Tenants Archives — Page 7 of 25 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

San Francisco agency agrees to legalize mid-Maket units slated for eviction

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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October 10, 2013

Moving can be a huge, stressful, harrowing ordeal. But now, some 300 tenants living at 1049 and 1067 Market Street might be spared from having to relocate thanks to organized resistance from tenants’ rights activists and the intervention of local elected officials to halt an eviction from going forward.

It’s the second major grassroots victory this week.

Building code violations made the housing units at those properties technically illegal, and the tenants were served with 60-day eviction notices last month. The property owner, John Gall, had taken out permits to convert some of the units into office space.

In response, tenant activists with the Housing Rights Committee and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic came to the tenants’ assistance and started a drumbeat on the pending mass eviction, which would have amounted to the largest since the I-Hotel in the 1970s. “We’ve worked really hard to get the city to do something aggressive,” housing activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca told the Guardian.

Before long, District 6 Sup. Jane Kim took up the cause. On Oct. 10, Kim phoned the Guardian to relate a surprising development.

Yesterday, the Department of Building Inspection “called and let us know they have found a pathway to legalization” for the units, Kim said. As long as some safety upgrades are made, DBI has agreed to exercise its discretion and waive code requirements that would necessitate renovations that aren’t feasible.

Once she got word that DBI would legalize the units, Kim phoned the property owner. “I did ask him to withdraw the notices of eviction,” she said. So far, Gall has made no guarantees that he would do so, but Kim said he’d agreed to “work toward a resolution over the next two weeks.” She said her office met with about 60 affected tenants on Oct. 9.

Kim said Mayor Ed Lee’s office also reached out to Gall to ask him to withdraw the notices of eviction.

“The ideal case scenario is to keep as many tenants in place as possible,” Kim said. “It could have really caused a lot of instability.”

The threat of that mass eviction would have impacted primarily students and artists living a stone’s throw from Twitter’s new mid-Market headquarters.

Two years ago, Mayor Ed Lee and other policymakers created a payroll tax break as an incentive to attract flourishing tech companies into the mid-Market area, a neighborhood that for years was marked by blight and some of the highest concentration of poverty citywide. As the Guardian recently reported, the corporate welfare stemming from these policies has soared, while the influx of tech startups and venture capital firms is transforming the neighborhood.

But the rising demand for commercial office space has brought the consequence of evictions, affecting not only residents but nonprofit organizations.

An important hearing was held at the Budget and Finance Committee yesterday about rising rents placing unbearable pressure on nonprofit organizations, many of which are located in mid-Market. Some cannot possibly run their operations anywhere else and continue to serve their clientele. Arts organizations are facing similar challenges affording rent in the increasingly pricey area.

“It’s turning from blighted to the hottest real-estate in town … and the unintended consequences are that people are being evicted from their homes and nonprofits are being evicted,” said Brad Erickson, executive director of Theatre Bay Area, who attended yesterday’s hearing. “It’s more than anybody can keep up with.”

He said Kim had been receptive to community concerns. Other supervisors have sought to address the issue too. At Tuesday’s Board meeting, Sup. David Campos noted, “Ellis Act evictions in San Francisco have reached a crisis level. I want to talk about a couple of things that we are doing to respond to the crisis.”

He said the Budget and Legislative Analyst would soon be issuing a report at his behest outlining the cumulative impact of Ellis Act evictions. He also noted that he’d been working with tenants’ rights advocates to design a way for the San Francisco Rent Board to better investigate tenant complaints alleging harassment by landlords. Campos also alluded to legislation that was in the works to address widespread real-estate speculation. “Unless we deal with speculation,” Campos said, “this crisis is not going to end.”

But in the case of 1049 and 1067 Market Street, at least, the tenants may soon be able to breathe a sigh of relief. “We’re hoping that this is a glimmer of good news,” Kim said.

Endorsements 2013

Michael Redmond

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October 1, 2013

125

We’re heading into a lackluster election on Nov. 5. The four incumbents on the ballot have no serious challengers and voter turnout could hit an all-time low. That’s all the more reason to read up on the issues, show up at the polls, and exert an outsized influence on important questions concerning development standards and the fate of the city’s waterfront, the cost of prescription drugs, and the long-term fiscal health of the city.

PROP. A — RETIREE HEALTH CARE TRUST FUND

YES

Note: This article has been corrected from an earlier version, which incorrectly stated that Prop A increases employee contributions to health benefits.

Throughout the United States, the long-term employee pension and health care obligations of government agencies have been used as wedge issues for anti-government activists to attack public employee unions, even in San Francisco. The fiscal concerns are real, but they’re often exaggerated or manipulated for political reasons.

That’s one reason why the consensus-based approach to the issue that San Francisco has undertaken in recent years has been so important, and why we endorse Prop. A, which safeguards the city’s Retiree Health Care Trust Fund and helps solve this vexing problem.

Following up on the consensus pension reform measure Prop. B, which increased how much new city employees paid for lifetime health benefits, this year’s Prop. A puts the fund into a lock-box to ensure it is there to fund the city’s long-term retiree health care obligations, which are projected at $4.4 billion over the next 30 years.

“The core of it says you can’t touch the assets until it’s fully funded,” Sup. Mark Farrell, who has taken a lead role on addressing the issue, told us. “The notion of playing political football with employee health care will be gone.”

The measure has the support of the entire Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco Labor Council. Progressive Sup. David Campos strongly supports the measure and he told us, “I think it makes sense and is something that goes beyond political divides.”

There are provisions that would allow the city to tap the fund in emergencies, but only after it is fully funded or if the mayor, controller, the Trust Board, and two-thirds of the Board of Supervisors signs off, a very high bar. So vote yes and let’s put this distracting issue behind us.

PROP. B — 8 WASHINGTON SPECIAL USE DISTRICT

NO, NO, NO!

Well-meaning people can arrive at different conclusions on the 8 Washington project, the waterfront luxury condo development that was approved by the Board of Supervisors last year and challenged with a referendum that became Prop. C. But Prop. B is simply the developer writing his own rules and exempting them from normal city review.

We oppose the 8 Washington project, as we explain in our next endorsement, but we can understand how even some progressive-minded people might think the developers’ $11 million affordable housing and $4.8 million transit impact payments to the city are worth letting this project slide through.

But Prop. B is a different story, and it’s something that those who believe in honesty, accountability, and good planning should oppose on principle, even if they support the underlying project. Contrary to the well-funded deceptions its backers are circulating, claiming this measure is about parks, Prop. B is nothing more than a developer and his attorneys preventing meaningful review and enforcement by the city of their vague and deceptive promises.

It’s hard to know where to begin to refute the wall of mendacity its backers have erected to fool voters into supporting this measure, but we can start with their claim that it will “open the way for new public parks, increased access to the Embarcadero Waterfront, hundreds of construction jobs, new sustainable residential housing and funding for new affordable housing.”

There’s nothing the public will get from Prop. B that it won’t get from Prop. C or the already approved 8 Washington project. Nothing. Same parks, same jobs, same housing, same funding formulas. But the developer would get an unprecedented free pass, with the measure barring discretionary review by the Planning Department — which involves planners using their professional judgment to decide if the developer is really delivering what he’s promising — forcing them to rubber-stamp the myriad details still being developed rather than acting as advocates for the general public.

“This measure would also create a new ‘administrative clearance’ process that would limit the Planning Director’s time and discretion to review a proposed plan for the Site,” is how the official ballot summary describes that provision to voters.

Proponents of the measure also claim “it empowers voters with the decision on how to best utilize our waterfront,” which is another deception. Will you be able to tweak details of the project to make it better, as the Board of Supervisors was able to do, making a long list of changes to the deal’s terms? No. You’re simply being given the opportunity to approve a 34-page initiative, written by crafty attorneys for a developer who stands to make millions of dollars in profits, the fine details of which most people will never read nor fully understand.

Ballot box budgeting is bad, but ballot box regulation of complex development deals is even worse. And if it works here, we can all expect to see more ballot measures by developers who want to write their own “special use district” rules to tie the hands of planning professionals.

When we ask proponents of this measure why they needed Prop. B, they claimed that Prop. C limited them to just talking about the project’s building height increases, a ridiculous claim for a well-funded campaign now filling mailers and broadcast ads with all kinds of misleading propaganda.

With more than $1 million and counting being funneled into this measure by the developer and his allies, this measure amounts to an outrageous, shameless lie being told to voters, which Mayors Ed Lee and Gavin Newsom have shamefully chosen to align themselves with over the city they were elected to serve.

As we said, people can differ on how they see certain development deals. But we should all agree that it’s recipe for disaster when developers can write every last detail of their own deals and limit the ability of professional planners to act in the public interest. Don’t just vote no, vote hell no, or NO, No, no!

PROPOSITION C — 8 WASHINGTON REFERENDUM

NO

San Francisco’s northeastern waterfront is a special place, particularly since the old Embarcadero Freeway was removed, opening up views and public access to the Ferry Building and other recently renovated buildings, piers, and walkways along the Embarcadero.

The postcard-perfect stretch is a major draw for visiting tourists, and the waterfront is protected by state law as a public trust and overseen by multiple government agencies, all of whom have prevented development of residential or hotel high-rises along the Embarcadero.

Then along came developer Simon Snellgrove, who took advantage of the Port of San Francisco’s desperate financial situation, offered to buy its Seawall Lot 351 and adjacent property from the Bay Club at 8 Washington St., and won approval to build 134 luxury condos up to 12 stories high, exceeding the city’s height limit at the site by 62 percent.

So opponents challenged the project with a referendum, a rarely used but important tool for standing up to deep-pocketed developers who can exert an outsized influence on politicians. San Franciscans now have the chance to demand a project more in scale with its surroundings.

The waterfront is supposed to be for everyone, not just those who can afford the most expensive condominiums in the city, costing an average of $5 million each. The high-end project also violates city standards by creating a parking space for every unit and an additional 200 spots for the Port, on a property with the best public transit access and options in the city.

This would set a terrible precedent, encouraging other developers of properties on or near the waterfront to also seek taller high-rises and parking for more cars, changes that defy decades of good planning work done for the sensitive, high-stakes waterfront.

The developers would have you believe this is a battle between rival groups of rich people (noting that many opponents come from the million-dollar condos adjacent to the site), or that it’s a choice between parks and the surface parking lot and ugly green fence that now surrounds the Bay Club (the owner of which, who will profit from this project, has resisted petitions to open up the site).

But there’s a reason why the 8 Washington project has stirred more emotion and widespread opposition that any development project in recent years, which former City Attorney Louise Renne summed up when she told us, “I personally feel rich people shouldn’t monopolize the waterfront.”

A poll commissioned by project opponents recently found that 63 percent of respondents think the city is building too much luxury housing, which it certainly is. But it’s even more outrageous when that luxury housing uses valuable public land along our precious waterfront, and it can’t even play by the rules in doing so.

Vote no and send the 8 Washington project back to the drawing board.

PROP. D — PRESCRIPTION DRUG PURCHASING

YES

San Francisco is looking to rectify a problem consumers face every day in their local pharmacy: How can we save money on our prescription drugs?

Prop. D doesn’t solve that problem outright, but it mandates our politicians start the conversation on reducing the $23 million a year the city spends on pharmaceuticals, and to urge state and federal governments to negotiate for better drug prices as well.

San Francisco spends $3.5 million annually on HIV treatment alone, so it makes sense that the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is the main proponent of Prop. D, and funder of the Committee on Fair Drug Pricing. Being diagnosed as HIV positive can be life changing, not only for the health effects, but for the $2,000-5,000 monthly drug cost.

Drug prices have gotten so out-of-control that many consumers take the less than legal route of buying their drugs from Canada, because our neighbors up north put limits on what pharmaceutical companies can charge, resulting in prices at least half those of the United States.

The high price of pharmaceuticals affects our most vulnerable, the elderly and the infirm. Proponents of Prop. D are hopeful that a push from San Francisco could be the beginning of a social justice movement in cities to hold pharmaceutical companies to task, a place where the federal government has abundantly failed.

Even though Obamacare would aid some consumers, notably paying 100 percent of prescription drug purchases for some Medicare patients, the cost to government is still astronomically high. Turning that around could start here in San Francisco. Vote yes on D.

ASSESSOR-RECORDER

CARMEN CHU

With residential and commercial property in San Francisco assessed at around $177 billion, property taxes bring in enough revenue to make up roughly 40 percent of the city’s General Fund. That money can be allocated for anything from after-school programs and homeless services to maintaining vital civic infrastructure.

Former District 4 Sup. Carmen Chu was appointed by Mayor Ed Lee to serve as Assessor-Recorder when her predecessor, Phil Ting, was elected to the California Assembly. Six months later, she’s running an office responsible for property valuation and the recording of official documents like property deeds and marriage licenses (about 55 percent of marriage licenses since the Supreme Court decision on Prop. 8 have been issued to same-sex couples).

San Francisco property values rose nearly 5 percent in the past year, reflecting a $7.8 billion increase. Meanwhile, appeals have tripled from taxpayers disputing their assessments, challenging Chu’s staff and her resolve. As a district supervisor, Chu was a staunch fiscal conservative whose votes aligned with downtown and the mayor, so our endorsement isn’t without some serious reservations.

That said, she struck a few notes that resonated with the Guardian during our endorsement interview. She wants to create a system to automatically notify homeowners when banks begin the foreclosure process, to warn them and connect them with helpful resources before it’s too late. Why hasn’t this happened before?

She’s also interested in improving system to capture lost revenue in cases where property transfers are never officially recorded, continuing work that Ting began. We support the idea of giving this office the tools it needs to go out there and haul in the millions of potentially lost revenue that property owners may owe the city, and Chu has our support for that effort.

CITY ATTORNEY

DENNIS HERRERA

Dennis Herrera doesn’t claim to be a progressive, describing himself as a good liberal Democrat, but he’s been doing some of the most progressive deeds in City Hall these days: Challenging landlords, bad employers, rogue restaurants, PG&E, the healthcare industry, opponents of City College of San Francisco, and those who fought to keep same-sex marriage illegal.

The legal realm can be more decisive than the political, and it’s especially effective when they work together. Herrera has recently used his office to compel restaurants to meet their health care obligations to employees, enforcing an earlier legislative gain. And his long court battle to defend marriage equality in California validated an act by the executive branch.

But Herrera has also shown a willingness and skill to blaze new ground and carry on important regulation of corporate players that the political world seemed powerless to touch, from his near-constant legal battles with PG&E over various issues to defending tenants from illegal harassment and evictions to his recent lawsuit challenging the Accreditation Commission of Community and Junior Colleges over its threats to CCSF.

We have issues with some of the tactics his office used in its aggressive and unsuccessful effort to remove Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi from office. But we understand that is was his obligation to act on behalf of Mayor Ed Lee, and we admire Herrera’s professionalism, which he also exhibited by opposing the Central Subway as a mayoral candidate yet defending it as city attorney.

“How do you use the power of the law to make a difference in people’s lives every single day?” was the question that Herrera posed to us during his endorsement interview, one that he says is always on his mind.

