s health care costs aren’t adequately contained by the deal.

“There’s a significant amount of dissatisfaction with the deal, even among conservatives,” SFJJHH member Paul Kumar, a spokesperson for the National Union of Healthcare Workers, told the Guardian.

On the progressive side, a big concern is that CPMC is proposing to rebuild the 220-bed St. Luke’s with only 80 beds, which activists say is not enough. And even then, CPMC is only agreeing to operate that hospital for 20 years, or even less time if Sutter’s fortunes turn around and the hospital giant begins losing money.

CPMC Director of Communications Kathryn Graham, responding by email to questions and issues raised by the Guardian, wrote generally and positively about CPMC and the project without addressing the specific concerns about whether housing, transportation, and other mitigation payments are too low.

On the jobs issue, she wrote, “Our project will create 1,500 union construction jobs immediately—and preserves and protects the 6,200 health care professional jobs that exist today at the hospitals. Currently, nearly 50 percent of our current employees live in San Francisco. During the construction phase of this project, we are committed to hire at least 30 percent of workers from San Francisco. We will create 500 permanent new jobs in just the next five years—200 are guaranteed to be local hires from underserved San Francisco neighborhoods. We don’t know where you got the ridiculous idea that our employees must reapply for jobs at our new hospitals. That is incorrect.”

Yet CPMC has resisted requests by the California Nurses Association and other unions to be recognized at the new facility or to agree to card-check neutrality that would make it easier to unionize. And union representatives say CPMC has offered few assurances about staffing, pay, seniority, and other labor issues.

As one CNA official told us, “If they aren’t going to guarantee jobs to the existing employees, those are jobs lost to the city.”

“We’re giving Sutter a franchise over San Francisco’s health care system for 30 to 40 years, so we should ensure there are basic worker and community protections,” Kumar said.

Welch and other activists say they believe CPMC is prepared to offer much more than it has agreed to so far, and they’re calling on the supervisors to be tougher negotiators than the Mayor’s Office was, including being willing to vote down the project and start over if it comes down to that.

“They make too much money in this city to just leave town,” Welch said of CPMC’s implied threat to pull out of San Francisco and shutter St. Luke’s. “It’s bullshit.”

Wiener goes after historic preservation

Zelda Bronstein
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40
Wiener goes after historic preservation

 

Sup. Scott Wiener is pushing a bill that would make it more difficult to create historic districts in San Francisco, and it’s already cleared the Land Use and Economic Development Committee.

UPDATE: Milk Club calls on Sup. Olague to drop her support for the bill.

The measure hasn’t received a lot of news media attention, but it could have a far-reaching effect on development in San Francisco.

In essence, the Wiener bill amends two parts of the city planning code to tighten the requirements for designating a part of the city as a protected historic area — a designation that makes it harder to demolish or substantially alter buildings.
Developers and some property owners dislike the historic designation. Perservationists see it as a way to prevent the destruction of buildings and neigbhorhoods that are a part of the city’s heritage.

Classic example: In the 1980s, members of the Residential Builders Association were tearing down vintage Victorians in the Richmond district and replacing them with boxy, multi-unit apartments that were worth more money than a single-family home. The builders made a lot of quick cash; the city lost some elegant old houses that can never be replaced.

They couldn’t do that as easily in Alamo Square, which is a historic district.

On the other hand, the owners of those stately well-protected houses in these special districts have to go through increased Planning Department scrutiny any time they want to make any substantial alteration in the structure.

Context: Less than 1 percent of the developed part of San Francisco is currently in a historic district. It’s not a huge deal, and most people don’t pay any attention to this stuff.

But it’s important, and here’s why: One, this city doesn’t care enough about its past — but more important, preservation is a tool that can be used to prevent very bad things from happening.

If we’d had good historic preservation laws in the 1970s, the International Hotel could have been designated an historic structure and wouldn’t have been demolished. Same, possibly, for the Goodman Building. Preservation laws could have been used to fight some of the horrors of redevelopment, which mowed down African American and Filipino neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s.

Some of Wiener’s suggestions are relatively benign. He wants to exempt affordable housing units from the laws that apply to historic districts, and Sup. Christina Olague, his co-sponsor, wants an economic hardship exemption so that the owners of buildings, particularly in communities of color, can avoid expensive battles over minor repairs and alterations.

I’m fine with all of that. I’m all for it. Good idea. Although it’s not fair to say that this process was driven by a concern for affordable housing; I spoke to Peter Cohen, at the Council of Community Housing Organizations, and he told me that the idea didn’t come from his crew. Not one affordable housing activist showed up at the Land Use hearing to support the Wiener bill.

But the measure also adds more burdens to the process of designating an historic district. It mandates a written survey of all property owners and occupants in an area proposed for historic designation — an expensive and cumbersome thing that isn’t required for commercial development, demolitions, zoning changes, massive market-rate housing projects, full-on gentrification, or anything else that screws up neighborhoods.
It requires the Planning Commission to consider whether historic preservation conflicts with “the provision of housing to meet the city’s regional housing needs allocation,” which is odd because the commission didn’t consider that when it approved 8 Washington, which directly conflicts with the city’s housing needs allocation, or when it’s allowed 20,000 units of mostly high-end housing over the past decade without any provision for the proper corresponding amount of affordable housing.

In short, it gives opponents of historic preservation more ways to stop new protections. That’s going to make developers very happy.

I asked Wiener why he decided to do this, what the problem was that this law is meant to solve. His answer: There are lots of potential new historic districts (including where he lives, in the Duboce Park and Dolores Street areas) and he wants to be sure that there’s a “robust community process.” Excuse me, Supervisor: There’s a robust community process every time anyone does anything in this town, and designating a historic district is no different.

Also: “A lot of people believe that in some situations, historic preservation can be taken to the extremes. This is a real hot topic for the city.”

Now here’s where it gets interesting (and even more complicated). There’s a neighborhood group called the Mission Dolores Neighborhood Association that’s been trying for almost seven years to get the area between Market and 20, Valencia and Sanchez designated a historic district. Peter Lewis, a musician who has been leading the battle, told me that he got involved because developers were tearing down some important old buildings (a Willis Polk building on Dolores and 15th came down a few years ago) and he wanted to halt it.
The group’s got sophistication and resources — MDNA has raised $80,000 for the necessary studies and has been working the the Planning Department and the Historic Preservation Commission.

Wiener is opposed to the idea — particularly the concept of including the Dolores Street median (designed by John Mclaren, he of Golden Gate Park fame) and Dolores Park in the district. The median’s already a state landmark.

“He’s been very polite to us, but he’s made it clear he doesn’t want to see streets or parks included in any historic designation,” Lewis told me.
Why? Well, for one thing, the Planning Department is talking about building bulb-outs on Dolores as a traffic-calming measure. Historic designation for the median might make that more difficult. And Lewis opposes the bulb-outs for all the wrong reasons: “They just want to get people out of their cars,” he said, dismissively.

But really: Is this all worth pushing a measure that could undermine preservation and encourage demolitions and bad development all over the city? Is the current system really all that bad? Didn’t a measure to strengthen historic preservation (placed on the ballot with an 11-0 vote on the Board of Supervisors) just pass overwhelmingly two years ago?

Because it seems to me that this is a solution in search of a problem.

 

San Francisco’s loss

Andrew Lam
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116
San Francisco’s loss

news@sfbg.com

San Francisco is increasingly losing its working and creative classes to the East Bay and other jurisdictions — and with them, much of the city’s diversity — largely because of policy decisions that favor expensive, market-rate housing over the city’s own affordable housing goals.

“It’s definitely changing the character of the city,” said James Tracy, an activist with Community Housing Partnership. “It drains a big part of the creative energy of the city, which is why folks came here in the first place.”

>>Is Oakland cooler than San Francisco? Oaklanders respond.

Now, as San Francisco officials consider creating an affordable housing trust fund and other legislative changes, it’s fair to ask: Does City Hall have the political will to reverse the trend?

Census data tells a big part of the story. In 2000, the median owner-occupied home in San Francisco cost $369,400, and by 2010 it had more than doubled to $785,200. Census figures also show median rents have gone from $928 in 2000 up to $1,385 in 2010 — and even a cursory glance at apartment listings show that rents have been steadily rising since then.

Tracy and other affordable housing activists testified at an April 9 hearing before the Board of Supervisors Land Use and Economic Development Committee on a new study by the Budget and Legislative Analyst, commissioned last July by Sup. David Campos, entitled “Performance Audit of San Francisco’s Affordable Housing Policies and Programs.”

“There’s a hearing right now at City Hall about our housing stock and how it’s been skewing upward toward those with higher incomes,” Board President David Chiu told us, noting that it is sounding an alarm that, “Creative individuals that make this place so special are being driven out of the city.”

Oakland City Council member Rebecca Kaplan said that San Francisco’s loss has been a gain for Oakland and other East Bay cities, which are enjoying a new cultural vibrancy that has so far been largely free of the gentrifying impacts that can hurt a city’s diversity.

“You can add more people without getting rid of anybody if you do it right. Most of development is looking at places that are now completely empty like the Lake Merritt BART station parking lot, empty land around the Coliseum, and the West Oakland BART station,” Kaplan told us. “We have to commit to revitalization without displacement.”

Yet the fear among some San Franciscans is that we’ll have just the opposite: displacement that actually hinders the city’s attempts at economic revitalization. “What’s at stake is the economic recovery of the city,” Tracy said. “You can’t have such a large portion of the workforce commuting into the city.”

TOO MANY CONDOS

A big part of the problem is that San Francisco is building plenty of market-rate (read: really expensive) housing, but not nearly enough affordable housing. The report Campos commissioned looked at how well the city did at meeting various housing construction goals it set for itself from 1999 to 2006 in its state-mandated Housing Element, which requires cities to plan for the housing needs of its population and absorb a fair share of the state’s affordable housing needs.

The plan called for 7,363 market-rate units, or 36 percent of the total housing construction, with the balance being housing for those with moderate, low, or very low incomes. Developers built 11,293 market rate units during that time, 154 percent of what was needed and 65 percent of the total housing construction. There were only 725 units built for those with moderate incomes (just 13 percent the goal) and just over half the number of low-income units needed and 83 percent of the very low-income goal met.

“We have to do a better job of monitoring and evaluating each project,” Chiu said. “Every incremental decision we make determines whether this will be a city for just the wealthy.”

The situation for renters is even worse. From 2001-2011, the report showed there were only 1,351 rental units built for people in the low to moderate income range, people who make 50-120 percent of the area median income, which includes a sizable chunk of the working class living in a city where about two-thirds of residents rent.

“The Planning Commission does not receive a sufficiently comprehensive evaluation of the City’s achievement of its housing goals,” the report concluded, calling for the planners and policymakers to evaluate new housing proposals by the benchmark of what kind of housing the city actually needs. Likewise, it concluded that the Board of Supervisors isn’t being regularly given information it needs to correct the imbalance or meet affordable housing needs.

Policy changes made under former Mayor Gavin Newsom also made this bad situation even worse. Developers used to build affordable housing required by the city’s inclusionary housing law rather than pay in-lieu fees to the city by a 3-1 ratio, but since the formulas in that law changed in 2010, 55 percent of developers have opted to pay the fee rather than building housing.

Also in 2010, Newsom instituted a policy that allowed developers to defer payment of about 85 percent of their affordable housing fees, resulting in an additional year-long delay in building affordable housing, from 48 months after the market rate project got permitted to 60 months now.

Tracy and the affordable housing activists say the city needs to reverse these trends if it is to remain diverse. “It’s not even debatable that the majority housing built in the city needs to be affordable,” Tracy said.

Mayor Ed Lee has called for an affordable housing trust fund, the details of which are still being worked out as he prepares to submit it for the November ballot. Chiu said that would help: “I will require a lot of different public policies, but a lot of it will be an affordable housing trust fund.”

GROWTH AND DIVERSITY

San Francisco’s problems have been a boon for Oakland.

“With much love and affection to my dear SF friends, I must say that Oakland is more fun,” Kaplan told us. “Also I think a lot of people are choosing to live in Oakland now for a variety of reasons that aren’t just about price. We have a huge resurgent art scene, an interconnected food, restaurant, and club scene, a place where multicultural community of grassroots artists is thriving, best known from Art Murmur.”

There is fear that Oakland could devolve into the same situation plaguing San Francisco, with rising housing prices that displace its diverse current population, but so far that isn’t happening much. Oakland remains much more racially and economically diverse than San Francisco, particularly as it attracts San Francisco’s ethnically diverse residents.

“We’re not looking at a situation where the people moving into town are necessarily predominantly white,” Kaplan said. “We’re having large growth in quite a range of communities, including growing Ethiopian and Eritrean and Vietnamese populations…If you don’t want to live in a multicultural community, maybe Oakland’s not your cup of tea.”

