Mayor

A century after the Raker Act, San Franciscans are still illegally denied public power

Sasha Cuttler
-
27

The San Francisco Examiner has a good story on today’s 100th anniversary of the signing of the Raker Act, federal legislation that allowed San Francisco to build a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley, a campaign championed most fervently at the time by the Examiner’s then-Publisher William Randolph Hearst.

The article was a good roundup of issues related to the Raker Act, and it included ongoing efforts by the group Restore Hetch Hetchy to try to tear down the dam, but there was a key aspect of the Raker Act that the Examiner left out, one that has been championed by the Bay Guardian over the years.

The Raker Act specifically called for San Francisco to directly distribute the water and electricity generated by the O’Shaughnessy Dam to its residents and for their benefit. The city does so with the water, through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, but Pacific Gas & Electric used its power and connections to take control of the electricity and keep it, corrupting the political system for nearly a century in the process.

“The result: San Francisco has paid through the nose to PG&E for its power and the city loses about $30 million a year in profits it would get from a public system,” journalist J.B. Neilands wrote in the March 27, 1969 issue of the Bay Guardian, the first of dozens of stories we’ve written on the topic, spanning many unsuccessful public power campaigns, each one dominated by millions of dollars in PG&E spending.

Section 6 of the Raker Act says that the city “is prohibited from ever selling or letting to any corporation or individual, except a municipality or municipal water district or irrigation district, the right to sell or sublet the water or the electric energy” generated by the dam.

That long-standing violation could become an issue that threatens San Francisco’s control over its main source of clean water and power if Save  Hetch Hetchy gains traction in the courts with a lawsuit that it is pledging to file.

While PG&E doesn’t wield the same strong influence that it once did at City Hall, thanks partly to years of aggressive overreach that soured many local officials on the powerful utility, it does still retain close ties to former Mayor Willie Brown (an attorney who has been on retainer with PG&E for years) and current Mayor Ed Lee, who has sabotaged the latest half-step toward public power, CleanPowerSF.    

Mayor Lee addresses Google bus controversy

Erica Hanna
-
116
Mayor Lee addresses Google bus controversy

At a press conference on affordable housing today, the Guardian asked Mayor Ed Lee about San Francisco’s favorite pinata: tech buses. The monstrous private shuttles, which daily whisk tech workers away to Silicon Valley, currently use Muni bus stops without paying fines, like most private autos do. 

In Guardian News Editor Rebecca Bowe’s article in the print edition of the Bay Guardian this week, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson Paul Rose tells her that although there is a proposal in the works to regulate them, the SFMTA won’t profit a single dime from the plan. 

“We are developing these policies to better utilize the boarding zones for these shuttle providers,” Rose said. “What we’re trying to do is provide a more efficient transportation network.”

But everyone in San Francisco who has ever ridden Muni knows that it struggles to run on time, and chronic underfunding is a perennial Muni problem. It even hurts the city’s bottom line, depressing our economy by over $50 million a year, according a report from the city earlier this May.

The report also highlights the cost to overhaul Muni between now and the year 2020: over $167 million would be needed to overhaul the system.

So why not make a few bucks from tech companies using Muni stops, who, according to the city, cause Muni delays? 

We asked Mayor Ed Lee that very question at a press conference today. You can listen to his answer in the audio embedded below, or read the transcript for yourself. 

San Francisco Bay Guardian: “Housing is one aspect of this, but transportation is another. The MTA’s plan to deal with tech buses is cost neutral. Is that a missed opportunity to get additional funding for Muni?”

Mayor Ed Lee: “Not a missed opportunity. That’s the essence of that 2030 task force, transportation task force, that we put together where they send a report to me, I’m in a process of reviewing all aspects of that. 

Muni officials themselves were directly involved in producing that very comprehensive review along with our Planning Department and many in fact all of the departments here had implemented them.

Transportation is not just about Muni, it’s about all the modes of how people get around the city. You can’t forget that, because that’s a really big part of the task force’s work.

How to get people walking. How to get them bicycling safer and more. How to get cars less, and the cars that do, get them through where they have to go without stalling and congesting. 

How do you invest in Muni? In its assets, in its transportation, in all of its aspects. How do you work with taxis and all the other car-sharing and automobile sharing companies. It’s not just about taxis, by the way. I hear from my taxi friends as I walk around City Hall, they don’t want to be left behind so we want to bring them in to see the new exciting use of Uber carshare and Lyft… all of those modes have to be paid attention to at the highest level, including investing in the assets of Muni.

I want Muni to be the choice.”

Earlier in the press conference Lee voiced his opposition to all of the hatred pointed at tech companies. 

“People, stop blaming tech, tech companies,” he said. “They want to work on a solution. I think it’s unfortunate that some voices want to pit one economic sector they view as successful against the rest of our challenge. The reality is they’re only eight percent of our economy.” 

We tried to ask a follow up question, but at the end of his answer on Muni, the mayor’s spokesperson Christine Falvey told the Guardian “We’re going to go on a tour now, this is off topic.”

Mayor Lee orders affordable housing push

Erica Hanna
-
26
Mayor Lee orders affordable housing push

Mayor Ed Lee stood on the rooftop terrace between high brick walls of the soon-to-be-built Natoma Family Apartments, and in the distance, the buzz and clanks of nearby construction echoed his message of the day: Build, baby, build. 

Today (Wed/18) the mayor announced an executive directive for all San Francisco government departments with a hand in housing development to prioritize construction of affordable units, from completely below market rate (BMR) projects to those that have a mix of BMR and market rate units. 

The Department of Building Inspection, Mayor’s Office of Housing, Planning Department and others involved with approving development will all reorient their priorities towards getting new affordable housing built — a stark indicator of just how potent this issue has become after months of high-profile evictions and progressive organizing and demonstrations.

“It isn’t always on the private sector, we’ve got to have a stake in the action as well,” Lee told reporters gathered at the Natoma apartment building. 

“(San Francisco) is expensive,” he said, “but we don’t have to accept it. We can do something.”

With the tech-fueled housing crisis pricing out San Franciscans left and right, and Ellis Act evictions surging 170 percent in the last three years, the city is in dire need of housing help. Even the national media has picked up on San Francisco’s rising inequality, even if some local media outlets have been slower to react.  

But as progressives have noted before, you can’t simply build your way out of this crisis, as Lee acknowledged. His directive carries a promise to incentivize an emphasis on middle class housing, which has been particularly lacking in the housing now being built. 

“The other part of this directive is to also get the other departments to work with me and the private sector to build more housing in all the different spectrums, and middle class housing,” Lee said.  

New Housing Project at Natoma street

Mayor’s Office of Housing Director Olson Lee speaks to a reporter on the deck of a community garden at the new Natoma Family Apartments, which will open in January. 

City rules will also change to protect current housing stock. Now, when a loss of housing is proposed, it will need to go through the Planning Commission for a discretionary review hearing. The mayor also formed a working group of city department heads to make recommendations to the mayor on how to preserve and create new affordable rental stock in San Francisco.

“It isn’t always on the private sector, we’ve got to have a stake in the action as well,” Lee said.

The promise of more housing in the city almost sounds too good to be true. Will the mayor’s plans reverse San Francisco’s affordable housing crisis? 

Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, said it sounded like a step in the right direction. “The proof’s in the pudding, of course,” Cohen told the Guardian. “It’s the kind of directive that I wish, honestly, would come out a year ago. The answer has been, let’s keep building and hope it fixes itself.”

By prioritizing affordable housing and mixed use housing, the mayor is using the leverage of government to get developers to do the right thing. “If developers are pushed to put more units they’ll do it,” Cohen said.

Let’s hope the new push from the mayor has come in time to stunt the crisis. Even at the Natoma property where he made the announcement, the need of San Franciscans for affordable housing was palpable.

The new Natoma affordable housing building has 60 units, and will open in January. How many San Franciscans applied to live there? 2,806. 

Plans for SF clean energy program still underway, despite political opposition

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
-
27

San Francisco’s longstanding effort to develop a municipal renewable energy program has been stymied by politics, but Sup. London Breed has taken up the cause of advancing aspects of the plan that haven’t been obstructed.

At a Dec. 13 meeting of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo), a committee comprised of members of the Board of Supervisors that has been working to develop CleanPowerSF for years, Breed called for putting out a Request for Proposals to develop a concrete plan for building out local renewable energy infrastructure. LAFCo adopted the motion. 

With plans for solar panel arrays or wind power facilities that would generate hundreds of megawatts of electricity for the municipal energy program, the build-out is a key aspect of the plan that could lead to job creation and stable electricity rates in the long term.

