Supervisors

Editorial: Lee needs to make a decision

Maria Poblet
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8

 

 The moment Ed Lee accepted the job as interim mayor — with the strong support of former Mayor Willie Brown and Chinatown powerbroker Rose Pak — we knew that the word “interim” would soon be in play.

Lee promised he wouldn’t run in November, and for some supervisors (particularly Sean Elsbernd, who nominated Lee) that was a deal breaker: Elsbernd told us he wouldn’t vote for anyone who wanted to seek a full term. But immediately some of Lee’s supporters began pushing him — quietly and not-so-quietly — to go back on his word and announce his candidacy.

Last week, a fake “draft Ed Lee” campaign emerged and got front-page treatment in the San Francisco Chronicle, despite the fact that it was orchestrated entirely by two political consultants. And word around City Hall is that Lee faces immense pressure to get in the race — and hasn’t entirely ruled it out.

That’s a problem. Lee is heading into a crucial budget season and will be negotiating with, and making deals with, a wide range of constituency groups. Everyone in town needs to know, now, what sort of mayor is running the show — a caretaker trying to get San Francisco through a rough time until a duly elected replacement can take office, or an ambitious politician looking at how to leverage this appointment into a four-year gig.

Lee has every right to run for mayor, and the filing deadline isn’t until August. By law, and political tradition, he can wait until the last minute to tell the city how he plans to spend the fall. And the fact that he promised not to run shouldn’t be an absolute bar: we never endorsed the idea of a caretaker mayor in the first place. What if Lee does a great job? What if the voters overwhelmingly want him to stick around? Why should that be off the table?

Still, this waiting game and this ongoing round of rumors and back-room discussions isn’t good for the city. If Lee wants to run, he needs to announce it now. If he’s not going to run, he needs to tell everyone — starting with Brown, Pak, and his other top backers — that he’s simply not going to do it, that he’s not changing his mind, and that they have to stop pushing him and making noise about it.

There are other candidates in the race, some directly involved in making city policy. When Sup. David Chiu talks about his budget priorities, we know exactly whom we’re dealing with — a board president who wants to be mayor. When City Attorney Dennis Herrera takes on the tricky job of running for mayor while serving as an impartial city legal officer, we know what the conflicts are. It’s not fair to them, or to anyone else, to be dealing with a mayor who may have secretly promised his supporters (who are also players and lobbyists at City Hall) that he’s getting into the race.

Lee may be personally undecided — but he can’t manage the city this way. He has to give San Franciscans a straight, and final, answer: is he running or not? Otherwise all these behind-the-scenes whispers, involving some very shady political operators, will fatally undermine his credibility.

 

Stop the AT&T boxes!

Zelda Bronstein
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15
Stop the AT&T boxes!

By the League of Pissed Off Voters


More than 60 people showed up on the steps of City Hall May 21 to demand that AT&T engage in the same old basic planning process that even small-scale businesses have to go through.  (Read: even little people without expensive corporate lobbyists.)


Neighborhood organizations, disabled and senior representatives and environmentalists all pushed the supervisors to make the sensible vote at tomorrow’s full board meeting: support a full Environmental Impact Review of the consequences of 726 giant metal lockboxes cluttering up our public sidewalks.  As Julian Davis, a longtime community activist put it: “Why would you plunk down 726 giant Buicks all over the city when you have a perfectly good underground high speed rail?”


True that.  San Francisco currently has miles of fiber optic cable pulsing beneath our city streets, and even that is already becoming outdated.  So now AT&T’s brilliant idea is to litter our sidewalks with what amounts to giant crusty supercomputers? And what happens when they’re obsolete?  Basically, taxpayers just got stuck with a bunch of metal junk on our sidewalks, while AT&T expanded its profit margins.


Why do small cafes have to pay hundreds of dollars in permit fees to put two piddly tables outside their shops, while AT&T gets a blanket “categorical exemption” for almost no money to nail down ugly boxes that will block the sidewalk and attract graffiti?  (Hmm, we can probably think of some choice graffiti actually…)


The last time we heard from the folks at AT&T, they were helping the NSA wiretap our private calls from a secret room in their headquarters, so excuse us if we’re a little hesitant about giving the company a free pass to put creepy lock boxes in front of our homes. 


According to the Department of Public Works at the last public hearing on this issue, DPW staffers are relying on AT&T’s “expert analysis” to guide them on whether or not AT&T should receive a categorical exemption – in other words, DPW is relying on AT&T to do its job, and the community just got cut out of the process.  An independent EIR is necessary to address these blatant conflicts of interest. 


Speaking of conflicted interests: The latest scuttlebutt inside City Hall has some progressive supervisors desperately looking to cut a deal to save face in the midst of election season.  And what would that deal look like?  Cutting the number of boxes and giving neighborhoods an opportunity to decide whether they want 4’x4’x7′ lock boxs on their blocks. 


So, basically, if your block doesn’t have a home owner association advocating on your behalf, guess what you’re going to be walking around everyday?  As Juan Monsanto of San Francisco Beautiful pointed out, most of these boxes will be installed in less affluent communities without strong representation at City Hall.   AT&T’s sweetheart deal gives the supervisors cover to punt their responsibility to administer public space safely and equitably. 


So, to recap: we are now officially a city that will arrest human beings for sitting or lying in the middle of the sidewalk, but the board is working overtime to try and figure out how to exempt AT&T from city oversight process so it can stick giant immovable metal boxes in our right of way?


Oh, it’s okay because they’re going in the Bayview. Or in a neighborhood that already has a bunch of blight, so what’s a little more?  Lame.  Call your supervisor today and tell him or her to get a backbone.  It’s tough being the swing vote, you know?  Help ’em out, let ’em know you’re watching – and voting.


The San Francisco League of Pissed-Off Voters is the local chapter of the League of Young Voters, a national organization that engages young people in the political process, organizes around progressive issues and takes it beyond just “get out the vote.” 


 


 

Mayor Lee’s dismal budget challenge

Zelda Bronstein
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4
Mayor Lee’s dismal budget challenge

The “create your own budget” app is nothing new; we’ve seen it at the state level for a couple of years. But it’s new to San Francisco, and Ed Lee’s promoting it. So you can go here and see if you can solve SF’s budget problems.


I did the whole thing, gave the best answers I could — and wound up with the city still deep in the red. That’s because the choices on the app are pretty limited. Only a few modest tax increases are available, along with a lot of cuts. There is, for example, no option for a commercial real estate tax, no option for a tax on vacant housing, no option for a prgoressive gross receipts tax, no option for a city income tax … just a higher sales tax, a utility user tax, and an increase in the (flat) payroll tax. Those are all somewhat regressive options (although the utility user tax isn’t that bad, but it offers a maximum of $4.6 million). All told, the taxes offered together make up about $60 million, or about 20 percent of the deficit.


So why the limited choices? According to the program, these options are “actual policy decisions the mayor and the board of supervisors must make in developing a balanced budget for the next fiscal year.”


Yes, but raising more revenue is also an “actual policy decision.” And while these budget simulators are just gimmicks, this one gives some indication of what Lee’s office things may be in the offing. And if these are the only options the mayor considers on the table, it’s not going to be a pleasant year for health, human services, parks, police, fire or anyone else.


  

Civil Grand Jury report rips Parkmerced plan

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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26
Civil Grand Jury report rips Parkmerced plan

One week before the massive Parkmerced redevelopment project is slated to go before the Board of Supervisors for a second shot at approval, the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury has issued a scathing critique of the plan in a report titled “The Parkmerced Vision: Government-by-Developer.” The assessment charges that the project’s development agreement fails to guarantee adequate rent-control protections for current tenants whose homes will be razed and replaced with new units as part of the ambitious, 20-to-30 year overhaul.

The Civil Grand Jury report charges that the development agreement “is fundamentally unable to deliver such assurances because of overarching state laws that are changeable and subject to court interpretation. Through its call for demolition of existing units, the agreement eliminates existing statutory rights of tenants, replaces them with a contractual agreement from the owner/developer, and bypasses due process in the face of eviction.”

The report appears to reject the claim that the tenant protections are “ironclad,” an assurance that was repeated often in public hearings by representatives of the developer and the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. “As it is stated, the agreement claims it can cause newly constructed units to be protected under the same rent stabilization ordinance previously applied to the demolished dwellings,” the report notes. “In reality, current laws appear to contravene this claim.”

When a discussion about Parkmerced was continued several weeks ago at a Board of Supervisors meeting, several members of the board voiced concerns that they did not have enough clarity on the question of whether renter protections could be guaranteed for tenants who reside in the complex’s 3,221 rent-controlled units, some of whom have lived there for decades.

“Never before has a redevelopment project of this size and length been undertaken in San Francisco in an existing community where more than 9,000 people live,” the report notes. It acknowledges the enormous tax revenues that the city stands to gain from the development, but cautions that “this windfall, no matter how promising, should not come at the expense of citizens’ legal rights.”

To remedy the flawed agreement, the Civil Grand Jury recommends that the city “enact legislation prior to signing the Development Agreement that adequately assures the statutory rights of existing tenants to remain at Parkmerced and enjoy undisturbed continued tenancy,” and goes onto suggest language providing that “If a landlord demolishes residential property currently protected under the City’s Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Ordinance, and builds new residential rental units on the same property within five (5) years, the newly constructed units are subject to the San Francisco Rent Stabilization Ordinance.”

Meanwhile, Parkmerced spokesperson P.J. Johnston has already issued a response the hot-off-the-presses report, sending out a press release calling it “flawed,” and charging that the Civil Grand Jury is “calling for a solution to a problem San Francisco has already solved.”

Johnston contends that San Francisco already has a provision in the local municipal code that would do exactly what the Civil Grand Jury is asking city government to enact as a remedy for the shortcomings of the development agreement. Is Johnston’s interpretation of the local ordinance an accurate assessment? Not being lawyers ourselves, the Guardian phoned the office of the City Attorney to find out. We’ll post a response as soon as we receive one.

Johnston criticized the Civil Grand Jury report as “a highly political stink bomb,” saying, “I believe we’ve been able to address those concerns over the past several weeks, and I hope our leaders are able to see past this kind of last-minute distraction.” Johnston, who previously served as former Mayor Willie Brown’s press secretary, added, “This reeks of the nasty side of San Francisco politics.”

**UPDATE** The Guardian just received a call from an official from the City Attorney’s office, who said they did not want to be quoted because Parkmerced is a highly politicized issue. This person confirmed that the existing code Johnston pointed to does in fact do just what the Civil Grand Jury was asking for, and added that the local law had been referenced in a Parkmerced board file from last week. Seems the Civil Grand Jury didn’t have that information when it issued the report.

