Supervisors

Healthy San Francisco enrollees can stay – for now

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Healthy San Francisco enrollees can stay – for now

Thousands of Healthy San Francisco enrollees will soon face a dilemma.

Federal health care reform will hold them to the “individual mandate,” a requirement to obtain health insurance – but Healthy San Francisco doesn’t count. Roughly 70 percent of uninsured San Franciscans currently rely upon the city-administered program, created by San Francisco’s Health Care Security Ordinance, to access medical care.

Anyone who doesn’t satisfy the individual mandate will be made to fork over $95 as a penalty – but that noncompliance fee will skyrocket to $625 in 2015.

Meanwhile, people who are eligible for subsidized health insurance under the Affordable Care Act will automatically become ineligible for Healthy San Francisco under current rules, according to San Francisco Department of Public Health Deputy Director of Health Colleen Chawla.

For many – especially those currently experiencing health problems – this change spells trouble.

The prospect of becoming suddenly ineligible for Healthy San Francisco will leave thousands of residents in the bind of being unable to rely on the system they now use to access care, while also being unable to afford the new insurance option  – and so far, city officials have found no clear resolution to this dilemma.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, who authored the legislation that created Healthy San Francisco as a member of the Board of Supervisors, admonished the Department of Public Health last week for turning away enrollees, conveying to program participants that only those who are undocumented would be eligible to remain in Healthy San Francisco.

“It’s really outrageous,” Ammiano told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ammiano’s legislative aide, Carlos Alcala, said the Assemblymember was aghast at DPH’s approach, because “this is what Healthy San Francisco was intended for – the city agreed to be committed to helping people who can’t afford insurance.”

Alcala said that over the course of the last week, numerous conversations had taken place between Ammiano’s staff and DPH staff, including Director Barbara Garcia.

On Feb. 18, the San Francisco Health Commission approved a temporary solution, signing off on a resolution that creates a “transition period” allowing Healthy San Francisco enrollees to remain in the program until the end of the 2014.

“SFDPH is making every effort to help San Franciscans enroll in the best health insurance option available to them,” according to the resolution. “Still, navigating the various options can be confusing and SFDPH wants to be sure that no one is left without health care options particularly during this time of transition.”

For some, the change under ACA will mean migrating from Healthy San Francisco to subsidized health insurance under Covered California, the state-administered program created by the ACA. But for low-wage earners and others struggling to make ends meet in pricey San Francisco, the monthly Covered California premiums may be unaffordable; even the options with lower premiums come with $5,000 deductibles and high co-payments.

The transition period extends Healthy San Francisco eligibility through December for San Franciscans who qualify for Covered California but haven’t enrolled.

Prior to this stopgap measure – apparently largely a product of the discussions between DPH and Ammiano – many would have faced being cut off from Healthy San Francisco in March, when full ACA implementation kicks in.

“Healthy San Francisco eligibility has not changed,” Garcia confirmed at the Feb. 18 meeting. “But the world around it has changed.”

The Department of Public Health’s mantra since the start of ACA implementation, repeated by Garcia at the Health Commission meeting, is that “health insurance is better than Healthy San Francisco.”

But for those who cannot afford the new subsidized health insurance option, “better” may remain out of reach.

“When people come in for renewal … we will counsel them to make sure they know that health insurance is better, and counsel them on affordability,” Chawla noted at the meeting. She added that if participants wish to remain in Healthy San Francisco, they will be able to do so – for now.

To be eligible for Healthy San Francisco, enrollees must live on a combined family income at or below 500 percent of the federal poverty level ($57,450 per year); be a San Francisco resident; have been uninsured for at least 90 days; not be eligible for Medi-Cal, and be between the ages of 18 and 64.

Between now and December, when the transition period comes to an end, DPH and other city agencies will presumably try and hash out a solution for people who are threatened with a loss of access to medical services.

In 2013, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee re-convened an ad-hoc body called the Universal Healthcare Council to address the looming problem of how ACA implementation would affect the city’s existing healthcare policies. However, the final report produced by that group did not offer much in the way of guidance.

Instead of drawing any solid conclusions, the various stakeholders drafted a set of recommendations – many of which stood in direct contradiction to one another.

That report is supposed to help city officials identify a solution going forward.

Deena Lahn, Director of Policy at the San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium, thanked the health commissioners for approving the transition period during the Feb. 18 meeting, saying nobody was sure what would happen in March, when thousands of Healthy San Francisco enrollees would have been suddenly unable to access services through the program.

“We had been especially concerned about people needing their medications,” she told them.

Kelly challenges Cohen in D10

Sasha Cuttler
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Kelly challenges Cohen in D10

After being narrowly edged out in the race for the District 10 seat on the Board of Supervisors four years ago, Potrero Hill political activist Tony Kelly says he will launch his campaign for the seat tomorrow [Wed/18], challenging incumbent Malia Cohen.

In 2010, after former Sup. Sophie Maxwell was termed out, the D10 race was a wide open contest that had low voter turnout and the squirreliest ranked-choice voting ending that the city has seen. On election night, former BART director Lynette Sweet finished first, followed by Kelly, a third place tie between Cohen and Marlene Tran, and Potrero Hill View publisher Steve Moss in fourth.

But the strong negative campaigning between Sweet and Moss, the leading fundraisers in the race, allowed the likable but then relatively unknown Cohen to vault into the lead on the strength of second- and third-place votes, finishing a few hundred votes in front of Kelly, who came in second.

Cohen has had a relatively unremarkable tenure on the board, spearheading few significant legislative pushes and being an ideological mixed bag on key votes. But she’ll likely retain the support of African American leaders and voters in Bayview and Hunters Point, and enjoy the always significant advantage of incumbency.

Kelly hopes to turn that advantage into a disadvantage, tying Cohen to City Hall economic development policies that have caused gentrification and displacement. “Too many San Franciscans face an uphill battle, especially here in District 10,” Kelly said in a statement announcing his candidacy. “Our district is part of one of the richest cities in the richest state in the richest country in the world, and yet our neighborhoods are home to the highest unemployment rates in the City, our homeowners are at risk of foreclosure, and our tenants at risk of evictions. This is unacceptable, and we must do better.”

Kelly and his supporters plan to file his official declaration of candidacy tomorrow at 12:30pm in the Department of Election office in the basement of City Hall.

 

 

The price of growth

Michael Redmond
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The price of growth

joe@sfbg.com

San Francisco is booming, but will its infrastructure be able to keep up with its population growth?

The problem is acutely illustrated in the southeast part of San Francisco, where long-stalled development plans were finally greenlit by the adoption of the Eastern Neighborhoods Community Plan a few years ago.

The Mission, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, and Mission Bay districts have attracted more attention from developers than any other sector of San Francisco, according to the Planning Department. Bayview and Hunters Point are also now attracting lots of investment and building by developers.

But when development projects don’t pay the full cost of the infrastructure needed to serve those new residents — which is often the case in San Francisco and throughout California, with its Prop. 13 cap on property tax increases — then that burden gets passed on the rest of us.

Mayor Ed Lee’s recent call to build 30,000 new housing units by 2020 and the dollar sign lures of waterfront development have pressed the gas pedal on construction, while giving short shrift to corresponding questions about how the serve that growth.

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Infrastructure needs — such as roads, public transit, parks, and the water and sewer systems — aren’t as sexy as other issues. But infrastructure is vital to creating a functional city.

That kind of planning (or lack thereof) impacts traffic congestion, public safety, and the overall livability of the city. And right now, the eastern neighborhoods alone face a funding gap as high as $274 million, according to city estimates highlighted by area Sup. Malia Cohen.

That’s why Cohen went looking for help, though that’s not exactly what she found.

 

MEETING DEMAND

Cohen has asked Mayor Lee about the lack of adequate investment in critical infrastructure again and again. She asked his staffers, she asked his aides. At the Feb. 11 Board of Supervisors meeting, during the mayor’s question time, she was determined to ask one more time.

Cohen asked the mayor about how to fund infrastructure needs in the eastern neighborhoods and whether the city should use a new, rarely used fundraising option called an Infrastructure Financing District, or IFD.

“When the city adopted the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, we were aware of a significant funding gap that existed for infrastructure improvement,” she said to the mayor. She asked if he would slow down development while the city caught up with infrastructure improvements, or commit more funding.

Cohen asked pointedly, “Would you support an IFD for the eastern neighborhoods?”

The mayor’s answer was in the foreign language known as bureaucratese, offering a firm “only if we have to.”

“Strategically planning for growth means making long-term investments in infrastructure,” he said. “And the most important thing that we can do right now is to work together to place and pass two new revenue generating bonds measures on the November 2014 ballot.”

But his proposed $500 million general obligation bond and $1 billion local vehicle license fee increase would just go to citywide transportation projects, where the city faces $6 billion in capital needs over the next 15 years, according to a task force formed by the mayor.

That’s small comfort for the people of the eastern neighborhoods, who are already ill-served by Muni and will have other needs as well. It’s a situation likely to get worse as the population there increases, unless the city finds a way to make serious new investments.

 

CITY VS. NEIGHBORHOOD

Development impact fees go to the city’s General Fund, paying for the planning work, building inspections, and a share of citywide infrastructure improvements. The problem with that strategy, opponents say, is that there are then no promises that the money will make its way back to the neighborhood that generated the funding in the first place.

Neighborhood advocates see a need to address the problems created by new development by capturing fees before they get to the General Fund. IFDs do just that. Though the nuts and bolts of how an IFD works are complex, the gist is this: Once implemented, an IFD sets up a special area in a neighborhood where a portion of developer impact fees are captured to exclusively fund infrastructure where the development is.

“So the idea that growth should pay for growth was the notion,” Tom Radulovich, executive director of the nonprofit group Livable City, told us. But with money flowing into the General Fund rather than being earmarked for specific neighborhoods, Radulovich said, “the infrastructure is going to come much later than the development. (The city) delivers projects slowly, if at all.”

IFDs are largely untested in California, and have only one recent use in San Francisco, on Rincon Hill, where a deal with developers cut by then-Sup. Chris Daly has morphed into an IFD created by his successor, Sup. Jane Kim. The neighborhood will now see new funding, and a new park, as a result of development there.

“This is a HUGE step towards getting the public infrastructure improvements needed to correct livability deficiencies in Rincon Hill,” read a newsletter from the Rincon Hill Neighborhood Association in 2011. “What does this mean for those of us living (here)? It means the Caltrans property at 333 Harrison Street has a short future as a commuter parking lot, because the front portion will become our first neighborhood park.”

The benefits are tangible, but putting an IFD into action is onerous. California Senate documents describe the hurdles involved: The county (or city) needs an infrastructure plan, it must hold public hearings, every local agency that will contribute property tax revenue must approve the plan, and the IFD needs to go to ballot and obtain two-thirds voter approval, a high mountain to climb.

Gov. Jerry Brown has called for lowering the voter threshold for IFDs to 55 percent in his newest budget. The mayor used the governor’s rationale as reason to avoid an IFD for the eastern neighborhoods when speaking on the topic last week. But that may not be his only reason.

