Tenants

Matt Smith loves prop. 98

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I almost don’t know what to say about Matt Smith’s SF Weekly piece in favor of Prop. 98. I know Smith gets a little unhinged when it comes to housing issues, but his faith in the free market to lower the price of housing in San Francisco – against all odds and all evidence – is just looney.

He starts off with the typical landlord/libertarian argument against rent control, which is that it screws up the marketplace:

Tens of thousands of other apartments are kept off the market through “hoarding,” as individual tenants remain in cheap and cavernous three-bedrooms, hang on to their old $200-a-month apartments long after they’ve moved in with a spouse, or are otherwise motivated to cling to their leases.

Except that Prop. 98 would allow existing tenants to stay in existing rent-controlled apartments, which lose rent control forever when they’re vacated. So the rent-controlled units would be even more valuable, and the incentive to “hoard” even greater. As would be the incentive for landlords to evict long-term tenants.

But wait, there’s more:

Studies also show that rent control discourages construction of new rental apartments New housing construction fell by one third in the seven years after San Francisco’s rent control law passed in 1979. During the 1990s, meanwhile, the number of rental units actually decreased by 7,500.

Ah, but all newly constructed units are exempt from rent control anyway. So something else must be going on here. Perhaps the number of rental units decreased because developers, who care nothing for the city’s housing needs, realized there’s more money to be made selling condos. It’s the same reasons Lennar Corp. broke its promise to build rental housing in Hunters Point: There’s more money in selling units right now than in renting them.

And, of course, we’re losing rental housing – not to rent control but to condo conversions, another way property owners can make money.

Smith seems to think that without rent control

“it’s reasonable to surmise … that downtown apartment construction would accelerate. Rents would stabilize or decline. …. Businesses would flock to San Francisco, which would have ample new office space and more, cheaper homes for their employees.”

Sounds idyllic, if you want to live in Manhattan, which I don’t.

In fact, Matt Smith’s vision of a “great city” is by nature one that’s constantly growing and ever-more dense. He berates the urban environmentalists:

San Franciscans replaced what had been a metropolitan vision of the future with one best described as suburban. Rather than being a great city, it would instead be a tranquil place to live.

Matt, you have no sense of history. After World War II, the captains of industry who had completely taken over planning and development policy, in the military model of command and control, to make the West Coast war machine work, decided they liked that way of doing business. So a handful of them sat down and planned the future of the Bay Area. Low-cost South of Market housing would be demolished to make way for hotels and a convention center. Following the suburban model, BART would connect outlying bedroom communities with a dense downtown office core. High-rise buildings would hold the economic center of the Pacific Rim. A network of freeways would cross the city in a Los Angeles-style grid.

That’s what the master planners who Smith lauds had in mind. And the people who lived here decided that it wasn’t fair that nobody asked them about it. So they fought back, cutting off the freeways, down-zoning neighborhoods, fighting over-development (which, by the way, hurts city coffers more than it helps) and trying to keep this a decent place to live.

Rapid growth is not always good, not always desirable. Cities are places where people live, and keeping them livable is a noble pursuit.

And when it comes to housing in a city like San Francisco, the market will never, ever solve the problem. I’ve written about this over and over, but here’s the latest.

Regulation – treating housing not just like a fungible commodity but like a necessity of life that the market can’t fairly provide – is the only way to keep San Francisco affordable.

Hellarity burns

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› news@sfbg.com

"The angels in the summertime are ashes in the fall. As Eden fell so heaven shall. I will burn them all."

The sign, written in gothic letters on weatherworn plywood with faded red flames, is nailed to the side gate of a two-story duplex off Martin Luther King Jr. Way in north Oakland. Today, the old sign’s words carry a chilling new meaning, greeting visitors to a house whose insides were scorched by an unidentified arsonist.

The charred house has been a cauldron of contention for more than 10 years. It has been the product of two anticapitalist housing experiments, one started by an environmentalist landlord who sought to create an ecotopia, and the other by a group of anarchists who intended to make it their home. In the process, it became a hub for traveling activists and aspiring hobos, and a headquarters for antiestablishment endeavors such as Berkeley Liberation Radio.

"People would hear about it through the grapevine, hop off a freight train, and show up on our doorstep with a backpack, a banjo, and a Woody Guthrie song," says Steve DiCaprio, a tenant who moved into the house in 2001 with his wife after living in a van out front. "We had an open-door policy. Anyone could come in, no questions asked. They just had to abide by certain rules: no hard drugs, no racism, no homophobia, and no violence. We wanted to emphasize equality — it was a reaction to the closed, materialistic, competitive, dog-eat-dog society we live in."

The house originally was part of the green property owner’s attempt to create a network of sustainable, affordable housing. When his project floundered, the residence was slowly taken over by his tenants, a group of people who one-upped his radicalism. Both sides claimed to be avowed anticapitalists, but their strategies were at odds; his was to produce an alternative to the local housing market by creating a nonprofit that would help tenants own their homes as a collective. Theirs was to make space for themselves in a rent-based housing market by seizing property from investors and absentee landlords.

The owner eventually went bankrupt — drowned in the early stages of the current defutf8g housing market — and the property fell into the hands of a small-time real estate investor, despite the tenants’ attempts to buy it themselves. The tenants refused to leave, transforming themselves into squatters, and fought it out with the buyer in court for three years. As the court case bogged down, housing values plummeted, making the landlord’s investment lose value by the day.

On Feb. 28, when one of many hearings was set to take place, the squatters showed up in court but the landlord hadn’t filed the paperwork needed to move the conflict closer to a resolution. The following night, in the early hours of March 1, someone lit three fires in the empty upper apartment, setting the house ablaze as people slept inside.

WELCOME TO HELLARITY


For years the house has been known as "Hellarity," although its original owner never called it that. In fact, he refuses to. To recognize that name would be to legitimize the people who adorned it with the title — a group he sees as thieves, squatters who disrupted a legitimate project he thought would have a small but tangible impact on a profit-driven housing market.

Born on the Sunrise Free School in northeastern Washington State, Sennet Williams — known by most as "Sand" — spent his early years bouncing between Spokane and "environmental and pacifist intentional communities" in the area. A year after moving to Berkeley in 1990, he graduated from UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business. With a degree in urban land economics, he wanted to do his part to turn the tide of environmental degradation by developing "nonprofit car-free housing" in Berkeley.

Williams didn’t see attending business school or investing in property as contradictions of his ideals. For Williams, they were strategic moves. He thought that anticapitalist projects lacked an important element — money — and wanted to be a benefactor for alternative forms of housing.

One week after graduating, his dreamy aspirations came to a crashing halt when an SUV plowed into his compact car while he was on a ski trip at Lake Tahoe, badly injuring him and causing brain damage. His goals would have been quickly destroyed, but Williams sued the driver and convinced the court that the accident interfered with his budding career, winning a settlement in 1993 that he says was "almost a million dollars."

While his money was tucked away in mutual funds and he was living briefly at a student co-op in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1994, Williams solidified his ideas into an ambitious project called the "Green Plan" with some of his housemates. The plan was an elaborate scheme to "end homelessness" by creating "an urban nonprofit dedicated to self-governing and radical environmentalism" that would fund "rural sustainable ecovillages in Hawaii and elsewhere."

That summer, Williams bought five houses on credit in what he calls Berkeley’s "’80s drug-war zones" and brought his Ann Arbor friends to California to turn his rundown properties into co-op material. Over the summer, the Green Plan became an official organization and Williams let its members live in his houses without paying rent. Instead, they were expected to pay monthly dues to their organization — roughly the equivalent of fair market rent — to put toward buying rural land or repurchasing the houses from Williams at cost. Those who couldn’t afford to contribute were allowed to stay free in exchange for working on the houses, doing extra work for the Green Plan, or volunteering in its Little Planet café.

"Sennet (Williams) tried to be clear that he wasn’t a landlord," says former Green Plan member Dianna Tibbs, but relations between Williams and the members quickly disintegrated. Three years after its formation, the Green Plan remained unincorporated as a nonprofit. A former member also said it was still too centered on Williams’ ideas. Williams’ relationship with the tenants soured. "Ultimately there was a rebellion among the people against Sennet," Tibbs says. In 1997 the project disbanded, transferring all of the money they had raised — about $50,000 — to the Little Planet café.

The Green Plan fell apart, but Williams was caught up in the fervor of the mid-90s real estate market. In 1997, he bought the house that would later be named Hellarity for $114,000, with the goal of "making it into a demonstration of an eco-house that would be an educational resource for the city." He says he chose that property in part so it "could be a tribute to the Black Panthers’ goals of providing food in the inner-city," as it was on the same block as the home of Black Panthers founder Bobby Seale.

But shortly after Williams bought Hellarity, he says he became "overextended in real estate." By the time he made his first mortgage payments, he says there were "over 60 people" living in his houses. He owned eight in Berkeley, two in Oakland, and was planning to buy farmland in Hawaii. With Williams tied up in too many projects to fix up Hellarity, he moved in some people to "house sit" in exchange for free rent.

Shortly after people moved in, Williams stopped coming around the house. The housesitters gradually brought in their friends, the walls were slowly painted to suit the eccentric tastes of the occupants, and more people started calling the house theirs. Williams said he didn’t invite them, but admits that he never asked them to leave. He had little contact with the occupants as years passed. "He was just a theoretical person that owned the house," DiCaprio says.

Hellarity took on a distinctly anarchist flavor in Williams’ absence. "People with alternative lifestyles and alternative family arrangements could live without having to dedicate their lives to making money, giving them more time to invest in their homes and their communities," says long-term resident Robert "Eggplant" Burnett, Bay Area punk rock legend, publisher of the zine Absolutely Zippo, and editor of Slingshot newspaper. Hellarity hosted the pirate radio station Berkeley Liberation Radio, a do-it-yourself bike shop, and cooked meals for Food Not Bombs.

It seemed like an anarchist paradise, but it wouldn’t last.

FOR SALE


By 2004, mortgage payments were driving Williams deep into debt, and Hellarity became a burden. The house was being pulled away from him from two sides: by anarchists who increasingly challenged the legitimacy of his ownership, and by creditors who placed liens against his properties.

When Hellarity was eventually sold by the court in a bankruptcy sale, the tenants say the man who would buy the house, Pradeep Pal, had never set foot in it. Pal, who refused to be interviewed for this article, lived in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Hercules and owned two businesses, Charlie’s Garage in Berkeley and European Motor Works in Albany. He wasn’t exactly a freewheeling real estate flipper — he was a South Asian immigrant who, according to Guardian research of property records, never owned real estate in the area other than his own home.

But to the tenants, Pal was a capitalist trying to buy them out of their home. In a recorded meeting with tenants, Pal admitted he hadn’t been inside the house before he bought it, and Williams tells us the real estate agent who arranged the sale also never toured the house before Pal bought it. "He obviously had no interest in moving into the place or contributing to the community if he didn’t even look at it," future occupant Jake Sternberg says. "This was someone who just wanted to make a profit."

The tenants made it clear to Pal that they didn’t want him to buy the house and would make life difficult for him. As soon as it became apparent that Williams would lose the house, Crystal Haviland and a few other occupants started searching for someone to help them buy the house. In the summer of 2004, the house was slated to go up on foreclosure auction, but the tenants hadn’t found a sympathetic donor.

The auction was set to occur on the steps of the René C. Davidson Alameda County Courthouse, and the occupants showed up banging drums and bellowing chants to warn off prospective buyers. "We wanted anyone interested in buying the house to know that the people who had been living at the house for 10 years wanted to buy it," says Haviland, who is now raising a child, studying psychology at San Francisco State University, and volunteering as a peer counselor at the Berkeley Free Clinic. "We didn’t want people to buy it and turn it into an expensive gentrified thing." While people gathered, Williams showed up and announced bankruptcy, a legal move that cancelled the auction.

With more time to search for financial support, Haviland started talking with Cooperative Roots, an organization that bought a couple of Williams’ other houses — now known as "Fort Awesome" and "Fort Radical" — in foreclosure auctions. Cooperative Roots is a Berkeley-based nonprofit organized in 2003 by members of the University Students Cooperative Association. They received money from progressive donors — mainly the Parker Street Foundation — to buy houses that they turned into "cooperative, affordable housing," says Cooperative Roots member Zach Norwood. Anyone who lives in their houses is an automatic member of the cooperative and makes monthly mortgage payments to the foundation.

For Hellarity, Cooperative Roots was a godsend. "Other people would walk into that house and say, "This place is disgusting," DiCaprio says. "But they said, ‘Wow, this is a work of art.’<0x2009>" The Parker Street Foundation was willing to put down whatever was needed to buy the house, Norwood says, but the occupants were limited by the monthly payments they could afford. On Nov. 4, 2004, the house went up for bankruptcy sale, and Cooperative Roots was prepared to bid up to $420,000. "It was exciting to be there with a bunch of crazy Hellarity people, putting out bids for hundreds of thousands of dollars," Haviland says.

No one expected them to show up at the sale. Williams says they had previously offered to buy the house from him but he "didn’t think they were serious." By the time they had the money, Williams no longer had control of the sale. At the courthouse, the anarchists were playing by the rules, bidding with money up front. The only other party interested in the house was Pal and his brother-in-law Charanjit Rihal, who were placing bids against the occupants. The two sides bid against each other, driving up the price until the occupants reached their limit. Pal and Rihal took the property for $432,000.

OWNERSHIP VS. CONTROL


"This sale was symptomatic of a housing market gone haywire," says DiCaprio. "People like Pal and Rihal thought they could just throw a bunch of money into real estate and it would always be a good investment. I’m glad the market finally crashed, because that kind of behavior hurts a lot of people. It ended up driving the price of housing to the point that normal people can’t buy anymore — and that’s absurd."

Pal soon discovered he owned the property on paper only. The occupants didn’t recognize the sale or his authority to tell them to leave. Three months after the sale, the occupants were still there, refusing to go. Pal took the case to court in an "action to quiet title," demanding that they be ejected from the property and that the title be freed from any future claims against it. He claimed the people in the house were squatters, living on his property without permission. But before the police could drag out the occupants, they countersued, holding themselves up in court without a lawyer for three years and living in the house the whole time.

One of the first cross-complaints came from Robert Burnett who — with his contempt for the computerized, cell phone-saturated consumer culture — wrote his cross-complaint on the back of a flyer on an ancient typewriter. When the document appeared in court, one side advertised a benefit for a pirate radio station at the anarchist info shop at the Long Haul with an image of tiny people being thrown out of an upside-down Statue of Liberty. On the other side, Burnett claims that he is a co-owner of the house, which he acquired through "adverse possession." Two other defendants made the same claim.

"Adverse possession transfers the ownership of a piece of real estate to people occupying the house without payment," says Oakland attorney Ellis Brown, an expert in property law. "In the state of California, you have to be openly living in a place for five years without the titleholder trying to make you leave to win an adverse possession case."

"Adverse possession originated to prevent Native Americans from taking back land from homesteaders, but squatters turned it around, using it to protect people who take possession of unused property," says Iain Boal, a historian of the commons who teaches in the community studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of the forthcoming book, The Long Theft: Episodes in the History of Enclosure. Boal emphasizes the large numbers of squatters in the world, a figure Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (Routledge, 2004), pegs at 1 billion. "It is only here that squatters are seen as bizarre leftovers from the ’60s," Boal says. "We are in a crisis of shelter, and people need to fill their housing needs."

DiCaprio concurs. Along with Burnett, DiCaprio was the main backer of the occupants’ legal case. As we talk in a dark, live-in warehouse, he sips coffee out of a Mason jar and looks over the court case on his laptop. He says he wants to be a lawyer, but he has never been interested in making lots of money — he says he wants to "fight for housing rights." DiCaprio learned squatter law while cycling through family law court, criminal court, and federal court over a Berkeley house he was squatting and trying to win through adverse possession. The city threw him in jail, and he was released just after Pal sued the occupants of Hellarity.

He says Hellarity was different from other situations he’s dealt with as a squatter. "We never thought of ourselves as squatters [at Hellarity] per se until Pal sued us and start using that language in court," he says. "Before he bought the house, no one was challenging our presence on the property. Sennet [Williams] was either actively or passively letting us stay there. By filing a claim to quiet title, Pal made it apparent the title was in question. By calling us squatters instead of tenants, they lost some claim to the property. So we took the ball and ran with it."

Their use of adverse possession was strategic, DiCaprio says, but they didn’t intend to win the house that way. "We were never under any illusion that we would win ownership of the house in court," he says. "We wanted to use the court as a forum to enable us to buy the house. We were just treading water until Pal got tired and agreed to sell." The occupants say they offered him $360,000 for the house, the price it was originally listed for, but he refused to take a loss on his investment.

DiCaprio says the courts generally aren’t sympathetic to squatters’ cases. "Pro pers tend to be poor, so there is a class bias against them," he says, referring to people who represent themselves without a lawyer. DiCaprio says judges have rejected documents for having dirt on them and refused to give fee waivers to people with no income. "The courts do not like squatters. If you mix pro per and adverse possession, you could not have a more hostile environment against us."

For more than two years, Pal and the occupants played a cat-and-mouse game, dragging out the case and trying to complicate it in hopes the other side would just give up. Pal’s lawyer, Richard Harms (who did not return Guardian calls seeking comment), objected to the terms "documents," "property," and "identify" when asked to produce evidence related to his claim. "Instead of trying to prove their case, they were just waiting for us to trip up and not file something before a deadline," says DiCaprio.

The occupants didn’t slip, but as the case wore on, he and Burnett grew tired of upholding their side in court. By fall 2007, the two cut side deals with Pal. Burnett settled for $2,000 and DiCaprio for an undisclosed amount. "I realized I couldn’t save it alone," DiCaprio says. "I told them to sink or swim."

ENDGAME


When Burnett and DiCaprio settled with Pal, the subprime housing crisis was splashing the headlines. Pal’s investment was starting to seem more like a loss, but for the first time since he bought the property, it looked like it would finally be his. By November 2007, the remaining squatters dropped the battle for ownership and began bargaining with him for concessions.

By mid-February, Pal was ready to start renovations, and all but two of the squatters had moved out. They made their final plea and Pal gave his last compromise: two more weeks, then they had to go. "He was sure he was going to get the house, so he agreed to let us stay," says a squatter called Frank, who asked not to be named because of his immigration status.

What Pal may not have understood was that he was not the only party still interested in the house. The house was becoming a point of contention among the larger community of squatters and anarchists in the East Bay. Fissures broke around a central question: was it up to those living there to decide the fate of the notorious squat, or did the larger community of radical activists have a say in the property?

As Pal was getting rid of the last people occupying the house, the squatters’ conflict came to Hellarity’s doorstep. A new group of people came to the North Oakland house, among them a few who had previously stayed at Hellarity, ready to renew the struggle against Pal. Frank, who had been living in the house for seven months, was unhappy about the new arrivals.

"I told them that this kind of action would make problems for me," he says. "I already made an agreement with this guy [Pal] to leave by the end of the month." The new group saw things differently. "We own this place," says Jake Sternberg, the new de facto caretaker of Hellarity, who has since been pushing for the squatters to renew their court case. The discord between the squatters split up the duplex: the two old squatters stayed upstairs while the recent arrivals occupied the lower half.

Two weeks after the new crew moved in, a fire was lit in the upper apartment that burned through the ceiling and the floor. But who did it? Was it a disgruntled squatter who would rather destroy the house than hand it back to Pal? Or was Pal connected to the arson, losing his nerve as a newly energized group of squatters took over and the value of his investment crashed?

If not for the squatters, Pal might have been less affected by the subprime crisis than most property owners. He had no mortgage on the house — he bought it outright — so he wasn’t under threat of foreclosure, unlike tens of thousands of other California homeowners. But Pal faced a different threat. It seems likely he bought the house as an investment, and as the market crashed, he was stuck with a house he could neither renovate nor sell, and was left to watch its value tank as he slogged through court proceedings.

For an investor like Pal, the numbers weren’t looking good. In March, median housing prices had fallen 16.1 percent compared with those of March 2007, according to DataQuick Information Systems, and home sales declined 36.7 percent from the previous year. In April — for the seventh consecutive month — Bay Area home sales were at their lowest level in two decades, DataQuick reported. And according to Business Week, national home prices will plummet an additional 25 percent over the next two to three years.

