MUNI

Pics: Trolley Dances salve Muni woes

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Text and photos by Ariel Soto

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For once, taking Muni was actually a pleasure. This weekend saw the San Francisco Trolley Dances dip and twirl along Muni stops, which meant riders had their noses pressed against the glass as salsa dancers shimmied along the street, chasing the J-Church as it made its way from Dolores Park to Balboa Park Pool. The annual event featured dance companies from around the Bay Area as well as the young and talented swimmers of the SF Merionettes Synchronized Swim Club. The piece “Journey through time in no time because it is time” performed by the Deep Waters Dance Theater, was especially inventive and witty, mixing theater, poetry and dance in a piece that revolved around the ideas of more time and less time, and the time in between, ending with the audience pointing to the sky, looking up towards a new time of “infinite possibilities.” Oh, if only every ride on Muni could be quite as enjoyable and entertaining as this one.

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Other participating dancers and companies included: Deborah Slater Dance Theater, Epiphany Productions Sonic Dance Theater, Kathleen Hermesdorf, and Rosamaria Garcia and Jorge Rodolfo De Hoyos

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Extended meter hours proposal gets heard today

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By Steven T. Jones

In a couple hours, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors will consider a controversial proposal to extend parking meter hours to evenings and Sundays, but it’s still unclear whether that body is inclined to take any action.

Alternative transportation and urban planning activists are excited about the chance to weigh in on a proposal that would raise nearly $9 million per year and begin to balance out the fare hikes and service cuts that Muni riders absorbed this year, while some motorists and business owners are likely to express their opposition.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has been expressing opposition to the item through the San Francisco Chronicle, but an item buried in yesterday’s Matier & Ross column seems to indicate that he’s backing off a bit, although they don’t seem to understand that this is a decision for the MTA board, not the Board of Supervisors.

As I’ve written before, this proposal will be a big test of whether the MTA board, whose seven members are all appointed by Newsom, is actually the independent agency capable of making tough decisions without regard to political consequences that the intent of 2007’s Proposition A, which gave them full authority over parking and public transit in San Francisco.

The meeting starts at 2 p.m. in City Hall’s Room 400, and the parking meter proposal follows a discussion of the agency’s deficit-plagued budget, appropriately enough.

P.S. Streetsblog SF has an excellent discussion of the proposal with parking guru Donald Shoup, who makes it clear why this study is so different for the meter rates increases in Oakland that caused such controversy.

Endorsements

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Endorsements

San Francisco is facing the worst budget crisis in modern history. More than 1,000 employees, mostly front-line workers in the Department of Public Health, have been laid off, and the red ink continues. Yet the only measure on the November ballot that would raise any money for the city is Sup. Bevan Dufty’s plan to sell off naming rights for Candlestick Park.

That’s pathetic. During the summer budget discussions, Mayor Newsom vowed to work with business, labor, and the supervisors to come up with a reasonable plan to bring in some new cash for the city. But that collapsed — largely because state law would have made it hard to raise taxes this fall without a unanimous vote of the supervisors. And while eight members were willing to put a revenue measure on the ballot, the three supervisors closest to the mayor — Sean Elsbernd, Carmen Chu, and Michela Alioto-Pier, all Newsom appointees — refused to go along. And the mayor made only a weak effort to change their minds.

So while Democrats everywhere decry Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s insistence on a cuts-only budget, the Democratic mayor of San Francisco has forced essentially the same approach on this city. The only revenue increases we’re seeing are fees, like Muni fare hikes, that amount to taxes on the poor.

That’s the state of San Francisco as we head into what will almost certainly be a low-turnout election. Only two elected officials are on the ballot, and both are unopposed. Five ballot measures — several fairly significant — round out the local ballot. And with no big-name races at the top, they will win or lose on the votes of a small majority.

That’s too bad, because the issues matter. Vote Nov. 3 — and let’s hope next year’s ballot actually includes some new, progressive taxes.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS


City Attorney

Dennis Herrera

San Francisco hasn’t always had a good track record with city attorneys. George Agnost, who ran the office in the 1970s and 1980s, was a dour, secretive, conservative lawyer who let downtown call all the shots. Louise Renne, who took over from Agnost, ran the office in the 1990s as if it was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. Herrera, who took over in 2001, has been a major improvement. He’s turned the office into a modern operation, professionalized the administration, and taken on an activist role on consumer, environmental, and public-interest issues. He’s been a big supporter of marriage equality and of the city’s landmark health-care legislation. On his own initiative, he sued to end gender rating in health insurance and crack down on predatory payday lenders. He also moved to enforce health codes in housing and has been out front going after corrupt landlords like Skyline Realty.

We have some concerns about Herrera. Although he’s been far more sunshine-friendly than his predecessors, open-government activists are still sometimes forced to sue the city to get access to records. He won’t use his power as city attorney to enforce the Raker Act and bring public power to San Francisco. And during the current budget crisis, he cut the number of city attorney hours the supervisors can use to draft legislation.

And if, as rumored, he wants to run for mayor, Herrera needs to start taking public stands on major issues — like the unfairness of the local tax code and the need for new revenue.

But we’re happy to endorse him for another term.

Treasurer

Jose Cisneros

The incumbent treasurer is running unopposed, and we see no reason not to endorse him. He’s done some very positive things: Cisneros worked to get the big downtown law firms and other partnerships to pay their fair share of city taxes. He closed a tax loophole exploited by the big airlines that put up flight crews in local hotels.

He also convinced local banks and credit unions to accept consular identification cards to allow immigrants to open accounts and has pushed those institutions to offer "second-chance banking" to people with past credit problems. During his tenure, more than half of the 50,000 households in the city that lacked bank accounts have been able to get away from predatory check-cashing outfits and open legitimate accounts.

As an elected official, however, he could be doing a lot more. The city still keeps all its short-term accounts in one bank — Bank of America, which isn’t even local. Cisneros has promised to open that deal up to competitive bidding, but doesn’t have a timeline. And although nobody knows better than the treasurer how unfair and regressive the city’s tax codes are, he has never spoken out or offered any solutions. Cisneros says he wants his office to be apolitical, but city money is, by its nature, a political issue, and we’d like to see a little more leadership from the person who handles it. But overall, he’s a professional money manager who’s done a decent job and deserves another term.

Proposition A

Budget process

YES

We’re a little nervous about Prop. A, which would institute a two-year budget cycle for the city. Sup. Chris Daly, who opposes it, points out that the city controller’s budget projections are often wrong — badly wrong — and trying to plan 24 months ahead when economic conditions (and thus the city’s revenue stream) can change so quickly and unpredictably is a dangerous game.

But on balance, the approach in Prop. A makes sense. The budget debates would still take place every year, and the supervisors would still have to approve an annual budget — although the budget would be a rolling two-year projection. So next year, the board would approve a budget for 2010 and 2011, the following year for 2011 and 2012, and so on — leaving plenty of room for adjusting to meet economic changes. And two-year cycles might make it easier for nonprofits that rely on city funding to do some serious long-term planning.

Equally important, Prop. A requires the police and firefighters to negotiate their union contracts the same time the other unions do — before the budget deadline. The current system allows those unions to make demands that are unrelated to — and often outside — the current year’s budget realities.

Every progressive on the board except Daly supports this, and Sups. Alioto-Pier, Elsbernd and Chu oppose it.

Proposition B

Board of Supervisors aides

YES

This one’s a no-brainer. The City Charter mandates that each supervisor be allowed to hire two aides. The requirement dates back to a long-ago era when city budgets were far smaller, problems were less pressing and complex, and the supervisors worked part-time. It makes perfect sense to take such an archaic law out of the City Charter and allow the supervisors to set their own budgets — and staffing levels — the same way the mayor does. Vote yes.

Proposition C

Candlestick Park Naming Rights

NO

You have to give Sup. Bevan Dufty, the author of Prop. C, credit for trying. He’s looking for any angle he can use to help keep the 49ers in town, and allowing a corporate sponsor to pay for naming rights might possibly help cover the immense cost of substantially renovating aging Candlestick Park. And, like Prop. D (see below), this measure has a nice beneficiary: part of the money from naming rights would go to save the jobs of recreation directors, many of whom have faced budget-driven layoffs.

We agree that rec directors play a crucial role, particularly in neighborhoods with large numbers of at-risk youth. And we wish the Chamber of Commerce, Sup. Elsbernd, and other supporters of Prop. C were willing to accept some progressive tax hikes to fund those jobs.

But this isn’t a good deal. The city owns the stadium; the taxpayers financed its construction and spent 30 years paying off the bonds. But the 49ers, a private outfit owned by a very wealthy family, would get half the money from any naming deal. And the money that would come in would be radically short of what the team would need to rebuild the ‘Stick. Vote no.

Proposition D

Mid-Market special sign district

NO

Again: credit for the effort. David Addington, who owns the Warfield Theater and several other properties on mid-Market Street, accurately notes that the city’s main thoroughfare, between Fifth and Seventh streets, is rundown, ignored, and badly in need of an economic boost. He argues that allowing new digital billboards would create something of a Times Square in San Francisco, attracting tourists and turning mid-Market into a thriving theater district. Nothing else the city has done has worked — why not give this a try?

We aren’t necessarily opposed to digital billboards and we’d love to see mid-Market reinvigorated. But Prop. D would give too much authority to an unelected, unrepresentative group. It would amount to privatizing city planning and set a terrible precedent.

Under the measure, the Central Market Community Benefits District, a private group of property owners, organizations, and residents, would be authorized to approve new general advertising billboards as large as 500 square feet. The ads would have to meet city codes, but the Planning Department and supervisors would have no ability to block new installations. And the money — potentially millions of dollars a year — would go entirely to the property owners and the CBD, which would decide how to distribute it.

Yes, like Prop. C, this measure would help a worthy group: some of the new money would go to youth programs in the Tenderloin. But the process this measure describes isn’t at all democratic. The CBD board selects its own members, and the only oversight the city has is the ability of the Board of Supervisors to abolish the agency and start over.

We’re open to new ideas for central Market Street. We’re open to lights and ads and maybe even billboards. But we’re not willing to turn over zoning and public finance decisions to a private group. Vote no.

Proposition E

Advertisements on city property

YES

Proposition E, written by former Sup. Jake McGoldrick, would freeze new commercial billboards and ads on street furniture at 2008 levels and outlaw advertising on public buildings. It’s an extension of existing city policy, which seeks to limit the increasing blight of commercial ads in public space. Vote yes.

Newsom reneges on parking, but the MTA shouldn’t

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By Steven T. Jones
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The Guardian explored the politics of parking in our July 1 cover package.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which will soon consider a long-awaited study into how to generate more than $1 million in additional parking meter revenue that was part of a May budget deal, faces another test of whether it is truly an independent agency or merely Mayor Gavin Newsom’s puppet.

As the backlash over extended meter hours in Oakland caused the City Council there to cave in to driver and merchant demands, Newsom – who likes to dress in green but has never really challenged the dominant car culture’s sense of entitlement – has signaled that he now wants to break the deal he helped broker and stop meter hours from being extended.

But under 2007’s Proposition A, which Newsom supported, this isn’t a decision for either the mayor or the Board of Supervisors, but instead for the theoretically independent MTA board. In fact, the whole argument for that change was based on giving that body the power to do the right thing even when craven, conflict-averse politicians get cold feet.

“Any decision on whether to extend meter hours is under the SFMTA Board of Directors,” confirmed SFMTA spokesperson Judson True, who also said the study is almost complete and could be released as soon as next week. He said it is a “study of parking with a variety of factors that will determine whether extended hours is a good idea.”

Drivers and merchants may squawk over extending meters into the evening hours, but with the city failing to put general revenue measures on the ballot and motorists not even coming close to paying for their full impacts and use of public spaces, this is a basic equity issue.

Muni riders took the biggest hit in the May budget deal, with their fares doubling since Newsom took office. Unlike in Oakland, San Francisco is well-served by public transportation, so there’s no good reason why motorists need such fiscal coddling. Newsom may be afraid, but the MTA board shouldn’t be.

After the peak

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After the peak

news@sfbg.com

To prepare for the inevitable decline in fossil fuel production, San Francisco’s Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force (see "Running on Empty," 1/30/08) has concluded the city needs to rapidly implement the community choice aggregation and its related renewable energy projects, beef up "buy local" programs, convert unused land (including some park and golf course property) into public food gardens, and consider implementing city carbon, gas, vehicle, and fast food taxes.