“Even if we get the changes that we seek, it’s important to point out that IFDs don’t create more money for our city, they fund specific capital improvements by earmarking money in the General Fund for a particular purpose,” Lee said.

In other words, IFDs take money from a city that is already wrestling with underfunded citywide infrastructure needs. “Earmarking general funds isn’t something that we do lightly,” Lee told Cohen.

But Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, put it this way to us: “Should the eastern neighborhoods be the cash cow for the General Fund?”

 

BOOMTOWN

With more than 10,000 housing entitlements, the eastern neighborhoods are where San Francisco will experience its biggest growing pangs.

“The eastern neighborhoods are ground zero for development in San Francisco,” Keith Goldstein, a long time member of the Eastern Neighborhoods Citizens Advisory Committee, told a Nov. 14 Board of Supervisors Government Oversight Committee hearing on the issue.

Sups. Cohen and David Campos spent the majority of the meeting trying to find solutions, but none were forthcoming. Instead they were met with presentations on the neighborhood’s myriad needs, but few on how they would be funded.

Muni is also starved for resources in the area, where the T-line is notorious for its “switchbacks” that leave riders stranded before completing its run.

“This is a topic I’ve advocated a lot,” Sup. Scott Wiener told us. “When you have a growing population, these folks absolutely have to have service.”

At the meeting, Planning Director John Rahaim put the problem simply: “There’s a lack of development fee funding.” The officials that day from the SFMTA, Planning Department, and the Department of Public Works presented plans that relied heavily on state and federal funding to meet the new construction and infrastructure needs, a funding gap of $274 million.

“We’re really struggling to maintain the infrastructure the city has,” Brian Strong, director of capital planning, said at the meeting. “For the General Fund itself, we’re deferring $3.9 billion in capital projects the city deemed high priority. We just don’t have the funds.”

The Mayor’s Office didn’t respond to our questions about how to solve the problem, but Sup. Cohen said she’s hopeful he’ll support an IFD in her district.

“When we introduced the plan five years ago, we knew there was a gap in terms of what we expected to collect. In terms of development impact fees, we’re still in that place,” she told us. “I just want to get shit done.”

One report seems to agree with Cohen on the importance of IFDs. In 2009, a major report on development in the eastern neighborhoods was filed to then-Mayor Gavin Newsom. It recommended the city “commission a consultant study to inform the formation of an IFD,” saying it was the best tool available to fund infrastructure in the eastern districts.

The top signature on the report belonged to then-City Administrator Ed Lee. Now that he’s mayor, a mayor calling for rapid growth, can he find a way to pay for the infrastructure to serve those new residents?

Staying power

Michael Redmond
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Staying power

rebecca@sfbg.com

Despite the rain on Feb. 8, organizers of a citywide tenants’ convention at San Francisco’s Tenderloin Elementary School wound up having to turn people away at the door. The meeting was filled to capacity, even though it had been moved at the last minute to accommodate a larger crowd than initially anticipated.

“Oh. My. God. Look at how many of you there are!” organizer Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee, called out as she greeted the hundreds in attendance. “Tenants in San Francisco, presente!”

The multiracial crowd was representative of neighborhoods from across the city, from elderly folks with canes to parents with small children in tow. Translators had been brought in to accommodate Chinese and Spanish-speaking participants.

Six members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors also made an appearance: Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, Malia Cohen, Jane Kim, and Board President David Chiu.

In recent weeks, the convention organizers had convened a series of smaller neighborhood gatherings to solicit ideas for new policy measures to stem the tide of evictions and displacement, a problem that has steadily risen to the level of the defining issue of our times in San Francisco.

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Ana Godina, an organizer with the SEIU, went to the convention with her daughter Ella, 5. Godina drove from Sacramento to support her colleagues. Three of her fellow union members have been evicted recently, all of them Tenderloin and Mission residents. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

While several legislative proposals are on track to move forward at the Board of Supervisors, the meetings were called to directly involve impacted communities and give them an opportunity to shape the legislative agenda on their own terms, according to various organizers.

Addressing the crowd, Shortt recalled what she termed “some amazing jiu jitsu” during last year’s tenant campaigns, which resulted in a 10-year moratorium on condo conversions rather than simply allowing a mass bypass of the condo lottery, as originally proposed.

That measure, which won approval at the Board of Supervisors last June, was designed to discourage real estate speculators from evicting tenants to convert buildings to tenancies-in-common, a shared housing arrangement that’s often a precursor to converting rent-controlled apartments into condos.

That effort brought together the founding members of the Anti Displacement Coalition, and momentum has been building ever since. “This is the beginning of a movement today,” Gen Fujioka of the Chinatown Community Development Center, one of the key organizations involved, told the gathering. “We are shaking things up in our city.”

 

MAINTAINING DIVERSITY

Around 160 participants attended the first in a series of neighborhood tenant conventions in the Castro on Jan. 10. The one in the Richmond a week later drew so many participants that organizers had to turn people away to appease the fire marshal.

“The idea of the neighborhood conventions was to solicit ideas,” explained Ted Gullicksen, head of the San Francisco Tenants Union. “The idea of this event is to review existing ideas and ultimately rank them.” From there, the campaign will pursue a ballot initiative or legislative approval at the Board of Supervisors.

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Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, and his dog Falcor. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

But first, a few speakers shared their stories. Gum Gee Lee spoke about being evicted from her Chinatown apartment last year along with her husband and disabled adult daughter, an event that touched off a media frenzy about the affordable housing crisis taking root in San Francisco.

“There were times that were very stressful for me. I would call places only for the owner to say, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ but they never did,” she said of that ordeal.

“To see everyone here, all kinds of people, it makes me really happy,” she later told the Bay Guardian through a translator. “I just hope they don’t get evicted.”

Mike Casey, president of UNITE-HERE Local 2 and an executive committee member of the San Francisco Labor Council, also made a few comments at the forum.

“Having the ability to live and vote in this city makes a difference,” he pointed out, saying workers who have to commute long distances for political actions because they’ve been displaced from San Francisco are less likely to get involved.

“The struggle of our time is the widening gap between the rich and the poor,” Casey added. “That is exactly what this struggle is about: to maintain that diversity. What we need to move forward on is bold, effective, measurable change that makes sure we are able to protect the fabric of this community.”

Maria Zamudio, an organizer with Causa Justa/Just Cause, emphasized the idea that the problem of evictions in San Francisco is less of a market-based problem and more of a threat to the city’s existing, interwoven communities.

“Those are our neighborhoods and our communities,” Zamudio said. “We’re fighting for the heart of San Francisco. Fighting for strong tenant protections is a necessary struggle if we are going to keep working class San Franciscans in their homes.”

 

ELLIS ACT UNDER FIRE

As Gullicksen noted at the start of the convention, San Francisco rents have ballooned in recent years, rising 72 percent since 2011.

“We are seeing the most evictions we have seen in a long, long, long, long time,” Gullicksen said. “Most Ellis evictions are being done by one of 12 real estate speculators — evicting us and selling our apartments, mostly to the tech workers.”

Even though median market-rate rents now hover at around $3,400 per month in San Francisco, low-income tenants can avoid being frozen out by sudden rental spikes because rent-control laws limit the amount rents may be increased annually.

But that protection only applies to a finite number of rental units, those built before 1979. That’s why tenant advocates speak of the city’s “rent-controlled housing stock” as a precious resource in decline. Long-term tenants with rent control — in the worst cases, elderly or disabled residents who might be homeless if not for the low rent — are often the ones on the receiving end of eviction notices.

From 2012 to 2013, according to data compiled by the Anti Eviction Mapping Project, the use of the Ellis Act increased 175 percent in comparison with the previous year. That law allows landlords to evict tenants even if they’ve never violated lease terms. Advocates say real estate speculators frequently abuse Ellis by buying up properties and immediately clearing all tenants.

Concurrently with local efforts agitating for new renter protections, organizers from throughout California are pushing to reform the Ellis Act in Sacramento.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano has promised to introduce a proposal by the Feb. 21 deadline for submitting new legislation, and Sen. Mark Leno is working in tandem with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee on a parallel track to pursue some legislative tweaks aimed at softening the blow from the Ellis Act.

“Our goal is to change the conversation in Sacramento, where tenants’ concerns are routinely ignored,” said Dean Preston, director of Tenants Together, a statewide organization based in San Francisco.

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Those who didn’t speak English were given head sets so they could listen to each of the speakers comments, which were translated into either Spanish or Chinese. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

On Feb. 18, busloads of protesters will caravan to Sacramento from San Francisco, Oakland, and Fresno for a rally. Preston said they’ve got three demands: reform the Ellis Act, restore a $191 million fund that provides financial assistance for low-income and senior renters, and pass Senate Bill 391, which would provide new funding for the construction of affordable housing.

Even though the law is technically intended to allow property owners to “go out of the business” of being a landlord, Ellis Act evictions in San Francisco are most often carried out by speculators who purchase real estate already occupied by tenants, Gullicksen said.

“Our focus is on the most immediate problem, which is the misuse of the Ellis Act by real estate speculators,” Preston said. “It’s urgent to address that specific use. That’s what Ammiano and Leno are looking at, is ‘what’s the best way to stop speculative use?'”

 

LOCAL POLICY CHANGES SOUGHT

Tyler McMillan of the Eviction Defense Collaborative said his group is often the last resort for tenants threatened with the loss of their rental units. “Too often, we face a losing fight at court,” he said. “We need to write better laws that work better to keep people in their homes.”

The legislative proposals moving forward at the local level seek to attack the problem of evictions and displacement from several angles. On Feb. 3, Sup. David Campos introduced legislation to require landlords who invoke the Ellis Act to pay a higher relocation fee to displaced tenants, equaling two years’ worth of the difference between the tenants’ rent and what would have been considered market rate for that same unit.

“It is time that we recognize that tenants must receive assistance that is commensurate with market increases in rent if we are to truly address our affordability crisis and check the rampant growth of Ellis Act evictions,” Campos said.

As things stand, relocation assistance payments are around $5,261 per tenant, and are capped at $15,783 per unit, with higher payments required for elderly or disabled tenants. But at current market rates, a tenant would not last more than a few months in the city relying solely on the relocation fee to cover rental payments.

Surveying the strong turnout at the tenant convention, Campos said, “There is a movement that’s happening in San Francisco to take our city back, and to make it affordable for all of us.” Yet he noted that he is concerned there will be major pushback from the San Francisco Apartment Association and the real estate industry, formidable interests that oppose the relocation fee increase.

Meanwhile, Sup. Mar has proposed an ordinance that would require the city to track the conversion of rental units to tenancies-in-common, a housing arrangement where multiple parties own shares of a building through a common mortgage. Speculators who buy up properties and immediately evict under the Ellis Act often angle for windfall profits by immediately converting those units to TICs.

Campos is also working on legislation that would regulate landlords’ practice of offering tenants a buyout in lieu of an eviction, a trend advocates say has resulted in far greater displacement than Ellis Act evictions without the same kind of public transparency.