On Feb. 17, the day after the new group of squatters moved in, Pal made an appearance at the house. In early March, Sternberg showed me a video he recorded during Pal’s visit. On the screen, Pal is sitting on a couch in the downstairs living room of Hellarity. At the door, a well-built man who looks to be in his 30s and calls himself Tony leans against the wall with two younger men who call themselves Salvador and Ryan. Sternberg tells me that Pal came to the house demanding they leave his property. Sternberg called the police, accusing Pal of trespassing. As they waited for the OPD to arrive, which took more than 25 minutes, they discuss their conflict over the house.

At the beginning of the video, Sternberg tells Pal why he and his friends refuse to give up the property: "People came over here from Europe and they said, ‘Hey, we’re going to take this place.’ Now they sell land to each other. And how did they get it? They took it…. And just because somebody pays for something doesn’t mean that they get it. And just because somebody sells something doesn’t mean they have a right to sell that."

A few minutes into Sternberg’s video, Pal told the squatters he was ready to take matters into his own hands. "You just have to deal with me now because what I’m saying is, it’s person to person…. And you know what? If it’s gonna get dirty, it’s gonna get dirty. I don’t care. Because you know what? That’s the way it’s gonna be, because this is what I need. I need to have it. I don’t have any lawyer. I can’t afford a damn lawyer. So it’s gonna be me and you. One to one. Man to man."

Pal eventually left the property after the police arrived, but the two younger men, Salvador and Ryan, spent the night upstairs. "[Pal] had them stay there because they thought the people downstairs would squat the upstairs," Frank says. "He wanted to protect the house." Frank, who says he was concerned that Pal would try to evict him with everyone else, initially didn’t protest the presence of the two young men.

The next day, at Frank’s request, Pal told Salvador and Ryan to leave, and for the two weeks that followed, Pal didn’t return to the house. The new group of squatters expected to see him Feb. 28, the date set for a case hearing called by Pal’s lawyer prior to the re-occupation of the house. If the defendants didn’t show up, a default judgment could have been entered, granting Pal his request to have the squatters removed and ordered to pay $2,000 per month in back rent. The squatters showed up for court, but Pal’s side hadn’t filed the necessary paperwork to hold the hearing.

Once again the house hung in legal limbo and the day after the hearing, the remaining people upstairs moved out as agreed. Frank says Pal called him while he was at work that afternoon to make sure they were gone. For the first time in 11 years, the upper apartment was empty, waiting for either Pal or the other squatters to seize it.

But someone was committed to preventing that from happening. The night after the people upstairs moved out, at around 3:15 a.m., the squatters downstairs awoke to fire creeping through the floorboards above them.

"Both of the doors upstairs were locked," Sternberg says. "We broke through one of the doors and threw buckets of water on the flames."

After the fire department extinguished the blaze, the squatters called the police to have an investigator search the scene. "It appears that unknown suspects entered the house through unknown means, and then set three fires in an attempt to burn the house," the police report states. According to the report, all three fires were set in the upstairs apartment; two burned out before the fire department arrived. Officer Vincent Chen found two used matches in the bathroom, where the wood around the sink had been burned, and a gas can hidden in the bushes on the east side of the house.

When I first met Sternberg, he told me the Oakland Police Department’s arson investigator, Barry Donelan, was helpful. Two and a half months after the fire, however, Sternberg says: "I regret having talked to the police."

Initially, Donelan didn’t know they were squatters — Sternberg had told him they owned the house. "Once he found flyers for a fundraiser to defend the squat, he became angry," says Sternberg. "He said he submitted the case to the district attorney, and didn’t expect anyone would be arrested."

Sternberg says Donelan also threatened to have him arrested for a traffic-related warrant and that he would turn Sternberg’s name over to the Federal Communications Commission, which had an open investigation on the house for hosting Berkeley Liberation Radio. In March, Donelan told us he wouldn’t comment on the case and at press time, he hadn’t return Guardian calls about the status of the investigation.

EPILOGUE


Although the arson may never be solved, the squatters have strong suspicions about who was behind the fire. But they have a hard time deciding who, ultimately, is most culpable for the blaze. "No one involved in Hellarity is innocent, and no one is completely guilty," says DiCaprio. The one point of view everyone seems to share is that Hellarity has long been a tinderbox of contention, in which property owners struggling in a beleaguered housing market faced off against a group of people who reject the market outright for its inaccessibility to low-income people. Eventually, it all — literally — burst into flames.

When I visit after the fire, people are sitting outside playing guitar, smoking rolled cigarettes, and singing the timeless hobo ballad, "Big Rock Candy Mountain." The sounds drift over the budding vegetable gardens and into the downstairs living room, where a message written on a big green chalkboard suggests that if the fire was intended to drive people out, it was unsuccessful: "WELCOME BACK TO HELL(ARITY). Because bosses, landlords, and capitalists suck, the house has lots of repairs that need to be done before it becomes fully livable."

Upstairs, Sternberg looks up at a charred, gaping hole in the ceiling. "We have to make lemonade out of lemons," he tells me, explaining that they just got a skylight to fill the cavity. "We’re going to continue fighting just like we’ve been fighting. This guy [Pal] has been in court with us for three years. He’s got no case." *

Assessing the deal

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom stood with San Francisco Labor Council executive director Tim Paulson, flanked by Sup. Sophie Maxwell and representatives from megadeveloper Lennar, the San Francisco Organizing Project, and the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) May 20 to announce "a historic community benefits agreement."

Lennar had been persuaded to promise more affordable housing and other giveaways in order to win some important new endorsements in their troubled bid to take control of Candlestick and Hunter’s points and cover them with about 10,000 new homes.

"This is a very big deal," Newsom said, plugging the Lennar-financed Prop. G and bashing Sup. Chris Daly for his leadership of the campaign to qualify Prop. F, which would require that half the new units be affordable to households making less than $75,000, a requirement that Lennar casts as a deal breaker.

"Prop. F is a pipe dream that guarantees you only one thing: what you already have," Newsom said. "We have to get the message out what a Trojan horse Prop. F is." Lennar’s top local executive, Kofi Bonner, added that the agreement "enables us to go forward, because now we have new allies."

The Labor Council’s ability to invigorate a campaign makes it an important ally. Yet Lennar’s giveaway of more than it had previously promised and the fact that the agreement comes just two weeks before the June 3 vote seem to indicate that the Prop. G supporters have grown desperate.

Lennar already has spent $3.26 million to promote Prop. G and oppose Prop. F, only to find polls showing Prop. F well ahead despite a campaign that has raised less than $10,000. The weak poll numbers clearly convinced Lennar and its backers in the political power structure that voters would be more likely to support Prop. G if Lennar came up with something that seemed legally binding.

But by supporting a deal that appears to pin down Lennar on levels of housing affordability and community investment, Newsom ironically seems to be validating the concern of Daly and Prop. F’s other backers that Prop. G lacks guarantees on these fronts (see "Promises and reality," 04/23/08).

Not even Newsom could deny that Prop. F’s presence on the political landscape pushed Lennar to seek a community benefits agreement with the Labor Council and ACORN, a group that had been a solid part of Daly’s affordable-housing constituency.

"It probably has," Newsom told the Guardian. "That said, I don’t think Prop. F should suggest the deal is better because of them. Perhaps it’s worse."

Daly dismissed Newsom’s attacks as more attempts to hurt Prop. F’s popularity by trying to attach it to Daly’s personal negatives. Daly also attacked the agreement as overstated in its promises and impossible to enforce.

"I really don’t know if there is any net gain from one deal to the next," Daly said. "And how is it enforceable? We’re not sure anything legally binding is on table now. If there was a development agreement then obviously we would have some surety, as we would if we had a development plan that had cleared the approval process — Lennar’s financial vulnerabilities notwithstanding."

Noting that the city has had "bad luck with big order projects before," Daly recalls how Lennar reneged on building rental units at the Shipyard’s Parcel A, where the developer also failed to properly monitor and control asbestos dust despite promising to do so.

The agreement, which doesn’t include the city or any government agency as a party, is certainly unconventional. But is the deal legally binding? And just who benefits from it?

The CBA purportedly commits Lennar to create 31.86 percent "affordable" housing units in the Bayview, contribute $27 million to provide affordable homes throughout District 10, rebuild the Alice Griffith public housing project, and give down payment and first-time homebuyer assistance on another 3 percent of the homes.

All told, Paulson claims the deal locks in an unprecedented 35 percent affordable housing into Lennar’s mixed-use proposal for the Bayview. The deal also obligates Lennar to invest $8.5 million in workforce development in District 10, hire locally, pay living wages, and allow worker organizing with a card check neutrality policy.

"This legally binding agreement is a way we can insure that our community gets the benefits it needs," said SFOP co-president and longtime Bayview resident Eleanor Williams.

Paulson said May 22 the deal is still being "lawyered up" to ensure its enforceability, and ACORN’s John Eller insists the deal was done with community input. "We have had numerous meetings in which the community was demanding accountability and clear commitments to the workforce and housing, including the possibility of home ownership," Eller told the Guardian.

But Julian Gross, director of the San Francisco–based Community Benefits Law Center, clarifies that the deal only becomes legally binding if Lennar builds a mixed-use project in Bayview/Candlestick Point. "A community benefits agreement gives people a way to work in a coalition," said Gross, who helped negotiate CBAs at Oakland’s Uptown and Oak to Ninth projects, and at Lennar’s development in San Diego’s Ballpark Village in 2005.

Michael Cohen, director of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Workforce and Development, said the city hopes to enter into its own legally binding agreement with Lennar over a mixed-use project by the end of 2009, once environmental reviews on the project are completed.

Given that the project is expected to take 12–15 years to complete, could Lennar change the CBA’s terms after it starts to develop the Bayview? Yes, says Donald Cohen of the San Diego–based Center for Public Policy Initiatives, but only if both sides agree to any changes.

"In a private deal between private parties, those parties can agree to change the terms of the deal at any time," Cohen explained.

That’s significant given the divisions over development within the Labor Council. As Paulson confirmed, the building-trade unions were pushing for outright endorsement of Prop. G and opposition to Prop. F, but he successfully pushed for the negotiations with Lennar, which lasted more than eight weeks and almost broke down several times, Paulson told us.

"I told them, I don’t think that’s where we are coming from because Prop. G doesn’t contain guarantees on affordable housing or jobs," Paulson said of his initial response to Prop. G supporters.

The agreement appears to stretch the definition of "affordable housing," reaching up to those earning 160 percent of area median income, which is essentially market-rate housing for the low-income southeast sector.

Prop. F supporter Alicia Schwartz of People Organized to Win Employment Rights said that what labor’s deal with Lennar means is that only 15.6 percent of the housing will truly be affordable to the folks who currently live in the Bayview. While "3,500 units sounds good," Schwartz observed, "Only 50 percent of them will be for families making 60 percent and less of area median income, while the other 50 percent are for 80 to 160 percent AMI. That means $500,000 condos, which 70 percent of the Bayview can’t afford."

Yet Cohen said it’s understandable that the Labor Council crafted a deal that caters to those with above-average incomes.

"Affordable-housing policies over the last 10 years have tended not to address the needs of many of their members," Cohen said. "Many families make more than $64,000, so they can’t qualify for affordable housing, but don’t make enough to buy. This provides a fantastic and large-scale opportunity to address the problem of the squeezing of the middle class in San Francisco."

Public records obtained from the Mayor’s Office show that prior to this latest deal, Lennar planned to build up to 75 percent market-rate housing at the site, including hundreds of million-dollar townhouses, thousands of high-rise units at $787,483, mid-rise units at $734,400, townhouses at $651,366, and low-rise units at $592,797.

But under the CBA, the top tier of condos that Lennar deems "affordable" cost about the same as the cheapest market rate units it had already planned to build, leaving only 1,566 rental units at rates truly affordable to San Francisco’s low-income workers.

Paulson believes the resulting agreement "ensures that residents, workers, tenants, and future homebuyers have a path to new jobs and housing." He also claims that it is tied to the land, "meaning that it would be transferable to other developers if Lennar pulls out."

Joseph Smooke, executive director of the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, said he believes the jobs agreements labor negotiated are good. "It’s the housing stuff where they gave away the store," Smooke said. "Why didn’t they stick to the jobs piece and support Prop. F?"

Pointing to the Board of Supervisors’ passage of policy saying that 64 percent of housing in eastern neighborhoods should be targeted at 80 percent of AMI and below, Smooke added, "There are ways to make 50 percent affordable work. This is free land. It’s not rocket science. But is it city policy to protect a developer’s stated desire for 18 to 22 percent profit?"

Meanwhile, Schwartz hopes SFOP and ACORN are being accountable to their base of low-income workers. "Lennar would like to tell you that if Prop. G doesn’t pass, nothing happens. But in reality, the community’s plan stays, plus now there is a 50 percent affordable-housing requirement," Schwartz said. "That’s a win-win."

"For Newsom and Lennar to say that Prop. F is a poison pill — the irony is not lost on the Bayview," Schwartz added, recalling the city’s failure to hold Lennar accountable for its promises and misdeeds. "We’re looking to change the way business is done in San Francisco." *

Renters fight back

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

A stream of perturbed tenants living in buildings owned by one of the city’s largest landlords, CitiApartments, Inc., converged on City Hall May 12 to testify that in recent years the company has engaged in an alleged campaign of intimidation and harassment against residents living in rent-controlled units.

Attendees, many wearing stickers that read "Tenants standing together for fair treatment," quickly filled to capacity a committee room used by the Board of Supervisors before the overflow was moved to two other large rooms where televisions airing the meeting were situated.

CitiApartments turned out its own army of supporters in an attempt to offset the impression that it’s unpopular among renters in the city. Dozens of people who claimed to back the company’s business practices attended the meeting wearing shirts that stated, "I support CitiApartments."

But a volunteer with the Queer Youth Organizing Project and organizer against CitiApartments complained to the supervisors that the crowd of supporters had either been paid to attend the meeting or were employees of the company. Few CitiApartments supporters filled out comment cards or spoke publicly in defense of the company.

Some CitiApartments tenants said they endured months of lingering construction work that filled their buildings with debris and garbage after CitiApartments bought its buildings, the upheaval intentionally designed to drive them out in frustration and thus give up their stabilized rent rates.

Others said vulnerable tenants like undocumented immigrants and seniors were specially targeted with intimidation tactics by a private security group working for CitiApartments that appeared at their doors asking for personal information. Utilities were frequently shut off, tenants said, or elevators relied upon by the physically disabled were left inoperable for long periods of time, all part of a campaign to scare them away from their apartments.

"This is not simply about a bad landlord," tenant Debbie Nuñez, who lives in a Lower Nob Hill building purchased by CitiApartments in 2000, told the supervisors. "This is about a well-oiled machine."

Sup. Chris Daly sponsored the hearing by the board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee to receive an update on the city attorney’s lawsuit against CitiApartments, a.k.a. Skyline Realty. He also wanted to discuss the company’s swift rate of property acquisitions in San Francisco and to hear testimony about mounting alleged building code violations at some of its buildings.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera sued the company and several of its subsidiaries in August 2006 alleging an "egregious pattern of unlawful and unfair business practices," and a "shocking panoply of corporate lawlessness, intimidation tactics, and retaliation against residents."

Five months prior, the Guardian published a three-part series of stories documenting claims by current and former CitiApartments tenants that they had been the victims of persistent, aggressive attempts to oust them from rent-controlled housing units. If such tenants vacate the apartments for whatever reason, CitiApartments can raise the rent on those units dramatically.

A recent report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office shows CitiApartments today owns nearly 300 properties here, which combined hold from 6,300 to 7,500 units and about 12,000 tenants.

Sup. Aaron Peskin, who sits on the committee with Sups. Gerardo Sandoval and Sophie Maxwell, said at the meeting that his office receives a complaint once a week or at least every 10 days about CitiApartments, a figure that has increased over the last three years.

"I don’t recall ever hearing complaints about Trinity Properties in the city," Peskin said. "They own 6,000 units."

Daly pointed to a May 9 New York Times article that reported on the rising phenomenon of "predatory equity," in which private investment funds bankroll the acquisition of a large number of rent-controlled apartments in New York anticipating higher-than-usual vacancy rates. But tenant advocates say achieving such rates requires a concerted effort, either through offering one-time buyouts, finding nuances in the law that allow for an eviction, or harassing tenants until they grow exasperated and leave.

The significantly higher revenue generated from market-rate rental prices then enable building buyers there to repay the equity firms that gave them the huge loans to buy the properties in the first place. Daly wants to find out if CitiApartments is deploying a similar "business model" in San Francisco.

According to the Times piece, developers backed by private equity firms have purchased nearly 75,000 rent-controlled units over the last four years in New York. One company that bought a group of buildings in Queens subsequently filed around 1,000 cases against tenants in housing court during an 18-month period.

A lawyer for CitiApartments, Tara Condon, promised the committee members that the company would investigate the complaints made by tenants at the May 12 meeting. She added that the company increases tax revenue for the city when it improves the conditions and appearances of buildings it purchases. She also declared that the company makes local charitable contributions and has reached out to financially troubled tenants.

"We are a business, but we try to work with [the tenants,]" Condon said. "We want to make sure they can stay in their apartments."

One former tenant, Donna O’Brien, testified that CitiApartments helped her and her husband find a more affordable apartment after the company bought a previous building she lived in at 516 Ellis St. last year. She said CitiApartments also paid for her moving expenses. "Quite honestly, CitiApartments has been very good to us."

JROTC must go now

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OPINION In November 2006, San Francisco made history when the school board made this the first big city in the nation to ban JROTC [Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps]. The board’s resolution, which called for phasing out JROTC from high schools this June, stated that “JROTC is a program wholly created and administrated by the United States Department of Defense, whose documents and memoranda clearly identify JROTC as an important recruiting arm.”

A poison pill was added to the resolution at the last minute: it called for a task force to be set up to find an “alternative” program to JROTC. The school district administration, in a particularly despicable move, set up the task force with more than 10 members supporting JROTC, and only one member opposed.

Surprise! After sitting for almost a year, the task force failed to come up with an alternative, so the school board rolled over and, except for two courageous members — Mark Sanchez and Eric Mar — voted last December to extend JROTC for another year.

In 2005, San Franciscans passed Proposition I by almost 60 percent, declaring it “city policy to oppose military recruiting in public schools.” That same year, by the Army’s own report, 42 percent of JROTC graduates across the nation signed up for the military. As this country enters its sixth year of the illegal occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s time for the school board to go back to its original decision to kick the military out of our schools.

The school board must end JROTC — now. JROTC is currently scheduled to be “phased out,” but not until June 2009. By then both Sanchez and Mar will be off the school board, and there will be little to prevent the military from orchestrating a vote to extend JROTC indefinitely. If, on the other hand, the school board votes to end JROTC this June as their original resolution required, JROTC would be gone.

Two progressives on the board must be convinced to send the military packing: Kim-Shree Maufas and Green Party member Jane Kim.

Both received endorsements from progressives. To convince them that they risk such endorsements in the future, the JROTC Must Go! Coalition is circuutf8g the following statement: “We will look very closely at the next school board vote on JROTC and will consider the votes carefully when making any endorsements for future candidates.”

Within a week, the Tenants Union, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, and the San Francisco Bay View newspaper signed the statement. If Maufas and Kim join Sanchez and Mar, we’ll make history again.

Riva Enteen is the former program director for the National Lawyers Guild and the mother of two San Francisco school district graduates. Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a southern Italian queer atheist writer and activist. For more information contact the JROTC Must Go! Coalition: (415) 575-5543 or JROTCmustgo@gmail.com.

 

Rising rents in San Francisco

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I’ve accomplished a difficult feat that may become impossible in coming years: I rented a room in a decent neighborhood in San Francisco for $550. It wasn’t easy. Searching Craigslist, spamming my friends, and looking at about 20 apartments over the last couple weeks has been like having another part-time job. And my success story was only the result of finding a tiny room in a rent-controlled four-bedroom apartment where some good friends live.
Rents and the number of apartment-seekers are both on the rise and the number of rental units is falling, a perfect storm hitting low-income San Franciscans who hope to stay in The City.

“The rents are definitely going up on the vacant units, and for various reasons, the supply is declining,” says Ted Gullicksen, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Some of those reasons include condo conversions (which number 2500 since 2003, according to the latest Planning Department figures), demolitions, temporarily rented SoMa condos taken off the rental market, and would-be home owners driven to rent by foreclosures, still-high prices, and fear that they bottom still hasn’t been reached (check here for some interesting rental data compiled from Craigslist listings).

