Tenants

A radical proposal: Squat Airbnb hosts’ homes to create affordable housing

Sasha Cuttler
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139
A radical proposal: Squat Airbnb hosts’ homes to create affordable housing

When I interviewed attorney Joseph Tobener for the story in our current issue on Airbnb being used to take affordable housing units off of the apartment market, he had a interestingly radical idea for get the attention of this scofflaw company and its political supporters, striking a blow for housing justice in the process.

What if hundreds of people, including many who are now homeless, rented out apartments in San Francisco for a night or two and then simply refused to leave?

Under tenant laws in San Francisco, renters have rights from the very beginning, and legally getting rid of someone who paid for just one night through Airbnb could require a long, difficult, and costly eviction process. Hundreds at once would overwhelm the courts and the deputies who carry out evictions for the Sheriff’s Department.

“That tenancy on day one law to me as a radical seems like a great way to address homelessness,” said Tobener, who got a call for advice from a doctor who sometimes hosts guests through Airbnb and faced that precise problem.

He isn’t the only one, as we at the Guardian learned and reported last summer, when San Francisco Rent Board spokesperson Robert Collins confirmed Tobener’s interpretation of the law and said the agency has already seen several such cases.

As I wrote in “Into Thin Air” on Aug. 6, “Tenants who rent out their apartments for a few days can even lose their rights to reclaim their homes. Collins cited multiple cases where subletters refused to leave and returning tenants had little legal recourse because ‘they would not have a just cause to evict the subtenant because, if they’ve rented the entire unit, they aren’t themselves a resident in the unit.’”

Even in cases where landlords rent out units they own, San Francisco’s 1979 rent control ordinance gives tenants rights to due process from the very beginning, making it difficult to get rid of Airbnb guests who decide to become squatters.

Sure, such a radical response to Airbnb’s impacts on the city may be breaking a few rules and hurting the credit records of those involved — but is that really any worse than the whole host of laws that Airbnb and its customers are violating in San Francisco everyday? It’s at least interesting food for thought. 

UPDATE 2/11: Just to clarify, Tobener isn’t actually advocating or organizing a campaign to squat in Airbnb apartments. This idea was, as I wrote, “food for thought,” something to ponder, a little thought experiment as we try to address Airbnb’s illegal business model and the city’s affordable housing crisis. 

San Francisco landlords targeted for elder abuse

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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76
San Francisco landlords targeted for elder abuse

Lisa Gray-Garcia, aka “Tiny,” led a press conference outside the San Francisco Hall of Justice Feb. 5 to announce that she and fellow activists were filing elder abuse charges against San Francisco landlords.

Clad in a gray pantsuit and flanked by activists and senior citizens who were facing eviction or had lost housing in San Francisco, the Poor News Network founder condemned landlords who’ve invoked the Ellis Act as “dangerous criminals.”

Gray-Garcia said criminal charges were being filed against the landlords in accordance with California Penal Code 368, which creates a special category for crimes – such as infliction of pain, injury or endangerment – committed against elders and dependent adults.

The theory is that carrying out an Ellis Act eviction against a senior citizen qualifies as a criminal act under that law, since an elder can suffer physical harm as a result of being turned out of his or her home.

The targeted landlords were taken from a list compiled by the San Francisco Anti Eviction Mapping Project, a volunteer-led group that published names, property ownership, and identifying information of 12 landlords who had repeatedly invoked the Ellis Act in San Francisco. Garcia read out their names as part of the press event.

Beyond that, however, the announcement was short on specifics. Gray-Garcia told the Bay Guardian she did not want to share the names of the affected seniors because she did not feel comfortable exposing the elderly tenants to potential backlash.

Joining the group of activists was an 82-year-old woman who used a walker and declined to share her name. She told the Bay Guardian she had lived in her Richmond District flat for more than 30 years, and had recently received a verbal warning from her landlord that if she did not move out, he would invoke the Ellis Act.

When Gray-Garcia and others filed into the San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon’s office inside the Hall of Justice, however, Chief Assistant District Attorney Sharon Woo first told them that they should complain to the police department, then scheduled a meeting with them at a later date.

Here’s how it went:

Guardian video by Rebecca Bowe

In order of appearance, speakers include Erin McElroy, a tenants’ rights advocate; Gray-Garcia; a District Attorney staff person whose name we didn’t catch; Woo, and Anthony Prince (there because he is campaign manager to Green Party gubernatorial candidate Luis Rodriguez, who spoke at the press conference).

Residents vs. tourists

Michael Redmond
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64

steve@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

STALLED IN LIMBO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

MISLEADING NUMBERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tee time: a peek inside Urban Putt, the Mission’s indoor mini-golf course

Sue Vaughan
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2

On the back wall of the main room of the old Victorian building at 1096 S. Van Ness is a sculpture of two creepy angels. One holds the other in its arms, their wings keeping them up. These angels are part of the original construction of the building, back when it functioned as a mortuary. Perhaps due to the haunting angels, perhaps due to the thought of a dead body storage center, the building has sat empty on the corner of South Van Ness and 22nd Streets for 15 years.

Today, the angels are still there and the building’s new owner has no intention of taking them down. “We will preserve as much as we can from this old look,” says Steve Fox, the man behind San Francisco’s first indoor mini-golf course, Urban Putt, set to open in April. The “high-concept” course will feature a restaurant with “eclectic California comfort cuisine” upstairs and two bars with a “creative bar program,” according to Urban Putt’s most recent press release. 

Urban Putt is not your traditional mini-golf course. The fantastical, technologically advanced, steampunk-y 14-hole course (four short of the customary 18 due to space constraints) will be composed of high-tech gadgets, countless buttons and nobs, and a few obligatory tongue-in-cheek twists (see: the “TransAmerica Windmill”) contained within its homages to San Francisco landmarks. 

A replica of the Painted Ladies shakes in a simulated earthquake at the first hole. At the “Musical” hole, the golf ball is catapulted toward the ceiling before bouncing delicately on drums and a cymbal. A two-hole underwater area pays homage to Jules Verne: an intricate submarine embellished with control panels and levers — although the 150 motion-sensor LED floorboards (imitating the lights of phytoplankton) are exceptionally post-Verne. Next to those wistful angels, the “Day of the Dead” hole honors the building’s previous tenants.

With a name like Urban Putt and its kitschy concept, it’s tempting to call out the spot as yet another example of gentrification in the Mission. Can’t you just see the hordes of trendy techies lining up to play putt-putt before hitting up the Make-Out Room on a Saturday night? (Because you know they will…)

Fox, a longtime mini-golf fanatic, was prepared for the criticism. “The very first note we got was like ‘the nerve of these people.’ It was written up on the Chron that we were doing this,” he says about the initial backlash. “We had signed the lease two days before.”

So Fox put up his phone number outside the building to encourage any and all complaints about Urban Putt. He also set out to connect with the neighborhood, reaching out to the community when he started hiring. “I think they realized that I had every intention of not being some sort of carpet bagger,” says Fox.

For Fox, Urban Putt is a longtime dream. A lousy golf player himself, the former editorial director of PCWorld and editor in chief of InfoWorld is an avid putt putt player. Since the 1990’s Fox and his wife have been hosting mini golf parties at their house. So what happens when you grow old and have a lot of money? Make your dream come true.

“My theory in all of this, having spent years and years running organizations — albeit editorial organizations, not mini golf — is if you don’t have expertise, go out and find the best people you can and have them do it,” says Fox. 

With experience that spans Burning Man, Maker Faire, the Exploratorium, and even MythBusters, the members of the design and construction team have an expansive background in creativity and innovation. “We have a group of people with real expertise in these areas. You can get that in San Francisco. There’s a lot of places you couldn’t find that. There’s that kind of wonderful talent base,” says Fox. At their disposal: the $17,000 3D printing ShopBot. Claiming it as one of their competitive advantages, Fox explains that the in-house printer will help his team can easily innovate, make changes, and repair the course over time.

Despite UrbanPutt’s extravagance, Fox maintains that the wonderland will be accessible to both children and adults, as well as both techy transplants and long-established local residents. His mission to keep games affordable ($8 for kids, $12 for adults) and to retain the vibrant local culture demonstrates his dedication to the city. Much of the building’s original construction will remain the same: the historical exterior, the metal front gate, the Victorian sconces, and the two angels at the back wall.

“People get that I am really of this neighborhood,” says Fox. “I think they’re responding well to that.”

Tenant battle brewing

Michael Redmond
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44
Tenant battle brewing

rebecca@sfbg.com

Benito Santiago, 63, was born and raised in San Francisco. But now that he’s received an eviction notice from the apartment he’s lived in since 1977, he isn’t sure what the future holds.