Peter Cohen of the Council on Community Housing Organizations said there’s “no silver bullet” to remedy San Francisco’s affordable housing crisis. “This process is going to come up with another bundle of things,” he said. “All of that is also complimentary to the state campaign. You could have five, six, or seven policy measures going forward — and all of them winnable.”

An idea Cohen said has received traction is the idea of imposing an anti-speculation tax to discourage real estate brokers who abuse the Ellis Act by buying up properties and evicting all tenants soon thereafter (see “Seeking solutions,” for details).

During a breakout session at the tenant convention, longtime LGBT activist Cleve Jones piped up to say, “Harvey Milk proposed the anti-speculation tax back in 1979.”

It wasn’t successful at that time, but Cohen said that given the current level of concern about housing in San Francisco, it’s being talked about in some circles as the most winnable ballot initiative idea.

 

TENANTS FIGHTING BACK

At the Feb. 8 convention, tenants shared stories of challenging orders to vacate their rental properties. “The most important thing that has brought us to the victories we’ve had so far is that tenants have stayed in their homes,” Shortt said. “Tenants have fought, tenants have sought help, tenants have organized.”

Tenants from a North Beach building owned by real estate broker Urban Green shared their story of banding together and successfully challenging an Ellis Act eviction. Chandra Redack, a nine-year resident of 1049 Market St., where tenants continue battling with owners who submitted eviction notices last fall, described to the Bay Guardian how her small group of tenants has continued to organize in the face of ongoing pressure, including the owners’ recent refusal to accept rent checks.

“Our organizations only can support tenants when they stand up and fight,” said Fujioka. “The tenants’ resistance themselves is part of the strategy. If we don’t have rights, we are going to create them.”

Paula Tejeda, a longtime resident of the Mission District originally from Chile, told the Bay Guardian that she’d been threatened with an eviction from her home of 17 years, a Victorian flat on San Carlos Street.

“I thought I was dealing with an Ellis Act, now he’s trying his best for a buyout,” she explained.

Living in that rent-controlled unit made it financially feasible for her to contribute to the Mission community as a small business owner, as well as a poet, author, and active member of the arts community, she said. Tejeda is the proprietor of Chile Lindo, an empanada shop at 16th and Van Ness streets.

“Having the rent control made it possible for me to build Chile Lindo, go back to college and get my MBA,” she said. That in turn gave her the resources to employ one full-time and three part-time staff members, she said.

When she was initially faced with the prospect of moving out, “I wanted to shut down and leave, and go back to Chile,” she said. “We are suffocated, as a society that cares only about the bottom line.”

But surveying the hordes of tenants milling about at the convention, she seemed a bit more optimistic. “The fact that this is happening to everyone at the same time,” she reflected, “is kind of like a mixed blessing.”

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Free lunch, had some vegan options. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

Seeking solutions

A number of policy ideas emerged from the neighborhood tenant conventions, which were held by the San Francisco Anti Displacement Coalition in the Mission, Chinatown, Haight/Richmond, Castro, SoMa, and the Tenderloin.

Here’s a list of what tenants came up with at those forums, which attendees ranked in ballots collected at the event. The ideas will most likely result in a November ballot initiative and one or more legislative proposals, which organizers plan to announce in the near future.

Anti-speculation tax: One idea is to impose a tax on windfall profits garnered by speculators who buy up housing and then sell it off without maintaining ownership for at least six years. The tax would be structured in such a way that the quicker the “flip,” the higher the tax. This would require voter approval.

Eviction moratorium: This proposal is to put a yearlong freeze on certain kinds of “no-fault evictions,” instances where a tenant is ousted regardless of compliance with lease terms. State law would prohibit it from applying to Ellis Act evictions. It might potentially require voter approval.

Department of Rent Control Enforcement and Compliance: This new department, which could be done by local legislation, would create a new city department with the mission and mandate to enforce existing tenant-protection laws and conduct research on eviction trends.

Relocation assistance: While Sup. David Campos is working on legislation to upgrade relocation assistance payments to displaced tenants who face eviction under the Ellis Act, this proposal would do the same for all other forms of “no-fault” evictions. This would require voter approval.

“Excessive rents” tax: While the Costa-Hawkins state law does not allow for cities to control rents in vacant units, this proposal would create a tax on new rental agreements where rents exceed an affordability threshold.

Housing balance requirement: This proposal would make it so that approval of new market-rate housing would be restricted based on whether affordable housing goals were being met. It would create new incentives to build affordable.

Legalize illegal units: This would provide a way to legalize the city’s “illegal” housing units that nevertheless provide a safe and decent source of affordable housing. (Board President David Chiu has already introduced a version of this proposal.)

Sugar fix

Michael Redmond
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0

A resolution to place a sugary beverage tax on the November ballot was introduced at the Feb. 4 Board of Supervisors meeting.

The two-cents-per-ounce tax would be levied at the point of distribution, with the ultimate goal of reducing the consumption of sodas and other sugary drinks to combat obesity in San Francisco. The tax, sponsored by Supervisors Scott Wiener, Eric Mar, Malia Cohen, John Avalos, and David Chiu, is similar to a resolution made two years ago in Richmond.

But Richmond voters ultimately voted it down by 66 percent, so how’s San Francisco any different?

In 2012, the American Beverage Association hired Chuck Finnie of San Francisco public relations group BMWL and Partners. The association funded the Community Coalition Against Beverage Taxes, which reached out to Latino communities and others, saying it was a tax on the poor.

Now Finnie is back as spokesperson for Stop Unfair Beverage Taxes — Coalition for an Affordable City, here in San Francisco.

“It’s a shallow argument, that it’s a regressive tax on poor people,” said Cohen, a sponsor of the ordinance. “What is it costing poor people? Literally it’s costing them their lives.”

Jeff Ritterman, a cardiologist and former Richmond City Council member, was a lead proponent of the Measure N campaign in 2012. He’s another actor from that campaign who’s back now too, helping the supervisors craft their new strategy.

Last time around they were outspent, Ritterman admits. But campaign money is only one way San Francisco is taking a different tack in the upcoming sugar battle.

The supervisors are also proposing to dedicate the estimated $30 million in revenue that the tax will generate to a specific purpose. The funding would be divided between the SFUSD, the Department of Public Health, and the Recreation and Park Department for a mix of outdoor activities and nutrition education. In contrast, Measure N left allocation of new funding open-ended.

In Richmond, “they told people on the telephone I’d use it for trips around the world. It got as crazy as that,” Ritterman said. “You get more support when you show you’ll use it for children’s health and physical activity.”

Since the use of tax funds collected was a major concern for Finnie’s group last time around, now that it’s been addressed he should be happy, right?

“No,” Finnie told the Guardian, flatly. “We disagree that singling out sugar sweetened beverages for special taxation has any merit whatsoever.” 

Higher wages and tenants’ rights, for the win

Michael Redmond
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10

As we document in this week’s cover story, a citywide coalition has sprung up to fight for tenants’ rights in the face of mounting evictions and soaring rents, and momentum on this issue is steadily growing.

But that isn’t the only sign of a newly invigorated movement that’s beginning to count its victories and advance forward on behalf of tenants, workers, and thousands of San Franciscans who are less focused on turning a quick profit and more concerned with bringing about positive change. Last week brought several high notes on this front.

Citywide legislation that will limit discriminatory practices by employers and housing providers by reforming background check policies won initial approval at the Feb. 4 San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting.

Introduced by Sup. Jane Kim, the Fair Chance Act is part of a “ban the box” movement, backed by local grassroots organizations that came together to champion the rights of individuals who’ve encountered barriers to improving their lives due to past convictions that have left them with a permanent stigma.

At the meeting, Kim mentioned a woman who’d been told she “need not apply” for a job working as a cook — because of a simple shoplifting conviction from when she was in high school. The ordinance will require certain employers and housing providers to refrain from criminal history checks until after an initial job interview, and would make certain kinds of information off-limits, such as arrests that never resulted in a conviction.

Meanwhile, an initiative to curb height limits on waterfront development amassed enough signatures last week to qualify for the June ballot. That effort grew out of a successful referendum last November against the 8 Washington project, a key pushback where San Francisco voters rejected luxury condominiums at the ballot.

The Chinese Progressive Association and Jobs With Justice held a celebration last week to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the passage of the city’s minimum wage ordinance.

While it remains the highest in the nation, San Francisco’s 2014 minimum wage of $10.74 an hour still isn’t enough to make ends meet, so allies of low-wage workers are launching the Campaign for a Fair Economy to push for a higher minimum wage at the ballot and to implement a higher wage standard for major retailers and chain stores.

There remains much to rail against, to be sure. A Craigslist ad for a $10,500-per-month two-bedroom apartment in the Mission generated a barrage of angry commentary from those who read it as doomsday for the historically Latino area, especially since the tone-deaf author used the word caliente to describe the neighborhood.

But the start of 2014 has already delivered some promising victories for progressives, and many have their sights set on even greater horizons.

 

Sue Hestor’s 70th birthday party: “We Shall Overcome.”

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Plus: Tim Redmond reports on Sue Hestor and her environmental legacy on his new local  website 48 Hills.org.  

How do you say happy birthday to a San Francisco icon like Sue Hestor?

Some 200 of her friends, allies, pro bono legal clients, political heavies, and fellow warriors against big developers and their pals in City Hall gathered Saturday at Delancey Street for a surprise party to celebrate Sue’s 70th birthday.

When she arrived, she was obviously surprised to find a band playing “We shall overcome” and her friends standing, clapping, cheering, and singing  in admiration for a woman who has spent more than four decades as a citizen activist and attorney fighting for one good cause after another, usually at bad odds against the big guys, often for clients without pay. It was truly a historic moment in the history of San Francisco politics. 

I first knew Sue when she popped up as a feisty volunteer in the Alvin Duskin anti-high rise campaign of the the early 1970s. The Bay Guardian was doing an investigative book, “The Ultimate HIghrise,” on the impact of highrises on the city. She pitched in on the project and was in the book’s  staff photo, jauntily wearing her trademark straw hat, standing next to the hole in the ground for the Yerba Buena Center development.

 We billed a central feature of the book as “the world’s first comprehensive study of the true cost of skyscrapers.” Our research group demonstrated that highrises cost much more in services than they bring back in revenue,  a finding that infuriated the Chamber of Commerce because they could never effectively refute it. We also laid out in detail for the first time the power structure behind pellmell Manhattanizaton, how destructive those policies are, how they shift the tax burden from dowotown to neighborhoods and small business, who profits from them, why there are more muckmakers than muckrakers. Our talented art director Louis Dunn provided brilliant graphics that drove home the damaging points about highrises.

Our conclusion was most prophetic: “The most disturbing finding can’t be quantified–but it should be shouted to the heavens.  It is this: unless the city of San Francisco reverses past practice and immediately enacts an ironclad land-use policy such as Duskin’s proposed height limit, the long scoffed at ‘Manhattanization’ of the entire city is a surefire, 100%-guaranteed inevitability.” 