Endorsements

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>>Click here for the full-text version of this story

Wait, wasn’t the primary election back in February? Yes, it was — in a way. The California Legislature, in an effort to make the state more relevant (that turned out well, didn’t it?) moved the presidential primary several months earlier this year but left the rest of the primary races, and some key initiatives, for the June 3 ballot. There’s a lot at stake here: three contested Legislative races, two judicial races, a measure that could end rent control in California … vote early and often. Our endorsements follow.

National races

Congress, District 6

LYNN WOOLSEY


It’s an irony that the congressional representative from Marin and Sonoma counties is far to the left of the representative from San Francisco, but Lynn Woolsey’s politics put Nancy Pelosi to shame. Woolsey was against the Iraq war from the start and the first member of Congress to demand that the troops come home, and she continues to speak out on the issue. At the same time, she’s also a strong advocate for injured veterans.

Woolsey, who once upon a time (many years ago) was on welfare herself, hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to have trouble making ends meet. She’s a leading voice against cuts in social service spending and is now pushing a bill to increase food stamp benefits. She richly deserves reelection.

Congress, District 7

GEORGE MILLER


George Miller, who has represented this East Bay district since 1974, is an effective legislator and strong environmentalist. Sometimes he’s too willing to compromise — he worked with the George W. Bush administration on No Child Left Behind, a disaster of an education bill — but he’s a solid opponent of the war and we’ll endorse him for another term.

Congress, District 8

NO ENDORSEMENT


Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist, is moving forward with her campaign to challenge Nancy Pelosi as an independent candidate in November, and we wish her luck. For now, Pelosi, the Speaker of the House and one of the most powerful people in Washington, will easily win the Democratic primary.

But Pelosi long ago stopped representing her San Francisco district. She continues to support full funding for Bush’s war, refused to even consider impeachment (back when it might have made sense), refused to interact with war critics who camped out in front of her house … and still won’t acknowledge it was a mistake to privatize the Presidio. We can’t endorse her.

Congress, District 13

PETE STARK


You have to love Pete Stark. The older he gets, the more radical he sounds — and after 32 years representing this East Bay district, he shows no signs of slowing down. Stark is unwilling to be polite or accommodating about the Iraq war. In 2007 he announced on the floor of the House that the Republicans "don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement." He happily signed on to a measure to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. He is the only member of Congress who proudly admits being an atheist. It’s hard to imagine how someone like Stark could get elected today. But we’re glad he’s around.

Nonpartisan offices

Superior Court, Seat 12

GERARDO SANDOVAL


There aren’t many former public defenders on the bench in California. For years, governors — both Democratic and Republican — have leaned toward prosecutors and civil lawyers from big downtown firms when they’ve made judicial appointments. So the San Francisco judiciary isn’t, generally speaking, as progressive or diverse as the city.

Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, who will be termed out this year, is looking to become a judge — and there’s no way this governor would ever appoint him. So he’s doing something that’s fairly rare, even in this town: he’s running for election against an incumbent.

We’re happy to see that. It’s heartening to see an actual judicial election. Judges are technically elected officials, but most incumbents retire in the middle of their terms, allowing the governor to appoint their replacements, and unless someone files to run against a sitting judge, his or her name doesn’t even appear on the ballot.

Sandoval is challenging Judge Thomas Mellon, a Republican who was appointed by Gov. Pete Wilson in 1994. He’s not known as a star on the bench: according to California Courts and Judges, a legal journal that profiles judges and includes interviews with lawyers who have appeared before them, Mellon has a reputation for being unreasonable and cantankerous. In 2000, the San Francisco Public Defenders Office sought to have him removed from all criminal cases because of what the defense lawyers saw as a bias against them and their clients.

Sandoval hasn’t been a perfect supervisor, and we’ve disagreed with him on a number of key issues. But he’s promised us to work for more openness in the courts (including open meetings on court administration), and we’ll give him our endorsement.

State races and propositions

State Senate, District 3

MARK LENO


It doesn’t get any tougher than this — two strong candidates, each with tremendous appeal and a few serious weaknesses. Two San Francisco progressives with distinguished records fighting for a powerful seat that could possibly be lost to a third candidate, a moderate from Marin County who would be terrible in the job. Two people we genuinely like, for very different reasons. It’s fair to say that this is one of the hardest decisions we’ve had to make in the 42-year history of the Guardian.

In the end, we’ve decided — with much enthusiasm and some reservations — to endorse Assemblymember Mark Leno.

We will start with the obvious: this race is the result of term limits. Leno, who has served in the state Assembly for six years, argues, convincingly, that he is challenging incumbent state Sen. Carole Migden because he feels she hasn’t been doing the job. But Leno also loves politics, has no desire to return to life outside the spotlight, and if he could have stayed in the Assembly, the odds that he would have taken on this ugly and difficult race are slim. And if Leno hadn’t opened the door and exposed Migden’s vulnerability, there’s no way former Assemblymember Joe Nation of Marin would have thrown his hat into the ring. We’ve always opposed term limits; we still do.

That said, we’ll hold a few truths to be self-evident: In a one-party town, the only way any incumbent is ever held accountable is through a primary challenge. Those challenges can be unpleasant, and some — including Migden and many of her allies — argue that they’re a waste of precious resources. If Migden wasn’t scrambling to hold onto her seat, she’d be spending her money and political capital trying to elect more Democrats to the state Legislature. But Leno had every right to take on Migden. And win or lose, he has done a laudable public service: it’s been years since we’ve seen Migden around town, talking to constituents, returning phone calls and pushing local issues the way she has in the past few months. And while there will be some anger and bitterness when this is over — and some friends and political allies have been at each other’s throats and will have to figure out how to put that behind them — on balance this has been good for San Francisco. Migden has done much good, much to be proud of, but she had also become somewhat imperious and arrogant, a politician who hadn’t faced a serious election in more than a decade. If this election serves as a reminder to every powerful Democratic legislator that no seat is truly safe (are you listening, Nancy Pelosi?), then the result of what now seems like a political bloodbath can be only positive.

The Third Senate District, a large geographic area that stretches from San Francisco north into Sonoma County, needs an effective, progressive legislator who can promote issues and programs in a body that is not known as a bastion of liberal thought.

Both Migden and Leno can make a strong case on that front. Leno, for example, managed to get passed and signed into law a bill that amends the notorious pro-landlord Ellis Act to protect seniors and disabled people from evictions. He got both houses of the Legislature to approve a marriage-equality bill — twice. During his tenure in the unpleasant job of chairing the Public Safety Committee, he managed to kill a long list of horrible right-wing bills and was one of the few legislators to take a stand against the foolish measure that barred registered sex offenders from living near a park or school. Migden helped pass the landmark community-aggregation bill that allows cities to take a big step toward public power. She’s also passed several key bills to regulate or ban toxic substances in consumer products.

Migden’s record isn’t all positive, though. For a time, she was the chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee — although she gave up that post in 2006, abandoning a job that was important to her district and constituents, to devote more time to campaigning for Steve Westly, a moderate candidate for governor. When we challenged her on that move, she showed her legendary temper, attacking at least one Guardian editor personally and refusing to address the issue at hand. Unfortunately, that isn’t unusual behavior.

Then there’s the matter of ethics and campaign finance laws. The Fair Political Practices Commission has fined Migden $350,000 — the largest penalty ever assessed against a state lawmaker — for 89 violations of campaign finance laws. We take that seriously; the Guardian has always strongly supported ethics and campaign-finance laws, and this level of disregard for the rules raises serious doubts for us about Migden’s credibility.

Sup. Chris Daly posted an open letter to us on his blog last week, and he made a strong pitch for Migden: "While there are only a few differences between Carole and Mark Leno on the issues," he wrote, "when it comes to San Francisco politics, the two are in warring political factions. Carole has used her position in Sacramento consistently to help progressive candidates and causes in San Francisco, while Leno is a kinder, gentler Gavin Newsom."

He’s absolutely right. On the local issues we care about, Migden has been with us far more than Leno. When the public power movement needed money and support in 2002, Migden was there for us. When the University of California and a private developer were trying to turn the old UC Extension campus into luxury housing, Migden was the one who helped Sup. Ross Mirkarimi demand more affordable units. Migden was the one who helped prevent a bad development plan on the Port. Migden stood with the progressives in denouncing Newsom’s budget — and Leno stood with the mayor.

The district supervisorial battles this fall will be crucial to the city’s future, and Migden has already endorsed Eric Mar, the best progressive candidate for District 1, and will almost certainly be with John Avalos, the leading progressive in District 11. Leno may well back a Newsom moderate. In fact, he’s made himself a part of what labor activist Robert Haaland aptly calls the "squishy center" in San Francisco, the realm of the weak, the fearful, and the downtown sycophants who refuse to promote progressive taxes, regulations, and budgets at City Hall. His allegiance to Newsom is truly disturbing.

There’s a war for the soul of San Francisco today, as there has been for many years, and Leno has often tried to straddle the battle lines, sometimes leaning a bit to the wrong camp — and never showing the courage to fight at home for the issues he talks about in Sacramento. We’ll stipulate to that — and the only reason we can put it aside for the purposes of this endorsement is that Leno has never really had much in the way of coattails. He supports the wrong candidates, but he doesn’t do much for them — and we sincerely hope it stays that way.

While Leno is too close to Newsom, we will note that Migden is far too close to Gap founder and Republican leader Don Fisher, one of the most evil players in local politics. She proudly pushed to put Fisher — who supports privatizing public schools — on the state Board of Education.

A prominent local progressive, who we won’t identify by name, called us several months ago to ask how were going to come down in this race, and when we confessed indecision, he said: "You know, I really want to support Carole. But she makes it so hard."

We find ourselves in a similar position. We really wanted to support Migden in this race. We’d prefer to see the state senator from San Francisco using her fundraising ability and influence to promote the candidates and causes we care about.

But Migden has serious political problems right now, baggage we can’t ignore — and it’s all of her own making. Migden says her problems with the Fair Political Practices Commission are little more than technical mistakes — but that’s nonsense. She’s played fast and loose with campaign money for years. When it comes to campaign finance laws, Migden has always acted as if she rules don’t apply to her. She’s treated FPPC fines as little more than a cost of doing business. This latest scandal isn’t an exception; it’s the rule.

Unfortunately, it’s left her in a position where she’s going to have a hard time winning. Today, the election looks like a two-person race between Leno and Nation. And the threat of Joe Nation winning this primary is too great for us to mess around.

Despite our criticism of both candidates, we would be happy with either in the state Senate. We’re taking a chance with Leno; he’s shown some movement toward the progressive camp, and he needs to continue that. If he wins, he will have a huge job to do bringing a fractured queer and progressive community back together — and the way to do that is not by simply going along with everything Newsom wants. Leno has to show some of the same courage at home he’s shown in Sacramento.

But right now, today, we’ve endorsing Mark Leno for state Senate.

State Senate, District 9

LONI HANCOCK


This is another of several tough calls, another creature of term limits that pit two accomplished and experienced termed-out progressive assembly members against each other for the senate seat of termed-out Don Perata. We’ve supported both Loni Hancock and Wilma Chan in the past, and we like both of them. In this one, on balance, we’re going with Hancock.

Hancock has a lifetime of experience in progressive politics. She was elected to the Berkeley City Council in 1971, served two terms as Berkeley mayor, worked as the US Department of Education’s western regional director under Bill Clinton, and has been in the State Assembly the past six years. On just about every progressive issue in the state, she’s been an activist and a leader. And at a time when the state is facing a devastating, crippling budget crisis that makes every other issue seem unimportant, Hancock seems to have a clear grasp of the problem and how to address it. She’s thought through the budget calculus and offers a range of new revenue measures and a program to change the rules for budget passage (two-thirds vote in the legislature is needed to pass any budget bill, which gives Republicans, all but one who has taken a Grover Norquist–inspired pledge never to raise taxes, an effective veto).

Chan, who represented Oakland in the assembly for six years, is a fighter: she’s taken on the insurance industry (by cosponsoring a major single-payer health insurance bill), the chemical industry (by pushing to ban toxic materials in furniture, toys, and plumbing fixtures), and the alcoholic-beverages lobby (by seeking taxes to pay for treatment for young alcoholics). She’s an advocate of sunshine, not just in government, where she’s calling for an earlier and more open budget process, but also in the private sector: a Chan bill sought to force health insurance companies to make public the figures on how often they decline claims.

But she seems to us to have less of a grasp of the budget crisis and the level of political organizing it will take to solve it. Right now, at a time of financial crisis, we’re going with Hancock’s experience and broader vision.

State Assembly, District 12

FIONA MA


We were dubious about Ma. She was a pretty bad supervisor, and when she first ran for Assembly two years ago, we endorsed her opponent. But Ma’s done some good things in Sacramento — she’s become one of the leading supporters of high-speed rail, and she’s working against state Sen. Leland Yee’s attempt to give away 60 acres of public land around the Cow Palace to a private developer. She has no primary opponent, and we’ll endorse her for another term.

State Assembly, District 13

TOM AMMIANO


This one’s easy. Ammiano, who has been a progressive stalwart on the Board of Supervisors for more than 15 years, is running with no opposition in the Democratic primary for state Assembly, and we’re proud to endorse his bid.

Although he’s certain to win, it’s worth taking a moment to recall the extent of Ammiano’s service to San Francisco and the progressive movement. He authored the city’s domestic partners law. He authored the living wage law. He created the universal health care program that Mayor Newsom is trying to take credit for. He sponsored the 2002 public-power measure that would have won if the election hadn’t been stolen. He created the Children’s Fund. He authored the Rainy Day Fund law that is now saving the public schools in San Francisco. And the list goes on and on.

Beyond his legislative accomplishments, Ammiano has been a leader — at times, the leader — of the city’s progressive movement and is at least in part responsible for the progressive majority now on the Board of Supervisors. In the bleak days before district elections, he was often the only supervisor who would carry progressive bills. His 1999 mayoral challenge to incumbent Willie Brown marked a tectonic shift in local politics, galvanizing the left and leading the way to the district-election victories that brought Aaron Peskin, Matt Gonzalez, Jake McGoldrick, Chris Daly, and Gerardo Sandoval to office in 2000.

It’s hard to imagine the San Francisco left without him.

Ammiano will do a fine job in Sacramento, and will continue to use his influence to push the progressive agenda back home.

State Assembly, District 14

KRISS WORTHINGTON


This is another tough one. The race to replace Loni Hancock, one of the most progressive and effective legislators in the state, has drawn two solid, experienced, and well-qualified candidates: Berkeley City Council member Kriss Worthington and former council member Nancy Skinner. We like Skinner, and she would make an excellent assemblymember. But all things considered, we’re going with Worthington.

Skinner was on the Berkeley council from 1984 to 1992 and was part of a progressive majority in the 1980s that redefined how the left could run a city. That council promoted some of the best tenant protection and rent control laws in history, created some of the best local environmental initiatives, and fought to build affordable housing and fund human services. Skinner was responsible for the first local law in the United States to ban Styrofoam containers — a measure that caused McDonald’s to change its food-packaging policies nationwide. She went on to found a nonprofit that helps cities establish sustainable environmental policies.

Skinner told us that California has "gutted our commitment to education," and she vowed to look for creative new ways to raise revenue to pay for better schools. She’s in touch with the best economic thinkers in Sacramento, has the endorsement of Hancock (and much of the rest of the East Bay Democratic Party establishment), and would hit the ground running in the legislature.

Worthington, Berkeley’s only openly gay council member, has been the voice and conscience of the city’s progressive community for the past decade. He’s also been one of the hardest-working politicians in the city — a recent study by a group of UC Berkeley students found that he had written more city council measures than anyone else currently on the council and had won approval for 98 percent of them.

Worthington has been the driving force for a more effective sunshine law in Berkeley, and has been unafraid to challenge the liberal mayor, Tom Bates, and other leading Democrats. His campaign slogan — "a Democrat with a backbone" — has infuriated some of the party hierarchy with its clear (and intended) implication that a lot of other Democrats lack a spine.

"All of the Democrats in the assembly voted for 50,000 more prison beds," he told us. "We needed a Barbara Lee [who cast Congress’ lone vote against George W. Bush’s first war resolution] to stand up and say, ‘this is wrong and I won’t go along.’"

That’s one of the things we like best about Worthington: on just about every issue and front, he’s willing to push the envelope and demand that other Democrats, even other progressive Democrats, stand up and be counted. Which is exactly what we expect from someone who represents one of the most progressive districts in the state.

It’s a close call, but on this one, we’re supporting Kriss Worthington.

State ballot measures

Proposition 98

Abolition of rent control

NO, NO, NO


Proposition 99

Eminent domain reforms

YES, YES, YES


There’s a little rhyme to help you remember which way to vote on this critical pair of ballot measures:

"We hate 98, but 99 is fine."

The issue here is eminent domain, which is making its perennial ballot appearance. Californians don’t like the idea of the government seizing their property and handing it over to private developers, and the most conservative right-wing forces in the state are trying to take advantage of that.

Think about this: if Prop. 98 passes, there will be no more rent control in California. That means thousands of San Francisco tenants will lose their homes. Many could become homeless. Others will have to leave town. All the unlawful-evictions laws will be tossed out. So will virtually any land-use regulations, which is why all the environmental groups also oppose Prop. 98.

In fact, everyone except the Howard Jarvis anti-tax group hates this measure, including seniors, farmers, water districts, unions, and — believe it or not — the California Chamber of Commerce.

Prop. 99, on the other hand, is an unapologetic poison-pill measure that’s been put on the ballot for two reasons: to fix the eminent domain law once and for all, and kill Prop. 98 if it passes. It’s simply worded and goes to the heart of the problem by preventing government agencies from seizing residential property to turn over to private developers. If it passes, the state will finally get beyond the bad guys using the cloak of eminent domain to destroy all the provisions protecting people and the environment.

If anyone has any doubts about the motivation here, take a look at the money: the $3 million to support Prop. 98 came almost entirely from landlords.

This is the single most important issue on the ballot. Remember: no on 98, yes on 99.

San Francisco measures

Proposition A

School parcel tax

YES, YES, YES


Every year, hundreds of excellent teachers leave the San Francisco Unified School District. Some retire after a career in the classroom, but too many others — young teachers with three to five years of experience — bail because they decide they can’t make enough money. San Francisco pays less than public school districts in San Mateo and Marin counties and far less than private and charter schools. And given the high cost of living in the city, a lot of qualified people never even consider teaching as a profession. That harms the public school system and the 58,000 students who rely on it.

It’s a statewide problem, even a national one — but San Francisco, with a remarkable civic unity, is moving to do something about it. Proposition A would place an annual tax on every parcel of land in the city; the typical homeowner would pay less than $200 a year. The money would go directly to increasing pay — mostly starting pay — for teachers. The proposition, which has the support of almost everyone in town except the Republican Party, is properly targeted toward the newer teachers, with the goal of keeping the best teachers on the job past that critical three to five years.

Parcel taxes aren’t perfect; they force homeowners and small businesses to pay the same rate as huge commercial property owners. The way land is divided in the city most big downtown properties sit on at least five, and sometimes as many as 10 or 20 parcels, so the bill will be larger for them. But it’s still nowhere near proportionate.

Still, Prop. 13 has made it almost impossible to raise ad valorum property taxes (based on a property’s assessed value) in the state, and communities all around the Bay are using parcel taxes as a reasonable if imperfect substitute.

There’s a strong campaign for Prop. A and not much in the way of organized opposition, but the measure still needs a two-thirds vote. So for the sake of public education in San Francisco, it’s critical to vote yes.

Proposition B

City retiree benefits change

YES


San Francisco has always offered generous health and retirement benefits to its employees. That’s a good thing. But in this unfortunate era, when federal money is getting sucked into Iraq, state money is going down the giant deficit rat hole, and nobody is willing to raise taxes, the bill for San Francisco’s expensive employee benefit programs is now looking to create a fiscal crisis at City Hall. Officials estimate the payout for current and past employees could total $4 billion over the next 30 years.

So Sup. Sean Elsbernd and his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors have engineered this smart compromise measure in a way that saves the city money over the long run and has the support of labor unions (largely because it includes an increase in the pensions for longtime employees, partially offset by a one-year wage freeze starting in 2009) while still offering reasonable retirements benefits for new employees.

Previously, city employees who worked just five years could get taxpayer-paid health benefits for life. Under this measure, it will take 20 years to get fully paid health benefits, with partially paid benefits after 10 years.

It’s rare to find an issue that has the support of virtually everyone, from the supervisors and the mayor to labor. Prop. B makes sense. Vote yes.