“Part of what I think is important in developing a plan is to make sure that if there are people who oppose it, that we have answers,” Breed said. “And we have clear answers, so that we’re communicating what the real, true accurate message is: There is real possibility for local jobs.”

Earlier this year, members of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, a body composed of mayoral appointees, refused to approve a not-to-exceed rate, effectively obstructing any forward progress on the green municipal power program. But some advocates who are thinking long-term have merely taken the setback as an opportunity to put some time and energy into crafting a well thought out plan that serves the interests of job seekers and environmentalists alike, which would ulimately be politically difficult to oppose.

The rate approval was a necessary step toward inking a contract with Shell Energy North America, the contractor selected by the SFPUC to procure renewable energy on the open market until a build-out gets off the ground.

Just before the commissioners made their decision, opponents of the plan who are affiliated with Pacific Gas & Electric Company – the utility giant that stands to lose customers if CleanPowerSF goes forward – plastered San Francisco residences with flyers denouncing the program and Shell’s involvement. The mailers were paid for by IBEW 1245, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union that represents PG&E employees.

Breed reflected on that messaging as an unfortunate setback. “It created, I think, the challenges that we’re facing getting this program moving forward,” she said. “We need a clear communication strategy. We need a clear understanding of the build-out.”

Eric Brooks, a longtime advocate of CleanPowerSF who has attended hundreds of meetings to help shape the plan on behalf of his nonprofit, Our City, said he was pleased with the latest direction LAFCo talks had taken. He recently penned an editorial for the Bay Guardian calling on LAFCo to take control of the program.

“This does not get around the political problem we have,” he said. “Politically, the program isn’t moving forward. On Aug. 13, from [the SFPUC’s] standpoint, they put the program on hold.” Nevertheless, “the idea is to work on all the other things, and get those things done.” Once there is a practical plan spelling out how the city will move forward with building out green renewable energy infrastructure, he said, it could serve to “show the building trade unions what’s possible.”

From what Brooks said and what was voiced at the meeting, it seems the political strategy of project proponents will be to bring on a consultant to hash out more tangible goals with regard to job creation, and then use those shovel-ready plans to bring trade unions on board. From there, Brooks hopes there may be more leverage to push for approval – or perhaps to pursue an alternative management structure that gets around the SFPUC, such as joining with another municipality to form a Joint Powers Authority that would oversee the program.

Sup. David Campos, who has been a key supporter of CleanPowerSF along with Sup. John Avalos, did voice some reservations about moving forward with the RFP. “We are here,” halted from moving forward, “even though we have a program that has been approved by the Board of Supervisors,” he pointed out. “How do we avoid going down the path of doing additional work, only to find ourselves in the same predicament?”

The political pressure against CleanPowerSF, fueled by groups associated with PG&E in political alignment with Mayor Ed Lee, is formidable. Nevertheless, advocates from environmental organizations such as 350.org, the Sierra Club and others have kept pushing for the program out of a conviction that it represents an opportunity to curb greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change at the local level.

“This is a very important move,” said June Brashares, a steering committee member of the Local Clean Energy Alliance. “A key piece of work that has not yet been done is the selection of actual sites all over the city for the installation of hundreds of megawatts of local clean energy projects that will make up CleanPowerSF.”

UPDATE: After we posted this, Breed returned a phone call from earlier in the day. She shared some thoughts about the program:

“I just think we’re overdue, to do it. The fact that we have five commissioners appointed, not necessarily elected, [blocking the program] disturbs me,” she said.

Asked why she’s supportive of CleanPowerSF, Breed said, “It’s not just about the choice. It’s also about the environment, and the future. There’s a lot of money in energy in general, and part of that money should go back to the local economy through those jobs.”

When we asked her about the strategy for advancing the program, she responded, “We want labor to be a partner on this. We want to make sure that it’s clear, and more importantly, we want it to be a strong proposal … My goal is to make it difficult for them to oppose it.”

Finally, questioned on whether she was worried about the political opposition, Breed responded, “I can’t do my job in fear that someone may oppose it. I have to do it based on what I think is truly right for the city of San Francisco.”

All that glitters

-
1
All that glitters

arts@sfbg.com

FILM If longer were better, this would be the platinum era of movies. Never before have so many mainstream releases staggered toward or beyond the two-and-a-half-hour mark once reserved for the truly epic — in storytelling breadth, not just in fight scenes, expensive CGI effects, or simple directorial inability to say “when.”

David O. Russell’s American Hustle is about that long, and it’s like a lot of things you’ve seen before — put in a blender, so the results are too smooth to feel blatantly derivative, though here and there you taste a little Boogie Nights (1997), Goodfellas (1990), or whatever. Normally that would not be a particularly promising combination, but in the current climate perhaps no praise could be higher than to say there isn’t a minute among Hustle‘s 138 when it’s safe to run to the bathroom. This isn’t necessarily the best film of the year, let alone the most original, but it’s quite possibly 2013’s most enjoyable major-studio release — at least if you’re over 15 and not over-enamored with superheroes or elves.

Loosely based on the Abscam FBI sting-scandal of the late 1970s and early ’80s (an opening title snarks, “Some of this actually happened”), Hustle is a screwball crime caper almost entirely populated by petty schemers with big ideas almost certain to blow up in their faces. It’s love, or something, at first sight for Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who meet at a Long Island party circa 1977 and instantly fall for each other — or rather for the idealized selves they’ve both strained to concoct.

He’s a none-too-classy but savvy operator who’s built up a mini-empire of variably legal businesses while honing a ’70s swinger suavity à la Bob Guccione. She’s a nobody from nowhere who crawled upward, gave herself a bombshell makeover (Adams is almost exclusively costumed J. Lo-style, inner side boobs on full display), and like Barbara Stanwyck in 1941’s The Lady Eve specializes in posing as British aristocracy — the Lady Edith, to be precise. They’re upwardly mobile con artists who know their limits.

The hiccup in this slightly tacky yet perfect match is Irving’s neglected, crazy wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), who’s not about to let him go — nor can he bring himself to leave their son, even if the kid isn’t his biologically. At least she’s their main problem until they meet Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), an ambitious FBI agent who entraps the two while posing as a client in desperate need of loan-sharking services. Their only way out of a long prison haul, he says, is to cooperate in an elaborate Atlantic City redevelopment scheme he’s concocted to bring down a slew of mafioso and presumably corrupt politicians. Even if they have to fabricate crimes to hustle the not-yet-guilty into — notably a beloved Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner) whose nose is as clean as can be given a constituency riddled with tough customers and backdoor deals.

A male even more aspirationally alpha than Irving, Richie is in over his head with this Machiavellian plan — which eventually ropes in terrifying, seldom-seen mob legend Victor Tellegio (Robert De Niro) — as his oft exasperated superiors are well aware. But as the sting rolls heedlessly forward, the conspirators’ Achilles’ heel turns out to be Rosalyn, who can’t be kept entirely out of the loop and certainly can’t be counted on not to blurt exactly the wrong thing at the worst possible time.

Scored to a K-Tel double-album-full of greatest hits from earlier in the Me Decade (these people aren’t on the cutting edge, musically or otherwise), American Hustle is a giddy tale of Horatio Alger-style all-American gumption headed toward a train wreck. Russell’s filmmaking is at a peak of populist confidence it would have been hard to imagine before 2010’s The Fighter, and the casting is perfect down to the smallest roles. But beyond all clever plotting, amusing period trappings, and general high energy, the film’s ace is its four leads, who ingeniously juggle the caricatured surfaces and pathetic depths of self-identified “winners” primarily driven by profound insecurity.

Our first view of Irving (or anything) is a camera spin around his ample middle-aged gut and up to the gaping bald spot he’s in the process of concealing. Bale retains his handsome features, but the physical transformation he’s undertaken here extends to a schlemiel-in-camouflage slouch whose roots you can feel in Irving’s very thought processes. More recognizable despite his curly locks and disco shirts is Cooper, who after this and Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook (2012) has clearly found his niche: playing control-freak rageaholism for manic comedy.

Lawrence’s Judy Holliday-meets-Valerie Perrine turn has justly been praised enough elsewhere. She’s spectacular, but the stealth heart of the movie belongs to Adams in a role that might easily have been played as merely “hot.” Sydney is brighter and more coolly rational than those around her; but life has taught her that a girl’s best bet is to look good and make the man think he’s doing the thinking for both of them.

Adams is a natural comedian, yet here she’s also the presence onscreen most alert to everything that’s going on, making Sydney the most thoughtful character and hers the most subtle performance. Without her, American Hustle would be great fun but a little hollow. With her, it almost seems genius, as if Preston Sturges had remade 1997’s Donnie Brascoe.

