The November ballot is shaping into a housing supply theory showdown, and yesterday’s [Thu/17] Board of Supervisors Rules Committee hearing was the first round.
The committee hosted two hearings on rival housing proposals for the November ballot: Sup. Jane Kim’s City Housing Balance Requirement and Mayor Ed Lee’s Build Housing Now initiative. The two purport to set similar goals for building affordable housing, but Lee’s proposal contains a poison pill that would invalidate Kim’s measure.
The mayor’s philosophy on housing, a strict supply and demand argument, was on full display.
“[Housing] is a competition based on who has the most dollars in their pocket, and the ones with the most dollars win,” Olson Lee, director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing said at the hearing. “If we limit the supply, the people with the most dollars will win.”
The arguments are a little complicated, but let’s try to break them down: Kim’s initiative lays out a requirement for new construction to build 30 percent affordable housing and 70 percent market-rate housing. Currently, new construction projects can build on-site affordable or pay a fee into a pot, known as the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. If new construction needs to be exempt from the balance requirement, under Kim’s measure, that can be decided by the Planning Commission.
But the mayor and his deep-pocketed development allies are shrinking away from this like the Wicked Witch of the West from water. Affordable housing doesn’t make a dime for developers, and the mayor fears Kim’s policy will slam the breaks on market-rate housing construction.
Activist and San Francisco historian Calvin Welch argues supply and demand housing theories won’t solve the San Francisco housing crisis, via 48hills.
Yet Kim’s measure is based on what many progressives in San Francisco believe: San Francisco’s housing market is hot, profits are high, demand is insatiable, and building lots of market rate housing that will never be affordable to most San Francisco won’t solve the city’s affordable housing crisis. The construction pipeline won’t slow down with a few dings to profit margins, she argued.
“I just have to say if building 30 percent affordable housing will halt development, we’re in a whole lot of trouble,” Kim said to her critics. “We have to build. Even people that make money leave San Francisco every day.”
No one is saying Kim doesn’t believe more housing needs to be built. But Lee’s staffers emphasized a belief that more housing construction alone is the solution to the city’s ills, a strategy that hasn’t exactly netted stellar results recently. They also defended the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, as the Mayor’s Office of Housing is funded about “40 percent” from developer’s fees, Olson Lee said. Sarah Dennis Phillips, from the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, argued sharply that any hit to developer’s fees, even marginal ones, would result in a loss of dollars for the city’s General Fund, the funding pot feeds most city services.
Meanwhile, people are losing their homes and fleeing the city. Some who are holding on by a thread came out to speak at the dueling hearings.
“I have health challenges including cerebral palsy,” Justin Bennet said during public comment. He spoke with a difficulty in his jaw, haltingly and with much effort. He said the housing market made it difficult to move from the dangerous areas of the city he calls home. “I’ve been robbed outside several residences I’ve lived in, so I’m hoping for a change in my housing situation in the future. Thanks for letting me speak.”
A family came up to the podium to speak, with two young housing activists, a brother and sister, 9 and 6, saying they didn’t want to see so many lose their homes.
Advocates from the SEIU 1021, South of Market Community Action Network, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and the Chinese Progressive Association, to name a few, were on hand at the hearing. They were also on hand for a press conference on the steps of City Hall shortly before the hearing. Ed Donaldson from ACCE called out the mayor’s housing measure, saying its only intent was to torpedo Kim’s.
“I say we should play chicken with the mayor,” Donaldson said at the podium. Metal bands have sung with less volume than the baritone he used while booming, “Let’s see if he has the gall.”
Inside the hearing, Patrick Valentino (who championed luxury development on the waterfront) and Tim Colen of the Housing Action Coalition spoke, defending the mayor’s measure.
“As San Francisco, as a city in affordability, we’re failing. Our rate of failure is accelerating,” he said flatly. He criticized Kim’s plan and asked, “Where’s the money? No one disagrees we need it. The shortcoming I see in the housing balance measure is its premise that if we increase restrictions on market rate housing, it helps subsidize housing.”
He argued instead to gather more stakeholders together (i.e. deep pocketed developers) to negotiate more private funding, a strategy he said that worked in the past.
As others came to the podium to argue against developer greed, Colen watched on, shaking his head, seemingly in disagreement. When someone in public comment argued that developers so far have shirked their responsibilities to build affordable housing, he shook his head again and left the hearing room.
There’s a stark divide in housing philosophy, and supply and demand’s ability to save San Francisco will soon see a trial by voter if Kim’s charter amendment can win six vote at the full Board of Supervisors.
The mayor’s policies seem to be more of the same, Kim said, and now the city seems to be fighting over the crumbs of developers’ fees. Despite opposition from the mayor, Kim told the Guardian she’s open to new ideas from the mayor.
But she also said she won’t back down.
“We’re on a two-fold path right now. If there’s a compromise to get [the city] to 30 percent affordable housing, like new revenue, we’re open to that compromise,” she said. “But we always intended this to go to the ballot.”
Thousands of Central American children fleeing drug wars and poverty are overwhelming the San Francisco nonprofits who care for them, but new information from the mayor shows this may just be the beginning.
Yesterday, just hours before Supervisor David Campos’ resolution to bolster funding to aid the incoming refugees passed, Mayor Ed Lee warned the Guardian and other journalists that San Francisco is bracing for another influx of even more children in need.
“I met with the federal Health Service System to prepare our city for the possibility of a higher influx [of refugees],” he said. “The numbers seem to be coming in, though they haven’t reached us yet.”
Campos’ measure to focus funding on the needs of Central American child refugees passed by unanimous vote, likely because its sorely needed. Nonprofits in San Francisco like the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) and other sounded the alarm: there are too many refugees, and not enough caregivers and legal aid to help them. More than 36,000 Central American children (often unaccompanied) entered the US illegally between Oct. 2013 and May this year, according to widely reported federal data. The number of Mexican children entering the US dropped to about 17,000.
But why are they coming here? Many reasons, but mostly they’re fleeing violence. Honduras, for instance, was the murder capital of the world, with 79 people murdered in every 100,000, according to Reuters. Neighboring El Salvador didn’t do much better, with the second highest murder rate per capita in the world.
“I am from Honduras and I just turned 16-years-old,” a teenager named Juan said, in a statement from CARECEN, “I came after my father was murdered and I feared for my life that I was next. If I go back I’m not sure that I can go back and live a good life. I want to go to school and live so I can grow up to do something good.”
False rumors in Central America that the US is offering permisos, meaning, permanent status, also spurred an influx of refugees.
CARECEN’s Washington D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco locations are advocating for President Barack Obama to declare a state of emergency and aid these refugees. But as the federal government grasps at possible solutions, local government is stepping in to help those reaching the city.
“There’s a long history on this board on calling out against injustices we’ve seen in different parts of the world,” Campos said at the board yesterday as he introduced his measure, adding “They’re escaping not just political turmoil but violence in their lives.”
“These are children,” he said.
Lee said one of the biggest challenges in helping these children may be a cultural one.
“I’m trying to wrap my arms around the fact that many of these kids don’t speak Spanish,” Lee told the Guardian yesterday. “They speak Mayan and different languages. This will test our cultural competency.”
Campos is planning a hearing on how best to focus funding to aid the child refugees, but hasn’t yet settled on a date for said hearing.
“Die techie scum.” Those words are sprayed ominously on sidewalks throughout San Francisco. They’re plastered on stickers stamped on lampposts. They’re even scrawled in the bathrooms of punk bars, the very establishments now populated by Google-Glass-wearing tech aficionados.
Journalists from San Francisco to New York have opined on the source of the hate: Is it the housing crisis? Tech-fueled gentrification? Rising inequality? Those same journalists later parachute into the tech industry to periodically peer at its soul: Is tech diverse enough? Is it sexist? Is it a true meritocracy?
Those issues are often looked at in a vacuum, but perhaps they shouldn’t be. Perhaps those problems are all interconnected, and solving tech’s diversity problem is also part of solving income inequality in San Francisco, giving longtime San Franciscans a chance to join the industry many now view as composed of outsiders and interlopers.
The average Silicon Valley tech worker makes about $100,000, according to Dice Holdings Inc., which conducts annual tech salary surveys. Opportunity in the tech sector may bolster San Francisco’s middle-income earners, vanishing like wayward sea lions from the city’s landscape. Statistics from the US Census Bureau show that 66 percent of the city is either very poor or very rich, showing a hollowing out of the middle class.
Some tech CEOs are addressing their employment needs with a foreign workforce. Mark Zuckerberg and a cadre of tech CEOs have lobbied Senate and House Republicans to reform immigration in their favor, hoping to lure out-of-country workers to fill tech’s employment vacancies. Politico reported Sean Parker gave upwards of $500,000 to Republicans in 2014, all for the cause of immigration reform.
Conversely, a movement is already underway to bring San Franciscans into tech’s fold, based on the idea of a win-win scenario: San Francisco’s public school students are overwhelmingly diverse and lower income, while the tech industry is not.
Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yahoo recently released their diversity numbers, showing the companies are mostly white and male. This accusation has long haunted Silicon Valley.
Two years ago, Businessweek heralded the “Rise of the Brogrammer.” The stereotype is as follows: He preens as he programs in his popped collar, his startup funds fuel the city as he hunts “the ladies,” and he is insensitive toward women in the workplace in the most fratboy-like way imaginable.
Biz dev VP of @path just cracked lame jokes re: “nudie calendars,” frat guys + “hottest girls,” “gangbang” at #swsx talk. Cue early exit.
But while outlier brogrammer douche-bros certainly exist, whose classist opinions ignite widespread ire (think Greg Gopman’s statement comparing homeless people to “hyenas”), the real brogrammer threat is more insidious, more systemic.
“The brogrammer is always someone else,” wrote Kate Losse, a freelance journalist, in an April blog post. “He is THOSE Facebook guys who yell too loudly at parties and wave bottles in the air, he is not the nice, shy guy who gets paid 30 percent more because of his race, gender and appeal to the boy-genius fetishes of [venture capitalists].”
The overarching point of Losse’s article was this: There is a subtle sexism, and also racism, in the tech sector, which shuts out women and people of color. The looming stereotype of a douchey brogrammer can obscure the smaller, more indirect ways in which minorities and women are shut out of the industry.
Tech’s disturbing (but unsurprising) lack of diversity is being highlighted amid an economic backdrop that has resulted in widespread displacement of San Francisco’s working class and minorities.
Some are seeking to create opportunities for Bay Area communities of color within tech, as a way to even the scales. A swell of new applicants with programming skills — including people of color and women — may soon come knocking. But in the time it will take school-age coders to cycle through the first generation of new computer science classes, Silicon Valley is going to have to take a hard look in the mirror.
Some of the Bay Area’s hate toward tech may be rooted in a perceived lack of access. Longtime residents see a sea of newcomers, often white, often male, who aren’t pulling up a seat for minorities to join the new gold rush.
The age of the brogrammer is now, and it’s as socially progressive as the paleolithic era, meaning: not at all.
FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT
Talk to anyone in the realm of new technology companies and startups, and they’ll surely tell you this: Tech is an inspiring, creative field, where pure skill is the key to unlocking any job you’d like. The dress style is casual (hoodies, of course) and the perks flow like wine (or energy drinks).
When the Guardian visited the CloudCamp social good hackathon, we saw video game arcade machines in the ground floor and beer flowing throughout. Another company, Hack Reactor, had desks attached to treadmills and a life coach on hand to mind employee health. These are accoutrements de rigeuer, stunningly standard. But tales of true Silicon Valley excess abound: One CEO offers employees free helicopter rides, many offer in-house chefs and extravagant travel.
Interns in Silicon Valley are enjoying huge perks like free meals, massages, swimming pools, nap pods: http://t.co/BdaaOdC95P
Skill and ability alone are the keys to unlocking this lifestyle, the tech industry says. Workers’ fervor can take on an almost cult-like zeal.
“I think the sharing economy is addictive,” said Rafael Martinez-Corina, a panelist at the Share2014 sharing economy conference in May, touting tech’s biggest stars like AirBNB, Lyft, and Uber. “Once you get it, you want more and more. You get into car sharing, you want to get into food sharing, time sharing.”
He asked the audience, “Who else is addicted to sharing?”
Almost every hand went in the room shot right up. Cheers immediately followed. Hallelujah!
Mars Jullian, an engineer at AdRoll, told the Guardian that employees of tech companies with name-brand apps tend to exhibit more ego. AdRoll is a big player, but more behind the scenes, she said, giving her perspective on the attitudes of her fellow tech workers.
“Sometimes it seems tech people feel like they own the city,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s the right attitude to have. Sometimes it’s more important to be humble.”
One might forgive the tech workers for their enthusiasm. The industry, after all, has ushered in widespread transformation in business and communications, resulting in dramatic economic shifts. But with such a high concentration of wealth and influence in the Bay Area, the question of who gets to participate is key.
Google’s diversity numbers rocked the world outside Silicon Valley, but surprised few in the Bay Area. The behemoth is 70 percent male and 60 percent white, with Asians making up 30 percent of the company’s ethnic representation.
Soon after Google’s numbers were revealed, Facebook, Yahoo, and LinkedIn followed suit with their own diversity reports. Their numbers differ a bit from Google, showing more Asian employees, and slightly more women. The numbers look worse, however, when only technology jobs are factored in. The tech worker population among these companies is about 15 percent female.
Hadi Partovi, an early Facebook investor, now adviser, and ex-chief of Microsoft’s MSN, told the Guardian that despite the industry’s challenges, tech’s doors are open to people with skills, regardless of background.
“The computer doesn’t know if it’s being programmed by someone rich or poor, black or brown,” he told us in a phone interview. “A lawyer, for instance, is looked at more explicitly. Tech has the opportunity to be more meritocratic.”
But the tech sector’s pious belief that it functions as a world-changing meritocracy ignores a host of factors that serve to hinder inclusion.
Many have touted the education pipeline as the root cause of tech’s lack of diversity. The number of women pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is stunningly low, 24 percent, according to the US Department of Commerce. African Americans and Latinos also lag far behind their white and Asian counterparts in completing their computer science degrees, according to studies by the East Bay nonprofit Level Playing Field Institute.
Considering Asian groups is important: the Level Playing Field Institute draws a distinction between represented and underrepresented minority groups, acknowledging that ethnicity, income and class intermingle in complex ways. It’s those underrepresented groups like women, Latinos and African Americans LPFI identifies as groups lacking in tech.