We at the Guardian have been happy to watch how he’s answered that question for nearly 11 years, and we offer him our strong endorsement.

TREASURER/TAX COLLECTOR

JOSE CISNEROS

It’s hard not to like Treasurer/Tax Collector Jose Cisneros. He’s charming, smart, compassionate, and has run this important office well for nine years, just the person that we need there to implement the complicated, voter-approved transition to a new form of business tax, a truly gargantuan undertaking.

Even our recent conflicts with Cisneros — stemming from frustrations that he won’t assure the public that he’s doing something about hotel tax scofflaw Airbnb (see “Into thin air,” Aug. 6) — are dwarfed by our understanding of taxpayer privacy laws and admiration that Cisneros ruled against Airbnb and its ilk in the first place, defying political pressure to drop the rare tax interpretation.

So Cisneros has the Guardian’s enthusiastic endorsement. He also has our sympathies for having to create a new system for taxing local businesses based on their gross receipts rather than their payroll costs, more than doubling the number of affected businesses, placing them into one of eight different categories, and applying complex formulas assessing how much of their revenues comes from in the city.

“This is going to be the biggest change to taxes in a generation,” Cisneros told us of the system that he will start to implement next year, calling the new regime “a million times more complicated than the payroll tax.”

Yet Cisneros has still found time to delve into the controversial realm of short-term apartment sublets. Although he’s barred from saying precisely what he’s doing to make Airbnb pay the $1.8 million in Transient Occupancy Taxes that we have shown the company is dodging, he told us, “We are here to enforce the law and collect the taxes.”

And Cisneros has continued to expand his department’s financial empowerment programs such as Bank on San Francisco, which help low-income city residents establish bank accounts and avoid being gouged by the high interest rates of check cashing outlets. That and similar programs are now spreading to other cities, and we’re encouraged to see Cisneros enthusiastically exporting San Francisco values, which will be helped by his recent election as president of the League of California Cities.

SUPERVISOR, DIST. 4

KATY TANG

With just six months on the job after being appointed by Mayor Ed Lee, Sup. Katy Tang faces only token opposition in this race. She’s got a single opponent, accountant Ivan Seredni, who’s lived in San Francisco for three years and decided to run for office because his wife told him to “stop complaining and do something,” according to his ballot statement.

Tang worked in City Hall as a legislative aide to her predecessor, Carmen Chu, for six years. She told us she works well with Sups. Mark Farrell and Scott Wiener, who help make up the board’s conservative flank. In a predominantly Chinese district, where voters tend to be more conservative, Tang is a consistently moderate vote who grew up in the district and speaks Mandarin.

Representing the Sunset District, Tang, who is not yet 30 years old, faces some new challenges. Illegal “in-law” units are sprouting up in basements and backyards throughout the area. This presents the thorny dilemma of whether to crack down on unpermitted construction — thus hindering a source of housing stock that is at least within reach for lower-income residents — look the other way, or “legalize” the units in an effort to mitigate potential fire hazards or health risks. Tang told us one of the greatest concerns named by Sunset residents is the increasing cost of living in San Francisco; she’s even open to accepting a little more housing density in her district to deal with the issue.

Needless to say, the Guardian hasn’t exactly seen eye-to-eye with the board’s fiscally conservative supervisors, including Tang and her predecessor, Chu. We’re granting Tang an endorsement nevertheless, because she strikes us as dedicated to serving the Sunset over the long haul, and in touch with the concerns of young people who are finding it increasingly difficult to gain a foothold in San Francisco.

Mayor Lee responds to political furor with more funding to fight evictions

Sasha Cuttler

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September 30, 2013

136

We’re not sure whether it was the high-profile recent protests against the eviction of the Lee family, our well-read “City Hall must address rising rents” editorial or eviction and gentrification coverage last week, our earlier focus on record eviction rates, or just the growing view that City Hall is too friendly to landlords and neglectful of tenants, but the Mayor’s Office has finally awoken to the biggest issue facing this city.

With skyrocketing rents — and with increasingly common efforts by the landlords of rent-controlled apartments to take advantage of that market by forcing out their tenants — Mayor Lee this afternoon announced that he’s tripling funding to fight illegal Ellis Act evictions, making populist statements along the way.

Now, spending an additional $700,000 to fight greedy, deep-pocketed landlords is not exactly going to change the playing field, but it’s a nice gesture and an indicator that Mayor Lee is starting to notice the problem. Hopefully, with pressure by progressive politicians and activists, this will be just the first of many such actions.

His press releases follows in it entirety:

*** PRESS RELEASE ***

MAYOR LEE ANNOUNCES ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FOR EVICTION PREVENTION IN SAN FRANCISCO

San Francisco to increase resources to support residents and families affected by illegal Ellis Act evictions and releases Eviction Prevention Funding from Housing Trust Fund

San Francisco, CA—Mayor Edwin M. Lee announced San Francisco will triple the amount of funding to prevent illegal Ellis Act evictions and that the City will release $700,000 in funding for other eviction prevention services from the Housing Trust Fund.

“San Francisco must remain a viable place to live and work for people at all levels of the economic spectrum,” said Mayor Lee. “That’s why I am providing additional resources to stop unlawful evictions and provide tenant counseling for our residents, so that San Francisco remains a City for the 100 percent.”

The Human Services Agency (HSA) currently provides nearly $8 million in homeless prevention and eviction defense services, an increase of $1.3 million from last year’s budget. In this year’s budget, the City was providing nearly $125,000 to fund free legal advice and represent 55 San Francisco families who have been affected by illegal Ellis Act eviction threats. Today, Mayor Lee tripled the amount of funding with an additional $250,000, which will immediately be available to eligible organizations that provide Ellis Act prevention legal work and will help more families and people at all levels of the economic spectrum remain in San Francisco.

“Providing resources to stop unlawful evictions has proven to be one of the most effective strategies to prevent displacement and homelessness in our City,” said Trent Rhorer, Director of the San Francisco Human Services Agency. “This additional $250,000 will help keep San Francisco families in their homes.”

The Mayor’s Office of Housing will also provide $700,000, from the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, to fund tenant counseling services. This is a 63 percent increase in funding and brings the total amount to more than $2.3 million in eviction prevention services from the Mayor’s Office of Housing. These additional resources will be distributed to community based organizations specifically expanding legal representation for individuals facing eviction; rental assistance to individuals and families who are currently homeless or are struggling to keep their current rental housing; and to provide outreach to San Franciscans to better inform them about their legal rights.

The Mayor’s Office of Housing has prioritized eviction prevention services and funds activities including legal services, tenant counseling, rental assistance, move-in assistance, know your rights trainings, and other types of tenant support. Services are offered through a diverse group of community based organizations that reach San Francisco’s many communities including seniors, people with disabilities, immigrants, the homeless and families.

The HSA will issue an ‘Invitation to Bid’ this week so eligible organizations can apply and use the HSA funding to expand their legal services in order for them to be available to vulnerable tenants within 30 days. It is anticipated that the additional HSA funds will help at least 150 households receive legal advice and representation.

Are Yee’s anti-tenant votes about courting contributions from landlords?

Sasha Cuttler

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September 4, 2013

30

Are Yee’s anti-tenant votes about courting contributions from landlords?

Sen. Leland Yee has never been a vote that renters could count on, from his days on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to his representation of San Francisco’s westside in the California Legislature. But now that he’s preparing a statewide campaign for Secretary of State, tenant advocates say he’s more squirrely that ever.

They’ve been rankled by a couple of key Yee votes this year — and by Yee’s apparent unwillingness to engage with them or explain any concerns he might have — particularly Yee’s vote yesterday against legislation that would allow cities and counties to reinstate requirements that developers include some affordable rental units in their housing projects, which the California Supreme Court took away in 2009 with its infamous Palmer v. Los Angeles decision.

That legislation, Assembly Bill 1229, was narrowly approved by the California Senate yesterday despite an aggressive opposition campaign by landlords and developers who initially got overwise supportive Democrats to take a walk and abstain from voting, although tenants groups were finally able to stiffen enough spines to win passage. It now awaits the signature of Gov. Jerry Brown, who hasn’t yet taken a position on the measure.

“It directly overturns [the Supreme Court’s ruling on local inclusionary housing laws] and puts us right back where we were before the Palmer decision. It’s a hugely significant affordable rental housing measure,” Dean Preston, head of the statewide Tenants Together, told the Guardian.

But Yee, who provided the Guardian with a written statement in response to our questions, dismisses the bill’s significance: “SB 1229 is a piecemeal solution, offering a chance at lotteries in housing developments scattered randomly throughout the state. I’m proud to stand by my record of supporting effective legislation to provide affordable housing, supporting inclusionary housing and protecting rent control.”

Preston told us the statement “makes no sense and it doesn’t explain why he supported the same thing two years ago that he now opposes,” referring to Sen. Mark Leno’s SB 184, which died in the Senate two years ago.

But Preston did say that he’s happy to hear Yee explain himself, something that he’s been unwilling to do so far this year, including on his vote against Leno’s SB 603, who would have created sanctions for landlords that illegally withhold security deposits from their renters. It stalled in the Senate back in May.

“SB 603 would have invited lawsuits against landlords throughout the state, honest and otherwise, which would inevitably lead to property owners taking units off the market and driving up prices,” is how Yee now explains that vote to the Guardian.

But Preston said that explanation also doesn’t make sense, noting that Leno’s bill is already law in Alabama. “There’s no disincentive whatsoever for landlords to illegally withhold deposits,” Preston said, noting the he and other activists have fruitlessly tried for months to reach Yee on the issue. “It’s good to finally hear any explanation for his vote, months later.”

“There’s a pattern emerging with him where he won’t even explain his votes,” Preston said, noting that Yee “is running for statewide office and he’s trying to appeal to landlords and developers.”

Indeed, Yee will need to raise buckets of cash to reach a statewide audience, and he certainly understands who has the money these days. But Yee denies that he is carrying water for landlords, citing other pro-tenant votes: “I’ve always been proud to fight for tenants. Earlier this year, I cast the deciding vote for SB 391 which directs an estimated $720 million in state funds annually to the construction, rehabilitation and continued preservation of low and affordable affordable housing for everyone, families, seniors, veterans, people with disabilities, the unemployed, and the homeless. I spent years fighting for redevelopment agencies, one of only three Democrats to do so, which put a billion dollars a year into providing affordable housing throughout the state. These are programs that have been proven to be effective, an example of good results rather than just good intentions.”

UPDATE 3pm: Leno just returned our call from the floor of the Senate, where he said that Yee mischaracterized SB 603. “Those are the talking point of the industry and they’re just plain wrong,” Leno told us.

Leno said he modified the bill significantly to win support, including removing provisions that would have required landlords to keep deposits in separate accounts and pay interest on them. “All that remained is the penalty for a landlord that is was determined by the courts had illegally kept a deposit,” Leno told us. “And it still stalled. It’s the power of that lobby.”

Forget the Willie Brown Bay Bridge

Michael Redmond

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September 3, 2013

73

EDITORIAL As the California Legislature prepares to wrap up before fall recess, a resolution is working its way through the approval process to rename the western span of the Bay Bridge the “Willie L. Brown Jr. Bridge.”

Brown, who formerly served as mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California Assembly, is known for boasting about his hobnobbing with the rich and famous in his San Francisco Chronicle column, “Willie’s World.” But to longtime progressive San Franciscans who spent decades trying to stem the tide of gentrification, he was the powerful figure that rolled out the welcome mat for high-end developers and corporate interests, whose interests in San Francisco revolved around profit alone.

As mayor, Brown presided over land-use policies that resulted in high-end developments at a time when evictions were rampant, a trend that rings familiar in today’s tech-saturated San Francisco. Once, when pressed on the idea that his approach was making the city increasingly unaffordable, Brown’s famous retort was: “If you don’t make $50,000 a year in San Francisco, then you shouldn’t live here.”

It’s not just Brown’s insensitivity to struggling tenants, deep ties to corporate interests and high-end real-estate developers, or continued behind-the-scenes influence in San Francisco politics that cause us to squirm when we think about the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge bearing this politician’s name. There’s also the key question of whether Bay Area residents actually want to see this happen — and, given Brown’s historic role as a divisive figure, the idea that there is universal support for such an idea is laughable.

A legislative analysis presented to the Assembly Committee on Transportation a few weeks ago noted that lawmakers actually came up with ground rules for big decisions like whether a bridge ought to be named after someone, to “promote fairness.” The rules stipulate that such a proposal “must reflect a community consensus” — and guess what? Even Brown’s editors over at the Chronicle issued a June editorial opposing the idea.

Not only that, but proposals like this are only supposed to come from representatives of the district where the thing being renamed is located — yet this scheme came from Assemblymember Isadore Hall, a Democrat from Compton. But despite clear failure to adhere to these basic rules, only a single committee member voted against naming the bridge after Brown.

Interestingly enough, the bill even includes a request for Caltrans to determine the cost of posting signs commemorating Brown, which would evidently be funded by donations from unspecified private sources.

If the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is going to be named after anyone, we agree that the honor should be reserved for beloved 19th-century San Francisco eccentric Joshua Abraham Norton, the Scotsman who proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States in 1859 and printed his own currency.

So far, a Change.org petition calling on Gov. Jerry Brown to name it the Emperor Norton Bay Bridge has garnered 1,800 signatures. “He was a champion of racial and religious unity, an advocate for women’s suffrage [and] a defender of the people,” the petition notes. That sounds more like something motorists can be proud of when they drive back and forth across the bay.

Mission eviction leaves activists without a home base

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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August 28, 2013

101

Mission residents who abruptly lost their battle against eviction Aug. 27 were given one last chance to retrieve belongings from their loft before their locks were changed by the landlord and sheriff.

The group of artists and activists occupied a 5,300 square foot space on the second floor of what’s known as the 17 Reasons Building, located at 3265 17th Street. They had been tipped off that the eviction might take place yesterday afternoon, after a request for a stay was denied during a morning visit to the courthouse. They headed straight home from there.

When they reached their loft, tenants Chema Hernández Gil and Alisha Pelton encountered an eight-officer sheriff escort with the building’s owner and a locksmith. “Do we have a chance to take our stuff out?” Hernández Gil asked the sheriff’s deputies, as he photographed the scene.

An officer permitted the pair to enter the unit for one minute to collect essentials. For everything else, they would need to contact the landlord within 15 days to arrange a time for pick-up.

Pelton’s sixty seconds were spent retrieving a small bench, a pot, and kitchen utensils. Gil emerged with a bicycle fork and a wooden poster for Food Not Bombs, a volunteer movement that provides free vegetarian meals to the hungry. Hernández Gil feared that much of the food left behind in the space, which served as the organization’s cookhouse, would spoil in his absence.

The eviction has been pending since the building was purchased by Rick Holman, head of Asher Insights, for approximately $16 million in early April. Not a week passed, according to Hernández Gil, before Holman made moves to evict the group, comprised of several collectives including Food Not Bombs, In the Works, and Rincon. “He’s told other tenants that the square footage is worth three times what we’re paying,” explained Hernández Gil.