“This is roots for me,” Santiago told us. “I have more affinity for San Francisco than the Philippines,” his family’s place of origin.

He works part-time with disabled youth enrolled in San Francisco public schools. “The idea that I built a rapport with these students here … to be put in a position where I wouldn’t be able to work with them, I’m a little saddened and depressed by it,” he said. “If I’m homeless, I can’t be taking care of these kids. I mean — it’s a worst-case scenario.”

He’s been exploring alternative housing options, and trying to stay positive. He says he’s even trying to “change the rate of vibration” of the real estate speculators seeking to oust him as part of his pre-dawn meditation and ritualistic movement practice, a routine he developed to mitigate the chronic pain he dealt with after being hit by an automobile when he was crossing the street in 1980.

“Hopefully, they can have some compassion,” he said.

Santiago is hoping to get a temporary extension to stave off his eviction, and he’s been looking into publicly subsidized below-market rate apartments. But rent for even the most affordable of those places would eat up 75 percent of his monthly income, he said. Unless he can find an affordable arrangement somewhere, he might end up having to leave the city.

 

GROWING MOVEMENT

Santiago has been a part of a growing movement underway in San Francisco to reform the Ellis Act and introduce meaningful legislation at the local level to protect the city’s renters.

In recent weeks, the San Francisco Anti Displacement Coalition, made up of a wide range of organizations including the San Francisco Tenants Union, has hosted a series of neighborhood tenant conventions to solicit ideas that will be boiled down at a citywide tenants’ gathering scheduled for Feb. 8. At that meeting, organizers plan to hash out a strategy and possibly solicit ideas for a ballot initiative.

The tenant conventions are happening on a parallel track with efforts to reform the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to remove apartments from the rental market and evict tenants.

“Our goal is to ban the use of the Ellis Act in certain circumstances,” explained Dean Preston of Tenants Together, a nonprofit focused on strengthening the rights of renters.

“More than half of Ellis Acts are performed by people who bought the properties within the past six months,” he told us. “Their whole purpose is to buy it and kick everyone out. It was supposed to be for long-term landlords to get out of the business” of being landlords, he added. Instead, “it’s being completely abused.”

Sen. Mark Leno is working with Mayor Ed Lee on a response that would seek to lessen the impact the Ellis Act has had in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano is spearheading a separate effort.

“At this time, he’s not really ready to say which avenue he’s taking” in terms of a legislative strategy, said Carlos Alcalá, Ammiano’s communications director. “Because that can rule out that avenue.”

Preston said he’s been through waves of evictions before, but the organizing now taking place has been especially effective at drawing attention to the issue. Oftentimes, “the speculators are not from within the city or even within the state,” he pointed out. “That has fueled a lot of activism and courage.”

For Santiago, the organizing has given him heart during a difficult time. “I’m hearing a lot of sad stories,” he said, “and I am not alone.”

Debunking SF Mag’s Ellis Act apologist article, point by point

Erica Hanna
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107
Debunking SF Mag’s Ellis Act apologist article, point by point

Well, everyone’s got an opinion. And when it comes to San Francisco’s housing crisis, that’s doubly true.

San Francisco Magazine’s opinion though, amounts to a cry for help for (they say) the oft-demonized landlords from what they call the ever-overblown Ellis Act eviction crisis.

In his Tweet earlier today, San Francisco Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jon Steinberg said “We’re calling BS on San Francisco’s eviction crisis.” The article, by San Fran Mag Web Editor Scott Lucas, lays out a San Francisco that’s hard to recognize, one where evictions and rental increases aren’t displacing people in droves. At least, not enough to qualify as a “crisis.”

Sorry Jon, we’re calling BS on your article.

The Guardian reached out to Ted Gullicksen, executive director of the San Francisco Tenant’s Union and Erin McElroy, the head of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, to debunk some of the claims made in SF Magazine’s attempt to de-fang the threat of Ellis Act evictions. 

You can read the full article here, but we’ve reproduced lines from the piece and included responses from Gullicksen and McElroy addressing their points one by one. 

San Francisco Magazine The narrative was a straightforward one: Because the Bay Area has seen an influx of people—largely young, white, and working in tech—who need housing (and can pay for it), greedy landlords, many of them out-of-town speculators, are throwing longtime San Franciscans into the streets and turning the city over to gentrification. It looked cut-and-dried.

It’s not. In fact, Ellis Act evictions represent only a small proportion of the city’s total evictions—and they’re not even historically high to begin with. 

Ted Gullicksen That is incorrect on a couple levels. First off, it’s important to understand that the main way people are evicted these ways are via the Ellis Act followed by a buyout. The reason for that is that San Francisco passed strict condominium conversion prohibitions several years ago. If you do an Ellis, you generally are not going to be able to convert to condos ever. 

(You need to) include the Ellis threats… for every single Ellis Act eviction filed with the rent board, they’re where the speculators tried to get the tenants to bite… for every Ellis Act eviction, there are about five buyouts where Ellis Act was used as a club.

I come to that number by the number of people coming to the Tenants Union concerned about buyouts, and comparing those with the rent board’s numbers. Pretty consistently we see 33 percent of what the rent board sees. 

Erin McElroy California is the only state where the Ellis Act is utilized, it’s hard to say whether it’s historically high or not. We also see it’s being utilized by landlords repeatedly. It’s being used as a business model, not a way of going out of business which was its intended use in 1986. 

SFM In the 12-month period ending on February 28, 2013, the total number of Ellis Act evictions was 116—an almost twofold increase over the previous year, but a nearly 70 percent decrease since 2000, when such evictions hit an all-time high of 384. All told, the Ellis Act was behind less than 7 percent of the 1,716 total evictions in the city between February 2012 and February 2013. “Isn’t it far more likely,” asks Karen Chapple, a professor of city planning at UC Berkeley, “that more units are being lost [from the market] through Airbnb?”

TG That number, the 1,716 number, includes “for fault” evictions. If you just include no-fault evictions, Ellis Act evictions are the highest amounts. No-fault evictions are the ones we’re all talking about here. There are a number of rental units lost from the market and that’s a big problem, but the TIC and condominium conversions far surpass tourist conversions (like AirBNB).

EM First of all, for every Ellis Act being recorded, there is not a recording of the units evicted. While you can say there is a number of evictions, it doesn’t represent the units or people being displaced: it doesn’t record the number of people losing their homes.

What we’ve done through the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is to match those petitions with the number of units. If you go to our website you can see the number of units lost since 1997 in each petition. While the city (of San Francisco) only recorded about 1,300 Ellis Act evictions since then, there have been at least 4,000 units lost. We don’t know how many people are in each unit. There could be between 1 and 6 people in each on average. 

SFM Laying the blame on nefarious Rich Uncle Pennybags types isn’t exactly right either. A recent report commissioned by Supervisor David Campos is clear on that point: The increase in Ellis Act evictions, it found, “occurred simultaneously with significant increases in San Francisco housing prices.” In other words, the problem isn’t speculators. It’s the market. 

TG The problem is indeed the speculators. Most of these buyouts are done by speculators, of the current Ellis Act evictions right now, most of the buyouts are done by one of twelve speculators. 

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project showed that these real estate speculators form Limited Liability Corporations for each building. The Anti Eviction Mapping Project went through all these LLC’s and identified actual owners and compared them to Ellis Act evictions at the rent board. One person involved is doing six Ellis evictions right now. 

EM Speculators are taking advantage of the market. If there weren’t people to buy luxury condos, Ellis Act evictors wouldn’t buy up the units and turn them into condos. 

It’s one thing for a landlord to issue an Ellis Act one time because they’re done being a landlord, it’s another to see serial evictors use it over and over again through Limited Liability Corporations. Urban Green has 40 or so LLC’s, they’re using them all to push the Ellis Act. See our serial evictor chart and you’ll see 12 different people that use that serial evictor model. It’s a way for them to make money. 

SFM The city simply doesn’t have enough housing to keep up with job growth. And as real estate values rise, the incentive for a property owner to sell grows considerably. No villainy. Just economics.

TG The city is building a ton of housing, as anyone can tell you. The city, though, is building nothing but luxury condos. There’s plenty of housing, but nothing affordable.

EM If displacing long term residents and folks with disabilities and seniors is just economics, it’d be an argument against our economic system. The city offers services for trans folk, queer folk, people with HIV, all reasons people moved to San Francisco and it has a popular place in people’s imagination. Native San Franciscans are also not being valued. If that’s economics, San Francisco has lost its heart and its soul.

