You’re probably already acquainted with the Guardian’s 2007 endorsements for the Nov. 6 elections — but what about the city’s other hot and steaming political bodies (yes, that sounded dirty). Below are endorsements from other groups, from the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club to the San Francisco Tenants Union. (All files below are PDFs.)
Tenants
Endorsements: Local offices
Mayor
1. QUINTIN MECKE
2. AHIMSA PORTER SUMCHAI
3. CHICKEN JOHN RINALDI
Let us be perfectly clear: none of the people we are endorsing has any real chance of getting elected mayor of San Francisco. Gavin Newsom is going to win a second term; we know that, he knows that, and whatever they may say on the campaign trail, all of the candidates running against him know that.
It’s a sad state of affairs: San Francisco has been, at best, wallowing helplessly in problems under Newsom, and in many cases things have gotten worse. The murder rate is soaring; young people, particularly African Americans, are getting shot down on the streets in alarming numbers. The mayor has opposed almost every credible effort to do something about it — he fought against putting cops on foot patrol in the most violent areas, he opposed the creation of a violence-prevention fund and blocked implementation of a community policing plan, and he’s allowed the thugs in the Police Officers Association to set policy for a police department that desperately lacks leadership. The public transportation system is in meltdown. The housing crisis is out of control; 90 percent of the people who work in San Francisco can’t afford to buy a house here, and many of them can’t afford to rent either. Meanwhile, the city is allowing developers and speculators to build thousands of new luxury condos, which are turning San Francisco into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Newsom only recently seems to have noticed that public housing is in shambles and that the commission he appoints to oversee it has been ignoring the problem.
The mayor is moving aggressively to privatize public services (including turning over the city’s broadband infrastructure to private companies), and he’s done little to promote public power. He’s cracking down on the homeless without offering adequate alternatives to long-term housing. Much of the time, he seems disconnected, out of touch with the city; he won’t show up and take questions from the Board of Supervisors and won’t even comply with the Sunshine Ordinance and release his daily calendar so the voters can see what he’s doing all day. He rarely appears in public, unless his handlers have complete control of the situation.
In fact, almost all of the significant policy discussions and initiatives that are happening in San Francisco today (including the universal health plan that Newsom likes to take credit for) have come from the Board of Supervisors.
There are good things to say about Newsom. We were among the huge number of San Franciscans who applauded when Newsom directed the city to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He did more than make a political statement, more than allow hundreds of couples to get married; he put one of the leading civil rights issues of our time on the center stage of the political agenda. And he made all of us proud to be San Franciscans. We were happy to see him stand up against the big international hotel chains and support striking hotel workers. In some ways, he’s brought modern management to the city — the 311 system, which connects callers directly to the proper city services, actually works, and sometimes works well.
But San Francisco is one of the world’s great cities, and it’s in serious trouble, and the person in charge isn’t offering much in the way of leadership — and he certainly isn’t offering the sort of progressive agenda that this city ought to be showing the nation. Newsom doesn’t deserve another term.
And yet the progressives in the city, who have come so very far since the return of district elections in 2000, were unable to field an electable candidate. We could spend pages dissecting why that happened. Matt Gonzalez should have made a decision much earlier in the process. Ross Mirkarimi should have run. The entire movement needs to be better about developing and promoting candidates for citywide office. But right now the issue on the table is this: who should the progressives, the independents, the neighborhood activists, the tenants, the people who have been dispossessed during the Newsom years, who don’t like the prospect of this mayor waltzing into another term atop a landslide majority, vote for Nov. 6?
We aren’t in the habit of endorsing for a big-league elective office people who haven’t put in their time in the minors. And Newsom’s challengers are not exactly a varsity squad. But many of them are raising important issues that Newsom has ignored, and we commend them all for taking on the difficult task of mounting a campaign against a mayor who most observers say is unbeatable. Our endorsements are, to be honest, protest votes — but we hope they’ll send a message to Newsom that there are issues, communities, and ideas he can’t just ignore after his coronation. The smaller the mayor’s margin of victory and the more votes the candidates who are pushing the progressive agenda collect, the less of a mandate Newsom will take into a second term that could be a truly frightening time.
Quintin Mecke has the strongest progressive credentials and by far the best overall approach to issues facing the city. He’s never held elective office (and had never run before), but he’s been involved in local politics for a decade. A volunteer with Tom Ammiano’s campaigns for supervisor and mayor and with Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign, Mecke went on to serve on the civil grand jury and the task force on redistricting, where he helped stave off attempts to chop up progressive supervisorial districts. He helped organize the South of Market Anti-Displacement Committee and now runs the Safety Network Partnership, a nonprofit that works to fight crime and violence in the city’s neighborhoods. He’s on the committee that monitors the city’s homeless shelters.
Mecke told the Guardian that "it’s hard to find an innovative, non-PR-type initiative out of the Mayor’s Office." He supports community policing, a progressive gross-receipts tax that would exempt small businesses, and a moratorium on market-rate housing until the city can determine how it will build enough affordable units. He complains that there’s no standard of care in Newsom’s homeless shelters. He opposes the privatization of public programs and resources.
Mecke tends a bit to bureaucratspeak; he talked about "horizontal conversations" instead of taking some issues head-on. And we’re concerned that he didn’t seem serious or organized enough to raise the modest amount of money it would have taken to qualify for public financing and mount a more visible campaign. But he’s a solid candidate, and we’re happy to give him the nod.
Ahimsa Porter Sumchai is a remarkable success story, an African American woman who grew up in the housing projects and wound up graduating from UC San Francisco’s medical school. She’s running primarily on the issue of environmental justice for southeast San Francisco — and for years has been one of the loudest voices against the flawed Lennar Corp. redevelopment project at and the reuse plan for the contaminated Hunters Point Shipyard. Sumchai says the shipyard can never be cleaned up to a level that would be safe for housing, and she suggests that much of it should be used for parks and open space and possibly maritime and green-industry uses. She’s highly critical of the low levels of affordable housing in market-rate projects all over the city, arguing that the developers should be forced to provide as many as 25 percent of their units at below-market rates. Sumchai is a physician, and she talks like one; her scientific language and approach sometimes confuse people. She suggested that one of the main causes of the homicide rate in the city is mental illness. "You can medically address people who are violent," she told us, saying the first step is to properly diagnose and treat depression in men. "Just as we looked at AIDS as an epidemic," she said, "we should look at violence as an epidemic." Which is, at the very least, an interesting approach.
Sumchai has some innovative ideas, including a universal child-care program for the city, paid for with a "fat tax" on unhealthy food. She’s a strong supporter of public power and a longtime critic of Pacific Gas and Electric Co.
She can be abrasive and temperamental, but she’s talking about critical issues that almost everyone else is ignoring. She deserves support.
Chicken John Rinaldi is the political surprise of the season, an artist and showman who has managed a traveling circus, run a bar in the Mission, put on unusual performances of every kind — and somehow managed to be the only person running for mayor who could qualify for tens of thousands of dollars in public funding. On one level Rinaldi’s campaign is a joke — he told us repeatedly he has no idea what he’s doing, and that if by some wild chance he were elected, he would hire people like Mecke and Sumchai to run the city. He’s the Dada candidate, with his entire run something of a performance art piece.
But Rinaldi has a real constituency. He represents a dying breed in the city: the street artists, the writers, the poets, the unconventional thinkers with economically marginal lifestyles, who were once the heart and soul of San Francisco. It’s hard to pin him down on issues since he seems to disdain any policy talk, but in the end, the very fact that he’s running speaks to the pressure on artists and the lack of support the unconventional side of the art world gets in this increasingly expensive city.
Rinaldi is the protest candidate of all protest candidates, but he’s going to get a lot of votes from people who think San Francisco needs to stop driving some of its most valuable residents out of town — and if that leads to a more serious discussion about artist housing, affordable housing in general, arts funding, and the overall crackdown on fun under Newsom, then it’s worth giving Chicken John a place on the ticket.
There are several other candidates worthy of consideration. Josh Wolf, a video blogger, served 226 days in a federal prison rather than turn over to the authorities tape of a demonstration he was filming. It was a bold and courageous show of principle (anyone who’s ever done time knows that spending even a week, much less month after month, behind bars is no joke), and it speaks to his leadership and character. Wolf is talking about some key issues too: he’s a big supporter of municipal broadband and sees the Web as a place to promote more direct democracy in San Francisco.
Lonnie Holmes, a probation officer, has roots in the African American community and some credible ideas about violent crime. He favors extensive, direct intervention in at-risk communities and would fully fund recreation centers, after-school programs, and antiviolence education in elementary schools. He thinks a network of community resource centers in key neighborhoods could cut the crime rate in half. He’s a little conservative for our taste, but we like his energy, commitment, and ideas.
Harold Hoogasian, a third-generation florist, registered Republican, and small-business activist, is a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative and law-and-order guy who complains that the city budget has skyrocketed while services don’t seem to have improved. Yet somewhat to our surprise, he told us he supports the idea of a moratorium on market-rate housing and a ballot measure that would force developers to build housing more in tune with San Francisco’s real needs (even if he wants to start with ownership housing for cops). He supports public power, wants more sunshine in government, and opposes privatization. He also brings a much-needed critique of the remaining vestiges of machine politics in this one-party town and speaks passionately about the need for outsiders and political independents to have a seat at the table. We’re glad to have him in the race.
In the end, though, our picks in this first ranked-choice vote for San Francisco mayor are Mecke, Sumchai, and Rinaldi — on the issues, as a political statement, and to remind Newsom that his poll numbers don’t reflect the deep sense of distrust and discontent that remains in this city.
District attorney
KAMALA HARRIS
We’re always nervous about unopposed incumbents. And since Kamala Harris unseated Terence Hallinan four years ago, running as an ally of then-mayor Willie Brown with the backing of a corrupt old machine, we’ve been nervous about her.
In some ways she’s been a pleasant surprise. Harris quickly showed that she has courage and integrity when she refused to seek the death penalty for a cop killer despite the fact that the police rank and file and much of the brass excoriated her for it. She remains one of the few district attorneys in the nation who oppose the death penalty in all situations. She’s created a public integrity unit and aggressively filed charges against Sup. Ed Jew. She’s made clear to the Police Department that she won’t accept sloppy police work. She talks constantly about making crime and criminal justice a progressive issue.
But there are plenty of areas in which we remain nervous. Harris hasn’t been anywhere near as aggressive as she could be in prosecuting political corruption. She doesn’t pursue ethics violations or Sunshine Ordinance violations. The San Francisco DA’s Office could be a national leader in rooting out and prosecuting environmental and political crime, but it isn’t.
Meanwhile, the murder rate continues to rise in San Francisco, and Harris and the police are pointing fingers back and forth without actually finding a workable solution.
And lately, Harris, to her tremendous discredit, has been stepping up the prosecution of so-called quality-of-life crimes — which translates into harassing the homeless. She’s made sure there’s a full-time prosecutor in traffic court, pressing charges for things like public urination, sleeping in the park, and holding an open container of beer. That’s a colossal waste of law enforcement resources.
We expect a lot more from Harris in the next four years. But we’ll back her for another term.
Sheriff
MIKE HENNESSEY
Mike Hennessey has been sheriff for so long that it’s hard to imagine anyone else holding the job. And that’s not a bad thing: Hennessey is one of the most progressive law enforcement officers in the country. He’s turned the county jail into a center for drug rehabilitation, counseling, and education (the first charter high school in America for county prisoners is in the SF jail). He’s hired a remarkably diverse group of deputies and has worked to find alternatives to incarceration. He’s openly critical of the rate at which the San Francisco police are arresting people for small-time drug offenses ("We’re arresting too many people for drugs in the city," he told us). He took a courageous stand last year in opposing a draconian and ineffective state ballot initiative that would have kicked convicted sex offenders out of San Francisco and forced them to live in rural counties without access to support, services, or monitoring.
We’ve had some issues with Hennessey. We wanted a smaller new jail than he ultimately decided to build. And we really wish he’d be more outspoken on local law enforcement issues. Hennessey told us he wants to stick to his own turf, but if he were more visible on police reform, criminal justice, and law enforcement, the city would benefit immensely.
Hennessey’s only opponent is David Wong, a deputy sheriff who was unable to make a case for replacing the incumbent. We’re happy to endorse Hennessey for another term — but since this might be his last before retirement, we urge him to take his progressive views and push them onto a larger stage.
The story of Q
› sarah@sfbg.com
With just a couple of weeks to go until San Franciscans elect their next mayor, Quintin Mecke, the 34-year-old program director of the Safety Network, has emerged as Gavin Newsom’s top challenger.
Since declaring his candidacy, the fresh-faced Mecke has been endorsed by almost every significant progressive entity in the city, including supervisors Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi, BART board member and Livable City director Tom Radulovich, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, the San Francisco Tenants Union, and the Guardian.
"Of all the mayoral candidates, Quintin has the longest record of working in the community and on important issues facing the city," said Daly, who was the first to publicly endorse the Pennsylvania native, shortly after Mecke declared his candidacy in August.
But despite his solid list of endorsers, Mecke hasn’t managed to raise much money. He didn’t come close to taking advantage of the mayoral public financing program created by Mirkarimi and approved by the most liberal members of the Board of Supervisors. Mecke said his late entry made it impossible to raise the required $25,000 (from at least 250 donors who could prove San Francisco residency) by the Aug. 28 deadline.
"Had I had more time, I don’t think raising the $25,000 is that much of a challenge," Mecke, a former Peace Corps volunteer, told the Guardian at the time. But two months later Mecke has only raised $11,203, with Sup. Tom Ammiano and former mayoral contender Matt Gonzalez respectively contributing $250 and $100, although neither has endorsed him yet.
With Newsom sitting on a $1.8 million war chest, Daly admits that it would take a perfect storm for Mecke to win.
"The incumbent would have to stumble between here and the finish line," said Daly, who toyed with running until Aug. 8, at which point Mecke dove into the race, challenging Newsom’s record on public safety, homelessness, and affordable housing — issues that Mecke has been intimately involved with since moving here a decade ago.
Mecke’s move to California came shortly after he survived a near-fatal climbing accident in Alaska, which shattered all of his teeth when he fell 40 feet off a glacier. The fall also saddled Mecke, who didn’t have health insurance, with $90,000 in medical bills.
"It was a humbling experience, but people have to take responsibility for the situations they find themselves in," said Mecke, who worked for Ammiano on arriving in San Francisco and has since worked on the Ammiano, Mirkarimi, and Gonzalez campaigns.
Mecke also helped found the South of Market Community Anti-Displacement Coalition, served as president of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco, and helped author a report on homelessness that led him to publicly debate then-supervisor Newsom over his Care Not Cash initiative.
"Accountability without support is a form of cruelty," Mecke stated in 2002, a belief he still holds as he tries, as a member of the Homeless Shelter Monitoring committee, to get the city to implement universal shelter standards.
"If you raise the quality of life and safety standards in the city’s shelters, then more homeless people will want to enter them," Mecke said.
Mecke, a Western Addition resident, believes in community-driven responses to crime and violence. While Newsom claims that black-on-black violence has decreased under his administration, Mecke counters that African Americans make up only 7 percent of the city population but constitute 60 percent of the homicide victims. He thinks we need a real community policing program.
"We have 10 fiefdoms, 10 police districts," Mecke said. "That means that the oft-touted and talked about idea of community policing doesn’t really exist."
Newsom campaign manager Eric Jaye claims the only thing he knows about Mecke is that "he opposed Care Not Cash and he is supported by Sup. Chris Daly.
"But his own record? That’s a little bit harder," Jaye continued. "Mecke works for a city-funded nonprofit, but ironically, he’s unhappy with the violence prevention work the city is doing. Presumably he’s running because he thinks he can do a better job, but we’re proud of our progress on universal health care, our work on climate protection, our civic efforts, the fact that the eviction rate has plummeted, and that there’s more housing and affordable housing in the pipeline than [under] any other mayor in recent history."
But Mecke points out that the city’s health care initiative was Ammiano’s brainchild and that Newsom failed to deliver on his "wi-fi for all" promise by stubbornly pushing a flawed proposal and refusing to engage with its critics.
"Newsom’s only successes are initiatives proposed and led by members of the Board of Supervisors," said Mecke, who accuses Newsom of "making every decision within the framework of a national model while promoting some future candidacy."
He faults Newsom for asking for mass resignations this fall and sees the fact that Newsom is raising piles of cash to defeat Proposition E, which would require the mayor to make monthly appearances before the Board of Supervisors, as further evidence of his cowardice.