Big fantasy films have grown repetitious, yet they grow ever longer despite the fact that short-attention-span cinema really, really benefits from reining in the runtime. Prestige movies, too, seem to be under some sort of pressure to streeeeetch it out. Would Captain Phillips, The Butler, or even (sue me) Blue is the Warmest Color have been better with a tighter length and focus? Of course they would. But the sheer bulk seems to confer importance, like those literary magnum opuses each year that command attention not because they’re an author’s best, but because they weigh as if they ought to be. *

 

AMERICAN HUSTLE opens Fri/20 in Bay Area theaters.

With more bikes on the roads, Folsom Street gets a makeover

-
7

As anyone who has traveled the streets of San Francisco knows, there’s an increasing number of bicyclists out there. And the just-released biennial bike count from San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency attempts to quantify that increase: 14 percent since 2011.

The agency counted bikes at 51 key intersections around the city during the afternoon/evening commute from Sept. 10-19, counting a total of 23,225 bikes. Comparing 40 counted intersections in 2011, that’s a 14 percent increase; or a 96 percent increase since 2005 when comparing the 20 intersections measured then.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition trumpeted the report as good news, including in its press release this quote from Mayor Ed Lee: “Every year we are seeing more people riding a bicycle in San Francisco, and the latest bicycle count data proves it.” And SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum said, “It’s clear that if we build it, they will come. No other mode of transportation is growing as fast or has a higher return on investment in terms of improving our city for everyone.”

But the reality is that the city is lagging far behind its own stated goals to make cycling a safer and more attractive transportation options, largely because of a severe underinvestment in its cycling network. The report notes that the city has invested $3.3 million in its bike network since 2011, but that was mostly playing catch-up from when a court injunction stalled all bike projects in the city for four years.

The SFMTA report doesn’t calculate the critical number in terms of how we’re really doing — transportation mode share, or the percentage of overall vehicle trips taken by bike — an estimate it is now working on in a separate study at the end of January.

An American Community Survey in 2012 put SF bike mode share at less than 4 percent, which is a far cry from the 20 percent by 2020 that is the city’s official goal, one it has little chance of meeting without a serious increase in infrastructure investment and other changes. The SFMTA’s own stated goal is 8-10 percent mode share by 2018, the result of failure to make needed investments, which amounts to an admission that the city’s official goal is little more than political pandering.

“We’re still moving forward on all the goals that we set to accomplish, but we do have funding needs,” SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose told us, instead emphasizing the agency’s goal of attaining a 50-50 split between private automobile use and all other modes of transportation, including Muni and cycling.

The SFBC has worked in close partnership with the city, but the continuation of Shahum’s quote in her press release also indicates that she’d like to see the city doing more to promote safe cycling: “It’s time for the City to truly invest in our bicycle network, and ensure that our City’s streets are welcoming and comfortable for the growing number of people riding.”

But the city is moving forward with some bike improvements, including a makeover of Folsom Street now underway.

In the wake of some high-profile cases of motorists running over cyclists in San Francisco this year, including the Aug. 14 death of Amelie Le Moullac at the intersection of Folsom and 6th Streets, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has taken a lane from drivers to create safer cycling along seven key blocks of fast-moving Folsom Street.

The project on one-way Folsom Street between 11th and 4th streets creates an extra wide bike lane with bright green cycling signage on the roadway, with that green lane narrowing and breaking up as it approaches the right turns on 10th, 8th, and 6th streets. The idea is communicate with both motorists and cyclists about how to safely merge and avoid having cars make the unsafe “right hook” turns that are dangerous to cyclists.

“Right now, the project is almost complete and it should be complete by the end of the month,” Rose told the Guardian.

He said the design was discussed and subjected to community outreach efforts during community plan meetings in recent years, but that it was recently accelerated as a $250,000 pilot project with help from Sup. Jane Kim’s office following public concerns about how dangerous that fast-moving strip is to cyclists.

Rose said the traffic flows in the project area will be carefully monitored to see how it’s working, and the agency hopes to learn from that data “so it will inform future projects.” 

Homework troubles

-
28
Homework troubles

joe@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Board of Education approved a land swap with city government on Dec. 10, gifting San Francisco an empty lot that it will use to build new affordable housing. That’s 115 units of living space for low-income San Francisco renters, wrapped in a bow for the holidays.

The proposal was the brainchild of board members Hydra Mendoza-McDonnell and Sandra Lee Fewer, who worked on the measure with the Mayor’s Office of Housing for over two years. The district will trade a lot on 1950 Mission street and another on Connecticut Street in exchange for a property it currently rents from the city of San Francisco. The city will also pay SFUSD $4.5 million, according to district data.

The deal was the culmination of that work, which Fewer said was the right thing to do.

“Could we get more money from [selling] this property with a private developer? I’m sure. But would we get the value? No,” Fewer said at the meeting.

The original intent of the land swap was to provide affordable housing for the school district’s employees. Project proponents say school district workers are being priced out of San Francisco in droves. But the affordable housing project will be general use, with no specific provisions for teachers or other SFUSD workers.

teachersinSF Though the teachers’ union supports the land swap, United Educators of San Francisco President Dennis Kelly warned that teachers are in dire need.

“It’s more than an oversight, it’s an insult, felt very deeply, and very bitterly,” Kelly said at the podium. “Affordable housing will not house a single teacher, not a single one, because of where the dollar breaks are.”

The board has made various promises over the past decade to aid with teacher housing, all empty words, Kelly told the Guardian. There’s yet to be a solution from the school district or the board on finding sustainable housing for teachers.

The problem is a microcosm of one of San Francisco’s toughest challenges during this tech-fueled affordable housing crisis. Affordable housing helps the poor, and the rich certainly don’t need help staying in the city, but help for middle-income earners is hard to come by.

 

NEW RECRUIT

Research from education nonprofit ASCD shows most first-year teachers face three challenges: difficulty learning to manage classroom behavior, an overload of curriculum creation, and lack of school support. San Francisco’s new teachers face a fourth: finding a place to sleep at night.

Second-year SFUSD science teacher Kate Magary, 29, knows this all too well. Her first year on the job went from challenging to hellish as she looked for an affordable place to live.

Despite having a modestly salaried full-time job, she couldn’t afford a studio on her own. She eventually found a room for rent on Craigslist, but her noisy roommates made grading papers and writing curriculum a constant challenge. She started a new apartment hunt, but even that was like a full-time job.

“As a first-year teacher, it was awful,” Magary said. “I tried not to let it affect me too much at school, but the stress from home eventually made it with me to the classroom.”

She over-disciplined some kids, she said, and her patience was at the breaking point for most of the year. When teachers suffer, students suffer.

Magary is a science teacher at the Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is on the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts campus at Twin Peaks. Three-story homes and apartment buildings dot the hills along the road from Market Street on her drive to school, but Magary can’t afford them.

Instead, she eventually found a place on Treasure Island. A sixth-generation San Franciscan, Magary is happy to stay in what is still technically part of the city. But her lease is tenuous, and she anticipates having to move within the next few years. She’s not alone.

Out of SFUSD’s 3,284 teachers, 927 live outside of San Francisco, according to data from their union. That’s 28 percent of teachers living outside of the city, 3 percent higher than just last year. That number masks the depth of the problem.

New teachers who aren’t established in San Francisco bear the brunt of displacement. Half of all new teachers leave SFUSD in their first five years, according to data from the district. And 35 percent of teachers hired since July 1 live outside the city.

“A teacher might start in the district, live in the city, and move out,” said UESF spokesperson Matt Hardy. “The turnover is very high, particularly in newer schools.”

Teachers we talked to said there are problems for those who manage to stay in San Francisco as well. They sometimes sleep in unstable or unsafe housing, couchsurf, or sleep in their cars. In the morning they teach the city’s children.

It’s bad for teachers, but worse still, it’s bad for students. Recognizing this, federal, state and city government have all pitched in to try and find housing solutions for teachers.

Unfortunately for them, and for us, they’ve mostly failed.

 

OWNERSHIP FOR NONE

Art Agnos is most well known for being San Francisco’s former mayor. But after stepping down in the ’90s, he served in the Clinton Administration as the Department of Housing and Urban Development regional director throughout California, Arizona, Nevada, and Hawaii.

He was in charge of finding folks places to live.

The crisis for teacher housing was stark. At the time, Agnos was in charge of implementing Clinton’s housing program for teachers in San Francisco. The experiment? Build affordable housing units at Dianne Feinstein Elementary School on 25th Avenue exclusively for teachers.

The idea died in a sea of NIMBYism.