Supervisors and activists decry businesses that deny wages to low-income workers

Sasha Cuttler
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13
Supervisors and activists decry businesses that deny wages to low-income workers

For one of this country’s first government hearings regarding wage theft yesterday (Thurs/12), San Francisco activists, public employees, and politicians alike were determined to find ways to address issues surrounding low-income workers who are paid below minimum wage or otherwise deprived of money they’re entitled to.

Wage theft may involve a number of different violations including payment below the minimum wage, obligation to work off the clock, and denial of overtime and sick pay. Low-income jobs such as construction work, hospitality and domestic care are the most cited types of employment for wage theft and wage theft disproportionately affects communities of color and those with language barriers.

“We are not going to allow any worker in San Francisco to be exploited,” said Sup. David Campos said on the steps of City Hall, later presiding over the Government Audit and Oversight Committee hearing on the issue. “Wage theft affects the lowest wage workers and their ability to make a living and survive in these tough economic times.”

The pre-hearing protest and the meeting was comprised of workers with emotional stories of poverty and injustice. Other speakers included Donna Levitt, the director of the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, the agency in charge of overseeing claims of employers withholding wages, and Rajiv Bhatia, the director of Occupational and Environmental Health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

Levitt said that 500 claims of wage theft have been addressed by the OLSE since the minimum wage law’s inception in 2003. Dan Goncher of Harvey M. Rose Associates, which does budget analysis for the city, cited data showing that the OLSE takes significantly longer to go through the hearing process for back wages than other agencies. However, Levitt mentioned that 97 percent of cases are settled and never go to the City Attorney’s Office for a hearing.

“Very little thought from our policymakers was made on how this was going to be enforced,” Levitt said of the current minimum wage law.

The coalition of community organizations including Young Workers United, Filipino Community Center, Chinese Progressive Association, San Francisco Tenants Association, Unite Here Local 2, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, and others joined together for the protest in order to raise awareness of some proposed amendments to the current minimum wage enforcement law.

Co-sponsored by Campos and Sup. Eric Mar, the amendments would add additional penalties such as raising the fine for employers from $500 to $1,000 for retaliating against workers exercising rights under the current law, the ability to interview employees and inspect payroll records at places of business, the requirement of notifying employees when an employer is being investigated, and to posting of a public notice when an employer fails to comply with a settlement agreement.

“We want to see the city taking a stronger commitment to addressing the issue of wage theft,” said lead organizer of the Chinese Progressive Association Shaw San Liu. “We don’t want this to be a one-day publicity stunt.”

One of the workers, who spoke about his experience of wage theft, recalled working long hours without the assurance of payment. “We would wait for hours for them to come back pay us but they never came,” Jose Cruz, a day laborer and client of La Raza Centro Legal, said about one of his jobs.

Bhatia explained to the supervisors and crowded audience in the committee hearing room that in the last week, 26 percent of the nation’s low wage workers were paid less than minimum wage. He also outlined different steps such as tracking chronic violators and training health inspectors to make referrals to local enforcement agencies in cases of non-compliance, so the SFDPH could support the community efforts in decreasing wage theft.

In addition, both Campos and Board President David Chiu made a point of speaking about how wage theft also detrimentally affects businesses.

“Most businesses play by the rules and those businesses are at a disadvantage when we allow businesses to not follow the rules,” said Campos.

“This is not about workers versus businesses,” Chiu said. “The issue of wage theft effects workers and workers’ families across the city.”

Preserving preservation

Maria Poblet
-
0
Preserving preservation

EDITORIAL San Francisco has a terrible record preserving its past. In the past 50 years, so many parts of the city’s history have been demolished, bulldozed, flattened, or destroyed in the name of development. The number of landmarks that are gone vastly exceeds the number of buildings or landscape features saved by historic preservation laws.

So when Sup. Scott Wiener called a hearing May 2 to discuss possible changes in the city’s historic preservation policies, it got a lot of neighborhood activists nervous. And for good reason. In a city where developers always seem to call the shots, where blocking a bad project is a difficult and expensive process, anything that removes a weapon from the quivers of the neighborhoods is potentially dangerous.

And coming in the wake of a 6-5 February vote at the board to appoint an unqualified, pro-development candidate to the Historic Preservation Commission, there’s a disturbing trend here. And the supervisors should be careful not to dismantle the protections that the 2008 ballot measure, Proposition J, put in place to protect the city’s history.

Wiener assures us he’s not out to gut preservation — he supported Prop. J and doesn’t think that the preservation movement has gone too far. “I just want to make sure that we are taking into account other policy priorities,” he said.

Wiener pointed to a few potential situations where historic preservation could get in the way of improvements to transportation and streetscapes. The street lights along Van Ness Avenue might have to be removed to make a bus rapid transit lane work — and some people might consider them historic structures. Pedestrian safety improvements along Dolores Street might require minor changes in the tree-lined median, which is not a landmark but potentially could be. He’s looking at changes in the City Planning Code provisions dealing with historic preservation — and potentially, with the way the Planning Department applies the California Environmental Quality Act.

There are always times when preservation conflicts with progress, and there will always be dubious uses of preservation law. But overall, in the course of many, many years, the pendulum has swung far in the other direction: historic preservation has been trumped again and again by the greed and political power of developers and the construction industry. And even well-meaning attempts to adjust city law will almost certainly become loopholes for more destruction.

Almost everything good in this city, from the cable cars to the Presidio, has been threatened with extinction at some point. Battling to save the city’s treasures is a full-time occupation.

There are ways to balance preservation against valid public policies like the need for affordable housing (almost never blocked by preservationists) and street improvements (one anti-bicycle character delayed new bike lanes for years, but not on the grounds of historic preservation). But there has to be a clear line: no changes or loopholes aimed at helping private, for-profit developers. Nothing that limits the ability of neighborhood groups to stop the destruction of city history.

The problem in San Francisco is not too much historic preservation, it’s that we allow too much to get lost. That’s why Wiener needs to tread lightly on this ground — and his colleagues have to make sure he doesn’t go too far. 

 

Boxed out

Maria Poblet
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5
Boxed out

rebeccab@sfbg.com

The Board of Supervisors is gearing up to revisit whether telecommunications giant AT&T should be permitted to install 726 new metal boxes on city sidewalks for a communications network upgrade, without completing an environmental impact review.

At an April 26 meeting, the board spent several tedious hours listening to concerns such as whether the boxes would attract graffiti or clutter the sidewalks, and debated the finer points of whether the project could legally be considered exempt, ultimately resolving to take up the issue again May 24.

Meanwhile, a small cadre of tech-savvy San Franciscans has seized on this debate as an opportunity to drum up enthusiasm for an alternate vision of a citywide communications future, one with faster connection speeds that wouldn’t necessarily be controlled by the AT&T and Comcast duopoly.

At the meeting, AT&T California President Ken McNeely, dressed in a sharp suit, trumpeted the company’s proposed upgrade, part of a new system called U-verse. “This is the largest single upgrade to the San Francisco local phone network in more than a century,” he said. “Our network will provide the next-generation IP technologies that San Francisco needs to provide if it wants to continue to attract the best and brightest in the region.”

Yet Rudy Rucker, bearded and clad in a camouflage T-shirt, sounded a different note. “The U.S. is No. 30 in the world in Internet speed,” he said. “The boxes are not the way to go. What we need to do is rework the entire infrastructure of how we do communications in the city. We’re relying on copper lines. We need to pull all those out, recycle the copper, and put in fiber-optic cable.” Rucker is a cofounder of MonkeyBrains, an independent Internet service provider (ISP) based in San Francisco.

AT&T’s U-verse upgrade would enable it to offer connection speeds three times faster than current service — but not nearly as fast as what fiber proponents envision. Several members of the tech industry interviewed by the Guardian cautioned that another AT&T upgrade might be necessary after less than a decade to keep pace with technological advancement. At that point, it’s anyone’s guess whether those boxes would continue to be useful. AT&T did not respond to a query from the Guardian.

SPEED FREAKS

When it comes to Internet speeds, the United States trails Asia and some European countries. “We’ve fallen from first place,” said Ashwin Navin, who founded several tech startups including a file-sharing company called BitTorrent. “It’s really put our software and technology industry at a disadvantage.”

According to a website that compares connection speeds using data compilation, California ranks 23rd in the nation, while San Francisco doesn’t even clear the top 30 cities nationwide, Navin noted.

Yet much faster connection speeds are possible — even commonplace — in countries such as Japan and Singapore. “Right now, the average download speed in San Francisco is something around eight megabits,” explained Dana Sniezko, who’s emerged as a tech activist since creating a website called SF Fiber, which calls for a neutral, open, affordable community fiber network. “What U-verse is going to offer is about three times that. Something like fiber can offer service that’s 1,000 megabits [called a gigabit], or even much larger than that. Fiber allows you to really have a huge capacity for the future.”

Put in practical terms, Sniezko said, the difference between a connection speed of eight megabits and a gigabit amounts to downloading a full-length feature film in 90 minutes, versus several seconds. And since fiber also can deliver faster upload speeds, it opens the door to new possibilities. “It lets individuals potentially come up with really innovative and creative ideas,” Sniezko said. “If you wanted to have your own streaming TV channel from your house, you could. Or anything, really.”

Fiber already exists under San Francisco city streets — but most places lack the direct connections to homes or businesses, so the capacity is not realized. The city’s Department of Technology and Information Services (DTIS) convened a study in 2007 for developing the infrastructure to create a full-fiber network, deeming fiber “the holy grail of communications networking: unlimited capacity, long life, and global reach.”

Since then, progress has been slow. AT&T’s new system would also be based on fiber, but information would still travel to homes or offices over copper phone lines, resulting in slower speeds than a direct connection could supply.

On a recent afternoon, MonkeyBrains cofounder Alex Menendez scrambled up a ladder leading from his small Potrero Hill office space to show off some rooftop antennas and laser devices. There was a clear view from the flat, sunny roof to the office building the laser was pointed at, many blocks away. Secured to a hand-built metal stand, the gadgets were part of the company’s high-speed Internet network, which counts KQED among its roughly 1,000 subscribers.

Menendez was explaining how his small company is able to use these microwave devices in combination with fiber-optic cables to provide high-speed Internet by leapfrogging from node to node throughout San Francisco.

Menendez said he didn’t feel strongly one way or another about AT&T’s metal boxes. “But it raises a more interesting issue: what’s the 50-year-down-the-line solution? There’s much better technology out there. It could be super-affordable, with a wide-open, massive amount of bandwidth.”

But, he added, it won’t happen without the support of local government.