I like to think this project and its results were a fitting start to Sue’s career in land use litigation and terrorizing big developers, City Hall enablers, and their ever more virulent forms of Manhattanization. 

In the early l990s, I called on Sue again, this time to be the founding chair of the spanking new Sunshine Task Force. It was a new task force formed to enforce the Sunshine Ordinance, which gave citizens the right to make complaints about government secrecy and its tradition of keeping City Hall safe for PG&E, big landlords, and developers etal. The task force would, I knew, drive the bureaucrats nuts and  it thus needed a strong attorney as chair who would be smart enough and tough enough to go up against the city attorney and the crocodiles in the back bays of City Hall.

 The neat thing was that nobody could kick Sue off the task force.  She was one of two members who were “grandfathered” in by the ordinance–an attorney (Sue)  and a media rep (B3) –who were selected by the Northern Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, not the supervisors. She performed admirably and got the task force on a firm footing as the first and still the best local open government task force in the country, if not the world. 

Through the years of development battles, it was often Sue and Calvin, Calvin and Sue.  Calvin being Calvin Welch, a crafty environmental and neighborhood strategist who worked with Sue and others in developing counters and initiatives and all kinds of hellish moves to beat or slow down and mitigate development.  He said Sue’s career could be summed up in two words: “cumulative impacts.”  The good thing was that we all knew, when the developers brought up their heavy artillery or their sneaky back alley maneuvers, Sue and Calvin would be there to blow the whistle and take on the fight. Call Sue, call Calvin was the watchword but they usually called us first at the Bay Guardian. 

Let me call now on Tim Redmond, a Guardian reporter who covered Sue and Calvin and the highrise battles from 1982 on, to explain what Calvin meant.  Tim laid out the political points in his piece, “Sue Hestor’s birthday and a lesson in SF environmental history,” on his new local  website “48 Hills.org.”  Read Tim’s first paragraphs for the fun stuff on Sue and the last paragraphs for the really important contributions she has made to the city and urban planning, as explained by Calvin.

As Tim concludes, “In 1964, Hestor, representing San Franciscans for Reasonable Growth, sued and won a stunning decision in the California Court of Appeal mandating that the city start studying the cumulative impacts of development. As Welch noted, ‘there was an obligation for developers to prioritize mitigations.’ That’s where the affordable housing program, the transit-impact fees–and the entire concept of analyzing development on the macro, not the micro level emerged.  That was the idea behind the 1986 measure Prop. M, which included no height limits at all–but did include programs and policies designed to protect neighborhoods from the effects of unlimited growth.” 

Well, the Hestor faithful may not have “overcome” the big developers and their latest monstrous Manhattanization plans.   But they have come pretty damn close. On Sunday, the day after Sue’s party, the Warriors caved on its waterfront project and Matier and Ross did a Chronicle column with the head, “Warriors call for timeout on Waterfront arena plan.” And on Monday, the waterfront warriors marched triumphantly into City Hall and, as the  Chronicle’s John Cote reported,  “turned in more than double the number of signatures needed to qualify a measure for the June 3 ballot that would require voter approval for any development on the San Francisco waterfront to exceed existing height limits.”

That could kill the massively inappropriate project.  “If passed,” the Chronicle continued, “the measure would put a check on high-rise hotels and condo towers along the bay and require voter approval for height increases for three major waterfront development plans, the Golden State Warriors’ proposal for an 18,000-seat arena complex, the San Francisco Giants’ plan for an urban neighborhood on what is their main parking lot and the development of the industrial Pier 70 area.”

Whew! That’s what I call a nifty bit of Hestoring and Calvinizing.   b3

If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own. (Wes “Scoop” Nisker on KSAN radio during the dark days of the Vietnam War.) 

(The Bruce blog is written and edited by Bruce B. Brugmann, editor at large of the Bay Guardian.  He is the former editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Bay Guardian with his wife Jean Dibble, from 1966 to 2012.)

 

 

 

  


 


 




 


 

The trouble with compromise

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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“It takes no compromise to give people their rights… It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.” — Harvey Milk

OPINION As I sat in the audience at the Jan. 23 San Francisco Young Democrats meeting and watched the first debate between David Campos and David Chiu in their race to represent San Francisco’s 17th Assembly District, I was disturbed to hear the words “compromise” and “consensus” come out of David Chiu’s mouth more often than the words “eviction” and “displacement.”

During the debate, a line in the sand was drawn by the two candidates: Campos was on the side of the underdog, a voice to the voiceless; and Chiu, by his own admission, was all about compromise and “getting things done.”

Don’t get me wrong. True compromise can be a good thing. Unfortunately, what has been coming out of City Hall, from both President Chiu’s Board of Supervisors chamber and the Mayor’s Office, hasn’t been real compromise. It’s been a wholesale selling of our city to the highest bidder. The only thing that our leadership’s compromises have yielded is a compromised San Francisco.

Compromise gave corporations millions of dollars in tax breaks and it has forced nonprofits and small businesses out of our neighborhoods. Compromise has not resulted in any substantive action to curb Ellis Act evictions, instead serving to green light the building of luxury condo towers throughout the city. Compromise has allowed queer youth shelters and our parks to be closed to the people who need them as a last resort, as our bus stops have been opened up to billionaires for little more than pennies.

Chiu’s compromises have cost this city dearly. His compromise with developers on Parkmerced will lead to the demolition of 1,500 units of rent-controlled housing. His compromise on Healthy San Francisco allowed restaurant owners to continue to defraud consumers and to pocket money that should have gone to health care for their employees. His compromise on Muni killed a much-needed ballot initiative that would have resulted in an additional $40 million for the agency — a ballot initiative that he originally co-authored.

Please forgive me if I am fed up with compromise and am demanding actual leadership from my representatives.

Now is the time to stand with people of color, with members of the LGBTQ community, with our youth and elders, with artists and with small businesses, all of whom are being forced out of our city.

Thankfully, we have another choice. Sup. David Campos has shown that real change comes not from compromising your values but standing up for your principles. His legislative accomplishments include providing free Muni for low-income youth, protecting women’s right to choose at the Planned Parenthood Clinic, and preventing teacher layoffs at our public schools.

Campos has demonstrated that he, not Chiu, is the right choice to follow Tom Ammiano’s footsteps to Sacramento. Ammiano, who had 13 of his 13 bills signed into law this past year, is the perfect example of the success that can come from leading with your principles and not compromising your integrity.

San Francisco needs a leader representing us in the capital. Successful victories in reforming the Ellis Act and closing the Prop. 13 tax loophole will take a leader who can stand up to landlords and corporations, not a compromiser who will sit down at the table in a backroom with them.

That is why I will give my all to make sure that David Campos is our next representative in Sacramento. Pardon me if I refuse to compromise.

Tom Temprano is president of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club.

Residents vs. tourists

Michael Redmond
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steve@sfbg.com

Evictions and displacement have become San Francisco’s top political issues, amplified by protests against tech companies that are helping gentrify the city. Yet Airbnb, which facilitates the conversion of hundreds of San Francisco apartments into de facto hotel rooms, has so far avoided that populist wrath.

Tenants use the online, short-term rentals to help make rent in this increasingly expensive city, a point that the company often emphasizes.

“For thousands of families, Airbnb makes San Francisco more affordable,” Airbnb spokesperson Nick Papas wrote to the Guardian by email, citing a company survey finding that “56 percent of hosts use their Airbnb income to help pay their mortgage or rent.”

But it’s also true that Airbnb allows hundreds of rent-controlled apartments to be removed from the permanent housing market — in violation of local tenant, zoning, tax, and other laws — something that has united tenant, landlord, hotel, and labor groups against it (see “Into thin air,” 8/6/13).

“The problem is Airbnb is so easy and attractive that you can take a unit out from under rent control forever,” San Francisco tenant attorney Joseph Tobener told the Guardian.

“We’re getting 15 calls a week on Airbnb,” he said, describing four categories of complaints: landlords evicting tenants to increase rents through Airbnb, tenants complaining about neighbors using Airbnb, tenants being evicted for getting caught illegally subletting through Airbnb, and Airbnb hosts who can’t get guests to leave (city law gives even short-term residents full tenant rights, except in hotels).

There isn’t good public data on how many units are being taken off the market, but Airbnb generally lists well over 1,000 housing units in San Francisco at any given time, with its smaller competitors (such as Roomorama and VRBO) adding hundreds more.

The San Francisco Rent Board listed 326 no-fault evictions (Ellis Act, owner move-in, capital improvement) in its 2012-13 annual report. That number is almost certain to rise in the 2013-14 report due out in March, and it is compounded by an unknown number of buyouts that pressure tenants to voluntarily leave, all of it creating a displacement crisis that has galvanized the city.

“Isn’t it far more likely that more units are being lost [from the rental market] through Airbnb?” San Francisco Magazine recently quoted a UC Berkeley professor as saying in an article questioning whether Ellis Act evictions are really a “crisis.”

So Airbnb is clearly having a big impact on the city’s affordable housing crisis. Yet Airbnb is largely flying under the political radar in its hometown and ducking questions about its impacts.

“Airbnb has all the statistics we need to assess its impacts on the city’s housing market,” Tobener said. The company refuses to disclose such data. Airbnb’s customers need to consider their impacts to the city’s affordable housing crisis, Tobener added, because “there are social consequences to the decisions we make.”

 

STALLED IN LIMBO

Last year I discovered Airbnb was flouting a ruling that it should be paying the city’s 15 percent transient occupancy tax (“Airbnb isn’t sharing,” 3/19/13), a nearly $2 million per year tax dodge.

Yet Airbnb, which has quickly grown from a small start-up into a company worth nearly $3 billion, has some powerful friends in Mayor Ed Lee and venture capitalist Ron Conway, who invests in both Airbnb and Mayor Lee’s political campaigns and committees.

So the company has stonewalled Guardian inquiries for the last year as it has worked with Board of Supervisors President David Chiu on legislation that tries to bring the company’s business model into compliance with local laws. That hasn’t been easy, as Chiu told us.

“It has been difficult to corral the different stakeholders to get on the same page,” Chiu said. “Airbnb has been like unraveling an onion. The more progress we make, the more issues come up.”

Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, says it shouldn’t be so hard. “They need to enforce the law. They need to collect the hotel tax. They don’t need new laws,” she told us.

While the city is unlikely to simply follow New’s advice, the displacement issue adds another layer to Airbnb’s onion, one that sources say has become an issue of growing concern within the company, which has finally begun to respond to Guardian inquiries.

Those concerns have also been compounded as Airbnb is now being sued by one of Tobener’s clients, Chris Butler, who says he was evicted from his rent-controlled Russian Hill apartment so the landlord could make more money through Airbnb (see “Airbnb profits prompted SF eviction, ex-tenant says,” SF Chronicle, 1/22/14).

“We strongly support rules that keep people in their homes, and the vast majority of Airbnb hosts are regular people just trying to make ends meet,” Airbnb told the Guardian. “Whatever happened in this case, we certainly do not support unscrupulous landlords who evict long term tenants solely to turn their apartments into short-term rentals, but it is important to note that experts have found such cases to be extremely rare.”