But the pipeline is only one part of the problem. Subtle (and not-so-subtle) misogyny and racism, often labeled micro-aggressions, pervade hiring.
Level Playing Field is focused on creating opportunity for people of color and women in STEM fields. In an extensive tech-industry study conducted in 2011, called “Hidden Bias in Information Technology Workplaces,” researchers concluded: “Despite widespread underrepresentation of women and people of color within the sector, diversity is not regarded as a priority.”
Surveying more than 645 engineers, the study’s authors found that white men were the most likely to believe that diversity was not a problem that needed addressing in the tech sector. The study also found that underrepresented people of color (Latinos and African Americans), and women were more likely to encounter exclusionary cliques, unwanted sexual teasing, bullying, and homophobic jokes.
Sometimes, these instances blow up for the world to see.
THE MIRROR-TOCRACY
The workday text messages between Tinder’s co-founder Justin Marteen and former VP Whitney Wolfe went public after Wolfe sued Tinder, revealing the ugly waters women must sometimes navigate in tech. Marteen was allegedly harassing Wolfe over her new love interest, and Wolfe asked him to stop.
“Stop justin [sic]. Were at work,” Wolfe asked of Marteen, to which he replied, “Ur heartless… go talk to ur 26 year old fucking accomplished nobody. I’ll shit on him in life.”
He should have ended there. But he continued his rage at his ex-girlfriend.
“Hagsgagahaha so pathetic I even imagined a life w u. I actually thought u would be a good mother and wife. I have horrible judgement. He can enjoy my left overs,” he allegedly wrote. “You’re effecting my work environment,” she replied, “and this is very out of control. Please don’t do this during work hours.”
Besides an awful command of rudimentary spelling, the squabble showed the very real harassment women in tech are exposed to every day. When Wolfe went to Tinder CEO Sean Rad for help, she found herself out of a job.
Tinder is not an outlier, according to studies by Level Playing Field. Nor is it the only company to see its harassment go public. Earlier this year, GitHub’s CEO Tom Preston-Werner resigned after a former employee, Julie Ann Horvath, alleged she was harassed by him, his wife, and engineers.
While Github denied the allegations, Horvath was defiant: “A company can never own you. They can’t tell you who to fuck and who not to fuck. And they can’t take away your voice.”
But for every example of outright sexism or racism, there are multitudes of more subtle biases in the workplace. Level Playing Field’s studies found these biases are pervasive. They start as early as the hiring process.
Carlos Bueno is a former Facebook engineer, now tinkering behind the scenes at memSQL. He is of mixed ethnicity, Irish and Mexican, among others. “My father called us ‘Leprechan-os’,” he told us.
Bueno trained interviewers at Facebook, and like many there, he also conducted interviews. He said Facebook’s interview process was probably one of the best in the industry for screening out biases of the interviewer, but other companies were not as aware of bias as a problem.
“Every startup wants to be a big dog,” he said, describing the process. “But the point of a startup is to grow very large, very quickly. They don’t have time to learn. Some people take rules of thumb or investor advice and run with it.”
Paypal co-founder Max Levchin is looked to as a thought leader in the startup world. He touts the idea that diversity of perspective in a startup’s early phases can actually hurt its chances of success, hindering its speed in “endless debates.”
Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel once famously put it this way: “Don’t fuck up the culture.”
Bueno pointed to a real estate startup, 42Floors, as an example of a company adopting Levchin’s philosophy. It looks for potential hires who are a “cultural fit,” i.e., making sure the candidate and employer think alike.
One 42Floors interviewer explained this on the company blog: “I asked her how she was doing in the interview process and she said, ‘I’m actually still trying to get an interview. Well, I grabbed coffee with the founder, and I had dinner with the team last night, and then we went to a bar together.’ I chuckled. She was clearly confused with the whole matter. I told her, ‘Look, you just made it to the third round.'”
So the interview process for tech may involve coffee dates or “beer with the guys,” and the onus is on the interviewee to figure all of this out. Similar blog posts from 42Floors go on to call out interviewees who wear suits, or act too stodgy for their liking.
We spoke to Bueno extensively over burgers, but he put it best in his blog.
“You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth,” he wrote. “What wearing a suit really indicates is — I am not making this up — non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up.”
Founders back up their faulty hiring practices with faulty logic. “It’s so hard to get in, if you get in you must be good,” Bueno said. “But those two statements don’t support each other.”
Some students of color training to code have already caught a glimpse of how the mirror-tocracy functions.
OPENING THE DOOR
Eight years ago, Kimberly Bryant moved to San Francisco to work in biotech. She moved to the city because she believed it to be more racially and economically diverse. She worked adjacent to Bayview Hunters Point, and has since revised her view of the city as a welcoming multicultural environment.
Instead, she found a city with an African American population dwindling below six percent in a city of over 800,000, and a gutted middle class. Latinos are moving out in greater numbers too. Over the last decade, 1,400 Latinos left the Mission District, according to a recent report on displacement by Causa Justa / Just Cause. In the same time, 2,900 white residents flooded in.
The displacement data reveals a significant parallel: The diverse ethnic groups Silicon Valley lacks in its employed ranks are the very same ethnic groups being priced out of San Francisco.
Seeking to mitigate the ethnic and gender disparity in tech, Bryant formed Black Girls Code, a student mentor and workshop program. It first opened up shop in the Bayview, but has sinced moved on.
“I really saw and experienced the true diversity of the community in Oakland,” Bryant told the Guardian, of the nonprofit’s new home. “It’s just an amazingly incredibly diverse community in terms of race and economy. What San Francisco used to be,” she added, “but is no longer.”
Black Girls Code teaches K-12 students rudimentary coding skills, providing instruction in Ruby and Python. Although companies like Google and others have opened their doors with welcoming arms, she said, convincing her students that the tech world is ready for them has been challenging.
When she brought her young students to an industry event, TechCrunch Disrupt, she dodged a minefield of fratboy-like behavior that made her students feel unwelcome, she said. This is the same event that heralded a prank app called “titstare,” which invited users (presumably male) to upload photos of themselves staring at women’s breasts.
The app was displayed on a stage before some of the most influential players in the tech industry, but Bryant’s students were in the audience too.
“They were shocked, like everyone there. It was disconcerting for the parents and the girls,” she said. Though she’s careful not to overplay the damage done (the girls “laughed awkwardly,” she said), the takeaway of the conference was that women and girls were not the intended participants. “It’s like a frathouse. I thought, ‘oh my god, this is like college all over again. This sucks.'”
At Mission and 19th streets sits MEDA, a nonprofit that has long worked to help Mission residents gain a foothold in San Francisco workplaces. This begins even in the lobby, where a small kitchenette in the corner plays host to a chef who mixes up a mean ceviche, with spices admittedly leaving this reporter in tears. He aspires to open his own restaurant, and MEDA is helping him get there.
The upstairs houses a group of students called the Mission Techies. They seek support in their aspirations to enter the tech industry, but for them the dream may be further off than the chef’s.
Gabriel Medina, policy manager at MEDA, doesn’t mince words. These are the “challenge” kids, he said, but they’ve done him and program manager Leo Sosa proud.
The Mission Techies pull apart computers to learn about their innards.
Sosa described a visit from Google and Facebook engineers who taught his students rudimentary coding skills. One student, Jamar, was so engrossed in programming that one engineer asked: “Is he okay?!”
“Jamar is on the coding program, [and he’s] on fire,” Sosa told the Guardian, while sitting in a MEDA office.
But students like Jamar, an African American San Franciscan, face an uphill battle before they ever get to the step of applying for a job like one at Google.
After visiting some tech offices, the students felt less sure of themselves.
“They were like ‘I don’t see no black guys, I don’t see no Latinos. Leo, do you really think I can get a job here?'” Sosa told us. For them, the mirror-tocracy did not reflect an image they recognized.
By many measures, MEDA’s Mission Techies program is a success, taking kids of modest means and equipping them with digital skills that can aid their employment prospects. Mission Techies, Black Girls Code, and other programs such as Hack Reactor and Mission Bit all nip at the heels of the education pipeline leading to tech industry employment. They also share a common focus: They’re educating largely minority populations, often low-income, and located in the Bay Area.
The solution to tech’s diversity problem and to San Francisco’s displacement may spring from the same well: educate the people who live here to work in the local industry. But in order to do that effectively, afterschool and summer programs alone won’t do the trick.
The schools themselves need disruption.
WORKING TOGETHER
In the midst of the tech hub, the San Francisco Unified School District finds itself surrounded by tech allies. Still, change comes slowly.
Only five of SFUSD’s 17 high schools have computer science courses. Ben Chun, an MIT graduate and former computer science teacher at Galileo High School, told us the outlook is bleak without digital training in schools. Though kids sometimes teach themselves programming at home, most low-income students don’t have that opportunity.
“It’s a privilege thing,” he told us. If you have access to computers at home, you’re more likely to tinker and teach yourself. Those kids are more likely to be the Bill Gates of the future, he said, the self-starters and early computer prodigies.
“If you don’t have those things in place,” he said, “there’s a zero chance it will be you.”
When he first got to Galileo, his computer teacher predecessor taught word processing. But a lot has changed since 2006.
Partovi took his successes at Facebook and Microsoft and parlayed his money into a nonprofit called Code.org. The organization created its own coding classes for kids as young as 6, and compelled 30 school districts nationwide to create computer science courses based on its work.
Code.org’s tutorials have been played by millions of students.
Now it has its sights set on SFUSD’s 52,000 students, potentially solving tech and the school’s problems at once.
“It would for sure level that diversity gap,” Partovi told the Guardian. “All of the data released from Google, Yahoo, and others show a male-dominated industry. The pipeline of educated kids is actually much more diverse.”
But integrating tech in the district is slow, and likely years away. The district needs state standards to require computer science, something SFUSD Superintendent Richard Carranza has already lobbied Gov. Jerry Brown to change.
“The demand [for computer science classes] is coming from everywhere,” Carranza told us, including parents, students, the tech industry, and city leaders.
“What makes it a game changer is the partnership with our tech partners,” he said. “It gives our students the opportunity to interact elbow to elbow with people doing computer science out in the real world.”
But the tech workers those students are interacting with, though well meaning, remain the domain of the brogrammers. Will they hire SFUSD graduates with computer science skills when and if they’re ready? Will they be the right “culture fit?”
“There’s definitely a libertarian thread, a free market, red-toothed nature of things [in tech],” Bueno told us. “Talking to people in unguarded moments, that definitely leaks out. You’re not going to convince anyone by singing kumbaya and holding hands.”
But logical tech workers need look no further than the current numbers facing Silicon Valley to see the need to reach beyond their in-groups: 1.2 million new tech jobs will be created by 2020, studies from the US Department of Labor show. At the same time, 40 percent of the United States will be Latino and black by 2040.
When the minority is the majority, the brogrammers may become a dying species.
Nearly 100 nonprofit workers and their allies, hungry for a raise, marched through the corridors of City Hall today and shouted down the Board of Supervisors at its weekly meeting. “Supervisors can’t you see? Inequality is killing me!” the protesters shouted at the board. Protesters linked arms across the wooden barricade between the supervisors’ seats and the audience, and 11 were detained for their act of civil disobedience.
The nonprofit workers are taking aim at Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed budget, which gives the workers a 1.5 percent cost of living funding increase they say is not enough to offset rising rents, healthcare costs, and other expenses in San Francisco. After doing the math, they say, for-profit contractors are getting as much as a 3 percent boost, which they’re calling a double standard.
Mostly, the workers are feeling exhausted and underpaid. Darien Lomeli, a counselor at Progress Foundation’s Rypins House, helps mentally ill seniors connect with housing services and navigate exceedingly low incomes — but now she says she’s facing those same hurdles herself. Last year, she finally got a 1.9 percent raise, but had no raises at all for over six years.
“We can’t survive on what we’re paid,” she said. Lomeli grew up in San Francisco but was priced out to Redwood City some time ago.
Raw video clips of the nonprofit workers’ Board of Supervisors action today. Alysabeth Alexander of the SEIU is the first speaker, shortly before 11 protesters were cuffed (with plastic) and detained.
But it’s not just about individual challenges, she said, low pay engenders high turnover in the nonprofit sector, which hurts those she helps. “The turnover rate,” she said, “is skyrocketing.”
The homeless seniors she works with need help from people they trust. Navigating services is also exceedingly difficult for trainees, and constantly training new workers is a drain on resources, she said.
— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) July 8, 2014
Sup. David Campos told the Guardian a cost of living adjustment for nonprofit workers was on the table during budget negotiations, but was eventually dropped. Now he and Sups. Eric Mar and Norman Yee are working on a solution.
“It’s just a conversation at this point,” Nick Pagoulatos, an aide to Mar, told the Guardian. More research needs to be done to find the dollars in the budget that could go towards the funding increases, which the SEIU estimates would cost somewhere near $6.8 million annually. “The timing of when or if [an increase] could move forward is up in the air,” Pagoulatos said.
Cost of living is just the latest in a series of fiscal hits the nonprofit sector has taken to the chin in San Francisco of late. The tech sector boom downtown and in South of Market have raised the rents on many surrounding nonprofits, which some have said led to the closure of over 1,000 nonprofit agencies in San Francisco since 2011. Mayor Lee and the board provided $4.5 million in the 2014-15 budget to offset rent increases for nonprofits in the city.
CULTURE The veteran Muay Thai master placed the braided circlet, the Mong Kong, on the head of his young pupil. The two stood together in the grass at the Contra Costa Fairgrounds in Antioch, in the qualifying round for the Battle of the Pacific, a day of martial arts battles featuring fighters both amateur and experienced.
May 17 was a bright, sunny day to enjoy a kick to the head; families, couples, and loved ones gathered on the grass around the red, white, and blue ring to cheer at flying legs and fists. Earlier in the night, two six-year-olds entered the ring for a round of Muay Thai in miniature headgear and leg shields. They smiled as they finished their adorable fight.
Others had more serious intentions. As Muay Thai struggles to find a foothold in the United States as a spectator martial art, every match matters. The Inner Sunset’s World Team USA already has one star in Ky Hollenbeck, who fought a nationally televised fight at Madison Square Garden last year.
But World Team’s newest up-and-comer is a San Francisco underdog at the beginning of his career, and that night he had much to prove.
The sun lowered at the fairgrounds, bringing a cool shade. Hands still outstretched, Kru Ajarn Sam Phimsoutham (Kru Sam for short) bowed his head with 22-year-old Robby Squyres, Jr., as both said a silent prayer before his championship fight.