MISSED CONNECTIONS

The City and County of San Francisco owns an underground fiber-optic network spanning more than 110 miles, used mostly for municipal and emergency purposes. AT&T has its own fiber — and with a history going back more than a century in San Francisco, it also has a lock on the market.

AT&T owns underground cables, copper phone lines, and rights-of-way, making it necessary for small market players to interface with the corporation and pay fees. This makes it difficult for local ISPs to compete on any meaningful scale. “They have the right to trench the street,” Menendez explained. “We don’t.”

Mendendez and others are looking at micro-trenching as a possible way around this. Last summer, Google hosted an event at its Mountain View headquarters called the Micro-trenching Olympics (“A very Google-y thing to do,” according to a company representative speaking in a YouTube video) to find out which contractor could best slice a one-inch wide, nine-inch deep trench in a parking lot and install fiber-optic cable inside. The idea behind micro-trenching is that it’s fast and minimally disruptive — and best of all, it doesn’t interfere with existing infrastructure, so there’s no need to pay a fee to AT&T, or any other company.

Some in the tech community are hoping it will signify a new and efficient way to link fiber-optic cable directly to homes and businesses, ultimately resulting in the kind of Internet speed that would let you download a movie in less than ten seconds. With micro-trenching, there would be no need for utility boxes.

Navin, Mendendez, and several others have talked up the idea of micro-trenching a small area in the Mission District to bring fiber-optic, high-speed Internet to an entire neighborhood. Yet their early conversations with the city’s Department of Public Works suggest that it may be a slow process. “They were like, ‘What is this?'” Menendez recounted. “There’s no established permitting process.”

Meanwhile, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu recently asked DTIS to examine the possibility of leasing excess capacity on city-owned dark-fiber infrastructure, which is currently in place but not being used. This could boost bandwidth for entities such as nonprofits, health care facilities, biotech companies, digital media companies, or universities, Chiu said, while bolstering city coffers. “There are many places in town that need a lot more bandwidth, and this is an easy way to provide it,” he said.

Sniezko noted that other cities have created open-access networks to deploy fiber. “This is really effective because it’s a lot like a public utility,” she explained. “The city or someone fills a pipe, and then anyone who wants to run information or service on that pipe can do so. They pay a leasing fee. This has worked in many places in Europe, and they actually do it in Utah. In many cases, it’s really cool — because it’s publicly owned and it’s neutral. There’s no prioritizing traffic for one thing over another, or limitation on who’s allowed to offer service on the network. It … creates some good public infrastructure, and also allows for competition, and it sort of revives the local ISP. Chiu’s proposal is a little bit in that vein, it sounds like. But he hasn’t released a lot of details on it yet, so we’re still looking.”

Visit www.sffiber.info for more info

 

Editorial: Preserving preservation in San Francisco

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0

 San Francisco has a terrible record preserving its past. In the past 50 years, so many parts of the city’s history have been demolished, bulldozed, flattened, or destroyed in the name of development. The number of landmarks that are gone vastly exceeds the number of buildings or landscape features saved by historic preservation laws.

So when Sup. Scott Wiener called a hearing May 2 to discuss possible changes in the city’s historic preservation policies, it got a lot of neighborhood activists nervous. And for good reason. In a city where developers always seem to call the shots, where blocking a bad project is a difficult and expensive process, anything that removes a weapon from the quivers of the neighborhoods is potentially dangerous.

And coming in the wake of a 6-5 February vote at the board to appoint an unqualified, pro-development candidate to the Historic Preservation Commission, there’s a disturbing trend here. And the supervisors should be careful not to dismantle the protections that the 2008 ballot measure, Proposition J, put in place to protect the city’s history.

Wiener assures us he’s not out to gut preservation — he supported Prop. J and doesn’t think that the preservation movement has gone too far. “I just want to make sure that we are taking into account other policy priorities,” he said.

Wiener pointed to a few potential situations where historic preservation could get in the way of improvements to transportation and streetscapes. The street lights along Van Ness Avenue might have to be removed to make a bus rapid transit lane work — and some people might consider them historic structures. Pedestrian safety improvements along Dolores Street might require minor changes in the tree-lined median, which is not a landmark but potentially could be. He’s looking at changes in the City Planning Code provisions dealing with historic preservation — and potentially, with the way the Planning Department applies the California Environmental Quality Act.

There are always times when preservation conflicts with progress, and there will always be dubious uses of preservation law. But overall, in the course of many, many years, the pendulum has swung far in the other direction: historic preservation has been trumped again and again by the greed and political power of developers and the construction industry. And even well-meaning attempts to adjust city law will almost certainly become loopholes for more destruction.

Almost everything good in this city, from the cable cars to the Presidio, has been threatened with extinction at some point. Battling to save the city’s treasures is a full-time occupation.

There are ways to balance preservation against valid public policies like the need for affordable housing (almost never blocked by preservationists) and street improvements (one anti-bicycle character delayed new bike lanes for years, but not on the grounds of historic preservation). But there has to be a clear line: no changes or loopholes aimed at helping private, for-profit developers. Nothing that limits the ability of neighborhood groups to stop the destruction of city history.

The problem in San Francisco is not too much historic preservation, it’s that we allow too much to get lost. That’s why Wiener needs to tread lightly on this ground — and his colleagues have to make sure he doesn’t go too far. 

Avalos and Chiu vie for bike vote at Sunday Streets

Sasha Cuttler
-
7
Avalos and Chiu vie for bike vote at Sunday Streets

If yesterday’s jam-packed Sunday Streets event in the Mission was any indication, only two mayoral candidates are vying for the votes of bicyclists, skaters, and strolling families who appreciate carfree streets: John Avalos and David Chiu. They were the only two candidates who showed up, and both had lots of supporters with signs to help campaign for them, with Avalos supporters enjoying a slight edge in overall numbers.

It’s a testament to the lackluster field of mayoral candidates this year that Avalos and Chiu were the only ones campaigning at such a popular, cool, and high visibility event. It also foreshadows what is likely to be a tough fight between the two sitting supervisors for a constituency they each need to win.

With more than 13,000 dues-paying members, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is the city’s largest grassroots political organization, an active and high-profile group of voters that both candidates have sought to stake their claims with.

Chiu often touts the fact that he doesn’t own a car and bikes regularly, he took a fact-finding trip to Amsterdam with bike advocates last year, and he sponsored legislation setting the policy goal of 20 percent of SF vehicle trips being by bike by 2020. Avalos has the strongest progressive credentials in the race, he sometimes rides his bike from the far-flung Excelsior District, and he has close and deep relationships with many bike-riding political activists.

The choice could determine where bike-advocacy ends and progressivism begins, particularly at a time when Chiu has sought to marginalize Avalos and what was once a solid progressive majority on the board. Chiu has won over some SFBC leaders and snagged a few early endorsements from the bike community (such as SFMTA board member Cheryl Brinkman, who spoke at Chiu’s campaign kickoff), but the endorsements are made by a vote of SFBC membership that is likely to be hotly contested.

Well, hotly contested by the only two candidates who seem to care about the bike vote.

The myth of the poor landlord

Zelda Bronstein
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112
The myth of the poor landlord

Early in my career at the Guardian, Bruce Brugmann, the editor, warned me about certain kinds of stories. “You know,” he said, “you can always find a welfare cheat.” It’s true: if you look hard enough, you can always find someone, somewhere, who’s getting an extra welfare check or scamming the system for a few bucks — and if that’s what you write about, you start to give the impression that everyone’s cheating on welfare, and that maybe we ought to crack down on the thieving bastards.


But the problem with welfare isn’t the handful of cheats — it’s the fact that most deserving people can’t get enough money to live on. And there are far more, bigger cheaters in the executive suites.


I thought about that when I read Elizabeth Lesly Stevens’ story in the Bay Citizen about poor Wayne Koniuk.


Listen:


By trade, Koniuk fashions artificial limbs for amputees. By habit, he fits prostheses at no charge for people who cannot pay. This has left him a less-than-wealthy man.


But he does have one substantial asset: a Divisadero Street building that his father, Walter, an orthotist, bought in 1970 and gave to his only son in 2001 so Wayne could run his business on the ground floor and Wayne’s adult children would always have a place to live.


For eternity,” Koniuk recalls his father saying, “my grandkids will always have a place they can go. No matter whatever happens, that building should stay in the family.”


A small problem has come up: Koniuk wants to evict his longtime tenant so his 24-year-old son can have the apartment. And since the tenant is over 60 — and has done nothing wrong, paid his rent on time and been well behaved for roughly 30 years — it’s not easy to get rid of him.


Koniuk, who himself lives in suburban Belmont, gave a half-interest in the building to his older son in 2007 so he could evict a tenant and move in himself. But under San Francisco’s extraordinarily pro-tenant housing laws, landlords can do this only once per building. 


I like that: extraordinarily pro-tenant housing laws.


The sob story of the poor landlord even registered with Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who has never once voted against single piece of pro-tenant legislation:


Vacancy rates are going up because owners have decided to take their units off the market,” said Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive member of the Board of Supervisors. He attributes that response to “peaking frustrations in dealing with the range of laws that protect tenants in San Francisco that make it difficult for small property owners to thrive.”


Well: Where do I start?


Maybe with the obvious: San Francisco is, overall, an extraordinarily tough place to be a tenant right now — and an extraordinarily excellent place to be a landlord. Between soaring rents and Prop. 13, virtually anyone who owns rental housing in this city is doing well. The pitiful tales of the poor broke landlord who can’t afford the upkeep are, frankly, mostly tales. I have heard hundreds of them over the years. In every single case, it turns out the landlord was a lot better off than he or she claimed.


There’s a good reason for that: San Francisco residential property is immensely valuable. The city’s only 49 square miles, most of it is built up, and almost nobody’s building new rental housing. Yeah, there are dips, but over the past 50 years, property values have gone in only one direction — and thanks to Prop. 13, if you bought the building more than a week ago, your taxes are less than what they ought to be.


There are, indeed, tenants who pay less than market rent, mostly people who have lived in their apartments for a long time and have been protected by rent control — and have somehow avoided the fate that awaits Koniak’s tenant, Robert Murphy, which is eviction.


Murphy pays “only” $525 a month, which seems like nothing compared to the $2,000 or more that Koniuk could probably get for the unit today. But keep in mind: That rent was set 30 years ago, when it was more than adequate to cover his share of the landlord’s mortgage, property taxes and maintenance. When Koniak’s dad bought the place, the building was worth a fraction of its current value. I’m pretty sure the mortgage payments didn’t go up (not as many variable-rate deals back then) — and the property taxes are essentially frozen under Prop. 13. Why should Murphy’s rent go up?