“The resistance came from the neighborhood who thought affordable housing for the teachers would diminish the value for their property and make traffic issues,” Agnos told the Guardian. “The Board of Education yielded to that NIMBYism and refused to pursue the deal, which was on the table.”

The federal push for teacher housing died, having created a home for just one teacher in San Francisco by the year 2000, and only 100 in California, according to news reports at the time.

California would follow suit with a less ambitious teacher housing program. The Teacher Next Door program offers assistance for teachers buying homes in San Francisco through the Mayor’s Office of Housing. We called the office to get statistics on its use, but as of press time it had not called back.

Among teachers, the program is mostly a joke.

“That’s the case with most teachers,” science teacher Tom Dallman of Ruth Asawa School of the Arts told the Guardian. “They roll their eyes when it comes to talk about buying a place in San Francisco.”

Median home prices in San Francisco skyrocketed past $1 million in June, a signal that for many teachers, homeownership in the city is a near impossibility.

Subsidized Below Market Rate housing is out of their reach too. San Francisco teachers make anywhere between $40,000 and $80,000 a year, placing them just above the salary as a single person to qualify for affordable housing.

“The struggle is about middle income people who do not qualify for mortgages or newly develop projects, because the market is astronomically high,” Agnos said. And that’s leading to a teacher migration, numbers from the UESF show.

“If they have to live in Oakland, they’ll work in Oakland,” Agnos said. “Their talent will follow them.”

The dream of homeownership for San Francisco’s education workforce is a thing of the past, Susan Solomon, vice president of the UESF told us.

“Maybe long, long ago this was a possibility,” she said, “way back when.”

 

FEW SOLUTIONS

Fewer was ecstatic to see the land swap deal go through, and excited to see affordable housing for San Francisco families.

But when asked what she’ll do to tackle the struggle to find affordable housing for teachers, she said that the upcoming contract negotiations may be the time to revisit a new plan.

“We’ve asked the unions to give us a poll for a long time,” she said. She wants to know what the teachers want. Do they want to live in housing together? Have rental subsidies? Housing assistance? What are their needs?

Sup. Jane Kim, a former school board member, said there’s a split of preference in the union. Should affordable housing solutions be given to teachers in their first five years in SFUSD, to encourage them to stay in San Francisco, or to veteran teachers?

“There’s a limited amount of funding,” Kim told us. And when the district lucks itself into extra funding, it’s hard not to spend it in the classroom. “How do you invest the limited dollars that you have?” she asked.

Santa Clara’s school district built its own affordable housing, and spent $6 million in 2005 to construct 40 units for its workforce. Three years later, they built 30 more units. Teachers there initially paid $1,075 a month in rent for a two-bedroom apartment, according to The New York Times.

“You cannot be an education advocate without being a housing advocate,” Fewer said. But housing help has been largely elusive for SFUSD employees.

“Stubbornness is keeping me in the city,” Magary said. But without some help, that may not be enough.

Crowdfunding apartments

-
7
Crowdfunding apartments

rebecca@sfbg.com

We caught up with Dan Miller at a cafe in San Francisco’s Financial District, where solitary patrons hovered over laptop screens as they sipped coffee.

Sporting a goatee and collared shirt, Miller, 26, seemed to blend in perfectly. The Washington DC native, a product of the East Coast real estate development world whose father had a hand in developing several iconic properties, was in San Francisco for meetings about FundRise, a startup he and his older brother Ben cofounded. The company is frequently described as being like Kickstarter, but for real estate investment.

Miller has been meeting with representatives from San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, a city agency in the Mayor’s Office. While nobody in City Hall was willing to get specific about those meetings, it seems officials are looking to FundRise for help tackling the city’s bedeviling housing affordability crisis.

Miller has been meeting with economic development offices in cities nationwide, and he’s convinced that housing affordability is a problem everywhere. “But it’s more acute in San Francisco than anywhere else I’ve seen,” he said, “just because of an influx of tech jobs.”

In the last six months, he added, OEWD representatives have seemed increasingly concerned.

The idea of crowd funding real estate is new, and the whole enterprise is still coming to fruition. But the underlying idea is intriguing: Take real-estate investment out of the hands of exclusive multimillion-dollar investment firms, and open it up instead to anybody who happens to have 100 bucks or more to throw in.

In an affluent city like San Francisco, the tool could create wiggle room for more housing projects that are tailored to actual needs, through partnerships with affordable housing developers.

It started when Miller and his brother encountered across-the-board rejection from big investment firms. To hear him tell it, the rise of private equity firms — which have no meaningful connection to the communities they develop — has produced blandness on a sweeping scale.

Objectives like preserving economic diversity, or honoring a community’s wishes, don’t factor in when these firms determine what to fund; they only consider whether an investment is deemed safe and profitable. That means predictable: think obscenely expensive, characterless market-rate condos. And since they’re the dominant financiers, their judgment is the final call.

“We spun off from our family business and started buying old auto warehouses, converting them, leasing them to local tenants,” Miller explained. “We took these projects to private equity firms, and they just didn’t get it. All the decisions they made were predicated on the financial pro forma,” he added, referring to documents that project expected returns. “They were really constraining what’s possible.”

Sounding like a tech person, he pronounced the whole system woefully inefficient. FundRise seeks to take advantage of little-known Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, as well as new provisions under the federal Jobs Act, to give people the opportunity to use crowd funding instead. (It doesn’t eliminate the need to apply for bank loans, which is a different part of the financing picture.)

The idea is that FundRise vets a project’s viability to make sure it won’t result in widespread loss, then helps proponents attract contributions through an online social network.

In the investment world, the vast majority of transactions are made by “accredited” investors, whose net worth equals $1 million or more, or with annual incomes of $200,000 or higher. But there are others out there who might have extra cash to put toward projects they believe in, like, say, affordable housing complexes for seniors — who don’t mind making a lower return.

The Miller brothers have built an online system they hope will connect these would-be lenders with projects in their own communities.

“Since you can invest directly, digitally, you’ve cut out so many middle men,” Miller explained. “You can make a 6, 8, 10 percent return. The real estate investment firm targets are 20 percent. But that’s because there’s just people taking a piece all the way down the ladder.”

The cofounders may be idealistic, but at the end of the day, they’re businesspeople, not activists. Since the company takes a cut of all investment earnings, it could succeed financially even if it the platform only winds up getting used to finance pet projects for dot-com millionaires.

Nevertheless, some longtime champions of low-income housing have recognized its potential to help solve a perplexing puzzle: How to secure capital for affordable housing in a world where investors are hardwired to make as much money as possible.

“We are hoping that as the larger movement for crowd funding works with the SEC, we can have more people make these investments in the local community,” said Tracy Parent, executive director of the San Francisco Community Land Trust.

Her organization is the first nonprofit affordable housing developer to test the waters with FundRise, in a bid to raise $1 million to keep Marcus Books, a historic African American-owned business, in its current Fillmore Street location. Due to a short timeline, they’re confined to accepting funding only from accredited investors. But in the future, they could use the tool to structure a public offering that would allow anyone to contribute toward preserving affordable housing.

While public subsidies will still be needed for below-market housing, “FundRise allows affordable housing developers to take properties off the speculative market,” Parent explained. “Any way we can democratize capital investment,” she added, “will be a good thing for our community.”

SF Board of Supervisors approves new tenant protections

Sasha Cuttler
-
11

The Board of Supervisors today (Tues/17) gave unanimous final approval to legislation aimed at giving renters in the city additional protections against being displaced by real estate speculators, and initial approval to legislation protecting tenants from harassment by landlords, both part of a wave of reforms moving through City Hall to address rising populist concerns about gentrification and evictions.

The anti-eviction legislation, created by Sup. John Avalos and co-sponsored by Sups. Eric Mar and David Campos, seeks to preserve rent-controlled and affordable housing by restricting property-owners’ abilities to demolish, merge, and convert housing units, three of the most common ways that affordable housing units are being eliminated in the city.

There was no discussion of the Avalos legislation today as it was approved on second reading, belying last week’s initial discussion, which got a little heated at times. “San Francisco is facing a crisis,” Avalos said last week as he conveyed the importance of passing the ordinance before the end of the year. “We’ve been called on by our constituents to declare a state of emergency for renters in the city.”

Last month, Campos held a high-profile hearing at the board on the city’s affordable housing and eviction crisis, and won approval for his legislation to double how much tenants being evicted under the Ellis Act receive. Today’s board meeting also includes a first reading of legislation by Campos to help protect tenants in rent-controlled apartments from being harassed by landlords seeking to force them out and increasing rents.

