› tredmond@sfbg.com
None of the candidates for public office this year can beat the performance of a 2004 supervisorial hopeful who showed up at the Guardian office for an endorsement interview with a completely spaced-out homeless friend in tow. The candidate was talking rapid-fire for an hour, shifting effortlessly back and forth from his history as a welfare recipient turned bartender turned subject of a drug bust turned successful businessperson to his suggestions for public policy and proposals for improving the neighborhood. His pal was muttering the entire time, off in his own world, his random comments a kind of atonal counterpoint to the candidate’s high-speed pronouncements and reminiscences — until the would-be politician began to talk about the time years ago when the cops caught him with a bunch of LSD that wasn’t really his. Quite a bit of LSD. At the description of the inventory, the sidekick snapped out of his reverie for a moment and proclaimed, “That’s a lot of dose.” Then he was back to his own world.
The 2006 contenders are a much more predictable lot, generally speaking. But there have been some moments.
At the top of the list, I think, were Starchild, the Libertarian candidate for District 8 supervisor, and Philip Berg, the Libertarian for Congress, who came in together and told us that the city would be a much safer place if the entire populace were armed — not just with handguns but with AK-47s — and that the trouble-plagued Halloween Night in the Castro would be much more peaceful if everyone who attended had a weapon.
I’ve always wanted the rest of the world to be able to share these moments with us — Guardian endorsement interviews are great moments in policy formation and political debate, as well as high theater of the finest kind. Soon we’ll have them online, unedited — questions, answers, speeches (ours and theirs), fights, laughs … every moment, for your listening pleasure. Check www.sfbg.com for details.
We generally don’t record interviews with people who just come down to the office to chat and give us advice about the election, which is fair — but I want to share a really sad moment with you. Sarah Lipson stopped by at my request to talk about the SF school board race; she’s one of the best members of that often-dysfunctional panel, the kind of person who gives you hope for the schools and for local politics … and she’s not seeking reelection. She misses teaching, she told us, and that’s understandable — but she also said that it’s basically impossible for someone with kids who isn’t rich to devote perhaps 30 or 40 hours a week to the school board and still have a job on the side.
Thing is, the San Francisco Board of Education, which oversees a half-billion-a-year budget, is essentially a volunteer ($500 a month) gig. That’s a model from a very different era, and it doesn’t work anymore.
San Francisco is a hideously expensive place, a city where almost nobody can support a family on one income. Full-time volunteerism is an impossible burden, and it means people like Lipson — who is exactly the sort of person we want setting policy for the schools — can’t serve on the board. Either you punish your family or you don’t do the job you want to do.
Being on the school board is a full-time job. We need to pay these folks a full-time salary. SFBG
Tim Redmond
EDITOR’S NOTES
Fuzzy police math
By Tim Redmond
After ducking the question for weeks, the San Francisco police chief has finally announced that she doesn’t want foot patrols in high-crime areas because it will harm response times. Take the cops out of their cars, the argument goes, and they can’t get around as fast when somebody calls for help.
The chief cites an internal study her staff has done (not enough cops to patrol the streets, but plenty of time for the uniformed staff to spend behind their desks doing studies) that purports to show that removing one mobile unit each shift and replacing the car-bound officers with foot patrols would increase the time it takes to answer a 911 call by several minutes. Sounds awful.
But the study didn’t seem to consider the other side: The cops on the beat — already stationed in the areas where crime is the worst — might actually decrease the number of 911 calls, or get to them faster than the car patrols coming from somewhere else in the precinct. It’s no secret where most of the violent crime happens; that’s why the supervisors are asking for the foot patrols.
If the cops really want to cut the homicide rate (instead of just getting there faster after someone’s already been shot) they need to embrace this kind of proposal. Chief Fong’s current approach clearly isn’t working.
Bad Pope
By Tim Redmond
When I was in college, my friend Dave formed a group called Rastifarians for an Inherited Papacy. (Think about it — Pope. Kids. Sex. Female heirs. As we said back then, Whoa …) That pretty much reflected my views on the institution of the Papacy.
Even the good nuns and priests at my Catholic middle school couldn’t convince me of the Pope thing; I’ve never been much for humans who claim to hear the exclusive word of God. I had plenty of problems with JPII.