The moment of prayer had a purpose. Squyres calls this his “switch.” Before a match, he closes his eyes and remembers his most feared memory, bringing himself to a point of aggression which he immediately must conquer to gain enough mental control to fight.
Kru Sam, before placing the Mong Kong on Robby Squyres Jr.’s head. Photo by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez
Four years ago, Squyres was not a walking weapon. Four years ago, he had a brush with death.
Squyres first walked off the path while attending Raoul Wallenberg High School. The San Francisco native wasn’t necessarily a proud student.
“I was trying, but I was barely skimming by,” he said, alluding to unsavory extracurricular activities. “That life all caught up to me.”
One summer night, the then-teenager was walking up Powell Street with his friends when they came across a group of nine guys who “had beef” with two of Squyres’ friends. The newcomers were spoiling for a fight.
Squyres thinks he was the primary target because he was the biggest; if the attackers’ philosophy was “take out the biggest guy first,” it’s easy to see why it would be him. He was quickly knocked to the concrete with a sucker punch.
As soon as his head hit pavement, they pounced. Boots hammered his head and body as the savage teenagers ensured he couldn’t get up. When a friend tried to jump in to help, he was snared in the melee too. By the end, Squyres’ face was bloodied and he suffered multiple injuries, including a concussion.
A security guard found him laid out on the sidewalk and pulled him to a nearby store. Through hazy memories, Squyres remembers a friend holding his hand during the ambulance ride to the hospital. His hospital release papers came with advice for treating head injuries, but those were the least of his troubles.
“It went downhill from there,” Squyres remembered. He found he had trouble coping with the fear, which plagued his waking moments as well as his sleeping ones. He quit school and spent nights looking over his shoulder. Eventually he sought peace of mind.
“I asked this gentleman in the San Francisco Police Department, a good friend, for a gun. I was stupid,” he said. “My friend said ‘No. I’m going to help you defend yourself.’ He called his friend in the Philippines. He said ‘I don’t know your story that well, but I’m going to give you an opportunity.'”
That opportunity was World Team USA, where he works in exchange for lessons — scrubbing mats, leading workouts, and opening up the school in the morning. He likens finding Muay Thai to a spiritual awakening.
Though many Muay Thai schools advertise danger and action, World Team USA’s logo is surrounded by three words: courage, honor, and respect. Squyres even teaches anti-bullying classes at Wallenberg, hoping to reach teenagers like those who attacked him.
“My school helped me become a better man and walk my faith,” Squyres, a born-again Christian, said. “To show what my life was, and what it is.”
What it is now is laser-focused passion.
In the month leading up to his fight he lost nearly 40 pounds, dropping from the super heavyweight category to the heavyweight category. The week before the match Kru Sam allowed him to eat nothing but one avocado per day.
“Every day I dreamed of Jamba Juice mixed with pizza,” he said. “It was probably worse than a pregnant woman’s cravings.”
As the sun faded at the fairgrounds, Kru Sam told us the fight “is a testing ground for him, to see his potential for the future. But no matter the outcome, I’ll be proud of him.”
All of this flashed in Squyres’ mind before his match. His trigger struck: the brush with death bringing his rage, the peace he learned from Kru Sam bringing him calm.
The announcer called Squyres to the ring in a booming baritone. His opponent, Steven Grigsby of Stockton, couldn’t have been more physically different. Squyres’ body is broad and naturally thick, while Grigsby is hard and lean, with wiry muscle. Torches surrounded the ring, and the flames whipped in the wind. Squyre’s mom, Winki, sat in the crowd, biting on her knuckles.
“Ding!” The bell sounded, and the two circled.
Grigsby scored the first shot, a foot connecting with Squyres’ side. The heavy-set San Franciscan returned with a flurry of fists to Grigsby’s head, snapping him back. The two met legs in mid-section kicks.
The match ended without a decisive lead, but that soon would change.
Muay Thai is known as the “art of eight limbs.” The following rounds made that more than clear. Grigsby’s fists flurried at Squyres, with elbows and legs soon twisted around each. Squyres took it again and again, falling back.
“SWEEP, BOBBY, SWEEP!” Kru Sam shouted from the side. Something snapped in Squyres. As Grigsby swooped in for the attack, he flipped his body around in a twist, the momentum swinging his fist like a sledgehammer hard into the side of Grigsby’s head.
The crowd cheered.
When the match was over, Squyres was declared the winner by unanimous decision. Tears streaked his face as he walked from the ring to the fellow fighters from his dojo, to Kru Sam, and to his mother.
“I’m so thankful,” he said. Through the tears he unwrapped the bandages from his fists.
Robby Squyres, Jr.’s next fight is tentatively July 19 at the Battle of the Pacific in San Jose; check out www.ikfkickboxing.com for details.
Bobby Squyres, Jr., connects a first with Steven Grigsby of Stockton at the Battle of the Pacific, at the Contra Costa Fairgrounds. Photo by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez.
Red explosions and yellow starbursts lit the sky, accompanied by the requisite oohs and aahs.
San Franciscans sat by the beach at Aquatic Park celebrating our nation’s independence, eyes fixed upwards. But all around them, a team of independent scavengers, mostly ignored, methodically combed the wharf, plucking cans and bottles from the ground and overflowing trash bins.
Often derided as thieves or parasites, these workers are cogs in a grand machine instituted by California’s Bottle Bill in 1986, forming a recycling redemption economy meant to spur environmentalism with market principles.
The concept is simple. Taxpayers pay an extra five cents when they buy a can or bottle, and may redeem that nickel by trading the used can or bottle in at a recycling center. Thus, more recycling is spurred.
But now a wave of recycling center evictions is causing San Francisco’s grassroots recycling economy to crumble, and newly released numbers reveal just how much stands to be lost by the trend.
San Franciscan recyclers may miss out on millions of dollars in redemption, local mom-and-pop stores could wind up on the hook for millions of dollars in state fees, and neighborhoods stand to be besieged by recyclers flocking to the few remaining recycling centers.
Recycling activists and local businesses are pushing for change, but NIMBY interests are pushing for more of the same.
SOLUTION IS THE PROBLEM
San Francisco Community Recyclers is on the parking lot of Safeway’s Church and Market location, and after months of legal entanglement, the recycling center’s eviction draws near. Still, SFCR is making a show of resistance.
The San Francisco Sheriff’s Department is set to evict the recycling center within a week or so, as the rebel recyclers have so far refused to vacate voluntarily.
Sup. Scott Wiener says he’ll be glad to see them gone.
“This recycling center caused enormous problems in our neighborhood,” he told the Guardian. This particular Safeway lies within the boundaries of his district, and Wiener says his constituents complain the recycling centers draw too many unruly patrons, who are often homeless.
“There is problem behavior around the center in terms of camping and harassing behavior, defecation, urination in a much more concentrated way,” he said.
This animation shows the areas around San Francisco where recycling centers remain, which are often overburdened with customers as other centers close. The red zones indicate areas where supermarkets are mandated by state law to host recycling centers, but have chosen to pay fees instead.
But others say the not-in-my-backyard evictions only serve to create a ripple effect. The catalyst is a story we’ve reported on before: As well-heeled Golden Gate Park neighbors complained of homeless recycling patrons and waged a successful campaign to shutter the Haight Ashbury Recycling Center two years ago, the clientele adjusted by flocking to the Church and Market recycling center. New numbers illustrate this outcome.
Susan Collins is the president of the Container Recycling Institute, a nonprofit that conducts analysis on recycling data. On average nationwide, Collins said, one recycling center serves about 2,000 people.
But since 2012 the number of recycling centers in San Francisco has been reduced from 21 to 7, causing Church and Market’s service population to boom closer to 40,000, a difference that has more to do with the closures than the density of the area. Data from CalRecycle shows almost half of the city’s populace lacks a recycling center within close proximity, forcing patrons to overwhelm the few remaining centers.
“This makes it a chicken and egg process,” Collins told us. “For people to have the perception that the site is attracting so many people, they have to realize it’s because there are so few sites to begin with.”
Late last month, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano wrote to Safeway Chief Executive Officer Robert L. Edwards, urging the grocery chain to reverse its decision to evict San Francisco Community Recyclers from the Church and Market Safeway.
“Safeway has such a long history of supporting sustainability efforts,” Ammiano wrote, “and I truly believe that it can do so again.” Safeway, however, has other concerns.
“As curbside recycling has increased in San Francisco and around the state,” Safeway Director of Public Affairs Keith Turner wrote to Ammiano, “Safeway’s focus on recycling has evolved as well.”
Safeway is now also flouting local and state laws to throw recyclers off its back. CalRecycle, the state’s recycling agency, performed an inspection in April of the Diamond Heights Safeway. It found that the grocer failed to accept recyclables and offer state guaranteed redemption, despite signing an affidavit with CalRecycle pledging to do just that. CalRecycle cited that location and two other San Francisco Safeways for noncompliance with the bottle bill.
And that’s just the violations CalRecycle has documented so far. Ed Dunn, owner and operator of San Francisco Community Recyclers, has initiated his own investigation into Safeway statewide, filing complaints with CalRecycle alleging that as many as 75 Safeway stores aren’t following the mandates of their affidavits and offering redemption for recyclables.
On the other side of the fence, Safeway and other recycling-center critics (such as Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius) are essentially saying, who cares? Don’t we all just use blue bins nowadays?
The short answer: Nope.
MAKING GREEN, GOING GREEN
“Why do we need recycling centers if we have curbside recycling?” Sup. Eric Mar asked the deputy director of recycling at CalRecycle, point blank.
Jose Ortiz responded in less than a beat. “While some communities think curbside operations ensure the state’s goals of collecting [recyclables], the reality is that 90 percent of recycling volume is collected through recycling centers, not curbside programs,” he said from the podium.
That number came as a shock to many at the Board of Supervisors Neighborhood Services and Safety Committee June 19, including Sups. Mar, David Campos, and Norman Yee. Only 8 percent of recycling statewide comes through blue bins, CalRecyle confirmed to the Guardian.
Nor is that limited to California: Data from the Container Recycling Institute shows that the 10 states with recycling redemption laws produce such a high rate of return that they account for 46 percent of the nation’s recycling. And since California Redemption Value recycling is pre-sorted, experts note, the bottles are often recycled whole (as opposed to broken) which can be used for higher-grade recycling purposes.
So for the city with a mandated goal of zero waste by 2020, the case for keeping recycling centers open is an environmental one. It’s also fiscal.
San Franciscans make $18 million a year selling back recyclables, Ortiz said, most of which went directly into the pockets of recyclers. Those scavengers at the Fourth of July festivities may have only collected five cents per can, but that’s enough to buoy the income of many poor San Franciscans.
At the recycling hearing, David Mangan approached the podium to speak. His red hat was clean and his grey sweatshirt was ironed, but his face was worn with worry-lines and creases.
“I can’t walk more than about eight blocks at a time, and I’m unemployable because of my disabilities,” he told the committee. Recycling centers are a lifeline, he added. “I need this job, I’m on a limited income. I need the help they offer. I need them to stay open, please.”
Critics say some poor and homeless depend on a black market of recycling truck drivers who trade drugs for cans and bottles, then turn to recycling centers to make a profit. But those at the hearing said the extinction of recycling centers actually helps the mobile, black market recycling fleets bloom, as motorists have an easier time shuttling recyclables across the city.
So recyclers are increasingly forced to rely on these so-called “mosquito fleets” for far-flung trips to cash in their bottles.
SMALL BUSINESS BUST
Meanwhile, recycling center evictions are becoming a source of anxiety within the small business community.
State law establishes a half-mile radius called a “convenience zone” around any supermarket that annually makes more than $2 million. The supermarket is mandated to provide recycling on-site, accept recyclables in-store, or opt to pay a $100 a day fee.
With the eviction of SFCR from Church and Market, Safeway may opt to pay the fee. But that gap would leave surrounding businesses inside that convenience zone with the same options: accept recyclables in-store or pay $36,000 a year.
Miriam Zouzounis of the Arab-American Grocer Association said those options are daunting for liquor stores and mom-and-pop grocers.
“We just don’t have the space for [recycling],” she said at the hearing. If SFCR were to close, the total of small businesses shouldering the burden of state recycling fees would jump from 100 to more than 360, said Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the city’s Office of Small Business.
All told, San Francisco small businesses would be made to send $12.96 million in annual fees to California coffers because a few supermarkets didn’t want to handle recyclables. Mar is now calling upon all involved to step up and solve this glaring problem.
SOLUTIONS ON THE WAY
This week the Board of Supervisors is tentatively set to vote on a moratorium of recycling center evictions, introduced by Mar on June 24. The pause would give Mar time to form a work group with those involved: Department of the Environment, Department of Public Works, CalRecycle, local supermarkets, grocers, the Coalition on Homelessness, and others to come together to form a compromise solution.
Department of the Environment proposed a mobile recycling center, which Wiener called an equitable solution that would help distribute recycling responsibility evenly across the city. While that agency did not provide a timeline on the creation of a mobile recycling center before our deadline, it’s been in the works since 2012, when then-District 5 Sup. Christina Olague said it was the answer to the Haight Ashbury Recycling Center’s closure.
It’s been a long wait for a solution. And in the meantime, many more stand to lose.
As City College of San Francisco struggles to loosen the noose around its neck, this week its accreditors are slated to offer the college a new way out. But some skeptics are sounding the alarm: it’s a trap.
The Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges is scheduled to vote on and announce a newly revised version of its “restoration policy,” which some journalists have called City College’s salvation.
“Huge CCSF Win: College Won’t Close,” one San Francisco Chronicle headline read. Bay Area TV stations and others echoed the jubilant headline, saying City College was saved. Chancellor Art Tyler told the Chronicle he would “absolutely” apply for restoration status. But many are calling the restoration policy a poor choice for the college’s future.
The college’s faculty union isn’t the only one worried. A report released this month by the California State Auditor shows ACCJC has operated against its own bylaws and without full transparency in threatening CCSF’s accreditation.
“To allow community colleges flexibility in choosing an accreditor,” the state auditor’s report wrote, “the chancellor’s office should remove language from its regulations naming the commission as the sole accreditor of California community colleges while maintaining the requirement that community colleges be accredited.”
In the staid and stuffy bureaucratic language, the auditor essentially wrote the accreditor group was so dysfunctional it should be closed. The 75-plus page report scathingly tears down ACCJC staff, board selection, decisions, and policies. There are few areas in which they did not find fault.