"San Francisco need to demand of this race that there’s public accountability," Mecke said. "Newsom seems to fear any form of nonscripted public interaction. When you go to his fake Question Time–town hall meetings you don’t actually get to ask the mayor your own question. He selects what he wants to hear."
41st Anniversary Special: Private practice
› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Low-income tenants cheered late last year when the San Francisco Department of Public Health ended its housing contract with the John Stewart Co. But no one expected the alternative would be a secret $5 million deal between DPH officials and a preferred vendor.
In fact, the DPH has opened a new chapter in privatization by creating a dubiously accountable, quasi-independent nonprofit while paying someone else to operate it with a sole-source contract.
The health department leases several single-room-occupancy hotels in San Francisco that house mental health and substance-abuse patients through a program called Direct Access to Housing, part of a laudable nationwide trend toward deinstitutionalizing such medical clients and changing how the formerly homeless receive services.
The Camelot on Turk Street and Le Nain on Eddy Street were among those managed by John Stewart until last autumn. Mercy Housing oversaw two more. But there were problems; tenants complained about the Stewart company’s management, and political organizers last year charged that desk clerks at some of the buildings prevented them from registering tenants to vote.
"If you’re part of a larger company that just sees themselves as a more generic property-management company," said Marc Trotz, director of the health department’s housing office, "there isn’t necessarily the training and skills development that needs to be there to handle the complexities that come up on a daily basis with the population we’re dealing with."
So the health department’s answer was to broker an exclusive $5 million contract with a nationwide nonprofit based in San Francisco known as the Tides Center. Tides doesn’t do any of the heartwarming outreach we tend to associate with nonprofits. Instead, the outfit handles the boring administrative functions like payroll and human resources for community projects created by others.
The project in this case is Trotz’s brainchild Delivering Innovation in Supportive Housing, which essentially exists as a nonprofit only on paper. There’s no board of directors. There are no federal tax forms outlining expenses and revenue. And Tides doesn’t itemize projects like DISH in its annual financial statements. So there’s no easy way for the public to track the money that goes into the project.
Yet DISH has so far never been forced to compete for property-management contracts like any other nonprofit wanting to do business with the city. That means the DPH gets the best of both worlds, paying someone in the private sector to manage its books and not having to subject its pet project to the competitive atmosphere of contract bidding.
Further, since Tides is technically the employer of record for DISH’s 60 or so employees, they exist in an ethereal world where they don’t fall under the city’s salary and benefits structure, but unions can’t reach them unless they’re willing to organize all 200 projects managed by Tides nationally.
Needless to say, none of this is sitting well with the nonprofits and unions that insist they weren’t informed of the plan until it was off and running.
"I feel like at union nonprofits, the turnover’s much lower, the training’s higher, and if a manager is abusing a tenant, for instance, a union worker can make a complaint to a city agency, write them up, do something without being afraid for their jobs," said Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer, a former organizer for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. "And we just give better care."
The THC, whose workers are represented by Service Employees International Union Local 1021, says it was never formally invited to bid on DISH, despite the fact that it does extensive work with the city and manages more than 1,500 units of low-income housing.
"All they had to do to find out was send a letter or call us…. The fact that they made the effort to set up their own entity kind of shows that’s what they wanted to do," THC director Randy Shaw said.
The Tides contract so annoyed Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin that he drafted a resolution pointing out that Mayor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in 2004 calling for maximum competition in city contracts.
"This Board of Supervisors has been on record for years in wanting to make sure contracts are competitively and fairly bid," Peskin told the Guardian. "This whole thing seems rather bizarre. The government was in essence contracting with itself."
The health department’s Trotz dismisses this criticism, saying sole-source contracts were designed in the first place to allow for agreements like the Tides deal, which he calls a pilot project. Next time, he promises, the department will open the contract to bids. Trotz added that Tides is responsible if a DISH employee screws up, and it faces an annual monitoring probe by DPH staffers, just like any other contractor.
"I know now that THC and the union seem to be upset by this," Trotz said. "What we’re saying is we’ve heard that and we are doing what we always intended to do, which is run a two-year pilot and put a [request for proposals] out on the street and ready for people to apply to prior to the start of the next fiscal year."
Of course, no one’s suggesting Tides and DISH will necessarily do a poor job handling supportive housing. Shaw said lefties were the first to argue nearly three decades ago that nonprofits could address public health much more sensitively than did Dianne Feinstein’s mayoral administration of the 1980s. Last year the health department did $174 million worth of business with nonprofits. While unions have been slow to organize nonprofits, the trend is growing, but Tides and DISH seem structured to stiff-arm them when covert, sole-source contracts haven’t done that already.
"This obviously was a secret decision," Shaw said. "[The DPH] never consulted with anybody. They just did it. I don’t want to comment on the health department beyond what I’ve said. But this experience has left people very cynical about dealing with the health department [and] the way they handled the whole thing."
Google’s gentrification shuttle
OPINION Cari Spivek thought it was wasteful that so many employees like her were driving to work in different cars. Her idea became the Google Shuttle, a private transit network made of biodiesel-powered, wi-fi-enabled, air-conditioned buses transporting employees from around the Bay Area to Google headquarters in Mountain View, south of San Francisco.
At first it was used by a hundred employees from the entire area. But Google has been growing and now shuttles more than 1,200 Googlers every day, many from the Mission District, which has recently added a second bus.
Anyone who has ever taken a population class knows that every migration has a countermigration. In addition to all of the Google employees already living in the city and doing less environmental damage by taking the shuttle, many employees are choosing to move to the city because there is now a comfortable shuttle to take them to work. And many want to be a short walk to one of the stops.
When one takes into account the cost of gentrification, which is destroying the arts in San Francisco and forcing many low-income workers out of the city, the Google Shuttle no longer looks so environmentally friendly. Low- and middle-income wage earners are forced to commute to the neighborhoods they can no longer afford to live in. Their commute can take more than an hour, and they can’t afford environmentally friendly cars.
It’s very possible the Google Shuttle is doing as much harm to the environment as good. And the young Google employees, many making well over $100,000 a year, who move to places like the Mission for the art and diversity, are unintentionally devastating the neighborhood they love. Soon there will be no economic diversity in the Mission, and the young rich who have driven the rents so high will wonder how they ended up living in a place that resembles Greenwich, Conn.
Ending the Google Shuttle is not the only solution. It’s not even the best solution. A much better alternative would be for Google to make substantial investments in low- and middle-income housing in the areas it’s transforming, like the Mission and the Tenderloin, where its employees are clustered.
Google could give back to the community by donating $5,000 per employee living in the Mission to a fund that offsets the costs incurred by tenants forced from their homes by owner move-ins or loss of primary leaseholder, with the rest of the money going to fund neighborhood artists and new middle-income housing. Annually, we’re talking between $5 million and $10 million, a cost Google could easily afford. It would be good for Google in other ways, keeping this an area its creative employees still want to live in, before they follow the rest of the artists to Portland, Ore., or Detroit.
It’s hard for people to admit that their mere presence is doing damage, that their ability to pay exorbitant rent is destroying the neighborhood they love. But the Mission cannot endlessly absorb renters with six-figure incomes. In many ways, including the use of biodiesel shuttle buses, Google has behaved like a responsible profitable corporation should. Now it has a responsibility to help the Mission maintain its diversity. Otherwise, Google needs to stop shuttling its employees from 24th and Mission and stop encouraging them to live in a neighborhood that simply can’t afford them.
Stephen Elliott is the author of six books. He has lived in the Mission for eight years.
Our three-point plan to save San Francisco
› news@sfbg.com
Curtis Aaron leaves his house at 9 a.m. and drives to work as a recreation center director for the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. He tries to leave enough time for the trip; he’s expected on the job at noon.
Aaron lives in Stockton. He moved there with his wife and two kids three years ago because “there was no way I could buy a place in San Francisco, not even close.” His commute takes three hours one way when traffic is bad. He drives by himself in a Honda Accord and spends $400 a month on gas.
Peter works for the city as a programmer and lives in Suisun City, where he moved to buy a house and start a family. Born and raised in San Francisco, he is now single again, with grown-up children and a commute that takes a little more than an hour on a good day.
“I’d love to move back. I love city life, but I want to be a homeowner, and I can’t afford that in the city,” Peter, who asked us not to use his last name, explained. “I work two blocks from where I grew up and my mom’s place, which she sold 20 years ago. Her house is nothing fancy, but it’s going for $1.2 million. There’s no way in hell I could buy that.”
Aaron and Peter aren’t paupers; they have good, unionized city jobs. They’re people who by any normal standard would be considered middle-class — except that they simply can’t afford to live in the city where they work. So they drive long distances every day, burning fossil fuels and wasting thousands of productive hours each year.
Their stories are hardly unique or new; they represent part of the core of the city’s most pressing problem: a lack of affordable housing.
Just about everyone on all sides of the political debate agrees that people like Aaron and Peter ought to be able to live in San Francisco. Keeping people who work here close to their jobs is good for the environment, good for the community, and good for the workers.
“A lack of affordable housing is one of the city’s greatest challenges,” Mayor Gavin Newsom acknowledged in his 2007–08 draft budget.
The mayor’s answer — which at times has the support of environmentalists — is in part to allow private developers to build dense, high-rise condominiums, sold at whatever price the market will bear, with a small percentage set aside for people who are slightly less well-off.
The idea is that downtown housing will appeal to people who work in town, keeping them out of their cars and fighting sprawl. And it assumes that if enough market-rate housing is built, eventually the price will come down. In the meantime, demanding that developers make somewhere around 15 percent of their units available at below-market rates should help people like Aaron and Peter — as well as the people who make far less money, who can never buy even a moderately priced unit, and who are being displaced from this city at an alarming rate. And a modest amount of public money, combined with existing state and federal funding, will make affordable housing available to people at all income levels.
But the facts are clear: this strategy isn’t working — and it never will. If San Francisco has any hope of remaining a city with economic diversity, a city that has artists and writers and families and blue-collar workers and young people and students and so many of those who have made this one of the world’s great cities, we need to completely change how we approach the housing issue.
HOMELESS OR $100,000
The housing plans coming out of the Mayor’s Office right now are aimed primarily at two populations: the homeless people who have lost all of their discretionary income due to Newsom’s Care Not Cash initiative, and people earning in the neighborhood of $100,000 a year who can’t afford to buy homes. For some time now, the mayor has been diverting affordable-housing money to cover the unfunded costs of making Care Not Cash functional; at least that money is going to the truly needy.
Now Newsom’s housing director, Matt Franklin, is talking about what he recently told the Planning Commission is a “gaping hole” in the city’s housing market: condominiums that would allow people on the higher end of middle income to become homeowners.
At a hearing Sept. 17, Doug Shoemaker of the Mayor’s Office of Housing told a Board of Supervisors committee that the mayor wants to see more condos in the $400,000 to $600,000 range — which, according to figures presented by Service Employees International Union Local 1021, would be out of the reach of, say, a bus driver, a teacher, or a licensed vocational nurse.
Newsom has put $43 million in affordable-housing money into subsidies for new home buyers in the past year. The Planning Department is looking at the eastern neighborhoods as ground zero for a huge new boom in condos for people who, in government parlance, make between 120 and 150 percent of the region’s median income (which is about $90,000 a year for a family of four).
In total, the eastern neighborhoods proposal would allow about 7,500 to 10,000 new housing units to be added over the next 20 years. Downtown residential development at Rincon Hill and the Transbay Terminal is expected to add 10,000 units to the housing mix, and several thousand more units are planned for Visitacion Valley.
The way (somewhat) affordable housing will be built in the eastern part of town, the theory goes, is by creating incentives to get developers to build lower-cost housing. That means, for example, allowing increases in density — changing zoning codes to let buildings go higher, for example, or eliminating parking requirements to allow more units to be crammed into an available lot. The more units a developer can build on a piece of land, the theory goes, the cheaper those units can be.
But there’s absolutely no empirical evidence that this has ever worked or will ever work, and here’s why: the San Francisco housing market is unlike any other market for anything, anywhere. Demand is essentially insatiable, so there’s no competitive pressure to hold prices down.
“There’s this naive notion that if you reduce costs to the market-rate developers, you’ll reduce the costs of the unit,” Calvin Welch, an affordable-housing activist with more than three decades of experience in housing politics, told the Guardian. “But where has that ever happened?”
In other words, there’s nothing to keep those new condos at rates that even unionized city employees — much less service-industry workers, nonprofit employees, and those living on much lower incomes — can afford.
In the meantime, there’s very little discussion of the impact of increasing density in the nation’s second-densest city. Building housing for tens of thousands of new people means spending hundreds of millions of dollars on parks, recreation centers, schools, police stations, fire stations, and Muni lines for the new neighborhoods — and that’s not even on the Planning Department’s radar. Who’s going to pay for all that? Nothing — nothing — in what the mayor and the planners are discussing in development fees will come close to generating the kind of cash it will take to make the newly dense areas livable.
“The solution we are striving for has not been achieved,” said Chris Durazo, chair of the South of Market Community Action Network, an organizing group. “Should we be looking at the cost to developers to build affordable housing or the cost to the neighborhood to be healthy? We’re looking at the cumulative impacts of policy, ballot measures, and planning and saying it doesn’t add up.”
In fact, Shoemaker testified before the supervisors’ committee that the city is $1.14 billion short of the cash it needs to build the level of affordable housing and community amenities in the eastern neighborhoods that are necessary to meet the city’s own goals.
This is, to put it mildly, a gigantic problem.
THE REST OF US
Very little of what is on the mayor’s drawing board is rental housing — and even less is housing available for people whose incomes are well below the regional median, people who earn less than $60,000 a year. That’s a large percentage of San Franciscans.
The situation is dire. Last year the Mayor’s Office of Community Development reported that 16 percent of renters spend more than half of their income on housing costs. And a recent report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition notes that a minimum-wage earner would have to work 120 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, to afford the $1,551 rent on a two-bedroom apartment if they spent the recommended 30 percent of their income on housing.
Ted Gullickson of the San Francisco Tenants Union told us that Ellis Act evictions have decreased in the wake of 2006 Board of Supervisors legislation that bars landlords from converting their property from rentals to condos if they evict senior or disabled tenants.
But the condo market is so profitable that landlords are now offering to buy out their tenants — and are taking affordable, rent-controlled housing off the market at the rate of a couple of hundred units a month.
City studies also confirm that white San Franciscans earn more than twice as much as their Latino and African American counterparts. So it’s hardly surprising that the Bayview–Hunters Point African American community is worried that it will be displaced by the city’s massive redevelopment plan for that area. These fears were reinforced last year, when Lennar Corp., which is developing 1,500 new units at Hunters Point Shipyard, announced it will only build for-sale condos at the site rather than promised rental units. Very few African American residents of Bayview–Hunters Point will ever be able to buy those condos.
Tony Kelly of the Potrero Hill Boosters believes the industrial-zoned land in that area is the city’s last chance to address its affordable-housing crisis. “It’s the biggest single rezoning that the city has ever tried to do. It’s a really huge thing. But it’s also where a lot of development pressure is being put on the city, because the first sale on this land, once it’s rezoned, will be the most profitable.”
Land use attorney Sue Hestor sees the eastern neighborhoods as a test of San Francisco’s real political soul.
“There is no way it can meet housing goals unless a large chunk of land goes for affordable housing, or we’ll export all of our low-income workers,” Hestor said. “We’re not talking about people on welfare, but hotel workers, the tourist industry, even newspaper reporters.
“Is it environmentally sound to export all your workforce so that they face commute patterns that take up to three and four hours a day, then turn around and sell condos to people who commute to San Jose and Santa Clara?”
A THREE-POINT PLAN
It’s time to rethink — completely rethink — the way San Francisco addresses the housing crisis. That involves challenging some basic assumptions that have driven housing policy for years — and in some quarters of town, it’s starting to happen.
There are three elements of a new housing strategy emerging, not all from the same people or organizations. It’s still a bit amorphous, but in community meetings, public hearings, blog postings, and private discussions, a program is starting to take shape that might actually alter the political landscape and make it possible for people who aren’t millionaires to rent apartments and even buy homes in this town.
Some of these ideas are ours; most of them come from community leaders. We’ll do our best to give credit where it’s due, but there are dozens of activists who have been participating in these discussions, and what follows is an amalgam, a three-point plan for a new housing policy in San Francisco.
1. Preserve what we have. This is nothing new or terribly radical, but it’s a cornerstone of any effective policy. As Welch points out repeatedly, in a housing crisis the cheapest and most valuable affordable housing is the stuff that already exists.