According to the 2010 census, a language other than English is spoken at home in 40.2 percent of Oakland households, compared to 25.4 percent in San Francisco. “Almost every language in the world spoken in Oakland,” Kaplan said.

African Americans make up 28 percent of Oakland’s population, compared to only 6.1 percent in San Francisco, and 6.2 percent of the population of California. In San Francisco, the number of black-owned businesses is dismal at 2.7 percent, compared to 4 percent statewide and 13.7 percent in Oakland. The census also finds that 25.4 percent Oaklanders are people of Latino origin, compared to San Francisco at 15.1 percent and 37.6 percent statewide. San Francisco is 33.3 percent Asian, compared to Oakland at 16.8 percent and all of California at 13 percent.

Both cities are less white than California as a whole; the state’s white population is 57.6 percent, compared to 34 percent in Oakland and 48.5 percent in San Francisco.

Gentrification shows its face differently depending on the neighborhood. Some say Rockridge, a trendy Oakland neighborhood where prices have recently increased, has gone too far down the path.

“Rockridge has been ‘in’ for a long time, but the prices are staggering and it isn’t as interesting any more,” Barbara Hendrickson, an East Bay real estate agent, told us.

The nationwide foreclosure crisis didn’t spare Oakland and may have sped up its gentrification process. “The neighborhoods are being gentrified by people who buy foreclosures and turn them into sweet remolded homes,” observed Hendrickson.

Yet Kaplan said many of these houses simply remain vacant, driving down values for surrounding properties and destabilizing the community. “I think we need a policy where the county doesn’t process a foreclosure until the bank has proven that they own the note,” said Kaplan, who mentioned that the city has had some success using blight ordinances to hold banks accountable for the empty buildings.

And as if San Francisco didn’t have enough challenges, Kaplan also noted another undeniable advantage: the weather. “The weather is really quite something,” she said. “I have days with a meeting in San Francisco and I always have to remember to bring completely different clothing. Part of why I wanted to live in California was to be able to spend more time outdoors, be healthy, bicycle, things like that. So that’s pretty easy to do over here in Oakland.”

Supervisors hope to halt foreclosures with new resolution

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John Avalos introduced a resolution today urging support for homeowners facing foreclosure in San Francisco. The resolution calls for several actions, including suspending all foreclosures until state and federal measures to protect homeowners are in place.

Sponsors of the resolution Avalos, David Chiu, Jane Kim, Eric Mar, and Christina Olague joined a coalition of community organizations to explain the resolution at a press conference.

The resolution would call for support of a statewide Homeowners Bill of Rights, a series of bills that would address predatory loans and robosigning, as well as California Attorney General Kamala Harris’s campaign for a statewide suspension on foreclosures in properties controled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It also “urges all city and county officials and departments to work proactively to ensure that San Francisco residents do not fall victim to unlawful foreclosure practices,” as Avalos explained.

Supervisors cited a report released in February by Assessor Phil Ting as one of the reasons for the resolution. The report found “irregularities” in 99 percent of foreclosure documents in San Francisco between 2009 and 2011, and “what appear to be one or more clear violations of the law” in 84 percent of cases. 

The resolution’s language also names “predatory banking practices that disproportionately targeted racial and ethnic minority communities, especially working class African Americans and Latinos” as an impetus for the resolution, noting that “from 2007 to 2008, Wells Fargo, and mortgage lenders it has since acquired, was 188 percent more likely to put African American borrowers and 117 percent more likely to put Latino borrowers into higher-cost, subprime loans.”

“What we see around foreclosures is that we have a systemic problem,” said Campos. Over 1,000 homes in San Francisco are currently in the process of foreclosure, 

Supervisor Kim connected the issue to another systemic problem affecting San Francisco, that has been a recent topic of discussion at City Hall: family flight. 

“We do have many low-income families that are actually homeowners in the city, primarily in the southeast sector. But how they afford to buy homes is by squeezing often two to three families in these homes in the southeast. So we’re talking about not just one household when we foreclose on a home, we’re often talking about two, three families with multiple youth and seniors,” said Kim.

“This is something that has been an important issue for many of our supervisors across the political spectrum, is how to retain families in San Francisco. Stopping foreclosure has to be a key part of that.” 

A few supervisors congratulated community organizers for focusing on the foreclosure crisis.

“I want to thank Occupy Bernal for not only shedding light on what’s happening in Bernal Heights, but realizing that the foreclosure crisis that we’re facing is something that involves all of us. Every single neighborhood,” said Campos.

The resolution was introduced to the Board of Supervisors March 20. It will be discussed further at the Land Use and Economic Development committee meeting April 2. 

If it eventually passes the Board of Supervisors, the resolution will be non-binding; a citywide foreclosure moratorium is likely not imminent. Yet many supporters expressed urgency and commitment for city action to address foreclosures. 

“When speaking with the sheriff about how we can stop evictions, what struck me most was he said that sometimes when we walk into these homes, we’ve found that people have committed suicide before the sheriffs even come in,” said Supervisor Kim. “This is a life and death issue for many of our residents.”

 

Agrarian visions

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Agrarian visions

By Cynthia Salaysay

arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART Artists are makers, though rarely of history. But Fernando García-Dory and Amy Franceschini, two internationally recognized artists, seem to have a gift for it. “Perhaps,” García-Dory says, “when you start with a long perspective on history, you start to make history as well.”

At the David Brower Center’s Hazel Wolf Gallery, their joint show “Land, Use” presents work that is whimsical and futuristic, yet rooted in traditional agricultural values. It’s like Disney’s Tomorrowland — but on an urban farm, where wheelbarrows are pedal-powered. Or on the rolling green pastures of Spain, where sheep wear GPS transmitters around their necks.

Franceschini is one of San Francisco’s own. Her Victory Garden project in 2007 caught the fancy of SF City Hall, with pieces like Trike — a part-cycle, part-wheelbarrow, designed to contain all the supplies necessary to build a small garden. Soon the city began encouraging its residents to grow food, as it did in World War II. City Hall was decked out in raised garden beds, and residents throughout the city began their own vegetable patches.

García-Dory, from Madrid, has worked extensively with the dwindling Basque shepherds of the Pyrenees, where they have lived for centuries. His images and films portray white-haired men stacking golden cheese in ancient caves, or facing the wind, shearing one of their grim-faced flock.

The images come from the Shepherds School he created, and from his World Gathering of Nomadic Peoples (2005), in which shepherds and goatherds around the world came together to talk about their way of life, which has become so rarified in these modern times.

García-Dory’s work, in part, uses new technology to protect mobile pastoralism, as it’s called. His piece Bionic Sheep sits in the foyer of the gallery. The device emits ultrasound waves to repel wolves, as shepherds in Spain are no longer allowed to kill them to protect their flock. It also has a GPS so shepherds can keep track of their flock without being chained to the pasture. “They can stay at the bar, and have another beer,” Dory explains.

Adds Franceschini, “The role of art for us is, in part, utility. It has this negative connotation in the art world, but I think for us it’s important for the work we’re doing to be useful.”

Their first collaboration, Shepherd’s Wagon, a Blueprint, is “like the blueprint for a molecule that was sent on the Voyager shuttle to Jupiter,” says García-Dory. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Here, it’s a model, and it can be reproduced.'”

A canopy reaches out over the gallery, mimicking the awning of a shepherd’s wagon, where they sleep. Wooden chairs and a communal table fold down from the wall. As part of the installation, Franceschini and García-Dory invited young farmers, shepherds, and naturalists to sit together beneath their fragile roof. The forum’s purpose: to discuss how to balance the environmental concerns of naturalists with those of farmers and pastoralists, and forge a new network for social activism.

The gallery still holds some of the collective energy of the group. Remnants of their brainstorm litter the gallery like leaves blown over a sidewalk — a chaos of hopeful thoughts and ideas. Phrases like “We all need to come back to understanding the Farm Bill,” and “Let’s Shadow Each Other Voluntary Exchange Program” hang from the walls.

“Promoting a gathering as we did, it’s a way for us to be close to the people and have the direct communication that very often we lack in our lives,” says García-Dory.

“I haven’t been involved in food politics and land use in the last two years in the Bay Area,” Franceschini says. “For me, it’s a check in. Here’s all the people I’ve met from the Victory Gardens, here’s people I’d like Fernando to meet.”

Although the Bay Area is a hotbed of environmentalism and the slow food movement, awareness of pastoralism is low. “Dory’s reminding us of the history of the Basque sheepherders and the culture that brought shepherding to the American West,” says Brittany Cole Bush of Star Creek Ranch.

In the East Bay hills, Basque and Peruvian shepherds, along with young shepherds like Bush, use sheep and goats to reduce fire hazard, target invasive plants, and encourage native grasses to grow. “These animals are helping to revitalize the lands, and at the same time they’re producing a local grass-fed product that can be taken to market,” explains Bush.

Adds García-Dory, “Maybe sheep are the new celebrity, or should be.”

The Blueprint isn’t finished yet. “The people [at the gathering] said they would like to keep meeting and working, and that was really very encouraging for us,” says García-Dory. “We hope that the heritage of small farmers and shepherds can be a point of anchor for a new movement.”

Such a hope, though ambitious, seems realistic, given their past work. García-Dory’s World Gathering of Nomadic Peoples created an international, politically active community of shepherds that continues to work together. His Shepherds School has graduated 100 people. And Franceschini’s Victory Gardens live on — 10 of the gardens planted from the original 18 still exist. The city of San Francisco, which discovered through the project that people needed to learn how to grow food again, continues to fund educational programs like Hayes Valley Farm.

Although their pieces have created a lasting impact, Franceschini insists that much of that impact is due to the people around her. “An important part of what Fernando and I do is using the community around you to organize and activate ideas. That’s a message I’m always trying to tell my students. Your friends and your closest colleagues are your allies. I think sometimes you don’t see the potential in front of your nose.”

Other pieces on display include Franceschini’s This is Not a Trojan Horse, as well as short films and other artifacts documenting the Victory Garden, Shepherds School, and World Gathering.

LAND/USE

Through May 9

Hazel Wolf Gallery

David Brower Center

2150 Allston, Berk.

(510) 809-0900

www.browercenter.org

Nightlife: Fun plus jobs

Andrew Lam
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By Supervisor Scott Weiner

OPINION We all know the cultural benefits of nightlife. It’s fun. We get to meet people — friends, lovers, and all the rest. We build community. We hear great music. We dance. We spend time outside on our streets. For LGBT people, we meet other LGBTs and keep our community strong. The list goes on: Without a strong entertainment scene, including bars, clubs, live music venues, arts venues, night-time restaurants, and street fairs, our city would be a less interesting and less diverse place.

But the undisputed cultural importance of nightlife isn’t the whole story. Nightlife is a significant economic contributor to San Francisco. It creates jobs, particularly for working-class and young people. It generates tax revenue that helps fund Muni, health clinics, and parks. It allows creative entrepreneurs to start businesses. It generates tourism. It draws foot traffic into neighborhoods to the benefit of other neighborhood businesses.

This is all pretty intuitive. Yet, as a city, we’ve never actually measured the economic impact of our nightlife scene. One of my first acts a member of the Board of Supervisors was to request the city economist to conduct an economic impact study doing just that.

The study is almost done, and we already have a few preliminary results. Nightlife in San Francisco generates $4.2 billion a year in spending, with $1 billion of that amount coming from bars, clubs, performance venues, and art spaces. Some 48,000 people are employed in nightlife businesses, and these businesses contribute $55 million a year in local taxes. On March 5, we’ll announce the full results of the study at a hearing of the Land Use and Economic Development Committee.

This data will help us make smart public policy around nightlife. In the past, those decisions frequently have been driven by anecdote and over-reaction to isolated events. Trouble near a small number of nightclubs? The city responds by making it difficult for all nightclubs to operate, even those with excellent safety records and despite the dramatic improvement in the Entertainment Commission’s oversight. Or, the city goes even further and proposes requiring all clubs, even small ones, to scan ID cards of everyone who enters. (That proposal, thankfully, was roundly rejected.)

When we make these decisions, we should do so with a full understanding not just of the downsides of nightlife but of the positives, including cultural and economic benefits.

Entertainment is under pressure in San Francisco. There are neighborhoods with significant friction between housing and nightlife. Some of that friction results from a small number of problem venues. Other times, a good venue is jeopardized for simply conducting its business within the limits of San Francisco law — for example, a single neighbor got Slim’s shut down for a few weeks for noise, despite the club’s compliance with our noise ordinance.

We also continue to have bizarre Planning Code restrictions that undermine entertainment, such as the Mission Alcohol Special Use District, which makes it difficult or impossible to start creative new businesses in the Mission if alcohol is involved. This provision almost prevented a new bowling alley from locating at 17th and South Van Ness. Similarly, some are concerned that the Western SoMa Plan, as currently written, will undermine nightlife on 11th Street by surrounding clubs with new housing and by reducing the number of venues.