“The report draws conclusions about accreditation without the necessary context and facts related to institutional evaluations,” ACCJC President Barbara Beno told the Guardian via email. “ACCJC is reviewed and approved by the United States Department of Education and its recognition was renewed in January 2014. That is the appropriate body to review the ACCJC’s practices.”
The DOE found many faults with the accreditors as well, but the scope of its review was limited to complaints made by the unions. The auditor viewed the accreditors in a fuller context, alleging the ACCJC decided to terminate CCSF’s accreditation “after allowing only one year to come into compliance,” while simultaneously allowing 15 other colleges two years and another six institutions to up to five years to reach compliance.
Such accusations of bias are also alleged in City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s lawsuit against ACCJC, charging CCSF was targeted with harsher penalties due to its political views.
Meanwhile, a closer look at restoration status shows it’s less like a lifeline and more like a tightrope suspended over flames.
The policy would give CCSF two years to come into compliance with all of the so-called “defects” ACCJC identified. If the college addresses these issues in two years, the commission would rescind the notice to terminate the college’s accreditation.
But buried in the legalese is a frightening clause noting that if CCSF isn’t found to comply with everything, “the termination implementation will be reactivated and the effective date will be immediate,” with “no further right to request a review or appeal in this matter.”
Beno said she heard the college community’s concerns around these clauses, during a two-week public comment period regarding the proposed policy that ended June 25.
“The Commission received a good deal of feedback,” she wrote, saying a revised “final version” of the restoration policy has been sent to the commissioners, who will vote remotely over the next week. “If it is approved, the ACCJC will post the final policy on its web page, the policy will be effective immediately.”
But the auditor found Beno hasn’t followed existing bylaws. This has long been an open secret in the community college world that’s referenced to in a 2010 public letter from the former California Community College Chancellor Jack Scott to the Department of Education. His immediate successor, Brice Harris (who also served on the ACCJC as a commissioner for seven years), did not heed this knowledge. He trusted Beno.
He met her for coffee, he talked to her on the phone. These interactions led him to believe replacing the college’s leadership would appease Beno, he said in his declaration (under penalty of perjury) in Herrera’s lawsuit against the ACCJC.
So on July 3, 2013, Harris released a video announcing he stripped the college’s elected Board of Trustees of all of its powers and promoted Special Trustee Bob Agrella to take its place. The college community was in an uproar, but Harris maintained publicly it was the right thing to do.
Privately, he received an email from Beno. “Dear Brice, Beautiful job,” she wrote to him, about his decision to whack the board. “The college may survive, with the right leadership.”
Harris wrote in his declaration: “Based on this email, which was consistent with all my prior interactions with Dr. Beno, I believed that City College could maintain its accreditation… if City College took extraordinary steps to comply with the ACCJC’s recommendations.”
But the accreditors did just the opposite. Just this month, it denied CCSF’s accreditation appeal, telling the college they it not review any evidence of progress it made after they voted to terminate its accreditation. This took Harris by surprise.
“If I had known on July 8, 2013, that the rules of the commission were later going to be interpreted to preclude any progress made by City College after June 2013,” he wrote in his declaration, “I would not have asked the Board of Governors to take the extraordinary step of setting aside the locally elected Board of Trustees.”
Harris was burned by the ACCJC. Now City College faces the choice to trust Beno and the accreditors again.
Above, California Community Colleges Chancellor Brice Harris explains why he pushed state entities to remove the City College’s Board of Trustees and replace them with Special Trustee Bob Agrella. Should City College of San Francisco trust the ACCJC?
Not many plays feature an all-Latino cast, let alone all El Salvadoran. But Paul Flores’ Placasplaced brown actors and a brown experience center stage. The 2012 production explored a father and ex-gang member’s struggle, leading his son out of a hard life of drugs, violence, and perhaps death.
“You had older generations coming to see the play right alongside their grandkids,” Flores told the Guardian. The play’s premiere venue packed its 500-seat capacity, and sold out seven out of its eight nights in San Francisco. “We tapped a community thirsty to hear its stories told.”
Placas is the kind of creative work not being funded often enough by the city’s largest arts grant organization, critics are saying. At a contentious San Francisco Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee hearing on June 20, artists told supervisors that programs serving diverse communities were severely underfunded, and alleged the city’s major arts funder, Grants for the Arts, awards money disproportionately to art forms favored by white audiences.
Spurred by public outcry and city studies, Sups. Eric Mar and London Breed recommended the transfer of $400,000 in unused funding from GFTA to another city arts funder, the Cultural Equity Grants (which funded Placas), to direct arts money to people of color.
The transfer won’t be approved until it goes before the full Board of Supervisors next month. But as San Francisco studio and housing rents soar, Mar said this was vital to keeping diverse artists in the city.
“I think the crisis for arts groups now is many of them are being displaced,” he told the Guardian. “How can the city subsidize groups with low rent or free rent, and how could we support small groups [to prevent them from] being displaced?”
Above is a PDF of the Budget Legislative Analyst’s report, as it breaks down lack of funding to diverse programs. The report has relevant sections highlighted.
The Guardian reached out to City Administrator Naomi Kelly for comment (her office ultimately directs arts grants funding). She was unavailable for an interview before we went to press, but her spokesperson Bill Barnes told us, “I don’t think we should be in a position of having governments regulate artistic content.”
But in a way, the government already does. The GFTA funding is made up of city dollars, and for decades its funding priorities have scarcely changed, favoring many of the largest mainstream organizations.
GFTA funds many arts organizations, but a recent report by the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office found it awarded about 70 percent of grants to organizations with mostly white artists who mostly cater to white audiences. The San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Opera, City Arts, the Exploratorium, the Museum of Modern Art, and the American Conservatory Theater received over one-third of GFTA funding over the past five years, the report found.
“The Bay [Area] will soon be 70 percent people of color,” Andrew Wood, director of the SF International Arts Festival, told the Guardian. “Why invest so heavily in organizations that are such a minority of the population?”
Taken on its face, the findings show a stark divide between funding for smaller, struggling minority arts groups and large, independently funded arts groups with predominantly white patrons. The report divided the diversity of GFTA arts funding into three categories: people of color (Asians, African Americans, and Latinos), ethnic minorities (Arab/Middle Eastern/Jewish), and LGBT organizations. The funding for these categories remained steady at about 20, 2, and 5 percent of arts funding, respectively, since 1989.
The lack of funding is one thing, but critics say the pattern indicates an outright dismissal of the broader community. In a mass email entitled “The State of the Arts in San Francisco” sent to the arts community from a group calling itself Arts Town Hall Organizing Committee said the outcry against critiques of GFTA’s diversity funding was “advanced by fringe members of the arts community.”
Realizing it called Black, Asian, and Latino artists a “fringe community,” the San Francisco Arts Alliance (a signatory to the email comprised of San Francisco’s symphony, opera, and other GFTA funded organizations) quickly backpedaled. It said the email was sent on their behalf by the public relations firm Barnes Mosher Whitehurst Lauter & Partners, a group that often runs astroturf campaigns for mainstream organizations.
One reason for GFTA’s inability to fund diverse arts groups may be a lack of trying: The BLA found the GFTA “does not have a definition or criteria for granting funds to people of color organizations.”
This color blindness is a problem, Wood told us. “[The money] the city invests in the War Memorial Opera House compared to the Bayview Opera House, also city owned, is completely out of whack,” he said. The Bayview Opera House was one among six “cultural institutions” to receive a portion of a $400,000 GFTA award, according to the organization’s 2013/14 annual report. Conversely, GFTA awarded the San Francisco Opera $653,000 the same year.
“They’re two different universes,” Wood said.
Allocating more funding for the Cultural Equity Grants was an oft-mentioned method for better supporting disadvantaged artists, the report found, even though GFTA and CEG share many of the same grantees.
Some say the report’s numbers don’t add up. San Francisco Arts Commission Director of Cultural Affairs Tom DeCaigny, a longtime local artist, disagreed with how the BLA defined which groups were white, ethnic, or otherwise.
“The methodology in the report assigns people an identity, and I know some of our grantees were referred to as white when they’re not,” DeCaigny told the Guardian. “We would want to see organizations self identify.”
Those faults undermine the value of the BLA’s findings, although he said, “I’m hesitant to comment on the value of that report.”
But some in the arts community felt DeCaigny’s opinion aligns suspiciously closely to the mayor’s priorities: funding the preferred arts organizations of his wealthy donors (like the symphony). We reached out to the San Francisco Symphony for comment but its representatives told us it would be unable to respond before our deadline.
DeCaigny defended the symphony, noting its annual Lunar New Year and Day of the Dead concerts serve diverse audiences. For the economically disadvantaged, he said, the symphony offers free concerts open to the public in Dolores Park, and that the symphony’s “artists are very diverse.”
DeCaigny pointed out the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra’s youth programs (shown above) are notably very diverse.
The donors are mostly white, he said, “but that’s true in other sectors as well. It has more to do with how wealth is distributed in our society.”
But Flores, Placas’ director, explained the need for ethnically diverse art was not just about who consumes it, but what message the art is sending to the audience. Nothing revealed this more, he said, then when he took Placas on tour across the United States. While in New York City, he conducted an informal poll.
“I asked ‘when I say San Francisco, what do you think of?’ They said the 49ers, the San Francisco Giants, the Golden Gate Bridge. They didn’t think gangs, pupusa, cumbia,” he said. That’s why Placas, which told the story of gang life among San Francisco Salvadorans, had such impact in the city and even beyond its borders.
“I love telling stories about San Francisco,” Flores told us. “The symphony doesn’t do that, the opera doesn’t do that. What does that? Locally generated art.”
The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance committee is tentatively slated to hold a hearing on allegations made in the BLA report on July 16.
Last night [Tues/24], a small group of protesters fighting for free speech on the Internet were arrested at Google’s Mountain View campus. The group is calling for a nation Internet blackout campaign on July 15 to demand the Federal Communications Commission solidify net neutrality.
Sgt. Kurtis Stenderup of the Santa Clara County Jail confirmed 10 protesters were arrested last night, and he indicated some may still be detained. “Most of the arrests were cited out for the trespassing charge,” he told us. “However, some arrests had outstanding warrants so I will have to look into their status.”
For the uninitated, the FCC recently proposed “fast lanes” for the Internet, which many allege would create a two-tiered access to Internet Service Providers’ pipelines. Having distributors of content (like Netflix, news websites, or individuals) pay for more bandwidth to distribute over broadband would stifle free speech, many allege, instead advocating a concept known as net neutrality. Basically, free speech is guaranteed by equal access, but those who control that access want to slap a price tag on distribution on the internet.
Though Google’s mantra, “don’t be evil” seems like a no-brainer, the protesters allege Google has only taken token gestures to address net neutrality. A damning report by the San Francisco Chronicle showed Google only spent about $280,000 in political contributions to sway regulators to maintain net neutrality (with their other net neutrality advocates’ money adding up to $600,000 spent). Conversely, the telecom industry (AT&T, Comcast and others) spent over $2 million to sway lawmakers to favor giving them more control over who pays for access to Internet usage.
“In 2012, Google created a petition as part of a campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act that collected over 7 million signatures. The massive online resistance in opposition to these two monstrous bills stopped them from becoming a reality.
Today, the Internet is once again under attack, this time by ISP’s who wish to capitalize on content providers and eliminate net neutrality. Though Google and other major companies such as Netflix, Amazon and Microsoft have come out in support of preserving a free and open web, we believe much more can be done.
Though many of us have concerns about the larger implications of Google’s effect on the world, as far as surveillance and ties to military technology, we are not here to protest Google.
Google, with its immense power, has a social responsibility to uphold the values of the Internet. We encourage Google to engage in a serious, honest dialogue on the issue of net neutrality and to stand with us in support of an internet that is free from censorship, discrimination, and access fees.”
At yesterday’s protest, 20 or so occupiers set up camp at Google HQ to convince the Googlers to take the lead on net neutrality. But as night fell, the Mountain View Police Department informed them it was time to leave.
A live video stream aired by Twitter user and Occupier @punkboyinsf revealed the conversation between police and protesters, which was mostly orderly, but the cops couldn’t see the protesters’ perspective. “We’re supporting them, we want them to support us,” one protester told police. One officer answered, “If you want to partner with them, just leave. Try to contact them tomorrow.” Peacefullly, almost pleadingly, one protester said “we just want to rap with them.”
At about 11pm, officers announced they’d make arrests. As @punkboyinsf caught the action on camera from a distance, an officer nabbed him as well. The occupier asked if he could at least put his camera in his bag, to which the officer replied “sir, it’s too late.Just relax, just relax,” and arrested him. @PunkboyinSF was one of the protesters released earlier this morning, he tweeted, and now the story has spread worldwide.
Seperate and loosely related protests outside Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco today are ongoing as of this writing. When we asked Mountain View Police Department spokesperson Saul Jaeger if the arrests were motivated by the MVPD, or because of a request from Google, Jaeger replied, “it was Google’s call.”
The protesters are calling for a national day of action on July 15, the end of the FCC’s public comment period on net neutrality. An Internet blackout campaign modeled after the anti-SOPA/PIPA online protests that managed to preserve Internet freedom in the past. Specifically, they wrote, they urge websites to do the following:
“Blackout their entire website for a day, replacing it with an info link to petitions and the FCC comment page.
Add a button to their website connecting users to information and petitions online.
Create their own creative way to connect their users to this issue and how to fight back.
We are committed to occupying the Google Headquarters until the company gets involved in honest dialogue on net neutrality, and until real action is taken to maintain a free and open internet.”
To his credit, Mayor Ed Lee recently championed net neutrality at the recent Conference of Mayors, this Monday. His resolution to urge the FCC to enshrine net neutrality as a right was signed by New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio and other mayors across the country.
“Net neutrality is critical for an innovation economy to thrive, because if the broadband companies could choose what web pages you can access, the Internet would lose its power as the most powerful communication tool we’ve ever known,” said Mayor Lee, in a press statement. “I am grateful to my cosponsors and the U.S. Conference of Mayors for adopting principles of a Free & Open Internet as the official policy of America’s Mayors. We believe in transparency and comprehensive non-discrimination, and we will fight for these values as the FCC writes regulations in the coming months. There are serious implications for commerce and democracy, and we’re making sure U.S. cities have a voice in this fight.”
It looks like Lee has a lot in common with the Occupy Google protesters.
As Pride celebrations across the country unfurl their rainbow flags this month, teacher tenure in California suffered a stunning blow from a Los Angeles Superior Court, undermining protections that have shielded the LGBT community from discrimination.