Every time a landlord or real estate speculator tries to make a fast buck by evicting a tenant from a rent-controlled apartment and turning that apartment into a tenancy in common or a condo, the city’s affordable-housing stock diminishes. And it’s far cheaper to look for ways to prevent that eviction and that conversion than it is to build a new affordable-rental apartment to replace the one the city has lost.
The Tenants Union has been talking about this for years. Quintin Mecke, a community organizer who is running for mayor, is making it a key part of his platform: More city-funded eviction defense. More restrictions on what landlords can do with buildings emptied under the Ellis Act. And ultimately, a statewide strategy to get that law — which allows landlords to clear a building of tenants, then sell it as condos — repealed.
Preserving existing housing also means fighting the kind of displacement that happens when high-end condos are squeezed into low-income neighborhoods (which is happening more and more in the Mission, for example, with the recent approval of a market-rate project at 3400 César Chávez).
And — equally important — it means preserving land.
Part of the battle over the eastern neighborhoods is a struggle for limited parcels of undeveloped or underdeveloped real estate. The market-rate developers have their eyes (and in many cases, their claws) on dozens of sites — and every time one of them is turned over for million-dollar condos, it’s lost as a possible place to construct affordable housing (or to preserve blue-collar jobs).
“Areas that have been bombarded by condos are already lost — their industrial buildings and land are already gone,” Oscar Grande of People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights told us.
So when activists (and some members of the Board of Supervisors) talk about slowing down or even stopping the construction of new market-rate housing in the eastern neighborhoods area, it’s not just about preventing the displacement of industry and blue-collar jobs; it’s also about saving existing, very limited, and very valuable space for future affordable housing.
And that means putting much of the eastern neighborhoods land off limits to market-rate housing of any kind.
The city can’t exactly use zoning laws to mandate low rents and low housing prices. But it can place such high demands on developers — for example, a requirement that any new market-rate housing include 50 percent very-low-income affordable units — that the builders of the million-dollar condos will walk away and leave the land for the kind of housing the city actually needs.
2. Find a new, reliable, consistent way to fund affordable housing. Just about everyone, including Newsom, supports the notion of inclusionary housing — that is, requiring developers to make a certain number of units available at lower-than-market rates. In San Francisco right now, that typically runs at around 15 percent, depending on the size of the project; some activists have argued that the number ought to go higher, up to 20 or even 25 percent.
But while inclusionary housing laws are a good thing as far as they go, there’s a fundamental flaw in the theory: if San Francisco is funding affordable housing by taking a small cut of what market-rate developers are building, the end result will be a city where the very rich far outnumber everyone else. Remember, if 15 percent of the units in a new luxury condo tower are going at something resembling an affordable rate, that means 85 percent aren’t — and ultimately, that leads to a population that’s 85 percent millionaire.
The other problem is how you measure and define affordable. That’s typically based on a percentage of the area’s median income — and since San Francisco is lumped in with San Mateo and Marin counties for income statistics, the median is pretty high. For a family of four in San Francisco today, city planning figures show, the median income is close to $90,000 a year.
And since many of these below-market-rate projects are priced to be affordable to people making 80 to 100 percent of the median income, the typical city employee or service-industry worker is left out.
In fact, much of the below-market-rate housing built as part of these projects isn’t exactly affordable to the San Franciscans most desperately in need of housing. Of 1,088 below-market-rate units built in the past few years in the city, Planning Department figures show, just 169 were available to people whose incomes were below half of the median (that is, below $45,000 a year for a family of four or $30,000 a year for a single person).
“A unit can be below market rate and still not affordable to 99 percent of San Franciscans,” Welch noted.
This approach clearly isn’t working.
So activists have been meeting during the past few months to hammer out a different approach, a way to sever affordable-housing funding from the construction of market-rate housing — and to ensure that there’s enough money in the pot to make an actual difference.
It’s a big number. “If we have a billion dollars for affordable housing over the next 15 years, we have a fighting chance,” Sup. Chris Daly told us. “But that’s the kind of money we have to talk about to make any real impact.”
In theory, the mayor and the supervisors can just allocate money from the General Fund for housing — but under Newsom, it’s not happening. In fact, the mayor cut $30 million of affordable-housing money this year.
The centerpiece of what Daly, cosponsoring Sup. Tom Ammiano, and the housing activists are talking about is a charter amendment that would earmark a portion of the city’s annual property-tax collections — somewhere around $30 million — for affordable housing. Most of that would go for what’s known as low- and very-low-income housing — units affordable to people who earn less than half of the median income. The measure would also require that current housing expenditures not be cut — to “lock in everything we’re doing now,” as Daly put it — so that that city would have a baseline of perhaps $60 million a year.
Since the federal government makes matching funds available for many affordable-housing projects, that money could be leveraged into more than $1 billion.
Of course, setting aside $30 million for affordable housing means less money for other city programs, so activists are also looking at ways to pay for it. One obvious option is to rewrite the city’s business-tax laws, replacing some or all of the current payroll tax money with a tax on gross receipts. That tax would exempt all companies with less than $2 million a year in revenue — the vast majority of the small businesses in town — and would be skewed to tax the bigger businesses at a higher rate.
Daly’s measure is likely headed for the November 2008 ballot.
The other funding option that’s being discussed in some circles — including the Mayor’s Office of Housing — is complicated but makes a tremendous amount of sense. Redevelopment agencies now have the legal right to sell revenue bonds and to collect income based on so-called tax increments — that is, the increased property-tax collections that come from a newly developed area. With a modest change in state law, the city should be able to do that too — to in effect capture the increased property taxes from new development in, say, the Mission and use that money entirely to build affordable housing in the neighborhood.
That, again, is a big pot of cash — potentially tens of millions of dollars a year. Assemblymember Mark Leno (D–San Francisco) told us he’s been researching the issue and is prepared to author state legislation if necessary to give the city the right to use tax-increment financing anywhere in town. “With a steady revenue stream, you can issue revenue bonds and get housing money up front,” he said.
That’s something redevelopment agencies can do, and it’s a powerful tool: revenue bonds don’t have to go to the voters and are an easy way to raise money for big projects — like an ambitious affordable-housing development program.
Somewhere, between all of these different approaches, the city needs to find a regular, steady source for a large sum of money to build housing for people who currently work in San Francisco. If we want a healthy, diverse, functioning city, it’s not a choice any more; it’s a mandate.
3. A Proposition M for housing. One of the most interesting and far-reaching ideas we’ve heard in the past year comes from Marc Salomon, a Green Party activist and policy wonk who has done extensive research into the local housing market. It may be the key to the city’s future.
In March, Salomon did something that the Planning Department should have done years ago: he took a list of all of the housing developments that had opened in the South of Market area in the past 10 years and compared it to the Department of Elections’ master voter files for 2002 and 2006. His conclusion: fully two-thirds of the people moving into the new housing were from out of town. The numbers, he said, “indicate that the city is pursuing the exact opposite priorities and policies of what the Housing Element of the General Plan calls for in planning for new residential construction.”
That confirms what we found more than a year earlier when we knocked on doors and interviewed residents of the new condo complexes (“A Streetcar Named Displacement,” 10/19/05). The people for whom San Francisco is building housing are overwhelmingly young, rich, white commuters who work in Silicon Valley. Or they’re older, rich empty nesters who are moving back to the city from the suburbs. They aren’t people who work in San Francisco, and they certainly aren’t representative of the diversity of the city’s population and workforce.
Welch calls it “socially psychotic” planning.
Twenty-five years ago, the city was doing equally psychotic planning for commercial development, allowing the construction of millions of square feet of high-rise office space that was overburdening city services, costing taxpayers a fortune, creating congestion, driving up residential rents, and turning downtown streets into dark corridors. Progressives put a measure on the November 1986 ballot — Proposition M — that turned the high-rise boom on its head: from then on, developers had to prove that their buildings would meet a real need in the city. It also set a strict cap on new development and forced project sponsors to compete in a “beauty contest” — and only the projects that offered something worthwhile to San Francisco could be approved.
That, Salomon argues, is exactly how the city needs to approach housing in 2007.
He’s been circuutf8g a proposal that would set clear priority policies for new housing. It starts with a finding that is entirely consistent with economic reality: “Housing prices [in San Francisco] cannot be lowered by expanding the supply of market-rate housing.”
It continues, “San Francisco values must guide housing policy. The vast majority of housing produced must be affordable to the vast majority of current residents. New housing must be economically compatible with the neighborhood. The most needy — homeless, very low income people, disabled people, people with AIDS, seniors, and families — must be prioritized in housing production. … [and] market-rate housing can be produced only as the required number of affordable units are produced.”
The proposal would limit the height of all new housing to about six stories and would “encourage limited-equity, permanently affordable homeownership opportunities.”
Salomon suggests that San Francisco limit the amount of new market-rate housing to 250,000 square feet a year — probably about 200 to 400 units — and that the developers “must produce aggressive, competitive community benefit packages that must be used by the Planning Commission as a beauty contest, with mandatory approval by the Board of Supervisors.” (You can read his entire proposal at www.sfbg.com/newpropm.doc.)
There are all kinds of details that need to be worked out, but at base this is a brilliant idea; it could be combined with the new financing plans to shift the production of housing away from the very rich and toward a mix that will preserve San Francisco as a city of artists, writers, working-class people, creative thinkers, and refugees from narrow-minded communities all over, people who want to live and work and make friends and make art and raise families and be part of a community that has always been one of a kind, a rare place in the world.
There is still a way to save San Francisco — but we’re running out of time. And we can’t afford to pursue moderate, incremental plans. This city needs a massive new effort to change the way housing is built, rented, and sold — and we have to start now, today.* To see what the Planning Department has in the pipeline, visit www.sfgov.org/site/planning_index.asp?id=58508. To see what is planned for the eastern neighborhoods, check out www.sfgov.org/site/planning_index.asp?id=67762.
Ficks’s top six
1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Christian Mungiu, Romania, 2007). This Romanian debut feature possesses a nonjudgmental flow reminiscent of a Dardenne brothers film as it follows two women who negotiate for an illegal abortion during the final days of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist regime. You’ll be holding your breath as the characters dash from one nightmare to the next. There’s a reason this movie won the Palme d’Or at the 60th Cannes Film Festival.
2. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, France, 2007). As a rambling red balloon affectionately takes to Simon, a seven-year-old boy in Paris, his single mother — played to perfection by Juliette Binoche — does her best to care for her child, deal with flaky tenants, and continue her professional career as a puppeteer. Don’t be intimidated by Hou Hsaio-Hsien’s reputation; his latest movie is accessible, as is the 1956 French film that it is based on. This tiny, chaotic journey can help you deal with the frantic contemporary world.
3. Cassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen, UK, 2007). Warning: the new Woody Allen movie is not a comedy. Set in the UK, this minimasterpiece pairs Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as middle-class brothers, both of whom want a better financial lifestyle. As the pair close in on their dreams, their moral codes begin to loosen. The acting is extraordinary (Farrell finds finesse), and Vilmos Zsigmond’s camerawork encloses the characters in a strikingly gloomy world immensely heightened by Philip Glass’s original score. Many critics are dismissing this dark drama as a comedic misfire. But like Allen’s 2005 UK production Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream isn’t courting laughs; these films dig into some disturbing human dilemmas at a time when there’s not much of a reason to laugh.
4. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US, 2007). For the follow-up to 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach creates another bittersweet coming-of-age exposé of a dysfunctional family. Both Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh contribute some of their best work as sisters who compete with more than support each other. Also, Jack Black is wonderful as a schlub whom Leigh is set to marry, and newcomer Zane Pais is as awkward as a young teenager should be in the role of Leigh’s son. But it’s the sincere and audacious writing that gives Margot at the Wedding its powerful kick.
5. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada, 2007). Behold a personal journey through Guy Maddin’s childhood and hometown done by way of archival footage, personal home movies, narration (by Maddin himself!), and reenactments starring his cinematic mother, Ann Savage (the unforgettable leading dame of the 1945 film noir Detour). It’s hilariously self-depreciating and utterly universal — can this man do no wrong?
6. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands, 2007). Carlos Reygadas updates Carl Theodor Dreyer. If that gets your beard in a bunch, then you’re gonna be in heaven for two and a half hours.
The death of Polk Street
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Click here to read about the Polk’s long, queer history
Kelly Michaels was following the San Francisco dream when she escaped her small Alabama hometown at 17 and hitchhiked westward. It was 1989.
"I had stars in my eyes," Michaels told the Guardian, sitting on the floor of her friend’s small single-room occupancy Tenderloin apartment, hints of a Southern drawl now paired with Tammy Faye mascara and bleached-blonde hair. "When you’re 16 or 17 and have dreams of being famous, you come to California — and you probably end up on Polk Street in drag."
Michaels arrived on Polk with little more than blue jeans, a bra, and rubber falsies to her name, making ends meet as a street sex worker. It wasn’t what she was looking for; the Polk was plagued with drugs and violence. But her dad was embarrassed by his transgendered daughter and didn’t her want her back. The neighborhood was a home.
She found a community at fierce Polk Gulch trans and boy-hustler bars like Q.T. and Reflections, where clientele included one "big, tall, black Egyptian transsexual hell-raiser" known to draw a gun. Scores of boy hustlers "coming in daily from the Greyhound station" danced naked on the bars. At the end of the night, Michaels’s new family members would pool their money and rent a hotel room for $30.
"The bars were the churches, the sanctuaries," Michaels’s friend Terri, an African American man in his 50s, told us. "You weren’t really going to be hassled there."
Not any more. "Polk Street is dead," Michaels told us. "Dead as fuck now."
THE NEW POLK STREET
The new kids on the block are calling it "revitalization."
After the three-decades-old gay bar Kimo’s is transferred to a new owner at the end of September, there will be only two queer bars left on a street that was San Francisco’s gay male center in the 1960s and a gritty, affordable home for low-income queers, trans women, and male sex workers in the following decades. Where scores of hustlers lined up against seedy sex shops and gay bars just a few years ago, crowds of twentysomething Marina look-alikes now clog the sidewalks in front of upscale clubs.
Polk’s queer residents and patrons are now being priced and policed out of their neighborhood — and their city — as business and tourism interests continue to eat away at the city’s center. Lower Polk Gulch, just blocks north of City Hall and one block east of Van Ness, has in the past few years succumbed to multimillion-dollar businesses, upscale lofts, increased rents at SRO hotels and apartments, and a new million-dollar city streetscape beautification plan. The related increase in policing and new efforts to clean up the street is making the area an unwelcoming place for the marginal queers who for so long called it home.
It has been the most down-and-out segments of the queer population — male sex workers, trannies, young people, poor people of color, and immigrants — who have often been the queer population’s boldest and most innovative actors, pushing the movement forward in new ways. What does queer San Francisco lose when our most marginalized members are pushed, policed, and priced out of the city?
HEART OF A COMMUNITY
Michaels stood under a neon purple Divas sign, advertising the three-story transgender club that has stood in Polk Gulch for more than three decades. Divas manager Alexis Miranda, a friend, stepped outside to chat, and a dozen characters from the neighborhood stopped by to shoot the shit. One man rubbed Miranda’s belly through her leopard bodysuit. "This is my baby," he told us jokingly.
Divas is as much a community center as it is a club. Girls from out of town and out of the country know to come to Divas when they step off the boat, plane, or bus. Many trans immigrants make a living as prostitutes, and while Miranda insists that she does not allow them to work inside the club, the close vicinity of San Francisco’s tranny prostitute district has meant tension for Divas.
Miranda told us the police have been targeting the club because of complaints from new merchants. "Some of the people who have new businesses don’t want the people who live here to stay. They want to close us down," she said. "They’re trying to gentrify the neighborhood."
Neville Gittens, a police spokesperson, told us that the San Francisco Police Department performs "regular enforcement in that area" but said any targeted operations cannot be discussed.
Theresa Sparks, a trans woman who chairs the Police Commission, said Miranda made the same claim at the commission meeting Aug. 15. "I don’t know if that’s true or not," Sparks told us. "My intent is to find out what is going on."
Sparks agreed that gentrification is driving trans people out of the Polk Gulch neighborhood: "It is very, very difficult for a transgendered person to survive in this city."
Miranda pointed to a bar across the street. Until 2000, the Lush Lounge was the cruisy trans and hustler bar Polk Gulch Saloon. Now, under a new owner, white twentysomething heterosexuals sip apple pie martinis.
Sonia Khanna, a 28-year-old trans woman with long, curly brown hair and mocha skin told us she doesn’t feel welcome there. "If you’re a tranny, they think you’re a whore," she said.