Chris Cook, an organizer with tenant-activist group Eviction Free Summer, said “from the start, since [Rick Holman] bought this building, he’s made it clear that his intention was to get rid of folks that stood in the way of making this the profit center that he was hoping for.” Holman did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

Holman’s eviction notice cited breach of lease for “unpermitted subletting,” but Hernández Gil said the building’s previous owner had authorized the arrangement for two years. At its peak, roughly 16 tenants were using the space, half of which was available as a venue for free community events.

In the months following the filing, however, the tenants’ ranks had dwindled. Over the summer, they faced harassment from their landlord, who changed exterior locks without notice and posted security guards requiring a California ID for access to the building, effectively blocking entry to residents from out-of-state.

“What’s infuriating to many of us in the community,” argued Cook, “is that many landlords are seeing that it is okay to just uproot people and totally disrupt their lives … This is something that has a concrete human impact.”

Eviction Free Summer activists held a rally on Tuesday night in support of building tenants. A Facebook posting for the event, which floated the question “Is Thrift Town Next?” caused a bit of a stir online, prompting a response from Thrift Town’s President and CFO, Lane Steinmetz.

In an August 28th letter posted to the group’s Facebook page, Steinmetz said the store had “just signed a renewal agreement for five more years,” and that it has “been very pleased with the actions by our new building owner to improve the safety and security of [the] property.”

“We don’t have any problem with [Eviction Free Summer’s] message. We just don’t want to be looped in on it because our lease is secure. The landlord’s been fair and good to us,” co-owner and Vice President of Marketing for Thrift Town, Wendy Steinmetz replied when the Guardian asked for clarification. She said references to Holman’s improvements were not related to the eviction.

Hernández Gil asked sheriff’s deputies at the scene why he hadn’t been served with the advance notice mandated by law. Officer Miramontes said he didn’t know the specifics of the case, but commented that evictions like this have been on the rise. The Sheriff’s Department, he said, oversees 20-25 actions of this sort per week.

The only formal 5-day notice came on August 7, but that eviction was postponed when a September 18 hearing was scheduled for the tenants’ relief of forfeiture action. Gil didn’t expect another attempt before then. The group’s legal team has been particularly concerned with minimizing disruption to one tenant who has advanced AIDS and is unemployed. As of yesterday, he is also homeless.

“By evicting tenants for profit, speculator landlords like Rick Holman and his wife/associate Toby Levy are playing a truly destructive role in the community. There has to be a social and economic price for landlords who do this,” Cook said. “Holman, Levy and others cannot pretend to care about this city and this community and then uproot people like this and effectively boot them out of the city altogether given how utterly insane rents have become.”

Several other tenants met up with Hernández Gil and Pelton as they exited through the rear of the building onto Capp Street. The group, lead by Hernández Gil, wheeled two shopping carts of possessions southbound to the San Francisco Tenants Union headquarters, where they planned to evaluate their options.

Meanwhile, Pelton loaded her few salvaged items into a ZipCar and wondered how she’d gain access to the rest of her belongings. “We’ve been locked out for months and months at this point, why should we believe the landlord will let us in now?”

When asked where she was headed, she offered up what’s becoming an all-to-familiar last resort for displaced San Franciscans. To find something affordable, she said, “we had to move to the East Bay.”

Compromises deliver results

Michael Redmond

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August 13, 2013

5

OPINION When Guardian Editor Steven T. Jones asked me to respond to his recent columns (“Chiu becomes City Hall’s go-to guy for solving tough problems“, 7/23/13; “Chiu: Centrist Compromiser, Effective Legislator, or Both,” 7/30/13), I reflected on how our Board of Supervisors’ 2013 accomplishments exemplifies the lessons and rewards of working together.

After several decades of intense fights between TIC owners and tenants, I asked both sides to sit down, share perspectives, and brainstorm beyond the impasse. To our surprise, when TIC owners shared their struggles and offered to pay a fee to condo convert, tenant advocates agreed to finally support conversions as long as their core principle of preventing evictions — which I strongly shared — was addressed.

After a decade of failed CEQA reform attempts, the pundits predicted an epic battle between developers and neighbors this year. The breakthrough for unanimous support occurred when both sides acknowledged to me that real neighborhood input and predictability in the planning process are not mutually exclusive, and progressive leaders wanted to ensure that pedestrian, bike, affordable housing, and public projects are not delayed.

After years of controversy, CPMC/Sutter and the coalition of dozens of community-based organizations deadlocked over how to rebuild the Cathedral Hill and St. Luke’s hospital campuses. After exposing financial documents challenging the original proposal, I worked with colleagues for six months at a mediation table that refashioned a CPMC plan to rebuild those 21st century hospitals the right way.

While each story is unique, what all of these accomplishments — along with recently balanced budgets, business tax reform, and pension reform — have in common is hard work and extreme patience by dedicated San Franciscans seeking creative solutions.

As Board President, my job is to build consensus among our diverse supervisors and deliver results. When I first came to City Hall, I asked my colleagues to move beyond past politics that had magnified differences. I am proud that today’s Board has the highest approval ratings in a decade, as we do more together working through our differences.

At the negotiation table, it’s essential to stand firm on core values. My vision for San Francisco has been of a city that protects tenants and families; creates good jobs across the economic spectrum; offers high quality public services with Muni, our schools, and our parks; and embraces our diversity, our immigrants, our seniors, and those who have been historically disenfranchised.

When we can’t always find creative win-wins, it’s still important to fight for what’s right. I’ve taken my political lumps championing the right of noncitizen parents to vote in school board elections, standing up for workers requesting family-friendly workplaces, and taking on a Yellow Pages industry dumping millions of phone books on our streets.

When I hear criticisms of “compromise,” I reflect that the most important federal legislation in recent years — from the Civil Rights Act to the Affordable Care Act, Wall Street reform to comprehensive immigration reform — were also criticized as “compromises.” Critics often forget the big picture: by incorporating different views, reforms actually get done, and if we wait forever for the perfect policy, people will suffer.

San Franciscans are at our best when we unite around shared values — from marriage equality to universal health care to environmental protections. We still have plenty of challenges: housing affordability, struggling workforces, family flight, public transit.

Let’s continue to work together to show the rest of the country how our city can govern.

David Chiu, who represents District 3 (North Beach, Chinatown, Nob Hill), is serving his second term as president of the Board of Supervisors.

Boxes in space

Michael Redmond

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August 13, 2013

38

rebecca@sfbg.com

On a recent weeknight, a group of volunteers met up at a warehouse space in SoMa to hash out plans for The Learning Shelter, a project that has attracted hefty donations and enthusiastic volunteers but lacks a permanent home base. The brainchild of Marc Roth, a maker-movement enthusiast, the idea is to give homeless people a boost toward a brighter future by teaching them how to make things with 3D printers, and other useful skills.

Eight large shipping containers, on loan from supportive organizations, are currently sitting in a gated lot adjacent to the 14,000-square-foot warehouse, which housed a community-based project called [freespace] in June and July.

Roth and his core group of volunteers have plans to retrofit each container to be a “shop in a box” — a mobile classroom, outfitted with whiteboards and enough juice to power the Cubes (a brand name for 3-D printers), CNC routers, laser cutters, and other maker toys. The vision is to use those retrofitted shipping containers to lead three-month intensives in technical skill instruction for up to 30 adult students without homes at a time.

Roth is currently working at a laser company startup, but it wasn’t long ago that he was among his project’s target population. He moved to San Francisco from Las Vegas in September of 2011 and slept in his car (which was “part of the plan,” he explained) while struggling to piece together a new life in the Bay Area.

After one job opportunity fell through, he landed a gig cooking pizzas on Treasure Island. But the long shifts kept him on his feet all day, and aggravated a health condition that causes nerve damage. With few options and a disability sending his health into a downward spiral, it was only a matter of months before he hit rock bottom and checked into a homeless shelter run by the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

It was near 5th and Bryant streets in SoMa. Just a few blocks away, Roth discovered TechShop, a do-it-yourself community workshop that describes itself as being “on a mission to democratize access to the tools of innovation.” An atypical member of the homeless population, Roth had worked as a programmer in the past, and had an itch to learn laser cutting. So he shelled out some of his last dollars for a TechShop membership.

At first, he was grateful just to have found a place where he could tinker for about 10 hours a day while sitting down, since his health problems were still sapping his energy. “I’d never heard of any of these machines,” Roth said. But soon, he was voraciously teaching himself to use them. “When they showed me what a water jet was and what it could do, the hair on the back of my neck stood up,” he said of the device that uses high-pressure water for cutting. “This was Disneyland, multiplied.”

Today, Roth is housed (for now, but he’s still seeking a permanent place to rent) and teaches multiple workshops at TechShop. Yet he’s acutely aware that there are others who were under the roof of St. Vincent with him who still wake up every day to a harsh and destitute life on the streets.

During his time there, he said he befriended several people and got a sense of their innate curiosity and creativity. “I was dragging people with me to the TechShop,” Roth recalled. “In my little group of five to six people, we had a couple ideas for inventions.” With the skills that could be mastered at the community workshop, “they could actually go out and get a part-time job.”

DIY BOOTSTRAPS

Of course, there are obvious barriers preventing the vast majority of San Francisco’s homeless population from following Roth’s example of just going out there and doing-it-yourself.

People who lack income generally cannot afford training programs to learn new skills. Nor is shelter ever a sure bet: Homeless advocates have reported that it can take eight hours of waiting around in line just to reserve a shelter bed through the lottery system, making it difficult even for would-be job hunters to devote time to much else — let alone the challenges presented by addiction, behavioral health problems, or a lack of access to nutritious food or bathing facilities.

Roth’s vision is to combine temporary housing with a 90-day training program, so that up to 30 individuals can participate in intensive trainings in how to use maker tools. His plan is to partner with homeless service providers who already offer basic computer-training courses, and enlist their help in screening for candidates who’ve demonstrated an interest in technical skills and stand to benefit the most.

To date, Roth has collected several Cubes donated by 3D Systems, eight shipping containers loaned by ReAllocate and Ekology, and struck a partnership with a similar project that seeks to convert retired Muni buses to bathing facilities for the homeless.

But things are still coming together, and the looming question (“the elephant in the room,” as one meeting participant put it) is location. The use of shipping containers as the basis for classroom design is intentional and a key element of the plan, Roth said, because the only surefire guarantee for viability in astronomically pricey San Francisco is to build something that can be taken apart and transported somewhere else if necessary. When economic barriers prevent cash-poor idealists from carving out a physical space, they find ways to adapt.

High on Roth’s wish list is finding a church to partner with, since he believes religious establishments can more easily gain residential permitting. And it almost goes without saying that there is a crowd-funding video pitch in his future.

“When I moved into the homeless shelter,” Roth said, “I thought it would be my secret until I died.”

Now, in a city where the idea of harnessing a powerful narrative to fuel crowd-funding campaigns is practically a way of life in some circles, he’s relating that experience to anyone willing to listen. Venture Beat, a magazine that chronicles tech culture, profiled Roth in an article that ran earlier this year (“Homeless to Hacker,” May 16, 2013).

Ilana Lipsett, an organizer who helped launch [freespace], read about Roth’s project and sent the article around to her co-conspirators, saying it seemed to complement their endeavor perfectly. Soon Roth was dubbed a “[freespace] fellow,” his shipping containers had found a home in the lot next door, and one of [freespace]’s final acts before its lease ran out at the end of July was to host a hackathon for The Learning Shelter.

BIG TECH, LITTLE TECH

The buzzy word hackathon is sometimes used to refer to different things; in this case, it was an extended brainstorming session organized over the Internet. Some 40 volunteers attended that event one July weekend, and wound up forming committees dedicated to tasks like promotion, workshop instruction, or soliciting donations.

The foundational reason for [freespace]’s existence was to host a series of hackathons under the umbrella theme “civic hacking,” to inspire a kind of extended collaboration-fest that would produce projects to benefit civic life in some way.

Its doors were open to all, “and you had people who had lived on the street interacting with people who worked in tech companies,” Lipsett recalled of some events hosted at the 14,000-square-foot warehouse space.

Can something with staying power emerge from this short-lived experiment? The concept behind [freespace] was to show what could be accomplished if a dedicated space was provided, and permission granted, for the civic hackers to run wild with their ideas. Emerging from the 60-day experiment was a community garden, a bike-sharing project, a plethora of visual art and a core of volunteers committed to making The Learning Shelter a reality.

[Freespace] came about when the landlords who own the spacious warehouse, a former sewing factory, agreed to rent it to the core group of volunteers for $1 during the month of June. (For the month of July, the tenants crowd-funded $24,000 and used $10,000 of it to pay the rent.) But now, [freespace] is technically homeless, because the space isn’t really free. In fact, the 14,000-square-foot SoMa warehouse is downright unaffordable to the group of makers and idealists who fervently believe they can better the lives of homeless people by teaching them skills that are in demand in the Bay Area’s changing economy. Lipsett says [freespace] will continue in some form, and Roth is still looking for collaborators to help elevate The Learning Shelter, but it’s struggle in a city where the economic forces unleashed by big tech is making things harder for little tech.

Alerts: August 14 – 20, 2013

Michael Redmond

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August 13, 2013

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WEDNESDAY 14

“Untitled” Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF. tinyurl.com/untitled814. 7-10pm, $5. The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts is kicking off one of its new exhibitions, “Untitled,” featuring pieces covering topics such as migration, intervention, documentation, and the interpretation of family and societal dreams. Work by artists such as Favianna Rodriguez, Carina Lomeli, Indira Urrutia, and Marc Hors will be up until Sept. 14. Chamber music band Classical Revolution will perform during the opening reception.

SATURDAY 17

World’s Largest Drag King Contest 550 Space, 550 Barneveld Ave, SF. www.sfdragkingcontest.com. 10pm, $15 to $35. DragStrip Productions presents the 18th Annual San Francisco Drag King Contest. Expect burlesque, lip-synching, mud-wrestling, and gender-bending stage acts judged by a panel of local drag celebrities. DJ after-party to follow the crowning of San Francisco’s next drag king. Fudgie Frottage and Sister Roma co-emcee. All benefits will go toward Pets Are Wonderful Support (PAWS).

Save CCSF: Lobby Committee Meeting Main Public Library, Mary Louise Strong Conference room, 100 Larkin. wendypalestine@gmail.com. 1-4pm, free. City College is slated to lose its accreditation in July of 2014, and Save CCSF is working to reverse that decision. The group has staged protests and Occupy-style actions, but also plans to lobby politicians about saving the college. Join them in planning how to save City College from its accreditors.

SUNDAY 18

Tenant Union Hall of Fame and auction San Francisco Tenants Union, 558 Capp, SF. www.sftu.org. 1-5pm, free. The San Francisco Tenants Union’s annual Hall of Fame ceremony recognizes tenants who have made notable contributions to the rights of tenants in San Francisco. This year the TU honors longtime volunteer Jim Faye, Tommi Avicolli Mecca and Sara Shortt from the Housing Rights Committee, and former Guardian Editor Tim Redmond. Join them for a BBQ and surf over to their website to scope out their silent auction, where one can bid on everything from a lunch with a supervisor to a sailboat ride.