“We have heard about tenants being locked out of their apartments. We have heard about loud construction work being done…for the purpose of forcing the tenants out,” Campos said today of his legislation to allow targetted tenants to have complaints heard by the Rent Board rather than having to file a lawsuit. Later, Campos said the legislation sends the message “that is not something that is going to be tolerated in San Francisco.”

Campos’ legislation also received unanimous approval and little discussion, even by supervisors who generally side with landlords over tenants, perhaps including just more potent this issue has become. Board President David Chiu also today introduced a resolution to support his work with Mayor Ed Lee and Sen. Mark Leno to amend the Ellis Act at the state level, hoping to give the city more control over its rent-controlled housing. 

Avalos last week said he is so convinced of the urgency of the current situation that he responded to concerns voiced during the Land Use and Economic Development Committee Meeting on Dec. 9 about how the new legislation would work in the cases of temporary evictions and residential hotels by immediately making amendments to the ordinance without objection.

Nonetheless, further questions arose during the Dec. 10 meeting. Sups. Norman Yee and Katy Tang expressed reservations about the legislation applying in the case of owner move-in (OMI) evictions.

“I would love to support the piece, but this part just doesn’t make sense to me,” Yee concluded. “I’m not getting how it hurts the tenants.”

While Avalos explained that OMI evictions still take affordable housing off the market, he agreed to compromise by reducing the ordinance’s 10-year moratorium on demolishing, merging and converting housing units to five years.

Then, Sup. London Breed spoke up.

“This might not be popular for me to say as a legislator, but I’m very confused,” she began. “I know we have this crisis of Ellis Acts around the city, but I really feel pressured, and that this legislation is being rushed. I can’t support something that I don’t completely understand the impacts of. I just need more time.”

While Breed did not have the chance to review the legislation before the meeting, she had found the time to prepare speeches about President Nelson Mandela’s passing last week and her alma mater Galileo High School’s recent football victory.

Concurring with Breed, Cohen stated, “I understand that we are in a crisis of protecting our rental stock units, but I’m hesitant. Connect the dots for me, how does this save rentals? Or conserve affordable housing? What are we trying to do here?”

Kim reprimanded her fellow board members for not attending the meeting prepared, then stated, “I would support moving the ordinance forward today. The situation we are facing here in the city is extremely challenging…and this legislation is one of the tools we have for it.”

Sup. Scott Wiener and David Chiu echoed Kim’s support, commending Avalos for promptly addressing their former issues with his amendments and additions.

When Cohen used her time on the floor to respond to Kim’s admonition by stating, “I certainly do my homework. I don’t want to be made to feel bad for not getting it on the first time,” Campos suggested that it might be a good time to put the discussion on hold and open the floor for public comments.

While members of the community stepped up to the visitors’ podium, Yee and Campos met at the back of the room while Breed conversed with Sophie Hayward of the Planning Department, who had reviewed the ordinance before it was presented for recommendations. After further discussion with Avalos himself, Yee returned to his seat to speak with Tang. Satisfied with what she learned from Hayward, Breed came over to discuss the ordinance with Campos and Avalos. Cohen remained seated for the duration of the time, speaking with no one.

After the conclusion of public comments, Avalos reiterated the importance of passing the ordinance as soon as possible. “We have been called on by scores, hundreds of people, to preserve this stock,” he stated. “This legislation will help keep families in San Francisco.”

The ordinance was passed unanimously in its first reading, but the fight is not over. Breed for one made it clear that, while she understood the ordinance better after her preceding discussions, she was only giving it her support because she knew the legislation would be up for further review in a week, when all the supervisors will have had time to study it more closely.

With the affordable housing and displacement issues only generating more heat in the last week, today there was only prompt, unanimous approval and no discussion. 

Official SF bike count shows big increase, but not big enough to meet city goals

Sasha Cuttler
-
98
Official SF bike count shows big increase, but not big enough to meet city goals

As anyone who has traveled the streets of San Francisco knows, there’s an increasing number of bicyclists out there. And the just-released biennial bike count from San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency attempts to quantify that increase: 14 percent since 2011.

The agency counted bikes at 51 key intersections around the city during the afternoon/evening commute from Sept. 10-19, counting a total of 23,225 bikes. Comparing 40 counted intersections in 2011, that’s a 14 percent increase; or a 96 percent increase since 2005 when comparing the 20 intersections measured then.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition trumpeted the report as good news, including in its press release this quote from Mayor Ed Lee: “Every year we are seeing more people riding a bicycle in San Francisco, and the latest bicycle count data proves it.” And SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum said, “It’s clear that if we build it, they will come. No other mode of transportation is growing as fast or has a higher return on investment in terms of improving our city for everyone.”

But the reality is that the city is lagging far behind its own stated goals to make cycling a safer and more attractive transportation options, largely because of a severe underinvestment in its cycling network. The report notes that the city has invested $3.3 million in its bike network since 2011, but that was mostly playing catch-up from when a court injunction stalled all bike projects in the city for four years.

The SFMTA report doesn’t calculate the critical number in terms of how we’re really doing — transportation mode share, or the percentage of overall vehicle trips taken by bike — an estimate it is now working on in a separate study.

An American Community Survey in 2012 put SF bike mode share at less than 4 percent, which is a far cry from the 20 percent by 2020 that is the city’s official goal, one it has little chance of meeting without a serious increase in infrastructure investment and other changes. The SFMTA’s own stated goal is 8-10 percent mode share by 2018, the result of failure to make needed investments, which amounts to an admission that the city’s official goal is little more than political pandering.

“We’re still moving forward on all the goals that we set to accomplish, but we do have have funding needs,” SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose told us, insteading emphasizing the agency’s goal of attaining a 50-50 split between private automobile use and all other modes of transportation, including Muni and cycling.

The SFBC has worked in close partnership with the city, but the continuation of Shaham’s quote in her press release also indicates that she’d like to see the city doing more to promote safe cycling: “It’s time for the City to truly invest in our bicycle network, and ensure that our City’s streets are welcoming and comfortable for the growing number of people riding.”

Tech leaders must engage their critics

Michael Redmond
-
33

EDITORIAL It’s time for San Franciscans to have a public conversation about who we are, what we value, and where we’re headed. In the increasingly charged and polarized political climate surrounding economic displacement, the rising populist furor needs to be honestly and seriously addressed by this city’s major stakeholders.

Whether or not the technology industry that is overheating the city’s economy is to blame for the current eviction crisis and hyper-gentrification, it’s undeniable that industry and it’s leaders need to help solve this problem. They are rolling in money in right now, including tens of millions of dollars in city tax breaks, and they need to offer more than token gestures to help offset their impacts.

As we were finalizing stories for this issue on Dec. 9, the Guardian newsroom was roiled by our rollercoaster coverage of a protest blockade against a Google bus, which has become a symbol for the insulated and out-of-touch nouveau-riche techies in the emerging narrative of two San Franciscos.

Our video of an apparent Google-buser shouting at protesters “if you can’t afford it, it’s time for you to leave” went viral and burned up the Internet (and our servers) even as we discovered and reported that he was actually a protester doing some impromptu street theater.

But there was a reason why his comments resonated, and it’s the same reason why The New York Times and other major media outlets have been doing a series of stories on San Francisco and the problems we’re having balancing economic development with economic security, diversity, infrastructure needs, and other urban imperatives.

Rents have increased more than 20 percent this year, the glut of new housing coming online now is mostly unaffordable to current residents, even that new construction has done little to slow real estate speculators from cannibalizing rent-controlled apartments, and the only end in sight to this trend is a bursting of the dot-com bubble, which would cause its own hardships.

We need this city’s political leaders to convene a summit meeting on this problem, and Mayor Ed Lee and his neoliberal allies need to bring tech leaders to the table and impress upon them that they must engage with their critics in a meaningful way and be prepared to share some of their wealth with San Franciscans. Not only is the future of the city at stake, so is its present, because the housing justice movement won’t be ignored any longer. The good news is that San Francisco has a golden opportunity to test whether democracy can help solve the worst aspects of modern capitalism, offering an example to others if we succeed. But if our political leaders don’t create good faith avenues for meaningful reforms, San Francisco may offer a far messier and more contentious lesson.

No poetry or magic in being a robot

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
-
85

I felt yesterday like I had been scooped after reading Jennifer Maerz’s post in the Bold Italic, which asked: Is Talking About High Rents So Often Crippling Our City?

She linked to the blog of “robotics genius” Kal Spelletich, who is a friend of mine. We’ve been getting into heated discussions on this very topic for months. Kal makes fantastical interactive machines that do things like spit fire, harness random mechanical motion to produce musical notes on a piano or a violin, or engulf you in an aromatic bundle of fennel, just for an instant. His creations are robots.