Miranda said the owner, Steve Black, ejected her when she went to welcome him to the neighborhood. Miranda, a former empress in San Francisco’s Imperial Court System, reported him to the Human Rights Commission. The inquiry was closed when the owner informed the commission that he allows transgendered people into the bar. He didn’t deny tossing out Miranda; he said he just disliked her personally.
The bigger problem may be the neighborhood’s increased property values. Divas owner and Polk Gulch resident Steve Berkey told us that rents have pushed out other established queer businesses on Polk. The only reason Divas stays open is that he owns the building. "It used to be that so many girls lived in the neighborhood," he said. "They packed the place. But now rents have driven them off."
CENTER OF THE STORM
The reasons behind the death of the queer Polk are complex, likely including the ascendance of the Internet as a social networking tool, rising property costs, and the aging of the bars’ core clientele and owners. But most of the community’s rancor has focused on the most visible manifestation of change: neighborhood associations representing new, upscale businesses working with police and the city to clean up the streets.
At the center of the storm is a glass-walled architecture studio at the bottom of Polk Gulch, around the corner from Divas. Two freshly planted palm trees in front of the studio are conspicuous on a site next door to a bleak, institutional homeless shelter outfitted with security cameras and across the street from a porn shop promising "Hot Bareback Action!"
Case+Abst Architects has been the workplace and home of husband and wife Carolyn Abst and Ron Case since they were lured by the area’s low cost in 1999. The trees were the first of 40 planted in a campaign they initiated last year as cofounders of Lower Polk Neighbors. Abst told the San Francisco Chronicle in September 2005 that she "wants a fruit stand [on Polk Street], and we’ll take a Starbucks too."
The group has had an impact: District Attorney Kamala Harris said at a recent community meeting organized by the LPN that she has responded to association agitation by having representatives of the District Attorney’s Office walk the neighborhood with police and installing high-tech surveillance equipment to gain more criminal convictions. Sup. Aaron Peskin has asked the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to include the Lower Polk in its Neighborhood Marketplace Initiative, a program designed to revitalize neighborhood business districts. As part of this program, a part-time staff person now acts as a liaison between Lower Polk merchants and police. Another city program is scheduled to spend $1 million on installing new lights and planting trees later this year.
Activists say the LPN focus is not on outreach, therapy, or support for the Polk’s marginalized residents but on pushing undesirables out of the neighborhood and ejecting outreach programs like a local needle exchange.
Last year Abst was the subject of a "wanted" poster put up on Polk by the group Gay Shame. The group calls the LPN a "progentrification attack squad" whose goal is to "remove outsider queers and social deviants from our neighborhood in order to accelerate property development and real estate profiteering."
The hustler bar Club RendezVous lost its lease in 2005 after the property was bought and razed. Its co-owner, David Kapp, didn’t return our phone calls seeking comment, but he told the Central City Extra in February 2006 that a "smear campaign" by the LPN stopped him from relocating down the street. A First Congregational Church is now being constructed where RendezVous once stood. The church was designed by Case+Abst.
Case told us that the Planning Department wanted to see neighborhood support for the RendezVous move. The LPN asked that RendezVous provide security, but the bar’s owners refused. "They always had younger, underage boys hanging out," Case said. "There are a lot of families in this neighborhood. We wished them well, but it’s also a community." He told us he wants not to gentrify the neighborhood but to make it clean and safe.
But safe for whom?
Chris Roebuck, a medical anthropologist at UC Berkeley, told us that the increased policing has also meant increased harassment of trans women. Sex workers, many of them immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines, and Thailand, are "increasingly being pushed into the alleyways, into unsafe spaces," he said. He’s also noticed a criminalization of what he called "walking while trans" in the six years he has spent interviewing trans women on Polk Street.
At a community meeting with the district attorney earlier this month, two trans women said the police, despite sensitivity trainings, do not take them seriously when they report a crime.
"Getting rid of the public space for trans women and drug users is not safe for them," Polk resident Matt Bernstein Sycamore (a.k.a. Mattilda) told us. "Deportation [of immigrant sex workers] is not a safe space. The needle exchange actually does make people safer. Getting rid of it does not make people safer."
Sycamore, editor of the book Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients, is concerned with what he calls a "cultural erasure" in the area. "Polk Street has been the last remaining place where marginalized queers can come to figure out how to cope, meet one another, and form social networks," he told us. "That sort of outsider culture has been so dependent on having a public space to figure out ways to survive. That is the dream of San Francisco — that you can get away from where you came from and cope, and create something dangerous and desperate and explosive."
POLK VILLAGE?
When Kimo’s changes hands at the end of September, San Francisco will lose one of the last vestiges of a hustler culture housed on Polk Street since at least the early 1960s.
On a recent night, six gray-haired men sat chatting or reading the paper, relics of Polk Street’s heyday. A young man with a shaved head and black hoodie stood outside the front door and gave a suspicious look to a young blonde woman in bikini straps who breezed in with two friends, laughing, oblivious to him. A sign in front read "No Loitering In Front of These Premises."
The state’s Department of Alcohol Beverage Control mandated the warning, Kimo’s bartender John David told us. He said he thinks that was the result of pressure from the LPN. "Kimo’s is the new whipping boy," he told us. "RendezVous is out, and now it’s our fault that people are on the streets."
Case denies that his group had anything to do with the crackdown on Kimo’s.
A tall man with shaggy brown hair standing on the sidewalk near Kimo’s, who asked to be identified by his porn-actor name, Eric Manchester, complained that a way of life is coming to an end. Manchester said he started hustling on Polk at age 17 after leaving the "redneck, racist town" of Martinsville, Ind., in 10th grade and being stationed in San Diego by the Navy.
"It wasn’t just money for me," Manchester told us. "This was a good place to come and get advice, comfort, support. There are people that need people, and they’re going to take that all away. San Francisco is going down the tubes. All the heterosexual people are moving in. They like the police-state mentality."
Among the new arrivals is the owner of the $6.5 million O’Reilly’s Holy Grail Restaurant that stands just a few doors down Polk Street from Kimo’s. On a recent evening, a musician played soft jazz on a black grand piano, while men in starched pastel button-down shirts stood around on the hickory pecan floor.
Myles O’Reilly opened the restaurant two years ago, when he also transformed a low-rent residential hotel above the space into 14 European-style hotel suites. Neighbors point to the property as a tipping point in Polk’s transformation. But O’Reilly sounded almost defeated when he talked about his "multimillion-dollar jewel in the middle of the desert."
"We are only a couple blocks from City Hall and Union Square," he told us. "But tourism doesn’t come this way."
With the goal of transforming the area, he teamed up with John Malloy, the head of the recently founded Polk Corridor Business Association, who has also chaired the LPN.
One of their projects is on view outside the restaurant and along the street. Colorful banners read: "Welcome to Polk Village … working together to build a cleaner, safer, more beautiful community." The PCBA plans to circulate a petition to officially change the name of Polk Gulch to Polk Village in a few years, but O’Reilly isn’t waiting. He defiantly lists the restaurant’s address as 1233 Polk Village on his building.
That "village" will house a small army if these merchants have their way. "We need foot patrols up and down Polk Street," Malloy, who lives in the neighborhood, told us. "We’re going to get more police even if we have to go out there and hire them ourselves."
O’Reilly took out his cell phone and started showing me photos. "This is defecation on the sidewalk outside," he said, pointing to a smudgy image. "This is condoms on the sidewalk. You see this lovely photograph? That’s a condom in the flowerbed. That’s what my son had to see this morning. And nobody helps."
"There are 1,000 condos being built here," O’Reilly said. "Something has to be done to restrict the number of street people."
VANISHING NEIGHBORHOODS
The Tenderloin, and to a lesser extent Polk Gulch, risked being swallowed by the expanding downtown financial district and tourist industries in the late 1970s. But in the 1980s, community activism secured a moratorium on the conversion of residential hotel units, required luxury hoteliers to contribute millions of dollars in community mitigations, downzoned dozens of blocks of prime downtown property, and created a nonprofit housing boom.
It is these achievements that new merchants and residents point to when distancing themselves from the word gentrification. LPN cofounder Case told us that because apartments in the area are rent controlled, gentrification is "not possible."
Not so, said Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee. "Look at the Castro," he told us. "It’s full of rent-controlled buildings. All you have to do is evoke the Ellis Act, or you buy out the tenants."
Or look next to the Congregational Church construction on Polk. There stands an almost-completed four-story building whose 32 units are being sold for up to $630,000. A large glossy poster in its window advertises the units’ "open living and dining areas," along with "stainless steel appliances, custom cabinets, [and] granite counters."
Brian Bassinger, cofounder of the AIDS Housing Alliance, told us that in one of the buildings where his organization houses people a few blocks south of Polk Gulch, rent is now $1,700 a month, up from $1,325 just a few years ago.
Gayle Rubin, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and a historian of South of Market leather cultures, told us that gay neighborhoods are disappearing across the country as the core of major cities are transformed into high-value areas. This puts pressure on the economic viability of queer neighborhoods, most of which — despite the stereotype of the wealthy gay — have taken root in marginalized, poor neighborhoods.
"Polk Street is just one little battle in the war," Mecca told us. "The Mission was a working-class lesbian area. That whole lesbian culture got lost overnight. The bustling culture of queer artists in the Castro — all gone. The South of Market leather scene — gone. Parts of our culture, the very thing we came to San Francisco for, keep getting wiped out."
Kelly Michaels did develop a certain amount of celebrity as a performer at the famed club Finocchio’s and as a porn star; fans still post photos and gush over her online. And she remains drawn to the Polk, even if her relationship with the neighborhood is deeply ambivalent.
"It’s so evil, so dark, full of drugs and despair," she told us outside Divas. "But this is my home and my family."
"The people left here are going to fight for their home," she said. "Some people have been here forever. Their whole life is here. It’s impossible to get an apartment in other places of this city."
"This is a sanctuary," she said. "They’re taking the sparkle out of San Francisco."
The original queer district
The Tenderloin and its more settled fringe, Polk Gulch, have a long history in queer San Francisco.
The city’s street prostitutes were pushed into the Tenderloin after the 1914 Red-Light Abatement Law led to a crackdown on the Barbary Coast. Police crackdowns on gay bars in North Beach in the early 1960s led to the ascendance of Polk Gulch as the city’s gay center.
In the 1960s, a vibrant queer culture consisting of young butch hustlers, drag queens, transgendered sex workers, and older men spanned lower Polk and the adjacent Tenderloin. By 1966, the area supported more than two dozen gay bars and baths, sex shops, restaurants, men’s clothing stores, gay theaters, and gay hotels, according to GLBT Historical Society records. The Gay Freedom Day Parade passed through Polk Gulch in the early 1970s. Before Halloween in the Castro, Halloween was in the Polk.
A 1966 police riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night hangout for hustlers and street queens just a few blocks from Polk Gulch, predates New York’s famous Stonewall riot by three years.
Many gay men from Polk Gulch migrated to the Castro in the mid-1970s, and their businesses left with them. But Polk Street remained a vital center for poor queers of color, hustlers, runaway youths, trannies, and drug users who were generally not welcome in the Castro. The AIDS epidemic hit the Polk hard in the 1980s, which also saw a rise in crime and drugs in the area.
The dot-com boom of 1999–2001 hastened this collapse, accelerating gentrification in the area. A series of fires at SROs, including one in 1998 at the Polk Street Leland Hotel, displaced low-income tenants, while condos began to be constructed in their place. Increased policing, tied in with new upscale businesses and tenants, the aging of the bars’ owners and core clientele, and competition from the new technology of the Internet, also changed the neighborhood’s character.
In the past few years especially, businesses began buying up limping gay bars, transforming them into hip, heterosexual meeting places. RendezVous was razed. The Polk Gulch Saloon became the Lush Lounge. Reflections, a male hustler bar, became the Vertigo Lounge. The Giraffe, a gay bar since 1979, became the Hemlock Tavern. The dive bar Katie’s became Blur. (Plaster)
School blues
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Roll over and let MF Doom give you the news: even during the soporific, sunlit waning days of summer, you needn’t wander far before tumbling headlong into a deep ditch of gloom. And is it any surprise, when even the top 10 is capped with hand-wringing, ditsy throwback-pop ditties like Sean Kingston’s suicide-dappled "Beautiful Girls" — just a few skittish dance steps away from Amy Winehouse’s anxious revamps of sweet soul music?
So when Danville-raised Film School headmaster Greg Bertens made the move away from the Bay to Los Angeles last September to be with his girlfriend and get some distance from 2006, his splintered group’s annus horribilis, it doubtless seemed like dour poetry that he ended up living just a few doors down from punk’s crown prince of dread, Glenn Danzig.
"Oh yeah, Glenn and I go way back!" Bertens said drolly from LA, describing Danzig’s lair as ivy covered and encircled by a gate topped with an iron fleur-de-lis. "Once in a while I see him walk by in a big, black trench coat. LA in general is a big amusement park, and Glenn Danzig happens to be an attraction close to my house."
That new home was where Bertens rediscovered his will to make music — and lost the old, jokey misspelling of his first name, Krayg. There he wrote and recorded Film School’s forthcoming album, Hideout (Beggars Banquet), alone at home with only a guitar, a keyboard, and a computer equipped with Pro Tools, Logic, and assorted plug-ins, while listening to old Seefeel, Bardo Pond, and Sonic Youth LPs. Guest contributions by My Bloody Valentine vet Colm O’Ciosoig, who also lived in the Bay Area before recently moving to LA, and Snow Patrol bassist Paul Wilson filled out the lush, proudly shoegaze songs that Bertens eventually took to Seattle for a mix with Phil Ek (Built to Spill, the Shins).
The recording is "the closest so far to what I’ve been trying to get to since Film School began," Bertens told me later, but it came at a price, following the release of the San Francisco group’s much-anticipated, self-titled debut on Beggars Banquet. Poised to become one of the first indie rock acts of their late ’90s generation to break internationally, after opening tours with the National and the Rogers Sisters, Film School instead found misfortune when Bertens was jumped outside a Columbus, Ohio, club.
Then the group’s instruments and gear were lost in Philadelphia when thieves stole their van, audaciously driving over the security gate of a motel parking lot. Despite benefits and aid from groups like Music Cares, the loss magnified band member differences, leading to the departure of guitarist Nyles Lannon (who also has a solo CD, Pressure, out in September), bassist Justin Labo, and drummer Donny Newenhouse, though longtime keyboardist Jason Ruck remains.
"Understandably, it kind of compounded any difficulties we might have had," Bertens recalled, still sounding a little tongue tied. After such events, he continued, "you definitely tend to reevaluate what is important in your life setup."
The loss of certain key pedals was particularly felt, although, he added, "ironically, after a year or so, one of the instruments showed up on eBay, and it was traced back to a pawnshop in Philly." The entire lot of gear had apparently come in three weeks after it was stolen, but though the store claimed it had checked with the local police department, and the band and Beggars had furnished the police with serial numbers and descriptions, no one made the connection. "We found a general unorganized response to the whole event," Bertens said with palpable resignation.
Yet despite the negativity Bertens associates with 2006 — "I think it was a heavy year globally as well, and Hideout comes a little from that, the impulse to hide out when external and internal factors are unmanageable" — he did find an upside to Film School’s downturn: the response to the theft "kind of restored my ideas about the music community within indie music. We’re a small band, and all these people — people we knew and people we didn’t know and other bands — all kind of came to our aid. I kind of knew that community existed, but I never experienced it." As a result, he said, the new CD’s notes will list the names of more than 150 people "we feel completely indebted to." Something for even Danzig to brood about.
ARTSF STRESSED What would we do without Godwaffle Noise Pancakes brunches and raucous noise shows stories above Capp and 16th Street? Let’s not find out, though word recently went out that the venue for those events, the four-year-old ArtSF, is being threatened. Allysun Ladybug Sparrowhawk has been handling art and music shows at the space for more than a year, and she e-mailed me to say she hadn’t been informed of an approximately $4,000 yearly building maintenance fee until the space received an eviction notice. "When there is a repair on the building, most of the cost is put on us," she wrote. "It should be split equally between all the tenants but most of the other floors are empty."