SFM Even if incremental changes happen, San Francisco’s affordability problem will likely continue almost unabated. Ellis Act evictions are, in Chapple’s words, not a cause of the housing crisis, but rather “a symptom. Fixing it is like using a Band-Aid for brain cancer.”

TG The Ellis Act is in fact a cause, because it’s taking thousands of units off the rent control market. When we’re losing more and more rent control units, supply dwindles and the rents go up. 

EM I would agree the Ellis Act isn’t the cause of the problem. The problem is it’s being utilized with other forms of evictions for landlords to take advantage of a political economy with the relationship between the city and tech. The problem is the relationship with the new tech class and the impunity it maintains through city government.

On the waterfront

Michael Redmond
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6
On the waterfront

steve@sfbg.com

Who should decide what gets built on San Francisco’s waterfront: the people or the Mayor’s Office and its political appointees? That’s the question that has been raised by a series of high-profile development proposals that exceed current zoning restrictions, as well as by a new initiative campaign that has just begun gathering signatures.

Officially known as the Voter Approval to Waterfront Development Height Increases initiative, the proposal grew out of the No Wall on the Waterfront campaign that defeated Propositions B and C in November, stopping the controversial 8 Washington luxury condo tower in the process.

“The idea was to have a public process around what we’re going to do with the waterfront,” campaign consultant Jim Stearns told the Guardian.

San Franciscans have been here before. When developers and the Mayor’s Office proposed big hotel projects on the city’s waterfront, voters in 1990 reacted by approving Proposition H. It created a temporary moratorium on new hotels and required the city to create a Waterfront Land Use Plan to regulate new development, which was approved in 1997 and hasn’t been updated since.

It was an important transition point for the city’s iconic waterfront, which was still dominated by industrial and maritime uses when the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989 led to the removal of the Embarcadero Freeway and opening up of shoreline property controlled by the Port of San Francisco.

Ironically, then-Mayor Art Agnos supported a luxury hotel project at Seawall Lot 330 (which is now part of the proposed Warriors Arena project at Piers 30-32) that helped trigger Prop. H. Agnos stayed neutral on that measure and says he was supportive of setting clear development standards for the waterfront.

Today, Agnos is one of the more vocal critics of the Warriors Arena and how the city is managing its waterfront.

“What’s happened in the last three to four years is all those height limits have been abrogated,” Agnos said of the standards set by the WLUP. “With the sudden availability of big money for investment purposes, there is now funding for these mega-developments projects.”

The trio of high-profile projects that would be most directly affected by the initiative are the proposed Warriors Arena, hotel, and condos at Piers 30-32/Seawall Lot 330; a large housing and retail project proposed by the San Francisco Giants at Pier 48/Seawall Lot 337; and a sprawling office, residential, and retail project that Forest City wants to build at Pier 70. Each project violates parts of the WLUP.

“We need to let the people protect the waterfront and current height limits,” Agnos said, “because clearly there is no protection at City Hall.”

 

CAMPAIGN LAUNCH

On a drizzly Saturday, Jan. 11, a few dozen activists crowded into the office at 15 Columbus Avenue, preparing to go collect signatures for the new waterfront initiative. It was a space that was already familiar to many of them from their fall campaign against height increases on the 8 Washington project.

“What we’re doing today is launching the next phase of that campaign,” campaign manager Jon Golinger told the assembled volunteers, calling this space “the center of the fight for San Francisco’s future.”

The campaign must collect at least 9,702 valid signatures by Feb. 3 to qualify for the June election, but Golinger said those involved in the campaign actually have six months to gather signatures if they want to wait for the November election.

Golinger said they would prefer June in order to build off of the momentum of the fall campaign and not get caught up in the more crowded November ballot. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm from the last election to ensure the waterfront gets the protection it needs,” he told us.

As for getting the necessary signatures, Golinger said he isn’t worried, noting that almost two years ago, he and other activists collected twice that many signatures — referendums require 10 percent of those voting in the last mayor’s race, but initiatives need only 5 percent — to challenge just the 8 Washington project.

Here, the stakes are much higher, spanning the entire seven-mile waterfront.

“We want the voters to have a say when a project goes beyond the rules that are in place,” said Sup. David Campos, the first elected official to endorse the measure and the first person to sign Golinger’s petition.

Campos also connected the campaign to the eviction crises and tenant organizing now underway, including the first in a series of Neighborhood Tenants Conventions taking place that day, culminating in a Feb. 8 event adopting a platform. “That struggle is part of this struggle,” Campos said. “We have to make sure we’re working collectively.”

The official proponent of the initiative is Becky Evans, who has been working on issues related to San Francisco’s waterfront for more than 40 years. “I remember walking along the waterfront with Herb Caen back in the ’70s,” she said of the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist for whom the promenade on the Embarcadero is now named.

Evans is a longtime Sierra Club member who also served on the city’s first Commission on the Environment, and she believes the shoreline is a critical intersection between the city’s natural and built environments, one where the citizens have an active interest.

“I think the 8 Washington process — including the petition gathering and the vote — awoke a bunch of people to making a difference in what happens to the city,” Evans told us, calling the waterfront a defining feature of San Francisco. “For many people, our skyline is the bay, not the buildings.”

 

BEYOND THE PLAN

The initiative has few overt critics at this point. Both city and Port officials refused to comment on the measure, citing a City Attorney’s Office memo advising against such electioneering. “I’m incredibly limited as to what I can say,” the Port’s Brad Benson told us.

And none of the spokespeople for the affected development projects wanted to say much. “We’re taking a wait and see attitude,” PJ Johnston, a spokesperson for the Warriors Arena, said when he finally responded to several Guardian inquiries.

“Right now, we’re trying to understand it,” said Staci Slaughter, the senior vice president of communications for the San Francisco Giants, whose proposal for Pier 48 and Seawall Lot 337 includes 3.7 million square feet of residential, commercial, parking, and retail, including the new Anchor Steam Brewery.

That project is just launching its environmental studies, which was the subject of a public scoping meeting on Jan. 13. Slaughter did tell us that “right now, the majority of the site doesn’t have an established height limit,” a reference to the fact that most of the site is zoned for open space with no buildings allowed.

Diane Oshima, associate director of waterfront planning at the Port, told us that during the adoption of the WLUP, “We did not broach the subject of changing any height limits.” But the plan itself says that was because tall buildings weren’t appropriate for the waterfront.

“Maintain existing building height and bulk limitations and encourage building designs that step down to the shoreline,” is the plan’s first design objective. Others include “Improve views of the working waterfront from all perspectives” and “Remove certain piers between Pier 35 and China Basin to create Open Water Basins and to improve Bay views.”

The plan also specifies acceptable uses for its various waterfront properties. Residential isn’t listed as an acceptable use for either Pier 48 or Seawall Lot 337, both of which are slated mostly for open space and maritime uses. Office space and entertainment venues are also not deemed allowable uses on either property, although it does list retail as an allowable use on Pier 48.

By contrast, Piers 30-32 and the adjacent Seawall Lot 330 were envisioned by the plan to allow all the uses proposed for it: “Assembly and Entertainment” and retail on the piers and residential, hotels, and retail on the property across the street — but not at the heights that are being proposed.

The plan calls Pier 70 a “mixed use opportunity area” that allows most uses, but not hotels or residential, despite current plans that call for construction of about 1,000 homes at the site to help fund historic preservation efforts.

Slaughter answered questions about her project’s lack of compliance with the WLUP by saying, “The whole project is going through a community planning process.”

Yet Agnos said that neither that process nor the current makeup of the Port or Mayor’s Office can get the best deal for the public against rich, sophisticated teams of developers, investors, and professional sports franchises.

“They don’t have the expertise for the multi-billion-dollar deals that are in front of them,” Agnos said of the Port of San Francisco. “The new identity for San Francisco’s Port is it has the most valuable land in the country, and maybe the most valuable land in the world.”

Left turn?

Michael Redmond
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27
Left turn?

rebecca@sfbg.com

Dan Siegel, an Oakland civil rights attorney and activist with a long history of working with radical leftist political movements, joined a group of more than 150 supporters in front of Oakland City Hall on Jan. 9 to announce his candidacy for mayor.

With this development, the mayor’s race in Oakland is sure to be closely watched by Bay Area progressives. Siegel’s bid represents a fresh challenge from the left against Mayor Jean Quan at a time when concerns about policing, intensifying gentrification, and economic inequality are on the rise.

Siegel is the latest in a growing list of challengers that includes Joe Tuman, a political science professor who finished fourth in the 2010 mayor’s race; Oakland City Councilmember Libby Schaaf; and Port Commissioner Bryan Parker.

