San Francisco

How to recapture foreclosed homes

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Text by Sarah Phelan

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Courtesy of the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation.

As the Guardian’s report about foreclosures in San Francisco reveals, they are concentrated in the southeast, where working people and communities of color live, making efforts to recapture these properties and resell them as affordable housing units a worthy endeavor.

But for those who believe buying these properties isn’t the best use of city money in stringent budgetary times, it’s worth looking at what’s happening policy-wise elsewhere in the Bay Area.

Last month, a dozen Democratic U.S senators joined their Republican colleagues to defeat a bill that would have allowed judges to reduce mortgages in bankruptcy courts. President Obama, facing strong opposition from the nation’s surviving banks, did not pressure lawmakers to support the measure, and the Senate killed a plan to spare thousands of homeowners from foreclosure through bankruptcy.

Steven Zuckerman, managing director of the California branch of Self-Help, one of the largest community development financial institutions (CDFI) in the United States, says his organization was deeply involved in supporting that legislation. And he doesn’t buy detractors arguments that lowering mortgages in bankruptcy courts would cause banks to raise other people’s mortgage rates.”

‘The bill only included mortgages that already exist,” Zuckerman, who blames the bill’s failure on the “lobbying of bankers’ associations,” told me.

According to information posted at its website, the North Carolina-based Self-Help has already provided billions in financing to small business owners and nonprofits nationwide in an effort to create and protect ownership and economic opportunities for minorities, women, rural residents, and low-wealth families and communities.

And locally, Self-Help is one of several CDFIs trying to help communities like San Francisco’s southeast sector and North Richmond in the East Bay, which have been hard hit by the recent wave of foreclosures sweeping the area.

”We do have a program and a product that we are trying to make available to groups that work in areas with high foreclosures,” Zuckerman said.

Aspect gallery goes there Friday night

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By Juliette Tang

“All art is erotic,” Adolf Loos famously said in 1908. We say, ok maybe, but not all art is equally erotic. All you need to do in order to test that hypothesis is look at American Gothic by Grant Wood and compare it to anything Edouard-Henri Avril has ever done.


Photo by Craig Scoffone

Those who like your art on the more (i.e. blatantly) erotic side will be happy to know that, this Friday, March 15, at the Aspect Gallery (731 Polk Street), there will be a nude and erotic art show from 6:00-9:30PM. Enjoy food and refreshments (you can BYOB) while perusing a titillating selection of erotic paintings and photographs from 12 local San Francisco artists who are making the art scene sexier for us all.


Man on Bed, by Erika Meriaux.

The Aspect Gallery is injecting a much needed shot of Viagra into the San Francisco art scene.

John Ross takes no prisoners

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By Tim Redmond

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Ross tell the supes how it is. Photo by Luke Thomas

It wouldn’t have been John Ross Day in San Francisco if they didn’t have to call the cops.

And, indeed, a few minutes after Ross – the poet, journalist, activist, author and Bay Guardian correspondent – was honored at the Board of Supervisors, with a proclamation sponsored by Sup. John Avalos, his companeros and campaneras recessed to a conference room down the hall to await refreshments, and since it was 4:20, and the windows of the room were open, well …. The smell of fresh herbal medicine wafted out the door and down the hall, and pretty soon you could smell it in front of the supervisors chamber, and before long a couple of sheriff’s deputies came by and – politely, respectfully – informed us all that smoking – “of any kind” – was forbidden in City Hall.

And for a moment, I shuddered, because whenever the cops are around and John is around, there always seems to be trouble.

But remarkably enough, everyone on all sides kept cool, and the deputies walked away, and John made it through an entire afternoon and evening at City Hall without getting arrested.

That’s a far cry from the old days.

Typically, when people are honored by the supervisors, they thank the board, praise the wonders of this city and politely and meekly receive their award. Not John Ross.

The half-blind, half deaf rabble rouser made a short statement in which he managed to insult city government, denounce the entire process of giving out awards and demand that the board reject the Muni fare hike. Then he read a poem denouncing the “motherfuckers” who are driving poor people out of the Mission.

It was a great moment in San Francisco history. Supervisors Chris Daly, David Campos, Avalos and Ross Mirkarimi seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely; some of their colleagues, as Daly later told me, were squirming.

But that’s why we love John Ross, an uncontrollable shit disturber who is utterly and sometimes insanely fearless, who is pure of heart and devoted so deeply to the cause of social justice that he can’t put it aside, even for a minute.

Here’s his statement, in entirety.

Velo-mutations

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P>I’ve been aware of the intersection between alternative culture and bicycles since 1996, when I saw my first tall bike at Reed College in Portland, Ore. Since then, I’ve seen bikes at Burning Man tricked out with paint, fun fur, and EL wire. Bikes at Critical Mass made to look like animals or disco balls. Bike-powered carnival rides at Coachella. And punk girls, dressed in pink, dancing on minibikes at Tour de Fat.

But it wasn’t until "The Art of the Bicycle," an underground multimedia art show and party held in a warehouse in the Mission District last May, that I came to understand how these were each parts of a greater whole — spokes in the wheel of a bicycle culture that centers around creativity, empowerment, and, above all, fun. It also became clear, as I sipped cheap beer and listened to live punk rock in an unpermitted space, that this culture was very different from the road bike culture my dad (and his Spandex shorts) was a part of in the 1980s — or even the activist culture my friends in the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition are in now.

No, this bike culture is something else. Rooted in DIY principles, punk and anarchist values, a good dose of geekiness, and rejection of the mainstream, the alternative bike culture that exists in San Francisco and beyond is an entirely different animal — and it’s growing up fast.

In the Bay Area alone, there’s Cyclecide, a bicycle club known for mutating found and rejected bikes into new forms and pedal-powered rides, as well as for their carnie aesthetic and rodeo-inspired antics; the Derailleurs, a group of women who dance on, with, and about bicycles; and the Trunk Boiz, an Oakland-based community of kids who pimp out their bicycles the way their older brothers might’ve pimped out their low-riders; and many others — all of whom operate outside the realm of traditional bike culture or politics.

And each of these are connected to a greater network of bicycle artists across the country and the world. The past decade has seen the birth of the Portland-based Bicycle Porn festival, which screened films showing the sexiness of (or near) bikes at Victoria Theater last November; as well as the New York City-based Bicycle Film Festival, which had its first West Coast showing in San Francisco several years ago and now visits 39 cities per year. There are now more than 120 bicycle clubs all over the world, with originals like Black Label growing so big it has 40 chapters of its own. And only five years after the first bicycle dance troupe, the Sprockettes, was formed in Portland, there are 11 bicycle dance troupes worldwide.

But who are these people? Why are they so inspired by bikes? And why make art with or about them, rather than just ride them? The answer is complex. For some, the bike is simply a beautiful machine, an engineering problem whose solution hasn’t changed much since the 1600s but whose application is infinite. For others, it’s the bike’s democracy that’s so appealing: cheap, accessible, and available to all kinds of riders. Some see the bike as a vehicle for change, undermining car culture and the politics involved in non-people-powered transportation.

But what seems to tie all these people together is a counterculture instinct. These are artists, musicians, and math geeks. They’re the same people who may have been drawn to skateboarding or surfing (before both became commercial and mainstream), punk shows, Dumpster diving, or even Stitch ‘n’ Bitch parties. It’s a community of people dissatisfied with the status quo and filled with the imagination and ambition to work outside it — if not against it.

"We wanted to have fun," said Jarico Reesce, about founding Cyclecide in 1997. "And we wanted to break every rule we could." (Molly Freedenberg)

Shooting past “sharrows”

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San Francisco’s bicycle advocates have been focused on winning approval for 56 near-term projects outlined in the city’s bike plan, which would increase the number of miles of bike lanes from 45 to 79, and quadruple the number of city streets bearing "sharrow" markings (see "Street fight," 2/4/09).

But bike-related projects farther out on the horizon could significantly raise the bar for a bikeable San Francisco. Here are a six long-range concepts that could make cycling in the city more safe, enjoyable, and accessible to people who might otherwise be driving solo.

BRIDGING THE GAP


Cyclists who commute between San Francisco and the East Bay have asked an obvious question for years: why must I spend money on BART fares or bridge tolls to get across the bay when I know I’m capable of biking there? When construction of the new east span of the Bay Bridge is finished, cyclists will finally get a bike path — but it will only get them from Oakland to Yerba Buena Island. Luckily, the idea of installing a complementary bike path along the west span to San Francisco is being entertained. It’s expensive (estimates place the cost at $200 million) and complicated (a 2001 feasibility study found there would need to be tracks on both sides of the bridge for balance). But in early April, the Bay Area Toll Authority agreed to spend $1.3 million on an 18-month study so the project could be shovel-ready when funding becomes available.