Proposition C

Benefit denials for convicts

NO


On the surface, it’s hard to argue against Prop. C, a measure promoted as a way to keep crooks from collecting city retirement benefits. Sup. Sean Elsbernd’s ballot measure would update an ordinance that’s been on the books in San Francisco for years, one that strips public employees found guilty of "crimes of moral turpitude" against the city of their pensions. A recent court case involving a worker who stole from the city raised doubt about whether that law also applied to disability pay, and Prop. C would clear up that possible loophole.

But there are drawbacks this measure.

For starters, the problem isn’t that big: cases of rejected retirement benefits for city workers are rare. And the law still uses that questionable phrase "moral turpitude" — poorly defined in state law, never clearly defined in this measure, and as any older gay person can tell you, in the past applied to conduct that has nothing to do with honesty. The US State Department considers "bastardy," "lewdness," "mailing an obscene letter" and "desertion from the armed forces," among other things, to be crimes of moral turpitude.

Besides, Prop. C would apply not only to felonies but to misdemeanors. Cutting off disability pay for life over a misdemeanor offense seems awfully harsh.

The law that Elsbernd wants to expand ought to be rethought and reconfigured for the modern era. So vote no on C.

Proposition D

Appointments to city commissions

YES


Prop. D is a policy statement urging the mayor and the supervisors to appoint more women, minorities, and people with disabilities to city boards and commissions. It follows a study by the Commission on the Status of Women that such individuals are underrepresented on the policy bodies that run many city operations.

Despite the overblown concerns raised by local Republicans in the ballot arguments, this advisory measure would do nothing to interfere with qualified white males — or anyone else — getting slots on commissions.

Vote yes.

Proposition E

Board approval of San Francisco Public Utilities Commission appointees

YES


"The last thing we need is more politics at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission," was the first line in Mayor Gavin Newsom’s ballot argument against Prop. E. That’s ironic: it was Newsom’s recent political power play — including the unexplained ousting of SFPUC General Manager Susan Leal and the partially successful effort to reappoint his political allies to this important body — that prompted this long overdue reform.

The SFPUC is arguably the most powerful and important of the city commissions, controlling all the vital resources city residents need: water, power, and waste disposal chief among them. Yet with the mayor controlling all appointments to the commission (it takes a two-thirds vote of the Board of Supervisors to challenge an appointment), that panel has long been stacked with worthless political hacks. As a result, the panel never pursued progressive approaches to conservation, environmental justice, public power, or aggressive development of renewable power sources.

Prop. E attempts to break that political stranglehold by requiring majority confirmation by the Board of Supervisors for all SFPUC appointments. It also mandates that appointees have some experience or expertise in matters important to the SFPUC.

If anything, this reform is too mild: we would have preferred that the board have the authority to name some of the commissioners. But that seemed unlikely to pass, so the board settled for a modest attempt to bring some oversight to the powerful panel.

Vote yes on Prop. E — because the last thing we need is more politics at the SFPUC.

Proposition F

Hunters Point-Bayview redevelopment

YES


Proposition G

NO


On the face of it, Proposition G sounds like a great way to restart the long-idle economic engine of the Bayview and clean up the heavily polluted Hunters Point Shipyard.

Who could be against a plan that promises up to 10,000 new homes, 300 acres of new parks, 8,000 permanent jobs, a green tech research park, a new 49ers stadium, a permanent home for shipyard artists, and a rebuild of Alice Griffith housing project?

The problem with Prop. G is that its promises are, for the most part, just that: promises — which could well shift at any time, driven by the bottom line of Lennar Corp., a financially stressed, out-of-state developer that has already broken trust with the Bayview’s low-income and predominantly African American community.

Lennar has yet to settle with the Bay Area air quality district over failures to control asbestos dust at a 1,500-unit condo complex on the shipyard, where for months the developer kicked up clouds of unmonitored toxic asbestos dust next to a K-12 school.

So, the idea of giving this corporation more land — including control of the cleanup of a federal Superfund site — as part of a plan that also allows it to construct a bridge over a slough restoration project doesn’t sit well with community and environmental groups. And Prop. G’s promise to build "as many as 25 percent affordable" housing units doesn’t impress affordable housing activists.

What Prop. G really means is that Lennar, which has already reneged on promises to create much-needed rental units at the shipyard, now plans to build at least 75 percent of its housing on this 770-acre waterfront swathe as luxury condos.

And with the subprime mortgage crisis continuing to roil the nation, there is a real fear that Prop. G’s final "affordability" percentage will be set by Lennar’s profit margins and not the demographics of the Bayview, home to the city’s last major African American community and many low-income people of color.

There’s more: The nice green space that you see in the slick Lennar campaign fliers is toxic and may not be fully cleaned up. Under the plan, Lennar would put condo towers on what is now state parkland, and in exchange the city would get some open space with artificial turf on top that would be used for parking during football games. Assuming, that is, that a deal to build a new stadium for the 49ers — which is part of all of this — ever comes to pass.

In fact, the lion’s share of a recent $82 million federal funding allocation will be dedicated to cleaning up the 27-acre footprint proposed for a new stadium. In some places, the city is planning to cap contaminated areas, rather than excavate and remove toxins from the site.

If the environmental justice and gentrification questions swirling around Prop. G weren’t enough, there remains Prop. G’s claim that it will create 8,000 permanent jobs once the project is completed. There’s no doubt that the construction of 10,000 mostly luxury homes will create temporary construction jobs, but it’s not clear what kind of jobs the resulting gentrified neighborhood will provide and for whom.

But one thing is clear: the $1 million that Lennar has already plunked down to influence this election has overwhelmingly gone to line the pockets of the city’s already highly paid political elite, and not the people who grew up and still live in the Bayview.

But there’s an alternative.

Launched as a last-ditch effort to prevent wholesale gentrification of the Bayview, Proposition F requires that 50 percent of the housing in the BVHP/Candlestick Point project be affordable to those making less than the median area income ($68,000 for a family of four).

That’s a reasonable mandate, considering that the city’s own general plan calls for two-thirds of all new housing to be sold or rented at below-market rates.

And if the new housing is built along Lennar’s plans, it will be impossible to avoid large-scale gentrification and displacement in a neighborhood that has the highest percentage of African Americans in the city, the third highest population of children, and burgeoning Latino and Asian immigrant populations.

Lennar is balking at that level, saying a 50-percent affordability mandate would make the project financially unfeasible. But if Lennar can’t afford to develop this area at levels affordable to the community that lives in and around the area, the city should scrap this redevelopment plan, send this developer packing, and start over again.

San Francisco has an affordable housing crisis, and we continue to doubt whether the city needs any more million-dollar condos — and we certainly don’t need them in a redevelopment area in the southeast. Remember: this is 700 acres of prime waterfront property that Lennar will be getting for free. The deal on the table just isn’t good enough.

Vote yes on F and no on G.

Proposition H

Campaign committees

NO


This one sounds just fine. Promoted by Mayor Gavin Newsom, Proposition H is supposedly aimed at ensuring that elected officials don’t solicit money from city contractors for campaigns they are sponsoring. But it lacks a crucial legal definition — and that turns what ought to be a worthy measure into little more than an attack on Newsom’s foes on the Board of Supervisors.

The key element is something called a "controlled committee." It’s already illegal for city contractors to give directly to candidates who might later vote on their contracts. Prop. H would extend that ban to committees, typically run for or against ballot measures, that are under the control of an individual politician.

Take this one, for example. Since Newsom put this on the ballot, and will be campaigning for it, the Yes on H campaign is under his control — he would be barred from collecting cash from city contractors, right? Well, no.

See, the measure doesn’t define what "controlled committee" means. So a group of Newsom’s allies could set up a Yes on H fund, raise big money from city contractors, then simply say that Newsom wasn’t officially aware of it or involved in its operation.

When Newsom first ran for mayor, the committee supporting his signature initiative — Care Not Cash — raised a fortune, and the money directly helped his election. But that wasn’t legally a "controlled committee" — because Newsom never signed the documents saying he was in control.

Prop. H does nothing to change that rule, which means it would only affect campaign committees that a politician admits to controlling. And guess what? Newsom almost never admits that, while the supervisors, particularly board president Aaron Peskin, are a bit more honest.

When Newsom wants to clearly define "controlled committee" — in a way that would have brought the Care Not Cash effort under the law — we’ll go along with it. For now, though, vote no on H.

San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee

The DCCC is the policy-making and operating arm of the local Democratic Party, and it has a lot of influence: the party can endorse in nonpartisan elections — for San Francisco supervisor, for example — and its nod gives candidates credibility and money. There’s been a struggle between the progressives and the moderates for years — and this time around, there’s a serious, concerted effort for a progressive slate. The Hope Slate, which we endorse in its entirety, has the potential to turn the San Francisco Democratic Party into a leading voice for progressive values.

There are other good candidates running, but since this group will have consistent support and is running as a slate, we’re going with the full crew.

13th Assembly District

Bill Barnes, David Campos, David Chiu, Chris Daly, Michael Goldstein, Robert Haaland, Joe Julian, Rafael Mandelman, Aaron Peskin, Eric Quezada, Laura Spanjian, Debra Walker

12th Assembly District

Michael Bornstein, Emily Drennen, Hene Kelly, Eric Mar, Jake McGoldrick, Trevor McNeil, Jane Morrison, Melanie Nutter, Connie O’Connor, Giselle Quezada, Arlo Hale Smith

Alameda County races

Superior Court judge, Seat 21

VICTORIA KOLAKOWSKI


There are two good candidates running for this open seat. Dennis Hayashi, a public-interest lawyer, would make a fine judge. Victoria Kolakowski would make history.

Kolakowski, who works as an administrative law judge for the California Public Utilities Commission, would be the first transgender person on the Alameda bench and, quite possibly, in the entire country. That would be a major breakthrough and important for more than just symbolic reasons: transpeople have extensive interactions with the judicial system, starting with the work to legally change their names; and, all too often, members of this marginalized community wind up in the criminal justice system. Having a sitting TG judge would go a long way toward educating the legal world about the importance of trans sensitivity.

Kolakowski is eminently qualified for the job: as a private intellectual property lawyer and later an ALJ at the CPUC, she’s handled a range of complex legal issues. She currently oversees administrative hearings that are very similar to court proceedings, and she has a calm and fair judicial temperament.

That’s not to denigrate Hayashi, who also has an impressive résumé. He’s spend much of his life in public-interest law, working for many years with the Asian Law Caucus, and he was co-counsel in the historic case that challenged Fred Korematsu’s conviction for refusing to report to a Japanese internment camp during World War II. He’s run the state’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing and was a civil rights lawyer in the Clinton administration.

We’d be happy to see either on the bench, but we’re going to endorse Kolakowski.

Board of Supervisors, District 5

KEITH CARSON


Keith Carson, the leading progressive on the board, has no real opposition this time around. He’s been a voice for protecting the fragile social safety net of the county, and we’re happy to endorse him for another term.

Oakland races

City Attorney

JOHN RUSSO


John Russo, who has made no secrets of his political ambition, failed in a bid to win the State Assembly seat for District 16 in 2006, and now he’s running unopposed for reelection. Russo has voiced some pretty ridiculous sentiments: he told a magazine for landlords in May 2006 that he opposed all forms of rent control and was against laws requiring just cause for evictions. That’s a horrible stand for a city attorney to take in a city with a huge population of renters. But Russo is smart and capable, and he’s one of the few city attorneys who consistently supports sunshine laws. We’ll endorse him for another term.

City Council, District 1

JANE BRUNNER


An attorney and former teacher, Jane Brunner spends a lot of time pushing for more cops; crime is the top issue in the North Oakland district she represents. And while we’d rather see anticrime approaches that go beyond hiring more officers, we appreciate that Brunner takes on the police department over its hiring failures. We also find her far more preferable on the issue than her opponent, Patrick McCullough, a longtime neighborhood activist who has become something of a celebrity since he shot a teenager who was hassling him in front of his house in 2005.

Brunner is one of the council’s strongest affordable housing advocates and has worked tirelessly for an inclusionary housing law. She deserves reelection.

City Council, District 3

NANCY NADEL


Nadel is hardworking, effective, a leader on progressive economic and planning issues, and one of the best members of the Oakland City Council. She asked the hard questions and demanded improvements in the giant Oak to Ninth project (although she wound up voting for it). She’s pushing for better community policing and promoting community-based anticrime efforts, including a teen center in a part of her district where there have been several homicides. She was a principal architect of the West Oakland industrial zoning plan, which she hopes will attract new jobs to the community (although she also pissed off a few artists who fear they’ll be evicted from living spaces that aren’t up to code, and she needs to address the problem). We’re happy to endorse her for another term.

City Council, District 5

MARIO JUAREZ


Somebody has to try to oust Ignacio De La Fuente, and this time around, Juarez is the best bet. A small-businessperson (he runs a real-estate operation with around 60 employees), he has some surprisingly progressive positions: he not only supports inclusionary housing but told us that he wanted to see the percentage of affordable units increased from 15 to 25 percent. He wants to see community policing integrated fully into Oakland law enforcement. He suggested that Oakland look into putting a modest fee on all airport users to fund local education. And he’s in favor of stronger eviction controls and tenant protections.

De La Fuente, the City Council president, has been the developers’ best friend, has run meetings with a harsh hand, often cutting off debate and silencing community activists, and needs to be defeated. We know Juarez isn’t perfect, but his progressive grassroots-based campaign was strong enough to get him the nod of both the Democratic Party and the Alameda County Greens. We’ll endorse him, too.

City Council, District 7

CLIFFORD GILMORE


Neither of the candidates in this race are terribly impressive, but incumbent Larry Reid has been so terrible on so many issues (supporting big-box development, inviting the Marines to do war games in Oakland, supporting condo conversions, etc.) that it’s hard to imagine how Clifford Gilmore, director of the Oakland Coalition of Congregations, could be worse.

City Council, at large

REBECCA KAPLAN


Rebecca Kaplan is exactly what the Oakland City Council needs: an energetic progressive with the practical skills to get things done. As an AC Transit Board member, she pushed for free bus passes for low income youths — and defying all odds, managed to get all-night transit service from San Francisco to the East Bay. She did it by refusing to accept the conventional wisdom that transit agencies on the two sides of the bay would never cooperate. She put the key players together in a meeting, convinced the San Francisco supervisors to allow AC Transit buses to pick up passengers in the city late at night, and put through an effective program to get people across the bay after BART shuts down.

Kaplan is running for City Council on a progressive platform calling for affordable housing, rational development, and community policing. Her latest idea: since Oakland has so much trouble attracting quality candidates for vacancies in its police department, she suggests the city recruit gay and lesbian military veterans who were kicked out under the Pentagon’s homophobic policies. Her proposed slogan: "Uncle Sam doesn’t want you, but Oakland does."

Vote for Rebecca Kaplan.

School Board, District 1

JODY LONDON


The Oakland schools are still stuck under a state administrator; the district, which was driven by mismanagement into a financial crisis several years ago, paid the price of a state bailout by giving up its independence. The school board has only limited authority of district operations, though that’s slowly changing. The state allowed the board to hire an interim superintendent, meaning issues like curricula and programs will be back under local control. So it’s a time of transition for a district that has had horrible problems, and the board needs experienced, level-headed leadership.

We’re impressed with Jody London, a parent with children in the public schools who runs a small environmental consulting firm. She has been active in the district, co-chairing the 2006 bond campaign that raised $435 million and serving on the bond oversight committee. She has a grasp of fiscal management, understands the challenges the district faces, and has the energy to take them on.

Her main opposition is Brian Rogers, a Republican who has the backing of outgoing state senator Don Perata and is a big fan of private charter schools. Tennessee Reed, a young writer and editor, is also in the race, and we’re glad to see her getting active. But on balance, London is the clear choice.

School Board, District 3

OLUBEMIGA OLUWOLE, SR.


Not a great choice here — we’re not thrilled with either of the two contenders. Jumoke Hinton Hodge, a nonprofit consultant, is too willing to support charter schools. Oluwole, who works with parolees, has limited experience with education. But on the basis of his community background (he’s on the board of the Oakland Community Organization) and our concern about Hodge and charter schools, we’ll go with Oluwole.

School Board, District 5

NOEL GALLO


Noel Gallo, the incumbent, is running unopposed. He’s been a competent member of the board, and we see no reason not to support his reelection.

School Board, District 7

ALICE SPEARMAN


Alice Spearman, the incumbent, isn’t the most inspiring member of the board — and she’s known for making some ill-considered and impolitic statements. But her main opponent, Doris Limbrick, is the principal of a Christian school and has no business running for the board of a public school district. So we’ll go with Spearman again.

Alameda County measures

Measure F

Utility users tax

YES


Measure F extends and slightly increases the utility tax on unincorporated areas of the county. It’s not the greatest tax, but it’s not terrible — and it provides essential revenue to pay for services like law enforcement, libraries, and code enforcement. The parts of Alameda County outside any city boundary have been dwindling as cities expand, but the county provides the only local government services in those areas. And, like every other county in California, Alameda is desperately short of cash. So Measure F is crucial. Vote yes.

Oakland Measure J

Telephone-user tax

YES


Measure J would update a 40-year-old tax on phone use that goes for local services. The tax law applies only to old-fashioned land lines, so cell phone users get away without paying. This isn’t the world’s most progressive tax, but Oakland needs the money and Measure J would more fairly share the burden. Vote yes.

Dark days

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Like a lot of San Franciscans, John Murphy wants to put solar panels on his roof. He’s worried about the environment, but it’s also about money: “I want it to pay for all my electricity,” he said one recent evening as we chatted in front of his house.

Murphy pays top dollar for power from Pacific Gas and Electric Co., every month hitting the highest tier of energy use and getting spanked 34 cents a kilowatt hour for it. He’s tried to cut costs by switching to energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs with motion sensors — with little incentive from PG&E’s billing department.

Murphy thought installing solar panels would be worth the up-front cost, especially if federal and state rebates made it more feasible. His roof — sturdy and pitched toward the south, unshaded by trees or other buildings, and located in the fogless hollow of the Mission District — seemed perfectly suited for solar energy.

So last fall he invited a representative from a local solar installation company to the house for a free consultation. He was told his roof could only fit a 2.8 kilowatt system, which would cover about 60 percent of his energy needs — and cost about $25,000.

Murphy is apoplectic about the results. “What’s 60 percent? That’s like going out with her for three-quarters of the night. I want to take her home,” he said.

While the federal incentive shaves $2,000 off the cost, the state rebate program — in place since January 2007 — is a set allocation that declines over time: the later you apply, the less you get. Today Murphy can get about $1.90 per watt back from the state, whereas at the start of the program it was $2.50 per watt. To him, the upfront costs are still too steep and the results won’t cover his monthly PG&E bill.

“The snake oil salesmen of yesterday are the solar panel installers of today,” Murphy said.

But Murphy still wants to install panels — and he’s not alone. The desire for clean, green energy runs deeply through San Francisco and the state as a whole. After the launch of the California Solar Initiative, the number of solar megawatts, represented by applications to the state, doubled what they’d been over the last 26 years. Almost 90 percent of the installations were on homes, indicating that citizens are jumping at the chance to decrease their carbon output.

Yet in San Francisco, where environmental sentiment and high energy costs ought to be driving a major solar boom, there’s very little action.

Back in 2000, then-mayor Willie Brown announced a citywide goal of 10,000 solar roofs by 2010. That would add up to a lowly 5 percent of the 200,000 property lots within the city of San Francisco.

But even that weak goal seems beyond reach: it’s now 2008, and the number of solar roofs in San Francisco stands at a grand total of 618 installations by the end of 2007. In terms of kilowatts per capita, the city ranks last in the Bay Area. The city’s total electricity demand runs about 950 megawatts; only 5 megawatts is currently supplied by solar.

 

WHAT’S WRONG?

Well, it’s not the weather. While heavy cloud cover can hinder panels, fog permits enough ambient light to keep panels productive. San Francisco’s thermostat isn’t much of a factor either — panels prefer cooler temperate zones, not blazing desert heat.

It’s also not for a lack of political ideas — Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing a major solar proposal and several others are floating around, too.

But Newsom is clashing with the supervisors over the philosophy and direction of his plan. It’s complicated, but in essence, the mayor and Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting put together a task force that included representatives of solar installers and PG&E — but nobody from the environmental community and no public-power supporters.

The plan they hatched gives cash incentives to private property owners, takes money away from city-owned solar installments, and does nothing to help the city’s move to public power.