But this is different. We don’t just have a Pope who’s kind of a wanker; we have a really BAD Pope. A bad man, a consumate asshole, a real evil presence as the head of 1 billion religious souls. Holy shit.
Bad soccer dads (and moms)
By Tim Redmond
My mom and dad never wanted me to play Little League baseball, and they were very clear about the reasons: They didn’t want to deal with the other parents. Me, I’m glad my kids are in a local soccer league. I’m the team dad for the Pumas (Go Pumas!); we have a great coach and great kids and parents, we don’t keep score at the games, and nobody takes it too seriously as long as the kids are having fun. The main job of the team dad is to make sure there’s an adequate snack for halftime at every game. My main job as a parent is to try to make sure that Michael, who likes to play goalie, is actually paying attention when the ball comes near him, instead of searching for bugs in the grass.
But apparently it’s getting ugly out there, even in microscoccer, where all the kids are under 8.
I realize that parents have been known to go completely crazy on the fields of play, but I’ve never seen it in San Francisco. So when I showed up for a mandatory parents meeting for all microsoccer kids — attend or your kid can’t play — last Sunday afternoon, I wasn’t prepared for what was coming. A league official gave us a handout that set the tone:
“Reasons for this meeting:
Six assault charges in two years
Parents yelling and screaming from the sidelines
Coaches making up their own rules
Dads walking onto fields and taking whistles from moms
Coaches fighting over practice fields
Parents walking onto the field during hte middle of the game to videotape their child
Hired coaches (!?) not knowing any of the league rules”
and on and on.
It offered us this training scenario, which actually happened last season:
“A parent from the other team doesn’t like the way you are refereeing a game. She has been complaining bitterly about your calls, challenging your authority. She has become increasingly exasperated. You hear a whistle. Play has stopped and now you know why. The woman upset with your calls has gotten a whistle, called a ball out of bounds and is now walking onto the field, picking up the ball and about to award the ball to her team when one of your parents confronts her and yanks the ball away from her. The sideline “ref” responds by hitting your parent. What do you do?”
All of these problems — all of them — came from parents with kids under 7 years old.
Somebody needs to take a chill pill.
PS: “Dads walking onto the field and taking whistles from moms?” How exactly does that work?
EDITOR’S NOTES
› tredmond@sfbg.com
I was six when they assassinated John F. Kennedy. It was warm and sunny in Dallas, but I remember the cold and snow in Rochester, NY. We were visiting my grandparents; I was walking with my mother to the grocery store when a guy driving by shouted the news out of his car window: “Did ya hear about the president? He was just shot.” We turned around and raced back to listen to the radio.
For the next few hours, the grown-ups in the big, roomy apartment were distracted, sort of shell-shocked. My grandpa, a solid Republican, never liked Kennedy the politician, and my dad didn’t particularly like Kennedy’s economic policies, but there was no joking about his death, no talk of covert government plots, no political speculation. Just sadness and respect.
The guy was the president. He fought in WWII. He came home and became part of a generation of optimism, just like my parents. Some lunatic had killed him, and that was just awful. “He was a great man,” my father told me later. “He wasn’t a great president, but he was a great man.”
It wasn’t until much, much later that I began to believe that a lot of what we’d been told about the assassination probably wasn’t true. Long before Watergate happened, Nov. 22, 1963, became a defining moment for baby boomers, the first major, world-changing event from which we developed a passionate distrust for the official government line. Today, I don’t think I know a single person my age who actually thinks Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
My son, Michael, won’t remember Sept. 11, 2001. He was barely two years old. But I’ll never forget the nervous feeling I got when I dropped him off at day care that morning. And I’ll never forget the realization that from the moment I started hearing news reports, I knew the government was lying to me.
I can’t sort out all of the Kennedy conspiracies and honestly, I don’t know exactly what happened on the day after my parents’ wedding anniversary five years ago. But I know that I will never tell my son that the president was a “great man.” When Michael asks me where I was Sept. 11, 2001, I’ll tell him it was a Tuesday morning and I was at work, writing a column for the next day’s paper that was as critical of the president of the United States as it was of the people who had just killed 3,000 Americans.
This doesn’t make me terribly comfortable.