CAR-FREE MARKET STREET


Market Street is a popular thoroughfare for bicyclists even though much of its design creates tight-squeezes and conflicts with automobiles. For years there’s been talk of making it car-free, an idea once advocated by former Mayor Willie Brown. It was studied in 1997, but never received enough support to move forward, in part because area merchants worry their business would be hurt by restricting motorists. But the latest attempt to quell Market Street traffic may get more traction. Sup. Chris Daly, who also sits on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, requested a comprehensive study on restricting Market Street traffic and a draft report is expected by early summer. Andy Thornley, program director at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, notes that the overarching idea is not to make Market Street exclusive to bikes and pedestrians, but to improve it as a whole. "A car-free Market Street may be the route," Thorney says, "but it’s not the reason."

COLOR ME BIKEABLE


Ask Dave Snyder, transportation policy director at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), what constitutes an ideal bike lane, and he’ll say it has to be safe enough for parents to feel comfortable allowing their eight-year-old to ride a bike there. "That’s a very high standard," he says. "But it’s a correct standard." One approach for safeguarding bike lanes, adopted in New York City and elsewhere, is to color them in. Bike activists have been pushing the idea here, but the monkey wrench in the works is a sort of national bible of traffic symbols that lacks a standard for colored bike lanes. If the city rolls with a concept that’s outside the rulebook, the thinking goes, it could be a liability. But bike advocates hope to incorporate colored bike lines into the standard via a pilot program. In coming months, be on the lookout for more colorful city streets.

THINK INSIDE THE BOX


A bike box is a colored bike zone just before an intersection designed to let cyclists get out in front of traffic at a red light so they can be more visible. SF has two low-profile bike boxes, Thornley notes, but plans are on the horizon to install more. When the city of Portland, Ore. installed them, it produced a video called "On the Move with Mr. Smooth" to promote the concept. Hosted by a greasy character in a neon green shirt, the video makes a big deal about how motorists get a great view when they stop behind the bike-box line. "The bike box," Portland’s slogan proclaims. "Get behind it."

A BLUE-GREEN WORLD


Blue for the water, green for the parks and open space, the Blue Greenway is envisioned as a 13-mile corridor along the southeastern waterfront that would connect a string of existing parks from the Giants’ stadium to Candlestick Point State Recreation Area. "We want to connect not only parks along the Blue Greenway, but connect people to the waterfront," explains Corrine Woods, who is working on the project through the Neighborhood Parks Council. The corridor will serve as the city’s southeastern portion of the San Francisco Bay Trail, a massive interconnected trail network planned by the Association of Bay Area Governments that is envisioned as a 400-mile recreational "ring around the Bay."

BACK ON TRACK


For now cyclists aren’t allowed to bring their bikes — not even the folding kind — on Muni trains or buses (although some buses have bike racks outside). But it’s something the Municipal Transportation Agency has on its radar as a possible policy change, according to spokesperson Judson True. "As we move forward and people become more aware of the benefits of public transit, our vehicles become more and more crowded," True notes. This may be a good problem to have, but it means the agency must work out a strategy to accommodate wheelchair-bound passengers, strollers, walkers, bikes, and other essentials that passengers bring on board. Once the bike-plan injunction is lifted, True says, he expects MTA to approve a pilot program for bikes on Muni. In order to discourage more people from driving, he says, "linking sustainable modes of transportation like biking and transit is key."

Saving the southeast

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sarah@sfbg.com

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This map of all foreclosures in San Francisco shows a heavy concentration in the southern part of the city, home to many low-income communities of color.

When Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Sophie Maxwell convened a task force in July 2007 to figure out why African Americans are leaving San Francisco and how to reverse this trend, the subprime loan market crisis was about to send a shock wave of home foreclosures sweeping through southeast San Francisco.

Hope SF, the promised rebuild of the city’s public housing projects, is underway at a cost of $95 million. The city’s certificates of preference program, giving housing priority to black residents displaced by redevelopment, has been expanded and extended. But little has been done to address the immediate problem.

Instead political leaders have focused on a plan to subsidize Lennar Corp.’s construction of thousands of new condos in the southeast section of the city — the heart of the San Francisco’s remaining African American community — and have done nothing to promote a plan that could convert hundreds of foreclosed homes into affordable for-sale or rental units there, right here, right now.

African American Out Migration Task Force (AAOMTF) members recall warning that the crisis would likely hit San Francisco’s already dwindling black population extra hard. And Sup. John Avalos, who was running for election in District 11, remembers seeing impacts in the Excelsior District as early as 2007.

"I was telling people in early 2007 that this was a problem in District 11, and even real estate people didn’t believe me," recalled Avalos, who is exploring legislation to hold banks accountable and spoke at an ACORN protest in support of Excelsior homeowner Genaro Paed, a Filipino native who just staved off eviction orders pending the outcome of his lawsuit against Washington Mutual concerning what Paed describes as "a predatory loan" secured in 2006.

Avalos also planned to introduce legislation on May 12 that would expand protection of renters, including those in foreclosed homes who are now being evicted by banks.

This isn’t the first time city leaders have studied the African American exodus or ways to prevent low-income and minority households from being preyed upon or displaced. Indeed, this task force’s initial findings, (released last summer after Lennar spent millions to persuade voters to support building 10,000 condos in the city’s southeast) suggests San Francisco’s entire black community is at risk unless proactive and immediate steps are taken.

According to U.S. Census data, the city’s African American population shrank to 6.6 percent of the city’s total population by 2005 (a 40 percent decline since 1990) and will likely slip to 4.6 percent by 2050, according to the California Department of Finance. And these findings were made before the foreclosure crisis heated up.

In 2008 Maxwell and other elected officials convened a Fair Lending Working Group (FLWG) to figure out how to respond to the wave of foreclosures. By year’s end, there were 667 home foreclosures in San Francisco, almost all in the city’s southeast sector.

These numbers sound small compared to Contra Costa County or Oakland, where thousands of foreclosures occurred. And they aren’t big enough to qualify for the first round of President Barack Obama’s National Stabilization Program grants, which were released earlier this year. Based on a census-driven formula, the grants sent $8 million to Oakland and no money to San Francisco.

But with half the city’s foreclosures in the Bayview, home to most of the city’s remaining African Americans, the fact that little has been done to save these homes — or to follow early recommendations to do so — is a gentrification crisis in the making.

Ed Donaldson, housing counseling director at the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation in the Bayview District, served on the FLWG and remembers suggesting a two-tier track. First, take steps to protect renters in places that have been foreclosed and second, buy as many foreclosed properties as possible with the aim of reselling or leasing them as affordable units. While the FLWG liked the renter protection angle, it did not support the foreclosure acquisition program.

"The idea fell on deaf ears," recalls Donaldson, who was disappointed his foreclosure purchase plan didn’t make it onto FLWG’s recent recommendation list. FLWG members include financial institutions such as Wells Fargo, Washington Mutual, and Patelco Credit Union; community-based organizations such as Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, SFHDC, Mission Economic Development Agency; and city agencies. The agency also has received staff support from Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, the Mayor’s Office of Housing, Treasurer Jose Cisneros and the Office of the Legislative Analyst.

"We’d already seen the spike in foreclosure numbers, so how did these recommendations get pushed out? We need something with teeth," Donaldson said.

SFHDC executive director Regina Davis says she suggested a foreclosure purchase and resale plan as an AAOMTF member and was concerned when she noticed that her recommendation was not included on the list discussed at the April 23 meeting. Billed as a closing-out session, that meeting took place at the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and was attended by Davis, chair Aileen Hernandez, Redevelopment director Fred Blackwell, the Rev. Amos Brown, Barbara Cohen of the African American Action Network, Tinisch Hollins of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, and former supervisor and assessor Doris Ward, among others. The AAOMTF is finishing up its work this week.

"I got involved because I believed that in exchange for participation, we would see things done and/or funded. Part of what we want to see are real action items that keep African Americans in San Francisco or bring them back. So we really want this issue to move forward with substance," Davis told the Guardian.