Since a slew of the organization’s art studio spaces is empty, she continued, "we are struggling to make the rent as it is. A fee like this has really threatened our existence." Does this mean even more artists and musicians are going to be priced out of this already-too-pricey city? Keep the pancakes coming: contact artmagicsf@yahoo.com and visit FILM SCHOOL
With Pela and the Union Trade
Wed/15, 9 p.m., $10
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
HEARING RAID
MOCHIPET
Girls really do love breakcore — and Journey reworks — by this son of a Taiwanese rocket scientist. With the Bad Hand and Bookmobile. Wed/15, 9 p.m., $10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com
WHITE SAVAGE
Look out — no wavy cacophony and apelike yelps. With the Go, Bellavista, and Thee Makeout Party! Fri/17, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com. Also with the Frustrations and the Terrible Twos. Sat/18, 6 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
THE DRIFT
Tarentel’s Danny Grody sails in, following the release of a limited-edition 12-inch of remixes by Four Tet and Sybarite. Sun/19, see Web site for time and price. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
SOMNAMBULANTS
The SF-by-way-of-Brooklyn synth poppers toast their new Paper Trail (Clairaudience Collective) with contemporary dance by peck peck. Aug. 23, 9 p.m., $8. Space Gallery, 1141 Polk, SF. www.spacegallerysf.com
Day’s dilemma
› gwschulz@sfbg.com
One investigation by the District Attorney’s Office is enough of a headache for City College of San Francisco. But two?
The Guardian learned that just days before the November 2005 election, in which City College asked voters for $246.3 million in bond money to continue a series of capital works projects, the office of Vice Chancellor Peter Goldstein received a letter from investigators requesting detailed information about a land transaction that took place in Chinatown earlier that year.
At least three of the school’s elected trustees don’t recall being informed by Chancellor Phil Day about the probe, setting off new concerns after we alerted officials about the letter, which the Guardian obtained. The DA’s Office is also investigating potential laundering of public funds into campaign donations by college officials in connection with that bond campaign.
"It puts a further cloud on the college," trustee Julio Ramos told us. "Presumably the statute of limitations has not run on the transaction, so what’s going on here? I’m concerned because no one ever informed us."
Two other trustees, Milton Marks and board president Anita Grier, told us they don’t remember being told of the inquest.
"We do have to give them some leeway to operate the college without informing us of everything," Marks said. "But when the district attorney is asking questions about something that’s coming from a board action, why wouldn’t we have to know about it as early as possible? It’s kind of indefensible."
But Day fervently insisted that the board was informed of the letter during a closed-session meeting the same month the letter was received and that Ramos and Marks simply weren’t there. Day had no explanation for why Grier couldn’t recall it, but trustees Rodel Rodis, Natalie Berg, and Lawrence Wong and former trustee Johnnie Carter all confirmed they’d been told about it. Day also said the school had never heard back from the DA’s office after it produced all of the requested documents.
"I had even forgot about the fact that we had this initial inquiry back then," Day told us. "I had totally removed it from my brain and forgotten about it completely."
Either way, this is the first the public has heard of the DA’s interest in City College’s land deals. Debbie Mesloh, a spokesperson for District Attorney Kamala Harris, told us she could neither confirm nor deny that any such investigation was taking place, although the letter confirms that an investigation was opened.
The DA this year began an inquiry into City College after the San Francisco Chronicle revealed that the school had used a $10,000 lease payment from a business tenant to help bankroll a campaign committee formed for the purpose of promoting the 2005 bond election, City College’s third since 1997.
But we now know that the DA began snooping around the college’s land purchases in October 2005, when Goldstein was asked for escrow documents, property appraisals, memos, and board minutes concerning the school’s purchase of two lots in Chinatown at the corner of Kearny and Washington streets for a long-planned (and now vastly over budget) campus.
The Guardian has also obtained a pile of documents detailing months of real estate negotiations between the college and politically connected Chinatown businessman Pius Lee, who owned one of the lots and had an option to buy a neighboring and much larger tract.
The construction of the new Chinatown–<\d>North Beach campus hasn’t gone smoothly for the college or voters. The school originally used $5.8 million to buy property in the neighborhood using bond money that voters authorized in 1997. Voters were then asked for $45 million in 2001 to build the campus, with construction expected to begin in 2003.
But Day’s ambitions led to clashes with Chinatown residents after the original plan — slated for an area facing Columbus Avenue on the other side of the block from where City College now hopes to build — called for demolishing a historic building and low-income apartments housing elderly tenants.
The school entered a legal settlement promising to preserve the Columbo Building and relocate the nearby Fong Building’s tenants. In 2005, however, it hastily decided incorporating that work would be "infeasible" and turned to Lee for help in finding a new location.
Lee (who did not return our calls) told the college he’d give up a sliver of land he owned on the other side of the block and also help it secure the much larger lot nearby owned by a Taiwanese company, Fantec Development Corp., with which Lee had a long business relationship.
The school paid Lee $1.9 million for a strip of parking lot 18 feet wide, even though an appraisal that City College received placed its market value at $1.1 million, records show. (San Francisco County assessed it at $267,000 in 2004 for tax purposes. The neighboring, much larger piece of land, also a parking lot, was assessed at $1.5 million.) During early negotiations, records show, the college offered $785,000 for Lee’s property and $4.5 million for Fantec’s, but in the end it wound up paying much more — a total of $8.7 million in bond money for both.
Yet it’s not clear precisely what investigators were looking into, what they found, or whether the investigation is still open.
"The properties were not available for anything less than the price we paid for them," Goldstein told us. "That’s what the sellers demanded in order to sell their properties…. Pius drove a very hard deal and demanded what I would consider to be the maximum possible price for his property that we could defend."
Ground still hasn’t been broken on the school’s Chinatown dream, and in the interim, as we’ve reported recently, the estimated costs have ballooned from $75 million to $122 million, an increase of 62 percent. As a result, the school has chosen to gut some projects authorized by voters to keep this and other favored proposals alive (see "The City College Shell Game," 7/4/07).
The Board of Trustees is slated to vote next month on whether to certify the campus’s environmental documents and whether the project should be exempt from building height limits in the neighborhood.<\!s>*
The budget’s opening battle
› sarah@sfbg.com
Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Chris Daly have been engaged in a high-profile clash over city budget priorities in recent weeks. Newsom appeared to win the latest battle when he galvanized an unlikely coalition and Daly clashed with some of his progressive allies, prompting Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin to remove Daly on June 15 as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee.
"This is not about personality, and it shouldn’t be about the mayor’s race. It should be about making sure we have a good budget," Peskin told the Guardian shortly before announcing that he would be taking over as Budget and Finance chair just as the committee was beginning work on approving a budget by July 1.
Yet this latest budget battle was more about personalities and tactical errors than it was about the larger war over the city’s values and spending, areas in which it’s far too early for the Newsom camp to declare victory. The reality is that Newsom’s "back-to-basics budget" — which would increase spending for police and cityscape improvements and cut health services and affordable-housing programs — is still likely to be significantly altered by the progressives-dominated Board of Supervisors.
In fact, while the recent showdown between Newsom and Daly may have been diffused by Daly’s removal as Budget and Finance chair, it’s conceivable that a clash between Newsom and the supervisors is still on the horizon. After all, eight supervisors voted for a $28 million affordable-housing supplemental that Newsom refused to sign, and the mayor could yet be forced to decide whether to sign a budget that lies somewhere between his vision and Daly’s.
Stepping back from recent events and the supercharged rhetoric behind them, a Guardian analysis of the coming budget fight shows that there are difficult and highly political choices to be made that could have profound effects on what kind of city San Francisco becomes.
If Daly wanted to spark a productive dialogue on whether the mayor’s budget priorities are in the best interests of the city, he probably didn’t go about it in the right way. But the approach seemed to be born of frustration that the mayor was refusing to implement a duly approved program for an important public need.
Daly has argued that when he introduced his $28 million affordable-housing supplemental in March, he thought it would be "noncontroversial." Last year the board approved and Newsom signed a $54 million supplemental budget, including $20 million in affordable-housing funds. Daly wrote on his blog that he hoped his latest $28 million request would help "stem the tide of families leaving San Francisco, decrease the number of people forced to live on the streets, and help elders live out their days with some dignity."
But Newsom objected, first criticizing Daly in the media for submitting it too late, then refusing to spend money that had been approved by a veto-proof majority, with only his supervisorial allies Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Ed Jew opposed. Daly pushed back against what he loudly labeled the mayor’s "backdoor veto," which he considered illegal.
"You may not believe the question of affordable housing and affordability is more important than redesigning the city’s Web site or perhaps installing cameras in police cars or fixing a pothole, but to say that the money does not exist is a lie," Daly said at a board meeting.
So when Newsom submitted his final budget June 1, Daly proposed restoring the funding and taking away $37 million from what he called the mayor’s "pet projects." His suggestion triggered a political firestorm, since his targets included a wide array of programs, including $700,000 for a Community Justice Center, $3 million for one police academy class, $10.6 million for street repairs and street trees, $2.1 million to expand the Corridors street cleaning program, and $500,000 for a small-business-assistance center. In their place, Daly argued, the city would be able to restore funds cut from affordable housing, inpatient psychiatric beds, and services for people with AIDS.
In addition to uniting against him those constituencies whose funding he targeted, Daly’s proposed cuts in law enforcement — and his brash, unilateral approach to the issue — threatened to cost him the support of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive with public safety credentials who represents the crime-plagued Western Addition. So it was a precarious situation that became a full-blown meltdown once the Newsom reelection campaign started phone banks and e-mail blasts accusing Daly of endangering public safety and subverting the normal budget process.
Pretty soon, with Daly’s enemies smelling blood in the water, it became a sort of feeding frenzy, and various groups urged their members to mobilize for a noon rally before the June 13 Budget and Finance Committee meeting. "We are a sleeping giant that has awakened," small-business advocate Scott Hauge claimed as he e-mailed other concerned stakeholders, who happened to include Friends of the Urban Forest and public housing activists, thanks to Daly’s call for a $5 million cut in Newsom’s Hope SF plan, which would rebuild public housing projects by allowing developers to also build market-rate condos at the sites.
"Mirkarimi seems to feel strongly about having cops and infrastructure, which are typically the priorities of conservatives," Daly told the Guardian as he announced plans to cancel the June 13 budget hearing, which he did after accusing Newsom of engaging in illegal electioneering.
Daly also accused Newsom of abusing his power by securing the City Hall steps for a budget rally at the same time, date, and place that Daly believed his team had secured — a mess-up city administrator Rohan Lane explained to us as "an unfortunate procedural thing."
But while Daly told us he "needed to hear from progressives who enjoy diversity, because if we don’t get more affordable housing dollars, San Francisco is going to become increasingly white, wealthy, and more conservative," all anyone could hear the next day was a pro-Newsom crowd chanting, "No, Supervisor Daly, no!" outside City Hall.
Newsom spoke at the rally and claimed that Daly’s proposal to cut $5 million from Hope SF would eliminate "$95 million in local money to help rebuild San Francisco’s most distressed public housing," a figure that includes the bond issue Newsom is proposing. With the 700 to 900 market-rate units included in the program, Newsom claims the cuts will cost the city $700 million in housing.
"Stop the balkanization of San Francisco!" Rev. Al Townsend roared, while Housing Authority Commissioner Millard Larkin said, "People are living in housing not fit for animals. Protect policies that give people a decent place to live."
"This is about your priorities," Newsom said as he made the case that fixing potholes, sweeping streets, and putting more cops on the beat are now San Francisco’s top concerns.
"I’ve never seen this type of disrespect to the public process," Newsom said, addressing a crowd that included a couple of Daly supporters holding "Homelessness is not a crime" signs alongside people dressed as trees, a dozen people in orange "Newsom ’07" shirts, Newsom campaign operative Peter Ragone, and former Newsom-backed supervisor candidates Doug Chan and Rob Black (the latter of whom who lost to Daly and now works for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce).
"Gavin Newsom’s budget reflects that he has been listening to you. It’s not something he has dreamed up is his ivory tower," Townsend said, while Kelly Quirke, executive director of Friends of the Urban Forest, pointed out that Daly’s proposal would mean the 1,500 trees that the Department of Public Works planted this year "would not be watered," and Police Commissioner Yvonne Lee said the proposal would "eliminate 50 new officers that could be on streets, plus a $400,000 system to identify the source of gunfire."
What Newsom’s supporters didn’t mention was that his proposed budget, which would add $33 million for the Police Department to help get more officers on the streets and pay existing officers more, also would drastically shift the city’s housing policies by transferring about $50 million from existing affordable-housing and rental-support programs into spending on home ownership and development of market-rate units. And that comes as the city is losing ground on meeting a goal in the General Plan’s Housing Element of making more than 60 percent of new housing affordable for low-income residents.
Daly doesn’t think people fully understand the implications of Hope SF and said public hearings are needed so they "can understand it better." Yet the Newsom rally still touted the mayor’s concern for those in public housing projects.
"We’re not interested in rebuilding unless the tenants are supportive," Doug Shoemaker of the Mayor’s Office of Housing told the Guardian, promising that existing public housing units will be replaced "on a one-to-one basis" and noting that 85 affordable rentals, along with 40 to 50 units for first-time home buyers at a below-market rate (for a household of two with an income of about $58,000 annually) and hundreds of market-rate condos, will be built.
"The market-rate condos will cross-subsidize the rebuilding of public housing," said Shoemaker, who claims that the "lumpiness of the mayor’s budget" — in which home-ownership funding increases by $51 million, while programs benefiting the homeless and senior and families renters appear to have been cut by $48 million — "is best understood over the long term" and is related to the redevelopment projects in Bayview–Hunters Point and Mission Bay.
"The hardest thing about explaining these figures is that it sounds like a game of three-card rummy, but we need to fuel whatever is coming down the pipeline," he said.
The confusing fight over affordable housing has even split its advocates. Coleman Advocates for Children and Their Families publicly urged Daly not to hold Hope SF funds hostage to his housing supplemental, while the Family Budget Coalition urged Newsom and the supervisors to "work together to find at least $60 million during the add-back process to prioritize affordable housing."
But with Daly gone from the Budget and Finance Committee, how will his proposals and priorities fare? Sources say Peskin was irritated with Daly’s budget fight and his recent Progressive Convention — both actions not made in consultation with colleagues — as well as his increasingly public spat with Mirkarimi. Yet Peskin publicly has nothing but praise for Daly and supports many of his priorities.
"We are working with the same schedule that Daly’s office laid out," Peskin said, noting that a lot of the decisions about funding will depend on "what ends up coming from the state." San Francisco could still lose money from the state or federal budget. During a June 18 budget hearing, Sup. Bevan Dufty introduced a motion to amend the mayor’s interim budget by appropriating $4 million for HIV/AIDS services, to be funded by General Fund reserves, for use by the Department of Public Health.
This was one of Daly’s top priorities, and as the hearing proceeded, it became clear that there was a method in the former chair’s apparent budget-dance madness. Newsom’s budget would restore $3.8 million of the $9 million in AIDS grants lost from federal sources, with Newsom asking Congress to backfill the remaining reductions to the Ryan White Care grant. Sup. Sean Elsbernd questioned the wisdom of appropriating $4 million now, when the feds may yet cough up, and Mirkarimi questioned whether doing so would send Washington the message that it doesn’t need to help us.
"It’s a discussion we have every year," Controller Ed Harrington said. He recommended appropriating $4 million now and sending the following message: "Yes, we think this is important, we’ll try and figure out how to fix it, but this shows it isn’t easy. It’s a political call rather than a technical one."
In the end, the Budget and Finance Committee voted 3–1, with Sup. Tom Ammiano (the only supervisor to publicly support Daly’s alternative budget) absent and Elsbernd dissenting, to appropriate $4 million, on the condition that if additional federal and state funds are granted to backfill the Ryan White Care grant, the controller will transfer the $4 million augmentation back to the General Fund.
The same kind of balancing act is expected on Daly’s other suggestions to restore funding for affordable housing and public health departments, so it’s still too early to tell whether his priorities might ultimately win the war after losing the battle.*
Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.
For more details on the city budget process and a schedule of Budget and Finance Committee meetings, visit www.tiny.cc/BJRSN.
Bad vibrations
by Sarah Kai Acker
A contentious battle—and an endless hearing—came to a possible close last night as the lawyer for Club Six and the lawyer for the disgruntled residents of the Lawrence Hotel atop the club compromised on a 120-day probation.
For the low-income Lawrence Hotel tenants, this means that if Club Six violates the decibel cap set by the city (it’s 88.1 decibels, for any audio geeks wondering) and if the vibrations from the bass thump their rooms, Club Six will be considered in violation of their probation. Then another hearing (promised to be short) will be held that will likely lead to the threatened 30-day suspension.
A suspension that long could put the club out of business and would create a financial hardship for the 50+ people employed there, many who are struggling financially themselves. For Club Six’s owner Angel Cruz, this means he has a grace period to perfect the soundproofing.
“We’re close, we’re so close,” Cruz told the Guardian. “A lot of [soundproofing the building] is trial and error. There’s no clear cut science.”