Although the decision will likely be appealed, Judge Rolf M. Treu’s ruling galvanized teachers unions and evoked memories of conservative attacks on gay teachers in the 1970s, including the unsuccessful Briggs Initiative that was a rallying point for then-Sup. Harvey Milk and a new generation of LGBT political leaders.
“To jeopardize any of the protections we have now, it’s a thinly veiled attempt to demoralize teachers, and it’s an attack on public education,” Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, the San Francisco Democrat who began his political career as an openly gay teacher campaigning against the Briggs Initiative, told the Guardian.
LGBT rights and teacher tenure may seem to have little in common, but a peek at the movers and shakers in the LGBT and teachers’ rights movements show an interconnected relationship of protections and the players who fight for them. Loss of tenure can threaten the protection of minority groups, academic freedom, and unpopular political speech, despite employment rights gained in recent years.
“We’ve beaten back that thinking,” Ammiano said, “but it’s still lurking.”
In California, K-12 teachers are shielded by legal protections often referred to commonly as tenure. Permanent status is the backbone of these protections, offering an arbitration process for teachers who administrators intend to fire. Also struck down by the judge was the First In, First Out law, which protects veteran teachers from layoffs by letting go of recent hires first.
In his ruling, Treu said these policies created an environment where students were burdened by ineffective teachers who were difficult to fire, disproportionately detracting from minority students’ education quality in the most troubled schools.
“The evidence is compelling,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “indeed, it shocks the conscience.”
Many education advocates vehemently disagreed with that ruling, and the veracity of the evidence will be further weighed in upcoming appeals. But along the way to pursuing equality for students, the equality of teachers may find itself eroded by an unlikely new hero of the LGBT movement: A conservative attorney who fought against marriage discrimination, but also litigated against the legacy of an LGBT legend.
HERO OF MARRIAGE EQUALITY
The morning last year when the US Supreme Court ruled to overturn California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, San Franciscans gathered inside City Hall by the grand staircase. Men held men, women held women, and families held the their children tight.
When the court’s decision finally hit the news, the outcry of happiness and surprise at City Hall was deafening. The expressions on the faces of those there was that of joy with many understandably streaked by tears. Attorney Theodore Olson helped litigate against Prop. 8 and won, and as he fought for gay rights, his face was often streaked with tears as well, LGBT rights activist Cleve Jones told us.
“There was a part of that trial when the plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier described their love for each other,” Jones said. “I was sitting with their family in [US District Court Judge] Vaughn Walker’s court. When we broke, Ted Olson went to embrace them and there were tears on his face.”
But Olson is not a poster child for most politics considered the realm of liberals and Democrats. Olson and fellow Prop. 8 litigator Attorney David Boies were on opposing sides of the Bush v. Gore case that Olson won, handing George W. Bush the presidency in 2000. Olson was then appointed solicitor general of the United States, often leading conservative causes.
Olson and Boies will talk about their new book Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equalityat the LGBT center on June 25 (joined by Supervisor Scott Wiener), but Olson gave us a glimmer of those motivations.
Olson, a Los Altos native who attended UC Berkeley School of Law, told the Guardian in a phone interview that his stand on gay rights was based on conservative principles: “I think of conservatives as including people who are libertarians and respect individual liberty.”
A trailer for “The Case Against 8,” which features Ted Olson heavily.
He said the right to marry the person of one’s choosing should be an individual right that government has no business banning. That belief in individual liberty is at the core of his political principles. “It affects me in absolutely the deepest personal way,” he told us.
Whatever his ideological motivations, Olson became a hero in the LGBT community. But this year, he was one of the attorneys who convinced Judge Treu of the evils of teacher tenure. In the trial, Olson claimed one Oakland teacher was harming elementary students’ educational outcomes: “The principal couldn’t remove that teacher. These stories are so awful, sometimes you feel people are exaggerating.”
Yet the problems afflicting Oakland schools and its children, the unions argued, are not due to teacher tenure. In a city with high violence rates, students’ broken homes, low teacher pay, and difficult working conditions, critics say Olson oversimplified and misrepresented a complex problem.
“We all know there are problems in our schools,” Jones, who works with unions, told us. “But there’s never of course discussion about poverty, or students growing up in single families, or class sizes.”
These were all arguments the union made against Olson, unsuccessfully. The decision to remove protections for teachers may send ripples into other states and spur increased attacks on teacher protections.
And unlike California, which has strong anti-discrimination protections, that campaign may allow teachers of other states to be fired or dismissed for coming out of the closet, an issue that helped elevate Harvey Milk into such an iconic leader.
ECHOES OF BRIGGS
Jones and Ammiano fought alongside Milk against Proposition 6 in 1978, known as the Briggs Initiative, which would have made it illegal for openly gay people to teach. Then-Sen. John Briggs and his allies associated gay teachers with child molesters and frequently said they may influence children to become gay.
“I was born of heterosexual parents, taught by heterosexual teachers in a fiercely heterosexual society,” Milk said in a speech at the time. “Then why am I homosexual if I’m affected by role models? I should’ve been a heterosexual. And no offense meant, but if teachers are going to affect you as role models, there’d be a lot of nuns running around the streets today.”
This fight may be history, but Ammiano said such biases are still with us today, such as with how some see the transgender community. “We’re holding people at bay around LGB issues, but the T part now is the crossroads for the right wing [activists] who are rolling back protections,” he said.
Only 30 US states offer employment protections for sexual orientation, and some of those only cover government employees, according to a study by Center for American Progress. Only 23 states protect against firing for gender identity.
Vulnerable teachers lacking protections granted by tenure or equal employment laws are still being fired in California and across the country. In April, a transgender Texas substitute teacher was fired for making children “uncomfortable,” according to news reports. In Glendora, California, a teacher was fired from a religious private school after a photo of he and his husband kissing on their wedding day made the local newspaper.
This month, President Barack Obama announced an Executive Order mandating federal contractors enact policies protecting workers from dismissal due to sexual orientation or gender identity. Many speculate this was announced to press Congress to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would protect private employees from discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation.
“This is only round one,” stated Senator John Briggs to the press about the defeat of Proposition 6, Nov. 7, 1978, at a Costa Mesa hotel. Proposition 6, called the Briggs Initiative, prohibits gay teachers from working in California public schools. AP file photo by Doug Pizac
But ENDA has stalled for years, despite the best efforts of advocacy groups nationwide. And as the country awaits equality, many teachers’ last hope against unlawful dismissal is tenure. In fact, tenure laws were first drafted after the Red Scare and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt for communists, California Federation of Teachers spokesperson Fred Glass told us.
Yet Olson recoils at linking LGBT rights to teacher protections. “I support wholly protections for people for who they are, for heaven’s sakes,” he told us, mentioning that Milk “was very much an inspiration and very important to us.”
And Jones still thinks of Olson as a hero, saying that life and politics are complex.
“Irony abounds,” Jones said. “I don’t square it. You can’t square it. It’s there. But my respect for Ted Olson is based on his very genuine support for our community on the issue of marriage. For LGBT people to win equalit,y it’s important there’s a national consensus, it can’t just be from the left. Ted Olson was incredibly important with that effort and will be remembered generations for now. You don’t have to like everything about Ted Olson or President Obama to acknowledge they had a profound effect.”
Update [6/25]: The minimum wage proposal won, and is now part of SFUSD’s approved budget. “There will be a larger conversation in August when I introduce the new minimum wage policy,” Matt Haney, of the Board of Education said. Read the article to get some context on SFUSD’s minimum wage struggles.
Hundreds of San Francisco Unified School District employees stand to finally be paid San Francisco’s minimum wage, in a new proposal expected for tonight’s Board of Education meeting.
Matt Haney, a board commissioner, plans to propose requiring SFUSD to pay San Francisco’s minimum wage. He said it’s a practical move that also carries a message.
“It’s a relatively small amount of people, but a dollar fifty or two dollars more an hour is not pocket change for them,” he told the Guardian. “It’s really a step towards aligning the school district towards paying everyone a living wage.”
As a state entity, the SFUSD need only adhere to the state minimum wage of $9 an hour, which will be the state’s new minimum wage starting July 1. For now, San Francisco’s minimum wage is $10.74 an hour, though that may change under a new November ballot measure to as much as $15 an hour by 2018.
Haney is considering introducing a new resolution in August to match the City’s $15 minimum wage hike, as well.
Over 800 SFUSD workers earn below San Francisco’s minimum wage. These employees are mostly unrepresented by unions, Haney told us, and though they serve in a variety of positions, most are yard monitors who oversee recess in the city’s over 100 schools.
Haney’s minimum wage proposal is part of the overall SFUSD proposed 2014-15 budget, which the school board will vote on tonight. As Governor Jerry Brown’s new funding mechanism, the Local Control Funding Formula, drives extra dollars into disadvantaged school districts, the unions and schools are expected to put on the pressure for the district to offer raises for teachers and paraprofessionals.
“There should be some fireworks, I imagine,” Haney said.
Negotiations between the school district and the unions are at a standstill, sources tell us. The district said it is proposing a 8.5 percent increase over three years, which amounts to an approximate $1.83 an hour raise for paraprofessionals. This offer infuriated the United Educators of San Francisco, who allege that is still not a living wage.
“They’re coming to us and saying ‘this is almost the best we can offer,'” Dennis Kelly, president of UESF told the Guardian. “What the hell does that mean?”
Paraprofessionals often work in special education or early childhood education, and some are security aides. There are between 1,350 and 1,500 of those employees at any given time in the district, Kelly told us, noting they’re also a group made up largely of minorities and women.
In a statement to the press, SFUSD Superintendent Richard Carranza said the district made the best offer it could under the circumstances.
“We are committed to providing salary increases this year and in the future as long as the revenues from the state continue to grow,” Carranza wrote. “Unfortunately the state’s forecast for school budgets just got a lot worse. Governor Brown just said that he is now expecting districts to pay a bill, in the amount of several billion dollars, to cover the State’s unfunded pension liabilities as soon as next school year and every year after for the foreseeable future. This expenditure will spend a significant amount of the very same revenues we are counting on to provide services for our students and salary increases for our employees.”
As the district struggles with its bills, the paraprofessionals are facing the very real rising costs of living in San Francisco. The average pay for a paraprofessional is $25,000, Kelly told us, adding “you’re employing 1,000 of these people at poverty wages.”
The UESF will take a vote to authorize a strike vote in August, and the negotiations between the UESF and the school district is expected to be mediated soon.
In the meantime, for 800 or so employees at least, Haney’s minimum wage increase should bring some much-needed good news to a school district beleaguered with money woes. Though the raise would only bump employees a dollar fifty or two dollars an hour more, Haney said, “it’s a symbolic in some ways, but important.”
And as a school district that mostly serves poor and disadvantaged students, Haney added, “if anyone should know about poverty in schools, it’s us.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story inaccuately cited the district’s wage offer. The Guardian apologizes for the error.
As if designer Roberto Cavalli hadn’t committed enough fashion atrocities, now he’s pissed off an entire religious community.
Tomorrow a gathering of Sufi students will protest the Just Cavalli line at Union Square, alleging the famous fashion designer used a sacred religious symbol in his clothing and perfume product lines.
The action is part of a global series of protests in London, New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Dusseldorf and other cities. In numerous YouTube videos, tweets, and blog posts, the Sufi students expressed outrage at seeing their symbol, which they also say is trademarked by their religious school for 27 years, used as a product for sale. The school’s religious traditions have been retold from teacher to teacher for over 1,400 years, students of the school told us.
Put simply, they’re pissed.
“The symbol spells out ‘Allah,’ which means god for us, and also spells out words from the holy Quran,” protest organizer and student Nasim Bahadorani told us. “Mr. Cavalli used the symbol on the top of a perfume bottle. He also took the symbol that means god to us and rebranded it as a snake bite in some contexts. For us that represents carnality.”
“It is,” she said, “outrageously insulting.”
The Sufi’s protest group, called the “Take Off the Just Cavalli Logo,” started a Change.org petition (with nearly 3,000 signatures):
The religious emblem belongs to MTO Shahmaghsoudi, it represents peace, purity and the name of God. Students of this school feel very strongly about the illegitimate use of this emblem as the JustCavalli logo. The logo has been tattooed onto models to represent snake bites and draws connotational indication of the deadly sins. This is completely opposing the original definition of the sacred emblem.
Not only is its use disrespectful but it’s also offensive and degrading.
The use of the sacred emblem as a fashion logo has also caused confusion amongst the family and friends of Sufi students. As well as having to witness the exploitation of their beloved sacred emblem, they also have to explain to their family and friends that they have no affiliation with the JustCavalli range due to the exploitation by Mr Cavalli.
He is making a habit of disregarding people’s beliefs and belief systems, support this cause and make him aware of his insistent disregard of sacred emblems.
The outrage may stem not only from the alleged misuse of their religious symbol, but because commerce itself is spurned in Sufi teachings.
Non-Muslims often mistake Sufism as a sect of Islam. Sufism is more accurately described as an aspect or dimension of Islam. Sufi orders (Tariqas) can be found in Sunni, Shia and other Islamic groups. Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century Arab historian, described Sufism as “dedication to worship, total dedication to Allah most High, disregard for the finery and ornament of the world, abstinence from the pleasure, wealth, and prestige sought by most men, and retiring from others to worship alone.”
Now this journalist is at a distinct disadvantage covering Roberto Cavalli, having been born in 1986 and having zero fashion sense (no need to cite sources, it’s well known). But the quite fashionable Bay Guardian Publisher Marke B. had this to say about Cavalli’s high waisted pleated pants: “His was the stuff you’d run away from in the eighties.” Then he shuddered.
Pants sin exhibit A:
The Cavalli company maintains any similarity is just a coincidence. In a written statement to the Guardian UK, it said “The logos are clearly very different and in no way can be deemed similar, and this has been recognised by the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM). When the company examined, conceptualised and registered the Just Cavalli logo, it received complete assurance by a primary trademark office that there would be no issues related to the juxtaposition of the logo, and in fact there have been none.”
In one of their many YouTube videos, the Sufi student group contends the use of their religious symbol is a “sign of hatred.” Clothing sporting the symbol can be found in San Francisco at H&M, Macy’s, and Nordstroms.
The Sufi students plan to protest at Union Square on Saturday, June 21, at 1pm. “All we want is for the company to remove the logo,” Bahadorani told us.