In a campaign kickoff speech emphasizing the ideals of social and economic justice, Siegel laid out a platform designed “to make Oakland a safe city.” But he brought an unusual spin to this oft-touted goal, saying, “We need people to be safe from the despair and hopelessness that comes from poverty and long-term unemployment. We need safety for our tenants from unjust evictions and … gentrification.”

Siegel voiced support for raising the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. He also called for shuttering Oakland’s recently approved Domain Awareness Center, a controversial surveillance hub that integrates closed circuit cameras, license plate recognition software, and other technological law enforcement tools funded by a $10.9 million grant from the federal Department of Homeland Security.

He spoke about pushing for improvements in public education “to level the playing field between children from affluent backgrounds and children from poor backgrounds,” and described his vision for reorganizing the Oakland Police Department to foster deeper community engagement.

Among Siegel’s supporters are East Bay organizers with a deep history of involvement in social justice campaigns. His campaign co-chair is Walter Reilly, a prominent Oakland National Lawyers Guild attorney who said he’s been involved with civil rights movements for years. “This is a continuation of that struggle,” Reilly told the Bay Guardian, adding that leadership affiliated with “a progressive and class-conscious movement” is sorely needed in Oakland.

Left Coast Communications was tapped as Siegel’s campaign consultant. Siegel’s communications director is Cat Brooks, an instrumental figure in Occupy Oakland and the grassroots movement that arose in response to the fatal BART police shooting of Oscar Grant, whose Onyx Organizing Committee is focused on racial justice issues.

Olga Miranda, an organizer with San Francisco janitors union, SEIU Local 87, also spoke on Siegel’s behalf during the kickoff event. “San Francisco has become for the rich, and we understand that,” she said. “But at the same time, Oakland isn’t even taking care of its own.”

Referencing a recent surge in Oakland housing prices due in part to an influx of renters priced out of San Francisco, she added, “Dan understands that if you live in Oakland, you should be able to stay in Oakland.”

Siegel’s decision to challenge Quan for the Mayor’s Office has attracted particular interest since he previously served as her legal advisor, but their relationship soured after a public disagreement.

In the fall of 2011, when the Occupy Oakland encampment materialized overnight in front of Oakland City Hall, Siegel resigned from his post as Quan’s adviser over a difference in opinion about her handling of the protest movement. Police crackdowns on Occupy, which resulted in violence and the serious injury of veteran Scott Olsen and others, made national headlines that year.

“I thought that the Occupy movement was a great opportunity for this country to really start to understand the issues of inequality in terms of wealth and power,” Siegel told the Bay Guardian when queried about that. “And I thought the mayor should embrace that movement, and become part of it and even become a leader of it. And obviously, that’s not what happened.”

Since then, his relationship with Quan has been “Cool. As in temperature, not like in hip,” he said during an interview. “I don’t want to make this personal. But we have a difference about policy and leadership.”

With Oakland’s second mayoral election under ranked-choice voting, the race could prove fascinating for Bay Area politicos. Also called instant runoff voting, the system allows voters to select their first, second, and third choice candidates. If nobody wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the last-place candidates are eliminated in subsequent rounds and their vote redistributed until one candidate crosses the majority threshold.

Quan, who ran on a progressive platform in 2010, was elected despite winning fewer first-place votes than her centrist opponent, former State Senate President Don Perata. She managed to eke out an electoral victory with a slim margin (51 percent versus Perata’s 49), after voting tallies buoyed her to the top with the momentum of second- and third-place votes, many gleaned from ballots naming Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan as first choice.

Early polling conducted by David Binder Research showed Quan to be in the lead with the ability to garner 32 percent of the vote, as compared with 22 percent for Tuman, who placed second. That’s despite Quan’s incredibly low approval ratings — 54 percent of respondents said they disapproved of her performance in office.

When Schaaf announced her candidacy in November, Robert Gammon of the East Bay Express opined, “Schaaf’s candidacy … likely will make it much more difficult for Quan to win, particularly if no true progressive candidate emerges in the months ahead.” But Siegel’s entry into the race means there is now a clear progressive challenger.

The Guardian endorsed Kaplan as first choice in 2010, and gave Quan a second-place endorsement. While there has been some speculation as to whether Kaplan would run this time around — the David Binder Research poll suggested she would be a formidable opponent to Quan — Kaplan, who is Oakland’s councilmember-at-large, hasn’t filed.

Siegel, meanwhile, cast his decision to run as part of a broader trend. “I feel that not only in Oakland, but across the country, things are really ripe for change,” he told the Guardian.

Indeed, one of the biggest recent national political stories has been the election of Kshama Sawana, a socialist who rose to prominence during the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the Seattle City Council.

“When you have a city like Oakland where so many people are in poverty or on the edge of poverty, or don’t have jobs or face evictions,” Siegel told us, “it’s no wonder that the social contract falls apart. It seems to me that what government should do is elevate the circumstances of all people, and particularly people who are poor and disadvantaged.”

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Michael Redmond
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0

When is a public opinion poll a valid representation of how people feel? That turns out to be a tricky and ever-evolving question, particularly in San Francisco — thanks to its prevalence of tenants and technology — and even more particularly when it concerns the approval rating of Mayor Ed Lee.

Traditionally, the central requirements for public opinion polls to be considered valid is that respondents need to be representative of the larger population and they need to be selected at random. Polls are often skewed when people need to opt-in, as is the case in most online polls.

So the Guardian took issue with claims that 73 percent of voters approve of the job that Mayor Lee is doing, a figure derived from an opt-in online poll focused on “Affordability and Tech” that was conducted by University of San Francisco Professors Corey Cook and David Latterman and released to the San Francisco Chronicle on Dec. 9. That figure quickly wallpapered the comment section of the Guardian’s website as the answer to any criticism of Mayor Lee, his policies, or the city’s eviction and gentrification crises.

“Any survey that relies on the ability and/or availability of respondents to access the Web and choose whether to participate is not representative and therefore not reliable,” is how The New York Times Style Guide explains that newspaper’s refusal to run such polls, a quote we used in our Jan. 10 Politics blog post on the subject, and we quoted an academic making a similar point.

We also interviewed and quoted Latterman discussing the challenges of doing accurate and economical polling in a city with so many renters (64 percent of city residents) and so few telephone landlines. “San Francisco is a more difficult model,” Latterman told us. “So Internet polling has to get better, because phone polling has gotten really expensive.”

So we ran our story dubbing the poll “bogus” — and the next day got angry messages from Cook and Latterman defending the poll and educating us on efforts within academia to craft opt-in online polls that are as credible as traditional telephone polls.

“The author is so quick to dismiss the findings of the study, which is based upon accepted methodology, and which had nothing to do with mayoral approval scores, that he actually misses the entire thrust of the study — that voters in San Francisco are deeply ambivalent about the current environment, concerned about the affordability crisis, and not trusting of local government to come up with a solution,” Cook wrote in a rebuttal we published Jan. 13 on the Politics blog.

Cook told us the survey’s methods are endorsed by the National Science Foundation and peer-reviewed academic papers, including a Harvard University study called “Does Survey Mode Still Matter?” that concludes “a carefully executed opt-in Internet panel produces estimates that are as accurate as a telephone survey.”

That study went to great lengths to create a sample group that was representative of the larger population, while Cook and Latterman both admit that their survey’s respondents had a disproportionate number of homeowners. But they say the results were then weighted to compensate for that and they stand by the accuracy of their work.

Yet Cook also notes that the mayoral approval rating number wasn’t even part of the package they developed from this survey, it was just a finding that they decided to give the Chronicle. “I don’t think the 73 percent means anything,” Cook told us, noting that snapshot in time doesn’t reflect Lee’s actual popularity going forward, despite how Lee supporters focused on it. “The number they use politically is not a meaningful number.”

What Cook found more significant is the “tepid support” for Lee indicated by the poll, including the 86 percent that expressed concern about affordability in the city, a concern that cuts across all demographic groups. Most respondents had little faith in City Hall to address the problem and many felt the tech industry should be doing more to help, particularly companies that have received tax breaks.

Confronting the speculators

Michael Redmond
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34

rebecca@sfbg.com

A group of tenant advocates has upped the ante in the ongoing protest movement against San Francisco evictions, publicizing the names, photographs, property ownership, and corporate affiliations of a dozen landlords and speculators they’ve deemed “serial evictors.”

The Anti Eviction Mapping Project, a volunteer-led effort that snagged headlines last fall when it released data visualizations charting long-term displacement in San Francisco, released its Dirty Dozen list Jan. 10.

The project spotlights property owners who’ve moved to evict tenants under the Ellis Act, a controversial state law that allows landlords to oust tenants even if they aren’t in violation of lease terms. In practice, the Ellis Act tends to be waged against longtime residents with low monthly rental payments, frequently impacting elderly or low-income tenants who benefit from rent control.