A thriving nightlife scene is key to our city’s cultural identity and economic future. Now that we have the data on its benefits, we can take a more balanced and thoughtful approach.

Supervisor Scott Wiener represents District 8 on the Board of Supervisors. The March 5 hearing will start with a noon rally on the steps of City Hall followed by the hearing at 1 p.m. in City Hall Room 263.

 

Have conservatives hijacked the Small Business Commission?

Sasha Cuttler
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Have conservatives hijacked the Small Business Commission?

Is the Small Business Commission really advocating for small businesses, or has the commission been hijacked by bankers and real estate developers aggressively pushing a right-wing agenda of unchecked growth and cuts to government regulation, programs, and fees? And why has the Mayor’s Office stacked the commission with these ideologues and worked behind-the-scenes to keep them in leadership roles?

Those are just a couple of the questions that have been raised by Mayor Ed Lee’s recent effort to amend the charter to give this commission broad authority over the city’s legislative agenda, which was dropped in the face of widespread opposition, and by his office’s alleged calls to their appointees urging them to vote for developer Luke O’Brien as vice president and banker Stephen Adams as president (simply reversing the roles they had played last year).

Traditionally, sources say the commission has sought to balance leadership between the mayor’s four appointees and the three appointed by the Board of Supervisors. But these days, the Mayor’s Office (mostly Chief of Staff Steve Kawa, we’re told) and its appointees (which include two bankers and one developer), at the urging of pro-development groups Coalition for Responsible Growth (CRG) and Plan C, seems to want to consolidate their control and push their agenda.

Neither Kawa nor Press Secretary Christine Falvey would address our direct question about the Mayor’s Office interfering with the internal working of supposedly independent commissions, but the Examiner today had a story about the Mayor’s Office doing the same thing on the Planning Commission with its leadership vote this week.

“If the Mayor’s Office feels the need to interfere in commission votes, it interferes with internal commission matters and the spirit of the commission,” Board President David Chiu, who has been following the Small Business Commission dynamics, told the Guardian.

Outgoing commission member Janet Clyde, who runs the legendary Vesuvio bar in North Beach, said she has long been bothered by the changing tone and dynamics on the commission: “There is definitely an agenda that is driven by the Mayor’s Office, a more conservative view…There is a big business agenda in small business clothes.”

And she said that change has been pushed by Plan C, CRG, and other fiscally conservative groups that backed Lee’s mayoral campaign. “They really saw an opportunity to use the Small Business Commission to push their agendas.”

The CRG board includes three members of Murphy O’Brien Real Estate Investments, including O’Brien and Mel Murphy, who is a mayoral appointee to the Building Inspection Commission, where he also regularly advocates for real estate interests. CRG, which did not return our calls for comment, testifies regularly at City Hall in favor of development and against regulation. Clyde and current commission member Kathleen Dooley say O’Brien has been especially aggressive in pushing his ideological agenda.

O’Brien ignored repeated Guardian requests for comment, and when we finally reached him by phone, he said, “I have no interest in talking to you.”

In December, in his role as president, O’Brien called a special hearing to discuss the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, the massive land use plan passed a few years ago after dozens of public hearings to work out its myriad complicated details and balance the preservation of light industrial properties with housing development, providing city services, and other considerations.

“This thing really needs to be thought out a little bit more,” O’Brien said at the hearing in a video clip that is prominently displayed on the CRG website.

Commission Executive Director Regina Dick-Endrizzi defended that hearing and others that have ventured into planning, regulation, and land uses issues that seem to be the purview of other city commissions. “Every business we talk to that wants to be in a brick-and-mortar space, it’s all about land use,” she said, noting that at the commission’s last annual retreat, “they decided to take a look at impact fees and their implications.”

She also noted that the city defines small businesses as having fewer than 100 employees, and that both developers and bankers are legitimate small business advocates, noting how important loans and other capital sources are to small business survival. Mayoral spokesperson Christine Falvey also defended the appointments and their focus: “The Commission has a diverse group of individuals to represent small business. The agenda is not controlled by any one group. There is a diverse group of voices and all deserve to be heard.”

Falvey also said it’s important to have bankers like Adams, a branch manager of Sterling Bank & Trust, on the commission: “The Mayor understands the important link between conventional banks and micro lenders. While there are moderate improvements in the lending environment, understanding the current status of access to capital is critical information for the Commission in its role to advise and make recommendations to the Mayor and Board of Supervisors on policy matters and City regulations that affect either the ease or difficulty in doing business in San Francisco.”

But progressive members of the Board of Supervisors – including Sup. Christina Olague, a mayoral appointee, in her recent interview with the Guardian – have regularly derided the narrow focus and ideological agenda of the commission, particularly its mayoral appointees. Some privately call it the “Small-Minded Business Commission.”

“We need some diversity on this commission. It can’t be all white men with a particular point of view,” Dooley said.

That could begin to happen on Tuesday when the Board of Supervisors is slated to replace two of its outgoing appointees, Michael O’Connor and Janet Clyde, with two that have been recommended by the Rules Committee: Monette White, who runs Food for Soul, “an upscale restaurant and holding company,” and William Ortiz-Cartagena, CEO of Gentle Parking, which managing parking lots in the city.

But that won’t go very far in changing a commission that seems focused on using the “small business” fig leaf to push a more broad and ideological pro-business agenda. Even Chiu, who is strongly pro-business, told us, “The Small Business Commission needs to be focused on the plight and issues of small businesses.”

Who gets to live here?

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Who gets to live here?

yael@sfbg.com

Housing policy — which determines who will be able to live in San Francisco — has been a hot topic at City Hall these days.

At a Board of Supervisors Land Use and Economic Development Committee meeting on Feb. 13, representatives from the Mayors Office of Housing (MOH) reported on the state of middle-income housing in San Francisco, at the request of Sup. Scott Wiener. “Middle class” people make up 28 percent of the city’s population, a 10 percent decrease in the past two decades, and to reverse that decline would cost about $4.3 billion in housing subsidies, or more than half the city’s annual budget.

Wiener, who insists that “middle income and low income housing are not mutually exclusive,” said he’s raising the issue because the needs of the shrinking middle class are not being addressed. But during the public comment period, a long procession of low-income residents say city housing policies have kept them on the brink of homelessness. The takeaway message was: don’t embark on new housing efforts until you can enforce the ones that are already in place.

Also underscoring the desperate state of many San Francisco residents, Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting released a report Feb. 16 that contains shocking statistics about invalid foreclosures and illegal evictions in San Francisco. Ting found that 99 percent of all foreclosure proceedings in San Francisco in the past four years have contained paperwork irregularities, and in 84 percent of cases, banks or lenders have committed fraud or broke other laws.

With the loss of the redevelopment agencies, Mayor Ed Lee’s proposal for a housing trust fund, renewed calls for more condo conversions, and a new focus on middle income housing incentives, the conversation on housing in San Francisco is heating up.

 

MOVING TOWARDS RENTAL

San Francisco’s housing market is 64 percent rentals and 36 percent ownership, according to MOH. So despite the focus of politicians and developers on homeownership, housing policy in San Francisco mostly involves renters, many of whom face myriad threats.

Rents can be so steep that market-rate rental housing is becoming increasingly accessible only for parts of the middle class and the highest income brackets in the city. People in San Francisco tend to pay a huge chunk of their income towards rent.

The federal Housing and Urban Development Agency considers it reasonable for a households to pay 30 percent of their income towards rent; but for the city’s very low income households, rent is typically nearly 60 percent of income. For middle income households, the average percent paid toward rent has increased since 1990, but remains below 30 percent.

Those people fall mainly into the middle-income bracket, those earning 80-120 percent of Area Median Income (AMI.) Planning Director John Rahaim said that for the very low-income population (0-50 percent AMI) all rental housing is “virtually off-limits.”

So, for the middle class, renting a place in San Francisco is tough. For the low and very-low income, it’s next to impossible. And that reality threatens the city’s diversity.

“The highest rent burden still falls on lower income residents, many of whom pay 70 percent of their income as rent,” Sup. Eric Mar, who also sits on the Land Use Committee, said at the hearing. “In my district, people have whole families living in their living room or extra bedroom.”

But things may be looking up for renters. MOH’ Brian Cheu said developers believe that the market trends are heading towards construction of new rental housing after being almost exclusively owner-occupied units for many years. Cheu said there are 725 rental units in the pipeline for the next five to ten years, more than twice the new housing units meant for ownership slated for that time period.

Most of this will be market rate housing, and thus still unaffordable for a good deal of the population. But for those making around 100 percent of AMI — the middle class that Wiener hopes to serve — there are more rental units on the way.

“Any increase in supply of rental housing would help,” said San Francisco Tenants Rights head Ted Gullickson, “because there’s been virtually no new rental housing built in San Francisco is last 20 years.”

Even as Wiener promised to continue to prioritize the needs low-income residents, the foreclosure crisis was barely acknowledged at the Feb. 13 hearing. Many low-income residents say they are not sure they can trust the city’s claim that “this is not a matter of us vs. them.”

At public comment, many community members spoke of the housing troubles that they were already facing. Yue Hua Yu, who spoke at the Feb. 13 hearing, lives with her family of four in a single residency occupancy hotel room (SRO), units intended for single occupants.

“We would support a policy that protects the city’s affordable housing stock,” said a statement from Wing Hoo Leumg, president of the Chinatown Community Tenants Association.

Renting may be the realistic choice for most San Franciscans, but homeownership remains an important goal and achievement for many families, and the main obsession of many politicians.

Part of the middle class exodus is unmistakably due to better homeownership rates in Oakland, Daly City, Marin, and other surrounding areas. But there are neighborhoods with higher rates of homeownership than others, including Bayview-Hunters Point.

BHP has long been a prime spot for low-income homeowners, but it’s slated for extensive new housing construction in the coming decades that could compromise its affordability. It is also an area hit hard by the foreclosure crisis: there have been 2,000 foreclosures in Bayview in the past four years, according to Ed Donaldson, housing counseling director at the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation.

Rising prices and the foreclosure crisis have played a large part in the large-scale African American out-migration that has devastated San Francisco communities in recent decades.

 

 

APARTMENTS OR CONDOS?

One of the biggest points of controversy in the homeownership debate has been the issue of condo conversion, which was brought up again this past week at the Feb. 14 Board of Supervisors meeting, when Sup. Mark Farrell asked Lee if he would support legislation to let 2400 tenancy-in-common (TIC) owners bypass legal limits and fastrack towards condo conversion.

Farrell framed this as “a vehicle to allow residents of our city to realize their goal of homeownership.”

On Jan. 16, the city held its annual condo conversion lottery, in which 200 lucky TIC owners win the chance to convert their units into condos, thereby legally becoming homeowners. TICs and condo conversion have long been fraught with controversy in San Francisco, where there is never enough housing for everyone who wants it.

Condo conversion proponents say that turning a TIC — usually a building that used to be rental housing that has been purchased by a group of people that own it in common — into condos is a cheap way to become a homeowner in a city as expensive as San Francisco.

But tenants rights advocates have long opposed this process on the basis that it depletes the city of its rental housing stock. “When you have more condo conversions, you have more evictions, and it’s harmful to low-income residents” Gullicksen said.

This controversy, and the struggle to maintain a balance between opportunities for homeownership and reasonable rents has raged in San Francisco for years. In 1982, the Board of Supervisors passed a limit of 200 condo conversions per year as a compromise. There are no regulations, however, on converting rental housing to TICs.

“This has come up almost every single year for years and years about this time,” said Peter Cohen, organizer with the Council of Community Housing Organizations.

This year, however, proponents are not simply reiterating a request to bypass the condo conversion lottery. Plan C, a coalition of San Francisco moderates, is pushing for adding a fee to condo conversion, ranging from $10,000 to $25,000, which would go towards an affordable housing fund.

Mayor Lee said that he is open to considering a change in condo conversion policy, “providing it balances our need for revenue for affordable housing, the value that responsible homeownership brings to the city, and the rights of tenants who could be affected by a change in policy.”

 

WHOSE TRUST FUND?

This comes at a time when the city is facing a loss of millions per year for affordable housing with the dissolution of the redevelopment agency (see “Transfer of power, Jan. 31).

That dissolution led to Mayor Lee’s plan for an affordable housing trust fund, to be voted on as a ballot measure this November. The kick-off for that plan also began recently, with a press conference and big-tent meeting to discuss what it might look like.

On the day after the Land Use Committee meeting, where he started the conversation on “middle class” housing, Wiener posed a question to Lee at a Board of Supervisors meeting, asking how the mayor plans to “ensure that the housing trust fund that comes out of the process you have convened will meaningfully address the need for moderate/middle income housing.”