The task force presented its findings, contained in a 125-page report, to the Board of Supervisors’ Government Audit and Oversight Committee on Sept. 24. It notes the city’s weak current position with respect to the economy, food security, and transportation, yet it remains to be seen how the Board of Supervisors will answer the task force’s call. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi says he will look for ways to initiate some of the short- and long-term recommendations "to legitimize its most salient parts."

San Francisco is the largest U.S. city to produce a sweeping report on the potential impacts of peak oil, a term that refers to the point of maximum oil production, after which extracting dwindling supplies gets steadily more difficult and expensive. Although there isn’t consensus on when the peak will come, the task force’s message is clear: action must be taken now. "The transition cannot be done quickly; the city faces a limited window of opportunity to begin, after which adaptation will become enormously difficult, painful, and expensive," concludes the report. Without sufficient preparation, dwindling supplies of oil and fossil fuel could have dire impacts on San Francisco’s economy, food supply, and security.

Many actions recommended by the task force focus on developing local sustainability. For example, disaster planning needs to cover peak oil phenomena. If delivery of food is delayed or reduced due to fuel shortage, food prices could soar, creating a great need for local options, particularly for low-income families. So the report recommends maximizing the amount of time San Francisco can sustain itself locally.

Specifically, implementing an aggressive "Buy Local First" program that prompts public institutions to purchase regionally produced food when possible would encourage more local food production. A fast food tax could further support this goal. Other recommendations include establishing food production education programs and conducting a comprehensive evaluation of which public lands could be converted to food production. Although the Bay Area is capable of producing enough food to sustain itself, food currently being produced is not diverse enough, and much of it is exported.

The report also warns of the social unrest that could result from improper preparation. San Francisco’s economy depends heavily on travel and visitors, with about 18 percent of city revenue coming from tourism. Escautf8g energy costs and its myriad impacts could send the economy into a prolonged downward spiral.

"With food becoming increasingly expensive, travel and the distribution of goods significantly affected, and unemployment climbing, economically vulnerable populations — including a high percentage of people of color — could experience increasing malnutrition, and some may not be able to maintain health without government intervention," the report reads.

Such future scenarios should affect today’s decisions in all realms, including transportation. Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable Cities and an elected BART board member, said at the Sept. 24 hearing that it doesn’t make sense to fund highway expansions when future resources might not be able to support even the current number of automobiles on the roads.

In fact, he said, there is a cultural shift already underway in which people want to move away from the car-dependant suburbs and into more pedestrian-friendly urban areas, although policymakers haven’t caught up with this trend yet. While BART and Muni fight uphill battles to expand public transit service with dwindling resources, Radulovich pointed out that the Bay Area Metropolitan Transport Commission (MTC) is proposing to direct $6.4 billion toward highway expansion, despite a decline in vehicle miles traveled. Livable Cities coauthored a resolution, recently approved by the Board of Supervisors, urging the MTC to redirect these funds toward improving transit.

As oil becomes scarcer, the need to create and improve communities where people can safely get around by foot or bicycle will be paramount. Ben Lowe, a task force member specializing in transportation security, noted how important it is to look for regional solutions that go beyond individual cities. There is no magic single solution, but dealing with limited-supply and cost-prohibitive oil requires numerous small solutions as we make this transition.

The main obstacle, as Mirkarimi sees it, is that the sense of urgency is not there. Public officials need to educate the public and "to find something, key pieces of legislation, to rally around," he said. He plans to look into formal ways to keep the seven task force members involved in this process, for example, by matching them with policy experts who can facilitate creation of pertinent legislation.

The task force’s mantra for dealing with forthcoming shortages in oil is to integrate peak oil consideration into government planning and all the decisions made by the mayor and Board of Supervisors. Mirkarimi warns that it would be myopic for San Franciscans not to deliberate on the dangers and opportunities outlined in this report.

Read the report at www.sfenvironment.org/our_policies/overview.html?ssi=20.

The mayor’s race begins

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By Tim Redmond

So now it’s official: Just when San Francisco political junkies needed something other than the generally dull November election to talk about, Bevan Dufty has done us all a favor and fired the opening gun in the 2011 mayor’s race.

It’s no surprise, really — everyone knew that Dufty was running. Just as everyone knows that City Attorney Dennis Herrera and state Senator Leland Yee will be in the race, and that Assessor Phil Ting is looking at it, and that Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and Public Defender Jeff Adachi are mulling their prospects.

With public financing in place, and ranked-choice voting, the race will be fascinating. Dufty has never run citywide, but he’s a nice guy who can be funny and charming and he’s built a reputation as a nuts-and-bolts supervisor who takes government seriously. “Ross Magowan [of KTVU] asked me what my biggest single issue was, and I said Muni,” Dufty told me today. “He said that Muni was getting better, but hey — crime is down 30 percent citywide and still up on Muni.”

Fixing Muni is a Dufty kind of thing — not a grand civic vision, but a basic public service that people use that has problems. (A classic Dufty story: When the city got rid of the crossing guard at the school my kids go to a couple of years ago, which is in Dufty’s district, the principal called Dufty, and the guard was back the next day. He loves that sort of thing.)

“What I try to be is a collaborator,” he said. “I’ve never had the luxury of knowing I had six votes on the board, so I’ve had to reach out to people.”

He also promised that Mayor Dufty would always show up for question time at the board. He joked that “it’s easy for me to promise that because Chris Daly will be off the board by them” but in the next breath told me how much he likes and respects Daly, who he called “incredibly talented.” (Again, classic Dufty.)

It’s going to be a challenge for him to stand out in this race. He’s not going to get a lot of progressive support; he simply hasn’t been there on a lot of progressive votes and issues. It’s rare to see him defy Mayor Newsom and he’s been on the wrong side of many of the key battles of the past ten years.

He has a lot of support in his district, and among the more centrist parts of the gay community. But he’s not a big downtown guy, not a prodigious fundraiser and won’t be the next Newsom, who ran the first time with the unwavering support of the big-business community and all the money he could ever need.

And Herrera and Yee — both with a proven track record of raising money, both with citywide name recognition — will also be sitting in that political center. Neither of them can claim the support of the majority of the progressive supervisors (although Herrera will no doubt have former Board President Aaron Peskin on his team).

If Mirkarimi or Adachi runs, they’ll take the left flank. Yee will be the more conservative candidate, especially when he’s working the west side of town. I don’t see how Dufty finds his niche.

He doesn’t either, right now — except to say that “I’m not running for anything else. I have no desire to go to Sacramento or Washington. I’m humble and I’m going to run a grassroots campaign.”

What he has, clearly, done is given a kind of shit-or-get-off-the-pot push to the other candidates. The race is a long way away, but with Dufty out there, raising money and seeking endorsements, Mirkarimi is going to have to decide if he’s serious, and if not, the progressives are going to have to decide if Adachi is their man, and the race is going to start firming up. There won’t be a Matt Gonzalez late entry this time around. What you see is what you get, and the late-comers will be at a disadvantage.

Lawns to highrises

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

When Aaron Goodman walks the grounds at Parkmerced, a sprawling apartment complex spanning about 116 acres in southwestern San Francisco, he picks up on details that might escape the notice of a casual observer. A gregarious tour guide, he chatters on enthusiastically about the unique design elements of an entryway or townhouse facade, the curve of a knee-high brick wall defining the slope of a courtyard, the simple elegance of a tiered planter or classic window frame, or the spacious feel of a breezeway that opens onto shared grassy space encircled by backyard terraces. "No two courtyards are alike," Goodman says. "Each one is like a little vignette."

An architect who lives in a rental unit in one of Parkmerced’s towers, Goodman is on a mission to document the complex’s 1940s-era courtyard landscapes — but he’s racing against the clock. Landscape and carpentry crews are constantly rearranging things before he can get to them, he says — and those piecemeal cosmetic changes are nothing in comparison with what’s coming.

A total overhaul has been proposed for Parkmerced. The low-rise town houses would be razed, the landscape drastically altered, and an additional 5,665 housing units constructed, nearly tripling the number of residents that can be accommodated.

Goodman regards the plan as a "total tear-down," an affront to the work of the influential landscape architect who designed the grounds, and a terrible waste.

But Skidmore, Owens and Merrill, the internationally renowned architecture firm hired by the owner, a real-estate investment group called Parkmerced Investors LLC, describes the future Parkmerced as a cutting-edge eco-neighborhood that would provide the city with desperately needed rental housing. "This will be the largest sustainable revitalization project on the West Coast — perhaps in the entire nation," says Craig Hartman, the principal architect. "Our goal is to create an international model of environmentally sustainable urban living, and all our decisions are being made in that context."

A development of this scale would fundamentally change the feel of an entire San Francisco neighborhood. It’s also, potentially, a case study in one of the most complex urban planning problems of our time.

"This is the kind of problem that America is going to be faced with over and over in the coming decades," Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, told us. "It’s this question of how do we retrofit suburbia?"

Parkmerced is one of many similar areas developed after World War II, "when people hated cities," Metcalf said, "when the idea was that everybody would drive everywhere, and it was a sort of new town in town. It’s a period piece. It’s from a time when people were trying to escape density and traditional Victorian patterns like in the Tenderloin or SoMa or North Beach — [instead], you would have big lawns, and it would look very suburban."

But that model, most environmentalists and planner agree, isn’t sustainable. And activists say that the western part of the city, which has always resisted density, will have to accept more residents in the coming years.

But a development of this size and magnitude, driven by a profit-seeking real-estate operation, creates all sorts of other problems, including potential traffic disasters on the nightmare called 19th Avenue. And while much of the new housing will be rental and some will be affordable, it raises the question: is this the sort of new housing the city needs?

TOO MUCH WATER


The plans for Parkmerced are bold, and the construction timeline spans 15 to 20 years. The 11 towers on the site, which account for about half the 3,000-unit housing stock, would remain standing, while the low-scale apartment dwellings would be demolished to make way for a mix of taller buildings, including 11 new towers at about the same height. Once the project is complete, Parkmerced would have a total of nearly 8,900 housing units, with a mix of rental and for-sale properties.

"Our plan for Parkmerced will directly address the city’s housing shortage for households at all income levels," Hartman told the Guardian, adding that existing rental units would be preserved, and the project would comply with the city’s affordable-housing requirements. The city typically requires about 15 percent affordability, which would mean about 850 new below-market units — and 4,800 at market rate.

And while the complex was originally designed for middle-class families, the owners have been targeting San Francisco State University students — who typically have their parents co-sign the leases and who don’t present a rent-control issue, since they don’t stay long.

Sustainability and energy-efficiency are underpinnings of the project, according to Hartman. The poorly insulated garden apartments are moisture-ridden and inefficient, he said, and the entire neighborhood layout reflects the car-centric mentality of a bygone era. The landscape also poses a problem. "Maintaining the expansive lawns … requires the application of tons of fertilizer and wastes millions of gallons of drinking water annually. In fact, actual metering shows the consumption of 55 million gallons of potable water per year — just for irrigation."

Parkmerced residents would use 60 percent less energy and water per capita than they do now, according to Hartman, through efficiency improvements and investments in renewable energy sources. Plans also call for an organic farm and a network of bike paths. A storm-water management system would naturally filter runoff and use it to recharge Lake Merced, which has been seeping lower in recent years.

The developers hope to re-route the Muni M line through the complex to make transit more accessible. New retail would eliminate the need to drive somewhere for something as simple as a quart of milk.

"To me what’s most exciting about this is, if they get it right, it’s actually taking an area that right now generates a ton of car trips, and making it walkable," Metcalf said.

But Goodman and others have suggested that Parkmerced should be designated as a landmark, which would hamper development plans, precisely because its character is reminiscent of that postwar era. A draft report issued by Page & Turnbull, a historic-architecture firm, found that Parkmerced would be eligible for designation as a historic district on the California and national registers of historic places.

It was built in the 1940s by Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. as part of a government-supported effort to supply housing for the middle-class and families of servicemembers. The "courtyard vignettes" bear the mark of Thomas Dolliver Church, regarded as the founding father of the modern movement in landscape design.

"It was Church’s biggest public project," notes Inge Horton, an architect and former regional planner with the San Francisco Planning Department who completed an historic assessment of Parkmerced for Docomomo, the International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighborhoods of the Modern Movement. Horton has mixed feelings about the proposed development. "It is one of these things where the developer or owner proposes to tear down all the low-rise buildings and put up a high-rise and make it a little bit green," Horton said. "Sorry to be so cynical."

Goodman wonders just what’s so sustainable about demolishing buildings that the owners have just sunk millions of dollars into for fix-ups and cosmetic repairs. "When you look at the overall site, it’s a functioning community — and it’s essential housing," he says, wondering why it can’t be reused and expanded," he says.