While all this plays out, the solar panels so many San Franciscans want aren’t getting installed.

 

SUN AND SUBSIDY

What makes solar work, according to local solar activists, is a combination of sun and subsidies. “Almost every area in the United States has better sun exposure than Germany, and Germany is leading the solar market worldwide today,” said Lyndon Rive, CEO of Solar City, a Foster City-based solar installer.

The price per kilowatt hour, with current state and federal subsides, is about 13 cents for solar, just two cents more than PG&E’s base rate for energy produced mostly by nuclear power and natural gas.

Still, the average installation for the average home hovers between $20,000 and $30,000. For many, that kind of cash isn’t available.

“The biggest reason for lack of adoption [of solar energy] is that the cost to install in San Francisco is higher than neighboring cities,” Rive said. It’s about 10 percent more than the rest of the Bay Area, according to a December 2007 report of the San Francisco Solar Task Force.

Why? According to Rive, system sizes are smaller. Solar City’s average Bay Area customer buys a 4.4 kilowatt system, but the average San Franciscan — with a smaller house and smaller roof — usually gets a 3.1 kilowatt installation. The smaller the system, the more the markup for retailers amortizing certain fixed costs such as material and labor. On top of that, San Francisco’s old Victorians can have issues — weak rafters need reinforcement; steep roofs require more scaffolding; wires and conduits have to cover longer distances. It adds up.

“There’s an extra cost to doing business in San Francisco,” said Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Akeena Solar and a member of the SF Solar Task Force. “I can expect $100 in parking tickets for every job I do.”

That was the motivation for Ting to establish the Solar Task Force in 2007, with the goal of creating financial incentives, including loans and rebates, to bring down the costs of San Francisco solar. The 11-member task force came up with an ambitious program that involved a one-stop shop for permits, a plan to give property owners as much as $5,000 in cash subsidies, and a system to lend money to homeowners who can’t afford the up-front costs.

The task force said installing 55 megawatts of solar would combat global warming, improve air quality by reducing pollution caused by electricity generation, and add 1,800 green collar jobs to the local economy.

The streamlined permit program is in place. None of the rest has happened.

 

THE MAYOR’S MONEY

The first obstacle was the loan fund. Newsom and Ting wanted to take $50 million currently sitting unspent in a bond fund for seismic upgrades on local buildings. Sup. Jake McGoldrick wanted to know why the money wasn’t being used to upgrade low-income housing; the city attorney wasn’t sure seismic safety money could be redirected to solar loans.

Then Newsom decided to take $3 million from the Mayor’s Energy Conservation Fund to pay for the first round of rebates. Over the next 10 years, that could add up to $50 million. McGoldrick balked again. That money, he said, was supposed to be used on public facilities (like solar panels at Moscone Center and Muni facilities and new refrigerators for public housing projects). Why should it be diverted to private property owners?

There’s a larger issue behind all this: should the city be using scarce resources to help the private sector — or devoting its money to city-owned electricity generation? “In 10 years, there could be $50 million in the fund,” McGoldrick said. “That’s a lot of money, and it’s power the city could own.”

Sup. Chris Daly agrees. “I would support this program if we were running out of municipal [solar] projects,” he said. “But we’re not.”

In addition, the progressive members of the Board of Supervisors, who have all advocated a citywide sustainable energy policy known as community choice aggregation, or CCA, weren’t represented on the Solar Task Force.

The fund Newsom wanted to tap for his project is also the source of funding for the community choice aggregation program, which the progressive supervisors see as the city’s energy plan, which in turn constitutes a far more comprehensive response to climate change, with a goal of relying on 51 percent renewable energy by 2017.

Sup. Gerardo Sandoval is working on a loan program that would allow residents to borrow money from the city for renewable energy and efficiency upgrades for their homes and pay it back at a relatively low interest rate folded into their monthly tax bills. (See “Solar Solutions,” 11/14/07.) Sandoval’s plan would enable loans of $20,000 to $40,000 at 3 percent interest to people who voluntarily put solar on their homes.

The city of Berkeley is pursuing a similar plan. But the task force never consulted Sandoval — in fact, he told us that he had no idea Ting’s task force was meeting until a few months ago.

The supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee is slated to review Newsom’s plan April 16.

Solar installers aren’t happy about the delays: “I’m on the disappointed receiving end of that start and stop,” Cinnamon said.

While city officials duke out where the money should come from and who gets it, San Franciscans interested in purchasing panels are left in limbo. Jennifer Jachym, a sales rep from Solar City who used to handle residential contracts in San Francisco, said, “I have worked all over the Bay Area and I’d have to say it seems that the delta between interest and actual purchase is highest here.

“It was hard to get people to pull the trigger,” she continued. “What the San Francisco incentive program basically did was bring the cost incentives here to where they are everywhere else.”

The holdup has dispirited customers and solar companies. Cinnamon said he wasted 10,000 advertising door hangers because of the delay. Solar City also put on hold a handshake deal with the Port of San Francisco to rent a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in the Bayview District for a solar training academy that could turn out 20 new workers a month.

“As a San Francisco resident, I really want to see it happen there, but as a business, I have to think about it differently,” said Peter Rive, chief operating officer of the company. “Almost every city in the Bay Area is aggressively trying to get us to build a training academy in their city.”

 

TENANTS AND LANDLORDS

Another reason we don’t see more panels on San Francisco roofs is that most San Franciscans are renting and have no control over their roofs. “The landlord doesn’t care. They don’t pay the electric bill,” Cinnamon said. When asked if there were any inroads to be made there, he said, “Nope. That’s not a market I see at all.”

In spite of that, solar companies still are eager to do business here, which means there’s either enough of a market — or enough of a markup.

Rive wouldn’t tell us their exact markup for panels, but said, “The average solar company adds 15 to 25 percent gross margin to the installation. Our gross margin is in line with that.”

Rive’s company has another option for cash-poor San Franciscans, a new “solar lease.” In this scenario, Solar City owns the panels and leases them to homeowners for 15 years. The property owner pays a low up-front cost of a couple of thousand dollars and a monthly lease fee that increases 3.5 percent per year.

For Murphy, the price would be $2,754 down and $88 a month. The panels would still cover only 64 percent of his energy needs, so he would owe PG&E about $70 a month. Because he would be using less energy, PG&E would charge a lower rate, which is something Solar City typically tries to achieve with a solar system.

However, people can’t make money off their solar systems. “People ask about it all the time,” Jachym said. “Especially people in San Francisco. They say ‘I have a house in Sonoma with tons of space. Can I put panels there and offset my energy here?'”

The answer, unfortunately, is no, which means San Franciscans have no incentive to put up more panels than they need and recoup their costs by selling the energy to the grid. Unlike Germany, for example, where people are paid for the excess solar energy they make, California’s net metering laws favor utility companies. If you make more power than you use, you’re donating it to the grid. PG&E sells it to someone else.

If the law was changed — which could be a feature of CCA — citizens could help the city generate more solar energy to sell to customers who don’t have panels, helping the city to meet its overall goal of 51 percent renewable by 2017.

Under Solar City’s lease program, the company gets the federal and state rebates. If Murphy leased for 15 years he’d have an option to buy the used panels, upgrade to new ones, and end or continue the lease. If San Francisco launches the incentive program, the $3,000 from the city could cover the up-front cost and he could get the whole thing rolling for almost no cash. It sounds like a sweet deal.

Except it’s not going to work. Solar City only leases systems of 3.2 kilowatts or more, and only 2.8 could be squeezed onto Murphy’s roof. “I think it’s Murphy’s Law,” Jachym says wryly. “If you have a house that wants solar, a whole row of houses on the street nearby are better suited for it.”

She says the 3.2 cutoff has to do with the company’s bottom line. “If it’s any less than 3.2 the company is losing money.” Ironically, she tells me, “the average system size in San Francisco is even smaller” — usually less than 3.1. Solar City has set the bar high in a place where many people like Murphy are prevented from leasing.

He tells us he isn’t interested in a lease anyway: “I don’t own that.” He’s now more interested in a do-it-yourself situation and wishes the city would put some energy toward that. “If they were serious they would have a city solar store,” he said, imagining a kind of Home Depot for solar, where one could buy panels and wiring, talk with advisors, contract with installers, or just fill out the necessary paperwork for the rebates.

Some people are going ahead anyway, without city support. Nan Foster, a San Francisco homeowner now installing photovoltaic panels and solar water heating, says her middle-class family borrowed money to do these projects, “because we want to do the right thing about the environment and reduce our carbon footprint. It would be a great help to get these rebates from the city.

“The public money for the project would increase the spending of individuals to install solar — so the public funds would leverage much more investment in solar on the part of individuals and businesses,” Foster argued.

There’s another approach that isn’t on the table yet. Eric Brooks, cofounder of the Community Choice Energy Alliance, told us that the city, through CCA, could buy its own panels to place on private homes and businesses, giving those homes and businesses a way to go solar — free.

“Clearly there would be a much higher demand for free solar panels over discounted ones that are still very expensive,” he said. “And because the panels would be owned by the city, all of the savings and revenue could be put right back into building more renewables and efficiency projects, instead of going into the pockets of private property owners.”

Proponents of the mayor’s plan argue that the city can build more solar panels — faster — by diverting public funds to the private sector. “While on its face this is technically true, it is actually a dead-end path,” Brooks said. “Yes, a little more solar would be built a little more quickly. However, once those private panels are built the city will get nothing from them.”

Full disclosure: Murphy is Amanda Witherell’s landlord.

 

McGoldrick wants Solar funds for low-income housing

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Sup. Jake McGoldrick just had an epiphany: install solar panels on affordable, low-income housing projects, citywide.

That way the City can green San Francisco, create local jobs and business opportunities—and eventually reduce to zero the utility bills of low-income folks.

McGoldrick’s moment of clarity came in face of increasing pressure from local solar businesses and work creation programs to support Mayor Gavin Newsom’s recently announced Solar Energy Incentive Program.

McGoldrick says he supports going green and hiring locally, but he balked at the lack of public discussion about the mayor’s program, which uses tax payer dollars to subsidize solar installation on private property.

Pitched as a pilot project, Newsom’s solar energy incentive program proposes to allocate $3 million between now and the end of June, and $3-5 million in subsequent fiscal years. That adds up to more than $50 million by 2018.

McGoldrick believes these monies would be better used subsidizing installations on public housing and non-profit-owned, low-income projects.

Supporters of Newsom’s proposed Solar Incentive program argue that could better leverage a portion of the SFPUC’s Mayor’s Energy Conservation Account, and get more out of Hetch Hetchy dollars spent in energy efficiency and solar.

But as McGoldrick observes, the Mayor’s current plan fails to address public ownership concerns.

‘That’s why I’m going to try and give these MECA funds to affordable housing projects,” McGoldrick said.. “That way, people get jobs, solar companies come here, the city goes green–and we do power purchase agreements.”

San Francisco only has a 30 percent home ownership rate. But since a portion of that percentage are absentee landlords, the City could only target an ever smaller fraction of the city’s roof tops for solar installation, under theMayor’s current Solar Energy Incentive Program.

‘Tenants can’t jump in and spend $25,000 to replace their roof, and you can’t have the question of jobs be the tail wagging the dog,” McGoldrick said.

Killing in the dark

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Police Department doesn’t want people to know about Asa B. Sullivan, a case that illustrates how difficult it is to get even basic information about law enforcement, which leaves the public in the dark about a public agency that makes life-and-death decisions.

Officers filled Sullivan with 16 bullets nearly two years ago on June 6, 2006. Sullivan was unarmed and hiding in the cramped attic of a townhouse at the Parkmerced complex near San Francisco State University when the shooting occurred.

The Guardian has spent the intervening time trying fruitlessly to obtain public records and other information from the department about what happened to Sullivan and about the officers involved, including the results of now-completed investigations.

Sullivan’s death briefly grabbed headlines, but beyond what police told the press at the time, the department has rejected several requests for reports and other documents related to the shooting. The department in February of this year rejected another records request, one of four rebuffed since Sullivan’s death.

Police initially claimed Sullivan’s gun was found at the scene, but that story changed significantly within a short period of time. Police later said the officers who shot him believed an eyeglasses case held by Sullivan was a gun.

It all started when the neighbors of 2 Garces Drive called police believing squatters had taken over the townhouse, but Sullivan was helping the tenants clean up so they could get their security deposit before moving out.

When police arrived, they ordered Sullivan’s friend, Jason Martin, to the floor after the officers aimed their weapons at him without explanation while Sullivan fled into an attic, according to allegations that later appeared in a federal civil suit filed by Sullivan’s family.

Sullivan was on probation for pot and any contact with police would surely have caused him more problems, but as we reported shortly after Sullivan was killed, the department’s General Orders instruct that when a suspect is barricaded, the responding officers should call in a negotiator. A K-9 unit was called that night, according to the suit, but it doesn’t appear the officers waited for it to show up.

Two officers tried to call Sullivan down before pursuing him into the attic. The rest is unclear except that the officers, John Keesor and Michelle Alvis, shot Sullivan to death believing he was armed and intended to shoot them first. But no gun was ever found. The 25-year-old Sullivan, a San Francisco native, was working for Goodwill Industries at the time and had a young son named Asa Isaiah Sullivan.

We first sent a public records request to the SFPD shortly after Sullivan’s death asking for "any and all documentation" related to the shooting including e-mails, notes, and witness statements. The department’s legal division responded that the material was exempt from disclosure laws because they were part of an ongoing law-enforcement investigation, a common response when reporters seek such documents.

After learning at a September 2006 San Francisco Police Commission meeting that some elements of the investigation were complete, we filed another request. The department’s rulebook requires that two divisions in the department — the homicide detail and internal affairs — complete their examinations of deadly officer-involved shootings within two months of the incident.

But again, citing the state’s Government Code, which allows them to withhold material considered part of an ongoing probe, the department responded that an investigation by the district attorney and an analysis of Sullivan’s body by the medical examiner were not complete.

Two months later, we confirmed through Sullivan’s autopsy that he’d been shot 16 times, so we filed another request for documents related to the shooting. But again the department’s legal division claimed the investigation was still open and disclosure would endanger its successful completion.

The alternative by then was to wait for the federal civil suit filed against the city by Sullivan’s family to unfold slowly: through that, perhaps we could determine if new evidence from the shooting would appear in the public record. No success there either. The parties requested a protective order in August 2006 that made crucial information in the case confidential, including personnel records of the officers involved as well as audiotapes, videotapes, photographs, and transcripts related to the investigation.

Through the suit, however, we did learn last November that the Office of Citizen Complaints and the police department’s Management Control Division, a.k.a. internal affairs, had completed their investigations of the shooting.

So we filed another request in February of this year. Yet again, however, the department’s legal division responded that the records were protected under the state’s Penal Code, which grants special exemptions for information related to the conduct of law-enforcement personnel. The OCC responded the same way in its denial of our request.

Making matters worse, California’s State Supreme Court ruled in an unrelated case in August of 2006 that citizens and the press would no longer be able to access most public information about why individual officers are charged with misconduct or even possibly breaking the law.

Records of misconduct charges filed by the OCC or the police chief against officers had largely been open to the public until then through summaries that appeared on the agenda of the police commission. The public could also attend misconduct hearings at the Hall of Justice which included testimony from officers.

But the Supreme Court ruling — known as the Copley decision — put a stop to it by broadening the scope of privacy laws that exclusively protected cops from the disclosure of disciplinary records. Since then, stories from Bay Area media outlets about police misconduct have been few and far between despite a steady stream of cases.

Of course, there’s a way around it all. Sometimes documents show up at the Guardian building in Potrero Hill without a return address, and literally dozens of people with potential access to records related to Sullivan’s death could plausibly deny knowing how they were accidentally sent to G.W. Schulz, San Francisco Bay Guardian, 135 Mississippi St., San Francisco, Calif., 94107.

Maybe by the June anniversary of Sullivan’s shooting, a fuller story of what happened that day (from any number of perspectives — we’re interested in talking to anyone) could land in front of readers. Maybe.

Gruesome twosomes

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Grindhouse Psychos!

(Shriek Show)

CULT DVDS Nepotism is hardly absent from mainstream Hollywood. But off-grid exploitation and sexploitation flicks have oft been a family affair by low-budget necessity. Russ and Eve Meyer, Ray Dennis Steckler and Carolyn Brandt, and Ron and June Ormond are only the most stellar names amongst many who purveyed legendary cinematic trash from the sanctimony of holy matrimony.

By coincidence, two of three features in Shriek Show’s not-too-shabby new discount box set Grindhouse Psychos! illuminate comparatively obscure marital exploitation couples. Cop Killers is a 1972 hippie drug-deal meller featuring actors who’d later go on to produce and star in the classic softcore spoof Flesh Gordon (1974). It’s not bad, though nowhere as good as the packaging ("In front of them, cops. Behind them, dead cops!"). Making a punchier impression are early-’80s titles that kept it all in the family.

Actually, Roberta Findlay’s 1985 Tenement, a.k.a. Game of Survival, a.k.a. Slaughter in the South Bronx, was released several years after husband Michael died in a bizarre helicopter-decapitation accident. Together they’d done it all: a kidnapping-rape film with pre-fame Yoko Ono (1965’s Satan’s Bed); an infamous trilogy of ultrasleazy late-’60s "roughies" (1968’s The Curse of Her Flesh, etc.); the 1974 cannibalism-meets-Bigfoot schlock masterpiece Shriek of the Mutilated; porn films both gay (Michael, Angelo, and David) and straight (Funk in 3-D). They engineered 1976’s Snuff, which capitalized on urban legend by intercutting crude new fake-documentary "murder" footage into a 1971 Findlay film shot in Argentina called The Slaughter. That con made millions.

Widowed Roberta soldiered on variably as director, cinematographer, producer, and scenarist for another decade, often under masculine aliases. Her activities ran a short gamut from porn (Lifestyles of the Blonde and Dirty) to horror (1987’s Blood Sisters). Tenement was an exception — an urban thriller à la Death Wish 3 (1985), Class of 1984 (1982), or any other ’80s movie where the evil gang was mixed race, punk, and dedicated to exterminating decent society. Here, one such crew gets arrested for shooting up in a Bronx apartment building’s empty basement. Freed five seconds later, they exact revenge by trapping and killing residents one floor at a time. Natch, the tenants fight back.

Considered so violent in 1985 that it was given an X rating, Tenement survives as the kind of vigorously crass grade-Z exercise that gives vintage exploitation a good name. Findlay is bemused and delightful in her DVD-extra interview, recalling the shoot amongst real junkies and gangs like a retired teacher might remember naughty third graders.

Much less prolific than the Findlays were Joseph Ellison and Ellen Hammill-Ellison, creators of just two New Joisey B flicks. Their incongruous 1986 doo-wop musical, Joey, bombed. But six years earlier, Don’t Go in the House made the full drive-in and grindhouse rounds, achieving disreputable immortality as an oft-cited example of extreme horror misogyny. Emotionally scarred by a late mother who’d used the gas stovetop as a disciplinary tool, Norman Bates–like nebbish Donny (Dan Grimaldi, The Sopranos‘s Patsy Parisi) lures women to his creepy hilltop home, where he gets back at mommy by burning them to death.

The reason this movie became notorious is the first such death. It left a lingering icky stain on my brain — among many others — and is mighty disturbing still. Gentleman Donny offers a ride to a stranded flower-shop proprietress (Johanna Brushay), who’s given enough screen time to seem like a real person rather than slasher-flick cannon fodder. Knocked unconscious after an unsettling buildup, she wakes to find herself naked, suspended from ceiling to floor in a metal-walled room he’s assembled for his new pastime. Entering in a flame-retardant suit, he douses her with gasoline, then applies a blowtorch at length — the grisly result patently faked by FX superimposition but horrible nonetheless.

Nothing else in this flaming Psycho imitation is so vividly appalling. But that sequence alone places House firmly in the special category of overenthusiastically female-abusive films one can’t quite believe a woman actually helped produce, let alone cowrote.

Rent control fix

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Cities would be empowered to require replacement of rent-controlled units lost to demolition or disasters under legislation introduced by state senator Carole Migden with the support of affordable housing advocates in San Francisco.

Migden, during a Feb. 22 rally outside City Hall announcing State Senate Bill 1299, acknowledged that many property owners might oppose the effort but said, "We are at our wit’s end in trying to keep this city affordable."

The legislation comes just as the San Francisco Tenants Union and other groups are mobilizing against this June’s Proposition 98, which would end rent control in California — affecting 170,000 apartments in San Francisco alone.