The Anti Eviction Mapping Project’s list gets up close and personal, publishing details such as landlord’s cell phone numbers, home addresses, and histories of legal entanglement.

It’s an edgy use of public records that seems to raise a slew of questions about free speech, privacy, and the use of information sharing and public shaming as a protest tactic in the digital age.

Erin McElroy, a volunteer and lead organizer of the project, said the goal was to spotlight landlords “who are disproportionately impacting senior and disabled tenants,” and to raise public awareness about “people who are making millions at the expense of tenants.”

She added that there is a budding effort to push for Ellis Act reform in Sacramento, and noted that a goal of this project was to fuel that statewide effort by providing easily accessible information.

Among those individuals named on the Dirty Dozen list was David McCloskey of Urban Green Investments, a company that owns more than 15 San Francisco properties. Urban Green has been a frequent target of San Francisco housing activists, in part due to the company’s ongoing attempt to evict Mary Elizabeth Phillips, a Dolores Street tenant who will turn 98 in April.

Another landlord who made the list, Elba Borgen, has also attracted past attention from tenant activists due to her history of pursuing Ellis Act evictions at six different San Francisco properties. A tenant currently residing in a 10th Avenue property, where Borgen’s LLC has filed for eviction, is 90 years old and suffering from Alzheimer’s, according to an interview with her daughter Vivian Montesdeoca posted to the mapping project website.

The Bay Guardian‘s efforts to reach landlords who were spotlighted on the Dirty Dozen list were largely unsuccessful. We did manage to contact Tom Iveli, president of Norcal Ventures, who spoke briefly before excusing himself, saying he had to take another call. Iveli clearly wasn’t aware that he and his business partner Bob Sigmund had been singled out.

McElroy said the Dirty Dozen list was the product of an in-depth research project which entailed filtering through property records, San Francisco Rent Board data, and information gleaned from the website Corporation Wiki.

The Anti Eviction Mapping Project initiative has attracted around 15 volunteers and will be partnering with Stanford University students to produce an oral history project showcasing the narratives of San Francisco tenants facing eviction, McElroy said.

Some of the same activists involved in recent high-profile blockades of tech buses were also part of the Anti Eviction Mapping Project effort.

“We’re not, you know, anti-tech by any means,” said McElroy. “We’re anti- speculative real estate,” and wary of policies like the Ellis Act and city government’s tendency to give deep-pocketed corporations a free pass, regardless of the consequences.

“It’s that linkage that is kind of the crux of the issue,” she added.

Alerts: January 15 – 21, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

WEDNESDAY 15

“Economic Crisis and System Decline: What We Can Do” First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing, Berk. Kpfa.org/events. 7:30pm, $12 advance, $15 door. KPFA Radio presents an evening with Richard Wolff, hosted by Mitch Jeserich. Wolff, a radical economist, recently published Capitalism Hits the Fan, offering an alarming analysis on global economic events that differs sharply from explanations offered by politicians, media commentators, and other academics. Professor of Economics Emeritus from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Wolff is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University in New York. According to KPFA, he’s got a reputation for “blunt speaking, clarity, refreshing scorn, and an enjoyable wit.”

 

FRIDAY 17

 

Gather round the fire for eviction ghost stories Silver Stone Cafe, 3278 24th St, SF. 6-9pm, free. Join Erin McElroy, of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and Adriana Camarena, of the Shaping San Francisco “Unsettlers: Migrants, Homies, and Mammas” project, for an evening of community stories about eviction and other housing horrors. Gather around a campfire to listen to and support San Francisco evictees in a family-friendly event. (No alcohol, yes s’mores.) Storytelling will be videotaped.

SATURDAY 18

Richmond/Haight Tenants Convention San Francisco Public Library Park Branch, 1833 Page, SF. 1-4pm, free. This gathering of tenants from District 1 and District 5 is being held to hash out strategies for fighting the evictions in our neighborhoods, educate tenants about their rights, and defend evictees. Participants will also make suggestions for a ballot initiative next November, which will be presented to a citywide tenants convention Feb. 8. Other neighborhoods, including the Mission, Chinatown and Tenderloin/SOMA are also holding or have held conventions and will be making recommendations to the citywide convention. Free and open to tenants. Sponsored by the San Francisco Tenants Union.

SUNDAY 19 Homeless Youth Alliance benefit El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. 3-8pm, $3-to-infinity sliding scale donation. Evicted from their building on Christmas Day, the Homeless Youth Alliance continues to provide services out of the back of a van. The organization’s mission is to help these marginalized youth build healthier lives through harm reduction, one-on-one counseling, and medical and mental health care, as well as creative and educational workshops, needle exchange, and accurate up-to-date referrals and information. This El Rio birthday bash for a generous HYA supporter will feature performances by Kat Marie Yoas, The Whoa Nellies and No Bone.

Preserve existing rental housing

Michael Redmond
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8

San Francisco’s housing affordability crisis has become the main threat to the livability of the city for hundreds of thousands of residents. One glimmer of hope came last month, as the Board of Supervisors reformed decades-old laws that permit, and often encourage, the loss of affordable rental units.

When San Francisco adopted its zoning laws in the 1960s, it assigned a zoning district to every parcel in the city. Each zoning district set a maximum number of dwelling units allowed per parcel. These density limits effectively forbade adding units to existing buildings across most of the city, and deemed approximately 51,000 dwelling units “nonconforming.”

Nonconforming units are allowed to remain for the lifetime of the building, but could not be enlarged or improved. The controls on merging dwelling units actually encouraged the loss of units if the units were nonconforming or denser than the neighboring buildings. The planners’ intent was that nonconforming units would be eliminated over time, as buildings are remodeled or rebuilt.

The 2009 General Plan Housing Element moved in a different direction, calling for preservation of dwelling units, especially affordable and rent-controlled housing, and favoring in-kind replacement of affordable units lost to conversion, demolition, and merger. Two ordinances, sponsored by Sup. John Avalos and based on proposals from Livable City, have now brought the Planning Code in line with the Housing Element policies.

One ordinance amended the controls on residential demolition, conversion, and merger to reflect the Housing Element goals. It strengthens requirements that lost units be replaced with similarly affordable units, and restricts mergers in buildings with a recent history of Ellis Act or owner-move-in evictions. It also clarifies the legal status of dwelling units where the permit records are ambiguous, making them legal unless there is conclusive evidence that the units are illegal. This will improve housing security for thousands of San Franciscans who dwell in older, rent-controlled buildings that are denser than the Planning Code currently allows.

A second ordinance permits the improvement and expansion of nonconforming units that exceed current density limits, so long as they remain within the existing building envelope. This allows owners to enlarge units by converting space in existing buildings to dwelling space. To protect tenants from speculative evictions, improvement and expansion are not permitted in buildings with a recent history of Ellis and owner move-in evictions.

In addition, Sup. David Chiu introduced legislation in November to permit legalization of thousands of existing rent-controlled units that were built without planning permission. This ordinance will protect these rent-controlled units from conversion and merger, and allow them to be brought up to building and housing code.

Bolder measures will be needed to make San Francisco an affordable city for all, but preserving more of our affordable housing moves us in the right direction.

Tom Radulovich is the executive director of Livable City.

Start the mayor’s race now

Michael Redmond
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4

EDITORIAL

We hope you enjoyed last week’s cover package, “The Rise of Candidate X,” a parable about politics and the media in San Francisco. While it was clearly a fantastical tale, it also had a serious underlying message that we would like to discuss more directly here. Bold actions are needed to save San Francisco. It will take a broad-based coalition to keep the city open to all, and that movement can and should morph into a progressive campaign for the Mayor’s Office, starting now.

While 22 months seems like an eternity in electoral politics, and it is, any serious campaign to unseat Mayor Ed Lee — with all the institutional and financial support lined up behind him — will need to begin soon. Maybe that doesn’t even need to involve the candidate yet, but the constellation of progressive constituencies needs to coordinate their efforts to create a comprehensive vision for the city, one radical enough to really challenge the status quo, and a roadmap for getting there.

It’s exciting to see the resurgence of progressive politics in the city over the last six months, with effective organizing and actions by tenant, immigrant rights, affordable housing, anti-corporate, labor, economic justice, LGBT, environmental, transit, and other progressive groups.

Already, they’ve started to coordinate their actions and messaging, as we saw with the coalition that made housing rights a centerpiece of the annual Milk-Moscone Memorial March. Next, we’d like to see progressive transportation and affordable housing activists bridge their differences, stop fighting each other for funding within the current zero-sum game of city budgets, and fully support a broad progressive agenda that seeks new resources for those urgent needs and others.