I spent a bit of time in his studio, a giant waterfront warehouse in the southeastern part of the city where strange, sharp-edged contraptions hang from the ceilings. I shared stories about the articles I was writing, increasingly on evictions and the dearth of affordable housing in San Francisco. But as we dissected the problem, Kal rejected what he saw as a narrative of desperation that has been formulated in response to the city’s affordable housing crisis.

He had his own rant, saying his community’s impulse to make art was being hindered by anxiety-producing discussions over loss of living space. These constant, embittered discussions were not only tiresome but toxic to creativity, he said, and distracting people from actually engaging in their life’s work.

But something about his argument irked me, since the idea that people should bow out gracefully and pursue their creative endeavors someplace else sounded akin to surrender, while the stories I gravitate toward feature individuals who find a way to dig in and stand their ground. And taken as a whole, the greater the exodus of artists and idealists from San Francisco, the more watered-down the city’s cultural soup starts to feel. We debated it endlessly.

Here’s how Kal phrased it on his blog. “We don’t hang and talk about the revolution or our exciting new piece we are working on any more. The wind has been taken out of our sails.  We react to the corporatists and capitalists, we are not proactive. Our dialogue has been taken from us. I feel like we have played right into their hands in more ways than one.”

He concluded it by saying, “The head fuck, stress and wasted energy. … There is nothing poetic or magic about it. And I do not see any answer for it in the Bay Area.”

I reflected on our discussions again when I read Mayor Ed Lee’s interview in the New York Times a couple weeks ago, in which Lee commented that “tech workers aren’t robots.” In a city bursting at the seams with makers and dreamers with high aspirations, those who possess coding skills are favored, since their work is perceived as having economic potential. Lee seemed very concerned with creating an environment in which they can thrive.

As the mayor told interviewer Willy Staley: “What I learned with tech companies is I gotta give people room to experiment, and also to make what might later on be a mistake. This is the attitude I want to build within San Francisco — give some time to the tech community. At the end of the day, tech workers are not robots: they feel, they think, they have values.”

That philosophy – the idea that people are people, and need room to breathe, experiment, maybe even maybe mess up – actually makes sense as a core value. The problem, as I see it, is that the economic reality of San Francisco makes it such that this recognition is extended exclusively to the tech set, while the same leeway is not granted to other kinds of makers, or to those pursuing a kind of success that can’t be defined strictly in financial terms. At the end of the day, all San Franciscans feel, think, and have values – but only some are receiving support for their work in the form of funding or policies that facilitate their success.

While one class is being encouraged to try, and forgiven when they fail, a different set – the creative or activist types who aren’t doing it for the money – are being sent the message that they must behave like tightrope walkers, or maybe robots, if they want to remain.

There are some signs of creative resistance – a community rallying together in memory of its heroes, some mischievous comic relief, here and there. By tapping into imagination instead of draining it all away with worry, this could prove to be the start of something.

City College Trustee resigns, protesting state takeover

Sasha Cuttler
-
28
City College Trustee resigns, protesting state takeover

Democracy is a thing of the past at City College of San Francisco, and now one member of its elected board has had enough. City College Trustee Chris Jackson announced today that he is resigning from the college board to protest the state takeover of the school, and he explains his reasoning in an op-ed in this week’s Guardian.

“I came to City College to do good work,” Jackson told the Guardian. “At this point it’s impossible to do that work I set out to do. That’s why I’m leaving.”

Jackson was first elected to City College’s board in 2008, but in 2013 he was a trustee in name only. The day City College was told it would lose its accreditation was also the day it lost its Board of Trustees. Those democratically elected by San Francisco voters to lead City College were pushed aside by California Community College Chancellor Brice Harris.

It was a state takeover, and the board was rendered powerless.

The seven-member board holds no more meetings, drafts no more legislation, casts no more votes. The public cannot hold elected officials accountable when things go wrong — because the man in charge is no longer someone San Francisco elected.

Robert Agrella is the “super” trustee, appointed by the state chancellor to make unilateral decisions regarding City College’s future, something they say is necessary to save the school. Agrella holds no public comment sessions, and told the Guardian previously that personal emails to him would suffice. Agrella hardly ever answers his phone, we’ve found.

Paul Feist, a spokesperson for the California community college state chancellor’s office, said that the takeover was necessary to make the hard decisions needed to save City College quickly.

“Tremendous progress has been made since July, with key positions having been filled, collective bargains agreements reached and fiscal controls implemented,” Feist told the Guardian. 

To Jackson, it’s a mockery of democracy.

“If my resignation can bring a light to this public policy issue, I hope it does,” he said.

In the last month a vote by the California Community College Board of Governors made Agrella’s stay indefinite. Legally, he won’t leave until the state tells him he has to.

“There is not a formal timeline for returning governance of CCSF to local trustees, but it is hoped that this happens soon after the college demonstrates it has addressed the deficiencies identified by [its accreditors],” Feist said. “The state has no interest in running City College indefinitely under a special trustee arrangement.” 

To those who wonder what this all means, and to understand Jackson’s grievance, one look only as far as two of Agrella’s latest unilateral decisions.

A performing arts center long planned to be built by City College was canned by the super trustee, citing funding concerns.

“Clearly, the college is in no position to make this commitment at this time,” Agrella told the San Francisco Chronicle when he cancelled the project. It was $6 million shy of its estimated $95 million cost.

The school’s only performance venue is the Diego Rivera Theater. It is the lone theater serving a school of 85,000 students (and sometimes more) but it seats only hundreds, and is dilapidated and crumbling.

That was the first of Agrella’s motions to overturn decisions by the Board of Trustees, but his next decision was directly challenged by Trustee Chris Jackson.

Just last month the super trustee overturned a decision by the board to drop Wells Fargo as its bank. Last year, the board voted to find a more ethical bank to do business with, instead of one that foreclosed San Francisco homes and held questionable ties to the student loan industry.

An investigation by the San Francisco Examiner found that after Wells Fargo exerted pressure on Agrella and promised the school at least $500,000 in grants, the super trustee repealed the decision to shop for a new bank.

The unilateral decisions of Agrella make Jackson furious, but it’s not as if he didn’t see it coming.

In a September 2012 meeting, the Board of Trustees faced a decision: Does it ask the state for a special trustee? It was quickly communicated to the trustees that if they didn’t ask for one, one would be imposed anyway.

It was a false choice. A public relations move designed to make the board look like they sought help when newspapers and TV stations asked them about the super trustee. In the end, no matter what decision they made the state would take control of the school.

“This special trustee, while not ideal, I don’t personally like, I think it’s appropriate for right now. But we need to understand how long they’ll be there, and what position need to be in for them to leave,” Jackson said.

“I hope this board doesn’t just cede power to the special trustee,” he said.

That was a year ago. Now five months without the board, City College has lost the vision a local politician can bring.

“I’ve certainly called him the conscience of the board,” Alisa Messer, the faculty union president at the college, said of Jackson.

“Chris made himself accessible to those who felt besieged. He’s for the underdog, regardless of being black or brown,” former student trustee William Walker told us.

“I’m just really sad to see Chris go,” said the current student trustee, Shanell Williams, who first met Jackson while on San Francisco’s youth commission.

All of them mentioned Jackson’s work to secure childcare for the two City College campuses in the Bayview. When City College’s accreditors tasked them with scaling down its mission of who to serve, Jackson championed the college’s GED program and won. He also worked closely with the group Students Making a Change, which endeavors to close the achievement gap for students of color at City College.

Jackson’s departure leaves a seat open on the board which Mayor Ed Lee can make an appointment to fill. But the legality of an appointment while the board is effectively out of power is an open question. The Guardian contacted the mayor’s office to find an answer, but did not hear back from them before press time.

“I think the thing San Franciscans ought to be asking is: Do we even have a board, and when are we going to?” Messer said.

As for Jackson, he’s looking forward to concentrating on his family and his career. He currently works at a nonprofit which helps people in Africa and India find new jobs in tech.

“I’ll have more time to spend with my daughter,” he said.  “I’ll have more time to focus on my own professional career, and am looking to go to law school.”

The 30 year old Jackson said he wants to be an attorney to help young men like D’Paris Williams, who was stopped for a traffic citation at Valencia Gardens in a case of alleged racial profiling. Jackson, who lives in the Bayview, wants to defend the people in his community.

“I want to be a part of that,” he said.