Airbnb didn’t respond to our follow-up questions, but those “expert” findings appear to be a reference to a study the company commissioned late last year from Berkeley-based Rosen Consulting Group entitled “Short-Term Rentals and Impact on Apartment Market.”

But that study of Airbnb’s impact to rental housing in San Francisco doesn’t really draw the conclusions that company seems to think and hope it does.

 

MISLEADING NUMBERS

One number that the study and Airbnb have repeatedly sought to highlight is the claim that “90 percent of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco use Airbnb to occasionally rent out only the home in which they live,” as the company put it to us.

“Airbnb users generally do not identify themselves as utilizing short-term rentals as a business. In fact, 90 percent of Airbnb hosts [in San Francisco] indicated that they live in the home listed on Airbnb,” was how the study put it.

“It’s trash. They pick and choose the data they want to share,” Tobener said of the study and the 90 percent figure, which he says was derived from a 2011 user survey before the local housing market exploded. Rosner Consulting told us it stands by the study but won’t discuss it.

The figure also lumped in those with multiple rooms in their homes that have traditionally been rented by local residents and covered by rent-control laws. It also discloses that 10 percent of Airbnb hosts are renting out outside units simply as a business, a figure that has likely risen over the last three years.

The study does disclose that there were 1,576 properties booked through the company in August 2012, which the study notes was just 0.4 percent of the 378,000 homes in San Francisco, which Airbnb uses to dismiss its impacts on the market.

But the study includes only macroeconomic data, rather than looking at the company’s impact on certain socioeconomic groups — such as those making 120 percent or less of median area income, the people being evicted from and priced out of the city — or the supply of rent-controlled housing.

“The average gross income per Airbnb property in the previous 12 months was $6,722, or an average of $564 per month,” the study discloses, choosing to use average rather than median figures even though they’re considered less accurate gauges of income and housing data.

Customers who only use Airbnb once or twice will skew those averages way down. Yet the study then compares that number to the “average market-rate apartment rent in San Francisco, which was $2,498 per month in mid-2013. The average income generated is insufficient to cover monthly rental expenses in full.”

Which tells us nothing about how Airbnb is impacting either rent-controlled housing or the median income San Franciscans who rely on it. According to the US Census Bureau, the median rent in San Francisco was $1,463 in 2012 and 64 percent of San Franciscans rent their homes.

“The study is bullshit,” Tobener said. “They could pull data and tell us how many people are renting full units on Airbnb, but they don’t.”

Yet the company claims that it is concerned about these issues and working with the city.

“We believe our community of hosts should pay applicable taxes and we are eager to discuss how this might be made possible. We’ve reached out to officials in San Francisco and we continue to have productive discussions with city leaders,” Airbnb told the Guardian. “These issues aren’t always easy, but if we work together, we can craft fair, responsible, clear rules that ensure San Francisco continues to benefit from home-sharing.”

Yet neither Airbnb nor its political supporters seem to want to have this public discussion. The company has stopped responding to our inquiries, again, and when we asked the Mayor’s Office about Airbnb’s impacts to the affordable housing market, we got this response and a refusal to directly answer either the original or follow-up questions: “The Mayor has prioritized preserving, stabilizing and growing the City’s housing stock. His policy priorities include protecting residents from eviction and displacement, including Ellis Act reform and stabilizing and protecting at-risk rent-controlled units, through rehabilitation loans and a new program to permanently stabilize rent conditions in at-risk units.”

Yet Airbnb continues to have an impact on those “at-risk rent-controlled units” that few people seem to want to discuss.

Marcus Books approaching landmark status as fundraising continues

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Marcus Books approaching landmark status as fundraising continues

It may be a long shot, but there is still time.

Marcus Books, which faces eviction from its Fillmore Street location, seeks to raise $1 million to remain in Jimbo’s Bop City building, the violet-colored Victorian it has operated out of since 1981. If Marcus Books succeeds in its fundraising endeavor, the building will be turned over to the San Francisco Land Trust and the bookstore will remain as a tenant in perpetuity.

Its fundraising campaign is titled Keep It Lit, and co-owners Karen Johnson and Tomiko Johnson have framed it this way: If 50,000 supporters donated $20 apiece, the bookstore could hit its goal by the fast-approaching Feb. 28 deadline. So far, the fundraising website reflects an amount of $5,660 raised so far.

Marcus Books has been doing business for 54 years and is the nation’s oldest continuously operating black-owned, black-themed bookstore.

Today the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is expected to approve historic landmark designation for the bookstore’s Fillmore Street address, on account of “its long-term association with Marcus Books … and for its association with Jimbo’s Bop City, one of the City’s most famous, innovative and progressive jazz clubs.”

The memory of Jimbo’s lives on, as it hosted the likes of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and other jazz greats for after-hours jam sessions.

The Board of Supes’ ordinance also highlights the contributions of Julian and Raye Richardson, Karen Johnson’s parents and the founders of Marcus Books, “who for many years served the city’s rapidly expanding Black community in a myriad of ways, from small-scale publishing and book-selling to academic instruction and mentorship.”

H. Brown: Goodbye to all that, we hope

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H. Brown: Goodbye to all that, we hope

In an SF Weekly piece published yesterday, it was announced that progressive political blogger and gadabout H. Brown – an “irascible” man who has attained a specific sort of fame in equal measure for his political connections, his egregious sexism, and his unfortunate alcoholism — was leaving San Francisco. Where’s he going? The article didn’t see fit to mention. It’s whatever. One can assume Brown’s destination is that netherworld set aside for those whose behavior was enabled by the old school boy’s club blinders of the San Francisco progressive movement, still worn at the dawn of the 21st century.
 
“Last Call For Know-It-Alls: Classic Specimen of Old-San Francisco Bon Vivantery,” the article was called. It was written by a man; if a woman had written it, the title might have been closer to: “I Just Bought an Evil Eye Necklace, Don’t Look at Me You Cursed Troll.”


Do I sound angry? In 2008 at a DCCC, Brown inquired at top volume and in front of an ex-President of the Board of Supervisors if I was the politician’s escort. When said political leader bailed on the situation, Brown interrogated me on camera about my knowledge of local politics. I wrote about it, most names omitted, for the Guardian. In the article’s wake, I received thankful and supportive emails from men and women across the San Francisco political scene. On his part, Brown sent out multiple emails about me to his prodigious correspondence rolls, one in which he shared an communique from his niece calling me an “ignorant cunt,” another in which he addressed an un-cc’ed me about the election night in question: “You tried to make up for your ignorance by wearing revealing clothing. I was mocking you. And rightly so.”
 
Nearly every woman in San Francisco politics has one of these stories. When a male politician was accused of any wrong against a woman, Brown could be depended on to dig through the Internet to find evidence that the victim had been asking for it. Those unwilling to suffer him had to opt out of the hobnobbing happy hours and salons in the homes of city leaders, at which Brown was a constant presence.
 
Ah, old San Francisco bon vivantery. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you don’t have to care about Brown. You do have to care that this man was your Supervisor’s drinking buddy, that he took Speedo-clad swims in the Bay with progressive leaders. You do have to wonder about what that did to the strength of our political movement. And you might want to wonder about the dynamics behind ubiquitous bigots who are tolerated by people who should know better.
 
“If comedy is indeed tragedy plus time, however, Brown will leave ’em laughing for posterity,” wrote Weekly reporter Joe Eskenazi. “Friend after friend recalled anecdotes of offensive, bourbon-fueled behavior invariably culminating with Brown being instructed to “Get the fuck out, H.!” But, always, these were happy memories, if not happy occasions.”
 
None of these friends — “former supervisors, consultants, academics, political Svengalis, and other city luminaries” – in Eskenazi’s article were women. (The writer, whose work on city issues I do appreciate, told me he did interview women, but apparently none of them said anything printworthy.)
 
Let’s remedy that now with a few female voices. Not coincidentally, most of these bourbon-fueled memories took place in ex-Supervisor Chris Daly’s since-closed Market Street progressive gathering spot, the Buck Tavern. None are happy.
 
“This was the first time I was introduced to H. At a benefit at the Buck Tavern I walked in and there were all these progressive journalists sitting around a table with him. He said ‘you’re the one with the great ass!’ He started asking me if I had family members he could date. I was standing there horrified, I just didn’t know what to say. I’m a mouthy lady, and even I couldn’t think of anything to come back with – not just to him, but to every other progressive journalist who was sitting there listening to him who laughed! I said hi to a few people, and then I left the event.”
– Laura Hahn, president of the San Francisco Women’s Political Committee
 
“Really, I don’t give much of a shit about one sad dude calling me a slut and a spy (for Newsom or Pinkerton Guards, depending on the year), but seeing some (not all) progressive men continue to put up with him was pretty demoralizing.”
– Anonymous volunteer on several progressive political campaigns
 
“The confrontation started because I came in to wish [ex-Supervisor and then-owner of the Buck Tavern] Chris Daly a happy birthday and have a drink, and H. asked Chris ‘Who the hell is she?’ To which Chris said, ‘She’s the President of the Harvey Milk Club.’ To which H began, ‘You’re not even gay, are you?’ I replied, ‘I’m queer.’ ‘Queer?!’ he said, ‘What the fuck is that? Some Shona Gochenauer shit? You’re not gay. I can tell you’re not gay by looking at you. She doesn’t know anything about politics. Look at her — she’s clearly just a vanity president.’ He said something about enjoying things because, “that ass isn’t gonna last forever, sweetheart. They [the other patrons in the bar] are only standing up for you because they want to fuck you.’”
– Stephany Joy Ashley, ex-president of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club
 
“As a purveyor of alcohol, I found that the man was a lawbreaking mooch and a pain to deal with.  As a woman, I found him pathetic, insulting, gross, or all three, depending on his mood. The first time I met him he cussed me out for an imagined slight in a way that was actually shocking — and it takes a lot for cuss words to flummox me. For a time, I simply refused to serve him.”
– Siobhann Bellinger, Buck Tavern bartender
 
“H. is a bully and a sexist. If you want to look at why the progressive movement is failing it’s because it alienates youth, women, and people of color. Deifying somebody like him is shutting women out, the message is they aren’t welcome. It’s not separated from the fact that progressives are really faltering right now with no leadership and very little inspiration.”
– Debra Walker, artist and longtime activist
 
“His behavior symbolized the running joke amongst some progressive men that women were there for their own entertainment to be mocked and harassed with no one blinking an eye. FUCK. THAT.”
– Anonymous ex-City Hall aide
 
These women – and the progressive men who were their allies – were not laughing at the hijinx of a mouthy old man. But people were, and they will be at the party that will be held in honor of Brown’s departure and attended by member’s of our city’s progressive elite.
 
Supporters say the guy’s behavior was a premeditated mockery of San Francisco’s political correctness, that he was an actor in the grand tradition of political theater. But if he is remembered by generations to come, it will be as the embodiment of an age-old archetype: the dude that other dudes keep around because he says the shit they can’t say to people who aren’t them. After all, who can control their own id?
 