Yet City Hall is out of touch with the growing populist outrage over trends and policies that favor wealthy corporations and individuals, at the expense of this city’s diversity, health, and real economic vitality (which comes from promoting and protecting small businesses, not using local corporate welfare to subsidize Wall Street). The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce recently gave this Board of Supervisors its highest-ever ranking on its annual “Paychecks and Pink Slips” ratings, which is surely a sign that City Hall is becoming more sympathetic to the interests of business elites than that of the average city resident.

This has to change, and it won’t be enough to focus on citizens’ initiatives or this year’s supervisorial races, which provide few opportunities to really change the political dynamics under the dome. We need to support and strengthen the resurgent progressive movement in this city and set its sights on Room 200, with enough time to develop and promote an inclusive agenda.

San Francisco has a strong-mayor form of government, a power that has been effectively and repeatedly wielded on behalf of already-powerful constituents by Mayor Ed Lee and his pro-downtown predecessors. Lee has used it to veto Board of Supervisors’ actions protecting tenants, workers, and immigrants; and the commissions he controls have rubber-stamped development projects without adequate public benefits and blocked the CleanPowerSF program, despite its approval by a veto-proof board majority.

Maybe Mayor Lee will rediscover his roots as a tenant lawyer, or he will heed the prevailing political winds now blowing through the city. Or maybe he’ll never cross the powerful economic interests who put him in office. But we do know that the only way to get the Mayor’s Office to pursue real progressive reforms is for a strong progressive movement to seek that office.

New York City, which faces socioeconomic challenges similar to San Francisco’s, has exciting potential right now because of the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who waged a long and difficult campaign based on progressive ideals and issues. By contrast, San Francisco seems stuck in the anachronistic view that catering to capitalists will somehow serve the masses.

The Mayor’s Office has been a potent force for blocking progressive reforms over the last 20 years. Now is the time to place that office in service of the people.

 

Alerts: January 8 – 14

Michael Redmond
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0

WEDNESDAY 8

Mayor Art Agnos on Warriors development Upper Noe Recreation Center, 299 Day, SF. 7:30pm, free. Former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos will discuss the Warriors proposal for Piers 30/32 (near the Bay Bridge) and the possible impacts it that it, as well as the associated condo development, would have on the City. The event is being sponsored by Upper Noe Neighbors and San Francisco Village.

 

THURSDAY 9

Immersive video exhibit: “Lives in Transit” Folsom Street Foundry, 1425 Folsom, SF. www.globallives.org/jan9event. 6-11pm, sliding scale. The Global Lives Project — a volunteer-based creative collaboration that curates an exponentially expanding collection of films documenting people from around the world, 24/7/365 — invites you to a celebration and a sneak preview of “Lives in Transit.” The film series followed 10 transit workers for 24 hours, faithfully documenting their experiences. In addition to the sneak peek, there will be music, appetizers and drinks. The Rent Is Too Damn High Park Branch Library Community Room, 1833 Page, SF. www.hanc-sf.org. 7-9pm, free. The Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) hosts “The Rent Is Too Damn High,” a meeting on the affordable housing crisis. In light of the lack of affordable housing as well as San Francisco’s alarming distinction as one of the most expensive places to live, HANC invites you to join with tenant advocacy leaders in discussing ways to respond.

FRIDAY 10

Roy Zimmerman comedy concert Mount Tamalpais United Methodist Church, 410 Sycamore, Mill Valley. tinyurl.com/zimconcert. 7:30-9:30pm, $15–$18 (benefit for Health Care for All). “There’s a whole new political landscape,” Roy Zimmerman sang in 2012, “painted by Jackson Pollack.” The local satirical songwriter is playing a benefit show to benefit Health Care For All Marin, an organization dedicated to building support for publicly financed, single-payer health care. Head up north for an evening and watch Zimmerman rip on all things local and national, political and social, Socialism and Popeye. Tickets are $15 in advance, $18 at the door.

SATURDAY 11

Castro Tenants Convention LGBT Center, 1800 Market, SF. Noon-2pm, free. This gathering of tenants from the Castro area will brainstorm strategies for fighting the evictions in their neighborhood and defending those who are being evicted. Participants in the convention will also come up with suggestions for a ballot initiative next November, and these suggestions will be presented to a citywide tenants convention in February. Other neighborhoods, including the Mission, Chinatown, Haight/Richmond/Western Addition and Tenderloin-SOMA are also holding or have held conventions. Free and open to all tenants. Organizers of the convention include the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, AIDS Housing Alliance, Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club and District 8 Democrats.

The Unconstitutional Truth about the Presidio

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4

 

By John Farrell

 

OPINION When Congress established the Presidio Trust in 1996, it wanted to ensure its financial stability. Congress believed taxing private tenants impeded the Trust’s financial stability, so it enacted provisions within the Presidio Trust Act to ensure that tenants were tax-exempt. The only problem is that Congress doesn’t have the power to exempt tenants under the US Constitution.

In 1897, the State of California ceded to the United States exclusive jurisdiction on all lands held for military purposes, including the Presidio. Military installations are federal enclaves exempt from state authority. Per legal counsel of the State Board of Equalization, a “federal enclave” is a property over which the federal government holds exclusive jurisdiction.

In 1989, the federal government closed the Presidio as a military base. Since the Presidio is no longer for military use, the federal government transferred jurisdiction to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) in 1994 for natural, historic, cultural, and recreational purposes.

Did this transfer to GGNRA end its tax-exempt status? Did this transfer negate the concept of “federal enclave” and “exclusive jurisdiction,” since the Presidio is no longer used for military purposes? Could the city now tax private beneficiaries? This issue has never been addressed.

The Presidio Trust was created by Congress in 1996 for a dual purpose: to rehabilitate and repurpose historic buildings and environmental resources, and operate as a vibrant public park independent of annual taxpayer funds.

In establishing the Trust, Congress’s concern was with the city’s potential assessment of property tax. In California, any private party that rents or uses space on government-owned property is subject to property tax.

In order to curtail the possible assessment of property tax, Congress enacted legislation signed into law by President Clinton on November 29, 1999. Public Law 106-113 (HR 3194) includes specific language providing that, “The Trust and all properties administered by the Trust and all interest created under leases, concessions, permits and other agreements associated with the properties shall be exempt from all taxes and special assessments of every kind in the State of California, and its political subdivisions, including the City and County San Francisco.”

Our City Attorney and Congressional representative have the opinion that all third party interests for private benefit under the Presidio Trust’s jurisdiction are exempted from taxes by the Presidio Trust Act.

This language confirms Congress’s intent to exempt private tenants from all forms of state and local property taxes. The only problem is that if Congress enacted the Presidio Trust Act to exempt third party beneficiaries, it did not have the authority per Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution, which provides the Powers of US Congress. In other words, this part of the legislation was unconstitutional.

Because of this unconstitutional loophole, the city is losing at least $10 million annually in property tax and over $100 million since inception. This amount doesn’t include revenue loss from other taxes such as real estate transfer tax. Further, if the George Lucas plan for a Presidio museum is approved, the city will lose at least $8.1 million annually in property tax.

The city is losing an additional $12.5 million from the recent sale of Lucasfilm’s to Disney in 2012 (based on a 2.5 percent transfer tax on a conservative $500 million assessment). An ownership transfer includes a lease of 35 years or more. Lucasfilm had a 66-year lease at the Presidio transferred to Disney. Per the state Revenue and Taxation Code, this is a legal transfer and there is no rational why there is no transfer tax imposed.

The city has decided to adhere to the legislation by Congress to tax exempt tenants even though it is unconstitutional. But everyone should pay their fair share.  

John Farrell is a Realtor, former city budget analyst, and fifth generation San Franciscan.

Crowdfunding apartments

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7
Crowdfunding apartments

rebecca@sfbg.com

We caught up with Dan Miller at a cafe in San Francisco’s Financial District, where solitary patrons hovered over laptop screens as they sipped coffee.

Sporting a goatee and collared shirt, Miller, 26, seemed to blend in perfectly. The Washington DC native, a product of the East Coast real estate development world whose father had a hand in developing several iconic properties, was in San Francisco for meetings about FundRise, a startup he and his older brother Ben cofounded. The company is frequently described as being like Kickstarter, but for real estate investment.

Miller has been meeting with representatives from San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, a city agency in the Mayor’s Office. While nobody in City Hall was willing to get specific about those meetings, it seems officials are looking to FundRise for help tackling the city’s bedeviling housing affordability crisis.