Bad vibrations
by Sarah Kai Acker
A contentious battle—and an endless hearing—came to a possible close last night as the lawyer for Club Six and the lawyer for the disgruntled residents of the Lawrence Hotel atop the club compromised on a 120-day probation.
For the low-income Lawrence Hotel tenants, this means that if Club Six violates the decibel cap set by the city (it’s 88.1 decibels, for any audio geeks wondering) and if the vibrations from the bass thump their rooms, Club Six will be considered in violation of their probation. Then another hearing (promised to be short) will be held that will likely lead to the threatened 30-day suspension.
A suspension that long could put the club out of business and would create a financial hardship for the 50+ people employed there, many who are struggling financially themselves. For Club Six’s owner Angel Cruz, this means he has a grace period to perfect the soundproofing.
“We’re close, we’re so close,” Cruz told the Guardian. “A lot of [soundproofing the building] is trial and error. There’s no clear cut science.”
Ghostbusters
› sarah@sfbg.com
Entertainment commissioner Audrey Joseph is, by her own assessment, a tough cookie. She successfully beat back a developer’s efforts to close her old SoMa nightclub. She attended her first Halloween in the Castro as a windup doll. And when skinheads targeted the famously gay Halloween event in the late 1980s, Joseph helped form the Gay Guards. But for all that, she is the first to admit that her latest gig — which involves helping Sup. Bevan Dufty and Mayor Gavin Newsom move Halloween festivities out of the Castro — won’t be easy.
"Sometimes I feel like a whipping post," Joseph told the Guardian the day after she gave the city’s first public presentation of the Dufty-Newsom plan to move the event into a parking lot behind AT&T Park — a lot that just happens to lie in the district of Newsom nemesis Sup. Chris Daly.
With Dufty stuck in traffic, though he did show up later, and Newsom nowhere in sight, Joseph was flying solo May 30 as she laid out their plan to an audience that was composed primarily of middle-aged Castro business and property owners. The city won’t close Market and Castro streets, and it won’t provide portable toilets or entertainment in the Castro, but it will police the area, and Castro merchants will be asked to voluntarily close early.
"We’d love to see the Castro dead," Joseph said as she laid out plans to lure Halloween revelers into the stadium parking lot by holding a concert featuring an as-yet-unnamed mainstream entertainer.
Some Castro residents expressed ambivalence about killing off what one attendee said amounts to "a sacred holiday" for the gay community, others pointed out that it would take a major hip-hop artist to lure the bridge-and-tunnel crowd to a concert that will cost $10 to $25 a pop, and bar owner Greg Bronstein questioned the sanity of closing early on what is the busiest business night of the year. Deputy police chief David Shinn pointed out that unlike New York’s 30,000-strong police force, which can encircle the Big Apple’s Halloween parade, the San Francisco Police Department’s 2,400 officers cannot ring the Castro.
"We’ve heard everyone’s cries about wanting Halloween out of the Castro," Joseph told the crowd. But her headache stemmed from the fact that her audience represented a small but highly vocal fraction of the 49,839 registered voters in Dufty’s district — and similarly small but vocal groups exist in Daly’s district too. Rincon Tenants Association president David Osgood decries the proposed plan as "the worst case of NIMBYism."
"This is an obvious effort by one neighborhood to get rid of their own event," Osgood told the Guardian. "But people are going to go to the Castro anyway. Halloween in the Castro has a flamboyance you don’t get anywhere else. Moving Halloween to the Embarcadero is like trying to move Mardi Gras out of New Orleans to Omaha. It’s just not going to work. It needs to be planned where it is."
But Joseph has high hopes for AT&T Park as a Halloween site, even though she has had a hard time finding event promoters. "The site is bigger, there’s less residential impact, it’s right on a Muni line, and we won’t have to stop traffic on the Embarcadero during rush hour when we’re setting up," she said.
Defending the lack of community meetings about Halloween in the past six months (something Newsom and Dufty had promised), Joseph said, "The city had to debrief from last year’s event, make a plan, and get Supervisors Dufty and Chris Daly to sign off on it, since both districts are involved, then meet with the mayor, the port, and a string of musical promoters."
As for concerns that people will just show up in the Castro or drift there once the city pulls the plug on the stadium parking lot concert at 10 p.m., Joseph said, "I’m open to suggestions. I’m trying to create a safe and fun environment where people say, ‘Wow, this is a great party!’ instead of coming to the Castro, looking terrified, and holding on to each other — for the thrill of what? Being stabbed or shot?" *
Why we’re with Mark Leno
OPINION The choice confronting voters in the State Senate District 3 primary in June 2008 is about electing the best candidate who personifies the direction, tone, and future of the progressive movement. Voters want positive changes, unequivocal vision, tangible accomplishments, and a leader who drives the movement forward.
Mark Leno represents the best progressive choice for that type of change. He is an articulate, innovative, and effective assemblymember who always makes a concerted effort to reach out to the people he serves with boundless energy; he will work equally hard as a senator.
As a legislator, Leno ensures that the voices of his constituents are well represented. His issues are driven by the communities he serves. He focuses on advancing controversial issues despite opposition in Sacramento, and he continues to achieve impressive political, cultural, and social milestones.
While serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Leno created the nation’s first medical cannabis identification program, which has become a model for similar programs across California.
On environmental issues, Leno has also won nationwide acclaim for his efforts to promote the use of renewable energy sources such as solar power in San Francisco and across the state.
When it comes to tenant rights, Leno’s legislative record speaks for itself. After many suffered the negative impact of Ellis Act evictions, he authored Assembly Bill 1217 to protect the disabled, elderly, and disadvantaged single-room-occupancy tenants from becoming homeless.
Leno has earned his reputation as a champion and visionary by introducing legislation that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity in housing and employment. Much like the transgender medical benefit legislation that he introduced as a member of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, his AB 196 is arguably one of California’s most significant nondiscrimination laws ever enacted to protect transgender people.
In 2005, Leno’s groundbreaking LGBT civil rights legislation to support marriage equality was the first in the nation to win approval by both houses of a state legislature. Although Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill, Leno has reintroduced it and will not quit until it becomes law.
Leno is running for the District 3 State Senate seat because he believes that elective offices belong to the people. He will bring to the office his integrity, experience, and accomplishments in protecting marginalized and underserved communities, promoting environmental protection, and developing alternative sources of energy, and he’ll still remain independent of special interests. He introduces innovative solutions to difficult problems and represents the values of the people of Northern California.
For all these reasons, Mark Leno is our best choice for change. *
Theresa Sparks is president-elect of the San Francisco Police Commission. Cecilia Chung is deputy director of the Transgender Law Center.
Fury over sound
› steve@sfbg.com
Club Six is a popular nightclub that has invigorated the seedy Sixth Street corridor, attracted new businesses nearby, and generally made it safer to walk that area at night. Yet along the way, the expanding club has become a magnet for noise complaints from adjacent residents of single-room-occupancy hotels who are pushing the city to yank the club’s permits and perhaps put it out of business.
The San Francisco Entertainment Commission will hear the case June 5 and decide how to balance a campaign started by a few irritated neighbors and then organized by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC) against concerns that the city is fast becoming less tolerant of nightlife and a vibrant urban culture (see "Death of Fun, the Sequel," 4/25/07).
"The concept of mixed use is going to be put to the ultimate test," Robert Davis, executive director of the commission, told the Guardian. "With the influx of housing in every neighborhood, it takes a careful hand to balance those uses, and that’s what the commission is trying to do."
Club Six is located in an old brick building underneath the Lawrence Hotel, where some residents complain that music rumbles their rooms and keeps them up at night. They blame club owner Angel Cruz. "His music kept getting louder and louder until it was vibrating the rooms up here," said Jim Ayers, the Lawrence Hotel resident who has filed the most noise complaints. "He ignores the law and doesn’t care about this area whatsoever."
Yet Cruz said he’s put more than $1 million into the club since he bought it in 2001, back when the neighborhood was mostly vacant storefronts and junkies ruled the streets. Those improvements include more than $229,000 in sound-accentuation work, mostly focused on the Lawrence Hotel.
"I thought it was a great space that could be developed into something special, which it has become. And this was a turnaround neighborhood," Cruz told us, noting that the space has been a bar since the 1930s and that several new clubs followed him into the neighborhood. "I think we’ve been a good neighbor. Do we make noise? Every club in town makes noise. And if you’re going to shut us down, you should shut down every club in town."
Cruz said the problems began two years ago when Ayers complained about noise from the club and sued him in small claims court, asking for $7,500. Before the case went to trial, Ayers offered to settle the case and stop complaining (Ayers told us he wanted $3,500; Cruz said it was $5,000), but Cruz refused, and the judge eventually awarded Ayers $500.
"He was trying to extort money from me so he wouldn’t keep complaining," Cruz said of Ayers. "He was upset that he only got $500 and told me he would make my life a living hell, which he has."
Ayers maintains that it’s about noise and not money, but he admits that the unsatisfying end to the case prompted him to keep complaining and seek regulatory relief. "He said to me that I can’t do a damn thing to him," Ayers told us. "Well, I say, ‘Mr. Cruz, look what I’ve done now.’"
Since January of last year, Ayers and a few other persistent complainers have triggered regular police visits to the club, organizational and political help from the THC (publisher of www.beyondchron.org, which has written critically of Club Six), and intervention by an Entertainment Commission sound engineer and the City Attorney’s Office.
"We’re concerned that the owner of Club Six is not being a good neighbor," the THC’s Paul Hogarth told us. "We have encouraged tenants to call the police when things are too loud." As a result, Club Six had to do more soundproofing and keep the music set at 88 decibels in the club, a level it has violated a few times, each by less than 10 decibels. Cruz said he’s made a good-faith effort to follow the rules and has worked with various speaker configurations and other experiments.
The complaint by the City Attorney’s Office seeks a 30-day suspension of the club’s entertainment and after-hours permits and charges that "the operation of Club Six has caused harm, and continues to harm, the public health, safety and welfare and has been a strain on police services. Angel Cruz has demonstrated that mere verbal warnings by enforcement officers are insufficient to stop the nuisance caused by the nightclub and has forced the Entertainment Commission to intervene."
But Davis said it will be a difficult decision for the appointed body, which he noted is increasingly being called on to mediate disputes like this all over town.
"One of the mandates of the commission is we want to promote entertainment. Angel is an asset to the community, and we don’t want to drive him out, but we have to act [on the complaints]," Davis said. "It’s based primarily on noise complaints, not whether Angel is popular. He is, and he’s tried to work with the community." The public may attend and testify at the Entertainment Commission hearing June 5 at 4 p.m. in room 406 of San Francisco City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place.
Jerry Falwell is dead
By Tim Redmond
Back in the early 1980s, after Sister Boom Boom ran for supervisor on the “nun of the above” ticket, Jerry Falwell sent out a mass mailing to raise money for the Moral Majority featuring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The letter included a Gay Pride photo and a description of my favorite nuns as a deep threat to the moral fiber of America.
I did a story about it, and Sister Sadie Sadie the Rabbi Lady called me to get a copy of the letter and the photo, which the sisters took to Melvin Belli, the famous tort lawyer, who then sued Falwell for misappropriation of their images. I don’t know where the suit went in the end, but the whole thing made for a lot of fun stories — because back then, frankly, Falwell was the Devil Incarnate.
You don’t hear as much about him anymore, but now that he’s dead, it’s worth remembering that this guy was a key player in the birth of the religious right, the election of Ronald Reagan, and the beginnings of a movement of intolerance and hatred that still plagues us today.
I saw him debate Larry Flynt on Nightline once, shortly after Falwell sued Flynt for a parody ad in Hustler suggesting that the televangelist had sex with his mother in an outhouse. Falwell was sputtering about how horrible it was to even suggest such a thing; Flynt laughed and said:
“You forgot to tell em, Jerry, that you had to kick the goat out of the outhouse first.”
Falwell’s suit went all the way to the US Supreme Court, and wound up in a stunning victory for the First Amendment; the court ruled that obvious parodies of public figures can’t be grounds for libel or defamation suits. That decision was key to the Guardian’s victory in a libel suit brought by a local landlord, Adam Sparks, who we had accused in a parody issue of using electroshock treatment on his tenants.
So we’ve had some history with the prick. And with all due respect to the dear departed, I can’t say I’m sorry he’s finally out of the way.
NOTE: There will be quite a rally at 5 pm on 18th and Castro to speak out against Falwell’s legacy.
Ellis Act crisis
OPINION Between 2004 and 2005, Chetcuti and Associates, a Walnut Creek real estate development company, bought eight Mission District apartment buildings. Within the first few weeks of ownership, the company served all the tenants in four buildings with Ellis Act eviction notices. In the next two months, three of the other buildings were Ellised. The company held on to the eighth building for a year before it gave those tenants Ellis notices.
The same is true throughout the city: John Hickey Brokerage, another out-of-town real estate company, gave Lola McKay (who died in 2000 while fighting her Ellis eviction) a notice within weeks after buying the building and then did the same to tenants in a North Beach apartment building – evicting those tenants just five days after a purchase deal closed.
In fact, more than half of all Ellis Act evictions in San Francisco are done by real estate speculators who have owned their buildings for less than six months. Almost one quarter are done by speculators who have owned the building for less than a month (and many of those are done in the first hours or days of ownership).
The buildings are then often sold as tenancies in common – essentially, as condos for people much wealthier than the ones who were evicted.
Rampant real estate speculation is bad enough on its own. What makes it worse is that this pattern is also an abuse of everything the Ellis Act was intended to be: a way for long-term landlords to be able to get out of the rental business and retire. When the Ellis Act was passed in 1985, its proponents said its purpose was to allow a landlord "to go out of business when he or she is convinced that they are no longer willing to devote the time, accept the frustration, expose themselves to the liability and other factors of continuing to be a landlord."
Apparently, companies such as Chetcuti and Associates and John Hickey Brokerage decided within days and weeks that they just couldn’t devote the time to or accept the frustration of being a landlord anymore and were compelled to evict the tenants. And that’s the case for hundreds of other real estate investors, many of whom are getting tired of being landlords within days of buying rental property.
Senate Bill 464 – which the State Senate will vote on any day now – would rectify this abuse and return the Ellis Act to its original intent. This bill simply says that a landlord must own property for at least five years before using the Ellis Act to evict tenants. It’s simple and fair, and it hurts only real estate speculators.
The vote is expected to be close – and unbelievably, the bill may not pass because a senator from San Francisco, Leland Yee, has indicated he may oppose it. No other city in California has been hit harder by the Ellis Act than San Francisco – yet our very own senator may kill this bill.
Thousands of residents here have been evicted under the Ellis Act, most of them senior or disabled. Ellis evictions are a crisis in San Francisco and are destroying lives and neighborhoods and communities.
Please call (415-557-7857) or fax (415-557-7864) Sen. Yee to ask him to support SB 464. *
Ted Gullicksen
Ted Gullicksen is executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union.
Unanswered questions
› sarah@sfbg.com
Bayview–Hunters Point resident Espanola Jackson says her phone rang off the hook after the San Francisco Chronicle printed her photo — but none of her concerns — under the headline "Residents Like Plan to Revitalize Area." It was part of the newspaper’s extensive coverage of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s plan to rebuild the community around a football stadium.
"People called to say, ‘You need to sue the Chronicle,’ " Jackson told the Guardian. Newsom wants to entrust Florida-based developer Lennar Corp. with cleaning up the five highly contaminated Hunters Point Shipyard parcels. Jackson finds this plan worrisome because, as the Guardian recently revealed ("The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07), Lennar was cited multiple times last year for failing to monitor and control dust and asbestos at Parcel A, the first and only piece of the shipyard that the Navy has released to the city as ready for development. Lennar is also being sued by three employees for allegations of racially charged whistle-blower retaliation in connection with the problems on Parcel A (see "Dust Still Settling," 3/28/07).
Beyond her problems with Lennar, Jackson worries that Newsom’s plan doesn’t account for climate change or the true cost of shipyard cleanup.
"Because of global warming, that entire area is going to be underwater," Jackson said. "And if Michael Cohen [of the Mayor’s Office of Base Reuse] and the rest of them are really interested in cleaning up the area, they should send a resolution to the Board of Supervisors requesting that Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi appropriate $5 billion, which is what it will really take to clean up the shipyard."
Jackson was also frustrated that neither the Hunters Point Shipyard Restoration Advisory Board, which is composed of local residents, tenants, and environmental and community groups, nor the regulators overseeing the cleanup have been consulted by the mayor in his haste to try to keep the 49ers in town by quickly building a new stadium.