Eskenazi compares Brown to F. Scott Fitzgerald and notwithstanding that both are writers, I’d like to posit an alternative historical precedent for Brown’s passionate trolling. Remember Bobby Riggs, the proud chauvinist who taunted tennis legend Billie Jean King until she wiped the floor with him in the widely broadcast Battle of the Sexes match? Man, that guy should have been in politics.
 
Brown was allowed to establish through constant bullying both online and off that only men have the right to feel comfortable in our city’s high-powered progressive circles. As San Francisco continues to cozy up with its new moderate identity, I hope he is remembered less for being a bon vivant and more as a sign that our once-vaunted avatars of progressivism were spending too much time pounding double shots at the Buck Tavern — while the world changed around them.

Local journalists starting to catch onto Airbnb’s subversion of SF’s rental market

Sasha Cuttler
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45
Local journalists starting to catch onto Airbnb’s subversion of SF’s rental market

Airbnb and other so-called “shared housing” sites allow hundreds of rent-controlled apartments in San Francisco to be essentially removed from the housing market, part of a concern that has caught populist fire recently with protesters and politicians pledging to do something about evictions and displacement.

Yet I’ve been one of the few local journalists to hound Airbnb over its illegal business model and refusal to pay nearly $2 million per year in transient occupancy taxes that it owes the city. But that may be beginning to change, as pair of mainstream local publications in the last week have cautiously waded into what outside journalists from Time magazine (which specifically mentioned my reporting on the issue) to German public television have already seen as a big and important issue.

The San Francisco Chronicle today has a story about a lawsuit from a tenant subjected to an owner-move-in eviction, with said owners then turning around to rent units in the building out through Airbnb. And San Francisco Magazine also mentioned Airbnb in its controversial article criticizing concerns over evictions.

“Isn’t it far more likely that more units are being lost [from the rental market] through Airbnb?” the magazine quoted a UC Berkeley professor as saying, comparing Airbnb to Ellis Act evictions. Hey, SF Mag, don’t you think that’s a good question that might be worth exploring?

Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, told me this week that she found 1,100 rent-controlled San Francisco apartments listed on Airbnb — almost all of it in violation of local tenant and zoning laws — a fact that she personally conveyed to Mayor Ed Lee, who supports Airbnb, shares a funding source with the company (venture capitalist Ron Conway), and has been dismissive of the issue.

“They need to enforce the law like they do in New York City,” New told us, referring to a city that has cracked down on Airbnb’s subversion of its rent control laws. She’s lobbied City Hall, documented the problem, and threatened to sue the city: “I’ve done everything I can possibly think of.”

Meanwhile, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu has been negotiating with Airbnb for almost a year on legislation that would attempt to legalize and regulate its activities here in San Francisco, telling us “it has been difficult to corral the different stakeholders to get on the same page” and no longer offering any predictions when it might be complete.

I was already working on a story about Airbnb (which still won’t respond to my inquiries) for our next issue [UPDATE: It looks like I’ll hold that story for our Feb. 5 issue], so I’ll have more to say about this then. And in the meantime, here’s my latest message to the Mayor’s Office of Communications trying to get some kind of response to this issue, which it has ignored for the last 24 hours:

“I’m about to write about the rampant illegal behavior by Airbnb customers again, which seems increasingly relevant to the “affordability agenda” that Mayor Lee is touting, so I wanted to check in to see whether the mayor is still offering his unqualified support to this company, despite its violations of local housing, zoning, and planning laws and refusal to collect and pay the transient occupancy tax.

“Janan New with the SF Apartment Association says she’s raised this directly with Mayor Lee, including informing him recently that more than 1,100 rent-controlled apartments in San Francisco are listed on Airbnb, all in violation of local law, and she’s frustrated that he’s unwilling to enforce the law, as New York City has been doing. Meanwhile, the Airbnb legislation that David Chiu has been working on for the last year is hopelessly stalled, at least partly because Airbnb has the mayor’s support and is unwilling to compromise while it’s making some much profits off of its illegal behavior in San Francisco.   

“A recent San Francisco Magazine article (http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/the-eviction-crisis-wasnt) even quotes a UC Berkeley professor saying that Airbnb is likely taking more rent-controlled units off the market than the Ellis Act. Considering the mayor is pursuing Ellis Act reform, why does he continue to ignore the impact that Airbnb is having on the city?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By the people

Michael Redmond
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3
By the people

rebecca@sfbg.com

A growing number of people seem to be convinced that “civic innovation” is sexy.

Tech-oriented events at San Francisco City Hall, like hackathons for improving government services, have become increasingly common. App developers are gaga over the idea of revolutionizing government through software, and the concept is gaining momentum.

To borrow an analogy referenced in an essay by tech publisher Tim O’Reilly, some software purveyors are moving away from the idea of government as a vending machine: “When we don’t get what we expect, our ‘participation’ is limited to protest—essentially, shaking the vending machine.”

Instead, they’re latching onto the idea of government as an open platform that citizens can tinker with.

That’s exciting. Can it lead to a government that is more responsive to the people, as enthusiasts predict? Can we really hack away the ineffective and irresponsive parts of the public sector?

Or is some of this just hype and libertarian idealism from a cash-drenched tech sector seeking business opportunities and greater political influence?

 

HACK THE LAW

Sup. Mark Farrell recently proposed doing away with an outmoded and widely disregarded law disallowing bicycle storage in garages. The legislative tweak matters because it was spurred by feedback submitted through a new website, SanFranciscoCode.org.

Operated by a private nonprofit organization called the OpenGov Foundation, the website presents an interactive, online version of the city’s municipal code with an open platform where anyone can easily comb through the thicket of city laws and leave comments on specific sections, using the software as a magnifying glass.

Farrell touted the website — launched in partnership with Mayor Ed Lee’s Office of Civic Innovation last September — as a tool that could spur “a more transparent and accountable city government.”

“I see this leading to better engagement,” said Jess Montejano, Farrell’s legislative aide. Seamus Kraft, executive director of the OpenGov Foundation, has been compiling all the comments submitted via SanFranciscoCode.org, and recently sent a memo with all user feedback to each member of the Board of Supervisors.

“Our mission is to put as much public information into the public’s hands as possible,” Kraft said, “so that people can access their laws the way they deserve in 2013.”

The idea that a law would be changed instantly based on public comments is a new take on an old concept, with shades of being enamored by that shiny new thing. After all, many supervisors have a habit of turning their backs, or very obviously zoning out, during public comment sessions at weekly board meetings.

Yet anyone with an Internet connection can run with this new portal for citizen engagement. How about a reinvigorated response to San Francisco’s Sit/Lie Ordinance? A torrent of online commentary about the public nudity ban? Not everyone has the same idea about what it means to fix a broken law.

In some respects, City Hall appears to be lending itself out as a laboratory in which to test the wide-ranging theories of civic innovators. Mayor Lee has greeted the technology sector with arms wide open, and empowered the Office of Civic Innovation to foster tech-fueled government fine-tuning.

With the rise of amply funded organizations such as Code for America, droves of programmers stand at the ready, eager to chip in and do their part to help transport the public sector out of the analog ages.

A recent brigade of Code for America fellows partnered with the city’s Department Health and Human Services to create an app that automatically notifies food stamp recipients via text when they are about to be automatically dis-enrolled. The idea is to give recipients advance notice so they can take steps to renew their enrollment.

Other initiatives, such as the Department of Public Health’s release of an open data set to reveal housing inspection records, can arm citizens with useful knowledge — like empowering apartment hunters to spot a slumlord from a mile away.

The use of tech for transparency holds potential: What if each and every public record — down to every last email, calendar appointment, or police report — were instantly uploaded to a publicly accessible database, easy to locate, and fully searchable? Would that be a check against corruption?

Ron Bouganim, a San Francisco-based venture capitalist and mentor to the very Code for America teams industriously improving city government through technology, recently filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to create GovTech. It’s a new kind of venture capital fund, specifically devoted to fostering companies looking to find their way in the “civic innovation” sector.

Bouganim laid out the dynamics driving the civic innovation trend: First, “2008-2009 was like a nuclear bomb,” he explained. “The financial crisis was a cataclysmic event. The money is not coming back, ever.”

 

THE NEW NORMAL?

This new normal, characterized by dramatically depleted public-sector finances, has helped make government more open to working with startups instead of trusted brands like IBM, Bouganim said, since startups can help government “do more with less.”

Bouganim also said adoption of cloud computing has changed the game. Whereas governments were initially hesitant to move their data to the cloud, the recent migration has made it possible for companies seeking government contracts to price below the “procurement threshold,” a price point that triggers a long public approval process before a purchase can go through. Now that technology has helped software developers slice through red tape, startups are flooding in, eager to land public sector contracts.

The city’s Entrepreneurship in Residence webpage (entrepreneur.sfgov.org), which markets a program rolled out by the Office of Civic Innovation, says it all. Sporting a gleaming picture of San Francisco City Hall, it bears the caption: “Develop products & services for the $142 billion public sector market.”

Bouganim wasn’t willing to say much in the way of GovTech’s plans, but he mentioned that his accelerator provides mentorship for startups that are paired with government agencies, and hinted that his initial investments would lead to “a dramatic impact on government savings.”

An underlying goal of the whole civic innovation movement, Bouganim added, “is to fundamentally change this concept that government is over there, and I am over here. We the people are the government, we’ve just lost touch with it.”

Bouganim responded to the Guardian’s call within 15 minutes, mentioning he was in London. “I wanted to get back to you so you didn’t think I was ignoring you,” he said, “because that would be awful.”

But the well-compensated public servants at the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation evidently had no such compunction. The Bay Guardian placed multiple calls to that office for this story, only to be met with radio silence.

And that’s a quandary. One cannot trumpet lofty goals of citizen engagement while habitually walling off government critics, and still expect to be taken seriously. And therein lies the rub with civic innovation: Even if technology is neutral, politics will never be so.

Nickels and dimes… or transit for our times?

Michael Redmond
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14

STREET FIGHT Much has been written about the so-called “Google buses” and San Francisco’s latest round of gentrification. It’s a horrible mess and the city’s trifling $1 charge per bus stop will do little to address the broader structural problem that these buses lay bare.

Ordinary people cannot ride them, nor do the people who clean and cook for the tech world. Like tour buses, they are clunky and inappropriate for many neighborhood streets. While they do substitute for some car trips, an ad hoc private transit system does not reflect the kind of thoughtful regional planning needed to truly reduce car use in the Bay Area.

But the controversy over the private commuter buses does show that there is great potential for a public regional express bus system. Consider that in 1980, 9 percent of commuters in San Francisco left the city every day to go to work. In 2010, outbound commuters approached 25 percent. Owing to regional political fragmentation, Muni cannot provide intercounty service and thus is not the travel mode of choice for many of these commuters. And although Caltrain and BART offer some regional service, the sprawling locations of suburban firms often make regional rail impractical or at the very least time-consuming owing to unavoidable multiple transfers to local buses.