Hartman says he views the site "as an architect," and finds it to be incongruous with San Francisco’s character. "To be frank, the architecture is unworthy of this extraordinary site," he says. Instead, he sees potential for what it could be: a pioneering example of a green neighborhood that uses urban density to meet the challenge of climate change.

MOVING OUT


At a public meeting held in June to discuss the future plans, residents shared their anxiety about being forced to move. Some tenants, particularly seniors, have lived there for decades in rent-controlled units. Parkmerced Investors has promised that those residents would be able to maintain their current rents in brand new, comparatively sized apartments. But Goodman points out that many would lose their meticulously cared-for garden plots and be forced to adapt to life in a high-rise instead.

About half the tenants are college students who attend San Francisco State, which lies adjacent to Parkmerced. District 7 Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who represents the neighborhood, told the Guardian that he often receives complaints from his constituents about "keggers" that go on until the wee morning hours.

"Parkmerced is such a fascinating societal study," Elsbernd noted. "You’ve got a lot of folks who’ve been there since it was built, but really the vast majority now are students at San Francisco State who are so transient and really aren’t terribly invested in the neighborhood."

Elsbernd said he also shares a different concern, which came across at the meeting loud and clear: traffic. Although development plans emphasize cycling, Muni access, and a shuttle that would carry passengers to the Daly City BART, the redesign would come with a grand total of more than 11,000 on-street and off-street parking spaces. And it’s situated along the 19th Avenue corridor, which is already notorious for traffic snarls (and for pedestrian deaths). Some fear the combination of two new developments would fuel perpetual, dangerous gridlock.

"At minimum, we’re talking 5,000 additional vehicular trips a day," said Calvin Welch, a longtime affordable housing activist. "You couldn’t build housing further from where people work if you tried." Welch regards the smart-growth school of thought, enthusiastically endorsed by SPUR, with skepticism. The pitfall, he says, is "allowing high-density development in transit-oriented neighborhoods … and then finding out that people drive."

On the other hand, Welch said, market-rate rental housing is much more affordable than market-rate condominiums, so Parkmerced will provide a service compared to the condos that are pricing so many middle-class families out of San Francisco. And the eastern half of the city has had its share of new residential development, so building new rental units in the western half might be an appropriate counterbalance.
Goodman said he has his own vision for Parkmerced, which would employ adaptive reuse of the existing structures and ensure truly affordable housing for people of modest means. "If I had money and tons of land and all the power in the world, I’d do it a completely different way," he says. "But I don’t. I’m a tenant living on site."

Word on the street

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news@sfbg.com

You see them everywhere. When you’re getting off Muni, when you’re crossing the street, in the corner of your eye: Street Sheets for sale. Behind every Street Sheet is a homeless person trying to legitimately make a buck and provide a voice for these frequently-ignored people and issues.

This month Street Sheet celebrates its 20th anniversary as the nation’s oldest, continuously operating street newspaper. Street Sheet is a newspaper focused solely on homelessness, poverty, and affordable housing issues and is distributed by homeless or formerly homeless vendors for a $1 donation.

The vendors keep the profits as a small source of income and, ideally, as a stepping-stone toward a a better life. Street Sheet, a project of the San Francisco-based Coalition on Homelessness, currently prints 16,000 copies twice a month with more than 200 vendors.

Lydia Ely, Street Sheet‘s editor for its first 10 years, believes that one of the paper’s strengths is the consistency of its mission. Bob Offer-Westort, the current coordinating editor, breaks down the mission into three objectives. The first is to provide supplemental income, in a dignified manner, to homeless men and women. Offer-Westort understands that this income is not a solution to homelessnees, but merely a stopgap measure.

Debbie, a vendor who has been selling the newspaper a couple times a week for eight years, uses the roughly $30 per day she earns to "make ends meet, pay for laundry and shampoo, or to go to the food bank."

The second mission, Offer-Westort says, is to "inform the broader public on issues that don’t make it into mainstream media." Even when homelessness, poverty, or housing issues seep into the news, they often are skewed, misinterpreted, or presented with a tone of judgment.

Andy Freeze, director of North American Street Newspaper Association, says street newspapers are "changing conversations around homelessness. Not everything revolves around drugs and alcohol," and street newspapers are bring the real issues of life on the streets to the forefront of discussion.

Despite pressure over the years to include positive stories for tourists, morality tales, horoscopes, and crosswords, Ely says Street Sheet continues to address serious news.

Last, Offer-Westort says, Street Sheet "creates a forum where an oppressed people get their voices heard." As of 2007, San Francisco’s official homeless count was 6,514; and in such a geographically small city, it is a community that is alternately ignored and vilified.

Even respectable vendors like Debby experience people who don’t understand Street Sheet. Debby says some people will "spit at you and call you names. They tell you to get a job." The irony in this is that the people yelling vulgarities at the vendors are the people in need of the education Street Sheet provides.

What those people don’t understand is that homelessness is not a choice and is not always drug or alcohol-related. In this economic crisis, Debby believes that a lot of the people who yell vulgarities "are just a paycheck away from being on the streets themselves."

But she doesn’t let the negativity get to her. "You learn a lot when you are on the other side of the fence. I have learned a lot about myself." Debby has an established spot to sell Street Sheet, a selling strategy, and has developed friendships with some of her regulars.

Offer-Westort, the coordinating editor for the past four years, says his role in the newspaper is not typical of editors in that he doesn’t write. Most of the stories are produced by homeless people. The Coalition on Homelessness includes three work groups — Civil Rights, Families and Immigration, and Right to a Roof — that work with volunteers and homeless or formerly homeless people to determine the content of each issue. Offer-Westort coordinates and "checks for spelling."

Much of what goes into print in street newspapers is "high quality journalism that is being recognized in their communities and nationally," according to Freeze. And while the mission of the paper hasn’t changed in 20 years, the material, as Ely says, has gotten better because of increased awareness and circulation.

When asked where Offer-Westort wants to see the paper in 20 years, he said he’d like to see it "going out of business because homelessness has ended."

Join Street Sheet‘s anniversary celebration Sept. 10 at 5:30 p.m. at SomArts Gallery, 934 Brannan, SF. Admission is $25 and includes food, drink, and entertainment. For more details visit www.cohsf.org/artauction.

RAWdance presents the Concept Series: 5

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PREVIEW RAWdance’s Concept Series is the brainchild of dancer-choreographers Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein, who needed a lab situation in which to test concept and show works in progress. They invited friends and artists who looked interesting and who had similar concerns. The result is a series of informal presentations that sparkle with fresh ideas, although the individual works are rarely finished. Watching this type of dance is so inviting, despite the tiny, near-impossible performance space. It’s long and narrow, and audiences must be prepared to move the furniture to accommodate a particular artist’s requirements. Concept 5 looks especially intriguing. In addition to Smith and Rein’s latest experiments, you’ll get the inimitable Mary Armentrout; Bob Webb/Bare Bones Butoh — you probably know him better as the ubiquitous stage manager who keeps dance shows on track; improv dancers Christine Cali and Amy Stemstetter, freshly back from the East Coast; Printz Dance Project, who have their own show Nov. 5-7; and Lily Dwyer and Scott Marlowe, LEVY Dance members who are striking out on their own. Parking is tough, so patronize Muni. But the price is right: pay what you can — and the popcorn is free.

RAWDANCE PRESENTS THE CONCEPT SERIES: 5 Sat/5–Sun/6, 8 p.m. (also Sun/6, 3 p.m.), pay what you can James Howell Studio, 66 Sanchez, SF. (415) 686-0728.

Muni: They love it

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By Tim Redmond

This is fascinating: Phil Matier talks to Nat Ford about the latest round of Muni accidents, and the bus-system chief is remarkably upbeat, saying, in effect, that we have so many trains out there that these things are going to happen (except that it would be better if he had the money to hire more supervisors).

But there’s a great line at the start of the interview. Ford says that the fact that 700,000 people ride the buses and trains every day shows that “they like it … they enjoy it.”

Okay, I’m one of those sickos who really DOES like riding Muni, particularly when I’m not trying to get anyplace in a hurry. But I have to wonder: Is Ford being a bit too optimistic here? Don’t people ride Muni in part because they have to get to work and there’s no other choice?

Something for nothing

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>>CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS GUIDE ON ONE PAGE

You can’t get much cheaper than free. And at a time when many of us are counting every penny, the Bay Area is full of free stuff. Some of it’s right in front of your face, but most of it takes a little digging to find. This guide should send you in the right direction.

Oh, and by the way: some economists and political thinkers are suggesting that, as the over-financed, money-driven economy of the last century goes into, well, free-fall, the idea of giving things away could be the model for a more sustainable future.

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FREE FOOD

You can eat like a gourmet for the price of a drink

By Virginia Miller

Eating free doesn’t have to begin and end with soup kitchens. Here are some spots where, for the price of a drink — or sometimes for nothing — you can get good food, and sometimes excellent food, for everybody’s favorite magic number of zero.

ADESSO HAPPY HOUR

Adesso is much more than wine bar with an Italian-centric list of wines by the glass. The drinks are (relatively) inexpensive and creative concoctions. But the best part (besides a Foosball table) is food that comes out continuously from the kitchen during weekday happy hours. We’re not talking about your average free bar food here — this is stuff from the regular menu, like excellent house-made charcuterie, cheeses, hefty arancini (fried Italian rice balls), pates, sardine crostini, and all kinds of goodness. Happy hour, indeed.

Mon.–Fri., 5-7pm. 4395 Piedmont, Oakl. 510-601-0305

ALISHA’S HOME COOKIN’ FRIDAYS AT THE RIPTIDE

It’s happy hour and it’s Friday … what could be better? Especially at dive bar extraordinaire the Riptide, all the way out by the ocean in the Sunset District. From 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. (or until the food’s gone), Alisha cooks up down-home goodness that pairs well with the ‘Tide’s PBRs and fireplace (in case — shall we bet on it? — the fog rolls in after a sunny summer day). You get chili con carne, chicken pot pie, and something called "blushin’ bunnies."

4–7 p.m. 3639 Taraval, SF.415-681-8433. www.riptidesf.com

MAYA HAPPY HOUR WITH BOTANAS

The $5 drink specials all night on margaritas, mojitos, and sangria are already a good deal. Add in free all-you-can-eat Mexican snacks and it’s a party. Free stuff includes Mexican bites like guac, quesadillas, taquitos, jicama with ceviche, tamales, and black bean dip. Arriba!

Weekdays, 4–7pm www.mayasf.com

EL RIO’S MONTHLY PANCAKE SATURDAYS

El Rio is one generous bar — the place serves free pancakes from the griddle the third Saturday of the month. Further cool points won by calling it "Rock Softly and Carry a Big Spatula." Breakfast is kindly served at 1 p.m., so after you’ve rolled out of bed and wandered over, ease into wakefulness with soft rock and hot flapjacks. Wear the "funkiest kitchen couture" and you could win their Golden Apron honors. After a meal that costs nothing, it’s easy to feed the tradition with generous tips. There’s also free barbecue at Friday night happy hours until 9 p.m. and on Sunday afternoons during the summer.

3rd Saturdays, 1–3 p.m. 3158 Mission, 415-282-3325. www.elriosf.com

PALIO D’ASTI’S PIZZA

Any two drinks (of the alcoholic kind, $6–$9) and you’re given a generous-sized pizza for two (or one massive eater). Devour the sauceless pizza d’Asti (shaved asparagus, fontina val d’aosta, thyme), a classic Margherita, or a Siciliana (fabulous Berkshire pork fennel sausage, fire roasted peppers, and smoked mozzarella). It’s no trouble drinking cocktails when they’re as playful as rosemary "sweet tea" (bourbon, muddled rosemary, lemon, and a splash of Moscato d’Asti), or a rhubarb margarita with lime and a salt rim.

Mon-Fri, 4–7pm. 640 Sacramento, SF.415-395-9800. www.paliodasti.com

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FREE DRINKS

Sometimes, even the booze is on the house

By Amy Monroe

If you’re curious and thirsty on a Friday, head to Spuntino’s free wine tasting from 4 to 6 p.m. Let the friendly staff pour and explain a flight of wines organized around a different theme each week. Drink free and get educated — imagine that.

1957 Union, 931-0122, www.spuntinosf.com

Cash-strapped social butterflies need only round up a group of friends and bring them to Tropisueno any night of the week to earn free drinks, and lots of them. The host imbibes gratis all evening provided she brings five friends with her to the bar.