Recognizing that San Francisco is facing massive budget constraints, SFHDC is proposing to borrow $1.5 million from Clearinghouse CDFI, a Los Angeles community development financial agency, to acquire and rehabilitate these foreclosed properties.

Davis’ group would then turn it around and offer residents several options: buy (if the prospective buyer qualifies for the city’s $150,000 downpayment assistance and a $50,000 loan from the California Housing Financing Agency); lease (in which SFHDC sells the home to the buyer but leases the land, making the price affordable), lease-to-own. Or, Davis adds, people could rent the units at affordable rates.

But to make the plan work, SFHDC need the banks to sell the properties AT below market rates. Noting that foreclosed properties are still selling in the Bayview for $400,000, Davis says her nonprofit intends to purchase 100 to 200 homes during a 24-month period at less than $200,000 mark.

Yet Davis remains optimistic about the plan’s chances as SFHDC negotiates with major banks for a 50 percent discount, noting that there is a monthly average of 50 foreclosures in the Bayview-Hunter’s Point, and SFHDC has access to 100 qualified buyers.

Blackwell said the Redevelopment Agency hasn’t developed an initiative or a funding pool to respond to the foreclosures in the city’s southeast sector. But, he said, the agency is looking at ways to apply for National Stabilization Program funds even though "federal guidelines mostly don’t apply well in expensive markets like San Francisco.

"We are engaged in advocacy so San Francisco can take advantage of any federal stabilization funds, but we don’t have an agency-specific proposal," he continued.

"Frankly, I think community-based organizations are the best to do programs like that, especially since there is so much anxiety about the Redevelopment Agency and property acquisition in the southeast," Blackwell added.

He believes that given the city’s current budgetary constraints, the AAOMTF "will likely look for leadership from the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors in cases where members have made recommendations and there is an opportunity to bring in public money."

Blackwell feels the city is still getting its mind around its foreclosure problem. "We’ve been spared the wholesale neighborhood-by-neighborhood devastation that places like Antioch faced," Blackwell said. "So, there wasn’t the same sense of urgency. And there’s a need to look more closely at the data. A lot of the information is based on anecdotes."

Yet the feds seem willing to help if city officials take the initiative. Larry Bush, spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s regional office, says San Francisco and Oakland could file a joint foreclosure plan application.

"If they can identify 100 homes, they’d be eligible for $5 million," Bush said, noting one snag that could unravel the plan locally. "Foreclosed properties must be vacant for at least six months. And as you know, in San Francisco, foreclosed homes still sell."

Maxwell says the city could do more to confront predatory lenders and enforce tenant rights, as well as developing a plan to buy foreclosed properties. "But in San Francisco it’s an issue because of relatively high prices," she told us.

Yet the city’s high prices are the very problem pushing out low-income residents. African American home ownership actually increased after 1990, even as out-migration among black renters increased. But now, if the foreclosures stand, that exodus will likely accelerate.

Asked if she supports SFHDC’s current foreclosure plan, Maxwell said, "It makes sense to me. If that could be done, it would be optimal."

Myrna Melgar of the Mayor’s Office of Housing says she’s not sure that a foreclosure resale plan would work in San Francisco for folks who bought a couple of years ago, when house prices hit $700,000, only to see house prices fall to around $400,000.

"San Francisco is a very different universe from Detroit," Melgar said. "Properties don’t sit around empty and vacant. They are bought by speculators who are betting that in two or three years, their values will go up. So if we had money to buy these properties, which we don’t, we’d be in competition with the speculators, who have lots of money with no strings attached, and who drive the prices up."

Another difference, Melgar said, is that San Francisco banks are holding onto 50 percent of their foreclosed properties, whereas Antioch banks are only holding onto 22 percent. "We’d like to keep folks in the homes," Melgar said. "But it’s a policy issue related to the reality that we have such limited funds."

Reels and (two) wheels

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What’s a "bike movie?" If you immediately thought of Breaking Away (1979), two upcoming events suggest that your definition is li’l old-fashioned. First up: the Disposable Film Festival is hosting a "Bike-In" outdoor screening. Pedal over and enjoy a selection of films (with an emphasis on bike themes) culled from DFFs past; an after-party celebrates the release of the Guardian‘s Bike to Work issue.

San Franciscans Eric Slatkin and Carlton Evans founded the fest in 2007 to highlight so-called disposable films — "any film made on these alternative devices we’ve seen cropping up in the past few years: cell phones, web cams, point-and-shoot cameras, one-time use video cameras, pocket cams," Slatkin said. "They really democratize the idea of not just filmmaking, but of a filmmaker."

The spirit of the festival lends itself to a bike-in screening. "The core of the DFF is a real DIY aesthetic," Evans said. "I think there’s a similar kind of aesthetic in the biking community in San Francisco. I bike all over the city, and I’m always navigating the city in a way where I’m having to overcome obstacles. You just sort of take on these challenges and come up with your own solutions."

Brendt Barbur, director of the New York City-based Bicycle Film Festival (now in its ninth year, it travels to San Francisco this summer), would likely agree with this comparison. The BFF showcases experimental films, music videos, documentaries, and more, with tie-in art exhibits and live music shows, but it’s powered by the creative energy of everyday cyclists.

"Technology has given the bike movement a tool to express themselves," he said from BFF headquarters in NYC. "That DIY spirit runs through the festival. A lot of people — maybe they’re graphic designers or bike messengers — have something to say, and cameras are now accessible to a lot of folks. Those little gems they produce are, a lot of times, the most popular movies at the festival."

DISPOSABLE FILM FESTIVAL: BIKE-IN

Wed/13, 8 p.m., free

Outside the Good Hotel, 112 Seventh St., SF

www.disposablefilmfest.com

BICYCLE FILM FESTIVAL

July 14-19

www.bicyclefilmfestival.com

Uphill climb

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steve@sfbg.com

Bicyclists generally try to avoid hills, so one of the most popular bike routes in town is a series of turns called the Wiggle, which snakes along a valley through the Lower Haight. The route — a sort of bridge between east and west — is traveled by a growing number of bicyclists, from hipster kids on colorful fixies to grizzled seniors on comfortable touring bikes.

I ride the Wiggle every day. Coming from the Panhandle, the most harrowing approach is the three blocks I have to travel on busy Oak Street, competing for space with impatient motorists who often seem to forget that they’re wielding deadly weapons. Many times I’ve had cars zip by me within inches, honk (a very startling sound when you’re not wrapped in metal and glass), zoom up right behind me, or flip me off.

But then I turn right onto Scott Street — and the world suddenly changes. My heart rate drops and I breathe deeply. Rain or shine, there are almost as many bikes there as cars. The cyclists smile and nod at one another and even the motorists seem more respectful, sometimes waving us through the stop signs even when it’s their turn. It feels like an informally functional community. It’s how traveling around this city ought to be.

Even though the citywide percentage of vehicle trips taken by bicycle in San Francisco is still in single digits (compared to more than 20 percent in many European cities), and even though a court injunction that’s expected to be lifted this summer has banned any new bike projects in the city for the past three years, bicycling is booming in San Francisco, increasing by almost 50 percent since 2006. I’m never alone these days on my solo commute.

My decision to ride a bike and sell my car wasn’t about joining a movement. I just like to ride my bike, a simple joy that I really began to rediscover about 10 years ago. It’s fun, cheap, and an easy way to get exercise. And it connects me with my surroundings — the people, buildings, and streetscapes of this beautiful city — in a way I didn’t even realize I was missing when I drove.

But as pressing political and planetary realities have welled up around my personal transportation choice, I’ve come to see that I am part of a movement, one that encapsulates just about every major issue progressive San Franciscans care about: public health, environmentalism, energy policy, economics, urban planning, social justice, public safety, sustainability, personal responsibility, and the belief that we can make our communities better places, that we’re not captive to past societal choices.

As a bicyclist and a journalist, I’ve been actively engaged in these struggles for many years. I understand that bicyclists are criticized in many quarters as a vocal minority with a self-righteous sense of superiority and entitlement, and that I’m personally accused of bias for writing empathetically about bicyclists in dozens of bike-related stories.

Well, guess what? I don’t apologize. We are better than motorists, by every important measure. We use less space and fewer resources and create less waste and pollution. Bikes are available to almost every segment of society, and we don’t need to fight wars to power them. They improve the community’s health and happiness. And when we get into accidents, we don’t kill or maim the people we hit.