Jackson, who bought a home in the Bayview 34 years ago, said residents want a thorough cleanup, not a rush job. That was what city residents said in November 2000 when they overwhelmingly approved Proposition P, demanding that no transfer of property take place "until the entire Shipyard is cleaned to residential standards."
"It’s a landfill, and it needs to be removed," Jackson said.
Yet Lennar, which won the contract to redevelop the shipyard, is in a worsening financial position to deal with unexpected challenges at the site. The company’s profits plummeted more than 70 percent in the first quarter of 2007 because of the slumping housing market. Jackson doesn’t believe the cleanup will cost $300 million, a figured touted by Cohen, but she questions where the cleanup money will come from.
"Only white folks will be able to afford the 8,900 housing units that Lennar is proposing to build near the stadium," Jackson said.
The Chronicle‘s overwhelmingly positive coverage of the mayor’s shipyard plan came shortly after Lennar Urban president Kofi Bonner wrote to the Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency claiming that articles in the Guardian and the Chronicle about Lennar’s asbestos and dust problems at the shipyard and the lawsuit by employees "are full of errors, inaccuracies and misinformation."
Asked what errors Bonner was referring to, Lennar spokesperson Sam Singer told the Guardian, "My main complaint is with the lawsuit, which contains numerous false allegations, and with the Chronicle‘s article, which called these employees ‘executives.’ " Lennar has not requested any corrections of Guardian articles.
Asked about the lawsuit’s claim that Bonner sat by and allowed the alleged discrimination to happen, Singer told us, "Kofi is one of the leading African American executives in the nation." Neither Bonner nor Lennar vice president Paul Menaker, who are both named in the whistle-blower suit, returned the Guardian‘s calls as of press time.
Attorney Angela Alioto, who represents the three African American Lennar employees suing the company, told the Guardian that Singer’s defense of Bonner is "racist."
"Just because Kofi is African American means he couldn’t discriminate?" Alioto asked.
Equally disturbing is the Mayor’s Office’s reliance on Lennar for accurate information about the developer’s performance at the shipyard. When the Guardian contacted Newsom press secretary Nathan Ballard for comment about Lennar, he wrote to the Guardian, "You might want to give Sam Singer a call. He’s the spokesperson for Lennar and can really answer questions about that stuff … accurately."
After making it clear that we wanted Newsom’s perspective, not Lennar’s, Ballard wrote that the Mayor’s Office is "confident the systems we have in place will protect human health," an answer that dodges our question about the violations that happened over a six-month period in 2006.
Insisting that Lennar will not be asked to take over the cleanup, Ballard claimed that "if the city pursues an ‘early transfer’ with the Navy, a specialized environmental remediation firm, not Lennar, would finish certain elements of the cleanup. And the city will have extensive oversight over any such work."
Ballard refused to comment on the suit brought against Lennar by three of its employees but went into detail about the Restoration Advisory Board, which he said was "created by the Navy to advise the Navy."
"The city created its own Citizens Advisory Board independent of the Navy for local input from the Bayview community," Ballard claimed.
He also maintained that the "Navy is and will always remain legally responsible for paying for the cleanup. Over the last three to four years, we have secured more cleanup money for the shipyard than any other closed Navy base in the county. We intend to have those robust funding levels continue."
This was also one of the most toxic bases in the country, which is why the conversion effort has been difficult. Plaintiff Guy McIntyre also alleges it is complicated because of chicanery. Before being demoted, McIntyre said he told his bosses there were "severe discrepancies in the invoicing submitted by Gordon Ball," which has a $20 million construction contract with Lennar.
"Specifically, while Gordon Ball stated that over $1 million was going to a certain minority-owned subcontractor, only a small fraction of that money was actually going to the subcontractor," the lawsuit contends.
We have been trying to review those public records, so far without success. James Fields, contract compliance supervisor for the Redevelopment Agency, told us that Gordon Ball subcontracted with several minority business enterprises, including Michael Spencer Masonry, Oliver Transbay, Remediation Services, Bayview Hunters Point Trucking, and Gordon Ball’s joint-venture partner, Yerba Buena.
Fields said, "I have been advised that the project manager usually presides over the collection of the data but that they are out of the country. Because the project is substantially completed, we will ask the prime contractor, which is Ball, and the minority business enterprises and the women business enterprises under Ball to show us how much they were paid, then compare the sets of records."
In other words, there are still more unanswered questions about Lennar and its subcontractors. *
A half-century of lies
View pictures of Leola King’s legendary Blue Mirror club here.
Leola King has lived your life, the lives of three friends and then some.
She’s traveled to Africa with the legendary entertainer, Josephine Baker. She’s featured jazz great Louis Armstrong at a popular Fillmore nightclub she helmed in the 1950s called the Blue Mirror, where she also once convinced a roomful of patrons to drink sweet champagne from the heel of her shoe.
She’s played host to the crusading television journalist Edward R. Murrow.
She’s even had a fling with championship boxer Joe Louis. From the ring at Madison Square Garden, he glanced toward her front-row seat, which she’d secured by chance during her first trip to New York, and had his lackeys retrieve her for a date afterward. Their rendezvous appeared as a gossip item in an Ohio paper and remains in its archives today.
Most of all, Leola King has come as close as anyone possibly can to experiencing bureaucratic hell on earth. For half a century, she’s been fighting with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which has taken four pieces of her property, wiped out a restaurant and two nightclubs she owned, and left her with a string of broken promises.
Her story is evidence that the ugly local chapter of Western Addition redevelopment history still isn’t over – and it’s a demonstration of why so many African Americans in this town will never trust the Redevelopment Agency.
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Beginning in the 1940s, King successfully operated a series of restaurants and nightclubs in the city, remarkable enough in an era that imposed a double-paned glass ceiling on black, female entrepreneurs.
“Back when I first moved onto Fillmore, it was very popular,” King told the Guardian. “Market Street didn’t have shit. They didn’t have traffic. They didn’t have nothing on Market Street.”
During the height of King’s accomplishments, the Redevelopment Agency infamously launched an ambitious project to clear out “blight” in the neighborhood. It was part of a nationwide urban-renewal trend, and while the project here still won’t be finished until 2009, it’s widely regarded as one of America’s worst urban-planning disasters.
In theory, Western Addition residents who were forced to give up their homes or businesses were given a “certificate of preference,” a promise that when the sometimes decaying buildings were turned to kindling and new ones built, the former occupants could return.
In practice, it didn’t work out that way. An estimated 5,500 certificates were issued to families and business owners shortly before the second phase of Western Addition redevelopment began in 1964. Some 5,000 families were dislodged and many of them fled to other sectors of the city (including Bayview-Hunter’s Point, which is today slated for its own redevelopment), or outside of the Bay Area completely.
Only a fraction of the certificates have benefited anyone. The agency has lost contact information for more than half of the holders, and redevelopment commissioners now openly admit the program is a joke.
“If we’re going to boast about being this diverse community in San Francisco, and we’re going to allow our African American population to become extinct, then how can we show our faces in government if we’re not really doing anything about it?” asked London Breed, a redevelopment commissioner appointed by Gavin Newsom in 2005. “And not just putting black people in low-income housing. There [are] a lot of middle-class African Americans all across America, specifically in the East Bay and in other places. Why do they choose to live in the East Bay over San Francisco?”
A renewed interest in the certificates by City Hall led to hearings this month, and District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has planned another for April.
King obtained two certificates, and attempts to later redeem them both devolved into costly legal wrangling with the agency that lasted more than two decades. She has never regained what she lost.
Leola King’s story is about more than certificates of preference. It’s a story about the troubling legacy of urban renewal.
King welcomes guests into her home on Eddy Street near Fillmore with ease. The living room in what is little more than a two-bedroom converted garage apartment swells unimaginably with antiques – three stuffed chairs with vinyl slips, crystal chandeliers, an ornate dining-room table, lamps, a fur throw.
She insists that she’s just 39 years old, but public records put her closer to 84.
When the Guardian first visited with her in person, she was dressed in black cotton leisure attire. Two chestnut braids cascaded from a gray Kangol-style cap, which she smoothed with her hands as they hugged a pair of light-skinned cherub cheeks.
King made her way west after spending her earliest years behind the barbed wire of a Cherokee reservation in Haskell, Ok. Her mother died when King was young, and her restless father had meandered off to Los Angeles. Her grandparents oversaw her adolescence before she trailed after her father to California, where he was establishing a chain of barbecue restaurants. She married a man at just 14, and a year later, she was a mother. Tony Tyler, her son, is a San Francisco tour guide today and remains a close confidant and business partner.
It was 1946 when she first landed in San Francisco and eventually started her own barbecue pit at 1601 Geary St., near Buchanan, historic building inspection records show. She called it Oklahoma King’s, and hungry San Franciscans were lured to the smell of exotic buffalo, deer and quail meats.
“That end of Fillmore was very popular all the way down until you got almost to Pacific [Avenue],” she said. “Heavily populated. There was at one time in that area of Fillmore over 100 bars alone. Lots of hamburger places. That’s where I had the barbecue pit.”
By 1949, however, Congress had made urban renewal federal law with the goal of leveling slums and deleting general “blight,” still the most popular and awkwardly defined threshold for determining where the government can clear homes and businesses using eminent domain.
The first redevelopment zone in the Western Addition, known as A-1, included Oklahoma King’s. She was paid approximately $25,000 for the property, but offered no relocation assistance or other compensation for the revenue she lost as a result of ceasing her day-to-day business.
Forging ahead, she opened in 1953 what became a hub of jazz and blues entertainment in the Fillmore, the Blue Mirror, at 935 Fillmore Street. The place was decorated with brass Greek figurines on the walls, a circular bar and velvet festoons. King spent a year hopping onto buses full of tourists and begging the driver to drop them by her nightclub for a drink. Before long, her brassy personality had attracted world-class performers, each of them adding electricity to the club’s reputation.
“She was the type of woman who knew how to handle people,” a Blue Mirror regular later said in the 2006 collection of Fillmore jazz-era photography, Harlem of the West. “She could talk to the pimps and hustlers. She didn’t play around, and they knew how to conduct themselves in her club.”
A musician who formerly worked there told the Guardian the Blue Mirror was one of the few places on Fillmore that actually provided live entertainment at that time. Bobbie Webb backed up B.B. King, Little Willie John, T-Bone Walker and others as a young saxophonist at the Blue Mirror with his band the Rhythm Rockers. He said the other establishments nearby on Fillmore were mostly bars except for headlining auditoriums where mainstream acts like James Brown and the Temptations performed. Smaller venues abounded up the street on Divisadero, he said, save mostly for King’s Blue Mirror and the Booker T. Washington Hotel.
“[King] didn’t only have a personality” said Webb, who now airs a show Tuesdays on 89.5 KPOO, “she was a beautiful lady. Personality just spoke for itself. All she had to do was stand there.”
But like virtually everyone in the neighborhood at that time, King rented the place where the Blue Mirror operated. Redevelopment again reached her business in the early 1960s. State booze enforcers, she says, claimed to have witnessed a bartender serving alcohol to a minor and her liquor license was taken away. When the Redevelopment Agency showed up shortly thereafter to sweep the block away, she was ejected without compensation because she wasn’t at that time technically in business.
Two more commercial and residential properties she owned on Post and Webster streets respectively were also eventually taken under redevelopment.
She pressed on, encouraged by Jewish business owners in the area she’d befriended, including liquor wholesaler Max Sobel and Fairmont Hotel operator Benjamin Swig.
“Whenever I’d lose something, they’d say, ‘Keep on moving. Don’t stop, because you’ll lose your customers. When you open back up, they won’t know who you are.’ They’re the ones who told me, ‘Go get another spot.'”
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By the time King began work on her third business in the Fillmore, urban renewal projects had wreaked havoc on minority communities across the nation, including neighborhoods in west-side Boston, downtown Atlanta, the celebrated 18th & Vine District of Kansas City and elsewhere.
King opened the Bird Cage Tavern at 1505 Fillmore St. in 1964 near O’Farrell complete with a jukebox, 30-foot mahogany bar, a piano and a gilded birdcage. Then-police chief Thomas J. Cahill tried to block her liquor-license renewal by complaining to the state about “winos” and “prostitutes” in the neighborhood, records show, but regulators dismissed the claims.
“We had viable businesses all around us,” King said. “I had one fellow I worked with a lot named Willie Jones. He was a blues singer. The interesting thing was, I had music in the daytime at the Bird Cage. I specialized in afternoon jazz.”
Despite a triumphant resettlement, nonetheless, the redevelopment agency arrived yet again and bought her building during the expansion of it’s A-2 redevelopment phase and served as landlord for the Bird Cage, a barber shop and a liquor store as it waited for another two years deciding what to do with the building.
On the agency’s watch, a fire broke out next door to the Bird Cage that led to water damage in her space. Federal Housing and Urban Development records show that no insurance claim was ever filed by the Redevelopment Agency. King says the agency removed some of the bar’s contents, mostly kitchen supplies, and made only stopgap repairs to the building anticipating that she would later be ousted anyway. The items they took, she says, were never returned.
The agency then evicted all of the building’s tenants in 1974. This time, King stood fast and had to be forced out by the sheriff. The agency promised relocation assistance, but those empty assurances became her biggest headache yet. In fact, she would spend the next 25 years quarreling with the agency over relocation terms.
King and the agency searched fruitlessly until 1977 for a suitable replacement building before King purchased her own out of desperation at 1081 Post St. She was then forced to begin another endurance test of working to actually extract money from the agency owed to her for properly outfitting the new building.
Meanwhile, the Bird Cage’s leftover furnishings – from oil paintings, rugs and curtains to an ice maker, wood shelving and an antique porcelain lamp – were destroyed when the agency amazingly chose to store them on an outdoor lot off Third Street during her move, a fact later confirmed by an agency employee in an affidavit.
“They moved it all out,” King said, “all these antiques and stuff, into this field where the weather ate it up.”
The agency’s initial response was to determine how it could best avoid legal liability. Redevelopment officials finally offered her about $100,000, which she needed desperately to keep things moving with the Bird Cage’s new location, but King insists today the materials were worth closer to $1 million.
As she was fighting to reopen her bar business, she attempted to redeem an earlier certificate of preference given to her when she’d lost a residential property on Webster Street to redevelopment. In 1983, she bought a condemned, 12-unit apartment building on Eddy Street hoping to rehabilitate it using a federally backed loan.
The deal only led to more trouble. The agency paid for its own roving security to patrol Western Addition properties it had purchased, and before 1431 Eddy St. was ever officially conveyed to King (as well as two other neighboring developers), thieves gutted the building of windows, doors, plumbing, light fixtures and other hardware. (Two buildings belonging to neighboring developers were also hit, and the agency addressed their losses the same way.)
Almost immediately, the agency told her she’d purchased the building “as is” and that they weren’t responsible for the break-in. But according to an internal 1983 memo marked “confidential,” later unearthed when friends of King submitted a records request to the agency, staffers clearly were concerned about the legal implications of offering one building for sale “as is” and actually providing another one on the date of delivery that had been thoroughly burglarized.
The memo shows that the possibility of a lawsuit was of greater concern to the agency than any obligation to compensate King for the lost hardware, regardless of whether proper security was the agency’s responsibility. Records show they did discuss a settlement of little more than $2,000, but King considered the stolen goods to be worth thousands of dollars more.
She managed to eventually finish the rehabilitation of her Eddy Street property after several years of work, and while she lives there today, time and angst took their toll. Each step of the transition to what she hoped would someday become her new bar, Goldie’s on Post Street, involved a seemingly endless round of yet more negotiations, letters, legal threats and bureaucratic backbiting before the agency would lift a finger and allocate money for contractors, necessary seismic upgrades, architects and equipment.
In 1997, then-Rep. Ron Dellums (now Oakland mayor) wrote a letter to top local HUD official Art Agnos (later a San Francisco mayor) on King’s behalf.
“On August 26, Ms. King met with a member of my staff and detailed issues surrounding a 25-year dispute she has attempted to resolve with HUD and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency,” Dellums wrote. “Your expeditious attention to this matter is [a] request, as Ms. King is elderly and experiencing health problems. The resolution to this issue would allow her to live the remainder of her life with some piece of mind.”
It was too late. The federally backed loans she’d received from HUD to rehab her Eddy Street property, from which the Redevelopment Agency strictly enforced repayment, fell into default. Loans leveraged against her other remaining properties began to slip, too, all while she fought with the forces of redevelopment to recreate what she had once proudly possessed.
King’s story may seem like an unfathomable streak of bad luck, but there’s a paper trail for all of it. And her battle, laid out in hundreds of pages of documents saved by King over several decades and reviewed by the Guardian, was ultimately unsuccessful..