"Rent control in San Francisco remains our largest and most effective affordable housing program," Sup. Chris Daly said at the rally. But SFTU head Ted Gullickson told the crowd that it is undercut by redevelopment projects, such as a current proposal to demolish apartment complexes at Park Merced, and could be wiped out by an earthquake.

As Gullickson said, "San Francisco every day is bleeding its rent control housing stock."

How to save the Housing Authority

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OPINION After repeated media attention to the myriad problems at the San Francisco Housing Authority, Mayor Gavin Newsom asked the agency’s director, Gregg Fortner, to resign. An interim director, Mirian Saez, was appointed to fill his shoes until a national search is conducted to find a permanent replacement. The mayor has announced replacements for two of the seven commissioners; one of the new appointees, Dwayne Jones, is a senior Newsom staffer.

As an affordable-housing advocate who works with residents of public housing, I am overjoyed at the prospect of change at the agency. No matter who is chosen to be the new director, a few key changes should be seriously considered for the city’s largest low-income-housing provider. Here are some suggestions:

1. Appoint commissioners who get it and care. The mayor could have made sweeping changes after he asked the SFHA commissioners to submit letters of resignation. Instead, he used the opportunity to appoint someone who is on his payroll. As long as political connections continue to trump experience, understanding, and compassion, tenants will suffer. What about having a public process in which residents and the community can nominate candidates? How about sharing the power to appoint housing commissioners with the Board of Supervisors, as is done with some other city commissions?

2. Listen to the residents, damn it! While it is refreshing to see the mayor look for solutions to the rampant problems at the SFHA, a panel of national experts is hardly necessary. The best experts are right here. They are residents, and they are clamoring to have their voices heard. Conduct a local survey, have regular open meetings, encourage the formation of resident councils, work with service providers and community groups that reach out to residents, and allow for resident participation as much as possible.

3. Talk among yourselves. The same lessons we learned after Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina apply to this disaster as well. City agencies that serve public housing residents are often unaware of the major issues at public housing developments. The Departments of Building Inspections and Public Health, for instance, should be monitoring conditions and reporting to the mayor and the supervisors. The Mayor’s Office of Housing should be working closely with the Redevelopment Agency, the Office of Community Development, and the Human Service Agency as they plan for the demolition and rebuilding of distressed projects. City officials and agencies shouldn’t have to pull teeth to get basic information from the SFHA.

4. Tell Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues to fight like hell. Whoever leads the Housing Authority in the future will always have a defense against charges of not addressing poor conditions because Congress keeps hacking away at the Department of Housing and Urban Development budget. We have powerful congressional representation in San Francisco; let’s push harder.

5. Step up to the plate to provide local resources to improve public housing. As hard as we fight to leverage more federal funds, it is nearly certain that the SFHA will still be severely underfunded. We can no longer rely solely on federal funds to house our lowest-income residents. A commitment to creative and innovative local funding solutions must continue or we will see an increase in the exodus of African American families, which the mayor claims to be committed to curbing.

Sara Shortt

Sara Shortt is executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.

Imagine San Francisco without rent control

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OPINION If you think the mortgage foreclosure crisis is big, imagine what would happen to San Francisco if rent control were repealed.

With 180,000 rent-controlled apartments currently housing more than 350,000 San Franciscans, the end of rent control would be disastrous. Literally hundreds of thousands would be forced from their homes and forced to leave the city.

The pain and suffering people would face as they lost their homes would be immense, making the foreclosure problem seem insignificant by comparison. Maybe even worse, repealing rent control would destroy forever the soul of San Francisco, eliminating altogether the city’s character and diversity and leaving it nothing more than a wealthy enclave affordable only to the very rich.

Envisioning the loss of rent control and the effect that would have is not fantasy. A statewide ballot measure this June would abolish rent control in San Francisco and all across California. The measure would also abolish requirements that developers include affordable housing in their projects. That means we could wake up on June 4 this year with all affordable housing in San Francisco gone — unless we all work as hard as we can to save our rent control and our affordable housing.

In 1979, rent control was adopted in San Francisco, and it was accomplished only because thousands of San Francisco tenants made it happen. People collected signatures, made phone calls, walked precincts, packed City Hall hearings, and demonstrated and marched. Through collective grassroots activism, rent control became a reality. Now many of us think of rent control as something we’ve always had and a law that will always be there.

But we need to face reality: in five months, all limits on rent hikes could be gone. It won’t be easy to save rent control, and we need to begin our work now. The fate of rent control will largely be up to voters in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where most California renters live. Los Angeles tenants are organizing and mounting a strong campaign there. We need to do the same in San Francisco.

The San Francisco campaign to save rent control will kick off Jan. 19 with a citywide mobilization of tenants and allied organizations to plan and begin our work. If we’re going to save rent control, we need the same level of grassroots activism we had when we fought to get rent control in 1979, and we need tenants to come to the Save Rent Control Convention and begin the hard work to keep our homes.

This will be a working convention: following an overview about the measure, we will map out strategies and plans for fundraising, voter registration and education, media strategies, Web site development, rally organization, and all of the other components that make for a successful grassroots campaign. The tasks are many, and there’s not much time.

If we lose rent control, we’ll lose not just our homes but also our city. Saving rent control is not a fight people can sit out and hope someone else will do something about.

Ted Gullicksen

Ted Gullicksen runs the San Francisco Tenants Union.

The Save Rent Control Convention will be Jan. 19, 1–4 p.m., at Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia (at 16th St.), SF. For more information on the rent control repeal measure, see www.saverentcontrol.net or www.sftu.org. For more information, call (415) 282-5525.

The great escape

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

There are some dark clouds hovering over City College of San Francisco. The District Attorney’s Office is investigating political corruption allegations, a long-awaited audit of half a billion dollars in bond spending is just months from completion, and several infrastructure projects are running tens of millions of dollars over budget.

But Chancellor Phil Day won’t be around to clean up those messes. He’s leaving City College for a new job on the East Coast at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators as early as March 1.

Day’s announcement came just weeks before the school’s Board of Trustees Jan. 10 unveiling of the results of an internal investigation into who knew what about City College money from taxpayers being diverted to an election campaign committee that should have operated entirely independently of the school.

The investigation concludes that there was no evidence that contractors made donations to a campaign committee formed by the school’s leadership in exchange for favorable business arrangements.

But the report does confirm that two lower-level bureaucrats, Stephen Herman and James Blomquist, instructed business tenants who used school facilities — the coffer vendor Bean Scene and Bay Area Motorcycle Training — to sign rent checks over to the committee instead of to the school. Neither tenant appeared to have any intention of contributing to the committee.

The timing of the checks is also questionable. The school returned the Bean Scene’s $20,000 rent check shortly after recognizing a potential violation of the state’s Education Code, which prohibits using school funds for electioneering purposes. But officials then violated the same provision when a $10,000 rent check from the motorcycle-training outfit wasn’t returned to public coffers until a year and a half later, when the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Lance Williams began snooping around.

"The fact that an apparent misuse of public funds could be discovered, corrected, and then occur again after such a short period reveals a glaring lack of oversight of the College’s involvement in fundraising from College contractors, literally from start to finish during the campaign," the report states.

City College’s trustees and school administrators created the Committee to Support Our City College in 2005 as a campaign vehicle for convincing voters to authorize $246 million in bond projects, the third such bond election for City College in a decade.

The report’s executive summary in part downplays the significance of the Chron stories from last April that inspired the probe in the first place. Rather, it implies that the fund diversions had more to do with a poor accounting system and an 11th-hour decision to rush the bond election to voters with minimum preparation.

It’s not clear how the report will impact a DA’s investigation of the campaign committee related to the same allegations. The Guardian revealed last summer (see "Day’s Dilemma," 8/8/07) that just days before the November 2005 election, Kamala Harris’s office also requested documents stemming from the college’s $8.7 million purchase of land in Chinatown that the county determined was worth only $1.7 million for tax purposes.

We also reported that City College’s half a billion dollars in infrastructure improvements are running approximately $225 million over budget and as a result, the school has gutted projects promised to voters and reallocated about $130 million in order to sustain others (see "The City College Shell Game," 7/4/07). An expansive management audit of the school’s bond spending is due in June.

In a prepared statement, Day insists the fund diversions were an accident, and he complains that if the San Francisco Ethics Commission had notified it of the mistake sooner, the school would have corrected it. The Guardian reported that the Ethics Commission had known the Bay Area Motorcycle Training check was illegally used by the committee but waited for more than a year to notify the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission of a possible elections law violation (see "At the Crossroads," 7/18/07).

"As the chancellor and CEO of this college, I take responsibility for these mistakes," Day’s statement reads. "However, it is important to understand that these mistakes occurred innocently and inadvertently, and as soon as we learned of them, we took immediate action to rectify them."

An exasperated Day, who became City College’s chancellor in 1998, said in a phone interview that he didn’t believe the school’s troubles would make it difficult for his successor to return to the ballot and get voters to approve bond projects they’ve already partially paid for, including a stem-cell technology training center.

"I don’t feel like I’m leaving someone with disarray," Day told us. "It’s the people in the institution that sometimes make mistakes, not the institution itself."

Day’s departure also comes as a building inspector hired by the school in 2003 alleges in a federal lawsuit that he was wrongfully terminated last summer for blowing the whistle on illegal building code violations and for making safety complaints during facility renovations. The suit was filed Dec. 24, 2007.

Plaintiff Lawrence Lauser contends that he’d repeatedly informed his bosses at City College that building codes were being violated during construction work, but there was no willingness to fix them.

Instead of being outright fired, Lauser alleges, he was told the work had run out. "That was a complete sham," his attorney, Frank Sarro, said. "There wasn’t a lack of work at all." Lauser is also suing his union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Local 22, for refusing to request arbitration with the school on his behalf.

"He just had a strong feeling that things should be done by the book," Sarro said of Lauser. "And his bosses didn’t want to hear it."

How Oakland’s fearful politicos enabled waste: Part III

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In 1996, Your Black Muslim Bakery lieutenant Nedir Bey had a wealth of ammunition with which to lobby city leaders for a $1.1 million loan to fund his health care company, E.M. Health Services.

The previous year, the city of Oakland had agreed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to bring the Oakland Raiders back from Los Angeles, a deal that quickly soured and has cost the city and Alameda County taxpayers more than $20 million a year ever since.

The developers of a new downtown ice rink had defaulted on $11 million in bonds just three months after the facility opened.

The city had also given plenty of money to other businesses, most white-owned. As a result, the City Council was getting a relentless drubbing from bakery members and black business associates who lined up at meetings to speak on behalf of E.M. Health Services and its efforts to obtain the loan.

They argued that white business owners had an easier time obtaining credit, unsecured loans and support from the city while black-owned businesses endured undue scrutiny. Elected officials endured hints and outright accusations of racism if they dared ask questions about the company or collateral for the loan.

Some of those accusations occurred during the June 4, 1996, council meeting where the officials discussed giving E.M. Health an interim start up loan of $275,000 in city funds. The loan was needed because the company’s application for a $1.1 million share of federal Housing and Urban Development funds for job training programs had not yet been distributed to the city of Oakland.

During the meeting, Shannon Reeves, then-president of the NAACP Oakland chapter, accused the city’s black elected officials of forgetting where they came from.

“It’s time to deliver for the people in the community…,” Reeves said. “We need those who look like us to advocate for us.”

Beth Aaron, executive director of the Bay Area Black Contractors Association also testified at the meeting that night. She said the record proved that white-owned businesses had a much easier time getting Oakland to open its purse strings.

“Those who are white or friends of friends get things done very quickly,” she charged. “Those of us who are of color… do not.”

Even Nedir Bey got into the act.

“A few years ago we wouldn’t have been able to come here and ask for anything without getting run out,” he said. “Cut us a check on Friday for $275,000. Compare us to other projects that you have passed.”

A decade later, E.M. Health is just an unpaid debt on the city’s books, its license suspended by the California Franchise Tax Board. Principal payments first due in May 1998 never materialized, and by the time city staff knocked on its doors in October 1999, the offices had been cleared out.

But the story of how the business, a subsidiary of the now-bankrupt Your Black Muslim Bakery, received the money despite a flawed business plan and a disturbing criminal incident in Nedir Bey’s past illustrates the extent politics and pressure played in officials’ decision to approve the loan.

Bakery members have also been linked to several violent incidents, including the shooting death of journalist Chauncey Bailey, as well as alleged real estate and welfare fraud and child rape. ‘Intimidation factor’

“In reality it was political pressure that got them the loans,” said now-City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, who was a councilmember at the time. “Deep down inside everybody knew it was bull—. No business plan, no records anyone could show. … And they kept saying they were failing because they didn’t get the city’s money soon enough.”

Retired councilmember Dick Spees, who is white, remembers how heated those meetings were, of being accused of racism because he dared question the business plan or ask about collateral or a missing business license. Bakery members would line up along the wall and refuse to sit, he recalled.

“It sounded good (on paper), this training program to help black people who were not getting opportunities,” Spees said recently. “But there was this intimidation factor, it just didn’t feel comfortable.”

Spees said he grew suspicious when Nedir Bey started racking up ineligible expenses even before federal government lenders had determined E.M. Health’s job training program met its criteria for financing.

Spees said he ended up voting for the loan and for several thousand dollars in advances from city coffers after he was assured by city staff on more than one occasion that HUD would approve the loan and that Bey had put up collateral.

De La Fuente, now council president, said he understood that the HUD money was intended for riskier loans, but that was no reason to cave in to pressure and give the money without trying to protect the city’s resources.

“I never got their support,” he said, referring to his black council colleagues, Nate Miley, Dezie Woods-Jones, Elihu Harris and Natalie Bayton.

Kidnap, torture

The city gave Nedir Bey money despite a disturbing incident that occurred on March 4, 1994, when Qiyamah Corporation, E.M. Health’s nonprofit parent company was still in its infancy.

On that date, Nedir Bey and Abaz Bey, another spiritually adopted son of bakery founder Yusuf Bey, were arrested and charged with abducting, assaulting, torturing and robbing a man they believed had cheated them on a real estate transaction.

Abaz Bey and other members of the bakery lived in an apartment building on 24th Street in North Oakland, the same one Nedir Bey wanted to buy with his very first request for city money, that ultimately was reduced in scope. The owner had hired the bakery to provide security after being sued by tenants fed up with rampant drug dealing and other crime.

According to police and court records, three men, led by Nedir Bey, beat the man with a flashlight and burned him with a hot knife. The arrests sparked a tense, full-scale standoff between more than 40 police officers and a similar number of male bakery members.

According to news reports, then-Mayor Elihu Harris agreed to meet the demand of bakery patriarch Yusuf Bey to discuss the standoff and the arrests.

Nedir Bey pleaded no contest to one felony count of false imprisonment. He was sentenced to three years’ probation after a veteran Oakland police officer and members of the community wrote a support letter on his behalf.

The probation report noted that two other prominent Oakland residents acted as character references for Nedir Bey: Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson and Larry Reid, then aide to Mayor Harris. However, Reid, now an Oakland city councilmember, said he never wrote a letter or served as a reference for Nedir Bey.

When Tribune reporters Diana Williams and Paul Grabowicz questioned whether the the arrest should impact his loan application, Nedir Bey said such details were irrelevant.

“Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, and he was respectable enough to become president of South Africa,” he was quoted as saying in a June 1996 Oakland Tribune article.

Unapologetic support

Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley, who was an Oakland council member and pushed hard for the E.M. Health loan, said recently that he never knew about Nedir Bey’s felony conviction or other clashes between bakery members and the police.

“Then-police chief Richard Word and I chaired the Public Safety committee and I didn’t know about it,” Miley insisted. “Clearly, I had a sense that the police had some concerns (about bakery members), but not how it’s been depicted recently.”

Miley is unapologetic about his unflinching support of E.M. Health during his time on the council. He wasn’t overly concerned when the company defaulted, he told his colleagues at the time, because the federal money was intended to fund higher-risk ventures.

He recalled in a recent interview that African-Americans had good reason to believe black businesses weren’t getting a fair share of city contracts or loans. Oakland’s leaders had poured millions in public money into bringing the Raiders home from Los Angeles and bailing out the Ice Center, Miley said, and African-Americans never let them forget it.

It’s also possible that city staff and some council members were intimidated by the accusations of racism, he added.

“I think we were very sensitive (about accusations) of being racist and Uncle Toms,” said Miley, who is African American.

“When E.M. came in to get a loan … on the face of it that looked like very worthy cause, something that would serve the public. So we decided to give them a chance,” Miley said, adding that there was some concern over the money being used for a car and consultants.

“We gave them some technical assistance and guidance rather than pulling the rug out from under them completely,” Miley recalled. “Still, even if it’s federal money they got, it’s still public taxpayer dollars down the toilet.”

Miley said he admired Yusuf Bey and the way he preached self-reliance, spirituality and discipline. Oakland was suffering record homicides and here was someone who was reaching out to ex-cons or those who might otherwise get caught up in the cycle of violence and helping them turn their lives around and earn money legitimately for their families, Miley said.

In February 1996, a smiling, soft-spoken Nedir Bey stood before the City Council and told them as much.

“This is an excellent program and it will target men and women who are not working presently and have no job skills,” Bey said. “We can train them in the home health care field and start them on a better way of life.”

‘Brilliant’ concept

Redevelopment Agency Director Gregory Hunter said the company’s goals were hard to turn down even if E.M. Health’s promises lacked details.

“The concept was brilliant, absolutely brilliant,” he said, adding that the business proposal drew applause from as far away as Washington, D.C. “Unfortunately, the execution fell somewhat short of the expectations the city had.”

Elihu Harris, now the chancellor of Peralta Community College District, was reluctant to discuss the matter recently because he said he did not recall many details. Harris said his dad received home health care from employees of E.M. Health, but it was his mother who handled the contract.

He added that a community loan advisory committee _ a body the federal lenders required _ had voted to fund E.M. Health, and the council debated that recommendation back and forth for many months. He said the council was not provided with a lot of details about the company.

“The (loan committee)… had really done the research,” Harris said. “The council was between a rock and a hard place.

“(E.M. Health) had made some mistakes and they were going to try and rectify those mistakes,” Harris said. “There was a lot to be concerned about, but they had strong community support.”

One supporter who turned out early and often to lobby for Nedir Bey was Theodora Marzouk, an administrator for Oakland-based Community Care Services, Inc.

She testified more than once about the shortage of training programs for nurses’ aides and said her own company couldn’t supply enough of them. She urged Oakland’s leaders to fund E.M. Health.

But Marzouk ended up on E.M. Health’s payroll for the last two quarters of 1996 earning more than $20,000, city records show.

Marzouk refused to comment for this story, but she sounded surprised to hear that she’d once been listed as an employee.

In any case, by 2000, the company’s business license was suspended, and by 2003, Alameda County records show, state and federal tax officials during the intervening years had imposed tax liens on the company’s assets totalling nearly $200,000.

But today, E.M. Health’s motto “Big enough to serve, small enough to care” is little more than a failed promise.

MediaNews investigative reporters Thomas Peele and Josh Richman, KQED reporter Judy Campbell, and radio reporter Bob Butler contributed to this report. Cecily Burt is a MediaNews staff writer. G.W. Schulz is a staff writer at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Portrait of the artist as an old cop

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Imagine Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, pondering the impact of abstract expressionism on the American zeitgeist with a far-off gaze. Or picture him dressed in fashionably tight jeans, walking his fixed-gear bike to the San Francisco Academy of Art University with a leather portfolio tucked under his skinny arm.

Does that seem incongruous to you? It does to us as well. After all, Delagnes is the very antithesis of an art school student. So why are the POA and Delagnes, a brutish former narcotics officer, lobbying the San Francisco Planning Commission on behalf of the Academy of Art?

The academy, which has been rapidly snapping up properties around town to accommodate its ambitious expansion plans, has become an entity of increasing concern in San Francisco’s dicey world of land-use politics.

The for-profit school, which costs students around $16,500 per year to attend, today owns or controls more than 30 properties across the city, half of which are used to house its students, and expects to take over nearly a dozen more to accommodate approximately 14,500 students by 2017.

In the meantime, the school is facing several enforcement actions initiated by the Planning Department for brazenly making building conversions without bothering to obtain proper permits.

Delagnes was nonetheless first in line at a September 2007 commission meeting held to address the academy’s pending enforcement cases and praised the school as a tremendous asset to the academic community.