75 Yerba Buena Ln., 243-0299, www.tropisueno.com

If you happen to be walking by one of the city’s many Kimpton hotels between 5 and 6 p.m. on a weekday, you might want to wander in and mingle with the guests in the lobby. If you look the part (and nobody asks you to show your room key), you can partake in the hotel chain’s free wine hour. Bonus: many locations pour free Anchor, too.

Nine locations in San Francisco, www.kimptonhotels.com

Like beer, music, and crowds? Then head to tiny Laszlo on the first Friday of the month for GroundSound Happy Hour. Hosts Upper Playground and SonicLiving buy you beer — and good beer at that, Trumer Pils and Shiner Commemorator — from 6 to 7 p.m. while DJs spin for your listening pleasure.

2526 Mission, 401-0810, www.laszlobar.com

upperplayground.com/wordpress/?tag=groundsound-happy-hour

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JOHNNY FUNCHEAP’S FAVORITE WAYS TO ENJOY THE CITY, FREE

By Johnny Funcheap

When you’re broke in San Francisco, sometimes even "cheap" can seem like a four-letter word. So thank God for free. Here are a few ways you can still enjoy the fun of living in San Francisco without cracking open your wallet even once.

GET LECTURED ABOUT YOUR DRINKING

The Mission District bar Elixir hosts a free Thursday night "Cocktail Club" with tastings (whiskeys, vodkas, tequilas … even absinthe) and a guest expert to help guide you through the process of finding new ways to appreciate staying off the wagon. For beer and wine drinkers, most BevMo! locations in the Bay Area have regular free tasting parties with themes like summertime ales and Mexican beers.

Elixir, 3200 16th St. http://www.elixirsf.com

ART GALLERY RECEPTIONS AND WALKS

To help lure in and lubricate casual art fans into being art-buyers, most galleries have regular receptions with free-flowing wine and a tasty platter of things to nibble on while you research art you can’t yet afford. If one reception a night isn’t enough, try sauntering from gallery to gallery during one of several monthly art walks — the most reliable of which clusters around Union Square with regular collective receptions the first Thursday evening of each month.

www.firstthursdayart.com

VOLUNTEERING MADE EASY: ONE BRICK

Unemployed? Got time on your hands? Do something useful with it — and meet new friends in the process. One Brick is a local nonprofit that hosts upwards of 20 different flexible volunteering opportunities each week, ranging from working a short shift beautifying a local park to serving food to the homeless. It’s not just about doing good — One Brick aims to help you make new friends by organizing meet-ups after each event so volunteers can get to know one another in a relaxed setting over a meal or a drink.

www.onebrick.org

GET YOUR GEEK ON: STAR PARTIES

If you’ve ever looked up to the heavens and wondered what the hell was up there, the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers might be able to give you some answers. The group gives free lectures the third Wednesday of each month at the Randall Museum. When skies are clear, it hosts free monthly Star Parties at Point Lobos at Lands End with a lecture and a public telescope viewing.

RandallMuseum, 199 Museum Way; Point Lobos, El Camino Del Mar in Lands End;

www.sfaa-astronomy.org

AURAL PLEASURES: MARKET STREET MUSIC FESTIVAL

If the live music at the Stern Grove and Yerba Buena Gardens Festivals make you sad that most weekdays are quiet, the annual People in Plazas festival should help fill in any remaining gaps in your work-week concert schedule. This free July-to-October Market Street music festival puts on more than 145 free lunchtime concerts of all types in 16 different public plazas from the Embarcadero through the Castro.

www.peopleinplazas.org

FRIDAY NIGHT SKATE

Rather than plunking down a big portion of your salary (or unemployment check) on a gym membership (or signing up for a free introductory pass at a different gym each week: a.k.a. "gym slutting"), get sweaty by donning your blades or old-school roller skates and join the Midnight Rollers’ weekly Friday Night Skate. A large group of skaters embark from the Ferry Plaza on a 10-mile dance party/skate tour of the city, which includes plenty of stops for ice cream, Frisbee-throwing, and a chance for slowpokes to catch up.

www.cora.org/friday

TASTE-MAKING

Macy’s Union Square puts on free monthly cooking demonstrations in the Cellar, where top local chefs reveal their secrets for dishing up creative yet healthy meals. Not only do you get to learn skills like how to barbecue like a grill master, expertly pair chocolate and wine, or make a brunch worth waking up early for, you also get to sample the yummy delights the experts have cooked up. It’s like watching your favorite cooking show on the Food Network, but getting to magically reach inside the TV to grab a taste.

www1.macys.com

Johnny Funcheap runs FunCheapSF.com, a free San Francisco-based service that uncovers and shares a hand-picked recommendation list of upwards of 50 cheap, fun, unique Bay Area events each week.

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FIVE FREE THINGS TO DISCOVER IN SF

Urban adventures don’t have to cost money

By Broke-Ass Stuart

Although wasting a day in Dolores Park or purposefully misdirecting tourists might be great way to have some free fun, anything can get redundant after a while. That’s why I put together this list of amazing free things to discover in San Francisco. Whether you’ve been here your whole life or just landed today, you’re bound to find something entertaining on this list.

The Wave Organ at the end of the jetty extending past the Golden Gate Yacht club in the Marina. It’s not bellowing quite like it used to, but the Wave Organ is a perfect particle of San Francisco’s quirkiness. Built by the Exploratorium, the Wave Organ consists of 25 PVC pipes of various lengths jutting through concrete into the bay below. The sounds it makes depend on the height of the tide.

The Seward Street Slides at Seward and Douglass streets in the Castro District. Cardboard: free. Concrete slides: free. Getting bloody scrapes from combo of cardboard and concrete slides: priceless. The two concrete chutes are constructed so that when you get to the top and sit on a piece of cardboard, you slide down. Bring wax paper for even greater velocity.

The Xanadu Gallery at 140 Maiden Lane. If you’re excited about free stuff, chances are you can’t afford anything in this gallery. But looking around is free — and awesome! Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright at the same time that he was doodling the Guggenheim, Xanadu Gallery (built as the VC Morris Gift Shop), has a remarkably similar interior to its New York City cousin — seemingly devoid of right angles and full of curving ramps. I’d pay so much money to see Tony Hawk go to town in here.

The Tiled Steps and Grand View Park, 16th Avenue at Moraga. Bring your sweetie and climb the lovely 163 tiled steps. Stop at the top and breathe a bunch. Then climb the next set of stairs to the right, and the ones after that. Now you’re in Grand View Park. Breathe a bunch more while checking out the staggering view. Smooching at the top is optional (but excellent).

The Jejune Institute, 580 California, Suite 1607,. Imagine if Lost took place in San Francisco. But instead of wandering the jungle dodging weird smoke monsters and "the others," you could explore the city in ways you never imagined. The JeJune Institute is kinda like that, only better. I don’t want to ruin anything for you, so all I’m gonna say is go there with a couple free hours, a cell phone, and $1.10 (not technically free but seriously the best $1.10 you’ll ever spend). The Jejune Institute blew my mind so hard that the top of my skull still flaps in the wind.

If you like cheap stuff, check out BrokeAssStuart.com.

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FREE HAIRCUTS

Let the students practice on your head

By Mayka Mei

Has anyone ever said you have a great face for hair modeling? Volunteering as a hair model gives salon trainees a chance to fulfill all their requirements for becoming full-time stylists. True, salons have become more guarded about their freebies, sometimes nixing the programs altogether. But a few freebies are still out there.

A few caveats: you’ll need an open, available schedule. Some salons have casting calls or will screen you for certain characteristics online or over the phone. Decide if you want a cut or color, and exactly what type of styling you have in mind. With specific days devoted to specific lessons, they may not need another graduate specializing in bobs the week you need a cut. Here are two places that still cut hair, absolutely free.

Festoon Salon

Haircuts Mondays at 9 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.

Coloring second and fifth Mondays at 11 a.m., 1 p.m., and 3 p.m.

1401 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Berk.

(888) 35-SALON or (510) 528-5855, www.festoonsalon.com

Visual Image

Hair modeling vacancies available one or two times a month, or once a quarter

5200 Mowry, Suite C, Fremont

(510) 792-5922, www.visualimagesalon.com

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FREE PHONES, MOVIES, AND WI-FI

Why are you still paying for Internet access?

By Annalee Newitz

Information may want to be free, but Internet service providers want to charge you too see it. That doesn’t have to crimp your style; there’s plenty of free Wi-Fi — and ways to get free movies and phone service.

Let’s start with a little disclaimer: When you’re talking about getting things like free Wi-Fi, or free phone service, even "free" comes with a price. You’re going to have to invest in some equipment to get free stuff later. You might also need some training — but that’s available free.

For free classes where you can learn more about how to build some of the technologies I’ll be talking about below, check out the Noisebridge hacker space near 16th and Mission streets (www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge).

Now, here’s the dirt on how you can stop paying for phone service, cable, Internet, and online media.

FREE INTERNET SERVICE

Novice level: If you have a laptop with a Wi-Fi card, you should never have to pay for an Internet connection while you live in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are countless cafes that provide free Wi-Fi to their customers. Yelp offers a good, up-to-date list of free Wi-Fi cafes in San Francisco at www.yelp.com/list/free-wireless-cafes-in-sf-san-francisco.

In San Francisco, check for free Wi-Fi provided by commercial vendor Meraki using this map: sf.meraki.com/map. Every branch library in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland offers free Wi-Fi.

Techie level: If you’d like to get free Internet service at home and not have to visit your local cafe all the time, you can build a cheap antenna so that you can see countless networks all around your house. Find out how to build such an antenna using this free online guide at www.en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wifi/Building_an_antenna.

If you are going to be borrowing your neighbors’ Wi-Fi service, please observe this cardinal rule: You are a guest, so use their service sparingly. Checking e-mail is fine, surfing the Web is fine, but downloading giant movie files is extremely uncool.

FREE MOBILE PHONE SERVICE

Novice level: Make all of your phone calls over the Internet using an IP phone. You can either invest in an IP phone and make phone calls using free Wi-Fi cafes and free city networks, or you can get the headset and microphone to plug into your laptop so that you can use Skype or another free Internet voice service.

Techie level: Turn your home phone into an IP phone.

Here are other ideas that some people have tried (and we, of course, don’t recommend that anyone does anything against the law). One of the open secrets about cordless phones is that it is extremely easy to steal phone service using them. Many cordless phones use the DECT chipset, and special laptop cards are available that that allow the users to trick cordless phones system into thinking that the laptop user is one of the cordless phones associated with it. www.dedected.org/trac

FREE CABLE

Novice level: Miro is an online service that allows you to turn your computer into a Tivo-like device that will download the shows you want to watch as soon as they are available via file-sharing programs. Find out more here: www.getmiro.com

Techie level: Turn your computer into a television tuner using Myth TV. www.mythtv.org

FREE MEDIA

Novice level: There are plenty of services online that offer free media, from Hulu.com, which offers a lot of free television and movies, to Archive.org, which has a vast collection of public domain films. Neither Hulu nor Archive.org requires you to download any special software. Or if you’d like something classier, you can download free, public domain classical music at MusOpen! www.musopen.com

Techie level: Use a BitTorrent client to download public domain music and movies that you can save on your computer. CreativeCommons.org lists many artists who offer their music for free. Public Domain Movies offers torrents of movies available to you for free. www.publicdomaintorrents.com

Other options people have tried: Some use a BitTorrent client to download any movie, television, music, software, or books that they like, using a popular Torrent search engine like Isohunt. There are a lot of what you might call grey area legal media at the Pirate Bay. That oufit is located in Sweden, a country that recenty elected representatives of the Pirate Party to serve in the European Parliament.

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FREE POT

You may be broke, but you can still smoke

By Rachel Buhner

It’s not well advertised, but if you’re short on money and need your organic herbal medicine, many of the city’s pot clubs will give it to you, free. Some places ask for proof of income or require membership while some are more loose about it. You won’t get big bags, either — typically the freebie is a gram. But while the American Medical Association and the insurance companies argue in Washington, D.C., about how to keep their fingers on the cash, local medical marijuana dispensaries are actually trying to serve needy patients.

The Green Door offers free marijuana every Thursday from 12 noon to 2 p.m. for those who can’t afford it. No proof is required.

843 Howard Street. (415) 541-9590. www.greendoorsf.com

The Market Street Cooperative offers free marijuana every Sunday for those who can’t afford it. No proof is required.

1884 Market. (415) 864-6686 www.marketstreetcooperative.com

The Hemp Center offers compassionate donations to all members when available; no proof of income is required. There’s also free Internet access, free bottled water, and free rolling papers.

4811 Geary (415) 386-4367www.thehempcenter.com

Sanctuary offers free medical marijuana, but there’s currently a waiting list and priority if given to terminally ill patients. Proof of income required; open to San Francisco residents only.