That’s the whole idea of rent control — not to deny landlords a reasonable rate of return on their investments, but to ensure that tenants aren’t punished if property values soar out of control.


And let’s remember: Koniuk didn’t pay a penny for the place — he inherited it from his dad. And he owns it free and clear; he confirmed to me when we talked that the original mortgage was paid off long ago. He complained about the cost of maintenance, but read the story carefully — he gave one of the units to his son, which was lovely but was also his choice. He could have been getting rent from that unit if he wanted more maintenance money. By moving your kids into a building, you become in essence a single-family homeowner. When I have to do maintenance on my house, it comes out of my pocket. That’s just how it is.


And Stevens’ line about Koniuk being a “less than wealthy man” seems a bit of a stretch. He owns a home in Belmont. He owns (free and clear) a building in the city worth well over $1 million. His mother owns another rental building just down the street, as well as a home in the Sunset. “Over the years,” he told me, “my dad bought up properties in the city, and fixed them up and sold them or gave them to his kids.”


And why does he need to evict Murphy? Because, he told me, his son, who is now 24, has moved out of the family home, and Koniuk is paying $1,200 a month to cover his son’s rent. If he could just get more money out of Murphy, he said, he wouldn’t evict him — “I could just use that money to pay my son’s rent someplace else.”


Well: Good for Mr. Koniuk, paying his 24-year-old son’s rent. Again, though, it’s a choice — my parents didn’t pay my rent when I was 24. Most parents don’t. I’m glad this not-wealthy landlord feels he can afford it — but that doesn’t mean a 30-year tenant, a retired union worker who is living on a fixed income, should lose his home.


There’s a fundamental misunderstanding in all of this about the relations between a tenant and landlord and how rental housing is, and should be, treated in San Francisco. I’ll give you my bias, first: I believe that in a city with a world-class housing crisis, and that’s San Francisco, housing should be regulated like a public utility. Landlords should be allowed a reasonable rate of return on their investment, but should not be allowed speculative profit — and should have no financial incentive to evict long-term tenants.


That’s impossible thanks to state law, which bars rent controls on vacant apartments and allows landlords to evict tenants whenever they want and sell the units as tenancies in common, or backdoor condos.


So the best we can do is use the regulatory powers that we have — and they ought to start with the notion (well established in law, and not just in San Francisco) that a tenant who pays rent on time and creates no nuisance has as much right to his unit as the landlord does. It ought to be okay for people to rent apartments and live in them for 30 or 40 years — and know, just as homeowners do, what the monthly nut will be when they retire.


I feel bad for Wayne Koniuk, who seems like a nice guy and a good human being. I feel much worse for his tenant, who is decidedly NOT rich and will have a huge burden paying market rent in this city right now. In fact, if he’s evicted, I don’t know where he’s ever going to find a place to live. He certainly won’t find a comparable place.


Now onto the claim that landlords are holding units vacant because they don’t like tenant-protection laws. First, if that’s true, in this city, and this market, right now, it ought to be a crime — it’s like a store withholding food and water from local residents after an earthquake because it might be more valuable later. The city has the right in a housing emergency to make laws strongly discouraging landlords from keeping housing vacant. The Rent Board ought to study this, and the supervisors ought to act. At the very least, the city ought to have a special tax on vacant residential units.


But I’m not entirely sure how much of that is really going on. Ted Gullicksen at the San Francisco Tenants Union told me it’s pretty rare: “That’s always been a big myth that the property owners put out.” he said. (I remember in the early days of rent control, when landlords insisted that nobody would ever build new rental housing in a city with rent control laws. So San Francisco exempted all new housing from rent control. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference; nobody builds rental housing anyway, because condos are more profitable.)


Stevens, who was very nice and polite when I called her and is a professional reporter who has done some excellent work, told me she didn’t want to talk to me for the record but would be glad to respond to comments on the Bay Citizen website. She pointed to a map of census data showing vacant buildings in San Francisco.


Gullicksen says his read of the data shows that most of the vacant units tend to be unsold condos; the highest concentration is in the Soma/South Beach area where the new condos have been built (and it’s no secret that a lot of them are vacant).


Check it out for yourself. The map function isn’t easy to use, but unless I’m reading the data wrong, the census tract with the most vacant housing is in the Mission Bay area, and the tracts that cover the Mission, the Haight and other tenant-heavy areas have a much smaller percentage of vacancies.


Now, there probably are landlords who keep units vacant; as I say, that ought to be a crime, but it isn’t. But it’s a bid odd for Ross Mirkarimi to talk about this situation the way Stevens quoted him, particularly his line about laws that “make it difficult for small property owners to thrive.”


Mirkarimi told me that he got involved in the case because Koniuk is “a constituent.” (So, by the way, is Murphy.) He reminded me that he’s been one of the best pro-tenant votes on the board (absolutely true). And he told me, for the record, very clearly, that he does NOT favor any relaxation of tenant laws or changes in the restrictions on owner-move-in evictions. “I would never want to change the protections for tenants against evictions,” he said.


I reminded him of the bottom line: Small property owners in San Francisco ARE thriving. The vast majority are doing far better financially than their tenants. This myth of the poor starving property owner with the rich greedy tenants is, frankly, so much horsepucky it’s hard to hear it without screaming.


In the comments section of the story, Stevens goes further on her interview with Mirkarimi:


Mr. Koniuk showed Mr. Mirkarimi the letter demanding $70,000. Mr. Koniuk had offered $45,000. (TBC also has a copy of the letter, and I spoke with the attorney who wrote it). When speaking with me, Mr. Mirkarimi said that “my jaw dropped” when he read the letter. “That letter is negotiated extortion, legitimized,” he said, by the tenant/landlord laws as they have evolved in SF. The Koniuk episode “revealed how greed or special interest can shift [power] to the other [tenant] side.”


Mirkarimi and I went back and forth on this for a while, and in the end, he told me that the statements in the Bay Citizen story “do not reflect my views or my record.” I think that’s true; I think he just got caught up in this one story of this one guy with a situation that isn’t at all the way it looks at first.


I mean, “extortion?” Seriously? What’s wrong with Murphy asking for $70,000 to move out? I don’t think that’s anywhere near enough. As another commenter noted:


You portray the tenant as “greedy” for asking for $70k but is it fair to do so without also stating the fair market value of the property? $70k on a building worth 2 million doesn’t sound so “greedy” specifically when the displaced tenant has to try to find a equivalent unit at market rate; just a guess but that cost per month I’d estimate at close to $3,000/month… do the math $70/3= 2 years at the higher rent. Doesn’t appear so “greedy”, to me.


Here’s what’s fair: Koniuk wants Murphy out so he can move in his son (who presumably won’t be paying rent at all). Fine: he should offer his tenant enough money to rent a comparable apartment in the city for the rest of his life. That’s what Murphy has now — the right to live in his apartment, at a controlled rent, until he dies. And he has a legal, moral and public-policy right to stay there.


The way I see it, Koniuk wants to buy from Murphy the right to occupy that apartment. He wants to buy the unit for his son. He ought to pay fair market value — enough to allow Murphy to buy or rent a similar place at a similar monthly payment.


The commenters who says that’s not fair because Koniuk “owns” the building


Don’t forget Murphy does not OWN the building, he pays for the privilege to live there; he has no right to it otherwise.


are missing a fundamental point. Ownership of residential property in San Francisco is not a single, simple right. It’s a bundle of rights and restrictions. I, for example, own a house in Bernal Heights. I do not own the right to demolish it and replace it with a gas station. (In fact, I don’t have the right to demolish it at all unless I can make a very good case for doing so.) I don’t have the right to drill for oil under the house. I don’t have the right to open a dog kennel in the house. I don’t have the right to add a second unit in the basement and rent it out.


If you buy, or inherit, a building with a longtime tenant in it, your rights as an owner are restricted. You don’t have the right to evict that person or raise the rent except under very limited circumstances. Murphy’s right to live in that house is every bit as solid as the rights of my neighbors not to see my house torn down and replaced with a Burger King.


That’s been a basic principle of real property law for a long time now. Some libertarians don’t like it, but most of society has come to accept it.


It doesn’t matter what Koniuk’s dad wanted; he left his son a building with a tenant in it, and thus he left a property with use restrictions. His dad could have gone to his grave dreaming that his son would turn the place into an amusement park, but that wasn’t going to happen either.


If all of this makes it tough on the poor landlords, I’m sorry: they knew, or should have know, the rules when they got into the landlord business. And virtually all of them can get out easily by selling the building — at a profit — to somebody else who realizes that residential property in San Francisco is, and has always been, an excellent financial investment.


PS: Randy Shaw at Beyond Chron really went after Mirkarimi for his comments, which I understand — Shaw’s been a tenant lawyer all his life and he has every right to criticize an elected official who makes what appear to be anti-tenant comments. What disturbed me is that Shaw never called Mirkarimi for comment; that’s just basic journalistic practice (and always a good idea). I asked him why he didn’t call; my email said:


I have no complaint with what you wrote; as a longtime tenant advocate you have every right (and responsibility) to be critical of a politician who makes statements that appear to run counter to the tenant agenda. I just think it’s fair to call people before you go after them; sometimes, as you well know, quotes that appear in news accounts are incomplete or inaccurate. That’s why I always try to check before I write.


His response:


I see the issue very differently and disagree with your premise.


Which is really, really weak. Pick up the phone, Randy. It’s really not that hard.

Guardian poll: dogs and the next mayor

Zelda Bronstein
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108
Guardian poll: dogs and the next mayor

The battle over dogs at Fort Funston, Crissy Field and Ocean Beach is now big news at City Hall. The supervisors — or most of them — are worried that a ban on off-leash dog walking in some GGNRA parks would drive more dogs into city parks (likely). But the Sierra Club folks are determined not to let the dogs keep running free because they threaten the endangered plants and animals. (I usually keep my dog on a leash at Ocean Beach because I know how badly she wants to disturb the mating habits of the Snowy Plover, but not all dogs have that burning desire.)


What fascinates me is how big a deal this has become in the mayor’s race. The Sierra Club is a significant endorsement in San Francisco — and from what I’m hearing from my sources in the club, the decision who to back for mayor could well rest not on energy issues, not on the future of clean public power, not on park privatization  … but on dogs. Supervisor John Avalos has great environmental credentials. Sup. David Chiu can make a case for the Sierra Club nod. But both of them may be out of the running — because they voted in favor of asking GGNRA to back off a bit on the leash rules.


So here’s your chance: Dogs in the park or not?