Miller has been meeting with economic development offices in cities nationwide, and he’s convinced that housing affordability is a problem everywhere. “But it’s more acute in San Francisco than anywhere else I’ve seen,” he said, “just because of an influx of tech jobs.”

In the last six months, he added, OEWD representatives have seemed increasingly concerned.

The idea of crowd funding real estate is new, and the whole enterprise is still coming to fruition. But the underlying idea is intriguing: Take real-estate investment out of the hands of exclusive multimillion-dollar investment firms, and open it up instead to anybody who happens to have 100 bucks or more to throw in.

In an affluent city like San Francisco, the tool could create wiggle room for more housing projects that are tailored to actual needs, through partnerships with affordable housing developers.

It started when Miller and his brother encountered across-the-board rejection from big investment firms. To hear him tell it, the rise of private equity firms — which have no meaningful connection to the communities they develop — has produced blandness on a sweeping scale.

Objectives like preserving economic diversity, or honoring a community’s wishes, don’t factor in when these firms determine what to fund; they only consider whether an investment is deemed safe and profitable. That means predictable: think obscenely expensive, characterless market-rate condos. And since they’re the dominant financiers, their judgment is the final call.

“We spun off from our family business and started buying old auto warehouses, converting them, leasing them to local tenants,” Miller explained. “We took these projects to private equity firms, and they just didn’t get it. All the decisions they made were predicated on the financial pro forma,” he added, referring to documents that project expected returns. “They were really constraining what’s possible.”

Sounding like a tech person, he pronounced the whole system woefully inefficient. FundRise seeks to take advantage of little-known Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, as well as new provisions under the federal Jobs Act, to give people the opportunity to use crowd funding instead. (It doesn’t eliminate the need to apply for bank loans, which is a different part of the financing picture.)

The idea is that FundRise vets a project’s viability to make sure it won’t result in widespread loss, then helps proponents attract contributions through an online social network.

In the investment world, the vast majority of transactions are made by “accredited” investors, whose net worth equals $1 million or more, or with annual incomes of $200,000 or higher. But there are others out there who might have extra cash to put toward projects they believe in, like, say, affordable housing complexes for seniors — who don’t mind making a lower return.

The Miller brothers have built an online system they hope will connect these would-be lenders with projects in their own communities.

“Since you can invest directly, digitally, you’ve cut out so many middle men,” Miller explained. “You can make a 6, 8, 10 percent return. The real estate investment firm targets are 20 percent. But that’s because there’s just people taking a piece all the way down the ladder.”

The cofounders may be idealistic, but at the end of the day, they’re businesspeople, not activists. Since the company takes a cut of all investment earnings, it could succeed financially even if it the platform only winds up getting used to finance pet projects for dot-com millionaires.

Nevertheless, some longtime champions of low-income housing have recognized its potential to help solve a perplexing puzzle: How to secure capital for affordable housing in a world where investors are hardwired to make as much money as possible.

“We are hoping that as the larger movement for crowd funding works with the SEC, we can have more people make these investments in the local community,” said Tracy Parent, executive director of the San Francisco Community Land Trust.

Her organization is the first nonprofit affordable housing developer to test the waters with FundRise, in a bid to raise $1 million to keep Marcus Books, a historic African American-owned business, in its current Fillmore Street location. Due to a short timeline, they’re confined to accepting funding only from accredited investors. But in the future, they could use the tool to structure a public offering that would allow anyone to contribute toward preserving affordable housing.

While public subsidies will still be needed for below-market housing, “FundRise allows affordable housing developers to take properties off the speculative market,” Parent explained. “Any way we can democratize capital investment,” she added, “will be a good thing for our community.”

SF Board of Supervisors approves new tenant protections

Sasha Cuttler
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11

The Board of Supervisors today (Tues/17) gave unanimous final approval to legislation aimed at giving renters in the city additional protections against being displaced by real estate speculators, and initial approval to legislation protecting tenants from harassment by landlords, both part of a wave of reforms moving through City Hall to address rising populist concerns about gentrification and evictions.

The anti-eviction legislation, created by Sup. John Avalos and co-sponsored by Sups. Eric Mar and David Campos, seeks to preserve rent-controlled and affordable housing by restricting property-owners’ abilities to demolish, merge, and convert housing units, three of the most common ways that affordable housing units are being eliminated in the city.

There was no discussion of the Avalos legislation today as it was approved on second reading, belying last week’s initial discussion, which got a little heated at times. “San Francisco is facing a crisis,” Avalos said last week as he conveyed the importance of passing the ordinance before the end of the year. “We’ve been called on by our constituents to declare a state of emergency for renters in the city.”

Last month, Campos held a high-profile hearing at the board on the city’s affordable housing and eviction crisis, and won approval for his legislation to double how much tenants being evicted under the Ellis Act receive. Today’s board meeting also includes a first reading of legislation by Campos to help protect tenants in rent-controlled apartments from being harassed by landlords seeking to force them out and increasing rents.

“We have heard about tenants being locked out of their apartments. We have heard about loud construction work being done…for the purpose of forcing the tenants out,” Campos said today of his legislation to allow targetted tenants to have complaints heard by the Rent Board rather than having to file a lawsuit. Later, Campos said the legislation sends the message “that is not something that is going to be tolerated in San Francisco.”

Campos’ legislation also received unanimous approval and little discussion, even by supervisors who generally side with landlords over tenants, perhaps including just more potent this issue has become. Board President David Chiu also today introduced a resolution to support his work with Mayor Ed Lee and Sen. Mark Leno to amend the Ellis Act at the state level, hoping to give the city more control over its rent-controlled housing. 

Avalos last week said he is so convinced of the urgency of the current situation that he responded to concerns voiced during the Land Use and Economic Development Committee Meeting on Dec. 9 about how the new legislation would work in the cases of temporary evictions and residential hotels by immediately making amendments to the ordinance without objection.

Nonetheless, further questions arose during the Dec. 10 meeting. Sups. Norman Yee and Katy Tang expressed reservations about the legislation applying in the case of owner move-in (OMI) evictions.

“I would love to support the piece, but this part just doesn’t make sense to me,” Yee concluded. “I’m not getting how it hurts the tenants.”

While Avalos explained that OMI evictions still take affordable housing off the market, he agreed to compromise by reducing the ordinance’s 10-year moratorium on demolishing, merging and converting housing units to five years.

Then, Sup. London Breed spoke up.

“This might not be popular for me to say as a legislator, but I’m very confused,” she began. “I know we have this crisis of Ellis Acts around the city, but I really feel pressured, and that this legislation is being rushed. I can’t support something that I don’t completely understand the impacts of. I just need more time.”

While Breed did not have the chance to review the legislation before the meeting, she had found the time to prepare speeches about President Nelson Mandela’s passing last week and her alma mater Galileo High School’s recent football victory.

Concurring with Breed, Cohen stated, “I understand that we are in a crisis of protecting our rental stock units, but I’m hesitant. Connect the dots for me, how does this save rentals? Or conserve affordable housing? What are we trying to do here?”

Kim reprimanded her fellow board members for not attending the meeting prepared, then stated, “I would support moving the ordinance forward today. The situation we are facing here in the city is extremely challenging…and this legislation is one of the tools we have for it.”

Sup. Scott Wiener and David Chiu echoed Kim’s support, commending Avalos for promptly addressing their former issues with his amendments and additions.

When Cohen used her time on the floor to respond to Kim’s admonition by stating, “I certainly do my homework. I don’t want to be made to feel bad for not getting it on the first time,” Campos suggested that it might be a good time to put the discussion on hold and open the floor for public comments.

While members of the community stepped up to the visitors’ podium, Yee and Campos met at the back of the room while Breed conversed with Sophie Hayward of the Planning Department, who had reviewed the ordinance before it was presented for recommendations. After further discussion with Avalos himself, Yee returned to his seat to speak with Tang. Satisfied with what she learned from Hayward, Breed came over to discuss the ordinance with Campos and Avalos. Cohen remained seated for the duration of the time, speaking with no one.

After the conclusion of public comments, Avalos reiterated the importance of passing the ordinance as soon as possible. “We have been called on by scores, hundreds of people, to preserve this stock,” he stated. “This legislation will help keep families in San Francisco.”

The ordinance was passed unanimously in its first reading, but the fight is not over. Breed for one made it clear that, while she understood the ordinance better after her preceding discussions, she was only giving it her support because she knew the legislation would be up for further review in a week, when all the supervisors will have had time to study it more closely.

With the affordable housing and displacement issues only generating more heat in the last week, today there was only prompt, unanimous approval and no discussion. 