669 O’Farrell (415) 885-4420

Harborside Health Centers offers a care package program to low-income patients. Paperwork showing a fixed low income is required; patients can receive a free gram and a half each week. Additionally, members from any income bracket can volunteer at the center performing general activist work (calling local representatives, writing letters, etc.). After one hour of work, patients receive a free gram.

And there’s more: every Sunday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., the center offers members free how-to-grow classes taught by David Gold, author of The Complete Cannabis. Members also get a free lending library for cannabis-related materials as well as free holistic health services such as hypnotherapy, chiropractic, naturopathy, yoga, reiki, traditional Chinese medicine, Western herbalist consultations, and Alexander Technique classes.

1840 Embarcadero, Oakl. (510) 533-0146, www.harborsidehealthcenter.com

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FREE PAINT

Not many colors, but the price is right

Every wonder what happens to all that old paint that good, responsible San Franciscans drop off at the city dump? It gets recycled, in the best possible way. The dump workers sort it by color, pour it into big buckets, and give it away.

You don’t get a wide color selection (off-white is the big choice) but the price is right and it keeps the stuff out of the landfill. Schools and community groups get priority, but San Francisco residents can stop by and pick some up whenever there’s extra.

501 Tunnel Avenue. 330-1400. www.sfrecycling.com/sfdump

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FREE SEX

Clubs, classes, and clinics dedicated to low-cost lovin’

By Molly Freedenberg

As anyone with a broken bed frame or a broken heart knows, even sex you don’t exchange money for is rarely free. But we’ve compiled a list of sex-related events, resources, health centers, and club nights that are easier on the pocketbook than most.

GOOD VIBRATIONS

Good Vibrations is always hosting free events, classes, and book signings at its Bay Area stores. This month, check out Paul Krassner reading from his book In Praise of Indecency on July 15 and Kevin Simmonds presenting his new project "Feti(sh)ame," based on interviews with gay men about sexual fetishes, on July 16, both at the Polk Street location, and a reading/signing of Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Prostitues Writing on Life, Love, Work, Sex, and Money (featuring stories by Annie Sprinkle and Tracy Quan, among others) July 30 in Berkeley. www.goodvibes.com

CHAPS

With no cover and nightly drink specials, this SoMa gay bar is the place to ogle hot men on a budget. Ongoing events include Shirts Off Mondays, Trumer Tuesdays (featuring $2 Trumer drafts and specials on Jäger and fernet); the sports-gear and jock-strap-themed Locker Room Wednesdays (with specials on Speakeasy ales, Wild Turkey, and shooters with names like Cock Sucker and Golden Showers); Thursday’s Busted (with whiskey specials and indie, electro, and ’80s remixes); Men in Gear on Saturdays, Cheap Ass Happy Hour every Monday through Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m.; and Rubber (hosted by the Rubbermen of SF Bay) every second Friday.

1225 Folsom, SF. (415) 255-2427, www.chapsbarsanfrancisco.com

CENTER FOR SEX AND CULTURE

This nonprofit organization provides education and resources across the gender spectrum. Though there’s a fee to attend many of the events hosted here, visiting the extensive library/media archive is free. So is checking out "Erotic Embrace of the Corset," an exhibit featuring 50 years of photography of bodies tied up tight, on display through Sept. 10. Call before you visit (the center is run by volunteers and has irregular hours), or try stop by between 1 and 5 p.m. weekdays.

1519 Mission, SF. (415) 255-1155, www.sexandculture.org

FIRST FRIDAY FOLLIES

Burlesque, by its very nature, is meant to be accessible to the masses — which means it should be not only lowbrow, but low cost. This monthly burlesque, music, and comedy revue takes "low" even lower by cutting out the cover charge entirely.

9:30pm. Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph, Oakl. www.myspace.com/firstfridayfollies

FEMINA POTENS

Part art gallery, part performance space, part community center, this nonprofit dedicated to greater visibility for women and transgendered artists has become a favorite of luminaries like Annie Sprinkle, Michelle Tea, and Carol Queen. Many events are low or no cost, and it’s always free to check out the art, including this month’s "Show Me Your Fantasy," featuring Malia Schlaefer’s photographs addressing contemporary female sexuality.

Thurs–Sun, 12–6pm. 2199 Market, SF. (415) 864-1558, www.feminapotens.org

SF JACKS

When you’re poor and bored, nothing perks you up quite like a good session of self-love. But if you’re tired of the solo mission, join other like-minded men for group "therapy" every second and fourth Monday. Though a $7 donation is suggested (insert "donation" pun here), no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Just remember the rules: mandatory nudity, jack-off play only.

7:30–8:30pm. Center for Sex and Culture, 1519 Mission, SF. (415) 267-6999, www.sfjacks.com

ST. JAMES INFIRMARY

Run by and for sex workers, this 10-year-old nonprofit provides free STI counseling and testing, rapid HIV testing, transgender healthcare and hormone therapy, self-defense classes, legal advice, and much MUCH more to sex workers and their families.

1372 Mission, SF. (415) 554-8494, stjamesinfirmary.org

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FREE TIPS GRAB BAG

More free stuff we love

You can watch Giants games free through the outfield fence; three-inning limit when there’s a crowd … Thrift stores all say "no dumping," but people leave stuff out in front late at night anyway … Ask someone leaving Muni for their transfer (and always take a transfer, even if you don’t need it, to share) … There’s almost always great free music at street fairs …. You can actually ski free at a lot of resorts if you do the old-fashioned thing and hike up the slopes instead of buying a lift ticket; on busy days nobody notices (obviously, this works best for short-run beginner hills) … There’s some great stuff at freecyle.org, but it’s a Yahoo newsgroup and floods your inbox so you have to keep up with it … The free stuff listings on Craigslist are also good … Casual carpools are a great way to get a free ride across the Bay … The Lyrics Born, Toto La Momposina, Kailash Kher’s Kailasa and the San Francisco Ballet all perform free this summer at Stern Grove, Sundays at 2 p.m., see www.sterngrove.org/2009season … Catch Wicked, Beach Blanket Babylon, Killing My Lobster, and more at the SF Theater Festival free shows; see www.sftheaterfestival.com and Yerba Buena Gardens Festival (till Oct. www.ybgf.org) … You can get free movie passes many weeks from the Guardian … Buy a Muni pass before the end of the month, and you can share your old one; it’s good for three days of free rides at the beginning of the month … Almost every used bookstore has a free box; mostly crap, but sometimes some gems …. The Cal Sailing Club in Berkeley offers free introductory sailing sessions on summer Sundays; for the schedule and details check out www.cal-sailing.org. San Francisco Brew Craft offers free beer-brewing classes every Monday night at 6 p.m. 1555 Clement, 751-9338 … You can catch free outdoor movies at Jack London Square in Oakland every other Thurs. night through August (www.jacklondonsquare.com/newscenter/upcomingevents) … Free Shakespeare in the Park performs The Comedy of Errors Sat. and Sun. afternoons in August and September at the Presidio Parade Grounds (schedule at www.sfshakes.org/park/index)

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FREE TRADE

Go ahead, give it away — that’s the way the next economy may work

By Cecile Lepage

The 2003 documentary film The Corporation established that corporations were psychopathic entities, prone to irresponsibility, manipulation, and remorselessness. Now writer Douglas Rushkoff contends that we — the human beings — have started to act like corporations. His new thought-provoking book — Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back (Random House) — retraces how society has internalized the corporate values that disconnect us from one another. The current economic meltdown, he argues, is our chance to overthrow this dysfunctional model. We talked to him about a very different economy — one based on things that are free.

SFBG Your outlook is bleak, but you are still optimistic enough to see a way out. What’s your plan?

Douglas Rushkoff This crisis is an opportunity to start doing things for each other. First we have to be daring enough to enter gift economies, where we exchange favors freely and openly without even keeping track, just assuming that it’s all going to work out. So if someone needs tutoring or help mowing his lawn, you should do it. Eventually we’ll realize how much less money we need to earn to get what we need.

SFBG You acknowledge that accepting favors in exchange for other ones feels messy and confusing to us. Why is that?

DR We’re afraid of being indebted to somebody else. In order to accept something from another person, you also accept your indebtedness and acknowledge your gratitude. Money feels cleaner to us. People prefer hiring a person to babysit for their child rather than accepting a favor from the old lady down the street — because if you accept, what social obligation have you incurred? What if she wants to join you at your next barbecue? What if she now wants to be your friend? So now we all have to work more to get money to buy things that we used to just exchange freely with each other.

SFBG You blame the corporations for convincing us that we are self-interested beings. How did they achieve that?

DR They thought that the mathematician John Nash’s bad game theory applied to real life. A number of experiments tried to show that human beings made decisions like poker players for personal short-term gain and assuming the worst about other people. None of the experiments actually worked: the secretaries they did the experiment on behaved collaboratively and compassionately.

The better scientists, like Dr. Glynn Isaac, an Africanist from Harvard, demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that food-sharing and collaboration are what allowed homo sapiens to survive. Nevertheless, we intentionally built an economy and a scarcity-based currency to promote the self-interest.

People look at the economy we’re living in as a fact of nature. They don’t see it as a set of rules that was put in place by a particular people at a particular time. They look at money the way a doctor looks at the bloodstream. They don’t understand that it’s a social construction and that we can rewrite it.

What’s wrong with San Francisco?

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EDITORIAL In the end, Mayor Gavin Newsom got his way. The San Francisco supervisors made some significant changes to the budget and saved some $40 million worth of programs that the mayor wanted to cut or privatize, but the Newsom for governor ads will still be able to proclaim that the mayor solved his city’s budget problem without raising taxes or cutting police and firefighters.

Instead, this fall some 1,500 city employees are slated to be laid off, 400 of them in the Department of Public Health. Many recreation directors will get pink slips. Human services will lose at least 100 people. Nonprofit service providers will see much of their city funding disappear. The money to pay for public financing of the upcoming supervisorial and mayoral races is gone. Newsom’s pet (and expensive) 311 service will still be open 24 hours a day (with a lot of the money coming from Muni).

Not one of the city’s hugely redundant fire stations will close, even for a few days at a time. The bloated police budget will see no significant cuts, and the cops and firefighters will still get raises. The mayor will continue to employ five people in his press office.

And the only new revenue in the budget comes from fee increases on Muni, public parks, after-school programs, street fairs, restaurants, and the like.

Sup. John Avalos, chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, told us this was the best deal the supervisors could get, and it’s true that the board forced Newsom to add back a lot of money he wanted to cut. But the committee stopped far short of doing what it should have done — fundamentally changing the priorities of the Newsom budget.

Campos told us that he had "mixed feelings" about the deal and expressed concern about the board’s ability to shape midyear cuts and the lack of commitment from Newsom to support support placing revenue measures on the November ballot. Mirkarimi said he was happy with the dollar amounts of the add-backs but proposed holding in reserve some funding for the mayor’s pet projects — a tool for ensuring that Newsom consults with supervisors on the midyear cuts as promised — but Avalos opposed the idea.

Avalos said he’s relying on Newsom’s commitment to him: "The mayor has given me the assurance that he will not make unilateral decisions." But Newsom has a history of breaking such promises.

And the supervisors have not included any new tax revenue in the budget projections. Which puts San Francisco far behind Oakland.

The Oakland City Council has plenty of problems, and the mayor of Oakland, Ron Dellums, has been missing in action on a lot of the city’s problems lately. But when the mayor and the council had to address the budget problems, they came up with a solution that includes at least $6 million in new taxes. While that sounds like a small number, it’s almost 10 percent of Oakland’s budget shortfall. And the new taxes, which will need voter approval in a special July 21 election, are included as part of the budget plan for fiscal 2009-10.

Two of the new taxes — a levy on pot clubs (which the clubs themselves strongly support) and a loophole-closing measure that forces big businesses to pay their fair share of real estate transfer taxes — require only a simple majority vote to take effect. The reason: the council voted unanimously to declare a fiscal emergency and put the measures on the ballot. That allowed the city to avoid the state law that requires a two-thirds vote on most new taxes.

Measures C, D, F, and H make up a generally progressive package that has the support of Council Members Rebecca Kaplan and Jean Quan and Rep. Barbara Lee. We’re happy to endorse all four.

Measure C is a 3 percent increase in the city’s hotel tax, which would rise from 11 percent to 14 percent. Half the new money would go to the Oakland Convention and Visitors Bureau while the other half would be split between the Oakland Zoo, the Chabot Space and Science Center, and cultural arts programs and festivals in the city. We could argue with the distribution (arts festivals should probably get more money and the Visitors Bureau less) but overall, it raises the hotel tax to the level of most other cities in the area and would raise money for the sorts of programs hotel taxes typically fund.