"I think that their reputation in San Francisco is unquestioned as some of the finest, true San Franciscans that I know," Delagnes said of the wealthy Stephens family, which owns the Academy of Art. "They are heavily involved and invested in the city of San Francisco and care deeply about its future."

Delagnes’s lobbying on behalf of the academy surprised and appalled at least one commissioner, Hisashi Sugaya, who told the POA president that he was "really offended" someone representing law enforcement was carrying water for a private art school that had flouted the law by racking up alleged planning and building code violations.

Responding in the union’s newsletter, POA vice president Kevin Martin reached a dizzyingly patriotic pitch in denouncing Sugaya as a liberal and demanding he apologize not just to Delagnes but also to the entire union for "demeaning our president" and "censuring his freedom of speech."

Delagnes admitted to the Guardian that his testimony was essentially a "quid pro quo." The academy has supported the POA, even offering special summer apprenticeships to the children of its members. "I’m sure that they were thinking, ‘You know what? The POA is a pretty powerful organization. It wouldn’t hurt to get close to them,’<0x2009>" Delagnes said. "Here came this problem with the Planning Commission. They called me and said, ‘Hey, would you mind going up there and basically saying that we’re a good organization? We’re good people.’<0x2009>"

During the meeting, school president Elisa Stephens, who did not return calls, portrayed the academy as a simple mom-and-pop business ignorant of planning politics and intending to fully cooperate with the city.

"My grandfather was an artist…. We’re an integral part of this community," Stephens told the commissioners. "I live in this community. We’ve been here since the late 1800s. We’re dedicated to this city…. I apologize for not being involved in city politics. I’m involved in education."

But city staffers implied there’s more to the academy’s troubles than a few honest mistakes. In March 2007, the school was hit with a litany of alleged code violations, including 14 properties converted without conditional-use permits and seven made into group housing or modified for other school uses without building permits, Planning Department records show.

Before last year the academy had never submitted an institutional master plan to the city, even though San Francisco’s Planning Code has required them from universities since the 1970s, particularly for a scattered campus that’s in a position to dramatically alter the face of downtown, where the school is primarily located and its private transit buses are ubiquitous.

The academy finally turned one over in 2007 after city planners issued a citation in summer 2006. Afterward the department visited all of the school’s properties and discovered multiple problems with use permits, plus an additional property the academy had recently acquired but didn’t include in its plan.

Code enforcers tried to negotiate with the school, planning staffer Scott Sanchez told the commission. But after department personnel outlined the March 2007 violations for the academy, it simply continued onward, converting 601 Brannan for its own use without any building permits and doing the same at the Star Motel on Lombard, this time without a conditional-use application.

As the department worked to keep up, the academy purchased four new buildings and put its eye on another, all between spring and fall 2007.

"All of our information about their new facilities came from members of the public…. It wasn’t actually through the academy, with whom we thought we had a dialogue about their institutional master plan," Sanchez told the Guardian. "We had something ongoing with them, yet they were not informing us of their new acquisitions, and they weren’t obtaining proper permits for them."

The school, in fact, is accelerating plans to convert 575 Sixth St., known as the San Francisco Flower Mart, into studio space, despite opposition from the Mayor’s Office, the Planning Commission, and the Board of Supervisors. The 30 floral business tenants that currently inhabit the building received eviction notices dated Christmas Eve 2007.

A future academy gymnasium is slated for 620 Sutter, but building it would result in the eviction of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, a 25-year-old institution specializing in African American stage performances. The academy already converted part of the building to group housing without a permit.

So what else is the POA getting for its support of the arts? For one, the Academy of Art was a $5,000 putf8um sponsor of the POA’s 2007 charity golf tournament at the StoneTree Golf Club in Novato, beating out dozens of other donors for the top of the list. The exclusive title was used for only three other contributors.

The union’s November 2007 newsletter, which appeared just after Delagnes voiced his support for the school, announced that academy president Stephens had also given POA members working at the police department’s Southern Station in SoMa 15 free underground parking spots on Bluxome, just a short walk from the Hall of Justice and the union’s headquarters.

And that’s the art of politics in San Francisco.

Amending the solar plan

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EDITORIAL San Francisco assessor Phil Ting wants to encourage more city residents and businesses to put solar panels on their roofs. It’s a noble idea, but the legislation he and Mayor Gavin Newsom have proposed needs work.

Ting told us he’s concerned that buying and installing solar panels is too expensive and that the cost is discouraging people from taking these steps toward putting the city on a path to greater reliance on renewable energy. So he’s put forward a two-pronged plan to lower the price: Using funds generated by the sale of Hetch Hetchy power, the city would offer cash payments of between $3,000 and $10,000 to residents and businesses that go solar. Then city bond money would be used to finance the remaining installation costs, and customers could pay back the city over 20 years.

The bond money Ting is eyeing comes from a measure passed more than 15 years ago, after the Loma Prieta earthquake, that makes money available for seismic upgrades to commercial property. For various reasons, including the complexity of the requirements, almost none of the $350 million in that bond fund has been spent, so with the approval of the voters it could be redirected to solar programs.

There are several problems with this approach.

We’re always a little leery of spending public money to benefit private property owners (and let’s remember that almost everyone who owns a home in San Francisco has seen its value increase dramatically in the past few years, despite the market slowdown). And while Ting and Newsom are right that the Hetch Hetchy money doesn’t come directly out of the General Fund, it’s still public money that could be spent on other programs — and the mayor is fighting against a plan to spend more city money on affordable housing.

But global warming and energy independence are important enough that we could live with the cash incentives — if the program were tailored to support community choice aggregation and public power. Instead, in its current draft, the plan would amount to a large incentive for electricity customers to snub the upcoming city program and stick with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. The language of the measure requires that applicants for the incentive program be eligible for a similar state program — but that state program is administered by PG&E and two other private utilities and is available only to their customers.

Starting sometime this year, if all goes well, San Francisco will be in the retail electricity business, competing directly with PG&E. Ting told us he’ll make sure the language is fixed to make the program available to all, but we’d go further: a city incentive program should help the city’s efforts. The first benefits should go to city customers, and they should be tailored as incentives for residents and businesses to stick with municipal CCA power and reject PG&E.

The bond money is problematic too. As it stands, landlords could pass along half of the costs of that money to tenants, many of whom don’t pay their own electric bills anyway and thus would get no benefits. That’s got to go: if the city is going to offer cheap loans to let landlords upgrade their buildings (and thus increase the value of their property), the supervisors shouldn’t pass any measure that sticks tenants with any of the costs.

The city of Berkeley is working on a similar program that seems much more simple: property owners can borrow money for solar panels and pay it back through increased property taxes. Sup. Gerardo Sandoval has suggested San Francisco pursue a similar plan, and Ting and the mayor should take that into consideration.

There’s the kernel of a good idea here — but the supervisors need to make some significant changes to what the mayor and the assessor are proposing before this plan moves forward.

Polishing SPUR

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› amanda@sfbg.com

Wedged among the commerce, tourism, and white-collar businesses north of Market Street is the slim entry to 312 Sutter, easy to miss unless you happen to be searching for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. SPUR occupies the fourth and fifth floors of the building — and occupies them completely. Cubicles are close and overstuffed. Conversations compete. Space for meetings is a hot commodity. Four bicycles, ridden to work by staff members, are crammed in a side room where languish a half century’s worth of policy papers, photographs, and planning documents generated by the active public interest think tank.

It looks more like a struggling nonprofit than one of the most influential policy organizations in town, one supported by the city’s richest and most powerful interests.

"This is why we’re building the Urban Center," said Gabriel Metcalf, the youthful executive director of the 48-year-old organization, clad in a dark suit and sipping from a Starbucks coffee cup while he roams the fourth floor office space searching for any available real estate to sit and talk.

He settles on an open-faced workroom with empty seats. They circle a table covered with a thick ledger of plans for SPUR’s new Urban Center, a $16.5 million, 12,000-square-foot four-story building at 654 Mission that the group is building with more than $8 million in public money.

Plans for the center include a free exhibition space, a lending library, and an evolution of the group’s current public education program, now consisting of noontime forums, to include evening lectures and accredited classes. Though the center will house meeting rooms for SPUR’s committees and offices for its staff, the suggestion is that the new space will be a more public place.

And SPUR seems to be searching for a new public image.

For years the organization was synonymous with anything-goes development, ruinous urban renewal, and an economy policy that favored big business and growth at all costs. Today SPUR’s staffers and some board members present a different face. The new SPUR features open debate and seeks consensus; phrases like sustainability and public interest are bandied about more than tax cuts and urban renewal.

But San Francisco progressives are a tough crowd, and SPUR’s history — and, frankly, most of its current political stands — makes a lot of activists wonder: Has SPUR really changed its spurs? And can a group whose board is still overwhelmingly dominated by big business and whose biggest funders are some of the most powerful businesses in town ever be a voice of political reason?

As one observer wryly noted, "I’ve yet to see SPUR publicly denounce a development project."

SPUR considers itself a public policy think tank, a term that conjures an impression of lofty independence. But the group has, and has always had, a visible agenda. SPUR members regularly advocate positions at public meetings, and the group takes stands on ballot measures.

And it has a painful legacy. "We have a dark history," Metcalf admits, referring to the days when "UR" stood for "urban renewal," often called "urban removal" by the thousands of low-income, elderly, and disabled people, many African American and Asian, who were displaced by redevelopment in San Francisco.

That history — and the fact that SPUR’s membership is largely a who’s who of corporations, developers, and financiers — has caused some to raise questions about the public money the group has received for the new Urban Center.

"They’re not an academic institution," said Marc Salomon, a member of the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force who’s butted heads with the group. "There’s no academic peer review going on here. The only peer review is coming from the people who fund them."

Yet prominent local progressives like artist and planning activist Debra Walker, veteran development warrior Brad Paul, and architect and small-business owner Paul Okamoto have joined the SPUR board in recent years. "There’s a bunch of us that have come in under the new regime of Gabriel Metcalf because there’s a real aching need for a progressive dialogue about planning," said Walker, who thinks SPUR is making concerted efforts to inform its policies with the points of view of a broader constituency. "I think SPUR is engaged in those conversations more than anyone."

SPUR defines its mission as a commitment to "good planning and good government." Though a wide range of issues can and does fall under that rubric, the 71 board members and 14 staff tend to focus on housing, transportation, economics, sustainability, governmental reform, and local and regional planning, and their agenda has a dogged pro-growth tinge.

SPUR likes to trace its history to the post–1906 earthquake era, when the literal collapse of housing left many people settling in squalid conditions. The San Francisco Housing Association was formed "to educate the public about the need for housing regulations and to lobby Sacramento for anti-tenement legislation." A 1999 SPUR history of itself places its genesis in the Housing Association, though other versions of the group’s history suggest a slightly different taproot.

According to Chester Hartman’s history of redevelopment in San Francisco, City for Sale (University of California Press, 2002), the 1950s were a time when corporate-backed regional planners were envisioning a new, international commercial hub in the Bay Area. They were looking for a place to put the high-rise office buildings, convention centers, and hotels that white-collar commerce would need. Urban renewal money and resources were coming to the city, and San Francisco’s Redevelopment Agency identified the Embarcadero and South of Market areas as two of several appropriate places to raze and rebuild.

The agency, however, was dysfunctional and couldn’t seem to get plans for the Yerba Buena Center — a convention hall clustered with hotels and offices — off the ground. The Blyth-Zellerbach Committee, "a group the Chamber of Commerce bluntly described as ‘San Francisco’s most powerful business leaders, whose purpose is to act in concert on projects deemed good for the city,’<0x2009>" as Hartman writes, commissioned a report in 1959 by Aaron Levine, a Philadelphia planner, which identified the Redevelopment Agency as one of the worst in the nation and recommended more leadership from the business community. The San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association was born, funded by Blyth-Zellerbach, whose leaders included some corporations that still pay dues to SPUR, like Bechtel, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

John Elberling, a leader of the Tenants and Owners Development Corp., a group representing the people who were trying to stay in the area, was one of many activists who litigated against the city’s plan and managed to wedge some affordable housing into the developers’ vision of South of Market. SPUR, he told us, was "explicitly formed to support redevelopment issues in the ’60s and ’70s."

By 1974, when Paul began fending off redevelopment efforts around the Tenderloin and directed the North of Market Planning Coalition, "all through that period SPUR was viewed by the community as a tool for the Chamber of Commerce," he said.

In 1976, "Urban Renewal" became "Urban Research," a move away from the tarnished term. The 1999 commemoration of SPUR’s 40th anniversary is a somewhat sanitized history that never presents the faces of the people who were displaced by the program; nor does the analysis nod significantly toward the neighborhood groups and activists who were able to mitigate the wholesale razing of the area.

That’s still a soft spot for SPUR, some say. "They’re uncomfortable with questions of class. Those questions tend to be glossed over," said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and a SPUR board member from 2000 to 2004.

Metcalf doesn’t duck the issue. "If you’re a city planner, you’ve got to meditate deeply on urban renewal, even though you didn’t do it. It’s the only time in urban history that planners were given power, and that’s what they did with it," he said.

Besides a long friendship with powerful businesses, SPUR has frequently enjoyed an intimate relationship with city hall. "They morphed in the ’80s into a good-government, good-planning group, but in fact they were really tight with the [Dianne] Feinstein administration," Elberling said. "One of the ways you got to be a city commissioner was by being a member of SPUR. Feinstein’s planning and development club was SPUR."

Mayor Feinstein’s reign is often remembered as a boom in downtown development — at least until 1985, when San Franciscans for Reasonable Growth succeeded in passing Proposition M, a measure severely limiting annual high-rise development. SPUR opposed the measure and still supports increased height and density along transit corridors in the city.

"SPUR always goes with more," Radulovich said. "Sometimes there’s a trade-off between sustainability and growth, and I don’t have much confidence they won’t go with growth."

A March SPUR report, "Framing the Future of Downtown San Francisco," is one example of a cognizance of other options, weighing the pros and cons of expanding the central business district or transforming it into a "central social district": "While office uses remain, the goal of a CSD is to create a mixed-use, livable, 24-hour downtown neighborhood." Another line in the report offers a telling look at how SPUR thinks: "Economic growth in the CSD model may be diminished as the remaining sites for office buildings become used for new residential, retail, or other non-office uses."

Retail means, in fact, economic growth. A 1985 Guardian-commissioned study of small businesses in San Francisco, "The End of the High-Rise Jobs Myth," found that most of the new jobs created in the city between 1980 and 1984 were not in the downtown office high-rises but around them. Businesses with fewer than 99 employees had generated twice as many jobs as those with more employees.

While the numbers may be different today, the concept that neighborhood-serving retail keeps a local economy healthy has only grown stronger, as has public sentiment against chain stores. Yet SPUR opposed a proposition calling for conditional-use permits for formula retail, which voters approved in 2006.

Over the years SPUR’s political record has been checkered. Though the group talks the good-government talk, it opposed propositions establishing the city’s Ethics Commission and reforming the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. According to Charley Marsteller, a founder of Common Cause and a longtime good-government advocate in San Francisco, "Common Cause supported initiatives in 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2005. SPUR opposed all of them."

This November, SPUR came out in favor of Proposition C, which calls for public hearings before measures can be placed on the ballot, but opposed Question Time for the mayor. The group gave a yes to the wi-fi policy statement and approved establishing a small-business assistance center — contrary to past stances.

SPUR isn’t afraid to defend its positions. "Those who disagree with a conclusion SPUR reaches object to us presenting our ideas as objectively true rather than as values based," Metcalf notes in the May SPUR report "Civic Planning in America," in which he surveys other similar organizations.

"And in truth, evidence and research seldom point necessarily to one single policy outcome, except when viewed through the lens of values. We want to stop sprawl. We want housing to be more affordable. We want there to be prosperity that is widely shared…. Perhaps it’s time to grow more comfortable with using this language of values," he writes.

Paul, who’s now program director for the Haas Jr. Fund and has served on the SPUR board for seven years, says the group is indeed changing. "Over the last six to eight years I’ve noticed a real shift on the board," he said. "We have really intense and interesting discussions about issues. People feel they can speak their mind."

Okamoto, a partner in the Okamoto Saijo architectural firm, thinks this is the result of a fundamental shift in planning tactics, due to a more recent and deeper comprehension of the coming environmental crises. "Global climate change is moving things. I think SPUR’s going in the same direction," he said. Okamoto joined SPUR "because I’d like to see if I could influence the organization toward sustainability. Now we have a new funded staff position for that topic."

And yet the fact remains that only 5 of the 71 board members — about 7 percent — can be described as prominent progressives. At least half are directly connected to prominent downtown business interests.

And a list of SPUR’s donors is enough to give any progressive pause. Among the 12 biggest givers in 2006 are Lennar Corp., PG&E, Wells Fargo, Westfield/Forest City Development, Bechtel, Catellus, and Webcor.

In the past 10 years SPUR’s staff has doubled, signaling a subtle shift away from relying mainly on the research and work of board members. One of the newest positions is a transportation policy director, and that job has gone to Dave Snyder, who helped revive the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition in 1991, founded Livable City, and spent seven years on SPUR’s board before taking the job.

Having occupied the new post for a year, he said, "If I left, it wouldn’t be because I didn’t like SPUR. The debates we have at the staff level are more open than I expected."

Proposition A, the November transportation reform measure, is one example of the group’s new approach. The group voted a month earlier than usual to endorse a measure that was directly in opposition to the interests of one of its biggest funders, Gap billionaire Don Fisher (the Gap is also a member of SPUR). According to Walker, when the SPUR board vetted the endorsements the number of no votes for Prop. A was in the single digits. "I was so surprised," she said.

SPUR opposed Proposition H, a pro-parking countermeasure largely funded by Fisher, and worked with progressives on the campaign.

Metcalf noted it was the ground troops who made all the difference. "We don’t have [that kind of] power, and there are other groups that do. We wrote it, but we didn’t make it win. The bike coalition and [Service Employees International Union Local 1021] did," he said.

Sup. Aaron Peskin, who brokered much of the Prop. A deal, called it a sign of change for SPUR. "They probably lost a lot of their funders over this."

Radulovich is still dubious. He jumped ship after witnessing some disconnects between the board and its members. Though SPUR asks members to check their special interests at the door, Radulovich couldn’t say that always happened and recalled an example from an endorsement meeting at which a campaign consultant made an impassioned speech for the campaign on which he was working.

As far as his board membership was concerned, Radulovich said, "there were times I definitely felt like a token…. Development interests and wealthy people were much better represented."

Some say that isn’t about to change. "SPUR has been, is, and I guess always will be the rational front for developers," said Calvin Welch, a legendary San Francisco housing activist. "The members of SPUR are real estate lawyers, professional investors, and developers. Its original function was to be the Greek chorus for urban renewal and redevelopment."

Welch and Radulovich agree SPUR doesn’t represent San Franciscans, and Welch suggests the Dec. 4 Board of Supervisors hearing on an affordable-housing charter amendment was a case in point. "The people who got up to speak, I’d argue that’s San Francisco, and it doesn’t look a fucking thing like SPUR."

SPUR recently applied for a tax-exempt bond capped at $7 million from the California Municipal Finance Authority to help pay the cost of SPUR’s new Urban Center. It’s a standard loan for a nonprofit — SPUR is both a 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) — but some neighborhood activists raised questions about whether SPUR’s project is an appropriate expense for taxpayer cash.

"There’s no city money going toward the Urban Center, but by using tax-exempt bond financing they’re depriving the US Treasury of tax revenues," Salomon said. "The people who are funding SPUR can afford to buy them a really nice building, with cash."

The Urban Center also received a $231,000 federal earmark from Rep. Nancy Pelosi, whose nephew Laurence Pelosi is a former SPUR board member. Another $967,500 will come to SPUR from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment, which voters set aside through Proposition 40 to fund projects that "provide a thread of California’s cultural and historical resources."

Metcalf said SPUR isn’t sitting on a pile of cash: "We’re not that wealthy. We just don’t have that level of funding." The group’s endowment is small, and according to its 2006 annual report, revenues were $1.8 million, 90 percent of that from memberships and special events. The annual Silver Spur Awards, at which the group celebrates the work of local individuals, from Feinstein to Walter Shorenstein to Warren Hellman, is one of the biggest cash cows for SPUR, typically netting more than half a million dollars.

So far most of the funds for the Urban Center have come from donations raised from board members, individuals, businesses, and foundations. Metcalf defends the use of public funds. "For a group like SPUR that needs to be out in front on controversial issues, our work depends on having a diverse funding base. The Urban Center is part of that," he said.