 





Free polls from Go2poll.com

 

Ross for boss (of the sheriff’s department)

Mary Magee
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3
Ross for boss (of the sheriff’s department)

City Hall’s steps were awash in multi-lingual black and yellow “Ross Mirkarimi for Sherrif” signs at noon today, as Mirkarimi supporters watched Sheriff Mike Hennessey, who is stepping down after 31 years of service and eight elections, endorse Sup. Mirkarimi as the next sheriff.  “New Leadership for a Safe San Francisco” was printed on the English version of the signs that Mirkarimi’s supporters carried. They included former Mayor Art Agnos, Sups. David Campos and Eric Mar, Tim Paulson of the Labor Council, Debra Walker, Linda Richardson, Sharen Hewitt, Terry Anders, and Mirkarimi’s partner Eliana Lopez and their almost two-year old son Theo. And everyone had plenty of great things to say about outgoing sheriff Hennessey and sheriff candidate Mirkarimi. And Hennessey even pinned a shiny toy sheriff’s badge onto the T-shirt of Mirkarimi’s son Theo, making him the happiest kid in town. At least for the day.

Campos kicked off the event by honoring Hennessey as the “most progressive and most effective sheriff in the country.”
“Mike Hennessey is also my neighbor in District 9. I see him taking out the trash so I know he’s a good neighbor,” Campos joked, as he listed the many achievements in Hennessey’s long career as an elected official in San Francisco. These achievements included Hennessey’s pioneering innovations in criminal justice and culminated in his decision to blow the whistle in 2010 on the federal government’s plan to activate its controversial Secure Communities program in San Francisco—without telling the public.
“He’s not afraid to stand up for what’s right,” Campos said.

‘This is the time for me to move on,” Hennessey announced, as he laid out his reasons for endorsing Mirkarimi as Sheriff, over other candidates in the field.
Hennessey described the Sheriff’s Department as a “large enterprise” that has over 1,000 employees, a $150 million budget and whose jail houses an average population of 2,000 folks in custody, on a daily basis.
“It’s not something that can be handled lightly,” Hennessey said. “That’s why I’m here to endorse Ross Mirkarimi as the next sheriff.”

Hennessey listed the many endeavors that he and Mirkarimi have worked closely on, including a number of criminal justice issues, and he cited Mirkarimi’s extensive law enforcement background, his significant legislative accomplishments in the areas of criminal justice and public safety, and his ability to find innovative solutions and overcome obstacles to progress, as reasons to support Mirkarimi.

Hennessey observed that criminal justice is “one of the thornier issues” that members of the Board of Supervisors are often asked to get involved in, but often duck.”But Ross has not shied away from working on them,” Hennessey said, citing Mirkarimi’s involvement in shaping the “No Violence Alliance Project” and his leadership in creating the Safe Communities Re-entry Council.

Hennessey also noted that in face of AB 109, the Governor’s plan to transfer state inmates to county jails, “it’s vitally important to have person in charge of sheriff’s office that understands these alliances and can make them work more effectively.”

Hennessey concluded by observing that the Sherrif’s Department has to deal with a lot of bureaucracy, so it’s important to understand how the Board, the budget process and other city departments, including the District Attorney’s office and the police, work.
‘And that’s why I’m endorsing Ross as Sheriff,” Hennessey said

Then it was the turn of Mirkarimi, who graduated from the San Francisco Police Academy, did Naval Reserve training and worked for more than 8 years as an investigator for the District Attorney’s office, to speak.

“I have never been at a loss for words,” Mirkarimi acknowledged, as he launched into a speech that began by thanking everyone for showing up at short notice “for one of the most important occasions of my political career.”

Mirkarimi did a great job of giving Hennessey the praise he deserves.
“He is a living legend,” Mirkarimi said. “It’s completely impossible to fill his shoes.”
Citing Hennessey’s integrity and his ability to innovate, Mirkarimi warned that, “Maybe it’s come to the point where we have taken him for granted. He’s the longest serving elected official in the history of San Francisco, and he’s probably the most understated.”

“And the most important endorsement in this race is that of Mike Hennessey,” Mirkarimi added, as he gave Hennessey his commitment “to build upon your legacy as effectively as possible.”

Mirkarimi cited some of the most immediate and serious challenges that face the next sheriff. These include AB 109, which Gov. Jerry Brown just signed, which. Mirkarimi said, threatens to increase the reentry prisoner level by 30 percent in California. “It will take creative ingenuity and resources to make sure we are effective in taking care of this population,” he said.

Mirkarimi also touched on the rising number of veterans that are ending up in the prison system, talked more about the No Violence Alliance Project, and suggested that certified deputy sheriffs could help serve warrants, transfer prisoners, and patrol Muni, “when the police department finds itself understaffed” so as to ensure that San Francisco is safe.

“For every four people arrested and jailed in San Francisco, three out of four are repeat offenders in a three-year period,” Mirkarimi warned, by way of explaining why he wants to advance a more collaborative spirit between SPPD and the Sheriff’s department.

Mirkarimi also noted that one out of every 15 African American males are in jail, at any time in the year, compared to I out of 300 males who are not black or brown. “So, we must step up our game in dealing with poverty,” he said, as he recommended increased access to job training and good jobs, “so work doesn’t become a seasonal hope but a permanent job.” He also made the connections between a lack of good housing, childcare, and schools and a rise in poverty, crime and recidivism.

Mirkarimi concluded by crediting Hennessey for “walking that fine pirouette” between upholding the principles of public safety and understanding the power of redemption at the same time.

I asked Sheriff Mike Hennessey what he considers to be the biggest challenges of running for sheriff/
“Letting people know what you are going to do, and what your issues are,” Hennessey said, noting that San Francisco has an intelligent, issues-driven electorate.

And Mirkarimi’s supporters weren’t shy about letting folks know the issues that the current D5 Supervisor has helped them with, over the years.

“Ross, as a supervisor and me, as someone who comes from a community of color, we know the habits that ex-offenders can bring with them, if there are no safety nets,” said Terry Anders who sits with Mirkarimi on the Safe Communities Reentry Council. “And I believe in what Ross stands for and the integrity of his person. He’s one of the first people to show up when there are crimes and victims, and he attends basketball games and boxing matches.”

Paulette Brown, whose son Aubrey Abraska Jr, was murdered in August 2006, but whose killers have still not been brought to justice.
“We shouldn’t have to run and leave our families, we should be protected,” Brown said. “Ross is my district supervisor and if he can get in, and do something about crime and solve unsolved homicides, then I’m for him. Maybe if he gets in, he’ll have more pull to do something about these unresolved cases.”

And then it was back to work, which for Mirkarimi now includes the somewhat daunting task of trying to raise money in an election year that also includes a mayor’s race, but does not include the help of public financing, at least not for the sherrif’s race….

‘

The case against consolidation

Andrew Lam
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0
The case against consolidation

sarah@sfbg.com

With officials predicting that San Francisco will spend $500 million annually on health care costs for city employees and retirees, the Board of Supervisors Government Audit and Oversight Committee held an April 28 hearing to analyze why hospitals costs are higher in Northern California than Southern California, and why costs have escalated in the last decade.

A panel of experts outlined a list of cost drivers and identified hospital consolidation as the major culprit — a finding that fueled concerns that costs will skyrocket once Sutter Health, which operates the California Pacific Medical Center that took over St Luke’s in 2005, builds a 555-bed hospital on Cathedral Hill. The board will consider approving the project as soon as this summer.

Ellen Shaffer, codirector of the Center for Policy Analysis, said that the city’s recently approved Health Care Services Master Plan (“Critical Care,” 11/23/10) provides San Francisco with leverage to collect and analyze data and make informed health choices.

Shaffer noted that since 1960, when there were 26 hospitals in San Francisco, facilities consolidated so frequently that by 1990, only 12 hospitals remained. And by 1998, the three largest hospital networks controlled 43 percent of hospital beds — compared to 18 percent just four years earlier.

“Today in San Francisco, the most expensive of the northern counties hospitals get $7,349 per patient per day on average,” she said. “In Los Angeles County, the figure is $4,389.”

David Hopkins, a senior advisor at the Pacific Business Group on Health, said that Sutter Health, which reported a 30 percent increase in net income in 2010, already controls 44 percent of hospital beds in San Francisco. Catholic Healthcare West controls 28 percent, and UCSF controls 26 percent. “Insurance companies say Sutter’s size and dominant position give it an upper hand in contract negotiations,” Hopkins observed.

Healthcare planning and policy consultant Lucy Johns said technology is another key cost driver. “It’s a medical arms race,” Johns said. “Every hospital wants the latest everything.”

Jane Sandoval, a registered nurse at St Luke’s, said that what residents and workers need is access to affordable healthcare, not luxury care at overpriced rates.

“We’d rather have enough staff and the ability to care for all patients than work in a facility that’s likened to a five-star hotel,” Sandoval said. She noted that State Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones filed suit April 13 to intervene on behalf of the plaintiff in a whistleblower suit against Sutter Health, which has been accused of fraudulently charging insurers millions of dollars for anesthesia services that either weren’t provided or were billed higher than typical rates.

Anne McLeod, senior vice president of health policy for the California Hospital Association, an industry trade group, claimed that Northern California’s higher hospital prices are primarily due to higher labor and living costs in the Bay Area. “Wages are a huge component of hospital costs, and they represent the fastest growing component of costs,” she said.

But Glenn Melnick, a professor of health care finance at the University of Southern California, said that even if a hospital was airlifted from Los Angeles to San Francisco, its costs would still be 38 percent higher after adjusting for local differences. “When hospitals consolidate into large systems that dominate a specific region, that hospital system has the power to demand contracts from health plans that include high reimbursement rates for their services and limit the ability of health plans to offer low-cost products and share the data consumers need to compare costs across providers,” Melnick said

Sup. David Campos, who called for the hospital costs hearing, observed that the cost of creating jobs includes health care benefits. “So to the extent that things like hospital consolidation are increasing costs, the hospitals themselves are implicated,” he said.

But CPMC media relations manager Kevin McCormack noted that CPMC/Sutter has invested more than $7 billion since 2000 on technology, facility construction, and improvements to address medical needs and state seismic safety requirements.

“Sutter Health appreciates its role in ensuring that health care is affordable. And we realize that holding the line on prices without compromising quality will require additional cost reductions,” McCormack said. “To this end, doctors and nurses and support staff throughout our Sutter Health network are working aggressively to substantially reduce expenses.”

He denied that Sutter had engaged in inappropriate anesthesia billing practices. “The lawsuit paints a false and inaccurate picture,” McCormack said.

He also said that plenty of competition remains in Northern California. “The decision by the California Public Employees Retirement System in 2004 to shift a significant number of members away from Sutter-affiliated hospitals to other providers demonstrates there’s plenty of healthy competition,” McCormack said.