NSA Surveillance and US: What We Know and What We Can Do About It Martin Luther King Room, Unitarian-Universalist Center, 1197 Franklin, SF. sf99percent@gmail.com. 3:45-6pm, free. This workshop will feature short presentations about NSA surveillance by attorneys and organizers, followed by breakout groups meeting to plan actions, write materials, and network. Hosted by the Unitarian Universalists for Peace-SF and the SF 99 Percent Coalition.

Alerts: August 7 – 13, 2013

Michael Redmond

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August 6, 2013

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WEDNESDAY 7

Whither Modern Times? 2919 24th St., SF. moderntimesfuture@gmail.com. 7-9pm, free. Venerable indie bookstore Modern Times is in flux, but its collective members have been hosting town hall meetings to envision, as a community, what the future holds. Feel compelled to chime in? Are you a skilled event organizer or fundraiser? Join the conversation, bring a friend, or help spread the word that this beloved, lefty bookstore needs a boost.

THURSDAY 8

Boing Boing and the Beats Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St., SF. www.thecjm.org. 6:30-8pm, $12. Presented in conjunction with the exhibit Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg, this panel talk, exploring the Beats Influence in Underground Publishing, will be moderated by David Pescovitz of Boing Boing. Panelists include Ron Turner of Last Gasp Books; RU Sirius of Mondo 2000 cyberpunk magazine, V.Vale of RE/Search Publications and Layla Gibbon of Maximum RocknRoll.

From MLK to Trayvon Redstone Building, 2940 16th St, SF. 7-9pm, free. Award-winning columnist Gary Younge, who writes for the Guardian UK and The Nation and authored The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream, will lead this discussion on past and modern movements against racism. In the wake of the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, people have taken to the streets nationwide for rallies and vigils. Now, momentum is building for an upcoming rally in D.C. commemorating MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. What are the parallels between now and then?

Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave Berk. Lapena.org/events. 6pm, free with donation requested. This speaking tour on the military strategy of counterinsurgency will feature Kristian Williams, author of Hurt: Notes on Torture in a Modern Democracy, and Kevin Van Meter, co-editor of the collection Uses of a Whirlwind. The discussion will revolve around essays published in Life During Wartime, exploring U.S. counterinsurgency tactics.

SATURDAY 10

Eviction Free Summer: Landlords in the crosshairs San Francisco Tenants Union, 558 Capp Street, SF. ellishurtsseniors.org. 10:30am, free. Eviction Free Summer is a newly formed band of activists that has developed the unnerving habit of noisily visiting landlords who’ve sent out eviction notices. They would like you to join them. On this day they plan to target property owners who are using the Ellis Act to evict Jeremy, a disabled senior living with AIDS who’s lived in the Castro for over four decades.

SUNDAY 11

Trip out on the future with Jaron Lanier Diesel Bookstore, 5433 College, Oakl. tinyurl.com/whowns. 3pm, free. Author Jaron Lanier will be present for a discussion and book signing of his new work, Who Owns the Future? In it, the writer, computer scientist, and classical music composer explores the rise of digital networks as it relates to the recession and the decimation of the middle class.

Into thin air

Sasha Cuttler

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August 6, 2013

97

By Steven T. Jones and Parker Yesko

Airbnb is an audacious corporation, particularly in San Francisco, the city where it’s headquartered and where its business model works best. This city is tech-savvy and popular with tourists, but hotels here are expensive, while rent-controlled apartments are still affordable, creating a strong incentive to rent those rooms at a profit through Airbnb.

The problem is that its business model is basically illegal. Its users violate five different sections of laws in San Francisco, from planning codes to tax laws to rent control. Disrupting complex regulatory systems developed over decades, Airbnb has managed to unite traditional adversaries against it: both the Hotel Council of San Francisco and the hotel workers of UNITE-HERE Local 2, both the landlords from the San Francisco Apartment Association and the renters from the San Francisco Tenants Union.

But Airbnb and its young founders just don’t seem to give a fuck about any of that. Sure, most of its hosts in San Francisco are violating their leases and land use laws, and a string of them have gotten evicted as a result. But Airbnb is rolling in cash, with Forbes now valuing the company in the billions, with a B, thanks to the double-digit percentage it takes from every transaction, low overheard costs, and venture capitalists who can’t seem to throw enough money at the company.

When the San Francisco Tax Collector’s Office last year held hearings on whether Airbnb and similar companies must collect the city’s transient occupancy tax (TOT), the surcharge of up to 16 percent that hotels charge to guests, the company rallied dozens of its local hosts to oppose the taxation and even enlisted the support of Mayor Ed Lee, who shares a financial benefactor with Airbnb: venture capitalist Ron Conway.

It wasn’t enough to overcome the clarity of city tax laws and the equity arguments made by the hotels, and the city ruled that Airbnb and/or its hosts are responsible for collecting the TOT. So what did the company do? Nothing. It just kept making money and stiffing the city, and when the Guardian wrote about how it appears to be shirking that annual tax bill of nearly $2 million (see “Airbnb isn’t sharing,” 3/19/13), the company and its consultants simply refused to answer our calls or questions — then and now, for months.

As this story was going to press, the company did finally send us a prepared statement that was more self-promotional than responsive to our questions, but it included the line, “Airbnb is committed to working with the City on policies that make San Francisco stronger, promote innovation, and ensure the sharing economy continues to grow.”

Really, you almost have to admire these guys’ chutzpah. Except for the fact that Airbnb and similar companies — VRBO, Roomorama, HomeAway, countless new upstarts, as well the DIY option of Craigslist — are exacerbating the city’s housing crisis by taking thousands of apartments off the rental market, driving up rents, and causing evictions in the process.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu stepped in to mediate this mess early this year, trying to create legislation that would legalize and regulate the activities of Airbnb and other so-called “shareable housing” companies. But hopes of introducing something in the spring turned into a goal of midsummer, then by the August recess, and now sometime this fall, hopefully.

In the meantime, the money keeps rolling into Airbnb, complaints against it mount (here and in other big cities), its tax bill goes unpaid, and the landlords and tenants, the hoteliers and the workers, are all left to wonder why the city can’t or won’t enforce its own laws.

CHIU’S CHALLENGE

Chiu may have met his match with Airbnb. He has forged compromises on some of the toughest legislative challenges that City Hall has wrestled with this year — including condo conversions, CEQA reform, and the CPMC hospital deal — each time finding the acceptable middle ground between the progressive and moderate supervisors and constituencies.

His approach to this one sounds similarly centrist, with Chiu supporting the concept of shareable housing but understanding the myriad problems that Airbnb is presenting in complex cities. He neither sounds Lee’s unqualified boosterism of Airbnb nor does he fret about its impact on the housing market as much as its critics.

“I do not think shareable housing is either the cause or the solution to the housing crisis,” Chiu told us.

He’s striving for something between New York City’s total ban on tenants renting out their apartments while they’re away and the laissez faire approach of other big tourist cities. He sees some merit in Chicago’s requirement that Airbnb hosts register with the city to regulate it, but that’s not quite what he wants to do either.

“It’s a much less materialistic way to live and that’s a good thing,” Chiu said of the basic shareable economy concept of making more efficient use of existing resources, whether it be housing, cars, or consumer goods.

But he’s equally clear in identifying the problems and overhyped claims, acknowledging that “it takes away housing from permanent residents, driving up the cost of housing.”

While he says it’s good to spread visiting tourists and their money around the city — a regular claim of Airbnb and its advocates — that also creates problems when apartments become virtual hotel rooms, disturbing neighbors and upsetting the dynamics of landlord-tenant relations.

“Shareable housing is used and abused in ways that displace permanent San Francisco residents,” Chiu said. “Those are the excesses that need to be reined in, in a serious way.”

So he’s trying to create legislation that will set fair and clear standards, ensure compliance with city laws, improve the city’s enforcement of those laws, and generate “tax revenues to cover the city’s expenses in hosting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of visitors every year.”

But Airbnb has only complicated Chiu’s goals and his reputation as the legislator who solves tough problems, largely because knowledgeable sources tell us the company has been unwilling to really compromise — perhaps emboldened by support from the Mayor’s Office and the city’s apparent impotence to enforce its own rulings — and is dragging out the negotiations.

Chiu wouldn’t comment on that, but he did acknowledge that these negotiations have been difficult. How can you allow renters to make a little extra money while recognizing the rights and concerns of their landlords and neighbors? How can you protect rent control and still allow tenants to profit from their units? Can you prevent landlords from using Airbnb or VRBO to bypass rent control? If you create a registry to ensure only permanent residents are playing host, what’s to stop landlords from using that list to evict those on it?

“We want to carve out a reasonable opportunity for people to do this,” Chiu said. “This is tough partly because of these complexities, and the laws are on the books for a reason….The more we pull these strings, the more this unravels.”

LANDLORDS AND TENANTS TOGETHER

San Francisco Tenants Union Executive Director Ted Gullicksen has been involved with the Chiu-Airbnb negotiations — from which he hopes to strengthen enforcement of rent control and apartment conversion laws while still allowing limited use of shareable housing sites by tenants — and he told us, “It turned out to be a very slow process.”

“Airbnb has just been balking and wanting more and more,” Gullicksen told us. “This process has been frustrating, but Chiu has hung in there.”

Gullicksen said the goal has been to limit short-term hosting to fewer than 90 days in a 12-month period, with only permanent city residents allowed to host, but Airbnb wants people to be able to rent out their apartments for eight months. And Gullicksen said he wants to see tenant laws and the rental stock protected from conversion to vacation rentals.

“We’re most concerned about the impact on the housing stock and evictions, because there’s so many of these…We have entire buildings that have been on the tourist market for years,” Gullicksen said. “It added a huge new way to remove units from the rental market.”

Gullicksen said that conversions of apartments became an even bigger problem than conversions to condos when the financial crisis hit in 2008, and that could become an even bigger problem now that the condo conversion lottery has been suspended for 10 years under legislation approved earlier this year (“Supervisors approve condo legislation,” Politics blog, 6/11/13).

In fact, he said that there has been a rash of unusual Ellis Act evictions in recent months, with buildings that have six or more units being cleared of tenants even though they are ineligible for condo conversions, raising suspicions that they’re being used for vacation rentals.

Hotel Council Executive Director Kevin Carroll told us Airbnb and similar companies should be paying the TOT, as the city ruled, and he doesn’t understand how they’ve gotten away with it for so long.

“A visitor to San Francisco, whether they are staying with Airbnb or a hotel, they’re using city services,” he told the Guardian, dismissing the arguments that shareable housing companies should be treated differently. “They do compete with hotels.”

Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, expressed frustration that city officials have let this situation drag on as long as it has.

“I don’t know why [Tax Collector Jose] Cisneros isn’t collecting the tax. I don’t understand it,” New told us. “They certainly have the money.”

Cisneros told us that his office has the power to audit companies, “and we can bring taxpayers into courts of law,” but because of taxpayer privacy laws, he can’t discuss what’s happening with Airbnb.

“I cannot confirm or deny or discuss what is or isn’t being done,” Cisneros said, even refusing to offer an off-the-record assurance that something is being done to back up his ruling last year and address the perception that companies are free to flout his authority with impunity.

Attorney James Parrinello, representing SFAA and Coalition for Better Housing, sent a letter to top city officials on Jan. 14 “to discuss the fast-growing practice of illegal short-term/transient rentals for profit and request the City take immediate action to address the problem.”

New said they never got a response, although she tells us, “We did have a candid dialogue with [Chiu] six months ago.”

“All of these tenants in San Francisco are using their units as pieds-a-terre for out-of-town tourists and they’re doing it in ways that jeopardize their rent control status and the safety of their neighbors,” New said.

She told stories of visitors being loud, disrespectful, even committing an assault. She said one tenant placed a lockbox on his door to facilitate a rotating series of guests, while another rented out a second apartment in his building exclusively for Airbnb guests.

And she confirmed that her association has worked with landlords to search Airbnb and other sites to identify tenants who are illegally renting out their apartments and to serve them with three-day “notice to quit” warnings, otherwise they would be evicted.

“Under rent control, some tenants are making more money than they pay in rent,” New said, noting that landlords are essentially underwriting the rentals. “It’s stealing.”

Gullicksen expressed concerns that landlords are doing that kind of research to try to evict tenants, but he said the Tenants Union is doing similar research to ferret out landlords who are using these services to illegally turn apartments where evictions have taken place into vacation rentals and de facto hotels, focused mostly on VRBO because “they have a greater landlord emphasis.”

“The homes that we’re talking about are owned by the person that’s renting them out. It’s not people that are basically subletting their homes,” VRBO spokesperson Victor Wang told us, refusing to comment on local apartment conversion laws or other issues specific to San Francisco.

Chiu told us he takes the rent control issues seriously: “Our rent control laws are in place for very important reasons and we need to make sure it stays affordable.”

DISAPPEARING APARTMENTS

In a city experiencing what politicians and activists of all stripes have called a “housing crisis,” it might come as a surprise that US Census numbers indicate 8.3 percent of San Francisco’s rental stock was vacant in 2010 — about 31,000 units — up from 4.9 percent a decade earlier.

Scott James, homeowner and small-time landlord advocate, would have us believe that rent control is to blame, arguing in a recent New York Times op-ed (“King of My Castle? Yeah, Right,” 6/11/13) that “San Francisco’s anti-landlord housing laws and political climate make [renting] untenable.”

Faced with a bad tenant at his home in the Castro, James said he “joined the ranks of thousands of other small-time landlords here who will never rent again, adding to the city’s housing shortage.”

Yet the San Francisco Rent Ordinance confers broad authority to evict tenants for a plethora of “just causes,” including late payments, breach of lease (such as, ahem, illegal subletting), nuisance or damage to property, and owner move-in. Since the law dates back to 1979, it probably doesn’t explain the steep rise in vacancies. And with evictions now hitting an 11-year high, it’s hard to paint landlords as helpless victims.

San Francisco Rent Board Executive Director Delene Wolf told us the eviction rate has actually mimicked bullishness in the real estate market rather than beefier tenant regulations. She said it “really spiked around the dot-com years, for obvious reasons went way down during the recession, and it’s back up now because the market heated up.”

Some embittered landlords may indeed live atop empty units for decades but, given a median rental price of $2,764 per month for a one-bedroom unit, there’s an enormous opportunity cost to being disgruntled.

But perhaps that’s what “shareable housing” is really about: getting around the rules to make some money. Short-term rentals have become so lucrative that it’s financially possible, and easier than ever, for a homeowner to exit the long-term rental market for good.

Airbnb is so unregulated that even a homeowner who has used the Ellis Act to supposedly get out of the rental business could easily and anonymously monetize an officially vacant space for higher profit margins and with less oversight as a “vacation” rental.

Annette Fajardo has made clients out of people like James. She started her business, SF Holiday Rentals, just after the first dot-com boom, when she began managing short-term rentals in the homes of her friends. When she had nine properties in her roster, the business became a full-time job.