Personal archives: CAAM’s home-movie project Memories to Light

Sue Vaughan
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0
Personal archives: CAAM’s home-movie project Memories to Light

For as long as I can remember, my family has spent New Year’s Day at my aunt and uncle’s house in Campbell. As we had our fill of sushi and kamaboko, watched football, and, in more recent years, entertained my little cousins, my Uncle Hiro would walk around the house with his video camera, getting everyone on tape. He would focus in on my brother and me, narrating in Japanese so I could only catch our names and how old we were that year. It was just a thing Uncle Hiro did on New Years Day. I never thought of it as recording history.

But that’s exactly what home movies are – a largely untapped source of our histories from an intimate and personal perspective. Recognizing this, the Center for Asian American Media has developed Memories to Light, an initiative that collects, digitizes, and shares the home movies of Asian American families. Advances in digital media and discussions between CAAM executive director Stephen Gong and archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger gave way to the project, which has now gained over a dozen family collections and somewhere between 30 and 50 hours of footage.

“I think Asian-American communities are becoming more relevant and more engaged and more deeply embedded in the American story and making our presence felt,” said Gong. “It’s a good time for a lot of good stories.”

Given today’s technology, it’s never been a better time to share these stories recorded on early film. Memories to Light takes donated home movies, digitizes them, and returns the original copy and a digital copy to the family. That way, the original footage doesn’t just sit in an archive and collect dust. And all it costs is the family’s willingness to share their little slice of history.

“One of the tenants of this project is not to treat these like they’re copyrighted materials that we need to monetize,” Gong explained. “That it is with a new ethos of saying that like a participatory society and culture that we can have greater effect in the culture if we do our best to make this stuff as widely accessible as possible.”

By having such an open transaction with donators and leaving the task of preserving the original film in their hands, Gong can focus on gathering, editing, and presenting collected content. CAAM’s mission to show the richness and diversity of Asian Americans, and Memories to Light achieves that by showcasing real, everyday life as important history.

“For communities of people that don’t have a sort of rich, moving image history, who have been depicted in mainstream media in stereotyped ways, articulated by someone else to someone else’s ends and needs, there is something that is amazingly liberating just by saying, ‘Let’s go right to the material that people themselves decided to shoot,’” said Gong.

The footage collected spans from as early as the 1930s all the way up to the 1970s. Though this medium is usually considered more personal than educational, there is a lot to be learned by these moments captured by various families. Mark Decena of Kontent Films, who originally got involved with Memories to Light to produce a trailer for the project, unearthed his own family’s films and had them digitized. He did not expect the onslaught of emotions that came with viewing the footage, which he ended up editing together into a film called The War Inside.

“The War Inside came about from the very implausible and ultimately ill-fated union of my Mom and Dad,” said Decena. “My mom is Japanese and my dad is Filipino. Not a common coupling, especially after Japan’s brutal imperialistic binge and World War II defeat. I always bemused that I was at war with myself by having such different racial and cultural mix.”

With a script he wrote in a day after viewing the footage, along with editing work by Blake Everheart and soundtrack by CAAM’s program manager Davin Agatep, Decena shared his film for the first time with an audience that included his entire family.

“Since it’s basically a story of a family breaking up, it was emotional for everyone,” he said. “In some ways, you could see it as an indictment of certain people, but it’s as much about the circumstances that brought them to make the choices they made.”

Decena’s film is just one form of presentation that has come out of this initiative. Another collection of footage, presented in September at the Asian Art Museum, was accompanied by live performances by DJ Deeandroid and Lady Fingaz. Given that much of this footage is silent, there are many creative options for screenings.
 
So when you head home for the holidays this year, ask your family about old home movies they might have hiding in a closet somewhere. Though videotapes like the ones my uncle recorded aren’t what Memories to Light is looking for, the project is currently accepting more 16mm, 8mm, and Super 8mm film to digitize and add to the collection.
 
Take a look at The War Inside on the Memories to Light website, as well as the Gee and Udo family collections, and perhaps you too will be inspired to dig into your own home archive for family history to share. Check out Memories to Light at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose on Dec. 18 and at CAAMFest in March 2014.
 
Memories to Light
Dec 18, 7pm, free
Japanese American Museum of San Jose
535 N Fifth St, San Jose
(408) 294-3138
www.jamsj.org

Marcus Books can stay if it can raise $1 million

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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8

Marcus Book Store continues to be threatened with the loss of its Fillmore Street location – but if an ambitious community-based campaign can succeed in raising $1 million by Feb. 28, the institution will be able to remain where it is for the foreseeable future.

At a Thu/5 press conference at the bookstore’s 1712 Fillmore Street location, attorney Julian Davis announced that the bookstore proprietors and the San Francisco Community Land Trust had reached an agreement with the current property owners, Nishan and Suhaila Sweis, enabling the land trust to purchase the property for $2.6 million.

If the money is raised, the property will be transferred to the trust, which will preserve the bookstore as a tenant in perpetuity and keep the upstairs flats as permanent affordable housing.

“This is an opportunity,” Davis told reporters. If the campaign succeeds, “That is going to be a rare victory for retaining cultural diversity in San Francisco.”

Tomiko Johnson, daughter of Karen and Gregory Johnson, said she was proud of her family for securing the agreement.

Marcus Book Store has been facing eviction since earlier this year, when the building was sold to the Sweis family in a bankruptcy sale after a family member of the proprietors got behind on payments after taking out a bad loan.

The new owners operate a taxicab business in San Francisco and had planned on living there, according to Joe Sweis, who spoke at the press conference. But after a wide range of community supporters mobilized to halt the bookstore eviction, “We felt that the best solution was really to just come to the table. We saw that their property meant so much,” Sweis said.

Raising $1 million in less than three months is a tall order, but the land trust is using a new, web-based fundraising tool it hopes will help attract support.

Called FundRise, the tool is similar to a real-estate investment version of the microloan website Kiva.org. It offers some intriguing potential for re-shaping the way real-estate investment happens in practice, particularly in a city like San Francisco where market pressure is so intense that droves of low and middle-income tenants are being priced out.

Taking advantage of new federal financial regulations, it works by allowing anyone – not just bankers or finance professionals – to contribute investment funding of any amount toward property acquisition.

By opening the doors for a broader subset of individuals to invest, the platform can offer greater potential for community residents to pool their resources toward ownership of significant buildings or critical housing.

“It sort of opens up a new power to change the face of a city,” said Ben Miller, who started FundRise three years ago with his brother, Daniel, in Washington, D.C. The brothers said they started it because “The idea that you could invest in a Japanese company but you can’t invest across the street made no sense. I think it’s a revolution in how a city can develop.”

In the case of the FundRise campaign that is being created by the San Francisco Community Land Trust to save Marcus Books, any “accredited investor” who wants to invest in the bookstore can provide a loan in the amount they choose and expect an annual return of four percent.

“We are the first nonprofit affordable housing developer to use this platform,” said Tracy Parent of the Land Trust, adding that the plan is to look to “investors across San Francisco and the nation to achieve this fundraising goal.”

Under federal guidelines, investors are considered “accredited” if they have assets totaling more than $1 million, or an annual income of $200,000 a year or higher.

If Marcus Book Store had more time, it might have been possible to open the door for supporters of any income level to become investors, Miller said. “That usually takes three to four months for regulators to give the green light,” he explained. “February’s too fast – you can’t get the regulators to sign off that quickly.”

But Parent noted that nevertheless, the Land Trust is investigating ways to incorporate contributions from anyone who wants to donate toward the effort of saving Marcus Books, be they accredited investors or not.  

Ever since the prospect of losing Marcus Bookstore surfaced this past spring, neighbors and supporters from the surrounding community have pitched in to help preserve the cultural institution. It is the oldest African American bookstore in the nation, housed in an historic building where, decades ago when it was Jimbo’s Bop City jazz club, luminaries from Dizzy Gillespie to Charlie Parker held late-night jam sessions.

Karen Johnson, a co-owner of the bookstore, remembers when her parents, Raye and Julian Richardson first discovered the building, which had been sitting vacant. “When I found out it was the Bop City building, I figured it was waiting for us,” she said. They had opened the business in 1960 and moved to a series of locations before settling into the Victorian, which averted demolition during redevelopment because it was put on a truck and transported around the corner.

Johnson said she was overwhelmed by support from the community in recent months. “It’s heartwarming, and it’s a witnessing that humanity is still in San Francisco,” she said. “Humanity is a verb,” she added. “You can’t just think it. It’s an action verb.”

Karen Kai is a community member who helped round up supporters for the months long campaign to save the bookstore. When news that the store could be evicted started to spread, “there was such an outpouring,” she said. “People said, we can’t lose this. Because if we lose this, we lose a little piece of our soul.”

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