See, I’m still a public sector kind of guy, someone who believes that for all its problems, democratically elected government is better than private corporatocracy, that for all the corruption, waste, and fraud, it’s still possible to have national health insurance, a progressive national housing policy, sound public education, and a lot of other things that probably wouldn’t have sounded all that weird to the folks who were my age in 1963.
So let me indulge in a truly strange conspiracy theory.
If I were a Bad Guy and I saw the baby boomers with all their energy and idealism and potential and I wanted to be sure that they never became a threat to the total dominance of private capital in America, I would have killed a president, covered it up, gone to war for no good reason, spied on them or their friends — and given an entire generation every reason to see that government was the enemy.
And it would have worked. SFBG
Who’s in Dufty’s “corner?”
By Tim Redmond
Okay, so I tweaked Sup. Bevan Dufty a couple of weeks ago about an item that appeared in Matier and Ross Aug. 20. The item suggested that “mud balls are being lobbed” in the District 8 supervisorial campaign; someone apparently sent the dynamic duo at the Chron a “1995 news clip from the Chicago Tribune describing how Rosenthal, then a 22-year-old senior at Northwestern University, abruptly resigned as student body president rather than face an impeachment hearing over a campaign finance scandal.
“Her sin: Exceeding the campaign spending limit by $26.06”
I picked it up and raised the question: Since Dufty has made a huge point (rightly so) of refusing to engage in negative campaigning, who exactly was flinging this mud?
Well, it’s turned into a fascinating little teapot tempest.
Dufty came in for an endorsement interview last week (we’ll post the full tape, all 90 minutes of it, on sfbg.com in a day or two), and tore into me for implying that he was somehow involved in dishing dirt on another candidate. He said he’d called Matier and Ross and complained that they never asked him for comment on the item (true); he then told us that the boys had apologized and promised to run a correction. He swore nobody affiliated with his campaign had done it, and suggested that it might have come from anywhere — even Rosenthal herself.
That’s not how Andy Ross remembers it. Ross told me that Dufty had, indeed, called him to complain, but that he had never promised to correct anything — the item, he insisted, was entirely accurate.
No, Dufty wasn’t the source for the dirt — but it was, Ross promised me, “someone in his corner … that’s why we said mud was flying.”
So someone allied with Dufty — perhaps an overzealous supporter — dragged Bevan the clean campaigner’s name through the, uh, mud by dredging up a silly and pointless item from a decade ago and tossing it to the Chron.
Dufty disavowed the hit, and told me that anyone who would do something like that “shouldn’t claim to be a supporter of mine.” But it raises an interesting question: Why would any of Dufty’s allies waste time on this sort of stuff? (Among other things, the B.A.R. has made a point of playing up Rosenthal’s attendance at Burning Man). Could it be that, as the latest Progressive Voter Index shows, District 8 is still a pretty left-voting part of the city? Rosenthal has some real political challenges — she’s not well known, she’s a straight woman running in what has traditionally been a gay district, and Dufty has most of the key endorsements — but on the issues, especially tenant issues, Rosenthal may be more in touch with the voters.
Frankly, Dufty’s the clear front runner at this point. For anyone in his “corner” to give Rosenthal additional press and credibility by attacking her for something everyone with any sense knows is irrelevant — that’s either a sign of world-class stupidity or a signal that the incumbent is vulnerable.
The secret police
By Tim Redmond
It’s hard to even describe how horrible this state Supreme Court ruling on the secrecy of police disciplinary cases really is. Read it and weep — or better, read it and hide. Under this ruling, the cops can do almost anything, and get away with it.
EDITOR’S NOTES
› tredmond@sfbg.com
There are people at the daily newspapers around here who bristle when I accuse them of ignoring important local stories, particularly ones involving powerful political, business, or social figures (and most particularly, involving the newspapers themselves). No representative of the Hearst Corp. stands in the newsroom door announcing that stories about management will be sent to New York for prior censorship. Nobody tells the Chronicle’s reporters that they can’t cover a pressing story.
And I believe all that. I really do. I know it doesn’t work that way.