Over the last decade, demand for her management services has increased so much that she says she’s now “very picky about who she works with.”

Fajardo currently manages more than 40 furnished units that guests can book on her own website, as well as Airbnb, Roomorama, VRBO, HomeAway, Trip Advisor, and Craigslist. Her clients are all owners offering full homes or apartments and all the units she manages have been permanently withdrawn from the long-term rental market.

Quite often, her guests stay for a month or longer. Some are international tourists, but the majority are new corporate transplants to San Francisco. The demand for units like hers keeps growing: She gets 100 inquiries on her properties each day, about half from Airbnb.

“There’s always been corporate furnished rentals,” Fajardo told us in the dining room of a Castro flat that she lists for $350 per night on Airbnb. “That market has always been there. It’s just that there’s so much more business now. We got Google, Apple — you’ve got the busses running here all the time. I get Google people all the time and they spend big bucks.”

And she’s been through it all — battles with the tax collector in three municipalities, catastrophic fires in two properties, fraudulent guests, drunk guests, pornographers, and, worst of all, meddlesome neighbors.

“Your neighbors are a problem,” Fajardo emphasized. “In the Castro, you have to do a 30 night minimum cause the neighbors fink on you.” And when they do, the Planning Department can step in. They “send a letter stating the residential code and to cease and desist. If you don’t stop less than 30 night rentals, then they can fine you.”

COMPLEX LAWS, SIMPLE SITE

City tax and zoning laws ban apartment rentals of less than 30 days, labeling it “illegal hotelling.” Dwellings in residential areas repurposed as tourist housing have, in the eyes of the Planning Department, essentially been commercialized without proper permitting or payment of the TOT.

Rentals for more than 30 days aren’t regulated as commercial properties, but the tenants in those homes have rights under the 1979 rent ordinance, which protects any tenant who, according to Rent Board spokesperson Robert Collins, “pays rent and inhabits a unit for two days. You don’t have to sign a lease to be a tenant — you just have to pay rent and occupy the unit.”

This presents a number of challenges to both tenant- and owner-hosts. Tenants who gouge tourists on nightly rates are often in violation of a rent ordinance ban on “charging upon additional occupancy more than the rent that the tenant pays to the owner,” explained Collins.

Tenants who rent out their apartment 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.”

Owners who offer their units on Airbnb assume the same risk of unwanted, long-term guests. But they hedge against it by charging exorbitant nightly, weekly, and even monthly rates. On the off chance that a guest does demand a lasting lease, Fajardo reasons, “if I’m getting $5,500 a month for a two-bedroom, you can stay for the next 10 years.”

Fajardo knows where laws limit her opportunity for gain and to remain within their bounds. But most hosts, the ones Airbnb advertises as offering “unused space to pay your bills or fund your next vacation,” aren’t running a sophisticated business. And Airbnb offers them little help or support.

Airbnb just lists the rentals then mediates the payments. And the company collects revenue at both ends of transactions, charging guests a 6-12 percent service fee upon booking then taking another 3 percent before remitting payment to hosts.

Anyone can create a guest or host profile and Airbnb conducts no user verification, although both can leave online reviews. “We do not attempt to confirm, and do not confirm, any Member’s purported identity,” Airbnb states in its terms of service. “You are responsible for determining the identity and suitability of others.”

The company advertises a $1 million “Host Guarantee” backed by Lloyd’s of London, but warns that it “should not be considered as a replacement or stand-in for homeowners or renters insurance. The Host Guarantee does not cover: cash and securities, collectibles, rare artwork, jewelry, pets, personal liability.”

The site also does not vet the content of property listings for legality. Hosts can set their rates and even add on a cleaning fee or refundable security deposit, but it offers no functionality for hosts to itemize and collect the TOT, now more than a year after San Francisco required that it be collected.

Tax issues are only vaguely addressed in an FAQ section for hosts, noting that “some hosts are required by their locality to charge a tax.” Hosts ambitious enough to attempt compliance must essentially become amateur tax specialists. Few, however, have the experience to decipher the code correctly and even fewer are likely to seek it out in the first place.

A search for the word “tax” across the site’s roughly 4,750 San Francisco listings yielded a mere 174 hits and myriad approaches to the issue. Several hosts mentioned collecting the TOT in cash on arrival or required credit card information in advance — a clear incursion into the secure nature of the transaction. A host named Jesse with 85 listings told the Guardian that he just rolls the TOT up into his daily rates, despite the city’s requirement that it be listed separately.

Fajardo isn’t alone in creating a full-time business of short-term apartment rentals. Casa Buena Vista Rental lists 76 properties on its website, many of which overlap with Jesse’s 85 Airbnb listings. A host named Bernat has 48 listings that also appear on Come2SF.com. Gaylord Suites, a Tenderloin apartment complex, markets at least seven different apartments in the same building on the site.

Fajardo said she’s pushed Airbnb for a dedicated TOT field “until [she’s] been blue in the face,” but she feels strongly that the company should not be held responsible for the collection of tax itself. “It’s not their burden,” Fajardo argues in defense of Airbnb. “They’re a booking agent. They funnel the money and they expect you to do the taxes.”

OTHERS CAN DO IT

The New York- and Singapore-based Roomorama was founded in 2009 and has a nearly identical payment model to Airbnb’s. But it has a formal host verification process and a higher price point that CEO Jia En Teo told us helps to filter out bad guests.

“Our host verification is very tight,” explained Teo. “When a host is listed on our site, they don’t go live immediately. They go through a quality control and validation process. We have a team that will call the host and ask for utility bills and ID. We do due diligence.”

Teo said a TOT field has been included in Roomorama’s price template from the beginning since the vast majority of the site’s listings are “professionally managed properties, people that are actually licensed to run short-term rentals. They’d already been paying and collecting these taxes….One of the first things that was requested was a way to collect.”

Teo also said that if Roomorama, as an operator, was deemed responsible for collection and remittance of taxes, it wouldn’t be “difficult from a logistical standpoint. It would add more work to our load but, to be honest, most of it is automated anyway. Once we put in the mandatory tax field, it would simply be paid the same way a consumer pays when they eat at a restaurant.”

She’s unsure why Airbnb has been so reluctant to address the tax issue head on, but “if I could venture a guess,” she said. “I’m guessing it’s because they work more with the occasional host, and that makes their value proposition a little bit less appealing.”

Other industry competitors include Craigslist and VRBO, both founded in 1996, and VRBO’s parent company, HomeAway. All three share a similar business model and one that’s considerably different from Airbnb’s — they are not financial gatekeepers in the transaction between guest and host. At their essence, these sites are little more than digital classified ads.

No competitor comes close to the market share that Airbnb has captured in San Francisco and globally. In New York, Roomorama has 2,688 listings compared with Airbnb’s 25,724, despite its questionable legality there. In San Francisco, Roomorama hosts 303 properties and VRBO features 1,123 — and Airbnb has about 4,750 throughout the city.

Airbnb’s statement to us touted that financial impact: “We are proud of the $56 million that Airbnb’s users generated for the San Francisco economy last year. The vast majority of Airbnb hosts share the home where they live, and more than half directly use their Airbnb income to pay their rent or mortgage.”

THE CITY’S SHARE

When the San Francisco Tax Collector’s Office discussed the matter last year and issued “Tax Collector Regulation 2012-1: Tax on Transient Occupancy — Multiple Party Transactions; Occupancy of Private Residences,” it made clear Airbnb should be collecting the tax as it processes the transactions.

“A website company, or any other person acting as merchant of record who receives rent in connection with an occupancy transaction, is an ‘operator’ who is responsible for collecting the TOT owed by the occupant and for remitting the TOT to the City. Any person receiving such rent shall provide a receipt to the occupant. Such receipt shall include a separate line item specifically identifying the TOT,” reads the regulation.

While it’s also true that the city tax codes make Airbnb and its hosts jointly liable for the tax debt — which the company’s apologists have used to accuse the Guardian of unfairly picking on the company in an avalanche of online comments —it would be a regulatory nightmare for the city to go after thousands of individual hosts, most of them small-time tenants who don’t even have business licenses.

Fajardo is diligent about compliance, but she can afford to be. She works with a team that includes assistants and an accountant and she does it full-time. She is not the casual homeowner supplementing her income (and it’s unlikely many of her clients are either) — she is an entrepreneur. And even she admits to having found the TOT difficult to interpret.

Fajardo contacted the Guardian in June in response to our coverage of Airbnb, citing the city’s complicated tax system and the difficulty that small users have in paying the TOT, which has varying fees tacked onto the base rate of 14 percent. (Although she also wrote, “We collect and pay sometimes as much as $10,000-20,000 per quarter.”)

“Don’t blame Airbnb, blame the SF Tax Collector for a shoddy website, incompetent workers, and their inability or lack of desire to chase individual lessors. It is not the responsibility of Airbnb to collect taxes; it is the responsibility of the lessor to collect the taxes, just like a hotel,” Fajardo wrote.

It’s certainly true that TOT rates aren’t simple — the 14 percent base rate gets another 1.5-2 percent tacked on it, depending on where the host is located, to fund the Tourism Improvement District proposed by hotels and approved by the city. (That fee just went up again July 1 to fund an expansion of the Moscone Convention Center.) The TOT also isn’t simple for Airbnb hosts to collect and pay.

We forwarded Fajardo’s criticisms and concerns to Greg Kato, the policy and legislative director for the Tax Collector’s Office. He acknowledged that the system is complicated — particularly for Airbnb hosts who aren’t legally allowed to operate as a hotel — but he said they try to simplify it as much as possible.

To pay taxes, a business first needs to register with the city by paying a $26 fee and filling out an application, which includes a line indicating whether transient occupancy is part of the business. “There are few, if any, barriers to initially register as a business,” Kato said.

The problems come when that business applies to the city for its “certificate of authority” to collect the taxes, and applicants are asked whether they have the relevant licenses and proper zoning to conduct that kind of business. And most Airbnb hosts don’t have that because they are actually violating a variety of city codes.

“In a residentially zoned area, this type of use is at least a conditional use [which requires a permit obtained after giving neighbors notice and going through a public hearing] if not a banned use,” Kato told us. “Those land use issues are what Sup. Chiu is trying to address with his legislation.”

Although Kato said such legislation is beyond the scope of his office, those issues can interfere with a host’s ability to receive a certificate of authority to collect the taxes.

“There are a lot of other parties interested in this issue that might have other issues that would break that authority,” Kato said, citing landlords, homeowners associations, and neighbors as parties that might object to someone essentially turning his or her apartment into a hotel room, which was banned decades ago by the Apartment Conversion Ordinance.

It’s pretty easy to see on the Airbnb website that it isn’t charging the TOT or making it easy for its hosts to do so (see “Airbnb isn’t sharing,” 3/19/13). Using Airbnb’s own stated figure that its San Francisco hosts collect about $12.7 million in rents each year, that would amount to nearly $2 million annually that the city should be collecting on these transactions.

When Airbnb’s 31-year-old founder and CEO Brian Chesky spoke at a hospitality conference organized by USF in April, he didn’t acknowledge any complexities or downsides to his business model, instead casting his company as saving the world.

“It’s like the United Nations at every kitchen table. It’s very powerful,” Chesky said of the social benefits of his company. “I think we’re in the midst of a revolution.” He wasn’t talking about revolution in the sense of challenging the authority or legitimacy of San Francisco, its laws, or its elected leaders, although that seems to be implicitly what he’s doing. And he certainly didn’t seem to be taking into account his evicted hosts, their upset neighbors and landlords, or the city’s disappearing apartments and rising rents when he said, “For us to win, no one has to lose.”

Rent Board Commissioner called a bad landlord, sued for $125,000 in damages

Sasha Cuttler

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July 24, 2013

11

Rent Board Commissioner called a bad landlord, sued for $125,000 in damages

San Francisco renter Deborah Silverman has found herself in a kind of mousetrap. Silverman says she was driven out of her apartment of more than 10 years because of a mouse infestation caused by the unit below her, and she alleges that her landlord, Bart Murphy – who is also a Rent Board Commissioner – failed to address the problem after numerous complaints.

Silverman has filed suit against Murphy, charging that he purposefully let the infestation in her apartment run rampant in order to force her out. She’s seeking more than $125,000 in damages, according to her attorney Eric Lifschitz. That would cover the $700 difference between what she was paying for rent and what it was raised to (multiplied by the years she lived there) and property damages from the infestation, as well as emotional and punitive damages. Murphy is the president of a property management company that runs more than 500 buildings.

Silverman’s lawsuit caught the attention of Tenants Together, a statewide organization that advocates for renter’s rights. Dean Preston, founder and executive director that organization, sees the dispute between Murphy and Silverman as part of a broader trend in San Francisco.

“We see a lot of landlords that don’t make repairs in order to drive tenants out,” Preston told the Guardian. He said Murphy should resign if he is in fact forced to fork over the thousands of dollars for Silverman’s settlement.

“If these allegations are found to be true, Murphy should resign,” Preston said. “Bart Murphy has no business serving on a commission in this city, especially a commission that passes judgment on tenant claims against landlords.”

Murphy could not be reached to comment on the matter, but we will update this post if we hear from him.

Delene Wolf, executive director of the San Francisco Rent Board, told us the case does not warrant the possibility of Murphy resigning as a commissioner on the Rent Board. “He is a landlord and is entitled to have disputes with his tenant,” Wolf said. “He has not been found guilty of any crimes. Nobody is being found guilty of anything, this is a civil litigation.”

But Lifschitz echoed Preston’s stance, saying Murphy should either resign or be forced off of the Rent Board if the trial does not go in his favor. “The best case scenario is that my client is vindicated and is able to find a new home in San Francisco,” Lifschitz said. “The worst outcome is if the jury determines that what Murphy did was reasonable. Every time we learn something new about this case we’re shocked that this happened.”

According to Lifschitz, Murphy has since rented out the abandoned units for a higher price. The next court hearing on the case is scheduled for tomorrow (Thu/25), and the trial is set to begin once a courtroom becomes available.

Jazzie Collins: forever fighting the good fight

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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July 12, 2013

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Jazzie Collins: forever fighting the good fight

Dedicated trans rights and economic equality activist Jazzie Collins passed away this week. She was honored in June in the State Assembly for LGBT History Month, and was on the board of the annual Trans March, among many other honors and activities. There will be a legacy party and fundraiser for Jazzie’s end-of-life expenses at El Rio tomorrow, Sat/13, 3pm-8pm. Below is a remembrance from her good friend Tommi Avicolli Mecca.

Some people die, but they remain with you for the rest of your life. Death just can’t keep them away.

Such a person is Jazzie Collins, African American transgender woman and tireless fighter for social and economic justice for tenants, seniors, people with disabilities, the homeless, those without healthcare, LGBT folks, and so many others. An organizer of the annual Trans March and co-chair of the city’s LGBT Aging Policy Task Force, she recently received an award from the LGBT caucus of the state assembly for her many years of activism.

Born in Memphis, Jazzie, 54, died in the early morning hours of July 11 at Kaiser Hospital, leaving a huge hole in the heart of San Francisco.