By 1997, King was submerged in bankruptcy proceedings and would lose pretty much everything that she owned, including an Edwardian landmark home on Scott Street near Alamo Square where she’d lived for years (partially burned in a 1986 fire, believe it or not) and a residential building on Sutter Street.
Goldie’s was to be her final resting place, a roost from which she hoped to feature cabaret dancing, fresh crab at happy hour, a refined art deco aesthetic and live music performances. She lost that, too. Today, it’s Diva’s just off Polk Street.
Urban renewal won.
———————-
Hopeful press accounts lately foretell a jazz revival in the Fillmore District fueled by enterprising developers deft at financing lucrative redevelopment projects through tax incentives and low-interest loans half a century after the promise of “renewal,” now described euphemistically as “historic preservation.”
But with such a sordid history behind them, it’s no wonder residents of Bayview-Hunter’s Point, many of whom escaped Western Addition “renewal” in the first place, are leery of a pending years-long plan to redevelop nearly 1,500 acres in the southeast neighborhoods.
Bayview newspaper publisher Willie Ratcliff led a petition drive last year in an effort to put the plan before voters. Over 20,000 petition signatures were certified by elections officials, but City Attorney Dennis Herrera ruled the petitions were technically invalid because circulators hadn’t presented the full text of the redevelopment plan to signers. Redevelopment foes have since sued to have Herrera’s decision tossed.
“The misuse by these people is just unbelievable,” King said. “They were fighting me every inch.”
Thanks to Susan Bryan for joining the Guardian in reviewing hundreds of pages of public and personal records preserved in Leola King’s estate. Bryan is currently working with Monkey Paw Productions on a documentary about King’s life
Dance dance revolution
"If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution" is a club-friendly sentiment traditionally attributed to estimable anarchist Emma Goldman. But even if she didn’t put it in quite those words, the message is clear: changing the world doesn’t have to be a grim slog. Why struggle at all if it doesn’t result in a world we can actually enjoy? That’s where these benefit-hosting, rabble-rousing, community-oriented bars, clubs, cultural centers, and performance spaces come in. Like the spoonful of sugar that masks the medicine, a nice pour and a few choice tunes can turn earnest liberation into ecstatic celebration.
DANCING QUEENS
Billing itself as "your dive," El Rio defines "you" as a crowd of anarchists, trannies, feminists, retro-cool kids, and heat-seeking salseros as diverse as you’re likely to find congregating around one shuffleboard table. Whether featuring a rawkin’ Gender Pirates benefit show or a rare screening of The Fall of the I-Hotel as part of radical film series Televising the Revolution, El Rio encourages an intimacy and camaraderie among its dance floor–loving patrons less frequently found these days in an increasingly class-divided Mission.
3158 Mission, SF. (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com
THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE SANITIZED
Although it’s really an aboveground Mission storefront, Balazo 18 has a great "in the basement" underground vibe, and within its gritty labyrinth, upstart idealists lurk like scruffy Minotaurs. The low overhead and inclusive ambience has proven fertile ground for local activist functions such as the recent Clarion Alley Mural Project fundraiser and December 2006’s Free Josh Wolf event (freedom still pending). The dance floor’s generous size attracts top-notch local bands and sweaty, freedom-seeking legions who love to dance till they drop.
2183 Mission, SF. (415) 255-7227, www.balazogallery.com
STARRY-EYED IDEALISM
Applause for the Make-Out Room‘s green-minded stance against unnecessary plastic drink straws (it doesn’t serve ’em), its championing of literary causes (Steven Elliott’s "Progressive Reading" series, Charlie Anders’s "Writers with Drinks"), and its calendar of benefit shows for agendas as diverse as animal sanctuary, tenants rights, and free speech. Plus, not only are the (strawless) drinks reasonably priced, but the wacked-out every–day–is–New Year’s Eve disco ball and silver star decor hastens their effect.
3225 22nd St., SF. (415) 647-2888, www.makeoutroom.com
STOP IN THE NAME OF ART
The Rickshaw Stop hosts progressive literary luminaries by the library-load, raising the roof and the funds for programs such as the 61-year-old San Francisco Writer’s Workshop and the reading series "Inside Storytelling." Other beneficiaries of the Rickshaw’s pro-arts programming include SF Indiefest and Bitch magazine, and the club calendar is filled with queer dance parties, record release shows, and even an upcoming "Pipsqueak a Go Go" dance party for l’il kiddies with the Devilettes and the Time Outs. If teaching a roomful of preschoolers the Monkey isn’t an act of die-hard, give-something-back merrymaking martyrdom, well …
155 Fell, SF. (415) 861-2011, www.rickshawstop.com
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
A dancer- and activist-run performance incubator, CounterPULSE hosts a diverse collection of cutting-edge artistes ranging from queer Butoh dancers to crusading sexologists to mobility-impaired aerialists. It’s also home to the interactive history project Shaping San Francisco and a lively weekly contact jam. But it’s the plucky, DIY joie de vivre that pervades its fundraising events — featuring such entertainment as queer cabaret, big burlesque, and an abundance of booty-shaking — that keeps our toes tapping and our progressive groove moving. Best of all, the "no one turned away for lack of funds" policy ensures that even the most broke-ass idealist can get down.
1310 Mission, SF. (415) 626-2060, www.counterpulse.org
MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
Sometimes a dance club, sometimes an art gallery — and sometimes not quite either — 111 Minna Gallery is pretty much guaranteed to always be a good time. Funds have been raised here on behalf of groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the West Memphis Three, and Hurricane Relief as a plethora of local and big-name artists and music makers — from Hey Willpower to Henry Rollins — have shown their stuff on the charmingly makeshift stage and the well-worn walls.
111 Minna, SF. (415) 974-1719, www.111minnagallery.com
THE HUMAN LAUGH-IN
It’s true — the revolutionary life can’t just be one big dance party. Sometimes it’s an uptown comedy club adventure instead. Cobb’s Comedy Club consistently books the big names on the comedy circuit — and it also showcases some side-splitting altruism, such as last month’s THC Comedy Medical Marijuana benefit tour and the annual "Stand Up for Justice" events sponsored by Death Penalty Focus. Even selfless philanthropy can be a laughing matter.
915 Columbus, SF. (415) 928-4320, www.cobbscomedyclub.com
OLD FAITHFUL
The headless guardian angel of cavernous, city-funded cultural center SomArts has been a silent witness to countless community-involved installations and festivals, such as the "Radical Performance" series, a Day of the Dead art exhibit, the annual "Open Studios Exhibition," and the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. And plenty of fundraising celebrations have been hosted beneath its soaring rafters on behalf of organizations such as the Coalition on Homelessness, Survival Research Labs, and the Center for Sex and Culture. We’ve got to admit — nothing cries "community" like a space where you can drink absinthe and build misfit toys one night, dance to live salsa the next, and attend a sober seminar on pirate radio the following afternoon.
934 Brannan, SF. (415) 552-2131, www.somarts.org
STORMING THE CASTLE
Even if the Edinburgh Castle were run by community-hating misanthropes, we’d come here for the craic and perhaps a wistful fondle of the Ballantine caber mounted on the wall. But general manager Alan Black has helped foster a scene of emerging and established writers, unsigned bands, and Robbie Burns lovers in the lively heart of the upper TL. The unpretentious, unflappable venue also hosts benefits for causes such as breast cancer research and refugee relocation. And the Tuesday night pub quiz, twice-monthly mod-Mersybeat dance nights, and annual swearing competition keep us coming back for more (except maybe the haggis).
950 Geary, SF. (415) 885-4074, www.castlenews.com
SHAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT
Turning martini shaking into charitable moneymaking, Elixir has been the go-to drinks dispensary for fundraisers of all varieties since it launched its unique Charity Guest Bartending program. The concept is simple: the organizers of a fundraising effort sign up in advance, beg or bully a hundred of their best buddies to show up early and stay late, get a crash course in mixology, and raise bucks behind the bar of this green-certified Mission District saloon (the second-oldest operating bar in San Francisco). Did we mention it’s green certified? Just checking. Barkeep, another round.
3200 16th St., SF. (415) 552-1633, www.elixirsf.com
SPACE IS THE PLACE
A 2006 Best of the Bay winner, CELLspace has weathered the usual warehouse-space storms of permit woes and facility upgrading, and yet it continues to expand its programming and fan base into some very far-flung realms. From roller disco to b-boy battling, hip-hop to punk rock, art classes to aerial performances, the CELL has been providing an urban refuge for at-risk youth, aging hipsters, and community builders since 1996. Though we mourn the loss of the Bike Kitchen, which moved to its new SoMa digs, we’re glad to see the return of the Sunday-morning Mission Village Market — now indoors!
2050 Bryant, SF. (415) 648-7562, www.cellspace.org
Home invasion
› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Don Barsuglia worried security was deteriorating at the SoMa public housing complex where he’s lived for about eight years after he watched a body drop past his ninth-floor balcony window late one evening.
A would-be thief had climbed over the 10th-floor balcony during an escape attempt after stealing a few thousand dollars from another resident in Clementina Towers, located close to Sixth Street between Howard and Folsom. The man misjudged his footing and dropped to his death below before police could arrive.
"He probably thought my balcony was open," Barsuglia told the Guardian. "However, I have a bird net on my balcony. So when he went to go down, he hit my net, and good-bye, Mr. Spider-Man. Splat. That’s it, man."
That was enough for Barsuglia, who joined dozens of angry public housing residents last week at City Hall for a special hearing on safety and living conditions, which was organized by Sup. Chris Daly, whose District 6 includes Clementina’s neighborhood.
The 74-year-old Barsuglia recounts with verve the building’s recent run-ins with dope dealers, prostitutes, and knife-wielding teenage stickup artists. Several years ago his building and a neighboring tower had two 24-hour security guards, he said, but they’re now down to one. And just a few weeks ago, when daytime watches were trimmed back to save money, Barsuglia and other residents say they noticed a marked difference.
"It’s neglect by management and administration," he said of the San Francisco Housing Authority. "They pay no attention to us … totally ignored. They don’t even return calls."
Daly’s office has been inundated with grievances from people frightened by an uptick in crime at public housing, including the Ping Yuen complex on Pacific Avenue in Chinatown and Sala Burton on Turk Street in the Tenderloin.
Clementina, built in the early ’70s, houses low-income elderly and disabled residents in 275 studios and one-bedroom apartments. The building is supervised by the trouble-plagued Housing Authority, which faced a litany of questions at the meeting about a diminished security presence at several of its 52 developments across the city.
In November 2006 housing officials sent an abrupt memo to residents notifying them that the authority would have to "explore other methods" for policing its senior and disabled housing sites due to cash shortages.
Progressives on the Board of Supervisors have set their sights on the authority’s seven-member commission, composed of mayoral appointees, demanding at the hearing that Mayor Gavin Newsom consider a shake-up of its membership. No one from the Housing Authority Commission attended the meeting.
"Where are they?" Sup. Tom Ammiano asked after hearing a steady stream of emotional public comments. "I find it criminal, and I challenge the mayor to look at his appointments. Are they the right people for the commission?"
A 51-year-old heart patient who’s lived at Clementina for nine years told the Guardian she positions her motorized wheelchair against the door each night for additional safety. The headboard of her bed seals off one of the windows. Full-time security returned to the building recently, but the woman, who asked not to be named, fearing an assault, said that when the single guard checks each of the 26 floors, nonresidents manage to sneak in. She said that just last week a duo armed with a hammer and a knife robbed an older man living in the building.
"It used to be nice and quiet," she said. "Our front doors we could leave open with just the chain on…. [Now] I’m not sleeping in my bedroom. I’m sleeping on my couch facing the door."
The authority’s embattled executive director, Gregg Fortner, blames it on the White House and congressional cuts to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the bureaucracy that controls his bank account. The money available for armed and unarmed patrols at public housing in San Francisco has dropped by half in the last six years, according to figures Fortner furnished at our request.
A contingent of San Francisco Police Department officers is hired for $83,000 a month to patrol the "Big Four" public housing projects — Sunnydale, Alice Griffith, Hunters View, and Potrero — where many of the city’s headline-grabbing violent crimes occur. That approach was recently expanded to the Western Addition.
Fortner was already struggling to stay out of the papers without the most recent security headaches. In a series of stories published in 2005, the Guardian exposed dangerous and unhealthy conditions at the city’s public housing projects, sparking promises by city officials to fix the problems. And Fortner has also been threatened with jail time by a judge for refusing to pay out millions of dollars the agency owes on verdicts in civil lawsuits.
In addition, last week the Guardian obtained more than 100 forms filled out by public housing residents detailing chronically deplorable living conditions that apparently continue unabated citywide. Compiled by local organizers of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (known nationally as ACORN), the reports of maintenance failure betray stubborn structural decay that persists despite frequent promises of reform from City Hall.
"Bathroom tub leaks through ceiling," one of them reads, closely echoing many of the other complaints. "Stove is broken. Roaches. Holes in my walls; some as big as a square foot."
"My kitchen window has been broken for eight months (due to burglary) and it keeps my house cold," another reads. Most of the maintenance failures have persisted for months, even years. Other complaints depict half-assed repairs that did little or nothing to fix the problem.
In response, Fortner told us tenants are charged for repairs if the authority determines they’re at fault, which leads some to avoid lodging complaints. He maintains that emergency work orders are handled within 24 hours and all others before 30 to 45 days are up.
"We did 63,000 work orders from Oct. 1, 2005, to Sept. 30, 2006," Fortner said. "That’s like 10 work orders per unit, per year. I don’t know where you live, but do you have a repairman in your unit once a month to fix something? We have an old stock that’s falling apart."
But beyond the indignant outcry and public hearings, no one at City Hall except the mayor is in a position to do anything about public housing unless San Francisco decides to take over the authority completely, which some supervisors have discussed informally. The authority answers mostly to the feds.
Fortner warned that when local governments attempt to babysit their housing authorities, they inevitably get into trouble with HUD. In fact, the Berkeley City Council fired itself last week as the charge of its housing authority because of pressure from HUD.
And the burglar who fell to his death at Clementina Towers? SFPD spokesperson Sgt. Neville Gittens told us he was 19 years old and had been working as a caretaker for his victim. The two quarreled over the money, and a neighbor eventually made a noise complaint to the guard downstairs. When the guard arrived, he managed to block the alleged perp from leaving through the front door but couldn’t keep him from making a gruesome exit out the back.
Other residents told the committee shady figures scaled the exteriors of the towers all the time and were doing so with more frequency. Fortner told the committee it was the first he’d heard of the problem. Maybe his promise of a new tip line for residents will prevent ignorance as an excuse in the future. Or maybe not. *
Will 49er tailgating burn the Alice Griffith Housing Project?
By Sarah Phelan
Residents of the Alice Griffith Housing project were a tad upset when they learned that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s retooled effort to stop the 49ers from dumping San Francisco could involve their homes being demolished. A resolution that came before the Board the day before the Mayor’s Sex scandal hit, included the surprising news that over the past 18 months developer Lennar, working in cooperation with the 49ers and the City, had created a preliminary plan that would provide a world-class stadium 49ers stadium and related mixed-use development. This development would consist of about 6,500 housing units, including affordable units and the replacement of the Alice Griffith Public Housing Development.
According to a letter from Newsom that was included with the Feb. 6 Board of Supes package, “The city and the Bayview in particular will benefit from extensive jobs and economic development opportunities, over one thousand units of affordable housing–including replacing the Alice Griffith housing project for the benefit of Alice Griffith residents.”
The problem was that Newsom hadn’t share this vision with the Alice Griffith residents and the few that showed up to the Feb. 6 Board meeting, which took place during the workday, expressed outrage at being left out of the loop.
As one lady said, waving a copy of the resolution in one hand, as she pounded the public comment lectern with the other “It’s not OK to have this in here without my input.”
Another, a single mother with four kids, recalled having to fight for four years to get into the project, in the first place. “I don’t want you guys to knock it down,” she said.
As Lavelle Shaw of the Alice Griffith Tenants Association told the Guardian, ” a lot of things seem to be going in through the back door. We want to be at the table for the replacement housing. And it can’t just be affordable. We want it to be low-income.”
As a result of all this uproar, Sup. Sophie Maxwell demanded a hearing, during which the resolution was reworded, reports Shaw, to give AG residents greater input. That said, Shaw urges folks to show up at the Feb. 13 Board of Supervisors meeting, to express their feelings, fears and desires.
Don’t know about you, but i sure wouldn’t want to be roasting hot dogs when displaced folks descend