Some are concerned that too much of the trust fund could be allocated outside low-income demographics. “There’s a limited size pie of resources,” Cohen said. “Just in a matter of the last months, we lost the redevelopment agency. The city is madly scrambling to try to replace that through housing trust fund, and working to get us back to somewhere close to where we were…Is that pie, that has dramatically shrunk, going to be stretched further for another income band?”

That question will be important when the proposal goes to vote in November. According to Donaldson, many low-income homeowners will not vote for the measure unless it addresses their needs. The specifics of the measure calling for the trust fund are still being worked out. But, it will likely be funded by an increase of the transfer tax paid when homes change ownership.

Yet that proposal was the subject of an unusual political broadside from the San Francisco Association of Realtors, which last week sent out election-style mailers attacking the idea. “Brace yourself for an unexpected visit from the city’s tax collector,” the mailer warns, showing the hand of government bursting through the wall of a home, urging people to contact Lee’s office.

The measure may also see opposition from low-income communities, especially if, as Wiener has urged in the past week, it allocates a chunk of funds towards middle-income housing.

“It’s hard to find people who will support it. They’re saying, ‘what’s in it for me? Why would I vote for a transfer tax that I’m going to have to pay to help finance the building of affordable housing or middle-income housing. Why support programs that will support middle income people, who make more money than existing homewoners?” explained Donaldson. To agree on a way forward for housing in San Francisco, policymakers will need to reconcile a range of interests. In the worst-case scenario, the profit interests of realtors and developers will overtake the interests of San Francisco families struggling to continue to live in the city they love. But housing advocates are willing to work together to come to a solution. “Let’s put everything on the table, and let’s figure it out. In the spirit of cooperation, and with the understanding that each respective constituent group is not going to get everything that they want, but let’s put all the cards of the table,” said Donaldson.

Conversation on Golden Gate Park concerts continues

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“I call for this hearing each year,” said District 1 Supervisor Eric Mar. The focus of the hearing was large events in Golden Gate Park, and each year, hundreds of San Franciscans have something to say about it.

At the Land Use Committee meeting Feb. 13, the room was packed with concert industry representatives, local artists, police officers, a couple dozen members of the Carpenters In Action from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters Local 22, and neighbors. Lots and lots of neighbors.

Many of the Richmond and Sunset residents who spoke are furious with the many large concerts that take place in Golden Gate Park throughout the year, including Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Alice’s Summerthing, Outside Lands, and Power to the Peaceful.

They spoke of unbearable noise, impossible parking, and crime spilling over from the event crowds. One man said that during Outside Lands, his house shakes so much that he feels “trapped inside an acoustic guitar for three days straight.”

The Recreation and Parks Department has implemented several measures addressing these ongoing concerns since the first annual hearing on this topic in 2009. Dana Ketchum and Nick Kinsey represented the department at the hearing, speaking in detail of tightened permitting measures, increased outreach to the community about upcoming events, and a hotline set up so neighbors can call in noise complaints more efficiently during large concerts and performances.

Ketchum said that noise complaints have resulted more than once in Rec and Parks representatives threatening to pull the plug on amplified sound in the park if partiers don’t turn it down. One neighbor called the hotline, “more useless than yesterday’s spit.”

Proponents of the events, too, were passionate.

Local hip hop artist Tom Shimura, aka Lyrics Born spoke on the importance of the events to the San Francisco music scene. Shimura praised how the Outside Lands lineup is 20 percent local artists.

“These festivals launch careers and create Bay Area success stories,” said Shimura.

“I just wanted to say that I’m a big fan,” said Supervisor Mar.

Many supporters cited a recently released San Francisco State University Study, which finds that Outside Lands generates “more than $60 million for the San Francisco economy,” and even claims the festival creates “683 full-time equivalent jobs” in the city.

Some Richmond residents demanded that all the festivals be cancelled, and, barring that, that they be issued the personal cell phone numbers of the Rec and Parks staff.

“It’s clear everyone supports these events,” said Supervisor Mar at the hearing’s conclusion.

“It’s a matter of collaboration.”

Meet the new supervisor

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Meet the new supervisor

Christina Olague, the newest member of the Board of Supervisors, faces a difficult balancing act. She was appointed by Mayor Ed Lee, whom she supported as co-chair of the controversial “Run Ed Run” campaign, to fill the vacancy in District 5, an ultra-progressive district whose voters rejected Lee in favor of John Avalos by a 2-1 margin.

So now Olague faces the challenge of keeping her district happy while staying on good terms with the Mayor’s Office, all while running in her first campaign for elected office against what could be a large field of challengers scrutinizing her every vote and statement.

Olague has strong progressive activist credentials, from working with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition to protect low-income renters during the last dot-com boom to her more recent community organizing for the Senior Action Network. She co-chaired the 2003 campaign that established the city’s minimum wage and has been actively involved in such progressive organizations as the Milk Club, Transit Riders Union, and the short-lived San Francisco People’s Organization.

“One of the reasons many of us are so supportive of Christina is she is grounded in the issues of low-income San Franciscans,” said Gabriel Haaland, who works with SEIU Local 1021 and accompanied Olague to a recent interview at the Guardian office.

She also served two terms on the Planning Commission — appointed by Board of Supervisors then-President Matt Gonzalez in 2004 and reappointed by then-President Aaron Peskin in 2008 — where she was known for doing her homework on complicated land use issues and usually landing on the progressive side of divided votes.

“Coming from the Planning Commission, she can do a lot of good,” said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and a supporter who has worked with Olague for 15 years. “We lost a lot of collective memory on land use issues,” he said, citing the expertise of Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin. “We do need that on the board. There is so much at stake in land use.”

Olague disappointed many progressives by co-chairing Progress for All, which was created by Chinatown power broker Rose Pak to push the deceptive “Run Ed Run” campaign that was widely criticized for its secrecy and other ethical violations. At the time, Olague told us she appreciated how Lee was willing to consider community input and she thought it was important for progressives to support him to maintain that open door policy.

In announcing his appointment of Olague, Lee said, “This is not about counting votes, it’s about what’s best for San Francisco and her district.” Olague also sounded that post-partisan theme, telling the crowd at her swearing-in, “I think this is an incredible time for our city and a time when we are coming together and moving past old political pigeonholes.”

With some big projects coming to the board and the working class being rapidly driven out of the city, progressives are hoping Olague will be a committed ally. There’s some concern, though, about her connections to Progress For All campaign’s secretive political consultant, Enrique Pearce.

Pearce has become a bit of a pariah in progressive circles for his shady campaign tactics on behalf of powerful players. In 2010, his Left Coast Communications got caught running an independent expenditure campaign partly funded by Willie Brown out of Pearce’s office, even though Sup. Jane Kim was both its beneficiary and his client — and that level of coordination is illegal. Last year, Pearce was hired by Pak to create the “Run Ed Run” campaign and write the hagiographic book, The Ed Lee Story, which also seemed to have some connections with Lee’s campaign. The Ethics Commission hasn’t fined Pearce for either incident, and he didn’t return a Guardian call for comment.

Olague told us not to worry. “He’s a friend…and I think it’s an exaggerated concern,” she said, confirming but minimizing his role so far. Yet she hired one of Pearce’s former employees, Jen Low, as one of her board aide. Olague’s other aides are Chris Durazo from South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN) and Dominica Henderson, formerly of the SF Housing Authority.

Debra Walker, a progressive activist who served on the Building Inspection Commission and has worked with Olague for decades, said she’s a reliable ally: “She’s from the progressive community and I have no equivocation about that.”

Olague makes no apologies for her alliances, saying that she is both independent and progressive and that she should be judged by her actions as a supervisor. “People will have to decide who I am based on how I vote,” she said, later adding, “I support the mayor and I’m not going to apologize for that.”

 

OLAGUE’S PRIORITIES

Olague was born in Merced in 1961 to a Mexican immigrant father who fixed farming equipment and a stay-at-home mother. She went to high school in Fresno and moved to the Bay Area in 1982. She attended San Francisco State University but had to drop out to help support her family, working at various stock brokerage firms in the Financial District. She later got a degree in liberal studies from California Institute of Integral Studies.

In 1992, Olague’s mother was in serious car accident that left her a quadriplegic, so Olague spent the next seven years caring for her. After her mother died, Olague left the financial services industry and became a community organizer for the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, battling the forces of gentrification and then-Mayor Brown and becoming an active player in the ascendant progressive movement.

But Olague never abided progressive orthodoxy. She backed Mark Leno over the more progressive Harry Britt in their 2002 Assembly race and backed Leno again in 2007 when he ran for state Senate against Carole Migden. She also voted for the Home Depot project on Bayshore Boulevard despite a progressive campaign against the project.

Olague worked with then-Sup. Chris Daly to win more community benefits and other concessions from developers of the Trinity Plaza and Rincon Tower projects, but now she is critical of Daly’s confrontational tactics. “Daly’s style isn’t what I agree with anymore,” Olague said, criticizing the deals that were cut on those projects to approve them with larger than required community benefits packages. “I think we romanticized what we got.”

So how does Olague plan to approach big development proposals, and is she willing to practice the brinksmanship that many progressives believe is necessary to win concessions? While she says her approach will be more conciliatory than Daly’s, she says the answer is still yes. “You push back, you make demands, and if you don’t think it’s going to benefit the city holistically, you just fucking say no,” Olague said.

Walker said Olague has proven she can stand up to pressure. “I think she’ll do as well as she did on the Planning Commission. She served as president and there is an enormous amount of pressure that is applied behind the scenes,” Walker said. “She’s already stood up to mayoral pressure on some issues.”

Yet even some of Olague’s strongest supporters say her dual — and perhaps dueling — loyalties to the Mayor’s Office and her progressive district are likely to be tested this year.

“It’ll be challenging for her to navigate,” Radulovich said. “The Mayor’s Office is going to say I want you to do X and Y, and it won’t always be progressive stuff, so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.”

But he said Olague’s land use expertise and progressive background will likely count for more than any bitter pills that she’s asked to swallow. “Sometimes, as a policy maker, you have to push the envelope and say we can get more,” he said. “It helps if you’re willing to say no to things and set boundaries.”

When we asked Olague to lay out her philosophy on dealing with land-use issues, she said that her approach will vary: “I have a very gray approach, project by project and neighborhood by neighborhood.”

Only a couple weeks into her new role, Olague said that she’s still getting a lay of the land: “I’m in information gathering mode, meeting with neighborhood groups to try to figure out what their issues are.”

But Olague said she understands that part of her job is making decisions that will disappoint some groups. For example, after Mayor Lee pledged to install bike lanes on Fell and Oak streets to connect the Panhandle to The Wiggle and lessen the danger to bicyclists, he recently stalled the project after motorists opposed the idea.

“I’m a transit-first person, for sure. I don’t even drive,” Olague said of her approach to that issue, which she has now begun to work on. “We’ll try to craft a solution, but then at some point you have to fall on one side or the other.”

 

THE “JOBS” FOCUS

One issue on which Olague’s core loyalities are likely to be tested is on the so-called “jobs” issue, which both Lee and Olague call their top priority. “Jobs and economic revitalization are very important,” she told us.

Progressives have begun to push back on Lee for valuing private sector job creation over all other priorities, such as workers’ rights, environmental safeguards, and public services. That came to a head on Jan. 26 at the Rules Committee hearing on Lee’s proposed charter amendment to delay legislation that might cost private sector jobs and require extra hearings before the Small Business Commission. Progressives and labor leaders slammed the proposal as unfair, divisive, unnecessary, and reminiscent of right-wing political tactics.

But when we interviewed Olague the next day, she was reluctant to criticize the measure on the record, even though it seemed so dead-on-arrival at the Board of Supervisors that Mayor Lee voluntarily withdrew it the next week.

Olague told us job creation is important, but she said it can’t squeeze out other priorities, such as protecting affordable rental housing.

“We always have to look at how the community will benefit from things. So if we want to incentivize for businesses, how do we also make it work for neighborhoods and for people so that we don’t end up with where we were in the Mission District in the ’90s?” she said.

Olague also said that she didn’t share Lee’s focus on jobs in the technology sector. “There’s a lot of talk of technology, and that’s fine and I’m not against that, and we can see how it works in the city. But at the same time, I’m concerned about folks who aren’t interested necessarily in working in technology. We need other types of jobs, so I think we shouldn’t let go of the small scale manufacturing idea.”

Transfer of power

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4
Transfer of power

yael@sfbg.com

Feb. 1 marks the first day that San Francisco and other California cities no longer have redevelopment as a tool for building affordable housing or dealing with urban blight, but questions remain about how the power and functions of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) will now be used.

On Dec. 29, the California Supreme Court upheld the validity of Assembly Bill 26, which dissolved all redevelopment agencies throughout the state and redirected the property tax revenue they accumulated to prevent deep cuts to public schools.