I don’t remember when I first met Jazzie. I’m pretty certain it was at one of the countless demos in the late 90s we attended to protest the displacement of working-class and poor people during the dot-com boom. She was involved in so much of the incredible activism happening in the Mission at that time, whether it involved feeding people from Mission Agenda’s food pantry, planning direct action with the Mission AntiDisplacement Coalition, or helping elect fellow activist Chris Daly as the neighborhood’s district supervisor.

Our paths crossed often, sometimes at the monthly meetings of Senior Action Network (now Senior Disability Action) where she worked, or a tenants rights demo on the steps of City Hall just before we went inside to take advantage of our two minutes at the mic during public comment. Jazzie was never at a loss for words.

One of the original members of QUEEN (Queers for Economic Equality Now), she helped organize several protests, including one outside the store run by the Human Rights Campaign in the Castro. We were furious that the national gay rights group pushed to exclude transgender people from ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act), the federal gay employment rights bill.

When a call went out from the Board of Supervisors for its newly formed LGBT Aging Policy Task Force, Jazzie called me and told me in no uncertain terms that I had to apply. She had already sent in her application and wanted to make sure another strong housing advocate was on the task force.

We sat together at the hearing, waiting for our chance to sell ourselves to the supervisors. After we were both appointed, and as we left the room, Jazzie started talking about what she wanted the task force to do, especially on housing issues. She was always a woman with a vision. Or a cause.

Jazzie called me whenever there was something to be done. She’d say, “We gotta do something about this.” It didn’t matter how busy I was. I knew I could never say no to her.

Jazzie, my sister, wherever you are now, I know you’ll always be beside me when I’m out there fighting the good fight.

“Eviction Free Summer” activists show up outside a landlord’s office to protest an eviction

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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July 3, 2013

19

On July 2, activists from “Eviction Free Summer,” formed to defend tenants facing eviction, gathered outside landlord Rick Holman’s South Park office building in San Francisco to protest an eviction he’d initiated against a Mission-based activist collective.

Organizer Fred Sherburn-Zimmer said it was one of many peaceful protests the housing activists plan to stage against property owners this summer. “We’re taking it to the landlord’s homes and offices,” Sherburn-Zimmer said. “They can’t pretend they’re not ruining people’s lives by displacing them.”

This past April, collective members from In The Works, an organization that rents space in what is often called the “17 Reasons” building, at 17th and Mission streets, received an eviction notice from Holman alleging illegal subletting.

Holman is a managing partner at Asher Investment Group, and from the perspective of Sherburn-Zimmer and other protesters, his move to evict the collective is helping to propel a trend of gentrification in the Mission. “We need this space, and if the whole neighborhood is high-end realty, then it’s not really helping the community,” Sherburn-Zimmer said.

The In The Works Collective bills itself as an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist arts and events collective, which regularly hosts skill-sharing workshops and other activism-oriented events. A collective member who introduced herself as Madeline said Holman has not been the most hospitable landlord.

“When he first came to talk to us, he said we had bad posture and body language,” she recounted. “The day after we got the three-day notice, the locks were changed.”

When the Guardian reached Holman this past May seeking comment for a longer article about widespread evictions, he declined to comment on the matter but emphasized that he planned to keep the building as commercial office space rather than convert it into high-end condos, and said his other tenants had expressed no complaints.

Like many folks facing eviction from San Francisco rental properties, In The Works may be forced to find another space. Currently, Madeline says the collective is paying 72 cents a square foot for the 5,200 square foot place — and it’s highly unlikely that they’ll find a place in the Mission for a similar price. That’s why they welcomed support from the activists at Eviction-Free Summer.

“I totally respect them helping us out,” Madeline said. “It’s important that we stick together. Our place has always been big on solidarity and community building.”

Eviction Free Summer hasn’t revealed what other landlords they might target, yet they plan to continue staging protests outside landlords’ homes and offices in coming months. “This is just the beginning of this direct action group,” Sherburn-Zimmer said. “We will do anything to prevent people from losing their homes and spaces.”

Wedding bells and Pride protests

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July 3, 2013

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rebecca@sfbg.com ; steve@sfbg.com

The city of San Francisco was a complete whirlwind from June 26 to June 30. First came the historic Supreme Court ruling that ended the ban on same-sex marriage in California and struck down the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act. The historic decision, handed down just before the city’s Pride festivities got underway and as a rare heat wave gripped the city, unleashed widespread celebration June 26, culminating with a rally and dance party in the streets of the Castro.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal recognition of same-sex marriage, “is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment.” According to the majority opinion, “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.”

Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Prop 8 case, was dismissed on standing due to the fact that the State of California refused to defend it in court. That meant the previous ruling invalidating Prop 8, by Judge Vaughan Walker and upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court, was upheld.

City Hall was totally packed at 7am when the Court convened, with hordes of journalists, gay and lesbian couples, and sign-wielding activists in the crowd. Cheers erupted when the decision was announced striking down DOMA. When the Prop 8 statement came down, the room went nuts.

“It feels good to have love triumph over ignorance,” said Mayor Ed Lee, who joined Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom in escorting a fragile Phyllis Lyon down the stairway. When Lyon married the late Del Martin, they became the first same-sex couple to get legally married in California in 2004.

“San Francisco is not a city of dreamers, but a city of doers,” Newsom said. “Here we don’t just tolerate diversity, we celebrate our diversity.” He thanked City Attorney Dennis Herrera and others who’d contributed to the fight to for marriage equality. “It’s people with a true commitment to equality that brought us here.”

When Herrera took the podium, he turned to Newsom, and said, “Now you can say, ‘Whether you like it or not!'” — a joking reference to Newsom’s same-sex marriage rallying cry, which some blamed for boosting the anti-same-sex marriage cause. “We wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Gavin Newsom’s leadership,” Herrera continued. “I remember in 2004 when people were saying it was too fast, too soon, too much.” Herrera also pledged to continue the fight that began here in City Hall more than nine years ago: “We will not rest until we have marriage equality throughout this country.”

Later that afternoon, clergy from a variety of faiths including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and the Church of Latter Day Saints gathered on the steps of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill for a buoyant press conference to celebrate the court’s rulings.

“For 20 years I’ve been marrying gay and lesbian couples, because in the eyes of God, that love and commitment was real, even when it wasn’t in the eyes of the state,” said Rabbi Michael Lerner of the Beyt Tikkun Synagogue. “We as religious people have to apologize to the gay community,” he added, for religious texts that gave opponents of gay marriage ammunition to advance an agenda of discrimination.

He added that the take-home message of the long fight for marriage equality is, “don’t be ‘realistic.’ Thank God the gay community vigorously fought for the right to be married — because they were not ‘realistic,’ the reality changed. Do not limit your vision to what the politicians and the media tell you is possible.”

Mitch Mayne introduced himself as “an openly gay, active Mormon,” which is significant since the Mormon Church was a major funder of Prop 8. He called it “one of the most un-Christlike things we have ever done as a religion,” but noted that the sordid affair had brought on “a mighty change in heart from inside the Mormon community, with greater tolerance than ever before,” with many Mormons going out and marching in solidary with gay and lesbian couples, he said.

Then on June 28, earlier than expected, the County Clerk started issuing same-sex marriage licenses. Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, plaintiffs in the case against Prop. 8, became the first of dozens of happy couples to be married at City Hall that evening, and the marriages continued in the days that followed.

And as if that weren’t enough excitement, it all happened before the weekend, when Pride festivities got underway. This year featured not only the official Pride parade and myriad performances, but also an “Alternative to Pride Parade,” signifying that a radical Pride-questioning movement has been reawakened in San Francisco.

“Have you had enough with the poor political choices of some community leaders that claim to represent you? Are you over the over-corporatizing of SF Pride? Or just tired of the same old events that don’t reflect who you are, and how you want to celebrate your queer pride?” organizers wrote in a statement announcing the event.

The parade itself, meanwhile, also featured some dissenters. The third annual Bradley Manning Support Network contingent swelled in ranks this year, due to the political maelstrom touched off when the Pride Board rescinded Manning’s appointment as Grand Marshal.

The Bradley Manning Support Network contingent attracted more than 2,000 supporters who marched to show solidarity with the openly gay whistleblower, comprising the largest non-corporate contingent in the Parade. Former military strategist Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked secret government documents known as the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, donned a pink boa and rode alongside his wife, Patricia, in a pick-up truck labeled “Bradley Manning Grand Marshal.” Patricia told the Bay Guardian, “There is something about the energy and triumph of this beautiful event … Just as the gays have made a tremendous difference with marriage, we have to do the same with wars and aggression” in U.S. foreign policy.

Pride’s legal counsel, Brooke Oliver — who resigned over the Pride Board’s handling of the Manning debacle — marched along with the Bradley Manning contingent. Bevan Dufty, former SF Supervisor and now the mayor’s point person on homelessness, stepped down as a Grand Marshal, also because of the Pride Board’s actions, but didn’t march with the contingent.

Nor were the Bradley Manning supporters the only protest contingent to take part in the parade. A group seized the opportunity to make a political statement by marching with a faux Google bus, an action meant to call attention to gentrification and evictions in San Francisco. They rented a white coach and covered it with signs printed up in a similar font to Google’s corporate logo, proclaiming: “Gentrification & Eviction Technologies (GET) OUT: Integrated Displacement and Cultural Erasure.”

Some trailed the faux Google bus with an 8-foot banner depicting a blown-up version of an Ellis Act evictions map. Others donned red droplets stamped with “evicted” to signify Google map markers, while a few toted suitcases to represent tenants who’d been sent packing. However, their ranks were thin in comparison with the parade contingents surrounding them, which included crowds of workers representing eBay, DropBox, and, of course, Google — the largest corporate contingent in the parade.

“The organizers of this anti-gentrification and displacement contingent are not ‘proud’ that folks are being kicked out of this city that was once their refuge,” organizers of the faux Google bus contingent wrote in a press statement. “The 2013 SF Homeless Count and Survey shows that 29 percent of the city’s homeless population is ‘LGB and other.’ The Castro is experiencing the highest number of evictions in the city. Meanwhile, the SF Pride Parade is becoming as gentrified as SF. This group is calling on Pride to remember its roots.”

Anti-gentrification activists “GET OUT” with Pride

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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June 30, 2013

110

A group of activists used the Pride Parade to make a political statement by marching with a faux Google bus, an action meant to call attention to gentrification in San Francisco. They rented a white coach and covered it with signs printed up in a similar font to Google’s coroporate logo, proclaiming: “Gentrification & Eviction Technologies (GET) OUT: Integrated Displacement and Cultural Erasure.”

Some trailed the faux Google bus with an 8-foot banner depicting a blown-up version of an Ellis Act evictions map.

Others donned red droplets stamped with “evicted” to signify Google map markers, while a few toted suitcases to represent tenants who’d been sent packing.

However, their ranks were thin in comparison with the parade contingents surrounding them, which included crowds of workers representing eBay, DropBox, and, of course, Google.

A member of the small anti-gentrification contingent gazes in the direction of the Google contingent, where a crowd of tech workers is bursting with energy and carrying balloons.

A member of the anti-gentrification part of the march gazes in the direction of the Google contingent, where a huge crowd of tech workers was bursting with energy.

Google workers clad in identical tees wore colorful sunglasses, carried balloons and held a banner.

Activist Leslie Dreyer was one of six activists who put together the faux Google bus contingent. She used crowd-funding to raise roughly $2,000 for parade registry, bus rental, and custom-made decals.

“All of us have either been affected, or are in a position where we wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in the Bay Area if something were to happen to our housing situations,” Dreyer said. “There’s really no security to stay here.”

They selected the Google bus as a symbol because “we think the tech boom is directly responsible for creating a population of people who can actually afford these market-rate rents,” while also fueling real-estate speculation and giving rise to a deep-pocketed political lobby. “It’s not targeting tech workers individually,” Dreyer added.

Zeph Fishlyn, a sculptor and activist who earns a living as a tattoo artist, also helped launch the Pride Parade action. “My communities that I’m a part of – not just the queer community, but also artists and activists – are being forced out,” said Fishlyn, who suffered through two separate evictions in 2012. “I know 34 people who got evicted last year.”

Housing advocates are gearing up for a campaign targeting landlords that are infamous for gobbling up rental properties and serially evicting long-term San Francisco renters. Dubbed Eviction Free Summer, the campaign could get underway in coming weeks.

Activists handed out fliers encouraging people to join them by visiting heart-of-the-city.org.

Why I’m still with the Bay Guardian…for now

Sasha Cuttler

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June 20, 2013

166

During the tumultuous week since my longtime boss and mentor Tim Redmond suddenly left the Bay Guardian, I’ve been repeateadly reminded of the old journalism adage “Show don’t tell.” That’s what we tried to do in our widely circulated story this week about Tim and our new corporate overlords, and it’s the standard that I’ll apply to their public assurances that the Guardian will remain a progressive, independent voice.

I’m glad that owner Todd Vogt and new Publisher Stephen Buel said it, and now I will wait and see whether they show it through their actions. I think that Guardian readers should do the same thing, reserve judgment for now, and delay any plans to abandon or boycott the Guardian.

First, there are a few things I want to tell you all. As the senior progressive political journalist still working for a newspaper in San Francisco, I hope that you’ll trust me to test our independence and speak honestly to you about whether the Guardian’s integrity remains intact (either here or through other media if that becomes necessary).

As tempting as it has been for all of us to just follow Tim out the door and refuse to give the new Guardian management any cover or credibility, it’s not clear to me how that would help San Francisco or the Guardian’s readers and community. The city needs the Guardian more than ever, given the arbitrary and exploitive exercises of corporate power now plaguing this great city, but nobody needs a Guardian that has been coopted by those same forces.

At this point, I’m willing to risk my job for the sake of truth and transparency, as I did with the long story I wrote with my courageous colleague Rebecca Bowe this week (and the support of another trusted ally, Guardian Interim Editor Marke B), and which I’m probably doing with this post as well.

So let me continue what we started by offering a bit of backstory and updating you on the latest developments before closing with some thoughts on the possible endgame to all of this. As we talked over the weekend following Tim’s sudden departure, a bit traumatized by how it all went down, Rebecca and I both seriously considered not returning to work on Monday.

Ultimately, we decided to come in to write a story on what happened, as Buel had invited the Guardian to do late Friday afternoon, his first official act as our new publisher. Initially wary that writing a full and truthful account of what happened might get us fired, we decided that was the only thing that we could do.

Consistent with longstanding Guardian editorial policy that sources may not preview news stories, we planned to refuse any requests by Buel or Vogt to read our story before it went to the press, and to their credit, they didn’t ask. When I interviewed each of them that day, I thanked them for letting us do the story and told them how important I thought it was to our community and the Guardian’s credibility.

Our noon press deadline passed without incident and we thought we were in the clear until around 3pm when we were called into CFO Pat Brown’s office and we saw him, Vogt, and Buel each holding copies of our article, clearly displeased with what they were reading. Executive VP David Ceccarelli, who oversees the company’s printing press, had seen the article and sent them copies, delaying the Guardian’s press run until Vogt gave the okay.