But Campos said the hearing clarified that, while there are different factors why costs are going up, one of the most important is hospital consolidation. “We need to ensure that we understand that, even in face of higher labor and cost of living costs, hospital costs in Northern California are still 30 percent higher than Southern California,” Campos said.

Noting that CalPERS excluded Sutter from its network, Campos added: “We need to follow suit in terms of saying that we’re only going to do business with hospitals that are responsive to our concerns and follow best practices.”

 

Canine conflict

Andrew Lam
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34
Canine conflict

news@sfbg.com

San Francisco enjoys proximity to natural beauty and recreation on a scale unlike any other major urban area in the country. The 75,000-acre Golden Gate National Recreation Area offers city dwellers almost 60 miles of rugged coastline, forested hiking trails, and scenic beaches to enjoy. In most cases, people can bring their dogs.

While the city is notoriously difficult to raise human children in, four-legged friends flourish in an environment that celebrates their existence. With a multitude of dog-friendly parks, pet hotels, and ubiquitous doggie boutiques to accommodate the estimated 120,000 dogs that call San Francisco home, the canines and their companions form their own political constituency.

So it’s only natural that GGNRA’s Draft Dog Management Plan, which restricts dog walking in the park, has the pet set howling. The plan would limit off-leash dogs to 21 different areas of the park, including some of the most popular places such as Crissy Field, Fort Funston, and Ocean Beach, and ban dogs from some areas, like Muir Beach, where they have long been welcome.

The 2,400-page plan has been in the works since 2002, created out of the need to uphold the agency’s duty to protect the sensitive wildlife and plant species in the park while accommodating a growing population of visitors. Since its unveiling in January, thousands have rallied against it, filing so many comments to the National Park Service that it has extended the public comment period until May 30.

Currently, dogs are allowed off-leash in small fraction of the GGNRA lands and on-leash throughout most of the park. The proposed plan offers six alternatives for each of the 21 areas examined, all strengthening existing — but often ignored — leashing policies and reducing areas where dogs are allowed to roam tether-free.

“This is overly restrictive and unrealistic,” said Martha Walters, chair of the Crissy Field Dog Group. “There are certainly more management measures that can be taken with signage and educational outreach to protect these environments without having to impose this plan.”

Opposition has been widespread among pet owners and groups like the SPCA and Animal Care and Control. The Board of Supervisors voted 10-1 on April 26 to adopt a resolution formally opposing the plan, although the city has no jurisdiction over the area.

“It’s one thing to make sure we protect endangered species, but this plan doesn’t just do that,” said District 8 Sup. Scott Wiener, who authored the resolution. “This is a much more extreme proposal that is a significant restriction to dogs.”

Opponents fear the plan will force more dogs into city parks where overcrowding and aggressive behavior could become problems. Dog owners and advocates stress that responsible dog guardianship can be compatible with environmental stewardship, and that the NPS should better enforce the pet policy already in place.

“This is not right for our community,” said Jennifer Scarlett, codirector of the SPCA. “I would never want to wish harm on any wildlife, but it’s a piece of land stuck in one of the most densely populated cities in the country.”

But the GGNRA is still part of NPS, although many existing national environmental policies have largely been ignored here.

“We don’t get to choose whether or not to fulfill federal mandates,” said Alexandra Picavet, public affairs specialist for the GGNRA.

The GGNRA allows leashed dogs in more places than any other national park, and is the only park in the entire NPS system that allows off-leash dogs. It achieved National Park status in 1972, but its unique position as the backyard of a major city caused it to bend the rules when it came to letting the dogs out.

“The policy was adopted by the superintendent at the time of the GGNRA, and even that wasn’t really enforced,” GGNRA spokesperson Howard Levitt told us. “This was relatively early in the parks history, and in the early days, we didn’t really understand the importance of natural resources and history in the park.”

According to NPS, GGNRA is home to more threatened and endangered species than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, Death Valley, and Kings Canyon national parks combined. It has a higher concentration of sensitive species than all but four of the 394 parks in the system.

The new pet plan would not be implemented until late 2012, after public comment is taken and the plan is revised. For six to 12 months, monitoring areas to measure compliance with leash laws will be conducted. If 75 percent of users do not comply, further restrictions will be made.

Current regulations are broken everyday at Ocean Bean and Fort Funston. Like the lax marijuana laws that are synonymous with San Francisco, leash laws have historically been considered more of a suggestion than a rule. At Crissy Field, one of the most popular recreation spaces for off-leash dogs, NPS observed dog owners disobeying the guidelines more than 60 percent of the time.

Many people do not realize that the four-mile stretch of Ocean Beach slated for restriction currently only allows dogs from May to June, or that the Great Meadow of Upper Fort Mason has never allowed the many off leash dogs seen there every day. Dog advocates say better signage about existing rules would help.

“To me, they went this way instead of having any intermediate steps in current policy and off leash areas,” said Rebecca Katz, director of the Animal Care and Control. “I am not supportive of the alternative. This isn’t like any other national park, and we don’t want it to be.”

On a recent visit to Fort Funston, it was evident that the park was, as some environmentalists call it, a de facto off-leash area. Dozens of dogs, most off leash, romped in the windy dunes, far outnumbering dog owners and professional dog walkers. Most dogs happily jumped from car to sand without ever being put on a leash.

Longtime San Francisco resident Candy Deboer and her giant schnauzer, Leila, have been coming to the park for years after finding city parks unsatisfactory.

“Golden Gate Park? I’ve tried that and I ended up stepping over hypodermic needles,” Deboer said. “Plus, I have a dog that loves junkie poop. I grew up camping, hiking, and fishing. I know how to preserve wildlife and take care of a park.”

Many said closing Fort Funston and Ocean Beach in March during tsunami warnings resulted in horribly crowded dog parks, and felt that GGNRA’s plan would deliver more of the same.

“We are using the parks the way they are supposed to be used,” said San Francisco resident Willa Hagerty, who also spoke at some of the hearings on the plan. “If we are doing something wrong, let us know with signs or fences.”

For some, walking dogs isn’t just a means of enjoying the outdoors, it’s a source of income. “The plan would really affect a lot of jobs like mine,” said SF resident and dog walker Josh Boutelle, who impressively handled eight different dogs while on a run for SF Pup Prep. “There will be more incidents in parks when there is crowding.”

Although everyone surveyed at Fort Funston stridently opposed the plan, most supported regulations in some form, from limiting the number of dogs professional walkers can handle to requiring leashes in some parts of the park. Sup. Wiener is also in the process of devising regulations for dog walking in city parks.

But the GGNRA plan has pitted environmentalists against dog advocates. The Sierra Club and Golden Gate Audubon Society support the plan and even argue that more restrictions are needed than proposed. Those groups, along with six other organizations including the California Native Plant Society and Nature in the City, wrote a letter to the Board of Supervisors April 8 opposing Wiener’s resolution.

“The GGNRA was created in part to bring a national park-caliber experience to all Bay Area residents and visitors, not to expand recreation opportunities for dog owners,” the letter states. “Contrary to what some are saying, the proposed plan is not about keeping dogs out of the GGNRA. Rather, it is about inviting dogs into the park in a manner that is sustainable and fair to all park users.”

The Sierra Club has even used the dog debate as a big factor for its mayoral endorsement. Sen. Leland Yee has spoken in support of the plan, while mayoral candidates Sup. John Avalos and Board President David Chiu voted to oppose it.

“I’m concerned that the Sierra Club is going to use a microscope on a tiny, insignificant measure to make a decision on mayoral endorsement,” Avalos told us. “The dog policy is insignificant compared to so many other environmental issues.”

Others disagree. Michael Lynes, director of the Golden Gate Audubon society, thought Wiener’s resolution was hasty and did a disservice to the years of work NPS has put into the plan.

“They keep talking about the impacts to the city, while here they are trying to do something that impacts the National Park,” Lynes said. “The resolution is really strange. It opposes the Park Service’s effort to regulate land in a way that is sustainable and equitable.”

Opponents say evidence of dog-induced damage to wildlife and humans is unclear, but the plan gives hundreds of pages of studies and incident reports. In 2008, nearly 900 dog-related incidents were reported, including attacks on vulnerable populations such as young children, seniors, and, disabled people. In 2005, Guide Dogs for the Blind found that 89 percent of their graduates had guide dogs interfered with by off leash dogs.

Plus, as difficult as it may be for dog lovers to fathom, not everyone wants to be around dogs when enjoying the outdoors. Currently, dogs are allowed on all but one major trail in the GGRNA, and China Beach in the Presidio is the only beach where people can have a dog-free experience.

“At the end of the day,” Lynes said, “people don’t want to change their behavior.”

 

Historic preservation debate raises a slew of questions

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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4
Historic preservation debate raises a slew of questions

The Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee spent several hours yesterday hearing from city officials and members of the public on the hot-button issue of historic preservation. The informational hearing was called by Sup. Scott Wiener, who framed it as a discussion about “the impact of historic preservation policies on other major public policy goals and the need to adopt legislation to ensure that the policies are achieved” — a statement that raised alarm bells among historic preservationists and sent members of that community out in droves to defend preservationist efforts and to urge Wiener not to weaken any of the city’s existing policies.

Wiener raised concerns about the time and expense associated with environmental impact reviews (EIR) that could be triggered if a property falls within an historic district, saying, “there’s a sense that the cost is rather high, and the time it takes is rather high,” and added, “a lot of times we order an EIR, and that’s the end of the project.” He also raised questions about whether historic preservation efforts placed too many constraints on upgrading transit-oriented neighborhoods, parks, and libraries.

While Wiener had opened the debate in order to highlight problems associated with historic preservation policies, preservationists packed the room to defend their efforts. “I am dismayed that the importance of historic preservation is being challenged,” June Osterberg noted during public comment. She charged that San Francisco had gone from being “a paradise for residents to a developers’ paradise, to my despair. Please do not diminish the importance of what’s left in San Francisco.”

Arthur Levy noted, “If you go back to 1967 [when policies were first created] you will see that preservation has not thwarted or trumped development” in the decades since. “There’s nothing the matter systematically,” he added.

Wiener seemed surprised by some of the strong reactions. “They thought I was going to start knocking down the Golden Gate Bridge and the painted ladies,” he told the Guardian. He insisted that while he supported historic preservation, he wanted to have a conversation about balancing it with other policy goals, since “it’s an issue that has a lot of pent-up demand.”