Redevelopment agencies, established in California in 1948, were charged with revitalizing “blighted” areas of cities. There were 400 such agencies throughout California, funded by incremental increases in property taxes within a redevelopment zone. Agencies could borrow against that revenue source to subsidize development projects.

AB 26 mandated that all cities dissolve their redevelopment agencies by Feb. 1 and transfer assets to successor agencies meant to “expeditiously wind down the affairs of the dissolved redevelopment agencies,” according the bill’s text.

A resolution passed by the Board of Supervisors on Jan. 24 authorized the transfer of SFRA affordable housing assets to the Mayor’s Office of Housing (MOH) and its non-housing assets to the city’s Department of Administrative Services. It also created a board to oversee the implementation of the SFRA’s ongoing projects.

Now, San Francisco is faced with the task of continuing to fund affordable housing projects and other development without the SFRA, and the board’s resolution laid out some of the terms for how the city will do that, although much remains to be determined.

Mayor Ed Lee appointed all members of the oversight board, which includes Planning Director John Rahaim; MOH Director Olson Lee; Nadia Sesay, director of the Mayor’s Office of Public Finance; and Bob Muscat, director of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 21.

In recent weeks, some groups have raised concerns that these appointees are not representative of the communities impacted by the ongoing redevelopment projects that they will be entrusted with overseeing, and that too much power is concentrated in the Mayor’s Office.

“One of our biggest concerns is that the oversight body could be made much more accountable and democratic,” said Jeron Browne of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER)-Bayview. Much of Bayview-Hunters Point is no longer under the authority of the Planning Commission or any regular zoning laws since it was declared a redevelopment project site in 2000.

Sup. Malia Cohen, who represents the area, added an amendment to the board’s resolution that would impose term limits on oversight board positions. “I understand that there are a number of concerns that have been raised about the composition of the board. However, given the short time frame and the technical nature of the board and its obligations, I’m very comfortable with these appointees that they will be able to make decisions necessary to make the projects move forward. Additionally, with the inclusion of staggering terms we will be able to ensure that there is ample opportunity to include representation from affected communities,” Cohen said at the meeting.

The board also passed an amendment to “clarify that the land use controls granted by the oversight board are consistent with previous land use authority granted by the Board of Supervisors and the redevelopment commission,” as a response to concerns that the oversight board will have too much power over land use in project areas.

Tiffany Bohee, interim director of the SFRA, said that the court’s ruling was the “least desirable possible outcome.” Bohee said the SFRA has spent recent weeks analyzing all enforceable obligations outlined by the ruling to make sure that the transition complies with the law and is as fair as possible to SFRA employees.

The positions that these 101 workers filled at the SFRA will no longer exist as of Feb. 1, and layoffs are underway. However, most will remain employed throughout a transition period that ends March 31, and Bohee said that many will find work in city agencies that will be charged with continuing the work of the SFRA, such as MOH and the Planning Department.

MOH was historically responsible for allocating federal housing grants to city agencies. In past decades, federal budget cuts have severely limited the grants to build affordable housing. Now, although MOH has some power over city housing policy and allocation of funds to build housing, many of those responsibilities had been transferred to the Planning Department — or, until recently, the Redevelopment Agency.

The Planning Department is governed by the Planning Commission with four mayor-appointed members and three members appointed by the Board of Supervisors. The Planning Department implements planning standards and signs off on structural changes to the city, ranging from homeowner requests to alter houses to developer requests to build high-rises.

In many ways, the Redevelopment Agency was redundant, shadowing work done by the Planning Department. When an area was designated an SFRA project area, the planning code and zoning restrictions no longer applied, and developers working in partnership with the city had the power to define new land-use regulations.

Many critics of the SFRA said that private developers were able to use this lack of regulation to take advantage of the significant amount of money reserved for the agency. Deepening this concern was the fact that the Redevelopment Commission, which oversaw the SFRA, was composed entirely of mayoral appointees, which some felt were less accountable to the public interest than the Planning Commission.

Some feel that the oversight board, composed entirely of mayoral appointees, will repeat the same lack of accountability to neighborhoods.

“The city is setting up a planning commission for the 1 percent. And the Planning Commission that we have is the for the 99 percent,” said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, which works on land use issues. He said that with the dissolution of the SFRA, the city has an opportunity to facilitate the construction of affordable housing in a more democratic fashion. His organization expressed concerns to the Board of Supervisors, cautioning that the Oversight Board should not have undue power over land-use in development project areas and that the new structure in city government for facilitating development projects should be created with the input of communities. The Board of Supervisors made clear Jan. 24 that the Oversight Board and its appointees are a temporary measure to comply with AB26 by the Feb. 1 deadline. As Sup. Christina Olague said, “I just want to assure the public that this isn’t the end-all, be-all of this discussion, that it will be ongoing, and we welcome any of your concerns at any time.”

The parking war

Andrew Lam
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29

EDITORIAL When you talk about changing parking rules in San Francisco, you’re setting off the political equivalent of shooting war. Nobody wants more parking tickets, nobody wants more expensive parking meters, nobody wants to pay for parking that’s been free for years — and the Municipal Transportation Agency has, by most accounts, done a pretty poor job of selling its new parking management program.

That’s too bad, because the MTA proposals aren’t all bad. In fact, the agency is doing exactly the right thing by looking at a long-term citywide plan for altering the way people pay for and use on-street parking. If the bureaucrats at a city department that isn’t used to San Francisco’s often slow community-oriented planning process can shift their outreach efforts into a different gear, there’s no reason they can’t come up with a plan that most neighborhood residents and small businesses will support.

The MTA’s SFPark program uses high-tech meters that accept credit cards and change prices at different points of the day to maximize turnover on the streets. That’s actually good for local businesses — the less time people spend circling the block looking for a parking space, the more likely they are to stop and shop. Limiting the number of cars cruising for a space improves traffic flow. And parking for an hour or two at a meter is still much cheaper than parking in a garage.

But when the MTA announced that it was expanding SFPark into the Northeast Mission, Dogpatch, Potrero Hill and Mission Bay, the neighborhoods rebelled. Some of that was just anger over the prospect of meters being installed on streets that don’t have them. Some of it comes from the changing land use in areas that are increasingly both residential and commercial. Some of it comes from the intense development pressure in those areas.

But a lot of it was a legitimate response to a perception that the MTA was trying to ram the changes through without making a serious effort to work with the community. It’s not surprising — the MTA has been somewhat isolated from the politics of land use and planning in the city. So the staff isn’t used to the fact that San Francisco is a process-oriented place where a wide range of constituent groups want input before anything happens where they live or work.

The neighborhoods need to understand reality, too: The era of free parking in San Francisco is coming to an end. That’s a good thing — the city as a matter of policy should discourage the use of cars, and charging drivers for parking (and using that money to improve Muni) is an obvious solution. And the proposals aren’t that onerous: Paying 25 cents an hour for all-day parking where you work is hardly a terrible financing burden. (And let’s face it — the neighborhood parking stickers are way, way too cheap.)

But much of the southeast is badly served by transit and there are vehicle-intensive production, distribution and repair uses, and MTA needs to understand that. The agency has wisely delayed the program — and after its shown it can work with the neighborhoods, this sort of bold initiative will be possible.

Guardian editorial: The parking war

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3

EDITORIAL When you talk about changing parking rules in San Francisco, you’re setting off the political equivalent of shooting war. Nobody wants more parking tickets, nobody wants more expensive parking meters, nobody wants to pay for parking that’s been free for years — and the Municipal Transportation Agency has, by most accounts, done a pretty poor job of selling its new parking management program.

That’s too bad, because the MTA proposals aren’t all bad. In fact, the agency is doing exactly the right thing by looking at a long-term citywide plan for altering the way people pay for and use on-street parking. If the bureaucrats at a city department that isn’t used to San Francisco’s often slow community-oriented planning process can shift their outreach efforts into a different gear, there’s no reason they can’t come up with a plan that most neighborhood residents and small businesses will support.

The MTA’s SFPark program uses high-tech meters that accept credit cards and change prices at different points of the day to maximize turnover on the streets. That’s actually good for local businesses — the less time people spend circling the block looking for a parking space, the more likely they are to stop and shop. Limiting the number of cars cruising for a space improves traffic flow. And parking for an hour or two at a meter is still much cheaper than parking in a garage.

But when the MTA announced that it was expanding SFPark into the Northeast Mission, Dogpatch, Potrero Hill and Mission Bay, the neighborhoods rebelled. Some of that was just anger over the prospect of meters being installed on streets that don’t have them. Some of it comes from the changing land use in areas that are increasingly both residential and commercial. Some of it comes from the intense development pressure in those areas.

But a lot of it was a legitimate response to a perception that the MTA was trying to ram the changes through without making a serious effort to work with the community. It’s not surprising — the MTA has been somewhat isolated from the politics of land use and planning in the city. So the staff isn’t used to the fact that San Francisco is a process-oriented place where a wide range of constituent groups want input before anything happens where they live or work.

The neighborhoods also  need to understand reality: The era of free parking in San Francisco is coming to an end. That’s a good thing — the city as a matter of policy should discourage the use of cars, and charging drivers for parking (and using that money to improve Muni) is an obvious solution. And the proposals aren’t that onerous: Paying 25 cents an hour for all-day parking where you work is hardly a terrible financing burden. (And let’s face it — the neighborhood parking stickers are way, way too cheap.)

But much of the southeast is badly served by transit and there are vehicle-intensive production, distribution and repair uses, and MTA needs to understand that. The agency has wisely delayed the program — and after its shown it can work with the neighborhoods, this sort of bold initiative will be possible.

 

 

The new board committes: Not great news

Zelda Bronstein
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49
The new board committes: Not great news

Board President David Chiu has released the new committee assignments for 2012, and they aren’t a whole lot different from last year’s — except in a few areas. And they aren’t exactly an indication of progressive power.

The three most conservative supervisors — Mark Farrell, Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu — all were named to chair committees. Supervisors Eric Mar and John Avalos also are committee chairs, although David Campos was relegated to the joint City and School District Select Commitee, which is important but takes no votes and has no role in the legislative process.

Word is, however, that Campos may wind up chairing the Transportation Authority.

The Budget and Finance Committee is run by Chu, but Avalos and Jane Kim are also members, giving a majority to the progressives. But during the budget season, that panel expands to five members — and the additional two, Scott Wiener and Malia Cohen, are both decidedly on the moderate side. That means progressives will not have a majority on the panel that plays the central role in setting the city’s budget.

The Rules Committee is improved from last year — Kim is the chair, joined by Campos and Farrell. But Land Use and Economic Development — possibly the second most important committee after Budget and Finance — is dominated by moderates; Mar is the chair but Cohen and Wiener will have a 2-1 majority.

State Assemblymember Tom Ammiano told me he’s concerned that the two openly gay members of the board, Campos and Wiener, aren’t in more prominent roles. “It seems like there are two very hardworking people who were slighted here,” he said.

But Chiu disagrees, saying that the assignments “reflect the diversity of the board and the city.” He added: “Last year (when conservatives were given key posts) everyone thought the sky would fall, and it didn’t.”

The sky falling is pretty dramatic; I suspect it won’t. But there’s a difference between the sky falling and the progressive agenda moving forward.

 

 

Guardian editorial: Mixed report on Mayor Lee

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21

EDITORIAL Mayor Ed Lee’s first big decision — the appointment of a District 5 supervisor — demonstrated something very positive:

The mayor knows that he can’t do what his predecessor did and ignore and dismiss the progressive community.

His inauguration speech demonstrated something else: That he has no intention of being a mayor who takes on and defies the interests of downtown.

Part of the reason Gavin Newsom was a failure as mayor is that he was constantly at war with the left. He ran the city as if his was the only way, as if there were no good ideas coming out of anywhere except his office — and as if anyone who disgreed with or voted against him was his enemy.

That didn’t work, and it doesn’t seem to be Lee’s style. He was under pressure to appoint a supervisor who would go along with him on key votes, but he also knew that a moderate or a lackey would deeply offend the voters in D5, who supported John Avalos for mayor and remain among the most progressive voters in the city. The choice of Christina Olague shows a willingless to accept that progressives play a significant role in San Francisco politics. (It also shows that he is better than any mayor in recent memory at keeping a secret — nobody outside of his inner circle had any idea who his choice was until he announced it Jan 9.)

Olague was, overall, an excellent planning commissioner, and has the potential to be an excellent supervisor. But she will need to make clear from the start that she is representing the district, not the person who gave her the job. Because on some of the key issues that will come before the board this spring, her constituents are well to the left of the mayor. If she can’t vote against his wishes, she’ll have trouble in November.

Olague also needs to be sure that some of the issues her predecessor, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, championed (public power and community policing, for example) don’t fall by the wayside. Her expertise in land use issues should be helpful as the board wrangles with waterfront development, affordable housing and the giant California Pacific Medical Center hospital project.