It was a tense but fairly measured conversation, and we made our case that the article was fair, straightforward, and accurate, even though it went beyond the scope of what they expected and may have sometimes cast them in an unflattering light. In fact, we told them this article was the only way that the Guardian would have any credibility with its readers.

Buel said that he didn’t see any incorrect facts in the article, but he took issue with the article’s emphasis and context, casting it as an example of how the Guardian isn’t “realistic” in its approach. Vogt’s main concern was that the article was what he repeatedly called a “fuck you,” a parting shot by three employees who planned to resign.

As someone who has written many “fuck you” polemics over the years, I assured him that this wasn’t one, and that I considered it a fair article that I was proud of. Still, he wanted our assurances that we planned to stick around, telling us he wouldn’t print the article if this was to be our final act as Guardian employees.

Writing the article was a cathartic experience for us, giving us some hope that the Guardian might still be worth fighting for. So we each told Vogt that we still want to know what the plan is for the Guardian — something we’ve been seeking for months — but that we’re willing to stick around for now to assess that plan and our roles in it.

Vogt told us that if we were lying to him that he would hunt us down to “burn down your houses” — a threat that he seemed to mostly mean as a joke, we hope — and then he told Ceccarelli by phone that he could roll the presses with our article. Within the hour, we then posted a longer version of the article on the Guardian website, which generated 218 comments and 684 Facebook shares within 48 hours.

Frankly, we’re still concerned about the comments from Buel and Vogt that the Guardian’s editorial tone and focus need to change, which they’re only been able to describe in vague terms so far. And we were all disturbed the next day when Buel told Marke that he will begin proofing Guardian stories after they are laid out and before they go to press (he hasn’t yet asked to preview blog posts like this one), ostensibly to catch typos and examples of our flawed tone.

While that is probably his perogative as our new publisher (to preview content without directing what we cover and how), it could also portend an unacceptable incursion into the newspaper’s independence and integrity by someone who has been critical of the Guardian and its progressive voice, and who often doesn’t seem to share our values and worldview.

But we meant what we said about giving the new Guardian a chance, and we’ve all found Buel to be an honest, straight-shooting person and experienced journalist who wants the Guardian to succeed. And we believe Vogt’s explanations that it doesn’t make financial sense to shutter the Guardian, and that he’s committed to its long-term viability.

Time will tell whether Buel’s input seems constructive and designed to elevate the Guardian as a forum for progressive-minded Bay Area residents (hopefully improving our business model along the way), or whether he intends to strip away what we all love about the Guardian and turn it into just another bland, centrist publication.

We’re trying to keep an open mind, hoping for the best but prepared for the worst. No matter what happens, we will continue to communicate with our community, the people who rely on the Guardian almost as much as we do, strategizing ways to help San Francisco realize its potential.

These have been tough days for us at the Guardian, a sad reflection of the struggles that many of us face as we grapple with economic insecurity, erosion of civil liberties, and exploitation by wealthy corporations and individuals.

But we’ve been sensing and chronicling a renewed progressive spirit in San Francisco, from the small victories of tenants groups to the organizing against Plan Bay Area to the growing recognition that economic development needs to be tempered with protection of this city’s cultural and economic diversity.

So for now, in the absence of Tim’s leadership, I’m taking my tenure at the Guardian one day at a time. “All I’m saying is keep reading and see if we live up to what I’m saying,” Buel said of the Guardian’s independent, progressive approach, which he promised would continue.

I’ll monitor that from the inside, you all can monitor it from the outside, and we’ll see what happens. Deal?

Guardian forum on Plan Bay Area draws big, engaged crowd

Sasha Cuttler

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June 13, 2013

72

San Franciscans who want to help shape how this city grows — rather than just leaving it up to regional planners and market forces — packed a large conference room last night for a community forum presented by the Bay Guardian: “Whose Future? What Does the Regional ‘Plan Bay Area’ Really Mean for San Francisco?”

Moderated and organized by Guardian Editor/Publisher Tim Redmond, and co-sponsored by the Council of Community Housing Organizations (CCHO) and Urban Institute for Development and Economic Alternatives (UrbanIDEA), the session began with a overview of what’s now being planned for the San Francisco of 2040.

Gen Fujoika of the Chinatown Community Development Center said that Plan Bay Area, which is being jointly developed by the Association of Bay Area Governments and Metropolitan Transportation Commission (which will hold a hearing on the plan tomorrow, Fri/14, at 9:30am in Oakland), doesn’t pay for itself yet it will include strong incentives that will shape development in the region.

“It is in some sense a plan and I think we need to critique the hell out of that plan,” he said. “As we think of Plan Bay Area as a vision statement, we need to think about whether it’s our vision.”

As illustrated by the Plan Bay Area maps that the lined the walls of the LGBT Center conference room, the plan’s “priority development areas” that are slated for dense, streamlined development are also the same areas identified as “communities of concern” with vulnerable, low-income populations, making the plan a recipe for mass displacement.

Fujoika quoted a comment that Mayor Ed Lee made on Tuesday when asked by Sup. Eric Mar about the issue: “San Francisco has some of the toughest anti-displacements laws in the country.” While that may be true, Fujoika said that the plummeting numbers of African-Americans in the city and Plan Bay Area’s displacement projections for San Francisco show those laws simply aren’t up the challenge.

“If we have the toughest anti-displacement position in the country, then we are in some trouble,” he said, calculating that the affordable housing needed to prevent extreme gentrification in the city would total $6.8 billion, and that the affordable housing fund created by voters last year is only projected to raise $1.3 billion by 2030.

Fujoika said that he and the other panelists aren’t against growth and development, “but we are for equitable growth,” which would involve more community buy-in for the plan, more money for affordable housing and infrastructure needs, and more of the growth burden being shared by other Bay Area communities.

San Francisco Planning Commission Chair Cindy Wu cited growth projections for Chinatown as a good example of the problem, noting that is already a dense, complete neighborhood that would suffer from the greatly increased traffic that would be funneled through it and other negative impacts of unfettered growth.

“It’s not just growth for growth’s sake, it’s who gets to live there and who gets those jobs,” she said. Wu called for more community organizing around this and other development plans, citing as a good example the coalition-building that forced California Pacific Medical Center to agree to a multi-hospital project with far better community benefits than the deal it originally cut with the Mayor’s Office.

It was a point echoed by Maria Zamudio with Causa Justa, who said Plan Bay Area will worsen pressures that are already displacing the Mission District residents she works with, or forcing them to live in unsafe housing. “They’re going to push our families out of the city and maybe out of the region,” she said.

To combat the power that this plan and profit-minded property owners will exert over how San Francisco grows, San Francisco Labor Council President Mike Casey, head of UNITE-HERE Local 2, said that progressive San Franciscans will need to work cooperatively with organized labor, a relationship that has suffered during these tough economic times.

“Unfortunately, I think we’ve become alienated and marginalized from each other,” Casey said, calling on activists to not let differences over individual projects or issues interfere with solidarity over the larger, longer struggle for equity and justice.

“Not everyone agrees that a strong labor movement is the cornerstone of a more progressive vision,” Casey said, arguing that displacement of working class people from the city has a cascading effect in gentrifying the city. “The demographics of a city shape very much what the politics of protest look like.”

And those politics of protest will be more crucial than ever in resisting the demands that powerful capitalists will make on San Francisco in the coming years, a point that all seven panelists seemed to agree on.

Bob Allen of Urban Habitat said the planning research groups represented on the panel need to find ways to funnel more funding into grassroots organizing, both in San Francisco and regionally. Otherwise, we’ll see the “suburbanization of poverty,” with Plan Bay Area funneling the best jobs and most expensive housing into urban areas and leaving everyone else to fend for themselves in communities that don’t have the tenant protections and other hard-won social justice programs that San Franciscans have struggled for.

“Local control can be a way of saying ‘I don’t want black or brown people to live in my suburban community,” Allen said.

Ironically, Plan Bay Area is ostensibly driven by concerns over climate change and the argument that it’s better to concentrate development along transit corridors, which is why almost all of San Francisco and much of Oakland is proposed for development that would be given waivers from some California Environmental Quality Act scrutiny.

Yet the plan doesn’t fund the transit upgrades that would be needed to serve that growth or create restrictions on automobile use that might encourage more transit use. Instead, Fujoika said low-income people who actually use transit would be the diplaced in favor of wealthier residents who might not.

“Transit has become an amenity rather than a necessity,” Wu said.

The forum, which was attended by more than 130 people, included a lively discussion that involved dozens of audience members who offered their own views, ideas, and strategies for how to move forward. Among them was Brian Basinger of the AIDS Housing Alliance, who said that he is working with a coalition to reform the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict tenants from rent-controlled apartments.

“We could move this as early as January,” Basinger said of the reform legislation now being developed with allies in the Legislature, urging attendees to get involved.

After the audience discussion, the meeting closed with Peter Cohen of the CCHO summarizing the high points and getting people to sign up on lists that were circulated to be involved with next steps. And Rachel Brahinsky, a former Guardian staff writer who is now a professor at USF’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, urged attendees to fight for San Francisco to remain inclusive and diverse: “San Francisco is the place it is because people have kept fighting.”

Everyone but Mayor Lee sees SF’s worsening “housing affordability crisis”

Sasha Cuttler

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June 12, 2013

43

There was a clear theme that ran through yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting from beginning to end, something understood equally by renters, homeowners, and politicians from across the political spectrum: San Francisco has a crisis of housing affordability that is forcing people from the city.

And the only person who doesn’t seem to understand or care about that is the person with the most power to deal with the situation, Mayor Ed Lee, who opened the meeting by essentially dismissing both short- and long-term gentrification forces and claiming “our city has some of the toughest anti-displacement laws in the country.”

It was a claim that Lee made twice, first in response to a question by Sup. Eric Mar about Plan Bay Area and the massive displacement of current San Franciscans that it would create by 2040. And it was also how he answered a question by Sup. John Avalos about rents that are now skyrocketing beyond what most San Franciscans can afford.

I followed Mayor Lee back to his office, asking him to explain his claim, and he cited the city’s “elaborate” rent control laws and the Rent Board recently hiring new personnel as he briskly retreated toward his office. But surely he’s aware that displacement is already happening and getting worse, I told him, citing Rent Board figures showing that evictions are now at a 12-year high.

Lee looked at me dubiously and said, “I’ll have to check the figures on that.” I followed up today with Press Secretary Christine Falvey to ask whether Lee did check those figures — which show 1,757 evictions in the last year, up from 1,395 the previous, both numbers representing returns to the mass displacement of the last dot-com boom — and I’ll update this post if/when I hear back.

“It shows he’s out of touch with what’s happening in San Francisco,” Avalos told me in response to the mayor’s remarks.

Lee seemed to bristle at the suggestion that his aggressive economic development policies might have a downside that he’s going to have to deal with at some point. He touts the 44,000 jobs the city has added during his mayoral tenure, even deflecting criticism that he’s too focused on the technology industry by citing estimates that every tech job creates at least four other jobs (seemingly oblivious to the fact that most of these are low-wage service sector jobs, the very people who are being forced from the city).

“I’m just hoping you’re not blaming the 44,000 jobs we helped created,” Lee told Avalos, saying that he understands the concern about the rising cost of living, “but those are 44,000 people drawing a paycheck and taking care of their families.”

Yes, Mr. Mayor, but those paychecks are having an increasingly tough time paying for housing in San Francisco. That concern animated the condo conversion debate that took place later in the meeting, voiced by those focused on the lack of affordable homeownership opportunities and those focused on reducing the city’s rental stock to create those opportunities.

“I don’t think saying ‘it’s good that we have a growing economy’ is enough to address the issue,” Sup. David Campos said during the condo debate, referring to Lee’s earlier remarks.

Speaking near the end that discussion, Campos summarized the concerns expressed by both sides and sought to put the legislation into perspective: while important, the condo deal is a drop in the anti-displacement bucket. “We are only dealing with the issue of affordability in San Francisco on the margins,” he said, later adding, “I don’t think we’re doing enough to deal with the fundamental issue of who gets to live in San Francisco.”

The debate on the condo conversion began with its original author — Sup. Mark Farrell, who represents District 2, the wealthiest and most conservative in the city — explaining his desire to help middle class people who want to own homes remain in the San Francisco.

“This is the most affordable form of home ownership in San Francisco today,” Farrell said of tenancies-in-common, the fiscally and legally precarious middle step between an apartment and condominium. Later, he said, “We need more affordable homeownership opportunities and not less.”

Farrell argued that “this didn’t need to be a zero sum game,” but that’s exactly what the stock of rent-controlled apartments is in San Francisco, where only housing built before 1979 is protected from the market forces that can drive rents up to whatever a landlord demands.

“We have a fixed rent control stock. Every apartment that converts to a a condo is one less unit,” said Board President David Chiu, who worked with Sups. Jane Kim and Norman Yee and tenant group to amend Farrell’s legislation to help both renters and homeowners.

“These units were once the homes of tenants who were displaced,” Kim said, objecting to the notion that one person’s apartment should be another person’s affordable homeownership opportunity and arguing that the city should be building more condos for first-time homebuyers instead of cannabalizing the homes of the nearly two-thirds of city residents who rent.

Like Chiu and Kim, Yee said that he wanted to help the TIC owners of today without simply clearing out of the backlog and letting the condo lottery continue unabated, which would green-light even more conversion of apartments. “We want to curb the speculation,” Yee said.

That idea that the city should help people who live in the city, without simply feeding the speculative investors who profiteer off of housing in San Francisco, was a strong theme among critics of condo conversion.

A pro-tenant crowd packed the Board Chambers. Although barred by board rules from addressing the condo legislation directly (that occurred at the committee level), one commenter said, “Giving any more power to the real estate market in San Francisco should be considered a crime.”

To help ward off real estate speculators once the annual condo conversion lottery resumes in 2024, the legisation also limited future conversions to buildings of less than four units, instead of the current cap of six units, a change that Farrell resisted.

“This is not an academic exercise anymore,” Farrell said of the condo conversion restrictions that were added to the legislation. “This will negatively impact thousands of TIC owners in the city.”

Farrell’s original co-sponsor, Sup. Scott Wiener, had a more pro-tenant point-of-view, objecting to the changes that Chiu inserted on more narrow grounds. In his comments, he noted how close the two sides were and how they share the same basic goal: preventing displacement of current city residents.

“The one thing we can all agree with is we have a housing affordability crisis,” Wiener said, praising the city’s rent control and tenant protection laws, but adding, “TIC owners are also part of this city.”

The price of dealing with the rapid growth in the city — whether it comes to infrastructure or housing affordability — was also a point that Wiener made earlier in the meeting as the board approved the term sheet for a massive office and residential development project proposed at Pier 70.

“We are not doing what we need to do to support the public transportation needed for those projects,” Wiener said, also referring to other projects along the waterfront (the Warrior Arena at Pier 30 and the Giants/Anchor Steam project at Pier 46) and in the southeastern part of the city. “We don’t have the transit infrastructure to support our current population, let alone new growth.”