And you know what else? This really is going to be the Year of the Bicycle, as it’s been dubbed by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, the city’s largest grassroots civic organization, with more than 10,000 dues-paying members. There are more of us than ever, politicians now listen to us, and San Francisco is on the verge of the most rapid expansion of its bike network that any American city has ever seen.

This is the moment we’ve been moving toward for many years, a turning point that the Guardian has meticulously chronicled and proudly promoted. The bicycle has become a metaphor for progress that is long overdue. So mount up on May 14, Bike to Work Day, if you’d like to be a part of the solution to what’s ailing our city and planet.

I love my bike, and so do most people who see it. San Franciscans appreciate the little things, like someone who rides a silly-looking bike.

It started as a basic used mountain bike, but I styled it out for Burning Man a few years ago, covering it with heavy red acrylic paint that looks like stucco, a big basket covered in fake fur and ringed with electro-luminescent wire, and custom-welded high handlebars topped by a lizard horn.

Maybe you’ve seen me around town — and if so, maybe you’ve seen me blow through stop signs or red lights. Yes, I’m that guy, and I only apologize if I’m stealing a motorist’s right-of-way, which I try to avoid. Rob Anderson, who successfully sued San Francisco to force detailed studies of its Bike Plan (and blogs at district5diary.blogspot.com), regularly calls me and my ilk the "bike fanatics."

I’ve interviewed Anderson by phone a few times and tangled with him online many times. He’s actually a pretty well-informed and well-reasoned guy, except for his near pathological disdain for bicycling, which he considers an inherently dangerous activity that government has no business promoting and is not a serious transportation option.

But San Francisco would be a gridlocked nightmare without bikes. Transportation officials say this is already one of the most traffic-choked cities in the country (second after Houston), a big factor in Muni never reaching its voter-mandated 85 percent on-time performance. During peak hours, most Muni lines reach their holding capacity. Imagine 37,500 additional people (the estimated number of San Franciscans who primarily travel by bike) driving or taking Muni every day.

Conversely, imagine the transportation system if bicycling rates doubled and some of those bulky cars and buses became zippy bikes. Quality of life would improve; the air would be cleaner; we would emit far less greenhouse gases (transportation accounts for about half of the Bay Area’s carbon emissions); housing would get cheaper (building parking increases costs and decreases the number of housing units); pressure would decrease to drill for oil offshore and prop up despotic regimes in oil-rich countries; pedestrians would be safer (about a dozen are killed by cars here every year); and public health would improve (by reducing obesity and respiratory ailments associated with air pollution).

Increase bicycling rates even more, to the levels of Berlin, Copenhagen, or Amsterdam, and San Francisco would be utterly transformed, with many streets converted to car-free boulevards as the demand shifts from facilitating speeding cars to creating space for more bicyclists and pedestrians.

Sure, as Anderson points out, many people will never ride a bike. The elderly, those with disabilities, some families with kids, and a few other groups can credibly argue that the bicycle isn’t a realistic daily transportation option. But that’s a small percentage of the population.

For the rest of you: what’s your excuse? Why would you continue to rely on such wasteful and expensive transportation options — a label that applies to both cars and buses — when you could use the most efficient vehicle ever invented?

At the SFBC’s annual Golden Wheels Awards banquet on May 5, SFBC director Leah Shahum described a bike movement at the peak of its power, reach, and influence. "In the last two years, we’ve seen an unprecedented political embrace of bicycling," she said, praising Mayor Gavin Newsom for his championing of the Sunday Streets car-free space and calling the progressive-dominated Board of Supervisors "the most bike-friendly board we’ve ever seen."

In just a few years, the SFBC went from fighting pitched battles with Newsom over closing some Golden Gate Park roads to cars on Saturdays — a two-year fight that ended in a compromise after some serious ill-will on both sides — to Newsom’s championing an even larger Sunday Streets road closure on six days this spring and summer, even fighting through business community opposition to do so.

As with many Newsom initiatives, it’s difficult to discern his motivation, which seems to be a mixture of political posturing and a desire to keep San Francisco on the cutting edge of the green movement. Whatever the case, the will to take street space from automobiles — which will be the crux of the struggles to come — is probably greater now than it has ever been.

Because at the end of the day, Anderson is right: bicyclists do have a radical agenda. We want to take space from cars, both lanes and parking spaces, all over this city. That’s what has to happen to create a safe, complete bicycle system, which is a prerequisite to encouraging more people to cycle. We need to realize that designing the city around automobiles is an increasingly costly and unsustainable model.

"The streets do not have to be solely — or even primarily — for cars anymore," Shahum told an audience that included City Attorney Dennis Herrera, top mayoral aide Mike Farrah, and several members of the Board of Supervisors (including President David Chiu, a regular cyclist and occasional bike commuter), drawing warm applause.

Shahum was certainly correct when she called the politically engaged community of bicyclists "one of the strongest and most successful movements in this city," one she believes is capable of moving an ambitious agenda. "During the next six weeks, we have the opportunity to win a literal doubling of the city’s bike network."

She’s referring to the imminent completion of environmental studies that support the city’s Bike Plan, which will allow the courts to lift the nearly three-year-old injunction against new bike projects in the city. The SFBC has been aggressively organizing and advocating for the immediate approval of all 56 near-term bikeway improvements outlined in the plan, which have been studied and are ready to go, most with grant funding already in the bank.

"I think San Francisco is hungry for a higher use of public space," she said. "Imagine streets moving so calmly and slowly that you’d let your six-year-old ride on them."

That’s the standard advocated by the international car-free movement, which I interacted with last year when I covered the International Carfree Conference in Portland, Ore. These influential advocates believe bikeways should be so safe and insulated from fast-moving traffic that both the young and old feel comfortable riding them.

"Streets belong to us — they are the public spaces of the city — but they don’t feel like they belong to us," said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, a sponsor of Sunday Streets, which was honored at the Golden Wheel Awards. The streets, he told the crowd, "don’t need to be the objects of fear."

Later, as we spoke, Radulovich said it’s not enough to create narrow bikes lanes on busy streets. One of the great joys of riding a bike with a friend is to be able to talk as you ride, something he said transportation advocates around the world refer to as the "conversational standard."

Politically, there’s a long way to go before San Francisco embraces the conversational standard, the creation of permanent car-free bike boulevards, or traffic law changes that promote bicycling. Anderson and his ilk reacted with outrage last year when the Guardian and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission began discussing adopting Idaho’s bike laws here, in which bicyclists treat stop signs as yield signs and stop lights as stop signs (see "Don’t stop: Bike lessons from Idaho," 5/14/08).

Yet until bicycling is taken more seriously as a real transportation option, all this talk about sustainability and green-everything is going to continue falling woefully short of its objectives.

The powerhouse environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council held a gala awards dinner May 9 at the California Academy of Sciences for its first Growing Green Awards, an effort to honor innovators in the growing sustainable food movement.

The award selection panel was chaired by journalist Michael Pollan, whose The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin Press, 2006) and other works have made him a leading voice calling for recognition and reform of a corporate food system that is unsustainable, unhealthy, and harmful to the environment.

That movement has garnered some high-profile support and attention, but has so far failed to effectively counter the influence of agribusiness interests, he told me. "We need an organization like the NRDC in the food area, or we need to get NRDC to embrace our issues."

The awards banquet showed that Pollan and his allies have made progress with the NRDC, which should be a natural ally of advocates for better food and transportation systems, two realms that have the biggest impact on this country’s natural resources.

But when I left the ceremony as hundreds of guests were being seated for dinner, I rode away — on the only bicycle there.

The world stage

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Recently I was lucky enough to land at an international theater festival in Wroclaw, Poland, jostling elbows with a transnational mix of theater folk on the occasion of the 13th annual European Theatre Prize, this year awarded to the great Polish director Krystian Lupa. It was an eye-opening glimpse at some awesome theatrical muscle rarely if ever seen in the Bay Area, or even the United States. Globally-renowned powerhouses like Italy’s Pippo Delbono and Belgium’s Guy Cassiers were there with some extraordinary work, not to mention that of Lupa, whose utterly brilliant and plotless eight-hour fantasia on Andy Warhol’s Factory, Factory 2, proved an absolute highlight of my theatergoing career thus far.

While dreaming of the day Factory 2 takes its local bow, I can only appreciate all the more what places like UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall or San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts do in bringing us news of the theatrical world — or news of the world, theatrically. Another local presenter of exceptional international work has been the San Francisco International Arts Festival, whose sixth season begins this week. SFIAF and executive director Andrew Wood have increasingly made world theater a vital part of the fest’s eclectic performance mix. This year is no exception, with three must-sees in the lineup.