As a side note, the Sufi group has bombarded the Bay Guardian and other San Francisco outlets with about a bajillion tweets (that’s a wholly accurate number) over the past few days. Suffice to say, they’ve gotten their message across.
One week and one day — that’s how long Sen. Mark Leno has to push his Ellis Act reform bill through two committees in order for it to go before to the assembly floor, making its prospects for passage this year look dim.
“I’d say it’s challenging,” Leno told us yesterday. San Franciscans have been displaced by real estate speculators, a dozen or more of whom are regularly “flipping” homes for profit and using the Ellis Act to clean out longtime renters. If passed, the bill would restrict the use of the Ellis Act to those who’ve owned their homes for five years or longer, allowing property owners to eventually get out of the rental business, as supporters of the Ellis Act say it was intended for.
“Bill Closing Ellis Act Loophole for San Francisco Fails in Assembly,” was the headline of Leno’s press release on yesterday’s action. But “fails” seems to imply a strong effort that fell short of the mark, when the reality of was that some of the bill’s highest profile and most powerful alleged supporters were missing in action: the tech industry and venture capitalist Ron Conway.
When Leno’s Senate Bill 1439 was announced in April, the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” Ron Conway stood before the microphone and cameras and announced the technology industry’s intent to protect tenants from being displaced by real estate speculators. Conway is a wealthy “angel investor” who cashed in big on companies like Twitter. Later on, he became Twitter’s greatest champion as he smooth-talked San Francisco government into providing big tax breaks to move Twitter into the mid-Market area.
In return, Mayor Ed Lee was counting on Conway and other tech titans to butress the other sectors of San Francisco, and to protect the people who were being evicted en masse.
Part of the tech backlash occurring in SF right now is due to evictions by real estate speculators. Please help stop evictions in SF by having your Company sign on to the below letter for Senator Leno.
The bill would prohibit rental property owners in San Francisco of less than five years from invoking the Ellis Act, threatening to invoke the Ellis Act, or prosecuting an unlawful detainer (eviction) action based on the Ellis Act.
Real estate speculators are misusing California’s Ellis Act to evict long-term rent paying tenants, who have done nothing wrong but are casualties of a loophole in the Act that must be closed to prevent further displacement.
The Ellis Act was adopted to allow landlords to exit the rental business, not to give windfall profits to speculators willing to exploit the Act by entering the rental business just to exit it. These speculators are exploiting a loophole in the Act that allows them to buy a building and then immediately “exit the rental business” through mass evictions of low and middle-income tenants. The stories are heartbreaking, with families, seniors, and disabled San Franciscans losing their long-term homes.
At the committee hearing yesterday, lobbyists on behalf of the California Association of Realtors and very wealthy elderly folks told misleading tales of woe, crowding the room to convince the five California politicians to kill the Ellis Reform bill that would affect mostly just San Francisco.
“What we’re trying to do is keep honest, law-abiding San Franciscans in their homes,” Leno told the committee yesterday. But that wasn’t the committee’s concern. Ultimately, they were concerned about the bottom line. As Tim Redmond at 48hills reported yesterday, Committee Member Cheryl Brown, D-San Bernadino, said her brother told her the bill “is taking my property.”
Those who defended the bill were scant: Jeff Buckley of the Mayor’s Office, Dean Preston from Tenants Together, Sara Shortt of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, and Committee Member Tom Ammiano, among others.
Perhaps having a wealthy tech giant in the room, say, a Twitter representative or Conway himself, may have tipped the scales in Leno’s favor. Conway’s frequent lunch partner Mayor Ed Lee even sponsored the bill. But still, no tech workers, no tech CEOs, not even someone glued to their iPhone raised their voices to defend tenants at the committee. Not even Conway.
When we called and emailed Conway for a response, all we received was an automatic reply saying “I am currently traveling will read email sporadically during this time.”
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to reject an environmental appeal of the decision to repeal paying for parking meters on Sundays, which was voted on by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency in April as part of the agency’s annual budget approval.
It was a hotly contested decision, as competing interest groups fought for their slice of Muni’s funding. SFMTA Chairman Tom Nolan told us at the time,“As long as I’ve been on the SFMTA board I’ve never felt more pressure.”
This week’s appeal to the Board of Supervisors focused on one aspect of the overall SFMTA budget: the repeal of paid Sunday meters.
“I appreciate there is frustration,” SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin said to the board. That was an understatement.
The Sunday meters benefit many, the appeal’s filers contended: Less cars circled around looking for parking (because more drivers could actually find spots) meant reduced congestion and safer streets for bicyclists and pedestrians. It’s a sign of the strength of the argument that the appeal was filed by transit advocacy group Livable City (whose executive director is BART board member Tom Radulovich) and Mario Tanev, a very bright policy wonk over at the San Francisco Transit Riders Union.
“The SFMTA’s own data proves the Sunday meters were good for the city,” Cynthia Crews of the League of Pissed Off Voters said to the board. “We need to stop playing chicken with public safety.”
But despite the environmental benefits of paid meters, the appeal was rejected. The reasons are buried in political gobbledygook, but untangling the complex story reveals the mayor’s power, and his missteps.
Firstly, the environmental appeal wasn’t exactly aimed at the meters themselves, but at the SFMTA budget as a whole. That’s because the SFMTA board didn’t vote to repeal Sunday meters directly, but stuffed it into their approved budget, which is exempt from California Environmental Quality Act review. It was like serving up a distasteful Sunday meter fruitcake with the Muni budget holiday meal: You’d better eat the whole dinner, or else you’re not eating at all.
Budgets are statutorily exempt from environmental review (otherwise there’d be an EIR with every major financial decision). So the Sunday meters were approved through a politically tactical move, shielded by the environmental exemption cloak of the budget.
This meant the environmental appeal yesterday targeted not just the meters, but it could effectively challenge the entire SFMTA’s right to environmental review exception for its budgets, supervisors said. They also warned such a challenge may set a precedent for other budgets from other agencies to not be exempt from environmental review, an onerous burden. That was too big of a pill for the board to swallow, which is likely why only two supervisors voted against granting the SFMTA the CEQA exemption: John Avalos and Eric Mar.
Yet most of the political maneuvering wasn’t from the board, but from Mayor Ed Lee, a problem Supervisor David Campos used this review hearing to highlight. “Even if you do or don’t want to see Sunday meter parking, irrespective of the issue,” Campos said, “I think the way this matter was handled by the SFMTA, respectfully, is not something anyone should be happy with.”
He continued: “Let’s be clear: The reason why the SFMTA budget included an item that did not provide for funding from Sunday meters is because the mayor wanted it that way. We have a budget system that is essentially run by decisions made in the Mayor’s Office.”
We posed this idea in our story “Politics over Policy” [4/22], contending that because the SFMTA is appointed by the mayor (meaning, he picks and chooses who is on the board), the board members are therefore politically beholden to the mayor.
Campos drove this point home at the meeting: “I think there’s something to be said when the appointment of one official (on the SFMTA board) is entirely dependent on [the mayor], who can disagree or agree with the decisions you made.”
The night before our last story went to print, SFMTA Board Chariman Tom Nolan told us that was in fact exactly what happened on the Sunday meter issue. The SFMTA board, whose directors vote on resolutions every week, received a phone call from the mayor asking for a specific vote. And he got it.
“Ed Resikin, myself, and a few others in a conference call [with the Mayor’s Office],” Nolan said. He told us the central message of the call was this: The mayor wanted to put a vehicle license fee increase on the city’s November ballot. In order to do that, the mayor contended, car drivers needed to feel like they weren’t being nickled and dimed. Paid Sunday meters had to go.
“That was where they advanced the idea that the mayor wanted to do that,” Nolan told us. “That call was right before the mayor’s State of the City message.”
Nolan is an affable, straightforward person. The budget the SFMTA passed came on the heels of a fiery meeting, filled to the gills with activists from the senior and persons with disabilties communities. They asked for free Muni for those same groups, which would cost less money than the Sunday meters would bring in — many at the meeting said the meters could pay for the free Muni service. The need is dire, as some seniors said they regularly made the choice between groceries and a Muni pass.
“Muni is for everybody, especially those who need it most,” he said. “The testimony was very heartbreaking. It’s expensive to live in this city.”
But in the end, he told us, the mayor felt it was best to kibosh the Sunday meters, which deprived the SFMTA of funding to make Muni free for qualified seniors. We asked Nolan if the mayor had outsized influence on the SFMTA board.
“I think people are aware that we are quasi-independent,” he said. “We are clearly part of the city family. I can assure you that this happens very seldom that we get this pressure from the Mayor’s Office. He’s a very open-minded guy, really, and he has a high tolerance for ambiguity, which I like.”
“But,” you don’t turn him down, he said, because, “he’s the mayor.”
SFMTA Board Director Cheryl Brinkman supported paid Sunday meters. But when justifying her vote to repeal them, she told the packed board meeting the “best political minds” in the Mayor’s Office said it was the right thing to do in order to pass the VLF increase ballot measure.
But in a move that outraged Sup. Scott Wiener and many others, just this month Lee dropped the VLF ballot measure altogether for this year, eventually agreeing to support its placement on the November 2016 ballot.
So to pave the way for success at the ballot box the board rejected free Muni for seniors and lost over $10 million in Muni funding. And in the end, the mayor threw all the justification for his compromises out the window.
The Board of Supervisors is now hearing an environmental appeal of the SFMTA’s proposed budget, specifically over the decision to make Sunday parking meters free once again. The move by the SFMTA to repeal paid parking meters deprived the agency of $11 million annually. Shortly after the decision was made, Livable City, San Francisco Transit Riders Unions, and a concerned citizen, Mario Tanev, filed for an environmental appeal of the decision.
They contend the paid meters not only reduced congestion, but reduced the amount of time drivers circled for parking and helped businesses. All of this was found in the SFMTA’s own December 2013 study. The decision to appeal the meter decision with environmental review goes before the board of supervisors today.
You can follow live coverage of the meeting by checking out Guardian reporter Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez’s Twitter feed, Twitter.com/FitztheReporter, and by checking out for our update tonight.
Programmers-in-training line the work tables at HackReactor, a software engineering boot camp many in the tech community call a “university disruptor” due to its speed in training coders. Those hunched over computers are typing their way toward a goal: joining the ranks of the 12-week course’s alumni, now employed at tech companies like Adobe, Beats Audio, Pandora, and Hipmunk. But walk past the rows of intensely driven (yet casually dressed) engineers and you’ll also encounter the program’s unlikely new trainees: San Francisco high school students.
Tech company HackReactor and nonprofit Mission Bit are co-training San Francisco Unified School District students for the summer, and throwing them into the trenches with pre-professional engineers.
Soon, these students will be proficient coder kids.
“Mission Bit gave us our first understanding of what javascript was,” Gisela, a 17-year-old Lowell High School student told us. “Hack Reactor said ‘now make a game,’ and threw me into the code.”
The free program is a new extension of Mission Bit’s after-school coding classes, offered this year at Mission High School, a SFUSD public school, and Lick Wilmerding High School, which is private. The semester program is paid for by tech companies: mainly WeChat (Tencent America), with in-kind sponsors including Salesforce, HackReactor, DeNA, Brightroll, AdRoll, Rackspace, co.lab, and Tagged. The summer program is fully paid for by HackReactor.
It also comes at a crossroads for San Francisco: Its communities of color are being priced out just as its tech industry is searching for ways to enroll more diverse workers.
Though many pin the displacement problem on the rising cost of housing, there’s also another less-spoken-of culprit: Local tech companies draw many applicants from around the world to fill jobs instead of hiring local residents.
This may be due in part to lack of trained prospective employees locally.
There’s a broken education pipeline between local schools and the tech sector, both sides admit. The new effort by Mission Bit and HackReactor may be a first step towards plugging the leak. If the program is successful, subsequent iterations may establish the first stable pathway to technology sector jobs for San Francisco students.
Though the intern program is still in its beta phase, it shows much promise, and comes at a dire time for the city.
PROBLEMS CONVERGE
The summer coding program may hold solutions for three problems that coexist simultaneously: displacement of communities of color, the tech sector’s shocking lack of diversity, and the SFUSD training gap.
The city’s Mission District, often pointed to as tech workers’ most desired neighborhood, saw 1,400 Latinos leave between 1990 and 2011, while its white population grew by over 2,900, according to a recent study by Causa Justa, Just Cause.
The tech industry has a complementary problem: Google recently revealed its employees are 70 percent men and 61 percent white. Just five percent of Google’s workforce is black or Hispanic. Though the Asian population is 30 percent of its workforce, that’s still out of line with the significant Asian presence in the Bay Area.
Sources tell us Google puts heavy effort into diversity recruitment and likely had better percentages than the rest of the industry. Google claimed in myriad news reports that potential employees of color were difficult to find.
But SFUSD’s 52,000 students are 25 percent Latino, 41 percent Asian and 10 percent African American, so why not recruit students from our diverse local public schools, bolstering San Francisco’s flailing middle class at the same time?
That brings us to our last problem. Until recently, the SFUSD only taught computer science in three of its 17 high schools: Balboa, Galileo, and Lowell. There’s a tech training gap in San Francisco, making the leap for SFUSD students to the tech sector all the less likely.
The SFUSD is now taking steps to rectify this, but the change will take time.
“SFUSD sees teaching coding, digital literacy and computer science as critical to preparing our students for success,” SFUSD spokesperson Gentle Blythe told the Guardian. “We have a long-term plan in place for how we are phasing in teaching computer science, including coding, throughout a student’s K-12 career.”
SFUSD launched computer science courses in two additional schools last year: Wallenberg and Washington. More are on the way, Blythe said. Other schools host coding tutoring programs. One organization, Code.org, led a “day of code” where thousands of SFUSD students to tried a hand at rudimentary programming exercises.
But in order to really tackle the gap, SFUSD teachers and students will need hands-on training with coders and software engineers. That’s where Mission Bit and HackReactor come in.
STARTING SMALL
Tyson Daugherty founded Mission Bit after a startling realization: San Francisco schools weren’t prepared to teach his children how to enter the tech industry.
Daugherty was on the business side of tech, starting his first company in 1999. After moving to the city he wanted schools where his children, ages 5 and 2, could one day train to join his industry.
“I became incredibly frustrated with what I was finding in public schools,” he said, sitting with us in HackReactor’s Market Street office. “These kids are learning fundamental material in science and math, but there’s a disconnection to application and purpose.”
Mission Bit was born, with a simple objective of increasing coding education in local schools.