Update: Commenters and sources that called the Guardian rightly asked what Chris Jackson’s Ethics Commission fines had to do with his stepping down. Jackson was late filing his campaign reports and was fined about $3,000 by the commission. When the Guardian spoke to them a few months ago about this, they told us it was a routine matter and that Jackson was complying with their requests for payment. Jackson had already reached a payment agreement well before his resignation, which does not affect the fine, he said. 

Heavy-duty problems

Michael Redmond
-
2
Heavy-duty problems

rebecca@sfbg.com

As a kid, Turcilo Caldera would climb into his father’s big rig and accompany him on runs to the Port of Oakland. “He would sit me on his lap and show me how to drive,” he remembered.

Originally from Nicaragua, Caldera came to California at age 5 and grew up in San Francisco’s Excelsior District. Now 30, he too is a trucker.

Speaking by phone around 8:30pm on a recent Friday, on his way to Stockton to drop off a shipment, he recounted how he’d arrived at the port at 5am and waited in line until 8:30am, only to move to a different line to pick up a load. “I ended up leaving the terminal around 10,” he said. That’s when he started getting paid.

Companies pay by the load, regardless of the time it takes to wait in line. Caldera works 12 to 13 hours a day.

He recently became a member of the Port of Oakland Truckers Association. It’s not a union, since truckers are classified as owner-operators rather than employees of the companies that hire them. Nevertheless POTA, which represents several hundred owner-operators, reflects the truckers’ attempt to ban together for better working conditions.

Truckers never know what they’re hauling, but it’s safe to assume that major retailers — Walmart, IKEA — are expecting shipments in advance of a holiday shopping blitz. While some companies anticipate a bump in profits, POTA and hundreds of other port truckers are facing potential job loss come New Year’s Day.

At a Nov. 22 meeting, POTA membership voted unanimously to begin a work stoppage at the port, starting Wednesday (11/27). “We don’t want to stop working, we need to make a living,” said Roberto Ruiz, a POTA member. “But this is the only thing they respond to.”

On Jan. 1, 2014, when new clean air regulations go into effect, hundreds of independent truck drivers will lose work as their vehicles fall out of compliance. They can’t afford to pay out of pocket for trucks that are compliant with new emission control regulations. Many face a tough time getting loans, and those who have dodged the bullet by securing a loan now find themselves in a worse financial crunch than before.

Many could be forced out of jobs completely. By the Port’s estimates, around 80 percent of the roughly 6,000 registered to service the Port are set to be in compliance. POTA estimates 800 truckers could be impacted.

POTA’s vote to stop work followed a series of meetings with Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and Deputy Mayor Sandré Swanson, as well as representatives from the Port and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to try and hash out a solution.

In meetings, POTA asked city officials and CARB to identify funding to help those in danger of job loss retrofit their vehicles to comply with the clean-air regulations. They also proposed some solutions: They want fees billed to shipping customers for the time truckers must spend waiting in line for the loads they haul, to help offset the cost of buying and maintaining compliant trucks.

The Jan. 1 ban on older trucks is part of a broader effort to alleviate air pollution in surrounding West Oakland, where cancer and asthma rates are abnormally high. The Port’s system of loading cargo shipments results in long lines idling for hours, leading to a chronic congestion problem that has fouled the air. Before the problem was addressed, “Ports were where old trucks went to die,” explained Isaac Kos-Read, a Port of Oakland spokesperson. “Old trucks were the worst polluters on the road.”

West Oakland, known for its iconic shipping cranes, has traditionally been a majority African American neighborhood with lower income levels than the surrounding Bay Area. The demographic is beginning to change as comparatively well-heeled newcomers settle in, but it was an economically disadvantaged community of color who disproportionately bore the brunt of harmful air pollution for decades. Switching to low-sulfur fuel for shipping vessels has helped the port make drastic reductions in air pollution, but harmful emissions linked to asthma are still emanating from truck tailpipes.

The rule change will lead to what is indisputably an environmental improvement. But that benefit doesn’t have to come with the tradeoff of job loss. State funding was made available in 2011 to help financially strapped truckers afford new rigs or retrofits — but the funding has now vanished, and truckers who are late in pursuing compliance are finding doors shut all the way around.

In December of 2011, the California Air Resources Board made $58 million available to the owners of 2,100 trucks across California “to replace their retrofitted trucks with newer trucks,” Karen Caesar, a CARB spokesperson, explained in an email. About 1,700 of those could legally service the Port of Oakland.

The funding came from a $4.5 billion set-aside created by Proposition 1B, a transportation bond approved by voters in 2006. The $58 million was available for truckers who had installed filters to comply with an earlier regulation limiting diesel particulates.

In theory, the funding was enough to award all 2,100 trucks more than $25,000 apiece. That’s an amount that Frank Adams, an organizer with POTA, told the Guardian would be adequate for affected truckers to get compliant without going underwater.

But that’s not what happened. “Applications for 970 trucks were received,” Caesar explained, bringing the total funding request to $24 million. But in the end, CARB awarded grants to just 359 trucks, disbursing $10 million. The rest of the money was reallocated to other air-quality improvement programs, Caesar said.

And since the remaining funding is now gone, neither the city of Oakland nor CARB has come up with any other answers for the truckers. “We’ve been meeting with them on a regular basis to see if there are other funding sources,” Kos-Read said. “We want to help all the truckers.” But the meetings clearly haven’t been productive, since POTA’s staging a work stoppage during the busiest shopping week of the year.

CARB officials emphasize that truckers can still take road work even after they’re banned from ports, but Caldera says it’s not that simple. “If my dad were to decide to run up and down California, he wouldn’t be home like he is now,” he said. Road work means being away from home for possibly long stretches, and it’s unclear whether enough of those jobs exist to make up for the port jobs that will be lost.

The truckers represent a predominantly immigrant workforce, with many native speakers of Chinese, Punjabi, and Spanish. “Most of the truckers don’t speak English, let alone write good English,” Adams said. He guesses that’s why some didn’t apply for CARB funding.

Yet CARB officials say they sent out materials in various languages and held outreach events. As for those now trying to stave off job loss, “It’s not as if this blindsided anybody,” Caesar said.

Caldera’s truck is compliant, but only because he borrowed $50,000 from a relative to purchase the $72,000 rig, which replaced a 2006 truck purchased on loan. Today, “I’m still paying that loan, which is $680 a month,” he explained. “But it’s not as much as I’m paying for my new truck.”

Truckers’ financial problems go deeper. Caldera estimates that fuel costs eat up around 40 percent of his earnings. There are insurance payments, registration fees, maintenance and other associated costs, all borne by the truckers and not the companies that hire them.

As it turns out, selling cheap Chinese goods to American consumers is rather lucrative. Delivering said goods by truck is not, even though it’s integral to the business.

Then there’s the restroom problem. A Port a Potty was recently installed near the Port entrance, Caldera said, but it’s only a partial solution. Truckers aren’t supposed to exit their vehicles while they’re waiting. “If you decide to go to the bathroom you have to leave your spot in line,” but that just means more unpaid time sitting in line. “So we have to carry bottles in here,” he said. “These are awful conditions. This is something that I imagine in a third world country where people have no rights.”

Now, with a work stoppage looming, the truckers could also wind up entangled in legal problems since they have no union and no authority to strike. “It’s a complicated and unclear legal situation that they’re in,” said attorney Dan Siegel, who is advising POTA. “Because they’re ‘owners,’ they’re not considered workers under labor laws … they are subject to punishment for anti-trust violations.”

“They cannot illegally block streets,” said Kos-Read, the port spokesperson. “Our goal is to respect the trucker’s free speech rights and keep commerce flowing.”

On Nov. 21, POTA members visited the International Longshore and Warehouse Union seeking support. Clarence Thomas, speaking as a rank-and-filer of the ILWU Local 10, said union or no, the truckers deserve to be treated fairly.

“For many years, trade unionists have looked at those workers as having a sweatshop on wheels,” Thomas said. “We don’t want to see anyone at the Port being exploited.”

 

BART standoff continues as board modifies contract

Michael Redmond
-
1

The BART Board of Directors voted 8-1 on Nov. 21, with conservative young Director Zakhary Mallett in dissent, to approve a hard-won contract with its unions, after removing Section 4.8, the paid family leave section that the district says was inserted by mistake.

The motion also directed management to negotiate a settlement over that issue with its unions, which have already approved the contract and now must decide whether they are willing to do so again without that provision or whether the possibility of another BART strike is once again looming.

The next day, BART’s largest unions, SEIU Local 1021 and ATU Local 1555, issued a joint statement: “We consider the Board’s actions to be unprecedented and illegitimate, and we’re considering our next steps, including possible legal action. The BART Board of Directors has disregarded the vote of more than 2,000 BART workers and has chosen to subvert the collective bargaining process, and we take their actions seriously.”