First, South Korea’s Cho-In Theatre makes its U.S. debut with The Angel and the Woodcutter, an original physical theater piece reutf8g the Korean folk tale in a wordless, poetical drama as uncompromising as it is unexpected. Then, Russia’s famed, immensely creative performance ensemble, the Akhe Group — proponents of what they call "Russian Engineering Theatre" and favorites at SFIAF in 2005, where they presented White Cabin — return with the U.S. premiere of Gobo.Digital Glossary, a wild and captivating conglomeration of video projections, animation, ambient music, lasers, clowning, and trompe l’oeil.

Also receiving its Bay Area premiere is Beyond the Mirror, an unprecedented collaboration between New York’s Bond Street Theatre and Afghanistan’s Exile Theatre. The description of this first American-Afghani theatrical outing might ring a bell: Mirror had been slated to open Brava’s theatrical season in fall 2008, when the U.S. government’s inexplicable delays in processing visas for the Afghan performers forced its last-minute cancellation. That disappointment will happily be rectified by SFIAF when Mirror opens at Cowell Theater. (A second San Francisco appearance follows as part of foolsFURY’s Fury Factory festival in June.)

The two companies began crafting the play after meeting by chance in 2002 among the refugee camps outside Peshawar in northern Pakistan, where the activist, physical-theater–based Bond Street went after 9/11 to develop links to the Afghan people and work with a German NGO building schools in the devastated country. Exile, meanwhile, had formed as a group of refugee playwrights, actors, and other performance professionals committed to keeping Afghan arts alive and reflecting the concerns of the Afghani population living as second-class citizens in Pakistan.

Never more timely, the play ranges over the last three decades of Afghanistan’s history, using an expressive mélange of theatrical forms and techniques — including oral history, mythology, live music, traditional dance, drama, acrobatics, puppetry, and film — to tell a story of war and hope at the cusp of yet another turbulent chapter in the country’s unfolding story. Notably, the eight-member half-American, half-Afghani cast includes Afghanistan’s most famous actress, Anisa Wahab, who grew up in happier times on camera as a child star and has continued to act despite its still dangerous implications for women.

Communicating partly with some mutual English, and largely in terms of both distinct and shared physical vocabularies, the artists developed what became Mirror in a nonlinear, highly abstract way, according to Bond Street artistic director Joanna Sherman, who codirected it with Exile’s Mahmoud Shah Salimi. That in no way diminishes its rootedness or poignancy.

"We went around the countryside and interviewed different people, and videotaped them as they would allow," Sherman explained by phone from New York. "Our challenge was to portray these terrible stories in a way that was not gruesome or impossible to watch. We used our physical techniques in a way that it would be watchable and compelling but not exactly ‘realistic.’"

Since Mirror‘s premiere at the second Kabul Theatre Festival in 2005, much has happened in the U.S. and Afghanistan, prompting a small but significant revision, a new final scene, according to Sherman. "We do leave on a thought of hope," she stressed. "But [we’re] doing some interviewing again and getting some additional video. We’ll see what happens."

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

May 20-31, various venues

www.sfiaf.org

Aerosol melodies

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marke@sfbg.com

Ah, Le Poisson Rouge — how I yearn for you. The edgy New York City club and performance space has become a golden nexus for the current rich collision of the indie, electronic, and contemporary classical worlds. Zing go the avant-garde, filter-bent strings in the Bay often enough, of course, especially through the out-there provenance of sfSound (www.sfsound.org), the biannual Soundwave Series (www.projectsoundwave.com), and Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (cnmat.berkeley.edu). But it took last August’s sold out Herbst Theater one-off by Wordless Music, the Poisson-based org that brings big indie names to the new music stage, to finally hold SF’s flannel-clad fixie pixie population enraptured by the freakier side of symphonica, with the white-noise-drenched West Coast premiere of “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and soul-loosening pieces by Bay boys Fred Frith (“Save As”) and Mason Bates (“Icarian Rhapsody”).

It’s been a massive year for 32-year-old Virginia native Bates, who told me over the phone that he moved from NYC to North Oakland four years ago because he “wanted a house and a short commute to a great city.” In March the Julliard grad debuted a six-movement work, Sirens, commissioned by local vocal greats Chanticleer, right after he wrapped up a three-season young-composer-in-residence program with the California Symphony. Perhaps his biggest break came last month, when the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, assembled via audition vids and led by San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, made its debut at Carnegie Hall, playing a portion of Bates’ latest orchestral suite, The B-Sides. Like many other professional cynics, I had my nails sharpened and painted Jungle Red for this dreadful-seeming Internet marketing buzz-blast, but the inclusion of Bates’ forward-thinking work helped rescue the affair from maudlin crowd-pleasing.

Speaking of gimmicks, here’s what many perceive as Bates’: he plays a laptop onstage with the orchestra. Good heavens! Mere gimmickry’s a sad assumption — sure enough, his YouTube gig has reignited that tired technology vs. “true” classical debate that has periodically raged ever since the theremin took the Paris Opera stage in 1927. But Bates, who has toured clubs in his DJ Masonic guise for years, rises above all that with a deep knowledge of dance music history, which itself claims a long and fruitful entanglement with contemporary classical, and a mission of sonic integration.

“The laptop is a piece of the enterprise, a means of augmenting the texture of an orchestral arrangement and adding a richness that evokes new sonic landscapes,” says Bates, who considers his keyboard a “specialized extension of the percussion family.” As for snap judgments about technology, “it actually goes both ways,” he says. “Of course, some traditional symphony-goers can’t really go there. But it’s important for people from the club world to know that I’m not just orchestrating techno” — like the Balanescu Quartet’s version of Kraftwerk or the Williams Fairey Brass Band’s take on acid house. “I’m not Richie Hawtin for woodwinds and booming tubas. I’m coming from a more ambient, electronica place — I’m always aware that I’m playing off something while delving into unique textures and expanded sonari.”

The B-Sides, which will have its full debut for three nights with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall, consists of five movements inspired by archetypal ambient moods — from the buzzing insects and tropical evocations of “Aerosol Melody Hanalei” to astronautical voice transmissions and blankets of static in “Gemini and the Solar Winds.” “Wharehouse Medicine,” which the YouTube Symphony debuted, is like a nifty bit of Leonard Bernstein pumped up with chattering clicks and back-ear bass that energetically summons up the chillout rooms of yore. If it seems odd that Bates references vinyl in his title, while combining laptop rumination and live orchestration, don’t sweat it. “I was thinking back to the experimental freedom that B-sides once afforded to groups like Pink Floyd — surgical strikes into trippy terrain.”

Bates will also be bringing his outstanding Mercury Soul project (www.mercurysoul.org), conceived with conductor Benjamin Shwartz and visual artist Anne Patterson, to Davies after the May 22 symphony performance and to Mezzanine (www.mezzaninesf.com) on May 28. Mercury Soul “is almost a negative image of what I do with an orchestra,” Bates says, “where I DJ and we create a club atmosphere interspersed with live performances of contemporary works by the likes of Steve Reich and John Luther Adams.”

“Look, I know a laptop is never going to be as expressive as a fiddle,” Bates says, a twang of his Virginian upbringing coming through. “And a CD installation pack may never rival the power of a written score. But if I can expand and screw around with orchestral space that way, then it definitely meets my intent.”

THE B-SIDES

With the San Francisco Symphony

Wed/20, Fri/22, and Sat/23

8 p.m., $35–$130

Davies Symphony Hall

201 Van Ness

(415) 552-8000

www.sfsymphony.org

“The Beast Stalker”

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REVIEW Missed The Beast Stalker at the just-completed 2009 San Francisco International Film Festival? Make sure you catch its theatrical run at the Four Star, a longtime hotspot for new Hong Kong genre films. (Owner Frank Lee was dishing ’em out long before 2006’s The Departed, a H.K. cops ‘n’ gangstas remake, raked in box office megabucks and Oscar gold.) Where else would I have seen 1998’s Beast Cops, starring the inimitable Anthony Wong and the irritating Michael Wong (no relation)? The Beast Stalker boasts neither Wong, but it does have Cops codirector Dante Lam, who directs solo here and cowrote the script. Prior to a car chase gone horribly awry, Tong (Nicholas Tse) was the kind of police captain his fellow officers hated to serve, thanks to anger issues, petty politics, and other charming attributes. After Tong accidentally causes the death of a child — coincidentally the daughter of an attorney, Ann (Zhang Jingchu), who’s prosecuting a mob boss — he takes some time off to become, uh, less of an asshole. It’s only when Ann’s other young daughter is kidnapped (what are the chances?) that Tong can attempt to redeem himself, though scar-faced baby snatcher Hung (Nick Cheung) proves an adversary as muddy-gray in the morality department as Tong is. Amid the gun battles and tense cell-phone negotiations (wouldn’t be a H.K. action flick without plenty of both), there’s not much beauty to be found in either of these two beasts. The movie, though, is plenty thrilling.