It’s about striking a balance, as Chiu said he did with the condo legislation, and not just a balance between renters and TIC owners. It’s about striking a balance between how to protect the San Francisco of today while planning for the San Francisco of tomorrow.

Yes, that means working with market rate housing developers, and it also means diverting some of their would-be profits into the city’s affordable housing fund and its infrastructure needs. Yes, it means private-sector job creation, but it also means more public sector jobs and providing a safety net for people without jobs or who work as artists or social workers or other professions that are being driven from the city. And it means beefing up our public housing and turning around the exodus of African-Americans, concerns raised at the meeting by Sup. Malia Cohen.

We at the Guardian last year looked at how Oakland has become cooler than San Francisco, largely because of the displacement from here. And now, even many people within the tech community have begun to decry the gentrifiction that is being driven by Mayor Lee’s narrow economic development vision.

“Plan Bay Area is an opportunity to think regionally and strategically about planned growth,” Lee said when addressing Mar’s question, sidestepping the direct answer that Mar sought on a set of specific proposals for mitigating some of the displacement planned for San Francisco and maintaining this city’s diversity.

Yes, we do have an opportunity to think strategically about the city we’re becoming and who gets to live in it, but only if we don’t think “jobs” is the answer to every question.

Supervisors approve condo legislation with veto-proof majority

Sasha Cuttler

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June 11, 2013

64

Supervisors approve condo legislation with veto-proof majority

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors today voted to approve compromise legislation that will allow more than 2,000 tenancy-in-common homeowners to convert to condominiums in exchange for a 10-year moratorium on the city’s current condo conversion lottery that now allows 200 conversions annually.

Approved by a veto-proof 8-3 majority after some last amendments were shot down by the six supervisors who most steadfastly supported the version that Board President David Chiu took the lead on crafting, this was a big victory for tenant groups who strongly opposed the original legislation, which did not include the moratorium and other restrictions.

“It’s great. We’re going to see a significant drop in condo conversions in the future. All of us tenants are very happy,” San Francisco Tenants Union head Ted Gullicksen told us after the hearing, which was packed with tenant supporters.

Sup. Mark Farrell, who sponsored the original legislation, decried how divisive the issue had become, criticized the approved version as deviating from his original intent of helping TIC owners in exchange for a fee that would help fund new affordable housing, and said, “This doesn’t need to be a zero sum game.”

But Chiu and the five supervisors who supported his version – Jane Kim, Norman Yee, David Campos John Avalos, and Eric Mar – noted the finite number of rent-controlled apartments in the city and the need to protect them from being converted into condos.

“How do we balance the needs of tenants who fear being evicted with TIC owners looking for relief?” Chiu said of the balance he aimed to strike, which he continued to tweak with new amendments today, including allowing TICs with all owner-occupied units to move forward if the legislation is challenged in court, an event that would otherwise freeze all condo conversions until the lawsuit is resolved.

Sup. London Breed wanted even greater flexibility in that so-called “poison pill” aspect of the legislation, which tenant groups had insisted on to prevent the bypass from going through even if the moratorium was challenged. Breed proposed allowing condo conversion applications to proceed for a year after a lawsuit was filed, but Chiu said that would let TIC owners convert to condos while challenging other aspects of the legislation, such as the lifetime leases for tenants in converted buildings.

Breed and Sup. Malia Cohen, who privately and rather grimly conferred with one another and sometimes Chiu before the item began a little after 4pm, were clearly the two swing votes on the question of whether the legislation would reach the crucial eight-vote threshold needed to override a possible mayoral veto. Mayor Ed Lee has refused to take a position on the issue, leaving both sides in the dark.

But after the motion to insert Breed’s amendments failed on a 5-6 vote, the board voted 8-3 to approve Chiu’s version of the legislation, with Sups. Farrell, Scott Wiener, and Katy Tang opposed. A subsequent vote on a version of the legislation backed by Farrell and Wiener – which contained a weaker poison pill and more flexible owner-occupancy provisions – then failed on a 4-7 vote, with Breed joining the three dissenting supervisors.

Underscoring this legislation was what some supervisors called a “housing affordability crisis” in San Francisco, an issue that Mayor Lee was asked about at the start of the meeting, which he deflected by claiming “our city has some of the toughest anti-displacement laws in the nation.”

We’ll analyze that discussion and offer more details on the condo conversion debate and the politics behind it tomorrow in the space, so check back then.

Alerts

Andrew Lam

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June 11, 2013

0

WEDNESDAY 12

Whose future? Community forum LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market, SF. sfbg.com, ccho@sfic-409.org. 6-8pm, free. In July, the Bay’s Regional governing body is scheduled to approve a state-mandated plan aimed at reducing carbon-emissions that proposes to put 280,000 more people, 92,000 new housing units, 100,000 new jobs (and 73,000 more cars) into SF over the next 30 years. By the proposed Plan’s own assessment: it will increase the risk of neighborhood disruption and displacement of existing residents and businesses, especially among the city’s working class communities. What can we do about it? Join Tim Redmond, San Francisco Bay Guardian; Mike Casey, Unite HERE Local 2; Cindy Wu, San Francisco Planning Commissioner; Maria Zamudio, Causa Justa: Just Cause; and others for this important panel discussion.

THURSDAY 13

Raising the Roof for Renters 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna, SF. tenantstogether.org/raisingtheroof2013. 6pm, $30 in advance/ $40 at the door. Tenants are hurting right now, so show your support by attending this fundraiser for Tenants Together — California’s statewide organization for renters’ rights. Celebrate five years of mobilizing tenants statewide for housing justice. Featuring a silent auction, fantastic food, and a cash bar.

SUNDAY 16

Teach-in: class struggle in Turkey Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakl. (510) 428-1578. 10:30am-12:30 p.m., free with donation requested. On May 31, without warning, Turkey erupted. For the first time in recent history, women, students, workers, artists, youth, Kurds, Artists, Turks, gays-lesbians, Alevites, doctors, small merchants, environmentalists, unions and progressive associations rose up together. Mehmet Bayram, a long time journalist and Bay Area activist from Turkey, will report on the developments that led to the events and the aftermath. A discussion of politics and class struggle in Turkey will follow.

THURSDAY 20

Rally and protest against Keystone XL Battery East, below Golden Gate Bridge Visitor Center, SF. tinyurl.com/mf6m2ef. Noon, free. Join Bill McKibben of 350.org for a noon rally against the Keystone XL pipeline, followed by a march across the Golden Gate Bridge. This time, environmentalists seeking to halt this major oil infrastructure project will be joined by National Nurses United, who are organizing a day of action in the city against austerity and the Keystone XL.

The myth of a pro-tenant city

Zelda Bronstein

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June 10, 2013

15

There are always bad tenants. Always will be. Human interactions are imperfect, and renting out a room in your flat or a flat under your apartment to a stranger is always a bit of a gamble. I’ve lived with housemates, and it’s always been great, but not everyone has that experience — one old friend of mine lived with a guy who threatened to kill him by writing demonic messages in blood on the bathroom wall and then smashed his car to bits with a street sign.

Yet most of the time, tenants pay the rent and keep things clean and it all works out — and that doesn’t make the news. Real drama is Pacific Heights, Michael Keaton breeding cockroaches and driving a poor young couple to bankruptcy and despair. Real drama is a guy who smashes the door in with a borrowed sledgehammer, floods the basement and throws a live appliance into the sink.

And when stories like that, written by a conservative man who clearly thinks the city is too soft on tenants, make the New York Times, it’s easy for the rest of the country to start thinking that San Francisco is some kind of commie paradise where even the worst tenants have all the rights and the nicest, most generous landlords always get screwed.

Such is the case with the Scott James tale of woe that has become one of the most-shared stories in the Times over the past week. Unfortunately, there’s nothing about this case that says anything about the state of landlord-tenant law in San Francisco.

James has decided not to rent out his available unit because he had a bad tenant. But he takes a bizarre example of unacceptable behavior and turns it into an argument that the city’s generally unfavorable to landlords — even when it’s clear that, in his case, the tenant could have been (and fairly easily was) evicted.

He argues that “it is a widely held belief among renters here that laws are so tilted in favor of tenants (and against landlords) that renters can get away with any outrageous behavior.” I know lots of renters and tenant lawyers, and I don’t know anyone who would say that breaking into the building with a sledgehammer and shorting out all the circuit breakers is something you can “get away with.” The laws that protect tenants essentially say that someone who pays the rent on time, honors the terms of the lease, and doesn’t do anything crazy like this guy did, gets to stay in place. The city restricts arbitrary, retailiatory, and purely economic evictions; what Scott found when he filed an eviction notice is that tenants who damage the property are not protected; in his case, there was no long battle, no expensive eviction process. He filed for eviction and the tenant left.

Story over.

If the tenant damaged the place, his or her security deposit would not be returned — and in most cases, the insurance would cover the rest of the damage. (Michael Petrelis has a nice takeout here; he also remembers that hideous Michael Keaton movie.)

Scott is clearly wealthy enough to pay for his turn of the century Victorian (which he bought for $1.3 million in 2004, according to public records) without renting out the downstairs unit. He’s not about to lose his home; in fact, he says he’s just as happy to have visitors stay there. So he’s not one of those landlords who says he can’t possibly survive without raising the rent or using the Ellis Act.

Instead, he’s just a whiner. He’s holding a valuable rental unit off the market because he wants … what? The right to throw out any tenant any time without any due process? What exactly is the problem he’s facing? How, exactly, did the city’s allegedly pro-tenant laws harm him?

I dunno. I have been trying to reach him; I send him emails and a message on Facebook. No response.

Here’s the truth: Most tenants are decent people who have, and should have, every right to stay in their homes. But these days, the amount of money flowing into the housing market (much of it, by the way, from big out-of-town investment groups) and the inability of the city to enact effective tenant protections has skewed the balance way, way in favor of the landlords.

The state Legislature has removed the only tools that actually protect low-income tenants in the long term, like rent controls on vacant apartments and anti-eviction rules. So San Francisco, in reality, is anything BUT a tenant paradise.

As for landlords who leave units vacant? They ought to pay a penalty. A tax on vacant residential units might encourage them to take the (modest) risk for the (big) reward, and put their places back on the market. Pacific Heights was just a movie.

A map of SF’s wealth — and poverty

Zelda Bronstein

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June 10, 2013

19

There’s a cool interactive map that gives you a visual picture of wealth and poverty in San Francisco. Check it out here. Just type in “San Francisco, CA” and click “income.”

What you see is a city full of green (wealth), with a few pockets of poverty. The data is at least two years old, so it’s almost certain that, say, the inner Mission no longer has a median income of $36,000 and the median in Noe Valley is above $108,000. The median in Vis Valley is (or was) $17,000. Nobody at that level could buy a house in VV now, not even close.

The fun thing is to imagine the income map overlaid with this map to see where housing costs — and thus median income — is rising fast. Check out, for example, the tiny Duboce Triangle area, with median income of $84, 000 (certainly no more than middle class by San Francisco standards). There were at least 17 buildings in that one census tract cleared of tenants by Ellis Act evictions; I wonder how much the median income has gone up.

It’s interesting to contrast SF to, say, Oakland and Berkeley, or to Los Angeles, where there are plenty of rich people (on the coast and in the hills) but also large swaths of more middle-income middle-class communities.

Just some thoughts for a Monday afternoon.

Rival condo conversion measures finally up for board vote

Sasha Cuttler

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June 7, 2013

58

Controversial condominium conversion lottery bypass legislation is finally headed for a vote by the full Board of Supervisors this Tuesday. Befitting legislation that has stirred strong emotions and traveled a twisting political path over the last six months, there are new dramas and uncertainties cropping up at the last minute, including the lingering unknown of where Mayor Ed Lee stands.

Originally co-sponsored by Sups. Mark Farrell and Scott Wiener, the legislation was intended to allow 2,000-plus tenancy-in-common owners to buy their way past the city’s lottery that allows 200 conversions to condominiums each year. But tenant groups and their progressive allies strenuously opposed the idea, and it was amended by Sups. David Chiu, Jane Kim, and Norman Yee working with tenants to couple the bypass with a 10-year moratorium on new conversions, thus clearing the backlog without opening the door to speculators taking more rent-controlled apartments off the market.

The Land Use Committee voted June 3 (2-1, with Chiu and Kim voting yes and Wiener opposed) to send the tenant-supported legislation to the full board and keep a Wiener-backed rival measure stuck in committee. But since then, Wiener invoked a board rule allowing four supervisors to pull the stalled legislation out of committee, getting Farrell and Sups. Katy Teng and London Breed to place that rival measure on Tuesday’s agenda as well.

Tenant groups decried the move and have put out the call for supporters to flood City Hall for the 2pm meeting, but Wiener told us that the differences in the two pieces of legislation are minor. One difference deals with whether transfers of ownership interest will affect an applicant’s spot in the queue and the other involves the so-called poison pill inserted by tenant groups, which would freeze the conversion process if anyone challenges the legislation in court, as real estate interests have threatened to do.

Wiener said the tenant-backed legislation’s changes to condo conversion eligibility, such as a 10-year wait period and banning future conversions of buildings with more than five units, that would remain in place after a successful legal challenge is an unfair overreach. But Chiu said tenant groups have already compromised as much as they can and they need this protection: “This is a carefully constructed compromise, and for the first time tenants groups are supporting thousands of condo conversions.”

Breed’s concerns about the poison pill provision — which was why she said she went along with Wiener’s play to bring up the rival measure — go even beyond Wiener’s. While most concerns involved a lawsuit from real estate interests, Breed worries about a pro-tenant litigant who wants to stop all condo conversions.

“If anyone chose to sue, it would help renters by shutting down everything completely. Where is the incentive not to sue?” Breed told us, noting that she still doesn’t have a solution to the problem, but she wanted the leverage of rival measures in order to address the issue. “I’m hoping it’s a win-win for renters and TIC owners,” she said. “Everyone else is not my concern right now.”

But the real estate interests will almost certainly try to preserve an ability for speculators to continue funneling more rent-controlled apartments into the real estate market, and just yesterday, the San Francisco Association of Realtors announced the hiring of an influential new point person on lobbying and housing issues: Mary Jung, a former spokesperson for then-Mayor Gavin Newsom before moving over to represent PG&E, and who was last year elected chair of the Democratic County Central Committee.

That could make a difference when it comes to Mayor Lee, who has resisted efforts by both sides to weigh in on the issue, saying only that he supports both tenants and TIC owners and that he understands the concerns about opening the door to a flood of new conversion requests.

“The one wild card here is no one know where the mayor is,” Wiener told us, noting that neither side is likely to get the eight votes that would be needed to override a veto. “The mayor, if he wanted to, could have significant leverage in crafting a compromise.”
Chiu said that he’s confident that his version of the legislation has the six votes needed to pass, but that it is still unclear what Mayor Lee will support, despite Chiu asking Lee to weigh in publicly in February and privately during a meeting yesterday. As Chiu told us, “We’ll see.”