Measure D is a technical amendment to the Oakland Kids First law that mandates spending on programs for children and youth. It changes the spending requirement from 1.5 percent of total city revenues to 3 percent of the general fund. That’s slightly less money than the program currently gets, but a lot more than it has had over the past decade. The coalition that put Kids First on the ballot in 1996 (and modified it in 2008) supports this modest change.

Measure F is a creative new tax. It would impose a 1.8 percent gross receipts tax ($18 per $1,000 in sales) on medical marijuana businesses. Most efforts to hike business taxes face bitter opposition from business owners, but in this case, the pot clubs are happy to pay. In fact, the four dispensaries in Oakland are among the measure’s strongest supporters. Paying taxes tends to legitimize the clubs — and while it’s going to be tricky to track sales in what is still largely a cash business where records have in the past been kept vague to avoid the threat of federal prosecution, this is a strong step in the right direction.

Measure H would prevent big corporations from cheating Oakland out of real estate transfer taxes. Under current law, a business that owns property in Oakland and is bought by another business (or becomes part of a merger) doesn’t have to pay transfer taxes on the property it owns. Closing that loophole could bring in as much as $4.4 million a year.

There’s a lesson here for the much larger city across the Bay.

San Francisco desperately needs new revenue. And while the mayor has talked, in vague terms, about maybe supporting some sort of tax measures in November, he hasn’t committed to anything. There are several proposals floating around the board, the latest of which is a Labor Council-supported tax on alcohol consumption, but no coherent package. The progressives on the board — both those who support the compromise Newsom budget and those who don’t — need to set aside those differences, now, and get to work on finding ways to bring in enough new money to deal with the impacts of further state cuts and stave off some of the layoffs slated for the fall.

The main obstacles are Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Michela Alioto-Pier. Everyone who cares about saving services in this city needs to pressure them to back away from their GOP-style no-new-taxes stands. If those two would at least agree to let the voters decide on new revenue measures, the city would likely get a unanimous board — and the ability to raise taxes with a simple majority vote.

Oakland’s pot club tax and real estate transfer tax are great ideas that can be directly imported to San Francisco. The city’s business tax could be made more progressive (and bring in new revenue) with a simple change in the tax rates (higher on the big outfits, lower on the small ones). We’re dubious about a sales tax increase — even a half-percent hike would bring the local tax rate to 10 percent. And, even though the alcohol tax isn’t exactly progressive, those ideas could be acceptable as part of a package.

The main thing is that the city will need, at minimum, another $100 million this fall, and probably ought to be looking at raising twice that much. Oakland — a city with far fewer resources, a much smaller business base, and radically less wealth — is managing to fight its deficit with progressive taxes. What’s wrong with San Francisco?

P.S.: Sup. Chris Daly was outspoken in his criticism of the budget deal, blasting Newsom and even taking on his former aide and longtime ally, Avalos. But for all his bluster about the mayor, Daly couldn’t bring himself to oppose Anson Moran, Newsom’s nominee for the Public Utilities Commission. Moran was a staunch ally of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. when he was the PUC’s general manager, and the full board should reject him. *

Editorial: What’s wrong with San Francisco?

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The only new revenue in the budget comes from fee increases on Muni, public parks, after-school programs and the like.Meanwhile, Oakland is fighting its budget deficit with progressive taxes.

EDITORIAL In the end, Mayor Gavin Newsom got his way. The San Francisco supervisors made some significant changes to the budget and saved some $40 million worth of programs that the mayor wanted to cut or privatize, but the Newsom for governor ads will still be able to proclaim that the mayor solved his city’s budget problem without raising taxes or cutting police and firefighters.

Instead, this fall some 1,500 city employees are slated to be laid off, 400 of them in the Department of Public Health. Many recreation directors will get pink slips. Human services will lose at least 100 people. Nonprofit service providers will see much of their city funding disappear. The money to pay for public financing of the upcoming supervisorial and mayoral races is gone. Newsom’s pet (and expensive) 311 service will still be open 24 hours a day (with a lot of the money coming from Muni).

Turning point

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MORE ON SFBG.COM

>>Deconstructing the politics of parking in San Francisco

>>Safer streets for cyclists cause growing pains for motorists

news@sfbg.com

San Francisco has been a "transit-first" city since 1973, when the Board of Supervisors first adopted the policy of officially promoting public transit, pedestrians, and bicycles over the automobile. But the label has really been in name only — until this year.

Through an unusual confluence of policy initiatives that have been moving forward for several years, San Francisco is finally about to have a serious discussion about the automobile and its impacts. And parking policies are being used as the main tool to reduce traffic congestion, better set development impact fees, increase city revenue, and promote alternatives to the automobile.

"Our parking requirements need to be revised to support this [transit-first] policy by limiting parking supply — the single greatest incentive to drive — where transit and other modes are viable alternatives," reads the city’s Better Neighborhoods Plan.

While the very notion of deliberately limiting parking will likely be met with howls of protest by many drivers — indeed, urban planners already acknowledge that it’s probably not politically feasible to make drivers pay for their full impacts — they also say it’s the only way to decrease the over-dependence on the automobile.

"Without limiting parking, people will choose an auto-oriented lifestyle and continue to drive. Traffic will continue to worsen, and we will never shift the balance in favor of ways of getting around that are more effective in moving people," the plan continues.

Yet the push isn’t as dire for drivers as its stark language suggests, thanks to some innovative initiatives that could ironically make it even easier to park in some areas than it is now, in the process easing traffic congestion by eliminating the number of cars circling the block looking for parking spaces, which studies show can often account for up to one-third of the cars on the road.

DEMAND-BASED PARKING PRICES


The SF Park program is scheduled to begin later this summer in eight pilot areas, providing real-time parking data to give drivers better information on where to find spots and controlling demand with a market-based pricing system that raises rates when spots are scarce, encouraging turnover and freeing up spaces.

It is just one of many current initiatives. The city is looking at extending meter hours to nights and Sundays and adding parking meters in Golden Gate Park (those are simply revenue measures aimed at city budget deficits). Another study is examining the nexus between parking and developer impacts that could be used to charge new fees for construction. There’s also a comprehensive study of on-street parking policies that will be going before the Board of Supervisors (sitting as the San Francisco County Transportation Authority) next month after nearly five years in the works.

Yet creating more progressive parking policies requires political will, which will surely be tested in the coming months. Indeed, this year’s battle over the Municipal Transportation Authority budget — whose $128 million deficit was closed by Muni fare increases and services cuts rather than parking increases by a ratio of about 4-1, thanks to pressure from drivers and Mayor Gavin Newsom — was an early indicator of the pitfalls that exist within the politics of parking.

Using a $20 million federal traffic congestion management grant, SFMTA has spent years developing the SF Park program, approving most of the details last fall and planning to roll it out by summer’s end.

"Under-regulated on-street parking results in limited parking availability, inefficient utilization of spaces, and excess vehicular circulation," begins the San Francisco On-Street Parking Management and Pricing Study Final Report, which is headed to the Board of Supervisors next month. "This program will assess the effectiveness of using pricing and complementary strategies as a way to manage demand for parking."

The program will be rolled out in eight areas, coordinating parking information in more than 6,000 street spaces and 20 city-owned parking garages, and using that information to adjust parking rates — charging more when spots are scarce and for additional hours — to try to achieve a parking occupancy rate of about 85 percent.

"An on-street parking occupancy of 85 percent has been demonstrated by parking experts … as the benchmark for the practical capacity of on-street parking. At 85 percent occupancy, approximately one available space is expected per block, thus limiting the cruising phenomenon and generally assuring the availability of a space," the study reads.

SFMTA spokesperson Judson True called SF Park "the future of parking management, adding that "we are taking a big bite of the parking management pie with SF Park, which is the most advanced parking management system of any U.S. city."

THE TRUE COST OF CARS


It’s just the latest work product from transportation planners that have spent years behind-the-scenes developing programs to deal with the city’s over-reliance on the automobiles. "It’s all part of a strategy of using parking as a demand management strategy," said Zabe Bent, a planner with the San Francisco County Transportation Authority.

She is working on the parking policies, as well as a proposal to charge motorists a congestion fee for driving into the downtown, which comes before the Board of Supervisors this fall (although implementation is probably at least three years away).

Bent said city officials are working on a number of fronts to shore up San Francisco’s "transit-first" status and prepare for growth in what is already one of the country’s most congested cities. So some of the decisions coming up are bound to be tough.

"It’s a tradeoff we need to make to achieve our goals," she said, noting that the central question transportation planners are wrestling with is, "How do we achieve a more sustainable growth pattern?"

Such noble intentions can always get hung up on politics, and the ever-present question of how to pay for it during an era of fiscal crisis. So it appears the city may have to get creative with funding its new approach to parking.

Alica John-Baptiste, the assistant planning director overseeing the parking impact fee study, said that while it does appear to be a big year for new parking policies, "this conversation has been underway for a number of years. A lot of the discussions we’ve had are now being studied."

Most recently it was the citizens committee that developed the Market-Octavia Plan — one of the first to cap how much parking developers may build along with the projects — that sought guidance about what the city could legally do to recover the full costs associated with automobiles.

"There were a bunch of questions that came up about parking as an issue," she said of the Market-Octavia process. So the Planning Department and other city agencies began to explore the cost of parking as part of the city’s update of the Transit Impact Fee that is charged to new development, with the idea of expanding that to include impacts to all modes of transportation.

"We are looking at parking as a land use and its impact to the [transportation] system," she continued. "This is a city that really wants to support other modes than just transit."

The contract for that parking nexus study was awarded to Cambridge Systematics earlier this month with initial recommendations expected by the end of the year. That study is expected to show that developers and drivers don’t come anywhere near paying for the full cost of the automobile to San Francisco. "These nexus studies usually suggest a much higher fee rate than is feasible to provide," she said.

In other words, drivers and developers would freak out if asked to pay for their full impacts, arguing that that doing so would stifle development, hurt the economy, punish those who need cars, etc. So the fees will likely be set lower than needed to cover the city’s costs.

Even in the short-term, simply extending meter hours into the evenings — as SFMTA is now studying to help the city deal with its budget deficit — is likely to trigger a pitched battle between progressive supervisors and politicians who side with some merchant groups that consider parking sacrosanct.
David Heller, president of the Greater Geary Merchants Association, will be one of those leading the charge. By way of argument, he criticized San Francisco as "a very business-unfriendly city" compared to competitors like Colma and Burlingame and laid out this scenario: "After 6 p.m., there are no power lunches going on. People want to relax. Imagine you sit down to a nice dinner. You’ve got your wine and are enjoying your appetizer and in the middle of your meal, you have to get up and feed the meter. When you return, the ambiance has been lost. What are the chances you’ll return to that restaurant?"
And so it goes with the politics of parking, where pressing realities clash with visceral reactions, driver prerogatives (such as the "right" to feed the meter, which actually isn’t legal), and other distracting entitlement issues.
Gabriella Poccia and Rachel Buhner contributed to this report.

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PARKING BY NUMBERS


Number of on-street parking spaces in SF: 320,000

Number these spaces that have meters: 24,000

Total parking spaces in San Francisco: 603,000

Number of cars and trucks registered in SF: 441,653

Annual revenue from meters and city-owned garages: $64.5 million

Annual revenue from parking citations: $90 million

Number of street spaces in 8 SF Park pilot zones: 6,000

Hourly meter rates in the zones, depending on demand: 25 cents to $6

Hourly garage rates in the zones, depending on demand: $1 to $10

Number of residential parking permits issued: 89,271

Cost of purchasing an on-street residential parking permit: $74 per year

Number of temporary permits: 2,867

Annual revenue from residential parking permits: $5.7 million
Cost of purchasing SF parking on Craiglist: $100 to $500 per month
Annual city revenue if residential permits were market-based: $320 million

The mobility of space

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sarah@sfbg.com

Jason Henderson is standing on Patricia’s Green in Hayes Valley, shielding his eyes from the midsummer sun, as he explains how this area, which once lay in the shadowy underbelly of the Central Freeway, was reclaimed as a pedestrian-friendly park.

"In 1989 the freeway went all the way to Turk Street," said Henderson, an assistant professor of geography at San Francisco State University, describing how the raised concrete roadbed, built in the 1950s, cut across this neighborhood and blocked the sky — until the Loma Prieta earthquake hit and damaged the final section so badly it had to be torn down.