THE BEAST STALKER opens Fri/15 at the Four Star.

Rewrite the Muni budget

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EDITORIAL Just one day after the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee voted to reject Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Muni budget, the mayor’s press flak, Nathan Ballard, reminded us of how deeply the Mayor’s Office remains in budget denial.

"We are currently operating under the assumption that the supervisors will approve the MTA’s sensible budget," Ballard told City Editor Steven T. Jones May 8. "If they reject the budget, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it."

That was a foolish assumption. At press time, seven supervisors had signed on as cosponsors to Board President David Chiu’s bill rejecting the Municipal Transportation Agency budget proposal, and Sup. Bevan Dufty, an eighth vote, was among the Budget Committee members favoring rejection. Only seven votes were needed, so the MTA budget was dead by May 7 — and Newsom’s refusal to recognize that was nothing more than a foolish attempt to play chicken with the supervisors. If the MTA fails to produce a new budget by the end of May, the current funding remains in effect — and that means the city’s budget deficit is much worse. The mayor strategy seems to be aimed at blaming the supervisors instead of addressing the problem.

And the problem is serious — the MTA budget is a mess. It seeks to close a $129 million shortfall almost entirely on the backs of the riders through service cuts and fare hikes. Only 20 percent of the new revenue would come from higher downtown parking fees.

That’s not just bad public policy for a transit-first city (the last thing San Francisco wants to do right now is discourage people from taking Muni), it’s bad economics. Every time Muni raises fares, ridership drops. Typically, most of the riders come back eventually. But at a certain point — possibly at the proposed $2 level — further increases in cost will drive people away from the system, and that will end up costing Muni money. The alternative — charging more for parking, particularly downtown — has multiple benefits: most people who drive cars downtown are better off than the Muni riders and can afford to pay more — and if higher parking meter rates discourage driving, that’s an excellent outcome.

The MTA is a creature of Proposition A, a 2007 transportation reform measure that was supposed to insulate Muni from political pressure — and guarantee the transit system more money. Newsom pushed for Prop. A and promised that the measure would guarantee Muni a $26 million additional funding stream that could be used to improve service. (He also promised — in writing — that he wouldn’t use the fine print in Prop. A to try to privatize the taxi medallions). He’s now gone back on both of those vows.

In fact, the budget put forward by Newsom’s MTA appointees, and his $316,000 a year general manager, diverts a huge amount of Muni money to the Police Department, the mayor’s pet 311 call center, and other city departments — far more than $26 million. That money goes for "work orders" — in other words, the cops get to suck money out of the Muni budget for doing what they’re supposed to do anyway. And 311 charges Muni almost $2 every time someone calls to ask about bus service (even though 311 exists to help people find out about city services).

The mayor needs to quit his political games and direct the MTA to draft a new budget, quickly, that hits drivers harder than bus riders and dramatically trims the money used as a back-door subsidy for the cops and Newsom’s call center. And the supervisors should make it clear that they won’t approve any MTA budget until he fixes those problems. *

Editor’s Notes

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

My friends and I were waiting for the bus the other day on Mission and 29th streets, wondering whether it made sense to make our kids walk about a mile to the Mission District branch library or to continue to hang out in front the donut shop and argue about why we weren’t buying donuts that afternoon. So we did what hundreds of other San Franciscans do every day: we called 311 and asked when the next bus was coming. Six minutes, the operator said.

Although we didn’t realize it at the time, we had just cost Muni $1.97.

That’s right — during Muni’s budget hearings last week, it came out that every time you call 311 and ask about the next bus — which is one of the main things people use that service for — it costs the broke and beleaguered transit system almost two bucks. That’s more than the fare you pay when you finally board. (You can call 511 and get an automated response much more cheaply, but it’s voice-activated software and can be frustrating.)

When Gavin Newsom set up his 311 system, he never told us that a fair amount of its funding would come from diverting resources away from the city departments the call center is supposed to serve. He sold it as one of his government-as-public-service programs, a way to make the city more businesslike by treating its customers — that’s us, the residents and taxpayers — better.

I’m fine with that, and I’ve never had a problem with the 311 idea. It can be intimidating for people to get through to city agencies and figure out whom to call about what, and a central dispatch makes sense. The problem is, at a time when the city’s really, really broke, I’m not sure the 311 center is more important than, say, nurses at San Francisco General Hospital or community-based mental health treatment.

Ah, but there’s a secret here: Newsom doesn’t have to fund 311 at the level of its real cost because he simply steals money from other departments.

Now that I know Muni is getting hit with a special "work order" charge (because Newsom never figured out how to pay for his pet project and is draining money from bus service to fund it), I’m done. I’m never calling 311 to ask for bus information again.

And I have to admit, I’ll feeling a little cheated. *

How to fix public transit

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OPINION As San Franciscans deal with the shock of ever-worsening budget cuts, it’s time we look to fundamental structural changes in the way government does business. That’s a scary thought because, as Naomi Klein warns, free market ideologues use shocks to accomplish a very damaging type of structural change that cuts public service, increases privatization, and strengthens class division. Those of us who support collective responsibility and a strong public sector had better work together to propose our own structural change.

In transportation, to reduce driving — which accounts for 47 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in this city — we must increase public transit ridership dramatically. Yet the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is cutting its budget by 16 percent. The solution is simple, but not easy: car transportation will have to cost more, in terms of money and time. Transit, walking, and bicycling will have to be easier, faster, and safer. We can use the funds from increases in driving costs to fund improvements to other forms of transportation.

The alternative is an abandonment of the great equalizer that is public transit — and a kind of privatization that provides the automobile as an option for the middle class but at the cost of miserable transportation for the 30 percent of San Francisco households who don’t have cars.

For this to work, public transit must be not just a little bit better, it must be a great deal better. It must remain affordable for families and serve the whole city efficiently, at all hours of the day. Residents should need cars so rarely that transit costs, plus occasional car-sharing and car rentals, are cheaper alternatives than car ownership.

With a higher gas tax and tolls on freeways (measures a recent San Francisco Planning and Urban Research analysis shows to be among the most cost-effective policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions), we can make public transit work better. SFMTA should implement its proposed rapid network on the routes that carry 80 percent of Muni’s passengers, speeding up the vehicles by at least 20 percent. That will cost car drivers some time: mixed traffic lanes will have to be converted to bus lanes. Turns will have to be restricted and parking will have to be removed.

The city also must make bicycling safe and easy. Our bikeways need to be safe for 8-year olds, who need systems that forgive mistakes and allow for slow and easy riding, and seniors, who are not physically able to ride fast and cannot afford to make emergency stops that may cause a fall. That means we need effective 18 mph traffic-calmed zones and a system of car-free bike paths, including one down Market Street.

Transportation is a regional issue that San Francisco cannot solve on its own. We must do a better job of matching our regional development patterns to our needs to promote walking, bicycling, and transit.

To make all this work, we must stop sprawl immediately and concentrate growth in cities and existing suburbs. More density in cities means more people to support transit (through fares and a higher tax base) and more people to support local shops so that walking to your grocery store is an option for more people.

Dave Snyder is transportation policy director at SPUR.

The quest to save the Bluepeter Building

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By Rebecca Bowe

bluepeterFINAL.jpg
Photo courtesy Janet Carpinelli

The Bluepeter Building, a unique industrial warehouse constructed in 1940 along San Francisco’s central waterfront, has become the focus of a neighborhood campaign for historic preservation. Under the Mission Bay redevelopment plan, it’s slated for demolition — but some community members are hoping an alternative vision can be implemented.

Janet Carpinelli of the Dogpatch Neighborhood Association has a vision for rehabbing the Bluepeter Building and converting it to a fish market, casual food vending business, and community gathering space which she says could also be integrated into a maritime history tour along the city’s Central Waterfront. Owned by the Port of San Francisco, it’s been shuttered for more than a decade and hasn’t been very well maintained. Under the Mission Bay redevelopment plan, the building would be torn down and a park would be constructed on the lot instead.