Lee’s inaugural speech was mostly a typical political speech for a new mayor, but it contained a nugget that’s worthy of note. He proclaimed that San Francisco should be a “city of the 100 percent,” a takeoff on the Occupy movement’s 99 percent slogan. And while that’s mostly rhetoric, it’s also a sign that the former housing activist is not going to be a mayor who wants to make a legacy of challenging the economic and political powers of San Francisco.

Working together is fine — but there are a small number of very wealthy and powerful people who have interests that are utterly opposed to the interests of the rest of us. Economic injustice is every bit as real in this city as it is elsewhere in the country — and that’s something the mayor didn’t even mention or acknowledge. Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the big real-estate developers, the landlords out at ParkMerced, the Chamber of Commerce,  and the Board of Realtors … they don’t want to work together. They want their way.

So it’s a mixed report for Mayor Lee — and over the next few months, he’s going to have to realize that everyone in the city can’t and shouldn’t work together, that there are battles where politicians have to take sides, and that all of us will be watching very closely to see where he draws the line.

BREAKING: Lee appointing Olague to D5 seat

Sasha Cuttler
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20
BREAKING: Lee appointing Olague to D5 seat

Sources say Mayor Ed Lee will appoint Christina Olague, the Planning Commission president and longtime progressive, to the District 5 seat on the Board of Supervisors that was vacated by Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. Formal announcement set for 10 am. More after the ceremony.

UPDATE 11:30 AM: Lee announced his decision and administered the oath of office to Olague this morning at City Hall before a large crowd of mostly progressive political activists who said they were pleasantly surprised to see one of their own get the nod, taking it as a positive gesture from a moderate mayor who has pledged to work with all sides.

In their remarks, both Lee and Olague talked about the need to get past political labels and stressed her detailed knowledge of planning and land use issues, which they hope will help with Lee’s main focus on job creation.

“This is not about counting votes, it’s about what’s best for San Francisco and her district,” Lee said. Olague echoed the sentiment: “I think this is an incredible time for our city and a time when we are coming together and moving past old political pigeonholes.”

She pledged to get right to work on pressing issues facing the city and with winning the “respect and trust” of voters in District 5, one of the city’s most progressive.

We’ll have more analysis and reaction to this appointment and Lee’s inaugural address yesterday in this week’s Guardian.

Battling big box

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1

news@sfbg.com   

In neighborhood commercial districts, national chains and other formula retail stores such as PETCO, Target, Subway, Walmart, and Starbucks are hot button issues for residents who don’t want to see San Francisco turn into a strip mall or have local money pulled from the community.

Sup. Eric Mar and other city officials want to make sure local small businesses aren’t being unnecessarily hurt by competition from national chains, which is why he called a hearing on Dec. 5 to discuss big box retailers and their impacts on San Francisco’s small businesses, neighborhoods, workers, and economy.

“There is no vehicle to see the impacts of big business on the city,” Mar told us, saying he is contemplating legislation to do just that.

Mar was part of city efforts to keep formula pet stores from locating in the Richmond area, working with a coalition of pet food small businesses concerned about PETCO and Pet Food Express trying to move into the area. But it isn’t just pet stores.

“There is a perception that Walmart might make a move into the city since we already have stores like Fresh n’ Easy,” Mar’s Legislative Aide Nick Pagoulatos told us.

The city doesn’t have a comprehensive analysis on how these companies impact San Francisco. Mar says he wants to “have a clear scale of their influence and see what we need to do to protect small business in San Francisco.”

History of wariness

In 2004, the Board of Supervisors adopted the first Formula Retail Use Control legislation, an ordinance that “prohibited Formula Retail in one district; required Conditional Use Authorization in another; and established notification requirements in all neighborhood commercial districts.”

The Planning Code changed again after a voter ballot initiative in 2007, Proposition G, required any formula retail use in neighborhood commercial districts to obtain a conditional use permit, which gave neighboring businesses a chance to weigh in during a public hearing.

Mar said the intent wasn’t to bar big box retail from entering the city, but to simply give neighborhoods a voice. But now, he said the city needs to take a more comprehensive look at what’s coming and how they will impact the city.

Small Business Commissioner Kathleen Dooley echoed the concern, which extends even beyond city limits. “I’ve heard through the rumor mill that Lowe’s in South San Francisco is going to close and

Walmart is looking to take that space since they know they’d never get into the city,” she told us. “It’s bad enough that Target is opening stores [in San Francisco]. They are the quintessential big box because they sell everything.”

Target is in the process of opening a massive store inside the Metreon in SoMa, and another store at Geary and Masonic. Mar isn’t diametrically opposed to the big box industry, but he thinks those companies should be appropriately situated.

“I’ve seen that people in Richmond are positive toward big box like Target coming into the district, but some are nervous that it will take down business,” he told us. “There are some property spaces that are supposed to be for big box, like the property at Geary and Masonic where the old Sears and Toys”R”Us used to be.”

But it’s not easy to figure out what other big box stores have their sights set on the city. The Planning Department’s list of projects in the pipeline aren’t always filed under the name of the business, making it difficult to stay vigilant.

For example, while application #3710017 at 350 Mission Street describes the project as a “95,000 sq. ft. building of office, retail and accessory uses,” it isn’t clear what businesses are actually setting up shop. And these days, some big box stores are coming in smaller boxes.

Prototype stores such as Unleashed by PETCO are specifically designed to squeeze into smaller property spaces so they can get into neighbor corridors that are typically reserved for small businesses.

More help needed

During the Dec. 5 hearing before the Land Use and Economic Development Committee, Sup. Scott Wiener echoed Mar concerns, commenting that he wants to see how the Planning Commission could “improve the Conditional Use process since we see a pushback of strong neighborhood activity.”

Dooley recalled an issue from 2009 when the Small Business Commission formally asked the Planning Commission not to authorize a PETCO in the Richmond because “the surrounding area was already well served by pet stores.” The board ultimately stopped PETCO, but Pet Food Express did locate a store nearby, which Dooley said has already taken a toll on the locally owned pet food suppliers.

“Big box stores carry a huge number of products that impact other stores,” she said. “Big box is a category killer in the neighborhood…the Planning Commission needs new criteria for formula retail because there are several different types.”

Some superstores require parking lots, taking up additional land, and increasing traffic in certain neighborhoods. Yet one trait that most chain stores have in common is that they extract more money from San Francisco than locally owned businesses, whose revenues tend to circulate locally.

“With every dollar spent at local stores, 65 cents will go back into the community, while only a quarter will be returned from a big box.” Rick Karp, owner of the 50-year-old Cole Hardware, said at the hearing, citing various studies on the issue.

Small business owners are asking for economic impact reports to be included in project applications from chain stores to see just how they measure up to their locally owned counterparts.

When Lowe’s entered his district, Karp says he lost 18 percent of his business and was forced to eliminate six full-time jobs. He appealed to city officials to “keep big box out of San Francisco because it impacts the efficacy of neighborhood shopping.”

Once chain stores puts the locals out of business, the consumer is stuck with set prices and reduced variety. But critics say it isn’t just consumers and small business owners who suffer, but workers as well. They singled out Walmart as notorious for union-busting and poor labor standards.

“We can use our land use ordinances and powers to set a basic minimum labor standard. Big box must abide by that and also include health care if implemented in local government [legislation],” Mar said.

But Steven Pitts, a labor policy specialist at UC Berkeley, told us there is a connection between low prices and low wages.

“People who work at Walmart are poorer than those who shop there,” he told us. “Therefore, if prices were raised to increase wages for employees, the burden wouldn’t be on people of lower income.”
Opposing Walmart

To illustrate how Walmart would adversely affect San Francisco’s workforce, the hearing included two employees of Walmart, Barbara Collins and Ronald Phillips from Placerville, who helped create Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OURWalmart) to push for better benefits and labor standards.

“We want to hold Walmart accountable,” said Collins, whose last annual income from Walmart was $15,000 annually, a salary she realized couldn’t support her four children. “Walmart says they pay living wages. No, they don’t.”

Phillips said that Walmart has “a tendency to fire people for any reason and then does not have to pay for the benefits… I was one of these people, but I was rehired.”

For the past three months, Phillips says she has worked at least six days and 40 hours per week, but that she still qualified for welfare assistance.

Also at the hearing, SF Locally Owned Merchants Alliance unveiled a study showing that formula retail costs nearly as many jobs as it creates. A domino effect occurs when stores close because fewer customers circulate to other nearby stores.

But the group noted that consumer habits are probably even more important than city regulations. The SFLOMA study found that if 10 percent of San Franciscans shifted their spending to locally owned small businesses, consumers would create 1,300 jobs and $190 million in the city.

And that would be good for everyone: owners, consumers, and workers. Steven Cornell, owner of Brownie’s Hardware, said that small business pays good wages, typically above the minimum wage, as well as sick leave, health coverage, and other benefits. As he told the hearing, “Local businesses have been doing this for 20 to 30 years since we are already invested in the community.”

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
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68

tredmond@sfbg.com

Twenty years ago, if you mapped income distribution in San Francisco on a standard graph, you’d see what the economist call a bell curve: At one end were a small number of very poor families, at the other a small number of very rich, and in between the bulk of the city was somewhere roughly close to what you could call middle class.

Take the 2012 census data and make that graph today and you get the opposite — it’s becoming a U-shape, with more people in poverty and more gross wealth and not as much in the center.

You could see that on stark display at City Hall Dec 12.

At 10 a.m., the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee heard several hours of testimony on the alarming rise in the number of homeless families. In the end, the Mayor’s Office agreed to find $3 million to help out.

At 1 p.m., the Land Use and Economic Development Committee heard testimony on a plan to build more housing — on the waterfront, for the top one quarter of the top one percent of the richest people in America, people who will need more than $3 million just for the downpayment on their new digs.

The plan calls for 145 of what Port of San Francisco officials call “high end” or “luxury” condominiums, along with 400 underground parking spaces. “It’s going to be tight on three levels,” a Port official testified. “Most of it will be valet parking.” The developer wants to raise the height limit along the waterfront for the first time in half a century.

The Port, which controls some of the land, will get a cut of all the condo sales, maybe as much as $500,000 a year; that money will go to rebuild old piers and fund a long list of Port projects — including the America’s Cup. (Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union was sitting next to me at the hearing, and he shook his head at that bit of news. “Condos for rich people to pay for boats for rich people,” he said.)

A long list of people, including former City Planning Director Alan Jacobs and former City Attorney Louise Renne — spoke against the project. Jacobs and Renne both explained that this was single-site spot zoning that would change the half-century consensus that the city should “decrease height toward the waterfront so the people can see and enjoy the meeting of land and water,” as Jacobs put it.

Jacobs gave the committee members his one “absolute truth” about city planning: “If a developer accepts and knows that a rule can’t be broken, then it will be economical to build within it. If he or she think it can be changed, then suddenly it will not be economical. It’s called greed.”

In other words, Simon Snellgrove, the developer of 8 Washington, could make money with a lower-scale project that conforms to existing height limits. But he can make more money if the city gives him a big honkin favor.

But it’s not all about height limits for me. It’s not even about the fact that the project will chop up a tennis and swimming club that serves about 2,000 more-or-less middle-class people in an effort to make life nicer for about 145 very rich people.

It’s about what kind of housing we’re building in San Francisco. “Every study that we’ve seen shows that we’ve vastly overbuilt housing for the wealthy,” Gullicksen testified.

And we’re not just talking the ordinary wealthy here. The most compelling testimony came from Frederick Allardyce, a real-estate broker from Sotheby’s who said he had been involved in the sale of about 70 percent of all luxury condos sold from Washington St. to the waterfront. He gave us a glimpse of who would be living — sort of — at 8 Washington.

The cheapest condos would require an income of $469,000, a downpayment of $625,000, and another $493,000 of liquid reserves. Monthly payment: $13,699. The higher-end units would require an annual income of $1.029 million and a downpayment of $6.5 million.

“That’s not the one percent,” he said. “It’s the top one quarter of the top one percent.”

And, Allardyce explained, most of the people who buy that level of property are so rich that they don’t actually live there. It’s a second or third or fourth home, a place to stay a few weeks out of the year. And since the project involves chopping up a tennis and swim club used by some 2,000 people (who are nowhere near that rich), “you’re eliminating the use of that land by the general public” in favor of a tiny elite.

The developer says that the city will get money to build 33 below-market-rate units. That’s nice; by that standard, 80 percent of the new housing goes to the richest people in the world, and 20 percent for everyone else. That percentage ought to be reversed — and until it is (or at least, until we have a plan to build enough affordable housing for the people who really need a place to live in San Francisco) I can’t imagine why we’d want to be doing favors to feed the greed of developers.