Gisela’s Lowell High School classes were rigorous, she said, but while programming her first game she relearned physics all over again.
“I’m making a game where each player has a ball, they bounce against each other to bounce the player into the hole,” she told us. Her technical mentor, Kwyn Alice Meagher, gave her a physics crash course to get the ball to bounce just right.
“[In school] I learned the logic of physics but not the application,” Gisela said. “Now that I understand the purpose of learning it, I’m figuring it all out.”
The students start at Mission Bit learning HTML, Javascript, CSS3, Ruby, SQL and Sinatra, with instruction provided by volunteers from local technology companies. Daugherty told us over 60 volunteers emailed Mission Bit after they reached out for potential teachers, and the nonprofit could only utilize 30. Those additional volunteers will get a chance to teach students in the upcoming fall after school program.
Once students “graduate” Mission Bit it’s time to join the workforce. Gisela and two other students jumped to an internship at HackReactor, where they’re putting their coding knowledge to practical use.
Isaac Zimmern, a graduating Lowell senior, is one of those other students. He celebrated working side by side with mentors while he programmed, inspiring him to pursue computer science in college.
And though Gisela and Zimmern are both from Lowell, many schools were represented in Mission Bit’s program. In one office a group of about a dozen students sat at computers, programming Android phones to play a simple game resembling “Doodle Jump.”
They hailed from a myriad of schools: Raoul Wallenberg, Balboa, Lowell and more. Douglas Mejia, 18, let us see his “Doodle Jump” clone. Its theme music popped on loud, singing “I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger, but she ain’t messin’ with a broke — — -,” and on-screen Kanye West hopped from platform to platform.
Mejia smiled proudly as he showed us his game. He said he wasn’t interested in making games while in school, but Mission Bit turned him into a believer. Now he’ll study computer science at the University of San Francisco.
Mission Bit’s class body is 8 percent African American, 24 percent Latino, and over 50 percent Asian, according to the company’s internal data (that’s in line with SFUSD’s own demographics). Nearly half of the students come from the south side of San Francisco, around the Ingleside District.
The program is still small, but Daugherty says it’s designed with scalability in mind. There’s potential for these students to one day not only fill tech’s diversity gap, but to allow tech jobs to be filled by San Franciscans, born and raised.
But Daugherty says such goals are secondary. The focus is on the students.
“The industry has a very specific agenda about where they want their engineers diversified,” he said. “If this is where our students want to go, we’ll support them. But there are other paths to take.”
Students can use their programming skills in many jobs and industries, he said, not just tech.
Still, the students will have an opportunity to visit local tech companies Square, AirBnb and others, meeting engineers who one day may be peers. Daugherty calls these people “touch points,” making social contacts for mentorships and job seeking that blue-collar SFUSD students may not have themselves.
Ultimately, the program “lets you get programming skills without going through the money filtering step of a university,” said Anthony Phillips, CEO of Hack Reactor. Counter to the belief in pure meritocracy many in tech swear to, Phillips acknowledged he had help: his brother, a Twitter employee. When Phillips first learned code and started to fumble, his brother told him “you’re so smart, but so dumb. Just keep doing it.”
So Phillips aims to do the same for the students at HackReactor. He’s like a coach in the corner for new boxers taking their aim at advanced coding skills.
“Not everyone has someone there that can say, ‘just keep doing it,'” Phillips said.
The last time the Daily Show with Jon Stewart skewered San Francisco in relation to Google, Stewart asked “why are they protesting those buses anyway?” Last night though, the Daily Show fire shot straight at Google and everyone’s favorite Glasshole: Sarah Slocum.
Slocum made national news from the now infamous fight over her Google Glasses one night at Molotov’s, a local bar. After patrons told her she (as a techie) was “ruining the city” (and to not record them as they drank), a fight ensued and someone pulled them straight off her face and ran. The incident was spinned as a “hate crime” against techies, by techies. People of color everywhere sighed, collectively.
In the Daily Show segment, correspondent Jason Jones delightfully skewers Slocum, who claims patrons were afraid she was video recording them (“Which you were,” he tells her, as we watch video she shot at the bar), and gives the Googlers the ultimate secret to avoiding “discrimination.”
Take the glasses off.
Slocum, to her credit, seems to have taken the ribbing in stride. Via her Twitter:
The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo is like Valhalla for male video game nerds, and though many gamer blogs are covering the newest thumb-twiddling doodads, only some are now bringing healthy dose of feminism too.
San Francisco-based media critic Anita Sarkeesian is covering E3 via the Twitter machine with scathing feminist critiques of all the newest game announcements, and a new hashtag is rising up to call out a major videogame developer for not coding women into its games.
Ubisoft’s announced it’d cut playable women’s characters from the newest Assassin’s Creed Unity. According to Kotaku, a gaming industry blog, Ubisoft claimed it was “purely a workload issue.” The team didn’t have a “female reader for the character” at its disposal, Kotaku wrote, nor did it have “all the animations in place.”
Sarkeesian brought it:
This “oh we wanted female characters but it’s just too much work/time/money” excuse is a pile of bullshit and makes me angry every time.
Sure, lots of folks will critique E3, so why is Sarkeesian special? Her opinion carries weight.
Sarkeesian’s YouTube video series Tropes Vs. Womenis almost as popular in the gaming world as Mario, mainly because it plainly says what many gamers know: women are routinely kidnapped, beaten and trivialized in video games. When they are major characters, it’s often to support a man. Bechdel test for video games? HA! We’re often lucky to get one major female character of note.
But she wasn’t the only one. The hashtag #womenaretoohardtoanimate soon took off, and tons of gamers are decrying Ubisoft. Here are just a few of the tweets calling BS on Ubisoft’s excuse for not coding playable female characters into the newest Assassin’s Creed.
And E3 is an especially big bullhorn with which to tout the new wave of gaming feminism. Every major publisher and developer in gaming plies their trade there, announcing new games (OMG HALO) and new consoles (NEW PS VITA?!) to tittilate and delight a gamer’s senses. Video game journalism is an odd place, celebrating or critiquing the newest multi-million dollar blockbuster games solely on the game’s playability or popularity.
Video games are oft-talked about as products, but the messages in the media are rarely analyzed.
In that dearth of critical media analysis, we should count our lucky stars the culture is shifting. But as Ubisoft has shown, diversity hasn’t yet arrived in the gaming world.
Until then we’ve got an internet-full of folks clamoring for change, with Sarkeesian, and her fellow Feminist Frequency producer, Jonathan McIntosh, lighting the way. Check her tweets, and her website throughout the rest of today, the last day of E3.
A second grader recounts his school calling in the police to stop his tantrum. A young girl repeatedly suspended by her school lowers her head in sorrow. A community confronts a seemingly-violent teen who lost his way.
Kevin Epps’ 2002 film Straight Outta Hunters Point pulled viewers through the painful churn of poverty in a historically black San Francisco neighborhood. In his newest film, Solutions not Suspensions, Epps shows viewers one systemic cause of poverty: kids who are suspended and sent out onto the streets, instead of embraced by their communities when they falter.
These students aren’t only held back by each other, they’re held back by their schools. Studies show African American and Latino students are disproportionately suspended compared to other ethnic groups, a topic we wrote about in our cover story “Suspending Judgement, [12/13].”
That’s now changing, and Epps’ film chronicles the efforts of Coleman Advocates and other youth groups to push the San Francisco Unified School District to implement Restorative Practices, a new form of discipline focusing on community-building as opposed to punishment.
The stakes are high. Though some argue students need punishment, the film (and Coleman Advocates) argue this is counter-intuitive. Suspensions don’t heal wounds, don’t address behavior, and exacerbate the school to prisons pipeline.
“I’m a troublemaker, I have a police record,” one girl in the film says, talking about how her teachers and counselors no longer trust her. “They don’t care about me now.”
Restorative Practices are a new set of rules for handling conflict in SFUSD schools, calling for students and teachers in disagreements to enter into restorative circles to discuss their differences. One of the most powerful moments in Solutions not Suspensions puts you right in the middle of one teen’s restorative circle.
A teenager sits in a room surrounded by teachers and his community. To his left is his crying mother, to his right is a man leading the restorative circle.
“I need for you to fall back a little bit from that man role in taking the lead,” the man tells the teen. “Just be a young man. Enjoy this journey to being a man. One thing I know is you love that woman right there so much.”
He points to the teens’ crying mom.
“I know you carry a heavy load sometimes,” he says. “You worry about her, you worry about your family, and worrying about your family may be behind the decisions in life you made. But you’ve got a network of people. You’ve got to let us know about that load.”
“You’ve got to tell us. You’ve got to tell us.”
Epps told the Guardian that the teen had gotten into fights at school. He came from a broken home and his mother had troubles with substance abuse. The fight, Epps said, “was his cry for help.”
And that’s the power of restorative practices, he said, it gives students help instead of sending them to the streets.
“Instead of suspending him they took him to the side,” Epps said. “They said ‘let’s talk about this.'”
Epps said Solutions not Suspensions has direct ties to his seminal film, Straight Outta Hunters Point, and its sequel. The kids suspended from schools, he said, were the same kids living in poverty and getting caught up in “mischievious things” in his other films.
That’s the message local and federal officials have drilled into City College’s accreditors in recent weeks. Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Jackie Speier; Assemblymembers Tom Ammiano and Phil Ting; and the state’s community college government have all publicly pressured the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges to give City College an extension to prove its worth.
Finally bowing to pressure, the ACCJC may soon chang their own rules to save City College.
“This is new for the ACCJC, but I don’t know if its new for other institutions,” Dave Hyams, a spokesperson for the ACCJC told us. But this new policy may offer new hope for City College.
In 2012 the ACCJC told City College its accreditation would be terminated, putting the school in the fight of its life. A loss of accreditation would mean its degrees are worthless, and the school would lose government funding. Notably, the school has not lost its accreditation yet.
The ACCJC’s policy change is not yet final, as the agency is allowing two weeks for the public to weigh in. The changes will be finalized on June 25, the commission said.
If the policy is adopted though, it means City College would be able to apply for a lifeline.
“If this policy is adopted as expected,” the ACCJC wrote in their statement to the press, “CCSF would have the opportunity to take steps to be designated as being in restoration status.”
Hyams denied the decision has anything to do with the very recent, and very public, emails from Nancy Pelosi and other politicians to demanding the ACCJC give City College more time.
“The ACCJC was looking for a way to balance the impact of termination on students,” he said, “with the needs for the college to meet basic standards.”
The college would need to file its application for restoration status by July 2014, City College’s originally announced accreditation termination date. This may all be moot, however, as City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed for an injunction to stall the college’s closure until the conclusion of the city’s lawsuit against the ACCJC. Legal proceedings are expected to begin in October.
Sara Eisenberg, the deputy city attorney leading the case against the ACCJC, told us this doesn’t affect the case at all.
“Our lawsuit is about the ACCJC’s bad acts, which go to the heart of the fairness and accuracy of the accreditation evaluation process,” she told the Guardian. “These violations of law, policy and fundamental fairness require that the ACCJC’s past decisions concerning City College be vacated and that City College be reevaluated on a clean slate using a fair process.”
Interestingly, the announcement of restoration status by the ACCJC contains a caveat: they will not extend CCSF’s appeal unless the US Department of Education gives them the go-ahead. Hyams said the ACCJC developed this plan while consulting the USDOE, so it may be a slam dunk.
Need some context on the City College fight? Check out the video above for a basic overview.
“The commission and the department had very recent meetings that have been constructive and productive, they’re fully aware of this proposal,” he told us.
One of those meetings was not so peaceful, however, as over 200 City College supporters rallied outside the ACCJC’s semi-annual meeting in Sacramento, demanding the organization rescind its decision to revoke the college’s accreditation. The protest was led by the California Federation of Teachers, the local AFT 2121 and attended by teachers and students alike.
Tim Killikelly, the president of the AFT 2121 had questions about the new policy.
“I’m not sure how this restoration status is different than what appeals already existed,” he said. “The students need to be sure about their academic future, and this doesn’t do that. The students need to breathe a sigh of relief.”
He’s referring to the college’s recent drop in enrollment. At its height City College had over 100,000 students enrolled. But, due in part to its accreditation struggles and (some have said) the economy’s mild upswing, the enrollment has recently dropped to under 80,000 students.
Killikelly laid much of the blame for that enrollment drop at the feet of the ACCJC. “They should’ve sent a team to verify we’re in compliance,” he said. Instead of this middling compromise, if the ACCJC had instead granted full accreditation Killikelly thinks confidence in the college could be restored.
City College Trustee Rafael Mandelman was also cautious about the decision.
“Its good news,” he said, but, “the powers that be have rallied and persuaded the ACCJC that they cannot shut City College down now. The ACCJC are not pulling their claws out of the college. We will continue this terrible dance unless the City Attorney wins his lawsuit.”
The college may already have bounced back. California Community College Chancellor Brice Harris and City College Chancellor Arthur Tyler have publicly stated the school is 95 percent done addressing all of the concerns the ACCJC wanted to see fixed.
Mandelman contends the ACCJC’s move to terminate City College’s accreditation did more harm than good. “This whole process has been incredibly and unnecessarily disruptive on City College,” he said. “It’s a horrendous way to reform an institution.”
It should be noted that City College is still open, and remains accredited. For a look at the new policy from the ACCJC, click here.
San Francisco’s municipal transportation system stood still, stranding middle class riders. Riots raged throughout the city as over 1,500 streetcar drivers, known as carmen, literally fought with bottles and stones for higher wages. Left with few options, stranded San Franciscans took to other means to get to work: by foot, by bicycle, and by horse-drawn carriage.
The year was 1907, and United Railroads carmen raged against their Baltimore-based bosses in a year-long strike, in the wake of the great earthquake and fires that leveled much of the city of St. Francis. It was a clash that made last week’s Muni driver sickout look tepid and tame by comparison.
It was one of the single bloodiest strikes in San Francisco history,” Fred Glass, a California labor history teacher at City College of San Francisco, told us. “People were killed on both sides as the cars were run by armies of scabs.”
But minus the violence, the century-old union action has eerie parallels to last week’s Muni sickout, the “non-strike” in which nearly 500 Muni drivers left buses stagnant in garages across San Francisco. The similarities begin with anti-union sentiment in the mainstream press.
As the conservative-leaning San Francisco Chronicle did during this sickout, one of the city’s papers-of-record, The Call, lambasted the unions and city officials alike in 1907.