“Just putting the park there is not as interesting,” Carpinelli says. “We shouldn’t just be knocking down the building.”

How the JROTC vote could come down

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By Tim Redmond

Like so much in San Francisco politics, the vote tonight on restoring JROTC isn’t as simple as it might seem.

The resolution by Jill Wynns and Rachel Norton simply directs the superintendent to preserve JROTC at the seven high schools where the program currently exists. It doesn’t say a word about Physical Education credit.

That’s a central issue, because just about everyone agrees that if students don’t get PE credit for JROTC, so few will sign up that the program will die anyway. State law seems to say that anyone teaching PE classes has to have a teaching credential, and the JROTC instructors don’t qualify. The Chron reports that

Last week, the California Board of Education clarified the issue, saying local education officials have the authority to offer PE credits for JROTC. The state Department of Education reiterated that position in a letter to district and county education officials Monday.

JROTC instructors, who have a state and federal credential to teach the military course, would not need a PE credential, said Phil Lafontaine, the department’s director of professional development and curriculum support.

“They’re appropriately credentialed,” he said, even if students are earning PE credit.

But Gentle Blythe, the SFUSD spokesperson, told me that the district “has not seen that letter, so we haven’t been able to analyze it.”

In the meantime, the school board voted last June to end PE credit for this past year, which was supposed to be the final year of JROTC. According to Norton, that resolution doen’t apply going forward — so she’s convinced that if her resolution passes tonight, the PE issue will be moot. “The board policy enacted last year only end PE credit for the 2008-2009 year,” she told me.

Now it gets interesting. The intent of the board last year was almost certainly to end PE credit forever, since JROTC was supposed to be phased out after this year (why deny PE credit in 2009-2010 for a program that wasn’t supposed to exist?) But if the technical interpretation Norton is offering holds up, the board may face another vote –to withold PE credit for next year and into the future.

And since the swing vote on JROTC, Norman Yee, has made it clear ijn the past that he doesn’t support PE credit, he could wind up voting yes tonight to save the program — then no on a future resolution killing PE credit (which would effectively kill JROTC anyway).

“That’s possible,” Norton said. “But I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

It might, though — I don’t see JROTC foes letting this go.

UPDATE: I just spoke with Norman Yee. He says he plans to support the Wynns-Norton resolution “with amendments” — including the right for some high schools to opt out. He says his previous refusal to support PE credit was based on the state’s position that only credentialed teachers could teach PE — but if the state is wiling to accept the SF program, so is he.

Ick, that means this comes down to the district’s legal interpretation of a letter from the state Board of Education. Stay tuned.

Newsom pushes hard for Muni budget cuts

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By Steven T. Jones
newsom on muni.jpg
Newsom only rides Muni for photos ops, so he won’t feel the pinch of paying $2 fares for decreased service.

As the Board of Supervisors prepares to vote this afternoon on a Muni budget that would raise fares and cut service in order to subsidize other city departments and protect drivers from increased parking fees, pressure from Mayor Gavin Newsom has reportedly flipped Sup. Bevan Dufty and weakened the resolve of the final swing vote, Sup. Sophie Maxwell.

Streetsblog has an excellent report (including audio from Newsom yesterday) about how Dufty – after voting against the Muni budget in committee just last week — has relented to accusations by the Mayor’s Office that a vote against the MTA budget is a vote to widen the city’s budget deficit.

Yet the reality is that the city charter makes the MTA an independent agency, not a piggybank for the Police Department, Newsom’s cherished 311 call center, or the other city agencies that will siphon off $66 million in Muni funds through work orders for functions that they perform anyway. Work orders have increased by way more than the $26 million per year that Newsom encouraged voters to give Muni by approving Prop. A in 2007.

Newsom tried dismissed arguments that the budget would create a downward spiral for Muni, which is already reeling from state budget cuts, saying of the issue “this is nothing.” He also said, “You have to be responsible for the things you advocate because there’s tradeoffs.” That’s true, and apparently Newsom is willing to trade the MTA’s independence and the quality of public transit in San Francisco for appeasing the cops, subsidizing 311, and justifying his budgetary unilateralism and opposition to new revenue measures.

Local businesses underrepresented in city contract awards

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By Rebecca Bowe

At Monday’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee hearing, Human Rights Commission Executive Director Chris Iglesias reported on how many locally owned San Francisco businesses benefit from city-issued contracts. The Guardian spotlighted this issue recently.

Across the board, the data showed, most city contracts are awarded to outside firms. (One speaker referred to them as “the Halliburtons of the world.”) The number of prime contracts and subcontracts awarded to non-local businesses was disproportionately higher than those awarded to local businesses, minority-owned businesses, or women-owned businesses, the data showed. Between September of 2006 and December of 2008, Iglesias noted, 35 percent of all city contracts went to certified local business enterprises.

In terms of city departments, Public Works led the way by awarding some 48 percent of its contracts to local firms. The airport issued just 10 percent of its contracts to local businesses, the port contributed 22 percent, and the Public Utilities Commission awarded 34 percent. Citywide, just 9 percent of term-contract awards and 7 percent of blanket-purchase orders were made through local firms.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, who formerly served on the city’s Small Business Commission, was less than thrilled by the findings.

Key JROTC vote tomorrow

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By Tim Redmond

The future of military recruiting in public schools will come back before the San Francisco School Board tomorrow (Tuesday May 12) as the seven board members take up a resolution by Jill Wynns and Rachel Norton that would undo a previous board decision and bring back JROTC.

This is, of course, a terrible idea.
It’s also going to be a close vote — Wynns, Norton and Hydra Mendoza are expected to support the resolution. Jane Kim, Kim-Shree Maufas and Sandra Fewer are going to oppose it. The swing vote is Norman Yee — and nobody has any idea what he’s going to do.

If the Wynns resolution bringing back JROTC fails, then the program is dead. The board has already voted to phase the recruiting program out, as of next month.

Of course, JROTC will be in trouble anyway as long as the board doesn’t grant phys ed credit to students who take the elective activity. Right now, the JROTC instructors don’t qualify as state-certified phys ed teachers, and the program doesn’t meet state standards. Assembly member Fiona Ma is trying to change that, but here bill doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

It’s a heated and emotional topic that’s generated a lot of organizing and energy at the board — and as the final vote nears, Kim, Fewer and Mendoza have been meeting with JROTC instructors to see if there’s any ground for compromise.

“I told them I would consider approving it as an after-school program,” Kim told me. “If students really want it, then they can do it after school, with no credit.” The response from JROTC: No way, that would kill the program.

“If the program is so popular, I don’t get the issue,” Kim explained.

The other glitch: The JROTC instructors say the Department of Defense, which ultimately calls the shots here, wouldn’t accept an after-school program.

In other words, the military really IS using the hook of P.E. credit to snag potential military recruits in public high schools.

There’s another interesting element to all of this. The San Francisco public high schools are considering changing curriculum anyway to fit more closely to the UC/CSU admission requirements — and there’s no way JROTC would qualify for any course credit under those standards.

Yee has said in the past — and has told me personally — that he doesn’t want JROTC to come back and that he won’t vote for P.E. credit for the program. But the pressure on the board members will be intense. I hope he has the courage to do the right thing.

The military has every right to go after 18-year-olds, and is using every tool at its disposal to convince them to join up. Seducing minors into the war maching just isn’t acceptable in San Francisco.

Appetite: Brazilian piranha ribs, Korean tacos, schnitzel sandwiches, fancy ‘tinis, and more

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Every Monday, Virginia Miller of personalized itinerary service and monthly food, drink, and travel newsletter, www.theperfectspotsf.com, shares foodie news, events, and deals. View the last installment here.

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‘Tini time at SF Cocktail Week

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EVENTS

May 11-18: SF Cocktail Week
SF Cocktail Week is here… In honor of SF’s truly vibrant cocktail culture and supporting the fab Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans (if you’re there, go!), the mission is "to preserve the Cultural Heritage of saloons and their cocktails in San Francisco, while also celebrating California’s Culinary Philosophy and Tradition". Sounds like a great mission to me. The third year in, this just keeps getting bigger. It’s no Tales of the Cocktail but it’s certainly a stellar line-up of parties, classes, competitions and events, taught and presented by a long list of the many of SF’s bartending greats.