So in noteworthy ways, the rise of private transit is an immediate reaction to poor regional transit connections. Yet rather than sidestepping failed regional planning by encouraging an inequitable, two-tiered, private system, we need to expand and regionalize the existing public bus systems. San Francisco’s mayor and Board of Supervisors have seats at the table of regional planning and ought to use the controversy over private buses as an opportunity to kickstart the implementation of a regional public bus system accessible to all.

For example, something like AC Transit’s Transbay routes should be extended through San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, perhaps operated by BART or Caltrain as part of the next iteration of Plan Bay Area. This network would use reallocated express lanes on 101 and I-280 and use transit priority lanes on arterials like 19th Avenue in San Francisco and El Camino Real in San Mateo. Regional property assessments on the corporations and developers, in part already possible within the existing BART district (one should be created for Caltrain), could be used to fund such a system. Congestion charging on 101 and I-280 should also be deployed and those funds used for electrifying Caltrain and developing the parallel and complementary regional bus system.

Of course there will be opposition to a regional public bus system as there already is to progressive regional planning. Transit-connected, walkable communities in the South Bay, for example, have been made all but illegal by decades of conservative middle and upper class, anti-density, anti-tax homeowners in suburban localities. As recently as last year, this Tea Party-style conservative politics dampened Plan Bay Area, resulting in a weak regional housing plan with an underfunded and lackluster transit vision. This conservative approach stifles our collective sense of what is possible and the fear-mongering has rendered regional planners virtually impotent. Yet it can and must be overcome.

Some progressives may find it convenient (and in some cases justifiable) to target tech workers right now, but they could also direct energy into shaping the next round of Plan Bay Area. Remember that Plan Bay Area is a living document, a work in progress. The current version of the plan, weak on transit funding, has been subdued by a loud, irrational mob of Tea Party cranks bent on sabotaging anything that hints of progressive ideas. Plan Bay Area is also stifled by a regional business class that wants to keep the status quo and that is comfortable with the neoliberal model of private transit.

So while a smattering of dedicated and hard-working progressive transit activists showed up and attempted to shape Plan Bay Area last year, in the coming years the plan needs a broader progressive movement — including transit, housing, social justice, and environmental activists — to demand a more visionary regional transportation plan that connects all of the Bay Area. I am hopeful that this would not only steer regional planning in a progressive direction, but many of the tech workers who are now on the private buses would gladly join in the cause.

 

THE POLITICS OF SUNDAY PARKING

Speaking of hopeful, last month the SFMTA reported that Sunday metering, implemented last January, is a resounding success. Switching-on the meters doubled parking availability on Sundays, which is invariably what small businesses, most of which are open on Sunday, want to see.

Sunday meters increased the number of cars using city-owned garages and decreased the time cars circled in search of parking from an average of four minutes to two — de-cluttering streets in commercial districts. While this might seem like a boon to drivers, it also means less pollution, safer conditions for pedestrians and cyclists, less delay for Muni, and a much needed enhancement of revenue for operating public transit.

So it is mystifying that such success would be ignored by Mayor Ed Lee, who instead has proposed to discontinue Sunday metering. This is doubly confusing because, based on existing travel behavior to many commercial districts, 25 percent of people arrived by driving, while 31 percent took transit and 25 percent walked. So what the mayor is effectively saying to the pedestrian and transit-using majority is you matter little. What does matter is the few whining motorists who called him to complain about being “nickel and dimed.”

The mayor talks a good game when saying he is truly concerned about pedestrian and cyclist safety, and insisting that he wants to fix Muni. But gutting a reliable source of operating funds and pandering to car drivers who will dangerously circle for parking is inconsistent.

Lee says money isn’t an issue because his proposed General Obligation bond (which must be approved by voters) will patch the lost revenue from Sunday metering. But the GO bond will incur further debt and only fund existing capital needs, while parking meters provide a debt-free steady revenue stream for Muni. It’s also slightly misleading because the bond would not cover Muni operations, while revenue from Sunday metering does pay for operations.

The mayor’s pandering also put the SFMTA Board of Directors, which has been working out parking management and Muni finance, on the spot. Ultimately, it has to vote to preserve or scrap Sunday metering in the coming months. Now the directors have to decide if they support transit-first or the mayor’s pandering.

Unfortunately, when it comes to parking policy, the way that the Board of Supervisors has behaved lately suggests it will either jump on the mayor’s bandwagon and pander to motorists or cower in silence as good public policy is trashed. Not a good situation at City Hall, where transit riders seem to be routinely thrown under the bus by the political establishment.

Street Fight is a monthly column by Jason Henderson, an urban geography professor at San Francisco State University.

Protect pedestrians

Michael Redmond
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0

More than 50 public commenters spoke at the Jan. 16 joint Police Commission and Board of Supervisors Neighborhood Services and Safety Committee meeting, and all sounded one message loud and clear: Drivers can maim and kill pedestrians with near impunity in San Francisco, and that must end.

"I’m here very simply to urge you to end the carnage on our streets," said Natalie Burdick of the nonprofit Walk SF. "These crimes cost the city millions annually, and untold value in terms of squandered human capital."

Pedestrian deaths reached a high last year, with 21 killed in traffic collisions. Sup. Eric Mar highlighted the lack of funding in Mayor Ed Lee’s Pedestrian Strategy, which has a funding gap of $5-18 million. But SFPD’s failure to cite motorists was the main criticism.

"The fact is these statistics have been consistent that two-thirds of pedestrian accidents are the fault of the driver," Sup. Scott Wiener said at the outset of the meeting. "It’s the fact of the situation."

SFUSD backs supervisors’ sugary beverage tax, with concerns

Erica Hanna
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8
SFUSD backs supervisors’ sugary beverage tax, with concerns

A San Francisco ballot initiative to levy a tax on sugary beverages got a boost last night as the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education voted 5-2 to endorse it.

“The school district has done amazing work around nutrition for kids,” said Supervisor Scott Wiener, one of the initiative’s authors, shortly after the meeting. “This is a big win.” 

The initiative is proposed by Supervisors Mar, Wiener, Cohen and Avalos, and is estimated to generate up to $31 million annually, according to data from the supervisors, but its main aim is to curb the consumption of beverages they believe contributes to obesity in San Franciscans. The supervisors will be introducing a final, unified measure at the Board of Supervisors in the coming weeks, they said. 

Advocates at the meeting said sugary drinks contribute to a crisis in children’s health. “Our community suffers some of the highest rates of diabetes and hospitalizations from diabetes,” said Roberto Vargas, a Bayview resident and Mission high graduate of 1989. “I ask you to support these policies for San Francisco’s children, and San Francisco’s families.”

The resolution to support the tax initiative passed, but not easily. The ensuing argument may even have given a peek inside the mayor’s insecurities around the upcoming November ballot.

Commissioner Hydra Mendoza McDonald, who works in the Mayor’s Office as his education advisor, thought backing the “soda tax” could put a ballot initiative regarding SFUSD funding in jeopardy. 

“I don’t have a political or personal agenda, but I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t think this would be a political fight,” Mendoza McDonald said. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for Supervisor Wiener… but I have to say my priority right now is the public education enrichment fund, and that’s it.”

She’s referring to the city’s supplemental funding to the school district, PEEF, which the SFUSD depends on to pay for over 50 librarians, 200 PE coaches and more. That fund is about to sunset in 2015 — meaning no more money for the SFUSD from the city. In the 2013-2014 fiscal year, the city is set to provide the SFUSD over $50 million.

A ballot initiative is slated for November that would renew the PEEF funding agreement. That’s a lot of money at stake. 

Mendoza McDonald expressed fear that support of the soda tax would put the SFUSD in the crosshairs of Wiener and Mar’s deep-pocketed opponents, the beverage industry. 

“It makes me nervous,” she said. “It’s in everyone’s mind a slam dunk to pass the (PEEF funding initiative)…People have voted time and time again for children’s issues. But in every single measure, we’ve cleared the field and made sure we haven’t had any opposition, and that’s what makes us successful. I’m worried if the people who have historically supported us would do so again knowing there’s a bigger pot of money going against us.”

This 13 minute audio recording features some of the main arguments made against backing the sugary beverages tax initative. 

The board then asked Wiener to respond.

“If I could be blunt, the arguments that I’m hearing from people not comfortable supporting this are going to be the same in June as they are today,” Wiener said. “The idea that this would generate a campaign against the Children’s Fund and PEEF, has no basis, with respect. This is about the sugary beverage industry.”

“In San Francisco we don’t shy away from big business trying to threaten us,” he added.

Ultimately the board voted to back the sugary beverage tax initiative. Its reasons were many. Some commissioners described the early onset of puberty children are facing due to the effects of sugary drinks, others brought up the growing rates of obesity in children. 

They all echoed the sentiment that the benefits of supporting the resolution outweighed the risks. Commissioner Rachel Norton probably echoed their myriad positions most succinctly. 

“I have no idea whether this legislation will ultimately pass at the ballot box, but I think what’s important is that we support this resolution,” she said. “This is the right thing to do, and be fearless about.”

Safety Scramble

Michael Redmond
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1
Safety Scramble

joe@sfbg.com

On New Year’s Eve, six-year-old Sofia Liu was struck and killed when a driver using the Uber rideshare app allegedly failed to yield to her and her family as they progressed through a crosswalk. The girl’s mother and brother survived, but their tear-stained faces were soon all over news networks in heartbreaking reports of their loss. No less sad, 86-year-old Zhen Guang Ng was struck and killed that same night by a driver who allegedly failed to stop at a stop sign in the Crocker-Amazon district. These incidents aren’t isolated.

In 2012, 16 pedestrians were killed in vehicle collisions in San Francisco. That number jumped to 21 in 2013, according to the SFPD, and the new year has brought new collisions and more pedestrian deaths.

Already, the SFPD and other city agencies are scrambling for political cover, and advocacy groups are rushing in to call for changes they say will save lives. On Jan. 16, myriad groups will try to sell their version of safer city streets at a joint meeting between the Board of Supervisors’ Neighborhood Services & Safety Committee and the city’s Police Commission.

As the debate continues to unfold, the road to pedestrian safety looks to be bumpy, and the first pitfall may be the Police Department itself.

Enforcement

At the Jan. 8 Police Commission hearing, the SFPD played defense.

A host of groups were calling out the cops: Cabbies wanted more enforcement against rideshare drivers, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition wanted more incident tracking. Nobody seemed happy with the current state of affairs around pedestrian safety.

Cmdr. Mikail Ali, tall and broad shouldered, approached the podium to give what amounted to the SFPD’s rebuttal. His presentation boiled down to this: Fewer cops equals fewer traffic citations, and fewer citations are dangerous.

“We did see a decrease in traffic citations issued last year,” Ali said. On the screens around the room, he displayed a chart showing two sloping red lines, one representing police staffing levels and another representing total citations. The charts showed a drop of 127 officers, and 20,000 fewer traffic citations, 2012-2013.