That natural disaster triggered a public discussion about the use of the surrounding space, and a 15-year fight that culminated in 2005 in the dedication of the Green, which is part of the Octavia Boulevard Project. Neighbors and business owners pushed the city to convert a damaged freeway into a landscaped park.

That sort of change fascinates Henderson. "I am interested in how people move around cities, and how urban space is configured for movement," he said.

The young professor was raised in New Orleans and wrote his dissertation on transportation and land use debates in Atlanta — which, as Henderson notes, is "the poster child for sprawl but became a hotbed in the ’90s of a national discourse about how we should grow, which became this very interesting debate about reurbanizing."

Henderson’s research focuses on the politics of mobility. He decided to move to San Francisco in 2003 because he saw it as an opportunity to live in a city where a car is not necessary and to study the history of the city’s freeway revolt, which began in the 1960s.

And while he is proud of this park, which was dedicated as Hayes Green then renamed for the late Patricia Walkup, a Hayes Valley resident who tirelessly advocated for the park until her death in 2006, Henderson thinks the local politics of parking have reached "a spatial stalemate."

"During the freeway revolt of the 1960s, San Francisco rejected the freeway but not the automobile," Henderson explained. "But even as San Francisco residents decided that they did not want big gashes of freeway through their waterfront, the Marina, and Golden Gate Park, the city continued to have laws that said every housing unit was to have one parking space.

"So the city adopted a transit-first policy on paper, but didn’t take space away from cars. And if you don’t do anything, you’re not solving the problem."

The problem in San Francisco is what he called the "essentializing of cars."

"A core idea within the parking debate is that there is a universal love affair with the automobile," Henderson explained. "But Obama is downsizing GM and Chrysler, and for the first time since 1960, vehicle miles traveled have started to go down. Until last year, the mantra was that Americans are going to drive. But then we found out that at $4 a gallon, this country freaks out and changes."

Earlier this year, Henderson published a paper that analyzes the city’s politics of parking through the lens of two ballot initiatives from the November 2007 San Francisco election.

"San Francisco’s parking debate is not just about parking. It is a contest over how the city should be configured and organized, and for whom," Henderson wrote in his paper, titled "The Spaces of Parking: Mapping the Politics of Mobility in San Francisco."

His research led him to conclude that progressives, who want to make the city more bike- and public-transportion friendly, are pitted against the more conservative elements (he calls them neoconservatives), who want to increase space for parking and cars at all costs, with the moderate (or in his words, "neoliberal") factions tangled in between.

Part of Henderson’s critique involves estimating the hidden costs of parking — and as it turns out, that can be done using Google and Craiglist. According to a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency 2008 fact sheet, there are an estimated 320,000 on-street parking spaces in San Francisco, including metered spaces, each consuming, on average, about 160 square feet.

According to a 2002 presentation by Jeffery Tumlin, a national transportation consultant, if the city rented these spaces for the lowball rate of $1,000 a year, San Francisco would rake in $320 million annually.

There would be no shortage of demand — market prices are way higher. Henderson’s review of Craiglist unearthed folks who looking to rent parking spaces in San Francisco and willing to pay from $100 to $500 a month.

But SFMTA — which issues more than 89,000 residential parking permits annually and recently opted to cut Muni service and routes and increase fares on public transit rather than extend parking meter hours to balance its budget shortfall — decided to increase the cost of these parking permits, starting July 1, by only $2, from $72 to $74 — per year. That’s less than 10 percent of market value.

The resulting revenue will be dedicated to the cost of administrating the program — not to offset the hidden costs of parking, which include carbon dioxide emissions, air pollution, congestion, and occupying valuable space.

Henderson is intrigued by the relationship between parking policy and a complex set of factors that include public health, obesity, and the cost of affordable housing. He notes that if a city’s housing policy requires developers to provide a parking space for each housing unit, too often developers don’t build that housing, or build it smaller, or build it as part of a luxury complex.

"The progressive response to this dilemma is to try to get government to eliminate the one parking-space-per-unit goal and cap the total amount of parking built. Meanwhile, the neocons, who believe government should be active in creating more parking, rail against more bus lanes," Henderson said.

As he notes, common to both groups is the desire for government to help them achieve their vision.

"Much as we see San Francisco as a progressive place, it’s also peopled by neoliberals and very conservative folks — and progressive and neoliberals coalesce on the issue of ‘smart growth.’ And there are lot of progressives who have a car and say, ‘I don’t want to be car dependent; I’d like to do city share, but I’d feel stranded.’ And those who say ‘I always want to have my own car, but I only drive it once a month.’"

Conceding that "tweaking the system" will cost money, Henderson cites congestion pricing as an area where the various factions can find agreement.

"The important question is, what will the revenue be used for?" Henderson said, noting that some will argue that if you charge motorists to use roads, then the money should be used to improve the roads, which is what has happened with toll roads in Texas.

But in San Francisco, activist are pushing the opposite approach. "Whereas the sustainable transportation movement in San Francisco wants to use the revenue from congestion pricing to fix Muni and discourage driving," he continued.

In his paper on parking policy, Henderson details exactly how parking allocations push up the price of housing — and change the face of ongoing developments.

A typical off-road parking space takes up 350 square feet when room to move in and out is factored in — and that’s comparable to many offices and living spaces in San Francisco. The parking alone costs $50,000 to $100,000 to develop — a cost that’s passed on to the homebuyer.

But in most neighborhoods, developers can’t avoid parking, because of planning laws. "This means that neighborhoods like the iconic North Beach simply could not be built today," Henderson wrote, noting how mandatory parking provisions mean that the lower floors of new buildings are likely to contain parking garages, not storefronts and cafes, and garage entrances take away street parking and limit where street trees can be planted.

"But at least contesting car space is on the table in San Francisco" Henderson said. "That makes it an intriguing bellwether for other places."

Tear up the budget

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EDITORIAL Here are a few of the new taxes in Mayor Newsom’s no-new-taxes budget.

The cost of sending your kid to a city day camp will jump 35 percent. The cost of after-school latchkey programs will go up 112 percent. It will cost a dollar more to swim in a public pool. Annual swim passes for seniors and people with economic needs will rise by $25. And that’s on top of the Muni fare hike. Fines, fees and licenses will go up a staggering 41 percent.

In other words, poor people who use city services will see their taxes — that is, the cost of using city services — go up significantly. But rich people, big business, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., property owners — they won’t pay anything more at all. (Of course, if you own a small tatoo parlor, your city fees will go up 1,200 percent.)

This is one of the essential lies of the Newsom budget. It’s not revenue-neutral at all; it just raises taxes on the poor.

It’s also not a budget that shares the economic pain fairly.

The Firefighters union is screaming that the supervisors might want to cut a little bit from that bloated agency, but their protests defy reality. In fact, the budget analyst has identified more than $6 million in relatively painless cuts to the Fire Department — and if the supervisors went along with those recommendations, the department would still be getting more than $1 million in increased funding. It’s hard to argue for cutting firefighting in a city built of wood that’s had a bad history with fires. But the reality is that San Francisco’s fire-suppression system was designed long before the days of fire codes, smoke detectors, and sprinklers, and there just aren’t as many fires these days. The budget analyst suggests — as the controller did in 2004 — that the city could temporarily close a few fire stations without any appreciable reduction in public safety.

Firefighters in San Francisco get pay and benefit parity with the cops — and the cops have gotten nice raises recently, in part because it’s been hard to recruit people to work for the San Francisco Police Department. On the other hand, there are 5,000 people on the waiting list to apply for a job as a San Francisco firefighter.

The Police Department’s due for a budget increase, too — of more than $15 million. The budget analyst suggests that $4 million of that could be cut without damaging law enforcement.

Then there’s the Mayor’s Office, where a staff of five people handle public relations for Newsom, at a cost to the public of $653,571. When Art Agnos was mayor in the late 1980s, he managed to get by with just one press secretary. The population of the city hasn’t changed; the number of reporters at City Hall has decreased. Why does Newsom need five times as many people in his communications office? And how much of that public money is actually being used to promote the mayor’s campaign for governor?

Those are just some of the revelations from the reports of the budget analyst and the hearings so far. And they add up to a budget situation that’s very different from anything the city has seen in years.

The Board of Supervisors typically tinkers with the mayor’s budget, changing a million here and a million there. This time the mayor has in effect declared war on the supervisors, appearing with the firefighters at rallies and denouncing board members (at one point Newsom told reporters, "Thank god we have a mayor.") The outcome of the current budget hearings will be a test for the progressive majority on the board, and particularly for president David Chiu. The board members have to be willing to essentially tear up the mayor’s budget, restructure the priorities, replace the fee increases with fair new taxes (even if it means including in the budget projections for tax measures to go on the November ballot), and eliminate the embarrassing waste. *

Editorial: Tear up the budget

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Editorial Here are a few of the new taxes in Mayor Newsom’s no-new-taxes budget.

The cost of sending your kid to a city day camp will jump 35 percent. The cost of after-school latchkey programs will go up 112 percent. It will cost a dollar more to swim in a public pool. Annual swim passes for seniors and people with economic needs will rise by $25. And that’s on top of the Muni fare hike. Fines, fees and licenses will go up a staggering 41 percent.

In other words, poor people who use city services will see their taxes — that is, the cost of using city services — go up significantly. But rich people, big business, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., property owners — they won’t pay anything more at all. (Of course, if you own a small tatoo parlor, your city fees will go up 1,200 percent.)
This is one of the essential lies of the Newsom budget. It’s not revenue-neutral at all; it just raises taxes on the poor.
It’s also not a budget that shares the economic pain fairly.

Mayor’s Office targetted for cuts

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By Steven T. Jones
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The Budget and Finance Committee tomorrow begins work on the 2009-10 budgets of 15 city department that are funded by the General Fund, and Budget Analyst Harvey Rose today released his annual recommendations, suggesting additional cuts to most departments to try to offset deep cuts proposed by the mayor that supervisors want to restore.

And it’s no surprise that the Mayor’s Office has a big, fat target on its back, particularly after progressives on the Budget Committee asked Rose to single out public relations positions and other fluff that serves Gavin Newsom the candidate more than the people of San Francisco.

So, in addition to the $444,415 in cuts to the Mayor’s Office that Rose recommends (a level consistent with his assessments of other departments), he also helpfully lists $2.12 million in areas singled out by supervisors. They are the Mayor’s Offices of Communications ($653,571), Criminal Justice ($361,855), Neighborhood Services ($789,652), and his education and greening directors that are largely funded by other departments, including Muni ($315,160).

As the supervisors today deliberate the interim budget and where to come up with $82 million to restore deep cuts to core city services, these Mayor’s Office plums are likely to be attractive targets for the progressive-dominated committee that convenes tomorrow.

Dismantling the Newsom budget

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom was upbeat when he delivered his budget proposal last week. It won’t be that bad, he told everyone — "At the end of the day, it’s a math problem."

Well, actually, it’s not. At the end of the day, it’s job losses, major cuts to city services, and hidden taxes — most of them, despite the mayor’s rhetoric, falling on the backs of the poor.

You can’t cut $70 million from the Department of Public Health — which is already operating at bare-bones levels after years of previous cuts — without significant impacts on health care for San Franciscans. You can’t cut $19 million out of the Human Services Agency without badly hurting homeless and needy people. You can’t raise Muni fares to $2 without taking cash out of the pockets of working-class people. The mayor’s cheery line may sound good when he’s out of town running for governor, but it’s not going to play so well on the streets of San Francisco.

Just for the record, here are a few of the proposed cuts:

A 21-bed acute psychiatric unit would be shut and replaced with an 18-bed unit for milder cases. Where would the seriously mentally ill go?

The number of home-healthcare workers, the folks who take care of the very sick who need skilled clinical services in the home, would be cut by 30 percent. Those clients would either suffer, go to (expensive) hospitals, or die.

Ongoing outpatient mental health services would be limited to the most severe cases. People who are, for now, only moderately mentally ill would lose access to care (until, without care, they become severely mentally ill).

The emergency food-bag program for seniors will lose $50,000, so hungry senior citizens won’t get to eat.

Almost $3 million will be cut from community-based organizations that provide direct, frontline services to the homeless.

Almost half of the city’s recreation directors — people who provide direct services and mentoring to at-risk youth — will be laid off.

The Tenderloin Housing Clinic Eviction Defense Center, the only place that offers free legal defense for Ellis Act evictions, will lose funding, leaving hundreds of tenants at risk of losing their homes.

Drop-in centers will close. Programs for homeless youth will shut down. More homeless people with increasingly more serious mental illness will be wandering the streets with nowhere to go for help.