A few highlights include opening (at Le Colonial) and closing (at Jardinere) parties, the US Bartenders’ Guild National Competition (all day Tuesday: 11am for SF competitors; 5pm for national finalists), CUESA’s Cane Spirits & Farmer’s Market Cocktails event is Wednesday night (their Winter Cocktails event was a blast – excellent cocktails at every turn!), there’s a historical cocktail and bar crawl with Tablehopper herself on Saturday, a Saturday class with artisanal cocktail genius,Scott Beattie, and monthly Savoy night at the one-and-only Alembic on Sunday. Thursday is Bar School, a day of classes around town, ranging from $25-45, the line-up includes Distillation 101 from Hangar One’s Lance Winters, Erik Atkins’ walk through the Gentleman’s Companion, Jeff Hollinger (Absinthe) and Neyah White (NOPA) teach you how to make your own cocktail ingredients from syrups to bitters, plus more worthy classes for the budding mixologist to take it to the next level.
All around SF; events free to $45
http://sfcocktailweek.com

May 12-16: The Big 4’s Wild Game Week returns
The Big 4 Restaurant (PSF) in Nob Hill’s Huntington Hotel has been around for decades and is just the kind of atmosphere I want when craving old world elegance and cocktails by the fireplace. On the food tip, its bi-annual Wild Game Week offers a menu so unique, it’s one of the only times you’ll see dishes like Himalayan yak or Rocky Mountain wapiti (elk chop, to you). This year a first is added: Brazilian piranha “ribs” with a creamy mustard dressing ($18). That’s right, piranha. Come hungry as the deer and the antelope certainly will play.
Appetizers: $16-19
Entrees: $38-46
1075 California Street
415-771-1140
www.big4restaurant.com

Dick Meister: Labor’s White House friend

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President Barack Obama brings new hope to America’s working families, says AFL-CIO president John Sweeney

By Dick Meister

(Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has been covering labor and politics for more than half a century.)

Barack Obama the presidential candidate declared that the nation needed “a
president who doesn’t choke on the word ‘union.'” But now that Obama has
assumed the presidency – and good riddance to his virulently anti-union
predecessor — is he delivering on his promise to lead a pro-union
administration?

Absolutely, says the AFL-CIO, which played a major role in Obama’s victory.
The federation spent more than $450 million and put more than a
quarter-million volunteers to work in its campaigns for Obama and pro-labor
congressional candidates, and turned out millions of union voters.

“The political pendulum is swinging back toward sanity,” says AFL-CIO
President John Sweeney. “Barack Obama brings new hope to America’s working
families.”

It is clear, in any case, that Obama’s strong support for unions is genuine.
He really meant it when he said — not while campaigning for labor votes,
but after his election – that “I want to strengthen the union movement in
this country and put an end to the barriers and roadblocks that are in the
way of workers legitimately coming together in order to form a union and
bargain collectively.”

Imagine George Bush making such a statement. He would indeed have been very
likely to choke.

Obama already has done a lot to back up his words. For starters, he quickly
rescinded some of the most damaging of the anti-worker executive orders that
Bush had issued. One had allowed White House staffers to overturn, in behalf
of Bush’s employer allies, job safety regulations that the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration had promulgated. Obama ordered that those
regulations and some new ones go into effect immediately.

He also voided a Bush regulation that had allowed federal contractors to be
reimbursed for the costs of blocking unionizing drives. And Obama overturned
a regulation that had banned so-called Project Labor Agreements, which in
effect call for collective bargaining on federal and federally funded
projects.

Unions are especially pleased — and should be — with Obama’s appointment
of Congresswoman Hilda Solis to head the Labor Department. Bolstered by what
promises to be a substantial increase in funds and personnel for labor law
enforcement, Secretary of Labor Solis is certain to move forcefully to
protect and enhance workers’ rights. Under Bush, workers had little
protection from employer exploitation.

Workers didn’t get much help, either, from the Bush appointees who
controlled the National Labor Relations Board, which is supposed to protect
workers’ union rights. Bush’s NLRB did the opposite in many cases, siding
with employers to block workers from unionizing, particularly by failing to
act against such illegal employer tactics as firing or otherwise penalizing
pro-union workers.

Obama will soon be able to appoint a majority of board members who are
certain to protect workers’ rights. His appointee as NLRB chair, longtime
board member Wilma Liebman, is expected to put a high priority on reversing
board rulings that stripped union rights from thousands of workers.

Other important pro-labor steps taken by the new administration include:

*Creating a cabinet-level “task force” headed by Vice President Joe Biden to
give working people a direct voice in developing and coordinating policies
to improve the status of poor and middle class Americans.

*Obama’s signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which Bush had threatened to
veto. It overturns a Supreme Court decision that made it virtually
impossible for women to sue for wage discrimination.

*The signing of a bill, vetoed twice by Bush, that reauthorizes a health
insurance program for more than 10 million children of low-income workers.

Additionally, Obama’s budget and stimulus programs call for major
infrastructure projects that would provide as many as 3.5 million
well-paying construction jobs. The programs also would give tax relief to
working people, create job training programs to help low-wage workers and
ex-offenders learn marketable skills and, among other changes, update the
unemployment insurance system to provide more help to the jobless.

Several other promised reforms await White House action, including
strengthening the union rights and job security of federal employees. What
organized labor wants most is passage of the highly controversial Employee
Free Choice Act that would remove the legal obstacles that have limited
union expansion. Obama supports the act, but he’s been giving signals that
he would back a compromise version because of heavy pressure from opponents
that threatens to block congressional approval.

Although some unionists are demanding that Obama take a stronger stand on
the proposed act and otherwise show even more support for labor, most
unionists seem to be highly pleased with his actions so far. The AFL-CIO
praises him for taking “big, concrete steps” to lay the foundation for
important change.

The federation’s organizing director, Stewart Acuff, says Obama is “doing
extremely well in very difficult circumstances. He continues to have our
unwavering support and appreciation …. There is much to be done and we
intend to do all we can to help him succeed.”

Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has covered labor and
political issues for a half-century. Contact him through his website,
www.dickmeister.com.

Hellman to the rescue

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By Steven T. Jones

San Francisco financier Warren Hellman is one of downtown’s most complex and interesting figures, as I learned years ago when I worked on an award-winning profile of him. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch and spoken every few months, often about the state of the print media in San Francisco and around the country.

Earlier this year, as the Chronicle was having its problems, we again talked about the need for a more sustainable media model and he said that he planned to contact Hearst executives and explore the possibility of creating a nonprofit paper, a goal that other less connected and endowed entities have also been pursuing (including The Public Press, on whose steering committee I’ve served). But Hellman has the pull to get top executives on the phone and to generate significant capital.

Now, as the San Francisco Business Times reports, Hellman has made significant progress and says he intends to make an announcement in two months about how he plans to create a new print media presence in San Francisco.

We wish him luck and are anxious to see what his team comes up with.

Live Shots: Boy in Static celebrates sweet suspicion

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Text and photos by Ariel Soto. Read Marke B.’s take on Boy in Static’s single “Young San Francisco” here

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Alexander Chen

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Newish to the San Francisco music scene, Boy in Static already has a fledgling following. Only one of the duo could make it, but Bottom of the Hill on Wednesday, May 6, Alexander Chen used everything from a violin, ankle bells and a toy piano to play pieces that expressed both joy and melancholy.

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Shotwell takes off — in Union Square, and at home

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By Laura Peach

Shotwell, the store, is at 36 Geary off Union Square. But for a recent Guardian article, I chatted with Shotwell owners Michael and Holly Weaver in their actual Shotwell Ave. home in the Mission, a space filled with glass jars holding a rainbow of bubblegum and chandelier candle holders. The former armory storage facility has been transformed into a wonderland — three separate concrete structures are connected by pathways where fountains trickle and faux birds roost in trees. The domestic space is fitting for this fashion-forward duo, who hope to push San Franciscan shoppers in a stylish new direction.

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SFBG This place is pretty amazing.
Michael Weaver Originally, we were going to run the store out of the garage in front, but there just wasn’t enough space. And this location is so tucked away that there wouldn’t be much foot traffic.
Holly Weaver We love finding little hidden gems in neighborhoods, and we did want to create that in some ways.

SFBG But you chose Union Square instead.
HW Right. San Francisco has lots of shopping in neighborhoods, yet nowhere that is really a shopping destination.
MW Except Union Square.
HW We thought, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we be there?

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More Shotwell talk after the jump

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