All told, the SFPD had 1,644 officers and issued 87,629 traffic citations last year.

But the idea that bringing on more cops is the only effective strategy for pedestrian safety seemed out of sync with a different aspect of Ali’s presentation, in which he conveyed a plan to “Focus on Five.”

Under that plan, police station captains are urged to boost traffic enforcement around the five intersections in their districts that have been identified as most dangerous. Though Ali said the approach was showing progress, the SFPD has yet to release data on how this enforcement approach has played out.

“Right now we don’t have full transparency into their reporting,” said Natalie Burdick of Walk SF, a pedestrian advocacy nonprofit. “We do have data showing they are issuing citations. What we don’t know yet … is has there been an increase in citations from Focus on Five?”

To be fair, it’s a new program, but data is key to many efforts geared toward improving pedestrian safety. The SFPD’s data shows that Focus on Five represents 22 percent of their citations, but it’s still unknown where they occurred and what incidents spurred the citations.

The Bike Coalition also wants more enforcement data from the SFPD.

“We’re hearing a lot of incidents go unreported,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the Bicycle Coalition. Incidents that normally don’t get written up, like an accident that only results in a bruise or a scrape, are just as important to record, she said, because thorough reports can help identify problem intersections. “Without solid, good accounting to show where things are happening, we’re not going to necessarily see change,” she said.

But that would require a cultural shift in the SFPD, Shahum said. For now, the police seem as interested in blaming the pedestrians as they do the drivers.

Victim blaming

The first shots fired by the SFPD on pedestrian safety amounted to a public relations gaffe.

“YOU’VE BEEN HIT BY A CAR! … It’s little comfort to know you had the right of way, while you recover from serious injury in the hospital,” reads an SFPD flyer, the message typed next to a picture of a chalk outline on pavement. “Distracted walking is one BIG reason pedestrians get hit by vehicles,” it continues. To emphasize the point, the chalk outline is wearing headphones connected to an iPhone.

Streetsblog San Francisco reporter Aaron Bialick, in his article about the flyers, responded to them thusly: “The SFPD has gone off the deep end with this one, folks.”

His response is understandable. With a choice of two perpetrators, one walking across the street, and another behind the wheel of a two-ton steel killing machine, one would think the latter would be the obvious target. Shahum thinks the problem goes deeper than bad messaging, saying the SFPD’s enforcement is skewed.

“We’ve seen some officers not knowing people’s rights when walking or biking. We’ve seen ‘blame the pedestrians’ from police, in the media,” she said. “We’re hearing things like ‘you should’ve been riding on the sidewalk,’ [showing] a really basic lack of understanding” about regulations cyclists must adhere to.

This issue came to a head when Sgt. Richard Ernst pulled up to a streetside memorial for cyclist Amelie Le Moullac, who died in a fatal collision last August, to lecture those gathered on bicycle safety.

As Guardian Editor Steven T. Jones noted in his article at the time, “apparently Ernst didn’t stop at denouncing Le Moullac for causing her own death, in front of people who are still mourning that death. Shahum said Ernst also blamed the other two bicyclist deaths in SF this year on the cyclists, and on ‘you people’ in the SFBC for not teaching cyclists how to avoid cars.”

Still, Shahum sees potential for change. “This is the area where I think we’re seeing the most promises from them,” she said.

At the Police Commission meeting, Ali noted the challenges police face when assessing traffic collisions. Training officers in the methods to deduce how a collision occurred is no easy task.

“It requires a high degree of science,” Ali said. “Geometry, physics, basic mathematics. Its not just about getting facts from people, but making conclusions from physical evidence.”

Chief Greg Suhr expressed confidence that the new recruits to come out of the academy were abreast of the latest techniques, and commissioners said they may use the need for traffic enforcement as a call to the mayor to help bring more officers into the SFPD’s ranks.

Enforcement and police culture are just some ways pedestrian safety needs to be addressed. Walk SF, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and the SFPD all will present their cases at the joint meeting on Thu/16. But as many of them would note, many of these promises have been made before.

Slow momentum

“We’re going to re-engineer streets around at least five schools and two areas that have the highest levels of concentration of senior injuries every year,” Mayor Ed Lee said at a press conference, responding to pedestrian deaths that rocked San Francisco.

No, this wasn’t after the New Year’s Eve fatalities. It was last April, when the mayor trumpeted an ambitious program to make the strets of San Francisco safer.

The San Francisco Pedestrian Strategy identifies 44 miles of the city’s most dangerous streets and intersections in need of upgrades. The goal was to improve five miles of city streets a year, with bulb outs (for better pedestrian visibility), raised crosswalks, new crossing signals, new traffic lights, and narrowing lanes.

One of the high priority intersections identified for improvements was Polk and Ellis — where Sofia Liu was killed on New Year’s Eve.

safetymap

A map of high priority corridors — the most dangerous streets for pedestrians in San Francisco.

That intersection hasn’t yet seen upgrades under the Pedestrian Strategy, Burdick of Walk SF told us.

“Any one or combination of the safety benefits of bulb-outs (or other improvements) could definitely have been the difference between life and death for Sofia,” she said. Walk SF works with city agencies to try to make sure these changes are happening, but she says the city hasn’t been transparent about the effort.

“We know there’s been some progress, but we don’t yet know if we’re doing enough each year to account for getting something done,” she said.

To get a sense of the city’s progress on this front, the Guardian contacted the Planning Department, which referred us to the Municipal Transportation Agency. The MTA did not respond before press time.

“That’s another thing at the hearing with the board (and Police Commission) we’ll be pushing,” Burdick said. “For engineering enforcement work to happen, it’s got to be paid for.”

According to public records outlining the city’s Pedestrian Strategy, the plan needs $65 million a year to hit proposed targets. The lion’s share, more than half, would go toward infrastructure improvements.

Burdick called that amount into question, saying the city had only allocated $17 million. A Pedestrian Strategy report confirmed that the program faces a $5-18 million a year funding gap.

Enforcement, a culture of victim blaming and inadequate funding all pose major challenges to pedestrian safety in San Francisco. Hopefully the joint Board of Supervisors and Police Commission meeting will finally result in some answers.

The joint Board of Supervisors’ Neighborhood Services & Safety Committee and Police Commission meeting will be held Thursday, Jan. 16, at 5pm, Room 250.

 

Article overlooks key findings and new academic research

Sasha Cuttler
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43
Article overlooks key findings and new academic research

By Corey Cook

I am writing in regard to Reed Nelson’s story “’Poll’ showing 73 percent approval for Mayor Lee was flawed.” As one of the two authors of the survey, I am deeply disappointed in the many insinuations in the article and the author’s cavalier abandonment of evidence or reason in order to make his politically expedient, but otherwise inane, point.

In fact, the author is so quick to dismiss the findings of the study, which is based upon accepted methodology, and which had nothing to do with mayoral approval scores, that he actually misses the entire thrust of the study – that voters in San Francisco are deeply ambivalent about the current environment, concerned about the affordability crisis, and not trusting of local government to come up with a solution.

You’d think the Bay Guardian might find that an interesting subject. Under a previous editor I have little doubt it would have. Instead, the author mind numbingly asserts that the mayor’s approval rate – a largely irrelevant number – is clearly overinflated and the survey must then be “bogus” (meaning fake or phony). While other scholars might find the popular characterization of their work as “fake” somewhat amusing. I do not.

The author relies on two main sources to claim that an on-line panel survey is “bogus”, the New York Times “style guide” and the “website publication” of Southeast Missouri State University Political Scientist Russell D. Renka, who is neither a survey researcher nor a political methodologist, and who does not seem to have published anything in this field (or even in political science based on his on-line vita), but who does seem to have a fairly robust home page that includes cute photos of his grandkids.

It’s not the kind of “source” that I would utilize to deride another academic’s work as “bogus”, and I could suggest some other (actual) publications to consider, including Harvard political scientist Stephen Ansolabehere’s peer reviewed article in Political Analysis titled “Does Survey Mode Still Matter?” from 2011 that compares national surveys fielded at the same time over the Internet (using an opt-in Internet panel), by telephone with live interviews (using a national RDD sample of landlines and cell phones), and by mail (using a national sample of residential addresses).

The authors of that study conclude that “comparing the findings from the modes to each other and the validated benchmarks, we demonstrate that a carefully executed opt-in Internet panel produces estimates that are as accurate as a telephone survey and that the two modes differ little in their estimates of other political indicators and their correlates.” But unfortunately that peer reviewed publication by a Harvard political scientist seems to contradict the simple assertion that a survey result the author doesn’t like must be phony.

Let me say that I don’t considered this issue “settled” in the scholarly community, but it is far from the case that serious on-line panel surveys ought to be derided as “bogus.” My preference would be to do a 1,200 person phone survey. If the Bay Guardian would like to commission such a survey, I would enjoy working with you on that project. But given the various cost limitations that preclude such a robust research design, this is not an altogether bad alternative.

That said, feel free to poke at the methodology and suggest that the numbers for Lee might not reflect that of the overall population because of the timing of the survey or because it was only conducted in English (though I’d disagree with you there – that likely holds down his numbers), or frankly just that surveys do often get it wrong. Even the best random sample is outside the margin of error one time out of 20 according to basic probability theory.

But the other thing I’d like to draw your attention to is that you’ve missed the entire point of the survey. Why do you focus on mayoral approval when it’s a survey about attitudes towards affordability and tech? In fact the article notes that “(i)nterestingly, the USF “poll” also found that 86 percent of respondants (sic) said that lack of affordability was a major issue in the city, while 49.6 percent of that same group considered housing developers to be most at fault for the astronomical real estate prices.” So apparently that part of the survey wasn’t bogus.

Here were our four findings:

* San Franciscans are of two minds: a clear majority of respondents say the city is going in the right direction, yet affordability is seen as a significant, and newly exacerbated problem.

* Most respondents see the tech boom as most strongly helping tech executives and workers. Though there is little sense that respondents and their families benefit from the tech boom, a clear majority say that tech is also good for other white collar workers and the city overall.

* The public strongly supports the idea that the city government ought to enact policies to preserve affordability but were skeptical of public officials’ ability to deal with these issues.

* Despite these concerns, there was little interest in making it harder for tech companies to come to San Francisco. For now, keeping the economy strong appears to be the priority, and we expect that feelings about the economy will likely stave off a substantial political “backlash” at least at the present time.

While Ed Lee has high approval scores, they are tepid – much more “good” than “excellent”. And those numbers erode on affordability, what the voters regard as the city’s most important issue. And we found that people don’t articulate a high degree of trust in mayor in dealing with affordability. Yes, they trust him more than they do others (like developers, or the Board of Supervisors), but not much. This survey help me understand what happened on the 8 Washington vote. Voters like the mayor, as they do Newsom incidentally, but don’t buy their argument that the development would address housing affordability. His popularity didn’t have coattails on this issue.

It strikes me as a real missed opportunity for your journalists to trash the poll, based on really flimsy grounds, rather than address it’s important, and yes, ambivalent findings.

Sincerely,

 

Corey Cook, Ph.D.

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