“Two of the most essential public utilities, the streetcar monopoly and the telephone monopoly, are tied up,” The Call wrote in a front-page editorial on May 06, 1907. “Where — and the question must suggest itself irresistibly to every man with a spoonful of brains — where does the public get off?”
A mob of strikers circle a streetcar at Turk and Fillmore, one site of violence during the 1907 carmen’s strike. San Francisco Examiner file photo courtesy of Market Street Railway, home of lots of interesting SF public transportation history.
The Call offered to publish the tirades of everyday citizens. Today, we can hear the hew and cry more directly. Last week, #MuniSickOut was a top San Francisco trending Twitter hashtag, as irate tweeters pounded their thumbs on smartphones with thoughts like that of user @ReggieMuth: “Grind the city to a halt? You should pay the consequences.”
Muth’s sentiment was echoed by many on the Twitterverse, and angry citizens emailed city leaders as well. One constituent wrote to Sup. David Chiu’s office that, “Public transportation workers held the public hostage for their greedy demand on pay and benefits.”
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency proposed Muni workers pay into their pensions more than it was offering in salary increases, amounting to a pay cut of $1.10 per hour. Muni workers make on average $29.52 an hour, the sixth-highest paid transit workers in the nation, according to the SFMTA. But San Francisco also has the highest cost-of-living in the country.
Transit Workers Union Local 250-A President Eric Williams told us most Muni drivers were long ago priced out of living in San Francisco. “The only members that live inside the city are those who purchased a home 20 or so years ago,” he told us. “The majority of our members live outside the city.”
Muni workers’ wages used to be mandated to be the second-highest in the nation. But in 2010 voters passed Proposition G, requiring Muni worker wages be negotiated and subjected to binding arbitration that the union says is skewed in the city’s favor. But Prop. G and the city charter also prevents workers from striking, hence the drivers calling in sick en masse.
By modern standards the Muni sickout was labeled extreme, by the Chronicle and others. San Franciscans of 1907 feared the URR carmen’s strike for another reason: The workers were ready to die for their cause. Market Street Railway and issues of The Call recalled the strike christened on a day known as Bloody Tuesday.
On May 07, 1907, a mob of URR carmen formed outside the Turk and Fillmore carbarn. At 3:25pm, six streetcars emerged, greeted by a hail of sticks and stones from the strikers. The cars were driven by scabs who crossed the picket lines. More dangerously, they were also manned by gunmen at the behest of the infamous URR strikebreaker, James Farley.
A second pelting of sticks and stones drew action: Farley and his men opened fire on the crowd. Bullets sprayed wildly into nearby police and union men alike. The strikers ran for cover and fired back. A gun battle echoed past what is now a Bi-Rite grocery, ending only when the strikers lacked the ammo to carry on.
“CAR STRIKE LEADS TO BLOOD” read The Call’s headline on Wednesday, May 08, 1907. The first to die was 19-year-old James Walsh, a teamster who was shot through the head. Ultimately, two died and 20 were injured that day. The strikers would bear six fatalities by 1908.
San Francisco is not only experiencing transit strike deja vu, but a repeat of the economic circumstances around the historical Bloody Tuesday, with a wealth gap approaching historic highs. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2012 the top 1 percent of Americans took home about 22 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the bottom 90 percent of the country took home less than 50 percent of the nation’s wealth.
A look at a graph of income inequality shows two giant spikes of the 1 percent’s massive wealth, one spire in the modern era, and another spire planted firmly in the gilded era of the early 1900s, altered only by the Great Depression and the leveling economic policies adopted to address it.
“We’re back to the level of inequality that existed at that time now,” Glass said. “To me that suggests there’s the potential for that kind of explosive conflict between classes.”
The 1907 strike was one in a series of labor battles around the country as wealth became consolidated in fewer and fewer hands, peaking with the stock market crash of 1929, after which the continuing hard times led to one of the most famous union actions in San Francisco history: The Longshoreman’s Strike of 1934.
Led by Australian-born Harry Bridges, the Longshoreman’s Strike seized San Francisco even more boldly than on Bloody Tuesday, with other unions participating in a General Strike that paralyzed the city. That and other labor battles compelled Congress to adopt the National Labor Relations Act, cementing union power that strengthened the middle class, which is today disappearing.
Harry Bridges’ brought the city of San Francisco to a standstill.
“It’s poor or rich in this city,” TWU’s Willliams told us. “There’s no in between, that’s no secret.”
But worse than just a hollowing out of San Francisco’s middle class, modern workers teeter on the edge. Creatives, designers, tech employees, and other professionals are increasingly independent contractors, “freelancers” with little wage or job security protections. Many tech workers, notably younger and libertarian-leaning, also may have little experience with unions, Glass said.
The difference in sentiment between the 1900s and now may be that of will. Glass tells a story from one of his History of California Labor classes. The year was 1991, and as is usual with most community colleges, Glass’ class drew people of a wide range of ages.
“One of my students was a woman in her late 70s,” he recalled, “and she listened as I talked about the situation before the Longshoreman’s Strike. I mentioned some people were disappearing, people lost their jobs, there was a dark mood, even suicides. She stopped me right there.”
“She said ‘I was there, and what you’re saying is completely wrong. Sure, some people despaired, but when we organized, we had hope.You want to know about despair? Now is the real despair, because people don’t think they can change anything.'”
The released map shows a peppering of dots representing what the SFMTA is calling “pilot network zones,” essentialy bus stops to be shared by Muni and commuter shuttles alike. The SFMTA will study those pilot network zones, measure impacts to Muni shuttles, and the zones will soon be marked up with signage denoting them as a commuter shuttle stops.
The site of the first and many subsequent Google Bus protests, Valencia and 24th street, is included among the proposed stops. Many of those protesters highlighted the lack of enforcement around the shuttle stops highlighted by a glaring set of numbers: Since January, San Francisco issued over 13,000 citations against double-parkers in red zones, but only 45 went to commuter shuttles. The shuttles use of those stops were, at the time (and even now) illegal, protesters said.
Carli Paine, the head of the commuter shuttle pilot program at SFMTA, told us now there’ll be increased enforcement.
“Implementation will include placards on the vehicles, signage at the zones that are in the pilot network, and additional enforcement,” she confirmed for us, in an email. The SFMTA also launched a special web form for lodging complaints about the commuter shuttles.
SFMTA surveyed tech companies, citizens, and government to decide which stops to study. Per SFMTA:
In February, the SFMTA collected requests from shuttle service providers and resident suggestions on what stops should be included in the pilot through an interactive website and open houses. We reviewed requests from shuttle service providers and suggestions from residents to develop a pilot network of zones that is a combination of:
Zones requested by shuttle service providers
Zones requested by residents
Alternative zones within a few blocks of requested zone locations
New white zones in locations where demand is high but sharing with Muni would likely disrupt Muni service for inclusion in the pilot network
Zones with Muni service every 10 minutes or less, most zones along Muni’s busiest routes and lines, and flag stops (stops that are in the street, away from the curb) on the bicycle network were not included in the proposed pilot network of shared bus zones.
The website that SFMTA referred to crowdsourced feedback from San Franciscans, an interactive map where anyone could place pinpoints proposing shuttle stops. Some jokers pinned proposed shuttle stops in the San Francisco Bay and the ocean. Some had reasoned arguments against corporate shuttles. “There should be a designed [sic] bus stop for the big corporate buses and not public bus stops,” read one post. Others were more flip, like the push-pin on Alcatraz, reading “Make ’em swim!”
Interestingly, the hotly contested tax that the SFMTA planned to levy against commuter shuttle companies of $1 per stop, per day may be revised.
“The permit and use fee will be updated based on actual project costs and actual stop events proposed as part of the permitting process,” the SFMTA stated in an email announcement of the new commuter shuttle project map. “The SFMTA Board will hold a public hearing to adopt the adjusted fee, if different from earlier calculations.”
The Guardian obtained a cost breakdown of the shuttle program from the SFMTA, and the numbers do seem to be fairly rough.
Above we’ve embedded the cost estimate of the commuter shuttle program, obtained through a public records request under the Sunshine Ordinance.
The shuttle pilot program proposed to fund 312 hours of work for transit planners and engineers each, annually. Notably, 4,000 hours are slated for a parking control officer, and 520 for a senior parking control officer annually. The two officers together are estimated to cost $300,000 annually. Double that estimate, as the project is slated to run two years.
The SFMTA board will meet to approve any new fees for the program during its July 15 meeting. There will also be a public SFMTA engineering meeting on June 20 (10am, City Hall, Room 416) to discuss changes to the commuter shuttle pilot program.
The map also denotes sidewalk white zones for shuttle use for commuter hours, between 6-10am and 4-8pm.
Wealthy Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway shouted down a fellow VC at Bloomberg’s Next Big Thing summit, after VC Chamath Palihapitiya dared criticize Ron’s biggest political investment: Mayor Ed Lee.
For context, Conway has been dubbed the “Godfather of Silicon Valley,” a capitalist Michael Jordan who invests lots of money in the tech industry (like Twitter) and politicians who support it. His catfight with Palihapitiya will no doubt be re-tweeted and Facebooked amongst the tech elite for days to come. Or you know, minutes to come. After all, there are great cat videos out there.
Conway sounded like an outraged muppet, but Palihapitiya took it all in stride.
“Ron, all I was talking about is you can make very simple economic measures to fund all of that and more,” Palihapitiya argued on stage at the conference. Conway wasn’t having it, and interrupted him.
“Then you said you recommend companies give 1 percent of their equity,” Conway shouted.
Palihapitiya fired back, calmly. “Ron listen, there are people in this city now who are really frustrated, you see it with the riots,” he said. Conway countered that Lee was making an effort to address it. “Effort is fine,” Palihapitiya replied, “but you have to see the follow through.”
Conway started shouting about Lee’s promise to build 30,000 housing units by 2020: “30,000 units, Ed Lee has a mandate to build 30,000 units. Is that not enough?”
Importantly, new reports from the San Francisco Public Press show the mayor’s 30,000 proposed units are partially a sham: 40 percent of those units are units are already being built, including existing public housing units simply being renovated.Only 6,000 affordable housing units would be new — making Conway’s shouting equal to only so much hot air.
“You can provide economic frameworks for all these problems,” Palihapitiya told Conway from the stage. He mentioned perhaps instituting an affordable housing tax on businesses. “Imagine how many units you can build,” he said, “300,000, a million! Making [Ed Lee’s plan] a magnitude or more impactful. That’s all I’m saying.”
When Conway mentioned Google’s contributions to Muni, Palihapitiya countered. “Ron, you could’ve taxed those guys at Google $10 million and Google would’ve paid.”
We called Conway for a response to his tirade, and he told us “I’m in a meeting. I can email you a statement.” We sent him an email, but aren’t holding our breath for a reply.
Either way, it’s something new to see someone in tech actually challenge the weak crumbs the tech industry has dropped from its table for San Francisco residents. It’s almost, dare we say, disruptive.
In a win for government transparency, a slew of strong new appointments for a city government watchdog group cleared their first round of approvals yesterday.
Society of Professional Journalists appointees Mark Rumold and Ali Winston, League of Women Voters appointee Allyson Washburn, and Attorney Lee Hepner were confirmed by the rules committee as appointments to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. That recommendation is now headed to the full Board of Supervisors for approval.
“Make no mistake, the people want open government,” Thomas Peele, co-chair of SPJ’s Freedom of Information Committee told city supervisors at the rules committee. “As Justice Brandeis said: ‘Sunshine is the best disenfectant.'”
The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force was formed in the ’90s, and tasked with policing transparency laws granting interested citizens (and journalists) access to government records. Emails, policy documents, and research are all openly accessible to the public under the city’s Sunshine Ordinance — but someone has to make sure city government plays by the rules. That’s where the task force comes in.
But the group has long drawn fire from the supervisors.
Supervisors have blocked SPJ appointments to the task force before, stemming from a political skirmish dating back to 2011, when the task force found the Board of Supervisors to be in violation of the Sunshine Ordinance after Board President David Chiu introduced amendments to a developer’s agreement for the Parkmerced redevelopment project. The SOTF found the Board’s action to be in violation of transparency laws; certain members of the board, in turn, accused the SOTF of going rogue.
That led to an impasse lasting more than two years, leading Bay Guardian founder and former publisher Bruce Brugmann to brand the Board the “anti-Sunshine Gang.” Brugmann alleged the good work of the task force earned it a slap by city officials, who fear it.
That slap manifested in long-delays of new appointments.
.@SFBG founder Bruce Brugmann gets up at rules committee and says “WTF GUYZ?!”* *not actual quote, but close enough. pic.twitter.com/1hpbwBsFj1
— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) June 5, 2014
“That prevents the task force from doing the job it was supposed to do,” Liz Enochs, immediate past-president of the SPJ told the committee yesterday.
We’ve covered the history in prior posts. One of Brugmann’s anti-Sunshine Gang, Supervisor Scott Wiener, was an ardent opponent of the task force. Some said his disapproval played a role in the Rules Committee blocking new appointees at their last meeting.
But that was before Wiener actually met the SPJ candidates: Rumold, an open government attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Ali Winston, a local investigative reporter of much renown. After sitting down with the pair, Wiener changed his tune.
“In the past, the task force has been highly dysfunctional and ineffective,” Wiener told the Guardian. But now, “the candidates I met with appear to have the big picture in mind — focusing on improving transparency — and I’m optimistic about the leadership role they can play in making the task force an effective and respected governmental body.”
That caused rumblings among local journalists, who know Winston is of Middle Eastern descent. He asserted this to the rules committee yesterday.
“I want the committee to know my mother is [Turkish], my family is throughout eastern Europe and the Middle East,” he said. “I’m very cogniscent of Middle Eastern and Muslim concerns in San Francisco.”
The LOWM’s candidate, Allyson Washburn, also addressed her diversity credentials.
“First of all, I’m a woman,” she said, “also I’ll be the oldest member.”
Sup. Yee interrupted, saying with a smile, “I can relate to you!”
That brought some laughs, a far cry from the usual tone when discussing appointments to the task force. But one final sticking point remained: a delay in the appointment of Bruce Wolfe, a local politico and board member of the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council. That leaves Bruce Oka still in his task force seat, though he’s long said he wants out.
Chris Hyland and Josh Wolf were also recommended by the Rules Committee. Interestingly, insiders say it’s still an open question if Wiener will move to block their appointments.
Sticking points aside, these six candidates now have a clearer path for approval by the Board of Supervisors. Maybe soon the sun will shine a bit brighter in City Hall.