The Historic Preservation Commission (HPC), created in 2008 with voter approval of Proposition J, has drawn criticism from members of the development community who’ve suggested that the panel would “shrink wrap” the city, stifling new building projects at a time when unemployment is particularly high in the construction sector. Yet Mike Buhler, executive director of San Francisco Architectural Heritage, noted that the city’s Historic Preservation Commission had given the green light to all but one project proposal that came before the it, suggesting that fears of the HPC freezing out potential development were unfounded.

Asked after the hearing how he reacted to those sending the message that everything was fine, Wiener noted, “In some respects, things are not fine,” citing the lengthy historic review process and lack of clarity on certain requirements.

Meanwhile, Sup. Malia Cohen took a different tack in her line of questioning on this issue. She wanted to know if teams of surveyors who conduct neighborhood assessments for designating historic districts reflected the ethnic diversity of the city, and whether historic context statements generated by those surveys took into account the myriad cultural and ethnic histories in a given neighborhood.

Planning officials assured Cohen that the surveyors were ethnically diverse, and community outreach was done in multiple languages. But one man who spoke during public comment charged that the planning department was “tone deaf” when it came to responding to concerns raised by the African American community, and that efforts to designate certain properties as historic, such as Sam Jordan’s Bar on Third Street in the Bayveiw, had “hit roadblocks.”

Speaking to the Guardian after the hearing, Cohen said she’d been hoping to highlight the omission of certain cultural perspectives when it came to decision-making about which properties are deemed historic. Cohen spoke about the contributions of Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, and African-American communities to the city’s historic landscape.

“And the Native Americans — they’re never included in the conversation,” she said, referencing a Shellmound on Bayview Hill leftover from an era when the Ohlone resided on the San Francisco peninsula. She said she was concerned that cultural contributions may not be reflected in the neighborhood surveys, or in which buildings are ultimately designated. “It’s systemic,” she noted.

Muni strike vote stems from “gigantic mistrust” of the MTA

Sasha Cuttler
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7
Muni strike vote stems from “gigantic mistrust” of the MTA

At a time when public employee unions are being demonized, downsized, and degraded by conservatives and much of the general public, it was a bold gesture for Muni drivers to recently authorize their Transportation Workers Union Local 250A to defy city law and go on strike anyway. But following through on that threat and shutting down Muni may only turn the public even more strongly against that union.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu said a Muni strike would be “a significant mistake” that he’s trying to avert, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera has issued a statement reminding the public and Muni workers that strikes are banned in the union contact and the City Charter and “we will take appropriate legal recourse.”

But the union’s Secretary-Treasurer Walter Scott told us the strike authorization vote was a result of the “gigantic mistrust” by Muni workers of their Municipal Transportation Agency bosses. “They wanted a strike authorization vote,” he said, which “shows that the membership is behind us” as union leaders negotiate a new contract in the wake of November’s Prop. G, which ended the union’s pay guarantees.

Among the recent factors that Scott said have led Muni workers to doubt that the agency is negotiating in good faith were the MTA’s unilateral decisions to withhold Health Care Trust Fund money that had gone to drivers in previous years and the new requirement that drivers bring in doctors’ notes if they call in sick, as well as the agency’s decision to hire public relations specialist Charlie Goodyear to publicize developments in the ongoing negotiations.

But Goodyear said those issues are diversions that haven’t been raised in the current negotiations, that the MTA was acting under authority it has under the charter, and that “we hope that the good work that’s been going on for five or six weeks continues” and the two sides reach an agreement on a new contract.

Scott also expressed hope that the two sides will reach a deal. “Nobody wants to strike, and we’re trying our damnedest to find a happy median in these negotiations,” he said.

As for the right of the drivers to strike, Scott agrees that the current contract prohibits it, but he noted that the contract expires on June 30 and that “on July 1, we have no contract. That’s went the legality [of a strike] comes into question.”

Herrera has noted that the City Charter also declares that “strikes by City employees are not in the public interest,” going on to note that “said employees shall be dismissed.” But Scott says Muni employees have already been so vilified by city officials and the local press that calling a strike wouldn’t hurt their standing with the public much more: “If I’m shot dead and someone stabs me, it doesn’t make that much of a difference.”

Earth Day in City Hall … on Wells Fargo’s dime

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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1

Who was lucky enough to get treated to Mayor Ed Lee’s Earth Day Breakfast in City Hall, with the city’s top politicos and a smattering of high-profile San Franciscans? After noticing that the Board of Supervisors had approved a grant of $12,000 from Wells Fargo a few weeks ago to sponsor the event, the Guardian contacted the Mayor’s Office to ask for the guest list. The response came from the city’s Department of the Environment, which accepted the donation and organized the affair.

The 472-person invite list (we don’t know how many actually attended) included prominent figures such as Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, billionaire investor Warren Hellman, and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. All 11 members of the Board of Supervisors were invited, too, as were mayoral hopefuls City Attorney Dennis Herrera, Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, and state Sen. Leland Yee.
 
Invitations were extended to some truly green organizations, too, such as Green for All, Save the Bay, Rainforest Action Network, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, the Sierra Club, the Apollo Alliance, Greenaction, and others.

And many seats were reserved for the corporate sector. A total of nine representatives of Pacific Gas & Electric Co. were on the list. There were seven from Cisco, several from consulting and design firm CH2MHill, and a couple representatives from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill — the firm that’s doing the Parkmerced overhaul and which was tapped to envision waterfront venues for the America’s Cup. 

Seven representatives — including the CEO — were invited from Recology, which is in the midst of a debate over its high-stakes, $275 million no-bid garbage contract with the city.

According to Mark Westlund of the Department of the Environment, only half of the Wells Fargo grant went toward the mayor’s Earth Day Breakfast, “the remainder to a series of community events held in the Department’s EcoCenter lobby.” The other sponsors included Blue Shield of California ($2,000); CH2MHill; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; United Airlines; Environmental Science Associates ($4,000); Levi Strauss & Co.; Cisco ($6,000) and Starbucks — which provided BPA-free travel mugs (double green points!).

It’s nice that San Francisco taxpayers didn’t have to shell out the $18,000 for all these people to celebrate Earth Day together. But at an event such as this, with so many millions of dollars in city contracts and major development projects flying around (not to mention the half a dozen or so people in need of campaign contributions), you can bet they weren’t all talking to one another about saving the planet.

This place

Andrew Lam
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0
This place

arts@sfbg.com

LIT Begun in part as a series of maps accompanying public lectures, Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California Press, 167 pages, $24.95) is a remarkable act of gathering, one that presents myriad versions and visions of San Francisco and its surrounding areas that can inform a reader’s experience.

Infinite City was recently selected by the Northern California Independent Booksellers as one of its 2011 winners. Duality is a fundamental aspect of the book’s breadth and depth and sense of sharply critical appreciation — structurally, Solnit pairs distinct maps with corresponding chapter-length essays. In keeping with that characteristic, and also with the book’s group spirit (though admittedly on a much smaller and less intensive scale), I asked different Guardian contributors to share appraisals of one, or in most cases two, of the 22 sections. The result provides just a hint of what can be found within Infinite City. (Johnny Ray Huston)

MAP 3. “Cinema City: Muybridge Inventing Movies, Hitchcock Making Vertigo“

The map for this chapter tracks the San Francisco life of Eadweard (sic) Muybridge, alongside landmarks from Alfred Hitchcock’s Bay Area masterpiece Vertigo. In “The Eyes of the Gods,” Solnit, who won the National Book Critics Circle award for her 2003 Muybridge bio River of Shadows, writes of the 19th century artist’s breakthrough high-speed photography, “It was as though the ice of frozen photographic time had broken free into a river of images.”

Many such rivers flowed all over this fair city when Vertigo premiered at the Stage Door Theatre at 420 Mason St. on May 9, 1958. Alas, only 10 of the more than 60 single-screen venues extant that year, all demarcated on Shizue Seigel’s fine map, are still functioning. Solnit rightly describes the shift to watching films on various digital delivery mechanisms as leaving contemporary culture with a “curious imagistic poverty.” As she concisely describes watching Milk and Once Upon a Time in the West on the Castro Theatre’s giant screen, we’re reminded that there is no comparison between enjoying cinema in such a grand setting and staring at a laptop. The great 20th century memoirist and observer Quentin Crisp wrote, “We ought to visit a cinema as we would go to a church. Those of us who wait for films to be made available for television are as deeply suspicious as lost souls who claim to be religious but who boast that they never go to church.”

That applies to you too, Netflix subscribers! The Roxie, Castro, Red Vic, Clay, and a small number of other houses of worship are still in business, so what are you waiting for? (Ben Terrall)

MAP 4. “Right Wing of the Dove: The Bay Area as Conservative/Military Brain Trust”

In “The Sinews of War are Boundless Money and the Brains of War Are in the Bay Area,” Solnit argues that antiwar, green, and left Bay Area hotspots are well known and don’t need to be charted again — unlike military contractors and assorted other forces of reaction in the region.

Solnit notes that many military bases that used to operate in the Bay Area are closed, “but the research, development, and profiteering continue as a dense tangle of civilian and military work, technological innovation, economic muscle, and political maneuvering for both economic and ideological purposes.”

Among the hard-right compounds providing counterevidence for that demonstration chestnut “the people united will never be defeated”: Lawrence Livermore National Labs (birthplace of Star Wars — the Reagan era money pit, not the George Lucas movie); Lockheed Martin, world’s largest “defense” contractor; the Hoover Institution, Stanford’s reactionary think tank; and Northrop Grumman, missile component designer. It’s useful to have so many of them in one place, if queasy-making.

On the lower left of the map sits Sandow Birk’s beautifully warped code of arms, which features the Cicero quote (Nervi belli pecunia infinita) that Solnit cites in her chapter title, under a half eagle/half dove, a rifle-toting soldier, and a scythe-clutching skeleton. It should be on the door of every U.S. military recruiting center. (Terrall)

MAP 6. “Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habits and Queer Public Spaces”

“How thoroughly the lexical landscape of gay history is invested with [a] paradigm of emergence,” notes poet Aaron Shurin in “Full Spectrum,” the chapter accompanying Infinite City‘s sixth map. Like one of the dazzlingly-named butterfly species rendered by Mona Caron on the map, Shurin flits gracefully between memoir and historiography as he tracks San Francisco’s ongoing evolution as a locus for queer emergence.