The new headquarters is modeled on similar urban centers in Paris and New York, places that invite the public to view exhibits and get involved in answering some of the bigger planning questions cities are facing as populations increase and sprawl reigns. According to SPUR, this will be the first urban center west of Chicago, and the doors should open in 2009.

Walker, who’s been a board member for about a year, isn’t ready to say SPUR has been transformed. "It’s in my bones to be skeptical of SPUR," she said. "I have a different perspective than most of the people who are on SPUR, but the membership is different from the people who are funding it. I still think we need to have a more progressive policy think tank as well."

Walker recruits for SPUR’s membership development committee and said some of her suggestions have been well received. "The reality is, the progressive community is really powerful here when we come together and work on stuff. You can’t ignore us. Rather than fight about it, SPUR is offering some middle ground."

Presidio gets a Starbucks

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GREEN CITY First came the troubling mandate that the Presidio needed to break even financially, a new model for a national park area. Then came the Starbucks. That’s right: the Guardian has learned that a Starbucks will open next month in the Presidio’s Letterman Digital Arts Center, replacing locally owned Perk Presidio.

The new Starbucks — and all it represents — has raised the ire of both park and city activists. Scott Silver, executive director of Wild Wilderness, based in Bend, Ore., is concerned that the Presidio’s self-funding requirement is a harbinger of things to come across federal land management agencies. He says other properties following the Presidio model include Fort Baker in Marin, Sandy Hook in New Jersey, Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico (Forest Service land), and Fort Monroe in Virginia.

"It brings the entire standard of our national park system down from a high pedestal to a pretty base commercial reality," Silver said. "I just look at the Presidio as the first in what I fear will be a long chain of national parks that move away from the model of a publicly funded public good to a privately funded, largely commercial extension of our commercial world that’s really not in any way what we associate with national parks."

City activists point to Proposition G, which passed by a healthy 16 percent margin in 2006, requiring formula retail stores to get conditional use authorization from the Planning Commission before opening in neighborhood commercial districts. Richmond District residents demonstrated the power of this legislation in September by blocking a Starbucks slated for Fifth Avenue and Geary.

Dean Preston, a neighborhood activist and attorney launching a statewide organization called Tenants Together, said, "The law specifically applies to neighborhood commercial districts, but I think those same people who live in neighborhood commercial districts are using the Presidio, which is here in their backyard. I think that whether or not [Letterman Digital Arts] is subject to local law on the issue, they should be taking into account that city sentiment when deciding what kind of businesses to lease there."

Raul Saavedra, leasing director for Letterman Digital Arts, told us he didn’t know about Prop. G but that the company is aware that some people have opinions about Starbucks. That’s why the LDA originally selected Perk Presidio for the space. "We wanted someone like that to be successful," Saavedra said. "And they weren’t, unfortunately."

So the LDA decided to look for a new vendor, considering sole proprietors and local and national chains. Saavedra said the smaller operators he considered had credit issues and concerns about making the location successful. He said the key factors in selecting Starbucks were its strong credit, good service, and solid sustainability program.

Dana Polk, the Presidio Trust’s senior adviser for government and media relations, said that as master tenant, the LDA is free to sublet that space to any company it chooses. Nevertheless, Saavedra indicated that the LDA anticipated possible concerns with choosing Starbucks: "We went to the trust before we signed the deal with Starbucks, because we knew that there would probably be some opinions. And at that time there was no problem."

This will not be the first national park area to host a Starbucks. That dubious honor goes to the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, which since October 2004 has housed a Starbucks as a subtenant of Kimpton Resorts in its Hazlett Warehouse, according to Shelley Niedernhofer, chief of administration and business services for the park.

However, National Park Service concessions program specialist manager Jo Pendry confirms that these Starbucks are the first examples of formula retail throughout the 391-site national park system.

Kim Winston, Starbucks manager of civic and community affairs for the western region, claimed that revenues from the Starbucks help fund National Parks Service operations, but Niedernhofer said of the Maritime Park, "We don’t receive any revenue directly from Starbucks." The Presidio arrangement will be similar.

But Preston isn’t mollified. He said, "To have a Starbucks go into the Presidio with no real public review right after a Starbucks is nearly unanimously blocked [by a Board of Supervisors’ vote] in the Inner Richmond does seem like a real contrast. The fact that there’s absolutely no public process for putting a Starbucks in such a visible spot is really a problem." *

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

For rent sale

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Luz Moran, 75, fingers through a shoebox full of certified envelopes from her landlord’s attorney, squinting at the English words. She’s sitting on a red couch in the living room of her modest Mission District apartment, her feet barely touching the floor.

"This is another check he sent me, look," she mutters in Spanish, pointing out two checks amounting to $3,752.85. The money was sent along with an Ellis Act eviction notice, the first half of the $7,500 in relocation benefits city law requires be given to elderly or disabled tenants who are removed through the state law (if the tenant is not elderly or disabled, the landlord only needs to provide them with $4,500).

"I don’t know what we will do. Other apartments are expensive, and we can’t afford them," Moran says. The money is barely enough to cover moving costs and the first month’s rent at another place, she says, adding, "I don’t think this landlord is dying because of lack of money."

The eviction was not her landlord’s first attempt to move Moran, along with her 92-year-old mother and her son, from their two-bedroom apartment. In May 2006 he offered to sell them the unit for a discounted rate of $310,000, which was out of the family’s price range. Then he suggested a buyout agreement so they would leave voluntarily, but said he couldn’t offer much more than the Ellis Act’s required compensation. After the initial attempt to subdivide the building and all other negotiations failed, the landlord finally issued the eviction. He now wants to sell the units as tenancy in common apartments. But the Morans — and some other tenants in the building — are refusing to cash his checks.

"Because if we accept the money, it says that we are willing to leave here," Moran says.

The word eviction brings back bad memories for many residents of San Francisco, where the number of people thrown out of their homes numbered 2,878 in 1999. Then, at the height of the dot-com era, long-term renters were booted to make room for higher-paying tenants and out-of-towners prepared to buy six-figure homes.

But Moran’s story highlights two new additions to the renter woes that fill the San Francisco Tenants Union these days: landlord buyouts and a surge in TIC homeownership. With San Francisco’s housing prices on a seemingly perpetual upswing, it’s no wonder TIC ownership has increased twelvefold in the past decade. In 1996, 55 TIC units were sold through the San Francisco Multiple Listing Service, and in 2006 that number rose to 650, according to Realtor groups.

At first glance, it looks as if this trend should answer the prayers of middle-class families while avoiding an increase in no-fault tenant evictions. The city’s total evictions have been going down since 2001, hovering around 1,500 since 2003. But over the past five years Ellis Act petitions have slowly picked up, then petered off again, according to Rent Board data. And Ted Gullicksen, office coordinator at the Tenants Union, says these numbers don’t take into account relocation as a result of unregistered buyouts and threats, which can often lead to TIC ownership.

Each weekday at the Tenants Union dozens of renters shuffle through the doors, plop into mismatched chairs, and wait for hours to spill their complaints and legal paperwork onto the desk of a volunteer counselor.

"We’re pretty busy here at the Tenants Union," Gullicksen says on a Friday afternoon during counseling hours. "It’s pretty close to what it was during the worst of the dot-com years."

Gullicksen reports an increase in the number of threats and buyouts of tenants in the past year. He attributes that to 2006 legislation passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors prohibiting the conversion of buildings after the eviction of elderly or disabled tenants or multiple units. By avoiding putting an Ellis Act or other no-fault eviction on the record, the landlord can eventually convert the building into a condominium because its history hasn’t been tainted.

A building with no eviction history goes for more on the MLS, according to Gullicksen, which explains why landlords are willing to pay up to $60,000 for a "voluntary" tenant relocation. The private landlord-tenant agreement may be lucrative to the individuals involved, but it results in an almost undetectable loss of an affordable rental unit.

Gullicksen says it’s impossible to determine how many tenants relocate due to buyouts on a citywide level, but about 60 people seek help with one at the Tenants Union every month. Most tell a similar tale: A developer or landlord will offer between $2,000 and $60,000 to tenants to voluntarily vacate. The tenant may ask for a higher sum, and they’ll negotiate back and forth. Eventually, the tenant may be either bought out or evicted.

"It’s a game of chicken, really," Gullicksen says.

The loss of rental units at the hands of TICs or buyouts is not a small matter in a city where two-thirds of residents are renters (on the national level only 34 percent of housing units were rentals in the year 2000), and there is already a shortage of affordable housing.

US Census data show that San Francisco lost 18,474 rental-occupied housing units between 2000 and 2006. And the city isn’t doing much to plug the drain. According to the Planning Department, 13,795 new units have been built and ready for occupancy since 2000, and approximately 12,600 of those are condominiums.

Although the terms "TIC" and "condo" are often used interchangeably, they’re legally different. TICs follow a shared-homeownership model involving one deed and multiple live-in shareholders. They aren’t registered or restricted by the city, whereas condominium conversions are capped at 200 a year. Most notable is the price differential: TICs go for about $200,000 less than a median-priced condominium in San Francisco, which currently runs at $783,000, according to the San Francisco Association of Realtors.

TIC owners typically buy in hoping to raise their property’s value by eventually converting their units to condos through the city’s lottery system. Proponents call TICs one of the city’s only affordable homeownership options. Critics call them a loophole in condo conversion restriction laws.

Radhi Ahern, managing partner and broker at the TIC Group, doesn’t apologize for buyouts to make room for TICs. She acknowledges that TICs are obtained through financial negotiations with tenants.

"It’s the tenant’s choice on whether they get a buyout or don’t take a buyout. And it’s sometimes very lucrative," Ahern says from her spacious Union Street office. "I can honestly say nobody’s given me $25,000 to $50,000 to move into a place…. It’s a win-win situation."

A number of recent changes have increased TICs’ popularity, Ahern says. At first they were financially risky — with multiple people on one mortgage, everyone is affected if one defaults. But in recent years banks have taken on more responsibility through individualized loans to TIC owners. Ahern adds that there are virtually no foreclosures on TICs.

"With the advent of fractional financing, we’re going to see more and more people adopting TICs, just like co-ops were adopted in NYC," Ahern says.

In a city where about 90 percent of residents can’t afford a median-priced home, TICs are lifesavers to people like Scott Ozawa. The recently divorced 31-year-old father of two toddlers makes six figures at a dot-com but says buying into a Western Addition TIC was the only way he could own the home he wanted in San Francisco. Evictions shouldn’t be blamed on TIC owners, he says, but on the city’s faulty housing system and lack of new development.

"The lower-income and the middle-income folks are all vying for the same resources," Ozawa says. "But middle-income folks have more options that are open to them."

Meanwhile, Moran and her family plan to stay in the rent-controlled apartment she has lived in for 35 years and might have to fight an unlawful-detainer order in court this month. She says she likes her place — the neighbors all know one another, she’s close to transit, and her apartment’s thick walls offer protection from earthquakes. The family pays only $507 per month, less than one-fifth the average rate for a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, according to the Tenants Union.

In September the Morans and other tenants at their apartment held a support rally outside their building, catering it with sandwiches and juice they prepared. Four elderly female tenants lined up on the front steps, taking turns speaking to the few dozen onlookers. Moran’s upstairs neighbor took out her oxygen tube to speak into a bullhorn. Moran stood beside her, later clapping along to a guitar-strumming activist singing, "Yuppie, yuppie stole my pad! Yuppie, yuppie, bad, bad, bad." As she smiled and mouthed the words in a language she doesn’t speak, a young couple wearing bandannas and carrying what looked like art supplies exited the building next door. They glanced toward the crowd with confused, down-turned brows but didn’t break their stride as they walked off the steps in the opposite direction.

In and out

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Playwright Rebecca Gilman’s work has often courted subjects with ripped-from-the-headlines appeal, such as Spinning into Butter‘s take on racism at a small New England college or Boy Gets Girl‘s stalker scenario. Her latest play, The Crowd You’re In With, is no less timely. But at first blush it seems quieter and more understated in its choice of setting and subject matter: a backyard barbeque and a clash between three couples over whether or not to have children. By the end of a taut if laugh-filled 80 minutes, however, this successful comedy, enjoying its world premiere at the Magic Theatre, has uncovered the acute social import and anxieties behind a set of everyday characters and choices.

The play opens on a contemporary American idyll: a sunny Fourth of July afternoon in Chicago, where two thirtysomething white guys, Jasper (T. Edward Webster) and Dan (Kevin Rolston), hover beside a backyard grill in the archetypal pose (and perplexity) of the modern suburban male. Such a scene, including their young wives Melinda (Makela Spielman) and Windsong (Allison Jean White) arranging a table nearby, would seem to contain no more angst than the residual variety implicit in grill time’s spur to primitive masculinity. But there’s already a subtle cornered and concentrated effect in Erik Flatmo’s naturalistic scenic design, with its tiny swath of yard bracketed by the enclosing sharp angles of a two-story duplex and an adjoining high wooden fence. Reproducing Norman Rockwell is not going to prove so easy (if it ever was) in the age of global warming and unending war.

One of the first things we learn is that couple number one — Jasper and Melinda, the renters of the apartment whose yard this is — are trying to get pregnant. Five months and counting. This has Melinda, especially, nervous. Their friends Dan and Windsong, meanwhile, are already very pregnant, as Windsong’s eight-month bulge makes clear. Dan (a happy and good-natured but also slightly abrasive and unselfconsciously vulgar rock critic) and Windsong (the chipper, emotionally fragile, and determinedly conventional child of hippies) are more or less equally incurious and young beyond their years. Jasper and Melinda, by contrast, seem more mature and clever than their friends and yet, we come to suspect, are very much under the sway of their baby-making example all the same. Jasper (played with nicely measured intelligence and sympathetic earnestness by Webster) seems particularly uneasy with this dynamic.

Enter couple number three: Jasper and Melinda’s landlords and upstairs neighbors, Karen (Lorri Holt) and Tom (Charles Shaw Robinson), a pair of politically active progressive boomers without a baby or any desire for one. The genial but opinionated older couple soon evince a thinly veiled disdain for the crass yuppie ideals of their tenants’ friends and for the very idea of knee-jerk breeding under present social conditions. A final arrival helps stir the pot even more: a slovenly, cheapskate friend and bandmate of Dan’s named Dwight (Chris Yule), with a jaundiced eye on the overbearing culture of middle-class child rearing.

The ensuing tension leads to some very funny dialogue, oozing sarcasm, and slow-dawning insults. Ably helmed by Amy Glazer (who has directed all of Gilman’s work at the Magic) and beautifully brought to life by her thoroughly fine, enjoyable cast, the scenes build with a kind of chemical inevitability to temperatures hotter than the day or the barbeque. The fireworks not only start early this July 4 but also — in slyly showing up the repressed violence and bellicosity behind the national picnic and its whole rockets’-red-glare conceit — point to a larger, precarious pattern of denial.

Taking place in a single act in real time, The Crowd You’re In With proves a compact, genuinely entertaining, and provoking play. Even as it skirts stereotype, the types themselves are adeptly fleshed out and will resonate for most people with plenty of lived experience. Moreover, Gilman skillfully grounds her characters’ stories and dilemmas in issues of immediate and universal significance. The questions the play raises about them — like who is the more selfish given their respective life choices — reach down to deeper ones about conformity, consciousness, the meaning of happiness, and the fate of the world we live in.

THE CROWD YOU’RE IN WITH

Through Dec. 9

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 and 7 p.m.; $20–$45

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center, bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 441-8822

www.magictheatre.org

Flop it out, Oaktown

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Intrepid reporter Justin Juul hits the streets each week for our Meet Your Neighbors series, interviewing the Bay Area folks you’d like to know most.

Mr. Floppy’s Flophouse is a cluster of buildings in East Oakland that has been used throughout the years as a saloon, a venue for underground raves, a brothel, and most recently as a movie set. It also used to be Jack London’s favorite place to get drunk. I wanted to interview George, the crazy guy who owns the place, but he repeatedly denied my request, stating with obvious disgust that he has no desire to “get his name out there.”

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Welcome to Mr. Floppy’s!

Luckily, one his tenants, Sarah Doppler, had no qualms.

Sarah is one of those free-spirited traveler types who pops into a city for a few months, makes a bunch of friends, and then disappears before she gets sucked into their drama. Very smart. The following interview took place in front of a bonfire in Sarah’s backyard.

SFBG: So where are you from, and how did you find yourself living in this weird floppy-house complex thing?

Sarah Doppler: I’m from Seattle, Washington and I moved to the Bay Area about 4 months ago. I needed to find a room so I just answered an ad on Craigslist. It said “Female Artists Wanted: $400.” So I came and checked it out one night. It was really creepy because there are all these pianos and statues and about 50 dark rooms throughout the place. It’s like a maze with weird art and raccoons and this huge backyard by the freeway where I can chill with all my homies.

SFBG: Yeah, dude, I just spent twenty minutes looking for the bathroom and finally had to leave when I accidentally barged in on a film crew and a bunch of vampires eating fried chicken. What’s up with that?

Doppler: Oh man, this place is amazing! There’s that saloon right behind my room; that’s where you were. It’s fully decked out with mahogany and stained glass and it’s been there since the 1880’s. There are pictures of Jack London all over the place and my landlord rents it out to movie studios. They do a lot of horror flicks back there. The vampires have been chillin’ for weeks. I got drunk with them last night.

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Sarah Doppler, flopper.

Rent control under attack

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San Francisco’s rent-control and affordable-housing laws could be struck down by a statewide initiative that appears to be headed for the June 2008 ballot.

The measure is sponsored by a coalition of conservative property rights advocates under the guise of limiting the government’s ability to seize property by eminent domain.

Cities and progressive organizations are fighting back by trying to qualify a competing ballot measure that would restrict the ability of governments to seize owner-occupied homes but would invalidate the more radical initiative. Groups from the San Francisco Tenants Union to the League of California Cities are actively mobilizing to gather the needed signatures by the Dec. 3 deadline.

SFTU director Ted Gullicksen told the Guardian, “180,000 rental units stand to be affected in San Francisco,” and argued that the invalidation of rent-control laws would rapidly gentrify the city. He noted that environmental groups have lined up against the measure because of ambiguous wording that “could also impact the revamping of the Hetch Hetchy Dam as well as the work on the levees and the delta.”

His group is mobilizing volunteer signature gatherers to qualify the competing measure — which would need more votes than the right-wing measure to quash the latter — and trying to educate the public through the Web site www.eminentdomainreform.com and a Nov. 14 rally planned for noon at the State Building at Van Ness and McAllister.

Eminent domain laws have been a hot-button political issue since 2005, when the US Supreme Court ruled in Kelo vs. City of New London that the Connecticut city could use eminent domain to seize land for a private development project. The furor over that decision triggered last year’s Proposition 90, which would have restricted eminent domain and defined “regulatory takings” so as to cripple local governments’ ability to enforce environmental laws and other restrictions on property use.

Prop. 90 was narrowly defeated (by 47.6 to 52.4 percent of voters statewide, but 29 percent in San Francisco), and advocates for the constitutional amendment titled Government Acquisition, Regulation of Private Property hoped to learn from the experience in crafting this new measure, for which they say they’ve gathered 850,000 signatures and plan to have one million by the Nov. 26 deadline for turning in 694,354 valid signatures of registered voters.

That measure “had a substantial amount of baggage in that it delved into regulatory takings,” Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, told the Guardian. The latest proposal, he said, “is a fairly tightly drafted measure that deals with eminent domain.”

Actually, as the Attorney General’s Office has concluded in its summary of the measure, it would also strike down rent-control laws, a key source of affordable housing in San Francisco, Berkeley, and a couple of other California cities. The measure’s broad prohibition on laws that “transfer an economic benefit to one or more private persons at the expense of the private owner” could also be interpreted as invalidating inclusionary housing laws, which require developers to create a set percentage of below-market-rate units, and other laws that regulate property.

Coupal admitted the measure attacks rent control and told us, “We think that’s part and parcel of complete property rights protection.” But he noted that units are only removed from rent-control protection when existing tenants move out. And he denied that the proposed act would affect inclusionary housing laws, citing a section that reads, “Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit or impair voluntary agreements between a property owner and a public agency to develop or rehabilitate affordable housing.”

Yet he also admits that it’s an open question whether affordable-housing requirements for developers will always be deemed voluntary. He said, “The issue of what is voluntary is currently being litigated in a number of courts.”

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