What we’re doing in this city is making life harder for low-income people who are increasingly living on the streets and doing big favors for the spectacularly wealthy. There’s no sanity in our housing policy — except to turn San Francisco even more into a city of the rich.

Is SF moving to the right?

Zelda Bronstein
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92
Is SF moving to the right?

The Bay Citizen/New York Times thinks so. The headline on the story — “more conservative is the new normal” — says it all. Matt Smith (formerly of our price-fizing rival SF Weekly) and Gerry Shih say the Nov. 8 election signals a turn to the right for this famously liberal city:

But Tuesday’s election signaled a palpable shift: In addition to Lee, a pro-business moderate, voters overwhelmingly picked George Gascón, the law-and-order former police chief — and former Republican — as district attorney.

“To whoever thinks San Francisco is loopy and left-wing, this election basically said, ‘No, it’s really not,’” said David Latterman, associate director of the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good at the University of San Francisco. “We just elected an ex-Republican, pro-death penalty district attorney by a landslide. Just ponder that.”

Well: It’s interesting that they call Lee a “pro-business moderate,” which is probably accurate but differs from how Lee’s more progressive supporters see the new mayor. But while they talk about Gascon, they conveniently leave out the fact that San Francisco has elected the first solid progressive to a citywide office in a long, long time. Ross Mirkarimi — a former Green Party member and without a doubt one of the most left-leaning supervisors — won a tight, contested race for sheriff running honestly as a progressive. I think you have to go back to 1987, when Art Agnos ran for mayor as the candidate of the left, to find another example of a progressive champion winning all across town.

The interesting element of all of this — and something I think Smith and Shih got absolutely right — is that the demographic makeup of the city is changing, and has been for a while:

“From a political perspective, the tech companies are employing young workers who often prefer to live in San Francisco, even if they commute to Silicon Valley, said Wade Randlett, a Bay Area technology executive and top fund-raiser for President Obama.”

Wade Randlett is not my favorite person in local politics, but the point he makes is valid — and it’s not happening by accident. Virtually all of the new housing that’s been built in San Francisco in the past decade has been aimed at wealthy people, a lot of them young tech types who commute from the city to Silicon Valley. The other people moving into new housing are empty-nest retirees from places like Marin County. If you walk through the new condo buildings in Soma, the residents are mostly white, with a few Asians; there are almost no African Americans, very few families and essentially zero working-class people.

For years, downtown groups (including Randlett’s former employer, SFSOS) have pushed for this kind of housing, and some of them have been very open about their goal: By bringing in more rich people and tech workers, you can change the politics of the city. Housing activist Calvin Welch puts it succinctly: Who lives here, votes here.

That’s the reason why land use and housing are so critically important in this town. If poor and working-class people are pushed out to make way for a more upscale set of residents, then progressives who talk about taxing the wealthy to provide services for the poor will have a harder time getting elected.

It’s not a conspiracy; it’s an open, stated policy goal of the people who spent vast sums of money electing Ed Lee.

 

 

San Francisco’s political spectrum: a primer

Sasha Cuttler
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120
San Francisco’s political spectrum: a primer

During yesterday’s post-election wrap-up at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, political consultant and analyst David Latterman cited the ideological breakdown of San Francisco voters: 19 percent are progressive, 36 percent are liberal, 39 percent are “moderate,” and 6 percent are conservative. I cited those figures in a post I wrote yesterday on the latest election results, and some people responded by asking me to explain those terms, so let me take a crack at that because I think it’s important to understanding the city’s political dynamics.

I even discussed the matter with Latterman – who self-identifies as moderate, whereas I and the Guardian have a progressive worldview. “That’s a fantastic question and I don’t think any of us can give suitable answers,” Latterman said. “These aren’t hard lines. It’s like: I don’t know how to define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” Nonetheless, we agreed on the basic outlines and borders between the labels, even though we might frame them and value them a little differently.

In San Francisco, there is general agreement on most social issues among the moderates, liberals, and progressives, although we may disagree on political tactics. We all basically support gay rights, reproductive freedom, the value of diversity, environmentalism, and freedom of expression. That’s why most people consider San Francisco to be a famously liberal city, because of our tolerance on social issues, which only that 6 percent who are conservatives don’t share.

Yet San Francisco is still a deeply divided city on economic issues, including land use and the role of government. This is where most of the political conflicts and divisions occur, and it is here where our political spectrum is as wide as anywhere – perhaps even wider given the extreme wealth and poverty here, as well as the long history of political activism and the setting of national political trends. And it is in this realm that our labels come from.

A “moderate” in San Francisco – which is a real misnomer despite its widespread usage – is a fiscal conservative: anti-tax, anti-regulation, an almost religious faith in the free market, and a resentment of the poor (particularly the homeless and the jobless) and those who advocate for them. They want bare minimal government and see the role of government as primarily to facilitate economic activity in the private sector and to provide the basic infrastructure that the private sector needs to operate efficiently. They even believe social services should be provided by the private sector, such as nonprofits, rather than by government. On economic issues, they’re almost indistinguishable from conservatives, with whom they disagree on social issues.

On the other end of the spectrum are the progressives, who don’t trust capitalists and large corporations and believe they need to be heavily regulated and taxed to provide for the common good. We believe in progressive taxation and a redistribution of wealth, particularly from the richest 1 percent, and that government has an important role to play in leveling the economic playing field and playing referee. Progressives generally believe this country has been drifting to the right for at least the last 31 years and that this is a dangerous trend that needs to be addressed with fundamental, systemic reforms. And at this point, we’re willing to adopt radical strategies for triggering that change, such as Occupy Wall Street or other forms of civil disobedience.

The liberals of San Francisco are somewhere in the middle. They’re Democrats (or DTS) who don’t believe in radical change or anything that might disrupt the existing order, preferring incremental reforms over long period of time. They accept the legitimacy of the two-party political system and an economic system governed by Wall Street and powerful corporations, and they believe we need to do what we can within that framework. They use neoliberal economic policies like business tax cuts and incentives to encourage private sector job creation and housing development, and they accept a shrinking public sector, which they expect to operate more like the private sector, and a waning labor movement.

The reactions to the OccupySF movement is an interesting illustration of the dividing lines. Moderates have voiced tepid support for the movement’s critique of the growing gap between rich and poor, but they’re appalled at the tactic of occupation, believing curfew and anti-camping laws are more important. Progressives have been the most enthusiastic supporters of a movement that echoes their core values and physically challenges the status quo. Liberals basically support the movement, but they’ve been very uneasy with the tactic of occupation and have been vacillating on how to deal with it.

Latterman and the moderates – as well as many liberals – see ideology as a dirty word, and he was happy that in this election “it was the least ideological race we’ve seen in a long time.” Mayor Ed Lee and Board President David Chiu – both of whom hover in the liberal to moderate range, depending on the issue – also treat the notion of ideology with disdain, claiming to support practical, pragmatic, or common sense solutions to problems.

But progressives see ideology as the essence of politics. They understand the world in terms of class struggle, and believe that the very rich have been aggressively exploiting the people and the planet for too long, and that the only real way to make progress is to fight them and win. They believe in the Occupy paradigm that the 1 percent – the greedy rich who have corrupted our political and economic systems – are actively hostile to the interests of the 99 percent. We know that’s an unsustainable system and we’re hopeful that this is the moment when progress – the core of our belief system, that it’s possible to devise better economic and political systems than the ones we’ve inherited – could finally be attainable if we continue to organize and challenge the system.

That’s my general analysis of San Francisco’s political dynamics. What’s yours?

The odd evictions at Parkmerced

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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8
The odd evictions at Parkmerced

rebeccab@sfbg.com

The San Francisco City Attorney’s Office has started investigating conditions at Parkmerced in the wake of housing advocates’ concerns that tenants have been issued a high volume of notices warning that they could face eviction due to unpaid utility fees.

The questions surrounding back payments and pending evictions, many of which impact low-income renters, have emerged only a few months after the Board of Supervisors narrowly approved a controversial redevelopment project at the neighborhood-scale housing complex. When it was under consideration, project opponents voiced concerns that housing for low-income residents could be jeopardized under the plan if tenant protections guaranteed by the developers did not stand up in court.

“The timing of it is a little suspicious,” said Tyler McMillan, executive director of the San Francisco-based Eviction Defense Collaborative. “A lot of folks suddenly are moving toward the eviction process … right after they got approved for this big development. It all just smells really bad.”

Parkmerced spokesperson PJ Johnston told the Guardian the notices had nothing to do with the development approval, and were simply a consequence of unpaid bills. “I don’t think the city attorney is going to find anything of particular interest,” he said. “This is an issue of a property owner telling people who owe bills that they have to pay their bills.”

Stellar Management, Parkmerced’s property management company, issued 196 notices this past summer and in September warning tenants that they could face eviction if they did not take steps to bring their accounts current within three days.

In some cases, back payments had piled up for more than a year, and the bills ranged from around $400 to $1,200 — a burdensome dilemma for very low income residents getting by on fixed incomes.

The issue wasn’t payment of rent; most of the charges stemmed from water, sewer, and trash pick-up fees administered by a third-party billing company called American Utility Management (AUM). Parkmerced cited breach of the lease agreement as grounds for eviction.

Some tenants dispute the charges, and have told the San Francisco Rent Board and other agencies that they were surprised to receive the bills and didn’t know they had past-due amounts until they were presented with the high bills.

In any case, it’s an unusual situation — San Francisco tenants rarely face eviction over water or garbage bills.

 

A HUGE GROUNDSWELL

Many tenants have since been given a chance to set up payment plans and were granted a 45-day timeline to work out a payback system, noted San Francisco Rent Board director Delene Wolf. But not everyone was lucky enough to dodge the bullet. Since the notices went out, the Eviction Defense Collaborative has taken on cases for 14 separate eviction proceedings at Parkmerced, McMillan said.

“They are evicting a lot more people in the last couple months than they were at this time last year,” McMillan noted. Wolf confirmed this, saying, “We saw a huge groundswell.”

The city attorney has been responsive to advocates’ concerns. “We met with the City Attorney’s office, and they’re collecting cases,” explained Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee. “A key question is, why are these low-income renters behind?”

So far, the answer remains unclear. Tenant advocates remain skeptical that the charges are legitimate, in part because they have questions about how fees were assessed. There have also reports of monthly parking fees charged to tenants who don’t own vehicles. “They’re really questionable amounts … that are years and years old,” McMillan noted. “There’s so much doubt about whether they owe this money.”

Some of the 196 tenants who received warning notices claimed they didn’t know they were responsible for the fees. John Martinek tried to help his friend, a 55-year-old Parkmerced resident and veteran, after he was hit with a bill totaling more than $600.

“He might’ve owed it, but here’s the thing: They never told him anything about paying water and garbage,” Martinek said. “They never once asked him, they never once said a word. They were trying to scare him, there’s no question about it. They were trying shake him out of there.” He said his friend had been spared from eviction thanks to legal assistance.

Johnston, meanwhile, dismissed the idea that tenants were in the dark on how much they owed. “It’s patently ridiculous to suggest that residents who have signed a lease weren’t aware that they had to pay their bills,” he said.

In most cases, garbage charges in San Francisco are either included in the rent or are completely separate from rent, collected by a private company and can’t be grounds for eviction. Water bills are typically included in monthly rent or collected by the city — and thus aren’t grounds for eviction either.

 

WHERE IS DAVID CHIU?

Of the 14 eviction proceedings that are going forward, McMillan said, 10 involve tenants who receive Section 8 housing assistance, a federal program administered by the San Francisco Housing Authority. Of those 10, eight concerned disputed fees, he said.

There are a total of 170 Section 8 tenants at Parkmerced, according to figures cited by Megan Baker of Catholic Charities CYO, and 82 of them were among the 196 tenants who received three-day notices.

While Parkmerced previously attracted renters enrolled in the Section 8 program, Stellar stopped accepting those housing applications about a year ago, Baker said. Her organization provides emergency financial assistance for families at risk of homelessness and has been working with Parkmerced tenants since October 2009.

Baker added that she’d met with some tenants who were charged attorney’s fees on top of the back-payments. “They don’t have the means to pay legal costs,” she said. “These very large charges are not going hand-in-hand with their monthly statements. It’s all of a sudden. It leads us to think that in the process of changing management and gearing up for redevelopment, they really don’t want low-income tenants.”

In the wake of recent coverage about the trend of eviction notices in the Guardian and other publications (See “Low Income Tenants Face Possible Eviction at Parkmerced,” Politics Blog, Oct. 7, 2011), the three-day notices have slowed, reports Wolf, of the Rent Board. “There were no notices this month,” she said, referring to October, which could be a sign that management had taken a different tack under pressure from housing advocates and media scrutiny.

Shortt, of the Housing Rights Committee, noted that she had sought assistance from Board President David Chiu after her organization began working with impacted tenants. Chiu cast the swing vote on Parkmerced, sparking the ire of tenant advocates, but professed to be looking out for tenant interests.