From North Beach to Polk Gulch, from Folsom to Castro, LGBT folk — be they American painted ladies, Satyr angel wings, or Mission blues — have continually migrated to and within the city to shed their cocoons and show their true colors. Local faux-queen Fauxnique traced this metamorphosis at the 2003 Miss Trannyshack Pageant when she climatically emerged as a regal butterfly to Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” (apropos to Shurin’s royalty motif, she won the crown). So too did the late Age of Aquarius painter Chuck Arnett, who often nestled butterfly imagery into his portraits of SoMa’s leather demimonde, and whose murals once adorned some of the many now-extinct bars also denoted by Ben Pease’s cartography. Only more than half a dozen of these “wildlife sanctuaries,” in Shurin’s parlance, have survived, with the Eagle Tavern’s announced closure marking another loss of habitat. Queers, though, are if anything adaptive, and my hope is that the future fluttering tribes of San Francisco will keep alighting on new ground to unfurl their wings. (Matt Sussman)

MAP 7. “Poison/Palate: The Bay Area in Your Body”

“Food is part of the Bay Area you hear about nowadays, exquisite upscale food at famous restaurants and gourmet markets. But it’s so boring we couldn’t stay focused on it in this map.” These refreshing, if rarely uttered words come two-thirds of the way through the chapter that accompanies the “Poison/Palate” map, Rebecca Solnit’s “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Gourmet.”

The phony Tuscany of Napa and the once-orchard-filled, now-EPA-Superfund-site-speckled Silicon Valley are wisely singled out for derision, a convenient duality in both geography and culture and the perfect framework on which to hang a critique of the local culinary community’s smug, myopic self-indulgence, by raising the not-so-elite-specters in Bay Area food history (the It’s It, the Popsicle, the Hangtown Fry, the Rice-a-Roni), and reintroducing the politics of food into the conversation, in the form of the chemical tonnage used to produce wine grapes, food giveaways at community gardens, Diet for a Small Planet, and Black Panther breakfast programs for school-kids. The sprawling topic is almost given too short a shrift, threatening to leap its mutant-mermaid-bedecked map.

Better is the 18th chapter, “How to Get From Ethiopia to Ocean Beach.” Solnit begins by loosely charting the ingredients that go into your cuppa joe: the water from Hetch Hetchy, the milk from West Marin, the coffee that courses through the port of Oakland, and, impishly, the leavings that flow toward the Southeast Water Pollution Control Plant. All that’s missing from the equation is the sugar that I need to make the darkest, brandy-and-cherry-tinged brew palatable. SF’s cafe culture is also deservedly lionized — though some might want to hurl china due to the exclusions on the accompanying map: why, for instance, call out Blue Danube Coffee House and not the grungier, more Chinese-populated Java Source? (Kimberly Chun)

MAP 8. “Shipyards and Sounds: The Black Bay Area since World War II”

Though author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro opens this chapter, subtitled “High Tide, Low Ebb,” with an eloquent invocation of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” — penned in Sausalito, by the way — it was the slight mention of Lowell Fulson’s “San Francisco Blues” that most resonated with me. “Ohh, San Francisco,” the lyric goes, “Please make room for me.” The facts presented in “Shipyards and Sounds” record The City’s answer as a genteel and progressive “No nigger.”

Beginning at the start of WWII, when Southern blacks migrated to the Bay Area to build ships in Hunters Point, Jelly-Schapiro points out that the main areas of wartime shipbuilding (Richmond, Hunters Point, Marin City) are “places that today remain centers of black population and of black poverty.” Indicating, to me, that little has changed since the 1940s in some significant ways. Don’t get mad at me, I didn’t say it. Jelly-Schapiro did.

Jelly-Schapiro also shows how terms like “redevelopment” displaced black Fillmore District residents to housing projects they’d been banned from during the war and land-grab euphemisms like “urban renewal” decimated black neighborhoods such as West Oakland. Electoral laws mandating that the SF Board of Supervisors be elected by citywide contests and not by district allowed a city that desegregated its schools and transit system in the 1860s to remain progressive and very, very white.

Jelly-Schapiro’s conclusion contains a critique of Bay Area celebrations when “Negro president” Barack Obama was elected in 2008. What he won’t say is covered in Shizue Seigel’s map. A sidebar shows the dwindling soul of a city, while the headers cover the founding of the Black Panthers and Sylvester’s solo debut at Bimbo’s. (D. Scot Miller)

MAP 9. “Fillmore: Promenading the Boulevard of Gone”

After the damned disheartening facts presented in the previous chapter, it’s both merciful and hopeful that “Little Pieces of Many Wars” — though just as rage-inducing — establishes some kind of equilibrium.

Gent Sturgeon’s incredible Rorschach-inspired artwork opens a thoroughly-researched piece on Fillmore Street and its many incarnations. Mary Ellen Pleasant’s abolitionist work and her eucalyptus trees — which still stand on the corners of Bush and Octavia streets — are a starting point for a leisurely stroll with Solnit, who runs the voodoo down, “The war between the states left its traces here,” she says, “as did the Second World War, and the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the stale and ancient war of racism, and the various forms of freelance violence.”

She remembers San Francisco as an abolitionist headquarters, and Fillmore Street as the first place Allen Ginsberg read “Howl.” Recalling the Fillmore’s rich heritage of jazz, poetry, and art, Solnit takes it even further, adding, “The wealthy sometimes claim to bring civilization to rough neighborhoods, but the Upper Fillmore neighborhood that was so culturally rich when it was the property of poor people in the 1950s is smoothed over in significance now.”

The tragedy of Japanese internment, and the cross-cultural exchange that was demolished by it and redevelopment loom like white sheets over the city to this day. But Solnit closes with an optimistic sense of resurgence, even though Nickie’s has gone Irish.

Ben Pease’s cartography shows the cross-currents of culture of yesterday’s Fillmore Street, but not much else. That’s not a complaint, really. (Miller)

 MAP 13. “The Mission: North of Home, South of Safe”

Two 2009 shootings on 24th Street pop out, in blood red, on the map accompanying Adriana Camarena’s “The Geography of the Unseen,” in much the same way that the spate of shooting deaths the previous year marked my brief time spent living in the Mission. In ’08, I lived in a Victorian flat at Treat and 23rd, distinguished by the fact that it was a favorite hang for the teenaged homies — its steps were slightly tucked back off the street, ideal when it came to hiding out, smoking dope, and snacking out — until my landlords installed a fence, ostensibly to keep the steps free of spit.

We were on the same block as an appliance-loaded junkyard; the last stop of an ancient Mission industrial railroad; and the Parque Niños Unidos, with its swampy, grassy corner, so often cordoned off to keep the tots from wading in the mud, its circling ice cream carts and its de facto refreshment stand, El Gallo Giro taco truck; and the community garden, where the feral kittens tumbled and hid and fresh produce was given away free every Sunday afternoon.

The Parque likely was the last thing 18-year-old poet Jorge Hurtado saw when he was shot and killed on our corner at 1 a.m. that year. I remember waking up that night to what sounded like a cannon boom, only the first of a slew that sweltering, ominous summer — Mark Guardado, president of the SF chapter of the Hells Angels, was killed a little over a week later, down Treat, in front of Dirty Thieves. The tension was thick and gooey in the air — who was next? The beauty of Shizue Seigel’s Mission map lies in how intimate it is, how it’s threaded around the shaggy-dog snatches of yarns Camarena catches among the day laborers waiting at Cesar Chavez and Bayshore, from the long litany of splintered families, time spent in the refuge of gangs at 24th and Shotwell, and then, in Frank Pena’s case, lives cut sadly short farther up 24th at Potrero. The included stories, rarely straying beyond the tellers’ voices and the facts they choose to reveal, stay with you — even if her sources’ internal lives remain, as the chapter’s subtitle goes, “the Geography of the Unseen.” (Chun)


NORTHERN CALIFORNIA INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS 2011 BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS

 

FICTION

 

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, stories, Yiyun Li (Random House, 240 pages, $25)

Nonfiction

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Mary Roach (W.W. Norton and Company, 336 pages, $15.95)

Honorable Mention: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1, (University of California, 760 pages, $34.95)

 

POETRY

Come On All You Ghosts, Matthew Zapruder (Copper Canyon, 96 pages, $16)

Food Writing

My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking from Italy’s Undiscovered South, Rosetta Costantino, Janet Fletcher, and Shelley Lindgren (W.W. Norton and Company, 416 pages, $35)

Children’s Picture Book

The Quiet Book, Deborah Underwood and Renata Liwska (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 32 pages, $12.95)

Honorable mention: Zero, Kathryn Otoshi (KO Kids, 32 pages, $17.95)

 

TEEN LIT

The Sky is Everywhere, Jandy Nelson (Dial, 288 pages, $17.99)

Honorable mention: The Mockingbirds, Daisy Whitney (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 352 pages, $16.99)

 

REGIONAL TITLE

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Rebecca Solnit (University of California, 167 pages, $24.95)

Honorable mention: A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California, Laura Cunningham (Heyday, 352 pages, $50)

 

Approve affordable housing — for youth

Andrew Lam
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1
Approve affordable housing — for youth

OPINION Booker T. Washington, born as a slave, risked his life to learn to read and write and went on to found Tuskegee University. At his core, he believed that economic independence and access to education were the keys to equality. He put it best when he said: “There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.”

Since 1919, the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center has worked to lift up San Franciscans of every background, with a particular focus on the African American community. To continue that vision, the center is embarking on a capital project that will provide 50 units of affordable housing to youth and families, along with new athletic and educational space.

The most critical part of the project is providing housing for transitional-age youth. Many of these young people age out of foster care with no family support, few job skills, and no chance to rent a market-rate apartment in this expensive city. The project represents a real commitment to these youth, who are overwhelmingly people of color. With affordable housing funding under threat at the federal and state levels, it’s essential that shovel-ready projects get the green light from City Hall.

That is why we were thrilled when Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, Eric Mar, and Mark Farrell introduced the necessary legislation to allow this project to move forward. Joining hundreds of community leaders, countless families, and prominent African Americans, these supervisors lent their support for a project that continues the ongoing fight for economic justice.

It’s also why we are concerned that a few neighbors are using their influence to push down on the hopes of San Francisco’s youth. Some neighbors have asked that we add additional parking, even though the site is just a few blocks from Geary Boulevard and most low-income youth don’t have cars. Others have suggested that we cut nine units to make the building shorter, even though San Francisco’s housing needs are so acute. As is often the case in San Francisco, those who support progressive values need to speak up to ensure that we can overcome this campaign of misinformation and fear.

On April 28, the Planning Commission will consider whether to certify the environmental impact report for this project, and whether to approve it. We are hopeful that progressive voices speak out so we can provide hope and a future to youth in our community. As Booker T. often said: “Success is to be measured not so much by the position one has reached in life as by the obstacles one has overcome.” 

Julian Davis is president of the board and Patricia Scott is executive director of the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, located at 800 Presidio Ave. The Planning Commission hearing is Thursday, April 28 at City Hall, Room 400.

 

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