Mayor Newsom brags in his campaign ads about creating private-sector jobs — but the budget will mean layoffs not just for city employees but for perhaps 1,000 nonprofit workers. That dwarfs the job creation he’s claiming — and defies the Obama administration’s call for government and private business to try to preserve and create jobs.

This isn’t a math problem. It’s a political problem, and the supervisors need to make it very clear that the mayor’s budget isn’t going to fly.

The supervisors need to take the budget apart, piece by piece, and reset its priorities. Newsom increases funding for police investigators by $7 million, while cutting the Public Defender’s Office by $2 million. He’s preserving his own bloated political operation (a big press office, highly paid special assistants and programs like 311 that are part of his gubernatorial campaign) while eliminating big parts of the social safety net. He’s raising bus fares, but not taxes on downtown.

"The mayor has presented his vision," Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the Budget Committee, explained. "Now our priorities have to be presented."

This can’t be a modest, typical budget negotiation with the supervisors tweaking a few items here and there. This is a battle for San Francisco, for its future and its soul, and the supervisors need to start talking, today, about how they’re going to fight back. *

Editorial: Dismantling the Newsom budget

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The mayor’s cheery line may sound good when he’s out of town running for governor, but it’s not going to play so well on the streets of San Francisco.

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom was upbeat when he delivered his budget proposal last week. It won’t be that bad, he told everyone — "At the end of the day, it’s a math problem."

Well, actually, it’s not. At the end of the day, it’s job losses, major cuts to city services, and hidden taxes — most of them, despite the mayor’s rhetoric, falling on the backs of the poor.

You can’t cut $70 million from the Department of Public Health — which is already operating at bare-bones levels after years of previous cuts — without significant impacts on health care for San Franciscans. You can’t cut $19 million out of the Human Services Agency without badly hurting homeless and needy people. You can’t raise Muni fares to $2 without taking cash out of the pockets of working-class people. The mayor’s cheery line may sound good when he’s out of town running for governor, but it’s not going to play so well on the streets of San Francisco.

Round one

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sarah@sfbg.com

The Board of Supervisors’ narrowly thwarted attempt to reject the Municipal Transportation Agency’s 2009-10 budget was the first in a wave of anticipated showdowns between Mayor Gavin Newsom and the progressives this summer as budget season gets underway.

The mayor appeared to win this particular showdown when the board voted 6-5 not to reject the MTA deal May 27, although the skirmish helped progressives voice their concerns over Newsom’s budget priorities. It also gave board President David Chiu the opportunity to conduct a masterful interrogation of MTA executive director Nat Ford that set the stage for Sup. John Avalos to try to place a charter amendment on the November ballot that would make MTA more accountable and accessible.

That said, the final MTA deal — which closes a $129 million deficit on the backs of Muni riders (through service cuts and fare hikes) rather than motorists (MTA governs all parking revenue) by a ratio of about 4-1 — seems to be inconsistent with San Francisco’s official "transit-first" policy.

Chiu was the first to suggest rejecting the deal when it became clear that the Mayor’s Office has been using the MTA as a backdoor ATM, authorizing $66 million in work orders for things like salaries for Newsom’s environmental aides and compensating the police department for vaguely defined security services.

The practice made a mockery of Prop. A., which voters approved in 2007 to increase funding to Muni by $26 million annually. But since then, work orders from unrelated city departments, including the police and Newsom’s 311 call center, had increased by $32 million.

"If people have to pay more for less, they will stop taking Muni," Chiu said at the May 6 Budget Committee hearing on the MTA budget.

Sup. David Campos also took issue with the work orders and service cuts. "Whatever money riders of Muni pay into the system should be used for public transportation," Campos said.

In the end, Chiu got the agency to trim $10 million from its budget, restore $8.6 million in proposed Muni service cuts, and delay the increases that seniors, youth, and the disabled will pay for fast passes. In exchange the board voted 6-5 May 12 to drop its MTA’s budget challenge, allowing fares to increase to $2 and for services to be reduced. Sups. Campos, Avalos, Ross Mirkarimi, Chris Daly, and Eric Mar dissented.

"We needed to work this out so we can move forward on the myriad issues before us," Chiu said.

But led by Avalos, who chairs the board’s powerful Budget and Finance Committee, the progressives revived the issue the next day. "Given our grave economic crisis, we owe it to seniors, youth, and other low-income Muni riders to come up with a better budget, one that ensures Muni accessibility and accountability," Avalos said.

Instead of increasing fares and cutting services, Avalos suggested that the MTA extend meter hours to evenings and Sundays. For a moment, it looked as if the progressives would be able to muster the seven votes needed to reject the deal. Ultimately Chiu, Sophie Maxwell, and the other MTA budget opponents stuck to the deal, which was reapproved May 27.

But the episode underscores why Avalos wants to reform the composition of the MTA board. Currently the mayor appoints all seven members. The only thing the supervisors can do is confirm or reject his nominations.

The mayor also appoints MTA’s executive director. Under Newsom, Ford was hired to the post for $316,000 annually, making him the city’s highest paid employee and someone who feels accountable to the mayor. "In all the cities, the mayor takes the heat for the transit system," Ford told the Guardian when challenged on his agency’s seeming lack of independence.

But under Avalos’ amendment, the mayor and the Board of Supervisors would each nominate three board commissioners while voters would elect the seventh. "The new MTA board composition will create greater checks and balances and also ensure that the MTA director is not solely accountable to one person, but to a board that is more representative of the city and county of San Francisco," Avalos said.

MTA now faces an additional $10 to $16 million deficit, thanks to union negotiations and fears that the state will raid city property tax and gas tax coffers. But as part of his budget deal with Chiu, Ford promised that the agency would study extending parking meter enforcement hours to close the gap.

Confirming that the agency dropped a $9 million a year proposal to extend meter hours citywide after receiving input from merchants, Ford said that "we’ll clearly have to revisit parking. We’ll be looking at how to administer extended meter hours, and how that impacts churches if we do it Sundays. But we are sitting here with a structural deficit that’s been going on for decades. We need to figure out the revenue streams we need to enhance the system."

Campos thought that a progressive Board of Supervisors should have gotten a better MTA budget. "As Sup. John Avalos and I pointed out, there’s almost nothing different between this budget and what was presented last week," Campos said. "I think it’s an illustration of how it is not enough to have power. You have to be willing to use it."

But Chiu defended his deal as a necessary way out of the board conflict with Newsom’s office. "Nat Ford has committed publicly and privately that he will propose meter hour change. And MTA Board President Tom Nolan has committed that he will ensure that car owners pick up more of the burden, and that if the budget gets worse, the additional problems won’t be balanced on the backs of Muni riders, which was not something we heard last week," Chiu said.

Avalos was less sanguine: "It was a clear moment for the Board of Supervisors to support transit-first and the city’s most vulnerable residents."

But he felt that concerns about the deal, and the realization that Newsom is an increasingly absent mayor, will help voters see the need for MTA reform.

"There wasn’t a single MTA commissioner or director accessible or accountable to the greater part of San Francisco. But they were responsive to Room 200, the Mayor’s Office," Avalos said. "Clearly, we need greater checks and balances."

Mirkarimi observed how, when faced with a crisis, people make practical decisions. "What gets lost when we are in crisis mode is our larger objective," he said. "We are a transit-first city that has strong climate change legislation, and Mayor Gavin Newsom is constantly campaigning on green issues. So it’s counterintuitive for us to broker an MTA budget on the backs of Muni riders and not understand that this deal could diminish that ridership."

But MTA spokesperson Judson True believes that what got lost in the discussion is that, as a result of Proposition A, the agency adopted a two-year budget that slapped drivers with increased rates and fees in 2008 while Muni riders and services were mostly spared.

Things changed, True said, when the economy tanked in 2008 and the MTA was left facing an unprecedented deficit. "At that point we reopened the budget and put everything on the table," True said.

Either way, Chiu has been urging supervisors to move on and focus on the next big thing: the mayor’s budget. "There’s a half-billion dollar hole in this budget," Chiu said last week. "It’ll make this debate look like child’s play."

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

Shrinking government

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steve@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom released his proposed 2009-10 city budget June 1, proclaiming it far better than doomsayers predicted and emphasizing how he minimized cuts to health and human services that he once said could be as deep as 25 percent in order to bridge a $438 million budget deficit.

"It doesn’t come close to balancing on the backs of our health and human services agencies, as some had feared," Newsom told the department heads, elected supervisors, and journalists who were tightly packed into his office for the announcement event.

But there’s still plenty of pain in a city budget where the General Fund — the portion of the budget local officials can control — would be reduced by more than 11 percent, its only reduction in recent memory. And at a time when every reasonable Democrat in Sacramento has been nearly begging for tax hikes to prevent budget blood, San Francisco’s Democratic mayor proudly proclaimed that there are no new taxes in the budget.

"We didn’t raise taxes, and we didn’t borrow," he said. You can almost hear that line being repeated in the ads he’ll be running as he campaigns for governor.

Newsom proposes slashing the city’s public health budget by $128.4 million, or 8 percent (a total of 400 employees), while the human services budget would take a $15.9 million hit, or 2 percent. "That’s a lot, but by no means is it devastating," Newsom said, noting that he restored some of the deepest cuts that were the subject of alarming public hearings. "I listened to the public comments at the Board of Supervisors… Things got a lot better than the headlines and the hearings."

The proposed budget includes 1,603 full-time-equivalent layoffs, or a 5.8 reduction in the city’s workforce, trimming more than $75.5 million from the general fund budget. In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services is cutting back its workweek to 37.5 hours to further trim costs.

"The smoke hasn’t cleared yet and there’s a lot of devastation in this budget that isn’t being talked about," Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the Board of Supervisors Budget Committee, said at the event. Newsom’s budget will be analyzed and then face its first committee hearing June 17, with approval by the full board required by July 31.

"The mayor told us a lot about what’s in the budget, but not a lot about what’s not in the budget, so we’ll spend a few days figuring that out," board President David Chiu told the Guardian.

The budget was aided greatly by more than $80 million in federal stimulus funds and other one-time revenue sources (such as $10 million from the sale of city-owned energy turbines) that were used to plug this year’s gap and offset cuts by the state and depressed tax revenue.

Although Newsom doesn’t want to raise taxes, licenses and fees would go up 41 percent, increasing revenue by $64 million to $220 million. Some of those proposed fee hikes range from the cost of parking in city-owned garages to admission fees for city-owned facilities such as the Strybing Arboretum. Muni riders will also see fares hiked to $2.

There will also be deep cuts to some key city functions. The Department of Emergency Management would take a 24 percent cut under the mayor’s plan, while the Department of Building Inspection faces a 20 percent cut to expenditures and a 29 percent reduction in staff.

The Planning Department would also take a hit of about 7 percent, with most of that focused on the department’s long-range planning functions, which were slashed by 19 percent to $4.7 million.

But it’s not an entirely austere budget. The police and fire departments have status quo budgets with no layoffs. Travel expenses would increase 13.5 percent to $2.9 million and the cost of food purchased by the city would rise 127 percent to $7 million.

The Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development — which often uses public funds to subsidize private sector projects — would get a 32 percent increase, to $24.7 million.

It’s unclear how much the Mayor’s Office has shared the budget pain. During the presentation, Newsom said his office’s budget has been cut by 28 percent, but he later clarified that was spread over the five years he has been mayor. Yet even that is tough to account for given that some functions have been shuffled to other departments.

The document shows a proposed 60 percent increase in the Mayor’s Office budget, although the lion’s share of that comes from the Mayor’s Office of Housing’s one-time financial support for some long-awaited projects, including rebuilding the Hunters View housing and support services project for low-income people connected to the Central YMCA, and an apartment project on 29th Avenue for people with disabilities.

Avalos has said he will look to find money by cutting some of the highly paid policy czars and communications specialists added to the Mayor’s Office in recent years, as well as Newsom’s cherished 311 call center and the Community Justice Court he created. Supervisors are also expected to resist Newsom’s penchant for privatization. Newsom proposed to privatize seven city functions, from jail health services and security guards and city-owned facilities, and to consolidate another 14 functions between various city departments.

Newsom pledged to work with supervisors who want to change the budget, continuing the rhetoric of cooperation that he opened the budget season with in January, which supervisors say hasn’t been matched by his actions or the secretive nature of this budget. "This budget is by no means done," Newsom said. "It’s an ongoing process."

In fact, Newsom warned that the budget news could be even worse than his budget outlines. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is talking about new cuts that could total $175 million or more for San Francisco only, although Newsom only included $25 million of that in his budget because it went to the printer on May 22 and the total hit is still unclear. "So," Newsom said, "we’re by no means out of the woods."

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