After meeting in closed session for about two hours, Vice President Joel Keller began the open session with a motion to remove Section 4.8 from the contract, approve the rest, and direct management to negotiate with the unions.

Mallett, the 25-year-old newbie who lives in unincorporated West Contra Costa County but whose District 7 includes part of San Francisco, spoke first: “Even before this hiccup, I was not in the position to support this contract. I find it too costly.”

But he was the only one to take that stance, with the rest of the directors calling the underlying contract a fair compromise, even if all said they couldn’t support the paid family leave provision that would add anywhere between $4 million and $44 million to a contract that was already going to cost the district an additional $67 million.

Director Gail Murray noted that the unions had given up raises for years when BART had budget deficits, and now that the district is running surpluses, it’s reasonable to give workers raises that amount to about 2 percent per year for four years.

“Our employees kept the system going…They’re the reason why we keep 40-year-old cars still running,” Murray said, later adding, “To say this contract is not a good contract is wrong.”

The rest of the board agreed, even while acknowledging it is more than they hoped to pay given the district’s capital needs and aggressive expansion plans.

“We’re probably paying more for this than we anticipated we would pay, and labor is probably giving up more than they want to, but that’s the nature of collective bargaining,” Keller said, who also began what turned into a chorus of criticism for how district negotiators signed off on a provision the board never agreed to.

“We ended on a sloppy note and that’s regrettable,” Keller said, pledging that if he’s elected president next month — an ascension that is customary for the vice president — he plans to launch a full investigation into what happened.

“I’m pained that we put ourselves in such adversarial positions with each other and that we lost the lives of two employees,” Director John McPartland said of the protracted labor negotiations and the fatalities that occurred while the unions were on strike Oct. 19. He called the contract “more than fair and equitable.”

Director James Fang, who represents western San Francisco, sounded the strongest criticisms of BART management and negotiators. “Yes, it was a mistake, but nobody has come forward and said ‘there was a mistake and I’m responsible,” Fang said, later adding, “The ones who signed this must be held to account.”

Fang then went further, albeit without specifics, when he said, “Every bit of management advice we’ve received has not worked out to the district’s best interests.”

Director Robert Raburn echoed Fang’s calls for accountability: “I’m still not clear on how that [contract provision] arrived and it hasn’t been accounted for by anyone at the district who said ‘I am responsible.'”

But he also said that the provision was clearly an error and not something arrived at through the negotiations: “Both parties agreed on a $67 million package and we should keep that intact because it’s fair.”

Reached by the Guardian while union leadership was conferring to plan next steps, SEIU Local 1021 Political Director Chris Daly told us, “We are about as up in the air as we’ve ever been.”

He called it “unlikely” that union leadership would simply submit the board-revised contract to an up-or-down vote by union membership, saying that he doesn’t think it would be approved.

And Daly echoed the concerns expressed by several BART directors about how this mistake happened and why nobody has taken responsibility or been held accountable: “If I were on that board, I’d have the general manager’s head, there’s no two ways about it.” (Steven T. Jones)

SF General reduces psych care

A 22-bed psychiatric unit at San Francisco General Hospital will be taken out of service, and reopened only if the facility experiences a high caseload of patients exhibiting the worst signs of psychiatric crisis.

As of Nov. 19, five patients were receiving care in that unit, 7B, according to spokesperson Rachael Kagan. None had symptoms that rose to the level of requiring acute care. Instead, they were classified as sub-acute patients, a distinction that essentially means they didn’t present an immediate threat to themselves or others.

But under a new policy that will take effect after they have been released, all 22 beds in 7B will be closed — unless they are needed for acute patients who do reach that critical threshold. The unit will be staffed only if patients can’t be accommodated in the hospital’s other acute psych unit, which has 21 beds.

The decision was made in response to a changing financial picture under federal health care reform, Kagan explained.

“There is a big push … to ensure hospitals are only providing acute care,” Kagan said, and this trend is driving efforts to reduce sub-acute patients. “It fiscally makes more sense,” she added, because insurers pay higher rates for acute care than for lower levels of treatment.

Yet some hospital staff members are nervous about the implications of this shift, because it means fewer patients will be able to access psychiatric care at SF General unless they represent a danger to themselves and/or the general public — at a time when demand for these services is on the rise.

“To us, it’s a matter of priority for the city,” said Brenda Barros, an employee at SF General who is active with hospital union SEIU 1021. “Do you want to take care of these people, or don’t you?”

Some staff members are doubtful that 7B will reopen. An internal SF General memo issued Nov. 18 informed the 7B staff: “Our census will be gradually reduced until we won’t have any more patients. Then 7B will be closed.” The memo added, “this came from [SF General CEO] Sue Currin due to budgetary constraints.”

However, a second internal memo went out the following day, to “clarify” the first one. In that message, Nursing Director Kathy Ballou wrote: “We are not closing psych beds or any beds.” Instead, beds in 7B would be closed unless “we get acute patients needing that level of care,” she wrote. “As in other hospitals, we are accountable to our operating budget.”

Further complicating matters, said Barros, is that patients can fluctuate rapidly between needing acute care and a lower level of attention. “They absolutely can swing back and forth.” She added that patients initially requiring a lower level of care could experience worsening conditions if they’re unable to secure an appointment in time to get help, and delays are very common.

Kagan emphasized that the unit wasn’t being closed down, but did confirm that sub-acute patients would no longer be able to receive treatment in 7B. Instead, those patients will be placed with various service providers throughout the city, she said. “The goal is to move the patients to their appropriate placement.”

Meanwhile, this shift coincides with an overall rise in citywide demand for psychiatric services. According to a report delivered to the Police Commission earlier this year, SF General had 6,293 patient admissions for psychiatric holds in 2012, a sharp increase from 5,837 in 2009.

While there were deep cuts to the city’s Department of Public Health during the economic downturn, Mayor Ed Lee has recently trumpeted a boost to city coffers thanks to growing economic activity. But if the city’s financial health has improved, it seems odd that its safety-net hospital would be put into the position of reducing psych care due to budgetary pressures when that kind of care is sorely needed.

For Barros, it’s a matter of whether or not city officials will decide to allocate more funding for mental health services. “If they don’t have enough money in Public Health,” she said, “then they need to put more into Public Health.” (Rebecca Bowe)

Alerts: November 27 – December 3, 2013

Michael Redmond
-
0

WEDNESDAY 27

Harvey Milk and George Moscone Memorial Harvey Milk Plaza, Castro and Market, SF. tinyurl.com/MilkMoscone. 7pm, free. A candlelight vigil and march will be held in remembrance of the 35th anniversary of the murders of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. The event is meant to honor their memories and bring people together. It is being co-sponsored by a broad coalition, including the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club.

 

FRIDAY 29

 

Black Friday Roller Disco Party San Francisco Women’s Building, 3543 18th St, SF. (415) 820-3907. 8pm-12am, free. SF Indiefest and Black Rock Roller Disco present a Black Friday roller disco party inside the Women’s Building auditorium. Disco costumes encouraged! Skate rentals will be provided, or bring your own.

 

SATURDAY 30

 

Citizen Journalism Symposium East Bay Media Center, 1949 Addison, Berk. 3pm, free. Live streamers, bloggers and social media mavens will converge for a series of conversations on citizen journalism, featuring those who helped capture Occupy Wall Street protests and a discussion led by host Clark Sullivan on ethics in citizen journalism. Bring your smartphone, laptop, curiosity, and enthusiasm.

 

MONDAY 2

World AIDS Day forum San Francisco LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market, SF. 6:30-8:30pm, free. This year’s forum, titled “Getting to Zero in San Francisco: How Close Are We?” offers attendees the latest news on San Francisco’s progress in fighting HIV/AIDS from experts in the field. They will also be informed about programs that are helping the city get closer to its goal of zero new HIV infections. The interactive town hall forum structure of the event enables it to be as informative as possible, and ensures audience engagement with the topic. TUESDAY 3 #GivingTuesday: Project Homeless Connect 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1286 or sstickel@jccsf.org. 10am-8pm, free. People ages 12 and up are asked to come help put together personal hygiene kits for homeless people in San Francisco. Participants may come anytime during either of two shifts, which run 10am-1pm and 3-4:30pm. Afterward, everyone is invited to a Hanukkah Candle Lighting, which will begin at 4:30pm. The kits will be distributed by volunteers the following week at Bill Graham Civic Center Auditorium. This event is part of #GivingTuesday, which is a national day dedicated to charitable activities.

1...121314...148Page 13 of 148

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org