Chiu introduced 14 pages of amendments to the Parkmerced development agreement intended to strengthen tenant protections, and used those changes to justify his support for the project. However, the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force determined Nov. 1 that members of the Land Use and Economic Development Committee violated the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance when it considered Chiu’s amendments, because the public wasn’t provided with full documentation of the proposed changes.

Chiu’s office contacted Parkmerced with questions about the eviction notices, but Shortt said she came away with the impression that the board president was not about to exert pressure on Stellar Management or Parkmerced developers over this issue. Chiu’s office indicated to Shortt that they planned to collaborate with Sup. Sean Elsbernd, whose District 11 includes Parkmerced, to decide how to proceed.

“We haven’t seen any evidence that this is connected to the development in any way,” Judson True, Chiu’s legislative aide, told the Guardian. “We’re committed to working with Parkmerced, Sup. Elsbernd’s office, and the residents to keep as many people in their homes as possible.”

The San Francisco City Attorney’s office is urging any Parkmerced tenants experiencing questionable late-payment charges to contact the Code Enforcement Hotline at 415-554-3977.

A new progressive agenda

Andrew Lam
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56
A new progressive agenda

Over the past three months, the Guardian has been hosting a series of forums on progressive issues for the mayor’s race. We’ve brought together a broad base of people from different communities and issue-based organizations all over town in an effort to draft a platform that would include a comprehensive progressive agenda for the next mayor. All told, more than 100 people participated.

It was, as far as we know, the first time anyone tried to do this — to come up with a mayoral platform not with a few people in a room but with a series of open forums designed for community participation.

The platform we’ve drafted isn’t perfect, and there are no doubt things that are left out. But our goal was to create a document that the voters could use to determine which candidates really deserve the progressive vote.

That’s a critical question, since nearly all of the top contenders are using the word “progressive” on a regular basis. They’re fighting for votes from the neighborhoods, the activists, the independent-minded people who share a vision for San Francisco that isn’t driven by big-business interests.

But those of us on what is broadly defined as the city’s left are looking for more than lip service and catchy phrases. We want to hear specifics; we want to know that the next mayor is serious about changing the direction of city policy.

The groups who endorsed this effort and helped plan the forums that led to this platform were the Harvey Milk LGBT Club, SEIU Local 1021, the San Francisco Tenants Union, the Human Services Network, the Community Congress 2010, the Council of Community Housing Organizations, San Francisco Rising, Jobs with Justice, and the Center for Political Education.

The panelists who led the discussions were: Shaw-san Liu, Calvin Welch, Fernando Marti, Gabriel Haaland, Brenda Barros, Debbi Lerman, Jenny Friedenbach, Sarah Shortt, Ted Gullicksen, Nick Pagoulatos, Sue Hestor, Sherilyn Adams, Angela Chan, David Campos, Mario Yedidia, Pecolio Mangio, Antonio Diaz, Alicia Garza, Aaron Peskin, Saul Bloom, and Tim Redmond.

We held five events looking at five broad policy areas — economy and jobs; land use, housing and tenants; budget and social services; immigration, education and youth; and environment, energy and climate change. Panelists and audience participants offered great ideas and the debates were lively.

The results are below — an outline of what the progressives in San Francisco want to see from their next mayor.

 

 

ECONOMY AND JOBS

Background: In the first decade of this century, San Francisco lost some 51,000 jobs, overwhelmingly in the private sector. When Gavin Newsom was sworn in as mayor in January 2004, unemployment was at 6.4 percent; when he left, in January 2011, it was at 9.5 percent — a 63 percent increase.

Clearly, part of the problem was the collapse of the national economy. But the failed Newsom Model only made things worse. His approach was based on the mistaken notion that if the city provided direct subsidies to private developers, new workers would flock to San Francisco. In fact, the fastest-growing sector of the local economy is the public sector, especially education and health care. Five of the 10 largest employers in San Francisco are public agencies.

Local economic development policy, which has been characterized by the destruction of the blue-collar sector in light industry and maritime uses (ironically, overwhelmingly privately owned) to free up land for new industries in business services and high tech sectors that have never actually appeared — or have been devastated by quickly repeating boom and bust cycle.

Instead of concentrating on our existing workforce and its incredible human capital, recent San Francisco mayors have sought to attract a new workforce.

The Mayor’s Office has, as a matter of policy, been destroying blue-collar jobs to promote residential development for people who work outside of the city.

There’s a huge disconnect between what many people earn and what they need. The minimum wage in San Francisco is $9.92, when the actual cost of living is closer to $20. Wage theft is far too common.

There is a lack of leadership, oversight and accountability in a number of city departments. For example, there is no officiating body or commission overseeing the work of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Similarly the Arts Commission, the chartered entity for overseeing cultural affairs, is responsible for less than 25 percent of the budget reserved for this purpose

There’s no accountability in the city to protect the most vulnerable people.

The city’s main business tax is highly regressive — it’s a flat tax on payroll but has so many exceptions and loopholes that only 8,500 businesses actually pay it, and many of the largest and richest outfits pay no city tax at all.

 

Agenda items:

1. Reform the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to create a department with workforce development as a primary objective. Work with the San Francisco Unified School District, City College and San Francisco State to create sustainable paths to training and employment.

2. Create a municipal bank that offers credit for locally developed small businesses instead of relying on tax breaks. As a first step, mandate that all city short-term funds and payroll accounts go only to banks or credit unions that will agree to devote a reasonable percentage of their local loan portfolios for small business loans.

3. Reform procurement to prioritize local ownership.

4. Link economic development of healthcare facilities to the economic development of surrounding communities.

5. Link overall approval of projects to a larger economic development policy that takes as its centerpiece the employment of current San Francisco residents.

6. Enforce city labor laws and fund the agency that enforces the laws.

7. Establish the Board of Supervisors as the policy board of a re-organized Redevelopment Agency and create community-based project area oversight committees.

8. Dramatically expand Muni in the southeast portion of the city and reconfigure routes to link neighborhoods without having to go through downtown. Put special emphasis on direct Muni routes to City College and San Francisco State.

9. Reform the payroll tax so all businesses share the burden and the largest pay their fair share.

10. Consolidate the city’s various arts entities into a single Department of Arts & Culture that includes as part of its mandate a clear directive to achieve maximum economic development through leveraging the city’s existing cultural assets and creative strengths and re-imagining San Francisco’s competitive position as a regional, national and international hub of creative thinking. Sponsor and promote signature arts programs and opportunities to attract and retain visitors who will generate maximum economic activity in the local economy; restore San Francisco’s community-based cultural economy by re-enacting the successful Neighborhood Arts Program; and leverage the current 1-2 percent for art fees on various on-site building projects to be directed towards non-construction-site arts activity.

 

 

LAND USE, HOUSING AND TENANTS

Background: Since the office market tanked, the big land-use issue has become market-rate housing. San Francisco is building housing for people who don’t live here — in significant part, for either very wealthy people who want a short-term pied a terre in the city or for commuters who work in Silicon Valley. The city’s own General Plan calls for 60 percent of all new housing to be below-market-rate — but the vast majority of the new housing that’s been constructed or is in the planning pipeline is high-end condos.

There’s no connection between the housing needs of city residents and the local workforce and the type of housing that’s being constructed. Family housing is in short supply and rental housing is being destroyed faster than it’s being built — a total of 21,000 rental units have been lost to condos and tenancies in common.

Public housing is getting demolished and rebuilt with 2500 fewer units. “Hotelization” is growing as housing units become transitory housing.

Planning has become an appendage of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, which has no commission, no public hearings and no community oversight.

Projects are getting approved with no connection to schools, transit or affordable housing.

There’s no monitoring of Ellis Act evictions.

Transit-oriented development is a big scam that doesn’t include equity or the needs of people who live in the areas slated for more development. Cities have incentives to create dense housing with no affordability. Communities of concern are right in the path of this “smart growth” — and there are no protections for the people who live there now.

Agenda items:

1. Re emphasize that the Planning Department is the lead land-use approval agency and that the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development should not be used to short-circuit public participation in the process.

2. Enact a freeze on condo conversions and a freeze on the demolition of existing affordable rental housing.

3. Ban evictions if the use or occupation of the property will be for less than 30 days.

4. Index market-rate to affordable housing; slow down one when the other is too far ahead.

5. Disclose what level of permanent affordability is offered at each project.

6. Stabilize existing communities with community benefits agreements before new development is approved.

 

 

BUDGET AND SOCIAL SERVICES

Background: There have been profound cuts in the social safety net in San Francisco over the past decade. One third of the city’s shelter beds have been lost; six homeless centers have closed. Homeless mental health and substance abuse services have lost $32 million, and the health system has lost $33 million.

None of the budget proposals coming from the Mayor’s Office have even begun to address restoring the past cuts.

There’s not enough access to primary care for people in Healthy San Francisco.

Nonprofit contracts with the city are flat-funded, so there’s no room for increases in the cost of doing business.

The mayor has all the staff and the supervisors don’t have enough. The supervisors have the ability to add back budget items — but the mayor can then make unilateral cuts.

The wealthy in San Francisco have done very well under the Bush tax cuts and more than 14 billionaires live in this city. The gap between the rich and the poor, which is destroying the national economy, exists in San Francisco, too. But while city officials are taking a national lead on issues like the environment and civil rights, there is virtually no discussion at the policy level of using city policy to bring in revenue from those who can afford it and to equalize the wealth disparities right here in town.

Agenda items:

1. Establish as policy that San Francisco will step in where the state and federal government have left people behind — and that local taxation policy should reflect progressive values.

2. Make budget set-asides a budget floor rather than a percentage of the budget.

3. Examine what top city executives are paid.

4. Promote public power, public broadband and public cable as a way to bring the city millions of dollars.

5. Support progressive taxes that will bring in at least $250 million a year in permanent new revenue.

6. Change the City Charter to eliminate unilateral mid-year cuts by the mayor.

8. Pass a Charter amendment that: (a) Requires the development of a comprehensive long-term plan that sets the policies and strategies to guide the implementation of health and human services for San Francisco’s vulnerable residents over the next 10 years, and (b) creates a planning body with the responsibility and authority to develop the plan, monitor and evaluate its implementation, coordinate between policy makers and departments, and ensure that annual budgets are consistent with the plan.

9. Collect existing money better.

10. Enact a foreclosure transfer tax.

 

 

YOUTH, IMMIGRATION, AND EDUCATION

Background: In the past 10 years, San Francisco has lost 24,000 people ages 12-24. Among current youth, 5,800 live in poverty; 6,000 have no high school degree; 7,000 are not working or attending school; 1,200 are on adult probation.

A full 50 percent of public school students are not qualified for college studies. Too often, the outcome is dictated by race; school-to-prison is far too common.

Trust between immigrants and the police is a low point, particularly since former Mayor Gavin Newsom gutted the sanctuary ordinance in 2008 after anti-immigrant stories in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Some 70 percent of students depend on Muni, but the price of a youth pass just went from $10 to $21.

Agenda items:

1. Recognize that there’s a separate role for probation and immigration, and keep local law enforcement from joining or working with immigration enforcement.

2. Improve public transportation for education and prioritize free Muni for youth.

3. Create family-friendly affordable housing.

4. Restore the recreation direction for the Recreation and Parks Department.

5. Implement police training to treat youth with respect.

6. Don’t cut off benefits for youth who commit crimes.

7. Shift state re-alignment money from jails to education.

 

ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Background: When it comes to land use, the laws on the books are pretty good. The General Plan is a good document. But those laws aren’t enforced. Big projects get changed by the project sponsor after they’re approved.

Land use is really about who will live here and who will vote. But on a policy level, it’s clear that the city doesn’t value the people who currently live here.

Climate change is going to affect San Francisco — people who live near toxic materials are at risk in floods and earthquakes.

San Francisco has a separate but unequal transportation system. Muni is designed to get people downtown, not around town — despite the fact that job growth isn’t happening downtown.

San Francisco has a deepwater port and could be the Silicon Valley of green shipping.

San Francisco has a remarkable opportunity to promote renewable energy, but that will never happen unless the city owns the distribution system.

 

Agenda items:

1. Promote the rebirth of heavy industry by turning the port into a center for green-shipping retrofits.

2. Public land should be for public benefit, and agencies that own or control that land should work with community-based planning efforts.

3. Planning should be for the community, not developers.

4. Energy efficiency programs should be targeted to disadvantaged communities.

5. Pay attention to the urban food revolution, encourage resident owned farmers markets. Use unused public land for local food and community gardens.

6. Provide complete information on what parts of the city are fill, and stop allowing development in areas that are going to be inundated with sea level rise.

7. Prioritize local distributed generation of electricity and public ownership of the power grid.

8. Change Clean Energy San Francisco from a purchasing pool system to a generating system.

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