Carl Jensen knows that too. When he started Project Censored back in 1976, he knew he’d get a lot of criticism. “Censored” is a pretty strong word; it evokes a mirthless military guy with a pair of scissors and a big black pen, preventing real news from emerging out of a pressroom bunker somewhere.
But what Jensen has been trying to say for years is that the stories cited by Project Censored represent choices made by editors and publishers about what’s important in today’s world. That’s what the front page of a newspaper is — a set of choices. Is the confession of the purported killer of JonBenet Ramsey more important than the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping of millions of Americans? Is the latest news about Brad and Angelina more important than the latest news from Iraq? Is one man’s quest to take control of every daily newspaper in the Bay Area worth more than a first-day story and a few tiny news briefs?
Editors are paid to make those decisions — and the ones who want to keep their jobs know what the rules are. That’s why some stories get more coverage, more play, and more attention and some get deeply buried or published in one place and never picked up by anyone else.
Anyone who reads political blogs knows about stories like the ones on this year’s Project Censored list (see page 15). Nobody blacked out the news with a big rubber stamp; it just never got reported in the first place.
For a Sunday afternoon on a Labor Day weekend, it was truly impressive: I counted at least 300 people at the Delancey Street events room for the Sue Bierman memorial. Just about everyone on the local left seemed to be there, along with a few luminaries like John Burton, Gavin Newsom, and Willie Brown, who were Bierman’s friends even when they were wrong and she was right.
Newsom, who was often at odds with Bierman, looked out over the crowd and made the point succinctly: “This is what happens,” he said, “when you’re nice to people.”
There were many funny and moving stories. Burton, who showed up in his usual sartorial splendor (striped sweatpants and an untucked shirt, which makes me respect the guy as much as anything he’s ever done in politics) talked about how Bierman always, always enjoyed herself, even in the most boring political drudgery. It was wonderful to see her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren there (and wonderful for them to see how many people were part of Bierman’s San Francisco community).
Calvin Welch, her Haight Asbury neighbor, friend, and longtime comrade in arms, reminded us all that Bierman “created the neighborhood movement in San Francisco” — and that she did it in her own style, always believing that “fun is important.”
A lot of people go to political funerals because they have to; most of us went to this one because we wanted to. Thanks, Sue. SFBG
Ammiano’s coup
By Tim Redmond
Matier and Ross reported Sunday what everyone on the San Francisco left knew was coming: Sup. Tom Ammiano is formally announcing his run for State Assembly in 2008. Aside from the fact that Ammiano would make an excellent state Assembly member, here’s the political brilliance of the move: The only other person remotely rumored to be considering running for that seat is Sup. Chris Daly. In fact, behind the scenes, a lot of local players have been saying that state Sen. Carole Migden would suport Daly, even in a run against Ammiano.
But Daly is up for re-election this fall, and obviously can’t announce a run for Assembly (if he’s even interested) until well after November. That means for months to come, Ammiano will be the only game in town — and he can start lining up endorsements. According to M&R, Migden has formally endorsed Ammiano, as has the incumbent in that seat, Mark Leno.
Daly would also be an excellent member of the state Assembly — but if he wants to run, he’s already way behind and will have the challenging task of explaining why he’s better than Ammiano, particularly when they generally agree on all the issues.
$70 million
By Tim Redmond
Assemblymember Mark Leno has gotten one of the most important bills of the year through the state Legislature, and if the governor signs it — and he might — it could bring an additional $70 million to San Francisco, enough (for example) to wipe out Muni’s structural budget deficit.
The billl would allow San Francisco the option of imposing a 2 percent fee on motor vehicle registrations — the same fee that every car owner in California paid for years until Gov. Schwarzenegger summarily repealed it, leaving the state with a $5 billion budget deficit.
If the city voters approved it, the fee could be assessed on cars registered in San Francisco. The city would pick up desperately needed cash for public transit, and car owners would be no worse off than they were under every governor in the past 25 years (except for this one).
Congrats to Leno for making this happen — and if it becomes law, the supervisors should move immediately to implement it.
Supervisor Burning Man
By Tim Redmond
I’ve been around a long time in city politics, and seen a lot of strange things, but even by my standards, it’s pretty darn wierd to see the Bay Area Reporter, a queer community paper, taking issue with the fact that a candidate for supervisor dresses in (mildly) outrageous clothes at Burning Man — and (gasp!) admits she might have even taken drugs at that annual desert party. Lordy, lordy, she even calls herself a “freak.”
Nice to see that Robert Haaland, who had endorsed Dufty, agrees with me that it’s “distasteful to hear politicos make snide remarks about her, about her attendance at Burning Man, and about her fondness for freaks.”
Has District 8 become so straight that the folks there can’t handle a “freak?” Even in these uber-gentrified days, that’s pretty hard to imagine.
EDITOR’S NOTES
› tredmond@sfbg.com
I was out of town when Sue Bierman died Aug. 6, her car crashing into a Dumpster near her Haight Ashbury home, in the neighborhood she loved. I was out of cell phone range and had no real Internet access, and the papers in Upstate New York didn’t carry the story. So I didn’t learn until I got home that San Francisco had lost one of its most vibrant, funny, warm, and passionate political voices.
Bierman, a native of Fremont, Neb., arrived in San Francisco in 1950. She was part of the first generation of urban environmentalists and was there at the birth of a movement that would change American cities forever.
The city that Sue Bierman adopted as her home was still largely a human-scale metropolis, a town coming out of World War II with a mix of blue-collar industry, a thriving waterfront, and a diverse population.
Her tenure as an activist tracked almost perfectly with the postwar assault on San Francisco by greedy real estate developers, speculators, and politicians who carried their water. She was part of the infamous freeway revolt, the successful effort by Haight residents to block a new elevated freeway that would have soared over part of Golden Gate Park. She was an early member of the anti–high rise crew that realized how intensive downtown development was going to turn San Francisco into another Manhattan. And when the late mayor George Moscone appointed her to the Planning Commission, she was a lonely voice for sanity through 16 years of development madness.
I first met her in 1983 when I was a young reporter covering planning and she was the only member of the commission who would ever come out against any major high-rise project. Over and over, she lost 6–1 votes.
When she was elected supervisor in 1990, she was not only a staunch environmentalist and neighborhood advocate but one of the few on the board at the time who really understood public power: as she would constantly remind her colleagues, she came from a state where electricity could never be sold by private entities for private profit.
And through year after year of brutal defeats, she kept not only her spirit but her sense of humor — and her personal warmth. She had none of the bitter anger that a lot of us took from that era. In fact, even when I criticized her both in private and in print for her loyalty to Willie Brown, she remained a friend. She never once had a harsh word to say to me.
A part of San Francisco passed when she died.
In other news: Supervisor Bevan Dufty insists he hates negative politics and won’t attack other candidates. And yet, the following appeared in Matier and Ross on Aug. 20:
“The campaign is barely under way, and already the mud balls are being lobbed. In this case, it’s a 1995 news clip from the Chicago Tribune describing how [Dufty opponent Alix] Rosenthal, then a 22-year-old senior at Northwestern University, abruptly resigned as student body president rather than face an impeachment hearing over a campaign finance scandal.
“Her sin: Exceeding the campaign spending limit by $26.06.”
Well, somebody dredged that up and leaked it to the press. Anyone you know, Bevan? SFBG
A memorial service for Bierman is set for Sept. 3 from 2 to 4 p.m. at Delancey Street Foundation, 600 Embarcadero, San Francisco.
Behind the redevelopment initiative
By Tim Redmond
I just said something nice about Randy Shaw, so it’s time to slap him a fast one. The big story in today’s BeyondChron is a gushing testimonial to the efforts of one Biran Murphy O’Flynn to block the city’s redevelopment plan for Bayview Hunters Point. Shaw calls O’Flynn’s efforts “the Little Engine That Could” (no, really, he does) and says that “O’Flynn’s tenacity in the face of funding problems, and the failure of any single powerful organization to take ownership of the campaign, shows how a single person’s passion and commitment can still make a difference in San Francisco.”
Okay, so there are problems with the redevelopment plan — but O’Flynn is no community hero. He’s the guy, you may recall, who tried to build some condos in what became a North Beach park and got so mad at Sup. Aaron Peskin for opposing the development that he tried to run against him in District Three, with an utter lack of success.
He’s a pal of Joe O’Donoghue and the residential builders, and is pissed at revevelopment, I suspect, not because he worries about the people in Bayview (remember, he ran for supervisor from North Beach, so presumably he lives there), but because the redevelopment plan, for all its flaws, would stop builders like him from turning the southeast neighborhoods into a condo development free-for-all.
1000 years of fuck
By Tim Redmond
You learn something new every day. I just learned from the Philadelphia Inquirer that fuck has been in the English language for more than 1,000 years.
They worry abuot that sort of thing in Philly
1000 years of fuck
By Tim Redmond
You learn something new every day. I just learned from The Philadelphia Inquirer that fuck has been part of the English language for more than 1,000 years.
I guess they worry about those sorts of things in Philly.
Who’s going to control Congress?
By Tim Redmond
Chris Bowers offers a pretty detailed analysis on the state of the battle for control of the House at MyDD.com. Hard to read without my glasses on, but worth checking out as the campaign continues.
When the assholes take over
By Tim Redmond
What happens when the people who run the SF Weekly take over a paper in Seattle? It’s not pretty. No more endorsements, no more politics, half the staff flees … Too bad for Seattle.
Democratic madness
By Tim Redmond
The Democratic County Central Committee can sometimes be a zoo, but it’s no joke: The endorsement of the panel gives tremendous credibility to local candidates and issues, since it represents the official position of the San Francisco Democratic Party. The Aug. 21st meeting was particularly crazy; Zak Szymanski has a good report in the BAR on the committee’s almost non-endorsement of Community College Board member Lawrence Wong, who got blasted for appearing at a hotel that was under union boycott. That’s a problem for any politician — and although Wong apologized over and over again, the labor follks on the committee were having none of it.
In the end, Wong squeaked to an endorsement, which is wrong: There’s a long list of reasons not to support Wong (starting with his support for the smelly deal that shifted bond money from a performing arts center to a new gym that will be used in part by a private school nearby).
And it was wrong — and a kind of sorry statement about the local party — that the DCCC refused to oppose Prop. 83, a tough-on-crime initiative that’s aimed at sexual predators — but has all kinds of problems, the way these things often do. San Francisco Sheriff Mike Hennesey is against it, saying it will cost a fortune for new jails; so is Assembly Member Mark Leno, who says it will drive ex-cons into rural areas, away from services — making them more likely to get into further trouble.
The problem is that the state Democratic Party has endorsed it, fearing that the measure will be a wedge issue in swing districts, where moderate Democrats are facing Republicans — and where Phil Angellides needs to be able to beat Arnold. Some local DCCC members were wary of bucking the state party.
That’s embarassing: San Francisco isn’t Stockton, and our local Democrats should be able to stand up to these dumb crime bills. The DCCC ducked, but thanks to Robert Haaland, the committee will vote again in September.
And check this out: The DCCC refused to back longtime incumbent School Board member Dan Kelly. Labor opposed him, and he lost. The unions are pissed about contract problems with the teachers and staff; I’m pissed at Kelly for his unwavering support of former Supt. Arlene Ackerman. Either way, it’s pretty dramatic for the DCCC to snub an incumbent Democrat like that.
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› tredmond@sfbg.com
Bad social failures eventually come back to haunt you. That’s what’s happening in the California prison system, where decades of lock-’em-up legislation, stupid drug laws, and governors who are terrified of the political consequences of paroling inmates have filled the jails with aging prisoners who require extensive medical care. Tens of thousands of people will die in state prisons in the next few years, not of murder or abuse but because they’re serving life sentences — and it’s going to cost a fortune to take care of them in their declining years. The state may have to set up special geriatric cell blocks and hospital wards for inmates who did something pretty bad a long, long time ago and never got another chance at life.
And so it is, apparently, with San Francisco’s homeless population.
According to a new study by the University of California, San Francisco, the median age of the city’s homeless people has gone from 37 in 1990 to about 50 today. The thousands of people who live on the streets are getting older and older — and their health is failing. Many of them, it seems, have been there at least off and on since the 1980s, when the federal government under Ronald Reagan stopped spending money to help cities provide low-cost housing.
If the study, reported in the Chronicle on Aug. 4, is accurate, there are some important policy conclusions that we need to be looking at. For starters, it suggests that many of the homeless people in San Francisco are not arriving here because of friendly programs and attitudes; we are not a “magnet” for the homeless. In fact, the people living on the streets are … San Franciscans. Some have been living here as long as I have. They are part of our community, part of our city. They just don’t have a roof over their heads or a place to go and shut out the world.
Then there’s the fact that harsh cutbacks in spending on low-income populations only create more, and more intractable, problems. The aging homeless are going to need a lot more expensive medical care over the next few years, and the only way they’re going to get it is at taxpayer expense. By the time the baby boomer generation of homeless people has died, I bet San Francisco will have spent so much money on caring for them in their later years that it would have been cheaper to just give them all a decent welfare payment, health insurance, and a decent place to live.
Building housing is expensive. Building so-called supportive housing — residential units with social services on-site — is more expensive. Treating people in hospitals who are literally dying of homelessness is even more expensive than that.
You want to be a cold-eyed conservative? The cheapest solution is to radically raise the general assistance payment to the point where homeless people can afford an apartment. That also happens to be the most humane.
Once upon a time, what a lot of homeless people needed was cash, not care. Cash, not care. Now they need care — and the people who elected Gavin Newsom and who complain about the homeless are going to be paying for that care. SFBG
For serious report-readers
By Tim Redmond
John Conyers, ranking minority member on the house judiciary committee, has released a massive report detailing a long list of violations of law by the Bush Administration, from the Downing St. Memo to Iraq war coverups to assaults on civil liberties at home. It clocks in at more than 350 pages, but it’s great stuff. You can download it here
Solving the Middle East
By Tim Redmond
Now here’s a brilliant idea: The Pentagon could subcontract the invasion of Iran and Syria to the Candians.
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› tredmond@sfbg.com
I had lunch with a friend near South Park the other day, and we got to chatting about the condo boom in the area — building after building after ugly high rise after boxy dorm. This stuff doesn’t look like luxury housing; it looks like modern urban junk.
Anyway, my friend is a smart, thoughtful person, and her first instinct was to say that more downtown housing is a good thing. Me, I get a headache whenever I try to be thoughtful about San Francisco housing policy these days, so I wasn’t thoughtful at all. I hate it all, I told her.
She asked why and I answered honestly. “There are already too many goddamn rich people in this city,” I said. “What we need is more poor people.”
Actually, that’s wrong: what we need are more middle-class people.
My friend is one of the few people in the world who make a decent living as a freelance writer. But she can’t buy a house here. If she didn’t have a rent-controlled apartment where she’s lived for about 20 years now, she couldn’t afford to live in San Francisco at all.
This is nothing new. What’s interesting is that it’s getting (some) national attention. The New York Times weighed in July 23 with an article citing San Francisco as an example of how US cities are becoming places for the rich and the poor with nobody in between. Again, no big news — but the Times had a twist on it. The writer, Janny Scott, asked: is that such a bad thing?
After all, cities like San Francisco are thriving. Property values are soaring. Everyone wants to live here. Some economists, Scott wrote, now refer to places like San Francisco, New York, and Boston as “superstar cities.”
From a strictly economic point of view, some of Scott’s sources argued that there’s nothing wrong with rich people driving the middle class out of cities. “There’s a whole lot of America that does a very good job of taking care of the middle class,” Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser insisted.
Now here’s the quote I love:
“But sociologists and many economists believe there can be non-economic consequences for cities that lose a lot of middle-income residents.”
Uh, yeah.
Here’s the point: if you measure everything the way a lot of economists (and a lot of San Francisco business leaders) do, the city’s cooking along just fine. People who want to live here will pay the price; the free market will eventually make it all work out.
And maybe so — after a while San Francisco will be such a hellhole of a precious bedroom community for Silicon Valley workers and a faux city for tourists that nobody like me or my friends will want to be here anymore. The free market will do its job — by ruining one of the world’s great cities. By destroying a community.
And what I want to leave you with is this: the only way to stop that from happening — the only way — is with active, strong public-sector (yes, that’s government) intervention. Some people (developers, speculators, and landlords) will have to make less money so the rest of us can keep San Francisco alive. The supervisors are doing that on many levels; the mayor still doesn’t seem to get it.
But we’re running out of time. SFBG